Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, 53706, USA.
World Psychiatry. 2015 Oct;14(3):262-9. doi: 10.1002/wps.20237.
The integrative field of developmental psychopathology is having a huge impact on our understanding of human health and behavior. In this paper, I use the example of children's early stress exposure to illustrate how developmental psychopathologists now tend to deemphasize diagnostic categories and, instead, emphasize the social and biological contexts, events and circumstances that have created opportunities for maladaptive responses and health problems in youth. This example shows that developmental psychopathology is increasing understanding of how children develop the abilities that allow them to cope effectively with challenges and what leads to failures in development of these abilities. Integrating research about the neurobiology of learning may prove to be a powerful future direction to understand how the environment regulates behavior. Learning processes become increasingly intricate and fine-tuned as relevant neuroanatomical systems develop, and as the range, complexity and amount of environmental information increases for the developing child. A focus on these processes allows psychopathologists to formulate questions about which neural mechanisms children use to process information, how these mechanisms are themselves shaped by social context, why adverse social environments confer risk for children, and, perhaps, what sorts of neutrally informed interventions might remediate the deficits in self-regulation that underlie common psychopathologies.
发展心理病理学的综合领域正在对我们对人类健康和行为的理解产生巨大影响。在本文中，我以儿童早期压力暴露为例，说明发展心理学家现在如何倾向于淡化诊断类别，而是强调社会和生物背景、事件和环境，这些因素为青少年的适应不良反应和健康问题创造了机会。这个例子表明，发展心理病理学正在增加对儿童如何发展使他们能够有效应对挑战的能力的理解，以及导致这些能力发展失败的原因。整合关于学习神经生物学的研究可能被证明是理解环境如何调节行为的一个有力的未来方向。随着相关神经解剖系统的发展，以及发展中的儿童所面临的环境信息量的增加、复杂性和丰富度的增加，学习过程变得越来越复杂和精细。关注这些过程使心理学家能够提出关于儿童用来处理信息的神经机制的问题，这些机制如何受到社会环境的影响，为什么不良的社会环境会给儿童带来风险，以及什么样的中性干预措施可能会纠正自我调节缺陷，而自我调节缺陷是常见精神病理学的基础。
