Despite extensive theoretical and empirical advances in the last two decades, little attention has been paid to the development of statistical techniques suited for the analysis of data gathered in studies of developmental psychopathology. As in most other studies of developmental processes, research in this area often involves complex constructs, such as intelligence and antisocial behavior, measured indirectly using multiple observed indicators. Relations between pairs of such constructs are sometimes reported in terms of latent variables (LVs): linear combinations of the indicators of each construct. We introduce the assumptions and procedures associated with one method for exploring these relations: partial least squares (PLS) analysis, which maximizes covariances between predictor and outcome LVs; its coefficients are correlations between observed variables and LVs, and its LVs are sums of observable variables weighted by these correlations. In the least squares logic of PLS, familiar notions about simple regressions and principal component analyses may be reinterpreted as rules for including or excluding particular blocks in a model and for “splitting” blocks into multiple dimensions. Guidelines for conducting PLS analyses and interpreting their results are provided using data from the Goteborg Daycare Study and the Seattle Longitudinal Prospective Study on Alcohol and Pregnancy. The major advantages of PLS analysis are that it (1) concisely summarizes the intercorrelations among a large number of variables regardless of sample size, (2) yields coefficients that are readily interpretable, and (3) provides straightforward decision rules about modeling. The advantages make PLS a highly desirable technique for use in longitudinal research on developmental psychopathology. The primer is written primarily for the nonstatistician, although formal mathematical details are provided in Appendix 1.

The development of vulnerability to depression is examined from the point of view of one area of cognitive and affective functioning, the processing of information about the future. Drawing on research into how people make choices in an uncertain world, this article reviews how depression affects people's judgments about the relative utility, or subjective value, of different outcomes, and about the relative probability of those outcomes. A developmental model is proposed which suggests that children learn that some people are willing to incorporate into their own utility ordering for different outcomes the utility structure of the child–that is, to care about the child. The role of lack of perceived care in the development of depression is reviewed, and suggestions are made for applications of decision analytic methods to some critical questions concerning the role played by judgments about the future in the development of vulnerability to depression.

Recent empirical and theoretical work on both normal and pathological development has led to the formulation of the metarepresentational conjecture for autism. This account of autistic development links the core impairments in imaginative abilities, communicative skills, and social competence to dysfunction of a single set of underlying cognitive mechanisms. In this context, Mundy and Sigman (1989) argue that the impairment of early gestural communication in autism cannot be accounted for by the metarepresentational theory. On the contrary, this early communication impairment in autism is highly consistent with a faulty theory-of-mind module. In normal development, this module is available from around the first year to handle estensive communication – shared pretense being a prime, though slightly later, example. We briefly consider the role in communication of perceptual processes that may trigger metarepresentation. This early theory-of-mind module, with its metarepresentational processes, provides the specific developmental basis for later versions of the child's theory of mind.

This article presents our response to the comments of Baron-Cohen, Harris, Hobson, and Leslie and Happé. We suggest that a singular cognitive hypothesis does not provide a parsimonious explanation of autism. We argue that certain aspects of autism, including observations of joint-attention deficits and observations of deficits in the prosodic elements of speech, may best be explained in terms of both cognitive and affective factors. We also acknowledge the validity of the criticism of our contingency processing deficit hypothesis (Mundy & Sigman, 1989a). In response to this criticism, we offer a modification of our model of joint-attention skill deficits in autistic children.

A structured childhood history interview was administered to 50 low-income mothers of infants. Three levels of risk for infant maltreatment were represented in the sample, including 10 maltreatment cases. Maternal behavior at home was rated and factor analyzed when the infants were 12 months and 18 months old, yielding separate factors labelled maternal involvement and hostile-intrusiveness. Risk for maltreatment was strongly correlated with the overall adversity of the mother's childhood history. Maternal hostile-intrusive behavior was best accounted for by psychiatric disorder in the mother's own mother and poor peer relationships in childhood. Maternal involvement was negatively associated with a separate cluster of variables indexing family disruption and lack of supervision. The emergence of two separate clusters of associations — positive affective involvement and negative affective involvement — is related to similar two-dimensional results in studies of self-reported mood, infant attachment relationships, and peer relationships. Implications of a two-dimensional affective construct for future theorizing in developmental psychopathology are discussed.

This research examined the impact of child maltreatment and grade level on perceptions of competence and explored relations between perceived competence and school functioning among a sample of 104 low-income school children, half of whom belonged to families in which child maltreatment had been officially documented. Data were collected on 76 first through third graders and 28 fourth through sixth graders, who were interviewed in a laboratory setting, and on a subset of 74 children, who were evaluated by their teachers on measures of school functioning. Results indicated that maltreated children perceive themselves and/or describe themselves differently than do their low-income peers. However, these differences took the expected negative direction only beginning around the middle of the elementary school years. In earlier grades, maltreated children demonstrated a tendency to describe themselves in exaggerated positive terms, over and above the self-enhancement bias documented here and in other research among younger nonmaltreated children. Differences between maltreated and comparison children also appeared in teachers' ratings of school functioning and in use of special educational services. These results are presented and discussed as suggestive evidence for a causal chain from parent-child relationships, to self-perceptions, to school functioning.

Adolescents attempt to end their own lives with greater frequency than do either younger or older persons. The aim of this study was to provide a developmental account of this anomaly by examining the contrastive ways in which suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents reason about their own personal continuity through time. Drawing upon an earlier program of normative research into the links between a maturing sense of personal continuity and the development of a sense of commitment to the future, and capitalizing on recent methodologic advances in the study of young persons' maturing sense of self-continuity, a series of comparisons were made between 30 psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents, at varying degrees of risk to suicide, and a matched control group of their nonsuicidal agemates. The results of this study show that, while almost all of the hospitalized adolescents evidenced some degree of developmental immaturity in their attempts to reason about their own identity across time, the high-risk suicidal group was unique in their special inability to locate any grounds upon which to justify their own continuity through time. These findings are interpreted in terms of their relevance for understanding both the normal identity formation process, and for the diagnosis and treatment of adolescents at special risk to suicide.