International Journal of Behavioral Development 2006, 30 (1), 2–4 http://www.sagepublications.com
© 2006 The International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development DOI: 10.1177/0165025406059966
Developmental psychopathology: Substantive, methodological and policy issues Caroline Braet
Marcel A.G. van Aken
Ghent University, Belgium
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
In recent decades, developmental psychopathology has emerged as a discipline for the study of maladaptive behaviour of children and adolescents from a developmental perspective. The articles in the special section illustrate various substantive and methodological advances in this field, and also discuss treatment and policy implications. In addition, some perspectives on issues are presented that will be on the research agenda for developmental psychopathology in the coming years.
Much of developmental child psychology is concerned with the mechanisms and processes that account for normative development in all children. Knowledge of these universals is fundamental to any understanding of the developmental process. However, when studying the normative development of children, we see many individual variations, sometimes leading children and their environments into experiencing all sorts of problems. Therefore, developmental psychologists often are also interested in individual differences in the developmental process. Within this broad area of research on individual differences in development, a new subdiscipline emerged, created specifically to study children and adolescents with maladaptive behaviour from a developmental perspective. This approach yielded new concepts and a new theoretical framework for disorders in children. Rather than starting from assumptions about origins of disorders in general, a developmental approach would start by using procedures appropriate for the developmental level and the developmental course of a disorder. From these circumstances and motivation, the active research domain known as “developmental psychopathology” was born. Achenbach (1990) provided the following definition of this emerging field: “developmental psychopathology: a general approach to understanding relations between development and its maladaptive deviations” (p. 3). The discipline is still young, hardly 20 years old. It effectively started with the seminal chapter on developmental psychopathology, written by Rutter and Garmezy (1983), in the prestigious Handbook of Child Psychology edited by Mussen. Subsequently, the first issue of the journal on Development and Psychopathology (1989) was published, and in 1990 the first handbook by Michael Lewis and Suzanne Miller came out (Lewis & Miller, 1990). In the same year Charles Wenar (1994) published a book with the same title. In this special section, Masten provides more details on the becoming of developmental psychopathology. Today, we find more than 1000 articles on development and
psychopathology. Several studies on a larger scale using longitudinal designs have been conducted, and even more are now under way or are being started. Major findings are reported at an impressive rate that increases every year. This increased level of activity is due to several factors, not the least of which is the recognition that giving young people a healthy start in life is critical for a society’s well-being. It takes pressure off the health care system as well. As a result, the interest in the roots of adjustment and maladjustment during childhood has never been stronger. It is expected that important findings will continue to be published over the next few years. Accordingly, the present moment may be a good time to see where we are and where we will be going in the next few decades. The present set of articles was intended to achieve this goal. The articles in this section of the International Journal of Behavioral Development include most of the contributions to a preconference workshop on developmental psychopathology connected to the 2004 Biennial Meetings of ISSBD in Ghent, Belgium. The preconference aimed at providing (young) researchers with an overview of recent developments and future directions in developmental psychopathology. In addition to substantive and methodological contributions, special attention in the preconference and in this special section is devoted to the translation of developmental psychopathological research into policy. Sometimes clinicians and researchers in child psychopathology classify childhood disorders along a number of dimensions: Externalizing problems (e.g., conduct disorders) versus internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety) or undercontrolled disorders (e.g., aggression) versus overcontrolled disorders (e.g., obsessions). In this special issue we present articles on internalizing as well as externalizing problems. Although such a dimensional approach is useful, it is not always clear where a specific problem is to be located along a particular dimension. In addition, dimensions are not totally independent from each other. Therefore, to facilitate research and to improve communication between clinicians and
Correspondence should be sent to Caroline Braet, Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, H. Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium; e-mail: caroline.braet@ ugent.be, or Marcel van Aken, Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands; e-mail:
[email protected]
The authors would like to thank all the presenters and participants of the preconference workshop on developmental psychopathology in Ghent, 2004, the Jacobs Foundation for their financial support of this preconference workshop, and Leni Verhofstadt-Deneve for her constructive comments.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2006, 30 (1), 2–4
researchers, the articles in this section will refer to more defined disorders as mentioned in the clinical practice (e.g., depression, anxiety, aggression, conduct disorders) and measured by well-recognized screening instruments or as described in the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1997) or both. Epidemiological studies typically reveal that a prevalence rate of emotional disorders of about 2 to 8% in the overall population of children can be expected. Developmental patterns have been found for childhood anxieties as well as for the frequency of children’s fears and anxiety. Muris (this issue) will present a “state of the art” on the growing knowledge on anxiety within a developmental psychopathology framework. The most prevalent kinds of disorder in children are conduct disorders (CD). Psychologists, psychiatrists and parents are very much concerned about these problems. In the DSM-IV (APA, 1997) a CD is defined as a disorder which lasts at least 6 months, during which at least three signals of described problems are presented. Many heterogeneous problems are included: aggression, delinquency, stealing, running away from home overnight, or lying, fire setting, cruelty, and so on. Prevalence rates differ from one study to another. Aggressive behaviour seems to be very pervasive across time and generations. Clearly, more specific research is required before any pronouncements can be made on the prognosis of later antisocial behaviour for aggressive children. Vitaro, Brendgen, and Barker (this issue) discuss these issues in their article. Various methods for studying and diagnosing developmental deviations are now emerging. This includes in particular the longitudinal-epidemiological approach, the study of at-risk populations, reconstructing “developmental pathways”, and the study of protective factors. Though it stands to reason that the stability and the consistency of children’s behaviour are subject to further development, rather more than in adults, Wierson and Forehand (1994) found that in 1992 a mere 4% of articles published in periodicals adopted the longitudinal methodology. A developmental approach to psychopathology emphasizes a longitudinal approach. As Cicchetti (1989) noted, “we had to be concerned with the origins and time course of a given disorder, its varying manifestations with development, its precursors and sequelae, its evolutions in the future” (p. 4). However, as described by Cole in this issue, although new methodologies yield new findings, developmental psychopathologists are also faced with new problems, such as the stability of many variables, thus making the prediction of change difficult. Within the longitudinal approach, there are several traditions of research in developmental psychopathology, which can be used separately or in combination. The more common of these are longitudinal studies of specific risk groups or of population groups as a whole (epidemiological studies). Most researchers follow children who already have a problem or who are “at risk”. The studies on children with conduct problems by Loeber and colleagues (Loeber, 1990) are an illustration of this approach. Longitudinal research is, however, very expensive and difficult because the children in this population tend to move frequently and are often hard to find again after several years. But if we are concerned with the developmental aspects of a given disorder, and with its different manifestations, then we have to find and to follow a great number of children for longer times who have the same problem. So, if these costly studies were conducted, it is important to know how this can be translated into policy.
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Petersen (this issue) discusses in her article that policy implications are mostly considered by developmental researchers, once findings are obtained, as afterthoughts. She proposes a more effective policy research whereby the developmental psychopathologists have considered all possible consequences for the target group as well as the pitfalls before starting a research programme. Several studies are beginning to trace factors which increase the risk of developing a disorder. A risk factor has a different meaning than a correlate of a later outcome. Correlates usually refer to factors that occur at the same time as the outcome and that statistically covary with it. Risk factors, on the other hand, refer to events occurring earlier and which predict a later outcome. Once we know the risk factors, we can translate research into interventions. The contribution of Lochman in this issue of the journal clearly illustrates such an approach. More specifically, he discusses six important ways in which research can influence the development of interventions. The developmental psychopathologist wants to know more about the variations in development and about individual differences in the developmental process. To that end we still need additional research on normal development as well as on protective factors that can help the child when faced with stressful events. Within this field, Masten, Best, and Garmezy (1991) tried to find out exactly why the development of certain children is so successful, in spite of the many difficulties they were faced with. In so doing they described different mechanisms, predictors or protective factors which explain why certain at-risk children manage to cope with their adversities, whereas others do not. This approach requires the strict individualization of the subject, and lays far more stress on specific contextual factors. Growing knowledge is now available that one and the same variable can serve as risk factor for one child but as a protective factor for another child. Especially in childhood, establishing social relations is one of the most important developmental tasks that, depending on the context, can develop into a risk factor or serve as a protective one. In this issue, Bukowski, Adams, and Santo consider new developments in the social domain of the child. It becomes clear in their article that the association between the individual and the social context is complex and multifaceted. It also illustrates how broad the domain of developmental psychopathology can be. Their contribution complements a previous set of articles published in the IJBD last year (see Laursen, 2005; Little & Card, 2005). This special section on developmental psychopathology of course does not pretend to give a comprehensive view of all studies conducted in this domain. Rather, some examples of research and some thoughts on the applications of findings are presented. In addition, in the last article in this section, Masten presents a small preview of what can be expected from developmental psychopathology research in the coming years. Despite the logical links that exist between the provision of psychotherapeutic interventions to children and adolescents and developmental theory and research, too few bridges have been forged between these two domains (Cicchetti & Toth, 1992). Different authors mention in their contributions to this issue that we first need to develop clear theories and test causal hypotheses about achieving change within a developmental framework. These articles all contribute to our knowledge on developmental models of normal and maladaptive behaviour in children. It is clear that development in children can manifest itself in different forms and subtypes and that a
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contextual approach is indicated. This makes the field of developmental psychopathology fascinating. We hope that this issue will inspire and challenge the developmental researcher!
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Little, T.D., & Card, N.A. (2005). On the use of the social relations and the actor-partner interdependence models in developmental research. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 29, 173–179. Lewis, M., & Miller, S.M. (1990). Handbook of developmental psychopathology. New York: Plenum Press. Loeber, R. (1990). Development and risk factors of juvenile antisocial behavior and delinquency. Clinical Psychological Review, 10, 1–41. Masten, A.S., Best, K.M., & Garmezy, N. (1991). Resilience and development: contributions from the study of children who overcome adversity. Development and Psychopathology, 2, 425–444. Rutter, M., & Garmezy, N. (1983). Developmental psychopathology. In P.H. Mussen (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology, Volume iv: Socialization, personality and social development (pp. 775–911). New York: John Wiley. Wenar, C.H. (1994). Developmental psychopathology, 3th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wierson, M., & Forehand, R. (1994). Introduction to special section: The role of longitudinal data with child psychopathology and treatment: Preliminary comments and issues. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 883–886.
