Early childhood interventions might help prevent progression towards chronic impairment. However, current treatments for child psychopathology are often ineffective and difficult to access, with as many as 50% of children continuing to suffer from mental health problems even after treatment. To pave the way for more effective treatment and prevention strategies, the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project launched by the National Institute of Mental Health has been championed as a systematic framework for linking symptoms (e.g., internalizing), across the normal to abnormal range, to behavior and neural circuits indexing constructs of relevance to psychopathology. Nonetheless, integrating RDoC into developmental psychopathology, especially the application of RDoC to early childhood, has been understudied.

To fulfill the promise of RDoC and integrate RDoC into developmental psychopathology, I argue that it is critical to 1) identify and establish early behavioral markers that could differentiate typical vs atypical development over time; 2) link these early behavioral markers to neurobiological mechanisms that are associated with emotional maladjustment; and 3) understand how these behavioral and neural markers could be modulated via intervention. In this talk, I will first examine whether specific self-regulation skills at age 3 are related to the development of internalizing and externalizing trajectories across time. Then I will link identified self-regulation vulnerabilities to neural correlates (i.e., error-related negativity; ERN) to understand the development of internalizing problems among preschoolers. Finally, I will conclude with my ongoing direction of targeting self-regulation and its neural correlates via self-regulation trainings as novel intervention for children with internalizing problems.