The population-based Seattle Longitudinal Prospective Study on Alcohol and Pregnancy unites the fields of developmental psychopathology and behavioral teratology. Examining prenatal biological influences on childhood learning problems, this report is the first to extend earlier findings of alcohol-related deficits into late childhood. This follow-up study of 458 singletons assesses the degree to which children's classroom behavior and achievement difficulties at age 11 are predicted by prenatal alcohol exposure across the full spectrum of maternal use. Partial least squares statistical techniques are used to summarize complex multiple measures of exposure and outcome as latent variables. Accounting for many factors potentially important in development, analyses reveal a significant and subtle dose-response relationship between prenatal alcohol exposure and children's school performance a decade later. Maternal binge drinking (five or more drinks per occasion) and drinking during very early pregnancy are particularly salient for children's poorer school performance. A wide variety of problematic classroom behaviors, including attentional, activity, information-processing, and academic difficulties, are salient for prenatal alcohol exposure. Considered within the body of data on alcohol teratogenesis, these findings suggest that prenatal alcohol exposure has an enduring and predictable relationship with developmental difficulties through late childhood. Clinical, research, and public health implications are discussed.

Results are reported for a 3-year prospective longitudinal study of behavior problems in a group of children born at very low birthweight (<1,500 g) and a full-term control. Behavior problems were assessed with the Behavior Screening Questionnaire (BSQ) at 3 years and with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the hyperactivity index from the Conners parent and teacher scales at 6 years. The findings indicate that the preterms manifested more behavior problems than full-terms at both ages and that the overall prevalence of clinically significant problems increased with age. Although cross-age continuity on parent rating scales was similar and modest for both groups (r = .24–.35), the persistence of significant problems was quite high (50%). Early BSQ scores predicted later externalizing problems, even after the effects of prematurity, socioeconomic status, and family stress were removed, but not later internalizing problems. The latter were more strongly influenced by low SES and family stress. Findings for the full-terms, who had received the CBCL as well as the BSQ at 3 years, suggest that these two instruments may tap somewhat different dimensions of behavior disturbance at age 3.

One reason for looking at a person's eyes may be to diagnose their goal, because a person's eye direction reliably specifies what they are likely to act upon next. We report an experiment that investigates whether or not young normal infants use eye contact for this function. We placed them in situations in which the adult's action toward them was either ambiguous or unambiguous in its goal. Results showed that the majority of normal infants and young children with mental handicap made instant eye contact immediately following the ambiguous action but rarely after the unambiguous action. Young children with autism, in contrast, made eye contact equally (little) in both conditions. These results are discussed in relation to the function of eye contact, to our understanding of infant cognition, and to the theory of mind hypothesis of autism.

The Preschool Socio-affective Profile, an 80-item teacher rating scale, was used to classify 126 French-Canadian children into three equal groups: socially competent (SC), average (AV), and anxious-withdrawn (AW). Mother-child interactions during a problem-solving task were observed. Base rates and conditional probabilities were calculated to assess the extent to which subjects responded contingently to each other's behaviors and affect. Children in all three groups exhibited a high degree of positive and negative reciprocity. SC children expressed more positive affect than AV or AW children and were more cooperative than AW children, who expressed more negative affect than either the SC or AV children. Mothers of the SC children displayed more positive behaviors and affect, were more contingent, and were more coherent in their discipline than all other mothers. Mothers of AV children were both less reciprocal with their child and less coherent than SC mothers. Failing to reciprocate positive affect or behavior, AW mothers engaged in a high degree of negative reciprocity and superfluous control and were aversive in response to compliance and noncompliance. These results are discussed from a developmental, transactional perspective, and their implications for an intervention strategy are considered.

This study examined the relation between maternal and filial attributions and the aggressiveness of their interactions. We also examined whether or not certain setting conditions (e.g., maternal and child depression, maternal and child negative life events, marital conflict, socioeconomic status) predispose some mothers and children to make negative attributions and interact coercively. One hundred four mothers and sons (age 7–9 years) from married and divorced families participated. They completed questionnaire and interview data and were observed while participating in two gamelike tasks (e.g., Trouble, Etch-a-Sketch). Both maternal and child attributions were significantly related to their coercive interactions. The most aggressive dyads were those in which both mothers and sons perceived hostile intent in the other. The relations between attributions and coercive interactions were found to be moderated by marital conflict, and maternal education, such that the association between attributions and coercive behavior, was stronger when marital conflict was low and the mothers were better educated.

This study addresses the question of whether or not parents' working models of childhood attachments constitute a risk factor for difficulties in current parent-child relations. In a sample of 27 families and their preschool-aged children, mother-child and father-child dyads were observed in separate laboratory play sessions from which ratings of parents' and children's behavior were collected. Working models of attachment were assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984). Results showed that parents classified as insecure were less warm and provided less structure in interactions with their children than did parents classified as secure. Children of insecure parents were less warm toward their parents than were children of secure parents. Analyses of parents' joint attachment classification showed that insecure women married to insecure men were less warm and provided less structure with their children than did mothers in either the insecure-secure or secure-secure dyads. These findings suggest that, in two-parent families, an insecure working model may be a risk factor for less competent parenting but that the risk is more pronounced when both parents have insecure working models of attachment.

Two population enquiries in Walthamstow and Islington, London, have shown that loss of the mother before the age of 17 years, either by death or separation for a year or more, doubles the risk of depressive and anxiety disorders among adult women. Furthermore, there was a particularly high rate of adult depression among those whose mothers died before they were 6 years old, and this was associated with a measure of childhood helplessness. There was no such link of either adult disorder or childhood helplessness with age at loss under 6 years for those losing a mother by separation. Two possible explanations were explored for these contrasting results. That concerning the adequacy of mourning of the mother's death received no support. However, evidence indicated that experience with the mother before the loss (usually affected by ongoing illness) explained the link of adult depression or anxiety with her early death. The failure of age at loss to relate in the separation group was probably due to the fact that among them age of separation was not a good indication of the quality of maternal care before age 6. Indirect evidence emerged which suggested that quality of early attachment (before age 6) to the natural mother before any loss relates to childhood helplessness. This in turn relates to a higher risk of disorder in adult life.

While depressive symptoms in adolescent mothers may affect both their own and their babies' development, little research has focused on the mothers. Self-reported symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory were collected at 1, 6, 12, and 28–36 months postpartum. Concurrent and reciprocal longitudinal relations among symptom levels, stressful life events, and social supports were investigated. Symptom levels declined over the four assessments, with changes in somatic, rather than cognitive affective, symptoms accounting for the decrease. Stressful life events and all sources of social supports predicted concurrent levels of depressive symptoms, but only social supports predicted declines in symptoms in the first year postpartum. Reciprocally, depressive symptoms tended (p = .06) to predict increases in stressful life events over time. Mothers were also categorized as reporting few (50%), intermittent (27.5%), or chronic (22.5%) symptoms in the first 12 months postpartum. Intermittently and chronically depressed mothers perceived their own mothers as less accepting than nondepressed mothers. Compared to nondepressed and intermittently depressed mothers, chronically depressed mothers also reported more stressful life events, were more likely to live alone, and experienced more moves by 28–36 months postpartum. The reciprocal causal relations among depressive symptoms, stress, and attachments to grandmothers and peers are discussed.

Determinants of individual differences in the sensitivity of parenting attitudes were investigated in mothers with schizophrenic or major mood disorders. Constructs from the major domains of the mother's childhood relational experiences, personality, social context, and child characteristics were evaluated in a developmental model to predict differences in parenting attitudes. Two pathways were identified. An index of the severity and chronicity of the mother's disorder was shown to predict less-adaptive parenting attitudes. A second pathway revealed that emotional support from network members influenced self-esteem, which predicted more adaptive parenting attitudes. However, perceptions of childhood relational experiences, particularly maternal uninvolvement, predicted parenting attitudes as well as accounted for relationships among emotional support, self-esteem, and parenting. The results were discussed from an attachment theory perspective. The implications of individual differences in maternal functioning for both the mother and the child's adaptation were discussed, and treatment issues were addressed.