Creative and methodologically sophisticated longitudinal research on bidirectionality in parenting and child behavior can shed important new light on the dynamics of behavior-problem development. The articles assembled for this Special Section are at the forefront of efforts aimed at tracing the interplay of parenting behavior and child and adolescent adjustment problems over time. In this commentary, we provide a brief overview of thinking and research on bidirectionality and then highlight key themes and findings reported in these articles. We describe some of the challenges in research on bidirectional processes and offer some recommendations for future research in this area.

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We examined interactions between children's physiological activity across two systems, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), as predictors of child-reported internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety). HPA activity was indexed by baseline salivary cortisol, and PNS activity was indexed by baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Study 1 consisted of 57 children (54% girls; M age = 8.81 years ±.34), and Study 2 included 219 children (51% girls; M age = 9.31 years ±.79). Cortisol interacted with RSA to explain unique variance in children's internalizing symptoms. Across the two studies, children with higher cortisol levels in conjunction with higher RSA levels tended to exhibit the lowest levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. Findings demonstrate that contemporaneous consideration of physiological activity across multiple systems can advance understanding of internalizing symptoms in children.

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