How do we make judgments about the presence of psychopathology in children and adolescents? This is a foundational and controversial issue in clinical science that has strong implications for clinical practice and everyday life. I discuss current criteria that are used to define psychopathology in children and adolescents, highlighting the importance of developmental issues and the child’s lived experiences in different environmental settings, including diverse cultures. I give brief examples from my own research, which has focused on early developmental contributions to psychopathology, and more recently, how parents in different cultural settings define, explain, and manage challenging behaviors in their young children. Finally, I show how current practices fail to incorporate developmental and contextual issues into their diagnostic criteria, with potentially adverse consequences for children, families, and their broader communities.

About the speaker: Dr. Sheryl Olson is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research has focused on the early childhood origins of disruptive behavior problems, highlighting complex transactions between self-regulation and social-cognitive difficulties experienced by the child and adverse relationships among family and peers. She has a long history of conducting studies that trace children’s early behavioral development over time, most notably a 19-year prospective study of the development of aggressive and impulsive behavior (the Michigan Longitudinal Study). Dr. Olson also has examined early emotion regulation difficulties in different cultural settings (U.S., China, and Japan), integrating biological, behavioral, and social assessments of preschool-age children and their functioning. Her current studies feature assessments of parents’ beliefs about the nature, causes, and management of challenging behaviors in young children growing up in North America, Spain, China, and Malaysia.