Research on Child and Adolescent Mental Health

ehavioral problems and difficulties in school,
research tracing the normal development of and
individual differences in these controls has
implications for advancing etiologic
understanding of a variety of childhood disorders
in which regulatory deficits are implicated (e.g.,
ADHD, mood and anxiety disorders). This work
needs to be extended to include clinical
populations, both to test the generalizability of
the basic findings and to clarify how, and in
which dimension, children with certain illnesses
or symptoms express these regulatory functions in
different ways. It will also increase the
understanding of how behaviors, symptoms, and
disabilities actually cluster across disorders.
Advances in the area of basic behavioral research
involve our understanding of contextual
influences on the development of personality or
behavioral traits. Contextual issues play a critical
role in the development, onset, and maintenance
of mental illness in children. For example, studies
have demonstrated that children with difficult
temperaments may push the caregiver away, and
with the caregiver less available, the child may
develop soothing strategies that do not involve
the caregiver. Nevertheless, mothers of such
infants can be taught to effectively regulate the
infant’s distress. Mothers who were trained to
soothe their distress-prone infants and taught
how to play with them were able to foster more
positive affect and greater involvement of their
children with them, with resulting benefits for
their children in terms of attachment and
sophistication of play (Van den Boom, 1994;
1995).
To better understand the social processes involved
in mother-child transmission of affect, Fogel
(Fogel, MH57669) is examining the development
of emotion and attention in the context of a
dyadic (mother-infant) relationship. Using a
process design called relational-historical
approach, this study is documenting the process
by which individual differences in patterns of
attention and emotion arise developmentally in
infants’ social relationships with mothers. This
study will include the observation of normally
developing mother-infant dyads across key
developmental transitions in the first 2 years of life,
and also a larger group of dyads at risk for
developmental disorders, who will then be followed
longitudinally. One of the goals of this study is to
understand the dynamic processes that regulate
developmental change and the origins of individual
differences in attention-emotion couplings. Such
research is a step forward in exploring how the
interaction of socialization and maturation of
infants’ motor and cognitive abilities affects their
ability to regulate their emotions.
Another example of the influence of contextual
factors relates to the widely documented gender
difference in depression, which begins to appear
during adolescence. Biological as well as social
and personality factors have been implicated. A
recent, large-scale NIMH study simultaneously
explored the social and personality differences
that could account for the gender difference
(Nolen-Hoeksema, Larson, & Grayson, 1999).
Findings suggest that social factors (e.g., sexual
abuse, lower income, inequities in distribution of
work), child care, and personality factors (e.g.,
lower levels of mastery and a greater tendency to
ruminate when depressed) were found to mediate
the effects of gender. When these variables were
controlled, gender difference in depression became
minimal. These findings suggest that the
increased incidence of depression among
adolescent girls is likely due to factors that
socialize them to be more emotionally expressive
and to adopt internalizing coping strategies.
Gender socialization processes prior to
adolescence that may increase girls’ vulnerability
to adolescent transitions (from elementary school
to junior high) and thereby contribute to gender
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