The field of developmental psychopathology has grown broadly. Here, I draw upon lessons learned from Dante Cicchetti to highlight areas that show promise for continued disciplinary advancement. These include attention to equifinality and multifinality in the conceptualization of initial study designs, and more emphasis on specificity in accounting for developmental change. A shift from reliance on external events and towards greater diversity of research approaches will allow researchers to devote attention to the variety of ways that individuals come to understand and then respond to their own life experiences. The field of developmental psychopathology holds tremendous promise for advancing basic science about human development that can be applied to create interventions that improve the well-being of individuals and address significant societal issues.

The transition from childhood to adolescence presents elevated risks for the onset of psychopathology in youth. Given the multilayered nature of development, the present study leverages the longitudinal, population-based Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to derive ecologically informed risk/resilience profiles based on multilevel influences (e.g., neighborhood and family socioeconomic resources, parenting, school characteristics) and their transition pathways and examine their associations with psychopathology. Latent profile analysis characterized risk/resilience profiles at each time point (i.e., baseline, Year-1, Year-2); latent transition analysis estimated the most likely transition pathway for each individual. Analysis of covariance was used to examine associations between profile membership at baseline (i.e., ages 9–11) and psychopathology, both concurrently and at Year-2 follow-up. Further, we examined the associations between profile transition pathways and Year-2 psychopathology. Four distinct profiles emerged across time – High-SES High-Protective, High-SES Low-Protective, Low-SES High-Family-Risk, and Low-SES High-Protective. Despite reasonably high stability, significant transition over time among profiles was detected. Profile membership at baseline significantly correlated with concurrent psychopathology and predicted psychopathology 2 years later. Additionally, profile transition pathways significantly predicted Year-2 psychopathology, exemplifying equifinality and multifinality. Characterizing and tracing shifts in ecologically informed risk/resilience influences, our findings have the potential to inform more precise intervention efforts in youth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented youth and families with a broad spectrum of unique stressors. Given that adolescents are at increased risk for mental health and emotional difficulties, it is critical to explore family processes that confer resilience for youth in the face of stress. The current study investigated caregiver emotion regulation (ER) as a familial factor contributing to youth ER and risk for psychopathology following stressful life events. In a longitudinal sample of 224 youth (Mage = 12.65 years) and their caregivers, we examined whether caregiver and youth engagement in ER strategies early in the pandemic mediated the associations of pandemic-related stress with youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms six months later. Leveraging serial mediation analysis, we demonstrated that caregiver and youth rumination, but not expressive suppression or cognitive reappraisal, mediated the prospective associations of pandemic-related stress with youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Greater exposure to pandemic-related stressors was associated with greater caregiver rumination, which, in turn, related to greater rumination in youth, and higher levels of youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms thereafter. Family interventions that target caregiver ER, specifically rumination, may buffer against the consequences of stress on youth engagement in maladaptive ER strategies and risk for psychopathology.

In this essay, I will briefly sample different instances of the utilization of the concept of resilience, attempting to complement a comprehensive representation of the field in the special issue of Development and Psychopathology inspired by the 42nd Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, hosted by the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota and held in October of 2022. Having established the general context of the field, I will zoom in on some of its features, which I consider “low-hanging fruit” and which can be harvested in a systematic way to advance the study of resilience in the context of the future of developmental psychopathology.

Dante Cicchetti propelled forward the field of developmental psychopathology by advancing this framework and championing new methods, including emphasizing the central role that multilevel analysis holds for explicating pathways of risk and resilience. His work continues to change the face of existing science. It has also paved the way for the formation of new projects, like the Research Domain Criteria initiative. This paper uses our laboratory’s work on multilevel approaches to studying adolescent depression, non-suicidal self-injury, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors to shine a spotlight on Dr Cicchetti’s contributions. In addition, we review recent developments, ongoing challenges, and promising future directions within developmental psychopathology as we endeavor to carry on the tradition of growth in the field.

The seminal contributions of Dante Cicchetti to the field/paradigm/metaparadigm of developmental psychopathology (DP) – and its continuing ascendance as a guiding force for multidisciplinary investigation of normative and atypical development – are legion. Our aim is to illustrate a number of DP’s core principles in the context of (a) prospective longitudinal research on children (particularly girls) with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and (b) theoretical and empirical work dedicated to alleviating the stigma and discrimination toward those experiencing mental health, substance use, and neurodevelopmental challenges. We feature (i) the mutual interplay of perspectives on normative and non-normative development, (ii) reciprocal and transactional processes, and the constructs of equifinaliy and multifinality; (iii) continuities and discontinuities in developmental processes and outcomes, with particular focus on heterotypic continuity; (iv) the inseparability of heritable and environmental risk; (v) multiple levels of analysis, and (vi) the benefits of qualitative perspectives. We highlight that interventions promoting recovery, along with the multi-level facilitation of protective factors/strengths, lie at the heart of both DP and anti-stigma efforts. The ongoing youth mental-health crisis provides a sobering counterpoint to the gains of the DP enterprise over the past half century.

The field of developmental psychopathology has grown exponentially over the past decades, and has become increasingly multifaceted. The initial focus on understanding abnormal child psychology has broadened to the study of the origins of psychopathology, with the goals of preventing and alleviating disorder and promoting healthy development. In this paper, we discuss how technological advances and global events have expanded the questions that researchers in developmental psychopathology can address. We do so by describing a longitudinal study that we have been conducting for the past dozen years. We originally planned to examine the effects of early adversity on trajectories of brain development, endocrine function, and depressive symptoms across puberty; it has since become an interdisciplinary study encompassing diverse domains like inflammation, sleep, biological aging, the environment, and child functioning post-pandemic, that we believe will advance our understanding of neurobehavioral development. This increase in the breadth in our study emerged from an expansion of the field; we encourage researchers to embrace these dynamic changes. In this context, we discuss challenges, opportunities, and institutional changes related to the growing interdisciplinarity of the field with respect to training the next generation of investigators to mitigate the burden of mental illness in youth.

A central goal in the field of developmental psychopathology is to evaluate the complex, dynamic transactions occurring among biological, psychological, and broader social-cultural contexts that predict adaptive and maladaptive outcomes across ontogeny. Here, I briefly review research on the effects of a history of childhood maltreatment on parental, child, and dyadic functioning, along with more recent studies on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Because the experience and sequelae of child maltreatment and the intergenerational transmission of trauma are embedded in complex biopsychosocial contexts, this research is best conceptualized in a developmental psychopathology framework. Moreover, there is a pressing need for investigators in this area of study to adopt dynamic, multi-level perspectives as well as using developmentally guided, sophisticated research methods. Other directions for research in this field are suggested, including the implementation of collaborative interdisciplinary team science approaches, as well as community-based participatory research, to increase representation, inclusion, and equity of community stakeholders. A greater focus on cultural and global perspectives is also recommended.

Greater unpredictability in childhood from the level of the caregiver-child dyad to broader family, home, or environmental instability is consistently associated with disruptions in cognitive, socioemotional, behavioral, and biological development in humans. These findings are bolstered by experimental research in non-human animal models suggesting that early life unpredictability is an important environmental signal to the developing organism that shapes neurodevelopment and behavior. Research on childhood unpredictability has surged in the past several years, guided in part by theoretical grounding from the developmental psychopathology framework (shaped largely by Dr. Dante Cicchetti’s innovative work). The current review focuses on future directions for unpredictability research, including probing intergenerational effects, the role of predictability in resilience, cultural and contextual considerations, and novel developmental outcomes that should be tested in relation to childhood unpredictability. We urge the integration of multidisciplinary perspectives and collaborations into future research on unpredictability. We also provide ideas for translating this research to real-world practice and policy and encourage high-quality research testing whether incorporating predictability into interventions and policy improves developmental outcomes, which would support further dissemination of these findings.

In this article, we celebrate Dante Cicchetti’s extensive contributions to the discipline of developmental psychopathology. In his seminal article, he articulated why developmental psychopathology was imperative to create research portfolios that could inform the causes, consequences, and trajectories for adults often initiated by early lived experiences (Cicchetti, 1984). In this three-part article, we share our transdisciplinary efforts to use developmental psychopathology as a foundational theory from which to develop, implement, and evaluate interventions for populations who experienced early adversity or who were at risk for child abuse and neglect. After describing interventions conducted at Mt. Hope Family Center that spanned over three decades, we highlight the criticality of disseminating results and address policy implications of this work. We conclude by discussing future directions to facilitate work in developmental psychopathology. Currently, one of three national National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-funded child abuse and neglect centers, we look forward to continuing to build upon Dante’s efforts to disseminate this important work to improve society for our children, our nation’s often most vulnerable and forgotten citizens.

Developmental psychopathology started as an intersection of fields and is now a field itself. As we contemplate the future of this field, we consider the ways in which a newer, interdisciplinary field – human developmental neuroscience – can inform, and be informed by, developmental psychopathology. To do so, we outline principles of developmental psychopathology and how they are and/or can be implemented in developmental neuroscience. In turn, we highlight how the collaboration between these fields can lead to richer models and more impactful translation. In doing so, we describe the ways in which models from developmental psychopathology can enrich developmental neuroscience and future directions for developmental psychopathology.

Developmental psychopathology has, since the late 20th century, offered an influential integrative framework for conceptualizing psychological health, distress, and dysfunction across the lifespan. Leaders in the field have periodically generated predictions about its future and have proposed ways to increase the macroparadigm’s impact. In this paper, we examine, using articles sampled from each decade of the journal Development and Psychopathology’s existence as a rough guide, the degree to which the themes that earlier predictions have emphasized have come to fruition and the ways in which the field might further capitalize on the strengths of this approach to advance knowledge and practice in psychology. We focus in particular on two key themes first, we explore the degree to which researchers have capitalized on the framework’s capacity for principled flexibility to generate novel work that integrates neurobiological and/or social-contextual factors measured at multiple levels and offer ideas for moving this kind of work forward. Second, we discuss how extensively articles have emphasized implications for intervention or prevention and how the field might amplify the voice of developmental psychopathology in applied settings.

Dante Cicchetti’s remarkable contributions to the field of developmental psychopathology include the advancement of key principles such as the interplay of typical and atypical development, multifinality and equifinality, the dynamic processes of resilience, and the integration of multiple levels of analysis into developmental theories. In this paper we assert that person-centered data analytic methods are particularly well-suited to advancing these tenets of developmental psychopathology. We illustrate their utility with a brief novel empirical study focused on underlying patterns of childhood neuroendocrine regulation and prospective links with emerging adult functioning. Results indicate that a childhood neuroendocrine profile marked by high diurnal cortisol paired with low diurnal DHEA was uniquely associated with more adaptive functioning in emerging adulthood. We discuss these findings, and person-centered methods more broadly, within the future of developmental psychopathology.

Developmental psychopathology has successfully advanced an understanding of risk and protective factors in multivariate models. However, many areas have relied on top-down approaches that define psychological constructs based largely or solely on their physical form. In this paper, we first describe how top-down approaches have significantly hindered progress by generating generic risk and protective models that yield little more than the conclusion that axiomatically positive and negative factors respectively beget an interchangeable array of positive and negative child sequelae. To advance precision and novelty as central priorities, we describe behavioral systems frameworks rooted in evolutionary theory that infuse both form (i.e., what it looks like) and function (what it is designed to do) into psychological constructs. We further address how this paradigm has generated new growing points for developmental models of interparental relationships and parenting. In the final section, we provide recommendations for expanding this approach to other areas of developmental psychopathology. Throughout the paper, we document how the focus on functional patterns of behavior in well-defined developmental contexts advance precision and novelty in understanding children’s response processes to threats, opportunities, and challenges in associations between their developmental histories and their psychological sequelae.

In this paper, dedicated to Dante Cicchetti’s contributions and enduring influence, we explore the prospective directions of developmental psychopathology. Our focus centers on key domains where Cicchetti’s significant achievements have continually shaped our evolving thinking about psychological development. These domains include (a) the concepts of equifinality and multifinality, along with the challenges in predicting developmental trajectories, (b) the imperative to integrate wider sociocultural viewpoints into developmental psychopathology frameworks, (c) the interplay of genetic and environmental influences in developmental courses, (d) the significance of mental state language, and (e) the progress, or its absence, in the development of prevention and intervention tactics for children, adolescents, and their caregivers. While many of our forecasts regarding the future of developmental psychopathology may not materialize, we maintain optimistic that the essential ideas presented will influence the research agenda in this field and contribute to its growth over the next fifty years.

In a thoughtful commentary in this journal a decade ago, Michael Rutter reviewed 25 years of progress in the field before concluding that developmental psychopathology (DP) initiated a paradigm shift in clinical science. This deduction requires that DP itself be a paradigm. According to Thomas Kuhn, canonical paradigms in the physical sciences serve unifying functions by consolidating scientists’ thinking and scholarship around single, closed sets of discipline-defining epistemological assumptions and methods. Paradigm shifts replace these assumptions and methods with a new field-defining framework. In contrast, the social sciences are multiparadigmatic, with thinking and scholarship unified locally around open sets of epistemological assumptions and methods with varying degrees of inter-, intra-, and subdisciplinary reach. DP challenges few if any of these local paradigms. Instead, DP serves an essential pluralizing function, and is therefore better construed as a metaparadigm. Seen in this way, DP holds tremendous untapped potential to move the field from zero-sum thinking and scholarship to positive-sum science and epistemological pluralism. This integrative vision, which furthers Dante Cicchetti’s legacy of interdisciplinarity, requires broad commitment among scientists to reject zero-sum scholarship in which portending theories, useful principles, and effective interventions are jettisoned based on confirmation bias, errors in logic, and ideology.

The field of developmental psychopathology has made significant contributions to our understanding of both typical and atypical development. However, while there are established theories for developmental psychopathology with detailed criteria for pathological outcomes, there is less agreement regarding development under optimal conditions and the definition of positive outcomes. In this conceptual paper, I make the case that a better understanding of positive child development is crucial because it will not only advance our general knowledge on human development but also complement current work on developmental psychopathology. After defining positive development as the development of positive functioning in children, such as skills, strengths, competencies, and wellbeing, rather than the absence of problems, current concepts with relevance for positive development are reviewed, before highlighting gaps in our knowledge on positive development and suggestions for future research. Although several of the reviewed frameworks provide important contributions to the conceptualization of positive development, most of them focus on positive functioning in adults with limited consideration of development in the early years. More research is needed that specifically targets the development of positive outcomes from early childhood onward in order to develop a more comprehensive and holistic theory of positive child development.

The current Special Issue marks a major milestone in the history of developmental psychopathology; as the final issue edited by Cicchetti, we have an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable progress of the discipline across the last four decades, as well as challenges and future directions for the field. With contemporary issues in mind, including rising rates of psychopathology, health disparities, and international conflict, as well as rapid growth and accessibility of digital and mobile technologies, the discipline of developmental psychopathology is poised to advance multidisciplinary, developmentally- and contextually- informed research, and to make substantial progress in supporting the healthy development of individuals around the world. We highlight key future directions and challenges for the next generation of developmental psychopathology research including further investigation of culture at multiple levels of analysis, incorporation of macro-level influences into developmental psychopathology research, methods advances to address heterogeneity in translational research, precision mental health, and the extension of developmental psychopathology research across the lifespan.

The integrative nature of developmental psychopathology is its defining and most remarkable feature. Since its inception, often identified with the special issue of Child Development (Cichetti, 1984), this new discipline has shattered barriers and divisions that until then had artificially compartmentalized the study of human development, and perhaps even psychology in general, and it has proposed new ways of integrative thinking about development. One, developmental psychopathology has programmatically integrated research on typical or adaptive and atypical or maladaptive developmental processes and demonstrated how those inform each other. Two, developmental psychopathology has promoted bridges between developmental research and other disciplines. Three, less explicitly but equally importantly, developmental psychopathology has abolished conceptual and empirical barriers that had existed among various theories and perspectives within developmental psychology by creating a welcoming niche for research inspired by theories often historically seen as contradictory or incompatible. Ideas originating in psychoanalytic, learning, cognitive, ethological, and sociocultural theories all find a welcoming home and seamlessly coexist in heuristically productive harmony within developmental psychopathology, inform each other, and generate exciting questions and insights. This eclectic and conceptually inclusive nature is one reason for developmental psychopathology’s lasting appeal and inspirational power.