Karen D. Rudolph, PhD - US grants

A six month longitudinal study is proposed to identify predictors of risk for depressive symptoms during children's transition to middle school. The long term objective of this research is to delineate the developmental pathways involved in the emergence of child depression and to understand the impact of early onset depressive symptoms on future adjustment. In line with recent efforts to construct developmentally sensitive, integrative models of child depression, this study will examine the interplay between individual vulnerability, construed as maladaptive cognitions about the self and others, and contextual risk, construed as stressful events and conditions. Two conceptual models of risk will be tested (a) a stress exposure model, wherein the joint influence of cognitions and stress precipitates depression and (b) a stress- generation model, wherein depression undermines children~s competence and leads to psychosocial impairment. In a community sample of 300 elementary school children, information will be gathered from multiple sources about 3 domains of adjustment: (a) cognitions about the self and interpersonal relationships, assessed with child questionnaires, (b) acute life events, daily hassles, and chronic strain, assessed with parent and child questionnaires, and (c)depressive, anxiety, and externalizing symptoms, assessed with parent, child, and teacher questionnaires. A follow up assessment will be conducted six months later, subsequent to children~s transition into middle school. Hypotheses will be tested using multiple regression procedures to compare several proposed moderator and mediator models of child depression. Extension of this line of research to include long term prospective studies and more in depth assessments will enable researchers to pinpoint early markers of risk for depression. This knowledge can inform interventions designed to interrupt the cycle between early maladjustment and later psychopathology.

Despite recent widespread recognition of child depression as a valid and potentially debilitating clinical phenomenon, controversy remains as to the etiology, significance, and prognostic power of depression in childhood. The primary goal of the proposed research is to identify the antecedents and sequelae of depression during the early course of disorder. A particular focus is placed on understanding the rise in depression during adolescence, especially in girls. The model guiding the research posits that family dysfunction in the form of parental depression and lifetime family disruptions fosters the development of maladaptive conceptions of interpersonal relationships and ineffective coping, which create a vulnerability to depression. Stressful circumstances, including the negotiation of normative developmental transitions, are hypothesized to activate this vulnerability, leading to depression during transition periods. Girls are expected to be most sensitive to these processes due to personal characteristics as well as the experience of unique challenges during adolescence. Finally, depression is expected to induce further psychosocial disruption, which increases the likelihood of persistence or recurrence of disorder across adolescence. This proposed multivariate model will be examined using a prospective, multi-informant, multi-method design. Subgroups of depressed, externalizing, and comparison children selected from a community sample will be followed over a period of 2 1/2 years to explore the social-cognitive, affective, interpersonal, and contextual processes underlying onset and recurrence of depression during the early course of disorder. Ultimately, it is anticipated that knowledge from such research can inform the creation of empirically based intervention programs designed to treat childhood-onset depression.

Over the past 2 decades, victimization among school children has become a growing public health concern. Once believed to be a normative and even acceptable part of growing up, this myth has now been dispelled. Consequently, researchers have become interested in understanding why some children are more likely to be victimized, and how this victimization affects their well being. The goal of the proposed research is to identify the psychological, emotional, behavioral, and physiological antecedents and consequences of victimization. A transactional model is proposed to explain how victimization in the peer group influences a range of developmental processes, which then place children at further risk. Specifically, this model posits that exposure to peer victimization contributes to maladaptive social-cognitive processes, ineffective emotional and behavioral self-regulatory responses, global emotional and behavioral dysfunction, and heightened adrenocortical reactivity. These developmental consequences, in turn, are proposed to heighten children's sensitivity to future interpersonal stress, as well as to cause children to generate additional stress in their relationships, including further victimization. Personal attributes of children and characteristics of victimization experiences are expected to influence how children react to victimization. This model will be evaluated in the context of a prospective longitudinal study. 400-second graders will be followed across four years using child, parent, and teacher reports. A sub-sample of children will participate in two observational procedures. First, observations will be conducted of natural playground interactions each of the four years to examine children's experiences with familiar peers, including incidents of victimization, and how they respond to stressful situations. Second, observations will be conducted using a laboratory paradigm to examine victimized children's responses to a social challenge during an interaction with an unfamiliar peer. Evaluation of the proposed transactional model will advance efforts to understand how children and their environments jointly contribute to development, and will provide a broad conceptual framework for understanding long-term risk in victimized children over time and across social groups. Moreover, this research will provide a basis for the creation of child-level and school-level programs designed to interrupt the cycle of victimization, violence, and distress associated with maltreatment by peers.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Peer victimization is a salient form of early adversity with long-term costs for youths' mental health. Indeed, research and media coverage place peer victimization on the national agenda as a critical public health issue, given its prevalence and it implications for emotional well-being into adolescence and adulthood. Identifying processes accounting for these enduring effects is critical for informing policy and practice, yet scientists have not yet discovered the processes through which victimization derails youths' development-that is, how victimization gets under the skin in ways that instill long-term risk. Inspired by a growing recognition of the pervasive impact of early life stress on maturing brain systems and associated psychopathology, this research will contribute substantially to scientific knowledge and its application by documenting the adolescent sequelae of victimization, with broader implications for enriching our understanding of the mechanisms through which early adversity shapes stress reactivity and mental health. Integrating ideas across the fields of developmental and social psychology, social affective neuroscience, and developmental psychopathology with the NIMH RDoC framework, this research will examine whether victimization is linked to dysregulated negative valence systems involved in sustained threat/loss, thereby heightening reactivity and compromising regulation and contributing to adolescent depression. Introducing an innovative methodological approach into the field of peer victimization, this research will use a multi-level design, examining reactivity and regulation at both the neural and behavioral levels in the context of an experimental design (laboratory cues of social threat/loss). This study will take advantage of an existing sample of adolescent girls (10th-11th graders), well-characterized on victimization, individual differences in risks and resources, and mental health from 2nd-9th grade, thereby providing the opportunity to leverage a comprehensive longitudinal data set to enrich the proposed short-term (two-year) investigation of neural/behavioral processing and depressive symptoms. Thus, this study is uniquely positioned to examine the link between childhood victimization and subsequent neural and behavioral processing of social cues as well as to determine whether stress reactivity/regulation account for the contribution of victimization to adolescent depression. This research also will provide novel data on individual differences in risk and resilience processes, thereby maximizing the efficiency of prevention/intervention programs. Ultimately, it is anticipated that this researc will serve as a basis for larger longitudinal studies investigating: (a) how early adversity withina variety of contexts influences emerging brain systems in ways that set the stage for adolescent mental health problems; and (b) individual and contextual resources that may buffer youth against these adverse consequences. This line of research can yield clear and compelling implications for policy and practice guidelines aimed at minimizing the threat posed by early social adversity to youths' health and development, with potential implications for long-term adaptation and societal burden.

7. Project Summary/Abstract Adolescence is marked by significant challenges, with critical implications for emotional health. During this stage, youth, especially girls, are exposed to increasing stress and show heightened emotional sensitivity, particularly within social contexts. Some adolescents may not yet have developed effective regulatory strategies, leading to difficulties managing these more intense emotions and consequent maladaptive health outcomes. Such health issues inhibit the ability of adolescents to reach their potential and create a significant societal burden. However, recent models of adolescent brain development highlight the potential for cognitive flexibility and growth during this period of rapid change. Given these potential risks and resources of adolescence, significant scientific and practical advances can be made by identifying individual differences that predict healthy vs. unhealthy emotional functioning during this stage. This research seeks to identify one psychological factor, mindsets about emotion, that may contribute to adolescent emotional risk or resilience. The guiding scientific premise for this research is that a growth emotion mindset (GEM) will promote adaptive emotion processing (EP), whereas a fixed emotion mindset (FEM) will disrupt EP. Because stress exposure and emotional sensitivity are particularly salient in adolescent girls, the research will focus on this group. Using an experimental design, girls scoring high on a FEM will be randomly assigned to either a mindset manipulation or a control group (brain education). Each group will complete a 25-minute computer-based lesson followed by a social stressor and an fMRI session that includes resting state, an emotional challenge, and a task assessing cognitive control within an emotional context. Two specific aims will be addressed: (1) to determine whether a laboratory-induced GEM, relative to a FEM, predicts more adaptive EP at the neural, behavioral, and psychological levels of processing; and (2) to determine whether neural processing of emotion accounts for the effect of a GEM manipulation on behavioral and psychological processing of emotion. Integrating across the fields of developmental psychology and social affective neuroscience, this exploratory proof-of-concept research will provide insight into the influence of mindsets on multiple levels of EP, a key step to refining theories of adolescent emotional development and furthering basic science efforts to understand cognition-emotion interactions during adolescence. This study builds on a strong empirical database establishing the effect of mindsets on multiple domains of functioning but will be the first to examine the implications of a growth vs. fixed mindset about emotion for EP in adolescent girls, thereby elucidating one specific youth attribute that can support or disrupt emotional development. More broadly, this line of research can yield clear and compelling implications for policy and practice guidelines aimed at optimizing long-term emotional health in adolescent girls and easing societal burden associated with compromised health outcomes.