Paul D Hastings

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of California, Davis

Objective Recent theories have implicated inflammatory biology in the development of psychopathology and maladaptive behaviors in adolescence, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). Examining specific biological markers related to inflammation is thus warranted to better understand risk for STB in adolescents, for whom suicide is a leadin...

Nutrition and the home environment contribute to the development of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). However, no study has examined the long‐term effects of prenatal and postnatal small‐quantity lipid‐based nutrient supplements (SQ‐LNS) and home environment on ANS regulation. We investigated the effect of early‐life SQ‐LNS and home environment o...

Parenting that is warm and supportive has been consistently linked to better emotion regulation in children, but less is known about this association in adolescents. Adolescence is thought to be an important period for emotion regulation development given that it coincides with the emergence of mental health issues. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RS...

Childhood adversity (CA) is associated with increased risk of negative health outcomes. Research implicates brain structure following CA as a key mechanism of this risk, and recent models suggest different forms of adversity differentially impact neural structure as a function of development (accelerated or attenuated development). Employing the Di...

The goal of this research was to expand theoretical models of adolescent suicide by exploring whether individual differences in adolescent girls’ need for approval (NFAavoid and NFAapproach) contribute to risk for, or protection against, self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs). We examined these novel hypotheses in a series of concurrent and...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated “lockdown” measures spurred adverse employment changes and economic insecurity in U.S. families. Paradoxically, there was a surge in prosocial behavior. Chronically lower socioeconomic status has been associated with adults’ greater prosociality, a counterintuitive phenomenon attributed to heightened sensitivity...

Depression and alcohol use are highly comorbid, and often emerge during adolescence. Depressive symptoms may precede alcohol use, via the self-medication pathway, or alcohol use may precede depressive symptoms, via the alcohol induced disruption pathway. Yet little is known about other risks for developing comorbidity via either path. The present s...

Background Early and delayed puberty are both associated with adverse health and psychosocial outcomes. Objectives We assessed the impact of provision of small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplement (SQ-LNS) to mothers during pregnancy and 6 mo postpartum and to their children aged 6–18 mo, on pubertal status. Methods This study was a follow-up...

Experiences of unpredictability can create significant disruptions for children’s psychosocial development. Despite growing evidence highlighting the importance of predictable caregiving in fostering long-term healthy development, there is still limited understanding of proximal unpredictability within caregiver-child relationships. This study exte...

The significance of physiological regulation in relation to behavioral and emotional regulation is well documented, but primarily in economically advantaged contexts. Few studies have been conducted in low‐ and middle‐income countries. We investigated the feasibility and reliability of measuring autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity and behavior...

Both parasympathetic nervous system regulation and receipt of social support from close relationships contribute to prosocial development, although few studies have examined their combined influences in adolescence and particularly within racially and ethnically minoritized populations. In this longitudinal study of 229 U.S. Mexican-origin adolesce...

This cohort profile paper describes a large longitudinal prenatal birth cohort study with Rohingya refugee and host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Over the course of 12 months, this study recruited 2889 pregnant women, a subsample of husbands (N=853), and, where present, an existing child aged 36 to 60 months (Early Years cohort / EY; n=52...

Despite copious data linking brain function with changes to social behavior and mental health, little is known about how puberty relates to brain functioning. We investigated the specificity of brain network connectivity associations with pubertal indices and age to inform neurodevelopmental models of adolescence. We examined how brain network conn...

This study investigated specialized and versatile antisocial patterns in preschoolers and examined the link between these patterns and the risk of developing chronic antisocial behaviors throughout childhood. A total of 556 children (50.6% boys, 88% White) participated in this three‐wave longitudinal study at 3–5, 6–8, and 10–12 years old. A latent...

Loneliness becomes more prevalent as youth transition from childhood into adolescence. A key underlying process may be the puberty‐related increase in biological stress reactivity, which can alter social behavior and elicit conflict or social withdrawal ( fight‐or‐flight behaviors) in some youth, but increase prosocial ( tend‐and‐befriend ) respons...

Mother's positive parenting predicts children's development of concern for others; however, it is unclear which distinct positive parenting behaviors contribute to children's concern for others. We examined the bidirectional associations between mothers’ warmth and reasoning and children's concern toward an adult in distress at 4 and 6 years. We te...

This study aimed to explore the dyadic influence of maternal and paternal perceptions of children’s anxiety and parents’ emotion socialization behavior across childhood. Participants were 206 mothers and fathers of preschool-aged children (91 females) recruited from a larger community-based longitudinal study and assessed when children were four, e...

The current study examined the Five Cs model of positive youth development (PYD; Lerner et al., 2005) in U.S. Mexican-origin youth (N = 674, 50% female) and tested the extent to which ethnic pride, familismo, and respeto, as an index of cultural orientation, predicted PYD across midadolescence. PYD was modeled using a bifactor structure, which defi...

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) adolescents and emerging adults experienced social and structural inequities and evinced more psychosocial adjustment difficulties than cisgender, heterosexual youths before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The unique array of stressors confronting SGM youths during the pandemic - including separation from affirm...

Prosociality is a multifaceted concept referring to the many ways in which individuals care about and benefit others. Human prosociality is foundational to social harmony, happiness, and peace; it is therefore essential to understand its underpinnings, development, and cultivation. This handbook provides a state-of-the-art, in-depth account of scie...

Adverse social experiences are often linked to suicidal behavior in adolescence, perhaps particularly for girls. Social problem-solving abilities may indicate more or less adaptive responses to adverse social experiences that contribute to adolescent girls' risk for suicidal behavior. While social problem-solving is implicated in cognitive and beha...

Prenatal and postpartum depression are highly prevalent worldwide, and emerging evidence suggests they contribute to impairments in children's executive functions. Studies of maternal depression, however, have focused on the postpartum and postnatal periods with relatively less consideration of prenatal influences on child development. This study o...

Background: Provision of small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS) during early life improves growth and development. In the International Lipid-Based Nutrient Supplements (iLiNS) DYAD-Ghana trial, pre- and postnatal SQ-LNS reduced social-emotional difficulties at age 5 years, with greater effects among children in less enriched hom...

There has been significant interest and progress in understanding the role of caregiver unpredictability on brain maturation, cognitive and socioemotional development, and psychopathology. Theoretical consensus has emerged about the unique influence of unpredictability in shaping children's experience, distinct from other adverse exposures or featu...

Background: Recent research has aimed to characterize processes underlying general liability toward psychopathology, termed p-factor. Given previous research linking p-factor with difficulties in both executive functioning and affective regulation, the present study investigated non-affective and positive affective inhibition in the context of a s...

Childhood adversity is a leading transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology, being associated with an estimated 31–62% of childhood-onset disorders and 23–42% of adult-onset disorders (Kessler et al., 2010). Major unresolved theoretical challenges stem from the nonspecific and probabilistic nature of the links between childhood adversity and p...

Alterations in immune system gene expression have been implicated in psychopathology, but it remains unclear whether similar associations occur for intraindividual variations in emotion. The present study examined whether positive emotion and negative emotion were related to expression of pro-inflammatory and antiviral genes in circulating leukocyt...

Adolescents' suicidal behavior frequently is preceded by interpersonal stress, but not all who experience distress attempt to end their lives. Recent theories have posited individual differences in stress-related inflammatory reactivity may be associated with psychopathology risk; this study examined inflammatory reactivity as a moderator of the pr...

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for youths in the United States. More Latino adolescents report suicidal thoughts and/or behaviors (STBs) than youths of most other ethnic communities. Yet few studies have examined multiple psychosocial predictors of STBs in Latino youths using multiyear longitudinal designs. In this study, we evaluated...

Research conducted over the past century has confirmed that severe and chronic stressful experiences undermine physical and mental health across the lifespan. In recent decades, McEwen's model of allostatic load has become one of the leading explanatory frameworks for understanding the mechanisms by which stressors affect health. Allostatic load re...

This 2‐year longitudinal study examined Mexican‐origin adolescents’ need to belong and cognitive reappraisal as predictors of multiple forms of prosocial behavior (i.e., general, emotional, and public prosocial behaviors). Prosocial behaviors, which are actions intended to benefit others, are hallmarks of social proficiency in adolescence and are i...

There is now strong evidence documenting an association between maternal depression and psychopathology in children and adolescents, but an increased understanding of the explanatory mechanisms is needed. This longitudinal study tested a model to determine if parenting processes that may promote parentification of adolescents (coded from narratives...

The motivation to socially connect with peers increases during adolescence in parallel with changes in neurodevelopment. These changes in social motivation create opportunities for experiences that can impact risk for psychopathology, but the specific motivational presentations that confer greater psychopathology risk are not fully understood. To a...

Este estudo objetivou investigar os papéis da ansiedade, depressão e do nível socioeconômico dos cuidadores na predição de problemas de internalização e externalização de crianças com câncer. Participaram 49 crianças e adolescentes (20 meninas; 29 meninos) com câncer e seus cuidadores (39 mulheres; 10 homens). Todos os cuidadores preencheram questi...

Objectives We aimed to investigate the effect of pre- and post-natal small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS) on child social-emotional problems at age 9–10 years in the context of children's home environments. As previously found in the 5-year follow-up study of the same trial, we expected that SQ-LNS would reduce social-emotional...

Psychiatry and allied disciplines have recognized the potency of structural and social determinants of mental health, yet there has been scant attention given to the roles of neurobiology in the links between structural and social determinants and mental health. In this article, we make the case for why greater attention must be given to structural...

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has raised deserved concern regarding adverse impacts on parents’ and children’s mental health, regulations like “sheltering-in-place” may have afforded parents novel opportunities to foster positive family connections, thereby bolstering well-being. Using latent profile analysis (LPA), we (a) distinguished family thr...

The experience of poverty embodies complex, multidimensional stressors that may adversely affect physiological and psychological domains of functioning. Compounded by racial/ethnic discrimination, the financial aspect of family poverty typically coincides with additional social and physical environmental risks such as pollution exposure, housing bu...

The experience of poverty embodies complex, multidimensional stressors that may adversely affect physiological and psychological domains of functioning. Compounded by racial/ethnic discrimination, the financial aspect of family poverty typically coincides with additional social and physical environmental risks such as pollution exposure, housing bu...

Prior research has struggled to differentiate cortisol stress response patterns reflective of well-regulated versus dysregulated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis function among adolescents. Here, we show how exploring profiles of joint HPA– inflammatory stress responsivity, and linking those profiles to pubertal development and peer stress...

This study examined adrenocortical responses in the days following the Pulse nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016, among emerging adults in Northern California (N = 202; M = 17.48 years, SD = 1.00; 25% LGBQ-Latinx, 25% LGBQ-White, 25% Straight-Latinx, and 25% Straight-White) between June 13—August 12, 2016. As predicted, participants tested more pro...

There has been significant interest and progress in understanding the role of caregiver-child unpredictability on brain maturation, cognitive and socioemotional development, and psychopathology. Theoretical consensus has emerged about its unique influence in shaping children’s experience, distinct from other adverse exposures or features of stress...

Reappraisal (reconstruing emotional experiences to alter their impact) and suppression (inhibiting emotionally expressive behavior) are emotion-regulation strategies with important implications for depression. While reappraisal generally predicts lower depressive symptoms, suppression generally predicts higher depressive symptoms. Because cultural...

This chapter summarizes developmental theories and research on the intersection of culture, biology, and moral emotions. It proposes that cultural canalizations might be evident for the neurobiology of moral emotions, such as empathy and sympathy, in distinct U.S. ethnic/racial minority groups, focusing particularly on work with U.S. Latino/a child...

There has been resistance to COVID-19 public health restrictions partly due to changes and reductions in work, resulting in financial stress. Psychological reactance theory posits that such restrictions to personal freedoms result in anger, defiance, and motivation to restore freedom. In an online study (N = 301), we manipulated the target of COVID...

Neurobiological and social-contextual influences shape children’s adjustment, yet limited biopsychosocial studies have integrated temporal features when modeling physiological regulation of emotion. This study explored whether a common underlying pattern of non-linear change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) across emotional scenarios character...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (M_(age) = 16.28, SD = 0.73; 51.1% f...

Introduction For adolescent girls, close friendships may facilitate stress management and mitigate risk for internalizing psychopathology. However, little is known about how friendship processes may buffer (or potentially exacerbate) acute psychobiological responses to interpersonal stressors in ways that affect risk. Methods In a sample of 220 gi...

Biopsychosocial models of children's socioemotional development highlight the joint influences of physiological regulation and parenting practices. Both high and low levels of children's baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) have been associated with children's maladjustment, indicative of nonlinear associations. Negative or unsupportive pare...

Parasympathetic nervous system activity can downregulate inflammation, but it remains unclear how parasympathetic nervous system activity relates to antiviral activity. The present study examined associations between parasympathetic nervous system activity and cellular antiviral gene regulation in 90 adolescents (Mage = 16.3, SD = 0.7; 51.1% female...

Biopsychosocial models of children’s socioemotional development highlight the joint influences of physiological regulation and parenting practices. Both high and low levels of children’s baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) have been associated with children’s maladjustment, indicative of nonlinear associations. Negative or unsupportive pare...

Background Well-orchestrated cortisol and DHEA stress responsivity is thought to support efficacious stressor management (i.e., coping) and reduce risk for psychopathology during adolescence. Evidence of these relations, however, is lacking empirically. This longitudinal investigation had three aims: 1) to identify within-adolescent profiles of joi...

This study of 52 predominantly lower-income Jordanian and Syrian families with young children (31 girls; M age = 53.37mo, SD = 3.53) in Jordan began in 2019, before the pandemic. Families were followed to explore stress physiology, family functioning and mental health over the first 9 months of the pandemic. Mothers reported less adaptive coping an...

Methods In a 2-year longitudinal study of 220 families, we examined how youth gender and adrenocortical and parasympathetic activity moderated reciprocal, bidirectional relations between parent and youth anxiety and depression problems. Results Maternal anxiety predicted subsequent youth anxiety and depression. Maternal depression predicted youth...

Background Substance use (SU) typically increases from middle to late adolescence. Anxiety is one factor associated with greater SU, although variability in who uses substances remains. Some models suggest that brain-based susceptibility markers could reveal which adolescents are at higher risk for psychopathology, but it is unknown whether these i...

Poverty is a chronic stressor associated with disruptions in psychophysiological development during adolescence. This study examined associations of chronic poverty and income changes experienced from pre- to mid-adolescence with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress responses in late adolescence. Participants (N = 229) were adolescents...

Diverting attention away from negative emotional stimuli has been associated with calmer physiological states in the moment, but little is known about the potential long-term effects of this emotion regulation strategy on physiology. Similarly, how physiological states, in turn, may contribute to the development of regulatory behaviors has seldom b...

Young adults are acutely sensitive to peer influences. Differences have been found in neural sensitivity to explicit peer influences, such as seeing peer ratings on social media. The present study aimed to identify patterns of neural sensitivity to implicit peer influences, which involve more subtle cues that shape preferences and behaviors. Partic...

Previous work from our lab has shown that basal cortisol levels are different between healthy young adults who spontaneously use caudate nucleus-dependent response strategies compared to young adults who use hippocampus-dependent spatial navigation strategies. Young adults who use caudate nucleus dependent strategies display lower basal cortisol le...

Adolescent risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (STBs) involves disturbance across multiple systems (e.g., affective valence, arousal regulatory, cognitive and social processes). However, research integrating information across these systems is lacking. Utilizing a multiple-levels-of-analysis approach (Cicchetti & Dawson, 2002), this pers...

Altruistic behavior after stress exposure may have important health and psychological benefits, in addition to broader societal consequences. However, so far experimental research on altruism following acute stress has been limited to adult populations. The current study utilized an experimental design to investigate how altruistic donation behavio...

An estimated 12 million girls aged 15–19 years, and 777,000 girls younger than 15 give birth globally each year. Contexts of war and displacement increase the likelihood of early marriage and childbearing. Given the developmentally sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence, adolescent motherhood in conflict-affected contexts may put a fa...

Overweight and obesity constitute the fifth leading cause of preventable deaths worldwide. One pathway through which excess weight contributes to poor health outcomes is via inflammatory activity and changes in cognitive processes. Prior theory has proposed a vicious cycle whereby obesity potentiates inflammatory activity, which alters cognitive pr...

Individual differences in children’s prosocial behaviors, including their willingness to give up something of value for the benefit of others, are rooted in physiological and environmental processes. In a sample of 4-year-old children, we previously found evidence that flexible changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were linked to donation b...

Introduction While peer delinquency is a known mediator between early pubertal timing and externalizing behaviors, little is known about factors that could protect against the adverse influence of peer delinquency. This study assesses the possible moderating role of cognitive flexibility, which is one index of executive functioning that facilitates...

Latent class analysis and multigroup mediation were used with 8,860 families in Chile to identify risk groups varying in socioeconomic status, family structure, and maternal depression, to determine whether profiles differed in children's development of externalizing problems (EP) from 35 to 61 months, and maternal parenting that predicted EP. Four...

We measured judgments about emotions across time. In Study 1 (N = 254) and Study 2 (N = 162), LGBTQ-Latinx, straight-Latinx, LGBTQ-White, and straight-White emerging adults rated how they would feel if a perpetrator acted positively (P) or negatively (N) toward them in single, isolated events. In Study 2, participants also responded to a new emotio...

This study utilized data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 14,860) to examine whether early‐life family income (age 0–5) predicted long‐term academic achievement (age 16–18) and to investigate the role of executive function (EF) assessed multiple times across age 7–11 in explaining this association. Task‐based EF was a s...

Background: Neurophysiological patterns may distinguish which youth are at risk for the well-documented increase in internalizing symptoms during adolescence. Adolescents with internalizing problems exhibit altered resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of brain regions involved in socio-affective processing. Whether connectivity-based biotyp...

Heterosexist and racist discrimination may adversely impact neurobiological processes implicated in the physical and psychosocial well-being of sexually diverse Latinx people. Yet, little is known about how experiences of both heterosexist and racist discrimination are associated with adrenocortical and psychological functioning in groups of people...

Background: Depression rates increase markedly for girls across the adolescent transition, but the social-environmental and biological processes underlying this phenomenon remain unclear. To address this issue, we tested a key hypothesis from Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression, which posits that individuals who mount stronger inflamma...

Functional neuroimaging studies have emphasized distinct networks for social cognition and affective aspects of empathy. However, studies have not considered whether substrates of social cognition, such as the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ), play a role in affective responses to complex empathy-related stimuli. Here, we used repetitive transc...

Previous studies showed that healthy young adults who spontaneously use caudate nucleus-dependent strategies on a virtual navigation task, have significantly lower basal levels of cortisol compared with adults who use hippocampus-dependent spatial navigation strategies. In the current paper, we assessed the relation between basal cortisol levels an...

This entry provides an overview of our current understanding of prosocial development, with a particular focus on early childhood. First, it discusses the personal benefits experienced by children who perform prosocial behaviors, as recent research suggests that children thrive in a number of domains when they do good to others. Second, it examines...

Functional neuroimaging results need to replicate to inform sound models of human social cognition and its neural correlates. Introspection, the capacity to reflect on one's thoughts and feelings, is one process required for normative social cognition and emotional functioning. Engaging in introspection draws on a network of brain regions including...

Without a doubt, parents play a critical role in socializing moral development in their children. This handbook provides a collection of state-of-the-art theories and research on the important role that parents play in moral development. The contributors take a comprehensive, yet nuanced approach to considering the links between parenting and diffe...

Children vary considerably in their propensities to orient toward, feel empathy for, and provide help to others in need or distress. This variability is rooted in a complex interplay between parenting factors, child neurobiology, and development. This chapter focuses on the two most common perspectives for studying and theorizing about this interpl...