No abstract

This study explored the development of young children's behavioral strategies for coping with child abuse. It was hypothesized that infants exposed to the controllingness and harshness of interaction with an abusive mother would first learn to inhibit behavior disagreeable to the mother and later learn to comply with maternal demands. It was expected that this developmental change in abused children's behavior would be adaptive in the short term because it would reduce the probability of continued abuse. In the long term, however, compulsive compliance was expected to be maladaptive because it distorted the child's perception of, and response to, reality. In addition, it was hypothesized that the compliant behavior pattern would be used only with controlling interactants during the first 3 years of life. In other words, the descriptions of defensive patterns of behavior applied indiscriminantly by older abused children were not expected to apply to infants and toddlers. Both hypotheses were supported using data drawn from videotapes of mother-child and other adult-child interaction.

Genetic factors exert an important influence on adult personality traits, accounting for anywhere between 30% and 60% of the variance. Heredity is also important for most forms of psychopathology and plays a major role in several theories that relate personality to psychopathology. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little multivariate genetic research reported on joint analyses of personality and psychopathology. The small amount of available data suggests that genes may account for over 50% of the observed correlation between neuroticism and state symptoms of anxiety and depression. The mechanisms behind such strong genetic correlations are crucial for understanding the causal relationship between a personality trait and a disorder because genetically influenced biological systems may operate as exogenous "third-party" factors that are responsible for what appear to be phenotypic cause-effect relationships. We illustrate how recent analytical advances in behavior genetics can use multivariate family data to address questions about the causal role of personality in psychopathology.