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This longitudinal study investigated how kindergartners' position in the classroom social hierarchy and cortisol response relate to their change in school engagement across the first year of kindergarten (N = 332, M = 5.3 years, 51% boys, 41% White, 18% Black). We used naturalistic classroom observations of social hierarchy positions, laboratory‐based challenges to elicit salivary cortisol response, and teacher, parent, and child reports of emotional engagement with school. Robust, clustered regression models revealed that in the fall, lower cortisol response (but not social hierarchy position) was associated with greater school engagement. However, by spring, significant interactions emerged. Highly reactive, subordinate children showed increases in school engagement from fall to spring of the kindergarten year, whereas highly reactive, dominant children showed decreases in school engagement. This is some of the first evidence that higher cortisol response marks biological sensitivity to early peer‐based social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains the prevalence of callable corporate bonds as the result of a tax differential in the United States, which gives borrowers a preference for callable rather than noncallable or puttable bonds. The tax effect is based on the difference in marginal tax rates between profitable borrowers and typical lenders. Profitable corporations with marginal tax rates of about 50 percent, while lenders' rates might be close to zero produce an incentive toward callable bonds which can be redeemed or replaced with a lower-cost bond. Transactions stated after taxes, after-tax discount rates, financial flexibility and interest rate premiums, government bonds, and a model of option provisions and interest rate changes are mentioned.

The study of autonomic nervous system responses and contextual factors has shed light on the development of children's negative outcomes, but the majority of these studies have not focused on minority populations living under adversity. To address these gaps, the current longitudinal study included a sample of poor, immigrant Latino families to examine whether associations between children's autonomic nervous system reactivity at 6 months and their externalizing behavior problems at 7 years of age were moderated by two risk factors associated with poverty: the interpersonal factor of chronic maternal depression and the environmental factor of chronic overcrowded housing. Multiple linear regression ( N = 99) revealed that children who exhibited less parasympathetic nervous system withdrawal in response to challenge during infancy had more externalizing problems during childhood only if they had mothers who experienced chronic depression. Children who exhibited greater sympathetic nervous system reactivity during infancy had the lowest levels of externalizing problems during childhood only if they had mothers who chronic depression. Chronic overcrowded housing did not moderate associations between physiological reactivity and level of externalizing problems. These findings extend our understanding of the interaction of physiology and context on child outcomes to the understudied population of impoverished Latino families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that there is a revolution afoot in the developmental science of gene-environment interplay. We summarize, for an audience of developmental researchers and clinicians, how epigenetic processes - chromatin structural modifications that regulate gene expression without changing DNA sequences - may offer a strong, parsimonious account for the convergence of genetic and contextual variation in the genesis of adaptive and maladaptive development. Epigenetic processes may play a plausible explanatory role in understanding: divergent trajectories and sexual dimorphisms in brain development; statistical interactions between genes and environments; the biological embedding of early psychosocial adversities; the linkages of such adversities to disorders of mental health; the striking individual variation in the strength of those linkages; the molecular origins of critical and sensitive periods; and the transgenerational inheritance of risk and protection. Taken together, these arguments converge in a claim that epigenetic processes constitute a promising and illuminating point of connection - a 'synapse' - between genes and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the dynamic interplay between teacher-child relationship quality and children's behaviors across kindergarten and first grade to predict academic competence in first grade. Using a sample of 338 ethnically diverse 5-year-old children, nested path analytic models were conducted to examine bidirectional pathways between children's behaviors and teacher-child relationship quality. Low self-regulation in kindergarten fall, as indexed by inattention and impulsive behaviors, predicted more conflict with teachers in kindergarten spring and this effect persisted into first grade. Conflict and low self-regulation jointly predicted decreases in school engagement which in turn predicted first-grade academic competence. Findings illustrate the importance of considering transactions between self-regulation, teacher-child relationship quality, and school engagement in predicting academic competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen-year-old adolescents ( N = 109) in a longitudinal study of child development were recruited to examine differences in DNA methylation in relation to parent reports of adversity during the adolescents' infancy and preschool periods. Microarray technology applied to 28,000 cytosine-guanine dinucleotide sites within DNA derived from buccal epithelial cells showed differential methylation among adolescents whose parents reported high levels of stress during their children's early lives. Maternal stressors in infancy and paternal stressors in the preschool years were most strongly predictive of differential methylation, and the patterning of such epigenetic marks varied by children's gender. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of prospective associations between adversities in early childhood and the epigenetic conformation of adolescents' genomic DNA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how physiological activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is related to various components of emotion process. It explains that brain responds to stressful environmental stimuli primarily via the locus coeruleus, a brainstem nucleus with noradrenergic projections to the hypothalamus which initiates and regulates the ANS response. The association between ANS activity and emotions, and context of physiological measurement are also presented.

This study examined the direct and interactive effects of stress reactivity and family adversity on socioemotional and cognitive development in three hundred and thirty-eight 5- to 6-year-old children. Neurobiological stress reactivity was measured as respiratory sinus arrhythmia and salivary cortisol responses to social, cognitive, sensory, and emotional challenges. Adaptation was assessed using child, parent, and teacher reports of externalizing symptoms, prosocial behaviors, school engagement, and academic competence. Results revealed significant interactions between reactivity and adversity. High stress reactivity was associated with more maladaptive outcomes in the context of high adversity but with better adaption in the context of low adversity. The findings corroborate a reconceptualization of stress reactivity as biological sensitivity to context by showing that high reactivity can both hinder and promote adaptive functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Many childhood psychiatric problems are transient. Consequently, screening procedures to accurately identify children with problems unlikely to remit and thus, in need of intervention, are of major public health concern. This study aimed to develop a universal school-based screening procedure based on the answers to three questions: (1) What are the broad patterns of mental health problems from kindergarten to grade 5? (2) What are the grade 5 outcomes of these patterns? (3) How early in school can children likely to develop the most impairing patterns be identified accurately? Methods: Mothers and teachers reported on a community sample ( N = 328) of children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms in kindergarten and grades 1, 3, and 5. In grade 5, teachers reported on children’s school-based functional impairments, physical health problems, and service use; mothers reported on children’s specialty mental health care. Results: Four patterns distinguished children who (1) never evidenced symptoms; (2) evidenced only isolated symptoms; or evidenced recurrent symptoms, either (3) without or (4) with comorbid internalizing and externalizing. By grade 5, children with recurrent comorbid symptoms had the greatest impairments, physical health problems, and service use. These children can be identified quite accurately by grade 1. Conclusions: Universal screening at school entry can effectively identify children likely to develop recurrent comorbid symptoms, and would provide a basis for developing optimal targeted intervention programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to develop a standardized protocol to measure preejection period (PEP), a measure of sympathetic nervous system, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a measure of parasympathetic nervous system, during resting and challenging states for 6- and 12-month-old infants and to determine developmental changes and individual stability of these measures. A 7-min reactivity protocol was administered to Latino infants at 6 months (n = 194) and 12 months (n = 181). Results showed: (1) it is feasible to measure PEP and RSA in infants, (2) the protocol elicited significant autonomic changes, (3) individual resting autonomic measures were moderately stable from 6 to 12 months, but reactivity measures were not stable, and (4) heart rate and RSA resting and challenge group means changed significantly from 6 to 12 months. Findings suggest that although infants' autonomic responses show developmental changes, individuals' rank order is stable from 6 to 12 months of age. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psyshobiol 48: 197–208, 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purposes of this systematic review were to present and compare recent estimates of the prevalence of overweight and obesity in school-aged youth from 34 countries and to examine associations between overweight and selected dietary and physical activity patterns. Data consisted of a cross-sectional survey of 137 593 youth (10–16 years) from the 34 (primarily European) participating countries of the 2001–2002Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Study.The prevalence of overweight and obesity was determined based on self-reported height and weight and the international child body mass index standards. Logistic regression was employed to examine associations between overweight status with selected dietary and physical activity patterns. The two countries with the highest prevalence of overweight (pre-obese + obese) and obese youth were Malta (25.4% and 7.9%) and the United States (25.1% and 6.8%) while the two countries with the lowest prevalence were Lithuania (5.1% and 0.4%) and Latvia (5.9% and 0.5%). Overweight and obesity prevalence was particularly high in countries located in North America, Great Britain, and south-western Europe. Within most countries physical activity levels were lower and television viewing times were higher in overweight compared to normal weight youth. In 91% of the countries examined, the frequency of sweets intake was lower in overweight than normal weight youth. Overweight status was not associated with the intake of fruits, vegetables, and soft drinks or time spent on the computer. In conclusion, the adolescent obesity epidemic is a global issue. Increasing physical activity participation and decreasing television viewing should be the focus of strategies aimed at preventing and treating overweight and obesity in youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interactive effects of physiological reactivity and social support on children's memory were examined. Four- to 6-year-olds completed a laboratory protocol during which autonomic responses and salivary cortisol were measured. Memory was assessed shortly afterward and 2 weeks later. During the second interview, children were questioned by a supportive or nonsupportive interviewer. Few significant relations emerged between reactivity and children's short-term memory. Following a 2-week delay, cortisol reactivity was associated with poorer memory and autonomic reactivity was associated with increased accuracy among children questioned in a supportive manner but decreased accuracy among children questioned in a nonsupportive manner. Results question traditional conceptualizations of reactivity as a risk factor and instead suggest that reactivity may only confer risk in certain environmental contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of cardiovascular reactivity in young children have generally employed integrated, physiologically complex measures, such as heart rate and blood pressure, which are subject to the multiple influences of factors such as blood volume, hematologic status, thermoregulation, and autonomic nervous system (ANS) tone. Reactivity studies in children have rarely employed more differentiated, proximal measures of autonomic function capable of discerning the independent effects of sympathetic and parasympathetic responses. We describe 1) the development, validity, and reliability of a psychobiology protocol assessing autonomic reactivity to challenge in 3- to 8-year-old children; 2) the influences of age, gender, and study context on autonomic measures; and 3) the distributions of reactivity measures in a normative sample of children and the prevalences of discrete autonomic profiles. Preejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) were measured as indices of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system reactivity, respectively, and autonomic profiles were created to offer summative indices of PEP and RSA response. Results confirmed the protocol's validity and reliability, and showed differences in autonomic reactivity by age and study context, but not by gender. The studies' findings offer guidelines for future research on autonomic reactivity in middle childhood and support the feasibility of examining sympathetic and parasympathetic responses to challenge in 3- to 8-year-old children. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 42: 64–78, 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research in both humans and nonhuman primates suggests that subtle asymmetries in tympanic membrane (TM) temperatures may be related to aspects of cognition and socioaffective behavior. Such associations could plausibly reflect lateralities in cerebral blood flow that support side-to-side differences in regional cortical activation. Asymmetries in activation of the left and right frontal cortex, for example, are correlates of temperamental differences in child behavior and markers of risk status for affective and anxiety disorders. Tympanic membrane temperatures might thus reflect the neural asymmetries that subserve individual differences in temperament and behavior. This report merged findings from four geographically and demographically distinctive studies, which utilized identical thermometry methods to examine associations between TM temperature asymmetries and biobehavioral attributes of 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 468). The four studies produced shared patterns of associations that linked TM temperature lateralities to individual differences in behavior and socioaffective difficulties. Warmer left TMs were associated with "surgent," affectively positive behaviors, whereas warmer right TMs were related to problematic, affectively negative behaviors. Taken together, these findings suggest that asymmetries in TM temperatures could be associated with behavior problems that signal risk for developmental psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there are general assumptions that physiological and behavioral indices of emotion are interrelated, empirical research has revealed inconsistent findings with regard to their degree of association, particularly in children. Two studies were conducted to examine the relations between cardiovascular reactivity and emotional behavior. In the first study, 3- to 6-year-olds completed challenging tasks during which measures of their physiological responses and facial expressions were obtained. With age, children's heart rate decreased, vagal tone increased, and facial expressions became slightly more exaggerated. However, children's physiologic reactions were unrelated to their concurrent facial expression when all children were considered, when only boys were considered, and when children extreme in their physiologic reactions were considered. Only among girls was physiologic reactivity moderately associated with concurrent negative expressiveness. In the second study, 4- and 5-year-olds' physiologic reactivity was examined as a predictor of later overt emotional reaction to venipuncture episodes. Children's overt emotional reactions were consistent across repeated venipunctures, and girls were more visibly distressed than boys. As in the first study, physiologic reactivity was generally unrelated to children's behavioral responses. Findings have implications for assumptions about the degree of coupling between biological and behavioral emotional systems in childhood. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 37: 153–175, 2000 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Twelve microsatellite loci were characterized in California mountain lions (Puma concolor) and sufficient polymorphism was found to uniquely genotype 62 animals sampled at necropsy. Microsatellite genotypes obtained using mountain lion faecal DNA matched those from muscle for all of 15 individuals examined. DNA from potential prey species and animals whose faeces could be misidentified as mountain lion faeces were reliably distinguished from mountain lions using this microsatellite panel. In a field application of this technique, 32 faecal samples were collected from hiking trails in the Yosemite Valley region where seven mountain lions previously had been captured, sampled, and released. Twelve samples yielded characteristic mountain lion genotypes, three displayed bobcat-type genotypes, and 17 did not amplify. The genotype of one of the 12 mountain lion faecal samples was identical to one of the mountain lions that previously had been captured. Three of the 12 faecal samples yielded identical genotypes, and eight new genotypes were detected in the remaining samples. This analysis provided a minimum estimate of 16 mountain lions (seven identified by capture and nine identified by faecal DNA) living in or travelling through Yosemite Valley from March 1997 to August 1998. Match probabilities (probabilities that identical DNA genotypes would be drawn at random a second time from the population) indicated that the samples with identical genotypes probably came from the same mountain lion. Our results demonstrate that faecal DNA analysis is an effective method for detecting and identifying individual mountain lions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used behavioural observations and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence analysis to examine demographic and genetic structure within and among home-range groups of desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) ewes in the Peninsular Ranges of southern California, USA. We identified substantial genetic variation in the first 515 bp of the mtDNA control region and determined that seven haplotypes were distributed in a nonrandom fashion among these ewe subpopulations. Although a significant (P < 0.01) amount of mtDNA variation (33%) was partitioned among home-range groups, we did not find strong evidence for matrilineal substructuring within these groups. Based on analyses of molecular variance, and comparisons of behavioural associations and distances between centres of activity, we concluded that within a given home-range group, bighorn sheep ewes generally associate with other ewes based on their availability rather than their matrilineal relationships. Our results also supported the conclusion that multiple ewe subpopulations exist within the Peninsular Ranges, and that these subpopulations are the most basic demographic and genetic units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines whether the degree of match or congruence between the behavioral characteristics of infants and their families influences the nature of their interactions and the success of their mutual adaptation. Degree of rhythmicity; Demographic, behavioral and adaptive outcome variables; Degree of predictable regularity in the ongoing daily life of the infant and the family.

Five nursery-reared rhesus (Macaca mulatta) infants were studied on 8 consecutive days over a period of 2 weeks when they ranged from 4 to 5.5 months. Saliva cortisol samples were obtained by giving each animal, while in its individual home cage, a 6-in. cotton dental toll pretreated with sugared fruit-drink crystals and dried. Subjects were allowed to mouth the cotton roll for 10 min during each collection period. Saliva was then expressed from the cotton and analyzed by the radioimmune assay. Samples were collected at 0830, 1100, 1400, and 1630 hr on each of the 8 days. On four of the days, 2-hr peer socialization sessions were imposed between 1200 and 1400 hr. Significant time-day effects were obtained. Values tended to be low at 0830 hr. rising significantly to peak levels at 1100 hr. and then declining over the 1400-hr and 1630-hr sampling periods. All 4 subjects with sufficient samples had higher average cortisol concentration when the 1400-hr sampling followed peer-socialization sessions, compared to no-socialization days. This difference was only marginally significant by paired t test, however. These results (a) support the feasibility of using noninvasive salivary sampling procedures with infant monkeys, and (b) indicate that salivary cortisol measures are sensitive to daily rhythms. Unexpectedly, the results also raise the possibility that nursery-reared infant rhesus macaques may be phase-delayed in their HPA rhythm, with the morning peak occurring several hours after rather than in the hour before lights-on and the morning feeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research has documented associations between adverse childhood environments and DNA methylation, highlighting epigenetic processes as potential mechanisms through which early external contexts influence health across the life course. The present study tested a complementary hypothesis: indicators of children's early internal, biological, and behavioral responses to stressful challenges may also be linked to stable patterns of DNA methylation later in life. Children's autonomic nervous system reactivity, temperament, and mental health symptoms were prospectively assessed from infancy through early childhood, and principal components analysis (PCA) was applied to derive composites of biological and behavioral reactivity. Buccal epithelial cells were collected from participants at 15 and 18 years of age. Findings revealed an association between early life biobehavioral inhibition/disinhibition and DNA methylation across many genes. Notably, reactive, inhibited children were found to have decreased DNA methylation of the DLX5 and IGF2 genes at both time points, as compared to non‐reactive, disinhibited children. Results of the present study are provisional but suggest that the gene's profile of DNA methylation may constitute a biomarker of normative or potentially pathological differences in reactivity. Overall, findings provide a foundation for future research to explore relations among epigenetic processes and differences in both individual‐level biobehavioral risk and qualities of the early, external childhood environment. This study examined whether children's early internal, biological, and behavioral responses to stress were predictive of DNA methylation later in life. Findings revealed an association between early life biobehavioral reactivity and DNA methylation in multiple genes measured at both 15 and 18 years of age. As such, DNA methylation may constitute a biomarker of normative or potentially pathological differences in reactivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented which is concerned with the need to conduct research on the impact that having a parent with a chronic illness has on a child's development.