Developmental Psychopathology Courts Developmental Neurobiology: Current Issues and Future Challenges

The last decade has witnessed significant advances in theory and research in the fields of developmental psychopathology and developmental neurobiology. These two fields have much in common, sharing a number of guiding principles and assumptions. This article describes the research implications that these shared principles contain for the growing partnership between developmental psychopathology and developmental neurobiology. Based upon the methods successfully employed in the developmental neurosciences, the author emphasizes that developmental psychopathology must (A) construct more specific (even clever) research questions, (B) develop research tools more capable of examining time-dependent brain-behavior relations, (C) outline and test particular causal mechanisms and their contextual dependencies, and (D) avoid formulaic, nonthinking statistics and design methods that often characterize mental health research.