Negative relationships between mathematics anxiety and achievement appear in many countries globally (Lee, 2009; OECD, 2013), suggesting that mathematics anxiety could be an underconsidered factor in regions with persistently low mathematics achievement. We draw on a national sample of students and their teachers in Belize to examine relations between mathematics anxiety and achievement. The data replicated the negative relationships between students' math anxiety and achievement observed in many higher achieving, higher resourced regions, and importantly also revealed that teachers' mathematics anxiety predicted their students' mathematics attitudes and sometimes achievement. The effects were small overall so the robustness of this relationship is not clear, but they provide novel data toward building a comprehensive theory of mathematics anxiety's relationship to achievement across cultural, gender and age contexts, and offer insight into how addressing mathematics anxiety might improve mathematics teaching and achievement in low resourced countries. Mathematical proficiency is a global area of concern, and improving the efficacy of mathematics education is viewed by many as a key to increasing nations' successful participation in the global economy. In light of the growing

Background: To advance early identification efforts, we must detect and characterize neurodevelopmental sequelae of risk among population-based samples early in development. However, variability across the typical-to-atypical continuum and heterogeneity within and across early emerging psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders represent fundamental challenges to overcome. Identifying multidimensionally determined profiles of risk, agnostic to DSM categories, via data-driven computational approaches represents an avenue to improve early identification of risk. Methods: Factor mixture modeling (FMM) was used to identify subgroups and characterize phenotypic risk profiles, derived from multiple parent-report measures of typical and atypical behaviors common to autism spectrum disorder, in a community-based sample of 17-to 25-month-old toddlers (n = 1,570). To examine the utility of risk profile classification, a subsample of toddlers (n = 107) was assessed on a distal, independent outcome examining internalizing, externalizing, and dysregulation at approximately 30 months. Results: FMM results identified five asymmetrically sized subgroups. The putative high-and moderate-risk groups comprised 6% of the sample. Followup analyses corroborated the utility of the risk profile classification; the high-, moderate-, and low-risk groups were differentially stratified (i.e., HR > moderate-risk > LR) on outcome measures and comparison of high-and low-risk groups revealed large effect sizes for internalizing (d = 0.83), externalizing (d = 1.39), and dysregulation (d = 1.19). Conclusions: This data-driven approach yielded five subgroups of toddlers, the utility of which was corroborated by later outcomes. Data-driven approaches, leveraging multiple developmentally appropriate dimensional RDoC constructs, hold promise for future efforts aimed toward early identification of at-risk-phenotypes for a variety of early emerging neurodevelopmental disorders.

Intense interests are common in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and little research has characterized aspects of interests that are unique to or shared among children with and without ASD. We aimed to characterize interests in a sample of infants at high‐familial‐risk (HR) and low‐familial‐risk (LR) for ASD using a novel interview. Participants included HR siblings who were diagnosed with ASD at 24 months (HR‐ASD, n = 56), HR siblings who did not receive an ASD diagnosis at 24 months (HR‐Neg, n = 187), and a LR comparison group (n = 109). We developed and collected data with the Intense Interests Inventory at 18‐ and 24‐months of age, a semi‐structured interview that measures intensity and peculiarity of interests in toddlers and preschool‐aged children. Intensity of interests differed by familial risk at 24 months, with HR‐ASD and HR‐Neg groups demonstrating equivalent intensity of interests that were higher than the LR group. By contrast, peculiarity of interest differed by ASD diagnosis, with the HR‐ASD group showing more peculiar interests than the HR‐Neg and LR groups at 24 months. At 18 months the HR‐ASD group had more peculiar interests than the LR group, though no differences emerged in intensity of interests. This measure may be useful in identifying clinically‐relevant features of interests in young children with ASD. We also replicated previous findings of males showing more intense interests at 18 months in our non‐ASD sample. These results reveal new information about the nature of interests and preoccupations in the early autism phenotype. Lay summary Intense interests are common in young children with autism and their family members. Intense interests are also prevalent among typically‐developing children, and especially boys. Here we catalog interests and features of these interests in a large sample of toddlers enriched for autism risk. Children who had family members with autism had more intense interests, and those who developed autism themselves had more unusual interests at 24 months. These results highlight the importance of different aspects of interest in autism.

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