Longitudinal associations between low morning cortisol in infancy and anger dysregulation in early childhood in a CPS‐referred sample

Children who experience early adversity are at increased risk for developing psychopathology, and dysfunction of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis is a possible mechanism conferring this risk. This study sought to characterize the association between morning cortisol during different developmental periods and deficits in children's emotion regulation, a core feature of many psychological disorders. Morning cortisol was collected at two time points (i.e., during infancy, M = 13.0 months old, and during early childhood, M = 36.8 months old) from 120 children with histories of child protective services (CPS) involvement. Children completed a lab visit during early childhood (M = 38.6 months old) that involved an observational measure of anger regulation. Results showed that low morning cortisol during infancy, but not early childhood, predicted increased anger dysregulation during early childhood. These results highlight the importance of developmental timing in assessing the effects of HPA axis functioning and suggest that low cortisol during infancy is a risk factor for later emotion regulation difficulties.     

Brief Counseling for Alcohol Misuse Among Trauma Patients: Two Interventions and Influence of Baseline Use

This study examined whether baseline trauma patient characteristics and randomized participation in 1 of 2 brief interventions predicted changes in alcohol use at 6 months postintervention. Higher total Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) scores predicted greater changes, and specific AUDIT items were significant predictors.     

Generating Multivariate Ordinal Data via Entropy Principles

When conducting robustness research where the focus of attention is on the impact of non-normality, the marginal skewness and kurtosis are often used to set the degree of non-normality. Monte Carlo methods are commonly applied to conduct this type of research by simulating data from distributions with skewness and kurtosis constrained to pre-specified values. Although several procedures have been proposed to simulate data from distributions with these constraints, no corresponding procedures have been applied for discrete distributions. In this paper, we present two procedures based on the principles of maximum entropy and minimum cross-entropy to estimate the multivariate observed ordinal distributions with constraints on skewness and kurtosis. For these procedures, the correlation matrix of the observed variables is not specified but depends on the relationships between the latent response variables. With the estimated distributions, researchers can study robustness not only focusing on the levels of non-normality but also on the variations in the distribution shapes. A simulation study demonstrates that these procedures yield excellent agreement between specified parameters and those of estimated distributions. A robustness study concerning the effect of distribution shape in the context of confirmatory factor analysis shows that shape can affect the robust \(\chi ^2\) and robust fit indices, especially when the sample size is small, the data are severely non-normal, and the fitted model is complex.     

Will Victims Become Aggressors or Vice Versa? A Cross-Lagged Analysis of School Aggression

Peer aggression and victimization are ubiquitous phenomena in schools which warrant the attention of educators and researchers. The high connection between aggression and victimization behooves researchers to look into how the comorbidity of them develops over time. The present study investigated the associations between aggression and victimization over 3 years in early adolescence and whether these associations are moderated by gender and teacher support. Participants were 567 Grade 7, 8 and 9 students (49.38% girls) from 3 schools in Hong Kong. Over the course of study, they were asked to fill in a set of questionnaires that consisted of items related to peer aggression, victimization, and teacher support at 5 time points. Four models of cross-lagged relations between peer aggression and victimization were tested. The results supported a reciprocal model of peer aggression and victimization for both boys and girls although girls engaged in less peer aggression and victimization than boys. Further analyses also revealed that teacher support acted as a suppressor of the reciprocal relations. The present study sheds lights on intervention strategies that may remediate peer aggression and victimization in schools.     

Ethics,Changing Populations,and the Dental Profession

This review emphasizes the worldwide and U.S. evolving population demographics and the need for the dental profession to exercise its professional and ethical duty to expand its traditional patient base to provide needed services.