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The error-related negativity (ERN) has been called a putative neural marker of anxiety risk in children, with smaller ERN amplitudes denoting greater risk in early childhood. Children of anxious mothers are at elevated risk for anxiety problems compared to children of non-anxious mothers. Still unknown is whether discrete maternal symptoms interact with child ERN to predict different forms of child anxiety risk, knowledge of which could increase our understanding of the specificity of known conditions and pathways for transgenerational effects. Targeting two of the most prevalent forms of anxiety problems across children and adults, we tested whether maternal generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social phobia (SP) symptoms when children were 3 years old interacted with child ERN at age 4 years to predict child symptoms of overanxiousness and separation anxiety at age 5 years. We found that greater maternal SP, but not GAD, symptoms along with smaller (i.e., less negative) child ERN predicted more separation anxiety and overanxious symptoms in children, suggesting some specificity in prediction but less specificity in outcomes regarding the transmission of anxiety risk from mothers to offspring., Competing Interests: Declarations. Conflict of Interest : All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (© 2025. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Temperamental characteristics and emerging cognitive control are meaningful predictors of children's development of adaptive and maladaptive social behaviors during the preschool period. However, knowledge of the interplay of these pathways, when examined concurrently to highlight their individual contributions, is limited. Using a cross-sectional sample of 3-year-old children, we examined parent-reported discrete traits of negative (anger, fear, sadness, and shyness) and positive (low- and high-intensity pleasure) temperamental reactivity as predictors of children's prosociality and physical aggression. Further, we tested whether the effects of discrete temperament were moderated by cognitive control, as indexed by the N2 event-related potential, during a go/no-go task. Analyses focus on a subsample of children with an observable N2 (n = 66). When controlling for other relative temperament traits, several significant main effects emerged. Moreover, at low cognitive control (smaller N2), fear was negatively associated with aggression, whereas at high cognitive control, sadness was positively associated with aggression. Heightened anger was linked to reduced prosocial behavior when cognitive control was low but linked to greater prosocial behavior when cognitive control was high. The results highlight that discrete temperament traits predict individual differences in child outcomes but that associations depend on concurrent levels of cognitive control., (© 2024 The Author(s). Developmental Psychobiology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)