For many children and their families, the period of time between Thanksgiving and the New Year is marked with great cheer, delicious home-cooked meals and exciting road trips to visit family and friends. But families affected by attention deficit disorder (ADD) can often miss out on the joys of the holiday season if the condition is not managed…

In this study we examined parent and teacher agreement at the item level of the newly revised Child Behavior Checklist/1??5 (CBCL/1??5) and Caregiver?Teacher Report Form/1??5 (CTRF/1??5) in 505 preschool children from low-income and predominantly African American families. Parents generally rated more children as having problem behaviors than did…

Mothers' emotion talk, children's emotion talk, and children's understanding of emotion were examined in 50 mother-child dyads at 41 months. Language measures included total emotion words, unique emotion words, labels, explanations, and different types of explanations. Children's emotion understanding was assessed for labeling, situation, and…

The aim of this article is to introduce readers to an alternative way of applying U-shaped functions to understand development, especially cognitive development. In classical developmental applications, age is the abscissa; that is, in the fundamental equation B = f(A), some behavioral variable (B) plots as a U-shaped or inverted U-shaped function…

The articles in this collection consider one very interesting puzzle of development: U-shaped developmental functions. At some point during development, an organism might exhibit what seems like a regression from its expected developmental trajectory and, according to continuity models of development, this is aberrant. In this special issue,…

Objective: To provide an initial description of the effectiveness and pharmacokinetics (PK) of quetiapine in aggressive children with conduct disorder (CD). Method: This 8-week, open-label outpatient trial, enrolled patients ages 6 to 12 years with CD. Outcome measures included the Rating of Aggression Against People and/or Property Scale…

Objective: This research examined the validity of criteria for diagnosing social phobia (SOC) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), where the "DSM-IV" criteria were modified to better identify toddlers who could have these disorders. Method: Diagnoses were made with a semistructured clinical interview that included child observations.…

Background: Associations between early mother-child mutually responsive orientation (MRO) and children's conscience have been previously established, but the mechanisms accounting for those links are not understood. We examined three such mediational mechanisms: (a) the child's enhanced enjoyment of interactions with the mother, (b) increased…

Our goal in this paper is to examine the potential origins of children's understanding of morally relevant transgressions, with a particular focus on how children's perceptions of both proximal and distal unfairness might influence their social reasoning and behavior. A preliminary theoretical model is presented that addresses connections among…

The early years of toddlerhood mark the emergence of self-regulation and the child's ability to comply with parental requests. The current study examined young children's compliance and noncompliance in a family context by observing mothers, fathers, and two children in a family clean-up paradigm. Marital conflict and mutual responsiveness in the…

The occurrence of developmental regression in autism is one of the more puzzling features of this disorder. Although several studies have documented the validity of parental reports of regression using home videos, accumulating data suggest that most children who demonstrate regression also demonstrated previous, subtle, developmental differences.…

Early detection of developmental and behavioral/mental health problems is greatly facilitated when quality instruments are deployed. This article describes how to identify accurate measures and presents standards for screening tests. Included is a table delineating accurate tools for primary care: typically those relying on information from…

The types of non-maternal child care received by more than 1000 U.S. children were examined from birth to 54 months and related to family selection factors and to child outcomes. Individual children tended to experience a variety of different types of care and not to fit into clear patterns of either stable care types or progressive patterns of…

This is a report of an 11-year-old, prepubertal boy with acute-onset urinary urgency and frequency, obsessions and compulsions related to urination, severe mood lability, inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity, and intermittent periods of immobilization. Fever, cough, otitis, and sinusitis preceded neuropsychiatric symptoms. Antistreptolysin O…

Oppositional defiant disorder is an individual diagnosis given commonly to children and adolescents who exhibit a pattern of noncompliant and defiant behaviors. Some children's temperament, behaviors, and interpersonal style merit this diagnosis. Other children, however, exhibit behaviors consistent with this diagnosis within the context of their…