C. Emily Durbin's research while affiliated with Michigan State University and other places

Publications (126)

Article
Full-text available
There was a large spike in gun purchases and gun violence during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We used an online U.S. national survey (N = 1036) to examine the characteristics of people who purchased a gun between March 2020 and October 2021 (n = 103) and compared them to non-gun owners (n = 763) and people who own a...
Article
Youth self-reports are a mainstay of delinquency assessment; however, making valid inferences about delinquency using these assessments requires equivalent measurement across groups of theoretical interest. We examined whether a brief 10-item delinquency measure exhibited measurement invariance across non-Hispanic White (n = 6,064) and Black (n = 1...
Article
Full-text available
Current methods of assessing children's emotional reactivity fail to capture individual differences in emotion across contexts that may be meaningfully related to youth psychopathology. We therefore explored the utility of modeling variability in young children's positive and negative emotion across emotionally evocative laboratory tasks to predict...
Article
Early childhood is an important developmental period for network formation. However, the observational methods used for measuring young children’s networks present challenges for capturing both positive and negative ties. To overcome these challenges, we explored the use of a bipartite projection backbone model for inferring both negative and posit...
Article
Individual differences in emotional reactivity emerge early in development and predict important child outcomes. Unfortunately, methods used to assess these often fail to tap dynamic changes in emotion, obscuring nuanced relationships between maladaptive emotional reactivity and early internalizing psychopathology. We therefore explored the utility...
Article
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The goal of this Special Section is to highlight the generativity of taking a developmental perspective toward the RDoC framework that considers developmental processes and principles and the environmental and contextual processes relevant at different ages and developmental stages. The 9 papers in this Special Section and 2 invited commentaries ex...
Article
In the United States, the duration of children's preschool attendance differs, with some children attending full-day preschool and some children attending half-day preschool. This difference provides uneven daily exposure to peers that may have implications for childhood social outcomes, including the formation of social networks over time. In this...
Preprint
There was a large spike in gun purchases and gun violence during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We used an online U.S. national survey (N = 1036) to examine the characteristics of people who purchased a gun between March 2020 and October 2021 (n = 103) and compared them to non-gun owners (n = 763) and people who own a...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Peer groups represent a critical developmental context in adolescence, and there are many well-documented associations between personality and peer behavior at this age. However, the precise nature and direction of these associations are difficult to determine as youth both select into, and are influenced by, their peers. Method: We t...
Article
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This study examined how youth aggressive and delinquent externalizing problem behaviors across childhood and adolescence are connected to consequential psychosocial life outcomes in adulthood. Using data from a longitudinal, high-risk sample (N = 1069) that assessed children and their parents regularly from early childhood (ages 3-5) through adulth...
Preprint
Early childhood is an important developmental period for network formation. However, the observational methods used for measuring young children's networks present challenges for capturing both positive and negative ties. To overcome these challenges, we explored the use of a bipartite projection backbone model for inferring both negative and posit...
Article
Background and Aims Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine use have identified many genome-wide association study (GWAS) loci. We measured associations between drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) and trajectories of alcohol and nicotine use outcomes from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liabili...
Preprint
Though sexuality and personality are related domains of personhood, the dynamics of their co-development remains relatively unexplored, especially during adolescence when partnered sexual behaviors tend to emerge. We examined the co-development between personality and sexuality at phenotypic and genetic levels of analysis from middle childhood to l...
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Educational success is associated with greater quality of life and depends, in part, on heritable cognitive and non-cognitive traits. We used polygenic scores (PGS) for smoking and educational attainment to examine different genetic influences on facets of academic adjustment in adolescence and educational attainment in adulthood. PGSs were calcula...
Preprint
In the United States, the duration of children’s preschool attendance differs, with some children attending full-day preschool and some children attending half-day preschool. This difference provides uneven daily exposure to peers that may have implications for childhood social outcomes, including the formation of social networks over time. In this...
Article
We examined whether a polygenic score (PGS) for smoking measured genetic risk for general behavioral disinhibition by estimating its associations with externalizing and internalizing psychopathology and related personality traits at multiple time points in adolescence (ages 11, 14, and 17 years; N = 3,225). The smoking PGS had strong associations w...
Preprint
Youth self-reports are a mainstay of delinquency assessment. However, making valid inferences about delinquency using these assessments requires equivalent measurement across groups of theoretical interest. We therefore examined whether a brief 10-item delinquency measure exhibited measurement invariance across non-Hispanic White (n=6064) and Black...
Preprint
The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is an observational coding method that enables continuous tracking of warmth and dominance in both members of a dyad as an interaction unfolds. Research using this tool has revealed dynamic patterns relevant to psychopathology and psychotherapy, suggesting considerable potential for clinica...
Article
The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is an observational coding method that enables continuous tracking of warmth and dominance in both members of a dyad as an interaction unfolds. Research using this tool has revealed dynamic patterns relevant to psychopathology and psychotherapy, suggesting considerable potential for clinica...
Preprint
Peer groups provide a critical developmental context in adolescence, and there are many well-documented associations between personality and peer behavior at this age. However, the precise nature and direction of these associations are difficult to determine as youth both select into and are influenced by their friends. We thus examined the phenoty...
Preprint
Educational success is associated with greater quality of life and depends, in part, on heritable cognitive and non-cognitive traits. We used polygenic scores (PGS) for smoking—a measure of genetic influences on behavioral disinhibition—and educational attainment to examine different genetic influences on facets of academic adjustment in adolescenc...
Article
Diverse mechanisms account for the familial aggregation of certain personality traits and externalizing psychopathology. We explored the roles of positive and negative parenting as mediators of longitudinal associations between parents' maladaptive personality traits and their children's inattention/hyperactivity problems. We collected self, inform...
Article
Full-text available
Peer groups influence the emergence of sexual behaviors in adolescence, but many details regarding the mechanisms underlying these effects have yet to be described. We examined the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental links between both antisocial and prosocial peer characteristics, and several sexual behaviors from middle childhood to late adole...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objective Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine have identified many genome-wide loci. We examined the predictive utility of drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) for alcohol and nicotine use from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liability PGS effects, and if PGS performance varied between consu...
Preprint
Importance: Large consortia of genome wide association studies have yielded more accurate polygenic risk scores (PRS) that aggregate the small effects of many genetic variants to characterize the genetic architecture of disorders and provide a personalized measure of genetic risk. Objective: We examined whether a PRS for smoking measured genetic ri...
Preprint
Full-text available
Importance Large consortia of genome wide association studies have yielded more accurate polygenic risk scores (PRS) that aggregate the small effects of many genetic variants to characterize the genetic architecture of disorders and provide a personalized measure of genetic risk. Objective We examined whether a PRS for smoking measured genetic ris...
Preprint
Objective: Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine have identified many genome-wide loci. We examined the predictive utility of drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) for alcohol and nicotine use from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liability PGS effects, and if PGS performance varied between cons...
Article
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...
Article
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Sexual debut, or first intercourse, predicts problem behaviors such as substance use. This association could reflect a direct effect of debut itself, general developmental trends, or the fact that some youth are more predisposed to a wide array of problem behaviors (e.g., risky sex, substance use). Understanding the association between sexual debut...
Preprint
Sexual debut, or first intercourse, predicts problem behaviors such as substance use. This association could reflect a direct effect of debut itself, general developmental trends, or the fact that some youth are more predisposed to a wide array of problem behaviors (e.g., risky sex, substance use). Understanding the association between sexual debut...
Article
Sexual development entails many experiences and is a major feature of adolescence. Most relevant behavioral genetic studies, however, focus primarily on sexual behaviors associated with health risks. We took a more normative, developmental perspective by examining genetic and environmental influences on five sexual behaviors ranging from dating to...
Article
We assessed the association of personality pathology with romantic couples' observed interpersonal behaviors. Couples engaged in four discussion tasks, after which observers used the Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics method to continuously rate each participant's dominance and warmth over the course of each discussion. Using these rat...
Article
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Investigating normative and maladaptive emotional development requires the ability to elicit children's reactivity to a range of affective stimuli. However, the field lacks a validated battery of stimuli tapping a broad range of childhood emotions. We therefore sought to validate a developmentally appropriate battery of emotionally evocative film s...
Article
The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is a method in which trained observers continuously code the dominance and warmth of individuals who interact with one another in dyads. This method has significant promise for assessing dynamic interpersonal processes. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of individual sex,...
Article
Effortful control (EC) is an important target for many interventions intended to facilitate positive psychosocial outcomes. The first wave of these efforts has emphasized adult-to-child instruction and individualized practice of target skills. Future tests of these ideas will be facilitated by efforts to critically evaluate and improve the construc...
Article
The feedback negativity (FN) and reward positivity (RewP) are event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that follow the presentation of negative and positive feedback information, respectively, and have become the focus of recent research on psychopathology because of their associations with symptom severity of and risk for depression. We advanced our...
Preprint
Examines impacts of familiarity, conflict, and sex on continuously assessed behavior in dyadic interactions using the Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics across several samples. Establishes norms and basic psychometrics for CAID while also informing factors that influence interpersonal behavior.
Article
A large proportion of the public health costs of alcohol use disorder (AUD) can be accounted for by a small percentage of severe cases with a chronic course starting in adolescence and persisting into adulthood. However, chronicity may be a less effective marker of AUD severity in women than men due to a gender risk–severity paradox, wherein compar...
Article
Parent history of psychopathology is an established marker of children's own risk for later disorder and can therefore be used as a means of validating other risks, such as child temperament. While associations between children's temperament and parent psychopathology have been reported, few studies have used observational measures of child tempera...
Article
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A growing literature has focused on the role children's temperament traits play in social behavior, but associations have traditionally been explored through informant report. We utilized a longitudinal, observational approach to (a) examine how children's traits related to their social behaviors when aggregated across the school year; (b) explore...
Article
Existing categorical models of personality disorder diagnoses capture heterogeneous populations in terms of symptom presentation and etiological influences on personality pathology. Though several well-validated alternative dimensional trait models (i.e., variable-centered approaches) of personality disorders have been developed, person-centered ap...
Article
Personality disorders are defined in the current psychiatric diagnostic system as pervasive, inflexible, and stable patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, and interacting with others. Questions regarding the validity and reliability of the current personality disorder diagnoses prompted a reconceptualization of personality pathology in the most r...
Article
This paper demonstrates a recently-popularized quantitative method, the time-varying effect model (TVEM), in describing dynamic, momentary interpersonal processes implicated by Interpersonal Theory. We investigated moment-to-moment complementarity in affiliation and control behaviors (i.e., correspondence in affiliation and reciprocity in control b...
Article
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Children enter preschool with temperament traits that may shape or be shaped by their social interactions in the peer setting. We collected classroom observational measures of positive emotionality (PE), negative emotionality (NE), effortful control (EC), and peer social play relationships from 2 complete preschool classrooms (N = 53 children) over...
Article
Anxiety disorders are among the earliest emerging disorders and most common mental health problem across the lifespan. A common characteristic of individuals with anxiety is poor attentional and cognitive control. Therefore, researchers are interested in how cognitive functioning relates to anxiety in young children. In particular, research has dem...
Article
Objective: Depressed parents have negatively distorted views of the personalities and behaviors of their children. Our goal was to evaluate how other internalizing symptoms and personality traits relate to perceptions of child temperament using data from mothers and fathers as well as novel statistical method for modeling multi-informant data. Me...
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Mõttus alerts us to the widespread predictive heterogeneity of different indicators of the same trait. This heterogeneity violates the assumption that traits have causal unity in their developmental antecedents and effects on outcomes. I would go a step further: broader traits are useful units for description and prediction but not for explaining p...
Article
Middle childhood is a crucial juncture in the lifespan where children work towards achieving a sense of competence foundational for future development. However, middle childhood has historically been underrepresented in the personality literature. The current study provides a comprehensive examination of personality in middle childhood using a larg...
Article
Children who exhibit elevated levels of the temperament trait behavioural inhibition (BI) across time may be at greatest risk for anxiety. However, little research has investigated the influence of other temperamental traits, particularly positive emotionality (PE), on the continuity of BI in childhood, nor whether parental overprotection influence...
Article
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Parent reports of temperament are used to study many important topics in child development, such as whether boys and girls differ in their levels of emotional reactivity and self-regulation. However, questions regarding measurement equivalence in parental reports of temperament are largely unexplored, despite the fact that this issue is critical fo...
Article
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Research has evidenced support for the spillover model, which posits that parents' marital functioning influences child adjustment by eroding parenting and coparenting in dyadic (mother-child and father-child) and triadic (mother-father-child) contexts. However, prior work has not simultaneously investigated dyadic and triadic parenting as mechanis...
Article
We explored patterns of self-reported personality trait change across late childhood through young adulthood in a sample assessed up to four times on the lower order facets of Positive Emotionality, Negative Emotionality (NEM), and Constraint (CON). Multilevel modelling analyses were used to describe both group- and individual-level change trajecto...
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Interactions between cognitive control and affective processes, such as defensive reactivity, are intimately involved in healthy and unhealthy human development. However, cognitive control and defensive reactivity processes are often studied in isolation and rarely examined in early childhood. To address these gaps, we examined the relationships be...
Article
Background: Recent work has demonstrated the co-development of personality traits and alcohol use characteristics from early adolescence to young adulthood. Few studies, however, have tested whether alcohol use initiation impacts trajectories of personality over this time period. We examined the effect of alcohol use initiation on personality devel...
Article
The current study tested the claim that trait effortful control (EC), the ability to suppress a dominant response to perform a subdominant response, is associated with children’s emotion expression. Participants were 206 community children between the ages of 3 and 7 years. Children completed a battery of 10 laboratory tasks to assess temperamental...
Article
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It is generally assumed that temperament traits exhibit structural and rank-order stability over time. Most of the research on structural and rank-order stability has relied on parent-report measures. The present study used an alternative approach, a laboratory-observational measure (Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery [Lab-TAB]), to examine...
Article
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The structure, stability, and validity of child temperament traits have primarily been examined with parent questionnaire methods, but laboratory methods represent an important complement. However, the novel setting and contrived scenarios of laboratory methods and their low convergence with parent questionnaire methods have led some to question th...
Article
The structure of child temperament traits has been explored primarily using informant report. Less is known about temperament structure assessed by alternative methods, such as laboratory assessments. We report on the structure of child traits assessed by experimenter ratings of child behavior during laboratory tasks, and their convergent and discr...
Article
A dominant paradigm in psychopathology research proposes that individual differences in personality are centrally involved in the origins and manifestations of psychopathology, and structural models of personality and psychopathology have been extremely useful in helping to organize associations among many traits and disorders. However, these model...
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This study investigated the associations among depression, relationship quality, and demand/withdraw and demand/submit behavior in couples' conflict interactions. Two 10-min conflict interactions were coded for each couple (N = 97) using Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB; Benjamin, 1979a, 1987, 2000a). Depression was assessed categorical...
Article
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Emotion knowledge in childhood has been shown to predict social functioning and psychological well-being, but relatively little is known about parental factors that influence its development in early childhood. There is some evidence that both parenting behavior and maternal depression are associated with emotion recognition, but previous research...
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Anxiety and mood disorders are among the most prevalent mental health problems affecting our youth. We propose that assessment and treatment efforts in this area can benefit from a focus on developmentally sensitive neurobehavioral trait constructs, that is, individual difference constructs with direct referents in both neurobiology and behavior ac...
Article
Utilizing the large, longitudinal Minnesota Twin Family Study (N = 2510; 96 % European American ancestry), we examined the influence of several person-environment transactions on adolescent substance abuse. We focused on the two childhood personality traits found to be most predictive of substance abuse in this sample-socialization (willingness to...
Article
This study compared the interpersonal behavior of distressed couples with depression in one partner (n = 23) to distressed couples without depression in either partner (n = 38). Participants (mean age = 44 years old) were recruited at an urban outpatient mental health center. Couples discussed the three best things in their relationship, and their...
Article
In accord with the now prevailing ecological view that both parent and child play an active role in shaping their interactions, the present study assessed the number of bids by parents and children for social engagement, compliance, and emotion regulation, and the quality of each partner's responsiveness to these bids, in a sample of mothers and fa...
Article
We used a longitudinal twin design to examine selection effects of personality traits at age 11 on high-risk environmental contexts at age 14 and the extent to which these contexts mediated risk for substance abuse at age 17. Socialization at age 11 (willingness to follow rules and endorse conventional values) predicted exposure to contextual risk...
Article
The present study examined associations between interpersonal traits, measured using self-reports on the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-Circumplex version (IIP-C), and interpersonal functioning in romantic and parent-child relationships, measured using multiple methods and reporters, among a community sample of 157 families (mothers, fathers,...
Article
Objective: Evidence supporting the continuity between child temperament and adult personality traits is accumulating. One important indicator of continuity is the presence of reliable gender differences in traits across the lifespan. A substantial literature demonstrates gender differences on certain adult personality traits and recent meta-analyti...
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Full-text available
Effortful control (EC), or the trait-like capacity to regulate dominant responses, has important implications for children's development. Although genetic factors and parenting likely influence EC, few studies have examined whether they interact to predict its development. This study examined whether the DRD4 exon III variable number tandem repeat...
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We propose that neuroscientific understanding of antisocial behavior can be advanced by focusing programmatic efforts on neurobehavioral trait constructs, that is, individual difference constructs with direct referents in neurobiology as well as behavior. As specific examples, we highlight inhibitory control and defensive reactivity as two such con...
Article
Investigations of contributors to and consequences of the parent-child relationship require accurate assessment of the nature and quality of parenting. The present study describes the development and psychometric evaluation of the Laboratory Parenting Assessment Battery (Lab-PAB), an observational rating system that assesses parenting behaviors dur...
Article
Individual differences in personality play a major role for functioning in a multitude of important life domains, including one's interpersonal relationships. The present study examined the effects of parental personality and child temperament traits on dyadic parent-child interaction during early childhood. Participants were a community sample of...
Article
This study examined the convergent validity of maternal reports of child emotion in a sample of 190 children between the ages of 3 and 6. Children completed a battery of 10 emotion-eliciting laboratory tasks; their mothers and untrained naïve observers rated child emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, and anger) following each task, and tra...
Article
Integrative interpersonal theory implies that relational uncertainty may play a role in the reassurance-seeking and negative feedback-seeking behavior of people with depressive symptoms. We sought to extend the theory by (a) documenting how individuals with depressive symptoms communicate under conditions of relational uncertainty, (b) evaluating a...
Article
Objective: Individual differences in personality play a major role for functioning in a multitude of important life domains, including one's interpersonal relationships. The present study examined the effects of parental personality and child temperament traits on dyadic parent-child interaction during early childhood. Method: Participants were a c...
Article
Full-text available
We examined the psychometric properties of the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (BIQ; Bishop, Spence, & McDonald, 2003), a rating scale for children's behavioral inhibition. Parent and teacher ratings, parent interviews, and laboratory observations were obtained for 495 preschoolers. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded 6 factors, each reflectin...
Conference Paper
Background / Purpose: This poster describes the development and validation of an observational rating system designed to measure the parenting behaviors of parents of young children. Ratings were selected to capture the effects of depression on parental affect, cognitions, and behavior. Main conclusion: The final observational parenting scales...
Article
Full-text available
Research has evidenced support for the spillover model, which asserts that parents' marital functioning influences their parenting and coparenting behavior in dyadic (mother-child and father-child) and triadic (mother-father-child) family contexts. However, few studies have simultaneously investigated the spillover model in both parenting and copar...
Article
Full-text available
The structure of temperament traits in young children has been the subject of extensive debate, with separate models proposing different trait dimensions. This research has relied almost exclusively on parent-report measures. The present study used an alternative approach, a laboratory observational measure, to explore the structure of temperament...
Article
To examine the reciprocal effects between the onset and course of alcohol use disorder (AUD) and normative changes in personality traits of behavioral disinhibition and negative emotionality during the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. Longitudinal-epidemiological study assessing AUD and personality at ages 17 and 24 years. Partic...
Article
Full-text available
Personality disorders (PDs) have been linked to impaired functioning in important interpersonal domains. The present study examined the effects of parental PD symptoms on observationally assessed parent-child interaction behaviors in a community sample of 145 mothers, fathers, and their 3- to 6-year-old children. As expected, parents who endorsed m...