Modestly prevalent in the general population (4%), but highly prevalent in prison populations (>40%), the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) involves aggression as one of several possible criteria. Using multiple informants, we aimed to determine if general aggression, as well as direct and indirect subtypes, assessed in early adolescence (ages 12, 14) predict young adulthood ASPD in a population-based sample. Using data from a Finnish population-based longitudinal twin cohort study with psychiatric interviews available at age 22 (N=1347), we obtained DSM-IV-based ASPD diagnoses. Aggression measures from ages 12 (parental and teacher ratings) and 14 (teacher, self, and co-twin ratings) were used to calculate odds ratios (OR) of ASPD from logistic regression models and the area under the curve (AUC) from receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. Analyses were adjusted for sex, age, and family structure. All informants' aggression ratings were significant (p

The family environment shapes children's social information processing and emotion regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from Cohesive, Disengaged, Enmeshed, and Authoritarian family types based on marital and parental relationship trajectories from pregnancy to the age of 12 months. A dot-probe task was used to assess children's emotional attention biases toward threatening (angry) and affiliative (happy) faces at the early (500 ms) and late (1250 ms) stages of processing. Situational priming was applied to activate children's sense of danger or safety. Results showed that children from Cohesive families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, whereas children from Enmeshed families had a late-stage bias toward threat. Children from Disengaged families had an early-stage attentional bias toward threat, but showed in addition a late-stage bias away from emotional faces (i.e., both angry and happy). Children from Authoritarian families, in turn, showed a late-stage attentional bias toward emotional faces. Situational priming did not moderate the effects of family system types on children's attentional biases. The findings confirm the influence of early family systems on the attentional biases, suggesting differences in the emotion regulation strategies children have developed to adapt to their family environments.

The aim of the present study was to investigate associations between internalizing and externalizing symptoms and deficits in executive functions (EF) as well as to examine the overall heterogeneity of EFs in a sample of preschool children attending a psychiatric clinic (n = 171). First, based on cut-off points signifying clinical levels of impairment on the parent-completed Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), children were assigned into groups of internalizing, externalizing, combined or mild symptoms and compared to a reference group (n = 667) with regard to day care teacher ratings of EFs on the Attention and Executive Function Rating Inventory-Preschool (ATTEX-P). Second, latent profile analysis (LPA) was employed to identify distinct subgroups of children representing different EF profiles with unique strengths and weaknesses in EFs. The first set of analyses indicated that all symptom groups had more difficulties in EFs than the reference group did, and the internalizing group had less inhibition-related problems than the other symptom groups did. Using LPA, five EF profiles were identified: average, weak average, attentional problems, inhibitory problems, and overall problems. The EF profiles were significantly associated with gender, maternal education level, and psychiatric symptom type. Overall, the findings suggest that the comparison of means of internalizing and externalizing groups mainly captures the fairly obvious differences in inhibition-related domains among young psychiatric outpatient children, whereas the person-oriented approach, based on individual differences, identifies heterogeneity related to attentional functions, planning, and initiating one's action. The variability in EF difficulties suggests that a comprehensive evaluation of a child's EF profile is important regardless of the type of psychiatric symptoms the child presents with.

Neuropsychiatric symptoms cause a significant burden to individuals with neurocognitive disorders and their families. Insights into the clinical associations, neurobiology, and treatment of these symptoms depend on informant questionnaires, such as the commonly used Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI). As with any scale, the utility of the NPI relies on its psychometric properties, but the NPI faces unique challenges related to its skip-question and scoring formats. In this narrative review, we examined the psychometric properties of the NPI in a framework including properties pertinent to construct validation, and health-related outcome measurement in general. We found that aspects such as test-retest and inter-rater reliability are major strengths of the NPI in addition to its flexible and relatively quick administration. These properties are desired in clinical trials. However, the reported properties appear to cover only some of the generally examined psychometric properties, representing perhaps necessary but insufficient reliability and validity evidence for the NPI. The psychometric data seem to have significant gaps, in part because small sample sizes in the relevant studies have precluded more comprehensive analyses. Regarding construct validity, only one study has examined structural validity with the NPI subquestions. Measurement error was not assessed in the reviewed studies. For future validation, we recommend using data from all subquestions, collecting larger samples, paying specific attention to construct validity and formulating hypotheses a priori. Because the NPI is an outcome measure of interest in clinical trials, examining measurement error could be of practical importance.

Here we report the first and most robust evidence about how sleep habits are associated with regional brain grey matter volumes and school grade average in early adolescence. Shorter time in bed during weekdays, and later weekend sleeping hours correlate with smaller brain grey matter volumes in frontal, anterior cingulate, and precuneus cortex regions. Poor school grade average associates with later weekend bedtime and smaller grey matter volumes in medial brain regions. The medial prefrontal anterior cingulate cortex appears most tightly related to the adolescents' variations in sleep habits, as its volume correlates inversely with both weekend bedtime and wake up time, and also with poor school performance. These findings suggest that sleep habits, notably during the weekends, have an alarming link with both the structure of the adolescent brain and school performance, and thus highlight the need for informed interventions.

Background Even though child psychopathology assessment guidelines emphasize comprehensive multi-method, multimodal, and multi-informant methodologies, maternal-report symptom-rating scales often serve as the predominant source of information. Research has shown that parental mood symptomatology affects their reports of their offspring's psychopathology. For example, the depression-distortion hypothesis suggests that maternal depression promotes a negative bias in mothers' perceptions of their children's behavioral and emotional problems. We investigated this difference of perception between adoptive mothers and internationally adopted children. Most previous studies suffer from the potential bias caused by the fact that parents and children share genetic risks. Methods Data were derived from the Finnish Adoption (FinAdo) survey study (a subsample of adopted children aged between 9 and 12 years, n = 222). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was used to assess emotional and behavioral problems and competences of the adopted children. The CBCL was filled in by the adopted children and the adoptive mothers, respectively. Maternal depressive symptoms were measured using the short version of the General Health Questionnaire. Results On average, mothers reported less total CBCL symptoms in their children than the children themselves (0.25 vs 0.38, p-value < 0.01 for difference). Mothers' depressive symptoms moderated the discrepancy in reporting internalizing symptoms (beta = - 0.14 and p-value 0.01 for interaction) and the total symptoms scores (beta = - 0.22 and p-value < 0.001 for interaction) and externalizing symptoms in girls in the CBCL. Limitations The major limitation of our study is its cross-sectional design and the fact that we only collected data in the form of questionnaires. Conclusions The results of our research support the depression-distortion hypothesis concerning the association of maternal depressive symptoms and child internalizing symptoms and externalizing symptoms in girls in a sample without genetic bias