The current study examined interactions among genetic influences and children's early environments on the development of externalizing behaviors from 18 months to 6 years of age. Participants included 233 families linked through adoption (birth parents and adoptive families). Genetic influences were assessed by birth parent temperamental…

The literature proposes that leisure boredom may systematically increase during adolescence. Moreover, some authors assume that this hypothesized developmental trend is associated with increases in youthful delinquency and depression. Individual dispositions (e.g., temperamental disinhibition) are believed to exacerbate the relationship between…

Interactions between reactive and regulatory dimensions of temperament may be particularly relevant to children's adjustment but are examined infrequently. This study investigated these interactions by examining effortful control as a moderator of the relations of fear and frustration reactivity to children's social competence, internalizing, and…

Community studies indicating that affluence has social-emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety-depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European-American descent, but…

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic and impairing clinical disorder in childhood, often characterized by a heterogeneous symptomatic profile and high co-occurrence with other disorders. The present study introduces a new perspective on the description of OCD symptoms in youth, and empirically examines the value of a personality…

The purpose of this study is to investigate longitudinal risk processes linking early child maltreatment, childhood personality organizations, and adolescent maladaptation. In a sample of maltreated and nonmaltreated children ("N" = 400; 62.3% African American, 11.8% Hispanic; 40.8% girls), a tripartite personality typology based on…

Prevalence rates of behavioral problems in children with motor disabilities are commonly based on questionnaires developed for a general population (e.g., Child Behavior CheckList). These questionnaires do not take into account lower levels of intellectual functioning. The first aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of parent-reported…

Effortful control (EC) refers to the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant one and has been shown as protective against a myriad of difficulties. Research examining precursors of EC has been limited to date, and in this study, infancy contributors to toddler EC were examined. Specifically, parent/family background…

Among adolescents and adults, there appear to be at least four different personality traits that dispose individuals to rash or ill-advised action: sensation seeking, negative urgency, lack of planning, and lack of perseverance. The four are only moderately correlated and they appear to play different roles in dysfunction. It is important to…

The present study investigates five types of continuity of personality and internalizing and externalizing problems (i.e., structural, differential, mean-level, individual-level and ipsative continuity) in a sample of referred children and adolescents (N = 114) with a broad variety of psychological problems. Mothers were administered a child…

Background: This study examines how and why children change in aggression and delinquency from age 6 to 15 years. Besides assessing the shape of the developmental trajectories of aggression and delinquency, we investigated whether child personality characteristics, parenting, and interactions between these two predict the development of…

The current paper provides external validation of the bifactor model of ADHD by examining associations between ADHD latent factor/profile scores and external validation indices. 548 children (321 boys; 302 with ADHD), 6 to 18 years old, recruited from the community participated in a comprehensive diagnostic procedure. Mothers completed the Child…

Research on differential susceptibility to rearing suggests that infants with difficult temperaments are disproportionately affected by parenting and child care quality, but a major U.S. child care study raises questions as to whether quality of care influences social adjustment. One thousand three hundred sixty-four American children from…

The Youth Psychopathy traits Inventory (YPI) is a newly developed self-report measure of psychopathy. There are no studies looking at the validity of this measure in UK samples. We assessed 115 male adolescents (mean age 16.22 years) with DSM-IV conduct disorder on a range of measures including the YPI, Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL) and the…

Research Findings: Family conflict is known to be associated with poor development for young children, but many children appear resilient. This study examined the extent to which high-quality center care during early childhood protects children from these negative consequences. Children participating in center-based sites of the Early Head Start…