The domain of developmental psychopathology

It is the "developmental" component of developmental psychopathology that distinguishes this discipline from abnormal psychology, psychiatry, and even clinical child psychology. At the same time, the focus on individual patterns of adaptation and maladaptation distinguishes this field from the larger discipline of developmental psychology. In this essay a developmental perspective is presented, and the implications of this perspective for research in developmental psychopathology are discussed. A primary consideration is the complexity of the adaptational process, with developmental transformation being the rule. Thus, links between earlier adaptation and later pathology generally will not be simple or direct. It will be necessary to understand both individual patterns of adaptation with respect to salient issues of a given developmental period and the transaction between prior adaptation, maturational change, and subsequent environmental challenges. Some examples are discussed, with special attention to the case of depression.     

Tracing the Cascade of Children’s Insecurity in the Interparental Relationship: The Role of Stage‐Salient Tasks

This study examined whether children’s difficulties with stage‐salient tasks served as an explanatory mechanism in the pathway between their insecurity in the interparental relationship and their disruptive behavior problems. Using a multimethod, multi‐informant design, 201 two‐year‐old children and their mothers participated in 3 annual measurement occasions. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that coder ratings of children’s insecure responses to interparental conflict from a maternal interview predicted observer ratings of their difficulties with stage‐salient tasks (i.e., emotion regulation, autonomy, resourceful problem solving) 1 year later after controlling for initial stage‐salient task performance. Stage‐salient task difficulties, in turn, predicted experimenter reports of children’s behavior problems 1 year later. Associations remained robust in the broader context of other pathways hypothesized in prevailing developmental cascade models.     

Action speaks louder than words: young children differentially weight perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn verbs

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.     

Attachment Security and Developmental Patterns of Growth in Executive Functioning During Early Elementary School

Despite the extensive research demonstrating the importance of child executive functioning (EF) for school adjustment, little longitudinal work has formally examined developmental change in EF during the early school years. Based on a sample of 106 mother–child dyads, the current longitudinal study investigated patterns of growth in child performance on three executive tasks between kindergarten (M_age = 6 years) and Grade 3 (M_age = 9 years), and the predictive role of earlier mother–child attachment security in these patterns. The results suggest that early elementary school is a period of significant developmental improvement in child EF, although child performance on different EF tasks follows distinct trajectories across time. The study also provides evidence for a sustained relation between children's early attachment security and their ongoing acquisition of executive skills.     

Opportunities for Neurodevelopmental Plasticity From Infancy Through Early Adulthood

Multiple and rapid changes in brain development occur in infancy and early childhood that undergird behavioral development in core domains. The period of adolescence also carries a second influx of growth and change in the brain to support the unique developmental tasks of adolescence. This special section documents two core conclusions from multiple studies. First, evidence for change in brain‐based metrics that underlie cognitive and behavioral functions are not limited to narrow windows in development, but are evident from infancy into early adulthood. Second, the specific evident changes are unique to challenges and goals that are salient for a respective developmental period. These brain‐based changes interface with environmental inputs, whether from the child's broader ecology or at an individual level.     

Evaluating the Continuity of Offending from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and its Effect on Academic Failure among College Student Arrestees: A Research Note

Life-course/developmental criminology has generated a significant amount of research in recent years, yet some questions remained unanswered. The current study seeks to fill the gap in the literature by exploring two related research questions: (1) Are there identifiable factors that distinguish offenders who demonstrate continuity in their offending in adolescence and emerging adulthood? (2) Does offending continuity increase the likelihood for experiencing negative adult outcomes? Using official data from 1,920 college student arrestees, the results of this study suggest that males and violent offenders are significantly more likely to demonstrate offending continuity, and that offending continuity significantly increases the likelihood of academic failure in college (e.g. dropping out). Study limitations and implications are discussed.     

Self-evaluation in young children.

A series of studies was conducted to examine the development of self-evaluation in children aged 1-5 years. Developmental changes in children's reactions to achievement-related outcomes were assessed in a variety of contexts, using different tasks and different criteria for success. The first study of 1-3-year-olds revealed an increased social orientation after the age of 21 months. Only children over this age were more likely to look up at the experimenter after they had produced an outcome themselves than after the same outcome had been produced by the experimenter. These older children were also more likely than younger children to call their mothers' attention to their achievements in a free-play situation. In a second study, on a task with visibly salient success versus failure outcomes, children aged 2-5 years responded to success with positive affect (e.g., smiling) and to failure with avoidance reactions (e.g., looking away from the experimenter). Praise enhanced children's positive affective reactions to success, but its effect was modest. In the final study, winning or losing on a competitive task was not understood by children below age 33 months and had no effect on their affective reactions to the task. In contrast, winning enhanced older children's pleasure in completing the task. Three stages are proposed in the development of self-evaluation. In the first stage, children experience joy in causality, but they lack the cognitive representational skills required for self-evaluation in a self-reflective sense, and they do not anticipate others' reactions to their performance. In the second stage, beginning before the age of 2 years, children anticipate adult reactions, seeking positive reactions to their successes and endeavoring to avoid negative reactions to failure. The proposed third stage involves a gradual internalization of external reactions, with children beginning to evaluate their performance and react emotionally to success and failure independently of their expectations of adult reactions. Although all studies focused on achievement outcomes, the development of self-evaluation in the moral domain may parallel this developmental sequence proposed for the achievement domain. It is also proposed that caretakers' reactions to rule violations might engender concerns about meeting adult expectations in achievement contexts.     

Taking the Initiative in Learning: A Developmental Investigation of Infants with Down Syndrome

A GROUP OF 16 infants with Down syndrome (DS) aged between 6 and 24 months were exposed to two operant learning tasks. One schedule allowed the infant 100% control over delivery of reinforcement (the rotation of a mobile); the other also allowed the infant total control but included a small proportion (10%) of ‘free’, computer‐inserted reinforcement. The response of subjects with DS to both tasks was compared with that of two control groups of nonhandicapped subjects, one matched for chronological age with the infants with DS, the other matched for developmental age. The performance of DS and ‘matched’ subjects differed on a number of levels, with a developmental pattern emerging in subjects with DS of increasing adoption of counterproductive learning behaviours with increasing age.     

Parents,Sons and Daughters:

This selective review highlights some representative types of problems students and parents experience during the college years. The key issue is adaptation to change. Academic work impairment, disruptions in parent-child and family relationships, interpersonal problems with peers as well as teachers at college can, more often than not, be related to the "normal" developmental changes occurring both in parents and college students whose life cycles and developmental tasks intersect and interact. These tasks and related problems include students' separation and independence from parents, imparied academic work performance, social and sexual difficulties, and severe emotional problems including suicidal and psychotic behavior. In this presentation neither panaceas nor easy solutions to student emotional problems are offered. Instead, an attempt is made to provide a psychological perspective, to clarify the issues, to suggest ways of avoiding certain problems and, where problems already exist, to show possible directions for successful outcomes.     

A follow-up study of dyslexic boys

Over 500 men who attended the Gow School, an independent school for boys with developmental dyslexia, were given a follow-up questionnaire from 1 to 38 years after they left the school. More than half had graduated from college; business was the most frequently chosen major in college; most were employed in managerial or related business positions; and their adult reading habits and attitudes did not compare well with those of other men of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Socioeconomic status and IQ were not predictive of adult outcome among these men in contrast to their effect in the general population. An important result was that severity of the reading problem upon entrance to Gow and the academic and remedial progress of the men while at the school were highly predictive of adult educational, occupational, and attitudinal status. This work was supported by funds from NIH grant HD00486, the Gow School, and the John F. Kennedy Institute.     

Links between systems of inhibition from infancy to preschool years

Links between early and late emerging inhibitory characteristics of young children are poorly understood. Based on existing evidence, this study proposed an indirect link between reactive inhibition to novelty (fearfulness) and later emerging effortful inhibition of prepotent response tendencies. A model was tested that posits that fearful children have opportunistic advantages in developing a nonimpulsive approach style in contexts that are not imbued with salient novelty cues. That nonimpulsive approach style, in turn, facilitates future effortful inhibition. Longitudinal panel data, all based on observational measures, at 9, 14, 22, 33, and 45 months were used to support the proposed indirect link. The implications for understanding regulatory influences of fearful behavior and developmental complexity in child characteristics are discussed.     

The influence of college students' epistemological style on selected problem-solving processes

Given the paucity of data supporting college students' epistemological style as an educationally relevant construct, we examined the degree to which individual differences in this style were predictive of various cognitive processing activities adopted to several problem-solving tasks. Twenty-two college subjects from each of three different epistemological groups—dualistic, multiplistic, and relativistic—were randomly selected to complete both a syllogism and Ink Blot problem-solving task. The results showed that the three epistemological groups reliably differed in how they mentally organized the ink blot stimuli, but not the syllogism problems. The findings are discussed as supporting the notion that the epistemology construct is an educationally salient source of individual differences, especially when performance tasks are ambiguous and ill-defined.     

Assessment of three-and-a-half-year-old children's emerging phonological awareness in a computer animation context

Four computer-animated tasks were created to analyze the underlying structure of emerging phonological awareness at 3.5 years of age and to explore the factors that influence children's (N = 91) performance on the tasks. Our findings indicated that already at this young age, children are able to master tasks demanding identification, blending, and continuation of phonological units when the tasks are presented in a motivating assessment context. In line with earlier research, children showed higher mastery in dealing with words and syllables than in dealing with phonemes. Targets in the initial position of a word were easier for children to identify than those in the final position. Our analysis provided support for two major dimensions of emerging phonological awareness based on the cognitive operations of the tasks: identification and blending of phonological units.     

Expressive Vocabulary Predicts Nonverbal Executive Function: A 2-year Longitudinal Study of Deaf and Hearing Children

Numerous studies suggest an association between language and executive function (EF), but evidence of a developmental relationship remains inconclusive. Data were collected from 75 deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and 82 hearing age-matched controls. Children were 6–11 years old at first time of testing and completed a battery of nonverbal EF tasks and a test of expressive vocabulary. These tasks were completed again 2 years later. Both groups improved their scores on all tasks over this period. DHH children performed significantly less well than hearing peers on some EF tasks and the vocabulary test at both time points. Cross-lagged panel models showed that vocabulary at Time 1 predicted change in EF scores for both DHH and hearing children but not the reverse.     

Amplitude envelope perception, phonology and prosodic sensitivity in children with developmental dyslexia

Here we explore relations between auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, prosodic sensitivity, and phonological awareness in a sample of 56 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. We examine whether rise time sensitivity is linked to prosodic sensitivity, and whether prosodic sensitivity is linked to phonological awareness. Prosodic sensitivity was measured by two reiterant speech tasks modelled on Kitzen (2001). The children with developmental dyslexia were significantly impaired in the reiterant speech tasks and in the phonological awareness tasks (onset and rime awareness). There were significant predictive relations between basic auditory processing of amplitude envelope structure (in particular, rise time), prosodic sensitivity, phonological awareness, reading, and spelling. The auditory processing difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia appear to impair their sensitivity to phrase-level prosodic cues such as metrical structure as well as to phonology, but in this study phonological and prosodic sensitivity made largely independent contributions to reading.     

The Fate of Early Experience Following Developmental Change: Longitudinal Approaches to Individual Adaptation in Childhood

2 strategies were used to investigate the continued impact of early experience and adaptation given subsequent experience and/or developmental change in a poverty sample (N = 190). Groups were defined whose adaptation was similar during the preschool years but consistently different earlier; then these 2 groups were compared in elementary school. In addition, a series of regression analyses was performed in which variance accounted for by near-in or contemporary predictors of adaptation in middle childhood was removed before adding earlier adaptation in subsequent steps. Children showing positive adaptation in the infant/toddler period showed greater rebound in the elementary school years, despite poor functioning in the preschool period. Regression analyses revealed some incremental power of early predictors with intermediate predictors removed. The results were interpreted as supporting Bowlby's thesis that adaptation is always a product of both developmental history and current circumstances. While this research cannot resolve such a complicated issue, it does point to the need for complex formulations to guide research on individual development.     

Children at work: The home workplace

Young children's early experiences with the adult work world have generally been ignored by researchers. Consequently, little research base exists for understanding children's conceptions of the adult work world. This study, part of a larger investigation of families who work at home for income rather than in separate workplaces, focuses on children's experiences with work in such families. Twenty-seven children ages 7 months to 18 years were observed or interviewed in the family work setting. Findings indicate that all the verbal children held concrete knowledge of their parents' work, as was evidenced by their ability to label jobs, describe procedures, and name tools. Furthermore, all the children were involved with their parents' work in a developmental progression: (1) playing and watching, (2) simple tasks, (3) regular assistance, paid or unpaid, (4) regular paid work. Their experiences suggest that home-working parents play a powerful role in their children's work socialization.     

不同语言能力幼儿在三种错误信念任务中的表现

本研究采用了实验的方法,以言语、非言语性任务,意外转移与表征变化任务为变量,考察了不同语言能力的88名3-4岁幼儿的错误信念理解能力。研究结果发现,降低错误信念任务对语言能力的要求并不能改变幼儿在错误信念理解上的年龄特征;在3岁和4岁两个年龄组中,语言能力超常的幼儿在各项实验任务上的表现均好于语言能力一般的幼儿。     

Cognitive processing and developmental changes in finnish school students: Comparison between normal and language impaired (dysphasic) students

Course of cognitive development was investigated in a sample of normal school students (N=163) in the middle part of Finland by giving the students tests of four cognitive functions that were categorized according to the PASS theory of intelligence (planning, attention, simultaneous and successive processing). Subsequently, a group of students in special education (N=60, language impaired school students) was also studied for possible deviations in cognitive development. The age of the students varied from 7 to 19 years. Three main goals were (1) to study developmental trends of cognitive functions across three different age groups of school students and in two samples, (2) to identify distinct cognitive subgroups and profiles among the students, and, (3) to compare the cognitive profiles of normal and language impaired (dysphasic) students. First, in a cross-sectional design, it was seen linear cognitive trends for all PASS tasks, however so, that for the language impaired group the cognitive development was not as salient as for the normal students. Especially successive processing did not show developmental trend in the sample of language impaired (dysphasic) students. Secondly, a cluster analysis procedure following a factor analysis demonstrated two very distinct cognitive subgroups among the normal and dysphasic students. The subgroups in both separate samples differed from each other in successive and simultaneous processes. Additionally, the two subgroups of the normal students differed from each other also in planning. Thirdly, compared to the normal students, the dysphasic highly functioning subgroup did worse than normals in nonverbal successive ordering, but did better in verbal successive task. Contrary to expectations, the deviation was not on the verbal but instead on a nonverbal task. Need for extending PASS research into other types of learning problems (such as arithmetics, severe learning disability) is articulated. Pragmatically, observed minor differences in cognitive structure between the two student samples refer to differential remediation and skill training.     

Children's Theories of the Self

This article provides a theoretical review of the developmental origins of children's “folk theories” about the nature of the self, linking theoretical developments in philosophy with empirical discoveries from developmental psychology. The article first reviews children's views about the material nature of the self, outlining evidence that children naturally think about the self as distinct from the body. It then discusses children's understanding of the persistence of the self over time and, finally, explores children's views about conflict within the self. Together, these findings suggest that preschoolers possess stable, coherent, and predictive theories about the nature of the self that are stable across individuals, early emerging, and in some cases undergo interesting developmental change.