Our parent grant involves a comprehensive examination of common and specific risk factors for emotional disorders, with a rich array of measures of personality traits, life stress, symptom status and diagnostic status, assessed repeatedly over a 4-year interval, as well as other measures assessed only once in the first year cognitive biases (attentional bias, interpretive bias, and memory bias) and psychophysiological functioning (daily cortisol rhythms and fear potentiated startle). Our sample is comprised of 627 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse adolescents recruited during their junior year in high school. Using a high risk design, we overselected (60%) Ps who scored high on a measure of neuroticism to increase our power to identify risk factors for emotional disorders and allow evaluation of various models of commonalities and specificities of risk and their interaction with stress? We now propose to extend data collection for another 4 years, by which time most of our sample will be aged 23 to 25 years. By so doing, we will extend the goals of the parent grant in several ways. First, we will be able to study risk factors for emotional disorders whose average age of onset peaks after the original window of 16 - 20 years. Second, we will be better able to evaluate risk factors for course, severity and comorbidity among the emotional disorders. Third, by repeating risk measurement, we will be able to evaluate stability/plasticity in risk and its relationship to the onset, course, and comorbidity of emotional disorders. In addition, we propose several new directions. First, we propose to evaluate the relationship between genetic markers (DRD4, 5HTT and markers of coping) and emotional disorders, especially the interaction between genetic markers and indices of episodic and chronic life stress, and the hypothesized role of personality traits in mediating the associations between the genetic markers and emotional disorders. Also, we propose to evaluate potential candidate genetic markers of coping styles that have been hypothesized to decrease risk for emotional disorders. Second, we propose to evaluate personality pathology and its moderation of psychopathology over the period of transition into adulthood. We will also test whether attainment of developmental milestones associated with young adulthood and whether changes in normal personality traits common in young adulthood are predicted by earlier personality trait levels and emotional disorders and are predictors of later emotional disorders. Furthermore, we propose additional risk variables of early adversity, perceived control, coping style and rumination. ? ? ?
Showing the most recent 10 out of 39 publications
