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This study examined the mediating role of emotional availability in the relation between parent positive personality and toddler problem behavior. The sample comprised 654 twins at 12 and 32 months. Primary caregivers (>95% mothers) completed six measures indexing parent positive personality assessed at 12 months, and emotional availability and toddler problem behaviors assessed at both times. Parent positive personality was positively associated with emotional availability and negatively associated with problem behavior. The indirect path from parent positive personality to problem behavior through emotional availability was significant, and parent positive personality was no longer significantly related to problem behavior, suggesting full mediation. Although problem behaviors were heritable, over half of the variance was due to the shared environment, pointing to early childhood as a time when parent characteristics and behaviors may have maximum influence. Parental emotional responsiveness could serve to reduce problem behaviors in young children.

Genetic association studies routinely require many thousands of participants to achieve sufficient power, yet accumulation of large well-assessed samples is costly. We describe here an effort to efficiently measure cognitive ability and personality in an online genetic study, Genes for Good. We report on the first 21,550 participants with relevant phenotypic data, 7,458 of whom have been genotyped genome-wide. Measures of crystallized and fluid intelligence reflected a two-dimensional latent ability space, with items demonstrating adequate item-level characteristics. The Big Five Inventory questionnaire revealed the expected five-factor model of personality. Cognitive measures predicted educational attainment over and above personality characteristics, as expected. We found that a genome-wide polygenic score of educational attainment predicted educational level, accounting for 4%, 4%, and 2.7% of the variance in educational attainment, verbal reasoning, and spatial reasoning, respectively. In summary, the online cognitive measures in Genes for Good appear to perform adequately and demonstrate expected associations with personality, education, and an education-based polygenic score. Results indicate that online cognitive assessment is one avenue to accumulate large samples of individuals for genetic research of cognitive ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study was to disentangle the common and unique genetic and environmental influences on social–emotional competence, problem behavior, physiological dysregulation, and negative emotionality (NE) in toddlers. The sample consisted of 243 twin pairs (mean age =31.94 months) rated by primary caregivers (>95% mothers) on the Children's Behavior Questionnaire and the Infant‐Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment. A multivariate Cholesky Decomposition revealed three shared environmental factors, with one set of environmental influences common to competence, problem behavior, and physiological dysregulation, a second common to problem behavior and physiological dysregulation, and a third common to physiological dysregulation and NE. Also, there were two additive genetic factors, with one explaining variance in competence, NE, and a small amount of variance in problem behavior, and a second explaining variance in problem behavior and NE. Given the common shared environmental factors across outcomes, these results suggest that toddlerhood could be a particularly important time to intervene, as interventions could simultaneously improve competencies and reduce problem behaviors. This study also highlights the need for genetically informed research to examine the etiology of multiple outcomes and address overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importance: Individuals exposed to discrimination may exhibit greater epigenetic age acceleration (ie, cellular indicators of premature aging) over time, but few studies have examined longitudinal changes in epigenetic age acceleration, the heterogeneity in these changes for diverse groups of youths, and contextual explanations (ie, discrimination) for differences by ethnicity or race., Objective: To provide a descriptive illustration of changes in epigenetic age acceleration across childhood and adolescence among an ethnically and racially diverse sample of youths., Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study leveraged longitudinal data on a large sample of youths from low-income households in 20 large urban US cities who provided repeated assessments of saliva tissue samples at ages 9 and 15 years for DNA methylation analysis. Of 4898 youths from the Future of Families and Child Well-Being study, an ongoing study that oversampled children born to unmarried parents from 1998 to 2000, 2039 were included in the present analysis, as these youths had salivary DNA methylation data assayed and publicly available. Analyses were conducted from March 2023 to June 2024., Exposures: Racialized intrusive encounters with police (eg, stop and frisk and racial slurs)., Main Outcomes and Measures: Analyses were conducted to examine longitudinal changes in salivary epigenetic age acceleration over time, whether such changes varied across ethnically and racially diverse groups of youths, and whether police intrusion was associated with variation across ethnic and racial groups., Results: Among 2039 youths (mean [SD] age at baseline, 9.27 [0.38] years; 1023 [50%] male and 1016 [50%] female; 917 [45%] Black, 430 [21%] Hispanic or Latino, 351 [17%] White, and 341 [17%] other, including multiple races and self-identified other) with salivary epigenetic clocks at 9 and 15 years of age, longitudinal results showed that White youths exhibited less accelerated epigenetic aging over time than did Black and Hispanic or Latino youths and those reporting other or multiple races or ethnicities from ages 9 to 15 years, particularly in the Hannum (B, 1.54; 95% CI, 0.36-2.18), GrimAge (B, 1.31; 95% CI, 0.68-1.97), and DunedinPACE epigenetic clocks (B, 0.27; 95% CI, 0.11-0.44). Across these clocks and the PhenoAge clock, police intrusion was associated with Black youths' more accelerated epigenetic aging (Hannum: B, 0.11; 95% CI, 0.03-0.23; GrimAge: B, 0.09; 95% CI, 0.03-0.18; PhenoAge: B, 0.08; 95% CI, 0.02-0.18; DunedinPACE: B, 0.01; 95% CI, 0.01-0.03)., Conclusions and Relevance: The transition from childhood to adolescence may represent a sensitive developmental period when racism can have long-term deleterious impacts on healthy human development across the life span. Future research should build on the present study and interrogate which social regularities and policies may be perpetuating discrimination against ethnically and racially minoritized adolescents.

Individuals with disabilities comprise one of the largest marginalized groups in the United States and experience systemic barriers in health care. In Westernized communities, disability has historically been conceptualized via the medical model, which considers disability an individual-level deficit in need of correction. Although other models of disability (e.g., social model) have been developed to address the medical model's ableist shortcomings, these fail to consistently acknowledge intersectionality. Specifically, these models fail to consider that (a) a disabled individual may hold other marginalized or oppressed identities and (b) these intersecting oppressions may exacerbate health inequities. Intersectionality, which originates from Black feminist literature, describes the ways that systems of power and oppression (e.g., racism, sexism) interact to form an individual's unique experience. To date, the intersection of disability and other marginalized identities has been neglected in psychology and related fields, leaving little guidance for how scholars, clinicians, and other stakeholders can address disability via an intersectional lens. The present article discusses how a disability-affirmative , intersectional approach can serve as a strategy for challenging and reforming oppressive systems across the field of psychology. We assert that, ultimately, this approach has the potential to optimize and expand access to equitable, inclusive mental health care, and we propose actionable steps psychologists can take in research, practice, training, and policy in pursuit of this aim. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).