Child Psychiatry Journals

Development and Psychopathology, Volume 20 Issue 01


This multidisciplinary journal is devoted to the publication of original, empirical, theoretical and review papers which address the interrelationship of normal and pathological development in adults and children. It is intended to serve and integrate the field of developmental psychopathology which strives to understand patterns of adaptation and maladaptation throughout the lifespan. This journal is of interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists, neuroscientists, paediatricians, and researchers.

Data were analyzed from 641 children and their families in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to test the hypotheses that in the early school years, mothers' and fathers' sensitive support for autonomy in observed parent-child interactions would each make unique predictions to children's reading and math achievement at Grade 3 (controlling for demographic variables), children's reading and math abilities at 54 months, and children's level of effortful control at 54 months and that these associations would be mediated by the level of and changes over time in children's observed self-reliance in the classroom from Grades 1 through 3. The authors found that mothers' and fathers' support for autonomy were significantly and uniquely associated with children's Grade 3 reading and math achievement with the above controls, but only for boys. For boys, the effect of mothers' support for child autonomy was mediated by higher self-reliance at Grade 1 and of fathers' support for child autonomy by greater increases in self-reliance from Grades 1 through 3. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Children's reasoning about individuals' willingness to disclose their successes and failures was investigated among 194 6- to 11-year-olds in the United States and China. In Study 1, participants showed a valence-matching effect, in which they predicted that individuals would be more likely to disclose their performance to an audience of friends if the friends' level of achievement was similar rather than dissimilar. This effect was weaker among children from China, who were more likely to justify their responses with reference to the implications for learning together or improving future performance. Results of Study 2 suggest that for children from the United States, the disclosure of successful performance to a friend who has performed poorly is seen as implicitly conveying the message "I'm better than you," whereas for children from China the message is "I can help you to do better." Results are interpreted with reference to cultural values and expectations about helping others to learn. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

This study examined the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure, environmental risk, and maternal verbal intelligence on children's cognitive ability. Gender and age were examined as moderators of potential cocaine exposure effects. The Stanford-Binet IV intelligence test was administered to 231 children (91 cocaine exposed, 140 unexposed) at ages 4, 6, and 9 years. Neonatal medical risk and other prenatal exposures (alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana) were also examined for their unique effects on child IQ. Mixed models analysis indicated that prenatal cocaine exposure interacted with gender, as cocaine-exposed boys had lower composite IQ scores. Age at assessment did not moderate this relation, indicating that cocaine-exposed boys had lower IQs across this age period. A stimulating home environment and high maternal verbal IQ also predicted higher composite IQ scores. Cocaine-exposed boys had lower scores on the Abstract/Visual Reasoning subscale, with trends for lower scores on the Short-Term Memory and Verbal Reasoning subscales, as exposure effects were observed across domains. The findings indicate that cocaine exposure continues to place children at risk for mild cognitive deficits into preadolescence. Possible mechanisms for the Exposure × Gender interaction are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Although there has been much debate over the content of children's first words, few large sample studies address this question for children at the very earliest stages of word learning. The authors report data from comparable samples of 265 English-, 336 Putonghua- (Mandarin), and 369 Cantonese-speaking 8- to 16-month-old infants whose caregivers completed MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and reported them to produce between 1 and 10 words. Analyses of individual words indicated striking commonalities in the first words that children learn. However, substantive cross-linguistic differences appeared in the relative prevalence of common nouns, people terms, and verbs as well as in the probability that children produced even one of these word types when they had a total of 1-3, 4-6, or 7-10 words in their vocabularies. These data document cross-linguistic differences in the types of words produced even at the earliest stages of vocabulary learning and underscore the importance of parental input and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural variations in children's early word-learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

While well-established attachment measures have been developed for infancy, early childhood, and adulthood, a "measurement gap" has been identified in middle childhood, where behavioral or representational measures are not yet sufficiently robust. This article documents the development of a new measure--the Child Attachment Interview (CAI)--which seeks to bridge this gap. The CAI is a semistructured interview, in which children are invited to describe their relationships with their primary caregivers. The coding system is informed by the Adult Attachment Interview and the Strange Situation Procedure, and produces 4 attachment categories along with a continuous measure of attachment security based on ratings of attachment-related dimensions. The main psychometric properties are presented, including interrater reliability, test-retest reliability, and concurrent and discriminant validities, both for normally developing children and for those referred for mental health treatment. The CAI correlates as expected with other attachment measures and predicts independently collected ratings of social functioning. The findings suggest that the CAI is a reliable, valid, and promising measure of child-parent attachment in middle childhood. Directions for improvements to the coding system are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of social preference and perceived acceptance as moderators of the relation between child temperament and externalizing behavior. Participants included 399 children evaluated at pre-kindergarten and kindergarten assessments. Pre-kindergarten children characterized by high temperamental Surgency/Extraversion were more likely to exhibit hyperactivity and aggression in the kindergarten classroom. In addition, kindergarten perceived acceptance and social preference moderated the relation between pre-kindergarten Surgency/Extraversion and kindergarten hyperactivity for girls only. Girls who were characterized by high temperamental Surgency/Extraversion, high perceived acceptance, and low social preference were at risk for higher levels of teacher-reported and peer-nominated hyperactivity. In contrast, accurately high perceived acceptance was a protective factor for high temperamental Surgency/Extraversion. Findings are discussed in terms of risk and protective factors for externalizing behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Disorganized attachment in infancy is known to predict a wide range of maladaptive outcomes, but its origins are poorly understood. Parental lack of resolution concerning loss or trauma has been proposed to result in atypical parenting behaviors, which in turn have a disorganizing effect on the parent-child relationship. The authors review the evidence for this transmission pathway, considering other factors (e.g., social environment, child characteristics) that might enrich understanding of the antecedents of disorganization. A threshold approach is proposed to explain (a) why different parental behaviors are linked to disorganization depending on prevailing social conditions and (b) why certain children appear more vulnerable to forming a disorganized attachment relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Despite the fact that faces are typically seen in the context of dynamic events, there is little research on infants' perception of moving faces. L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz (2002) demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminate and remember repetitive actions but not the faces of the women performing the actions. The present research tested an attentional salience explanation for these findings: that dynamic faces are discriminable to infants, but more salient actions compete for attention. Results demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminated faces in the context of actions when they had longer familiarization time (Experiment 1) and following habituation to a single person performing 3 different activities (Experiment 2). Further, 7-month-old infants who have had more experience with social events also discriminated faces in the context of actions. Overall, however, discrimination of actions was more robust and occurred earlier in processing time than discrimination of dynamic faces. These findings support an attentional salience hypothesis and indicate that faces are not special in the context of actions in early infancy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

In a 19-year longitudinal study, the 15% most inhibited and the 15% most aggressive children at ages 4-6 years were followed up until age 23 years and were compared with controls who were below average in preschool inhibition or aggressiveness. As adults, inhibited boys and girls were judged as inhibited by their parents and showed a delay in establishing a first stable partnership and finding a first full-time job. However, only the upper 8% in terms of inhibition tended to show internalizing problems, including self-rated inhibition. Aggressive boys showed an externalizing personality profile in the parental and self-judgments, were educational and occupational underachievers, and showed a higher adult delinquency rate than the controls, even after sex and socioeconomic status were controlled. The results suggest delayed social transitions without internalizing problems for most male and female inhibited children and a significant long-term risk of an externalizing profile for aggressive children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

This study used a narrative approach to understand how emerging adults experience ethnicity in their everyday lives and to link ethnic identity processes with the content of how ethnic identity is experienced. Participants were 191 ethnically diverse emerging adults who completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) and provided a written narrative about a time at which they became aware of their ethnicity. Participants' narratives differed significantly by ethnic group and by ethnic identity status membership, as indexed by the MEIM. The results underscore the value of adopting a narrative approach to understanding the content of ethnic identity and the links between content and ethnic identity development processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Selection and socialization have been implicated in friendship homophily, but the relative contributions of each are difficult to measure simultaneously because of the nonindependent nature of the data. To address this problem, the authors applied a multiple-groups longitudinal actor-partner interdependence model (D. A. Kashy & D. A. Kenny, 2000) for distinguishable dyads to 3 consecutive years of intoxication frequency data from a large community-based sample of Swedish youth. Participants, ranging from 12 to 18 years old (M = 14.35, SD = 1.56) at the start of the study, included 902 adolescents (426 girls and 476 boys) with at least one reciprocated friend during at least one time point and 212 adolescents (84 girls and 128 boys) without reciprocated friends at any time. Similarity estimates indicated strong effects for selection and socialization in friends' intoxication frequency. Over time, younger members of these dyads had less stable patterns of intoxication than older members, largely because younger partners changed their drinking behavior to resemble that of older partners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

According to the mental-state reasoning model of suggestibility, 2 components of theory of mind mediate reductions in suggestibility across the preschool years. The authors examined whether theory-of-mind performance may be legitimately separated into 2 components and explored the memory processes underlying the associations between theory of mind and suggestibility, independent of verbal ability. Children 3 to 6 years old completed 6 theory-of-mind tasks and a postevent misinformation procedure. Contrary to the model's prediction, a single latent theory-of-mind factor emerged, suggesting a single-component rather than a dual-component conceptualization of theory-of-mind performance. This factor provided statistical justification for computing a single composite theory-of-mind score. Improvements in theory of mind predicted reductions in suggestibility, independent of verbal ability (Study 1, n = 72). Furthermore, once attribution biases were controlled (Study 2, n = 45), there was also a positive relationship between theory of mind and source memory, but not recognition performance. The findings suggest a substantial, and possibly causal, association between theory-of-mind development and resistance to suggestion, driven specifically by improvements in source monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Adolescents' future expectations are a potentially important precursor of adult attainment and may illuminate how males and females vary in schooling and work. Thus, this longitudinal study examined gender variation in developmental trajectories of educational and occupational expectations from adolescence to adulthood and in connection to corresponding adult attainment. National data (NELS:88) including individuals aged 14 to 26 and hierarchical linear modeling analyses yielded several findings: Males and females had similar developmental trajectories of educational expectations from adolescence to adulthood with the sample average expecting to attend college. Probabilities of expecting a professional occupation were lower for males than females. Adolescent educational and occupational expectations predicted corresponding attainment in adulthood, although the relationship varied by gender. Males who reported high occupational expectations in adolescence had higher occupational attainment in adulthood compared to males with low occupational expectations, whereas females' adult occupational attainment did not vary by their adolescent occupational expectations. Gender variation in expectations and attainment is discussed in light of historical changes, and future directions of research are proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

This investigation addresses the mediational role of friends' characteristics between adolescents' activity breadth (i.e., variety in activity participation) and their later adjustment. Data were drawn from 2 longitudinal studies: the Childhood and Beyond (CAB; N = 925) study and the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS; N = 1,338). Adolescents at Time 2 in each study (8th, 9th, and 11th graders in CAB and 8th graders in MADICS) reported on the breadth of their participation across 5 activity settings: sports, religious, volunteering, community, and school. Friends' characteristics and adolescent adjustment were reported by adolescents at Times 1 and 3. Friends' positive characteristics significantly mediated relations between activity breadth and adolescent depressive affect, self-worth, alcohol use, and problem behavior in both studies. Friends' negative characteristics significantly mediated these relations in CAB, but not in MADICS. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Relations of maternal and child characteristics to child cortisol reactivity to and recovery from emotional arousal were examined prospectively at approximately 7 months of age (infancy) and then again at approximately 15 months of age (toddlerhood). The sample was diverse and population based (N = 1,292 mother-infant dyads) and included families from predominantly low-income, rural communities. Maternal behavior, family income-to-need ratio and social advantage, and child temperament, attention, and mental development were assessed, and children's saliva was sampled before and after standardized procedures designed to elicit emotional arousal. Maternal engagement in infancy was associated with greater cortisol reactivity at the infancy assessment and with reduced overall cortisol level at the toddler assessment. Also at the toddler assessment, child attention, mental development, and temperamental distress to novelty were associated with increased cortisol reactivity and regulation, whereas temperamental distress to limitations and African American ethnicity were associated with reduced cortisol reactivity. Findings are consistent with prior work linking early caregiving to the development of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress response system and with a conceptual model in which developing temperament is characterized by the interplay of emotional reactivity and the emergence of the ability to effortfully regulate this reactivity using attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Trajectories of emotion regulation processes were examined in a community sample of 269 children across the ages of 4 to 7 using hierarchical linear modeling. Maternal depressive symptomatology (Symptom Checklist-90) and children's physiological reactivity (respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) and vagal regulation (?RSA) were explored as predictors of individual differences in trajectories of emotion regulation and negativity (mother-reported Emotion Regulation Checklist; A. M. Shields & D. Cicchetti, 1997). In addition, the authors explored whether children's physiological regulation would moderate the effect of maternal depressive symptomatology on children's emotion regulation trajectories. Results indicated that over time, emotion regulation increased whereas negativity decreased, though considerable individual variability in the pattern of change was observed. Greater maternal depressive symptomatology was associated with less steep emotion regulation trajectories. There was a significant Maternal Depressive Symptomatology × Baseline RSA × Age interaction predicting emotion regulation trajectories. Overall, it appears that the development of emotion regulation over time is compromised when mothers report greater depressive symptomatology. There is also evidence that children's capacity for physiological regulation can buffer some of the adverse consequences associated with maternal depressive symptomatology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

This study investigated the prospective predictors of body image in 9- to 12-year-old girls. Participants were 150 girls in Grades 4-6 with a mean age of 10.3 years. Girls completed questionnaire measures of media and peer influences (television/magazine exposure, peer appearance conversations), individual psychological variables (appearance schemas, internalization of appearance ideals, autonomy), and body image (figure discrepancy and body esteem) at Time 1 and 1 year later at Time 2. Linear panel analyses showed that after controlling for Time 1 levels of body image, none of the Time 1 sociocultural variables predicted body image variables at Time 2. Body mass index (BMI; a biological variable) and psychological variables, however, did offer significant prospective prediction. Specifically, higher BMI, higher appearance schemas, higher internalization of appearance ideals, and lower autonomy predicted worsening body image 1 year later. Thus, higher weight and certain psychological characteristics were temporally antecedent to body image concerns. It was concluded that both biological and individual psychological variables play a role in the development of body image in children. Individual psychological variables, in particular, may provide useful targets in prevention and intervention programs addressing body image in 9- to 12-year-old girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

The authors investigated the relationship between the acquisition of cultural life scripts and the degree of coherence in children's and adolescents' life stories. Three groups of Danish school children aged 9 to 15 years participated. In 3 sessions, they wrote down a recently experienced single autobiographical event, their life story, and their cultural life script. Single-event and life stories were scored for coherence; life scripts were scored for normativity compared to an adult norm. Single-event stories and life stories were longer and more coherent in the older participants. Younger participants wrote significantly more coherent single-event stories than life stories. When controlling for age, single-event story coherence and global life story coherence did not correlate significantly, suggesting different developmental pathways. Life script normativity increased steadily across childhood and adolescence. Further, a significant relationship between the normativity of life scripts and the coherence of life stories, but not the coherence of single-event stories, was found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)