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32 BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL UNIVERSALSyoung people who grew up in very adverse circumstances, or children showingearly signs of difficulty controlling their behavior or learning (Garmezy, 1984;Kopp, 1983; Masten & Gewirtz, 2006).Investigators who wanted to study the origins of mental health problems beganto study “high-risk” cohorts of children and youth, in hopes of learning enoughabout the causes and consequences of mental disorders and problems to informpractice and policy aimed at preventing or ameliorating them. Clinical scientistsand experts on psychopathology began to collaborate with colleagues who studiednormal human development in research teams and consortia, seeking help fromeach other in the design and interpretation of longitudinal studies of children andadolescents that would encompass normal and abnormal development (Cicchetti,1990; Masten, 1989, 2006a). From longitudinal data, risk researchers soon beganto note that individuals with the same kind of risks had very different outcomes,and that some children from disastrous backgrounds grew up to be highly competentand healthy adults, that many disorders had origins in childhood or adolescence,and that the same mental health problem could have different beginnings.Perhaps most important, however, these investigators became convinced of thenecessity for a developmental approach to science, practice, and policy concernedwith the causes, prevention, or treatment of mental health problems.It was not long before a pioneering group of these scholars and their studentsbegan to lay the foundations of DP (Achenbach, 1974, 1990; Cicchetti, 1984, 1989,1990, 1993; Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995; Gottesman, 1974; Masten & Braswell, 1991;Rutter, 1981; Rutter & Garmezy, 1983; Sroufe 1997; Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). DP,which spans multiple disciplines and levels of analysis, has roots deep in the historyof science and medicine. However, it was not until recent decades that conditionswere ripe for this cross-cutting approach to take hold as the prevailingframework for the sciences focused on mental health in childhood, adolescence,and, increasingly, across the life span (see Cicchetti, 1990, 2006),In addition to generally anchoring the study of mental health and illness indevelopment, DP underscored the importance of studying positive life patternsalong with the negative ones. Among the early developmental psychopathologists,several leading scientists, including Norman Garmezy, Michael Rutter, and EmmyWerner (Masten, 1989; Masten & Gewirtz, 2006), were intrigued with the phenomenonof resilience in the lives of the people they were observing. Resiliencein human development generally refers to positive adjustment among individualsexposed to serious threats to adaptation or development; in other words, doingwell in spite of adversity. Developmental psychopathologists recognized thatunderstanding the processes involved in competence and resilience, as well as thosein psychopathology, held the promise of informing interventions to promote betterdevelopment among high-risk children, to prevent mental illness, and to promoteearlier or better recovery from psychopathology.