Anxiety disorders are prevalent throughout childhood and adolescence. As such, identifying the factors and mechanisms that precede, maintain, or exacerbate anxiety disorders is essential for the development of empirically-based prevention and intervention programs. The current review focuses on child temperament (i.e., behavioral inhibition) and the child's environment, including parenting, child care, and peer relationships, as these factors have been linked to internalizing problems and anxiety diagnoses. Research programs are needed that examine the associations between the environment and anxiety in temperamentally at-risk populations. In order to be successful, early intervention and prevention programs require a more detailed analysis of the interplay between various environmental contexts, both distal and proximal to the child, and the child's temperamental reactivity to novelty and threat. Furthermore, conducting these investigations across multiple levels of analysis in large-scale, longitudinal samples would be an important addition to the literature on the developmental psychopathology of anxiety.

Background Previous reports from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project suggested that children removed from institutions and placed into intervention displayed gains in IQ relative to children randomized to remain in institutional care. Method The current report presents data from the 8 year follow-up of these children. One hundred and three of the original 136 children in the study were tested with the WISC IV. Results Results reveal continued benefit from the intervention even though many of the children in both the intervention and control groups were no longer residing in their initial placements. Gains in IQ were particularly evident for those children who remained with their intervention family. There were also modest timing effects such that children placed earlier displayed higher scores on the WISC processing speed subscale. Early placement was also a significant predictor of a profile of stable, typical IQ scores over time. Conclusion These data suggest the continued importance of early intervention and the negative effects of severe psychosocial deprivation on the development of IQ scores across early childhood.

Behavioral inhibition is a temperament assessed in the toddler period via children’s responses to novel contexts, objects, and unfamiliar adults. Social reticence is observed as onlooking, unoccupied behavior in the presence of unfamiliar peers and is linked to earlier behavioral inhibition. In the current study, we assessed behavioral inhibition in a sample of 262 children at ages two and three, and then assessed social reticence in these same children as they interacted with an unfamiliar, same age, and same sex peer, at 2, 3, 4, and 5 years of age. As expected, early behavioral inhibition was related to social reticence at each age. However, multiple trajectories of social reticence were observed including High-Stable, High-Decreasing, and Low-Increasing, with the High-Stable and High-Decreasing trajectories associated with greater behavioral inhibition compared to the Low-Increasing trajectory. In addition, children in the High-Stable social reticence trajectory were rated higher than all others on 60-month Internalizing problems. Children in the Low-Increasing trajectory were rated higher on 60-month Externalizing problems than children in the High-Decreasing trajectory. These results illustrate the multiple developmental pathways for behaviorally inhibited toddlers and suggest patterns across early childhood associated with heightened risk for psychopathology.

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The present study compared the social behaviors of 8-year-old previously institutionalized Romanian children from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) in two groups: 1) children randomized to foster care homes (FCG), and 2) children randomized to care as usual (remaining in institutions) (CAUG). Children were observed interacting with an age and gender-matched unfamiliar, non-institutionalized peer from the community (NIG) during six interactive tasks, and their behavior was coded for speech reticence, social engagement, task orientation, social withdrawal, and conversational competence. Group comparisons revealed that FCG children were rated as significantly less reticent during a speech task than CAUG children. For CAUG children, longer time spent in institutional care was related to greater speech reticence and lower social engagement. Using an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, CAUG children's behaviors, but not FCG, were found to influence the behavior of unfamiliar peers. These findings are the first to characterize institutionalized children's observed social behaviors towards new peers during middle childhood and highlight the positive effects of foster care intervention in the social domain.

Aggression and other forms of antisocial behavior have captured the attention of developmental researchers to a far greater extent than prosocial behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing, defending, and making restitution for antisocial behavior. Yet the ability to feel empathy for the distress of others and to care for them is surely an equally if not more admirable feature of human behavior than simply refraining from harming others. At the same time, it is a more complex form of behavior. Thus, conditions under which people should assist others, particularly when that assistance involves personal sacrifi ce, are ambiguous, at least in Western European cultures. Although children who help others have more positive relationships and interactions with their peers (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006 ) and people who were prosocial as children are less likely to be antisocial as adults (Hamalaimen & Pulkiinen, 1995 ), prosocial behavior may make excessive demands on the resources of the giver as well as occasionally be viewed negatively by the recipient. Accordingly, studies indicate that prosocial behavior is often not praised by parents or teachers (Caplan & Hay, 1989 ;Grusec, 1991 ) and that parents frequently do not welcome it in young children (Rheingold, 1982 ). Not all acts that benefi t others, of course, have a personal cost. Helping others leads to feelings of mastery and opportunities for social interaction, even when that help is not likely to be reciprocated. What characterizes prosocial behavior is that it is voluntary and intentional behavior that benefi ts another. It is not done in response to direction or request, and it appears to be motivated by some form of internal direction rather than by hope of external reward or fear of punishment.In this chapter we survey a number of features of empathy and prosocial behavior in children. We begin with an overview of the development of prosocial behavior. Then we consider its evolutionary and genetic underpinnings as well as its developmental 550 Joan E. Grusec et al. progression. We next turn to the various ways in which it is socialized as well as to differences in cultural demands for and expressions of concern for others. Next we review recent work on the neurological and hormonal infl uences underlying prosocial behavior. Finally, we discuss the relation between prosocial and antisocial behavior.

The present study examined the social skills of previously institutionalized, 8-y-old Romanian children from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project and the influence of attachment security and brain electrical activity (alpha power) on these skills. Participants included children randomized to an intervention involving foster care [Foster Care Group (FCG)], children randomized to remain in institutions [Care As Usual Group (CAUG)], and neverinstitutionalized children living with their families in the Bucharest community [Never-Institutionalized Group (NIG)]. A continuous rating of children's attachment security to their primary caregiver was assessed at 42 mo of age. When children were 8 y old, teachers rated their social skills, and the children's resting electroencephalogram alpha power was recorded. Teachers rated social skills of FCG children who were placed into foster care before 20 mo of age as no different from NIG children, and both of these groups were higher than CAUG children and FCG children placed after 20 mo. Electroencephalogram alpha power at age 8 significantly moderated the relations between attachment security and social skills. These findings characterize institutionalized children's social skills in middle childhood within the context of a randomized intervention while highlighting the roles of both relational and biological factors in these developmental trajectories.social behavior | neglect | early experience T he present study examined 8-y-old children who had a history of institutional rearing to better understand the impact of this early experience on social skill development in middle childhood. Specifically, we examined the timing of an intervention (placement into a foster care home), as well as attachment security with the primary caregiver at 42 mo and children's brain electrical activity in relation to teacher-rated social skills at 8 y of age.Considerable research has been conducted examining the consequences of severe emotional and physical deprivation associated with institutional rearing across physical, cognitive, and social domains (e.g., 1-4). Recently, these findings have been augmented by demonstrations of abnormal brain structure and functioning following severe early deprivation (5-10). Across these studies, several factors appear to influence outcomes, for example, age of placement into an institution (11), timing of removal and placement in a family (2), and sex of the child (12).Additional work has focused on social developmental outcomes following institutional rearing. Many studies have characterized children's attachment relationships formed with institutional (13, 14), adoptive (15), or foster (16, 17) caregivers. These studies have documented profound problems in the attachment relationships that young children form with caregivers following early deprivation. In addition, these children are reported to display abnormal social behavior toward adults (e.g., 18-20). Additional research has examined the social behavior of institutionalized children among their ...

The relations between maternal parenting characteristics, child disclosure and secrecy, and child outcomes (positive and negative strategies for coping with distress), were examined in a study of 140 children (10-12-year-olds) and their mothers. Child disclosure and secrecy were shown to be distinct but related constructs with authoritativeness predictive of disclosure and dispositional anger predictive of secrecy. These relations held even when child compliance was included as a control variable. Mothers' authoritative parenting predicted disclosure which in turn predicted children's use of positive coping strategies. Mothers' dispositional anger predicted secrecy which mediated the relation between maternal anger and children's use of negative coping strategies. Results are discussed in terms of parent-child communication and opportunities for mothers to use knowledge gained from child disclosure to teach children successful ways of dealing with distress.