Leslie D Leve

University of Oregon | UO · College of Education

Objective This study aimed to examine whether child genetic risk for obesity and temperament (i.e., negative affectivity, effortful control) accounted for stability versus lability in children's weight status (BMI z score) over time. Methods A total of 561 adopted children (42% female; 56% Caucasian, 13% African American, 11% Latino, and 20% other...

Human microbiome variation is linked to the incidence, prevalence, and mortality of many diseases and associates with race and ethnicity in the United States. However, the age at which microbiome variability emerges between these groups remains a central gap in knowledge. Here, we identify that gut microbiome variation associated with race and ethn...

Objectives: To predict behavioral disruptions in middle childhood, we identified latent classes of prenatal substance use. Study design: As part of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, we harmonized prenatal substance use data and child behavior outcomes from 2,195 women and their 6- to 11-year-old children acros...

The present study leveraged data from a longitudinal adoption study of 361 families recruited between 2003 and 2010 in the United States. We investigated how psychopathology symptoms in birth parents (BP; Mage = 24.1 years; 50.5–62.9% completed high school) and adoptive parents (AP; Mage = 37.8 years; 80.9% completed college; 94% mother–father coup...

Importance: Emotional and behavioral dysregulation during early childhood are associated with severe psychiatric, behavioral, and cognitive disorders through adulthood. Identifying the earliest antecedents of persisting emotional and behavioral dysregulation can inform risk detection practices and targeted interventions to promote adaptive develop...

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)-wide Cohort Study (EWC), a collaborative research design comprising 69 cohorts in 31 consortia, was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2016 to improve children's health in the United States. The EWC harmonizes extant data and collects new data using a standardized protoc...

Without preventative intervention, youth with a history of foster care (FC) involvement have a high likelihood of developing depression and anxiety (DA) symptoms. The current study used integrative data analysis to harmonize data across four foster and kinship parent-mediated interventions (and seven randomized control trials) designed to reduce yo...

Background: Childhood maltreatment is associated with adverse health outcomes and this risk can be transmitted to the next generation. We aimed to investigate the association between exposure to maternal childhood maltreatment and common childhood physical and mental health problems, neurodevelopmental disorders, and related comorbidity patterns i...

Background Research and clinical practice rely heavily on caregiver-report measures, such as the Child Behavior Checklist 1.5-5 (CBCL/1.5-5), to gather information about early childhood behavior problems and to screen for clinically significant behavior problems. While studies have shown that demographic variables influence ratings of behavior prob...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color, including Latinx communities. Oregon Saludable: Juntos Podemos (OSJP) is a randomized clinical trial aimed at reducing this disparity by both increasing access to testing for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, for Oregon Latinx community members and studying the ef...

Background: The financial hardships and social isolation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic have been found to adversely affect children's developmental outcomes. While many studies thus far have focused on school-aged children and the pandemic-related impacts on their academic skills and behavior problems, relatively less is known about pan...

Objective: Many studies have shown that severe (hospitalized) bronchiolitis during infancy is a risk factor for developing childhood asthma. However, the population subgroups at the highest risk remain unclear. Using large nationwide pediatric cohort data, namely the NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, we aimed to...

The biopsychosocial model for health and illness posits that interactions between psychological, environmental, and biological factors contribute to adolescent risk behaviors (Engel, 1977; Irwin and Millstein, 1986). A significant strength of the biopsychosocial model is in its ability to integrate two processes that are often examined separately:...

Identification of early promotive and risk factors for social competence is important for fostering children’s successful social development; particularly given social competence is essential for children’s later academic and psychological well-being. While research suggests that the early parent–child relationship, genetics, and prenatal influence...

Objective: The prevention of delinquency can have long-term benefits for both the individual and society. Previous work has demonstrated positive effects of Treatment Foster Care Oregon (TFCO) on reducing delinquency across a 2-year period for adolescent females involved in the juvenile justice system. The present study examined whether the effect...

To promote COVID-19 preventive attitudes and behaviors among Latinx individuals, researchers and community partners implemented a culturally tailored health education intervention across 12 Oregon counties from February 2021 through April 2022. We did not identify any significant intervention effects on preventive attitudes and behaviors but did ob...

Background Latinx communities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 compared with non-Latinx White communities in Oregon and much of the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a critical and urgent need to reach Latinx communities with innovative, culturally tailored outreach and health promotion interventions to reduce viral transmiss...

Some children are more affected by specific family environments than others, as a function of differences in their genetic make-up. However, longitudinal studies of genetic moderation of parenting effects during early childhood have not been conducted. We examined developmental profiles of child behavior problems between 18 months and age 8 in a lo...

The present study is focused on anger expression and regulation within the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) construct of Frustrative Nonreward. Although previous studies have examined associations between child anger regulation and expression, these studies do not directly address the dynamic processes invo...

Genetic studies show that children's reading achievement is in part genetically influenced, and intervention studies show that reading achievement can be increased by environmental interventions. However, correlational and mean‐level analytic strategies are rarely integrated into achievement research, potentially leading to misinterpretation of res...

The thrifty phenotype and fetal overnutrition hypotheses are two developmental hypotheses that originated from the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) perspective. The DOHaD posits that exposures experienced prenatally and early in life may influence health outcomes through altering form and function of internal organs related to me...

Importance: Latinx individuals have been disproportionately affected during the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the spread of SARS-CoV-2. It is imperative to evaluate newly developed preventive interventions to assess their effect on COVID-19 health disparities. Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a culturally tailored outreach intervention d...

This study used a convergent mixed methods design to examine environmental and curricular influences on peer relationships and support for young women with disabilities within a clustered, randomized controlled trial of a gender-specific, disability-focused intervention, Paths 2 the Future (P2F). Pre-and post-intervention surveys of perceptions of...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245064.].

Background To examine the associations between adolescent pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes on substance use and suicide attempts in a sample who is at greater risk for substance use and suicide attempts — those who have been involved with the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Methods Using a prospective, longitudinal design, we examined...

The focus on the role of parenting in child development has a long‐standing history. When measures of parenting precede changes in child development, researchers typically infer a causal role of parenting practices and attitudes on child development. However, this research is usually conducted with parents raising their own biological offspring. Su...

Given inconsistent evidence on preconception or prenatal tobacco use and offspring autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this study assessed associations of maternal smoking with ASD and ASD‐related traits. Among 72 cohorts in the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes consortium, 11 had ASD diagnosis and prenatal tobaccosmoking ( n = 8648). a...

Female adolescents with disabilities are at an increased risk for mental health concerns, which can negatively impact their self-determination, making transition to postschool opportunities difficult. We analyzed two waves of survey data from 366 female adolescents with disabilities, recruited from 26 U.S. public high schools, as part of a randomiz...

Rationale: Asthma and obesity often co-occur. It has been hypothesized that asthma may contribute to childhood obesity onset. Objectives: To determine if childhood asthma is associated with incident obesity and examine the role of asthma medication in this association. Methods: We studied 8716 children between ages 6-18.5 years who were non-ob...

Family systems research has identified two key processes (spillover and compensatory), linking interparental relationship quality to the parent-child relationship. However, previous research has focused on the parent as the sole initiator and had not often considered the role of the child in these processes. The present study adds to the literature...

Intellectual performance is highly heritable and robustly predicts lifelong health and success but the earliest manifestations of genetic effects on this asset are not well understood. This study examined whether early executive function (EF) or verbal performance mediate genetic influences on subsequent intellectual performance, in 561 U.S.‐based...

Pubertal synchrony is defined as the degree of coherence to which puberty-related body changes (e.g., breast development, growth spurt, voice change, underarm hair growth) are coordinated. During the pubertal transition, youth’s body parts grow asynchronously, making each youth’s physical appearance unique. Physical appearance is a known correlate...

This study examined the role of gene × environment interaction (G × E) in the development of effortful control (EC) and externalizing symptoms (EXT). Participants included 361 adopted children, and their Adoptive Parents (APs) and Birth Mothers (BMs), drawn from the Early Growth and Development Study. The primary adoptive caregivers’ (AP1) laxness...

Supporting healthy youth development depends on recognizing how anti-Black racism intersects with the core needs and opportunities of adolescence and working to mitigate and eliminate these effects. A new report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence (NSCA), housed at the Center for the Developing Adolescent (CDA) at UCLA, summarizes r...

Objective The aim of this study was to describe the association of individual-level characteristics (sex, race/ethnicity, birth weight, maternal education) with child BMI within each US Census region and variation in child BMI by region. Methods This study used pooled data from 25 prospective cohort studies. Region of residence (Northeast, Midwest...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-021-10061-z

Introduction The dynamic interplay between parent depressive symptoms and child internalizing behavior over time is not well understood. Methods We used data from a prospective parent-offspring adoption design (N = 561) to examine associations between adoptive parent depressive symptoms and child internalizing behavior when children were ages 18 m...

Importance Asthma is the leading chronic illness in US children, but most descriptive epidemiological data are focused on prevalence. Objective To evaluate childhood asthma incidence rates across the nation by core demographic strata and parental history of asthma. Design, Setting, and Participants For this cohort study, a distributed meta-analys...

Background: Evocative gene-environment correlation (rGE) describes a process through which children's heritable characteristics influence their rearing environments. The current study examined whether heritable influences on parenting and children's behavioural outcomes operate through child negative emotionality. Method: Using data from the Ear...

The composition of the human gut microbiome is highly variable, and this variation has been repeatedly tied to variation in human health. However, the sources of microbial variation remain unclear, especially early in life. It is particularly important to understand sources of early life variation in the microbiome because the state of the microbio...

Sexual risk behavior in adolescence can lead to adverse health consequences, particularly for female youth. Most interventions focus on imparting knowledge about the consequences of such behaviors, even though little research has examined whether increasing such knowledge results in desired behavioral changes. Further, individual factors such as im...

Understanding the role of negative emotionality in the development of executive functioning (EF) and language skills can help identify developmental windows that may provide promising opportunities for intervention. In addition, because EF and language skills are, in part, genetically influenced, intergenerational transmission patterns are importan...

Purpose Smoking during pregnancy may be linked to other problematic prenatal health behaviors in women. We examined interrelationships among prenatal smoking, prenatal health behaviors and mental health. The objective of this study was to examine factors that may contribute to variations in prenatal health practices among women who smoke during pre...

Preterm birth occurs at excessively high and disparate rates in the United States. In 2016, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program to investigate the influence of early life exposures on child health. Extant data from the ECHO cohorts provides the opportunity to examine...

Prior to COVID-19, options for parenting support while receiving substance use disorder (SUD) treatment were limited. The transition to using mobile technology for SUD treatment due to physical distancing during the pandemic may make parenting resources for people with SUDs even more limited. The rapid integration of parenting supports into telehea...

Fertility problems are known to exert a negative impact on psychological health. Meanwhile, individuals with fertility challenges often view adoption as a positive healing experience. Yet, a dearth of work has examined the long-term impact that fertility problems have on adoptive parents and their childrearing stress. Here, we investigated how fert...

Previous research has shown that as depressive symptomology increases, mothers tend to show withdrawn or harsh interaction patterns with their children, and the quality of these interaction patterns have subsequently been linked to child behavior problems. However, little research has examined bidirectional influences between mothers and their chil...

School psychologists serve a critical role directly and indirectly in postsecondary transition of adolescents with disabilities, given their expertise and skills in special education and interventions. The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Domains of Practice (2010) provide guidelines for school psychologists’ service delivery, wh...

This study examined two possible mechanisms, evocative gene–environment correlation and prenatal factors, in accounting for child effects on parental negativity. Participants included 561 children adopted at birth, and their adoptive parents and birth parents within a prospective longitudinal adoption study. Findings indicated child effects on pare...

The Society for Prevention Research (SPR) aims to continually provide relevant professional development training opportunities to advance scientific investigation of ways to improve the health, well-being, and social and educational outcomes of individuals and communities. Our study, led by the Training Needs Assessment Task Force, designed a quant...

Objective: Mothers are known to be reliable reporters of smoking during pregnancy, type of delivery, and birth weight when compared with medical records. Few studies have considered whether the timing of retrospective collection affects the mother's retrospective self-report. We examined the consistency of maternal retrospective recall of prenatal...

Dietary and physical activity behaviors formed early in life can increase risk for childhood obesity and have continued negative consequences for lifelong health. Previous research has highlighted the importance of both genetic and environmental (e.g., cultural environment or parental lifestyle) contributions to obesity risk, although these studies...

Differential susceptibility theory (DST) posits that individuals differ in their developmental plasticity: some children are highly responsive to both environmental adversity and support, while others are less affected. According to this theory, “plasticity” genes that confer risk for psychopathology in adverse environments may promote superior fun...

Background The naïve neonatal gut is sensitive to early life experiences. Events during this critical developmental window may have life-long impacts on the gut microbiota. Two experiences that have been associated with variation in the gut microbiome in infancy are mode of delivery and feeding practices (eg, breastfeeding). It remains unclear whet...

Although genetic factors may contribute to initial liability for ADHD onset, there is growing evidence of the potential importance of the rearing environment on the developmental course of ADHD symptomatology. However, associations between family-level variables (maternal hostility, maternal depressive symptoms) and child behaviors (developmental c...

Although the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001) is the most popular assessment for childhood temperament, its psychometric qualities have yet to be examined using Item Response Theory (IRT) methods. These methods highlight in detail the specific contributions of individual items for measuring different...

Sexual risk behavior in adolescence can result in serious health consequences that persist across the lifespan, particularly for female youth. While adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are linked to engagement in sexual risk behavior later in life, little research has examined pathways that may help explain this association. To address this gap, t...

The family environment, with all its complexity and diverse components, plays a critical role in shaping neurodevelopmental outcomes in children. Herein we review several domains of the family environment (family socioeconomic status, family composition and home environment, parenting behaviors and interaction styles, parental mental health and fun...

Young women with disabilities face unique barriers in the transition from school to adulthood, yet very few studies have examined the effectiveness of gender-specific career interventions. Using an intent-to-treat analysis, this study tested the efficacy of the Paths 2 the Future (P2F) career development curriculum to produce beneficial impacts as...

There is evidence that risk for delinquency is elevated among girls with foster care histories, and one correlate of delinquency is affiliating with peers who engage in delinquent behavior. Although intervention studies have shown positive effects of interventions that target delinquent peer affiliation on reductions in delinquency among adolescent...

This study tested the theory that anxious fathers pose a quantitatively different environmental influence on childhood anxiety than anxious mothers. The analysed sample contained 502 linked adoption units from the Early Growth and Development Study (EGDS), a longitudinal multisite study that follows 561 adopted children (57.2% boys) and their adopt...

Experts discuss the potential of early intervention to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders. Mental illness represents one of the largest disease burdens worldwide, yet treatments have been largely ineffective in improving the quality of life for millions of affected individuals—in part because approaches taken have focused on late-s...

We investigated the prediction of young adult service utilization and trauma symptoms from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adolescent mental health symptoms in young women with dual child welfare and juvenile justice system involvement. A sample of 166 females (ages 13 to 17) was followed to examine the transition to young adulthood. Path...

The present study uses a parent‐offspring adoption design to examine the dual roles of heritable and environmental influences on children’s mathematics achievement. Linked sets (N = 195) of adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth parents each completed a measure of mathematics fluency (i.e., simple computational operations). Birth parent math...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141881.].

Sociological research has traditionally emphasized the importance of post-birth factors (i.e., social, economic, and cultural capital) in the intergenerational transmission of educational advantages, to the neglect of potentially consequential pre-birth endowments (e.g., heritable traits) that are passed from parent to child. In this study, we leve...

The Early Growth and Development Study (EGDS) is a longitudinal study of birth parents and adoptive families recruited from domestic U.S. adoption agencies across the United States beginning in 2002. The EGDS demonstrates many benefits of the adoption design, including the ability to study heritable and environmental contributions to health and beh...

More than 100,000 domestic adoptions occur each year in the United States through public agency, private agency, and independent adoptions. A growing body of evidence highlights the important role of the adoptive family in facilitating the healthy development of the adopted child, as well as the role that experiences prior to adoption play in the a...

Background Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is highly heritable and is associated with lower educational attainment. ADHD is linked to family adversity, including hostile parenting. Questions remain regarding the role of genetic and environmental factors underlying processes through which ADHD symptoms develop and influence academic...

This pilot quasi-experimental trial tested a gender-responsive cognitive behavioral group intervention with 87 court-involved female adolescents (5 juvenile courts) who were at indicated risk for substance use disorder. Participants in the intervention (n = 57) received twice weekly group sessions for 10 weeks (20 sessions) focused on building emot...

Data from an evaluation of a female-specific substance abuse prevention program delivered by trained probation counselors in juvenile courts

Understanding the interplay between genetic factors and family environmental processes (e.g. interparental relationship quality, positive vs negative parenting practices) and children’s mental health (e.g. anxiety, depression, conduct problems, ADHD) in the contexts of adoption and foster care research and practice is critical for effective prevent...