Nancy A. Gonzales

The combination of discrimination and cultural-contextual stressors associated with acculturation demands and immigration processes cause stressful conditions for Latinos above and beyond daily, stressful life events experienced in families. This in turn, can have repercussions on parent–child relationships and family dynamics. We hypothesized that acculturative and general family stress would be associated with increased parental depression, which would negatively affect family cohesion and parents, and that these disruptions would predict children’s internalizing symptoms. Accordingly, mothers and fathers (N = 467) completed questionnaires to describe their experiences of acculturative stress, with mothers also reporting on general family stress. Parent and children’s reports of parenting and family cohesion were also assessed. Structural equation modeling analyses were employed to examine the relationship between parental stress (acculturative and general family stress) and depression at Wave 1, with spillover effects on family cohesion, parenting, and children’s internalizing symptoms at Wave 2. Familial acculturative stress was positively associated with increased parental depression, compromised family relationships and parenting, and in turn, was linked to increased anxiety and depression in their children. In addition, family cohesion served a mediating role in families, helping to explain the pathway though which acculturative stress affects family relationships and children’s internalizing symptoms. This study addresses a critical gap in immigrant family adaptation research, highlighting the need for a cohesive model that integrates multiple stressors to capture their unique, collective, and cumulative effects.

Social media is a pervasive platform for delivering targeted interventions, albeit with cautionary ethical consequences. Recently AI robots or "bots" have been combined with social media platforms to enhance interaction, and enact behavior change through increased engagement and adherence to intervention protocols. This paper presents a customized social media platform for promoting engagement and adherence to a prevention intervention protocol. The protocol was originally developed in a group workshop format, and then online during COVID-19. A social media platform was utilized to connect group participants and deliver protocol activities. Bots encouraged participation via positive reinforcement mechanism for the entire group, and to remind a participant of protocol activities. While not a formal study, our exploratory results demonstrate that bots and a social media context support a group leader in increased engagement and adherence to the protocol. Our principal contribution in this paper is demonstrating that a personalized, adaptive instance of a Control Systems Engineering model may improve engagement-related outcomes in brief protocols.

This study sought to describe latent transitions in developmentally and culturally salient interpersonal stressors from late childhood to late adolescence and examine whether different transition patterns predicted early adult mental health problems. Data from four waves (Grades 5, 7, 10, 12) of a study of 749 U.S. Mexican-origin youth were used for a latent transition analysis (LTA) of family, peer, and community stressors; distal outcomes of externalizing and internalizing problems were measured 5 years after Grade 12. Latent class analysis (LCA) and LTA were conducted for investigating underlying subgroups of interpersonal stress at each wave and transitions between subtypes over waves. For the LCA, two latent classes emerged at all four waves, representing low and high interpersonal stress. The LTA model with two classes at all waves was conducted with good fit. Six prominent transition classes emerged and related to young adult internalizing and externalizing problems. Transition class related to young adult internalizing and externalizing problems, such that youth who consistently had exposure to interpersonal stress or who had transitions from low to high exposure had more internalizing and externalizing problems. Findings are discussed relative to the developmental salience of these transitions and opportunities to intervene during adolescence to mitigate later mental health problems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Introduction Childhood maltreatment is a well-established risk factor for health problems in adulthood and may also have intergenerational consequences for infant health. Childhood maltreatment may confer risk for infant health by undermining caregiver capacities for sensitive and responsive caregiving. However, associations among childhood maltreatment, maternal sensitivity, and infant health are not well understood. These processes may be of particular importance among low-income and ethnic minority populations for whom disparities in maltreatment exposure and poorer health outcomes are well-established. Method The current study drew data from a sample of low-income, Mexican American families to examine whether maternal childhood maltreatment would be associated with more infant health concerns, and whether lower maternal sensitivity would explain their associations. Data were collected from 322 mother-infant dyads during home visits completed during pregnancy and when infants were 12, 18, and 24 weeks old. Results Maternal childhood maltreatment exposure and lower maternal sensitivity were both associated with more infant health concerns. Maternal childhood maltreatment was not associated with maternal sensitivity. Discussion These findings highlight potential intergenerational consequences of maternal childhood maltreatment for infant health and underscore a need for evaluating pre- and postnatal mechanisms through which these effects may be perpetuated. Furthermore, results indicate that maternal sensitivity may represent a promising target for interventions seeking to counteract intergenerational transmission processes. Clarification about underlying risk processes and potentiating resiliency characteristics may elucidate ways to better support mothers and infants across the lifespan.

Early oral language development lays an essential foundation for academic and socioemotional competencies but is vulnerable to the impact of family stress. Despite robust evidence that family stress affects early oral language development in monolingual samples, little is known about whether the family stress processes affecting language acquisition are similar among dual language learners. Furthermore, although Mexican American families often face stressors related to their ethnic minority and immigrant status, no studies to date have tested whether exposure to sociocultural stressors may likewise have negative consequences for early language acquisition. The present study examined whether financial and sociocultural stressors were associated with maternal stress perception, parenting sensitivity, and child Spanish and English receptive vocabulary at child age 3 and 4.5 years. Participants included 322 low-income Mexican American mothers and their children followed from pregnancy through 4.5 years postnatal; most mothers preferred to speak Spanish (82%). Results of a path model indicated that links between family stress and child receptive vocabulary varied by language (Spanish or English) and stress type (financial or cultural). Specifically, Spanish acquisition was more closely related to the quality of mother-child interactions, whereas English acquisition was more susceptible to the impact of family stress. The consequences of family stress on children’s vocabulary acquisition were evident earlier in development for Spanish than English, and appeared more pronounced for financial versus sociocultural stressors. Findings underscore a need to attend to the impact of poverty on children’s Spanish and English language development in low-income, Mexican American children.

This study sought to (a) replicate infant temperament profiles from predominantly White samples in a sample of low-income, predominantly first-generation Mexican-American families, (b) investigate associations between infant temperament profiles and toddler behavioral and physiological regulation, and (c) explore whether mothers’ cultural orientation would moderate those associations. Mothers and infants (n = 322; 46% male) were assessed during pregnancy and at infant ages 9, 12, and 24 months. Latent profile analysis yielded three temperament profiles that were consistent with those from extant research. Compared to the high positive affect, well-regulated profile, the negative reactive, low regulated profile was associated with poorer behavioral and parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia) regulation, but associations depended on mothers’ Mexican and Anglo cultural orientation.

Mindful parenting is linked to positive youth emotion regulation, mental health, and parent–child relationship quality. We examined bidirectional relations between adolescent mental health and mindful parenting among a diverse sample of 249 7th grade students and their female (N = 232) and male caregivers (N = 120). We conducted multiple-group cross-lagged models (grouped by adolescent sex). Female adolescents’ externalizing symptoms predicted decreased female caregiver mindful parenting six months later, but male and female adolescent externalizing behaviors were negatively associated with male caregivers’ mindful parenting one year later. Findings suggest mindful parenting capacities are vulnerable to disruption via adolescent problem behavior. Mindful parenting’s potential benefits, caveats, and need to support parent efforts to sustain mindful parenting amidst adolescents’ externalizing behaviors are discussed.