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Exposure to child maltreatment and maternal depression are significant risk factors for the development of psychopathology. Difficulties in caregiving, including poor emotion socialization behavior, may mediate these associations. Thus, enhancing supportive parent emotion socialization may be a key transdiagnostic target for preventive interventions designed for these families. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal emotion socialization behavior by enhancing maltreating mothers’ sensitive guidance during reminiscing with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, maternal depressive symptoms, and the RET intervention with changes in children’s maladjustment across one year following the intervention, and examined the extent to which intervention-related improvement in maternal emotion socialization mediated change in children’s maladjustment. Participants were 242 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers from maltreating (66%) and nonmaltreating (34%) families. Results indicated that RET intervention-related improvement in maternal sensitive guidance mediated the effects of RET on reduced child maladjustment among maltreated children one year later. By comparison, poor sensitive guidance mediated the effects of maltreatment on higher child maladjustment among families that did not receive the RET intervention. Direct effects of maternal depressive symptoms on child maladjustment were also observed. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating emotional and behavioral adjustment in maltreated children by improving maltreating mothers’ emotional socialization behaviors.

The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) is a measure widely used to assess childhood anxiety based on parent and child report. However, while the SCARED is a reliable, valid, and sensitive measure to screen for pediatric anxiety disorders, informant discrepancy can pose clinical and research challenges. The present study assesses informant discrepancy, measurement invariance, test–retest reliability, and external validity of the SCARED in 1092 anxious and healthy parent–child dyads. Our findings indicate that discrepancy does not vary systematically by the various clinical, demographic, and familial variables examined. There was support for strict measurement invariance, strong test–retest reliability, and adequate external validity with a clinician-rated measure of anxiety. These findings further support the utility of the SCARED in clinical and research settings, but low parent–child agreement highlights the need for further investigation of factors contributing to SCARED informant discrepancy.

Parent report is frequently used to assess children’s psychopathology, however, researchers have expressed concerns about the validity of parent reports. Some parental characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs may systematically bias a parent’s report of their child’s behaviors and functioning. Informed by social information processing models of parenting risk, parents with more difficulties reflecting on and interpreting their children’s behavior may be at risk for less accurate reports. The present study conducted two regularized moderated non-linear factor analyses with LONGSCAN data to examine how parents’ self-reported negative parenting cognitions were associated with structural parameters of parent-reported child aggression and attention problems. While differential item functioning (DIF) was present on the aggression and attention problems subscales as a function of negative parenting cognitions, the DIF was small in magnitude, inconsistent in directionality and did not significantly alter factor-level parameters. Negative parenting cognitions did demonstrate a small but significant negative impact on all latent externalizing factors (aggression and attention problems), such that caregivers with fewer negative parenting cognitions endorsed fewer items, and this was associated with a lower mean of each latent variable. Given that accounting for DIF did not contribute to meaningful differences in impact parameters or improve criterion validity, findings suggest that the aggression and attention subscales are functionally invariant to negative parenting cognitions, suggesting that externalizing symptoms can be reliability compared across parents of varying parenting cognitions.

Child maltreatment is a pathogenic relational experience that creates risk for physical and psychological health difficulties throughout the lifespan. The Reminiscing and Emotion Training intervention (RET) was developed to support maltreated children’s healthy development by improving parenting behavior among maltreating mothers. Here, we evaluated whether RET was associated with reductions in child welfare reinvolvement over the course of two years. The sample included 165 maltreating and 83 nonmaltreating mothers and their 3- to 6-year-old children who were enrolled in a longitudinal randomized controlled trial of RET. Maltreating mother–child dyads were randomly assigned to receive RET or an active control condition (community standard [CS]). Nonmaltreating dyads were a separate control group (nonmaltreating control). Comparing CS and RET dyads, there was a significant effect of RET on frequency of child welfare reinvolvement (substantiations and unsubstantiated assessments) during the two years following dyads’ enrollment in the intervention, t (163) = 2.02, p < .05, Cohen’s d = 0.32. There was a significant indirect effect of RET on child welfare reinvolvement through maternal sensitive guidance during reminiscing [95% CI −0.093, −0.007]. Results provide support for the efficacy of RET in preventing child welfare reinvolvement.

Children’s relationships inform their internal working models (IWMs) of the world around them. Attachment and emotional security theory (EST) emphasize the importance of parent–child and interparental relationships, respectively, for IWM. The current study examined (a) data-driven classes in child attachment and emotional security IWM, (b) associations between IWM classes and demographic variables, maltreatment, intimate partner violence (IPV), and maternal depressive symptoms, and (c) consistency in attachment and emotional security IWM classes, including as a function of maltreatment, IPV, and maternal depressive symptoms. Participants were 234 preschool-aged children ( n = 152 experienced maltreatment and n = 82 had not experienced maltreatment) and their mothers. Children participated in a narrative-based assessment of IWM. Mothers reported demographics, IPV, and maternal depressive symptoms. Latent class analyses revealed three attachment IWM classes and three emotional security IWM classes. Maltreatment was associated with lower likelihood of being in the secure attachment class and elevated likelihood of being in the insecure dysregulated attachment class. Inconsistencies in classification across attachment and emotional security IWM classes were related to maltreatment, IPV, and maternal depressive symptoms. The current study juxtaposes attachment and EST and provides insight into impacts of family adversity on children’s IWM across different family relationships.

Overgeneral memory (OGM), or difficulty recalling specific memories when recounting autobiographical events, is associated with psychopathology. According to functional avoidance theory, OGM—or reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS)—may serve as an emotion regulation strategy that aids in the avoidance of painful, negative memories (Sumner, 2012; Williams et al., 2007). Some researchers argue that there may be a valence effect for OGM, such that there is a higher frequency of overgenerality when recalling negative memories compared to positive memories. Although not supported among adults, valence effects may be present among children and adolescents if OGM initially develops in response to negative cues and then generalizes to all memory recall over time. This meta-analysis examined differences in child and adolescent OGM and AMS based on cue valance; standardized mean differences between negative and positive valence cues for OGM and AMS indices were calculated. Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic literature search resulted in 26 studies assessing OGM and 30 assessing AMS. There was a significant effect of valence on OGM (d = 0.17, p = 0.01) and AMS (d = -0.20, p = 0.01). There was a higher frequency of overgeneral responses to negative cue words than positive cue words. Similarly, there was a higher frequency of specific responses for positive cue words than negative cue words. Subgroup analyses considering differences in valence effects by participant age (childhood vs. adolescence), sample type (clinical vs. community), and task instructions (verbal vs. written) were not significant. Theoretical advancements for our understanding of OGM and AMS and clinical implications are discussed.

Parent report is frequently used to assess children’s psychopathology, however, researchers have expressed concerns about the validity of parent reports (Madsen et al., 2019; Olino et al., 2021; Richters & Pellegrini, 1989). Some parental characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs may systematically bias a parent’s report of their child’s behaviors and functioning. Informed by social information processing (SIP) models of parenting risk (Azar & Weinzierl, 2005; Azar et al., 2008; Crittenden, 1993; Milner, 1993), parents with more difficulties reflecting on and interpreting their children’s behavior may be at risk for less accurate reports. To address this, the present study conducted three regularized moderated non-linear factor analyses (Bauer et al., 2020; Bauer & Belzak, 2020; Belzak, 2023), with the LONGSCAN data to examine how parents’ self-reported negative parenting cognitions were associated with structural parameters of parent reported child aggression, delinquency, and attention problems. The findings indicated that while differential item functioning (DIF) was present on the aggression and attention problems subscales as a function of parenting cognitions, the DIF was not consistently in one direction, was small in magnitude, and did not significantly alter factor-level parameters. There was no DIF on the delinquency subscale. Given that accounting for DIF did not contribute to meaningful differences in impact parameters or improve criterion validity, findings suggest that the aggression, attention, and delinquency subscales are functionally invariant to negative parenting cognitions.