Individuals often vary in how they display signs and symptoms of personality disturbances and psychopathology. As such, comprehensive assessments of these signs and symptoms ought to capture how they manifest within and across time and contexts (e.g., community, home, work). Contexts may vary in the degree to which they influence personality and…

Feeling inhibited and socially not at ease is reflected in the trait social inhibition (SI). SI is associated with psychopathology that arises in young adulthood, such as anxiety. We aim for a better insight into the genetic and environmental contributions to SI across the life span, and as such examine their contributions to SI stability and…

Individual differences in emotional reactivity emerge early in development and predict important child outcomes. Unfortunately, methods used to assess these often fail to tap dynamic changes in emotion, obscuring nuanced relationships between maladaptive emotional reactivity and early internalizing psychopathology. We therefore explored the…

There is considerable variability in the extent to which young people with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience mental health difficulties. What drives these individual differences remains unclear. In the current article, data from the Twin Early Development Study were used to investigate the genetic and environmental influences on…

The articles in this special issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development" examine the cognitive development of children who are following typical and atypical developmental pathways. The articles offer a mixture of theory-based considerations, reviews of the literature, and new empirical data addressing fundamental aspects of…

The Personality Psychopathology-Five (PSY-5; Harkness & McNulty, 1994) is a model of individual differences relevant to adaptive functioning in both clinical and non-clinical populations. In this article, we review the development of the PSY-5 model (Harkness, 1992; Harkness & McNulty, 1994) and discuss the ways in which the PSY-5 model is…

The physical changes of puberty coincide with an increase in the salience of peer relationships and a growing risk for depression and other forms of psychopathology. Previously, we reported that pubertal tempo, defined as a child's rate of intraindividual change in pubertal status (measured using parent-reported Tanner stages; Marshall & Tanner,…

Ellis et al. (2012) bring an evolutionary perspective to bear on adolescent risky behavioral development, clinical practice, and public policy. The authors offer important insights that (a) some risky behaviors may be adaptive for the individual and the species by being hard-wired due to fitness benefits and (b) interventions might be more…

A diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) according to the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th Edition" (DSM-5) is assessed in youth using ratings from both a parent and a teacher. However, individual and contextual differences between informants may lead to discrepancies in these ratings (De Los Reyes and Kazdin…

Background: Substantial evidence suggests that a Five-Factor Model personality assessment generates a valid description of childhood individual differences and relates to a range of psychological outcomes. Less is known, however, about naturally occurring profiles of personality and their links to psychopathology. The current study explores…

Depressive brooding--a passive ruminative focus on one's problems, negative mood and their consequences--is a thinking style that places individuals at a greater risk to develop future psychopathology. In this study, we investigated whether inter-individual differences in depressive brooding are related to neural differences underlying the…

Objective: Previous studies show that children with psychopathic traits may be less responsive to parenting. Although harsh/inconsistent parenting is associated with increased problem behaviors in children low on psychopathic traits, children high on psychopathic traits show consistently high levels of problem behavior regardless of negative…

Background: We assessed trajectories of children's internalizing symptoms as predicted by interactions among maternal internalizing symptoms, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and child sex. Method: An ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of children (n = 251) participated during three study waves. Children's mean ages were 8.23 years…

Nearly 80% of children in the United States have at least 1 sibling, indicating that the birth of a baby sibling is a normative ecological transition for most children. Many clinicians and theoreticians believe the transition is stressful, constituting a developmental crisis for most children. Yet, a comprehensive review of the empirical…

Background: Although low positive affect (PA) and high negative affect (NA) have been posited to predispose to depressive disorders, little is known about the developmental trajectories of these affects in children at familial risk for mood disorders. Methods: We examined 202 offspring of mothers who had a history of juvenile-onset unipolar…