The present study sought to document an example of how maternal and infant vulnerabilitiesinteract in contributing to the quality of early attachment relationships. Maternal depressivesymptoms, neonatal health characteristics, and infant–mother attachment were assessed for42 preterm, low birth weight infants and 42 full-term infants at 12 months postterm. Resultsindicated that preterm birth moderated the relation between maternal depressive symptoms andquality of infant–mother attachment, even controlling for level of neonatal healthcomplications. Preterm infants with more symptomatic mothers were most likely to be classifiedas insecurely attached to their mothers, whereas no direct relation between subclinical depressivesymptoms and attachment was found for full-term infants.

Relations between attachment and child emotional and behavioral regulation were studiedlongitudinally in a sample of 223 children from urban, low-income families. Attachment in theStrange Situation at 12 and 18 months was scored using the infant classification system and at 24months was scored using a preschool classification system. Only modest stability was found inattachment whether within or across classification systems, with the percentage of insecureattachments consistently increasing over time. Results indicated both concurrent and predictiveassociations with indices of child regulation based on observer ratings or maternal report.However, only the 24-month classification predicted maternal report of externalizing andinternalizing behavior problems at age 3.5 years, with additional variance accounted for byselected measures of child emotional and behavior regulation from the same assessment.Attachment security (B) and atypical attachment classifications (D, A/C, and AD) appear toprovide the most consistently useful information about child functioning. Results are discussed interms of continuity and change from the perspective of developmental psychopathology.

Several theoretical models of child development have posited the spread of conflict withinfamilies; however, few researchers have studied this process in association with relationshipschildren have with teachers and peers at school. The present study examined the direct, additive,and interactive contributions of interparental, parent–child, and sibling conflict in relationto teacher–child and child–peer conflict in a sample of 117 low-income boys fromages 3.5 to 6 years. Overall, the results suggest that while conflict in any one dyadic familyrelationship is only modestly associated with later conflictual relationships at school, risk forconflict in relationships with teachers and peers increases when multiple forms of earlyfamily conflict are experienced. Results are discussed in terms of the development of conflictacross early relationships.

We examined the relations of verbal ability and self-regulation in preschool to emotionknowledge in first grade, and concurrent relations between emotion knowledge and indexes ofsocial functioning in 143 children from low-income families. After controlling for children'sverbal ability in preschool, teacher reports of attentional control and caregiver reports ofbehavioral control in preschool predicted children's emotion expression knowledge andemotion situation knowledge 2 years later. After controlling for verbal ability and attentional andbehavioral control, children's emotion knowledge predicted concurrent teacher-reportedsocial problems and social withdrawal. Results suggest that low levels of emotion knowledgeco-occur with many important aspects of children's early social adaptation.

This study tested an integrative, multipathway model designed to explain bidirectional effectsof the attributions and coercive behaviors of mothers and sons in the context of a longitudinalstudy. Subjects were 246 mothers and sons who were 7–9 years of age. Mothers'and sons' attributions about one another's intent were significantly related to theaggressiveness of the behavior that each of them directed toward the other. Boys' earlieraggression did not significantly predict the mothers' subsequent attributions, whereasmothers' negative behavior indeed predicted subsequent negative attributions on the part ofthe boys. Even after considering children's earlier negative behavior, children'snegative attributions about their mothers helped explain the aggressiveness of their subsequentbehavior. The same was not true for mothers whose earlier attributions indirectly influenced theirsubsequent aggressive behavior.

Three hundred sixty-three school-aged children from maritally violent and nonviolent familieswere interviewed about their friendship networks, frequency of social contact, the interpersonalquality of their friendships, and hostile attributional biases. Mothers answered items from theChild Behavior Checklist about peer conflict. Children did not differ on the number of friends theyclaimed or their frequency of contact with peers. However, children exposed to marital violencereported feeling more lonely and having more conflict with a close friend. Their mothers alsoreported them as having more problems with peers. In addition, children with punitive mothershad more conflict with a best friend. Residing in a shelter added further to children'sfeelings of loneliness, with one third having no best friend. Children's attributional biaseswere unrelated to the quality of their peer relations or any other index of peer functioning. Resultsare discussed in terms of an attachment framework. Findings confirm that it is important toexamine the quality of relationships to determine how children at risk fare in their social lives.

Executive tasks typically contain a prepotent lure. In addition, they require individuals eitherto (a) follow arbitrary procedures or (b) update their model of the physical world. Recent researchsuggests that children with autism may be challenged only by executive tasks of the former kind(containing arbitrary rules). We asked whether this continues to be true when there is no prepotent lure, comparing performance on (a) a task with arbitrariness but without prepotency with (b) a task with both features and (c) a task with neither. The participants withautism performed at a lower level than comparison groups on the first and second task but not onthe third task. This outcome is consistent with the view that autism is associated with difficultiesin following arbitrary procedures per se. We try to locate difficulties with acting on the basisarbitrary rules in relation to more mainstream ideas about autistic executive dysfunction.

Individuals with autism have difficulty integrating information and generalizing previouslylearned concepts to new situations. It was hypothesized that these problems result from anunderlying impairment in category formation. Persons with autism may not abstract a summaryrepresentation (a prototype) during category learning and, instead, may form categories bymemorizing a list of rules. Children with autism, Down syndrome, and normal developmentparticipated in one set of category learning tasks that could be solved using a rule-based approachand a second set of tasks in which there was no rule that defined category membership (prototypetasks). In the rule-based tasks, all groups were successful at using a rule to learn a new category.In the prototype tasks, only the typically developing children were able to learn a new category.Neither the persons with autism nor the persons with Down syndrome appeared to develop aprototype during category learning. These data suggest that persons with autism and Downsyndrome have difficulty categorizing new information by forming prototypes and, instead, tendto rely on a rule-based approach to learning.

This study assessed whether the lack of parental participation in community activities duringlate childhood is significantly related to the persistence of criminal activity from adolescence toadulthood. A prospective, longitudinal investigation of a representative cohort of 548 boys from amiddle-sized Swedish community was employed. A pattern-oriented analysis identified fiveconfigurations of boys who showed different profiles of social and academic competence at theage of 13 years. The configurations were compared with respect to persistent criminality amongthe boys for parents who did, and who did not, show stable participation in a community activitywhen their sons were in late childhood. Fathers engaged in a community activity had sons withsignificantly lower rates of persistent criminality. This result was most marked for youth with lowschool achievement, and multiple problem profiles of social and academic disadvantage. Thefindings held after controlling for family socioeconomic status. Mother's participation incommunity activities was statistically dependent on father participation but was not related topersistent offending among multiple problem boys. Results are discussed in terms of the differentimpact associated with mother and father community activity participation on persistent offending,and the holistic perspective to development guiding this research.

Antecedents of depressive symptomatology in childhood and adolescence were examined in aprospective longitudinal study of at-risk youth (n = 168) from families of lowersocioeconomic status. Relations between family context factors, maternal depressive symptoms,and depressive symptoms in childhood and adolescence were examined, with a focus on earlyfamily relationship factors rarely available for analysis in longitudinal data sets. Results suggest thepossibility of etiological differences between depressive symptoms in childhood and inadolescence. Depressive symptomatology in childhood was predicted by the overall familycontext. Cumulative effects of maternal depressive symptomatology, early care lacking inemotional supportiveness, abuse, and family stressors were observed. Depressive symptomatologyin adolescence, on the other hand, was specifically associated with maternal depression and earlycare lacking in emotional supportiveness. Moreover, an intriguing sex difference emerged:maternal depressive symptomatology was strongly associated with depressive symptomatology inadolescence for females, but for males supportive early care appeared more relevant.

In this study, women's levels of ego development and their psychological difficultieswere examined in relation to feelings in the maternal role. The sample consisted of 91 mothersfrom diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Ego development was assessed by the WashingtonUniversity Sentence Completion Test, and psychological difficulties were operationalized byself-reported global symptomatology, maternal substance abuse, and expressed anger. Outcomevariables included feelings of satisfaction, distress, and support in the maternal role, as well as thedegree to which negative and positive emotions were integrated in response to hypotheticalvignettes of challenging everyday child-rearing experiences. Hypotheses were that women at highlevels of ego development would show greater deterioration in the presence versus absence ofself-reported adjustment problems than would those at lower levels. A series of interaction effectseach indicated trends consistent with the hypotheses. These results add to accumulating evidencethat tendencies toward self-examination, characteristic of high developmental levels, do notinevitably serve protective functions but may be linked with heightened reactivity to negativeintrapsychic forces.