From teachers' rating in kindergarten through third grade, mutually exclusive groups of internalized, externalized, and mixed behavior problems were examined as pathways to three groups of psychiatric diagnosis in later adolescence: depression/anxiety, conduct/oppositional defiant, and other disorders. In looking both forward and backwards, the relation between behavior problems in the early school years, regardless of type, and psychopathology in adolescence, regardless of diagnosis, was very strong. The relations between type of early problems and specific outcomes were weak. The findings provided support for both the constructs of multifinality and equifinality; however the nature of the pathways differed somewhat by disorder. There was a substantial amount of multifinality (dispersion of outcomes) for the early internalizing pathway. There was less multifinality for the externalizing pathway, in that there was greater correspondence between early externalizing and later antisocial outcomes than for the internalizing pathway and depressed/anxious outcomes.

Dissociative behaviors and their relation to both the self and self-organization were examinedusing the developmental psychopathology perspective in a prospective longitudinal study ofhigh-risk children. Participants were 168 young adults (n = 79 females, n =89 males, age = 18–19 years) considered high-risk for poor developmental outcomes atbirth due to poverty. The present study investigated whether trauma, sense of self, quality of earlymother–child relationship, temperament, and intelligence were related to dissociativesymptomatology measured at four times across 19 years. Findings were (a) age of onset,chronicity and severity of trauma were highly correlated and predicted level of dissociation; (b)both the avoidant and disorganized patterns of attachment were strong predictors of dissociation;(c) dissociation in childhood may be a more normative response to disruption and stress, whiledissociation in adolescence and young adulthood may be more indicative of psychopathology; (d)preliminary support was found for a model proposed by G. Liotti that links disorganizedattachment, later trauma, and dissociation in adulthood; and (e) strong support was found for N.Waller, F. W. Putnam, and E. B. Carlson's contention that psychopathological dissociationshould not be viewed as the top end of a continuum of dissociative symptomatology, but as aseparate taxon that represents an extreme deviation from normal development.