Dramatic changes take place in the neural physiology and emotional behavior of the human infant during the first 2 years of life. Evidence suggests that certain variations in the infant's early social environment, such as disturbances in mother-infant interaction that are associated with maternal depression, influence the development of biological systems related to the expression and regulation of emotion, particularly those systems involved in frontal lobe, autonomic, and adrenocortical functioning. In this essay, we provide an overview of the links between maternal depression and disruptions in early social and emotional development, and we highlight parallels between disturbances in biological systems found in depressed adults and those found in infants of mothers experiencing depression. We then discuss the possibility of sensitive periods for the enduring influences of maternal depression on the emotional development of these children and for increased risk for affective disorder. Finally, we point to directions for further research on the nature of the intergenerational transmission of emotional disturbance.

This study examines the relationship of child sexual abuse to classroom academic performance and behavior in a sample of 6–16-year-old girls. Half of the sample was sexually abused by a family member. The other half is a demographically similar nonabused comparison group. Measures of academic performance include school records, teacher's ratings of classroom behavior and performance, and parental reports of school performance. Possible mediators of the impact of sexual abuse on classroom performance and behavior – cognitive capability, perceived competence, and behavior problems–are also measured. Results can be summarized as follows, (a) A history of sexual abuse does predict academic performance: Abuse is directly negatively related to ratings of classroom social competence, competent learner, and overall academic performance and positively related to school avoidant behavior, but is not related to grades, (b) Sexual abuse is negatively related to cognitive ability and positively related to measures of behavior problems indicating depression, destructiveness, and dissociation, (c) Cognitive ability and perceived competence predict the more “academic” aspects of academic performance—grades, ratings as a competent learner, and overall academic performance. Behavior problems predict ratings as a competent learner, classroom social competence, school avoidant behavior, and overall academmic performance.

Electrophysiological kindling and behavioral sensitization to psychomotor stimulants and stress provide paradigms for understanding how repeated acute events can leave neurobiological residues in gene expression, accounting for the observed long-lasting alterations in behavioral responsivity. Kindling helps conceptualize how repeated electrical stimulation of the brain can progressively evoke increased behavioral and convulsive responsivity, leading to spontaneous seizures in the absence of exogenous stimulation following sufficient stimulations. As kindling unfolds, a complex spatiotemporal cascade of events occurs and includes the induction of immediate early genes (e.g., c-fos) and late effector genes (including peptides and growth factors) possibly associated with the observed changes in brain microstructure (e.g., synapse formation, axonal and dendritic sprouting, apoptosis). Behavioral sensitization to psychomotor stimulants and stress has also been shown to induce related but different cascades of effects on immediate early and late effector gene expression. These may be associated with the observed long-lasting alterations in behavioral responsivity based on prior experience. If these types of alterations are put into a developmental context, this would provide a paradigm for understanding how early life events could exert profound and behaviorally relevant biochemical and microstructural effects on the central nervous system of the developing organism. The conceptual overview offered by the sensitization and kindling models suggests that environmentally triggered neurobiological processes do not form a single or static residue but, instead, engage processes related to developmental neurobiology and learning and memory and whose substrate is constantly evolving over an organism's lifetime.

Recent work on psychopathology supports a connection between repeated childhood maltreatment and disturbances in self-definition and -regulation. This study tested the hypothesis that chronic childhood sexual abuse is associated with developmentally complex affective splitting of representations of self-with-others, including both a negativity bias in evaluating core self and a high degree of affective splitting of scripts for self-in-relationships. Sixteen inpatient adolescent girls with affective disorders participated in the Self-in-Relationships Interview to produce and analyze a self-diagram; seven had been victims of prolonged sexual abuse, and nine had not. The results supported the hypothesis, showing two powerful differences in splitting between the groups, (a) The abused girls placed negative characteristics as central to their core self and also produced an unusually large overall number of negatives. The nonabused girls regarded negative characteristics as mostly peripheral in their self-diagram and produced fewer negatives, (b) The abused girls showed a form of complex dissociative coordination called polarized qffective splitting, which was not produced by the nonabused group. They also showed slightly higher developmental levels in general than the nonabused group, thus contradicting the traditional view that maltreatment produces splitting through developmental fixation or regression. Psychopathology from abuse arises along a complex, distinctive developmental pathway, not as a result of a delay or failure of development.

In this article, operational definitions of resiliency used in previous studies are reviewed. Data from a sample of 56 maltreated school-age children are then explored to highlight how variations in the source, type, and number of assessments obtained affect the rates of children classified as resilient. Assessments were obtained in three domains: academic achievement, social competence, and clinical symptomatology. Two sources of information were used to assess each domain, and three different data integration procedures were used to calculate rates of resiliency in the maltreated cohort. It is concluded that the most appropriate definition of resiliency to be used in future investigations depends on the aims of the study. If the goal of the study is to assess overall functioning, there is an advantage to using more broad, multidimensional assessments. If, in contrast, the goal of the study is to determine why some high-risk children develop particular types of problems, to identify underlying etiological processes associated with different outcomes, there is an advantage to using narrower definitions.

Substantial evidence indicates a link between exposure to family violence in childhood and troubled social relationships. We draw on attachment and social-cognitive theory to formulate a model of the mechanisms underlying this association. The model proposes that early experiences of overt rejection (e.g., physical maltreatment) or covert rejection (e.g., emotional neglect) are internalized as sensitivity to rejection. In this study, we operationalize sensitivity to rejection in social-cognitive terms as a tendency to expect and be concerned about rejection across a range of social situations. We hypothesize that rejection sensitivity mediates the link between exposure to family violence and adult attachment behavior. Data from a survey of 212 undergraduates support this hypothesis and also provide evidence that indicates sensitivity to rejection underlies both avoidant and ambivalent patterns of insecure adult attachment behavior. Overall, the results illustrate the power of a process approach to explaining the developmental sequelae of maltreatment.