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Call for Papers: Special Issue of Clinical Psychological Science

Emerging Temperament Perspectives on Heterogeneity and Psychopathology Risk

Co-Guest Editors: Sarah Karalunas, PhD; Erica Musser, PhD; and Koraly Pérez-Edgar, PhD

Temperament perspectives provide a critical window into the development of psychopathology and a promising option to facilitate more developmentally and neurobiologically grounded nosology. The building blocks of temperament emerge early in life, are linked to biological processes, and are associated with multiple types of psychopathology risk. Further, understanding temperament risk can help link developmental psychopathology to models of adult psychopathology that are based on related dimensional personality features. While the literature on temperament and internalizing problems is quite well-established, there is considerably less work on temperamental risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorders. Variation in temperament may help explain transdiagnostic risk (e.g., across neurodevelopmental disorder categories or accounting for high comorbidity between neurodevelopmental disorders and other diagnoses), as well as the extensive variation in symptoms, outcomes, and biological correlates often observed within existing diagnostic groups.

Articles in the special issue will address how developmental psychopathology can be understood from a temperament/personality perspective across infancy, middle childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. Submissions on any aspect of psychopathology are welcomed but priority will be given to submissions focused on domains with emerging temperament/personality literatures, including neurodevelopmental disorders and/or their related features (e.g., attention dysregulation, impulsivity, affiliation, social reciprocity, etc.). Consistent with CPS’s mission, article submissions should span multiple levels of analysis and inform etiological mechanisms and/or clinical assessment. Priority will be given to articles that emphasize investigations in diverse populations and that directly address reproducibility and/or generalizability. We are particularly interested in articles that use a temperament or personality perspective to address:

  • Transdiagnostic risk processes that help explain comorbidity between neurodevelopmental disorders and other problems (e.g., mood, anxiety, substance use, etc.)
  • Heterogeneity within existing diagnostic groups and associations with differences in neurobiological mechanisms and/or clinical outcomes
  • Prospective studies of very early temperament risk for all types of psychopathology
  • Novel subgroups or prospective risk prediction models with clear clinical translatability
  • Protective features that buffer against risk in the context of neurodevelopmental challenges
  • Longitudinal studies of temperamental risk and resilience
  • Studies using multimodal temperament assessment, including task-based or physiological assessments
  • Reproducibility of models
  • Generalizability to diverse groups (including but by no means limited to diverse racial and ethnic groups, economically diverse samples, gender diverse samples)

Abstracts (500 words max) summarizing the proposed manuscript will be reviewed on a rolling basis. For full consideration, submit abstracts by November 20, 2023 via email to [email protected]. Abstracts that summarize the manuscript’s significance to the call, methods, and (completed, preliminary, or expected) results will be most competitive. Full manuscript invitations will be issued by December 22, 2023. Full manuscripts should be submitted to Clinical Psychological Science via the journal portal by June 21, 2024. We encourage contributing authors to post submitted versions of their articles to Advance, Sage’s preprint server. We also encourage authors to make their research materials and data available on OSF or other (restricted) accessible repositories.

Please feel free to contact the Guest Editors via email at [email protected] if questions arise about the scope of the special issue or the submission process.