Organismic theories and recent research suggest that environments that do not support growth and self-expression are associated with valuing financial success relatively more than affiliation, community feeling, and self-acceptance. This prediction was investigated in a heterogenous sample of 18year-olds using a variety of methods and informants. Teenagers who rated the importance of financial success aspirations relatively high compared to other values were found to have mothers who were less nurturant. Further, materially oriented teenagers grew up in less advantageous socioeconomic circumstances and were raised by mothers who especially valued the teens' financial success. Discussion focuses on explicating the different ways values are acquired.

Early indicators of schizophrenic outcomes were sought in a group of children of chronically ill schizophrenic women. A sample of pregnant women with varying degrees of mental illness were examined during the perinatal period and recruited into a 4-year longitudinal evaluation, which included cognitive, psychomotor, social, and emotional assessments at birth, 4, 12, 30, and 48 months of age. The mothers varied on mental health dimensions of diagnosis, severity of symptomatology, and chronicity of illness. Other factors included in the analyses were socioeconomic status (SES), race, sex of child, and family size. Hypotheses were tested to determine the relative impact of three sets of variables on the child's behavior: (1) specific maternal psychiatric diagnosis, (2) severity and chronicity of disturbance independent of diagnosis, and (3) general social status. We found that a specific maternal diagnosis of schizophrenia had the least impact. Neurotic-depressive mothers produced worse development in their children than schizophrenic or personality-disordered mothers. Both social status and severity/chronicity of illness showed a greater impact on development. Children of more severely or chronically ill mothers and lower-SES black children performed most poorly. These results do not support etiological models based on simple biological or environmental transmission of schizophrenia. The role of social and family environmental factors in predicting child cognitive and social-emotional competence was further evaluated using a multiple risk index. Children with high multiple environmental risk scores had much worse outcomes than children with low multiple risk scores.

Verbal IQ scores in a socially heterogeneous sample of 215 4-year-old children were highly related to a cumulative environmental risk index composed of maternal, family and cultural variables. Different combinations of equal numbers of risk factors produced similar effects on IQ, providing evidence (1) that no single factor identified here uniquely enhances or limits early intellectual achievement and (2) that cumulative effects from multiple risk factors increase the probability that development will be compromised. The multiple risk index predicted substantially more variance in the outcome measure than did any single risk factor alone, including socioeconomic status. High-risk children were more than 24 times as likely to have IQs below 85 than low-risk children.

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The factors contributing to the mental health of a sample of 18-year-olds were analyzed in a hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The contribution of proximal variables such as parenting behavior, intermediate variables such as other family factors, and the more distal variables such as social class and minority status were all highly significant. Child variables were also found to make significant contributions to understanding mental health. When the sample was divided into three subsamples, white advantaged, white disadvantaged, and African American (almost entirely disadvantaged), the mental health of the African American sample was higher than that of the white disadvantaged sample. The regression coefficients fit to the whole sample underestimated the mental health of the African Americans and overestimated the health of the white disadvantaged. The parenting of the African American sample was less approving and more critical and more controlling than that of the other two samples. To investigate the correlates of resilience, pairs of subjects were contrasted who had the same mental health but differed in whether they exceeded or were less than the mental health predicted for them. None of the variables in the study differentiated significantly between the two groups.

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Children in the primary grades of a single experimental school were exposed, for 3 yr., to a comprehensive program designed for the early detection and prevention of emotional disorders. At the end of that period they were contrasted, on a variety of school-record and adjustment measures, to control 3rd-graders from 2 demographically comparable schools. Evidence was presented demonstrating the salutary effects of the preventive program with respect to several criterion measures of behavior, achievement, and adjustment. Additionally, within the E school, youngsters in whom manifest or incipient pathology was identified very early in their careers, were found, by the end of the 3rd year, to be performing less adequately in school, showing greater indications of maladjustment on objective tests and behavioral ratings, obtaining lower standard achievement test scores, less well-rated by their peers, and manifesting more physical complaints than their nonaffected peers. The implications of these data for a preventively oriented, community-based approach to mental health problems were considered.

A college student, afterschool, day-care volunteer program for primary grade children with manifest or incipient emotional problems is reported. Attitudes differentiating volunteers from nonvolunteers and changes in volunteer attitudes following participation in the program are identified. A description of the program itself, including objective process data and evaluation of outcome indices is presented. Interrelations among various process measures, among the several outcome measures, and, finally, between process and outcome measures are summarized.