S. Alexandra Burt

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Psychology

Background: Youth experiencing socioeconomic deprivation may be exposed to disadvantage in multiple contexts (e.g., neighborhood, family, and school). To date, however, we know little about the underlying structure of socioeconomic disadvantage, including whether the 'active ingredients' driving its robust effects are specific to one context (e.g....

Background: Trajectories of youth antisocial behavior (ASB) are characterized by continuity and change. Although numerous longitudinal studies have examined ASB, findings from person-centered and variable-centered research have not yet been integrated. The present paper integrates findings across statistical methods for a more comprehensive unders...

Socioeconomic disadvantage may be a significant risk factor for disordered eating, particularly for individuals with underlying genetic risk. However, little to nothing is known about the impact of disadvantage on disordered eating in boys during the critical developmental risk period. Crucially, risk models developed for girls may not necessarily...

Objective: Puberty is a period of increased risk for the development of binge eating in female adolescents. Although developmental changes in autonomy-seeking behaviors and body weight and shape may influence both parenting styles and binge eating during puberty, studies have yet to examine how parenting practices may be differentially associated...

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8058) with genotypi...

Background: COVID-19 was associated with significant financial hardship and increased binge eating (BE). However, it is largely unknown whether financial stressors contributed to BE during the pandemic. We used a longitudinal, cotwin control design that controls for genetic/environmental confounds by comparing twins in the same family to examine w...

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8,058) with genotyp...

Psychopathology is the result of a complex interaction between one's genetics and environmental experiences that unfolds over the course of the lifespan, varying with context (family, neighborhood) and developmental stage. This entry will focus on how genetic influences and the parent-child relationship contribute to the development of youth psycho...

Background Aggression is a major public health concern that emerges early in development and lacks optimized treatment, highlighting need for improved mechanistic understanding of aggression etiology. The present study leverages fetal resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) to identify candidate neurocircuitry for the onset of aggressive behaviors, p...

Twin studies demonstrate significant environmental influences and a lack of genetic effects on disordered eating before puberty in girls. However, genetic factors could act indirectly through passive gene–environment correlations (rGE; correlations between parents’ genes and an environment shaped by those genes) that inflate environmental (but not...

Deficits in executive functioning both run in families and serve as a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. The present study employed twin modeling to examine parenting as an environmental pathway underlying the intergenerational transmission of executive functioning in an at-risk community sample of children and adolescents ( N = 354 p...

Background Body mass index (BMI) shows strong continuity over childhood and adolescence and high childhood BMI is the strongest predictor of adult obesity. Genetic factors strongly contribute to this continuity, but it is still poorly known how their contribution changes over childhood and adolescence. Thus, we used the genetic twin design to estim...

Background Stress is associated with binge eating and emotional eating (EE) cross-sectionally. However, few studies have examined stress longitudinally, limiting understanding of how within-person fluctuations in stress influence EE over time and whether stress is a risk factor or consequence of EE. Additionally, little is known regarding how the b...

Longitudinal data are needed to examine effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on disordered eating. We capitalized on an ongoing, longitudinal study collecting daily data to examine changes in disordered eating symptoms in women across 49 days that spanned the time before and during the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Women from the Michigan Sta...

Background: While negative affect (NA) typically increases risk for binge eating, the ultimate impact of NA may depend on a person's ability to regulate their emotions. In this daily, longitudinal study, we examined whether emotion regulation (ER) modified the strength of NA-dysregulated eating associations. Methods: Women (N = 311) from the Mic...

Objective: Our goal was to illuminate associations between specific characteristics of under-resourced neighborhoods (i.e., socioeconomic deprivation, danger) and specific aspects of parenting (e.g., parental praise, parental nurturance, harsh parenting, parental control). Background: Prior work has highlighted associations between level of neig...

Abstract Background Puberty‐driven increases in the secretion of testosterone may be a biological factor that protects males against the development of depression. Although all males produce testosterone, there are substantial between‐person differences that could contribute to differential vulnerability to depression among pre‐adolescent and adole...

Although it is well known that parental depression is transmitted within families across generations, the etiology of this transmission remains unclear. Our goal was to develop a novel study design capable of explicitly examining the etiologic sources of intergenerational transmission. We specifically leveraged naturally-occurring variations in gen...

Background The specific ‘active ingredients’ through which neighborhood disadvantage increases risk for child psychopathology remains unclear, in large part because research to date has nearly always focused on poverty to the exclusion of other neighborhood domains. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether currently assessed neighborhood...

Objective To investigate the genetic architecture of internalizing symptoms in childhood and adolescence. Method In 22 cohorts, multiple univariate genome-wide association studies (GWASs) were performed using repeated assessments of internalizing symptoms, in a total of 64,561 children aged between 3 and 18. Results were aggregated in meta-analyse...

Background: In 1942, Shaw and McKay reported that disadvantaged neighborhoods predict youth psychopathology (Shaw & McKay, 1942). In the decades since, dozens of papers have confirmed and extended these early results, convincingly demonstrating that disadvantaged neighborhood contexts predict elevated rates of both internalizing and externalizing...

The parent-child relationship is critically important for children's functioning and long-term outcomes. Although typically measured by self-report or global codes in observed interactions, parent-child interactions actually occur on a moment-to-moment basis, with frequent shifts in behavior and affect happening in each member of the dyad. Even so,...

Adolescence is a period of increased risk-taking behavior, thought to be driven, in part, by heightened reward sensitivity. One challenge of studying reward processing in the field of developmental neuroscience is finding a task that activates reward circuitry, and is short, not too complex, and engaging for youth of a wide variety of ages and soci...

Defining reference models for population variation, and the ability to study individual deviations is essential for understanding inter-individual variability and its relation to the onset and progression of medical conditions. In this work, we assembled a reference cohort of neuroimaging data from 82 sites (N=58,836; ages 2-100) and use normative...

Youth growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely than their advantaged peers to face negative behavioral and mental health outcomes. Although studies have shown that adversity can undermine positive development via its impact on the developing brain, few studies have examined the association between neighborhood disadvantage and neur...

Background: Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with chronic and escalating trajectories of antisocial behavior. Extant etiologic studies suggest that heritability estimates for CU traits vary substantially, while also pointing to an environmental association between parenting and CU traits. Methods: We used twin modeling to estimate...

Emerging evidence suggests socioeconomic disadvantage may increase risk for eating disorders (EDs). However, there are very few studies on the association between disadvantage and EDs, and all have focused on individual-level risk factors (e.g., family income). Neighborhood disadvantage (i.e., elevated poverty and reduced resources in one's neighbo...

Background: Although early-life exposure to chronic disadvantage is associated with deleterious outcomes, 40-60% of exposed youth continue to thrive. To date, little is known about the etiology of these resilient outcomes. Methods: The current study examined child twin families living in disadvantaged contexts (N=417 pairs) to elucidate the etio...

Trajectories of youth antisocial behavior (ASB) are characterized by both continuity and change. Twin studies have further indicated that genetic factors underlie continuity, while environmental exposures unique to each child in a given family underlie change. However, most behavioral genetic studies have examined continuity and change during relat...

We test whether genetic influences that explain individual differences in aggression in early life also explain individual differences across the life-course. In two cohorts from The Netherlands ( N = 13,471) and Australia ( N = 5628), polygenic scores (PGSs) were computed based on a genome-wide meta-analysis of childhood/adolescence aggression. In...

Background Psychopathic traits involve interpersonal manipulation, callous affect, erratic lifestyle, and antisocial behavior. Though adult psychopathic traits emerge from both genetic and environmental risk, no studies have examined etiologic associations between adult psychopathic traits and experiences of parenting in childhood, or the extent to...

Defining reference models for population variation, and the ability to study individual deviations is essential for understanding inter-individual variability and its relation to the onset and progression of medical conditions. In this work, we assembled a reference cohort of neuroimaging data from 82 sites (N=58,836; ages 2-100) and use normative...

Childhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children ag...

Many behavior genetics models follow the same general structure. We describe this general structure and analytically derive simple criteria for its identification. In particular, we find that variance components can be uniquely estimated whenever the relatedness matrices that define the components are linearly independent (i.e., not confounded). Th...

Background Adversity has consistently been found to predict poor mental health outcomes in youth. Perhaps the most omnipresent form of adversity in the last several decades is the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, a global health crisis linked to elevated rates of numerous forms of youth psychopathology. The ongoing nature of the pandemic renders it cr...

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., callousness, low empathy, shallow affect) have been conceptualized as a downward extension of the interpersonal and affective components of adult psychopathy and are associated with stable and severe antisocial behavior. Research suggests that CU traits are moderately heritable, but also influenced by environm...

The present report describes the motivation for the Michigan Twin Neurogenetic Study (MTwiNS), which seeks to illuminate the underlying biological mechanisms through which familial and community factors support resilience (i.e., adaptive competence in the face of adversity) in youth exposed to neighborhood disadvantage. To accomplish these goals, w...

Objective Negative and positive urgency, anxiety, and depressive symptoms are significant factors of disordered eating (DE) symptoms in early adolescence through young adulthood. However, it is unclear how puberty—a critical developmental milestone that is associated with increased risk for DE symptoms—affects the relationship between these factors...

Objective: Antisocial behavior (aggression, rule breaking) is associated with lower intelligence and executive function deficits. Research has not clarified whether these associations differ with the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits, particularly within levels of antisocial behavior observed in the community. Method: We examined wheth...

In the current study, we leveraged differences within twin pairs to examine whether harsh parenting is associated with children's antisocial behavior via environmental (vs. genetic) transmission. We examined two independent samples from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Our primary sample contained 1,030 families (2,060 twin children; 49...

We describe an ecological approach to understanding the developing brain, with a focus on the effects of poverty-related adversity on brain function. We articulate how combining multilevel ecological models from developmental science and developmental psychopathology with human neuroscience can inform our approach to understanding the developmental...

Conventional longitudinal behavioral genetic models estimate the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to stability and change of traits and behaviors. Longitudinal models rarely explain the processes that generate observed differences between genetically and socially related individuals. We propose that exchanges between indiv...

Mindset interventions are designed to encourage students to adopt a growth mindset, reflecting the belief that one's intelligence can be improved in an effort to increase academic achievement. How do these interventions exert their effects? We assessed the effects of an online mindset intervention on mindset and four outcome variables, grit, locus...

Ovarian hormones significantly influence dysregulated eating in females. However, most women do not develop appreciable disordered eating, which suggests that ovarian hormones may not affect all women equally. We examined whether individual differences in trait negative affect (NA) moderate ovarian hormone–dysregulated eating associations in 446 wo...

Internalising symptoms in childhood and adolescence are as heritable as adult depression and anxiety, yet little is known of their molecular basis. This genome-wide association meta-analysis of internalising symptoms included repeated observations from 64,641 individuals, aged between 3 and 18. The N-weighted meta-analysis of overall internalising...

Background Individuals with eating disorders (EDs) have increased rates of major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders. Yet, few studies have investigated rates of EDs and their symptoms in individuals presenting with MDD/anxiety disorders. Identifying potential disordered eating in people with MDD/anxiety disorders is important because e...

Cyberaggression (CA), or the use of information communication technologies to inflict harm on others, is an emerging public health crisis. Unfortunately, our current ability to assess CA in a research context remains limited, curtailing efforts to address this important issue. We sought to fill this gap in the literature by developing an adapted “c...

Genetic factors explain a major proportion of human height variation, but differences in mean stature have also been found between socio-economic categories suggesting a possible effect of environment. By utilizing a classical twin design which allows decomposing the variation of height into genetic and environmental components, we tested the hypot...

Digital aggression (DA) refers to the use of computer-mediated technologies to harm others. A handful of previous studies have provided mixed results regarding the personality correlates of DA. We clarified these findings by analyzing the associations between three measures of DA (behavioral, Twitter, and self-report) and the Big Five traits using...

Socioeconomic disadvantage during childhood is associated with a myriad of negative adult outcomes. One mechanism through which disadvantage undermines positive outcomes may be by disrupting the development of self-control. The goal of the present study was to examine pathways from three key indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage - low family inc...

Conventional longitudinal behavioral genetic models estimate the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to stability and change of traits and behaviors. Longitudinal models rarely explain the processes that generate observed differences between genetically and socially related individuals. We propose that exchanges between peopl...

Background: Low emotion differentiation (the tendency to experience vague affective states rather than discrete emotions) is associated with psychopathology marked by emotion regulation deficits and impulsive/maladaptive behavior. However, research examining associations between emotion differentiation and dysregulated eating is nascent and has ye...

Background Human aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial genetic component. Here we present a large genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG. Methods We analyzed assessments of AGG for a total of 328,935 observations from 87,485 children (aged 1.5 – 18 years), from multiple assessors, instruments, and ages, while accounti...

The heritability of disordered eating increases during puberty; however, prior studies have largely examined a composite score of disordered eating, rather than specific symptoms. Body weight and shape concerns cut across all eating disorder diagnoses and are some of the strongest prospective risk factors for the development of eating disorders. Ye...

Prior research has suggested that disadvantaged neighborhood contexts alter the etiology of youth antisocial behavior (ASB). Unfortunately, these studies have relied exclusively on governmental data collected in administratively-defined neighborhoods (e.g., Census tracts or block groups, zip codes), a less than optimal approach for studying neighbo...

The primary aim of the Michigan State University Twin Registry (MSUTR) is to examine developmental differences in genetic, environmental, neural, epigenetic, and neurobiological influences on psychopathology and resilience, particularly during childhood and adolescence. The MSUTR has two broad components: a large-scale, population-based registry of...

The current study evaluated associations among externalizing psychopathology, personality, and relationship quality in a sample of 794 couples. Personality and psychopathology were assessed using dimensional measures, and relationship attributes were assessed with both self-report and observer reports of videotaped interactions. Results were consis...

The COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins) project is a large international collaborative effort to analyze individual-level phenotype data from twins in multiple cohorts from different environments. The main objective is to study factors that modify genetic and environmental variation of height, body...

Objective: Early detection of binge-eating (BE) behaviors and their risk factors is associated with better outcomes. A multi-informant approach for assessing BE psychopathology and risk factors has been emphasized to increase the probability and accuracy of early detection. Impulsivity (particularly negative and positive urgency), trait anxiety, a...

Familial resemblance in eating pathology is typically attributed to parents providing an environment that leads to the development of eating pathology. However, offspring raised by biological parents receive both their environment and genes from their parents, raising the possibility that genetic influences, environmental influences, and/or gene-en...

Background Prior work has robustly suggested that social processes in the neighborhood (i.e. informal social control, social cohesion, norms) influence child conduct problems (CP) and related outcomes, but has yet to consider how these community-level influences interact with individual-level genetic risk for CP. The current study sought to do just...

Available twin-family data on sex differences in antisocial behavior (ASB) simultaneously suggest that ASB is far more prevalent in males than in females, and that its etiology (i.e. the effects of genes, environments, hormones, culture) does not differ across sex. This duality presents a conundrum: How do we make sense of mean sex differences in A...

Objective The objective of this study was to analyze how parental education modifies the genetic and environmental variances of BMI from infancy to old age in three geographic‐cultural regions. Methods A pooled sample of 29 cohorts including 143,499 twin individuals with information on parental education and BMI from age 1 to 79 years (299,201 BMI...

Background Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are critical to developmental, diagnostic, and clinical models of antisocial behaviors (AB). However, assessments of CU traits within large-scale longitudinal and neurobiologically focused investigations remain remarkably sparse. We sought to develop a brief measure of CU traits using items from widely adm...

Behavioral genetic (BG) research has yielded many important discoveries about the origins of human behavior, but offers little insight into how we might improve outcomes. We posit that this gap in our knowledge base stems in part from the epidemiologic nature of BG research questions. Namely, BG studies focus on understanding etiology as it current...

Lead represents a highly prevalent metal toxicant with potential to alter human biology in lasting ways. A population segment that is particularly vulnerable to the negative consequences of lead exposure is the human fetus, as exposure events occurring before birth are linked to varied and long-ranging negative health and behavioral outcomes. An ar...

Objective Elevated ovarian hormone levels are associated with increased risk for binge eating (BE) and emotional eating (EE) during the midluteal phase of the menstrual cycle. However, past studies have not examined whether pronounced hormonal changes that precede the midluteal phase (i.e., the dramatic decrease in estradiol and increase in progest...

Community violence exposure and harsh parenting have been linked to maladaptive outcomes, possibly via their effects on social cognition. The Social Information Processing (SIP) model has been used to study distinct socio-cognitive processes, demonstrating links between community violence exposure, harsh parenting, and maladaptive SIP. Though much...

Background Prior work has indicated both theoretical and empirical overlap between social and physical aggression. The extent to which their covariance can be explained by the same underlying genetic or environmental factors, however, remains unclear. It is also uncertain whether or how the origins of their covariance might vary across sex. The cur...

During adolescence, peer approval becomes increasingly important and may be perceived as contingent upon appearance in girls. Concurrently, girls experience hormonal changes, including an increase in progesterone. Progesterone has been implicated in affiliative behavior but inconsistently associated with body image concerns. The current study sough...

There is a strong relationship between sleep and behavioral problems. These findings are often interpreted via environmental explanations, such that poor sleep directly exacerbates or causes symptoms of aggression and behavior problems. However, there are other possible explanations, such that the genes predicting poor sleep also predict aggression...

We are pleased to present this special issue of JCPP, which brings together a collection of cutting‐edge empirical studies that focuses on developmental trajectories and pathways associated with ADHD, conduct problems and other externalizing behaviors. JCPP has had a long‐standing focus on theoretically strong prospective longitudinal studies that...

The current study examined how discrimination relates to adjustment outcomes in a sample of internationally, transracially adopted Korean Americans from the Minnesota Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (N = 456 adoptees; Mage at T1 = 14.9, Mage at T2 = 18.3, Mage at T3 = 22.3). The moderating roles of ethnic socialization and preparation for bi...

Objective Callous-unemotional (CU) traits increase risk for children developing severe childhood aggression and Conduct Disorder. CU traits are typically described as highly heritable and debate continues about whether the parenting environment matters in their etiology. Strong genetically-informed designs are needed to test for the presence of env...

Mindset refers to a person’s beliefs about the nature of their abilities—whether they believe their ability in a given domain is malleable or fixed. We investigated whether a brief, online intervention could alter ability and non-ability traits, including mindset of intelligence, locus of control, challenge-approach motivation, grit, and performanc...

Objective Emotional eating has been linked to ovarian hormone functioning, but no studies to‐date have considered the role of brain function. This knowledge gap may stem from methodological challenges: Data are heterogeneous, violating assumptions of homogeneity made by between‐subjects analyses. The primary aim of this paper is to describe an inno...

Although there is growing recognition that disadvantaged contexts attenuate genetic influences on youth misbehavior, it is not yet clear how this dampening occurs. The current study made use of a “geographic contagion” model to isolate specific contexts contributing to this effect, with a focus on nonaggressive rule-breaking behaviors (RB) in the f...