Anxiety and mood disorders are among the most prevalent mental health problems affecting our youth. We propose that assessment and treatment efforts in this area can benefit from a focus on developmentally sensitive neurobehavioral trait constructs, that is, individual difference constructs with direct referents in both neurobiology and behavior across the lifespan. This approach dovetails with...

High rates of comorbidities and poor validity of disorder diagnostic criteria for mental disorders hamper advances in mental health research. Recent work has suggested the utility of continuous cross-cutting dimensions, including general psychopathology and specific factors of externalizing and internalizing (e.g., distress and fear) syndromes. The current study evaluated the reliability of com...

OBJECTIVE To determine the independent effects of parental depression and family discord on psychopathology in offspring at high and low risk for major depression. METHOD One hundred eighty-two offspring of depressed or nondepressed parents were followed over 10 years. In direct interviews, parents' and offspring's psychopathology was evaluated by raters blind to parents' clinical status. Fiv...

The present study examined the factor structure underlying the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales and the validity of these dimensions. Confirmatory factor analysis with 6137 nonclinical young adults supported a 2-factor model with positive and negative schizotypy dimensions. As predicted, the schizotypy dimensions were differentially related to psychopathology, personality, and social impairment. Bot...

Recent work on the empirical structure of psychopathology has aimed to address some limitations that can arise from traditional categorical classification approaches. This research focused modeling patterns co-occurrence among diagnoses, uncovering a variety well-validated dimensions (or spectra) psychopathology, spanning common and uncommon mental disorders. A model integrating these empirical...

OBJECTIVES Physical punishment, as a means of disciplining children, may be considered a mild form of childhood adversity. Although many outcomes of physical punishment have been investigated, little attention has been given to the impact of physical punishment on later adult psychopathology. Also, it has been stated that physical punishment by a loving parent is not associated with negative ou...

There is substantial interest in identifying biobehavioral dimensions of individual variation that cut across heterogenous disorder categories, and computational models can play a major role advancing this goal. In report, we focused on efficiency evidence accumulation (EEA), computationally characterized variable derived from sequential sampling choice tasks. We created an EEA factor three beh...