A hypothesized need to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships is evaluated in light of the empirical literature. The need is for frequent, nonaversive interactions within an ongoing relational bond. Consistent with the belongingness hypothesis, people form social attachments readily under most conditions and resist the dissolution of existing bonds. Belongingness appears to have multiple and strong effects on emotional patterns and on cognitive processes. Lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being. Other evidence, such as that concerning satiation, substitution, and behavioral consequences, is likewise consistent with the hypothesized motivation. Several seeming counterexamples turned out not to disconfirm the hypothesis. Existing evidence supports the hypothesis that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.

The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.

A novel behavioural screening questionnaire, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), was administered along with Rutter questionnaires to parents and teachers of 403 children drawn from dental and psychiatric clinics. Scores derived from the SDQ and Rutter questionnaires were highly correlated; parent-teacher correlations for the two sets of measures were comparable or favoured the SDQ. The two sets of measures did not differ in their ability to discriminate between psychiatric and dental clinic attenders. These preliminary findings suggest that the SDQ functions as well as the Rutter questionnaires while offering the following additional advantages: a focus on strengths as well as difficulties; better coverage of inattention, peer relationships, and prosocial behaviour; a shorter format; and a single form suitable for both parents and teachers, perhaps thereby increasing parent-teacher correlations.

https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1997.tb01545.x

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: A Research Note

Background Little is known about the general population prevalence or severity of DSM-IV mental disorders. Objective To estimate 12-month prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of DSM-IV anxiety, mood, impulse control, and substance disorders in the recently completed US National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Design and Setting Nationally representative face-to-face household survey conducted between February 2001 and April 2003 using a fully structured diagnostic interview, the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey Initiative version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Participants Nine thousand two hundred eighty-two English-speaking respondents 18 years and older. Main Outcome Measures Twelve-month DSM-IV disorders. Results Twelve-month prevalence estimates were anxiety, 18.1%; mood, 9.5%; impulse control, 8.9%; substance, 3.8%; and any disorder, 26.2%. Of 12-month cases, 22.3% were classified as serious; 37.3%, moderate; and 40.4%, mild. Fifty-five percent carried only a single diagnosis; 22%, 2 diagnoses; and 23%, 3 or more diagnoses. Latent class analysis detected 7 multivariate disorder classes, including 3 highly comorbid classes representing 7% of the population. Conclusion Although mental disorders are widespread, serious cases are concentrated among a relatively small proportion of cases with high comorbidity.

/pdf/prevalence-severity-and-comorbidity-of-12-month-dsm-iv-54fahxwd1s.pdf

Prevalence, Severity, and Comorbidity of 12-Month DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication

So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

This chapter suggests that delinquency conceals two distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: A small group engages in antisocial behavior of one sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence. According to the theory of life-course-persistent antisocial behavior, children's neuropsychological problems interact cumulatively with their criminogenic environments across development, culminating m a pathological personality. According to the theory of adolescence-limited antisocial behavior, a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive. There are marked individual differences in the stability of antisocial behavior. The chapter reviews the mysterious relationship between age and antisocial behavior. Some youths who refrain from antisocial behavior may, for some reason, not sense the maturity gap and therefore lack the hypothesized motivation for experimenting with crime.

/pdf/adolescence-limited-and-life-course-persistent-antisocial-52vil00qlw.pdf

Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.

A general assumption is that science is just organised commonsense. It is noted that translation involves a two-way pathway between basic laboratory science and patient care, and that some scientific findings have implications for prevention rather than treatment. A succinct critique follows on the key features that differentiate science and commonsense. The main part of the paper discusses six rather different examples of translation that went awry because people treated science and commonsense as equivalent. Examples based on empirical evidence of translation going awry include (i) the claim that only early intervention can bring lasting benefits; (ii) the claim that the main policy goal for children should be the elimination of all stresses; (iii) the claim that exposure in utero to maternal smoking causes ADHD and conduct disturbance; (iv) the claim that tax benefits should be used to encourage couples to marry; (v) the effects of profound institutional deprivation are similar to those of any adversity; and (vi) environmental effects are largely independent of genetic influences. Much of science is 'unnatural' in the sense that technical tools (such as imaging or DNA) are employed, or because animal models are used, or because unusual comparisons are made. Science cannot be based solely on an inductive process; rather, there must be some form of experiment and the testing of two or more alternative explanations. Translation needs to be based on top quality science and an appreciation that even the best science needs to take account of multiple strategies and multiple evaluations.

Translation gone awry: differences between commonsense and science

The two key features of developmental psychopathology (DP) concern the importance of continuities and discontinuities across the span of development and the span between normality and disorder (Rutter, 1988; Rutter & Sroufe, 2000; Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). Both, however, required a shift from what has been traditional in developmental psychology and in child psychiatry (Rutter, 2003). Thus, developmental psychology has tended to focus particularly on developmental universals and on trait continuities over time, whereas DP demands a focus on individual differences and on the growing psychological cohesion that may extend across traits and on the modifications and changes that derive from altered circumstances. Child psychiatry, on the other hand, has tended to concentrate on the causes and course of individual diagnostic conditions. Of course, these are important, but what is different about a DP perspective is that it is necessary to go on to pose questions such as those involving age-related variations in susceptibility to stress, the extent to which development of disorder is dependent on prior circumstances at an earlier age, the query as to whether there are points in development when psychological qualities become relatively stabilized, and the question as to why some psychopathological patterns become so much more common during adolescence than they had been in childhood. DP concepts emphasize that both continuities and discontinuities have to be considered and that a central concern has to involve determination of the mediating mechanisms involved in both change and stability.

Nature-Nurture Integration

Adult outcome of childhood and adolescent depression: psychiatric status

Background Institutional deprivation in early childhood is associated with neuropsychological deficits in adolescence. Using 20-year follow-up data from a unique natural experiment – the large-scale adoption of children exposed to extreme deprivation in Romanian institutions in the 1980s –we examined, for the first time, whether such deficits are still present in adulthood and whether they are associated with deprivation-related symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Methods
 Adult neuropsychological functioning was assessed across five domains (inhibitory control, emotion recognition, decision-making, prospective memory and IQ) in 70 previously institutionalized adoptees (mean age = 25.3, 50% female) and 22 non-deprived UK adoptees (comparison group, mean age = 24.6, 41% female). ADHD and ASD symptoms were assessed using parent-completed questionnaires. Results
 Early institutionalization was associated with impaired performance on all tasks in adulthood. Prospective memory deficits persisted after controlling for IQ. ADHD and ASD symptoms were positively correlated. After controlling for ASD symptoms, ADHD symptoms remained associated with deficits in IQ, prospective memory, proactive inhibition, decision-making quality and emotion recognition. ASD symptoms were not independently associated with neuropsychological deficits when accounting for their overlap with ADHD symptoms. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the link between childhood deprivation and adult ADHD symptoms was statistically explained by deprivation-related differences in adult IQ and prospective memory. Conclusions
 These results represent some of the most compelling evidence to date of the enduring power of early, time-limited childhood adversity to impair long-term neuropsychological functioning across the lifespan – effects that are linked specifically to deprivation-related adult ADHD symptoms.

/pdf/the-impact-of-childhood-deprivation-on-adult-2sm1ds9nj9.pdf

The impact of childhood deprivation on adult neuropsychological functioning is associated with ADHD symptom persistence

This study presents follow-up findings on the reading progress of black and white children from an inner London sample between the ages of 10 and 14. At 10, mean scores for black children of West Indian origin were well below those of whites. By 14, black girls had maintained comparable levels of progress with white girls, but there was some evidence of slower progress among black boys. These findings differ from the results of previous British longitudinal research in this area. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed.

Michael Rutter

Papers

Translation gone awry: differences between commonsense and science

Nature-Nurture Integration

Adult outcome of childhood and adolescent depression: psychiatric status

The impact of childhood deprivation on adult neuropsychological functioning is associated with ADHD symptom persistence

Black pupils' progress in secondary school—I. Reading attainment between 10 and 14