About this session

Friday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Innovative and Translational Methods for Promoting Early Childhood Mental Health: A Strengths-Based Approach

Internalizing and externalizing problems are common during the child’s first few years, manifesting behaviorally and physiologically as early as infancy. Resilience-promoting factors reduce the likelihood that these early manifestations will develop into a mental health disorder, revealing the child’s potential to meet challenges and adapt in the context of risk. Adopting a strengths-based approach may be particularly impactful for advancing translation of early childhood mental health research, helping to reduce stigma surrounding labeling young children with mental health problems and over-identification of mental health disorders in children from marginalized communities.

This symposium brings together four papers that use novel methods for enriching and translating the existing evidence by capitalizing on protective pathways toward early mental health. Paper 1 leverages latent transition analysis to chart whether parents transition in and out of classes characterized by positive/sensitive parenting, and whether these patterns are associated with internalizing/externalizing trajectories across early childhood. Paper 2 uses both child and parent factors in assessing whether self-regulation during a novel, ecologically valid version of the still-face paradigm in infancy predicts internalizing/externalizing problems in toddlerhood. Paper 3 leverages fNIRS hyperscanning methods to measure neural synchrony in caregiver-child dyads as a potential protective factor for mental health in early childhood. Finally, Paper 4 uses an innovative risk calculator approach that incorporates child and parenting assets to support equitable decision-making about young children’s mental health in pediatric practice. Taken together, our symposium highlights the importance of capturing resilience-promoting processes, from developmental discovery to clinical practice.

Paper #1
Title	Latent Transition Analysis of Parenting Processes and Very Premature Birth: Developmental Impacts on Child Psychopathology
Presenting author	Berenice Anaya, Washington University in St. Louis, United States

Paper #2
Title	Exploring the Protective Role of Infant Self-Regulation in the Context of Maternal Internalizing Symptoms
Presenting author	Eunkyung Shin, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Using Multi-Person Neuroscience to Identify Dyad-Level Protective Factors for Early Childhood Mental Health
Presenting author	Dr. Laura E. Quinones-Camacho, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, United States

Paper #4
Title	Predictive Utility of Child and Parenting Assets for an Early Childhood Mental Health Risk Calculator
Presenting author	Leigha A. MacNeill, Ph.D., Purdue University, United States

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Session chair
Leigha A. MacNeill, Ph.D., Purdue University, United States

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