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Children in foster care have often encountered a range of adverse experiences, including neglectful and/or abusive care and multiple caregiver transitions. Prior research findings suggest that such experiences negatively affect inhibitory control and the underlying neural circuitry. In the current study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed during a go/no go task that assesses inhibitory control to compare the behavioral performance and brain activation of foster children and nonmaltreated children. The sample included two groups of 9- to 12-year-old children: 11 maltreated foster children and 11 nonmaltreated children living with their biological parents. There were no significant group differences on behavioral performance on the task. In contrast, patterns of brain activation differed by group. The nonmaltreated children demonstrated stronger activation than did the foster children across several regions, including the right anterior cingulate cortex, the middle frontal gyrus, and the right lingual gyrus, during correct no go trials, whereas the foster children displayed stronger activation than the nonmaltreated children in the left inferior parietal lobule and the right superior occipital cortex, including the lingual gyrus and cuneus, during incorrect no go trials. These results provide preliminary evidence that the early adversity experienced by foster children impacts the neural substrates of inhibitory control.

The current study examined two family process predictors of parent-reported child sleep problems at 4.5 years in an adoption sample: marital hostility and hostile parenting. Participants were 361 linked triads of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted children. We examined direct and indirect pathways from marital hostility to child sleep problems via hostile parenting. Mothers’ marital hostility at 9 months was associated with child sleep problems at 4.5 years. Fathers’ marital hostility at 9 months evidenced an indirect effect on child sleep problems at 4.5 years via fathers’ hostile parenting at 27 months. Findings were significant even after controlling for genetic influences on child sleep (i.e., birth parent internalizing disorders). The findings suggest targets for prevention and intervention programs that are potentially modifiable (e.g., hostile parenting, marital hostility), and inform theory by demonstrating that relations among marital hostility, hostile parenting, and child sleep problems are significant after accounting for genetic influences.

This study examined the longitudinal association between marital instability and child sleep problems at ages 9 and 18 months in 357 families with a genetically unrelated infant adopted at birth. This design eliminates shared genes as an explanation for similarities between parent and child. Structural equation modeling indicated that T1 marital instability predicted T2 child sleep problems, but T1 child sleep problems did not predict T2 marital instability. This result was replicated when models were estimated separately for mothers and fathers. Thus, even after controlling for stability in sleep problems and marital instability and eliminating shared genetic influences on associations using a longitudinal adoption design, marital instability prospectively predicts early childhood sleep patterns.

This research examined visual and auditory imagery in adults and 5-year-old children. We focused on 3 broad issues: 1) parallels between visual and auditory imagery; 2) static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities; and 3) individual differences in these imagery processes. In Experiments 1 and 2, adults completed a set of four tasks of visual and auditory imagery and self-report measures of imagery. In Experiment 3, the set of imagery tasks was presented to 83 5-year-old children. Although children were less consistent in their imagery use than adults, there were interesting parallels between the children's and adults' performance. Across the 3 experiments, we found little or no relationship between static and dynamic imagery processes within the visual and auditory modalities. In contrast, significant correlations were observed across modality for dynamic imagery. These findings highlight the importance of examining cross-modality parallels in the development of imagery processes.

Placement instability is a common occurrence among foster children and others involved with child welfare system services, and is associated with negative psychiatric and mental health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research in this area and to consider this information in terms of child welfare practice and policy. Evidence from 59 sources is reviewed, including research on (a) the connection between placement instability and poor outcomes; (b) sources of information that can be employed to reliably predict risk for placement instability; and (c) interventions designed to mitigate the effects of placement instability. The available empirical evidence suggests that placement instability and other family chaos is associated with disrupted development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is involved in executive functioning. Poor executive functioning is implicated in elevated risk for ADHD, disruptive behavior disorders, substance abuse, and other forms of disinhibitory psychopathology. This might help to explain the high rates of psychiatric medication prescriptions for foster children. Notably, however, recent research findings have shown that placement instability is both predictable and preventable and that interventions to address placement instability have the potential to mitigate neurobiological and psychiatric effects of prior adversity.

Approximately 95% of foster children experience at least one placement disruption while in out-of-home care (James, 2004), and the adverse effects of these disruptions on psychosocial functioning are well-documented (Jonson-Reid & Barth, 2000; Leathers, 2002; Ryan & Testa, 2005). Moreover, recent evidence has suggested that such disruptions are also associated with negative effects on brain development (Fisher, Bruce, Abdullaev, Mannering, & Pears, in press). Thus, identifying cost-effective tools for the prediction and prevention of problem behavior related placement disruptions is critical. Problem behavior is an indicator of risk for future placement disruptions (Fisher, Burraston, & Pears, 2005; James, 2004; Leathers, 2006; Price et al., 2008). For example, James found that, after 6 placement changes, over 60% of any subsequent changes were behavior related. Other researchers have shown that the initial level of externalizing behavior (Newton, Litrownik, & Landsverk, 2000) and the number of problem behaviors (Chamberlain et al., 2006) are the strongest predictors of placement disruptions over a 12-month period. The Parent Daily Report Checklist (PDR; Chamberlain & Reid, 1987), a brief telephone interview, is a highly practical method for assessing problem behavior in the context of foster care. In a prior study with a sample of 5- to 12-year-old foster children using the PDR, Chamberlain et al. (2006) found a “threshold effect” in the association between problem behavior and subsequent disruptions: Children with scores at or below the sample mean of 6 problem behaviors per day were at low risk for placement disruptions. In contrast, for the children with PDR scores exceeding the sample mean, each additional problem behavior increased the odds of placement disruptions by 25%. In the present study, we sought to replicate Chamberlain et al.’s (2006) threshold effect findings with a sample of foster preschoolers and to examine whether this effect could be mitigated by a treatment foster care intervention. The study was conducted in the context of a randomized clinical trial to evaluate Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care for Preschoolers (MTFC-P; Fisher, Ellis, & Chamberlain, 1999). This comprehensive family-based intervention employs social learning principles to decrease disruptive behaviors, enhance prosocial behaviors, and mitigate developmental delays among foster preschoolers. The intervention includes training and ongoing support/consultation to foster caregivers, individual and group treatment for children, and aftercare services to promote successful permanent placements. The brief format of this article precludes a detailed description of MTFC-P. For more information, refer to Fisher et al. (1999) or Fisher and Chamberlain (2000). Based on Chamberlain et al.’s (2006) findings, we expected to find a specific number of problem behaviors reported by caregivers on the PDR below which there would be low risk for placement disruptions and above which there would be increasing risk for placement disruptions with each additional behavior. However, given that higher rates of problem behavior are developmentally normative for preschoolers (Campbell, 2002), we hypothesized a higher threshold in the number of problem behaviors that was tolerable to caregivers. In addition, we expected that, for children receiving the MTFC-P intervention, higher rates of problem behavior would not be associated with increased risk for disruption.

Because of their exposure to severe early adversity and the heterogeneity of these adverse experiences, foster children are an important population in which to study the associations between stress, alterations in underlying neural systems, and subsequent developmental and psychosocial outcomes. Moreover, inasmuch as the US foster care population numbers over half a million children and the needs of these children are not always met by existing service delivery programs, there are scientific and public policy reasons to pursue this work. In this chapter, we describe the results of a research program involving young foster children that has focused on the following three areas: examining how variations in dimensions of early adverse experiences are associated with specific negative developmental and psychosocial outcomes; identifying neural deficits associated with these negative outcomes; and conducting randomized clinical trials of preventive interventions with dual goals to improve developmental and psychosocial outcomes and examine the potential for recovery of or improved functioning in the underlying neural systems. The specific focus of this chapter is our investigations of inhibitory control within the context of this larger research program. We provide an overview of the research program and guiding conceptual model, summarize the studies focused on inhibitory control, and discuss the implications of this work for science and public policy.

Although recent evidence suggests that young children use prosodic information to ‘‘bootstrap’’ themselves into syntactic comprehension, little is known about how children use prosody to signal syntactic boundaries in their spoken utterances. A speech elicitation task examined the extent to which children and adults control duration and intonation to mark phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech. Adults and young children (ages 5 and 7) were asked to describe groupings of colored blocks in a manner such that a blindfolded listener could tell ‘‘which blocks go together.’’ This procedure elicited utterances corresponding to three syntactic bracketings of the phrase ‘‘pink and green and white.’’ Acoustic analysis of subjects’ productions indicated that adults reliably controlled duration (i.e., syllable lengthening, pauses) and intonation fall–rise patterns to signal phrase boundaries. In contrast, children’s productions were highly variable and showed no evidence of intonation cues being involved. Individual subject analyses suggested that some of the 7‐year‐old children used duration cue to signal phrase boundaries, although the contrasts were not as marked as in the adult data. The results were interpreted as showing that by age 7, most children have not yet mastered prosodic cues for phrasal boundaries in their speech production.