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Biomedical subjects

D Cicchetti

Publications and source records attributed to D Cicchetti.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers' conceptions of hypothetical and actual moral transgressions.

Maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers' (mean age = 4 years 6 months) judgments regarding hypothetical and actual moral transgressions were examined. Thirty-six maltreated children (17 physically abused and 19 neglected) and 19 comparison nonmaltreated children judged, justified, and evaluated affective responses to 6 hypothetical moral transgressions. Perpetrators and victims also judged and evaluated affective responses to actual classroom moral transgressions. All children evaluated moral transgressions as very serious, punishable, and wrong in the absence of rules. Moral judgments and justifications differed as a function of context (hypothetical vs. actual) and type of transgression but not maltreatment status. Affective responses differed as a function of maltreatment subtype and gender. Maltreated and nonmaltreated children may differ in the organization of their affective responses rather than in their moral evaluations.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1999

Effect of maltreatment on preschoolers' narrative representations of responses to relieve distress and of role reversal.

A total of 80 low-socioeconomic status maltreated preschoolers were contrasted with 27 nonmaltreated preschoolers on their narrative representations. The children completed story stems, taken from the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery (MSSB; I. Bretherton, D. Oppenheim, H. Buchsbaum, R. N. Emde, & the MacArthur Narrative Group, 1990), that introduced stressful family situations. Using the MacArthur narrative coding manual (J. Robinson, L. Mantz-Simmons, J. Macfie, & the MacArthur Narrative Group, 1992), coders rated portrayals of parental and child character responses, as well as participant responses, to relieve children's distress. They also rated role reversal (children caretaking their parents) from the narrative emotion coding manual (S. L. Warren, L. Mantz-Simmons, & R. N. Emde, 1993). Maltreated preschoolers portrayed parents and children as responding less often--yet themselves as stepping into the story more often to relieve children's distress--than did nonmaltreated preschoolers. Abused children (sexually, physically, or both) portrayed the most participant responses, and neglected children (with no abuse) portrayed the fewest child responses. Role reversal was associated with physical abuse.

Child Abuse↗
PubMed1999

Psychopathology as risk for adolescent substance use disorders: a developmental psychopathology perspective.

Examines several issues on psychiatric diagnoses as risk factors for adolescent drug use and substance use disorders. The articles in this special section are discussed in terms of dynamic models of risk and protective factors, stages of research needed for establishing causal mechanisms in the etiology of drug use disorders, conceptualizing drug use and abuse in the context of the developmental organization of the individual, equifinality and multifinality in developmental pathways to drug use and abuse, and issues in conceptualizing drug use problems as mental disorders. Future directions for research on the etiology of problem drug use, guided by principles of developmental psychopathology and prevention science, are provided.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

An ecological-transactional analysis of children and contexts: the longitudinal interplay among child maltreatment, community violence, and children's symptomatology.

Cicchetti and Lynch have conceptualized ecological contexts as consisting of nested levels with varying degrees of proximity to the individual. These levels of the environment interact and transact with each other over time in shaping individual development and adaptation. With a sample of maltreated (n = 188) and nonmaltreated (n = 134) children between the ages of 7 and 12 years, this investigation employed a 1-year longitudinal design to conduct an ecological-transactional analysis of the mutual relationships among community violence, child maltreatment, and children's functioning over time. Indicators of children's functioning were externalizing and internalizing behavior problems and self-rated traumatic stress reactions, depressive symptomatology, and self-esteem. Either full or partial support was obtained for the study's primary hypotheses. Rates of maltreatment, particularly physical abuse, were related to levels of child-reported violence in the community. In addition, child maltreatment and exposure to community violence were related to different aspects of children's functioning. Specific effects were observed for neglect and sexual abuse and for witnessing and being victimized by violence in the community. Finally, there was evidence that children and their contexts mutually influence each other over time. Results were discussed within the framework of an ecological-transactional model of development.

Aggression↗
PubMed1998

Maternal depressive disorder and contextual risk: contributions to the development of attachment insecurity and behavior problems in toddlerhood.

Research has shown that offspring of depressed caregivers are at increased risk for maladaptive development and emotional difficulties. Specifically, infants and toddlers of depressed mothers have been shown to evidence higher percentages of insecure attachments and more behavioral difficulties than offspring of nondisordered mothers. However, even in studies that reveal significant differences between children of depressed and nondepressed caregivers, a substantial number of children with depressed caregivers do not evidence dysfunction. Such findings have resulted in increased attention to the broader social context in which children of depressed mothers develop. This investigation examined the direct influences of maternal depression on child development, as well as the role of contextual risks that may be particularly heightened in families with depressed parents. Toddlers with depressed mothers evidenced significantly more insecure attachments than did toddlers with nondisordered mothers, and this difference was not accounted for by contextual risk. In predicting child behavior problems, contextual risk was found to mediate the relation between maternal depression and child behavior problems. Father-report data on child behavior corroborated the mother report data. Results are discussed in terms of the diversity of functioning in offspring of depressed caregivers that can be attributed to varied levels of contextual risk accompanying depression.

Child Behavior Disorders↗
PubMed1998

Remembering, forgetting, and the effects of trauma on memory: a developmental psychopathology perspective.

A developmental psychopathology framework, with its emphasis on an interdisciplinary perspective, the interplay between work conducted with normal and atypical populations, and its focus on investigating functioning in multiple domains of development concurrently, possesses significant potential for advancing work on memory and trauma. A brief historical overview of memory and trauma is provided. Significant issues are highlighted that must be confronted in order to advance the understanding of the effects of trauma on memory and the utility of a developmental psychopathology perspective for informing research efforts is examined. The implications of a developmental psychopathology perspective for guiding research, clinical, and social policy initiatives of relevance to trauma and memory are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1998

Trauma, mental representation, and the organization of memory for mother-referent material.

Research on the effects of child maltreatment and exposure to community violence suggests that children who experience these types of traumatic events may be at risk for alterations and biases in attention and memory similar to those that have been observed in adults suffering from traumatic stress reactions. Along these lines, attachment theory posits that representational models of relationships also may act as moderators of similar cognitive biases by selectively guiding children's attention to and processing of interpersonal stimuli. Building upon the trauma and attachment literatures, the present investigation examined the links among trauma, representational models of caregivers, and children's memory for mother-relevant information using an incidental recall task in a sample of maltreated (n = 71) and nonmaltreated (n = 102) children between the ages of 8 and 13 years. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that experiences of trauma and representational models of caregivers are associated with differences in the way children process and retrieve information about positive and negative mother attribute words. In particular, experiences of trauma initially were associated with increased insecurity in children's representational models. Moreover, the interaction of traumatic experience and security of mental representation predicted children's recall for mother attribute words: victimized children with insecure models recalled the highest proportion of negative mother stimuli. Trauma and mental representation did not have a consistent effect on structurally encoded aspects of recall. Results were discussed in terms of the ways in which children who have experienced trauma process information about their worlds. The importance of assessing functioning in multiple developmental domains when studying memory also was discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Stress, memory, and emotion: developmental considerations from the study of child maltreatment.

Emotion and memory are examined within a developmental framework. The point of departure for this discussion is the study of maltreated children whose traumatic experiences have been linked to difficulties in emotional development. It is suggested that cognitive processes such as memory and attention serve to link experience with emotion and emotion with psychopathology. Thus, an information processing approach is used to explain the development of maltreated children's adaptive and maladaptive coping responses. It is argued that maltreated children's association of affective stimuli with traumatic experiences and memories selectively alters the meaning of emotions for these children. More generally, the role of experience and learning as a component of emotional development is emphasized.

Animals↗
PubMed1998

A mental health program report card: a multidimensional approach to performance monitoring in public sector programs.

This report presents a comprehensive, multi-dimensional mental health program performance monitoring system that has recently been implemented in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Principles underlying the development of the system are reviewed and 68 specific monitors are described addressing four major performance domains: access, inpatient care, outpatient care, and economic performance. Simple methods are presented for identifying outliers, for generating summary performance scores across series' of related monitors, and for adjusting results for differences in patient characteristics across locales. Although still technically imperfect, and therefore requiring continuous improvement, monitoring systems such as the one presented can be useful tools guiding and improving service delivery and mental health system performance, and providing a medium of accountability to consumers and other stakeholders.

Community Mental Health Centers↗
PubMed1998

The development of depression in children and adolescents.

In recent decades, research on child and adolescent depression has proliferated. Currently, attention in the field is directed toward examining the epidemiology, causes, course, sequelae, and treatment response of children at risk for developing or presently experiencing depressive disorders. In this article, a developmental psychopathology approach is used to elucidate the development of depressive disorders, the diverse pathways that evolve, and the processes that contribute to varied outcomes. The developmental psychopathology perspective underscores the importance of moving beyond the identification of isolated aberrations in psychological and biological components of depressive presentations to the understanding of how those components have evolved and how they are integrated within and transact across biological, psychological, and social systems. Implications for prevention and intervention are addressed as is the importance of increasing the public awareness of depressive disorders and reducing the social stigma that interfere with the attainment of treatment for depressed persons.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Child abuse and neglect--usefulness of the animal data: comment on Maestripieri and Carroll (1998)

Issues related to definition, epidemiology, and etiology in the human literature are examined to explore possible contributions that D. Maestripieri and K. A. Carroll's (1998) discussion of nonhuman primate research can make to an understanding of child maltreatment. Similarities and differences between maltreatment in nonhuman primates and humans are discussed, and recommendations are proffered that could be useful in advancing research on child abuse and neglect in both monkeys and humans.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Reactive aggression among maltreated children: the contributions of attention and emotion dysregulation.

Examined the complex interplay among emotion, attention, and aggression in a sample of 141 maltreated and 87 non-maltreated impoverished, inner-city children. Data were collected during a summer day camp, which provided an ecologically valid setting for studying children's behavior in social contexts. Maltreated children were more likely than non-maltreated children to be aggressive, with findings suggesting that physically abused children were at heightened risk for reactive aggression. Maltreated children also evidenced attention deficits, and subclinical or nonpathological dissociation was more likely among children who had experienced physical or sexual abuse. A history of abuse also predicted emotion dysregulation, affective lability/negativity, and socially inappropriate emotion expressions. This emotion dysregulation, fostered by poor attention modulation, was a mechanism of the effects of maltreatment on reactive aggression.

Affective Symptoms↗
PubMed1997

Affect, cognition, and the emergence of self-knowledge in the toddler offspring of depressed mothers.

Visual self-recognition was examined utilizing the mirror-rouge paradigm in a sample of 18- to 21-month-old toddlers of depressed (n = 91) and nondepressed (n = 43) mothers in regard to linkages with cognitive and affective development. Overall, attainment of self-recognition was not related to differences in level of cognitive development, pre-rouge affective expression, or maternal depression. However, children of depressed mothers who exhibited self-recognition were more likely than children of nondepressed mothers to display nonpositive affect and to shift affect from positive to nonpositive in the post-rouge condition. Within the group of children of depressed mothers, toddlers who did not evidence self-recognition and who shifted affect were lower in attachment security and had mothers with less positive affect characteristics. Also, self-recognition and affective instability were related to differences in cognitive developmental level among toddlers of depressed mothers. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding the relations between affect and cognition and the influence of maternal depression on affective and cognitive development.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Talking about self and other: emergence of an internal state lexicon in young children with Down syndrome.

The ability to talk about the internal states (IS) of self and other is an age-typical development of early childhood that is thought to reflect young children's emergent self-other understanding. This study examined the emergence of an IS lexicon in a cross-sectional sample of young children with Down syndrome (DS) and a cognitively and demographically comparable group of normally developing (ND) children. Children's IS lexicons were derived from transcripts of their spontaneous utterances during two laboratory contexts: a mother-child emotions picture book task and semistructured play. Children with DS produced significantly fewer IS words and fewer IS word types than their MA-matched counterparts. Controlling for corpus size, children with DS also were less likely to attribute internal states to themselves and were more context bound in their use of IS language. In addition, children with DS also differed from ND children in the semantic content of their IS language, with proportionately higher rates of affective words and lower rates for words about volition ability, and cognition. For both the DS and ND groups, individual differences in IS language production were significantly related to general expressive language skills. However, dissociations were observed for the relation between children's IS word production and nonverbal symbolic play skills in the two groups. These findings suggest some degree of disorganization at the interface among symbolic domains for children with DS. Because IS language is critical to the regulation of social interaction and an early index of self-other differentiation and understanding, children with DS may be at risk for later compromises in self-organization.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Representations of self and other in the narratives of neglected, physically abused, and sexually abused preschoolers.

The MacArthur Story Stem Battery was used to examine maternal and self-representations in neglected, physically abused, sexually abused, and nonmaltreated comparison preschool children. The narratives of maltreated children contained more negative maternal representations and more negative self-representations than did the narratives of nonmaltreated children. Maltreated children also were more controlling with and less responsive to the examiner. In examining the differential impact of maltreatment subtype differences on maternal and self-representations, physically abused children evidenced the most negative maternal representations; they also had more negative self-representations than nonmaltreated children. Sexually abused children manifested more positive self-representations than neglected children. Despite these differences in the nature of maternal and self-representations, physically and sexually abused children both were more controlling and less responsive to the examiner. The investigation adds to the corpus of knowledge regarding disturbances in the self-system functioning of maltreated children and provides support for relations between representational models of self and other and the self-organizing function that these models exert on children's lives.

Child Abuse↗
PubMed1997

The role of self-organization in the promotion of resilience in maltreated children.

The dynamic nature of resilience necessitates that children from high-risk backgrounds who are functioning adaptively despite experiences of adversity must be examined over time. In the current investigation, the adaptation of school-age maltreated and nonmaltreated socioeconomically disadvantaged children was examined over 3 consecutive years. In accord with predictions, a higher percentage of nonmaltreated children than of maltreated children were found to be resilient. Moreover, a higher percentage of maltreated than of nonmaltreated children were shown to exhibit functioning consistently in the low adaptive range. Differential predictors of resilience were found in maltreated and nonmaltreated children. Specifically, for maltreated children, positive self-esteem, ego resilience, and ego overcontrol predicted resilient functioning, whereas relationship features were more influential for nonmaltreated children. These findings are discussed in relation to the unfolding of resilient self-organizational strivings in maltreated and nonmaltreated children.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1997

Emotion regulation among school-age children: the development and validation of a new criterion Q-sort scale.

To foster the study of emotion regulation beyond infancy and toddlerhood, a new criterion Q-sort was constructed. In Study 1, Q-scales for emotion regulation and autonomy were developed, and analyses supported their discriminant validity. Study 2 further explored the construct validity of the Emotion Regulation Q-Scale within a sample of 143 maltreated and 80 impoverished children, aged 6 to 12 years. A multitrait-multimethod matrix and confirmatory factor analyses indicated impressive convergence among the Emotion Regulation Q-Scale and established measures of affect regulation. This new scale also was discriminable from measures of related constructs, including Q-sort assessments of ego resiliency. The use of this new measure was further supported by its ability to distinguish between maltreated and comparison children and between groups of well-regulated versus dysregulated children.

Affective Symptoms↗