Kristin Valentino

• Ph.D.
• University of Notre Dame at University of Notre Dame

This longitudinal study aimed to examine the long-term effects of Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET), child maltreatment, and the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal elaboration and sensitive guidance during reminiscing. RET was developed to improve maternal elaborative and emotionally sensitive reminiscing among maltreating mothers of preschool-aged...

Parent report is frequently used to assess children’s psychopathology, however, researchers have expressed concerns about the validity of parent reports. Some parental characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs may systematically bias a parent’s report of their child’s behaviors and functioning. Informed by social information processing models of paren...

Longitudinal study of associations between family‐level emotion socialization and adolescent adjustment is limited. When American children (53.5% girls) were in second grade (N = 213; Mage = 7.98; data collected 2002–2003), mothers and fathers (79.8% of mothers and 74.2% of fathers were White) reported on their reactions to children's emotions; in...

This paper introduces the Ithemba Hope for Parents Study and analyzes the first wave of data collection. This study enrolled 380 Zulu families to participate in a biweekly home visit intervention for up to two years. Of these, 100 are in a delayed control group. The ongoing intervention includes intergenerational support groups and resources such a...

The present 21‐day daily diary study (conducted 2021–2022) tested anger and racism‐related vigilance as potential transdiagnostic mediators linking exposure to racial and ethnic discrimination (RED) to distress (negative affect and stress, respectively). The data analytic sample included N = 317 Mexican‐origin adolescents (Mage = 13.5 years; 50.8%...

The current study evaluated cultural values and family processes that may moderate associations between daily racial-ethnic discrimination and distress among Mexican-origin youth. Integrating micro-time (daily diary) and macro-time (longitudinal survey) research design features, we examined familism, family cohesion, and ethnic-racial socialization...

The current Special Issue marks a major milestone in the history of developmental psychopathology; as the final issue edited by Cicchetti, we have an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable progress of the discipline across the last four decades, as well as challenges and future directions for the field. With contemporary issues in mind, including...

Parental emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs)—including reactions to emotions, emotional expressiveness, and emotion-related discussion—can foster or hinder children and adolescents’ self-regulation development. Toward a goal of identifying specific mechanisms by which children and adolescents develop skillful, adaptive self-regulation o...

Overgeneral memory (OGM), or difficulty recalling specific memories when recounting autobiographical events, is associated with psychopathology. According to functional avoidance theory, OGM-or reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS)-may serve as an emotion regulation strategy that aids in the avoidance of painful, negative memories (Sumn...

Child maltreatment is a pathogenic relational experience that creates risk for physical and psychological health difficulties throughout the lifespan. The Reminiscing and Emotion Training intervention (RET) was developed to support maltreated children's healthy development by improving parenting behavior among maltreating mothers. Here, we evaluate...

Child maltreatment is considered a pathogenic relational experience, typically occurring in the parent child relationship. Relational interventions focus on improving the parent-child relationship as the key mechanism of change to support adaptive development of children who have been maltreated. This chapter presents the theoretical rationale and...

Parallel process latent growth curve mediation models (PP-LGCMMs) are frequently used to longitudinally investigate the mediation effects of treatment on the level and change of outcome through the level and change of mediator. An important but often violated assumption in empirical PP-LGCMM analysis is the absence of omitted confounders of the rel...

The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ; Luyten et al., 2017) is a central measure of parental reflective functioning (i.e., the tendency to consider children's mental experiences); still, little is known about the psychometric properties of the PRFQ among maltreating and nonmaltreating mothers. Maltreating mothers may have difficul...

Children’s relationships inform their internal working models (IWMs) of the world around them. Attachment and emotional security theory (EST) emphasize the importance of parent–child and interparental relationships, respectively, for IWM. The current study examined (a) data-driven classes in child attachment and emotional security IWM, (b) associat...

Mother–child reminiscing about past emotional experiences is one aspect of emotion socialization that facilitates child socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes. To advance understanding of the multidimensional nature of this clinically significant transdiagnostic process, the current investigation examined the structure of maternal reminiscing and h...

Little is known about the development of self-regulation processes during the preschool period in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). How parental characteristics such as the broader autism phenotype (BAP) relate to children’s self-regulation is not well understood. Preschool-aged children with (n = 24) and without ASD (n = 21) completed an inhibitory...

Background The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on child functioning have been especially pronounced among low-income families. Protective factors, including sensitive reminiscing and sufficient family resources, may reduce the negative effects of the pandemic on child adjustment. Objective The current study investigated how family resources durin...

Autobiographical memory (AM) is a socially-relevant cognitive skill. Little is known regarding AM during early childhood in ASD. Parent–child reminiscing conversations predict AM in non-ASD populations but have rarely been examined in autism. To address this gap, 17 preschool-aged children (ages 4–6 years) with ASD and 21 children without ASD match...

There is considerable controversy regarding the accuracy and sug-gestibility of children's autobiographical memory for emotionally salient life events. Attachment perspectives of autobiographical memory development identify the attachment security of parent child dyads and parents' emotional support and coherence during reminiscing with their child...

Parentification is a parent-child dynamic in which children assume caregiving responsibilities while parents fail to support and reciprocate children's roles. There is a gap between empirical research, which typically operationalizes parentification as the occurrence of children's caregiving behaviors, and theory, which emphasizes consideration of...

Mother–child reminiscing, particularly maternal sensitive guidance, fosters the development of autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) in both typically developing and maltreated children, yet little is known regarding the processes underlying individual differences in maternal reminiscing that could also relate to child AMS. Emerging evidence ha...

Exposure to child maltreatment and maternal depression are significant risk factors for the development of psychopathology. Difficulties in caregiving, including poor emotion socialization behavior, may mediate these associations. Thus, enhancing supportive parent emotion socialization may be a key transdiagnostic target for preventive intervention...

This study examined the development of autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) in a longitudinal randomized controlled trial of 242 maltreated and nonmaltreated children (aged 36–86 months; 50.4% male; 39.7% Black, 25.9% White, 34.5% Latinx/other) and their mothers. Half of the maltreated families were randomized to receive an intervention to imp...

Children’s reports during forensic interviews regarding maltreatment allegations are often critical for legal processes and for guiding decisions regarding services for children and their families. Field research examining forensic interviews with children has identified a wide range in the amount of information children report to interviewers. Res...

Recent conceptualizations of depression and supporting empirical work suggests that elevations and allievations of depressive symptoms can be understood from a dynamic systems perspective. Specifically, depression is proposed to result from strong-feedback loops in a system comprised of highly interdependent component parts (e.g., affect states). S...

Young children's physiological and emotional regulation depend on supportive caregiving, especially in the context of stress and adversity. Experiences of child maltreatment become biologically embedded by shaping stress physiology. Maternal emotion socialization may have an important influence on children's limbic‐hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (L...

Dysregulation in children's physiological stress systems is a key process linking early adversity to poor health and psychopathology. Thus, interventions that improve children's stress physiology may help prevent deleterious health outcomes. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal careg...

Objectives Emotional reminiscing, or mother-child discussion of past emotional experiences, is a critical aspect of emotion socialization that predicts a range of child outcomes and is central to parent-child interventions. Thus, understanding individual differences in emotional reminiscing will advance our ability to identify families at-risk for...

The elaborative and sensitive guidance of maternal reminiscing are robust facilitators of children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. Maternal reminiscing has been identified as impaired among maltreating mothers and as a mechanism linking maltreatment with poor developmental outcomes. Few studies, however, have examined associations betwe...

Maltreated children are susceptible to dysregulation, but developmental mechanisms at the family level that influence this process are understudied. In the current investigation, 4 mediators (positive parenting, positive and negative family expressiveness, and maternal sensitive guidance during reminiscing) were examined as process variables throug...

Exposure to trauma during childhood is highly prevalent. This review seeks to evaluate the current state of the literature in regard to trauma-informed care within the school setting. A number of models have been put forth to describe broad trauma-informed approaches integrated within school systems, which incorporate trauma-sensitive care and prac...

Family violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV) and child maltreatment, has detrimental consequences across the life span. Robust evidence from families experiencing relatively normative conflict demonstrates the central role of children’s internal representations, or beliefs and expectations of relationships, on children’s adjustment. T...

This study investigated whether the effect of maternal elaborative reminiscing on child language is moderated by maternal sensitivity and whether this association depends on children’s experience of maltreatment. A total of 236 mothers and their 3- to 7-year-old children (mean age = 5 years) were observed interacting with experimenter-provided toys...

Data were drawn from an ongoing study of preschoolers (N = 221). Mothers self-reported experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) and parenting practices, and collected three saliva samples (waking, midday, and bedtime) on themselves and their child on two consecutive days. Saliva samples were later assayed for cortisol. Bootstrapped mediation...

Maternal reminiscing and preschoolers’ (M = 5.00 years, SD = 1.11) autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) were examined among abusive (n = 24), neglecting (n = 78), emotionally maltreating (n = 32), and demographically similar nonmaltreating families (n = 74). Neglect was negatively associated with child AMS and the quantity of maternal elaborat...

Objectives Role reversal or boundary dissolution (BD) refers to the breakdown of expected parent-child roles and poses risk to development. Although retrospective reports in adulthood demonstrate that the emotional aspects of BD negatively influence self-concept, examination of BD in early childhood typically focuses on BD broadly as a reversal of...

Data were drawn from an ongoing study of preschoolers (N = 221). Mothers self-reported experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) and parenting practices, and collected three saliva samples (waking, midday, and bedtime) on themselves and their child on two consecutive days. Saliva samples were later assayed for cortisol. Bootstrapped mediation...

The current investigation reports the results of a randomized controlled trial of a brief, relational intervention for maltreated preschool-aged children and their mothers, called Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET). RET facilitates elaborative and emotionally supportive parent-child communication, which is an essential component of the parent-c...

Objective: The present study examined the intergenerational risk of instrumental filial responsibility in the first generation on children's externalizing behaviors in the next generation and examined difficult child temperament as a potential moderator of this association. Background: Filial responsibility refers to children's instrumental or emot...

Introduction: Maternal sensitivity, a mother’s ability to be alert and responsive to her child’s cues, is a key element in the parent–child relationship in early childhood. In the preschool years, maternal sensitivity also includes a facet of autonomy support, or the ability for the mother to respect the child’s developing independence. Other auton...

In the current study, we examined the attunement and transmission of mother–child diurnal cortisol among maltreating (N = 165) and nonmaltreating (N = 83) mothers and their preschool-aged children. Over half of the families had a substantiated child maltreatment case with the mother as the perpetrator. Mothers collected three saliva samples (waking...

The manner in which mothers engage in emotional discussion, or reminisce, with their young children about past emotional experiences poses important ramifications for child socioemotional and cognitive development. Maltreating mothers may have difficulty engaging in emotionally supportive reminiscing. The current study examined the role of maternal...

This study examines the integration of the two main branches of the stress response system: the autonomic nervous system (via salivary alpha-amylase, sAA) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (via cortisol). Mothers (n = 117) were randomized to have either a positive (n = 57) or conflictual (n = 60) discussion with their marital partner, aft...

Background and objectives: Overgeneral memory (OGM), difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories, is a robust phenomenon related to the onset and course of depressive and posttraumatic stress disorders. Inhibitory mechanisms are theorized to underlie OGM; however, empirical support for this link is equivocal. The current study exam...

In the current investigation, we examined associations between maternal attachment and the way that mothers and children discuss past emotional experiences (i.e., reminiscing) among 146 maltreating and 73 nonmaltreating mothers and their 3- to 6-year-old children. Recent studies demonstrate that maltreating mothers engage in less elaborative remini...

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) has robust associations with psychopathology. As such, understanding the development of AMS (or its inverse, overgeneral autobiographical memory; OGM) and how it may be unique from other aspects of memory performance is important. In particular, it is unclear whether child AMS is distinct from autob...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has traditionally been associated with persistent deficits in many functional areas across the life span. However, recent work suggests that some individuals initially diagnosed with ASD can later achieve functioning in normative ranges, a phenomenon referred to as optimal outcome (OO) or, effectively, recovery from A...

There has been increasing interest in evaluating whether interventions for child maltreatment can improve and/or prevent child physiological dysregulation via measurement of diurnal cortisol. The assessment of diurnal cortisol typically involves the home-based collection of saliva multiple times per day, bringing forth important methodological cons...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition defined along a continuum of socio-communicative difficulties, is associated with unique patterns of memory functioning including difficulties with autobiographical memory (AM). AM refers to memory for information related to the self and personally experienced events and has a strong social function. The...

Child maltreatment may be best characterized as a pathogenic relational experience which primarily occurs in the mother–child relationship. As such, enhancing the mother–child relationship is the key process that should be targeted in intervention approaches for child maltreatment. Two salient and modifiable components of the mother–child relations...

Maternal adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with negative physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood. Less is known regarding how maternal ACEs relate to perinatal depressive symptoms or the intergenerational effect of maternal childhood trauma history on birth outcomes and infant functioning. To address this gap, an at...

The present paper proposes an updated model of boundary dissolution. Specifically, the model presented integrates the ecological-ethical model of parentification (Jurkovic, 1997) with a broader model of boundary dissolution (Kerig, 2005) and further incorporates an ecological-transactional perspective (Cicchetti & Lynch, 1993; Cicchetti & Valentino...

Mother-child reminiscing, the process by which mothers and their children discuss past events and emotional experiences, has been robustly linked with child outcomes, including autobiographical memory. To advance previous work linking elaborative maternal reminiscing with child autobiographical memory specificity, the ability to generate and retrie...

Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that the way in which parents discuss everyday emotional experiences with their young children (i.e., elaborative reminiscing) has significant implications for child cognitive and socioemotional functioning, and that maltreating parents have a particularly difficult time in engaging in this type of dialogu...

Salmon and Reese review literature on parent-child conversations about children's negative experiences and consider how impoverished parent-child reminiscing about child sexual abuse may affect children's memory for that trauma. To extend the application of developmental psychopathology theory to the study of reminiscing and memory, the present com...

The notion of an average expectable environment for promoting normal development proposes that there are species-specific ranges of environmental conditions that elicit normative developmental processes. This chapter provides a review of child maltreatment. Of particular salience is the growing contribution of neurobiological and genetic research t...

Maternal history of parentification in the family of origin poses subsequent risk to parenting quality during the transition to parenthood. The present study builds on prior work by evaluating whether the association between maternal parentification history and warm responsiveness is mediated by maternal knowledge of infant development in first tim...

Overgeneral memory refers to difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories and is consistently associated with depression and/or trauma. The present study developed a downward extension of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) given the need to document normative developmental changes in ability to retrieve s...

The present study investigated the contributions of maternal depressive symptoms and child temperament to youths' executive functioning (EF) across an 18-year longitudinal study. The primary hypothesis proposed that the association between youths' exposure to early maternal depressive symptoms (ages 3 & 5) and their EF (age 18) would be moderated b...

Overgeneral memory (OGM) refers to difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories. The tendency to be overgeneral in autobiographical memory recall is more commonly observed among individuals with emotional disorders compared with those without. Despite significant advances in theory and identification of mechanisms that underlie the e...

The current study examined the interactive influence of multiple factors (i.e., physical abuse severity and negative affectivity) in predicting youth's inpatient psychiatric length of stay (LOS), extending previous research focused on identification of only single LOS predictors. Elevated physical abuse severity was hypothesized to predict longer y...

Objective: In the current study, the effects of training maltreating parents and their preschool-aged children in elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing were examined. Method: 44 Parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a training (reminiscing) or wait-list (control) condition. All participating parents had substantiated maltreatment and w...

Destructive parentification occurs when children are expected to provide instrumental or emotional caregiving within the family system that overtaxes their developmental capacity. According to parentification theory, destructive parentification in family of origin poses a risk to child development in subsequent generations; however, there is a pauc...

Prior research has established the independent associations of depressive symptoms and childhood trauma to overgeneral memory (OGM); the present study addresses the potentially interactive effects between these two risk factors on OGM. In addition, the current study comprehensively evaluates whether executive functions (EF) mediate the relation bet...

The current study examined temperament characteristics as risk factors for restraint and seclusion (R/S) events in psychiatrically hospitalized youth, extending work that has sought to identify R/S risk factors and research examining temperament-behavior problem associations that has largely relied upon community samples. It was anticipated that ch...

Among the negative sequelae of child maltreatment is increased risk for continuity of maltreatment into subsequent generations. Despite acknowledgment in the literature that the pathways toward breaking the cycle of maltreatment are likely the result of dynamic interactions of risk and protective factors across multiple ecological levels, few studi...

Mother-child play of maltreating and nonmaltreating families was analyzed when infants were 12 months old (Time 1), and 2 years old (Time 2), as a context to examine children's developing cognitive and social skills. At Time 1, infants from abusing families demonstrated less independent and more imitative behavior during play than did infants from...

Overgeneral memory (OGM) is a phenomenon that refers to difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories. The tendency to be overgeneral in autobiographical memory recall has been commonly observed among individuals with emotional disorders compared to those without emotional disorders. Despite significant advances in identifying mechanisms...

Child- and caregiver-report about parenting behaviors, and caregiver-report of their own symptoms were examined in relation to children's symptomatology following a potentially traumatic event (PTE) among 91 youth. Child-report of hostile and coercive parenting was a salient predictor of child posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), internalizing sym...

This investigation addresses whether there are differences in the form and content of autobiographical memory recall as a function of maltreatment, and examines the roles of self-system functioning and psychopathology in autobiographical memory processes. Autobiographical memory for positive and negative nontraumatic events was evaluated among abus...

A depth-of-processing incidental recall task for maternal-referent stimuli was utilized to assess basic memory processes and the affective valence of maternal representations among abused (N = 63), neglected (N = 33), and nonmaltreated (N = 128) school-aged children (ages 8-13.5 years old). Self-reported and observer-rated indices of internalizing...

This chapter briefly reviews the extant literature on trauma and memory, with a particular focus on child maltreatment and memory. This serves as the foundation for examining the clinical and social policy implications of this research for children who have been victimized by abuse and neglect. There is increasing evidence that the experience of ma...

We investigated whether there is an age-related decline in implicit learning of an invariant association. Participants memorized letter strings in which a given letter always occurred in the second position (see Frick & Lee, 1995). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that young and older adults learned this regularity implicitly, with no significant age dif...

The current investigation addresses the manner through which trauma affects basic memory and self-system processes. True and false recall for self-referent stimuli were assessed in conjunction with dissociative symptomatology among abused (N=76), neglected (N=92), and nonmaltreated (N=116) school-aged children. Abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated...

Mother-child play of 12-month-old infants (N=130) from maltreating (N=78) and non-maltreating (N=52) families was analyzed as a context that integrates infants' developing social and cognitive skills. Play was coded from semistructured and unstructured play paradigms. No group differences were found in infants' play maturity. Infants from abusing f...