Professor
Office: Center for Children, Youth, and Families
Phone: (334) 844-3228
gpettit@auburn.edu
Ph.D., Indiana University, 1984

Research Interests

My research focuses on the development of social competence across childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I am especially interested in the mechanisms through which family and peer experiences exert an impact on important developmental outcomes and on the risk and protective factors that moderate these linkages. In one line of research we have identified critical components of effective parenting and have described the cognitive-emotional processes through which parenting influences children's subsequent behavior and competence. In another line of research we have traced life-course adaptations from early childhood to adulthood, using data from the Child Development Project (CDP), an ongoing longitudinal study that was launched over 20 years ago with colleagues at Duke University and Indiana University. I have been particularly interested in the interplay of close relationships across development and the ways in which relationships later in life (with friends or a romantic partner, for example) may compensate or ameliorate poor-quality relationship experiences earlier in life. As the CDP participants move into young adulthood we will have opportunities to chart key life experiences and events that increase (or decrease) the likelihood of successful adaptations in the realms of education, work, and family life, as well as possible turning points in which prior adjustment trajectories are rerouted, for better or worse.

Selected Publications

Dodge, K. A., Malone, P. S., Lansford, J. E., Miller, S., Pettit, G. S., & Bates, J. E. (in press). A dynamic cascade model of the development of substance-use onset. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Erath, S.A., Keiley, M.K., Pettit, G.S., Lansford, J.E., Dodge, K.A., & Bates, J.E. (in press). Behavioral predictors of mental health service utilization in childhood through adolescence: Evidence for ethnic differences. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

Mize, J., & Pettit, G.S. (in press). The mother-child playgroup as socialization context:
A short-term longitudinal study of mother-child-peer relationship dynamics. Early Child Development and Care.

Pettit, G.S., Lansford, J.E., Malone, P.S., Dodge, K.A., & Bates, J.E. (in press). Domain specificity in relationship history, social information processing, and violent behavior in early adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Dick, D.M., Latendresse, S.J., Lansford, J.E., Budde, J.P., Goate, A., Dodge, K.A., Pettit, G.S., & Bates, J.E. (2009). The role of GABRA2 in trajectories of externalizing behavior across development and evidence of moderation by parental monitoring. Archives of General Psychiatry, 66, 649-657.

Erath, S.A., Pettit, G.S., Dodge, K.A., & Bates, J.E., (2009). Who dislikes whom, and for whom does it matter: Predicting aggression in middle childhood. Social Development, 18. 577-596.

Laird, R. D., Criss, M. M., Pettit, G. S., Bates, J. E., & Dodge, K. A. (2009). Developmental
trajectories and antecedents of distal parental supervision. Journal of Early Adolescence, 29,
258-284.

Pettit, G.S., Davis-Kean, P.E., & Magnuson, K. (2009). Educational attainment in developmental perspective: Longitudinal analyses of continuity, change, and process. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 55, 217-223.

Pettit, G.S., Yu, T., Dodge, K.A., & Bates, J.E. (2009). A developmental process analysis of cross-generational continuity in educational attainment. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 55, 250-284.

Crozier, J.C., Dodge, K.A., Fontaine, R.G., Lansford, J.E., Bates, J.E., Pettit, G.S., & Levenson, R.W. (2008). Social information processing and cardiac predictors of adolescent antisocial behavior. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117, 253-267.

Fite, J.E., Bates, J.E., Holtzworth-Munroe, A., Dodge, K.A., Nay, S.Y., & Pettit, G.S. (2008). Social information processing mediates the intergenerational transmission of relationship conflict. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 367-376.

Laird, R. D., Criss, M. M., Pettit, G. S., Bates, J. E., & Dodge, K. A. (2008). Parents' monitoring knowledge attenuates the link between antisocial friends and adolescent delinquent behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 36, 299-310.

Lansford, J.E., Erath, S.A., Yu, T., Pettit, G.S., Dodge, K.A., & Bates, J.E. (2008). The developmental course of illicit substance use from age 12 to 22: Links with depressive, anxiety, and behavior disorders at age 18. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49, 877-885.

Mize, J., & Pettit, G.S. (2008). Social information-processing and the development of conduct problems in children and adolescents: Looking beneath the surface. In C. Sharp, P. Fonagy, & I. Goodyer (Eds.), Social cognition and developmental psychopathology (pp. 141-174). New York: Oxford University Press.

Pettit, G.S., & Arsiwalla, D.D. (2008). Commentary on Special Section on "Bidirectional Parent-Child Relationships": The continuing evolution of dynamic, transactional models of parenting and youth behavior problems. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 36, 711-718.

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