Part V focuses on risk and protective factors in the initial development and evolving course of schizophrenia and other severe psychopathology, an area of study to which Norman Garmezy has made contributions for over three decades. Research on this topic has yielded direct benefits for our understanding of schizophrenia, as well as broader indirect benefits for the emerging field of developmental psychopathology. A direct result has been the identification of several personal characteristics and environmental factors that are associated with risk for schizophrenia and that may have an influence on the development and course of schizophrenia and related disorders. Work in this area also has led to conceptual advances that should aid future attempts to clarify the roles that potential risk and protective factors play in developmental pathways toward schizophrenia. Furthermore, as the chapters in this part show, research that began in this area has made a wide range of conceptual and empirical contributions to developmental psychopathology more generally, ranging from clarifying the predictive role of early competence for later psychopathology to focusing attention on specific ways in which genetic and environmental influences might interact during the epigenesis of psychopathology.

This part begins with a chapter in which Michael J. Goldstein presents the current evidence for family environmental factors as one set of stressors relevant to the onset and recurrence of schizophrenic episodes. Integrating evidence from his longitudinal study of disturbed adolescents and the ongoing Finnish Adoption Study by Tienari and colleagues, Goldstein concludes that interactions between a child's genetic vulnerability and disturbances in the family environment may be important in the epigenesis of schizophrenia.