Welcome to Child & Adolescent Psychopathology

1. Welcome to Child & Adolescent Psychopathology Course Website:http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/ggoodman/home.htm Dr. Geoff Goodmanext. 4277ggoodman@liu.edu

2. Basic Course Overview • Please briefly share your academic, professional, and clinical experiences. • What are your expectations for this course? Syllabus: • Did everyone receive a syllabus and relevant readings? • Class dates and holidays Psychopathologies not covered in this course: • Learning Disabilities • Mental Retardation(educational specialists)

3. Goals of the Course • Provide information about risk factors for child and adolescent psychopathology • Provide information about protective factors against the development of child and adolescent psychopathology • Provide information about the major conditions anddisorders that come to clinical attention • This course does not explicitly cover information about intervention strategies.

4. Developmental Psychopathology (DP) as a Scientific Discipline Effects of emotional and behavioral problems in children • Impairments in academic achievement • Impairments in interpersonal competencies • Impairments in independent living skills • Persistence across the lifespan

5. Key Developmental Psychopathological Concepts • Integrate studies of normal and pathological development • Examine developmental continuities and discontinuities of traits, behavior patterns, emotional responses, and diagnoses. • Evaluate evidence across multiple levels of analysis • a. genetic • b. biological • c. psychological • d. family • e. neighborhood • f. culture

6. Key DP Concepts (cont’d) • Use interdisciplinary methods • Clinical and developmental psychology • Child and adolescent psychiatry • Genetics • Neurology • Public health • Philosophy of science • Explore risk and protective factors and their interaction • Use transactional models of influence • Not linear patterns of association • Probabilistic, dynamic, nonlinear, complex conceptual models • Consider social and cultural context in understanding function and meaning of behavioral and emotional states

7. Four Developmental Psychopathology Principles • Equifinality– multiple pathways yield the same psychopathological outcome (mediationalmodels) • genetic constellation • environmental deprivation • prenatal teratogens • brain injury • different combinationsof risk factors or sheernumber of risk factors

8. DP Principles (cont’d) • Multifinality – same pathway to multiple psychopathological outcomes (mediational models) • Consideration of unique subgroups (moderational models): • Common genotypes • Common personality variables • Common socialization practices (e.g., secure base behavior) • Common neighborhoods • Consideration of neuroscientific principles and the role of the brain

9. Importance of Studying “Normal” and Atypical Development • Study of aberrations in normal developmental pathways • Study of normal developmental pathways • Study of normal processes can elucidate atypical processes, while study of atypical processes can elucidate normal processes • Progress in one domain depends on progress in another • Mental disorders are not discrete and categorical, but rather, dimensional and continuous (flaw with DSM-IV) • Schizophrenia-spectrum disorders • Autism-spectrum disorders

10. Developmental Continuities and Discontinuities • Developmental pathways are lawful and coherent • Developmental pathways are sometimes discontinuous (e.g. Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)Conduct Disorder (CD)Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD)) • Different continuities exist across different subgroups (e.g., outcomes of authoritarian parenting in Caucasian, middle-class children versus African American children children)

11. Multiple Levels of Analysis • Examining both “micro” and “macro” levels of analysis • Connecting these various levels from gene expression to cultural expression and their mutual influence • Bottom-up and top-down conceptions must co-exist

12. Risk and Protective Factors • Risk factors – “antecedent variables that predict such dysfunction” (p. 13) • Identify risk factors causal of disorder • Identify risk factors that are malleable • Protective factors (resilience; buffering) – “unexpectedly good outcomes, or competence, despite the presence of adversity or risk” (p. 14; see Crockenberg (1981) study) • Same risk factors might produce different outcomes, depending on the presence of protective factors (multifinality) • Criticism of uniqueness of protective factors because they exist on the opposite end of the continuum with risk factors (e.g., IQ, temperament, parenting)

13. Reciprocal, Transactional Models • Children influence parents, teachers and peers • Parents, teachers, and peers influence children • Early maturing brain regions influence and are influenced by environmental factors • Operation of gene-environment interactions

14. Context Matters • Family, school, neighborhood, and culture are all central to the unfolding of both aberrant and adaptive behavior • Different cultural contexts can provide different meaning to particular behaviors (e.g., suicide)

15. Equifinality and Multifinality • Multiple risk factors related to lowered chances of recovery • Malleability, plasticity, and flexibility in development • Bi-directional influences between genes and epigenetic factors (e.g., brain structures, behavioral patterns, environmental influences)