May's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains three articles on trust that got me thinking a bit.  It's been said that the qualities that attract you to a potential partner (or friend) may well end up being the very issues that become most problematic in the relationship.  So, for example, one's partner's ability to be spontaneous, emotional, let their hair down & have a great time may later become a real issue over their drinking, extra-marital affairs, and irresponsibility with money.  Or from the other end of the personality spectrum, their reliability and conscientiousness may become a real strain because they later seem over-cautious and kill-joys.  Anyway here's three additional contributions to this debate:

Here are five papers on childhood, the effects childhood experience can have on adulthood, and the effects adults may then have on their own children.  The first paper by Brody et al. is the encouraging one.  It demonstrates how caring parenting can combat genetic vulnerability - "involved-supportive" mothering greatly reduced the link between vulnerable genes and subsequent youth substance abuse.  The Van Meurs et al study shows the reverse - how problem behaviours in one generation of children increases the likelihood that, when these children become parents themselves, their own children will develop similar problem behaviours.

Here are five papers on difficulties experienced by adolescents.  A couple of the papers are follow-up studies.  Colman et al looked at the multiple negative personal & relationship outcomes in a UK national cohort of adolescents with conduct problems followed over 40 years.  Wentz et al studied the somewhat more encouraging 18 year outcomes of a group of adolescents suffering from anorexia. 

A couple of the papers are about depression.  Kennard and colleagues report again on the well-known Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS) comparing antidepressants, cognitive-behavioural therapy and combined treatment.  By about six months there was little difference between the three forms of treatment.  At nine months the remission rate for intent-to-treat cases was 60% overall.  Primack et al investigated the association between electronic media use in adolescence and subsequent depression in young adulthood.  They reported "Controlling for all covariates including baseline Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale score, those reporting more television use had significantly greater odds of developing depression."