OBJECTIVE:Higher well-being is consistently associated with better cognitive health. However, little is known about how long-term trajectories of well-being are associated with cognitive health or modifiable dementia risk factors, particularly among populations at high risk for dementia. The current study addressed these open questions. METHOD:The California Families Project, a 14-year longitudinal study of Mexican-origin adults living in the United States (N = 1,240), was used to estimate long-term trajectories of life satisfaction and optimism and whether the level and/or slope of each factor was associated with later cognitive health (i.e., cognitive function and impairment status, and self- and informant-rated memory) and modifiable dementia risk factors (i.e., hearing loss, hypertension, higher body weight, smoking, depression, social isolation, physical inactivity, diabetes, alcohol use, poor sleep quality, inadequate or excessive sleep, inadequate health insurance, and poor self-rated health). RESULTS:Higher life satisfaction level was associated with better self- and informant-rated memory. More positive life satisfaction change was associated with better self-rated memory only. Higher optimism level was associated with better cognitive function, better self-rated memory, and better informant-rated memory. More positive optimism slope was associated with better cognitive function. Life satisfaction and optimism levels and change were also associated with several modifiable dementia risk factors. CONCLUSIONS:Long-term trajectories of well-being are associated with later levels of cognitive health and modifiable dementia risk factors in Mexican-origin adults living in the United States. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Childhood adversity increases risk for depression and higher allostatic load (AL), defined as long-term wear and tear on the body, and adolescence is an especially sensitive time for adversity to be biologically embedded. Individuals of Mexican origin may face multiple forms of adversities relating to their intersectional identities of ethnicity and class, including ethnic discrimination and economic hardship, the experience of which may further depend on sex. However, relatively little research has simultaneously assessed associations between these two types of adolescent adversity and outcomes of both young adult depression and AL longitudinally in Mexican-origin individuals. This preregistered study addressed these gaps in a longitudinal study of 208 Mexican-origin participants. Ethnic discrimination and economic hardship were assessed annually from ages 10-19 and AL and depression symptoms were assessed at age 26. Sex differences were also tested. Perceived discrimination in adolescence significantly predicted higher levels of depression at age 26 (β =.09, p = .045, R2 =.03, ΔR2 = 0.005, 95% CI [.002,.181]). In addition, age 26 depression levels moderated the association between adolescent economic hardship and age 26 AL (β = -.17, p = .03, R2 =.12, ΔR2 =.028, 95% CI [-.33, -.02]). Participants exhibited higher AL with high levels of economic hardship but low levels of depression, as well as with low levels of economic hardship and high depression, suggesting that both psychological resilience to economic hardship and the association between mental health and AL may depend on context. Findings indicate intersectional effects of different types of adversity during adolescence on mental and physical health in young adulthood within Latino individuals.

Conversations surrounding ethnic identification are common for many minoritized individuals, and the seemingly simple act of endorsing a particular ethnic label has important implications for ethnic-racial identity, psychosocial adjustment, and wellbeing across the lifespan. While ethnic labeling is a key aspect of ethnic identity, as it can affirm and reflect one’s self-identification, heritage and cultural values, little is known about how ethnic labeling choices change across time and developmental periods. Using data from the California Families Project, the current study examined the trajectory of Mexican-origin youth’s propensity for identifying as Mexican or Mexican American across a 17-year timespan. The present study followed 674 youth from 5th grade (Mage = 10.86, SD = 0.50; 50

School success is pivotal for minoritized youth from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve upward social mobility. Using data from the California Families Project, a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin youth living in the United States, the present study examined the association between trajectories of psychiatric disorders from late childhood to adolescence and a wide range of high school outcomes assessed via school records. Psychiatric disorders were examined at different levels of breadth, including individual psychiatric disorders, internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and total symptoms. Results of latent growth curve models showed that youth exhibiting more overall psychiatric symptoms had lower high school grade point averages and achievement test scores, took fewer challenging courses during high school, and were less likely to attend college compared with youth exhibiting fewer symptoms. Counterintuitively, faster increases (or slower decreases) in psychiatric symptoms were associated with more positive school outcomes. These findings were similar for boys and girls and for youth born in the United States and Mexico. Incremental validity analyses showed that temperament levels were more robust predictors of school outcomes than psychiatric disorder levels. Developmentally, changes in temperament and psychiatric disorders independently predicted school outcomes. Overall, temperament levels and slopes had incremental validity over psychiatric disorder levels and slopes, suggesting that temperament may be a better target of intervention efforts to promote school success than psychiatric symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Researchers have long debated whether self-esteem is associated with aggression. In this preregistered research, we tested the effects of self-esteem on aggression by using statistical models that control for unmeasured time-invariant confounders. Data came from a multi-wave longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin families, including multi-informant assessments of children, mothers, and fathers at 1- or 2-year intervals. There was no evidence of systematic self-esteem effects on aggression, and the results held when we controlled for narcissism and when the influence of shared-method variance could be ruled out. Also, there was little evidence for effects in the reverse direction, that is, from engaging in aggression on self-esteem. One limitation was that in most cases it was not possible to test whether the self-esteem effects were curvilinear because of the nonconvergence of these models. Overall, the findings do not support either low or high self-esteem as a risk factor for aggression.

Prior research examining the impact of job loss on personality change has yielded inconsistent findings. The present preregistered study extends prior research by analyzing longitudinal data from Sample N = 1,110 predominantly first-generation Mexican-origin adults, who reported on their employment status and Big Five personality traits up to eight times over 16 years. We explored the influence of both individual and spousal unemployment on four forms of personality trait stability and change: rank-order stability, mean-level changes, within-person trait stability, and profile stability. Job loss was associated with a wide range of mean-level personality changes; collectively, the findings suggest that the experience of unemployment can disrupt the normative process of maturation, leading to decreases in conscientiousness and agreeableness and impeding the typical decline in neuroticism. Our study is the first to establish a spillover effect of spousal job loss on partners' personality dynamics, demonstrating that personality changes can occur in response to a partner's job loss. In some cases, these changes paralleled those found for one's own job loss (specifically, gradual postevent declines in agreeableness and openness), whereas in other cases, we found evidence of a compensatory effect (where individuals whose partner lost their job showed an immediate increase in conscientiousness). On the contrary, job loss had no significant effects on rank-order stability, whether experienced by self or spousal, and was associated with higher extraversion within-person trait stability. Likewise, job loss was associated with lower profile stability; those who experienced unemployment showed lower stability in their personality profiles than those who remained employed. These findings highlight the importance of studying the effects of major life transitions on personality change in diverse samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The development of narcissism has been theoretically tied to childhood experiences, yet little empirical research has examined the influence of the family environment on adult narcissism using long-term longitudinal data. The present study identified family factors in late childhood and early adolescence that are prospectively associated with narcissism (grandiosity, superiority, exploitativeness, vulnerability) in emerging adulthood using data from a longitudinal study of Mexican-origin youth (N = 674) spanning from age 10 to 26. Using structural equation modeling of multimethod data (child report, parent and spouse report, and coded parent-child interactions), we found that grandiosity and superiority were significantly predicted by positive aspects of the family environment (e.g., parental warmth, parent-child relationship quality, parental relationship quality), whereas exploitativeness and vulnerability were significantly predicted by negative aspects of the family environment (e.g., parental hostility, parent-child conflict). These findings were much weaker and often nonsignificant after controlling for earlier levels of narcissism, suggesting that the family environment exerts its effect on adult narcissism via its concurrent effect on adolescent narcissism. Overall, our study highlights several underexplored family factors in childhood that contribute to the development and maintenance of narcissism in adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolescence is a sensitive period during which socioeconomic conditions can shape brain development and mental health. To further clarify such pathways, the present study examined how trajectories of different poverty indices across adolescence relate to brain structure and depressive symptomatology. In a sample of 206 Mexican-origin youth, latent growth curve modeling was used to assess parent-reported income-to-needs and economic hardship measured from ages 10 to 16 as predictors of self-reported depressive symptomatology at age 18. Youths also reported on perceived economic hardship at 14 and 16 years. Amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex volumes assessed using structural magnetic resonance imaging at age 17 were examined as mediators within the models. Lower average income-to-needs across adolescence was associated with larger amygdala and hippocampal volumes, whereas youth-reported economic hardship predicted smaller anterior cingulate cortex volumes. Youth-reported economic hardship, but neither parent-reported economic hardship nor brain volumes, significantly predicted depression symptoms. Parent-reported economic hardship across adolescence was unrelated to both brain volume and depression symptoms. Results highlight that objective poverty and adolescents' own perceptions of hardship may each relate to neurodevelopment, and that youth-reported hardship may be more proximally linked to depressive symptomatology in late adolescence than parent-reported hardship or brain volume.

Parenting that is warm and supportive has been consistently linked to better emotion regulation in children, but less is known about this association in adolescents. Adolescence is thought to be an important period for emotion regulation development given that it coincides with the emergence of mental health issues. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a measure of parasympathetic regulation linked to emotion and behavior regulation. Despite the well-documented links between parenting practices and emotion regulation, and between RSA and emotion regulation, few studies have focused on the association between positive parenting and adolescent RSA or included both mothers and fathers. The current study analyzed the influence of warm parenting throughout adolescence (ages 10-16) on basal RSA at age 17 in 229 Mexican-origin youths. Latent-growth curve models were used to analyze associations between maternal and paternal warmth and baseline RSA. Changes in maternal, but not paternal, warmth from age 10 to 16 were related to youths' basal RSA at age 17. Specifically, youths who perceived increasing (or less decreasing) maternal warmth across adolescence had higher basal RSA. This finding suggests that positive maternal parenting experiences during adolescence "get under the skin" to enhance parasympathetic functioning that supports youths' emotion regulation capacities.

Theories of personality development emphasize the continuity between who we are as a child and who we are as an adult. However, there are major unanswered questions about this (dis)continuity because research on traits has long been divided into studies of temperament in childhood and studies of personality in adolescence/adulthood. To bridge this divide, the present study used longitudinal data from a sample of 674 Mexican-origin youth who completed assessments of temperament traits (i.e., Negative Emotionality, Surgency, Affiliation, Effortful Control) from ages 10-16 and assessments of Big Five personality traits from ages 14-26. Leveraging two waves of overlapping temperament/personality trait assessments at ages 14 and 16, we found: (1) continuity between childhood/adolescent temperament and age 26 personality, with the strongest associations between conceptually similar traits, and Effortful Control predicting all Big Five traits (except Extraversion), suggesting self-regulation broadly promotes maturation; (2) temperament starts predicting adult personality traits by age 12-14, indicating that temperamental foundations of adult personality development crystallize in adolescence; (3) conceptually similar temperament/personality traits reflect different expressions of the same underlying trait from age 10-26, established using latent growth models of joint temperament/personality factors; (4) mean-level personality development across late childhood to adulthood showing that all joint traits maintain consistent rank-order stability and youth increase in Effortful Control/Conscientiousness, decrease in Negative Emotionality/Neuroticism and Surgency/Extraversion, and do not change in Affiliation/Agreeableness. Findings add novel support for widely accepted–yet largely untested–theories, although some unexpected results undermine prevailing assumptions about personality development.

The present study addresses a fundamental yet largely neglected question about personality development: To what extent are changes in parent personality traits associated with changes in their child's personality traits? Numerous developmental processes suggest that parent and child personality might have transactional associations over time, contributing to their codevelopment. This codevelopment may be homotypic (e.g., associations between changes in parent and child conscientiousness) and heterotypic (e.g., associations between changes in parent conscientiousness and changes in child extraversion). In addition to investigating the extent to which parent and child personality codevelops, we also investigated the extent to which parental (mother and father) personality codevelops. We tested these ideas using bivariate growth curve models of personality trait assessments from a 17-year longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin families. Intercepts of parent and child trait trajectories were generally correlated, but we did not find significant correlations between the slopes, contrary to our expectation of parent-child codevelopment. We found stronger evidence for codevelopment in mom-dad dyads, with significant slope-slope correlations for extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. In almost all cases, the results generalized across child gender, child nativity, and parental age. We discuss the implications of the findings for adolescent personality development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Stressors experienced across multiple domains (e.g., family and peers) may contribute to alcohol use trajectories; however, little is known about the longitudinal links between stressors and alcohol use among Latinx youth. Guided by prior work on stressors and alcohol use, the present study used longitudinal data to examine whether Mexican-origin adolescents' (N = 674; 50% female; 28% Mexico born; 72% U.S. born) experiences of family and peer stressors across early to middle adolescence (Mage = 10.86, SDage = 0.51) predicted trajectories of alcohol use frequency and binge drinking from middle adolescence to young adulthood (Mage = 23.17, SDage = 0.59). Using two strategies for modeling stressors, we report results that showed more support for stressors across early adolescence as predictors of alcohol use trajectories when stressors were modeled as growth trajectories versus modeled as distal and proximal stressors. Findings underscore the need to consider strategies to attenuate the longitudinal links between stressors and alcohol use among Mexican-origin youth.

Loneliness is a pressing public health concern, particularly among adolescents and young adults. This preregistered study examined changes in time spent alone from 7th to 12th grade, as well as relationship and personality predictors of time spent alone in adolescence and loneliness in early adulthood, using data from a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin youth in the United States, a rapidly growing yet understudied demographic. Time spent alone showed linear increases from 7th to 12th grade, with greater increases in time spent alone in high school for youth who spent a high proportion of time alone at the start of high school (9th grade). Greater time spent alone in 9th grade was significantly predicted by gender, lower peer relationship quality, parent-child support, parental warmth, higher parent-child conflict, parental hostility, and youth neuroticism. However, there were no significant predictors of change in time spent alone throughout the course of high school (from 9th to 12th grade). Lastly, loneliness in young adulthood was predicted by spending a high proportion of time alone, higher neuroticism, and lower extraversion in the 9th grade. Thus, time spent alone in adolescence may be a crucial early indicator of later loneliness.

Prior research has demonstrated a link between perceived discrimination during adolescence and depression symptoms, but few studies have examined whether this link holds into young adulthood. Moreover, little is known about the neural mechanisms that explain the association between discrimination and depression, or the protective cultural factors that buffer youth against the adverse effects of discrimination. These gaps were addressed with a sample of 196 Mexican-origin youth (51% female) enrolled in the longitudinal California Families Project. Perceived discrimination was assessed in early adolescence (ages 10–14); participants completed two neuroimaging scans while experiencing social exclusion in late adolescence (ages 16 and 18); and, depression symptoms were assessed in young adulthood (ages 21 and 23). Growth curve analyses tested whether perceived discrimination was associated with depression symptoms in young adulthood, whether exclusion-related neural activity mediated this association, and whether cultural factors (ethnic pride, familism) moderated these associations. No significant effects were found, except that higher levels of ethnic pride in later adolescence were associated with lower levels of depression symptoms in young adulthood ( $$\beta$$ = − .17, SE = .06, p = 0.007). Findings suggest that ethnic pride could be leveraged in interventions to promote more positive mental health outcomes in Mexican-origin individuals in young adulthood.

The present study examined stability and change in narcissism during adolescence and emerging adulthood, a time of turbulent transitions and shifting social roles. Using data from a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin youth, we investigated rank-order stability and mean-level change in narcissistic grandiosity from age 14 to 26 and narcissistic vulnerability from age 19 to 26. Grandiosity and vulnerability showed moderate-to-high stability across 2- to 3-year intervals (rs = .43-.75) and across the full study period. On average, grandiosity increased from age 14 to 26 and vulnerability increased from age 19 to 26. However, these overall trends obscured significant individual-level changes, with about one third of the sample declining or showing no change in narcissism. Thus, although most individuals become more narcissistic from adolescence to emerging adulthood, many do not, and future research should identify factors that explain why some people increase and others decrease during the critical transition into adulthood.

Loneliness becomes more prevalent as youth transition from childhood into adolescence. A key underlying process may be the puberty-related increase in biological stress reactivity, which can alter social behavior and elicit conflict or social withdrawal (fight-or-flight behaviors) in some youth, but increase prosocial (tend-and-befriend) responses in others. In this article, we propose an integrative theoretical model that identifies the social, personality, and biological characteristics underlying individual differences in social-behavioral responses to stress. This model posits a vicious cycle whereby youth who respond to stress with fight-or-flight tendencies develop increasing and chronic levels of loneliness across adolescence, whereas youth who display tend-and-befriend behaviors may be buffered from these consequences. Based on research supporting this model, we propose multiple avenues for intervention to curtail the prevalence of loneliness in adolescence by targeting key factors involved in its development: social relationships, personality, and stress-induced behavioral and biological changes.

Self-esteem represents one of the most important personal resources for workers. However, the value of different forms of self-esteem (i.e., global vs. organization-specific) for work outcomes and their reciprocal associations over time have yet to be examined. This preregistered study examined (1) longitudinal reciprocal relations between global and organizational self-esteem, (2) prospective effects of global and organizational self-esteem on job satisfaction and work engagement, and (3) the role of organizational self-esteem as a mediator of the effects of global self-esteem on job satisfaction and work engagement. Using data on 1014 workers who were assessed annually during the first three years of their careers, we implemented three cross-lagged panel (CLPM) models: the traditional CLPM, the Random Intercept-CLPM, and the Latent State Trait Model. The results from the best fitting model (the Latent State Trait Model), as well as the other two, failed to support our preregistered hypotheses; instead, the findings suggest that global and organizational self-esteem are largely independent, at both the between- and within-person level, and that neither form of self-esteem has important effects on job satisfaction or work engagement.

A widely held belief among laypeople and psychologists suggests that self-esteem and relational aggression (i.e., perpetration and victimization) are associated over time. The present study examines the bidirectional associations between self-esteem and relational aggression across 6 years, using two types of longitudinal models (latent cross-lagged panel models and latent random intercepts cross-lagged panel models) to separate between- and within-person effects. Six hundred and seventy-four Mexican-origin youth reported their global and domain-specific self-esteem and relational aggression (perpetration and victimization) in the fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades. Our findings suggest that: (a) being a perpetrator is prospectively associated with later lower opposite-sex relationships self-esteem at the between-person level, (b) lower self-esteem in the domain of honesty-trustworthiness is prospectively associated with becoming a perpetrator and a victim at the within- and between-person level, (c) lower global self-esteem is prospectively associated with higher victimization at the between-person level, and (d) being victimized is not prospectively associated with later global or domain-specific self-esteem, at neither the within- nor the between-person level. The present study provides little evidence for the widely held belief about the bidirectional associations between self-esteem and relational aggression across time but demonstrates the complexity of these associations on the between- and within-person level.