Indirect aggression, anxiety, and empathy: Disaggregating between and within person longitudinal associations during childhood and adolescence

Although indirectly aggressive behavior and anxiety symptoms can co-occur, it is unclear whether anxiety is an antecedent or outcome of indirect aggression at the individual level and whether other personality traits can contribute to these longitudinal associations. Therefore, the between- and within-person associations among indirect aggression, anxiety symptoms, and empathic concern were examined across adolescence from ages 11 to 16 in a cohort of individuals followed annually (N = 700; 52.9% girls; 76.0% White) controlling for direct aggression and demographic variables. Results of autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals supported an acting out model at the within-person level. Specifically, anxiety symptoms positively predicted indirect aggression and indirect aggression negatively predicted empathic concern at each adjacent time point. These findings suggest that methods of reducing worries about the self and increasing healthy self-confidence could prevent indirect aggression and help build concern and compassion toward others.

In Defence of Ordinary Help: Estimating the effect of Early Help/Family Support Spending on Children in Need Rates in England using ALT-SR

Randomised controlled trials are often inappropriate for many forms of preventative children’s services; as such, observational studies using administrative data can be valuable for evidence-based policymaking. However, estimates of effectiveness can be confounded by differences in thresholds of intervention and national policies that exert pressure on local trends. This study adjusted for these factors using methods developed in clinical psychology to control for individual traits and developmental trajectories, Autoregressive Latent Trajectory Models with Structured Residuals, to analyse the relationship between local authority preventative spending and Children in Need (CIN) rates in England. Higher spending was associated with significant decreases in CIN rates between 2010/11 and 2014/15, but not from 2014/15 onwards. In the first half of the decade, 1% increases in expenditure were associated with between 0.07% and 0.157% decreases in CIN rates. Based on average local authority spending cuts, this translates to an additional 13,000 to 16,500 children and young people put or kept at risk of developmental or health impairments nationally for each year between 2011 and 2015. These findings highlight the potential of early help/family support policies and concerns around how their effectiveness has changed consequent to prolonged austerity and a deliberate policy focus on ‘what works’.

Unobtrusive Sensing Technology Detects Ecologically Valid Spatiotemporal Patterns of Daily Routines Distinctive to Persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background The ability to capture people’s movement throughout their home is a powerful approach to inform spatiotemporal patterns of routines associated with cognitive impairment. The study estimated indoor room activities over 24 hours and investigated relationships between diurnal activity patterns and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Methods 161 older adults (26 with MCI) living alone (age=78.9±9.2) were included from two study cohorts–the Oregon Center for Aging & Technology and the Minority Aging Research Study. Indoor room activities were measured by the number of trips made to rooms (bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, living room). Trips made to rooms (transitions) were detected using passive infrared motion sensors fixed on the walls for a month. Latent trajectory models were used to identify distinct diurnal patterns of room activities and characteristics associated with each trajectory. Results Latent trajectory models identified two diurnal patterns of bathroom usage (high; low usage). Participants with MCI were more likely to be in the high bathroom usage group that exhibited more trips to the bathroom than the low usage group (OR=4.1,95%CI [1.3-13.5],p=0.02). For kitchen activity, two diurnal patterns were identified (high; low activity). Participants with MCI were more likely to be in the high kitchen activity group that exhibited more transitions to the kitchen throughout the day and night than the low kitchen activity group (OR=3.2,95%CI [1.1-9.1],p=0.03). Conclusions The linkage between bathroom and kitchen activities with MCI may be the result of biological, health, and environmental factors in play. In-home, real-time unobtrusive-sensing offers a novel way of delineating cognitive health with chronologically-ordered movement across indoor locations.

Heavy alcohol consumption before and after negative life events in late mid-life: longitudinal latent trajectory analyses

BackgroundPeople who experience negative life events report more heavy alcohol consumption compared with people without these experiences, but little is known about patterns of change within this group. This study aims to identify trajectories of heavy alcohol consumption before and after experiencing either divorce, or severe illness or death in the family. Furthermore, the aim is to examine characteristics of individuals belonging to each trajectory.MethodsLongitudinal study of public sector employees from the Finnish Retirement and Aging Study with up to 5 years of annual follow-ups (n=6783; eligible sample n=1393). Divorce and severe illness or death in the family represented negative life events. Heavy alcohol consumption was categorised as >14 units/week.ResultsBased on latent trajectory analysis, three trajectories of heavy drinking were identified both for divorce and for severe illness or death in the family: ‘No heavy drinking’ (82% illness/death, 75% divorce), ‘Constant heavy drinking’ (10% illness/death, 13% divorce) and ‘Decreasing heavy drinking’ (7% illness/death, 12% divorce). Constant heavy drinkers surrounding illness or death in the family were more likely to be men, report depression and anxiety and to smoke than those with no heavy drinking. Constant heavy drinkers surrounding divorce were also more likely to be men and to report depression compared with those with no heavy drinking.ConclusionsMost older workers who experience divorce or severe illness or death in the family have stable drinking patterns regarding heavy alcohol consumption, that is, most do not initiate or stop heavy drinking.

Limitations of a proposed correction for slow drifts in decision criterion

Trial history biases in decision-making tasks are thought to reflect systematic updates of decision variables, therefore their precise nature informs conclusions about underlying heuristic strategies and learning processes. However, random drifts in decision variables can corrupt this inference by mimicking the signatures of systematic updates. Hence, identifying the trial-by-trial evolution of decision variables requires methods that can robustly account for such drifts. Recent studies (Lak 20, Mendonça 20) have made important advances in this direction, by proposing a convenient method to correct for the influence of slow drifts in decision criterion, a key decision variable. Here we apply this correction to a variety of updating scenarios, and evaluate its performance. We show that the correction fails for a wide range of commonly assumed systematic updating strategies, distorting one's inference away from the veridical strategies towards a narrow subset. To address these limitations, we propose a model-based approach for disambiguating systematic updates from random drifts, and demonstrate its success on real and synthetic datasets. We show that this approach accurately recovers the latent trajectory of drifts in decision criterion as well as the generative systematic updates from simulated data. Our results offer recommendations for methods to account for the interactions between history biases and slow drifts, and highlight the advantages of incorporating assumptions about the generative process directly into models of decision-making.

Does emotion dysregulation mediate the association between ADHD symptoms and internalizing problems? A longitudinal within-person analysis in a large population-representative study

Background: Previous research has suggested that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms commonly show emotion dysregulation difficulties. It has been suggested that these difficulties may partly explain the substantial co-occurrence of internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression with ADHD symptoms. However, no study has yet provided a longitudinal analysis of the within-person links between ADHD symptoms, emotion dysregulation, and internalizing problems necessary to determine if emotion dysregulation mediates the links between ADHD symptoms and internalizing problems. Methods: We used data from three waves (age 3,5, and 7) of the large UK population-representative Millennium Cohort Study (n = 9619, 4885 males) and fit an autoregressive latent trajectory model with structured residuals (ALT-SR) to disaggregate within- and between-person relations between ADHD, emotion dysregulation, and internalizing problem symptoms. Results: Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that emotion dysregulation significantly mediated the longitudinal within-person association between ADHD symptoms and internalizing problems. Conclusions: Results underline the promise of targeting emotion dysregulation as a means of preventing internalizing problems co-occurring with ADHD symptoms.