Identifying brain mechanisms implicated in the intergenerational transmission of major depressive disorder (MDD) is crucial for early detection and developing novel interventions.

"Results of the study demonstrated that immigrants were 80% more likely than parents born in the U.S. to report they did not share decision making with their children’s medical providers."

"A new study from researchers at Penn State, published in JAMA Network Open, suggests that a handful of routines around feeding, sleep and play during the first two months of an infant’s life can be linked to higher weight just a few months later."

Our aim was to evaluate early intervention (EI) service use associated with 3 child welfare service (CWS) responses.

The present study explored infant nighttime distress as a predictor and outcome of coparenting during the first year of life, examining family socioeconomic risk (SER) as a moderator in these relations.

This study describes methodological advancements that are important for improving how we assess interpersonal interactions—key sources of protection and risk for adolescent depression.

Children of transgender and nonbinary parents demonstrate typical behavioral and emotional development, while their parents use effective parenting techniques comparable to those of cisgender parents, according to a new study led by a researcher in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State.

Behavioral sleep interventions may have lasting impacts on sleep and health and serve as a novel obesity prevention strategy.

Findings revealed distinct patterns for Black and Latino families.

Mark Feinberg, a Penn State research professor in health and human development and CSC faculty affiliate, created Family Foundations, a new kind of positive parenting program that focuses on the core of the family—the co-parenting relationship.

"This conversation offers a fascinating look into the science of human development. From the biology of fear to the power of supportive relationships, Dr. Pérez-Edgar shows how small moments can have a lifelong impact."

“When we eat quickly, we don’t give our digestive track time to sense the calories,” said Kathleen Keller, professor and Helen A. Guthrie Chair of nutritional sciences at Penn State and co-author of this study.

Children who are mistreated at a young age are more likely to experience a wide range of developmental delays and health problems, according to Christian Connell, Ken Young Family Professor in Healthy Children and professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.

Two Penn State Department of Kinesiology faculty members, Lacy Alexander, professor of kinesiology, and Danielle Symons Downs, professor of kinesiology and obstetrics and gynecology, were recently named fellows of the National Academy of Kinesiology (NAK).

Adequate sleep duration among middle-aged and older adults predicts better future cardiovascular health (CVH). It is unclear whether adolescent sleep health predicts young adult CVH, particularly using objective sleep measures.

Speech and language impairment is the second most common disability category for which children are served in public schools under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004).

This qualitative study presents findings from a co-design initiative conducted with rural middle school students to examine adolescents’ views on body image, social media use, and engagement in physical activity, and to inform the development of the Hoosier Sport Re-Social intervention.

Findings suggest authoritarian parenting styles and altered error-related negativity may be important targets for depression prevention for this vulnerable population of adolescent girls and mothers.

This study investigates the AAC professionals' perceptions on (a) their professional development, (b) the learning environments in which they work, and (c) the families and children they serve.

The Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center will welcome its 2025 Bennett Lecturer, Catherine Bradshaw, senior associate dean for research and professor at the University of Virginia, at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.

The reinforcing value of food, a measure of motivation to obtain food, is associated with obesity in children. However, the extent to which food reinforcement predicts children’s intake under different contexts (i.e., meals fasted, eating in the absence of hunger-EAH) is unknown.

"We show that delta–beta coupling trajectories are differentially modulated by infant temperament and anxiety levels in the infants’ proximal environment."

"Racial discrimination confers considerable risk for myriad negative mental health outcomes among Black youth."

As a doctoral student at Penn State, Maddie seeks to address her research questions from a developmental perspective, with a focus on translational science.

Young boys ate less during a meal if they had already consumed a serving of fruit, but girls ate the same amount of the meal whether or not they had eaten fruit.

"These findings highlight the unique interplay of rumination and neural error processing in the prospective prediction of youth depressive symptoms."

This study examines the prevalence and features of prenatal substance exposure among children aged 0 to 36 months involved with the child welfare systems.

The Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) is 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to advancing scientific research on food and fluid intake and its associated biological, psychological and social processes.

Penn State ties for No. 17 among US public universities, No. 39 among all US institutions and No. 108 worldwide.

One in five children in the United States has obesity, which is a significant predictor of chronic health problems later in life.

Beginning Oct. 15, the Research Informatics and Publishing department at Penn State University Libraries will offer a series of four workshops on research reproducibility and data management in the programming language R and its associated open-source integrated development environment, RStudio.

Research in adults has shown that food form (e.g., liquid, semi-solid, solid) influences satiety, even when energy and energy density are matched. However, less is known about the impact of food form on satiety in children.

The Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) has been widely used to assess infant temperament traits, though there is limited empirical support for the recommended three-factor structure.

Findings suggest that parent beliefs about gender may shape identity development in environments perceived as risky or under-resourced.

Researchers will examine how children's brains process reward and frustration in order to understand why some children show improvements with ADHD medication while others do not.

The pervasive marketing of energy-dense food and beverages across many social media platforms continually targets and appeals to young consumers.

Findings from this study further our understanding of the pandemic's impact on child development.

"The current study sought to move beyond exploratory analyses and use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to examine the joint structure of psychopathology and personality in children."

Findings provide a stepping stone for understanding Black and Latinx youth's development and the role of parenting and neighborhood social processes in new destination neighborhoods.

In this insightful session, Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, McCourtney Professor of Child Studies at Penn State University, will explore how early-emerging temperament, particularly behavioral inhibition, can influence children’s long-term social and emotional development.

Adolescent impulsivity is a robust risk factor for adolescent problem behaviors. Historically, impulsivity has been conceptualized as a trait characteristic; however, recent work conducted with adult samples indicates impulsivity also exhibits state-like qualities, fluctuating within persons from day to day.

Becoming a parent is stressful, and it can be especially so for those who already have higher levels of anxiety and worry, but researchers at Penn State have found that the type of birthing class parents take may help them better manage stress.

Gatzke-Kopp, who began her role as head of the department July 1, joined Penn State in 2007 as an assistant professor of human development and family studies.

We examined the feasibility and value of qualitatively analyzing the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) to gain insights into attachment representations and intergenerational patterns in their parenting among incarcerated mothers in Turkey.

Externalizing behaviors (e.g., aggression, oppositionality, conduct problems) typically peak then decrease across early childhood (ages 2–5). However, some children continue to exhibit elevated levels of externalizing behavior throughout childhood, which can have implications for later socioemotional difficulties.

Adolescents are particularly susceptible to peer influence and at higher risk of engaging in problematic behaviors through peer interactions, but also vary in the extent to which they are influenced by their peers.

We examined whether mother-preschooler respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) synchrony and self-regulation, as potential biological antecedents of developmental psychopathology, interacted to shape children's later behavior problems directly and indirectly via harsh parenting.

Emotional reactivity is a well‐validated corollary of children's risk for internalizing psychopathology and can be indexed by autonomic and behavioral measures. Yet, it is unclear whether and how autonomic and behavioral markers of emotional reactivity interact to characterize internalizing symptoms and whether these associations differ based on emotional context.

Universal and selective preventive interventions targeting youth behavioral problems have shown crossover effects on suicide risk, the second leading cause of death among youth.

Identifying atypical body mass index (BMI) trajectories in children and understanding associated, modifiable early-life factors may help prevent childhood obesity.

Social behavioral inhibition (BI), or wariness in response to unfamiliar social stimuli, is a temperament trait that, when present in preschool-age children, predicts neural alterations and anxiety disorders by adolescence.

The Social Science Research Institute’s (SSRI) Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction (CSUA) hosted the sixth annual conference in May at the the Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub at Penn State University Park.

Cognitive theories suggest that biased suicide-related attentional processing confers risk for suicide ideation (SI) and attempts (SAs), but studies to date, which have been mixed, have not compared lower- and higher-order measures of attentional processes.

This study aimed to identify whether interparental conflict (IPC) is associated with patterns of convergence and divergence in parent–adolescent perceptions of parental warmth.

"Researchers must be allowed to press on, to continue to make discoveries that give hope — and give life — to others. If we do not support research, we fail our families and neighbors."

We examined how family-level stressors were associated with parent- and youth-reported youth anxiety and depressive symptoms six months later during the first year of the pandemic.

The present study examined the role of racism-based traumatic stress (RBTS) symptoms (i.e., traumatic stress reactions in direct response to experiences of racial discrimination) and suicide-related risk in a national sample of U.S. Black and Latine adolescents.

The first wave of data from Penn State's HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study is now available to researchers interested in addressing a wide-range of questions, including how environments and substances impact infant and child development.

The primary aim of our investigation is to examine racial disparities in the association between ACEs and BMI among non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White females and males as they move through adolescence and into young adulthood.

The 2025 Big 10 Neuroscience Symposium will be the fourth annual meeting to be held by the neuroscience community in the Big 10 Academic Alliance.