Lifespan developmental psychology extends from birth to old age. I describe my research career from studies of newborns through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. I also include reflections from my aging brain on determinants of the life course especially in regard to risk and resilience. Infant learning, toddler temperament, and parental conc...
Published in Psychological medicine
There is an emerging consensus in developmental psychopathology that irritable youth are at risk for developing internalizing problems later in life. The current study explored if irritability in youth is multifactorial and the impact of irritability dimensions on psychopathology outcomes in adulthood. We conducted exploratory factor analysis on ir...
Published in Psychological medicine
Classic conceptual frameworks explaining the relationship of personality traits to depression include the precursor and predisposition models. The former hypothesizes that depression is predicted by traits alone whereas the latter hypothesizes that stress, together with personality, predicts depression. Dynamic vulnerability models (DVM) expand on ...
Published in International journal of environmental research and public health
The present study aims to investigate the outcomes of the Focal Play Therapy with Children and Parents (FPT-CP) in terms of parent-therapist alliance, parent-child interactions, and parenting stress. Thirty parental couples (N = 60; 30 mothers and 30 fathers) and their children presenting behavioral, evacuation and eating disorders took part to the...
Published in Psychological medicine
Reward processing deficits have been implicated in the etiology of depression. A blunted reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential elicited by feedback to monetary gain relative to loss, predicts new onsets and increases in depression symptoms. Etiological models of depression also highlight stressful life events. However, no studies hav...
Published in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines
Aggression in children has genetic and environmental causes. Studies of aggression can pool existing datasets to include more complex models of social effects. Such analyses require large datasets with harmonized outcome measures. Here, we made use of a reference panel for phenotype data to harmonize multiple aggression measures in school-aged chil...
Published in Psychological medicine
Although early life adversity (ELA) increases risk for psychopathology, mechanisms linking ELA with the onset of psychopathology remain poorly understood. Conceptual models have argued that ELA accelerates development. It is unknown whether all forms of ELA are associated with accelerated development or whether early maturation is a potential mecha...
Published in Developmental science
Executive Function (EF) and Effortful Control (EC) have traditionally been viewed as distinct constructs related to cognition and temperament during development. More recently, EF and EC have been implicated in top-down self-regulation - the goal-directed control of cognition, emotion, and behavior. We propose that executive attention, a limited-ca...
Published in Frontiers in Psychiatry
The present case-control study aimed to investigate the relationship between alexithymia and somatic complaints in the psychopathological setting of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). A clinical sample of 134 adolescents (115 females; 85.5%) from 12 to 18 years old engaging in NSSI was compared with a control group of 243 high-school students (157 fe...
Published in Attachment & human development
The current study examined the development of toddler attachment and early childhood behavior among children of mothers with a history of childhood maltreatment and current major depressive disorder. Maternal depression, maternal sensitivity, and toddler attachment were assessed as mediators of the association between maternal history of childhood ...
