University of North Carolina at Greensboro

About: University of North Carolina at Greensboro is a education organization based out in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 5481 authors who have published 13715 publications receiving 456239 citations. The organization is also known as: UNCG & UNC Greensboro.

Longitudinal Associations between the Quality of Mother-Infant Interactions and Brain Development across Infancy.

Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate if normative variations in parenting relate to brain development among typically developing children. A sample of 352 mother-infant dyads came to the laboratory when infants were 5, 10, and 24 months of age (final N = 215). At each visit, child resting electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Mother-infant interactions were videotaped at the 5-month visit. The results indicated that higher quality maternal behavior during mother-infant interactions predicted higher frontal resting EEG power at 10 and 24 months, as well as increases in power between 5 and 10 months, and between 10 and 24 months. These findings provide rare support for the hypothesis that normative variation in parenting quality may contribute to brain development among typically developing infants.

Configurations of common childhood psychosocial risk factors

Abstract: Different psychopathological symptoms commonly co-occur. Researchers have used person-oriented approaches to model such co-occurrences, in an effort to identify more homogeneous diagnostic groupings and subtypes of disorders (Frazier, Youngstrom, & Naugle, 2007; Shevlin, Murphy, Dorahy, & Adamson, 2007; Sullivan, Kessler, & Kendler, 1998), to clarify relations between comorbid symptoms and disorders (Fergusson, Horwood, & Lynskey, 1994), and to refine psychiatric phenotypes for genetic analyses (Eaves et al., 1993; Rasmussen et al., 2004; Todd et al., 2005). Co-occurrence of psychosocial risk factors for psychopathology is also ubiquitous (Evans, 2004; Kessler, Davis, & Kendler, 1997; Mullen, Martin, Anderson, Romans, & Herbison, 1996; Rutter, 2000). However, empirical risk research commonly uses variable-based approaches to the study of risk, relying on variants of the general linear model and typically focusing on additive linear contributions of individual risk factors or interactions among two or three risk factors. In the real world, children may ‘face a daunting array of suboptimal psychosocial and physical conditions’ (Evans, 2004, p.77) that interact in complex ways in the development of psychopathology. For example, poverty may be associated with parental unemployment and living in a single parent household for one group of children, but with parental mental illness and parental criminality for others. According to the cumulative approach, which relies on the assumption that all risk factors can be summed with unit weights, both groups would be seen as having an overall risk score of three, when, in fact, these differing configurations might be related to different psychopathological outcomes. The identification of valid risk profiles (or configurations, or clusters) could contribute to the identification of etiological pathways to childhood disorders.

Profiles of Disruptive Behavior Across Early Childhood: Contributions of Frustration Reactivity, Physiological Regulation, and Maternal Behavior

Abstract: Disruptive behavior, including aggression, defiance, and temper tantrums, typically peaks in early toddlerhood and decreases by school entry; however, some children do not show this normative decline. The current study examined disruptive behavior in 318 boys and girls at 2, 4, and 5 years of age and frustration reactivity, physiological regulation, and maternal behavior in the laboratory at 2 years of age. A latent profile analysis resulted in 4 longitudinal profiles of disruptive behavior, which were differentiated by interactions between reactivity, regulation, and maternal behavior. A high profile was associated with high reactivity combined with high maternal control or low regulation combined with low maternal control. Results are discussed from a developmental psychopathology perspective.