Blackwell Reference Online

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Developmental psychopathology is an organizational framework to study children and adolescents' behavioral, emotional, and social problems arising from different etiologies, manifesting different symptoms at different ages across the life-span, and resulting in different outcomes. It is a combination of developmental psychology (the study of how children and adolescents change over time and the factors responsible for those changes) as well as psychopathology (the study of abnormal or maladaptive behavior). From a developmental psychopathology perspective, behavioral, emotional, and social problems experienced by children and adolescents result from multiple causes. The multiple causes may include biological factors (e.g., deficits in neurotransmitters), genetics (e.g., chromosome abnormalities), contextual variables (i.e., family, school, peer, and cultural variables), and the interactions between contextual variables and the child or adolescent. All of these factors may contribute to children and adolescents' behavioral, emotional, and social problems. Yet, some of these factors may be difficult to identify and in some cases, they may not be possible to treat. Developmental psychopathologists are interested in children and adolescents' current functioning, and how their current functioning is the product of past events and is also related to their current and future development ... log in or subscribe to read full text