Developmental trajectories of youth antisocial behavior (ASB; i.e., physical aggression and rule violations) unfold via dynamic interplay between individual predispositions and the contexts in which their development is embedded. Indeed, prior work has implicated both genetic influences and the broader environmental context (i.e., family, peers, and neighborhoods) in the emergence of youth behavioral problems, both cross-sectionally and over time. Nevertheless, much remains unknown about the developmental origins of ASB. Extant longitudinal studies examining its genetic and environmental etiology have done so across relatively brief windows of development, and nearly all longitudinal phenotypic studies have relied on either person centered or variable-centered approaches but not both, with key downstream consequences for our understanding of the factors that give rise to the development of ASB. The present studies addressed these gaps in the literature by examining trajectories of ASB across early development via a series of behavioral genetic, variable-centered, and person-centered analyses, with familial, peer, and neighborhood characteristics considered as moderators. Participants were drawn from the Twin Study of Behavioral and Emotional Development in Children (TBED-C; N = 1,030 twin pairs) and MTwiNS projects within the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Both the TBED-C and its longitudinal follow-up, MTwiNS, were enriched for neighborhood disadvantage. Study 1 made use of a series of longitudinal growth curve models and classical twin analyses to examine the genetic and environmental origins of ASB from the preschool years through to emerging adulthood, with neighborhood disadvantage considered as a phenotypic predictor. Results indicated a mean-level decline in ASB that was shaped by both genetic influences and nonshared (i.e., person-specific) environmental factors. Exposure to neighborhood disadvantage predicted higher levels of ASB at baseline but a somewhat more rapid age-related decline. Studies 2 and 3 built on these findings by disambiguating physical aggression (AGG) and non-aggressive rule-breaking (RB), respectively, and by incorporating person-centered statistical methods as well as variable centered methods. In Study 2, the development of AGG was examined from middle childhood through to emerging adulthood via growth curve modeling and mixture modeling. Both sets of analyses identified age-related declines in AGG, but only the person-centered models elucidated the factors (i.e., low parent-child conflict and familial affluence) that interrupted trajectories of elevated AGG. Likewise, in Study 3, variable-centered analyses were integral to modeling the mean-level increase in RB for the full sample, whereas the person-centered models implicated peer delinquency as well as family and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage as predictors of persistent and escalating RB trajectories. Altogether, these findings underscore the non-interchangeable contributions of the family, neighborhood, and peer contexts to trajectories of ASB across nearly the entire early developmental period. Moreover, integration of findings from variable-centered and person-centered statistical approaches demonstrated the potential to illuminate risk factors predicting persistent behavioral problems and protective factors predicting recovery, which may have important methodological implications for future studies of developmental psychopathology.
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