One of the challenges of developmental psychopathology is to determine whether identifiable pathways to developmental disorders exist in the first months or years of life. Early identification of such disorders poses a similar challenge for clinical services. Using data from a large contemporary birth cohort, we examined whether psychopathology at…

Recent models of the early emergence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) propose an interaction between risk susceptibility and the infant's social environment, resulting in a progressively atypical developmental trajectory. The infant's early social environmental experience consists mostly of interaction with caregivers, yet there has been little…

To establish which social interactive behaviours predict later psychiatric diagnosis, we examined 180 videos of a parent-infant interaction when children were aged one year, from within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort. Sixty of the videos involved infants who were later diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder at…

This study investigated the utility of adult and infant vocalisation in the prediction of child psychopathology. Families were sampled from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort. Vocalisation patterns were obtained from 180 videos (60 cases and 120 randomly selected sex-matched controls) of parent-infant…