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Preface

Developmental Psychopathology is an interdisciplinary field that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is defined as “an evolving scientific discipline whose predominant focus is elucidating the interplay among the biological, psychological, and social contextual aspects of normal and abnormal development across the life span” (Cicchetti, 2006, p. 1). While this definition certainly highlights the enormous undertaking that a developmental psychopathology perspective demands, a number of principles help to guide us:

 Interweaving studies of normal development and pathological functioning into a true synthesis

 Examining developmental continuities and discontinuities of traits, behaviors, emotional responses, and disorders

 Evaluating evidence across multiple levels of analysis to include the biological, individual, family, social, and cultural levels

 Incorporating distinct perspectives: clinical, developmental psychology, child/adolescent psychiatry, genetics, neurology, public health, and philosophy of science into multidisciplinary effort

 Exploring both risk and protective factors and their interplay in order to delineate pathways of risk and resilience

 Involving reciprocal, transactional models of influence in the field’s causal models (e.g., gene–environment interaction)

These principles highlight how the developmental psychopathology approach differs from the traditional descriptive psychiatric approaches represented in most child psychology textbooks. The developmental psychopathology approach goes beyond the “what” of psychopathology to include the “how” of psychopathology. How does normal development go awry? What factors determine the multiple pathways that lead to psychopathology in one child, but not another? Because of the focus on “how,” the developmental psychopathology approach has, over the last 30 years, become the guiding framework for understanding psychopathology in youth. Courses both at the undergraduate and graduate levels are being renamed from “Abnormal Child Psychology” to “Developmental Psychopathology.” Yet, few textbooks have been created to guide teaching of developmental psychopathology courses at the upper undergraduate level.

There are two major challenges in writing a developmental psychopathology textbook: (1) finding organizing principles that can structure a complex, dense, and multidisciplinary field into manageable chapters and (2) not digressing back to a descriptive psychiatric approach of providing information on the “what” of disorders, but rather staying true to the “how” of psychopathology. In addressing these challenges, the organization of the textbook is as follows:

 In Part I, three introductory chapters lay the foundation. First, we want to present how psychology has typically classified and understood psychopathology, highlighting both the benefits and problems of the traditional approach. Building on that background, we then describe how the developmental psychopathology approach can address some of the limitations of the traditional approach. We will use the principles of developmental psychopathology throughout the rest of this book. In Part I, we also provide a summary of normal development, which is key to the developmental psychopathology approach—that is, we understand that normal and abnormal development are both components of understanding disorder. In this section you will also find a chapter on insecure attachment—a way of describing relationships between children and their caregivers—because, when disrupted, those relationships often relate to various forms of psychopathology.

 To showcase the fact that our approach is “developmental,” disorders are organized not following the usual organization in psychopathology textbooks (e.g., mood disorders), but rather how they appear through development. Accordingly, Part II of this book focuses on the problems that first emerge in childhood: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, antisocial behavior, and fear and anxiety. In Part III, we shift our focus further down the developmental course in order to focus on adolescents, with chapters covering depression and suicide, eating disorders, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, and emerging personality disorders. It is important to note that the problems described in Part II also affect teenagers, and that the problems described in Parts II and III also affect adults. We have arranged sections by the stage of development where problems are typically first noticed by individuals and their loved ones, but every chapter reviews psychopathology that exists, in some form, across the whole lifespan. Finally, in Part IV of the book we talk about important topics in developmental psychopathology that were not covered elsewhere, like maltreatment and divorce, separation, and loss. We close with a chapter asking “quo vadis?” or “where do we go from here?” which looks to the future.

 Disorder chapters will be organized similarly: (1) defining the disorder according to the DSM, (2) presenting the most empirically validated developmental psychopathology model for that disorder, reflecting the interplay between risk and protective factors across multiple levels of analyses—to include the biological, individual, social, and cultural factors, (3) discussing the empirical evidence in support of each of the etiological factors in the model, including studies that have tested interactions between factors (e.g., gene–environment studies), (4) presenting assessment and intervention implications, and (5) highlighting areas for future research.

 Each chapter will contain a figure capturing the developmental psychopathology approach visually. Your first introduction to that figure is in this preface, where each of the terms is defined (see Figure 1). You will also see this framework through the remainder of the book and we encourage you to refer back here when you need a reminder of what each component represents.

FIGURE 1 Developmental Psychopathology Framework

It is our hope that this textbook will provide you with a rich understanding of psychopathology that moves beyond simple characterizations of mental health disorder as something you either do or do not have—something that was absent one day and emerged the next. The developmental psychopathology approach instead paints a more complicated, flexible picture of psychopathology. We will review research in each of the areas described above, showing that psychopathology emerges through the combination of many factors that shift across time—some of which are deeply buried in our biology and some of which exist in our outside environments. This approach is not only consistent with the most cutting‐edge science, but it can help combat stereotypes and stigma about mental illness head‐on by showing that all of us are shaped by small and large forces across our lives, many of which are out of our control.

Reference

1 Cicchetti, Dante (2006). Theory and method. In Dante Cicchetti & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Development and psychopathology (2nd ed., pp). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.