Faculty Bibliography

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been gaining attention, partly as an example of unusual developmental trajectories related to early neurobiological differences. The present investigation addressed the process of learning new words to explore mechanisms of language delay and impairment. The sample included 21 typically developing toddlers matched on expressive vocabulary with 21 young children with ASD. Two tasks were administered to teach children a new word and were supplemented by cognitive and diagnostic measures. In most analyses, there were no group differences in performance. Children with ASD did not consistently make mapping errors, even in word learning situations that required the use of social information. These findings indicate that some children with ASD, in developmentally appropriate tasks, are able to use information from social interactions to guide word-object mappings. This result has important implications for understanding of how children with ASD learn language

OBJECTIVE: To examine the extent to which stress, coping, and temperament accounted for variability in adjustment among children with cancer. METHODS: Seventy-five mothers of children with cancer (ages 5-17) completed questionnaires regarding their child's cancer-related stress; coping; temperament characteristics including positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and effortful control (EC); and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Assessments occurred within one year of initial diagnosis or relapse (M = 5.74 months; SD = 4.72). RESULTS: Cancer-related stress was positively associated with symptoms of depression in children. NA was positively associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. Primary control coping moderated the association between NA and depression, and primary and secondary control coping mediated this association. CONCLUSION: Results partially support the utility of an integrated model including cancer-related stress, coping, and NA in identifying children at risk for internalizing symptoms during treatment. Additional research is needed to inform interventions for this population.

Behavioral transitions characterize development. Young infant rats paradoxically prefer odors that are paired with shock, but older pups learn aversions. This transition is amygdala and corticosterone dependent. Using microarrays and microdialysis, we found downregulated dopaminergic presynaptic function in the amygdala with preference learning. Corticosterone-injected 8-d-old pups and untreated 12-d-old pups learned aversions and had dopaminergic upregulation in the amygdala. Dopamine injection into the amygdala changed preferences to aversions, whereas dopamine antagonism reinstated preference learning

There is growing evidence that mental health and school functioning for children are intertwined. This article summarizes historical perspectives on U.S. child mental health policies and their interface with education and discusses trends in educational policy relevant to children's mental health, specifically the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and No Child Left Behind. The traditional approach of mental health research in schools, which focuses on program and intervention development, has become stagnant. New paradigms are needed. These include attending to indigenous school resources, to the organizational context of learning, and to participatory models for constructing environments conducive to mental health promotion and learning. Persistent underfunding and fragmented fiscal support, however, render new approaches meaningless. If progress is to be made, new funding structures to support integrative educational and mental health practices are needed.

OBJECTIVES/OBJECTIVE:The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between 46 states and four major tobacco companies increased tobacco control funding and restricted tobacco marketing. In 2002, New York City (NYC) began a comprehensive tobacco control program that raised the price of cigarettes, banned indoor workplace smoking, and increased access to cessation treatment. We examined the temporal pattern of smoking during pregnancy, including ethnic variation in smoking prevalence, relative to the implementation of the MSA and NYC's comprehensive tobacco control program using birth certificate data. METHODS:Using multiple logistic regression, we analyzed NYC birth certificate data to examine prenatal smoking during three time periods: 1995-1998 (pre-MSA), 1999-2002 (post-MSA, pre-NYC tobacco control), and 2003-2005 (post-MSA, post-tobacco control). RESULTS:Overall, 3.0% of 1,136,437 births included were to smoking mothers. The proportion of smoking mothers declined from 4.5% in 1995-1998 to 1.7% in 2003-2005. Compared with non-Hispanic white women, African American women had 2.46 increased odds (95% confidence interval [CI] 2.36, 2.55) of smoking during 1995-1998, and 3.63 increased odds (95% CI 3.39, 3.88) of smoking during 2003-2005, despite an absolute reduction in smoking from 10.4% to 5.0%. Puerto Rican women also smoked considerably more than non-Hispanic white women. CONCLUSIONS:These findings document a striking temporal decline in prenatal smoking in NYC concurrent with changing tobacco control policies. Targeted efforts may be required to address the increasing disparity in prenatal smoking between non-Hispanic white and African American and Puerto Rican women.

Unintended consequences of participating in research studies are not well characterized, particularly in veterans who are frequent study participants. Our objective, then, was to assess the rate of and variables associated with distress resulting from veterans' participation in a study on a sensitive subject. Veterans Administration (VA) hospital outpatients were administered questionnaires with three increasingly severe scenarios of a U.S. soldier abusing a detainee. Distress--upset requiring clinical intervention--was assessed, as were sociodemographic characteristics, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and locus of control (LOC). Three hundred fifty-one veterans participated. Forty-three (12%) became distressed. Modeling indicated distress was associated with minority status (odds ratio [OR] = 5.72, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.59, 20.58), PTSD (OR = 2.66, 95% CI = 1.12, 6.29), and external LOC (OR = 6.27, 95% CI = 2.82, 13.90). Distress related to study participation was high in this veteran sample. Higher rates in some subgroups suggested that some individuals may not be able to accurately anticipate risk for harm in sensitive studies.

BACKGROUND: Individual differences in specific components of attention contribute to behavioral reactivity and regulation. Children with the temperament of behavioral inhibition (BI) provide a good context for considering the manner in which certain components of attention shape behavior. Infants and children characterized as behaviorally inhibited manifest signs of heightened orienting to novelty. The current study considers whether this attention profile moderates risk for clinical anxiety disorders among adolescents with a history of BI. METHODS: Participants were assessed at multiple time points for BI, beginning in early childhood. At adolescence, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a three-stimulus auditory novelty oddball task, which employed frequent standard and infrequent deviant tones as well as a set of complex, novel sounds. Clinical diagnosis was carried out using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL). P3 and mismatch negativity (MMN) components were examined at midline frontal, central, and parietal electrode sites. RESULTS: Individuals who displayed high levels of BI during childhood and increased P3 amplitude to novelty in adolescence were more likely to have a history of anxiety disorders compared to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lower P3 amplitudes. Groups did not differ on measures of MMN. CONCLUSIONS: Increased neural responses to novelty moderate risk for anxiety disorders amongst individuals with a history of BI.

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is characterized by a pattern of extreme social reticence, risk for internalizing behavior problems, and possible protection against externalizing behavior problems. Parenting style may also contribute to these associations between BI and behavior problems (BP). A sample of 113 children was assessed for BI in the laboratory at 14 and 24 months of age, self-report of maternal parenting style at 7 years of age, and maternal report of child internalizing and externalizing BP at 4, 7, and 15 years. Internalizing problems at age 4 were greatest among behaviorally inhibited children who also were exposed to permissive parenting. Furthermore, greater authoritative parenting was associated with less of an increase in internalizing behavior problems over time and greater authoritarian parenting was associated with a steeper decline in externalizing problems. Results highlight the importance of considering child and environmental factors in longitudinal patterns of BP across childhood and adolescence.

BACKGROUND: There is a virtual avalanche of medical information available to clinicians and researchers. The traditional 'search' can be substantially augmented by proactive 'harvesting.' AIMS: To describe how to search and harvest the medical literature. MATERIALS & METHODS: Survey of selected resources available on the internet. RESULTS: PubMed remains the backbone of the traditional literature search. The availability of automated delivery of electronic tables of contents ('eTOCs'), electronic feeds of targeted search results, and workflow tools allows relevant articles to find the reader. Electronic storage and retrieval tools make it possible to manage this information and make day-to-day clinical and research activities more efficient. DISCUSSION: Searching and harvesting the medical literature is made easier with the advent of the internet and email. In addition, there are internet resources that screen and filter potential articles of interest. Managing one's electronic library of PDF documents requires attention to appropriately naming files and the use of indexing programs. CONCLUSION: In addition to readers searching for relevant citations, these citations themselves can be searching for readers. Clinicians and researchers can take advantage of this and efficiently harvest the medical literature with a modest investment of time