Psychoanalytic theories and developmental psychopathology

Although many of Freud’s specific notions have been dismissed and are often disparaged, derided, or ridiculed, his fundamental deeper ideas about human psyche – albeit substantially recast and transformed – have been echoed in many research themes in developmental psychopathology (Sroufe, Reference Sroufe1986; Westen, Reference Westen1998). We appreciate Freud’s original emphasis on affective processes and his portrayal of the mind as not merely reflecting reality but actively transforming it to help cope with anxiety, fear, anger, and other aversive emotions through “defense mechanisms”. In developmental psychopathology, those topics are mirrored by our appreciation of emotions and emotion regulation and dysregulation, widely viewed as key transdiagnostic markers in research on origins of adaptive and maladaptive development.

We also embrace Freud’s beliefs in the significance, importance, and complexity of the early affective experiences that can frame future development through unconscious or partly conscious processes. Freud was the first to emphasize that early relational experiences, even if preverbal, unconscious, and represented in what we would call implicit, nondeclarative memory, are critically important. They are – again in today’s language – “developmentally privileged”, carried forward, and framing future trajectories, often in a complex and nonlinear manner. Within modern frameworks, developmental psychopathology scholars have highlighted the critical impact of early relationships, written extensively about how that process may occur, and delineated its various forms: direct, moderated effects, indirect effects; or cascades (Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Boldt and Goffin2019; Masten & Cicchetti, Reference Masten and Cicchetti2010; Sroufe, Reference Sroufe1986; Reference Sroufe2005; Reference Sroufe2013; Reference Sroufe, Cassidy and Shaver2016). We also revisit Freud’s belief that emotional experiences can be expressed in dreams, although we view the process through the lens of the contemporary attachment theory (Mikulincer et al., Reference Mikulincer, Shaver and Avihou-Kanza2011).

Freud’s follower, Erikson, transformed Freudian ideas in ways remarkably aligned with contemporary tenets of developmental psychopathology. We view development through a strikingly similar lens. We consider age-salient adaptation tasks (Sroufe, Reference Sroufe, Cassidy and Shaver2016), tied to developmentally changing challenges, carrying a potential for resilience, adaptation, and growth or a risk of maladaptation or failure, and setting the stage for, or framing future development.

Learning theories and developmental psychopathology

Classic learning research produced an important finding that fits well with developmental psychopathology. Studying effectiveness of punishment, Parke (Reference Parke1969) observed that punishment delivered by a “nurturant agent” – an experimenter who had first engaged in a friendly interaction with the child – was more effective than one delivered by a neutral agent. Although not much noticed at the time, that insightful result dovetails with current research on relationships as developmental contexts whose quality can powerfully moderate effects of parenting strategies (Bendel-Stenzel et al., Reference Bendel-Stenzel, An and Kochanska2023; Deater-Deckard et al., Reference Deater-Deckard, Ivy and Petrill2006; Kim & Kochanska, Reference Kim and Kochanska2012).

Learning theories have also inspired research by the Oregon Social Learning Center that has produced sophisticated microanalytic analyses of coercive family systems and nuanced descriptions of the process of entrenching or cascading mutually aversive and destructive parent-child dynamics. That research demonstrated how difficult, hard-to-manage children elicit harsh parental control that leads to more child defiance, and then to more parental coercion (Dishion & Patterson, Reference Dishion, Patterson, Cicchetti and Cohen2006; Scaramella & Leve, Reference Scaramella and Leve2004; Tiberio et al., Reference Tiberio, Capaldi, Kerr, Bertrand, Pears and Owen2016). Over time, those dynamics cascade, resulting in an entrenched, escalating mutually adversarial parent-child relationship, and finally, in maladaptive child outcomes. That approach remains prominent and influential in developmental psychopathology, and widely accepted as elucidating origins of externalizing psychopathology in children and youth and informing treatment and prevention.

Ethology and developmental psychopathology

Ethological theories – most prominently, Bowlby’s attachment theory – have been uniquely synergistic with questions and constructs of developmental psychopathology (Sroufe et al., Reference Sroufe, Carlson, Levy and Egeland1999; Sroufe, Reference Sroufe1986, Reference Sroufe, Cassidy and Shaver2016); Bowlby could be legitimately seen as its forerunner, and the construct of attachment has been enormously influential in developmental psychopathology. Bowlby had recast psychodynamic tenets on the importance of early relationships in an evolutionary framework (Bowlby, Reference Bowlby1969/1982). Ever since, attachment theory has remained a conceptually, empirically, and heuristically powerful force in developmental psychopathology, as it embodies its multiple key principles.

Attachment is an evolutionarily based proximity-regulating biobehavioral system, amenable to rigorous measurement; secure attachment provides the child with confidence in protection and helps manage threat, stress, and distress at the behavioral, emotional, and physiological levels. Analyses of secure and insecure attachment organizations, representing examples of adaptive and maladaptive developmental processes informing each other, have had an enormous impact on research on risk and resilience across the lifespan (e.g., Cassidy & Shaver, Reference Cassidy and Shaver2016; Thompson et al., Reference Thompson, Simpson and Berlin2021; Thompson, Reference Thompson and Lamb2015, Reference Thompson, Cassidy and Shaver2016). The view of development in attachment theory, depicting indirect, complex, nonlinear probabilistic effects, highlighting adaptive and maladaptive trajectories in development, is fully consistent with contemporary views in developmental psychopathology (Kochanska & Kim, Reference Kochanska and Kim2012; Sroufe, Reference Sroufe2005, Reference Sroufe, Cassidy and Shaver2016).

More recently, attachment’s role has been broadened to include also another developmental goal: To promote the child’s positive, receptive orientation toward the parent. A secure attachment renders the child receptive to parental influence and eager to embrace it. It inaugurates positive parent-child socialization dynamics, the parent-child implicitly cooperative interpersonal set, permeated with mutual good will and infused with shared positive feelings. Such orientation is especially significant at the beginning of the second year, as it coincides with the typical onset of parental control and discipline, and child compliance and noncompliance. By contrast, an insecure attachment can launch the dyad on a mutually adversarial and resentful trajectory, with the parent and the child becoming increasingly antagonistic (An et al., Reference An, Kochanska, Yeager, Sivagurunathan, Praska, Campbell and Shin2021; Goffin et al., Reference Goffin, Boldt and Kochanska2018; Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Kim and Boldt2015; Shaver et al., Reference Shaver, Mikulincer, Gross, Stern, Cassidy, Cassidy and Shaver2016; Thompson, Reference Thompson, Cassidy and Shaver2016; Waters et al., Reference Waters, Kondo-Ikemura, Posada, Richters, Gunnar and Sroufe1990).

Cognitive theories and information-processing theories and developmental psychopathology

In recent decades, cognitive theories have found a particularly heuristically fertile niche in developmental psychopathology, due to their conceptual and empirical interface with attachment theory’s key constructs of Internal Working Models (IWMs). Research on representations, implicit and explicit memory, scripts, procedural knowledge, and mentalization – studied in both parents and children – has become one of the most dynamic hubs in developmental psychopathology.

Research on parents’ cognitive processing and mentalization, with the foci on reflective functioning (Katznelson, Reference Katznelson2014; Luyten et al., Reference Luyten, Nijssens, Fonagy and Mayes2017; Sharp & Fonagy, Reference Sharp and Fonagy2008), mind-mindedness (McMahon & Bernier, Reference McMahon and Bernier2017; Meins, Reference Meins1997, Reference Meins1999, Reference Meins2013; Slade, Reference Slade2005), relational schemas (Sher-Censor, Reference Sher-Censor2015), secure base scripts (Fraley et al., Reference Fraley, Roisman and Haltigan2013; Groh & Haydon, Reference Groh and Haydon2018; Waters et al., Reference Waters, Fraley, Groh, Steele, Vaughn, Bost, Verissimo and Roisman2015), and attributions (Snarr et al., Reference Snarr, Slep and Grande2009) has substantially informed our understanding of intergenerational links between parents’ emotional histories and their adaptive and maladaptive parenting (An et al., Reference An, Bendel-Stenzel and Kochanska2022). Research that has applied well-established infant cognition paradigms, such as violation of expectations, to children’s representations of parents, provided a unique, innovative window into infants’ IWMs of the caregiver, self, and others (Johnson et al., Reference Johnson, Dweck, Chen, Stern, Ok and Barth2010). Memory paradigms have also proved useful (Belsky et al., Reference Belsky, Spritz and Crnic1996; Kirsh & Cassidy, Reference Kirsh and Cassidy1997). Rigorously studied children’s narratives elucidate their representations of parents, self, and relationships (Toth et al., Reference Toth, Cicchetti, Macfie and Emde1997, Reference Toth, Cicchetti and Kim2002, Reference Toth, Rogosch, Sturge-Apple and Cicchetti2009). Several systematic reviews summarize this emerging and vibrant field (Cassidy et al., Reference Cassidy, Jones and Shaver2013; Dykas & Cassidy, Reference Dykas and Cassidy2011; Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Boldt and Goffin2019; Sherman et al., Reference Sherman, Rice and Cassidy2015).

Research on social-information processing, implemented to explain mechanisms of children’s aggression, represents another example of a cognitive perspective finding an important key niche in developmental psychopathology. This elegant, highly influential, and heuristically productive application of social cognition and attributional theories has elucidated how biased information processing explains origins of aggression in children and youth, leading to cascading risks to peer rejection and entrenched social problems (Crick & Dodge, Reference Crick and Dodge1994). Notably, those early biases, due largely to experiences of early abusive care, coalesce into a broad defensive set that frames maladaptive outcomes into adult age (Dodge et al., Reference Dodge, Bai, Godwin, Lansford, Bates, Pettit and Jones2022).

Sociocultural and ecological theories and developmental psychopathology

Developmental psychopathology has also incorporated extensions beyond individual-level factors to emphasize the roles of contexts and social environment in the unfolding adaptive and maladaptive trajectories. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner’s model of development as embedded in multilayered ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, Reference Bronfenbrenner, Morris, Lerner and Damon2006), theories focused on broader contexts have found a welcoming niche in developmental psychopathology, and they provided rich tools and resources for understanding adaptive and maladaptive trajectories of development and phenomena of risk and resilience.

Decades of research on developmental risk and resilience have highlighted the concepts of adverse childhood experiences and cumulative risk, and the ways to mitigate their negative impact and to promote resilience (Ellis et al., Reference Ellis, Sheridan, Belsky and McLaughlin2022). Much of the early focus on resilience has been on individuals’ sensitivity to the risk and protective factors in the environment (e.g., differential susceptibility). In the recent years, the definition of resilience has been extended to incorporate a multisystem perspective, which views resilience as a dynamic process that can exist both within the individual and in the environment, connecting individuals and families to the resources necessary for positive adaptation (Masten et al., Reference Masten, Lucke, Nelson and Stallworthy2021). The process of resilience can occur at multiple levels and cascade across levels.

This evolving view of resilience has elucidated both research and intervention work in developmental psychopathology, especially in the current contexts of social justice, multiculturalism, and crises (e.g., pandemic, wars). A growing body of literature has examined the interplay between family dynamics and broader sociocultural contexts, and emphasized the crucial role of parental socialization in mitigating risks in the social environment, as well as the importance of building an equal, inclusive, and safe society and addressing structural barriers for promoting positive dynamics and adaptive functioning among families and children (Dunbar et al., Reference Dunbar, Zeytinoglu and Leerkes2022; Eltanamly et al., Reference Eltanamly, Leijten, Jak and Overbeek2021; Stern et al., Reference Stern, Barbarin and Cassidy2022; Tyrell & Masten, Reference Tyrell and Masten2022).

Enriching the learning theories’ perspective on early traits and later adjustment: parent-child relationship as a foundation for multifinal cascades

In our work, we bridge children’s biologically-based traits with relationship science by examining multifinality in trajectories from early temperament to later adjustment in the context of family relationships. By integrating perspectives and constructs from the biological, learning, attachment, cognitive, and ecological theories, we aim to elucidate children’s adaptive and maladaptive developmental cascades.

Ever since Bell (Reference Bell1968) highlighted the importance of child effects in socialization, several biologically-based traits have been seen as early markers of risk for maladaptive development. Often referred to as “child difficulty”, those traits include anger proneness, challenging, hard-to-manage temperament, or poor regulation, and more recently, also molecular genetic markers (Brock et al., Reference Brock, Kochanska and Boldt2017). We have drawn from that research, deploying multilevel measures of child difficulty (behavioral, genetic, psychophysiological, and parent rated).

Further, we have drawn from the above-mentioned elegant body of research on coercive family systems, inspired by learning theories. That work has persuasively shown that “child difficulty” elicits harsh, power-assertive control, which in turn leads to children’s escalating negative socialization outcomes. We have noticed, however, growing evidence that shows that such negative cascade from child difficulty to parental power assertion to negative socialization outcomes is far from universal. In the language of developmental psychopathology, research has increasingly revealed substantial multifinality in paths that unfold from early child difficult temperament (Cicchetti & Rogosch, Reference Cicchetti and Rogosch1996; Kim & Kochanska, Reference Kim and Kochanska2021). Consequently, we explored potential factors that can alter such negative cascades.

We observed that the learning perspective was largely silent on the role of the early parent-child relationship in the first years of life, prior to the onset of control. To address this gap, we have next reached to Bowlby’s construct of attachment, as well as constructs of reciprocity, cooperation, and communal relationship from social psychology (Clark & Mills, Reference Clark, Mills, Van Lange, Kruglanski and Higgins2012; Maccoby, Reference Maccoby1992). We proposed that the quality of the early parent-child relationship (security, mutuality) in the first two years is key in determining whether the cascade from child difficulty to parental negative, harsh control to child maladaptive outcomes will – or will not – unfold. Specifically, we expected that such adversarial, maladaptive cascades depicted by the learning literature would be present in dyads whose early relationships are suboptimal, insecure, and negative, but absent or defused in dyads whose early relationships are optimal and secure.

Over three decades, we have obtained converging, remarkably consistent evidence, across multiple studies, designs, ages, and diverse measures of all constructs, supporting our model (Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Boldt and Goffin2019; Kochanska & Kim, Reference Kochanska and Kim2012). Early relational experience does alter future socialization processes that unfold in parent-child dyads. Dyads with temperamentally difficult children are indeed at high risk, but only if they have a history of an early suboptimal relationship. This conclusion is consistent with tenets of developmental psychopathology, but rarely integrated with the learning perspectives. The early relationship is an organizing core in development, always integrated with later experience and never lost; it has a distinct, privileged impact, framing the child’s subsequent transactions with the environment (Fraley et al., Reference Fraley, Roisman and Haltigan2013; Sroufe, Reference Sroufe2005, Reference Sroufe2013, Reference Sroufe, Cassidy and Shaver2016). We have also incorporated the sociocultural perspective by testing our model in both low-risk community families and in high-risk mother-child dyads, struggling with a harsh ecology of poverty and multiple forms of adversity. Our model has informed a randomized intervention we deployed in the latter sample, targeting the quality of the mother-child relationship. The intervention exerted its primary influence on the cascade from child difficulty to maternal negative control to child maladjustment by weakening the first link: between child difficulty and maternal negative control (Brock & Kochanska, Reference Brock and Kochanska2016).

Mechanisms that account for multifinality: contributions of cognitive and information-processing theories and the constructs of internal working models (IWMs)

We are now asking the next generation of questions: Why and how do such divergent cascades emerge? What mechanisms account for such multifinality?

Here, we have drawn from cognitive and information-processing theories. We have proposed that the parent’s and the child’s representations of each other, evolving in early relationships – IWMs in attachment theory – are key mechanisms that account for the cascades of parent-child dynamics unfolding in suboptimal relationships, as compared to optimal ones.

In suboptimal relationships, the parent’s IWMs of the child are characterized by impoverished reflective functioning, poor mind-mindedness, negative relational schemas, and hostile attributions, and the child’s IWMs include representations of the parent as untrustworthy, unresponsive, rejecting, hostile, and unfair. By contrast, in optimal relationships, parents have reflective and positive views of their children and children perceive the parents as trustworthy, responsive, accepting, well-intentioned, and benevolent (Bretherton & Munholland, Reference Bretherton, Munholland, Cassidy and Shaver2008; Carlson et al., Reference Carlson, Sroufe and Egeland2004; Cassidy et al., Reference Cassidy, Jones and Shaver2013; Dykas & Cassidy, Reference Dykas and Cassidy2011; Main et al., Reference Main, Kaplan and Cassidy1985; Thompson, Reference Thompson, Cassidy and Shaver2016; Toth et al., Reference Toth, Rogosch, Sturge-Apple and Cicchetti2009). Of note, children’s early representations of their parents generalize to other relationships, and more broadly to perceptions of safety and stress (Smith & Pollak, Reference Smith and Pollak2021; Thompson, Reference Thompson, Thompson, Simpson and Berlin2021).

We then integrated those concepts into a “dual-moderator” model, in which the parent’s IWM of the child moderates the links between child difficulty and parental control, and the child’s IWM of the parent moderates the links between parental control and developmental outcomes. For a parent with less reflective, negative, and hostile IWM of the child, the child’s difficult, angry, hard-to-manage traits easily trigger harsh, angry, negative, rejecting control (Scaramella & Leve, Reference Scaramella and Leve2004; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Dishion, Shaw, Wilson, Winter and Patterson2014, Reference Smith, Dishion, Shaw and Wilson2015). By contrast, for a parent with a rich, reflective, positive IWM of the child, the same child traits do not trigger negative control; indeed, they may even elicit supportive and empathic control (Dix, Reference Dix1991). Thus, the parent’s perception of the child accounts for the moderated link between child difficulty and parental negative control.

In turn, a child who has a negative IWM of the parent is biased to perceive parental control as hostile, unfair, mean-spirited, and arbitrary (Gershoff, Reference Gershoff2002; Grusec & Goodnow, Reference Grusec and Goodnow1994). The child then resents and rejects parental influence, ultimately leading to poor developmental outcomes, particularly disruptive behavior problems. By contrast, a child who has a positive, trusting IWM of the parent, comes to view control – even if firm – as benevolent, fair, and well-intentioned. That child willingly embraces socialization, entering a path to positive outcomes and competence – and as a result, the maladaptive cascade is “defused” (Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Boldt and Goffin2019). Thus, the child’s perception of the parent accounts for the moderated link between parental harsh control and poor developmental outcomes. Preliminary evidence has supported such a “dual moderator” model (An & Kochanska, Reference An and Kochanska2020; Kochanska & An, Reference Kochanska and An2023).