This chapter explores the relationship between climate distress – particularly fear and sadness about climate change – and clinical-level psychiatric symptoms in children and young people, focusing on pediatric anxiety and depression. In response to societal tendencies to under- or overplay the mental health risks of climate emotional impacts, it describes the spectrum of healthy and unhealthy pediatric anxiety and depression, the role that chronic stress and direct climate impacts play on child and adolescent brain development and clinical syndromes, and the ways that responding emotionally to climate change can influence youth identity development and emotional strength. The chapter provides a template for how to assess young people’s climate emotions clinically, offering several detailed case descriptions to illustrate how stress, psychopathology, psychological and brain development, and climate emotions can weave together to influence the sum of a young person’s presentation. As parents’ and other adults’ responses play a key role in whether these emotions evolve to a clinical level, it also suggests some best practices for interacting with climate-distressed youth to minimize poor clinical outcomes.

This chapter reviews contemporary computational models of psychological development in a historical context, including those based on symbolic rules, artificial neural networks, dynamic systems, robotics, and Bayesian ideas. Emphasis is placed on newer work and the insights that simulation can provide into developmental mechanisms. Within space limitations, coverage is both sufficiently broad to provide a general overview of the field and sufficiently detailed to facilitate understanding of important techniques. Prospects for integrating the dominant approaches of neural networks and Bayesian methods are explored. There is also speculation about how deep-learning networks might begin to impact developmental modeling by increasing the realism of training patterns, particularly in visual perception.

In this integrative chapter, we summarize insights emerging from the volume as a whole with respect to the main propositions outlined in the introduction, namely, that (a) revenge is part and parcel of children’s and adolescents’ lives, manifesting various normative forms and functions, and (b) throughout childhood and adolescence, revenge can be both a consequence and a predictor of adverse psychological and social processes. In addressing the ways in which these two overarching concerns are woven throughout the chapters in this book, we summarize the contributions of individual, interpersonal, and institutional-level influences on the development of revenge. We conclude with proposed future directions and implications for intervention.