Objective: The purpose of this study was to test whether COVID impact interacts with genetic risk (polygenic risk score/PRS) to predict alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms. Method: Participants were n = 455 college students (79.6% female, 51% European Ancestry/EA, 24% African Ancestry/AFR, 25% Americas Ancestry/AMER) from a longitudinal study…

Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

Despite growing interest in placental epigenetics, the combined impact of prenatal stress and socioeconomic status on placental methylation is still largely understudied. We conducted a study to examine the associations of prenatal stress and socioeconomic factors (household income, Hollingshead socioeconomic index) with placental methylation.…

Parenting and children's temperament are important influences on language development. However, temperament may reflect prior parenting, and parenting effects may reflect genes common to parents and children. In 561 U.S. adoptees (57% male) and their birth and rearing parents (70% and 92% White, 13% and 4% African American, and 7% and 2% Latinx,…

Background: International literature has underlined the complex interplay between genetic and environmental variables in shaping children's emotional-behavioral functioning. Objective: This study aimed to explore the dynamic relationship between children's Dopamine Transporter (DAT1) genotype and methylation, and maternal and paternal affective…

Many individuals with autism experience challenges using language in social contexts (i.e., pragmatic language). Characterizing and understanding pragmatic variability is important to inform intervention strategies and the etiology of communication challenges in autism; however, current manual coding-based methods are often time and labor…

Individuals with higher levels of the broad autism phenotype (BAP) have some symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Like individuals with ASD, people with higher-BAP may have fewer sexual experiences and may experience more same-sex attraction. This study measured BAP traits, sexual experiences, and sexual orientation in typically developing…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is challenging due to its phenotypic and etiological heterogeneity, but critical for implementation of early interventions. We examined the age of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis in a sample of 554 children and adolescents enrolled in the ELENA cohort study in France with regard to the influences of…

Structures and functions of protein motifs are widely included in many biology-based course syllabi. However, little emphasis is placed to link this knowledge to applications in biotechnology to enhance the learning experience. Here, the conserved motifs of nucleotide binding site-leucine rich repeats (NBS-LRR) proteins, successfully used for the…

The present study investigates whether grade 6 reading outcomes, reading fluency, and reading comprehension can be predicted by grade 3 reading fluency, familial risk of dyslexia (FR), and grade 3 reading related skills: rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological awareness (PA), and vocabulary. In a sample of 150 children, of whom 83 had a…

Literature has shown the importance of social cognition for emotional wellness. However, to our knowledge, few studies so far investigated the relationship between social cognition and anxiety in childhood. No study systematically examined social cognition in relation to specific domains of anxiety. By a correlational design and multivariate…

At the end of compulsory schooling, young adults decide on educational and occupational trajectories that impact their subsequent employability, health and even life expectancy. To understand the antecedents to these decisions, we follow a new approach that considers genetic contributions, which have largely been ignored before. Using genomewide…

Objective: This study examined the moderating and mediating effects of perceived social support on the association between precollege sexual assault (SA) and college-onset SA. Participants: A representative sample of 6,132 undergraduates. Methods: The PLUM procedure in SPSS was used to test the moderation model, with individual regressions…

Understanding the role of negative emotionality in the development of executive functioning (EF) and language skills can help identify developmental windows that may provide promising opportunities for intervention. In addition, because EF and language skills are, in part, genetically influenced, intergenerational transmission patterns are…