The objective of this study was to explore the relationship among extremely low birthweight (ELBW), psychopathology, and impairments in adaptive functioning in a regional cohort of 7–8-year-old children with a birthweight of 501–1,000 g compared to a sample of full-term controls. One-hundred twenty-nine of 143 (90%) ELBW survivors and 145 controls, born between 1977 and 1981, agreed to participate in the study. The children were assessed at a mean, unadjusted age of 7.8 years. Results showed that parents of ELBW children were more likely than parents of controls to report specifically problems of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There were few differences between the groups in terms of impairments in adaptive functioning. Further analyses showed that the relationship between ELBW and ADHD could not be explained by confounding psychosocial risk factors, nor were ELBW children from disadvantaged environments more likely to have ADHD problems than ELBW children from nondisadvantaged environments. The relationships between ELBW and ADHD problems appeared to be associated with the lower IQ of the ELBW subjects.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (3rd ed., rev.) (DSM-III-R) diagnosis of conduct disorder assumes that all children who engage in three or more criterion antisocial behaviors for 6 months or more suffer from a mental disorder. It resists all contextual information about a child's developmental history, capacities, strengths and circumstances, and assumes that the antisocial behavior necessarily stems from an underlying disorder. In this review, we use Mark Twain's narrative of the lives of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as a point of departure for questioning the reasonableness of this assumption, and for examining normal as well as pathological pathways to antisocial behavior. We begin by reviewing the status of earlier controversies about the mental disorder concept in the service of documenting the impressive progress of the field in conceptualizing disorder. Next, we examine Wakefield's (1992a, 1992b) recently introduced “harmful dysfunction” concept of mental disorder and employ its criteria to evaluate the hypothesis that chronic antisocial behavior in childhood as defined by DSM-III-R is caused by an underlying mental disorder. We also examine some of the difficulties in discriminating between disorder- and nondisorder-based antisocial behavior, and consider issues that warrant attention in future theoretical and empirical work. Finally, we explore the pragmatic rather than scientific basis for DSM-III-R's mental disorder claim and argue that regardless of its status as a mental disorder, this most troubling and harmful behavior syndrome of childhood deserves the intensive interest, concern, and resources of the scientific and public health communities.

This article summarizes the major findings of a longitudinal study that traced the developmental paths of a multiracial cohort of children who had been exposed to perinatal stress, chronic poverty, and a family environment troubled by chronic discord and parental psychopathology. Individuals are members of the Kauai Longitudinal Study, which followed all children born in 1955 on a Hawaiian island from the perinatal period to ages 1, 2, 10, 18, and 32 years. Several clusters of protective factors and processes were identified that enabled most of these high-risk individuals to become competent and caring adults. Implications of the findings for developmental theory and social action programs are discussed, and issues for future research are identified.

Using longitudinal data, a subsample of 37 high-risk children whose mothers were observed to be intrusive in their interactions with their 6-month-old infants in feeding and play situations were compared to 145 children from the same environmental risk sample. The children of mothers judged to be intrusive were doing poorly academically, socially, emotionally, and behaviorally in first and second grades. The findings were robust even after covarying out the effects of a maternal social/affective interaction factor, IQ, and stressful life events experienced by the family. The relation between an intrusive style of caretaking in infancy and child maladaptation in the early school years is viewed as support for a mutual regulation model of social engagement.

Resilience, the development of competence despite severe or pervasive adversity, is examined using data from a longitudinal study of high-risk children and families. The study is guided by an organizationaldevelopmental perspective. Resilience is conceived not as a childhood given, but as a capacity that develops over time in the context of person-environment interactions. Factors related to resilience in our study are examined in terms of this transactional process. From our studies, we have found emotionally responsive caregiving to mediate the effects of high-risk environments and to promote positive change for children who have experienced poverty, family stress, and maltreatment. The implications of these findings are discussed.

A developmental approach to the classification of antisocial behavior is necessary for two reasons. First, although the continuity of antisocial behavior is strong for many individuals, the topography of antisocial behavior changes during the course of development. Second, antisocial behavior apparently develops in at least two separate pathways — child-onset versus adolescent-onset — that differ markedly regarding types of antisocial behavior displayed, persistence, and perhaps etiology. The development of antisocial behavior must also be understood within the context of co-occurring disorders and conditions. Comorbid attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder appears to be associated with greater aggression and a worse prognosis, and comorbid academic underachievement is also associated with a negative course. Emerging evidence also suggests that comorbid anxiety disorder is associated with level of aggression, but the direction of the correlation appears to differ at different ages. In all, full understanding of conduct disorder requires developmentally sensitive classification as well as consideration of comorbid conditions.

The current study investigated the relationship between previous, recent, or chronic maternal depressive symptoms and subtypes of child behavior problems rated by teachers and mothers among 64 low-income children aged 4–6 years. Sixty-nine percent of mothers with high depressive symptom levels at the preschool assessment had also reported high symptom levels during the child's infancy. Children whose mothers reported depressive symptoms at both ages exhibited significantly elevated rates of hostile behavior problems in the classroom and at home compared to children of never-depressed mothers. Children of mothers who were previously but not currently depressed showed significantly more anxious and withdrawn behavior at school and at home, while children of recently depressed mothers were more hyperactive and demanding. Child cognitive scores and father absence were also related to behavior problems, but these variables did not mediate the independent effects of chronicity and timing of maternal depressive symptoms on the types of child symptoms displayed.

The role of environmental risk and protective factors (attachment, verbal intelligence) in school-aged children's adaptation was examined. Subjects were 45 7-year-old children from low socioeconomic status environments. Security of attachment to mother was assessed by reunion behavior in the laboratory following an hour-long separation. Mothers and teachers reported on behavior problems using the Child Behavior Checklist. Results revealed a higher proportion of insecure attachments and behavior problems than in low-risk populations. Greater risk and less security were associated with poorer behavioral adaptation. Multiple regressions tested a model of protective processes; results demonstrated main effects of attachment security, even after controlling for extent of environmental risk.

We examine resilience in relation to one type of risk — familial risk — from a genetic perspective. Specifically, we ask why only some children growing up with the same familial risk develop psychopathology. Unlike environmental theories, genetics predicts that children in the same family will differ in their outcomes. That is, some children in a family at risk are unaffected not because they are resilient but because they are not at risk genetically. Eventually, some of the genes responsible for genetic risk will be identified, making it possible to predict which children in a family will be affected. Resilience from a genetic perspective can be viewed as the extent to which children at genetic risk are not affected. In addition, there may be genetic contributions to resilience that protect some individuals in high-risk families. Finally, genetic research has shown that salient environment influences often operate in a nonshared manner, making children in the same family different. Research on nonshared environmental factors will advance our understanding of environmental origins of resilience by focusing on environmental reasons why children growing up in high-risk families have such different outcomes.

Many children meet criteria for multiple Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) categories, such as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD). If each disorder has been well validated as a separate entity, statistically significant co-occurrence of different disorders may be highly informative. However, ODD and CD have not been well validated as separate entities. The very high rate of overlap between diagnoses of ODD and CD may therefore arise artifactually from the lack of a valid distinction between them, rather than from potentially informative comorbidity between two different disorders. Empirical research strongly supports a distinction between two syndromes that correspond to subsets of the DSM-III-R criteria for CD. Designated as delinquent behavior and aggressive behavior, these syndromes have been found to differ in biological correlates, heritability, developmental stability, course, response to interventions, and long-term outcomes. At this stage of our knowledge, empirically based assessment and taxonomic methods can be especially useful for distinguishing between syndromes, deriving norms, doing longitudinal studies, and detecting patterns of comorbidity. These methods do not preclude categorical taxa, which can be formed by imposing cutpoints on the distributions of syndrome scores. Categorical taxa can also be formed by cluster analyzing profiles of syndrome scores. Accelerated longitudinal designs can bring multiple analyses to bear on empirically derived syndromes to test complex developmental relations more quickly and powerfully than can traditional longitudinal designs. Follow-ups of high-risk groups can identify variables that predict good versus poor outcomes if standardized baseline and outcome measures are used. Interventions for conduct problems should be designed to counteract the risk factors found to predict poor long-term outcomes.

This study involved observations of children's behaviors in interactive situations with both familiar and unfamiliar partners. The greatest differences between the autistic and nonautistic children were in an unstructured situation where caregivers did not initiate interactions. In this situation, autistic children rarely looked to the partner or initiated social bids to the partner. They also were less focused on the toys available for play compared to nonautistic children. However, the autistic children were similar in their interactive responses to the partner in an adult-initiated social situation. Individual differences confirmed that more able autistic children in terms of cognitive and language abilities also engaged in greater social and communicative behavior with the partner. These findings suggest that the ways in which social deficits are manifested by autistic children are variable with respect to the context in which they are measured.

The goal of this article is to explore the utility of integrating two lines of research on questions of modifiability or plasticity of human development. The first line, dealing with the notion of resilience, originated within the field of clinical developmental research. The second line, concerned with developmental reserve capacity, evolved primarily within the field of life-span developmental psychology. Resilience addresses questions of maintenance and recovery of adaptation in the face of stress. In addition, ideas about levels of reserve capacity, rooted in life-span developmental psychology, emphasize the potential for growth. A review of research in the areas of cognitive and self-related functioning provides evidence for resilience as well as developmental reserve capacity in adulthood and old age. It is argued that across the life span reserve capacity is increasingly allocated to resilience-related processes (maintenance of functioning and recovery from dysfunction) rather than growth. A model of successful aging is discussed which suggests that, by means of selective optimization with compensation, old age nevertheless continues to hold the potential for selective growth.

A discussion of gender and conduct disorder must first answer the basic questions of whether or not there are any differences in prevalence, symptoms, and correlates of conduct disorder by sex. Several epidemiologic studies have found no difference in the prevalence of conduct disorder in adolescence by sex. Correlates of conduct disorder in girls are similar to those in boys (including aggression and internalizing disorders), once base rates of the correlates are accounted for. A major problem in studying conduct disorder in girls is the lack of appropriate criteria; the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (3rd ed., rev.) criteria are not appropriate for girls. A case is made for sex-specific criteria for conduct disorder that take into account known differences in male and female childhood cultures and base-rate differences in aggression and criminality. Until basic issues of diagnosis and prevalence are resolved, other issues such as risk factors and developmental pathways cannot be successfully addressed.

Antisocial behaviors in females may differ from more prototypically “male” patterns of aggression, violence, and criminality that dominate criteria for conduct problems in diagnostic systems. This raises questions of how to define and investigate conduct problems in females as well as how to identify differential childhood antecedents. A developmental psychopathology perspective is advanced as one useful approach to understanding adaptive and maladaptive social patterns in males and females that may lead to different developmental trajectories and influence the forms of psychopathology that develop. The utility of de-emphasizing serious physical aggression as one important criteria for conduct problems is questioned. Recommendations that particular forms of deviance in females be considered as markers of their antisocial patterns (e.g., somatic complaints, friendlessness, underachievement) are also called into question. Rather than adopt sex-specific criteria to assess conduct problems, it is necessary to expand and broaden the diagnostic categories to include serious externalizing problems regardless of whether they occur in males or females.

This research tested the hypothesis that information-processing deficits associated with hyperactivity implicate a self-regulatory dysfunction. Hyperactive and control children were compared on nonspeeded classification tasks. In Studies 1 and 2, children classified sets of either three (triads) or four (tetrads) stimuli. The stimuli varied simultaneously on size and brightness or on length and density. They could be classified analytically (separably) on the basis of identical values for one dimension and holistically (integrally) on the basis of overall similarity. Control children made an equal number of dimensional classifications for triads and for tetrads. As predicted, however, hyperactive children made fewer dimensional classifications for tetrads, suggesting that they apparently resorted to less effortful holistic responding under the increased processing load. In an unexpected finding in Study 1, older hyperactive children appeared to behave like younger controls, making more dimensional classifications when size, rather than brightness, was the shared dimension. Study 3 explored the possibility that hyperactive children lagged behind the controls in their responding to the shared dimensions. Three age groups of normal children (mean ages: 5, 8, and 11 years) and adults were asked to classify stimuli that varied on size and brightness. Consistent with the lag hypothesis, normal preschoolers behaved like the young hyperactive children in Study 1, classifying equally on the basis of size and brightness. The discussion focuses on the contribution of processing load and stimulus salience to the cognitive deficits of hyperactive children.

We examined maternal and paternal characteristics at 1 month postpartum as risk and protective factors for children's internalizing and externalizing problems at 2–3 years of age. In a sample of 70 couples and their children, fathers' depressive symptoms at 1 month postpartum predicted children's internalizing and externalizing problems at 2–3 years of age, and the interaction of fathers' and mothers' depressive symptoms predicted subsequent internalizing problems. Mothers' postpartum symptoms did not predict either type of children's behavior problems at age 2–3. When entered in the regression equations, mothers' depressive symptoms when the children were age 2–3 years accounted for all of the effects of paternal and maternal postpartum depressive symptoms. No evidence was found for the protective effects of marital satisfaction or social support, or for low levels of depressive symptoms in a spouse. We highlight directions for future risk and resilience research related to parental postpartum depression.

Under high-risk conditions of genetic and family environmental origins, some children maintain a high level of adaptive behavior, whereas others develop serious problems. What distinguishes these children? Using measures systematically obtained in a 10-year longitudinal study, standard case studies were developed on 18 resilient children with healthy adaptation throughout development (psychiatric assessment) and on 26 troubled children with serious persistent problems. All children had family risks of affective illness in both parents and a highly chaotic and disturbed family life. Well children of well parents and well-functioning families were a comparison group. The children were preadolescent or adolescent at the time of most recent assessment. The ill and well families had similar demographic characteristics. Resilient and control children were very similar on most measures. Troubled children as a group had lower scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised, were more often shy, had poor academic achievement, and had a history of poor peer relationships. Resilient children elicited more positive reactions from teachers, were more likely to be the favored child in the family, and had more positive self-perceptions. Profiles of each child showed competing processes of vulnerability and coping. Children used a wide range of methods for coping with parental and family pathology. Resilience appeared variably robust or fragile depending on the combinations of risks and supportive factors present and the styles of coping with stress.

In light of putative developmental constraints, some have argued that prior to the middle to late elementary school years children's reports of depressive symptoms represent nothing more than transient developmental phenomena. In an earlier study of an epidemiologically defined sample of first-grade children, self-reported depressive symptoms proved relatively stable and significantly related to adaptive functioning. In the present study, we follow that cohort of first graders longitudinally and assess the prognostic value of self-reports of depressive symptoms in first grade with respect to depressive symptoms and adaptive functioning in the late elementary school years. We also assess whether or not children's reports of depressive symptoms demonstrate greater stability and are more highly associated with adaptive functioning in the middle to late elementary school years. First-grade depressive symptoms were found to have significant prognostic value in terms of levels of depressive symptoms and adaptive functioning in fifth grade, with the strength of prediction varying by gender in the former. Although there was a moderate increase in short-term stability from first to fifth grade, it remained consistently strong across first, fourth, and fifth grades. The magnitude of the relationship between depressive symptoms and adaptive functioning also remained consistent over time. These findings on stability, caseness, and prognostic power attest to the significance of children's self-reports of depressive symptoms in the early as well as the middle to late elementary school years.