The relationship of various personality and behavior describing characteristics of the mother in earliest childhood (ages 1–3) and in later childhood (ages 6–8) to the child's registered criminality up to the age of 30 was investigated for a sample of 122 males. Maternal attributes were rated by psychologists and nurses. Canonical correlations, measuring the relationship between the set of maternal attributes in young age of the child and the future registered criminality of the subjects, were in the magnitudes of .40 to .50. Both in early and in later childhood, mother's mood and her perceived maturity were attributes that, controlled for socioeconomic status of the home and mother's age, were significantly related to the child's future criminal behavior. In addition, mother's affective attitude in later childhood was significantly related to registered crime among the subjects. The change in prognostic power of maternal attributes from early to later childhood was discussed.

One of the most dramatic findings from quantitative genetic research is that environmental influences shared by siblings in a family do not make the siblings similar in terms of psychopathology. Sibling resemblance for psychopathology appears to be genetic rather than environmental in origin; environmental influences that affect the development of psychopathology must be nonshared and make children in the same family different rather than similar. This study sets out to identify environmental factors that differ for young siblings and to assess associations between such nonshared factors and differences in the older siblings' outcome in two domains: internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Maternal interview and observations of differential maternal and sibling behavior were compared within 67 sibling dyads (younger and older siblings aged 4 and 7 years, respectively, on average), and differential experiences were related to the adjustment of the older sibling, as assessed by mother and teacher. Differential maternal behavior appeared to be particularly important as a predictor of adjustment problems. Older siblings showed internalizing problems in families in which mothers were less affectionate to the older than to the younger sibling. Greater maternal control toward the older than the younger sibling predicted both internalizing and externalizing problems. Differential maternal behavior explained 34% of the variance of internalizing behavior and 27% of the variance of externalizing behavior problems, independent of variance explained by family structure variables. Although the sample was unselected for psychopathology and was too small to permit analyses of the diagnosable extremes of internalizing and externalizing dimensions, these results are encouraging in relation to the goal of identifying systematic sources of nonshared environment that affect the development of psychopathology.

The impact of environmental risk on toddlers' cognitive and linguistic development was investigated in a longitudinal study of 78 high-risk families. The risk factors examined were family social status, mother's psychosocial functioning, and quality of dyadic involvement at 1 year of age (including measures of mother-infant interaction and infant-mother attachment security). Child outcome measures included the Bayley MDI (at 24 months) and the Preschool Language Scale (at 36 months). The data indicate that dyadic involvement was an important mediator in the relation between environmental risk and subsequent child competence. Specific relations among early interactive experiences, infant attachment security, and subsequent cognitive and linguistic gain were examined within a framework of risk and protective factors. The results suggest that secure attachment may operate as a protective factor, but only among the more extreme cases in this exclusively high-risk sample.

The effectiveness of imitating an autistic child's actions as a means for promoting social responsiveness and creative toy play was explored. Fifteen autistic children between the ages of 2 and 6 years and their mothers were assessed before and after a 2-week period during which they engaged in imitative play for 20 minutes per day. At the pre-intervention assessment, autistic children's gaze at mother's face was of longer duration, and their toy play was more creative during imitative play than during a free play session. At the post-intervention assessment, significant cumulative increases in duration of gaze at mother's face and creative toy play were found. Children's positive behavior changes were not found to be a function of developmental level of imitative ability, play skills, Vineland social age, IQ, or severity of autistic symptoms. Instead, the majority of children showed positive responses to this interactive strategy, regardless of these individual characteristics.

This article examines what it means to have a self. My focus is on the essential components of self-experience, the kind of psychological architecture required to construct a self, rather than on the configurations or qualities of individual “selves.” I adopt a developmental perspective and indicate how early childhood autism may afford unique insights into the role of perceptual-affective and interpersonal experience in determining the normal child's developing awareness of self.

We studied the conservation scores of 21 schizophrenic and schizotypal children (aged 6;7–12;5 years) and 21 yoked normal mental age matches and their relationship to the Kiddie Formal Thought Disorder Scale measures. Like the normal children, the schizophrenic/schizotypal subjects were able to recognize the invariance of two dimensional space, number, and substance, but not of weight. Unlike the normal children, the schizophrenic/schizotypal children were poor conservers of continuous and discontinuous matter, and this was related to their illogical thinking scores. Age and IQ accounted for the conservation competence of the normal children. The conservation skills of the patients, however, were associated with the severity of their formal thought disorder scores, not with their age or IQ. The developmental approach employed in this study enabled further clarification of the cognitive parameters of formal thought disorder in middle childhood. We discuss the developmental, clinical, and possible information processing implications of these findings.

This article describes the Rochester Child Resilience Project (RCRP) and summarizes findings based on its initial year of operation. Among 4th-6th-grade urban children who had experienced significant life stress, convergent sources of evidence about current adjustment identified demographically matched samples of 37 stress-affected (SA) and 40 stress-resilient (SR) children. These two groups were compared on 11 test measures designed to expand the nomological definitional net for the concept of childhood resilience. Additionally, separate in-depth individual interviews were conducted with children and primary caregivers. Both test and interview responses significantly differentiated the groups in the predicted directions. Children's group status (SR vs. SA) was predictable on the basis of discriminant function analysis involving five test measures, blind ratings done both for the parent and child interviews, and hierarchical regression analyses reflecting major domains of the parent interview.