Nineteen autistic children were examined in a modified version of Ainsworth's Strange Situation. The attachment security of 15 children could be classified. Each of these children displayed disorganized attachment patterns, but almost half (40%) of them were subclassified as securely attached. To assess the validity of the attachment classifications, children and their mothers were observed in a separate interaction. Mothers of children who were subclassified as securely attached displayed greater sensitivity than mothers of children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children who were subclassified as securely attached more frequently initiated social interaction with their mothers than did children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children with secure and insecure subclassifications were compared to investigate correlations between attachment organization and representational ability and social-emotional understanding. Although children with underlying secure attachments were no more likely to initiate joint attention, they were more responsive to bids for joint attention, made requests more frequently, and demonstrated greater receptive language ability than children subclassified as insecurely attached. Discussion focuses on dynamics that may contribute to individual differences in the attachment organization of autistic children and on the reciprocal relationship between advances in our understanding of normal and pathological development.

This study compared a group of 18 high-functioning children with autism (9–16 years of age) and a group of 14 normally developing children (9–14 years of age) on their abilities to take the perceptual perspective of someone else and to seriate objects based on length, size, weight, and color. Results indicated that the high-functioning children with autism were as able as the normally developing children to seriate the various objects. In contrast, significant differences emerged on the perceptual perspective-taking tasks with the high-functioning children with autism as a group performing less well than the normally developing children. However, the majority of autistic children showed good perspective-taking ability. The implications of these results to our understanding of autism are discussed.

The ability to use language to identify causes for emotion and to describe the subjective experience of various emotions was examined in 28 male and female children and adolescents with autism compared to 28 normally developing and mentally handicapped subjects of equivalent chronological age and mean length of utterance. Mentally handicapped and lower functioning autistic subjects were also similar in verbal IQ. Individuals with autism did not grossly differ from other participants in their descriptions of emotion but were less likely to relate emotions to either reaching a goal or social interaction and more likely to attribute positive emotions to concrete events (e.g., going on a trip). Results are discussed in terms of current cognitive and affective theories of autism.

The purpose of this work was to investigate the way in which boys, ages 6, 8, and 10 years, who are behaviorally disturbed, understand motives behind human behavior, compared to normally functioning peers. Four tasks were administered that differed in surface features but that shared an underlying conceptual structure. A structural analysis of response protocols was undertaken to assess the level of cognitive complexity of their productions. Age-appropriate performance required varying degrees of intentional understanding (i.e., the reciprocal causal relations between action and mental states such as feelings and desires). The results of this analysis supported our predictions that behaviorally disturbed children use developmentally naive reasoning in the domain of conflict resolution, compared with their normal peers. Additionally, a thematic analysis of the content of responses was performed. The results of this analysis showed that the two groups' reasoning also differed qualitatively, in that the aggressive boys showed greater evidence of socially maladaptive thought, whereas the comparison group's performance was largely adaptive. We propose that early-formed primitive defense mechanisms may interfere with the aggressive group's construction of prosocial mental models of the social world. The results suggest that this line of research, which integrates developmental and psychoanalytic theory, has the potential to offer insight into the mechanisms underlying behavioral aggression.

The objective of this study was to test a social interactional model of physical aggression. Specifically, this model hypothesizes that the performance of physical aggression has its roots in socialization settings that are characterized by high densities of aversive stimuli and that provide frequent reinforcement for escalation to high intensity aversive behavior during social conflict. Social conflicts were observed during 10 hr of interaction of each of 20 mothers and their 5-year-old sons; half of the sons were selected based on evidence of frequent aggression in home and school settings. Simple descriptive and sequential analyses indicated that aggressive relative to nonaggressive dyad members were more likely to engage in conflict, engaged in longer conflicts, were more likely to escalate to higher levels of aversiveness, and were less likely to de-escalate the intensity of conflict. In aggressive and nonaggressive dyads, the cessation of conflict contingent on the escalation of one dyad member was reliably associated with an increased likelihood of escalation and with escalation to higher levels of aversiveness by that member in the subsequent conflict. However, escalation occurred more frequently and was more likely to result in cessation of conflicts in aggressive than nonaggressive dyads.

This study examined multiple paths that can explain the co-occurrence of behaviors comprising a problem behavior syndrome in adolescence. Two hundred sixteen 15–18-year-olds in service programs for at-risk adolescents were assessed twice over a 6–12-month period to examine predictors of changes in levels of their delinquency, unprotected sexual intercourse, and use of soft and of hard drugs. This study considered (a) potential common predictors of multiple behaviors, (b) predictive links among behaviors over time, and (c) whether or not important unique aspects of individual behaviors remain in spite of their co-occurrence. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that the co-occurrence of problem behaviors results from multiple pathways of influence. The future occurrence of several problem behaviors was predicted by adolescents' initial negative expectations in social interactions. In addition, alcohol and marijuana use predicted increases in several other problem behaviors over time. Finally, individual problem behaviors retained important unique characteristics, suggesting the need for further research examining both their syndromal and unique aspects.

In this 6-month prospective study, interactions between intelligence and emotional distress were examined in predicting social competence among 138 inner-city adolescents. The attempt was to extend previous cross-sectional findings obtained with a similar sample of disadvantaged youth. Intelligence was assessed via a nonverbal test of cognitive abilities, and social competence was operationalized based on teacher and peer ratings and school grades. Distress variables examined in interaction with intelligence included internalizing and externalizing symptomatology as well as the more specific internalizing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Interaction effects obtained indicated that intelligent youth who reported high depression and anxiety at Time I showed decreases in social competence over time, whereas those low on initial distress showed improvements in social competence levels. No such associations between initial distress and subsequent social competence were seen among the less intelligent children. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical issues and empirical evidence in developmental psychopathology, and implications for future research are noted.

The secure working model classification of adult attachment, as derived from Main and Goldwyn's (in press) Adult Attachment Interview scoring system, was considered in terms of earned-security and continuous-security. Earned-security was a classification given to adults who described difficult, early relationships with parents, but who also had current secure working models as indicated by high coherency scores; continuous-security referred to a classification in which individuals described secure early attachment relationship with parents and current secure working models. Working models of attachment were classified as earned-secure, continuous-secure, or insecure in a sample of 40 parents of preschool children. Comparisons among the classifications were conducted on a measure of depressive symptoms and two sets of ratings of observed parenting styles. Adults with earned-secure classifications had comparable depressive symptomatology to insecures, with 30% of the insecures, 40% of the earned-secures, and only 10% of the continuous-secures having scores exceeding the clinical cut-off. The rate of depressive symptomatology in the earned-secure group suggests that reconstructions of past difficulties may remain emotional liabilities despite a current secure working model. With regard to parenting styles with their preschoolers, the behavior of earned-secure parents was comparable to that of the continuous-secures. This refinement in conceptualizing secure working models suggests ways for understanding variation in pathways to competent parenting as well as a possible perspective on how adults' adverse early experiences may continue to place them and their children at risk.

Controversy surrounds the role of early social experience in the development of personality disorder. In particular, little is known of the means by which continuities from infancy through adulthood might be mediated. One suggestion is that a person's mental representations of relations between him- or herself and other people, either in the form of “internal working models” or “internal object relations,” provide the essential link. We report on an investigation of this issue in which we focused on the formal qualities of accounts of childhood offered by adults who were drawn from two contrasting clinical groups; borderline personality disorder and dysthymia. The results lend support to the claims made by attachment theory and the object relations school of psychoanalysis, that at least in certain groups of individuals, adults' modes of representing early experience are intimately related to styles of interpersonal functioning. More specifically, the form of interpersonal Psychopathology characteristic of borderline personality disorder may be associated with enmeshed and unresolved patterns of responding to the Adult Attachment Interview of George, Kaplan, and Main (1985) and with reports of low maternal care and high maternal overprotection on the Parental Bonding Instrument of Parker, Tupling, and Brown (1979).