Multilevel developmental approaches to understanding the effects of child maltreatment: Recent advances and future challenges
Date
2015
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Development and psychopathology
Abstract
Recent research in the field of child maltreatment has begun to shed new light on the emergence of health problems in children by emphasizing the responsiveness of developmental processes to children’s environmental and biological contexts. Here, I highlight recent trends in the field with an emphasis on the effects of early life stress across multiple levels of developmental domains. Developmental approaches to understanding the effects of child maltreatment have enhanced our understanding of this serious public health problem. Research on child abuse has also served as a model for exploring the ways in which the social environment can influence the course of an individual’s development. Over the past decade, researchers in the field have ushered in a sophisticated emphasis on developmental process that has emphasized more precise predictors of certain behavioral problems and helped clinicians focus on the various forms of symptomatology that may be expressed at different stages of the life course. Perhaps most important, recent research in the field has begun to forge connections between sequelae of child abuse for which linkages were not well understood: these most recent advances highlight the importance of combining multiple levels of analysis to advance knowledge of the interplay between biology and social experience. In the past, studies on the effects of child abuse largely comprised correlational methods and behavioral observations. This formative research played an important role not only in demonstrating the degree to which maltreatment had a lasting impact on child development but also in beginning to map the wide range of domains affected by child abuse. More recent emphases in developmental psychopathology now focus on elucidating the specific developmental processes affected by child abuse that may lead to maladaptive behavior. This approach mirrors significant changes in the way many developmentalists now conceptualize psychopathology. For example, cutting-edge researchers in the field of child maltreatment now tend to de-emphasize distinctions between what would have previously been construed as mental versus physical disorders. There is also a renewed emphasis among researchers on the interactions between persons and their environments. Below, I illustrate how these types of developmentally informed approaches are testing novel hypotheses about the biological conduits across levels of analysis, such as the biology of the individual and that individual’s social environment. (Author Abstract)
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Keywords
child abuse, biological effects, psychological effects, review
Citation
Pollak, S. D. (2015). Multilevel developmental approaches to understanding the effects of child maltreatment: Recent advances and future challenges. Development and psychopathology, 27(4pt2), 1387-1397.