Children in foster care have often encountered a range of adverse experiences, including neglectful and/or abusive care and multiple caregiver transitions. Prior research findings suggest that such experiences negatively affect inhibitory control and the underlying neural circuitry. In the current study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed during a go/no go task that assesses inhibitory control to compare the behavioral performance and brain activation of foster children and nonmaltreated children. The sample included two groups of 9- to 12-year-old children: 11 maltreated foster children and 11 nonmaltreated children living with their biological parents. There were no significant group differences on behavioral performance on the task. In contrast, patterns of brain activation differed by group. The nonmaltreated children demonstrated stronger activation than did the foster children across several regions, including the right anterior cingulate cortex, the middle frontal gyrus, and the right lingual gyrus, during correct no go trials, whereas the foster children displayed stronger activation than the nonmaltreated children in the left inferior parietal lobule and the right superior occipital cortex, including the lingual gyrus and cuneus, during incorrect no go trials. These results provide preliminary evidence that the early adversity experienced by foster children impacts the neural substrates of inhibitory control.

Placement instability is a common occurrence among foster children and others involved with child welfare system services, and is associated with negative psychiatric and mental health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research in this area and to consider this information in terms of child welfare practice and policy. Evidence from 59 sources is reviewed, including research on (a) the connection between placement instability and poor outcomes; (b) sources of information that can be employed to reliably predict risk for placement instability; and (c) interventions designed to mitigate the effects of placement instability. The available empirical evidence suggests that placement instability and other family chaos is associated with disrupted development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is involved in executive functioning. Poor executive functioning is implicated in elevated risk for ADHD, disruptive behavior disorders, substance abuse, and other forms of disinhibitory psychopathology. This might help to explain the high rates of psychiatric medication prescriptions for foster children. Notably, however, recent research findings have shown that placement instability is both predictable and preventable and that interventions to address placement instability have the potential to mitigate neurobiological and psychiatric effects of prior adversity.

Role-play (i.e., pretending in which children imagine and act out the part of another individual) was assessed with child interviews and parent questionnaires about invisible friends, personified objects, and pretend identities in a sample of 208 young children. Children who engaged in role-play did not differ from other children in age or vocabulary comprehension. However, they were better able to generate a pretend conversation than other children and were rated by their parents as less shy. The overall pattern of results suggests that the capacity to interact with imaginary others (in and out of the lab) is more closely associated with individual differences in personality than developmental level.

The current study examined two family process predictors of parent-reported child sleep problems at 4.5 years in an adoption sample: marital hostility and hostile parenting. Participants were 361 linked triads of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted children. We examined direct and indirect pathways from marital hostility to child sleep problems via hostile parenting. Mothers' marital hostility at 9 months was associated with child sleep problems at 4.5 years. Fathers' marital hostility at 9 months evidenced an indirect effect on child sleep problems at 4.5 years via fathers' hostile parenting at 27 months. Findings were significant even after controlling for genetic influences on child sleep (i.e., birth parent internalizing disorders). The findings suggest targets for prevention and intervention programs that are potentially modifiable (e.g., hostile parenting, marital hostility), and inform theory by demonstrating that relations among marital hostility, hostile parenting, and child sleep problems are significant after accounting for genetic influences.

OBJECTIVE:Placement disruptions have adverse effects on foster children. Identifying reliable predictors of placement disruptions might assist in the allocation of services to prevent disruptions. There were two objectives in this study: (a) to replicate a prior finding that the number of daily child problem behaviors at entry into a new foster home predicts subsequent placement disruptions in foster preschoolers and (b) to determine whether this association is mitigated by a treatment foster care intervention. METHOD:Problem behavior and placement disruptions were examined in 60 children in regular foster care (age range = 3.10-5.91 years [M = 4.34, SD = 0.83], 58.3% male, 93.4% Caucasian) and 57 children in a treatment foster care program (age range = 3.01-6.78 years [M = 4.54, SD = 0.86], 49.1% male, 82.5% Caucasian). Using the Parent Daily Report Checklist (Chamberlain & Reid, 1987), a brief telephone interview, foster caregivers reported problem behavior 6 times over 3 months. Placement disruptions were tracked over 12 months. RESULTS:The regular foster care children with 5 or fewer problem behaviors were at low risk for disruption, but their risk increased 10% for each additional behavior (p = .013). The intervention appeared to mitigate this "threshold effect"; number of problem behaviors did not predict risk of placement disruption in the treatment foster care group (p = .63). CONCLUSIONS:These findings replicate previous evidence linking child problem behavior to placement disruptions and further highlight the need for early preventative interventions.

In this study we interviewed children about their experiences of visual and auditory images when interacting with imaginary companions, and explored the extent that the nature of those experiences was related to children's performance on visual imagery tasks. Eighty-three 5-year-old children and their parents were asked about the children's imaginary companions, and the children were given tasks that assessed visual imagery, their ability to generate an imaginary conversation, verbal ability, and working memory. There were substantial individual differences in the extent that children report having visual and auditory images of their invisible friends, but almost all the children with personified objects reported finding it easy to both see and hear them. Children who found it easy to imagine seeing their invisible friends were more likely to show a pattern of reaction times that was consistent with the use of imagery than children with personified objects, children who reported finding it difficult to see their invisible friends, or children who did not have any type of imaginary companion. Children with imaginary companions (either invisible friends or personified objects) were more able to generate an imaginary conversation in the lab than children who did not have imaginary companions.

This study examined the longitudinal association between marital instability and child sleep problems at ages 9 and 18 months in 357 families with a genetically unrelated infant adopted at birth. This design eliminates shared genes as an explanation for similarities between parent and child. Structural equation modeling indicated that T1 marital instability predicted T2 child sleep problems, but T1 child sleep problems did not predict T2 marital instability. This result was replicated when models were estimated separately for mothers and fathers. Thus, even after controlling for stability in sleep problems and marital instability and eliminating shared genetic influences on associations using a longitudinal adoption design, marital instability prospectively predicts early childhood sleep patterns.

Because of their exposure to severe early adversity and the heterogeneity of these adverse experiences, foster children are an important population in which to study the associations between stress, alterations in underlying neural systems, and subsequent developmental and psychosocial outcomes. Moreover, inasmuch as the US foster care population numbers over half a million children and the needs of these children are not always met by existing service delivery programs, there are scientific and public policy reasons to pursue this work. In this chapter, we describe the results of a research program involving young foster children that has focused on the following three areas: examining how variations in dimensions of early adverse experiences are associated with specific negative developmental and psychosocial outcomes; identifying neural deficits associated with these negative outcomes; and conducting randomized clinical trials of preventive interventions with dual goals to improve developmental and psychosocial outcomes and examine the potential for recovery of or improved functioning in the underlying neural systems. The specific focus of this chapter is our investigations of inhibitory control within the context of this larger research program. We provide an overview of the research program and guiding conceptual model, summarize the studies focused on inhibitory control, and discuss the implications of this work for science and public policy.

This research examined visual and auditory imagery in adults and 5-year-old children. We focused on 3 broad issues: 1) parallels between visual and auditory imagery; 2) static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities; and 3) individual differences in these imagery processes. In Experiments 1 and 2, adults completed a set of four tasks of visual and auditory imagery and self-report measures of imagery. In Experiment 3, the set of imagery tasks was presented to 83 5-year-old children. Although children were less consistent in their imagery use than adults, there were interesting parallels between the children's and adults' performance. Across the 3 experiments, we found little or no relationship between static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities. In contrast, significant correlations were observed across modality for dynamic imagery. These findings highlight the importance of examining cross-modality parallels in the development of imagery processes.

Although recent evidence suggests that young children use prosodic information to ‘‘bootstrap’’ themselves into syntactic comprehension, little is known about how children use prosody to signal syntactic boundaries in their spoken utterances. A speech elicitation task examined the extent to which children and adults control duration and intonation to mark phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech. Adults and young children (ages 5 and 7) were asked to describe groupings of colored blocks in a manner such that a blindfolded listener could tell ‘‘which blocks go together.’’ This procedure elicited utterances corresponding to three syntactic bracketings of the phrase ‘‘pink and green and white.’’ Acoustic analysis of subjects’ productions indicated that adults reliably controlled duration (i.e., syllable lengthening, pauses) and intonation fall–rise patterns to signal phrase boundaries. In contrast, children’s productions were highly variable and showed no evidence of intonation cues being involved. Individual subject analyses suggested that some of the 7-year-old children used duration cue to signal phrase boundaries, although the contrasts were not as marked as in the adult data. The results were interpreted as showing that by age 7, most children have not yet mastered prosodic cues for phrasal boundaries in their speech production.