The links between discrimination and adjustment in U.S. Latino/a immigrant adolescents is an important but understudied phenomenon. We aimed to investigate the longitudinal associations (across 1 year) among discrimination, prosocial behaviors, and depressive symptoms in U.S. Latino immigrant adolescents using two competing models: associations between discrimination and prosocial behaviors via depressive symptoms (mental health strain model), and associations between discrimination and depressive symptoms via prosocial behaviors (prosociality strain model). Participants were 302 Latino/a recent immigrant adolescents (53.3 % boys, M age = 14.51 years at Time 1, SD = .88 years) who completed measures of discrimination, depressive symptoms, and prosocial behaviors at 6-month intervals. The results provided support for both proposed models. The discussion examines the importance of prosocial behaviors in understanding adjustment and effects of discrimination among recently immigrated U.S. Latino adolescents.
Attachment and social support theories are normative developmental approaches that postulate positive social behavioral outcomes for individuals who develop strong relationships to parents and peers; however, research on positive aspects of Latinos in the United States is scarce. One hundred and forty-five Mexican American college students (M age ¼ 23.05 years; 99 females) from state universities in the United States completed measures of parent and peer attachment, empathy, prosocial behaviors, and physical aggression. Structural equation models showed that both parent and peer attachments were associated with prosocial and physically aggressive behaviors. In general, empathy mediated the relations between peer attachment and both types of social behaviors but mostly for men and not women. Discussion focuses on the importance of attachment
We identified developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms among 674 Indigenous adolescents (M age = 11.10, SD = 0.83 years) progressing from early to late adolescence. Four depressive symptoms trajectories were identified: (a) sustained low, (b) initially low but increasing, (c) initially high but decreasing, and (d) sustained high levels of depressive symptoms. Trajectory group membership varied as a function of gender, pubertal development, caregiver major depression, and perceived discrimination. Moreover, participants in the different trajectory groups were at differential risk for the development of an alcohol use disorder. These results highlight the benefit of examining the development of depressive symptoms and the unique ways that depressive symptoms develop among North American Indigenous youth as they progress through adolescence.
Self‐regulation is essential for adaptive behavior in everyday contexts that become increasingly elaborated and complex through childhood and adolescence. Here, we review literature and discuss our own findings regarding the development of executive control (
EC
) skills that support gains in self‐regulation over the preschool years. Children's accuracy on executive inhibitory control, working memory, and flexibility tasks increases dramatically between 3 and 4 years of age, paralleling both quantitative and qualitative changes in neural volume and connectivity. Levels of proficiency on these
EC
measures are strongly tied to children's sociofamilial backgrounds, and particularly to family financial resources that facilitate access to learning materials and supports. Moreover, our data indicate that children's level of performance on
EC
tasks administered during preschool mediates the relation of family financial resources to children's mathematical achievement in early kindergarten. Collectively, findings indicate that the acquisition of
EC
represents a critical developmental task of early childhood and provides a platform for wellbeing across academic and socioemotional domains.
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