Objective Relatively little research has examined the correlates of suicidal ideation (SI) and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in children. To address this gap, we sought to identify demographic, psychological and parent-related factors associated with increased SI and NSSI in this population.Method Participants were 697 children (ages 7-11; 62.6% Non-Hispanic White; 51.9% boys) and their mothers recruited from the community. Information was collected regarding children's histories of SI and NSSI, demographics, children's and mothers' psychopathology, mothers' prior suicide attempt and parenting styles.Results SI and NSSI were relatively common in this age range, with lifetime rates of 12.6% and 6.3%, respectively. Rates of both outcomes were higher in boys, Hispanic youth, children with histories of major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, children with higher levels of internalising and externalising symptoms and children of mothers with histories of agoraphobia. Additional relations were specific to SI (child history of generalised anxiety disorder, mother's prior suicide attempt and maternal warmth) or NSSI (minority race, mother history of panic disorder and maternal authoritarianism).Conclusions Results provide evidence for correlates of SI and NSSI in children spanning demographic, psychopathology-related and parenting variables, which may further our understanding of which children are at greatest risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviours.

OBJECTIVE:This study examined children's attention biases to angry, sad, and happy displays as antecedents to callous-unemotional (CU) traits and subsequent internalizing and externalizing difficulties. The goal was to identify early risk processes that contribute to the developmental cascade of CU traits during the transition from preschool to early elementary school. METHOD:Participants included 238 mothers and their preschool-aged children (Mage = 4.38 years, 52% female) assessed across three annual measurement occasions. The sample was racially and ethnically diverse (68% White, 18% Black, 14% Multiracial or another race; 16% Latinx). A multi-method, multi-informant design was used, including eye-tracking indices of children's fixation duration to angry, sad, and happy facial expressions, maternal reports of CU traits, and both maternal and paternal reports of children's psychological symptoms. Path analyses tested a prospective cascade from children's attention biases to later CU traits and adjustment difficulties, controlling for autoregressive effects and demographic covariates. RESULTS:Children's greater fixation duration on angry faces at Wave 1 predicted residualized increases in CU traits at Wave 2 (b = .35, p < .05). Wave 2 CU traits, in turn, predicted residualized increases in externalizing (b = .31, p < .001) and internalizing (b = .32, p < .001) symptoms at Wave 3. Sensitivity analyses supported the robustness of these associations. CONCLUSIONS:Findings highlight heightened attention to anger in early childhood as a precursor to CU traits, which later shaped emotional and behavioral maladjustment. Early assessment of affective attention may aid prevention efforts targeting socioemotional risk mechanisms in children.

Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs), encompassing both nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidality, are a growing public health concern in youth. Although maternal depression is a well-established risk factor for psychopathology in offspring, less is known about protective factors that may mitigate this risk. Peer social support, particularly during the transition to adolescence, may play a critical role in reducing risk for SITBs, yet limited research has examined the potential impact of different domains of peer influence (e.g., close friends versus classmates) as specific and distinct facets of the peer environment. In a two-year longitudinal study, we assessed SITBs in 215 children (ages 8–14), half of whom had mothers with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) during their child’s life. We hypothesized that maternal MDD would predict increased risk of SITBs in children but that higher levels of peer social support would buffer this effect. Survival analyses confirmed that children of mothers with MDD were over twice as likely to develop SITBs during the follow-up. Importantly, higher levels of social support from classmates uniquely predicted reduced risk for SITBs in children, even after accounting for the influence of maternal MDD history. Our findings highlight the role of broad peer environments in protecting against SITBs in youth. These results underscore the importance of school-based interventions that foster social inclusion as potential preventive measures for SITBs.

There is preliminary evidence that children of parents with depression exhibit alterations in reward processing that may increase children's risk for developing psychopathology. However, depression is a heterogeneous disorder, and it is unclear whether specific symptoms of parental depression may be particularly associated with increased risk in children. The current study examined links between parents' anhedonic versus non-anhedonic symptoms of depression and neural indices of reward outcome processing in children. Participants in this study were a community sample of 217 parent-child dyads (children ages 7-11; 53.00% male, 65.90% non-Hispanic White). Children's reward outcome processing was assessed during a simple guessing task with the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential (ERP), which indexes initial neural responsiveness to positive and negative outcome feedback (e.g., winning or losing money). Higher levels of parental anhedonic, but not non-anhedonic, depressive symptoms were associated with more blunted reactivity to both positive and negative outcome feedback in children. The finding was maintained when statistically controlling for children's own levels of depression and positive affect. These results suggest that parental anhedonia may be a core feature of depression uniquely related to alterations in children's reward processing, which may have important implications for interventions designed to reduce risk in youth.

Guided by steeling and hormesis models, this paper examined parenting adversity as a quadratic predictor of children's emotion knowledge and effortful control and, in turn, their internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Participants were 238 mothers, partners, and their preschool children (Mage = 4.38 years; 52% female). Multiple methods (i.e., observations, interviews, surveys, q-sorts) and informants (i.e., trained observers, experimenters, mothers, children, teachers) were used in a longitudinal design with three annual measurement occasions. Supporting the first link in the mediational cascade, lagged, autoregressive analyses indicated that a quadratic composite of parenting adversity derived from trained observer ratings of parenting at Wave 1 was a significant predictor of children's emotion knowledge and effortful control at Wave 2. In the second part of the proposed cascade, children's Wave 2 emotion knowledge predicted lower levels of their Wave 3 internalizing symptoms, while their Wave 2 effortful control predicted lower levels of their Wave 3 externalizing symptoms. Consistent with steeling effects, curvilinear findings in the first part of the cascade indicated that moderate levels of exposure to parenting adversity predicted the highest levels of children's subsequent emotion knowledge and effortful control. Children also exhibited substantially diminished emotion knowledge and effortful control as their exposure to family adversity increased from moderate to high levels.

Suicide is a significant public health concern and a leading cause of death for children in the United States. As such, there is a growing need to identify correlates of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors in youth, particularly potentially modifiable factors that could be targeted by interventions. One potential factor is neural reactivity to emotional stimuli. Prior research has suggested that the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes this reactivity, may be blunted in adults with a history of suicidality (i.e., ideation and/or suicidal behaviors). These findings have been interpreted in the context of cognitive models of risk, which focus on blunted reactivity to emotional stimuli broadly or to positive stimuli specifically (with perhaps heightened reactivity to negative stimuli). The goal of this study was to determine whether blunted patterns of neural reactivity toward emotional stimuli are observed in children with a history of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) and whether this may differ across emotional contexts (afraid, happy, sad) and intensities (low, medium, high). The study focused on 7-11-year-old children (50.51% girls, 62.63% non-Hispanic White) with (n = 16) and without (n = 83) a history of SITBs. LPP amplitudes were indexed during a Morphed Faces task, in which stimuli displaying a variety of emotional expressions (afraid, happy, and sad) were morphed to display low, medium, and high levels of each emotion. The strongest between-group difference was observed for medium-intensity positive emotional stimuli, with children with SITBs showing blunted responses. These findings provide some support for the positive attenuation hypothesis and suggest that blunted LPP response to ambiguous positive emotional stimuli may be useful as a marker of risk and potential target for intervention.

Approximately 50 % of people who recover from an initial episode of major depressive disorder (MDD) experience a recurrence, and the risk for recurrence increases with each additional episode. Consistent with the stress sensitization model, there is evidence that whereas initial MDD onsets are often preceded by major negative life events, recurrences are often triggered by more minor events. However, it is unclear whether this is due to increased frequency of minor life events, increased reactivity to these events, or both. The current study examined these questions in a community sample of 227 adult women with a history of recurrent MDD (rMDD, n = 77), first-episode MDD (fMDD, n = 38), or no history of MDD (n = 112). Women were assessed at baseline and every six months for two years (5 assessments total). Throughout the follow-up, major and minor life events were assessed using contextual threat interviews and depressive symptoms were assessed using a self-report questionnaire. Regarding event frequency, minor events were more common than major events, and the rMDD group experienced more negative events overall (both major and minor) than the never depressed group but not the fMDD group. Regarding stress reactivity, results of linear mixed modeling revealed that whereas all three groups exhibited similar increases in depressive symptoms following major events, only women in the rMDD group experienced significant increases in depressive symptoms following minor events. These findings show that not only are women with rMDD living in more stressful contexts, but they are also more reactive to minor stressors, increasing risk for future depression.

Genome-wide association studies have allowed for the creation of polygenic scores (PGSs) reflecting genetic liability for depression, yet recent work suggests that these PGSs may also reflect greater genetic propensity towards higher levels of stress exposure. The current study sought to extend prior findings to examine whether an established depression PGS (DEP-PGS) is associated with greater stress exposure at the neighborhood level in a sample of preadolescent children. This study included 278 children of European ancestry between the ages of 7 and 11 (45.3% female) and their parent. Parents and children completed clinical interviews and questionnaires and children provided genetic samples. Children’s neighborhoods were defined based on their current home address and geocoded indices of neighborhood adversity (i.e., area socioeconomic disadvantage, crime, opportunity) were matched to zip codes. As hypothesized, children with greater genetic liability for depression as reflected by DEP-PGSs were more likely to live in neighborhoods characterized by greater adversity. Findings were maintained when statistically controlling for family socioeconomic status and parent’s and children’s histories of depression and anxiety. The current findings build upon prior research highlighting depression-relevant gene-environment correlations and extend this work to provide evidence that DEP-PGSs may capture genetic liability for exposure to stressful contexts at the neighborhood level. Future research is needed to replicate findings in diverse samples and to examine whether neighborhood-level adversity mediates the relation between DEP-PGSs and future depression risk in youth.

In this study, we examined associations between census-derived indices of neighborhood disadvantage and children's reward outcome processing and whether these relations would be stronger among children already at risk for alterations in reward processing due to having a parental history of major depressive disorder (MDD) compared to children of never depressed parents. Participants were 224 children aged 7-11 years old and their parent. Parents were required to either have a history of MDD or no lifetime history of any depressive disorder. To measure reward outcome processing, we focused on the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential (ERP) elicited following gain and loss outcome feedback while children completed a monetary reward task. Census-derived measures of neighborhood disadvantage based upon families' addresses included the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), neighborhood crime risk, and the Child Opportunity Index (COI). The general pattern of findings across indices was that higher levels of neighborhood disadvantage were associated with more blunted neural reactivity to both gain and loss feedback, but only among children with a parental history of MDD and not among children of never depressed parents. These results suggest that broader contextual stressors may impact how youth process reward outcome feedback, especially youth already at heightened risk for depression, which may have implications for understanding risk for disorders associated with reward dysfunction.

Reduced autobiographical memory (AM) specificity, characterized by difficulty recalling specific past events, is a feature of multiple psychiatric disorders. While meta-analyses indicate that reduced AM specificity can predict future symptom severity, its role as a premorbid risk factor for mental illness onset in young people remains unclear. Our preregistered individual participant data meta-analysis (PROSPERO; CRD42022287786) synthesized longitudinal data from 14 community-based studies of children and adolescents (N = 9,165). Most studies reported symptom severity (92.9%), with one third also reporting diagnostic status (35.7%). Assessment timing ranged from 2 months to 8.3 years following the autobiographical memory task. Multivariate mixed-effect models found no support for AM specificity predicting future symptom severity in depression or posttraumatic stress disorder. Contrary to expectations, higher memory specificity significantly predicted higher anxiety symptoms, but the quality of evidence was low. Intriguingly, reduced AM specificity significantly predicted an increased risk of receiving a psychiatric diagnosis and an earlier onset of disorder (hazard ratio = 0.55, p = .018). This risk was most robust for depressive disorders (hazard ratio = 0.21, p < .001). Findings suggest reduced AM specificity could be a risk factor for the onset of functionally impairing psychiatric disorders, but it does not consistently predict elevated symptoms in community-based samples. Further theoretical development is needed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ABSTRACTResearch has shown that exposure to higher rates of neighborhood disadvantage and contextual threat increases risk for the development of psychopathology in youth, with some evidence that these effects may differ across racial/ethnic groups. Although studies have shown that direct exposure to stress impacts neural responses to threat‐relevant stimuli, less is known about how neighborhood characteristics more generally (e.g., living in neighborhood characterized by high crime risk, whether or not the individual directly experiences any crime) may impact children's neural responses to threat. To address this question, we examined links between census‐derived indices of neighborhood crime and neural reactivity to emotional stimuli in a sample of 100 children (Mage = 9.64, 54% girls, 65% non‐Hispanic White) and whether these differ for children from minority backgrounds compared to non‐Hispanic White children. Focusing on the late positive potential (LPP) event‐related potential (ERP) component, we examined neural reactivity to threat‐relevant stimuli (fearful faces) as well as nonthreat‐relevant negative (sad faces) and positive (happy faces) stimuli across low, medium, and high intensities (morph levels). We found that levels of neighborhood crime risk were associated with larger LPP amplitudes for high‐intensity fearful, but not happy or sad faces, but only among children from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds. This suggests that levels of crime risk within one's neighborhood may be a more salient stressor for children from minority racial‐ethnic groups than for non‐Hispanic White children.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a significant public health concern that is thought to increase risk for future self-injurious behaviors, including suicide attempts. Notably, NSSI is especially prevalent among adolescents, which underscores a critical need to identify modifiable risk factors that could be targeted to reduce future risk. The current study examined self- and co-regulation of physiological responses during mother-daughter interactions in adolescent girls with and without a history of NSSI. Participants were 60 girls aged 13-17 with (n = 27) and without (n = 33) a history of NSSI and their mothers. Adolescents and their mothers completed positive and negative interaction tasks during which physiological reactivity was assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Across tasks, adolescents with an NSSI history demonstrated higher levels of RSA than adolescents without this history. Moreover, Actor-Partner Interdependence Modeling (APIM) reflected differences in co-regulation during the negatively-valenced interaction, such that mothers of daughters with NSSI were more reactive to fluctuations in their daughters’ RSA than mothers of daughters without an NSSI history. These findings highlight intra- and interpersonal aspects of physiological dysregulation associated with NSSI that could provide promising targets of intervention to reduce future risk in adolescent girls.

This study tested children's emotion recognition as a mediator of associations between their exposure to hostile and cooperative interparental conflict and their internalizing and externalizing symptoms. From 2018 to 2022, 238 mothers, their partners, and preschool children (Mage = 4.38, 52% female; 68% White; 18% Black; 14% Multiracial or another race; and 16% Latinx) participated in three annual measurement occasions. Path analyses indicated that Wave 1 observations of hostile interparental conflict predicted residualized increases in children's emotion recognition accuracy (i.e., angry, sad, and happy) at Wave 2 (beta = .27). Wave 2 emotion recognition, in turn, predicted residualized decreases in children's internalizing symptoms at Wave 3 (beta = -.22). Mediational findings were partly attributable to children's accuracy in identifying angry and high-intensity expressions.

BACKGROUND:Theorists have proposed that the way children process social-emotional information may serve as a mechanism of risk for the intergenerational transmission of depression. There is growing evidence that infants and children of mothers with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) during the child's life exhibit attentional avoidance of sad faces, which has been proposed as an early emerging emotion regulation strategy. In contrast, there is clear evidence that at-risk and depressed adolescents and adults exhibit difficulty disengaging attention from sad faces.METHODS:Seeking to link these two literatures, the current U.S.-based study used eye tracking within the context of an accelerated longitudinal design to assess attentional biases in 8-14-year-old offspring of mothers with a history MDD during the child's life (n = 123) or no history of MDD (n = 119) every six months for two years, allowing us to map trajectories of attention from age 8 to 16.RESULTS:Mother MDD history moderated age-based changes in children's gaze duration to sad (t[240] = 2.44, p = .02), but not happy (t[240] = 0.11, p = .91) or angry (t[240] = 0.67, p = .50), faces. Consistent our hypotheses, offspring of mothers with MDD exhibited significantly less attention to sad faces than offspring of never depressed mothers before age 8.5 but significantly more attention to sad faces after age 14.5, which was due to an increase in gaze duration to sad faces from childhood to adolescence among offspring of mothers with MDD (t[122] = 5.44, p < .001) but not among offspring of never depressed mothers (t[118] = 1.49, p = .14).CONCLUSIONS:It appears that the form, and perhaps function, of attentional bias may shift across development in at-risk youth. To the extent that this is true, it has significant implications not only for theories of the intergenerational transmission of depression risk but also for prevention and early intervention efforts designed to reduce this risk.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is an alarming public health concern that is particularly widespread among adolescents. The current study examined affective responses during mother-daughter interactions in adolescent girls with and without a history of NSSI. Participants were 60 girls aged 13–17 with (n = 27) and without (n = 33) a history of NSSI and their mothers. Adolescents and their mothers completed two interaction tasks: one positive and one negative. During these interactions, facial affect was assessed via electromyography (EMG). Results of Actor-Partner Interdependence Modeling (APIM) revealed several intra- and interpersonal disruptions in affect during both tasks among dyads in which the adolescent had an NSSI history. Findings suggest deficits in both self- and co-regulation of facial affect during mother-daughter interactions involving dyads in which the adolescents reports NSSI. Ultimately, if replicated and extended in longitudinal research, these disruptions may prove to be promising targets of intervention to reduce risk for future NSSI in adolescent girls.