Pathways and processes of risk in associations among maternal antisocial personality symptoms, interparental aggression, and preschooler's psychopathology

Two studies examined the nature and processes underlying the joint role of interparental aggression and maternal antisocial personality as predictors of children's disruptive behavior problems. Participants for both studies included a high-risk sample of 201 mothers and their 2-year-old children in a longitudinal, multimethod design. Addressing the form of the interplay between interparental aggression and maternal antisocial personality as risk factors for concurrent and prospective levels of child disruptive problems, the Study 1 findings indicated that maternal antisocial personality was a predictor of the initial levels of preschooler's disruptive problems independent of the effects of interparental violence, comorbid forms of maternal psychopathology, and socioeconomic factors. In attesting to the salience of interparental aggression in the lives of young children, latent difference score analyses further revealed that interparental aggression mediated the link between maternal antisocial personality and subsequent changes in child disruptive problems over a 1-year period. To identify the family mechanisms that account for the two forms of intergenerational transmission of disruptive problems identified in Study 1, Study 2 explored the role of children's difficult temperament, emotional reactivity to interparental conflict, adrenocortical reactivity in a challenging parent–child task, and experiences with maternal parenting as mediating processes. Analyses identified child emotional reactivity to conflict and maternal unresponsiveness as mediators in pathways between interparental aggression and preschooler's disruptive problems. The findings further supported the role of blunted adrenocortical reactivity as an allostatic mediator of the associations between parental unresponsiveness and child disruptive problems.

Interparental aggression and children's adrenocortical reactivity: Testing an evolutionary model of allostatic load

Guided by an evolutionary model of allostatic load, this study examined the hypothesis that the association between interparental aggression and subsequent changes in children's cortisol reactivity to interparental conflict is moderated by their temperamental dispositions. Participants of the multimethod, longitudinal study included 201 2-year-old toddlers and their mothers. These children experienced elevated levels of aggression between parents. Consistent with the theory, the results indicated that interparental aggression predicted greater cortisol reactivity over a 1-year period for children who exhibited high levels of temperamental inhibition and vigilance. Conversely, for children with bold, aggressive temperamental characteristics, interparental aggression was marginally associated with diminished cortisol reactivity. Further underscoring its implications for allostatic load, increasing cortisol reactivity over the one year span was related to concomitant increases in internalizing symptoms but decreases in attention and hyperactivity difficulties. In supporting the evolutionary conceptualization, these results further supported the relative developmental advantages and costs associated with escalating and dampened cortisol reactivity to interparental conflict.