Developmental Psychopathology and Wellness

A major benchmark in the understanding of psychiatric
illness in children and adolescents, Developmental Psychopathology and
Wellness reports on progress in identifying genetic and
environmental influences on emotional-behavioral disorders. A team of 22
international authorities presents work that changes the way child
psychiatry and clinical psychology are conceptualized, debunking
misconceptions about depression, antisocial behavior, and other conditions
to enhance our understanding of the causes of child psychopathology-and
improve the ways we treat these disorders.

Coverage of basic
principles describes the influence of genomic medicine, as explained by
trailblazers in the field who demonstrate the importance of the
developmental perspective. Chapters on gene-environment interaction review
the important concepts of personality and temperament, cognition, and
sex-including findings from molecular genetic investigations on adolescent
cognition, temperament, and brain function. Disorder-based examples show how
emotional-behavioral illness and wellness attest to the interaction of
genetic and environmental factors over time, providing new insight into the
study of anxious depression, ADHD, autism, and antisocial personality
disorders. And in considering how we can bridge the gap between research and
clinical applications, Dr. Hudziak describes his family-based
gene-environment approach as a means of better understanding etiopathology
and treatment. Among the other significant contributions:


* Thomas Achenbach focuses on the importance of culture in
understanding the genetic and environmental impact on children, with
insights into measuring these sources of influence.
* Joan Kaufman
reports on her seminal work on the genetic and environmental modifiers of
risk and resilience in child abuse, relating maltreatment to other forms of
environmental risk, genetic mediation, and reactivity.
* D. I. Boomsma
describes the genetic architecture of childhood worry, presenting data from
an extraordinary sample of 30,000 twin pairs.
* Frank Verhulst draws on
a 14-year study to detail the advantages of the developmental perspective in
understanding antisocial behavior.
* Stephen Faraone offers guidelines
for moving beyond statistics to document the functional significance of DNA
variants associated with psychopathology.


As the contributors ably demonstrate, these new approaches to the care
and treatment of at-risk children are applicable to daily practice,
teaching, and research. Developmental Psychopathology and Wellness
shows that these psychopathologies are not a matter of nature versus nurture
or genes versus environment, but rather an intertwining web of them all.