Development and Prevention of Behaviour Problems

From Genes to Social Policy

Richard E. Tremblay, Marcel A. G. van Aken, Willem Koops

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135247324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together world leading researchers from diverse fields to explore the potential causes of the development of behaviour problems. The book presents theories that hope to influence public health, education and social policy in the prevention of the costly social troubles that behaviour problems can cause.

Featuring contributions from researchers whose backgrounds range from the social and behavioural sciences to economics, the varied chapters assesses the potential role of gene–environment interactions, biological factors and gender differences in the development of behaviour problems. The book includes a review of studies that attempt to understand why antisocial behaviour is concentrated within families, and concludes with three chapters that link developmental research directly with policy issues. It provides a framework for students, scientists, educators and care givers to understand where frontier research on behaviour problems is going and how it can be applied in the social, educational and health services.

This collection will interest all students of psychology and the behavioural sciences as well as those with an interest in public policy, sociology, abnormal psychology, psychopathology and personality disorders.

1
Research on the development and prevention of behaviour problems

A fundamental change still hard to grasp for most investigators

Richard E. Tremblay, Marcel A. G. van Aken and Willem Koops

This book brings together world leading investigators to illustrate how different fields of expertise are coming together to unravel the development of behaviour problems and, hopefully, influence public health, education and social policies in preventing costly health and social problems.

There was a time, not so long ago, when social, cognitive, psychodynamic, behavioural and biological investigators were each working in their own small corner of the world trying to find “The Cause” and “The Cure” of behaviour problems. We vividly remember the freshly minted PhD from one of the top child development research institutes in the USA proudly telling, in a job interview, that he specialized in emotional development rather than cognitive development because it was the “real” basis of behaviour problems, and the candidate for a postdoctoral position claiming that her knowledge of multilevel analyses was essential and foundational for the future of research of behavioural problems, if not for any behavioural research.

Students were not the only naïve members of the academic and public policy environment. In the years leading to the last decade of the 20th century, the McArthur Foundation joined forces with the National Institute of Justice, investing very large amounts of money to plan a longitudinal study aimed at understanding the development of antisocial behaviour from an interdisciplinary perspective (Farrington et al., 1990; Tonry et al., 1991). The genetic-biological component that the first author of this chapter worked on with Felton Earls and David Rowe was not the most popular during the planning phase and, eventually, had to go “underground” because the project was finally targeted at an African-American community in Chicago (Sampson, Raudenbusch, & Earls, 1997). This was all before the worldwide collaborative-competitive effort launched by geneticists succeeded in giving us the tools to use genetic information in our behavioural studies (Roberts, 2001), and before neuroscientists acquired effective brain imaging tools (Albright, Jessell, Kandel, & Posner, 2001; Raichle, 1998) to help understand the brain mechanisms involved in cognitive, emotional and social behaviour. However, not all of the prejudices disappeared with the advent of the new millennium and the new technologies. University departments still breed millions of young professionals blind to most of the other disciplines studying their object of interest. Research on the development of behaviour problems is still done mostly from a behavioural, cognitive, genetic, hormonal or social perspective, to name only a few of the multitude of angles that can be taken.

If most investigators are still trained with tightly fitting blinkers, it is easy to imagine the resistances new interdisciplinary research results are meeting in the public arena. For example, in 2004 the first author was invited by the French national research institute of health (INSERM) to be a member of an expert panel charged with reviewing the state of knowledge on conduct disorder. The 428-page report appeared one year later (INSERM, 2005) and included chapters on development, prevention, treatment and risk factors such as perinatal events, family characteristics, parenting, attachment, neuro-cognitive deficits and genetics. On the day the report was released an editorial appeared in one of the main French daily newspapers accusing the report, among other things, of proposals that would stigmatize children and promote the use of medication to “cure” a “social” problem (Le Monde, 2005). A group of university professors and professionals working in the child protection area created a web site denouncing the report and asking the public to sign a petition against its recommendations. Within a few months 200,000 people had signed the petition, dozens of newspaper articles, radio, and television programmes were debating whether conduct disorder existed or not, whether it was a medical or social problem, whether there were clear long-term risk factors, and whether we should try to prevent these social problems by intervention programmes before adolescence. The “revolt” against the national research institute was clearly led by professionals trained within university departments where biological and behavioural research was depicted as a threat to human dignity (Tremblay, 2008a). Demonization of a biological approach to “social” problems is not limited to French psychoanalysts. A good example can be found in a recent New York Times Bestseller, The Lucifer Effect (Zimbardo, 2007). The book presents in detail social psychology experiments which try to explain “how good people turn evil”. In the book’s Foreword the author writes that he challenges “the traditional focus on the individual’s inner nature”. However, the only reference to research on “individual inner nature” was to the eugenics movement more than a century ago (p. 313)!

The chances that the present book will be a bestseller among professionals who have made up their minds concerning the “causes” of behaviour problems are perilously close to zero. Our aim is not to convert those who have long adhered to the idea that the human mind and human behaviour escape the laws of nature. Our hope is that the chapters of this book will help a new generation of students, scientists, educators and care givers to understand where frontier research on behaviour problems is going and how it can be applied in the social, educational, and health services.

This being said, it will be easy to understand that we start with non-human animal studies. Chapter 2 describes fascinating work with rhesus monkeys, relatives that are close enough to accept that the mechanisms that explain their behaviour should be a good approximation of the mechanisms underlying human behaviour. Steve Suomi has published on rhesus monkey behaviour for close to 40 years and has been extremely successful in answering questions that help investigators working with human subjects to go beyond the traditional frontiers. For example, the work on gene–environment interactions he presented at an International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD) symposium in Beijing (Suomi, 2000) sparked the work of Caspi et al. (2002) on gene–environment interactions for violent behaviour in humans. In this book he shows how both genetic and experiential mechanisms are implicated not only in the expression of behaviour patterns but also in their transmission across successive generations of monkeys.

Chapter 3 takes over from where Chapter 2 ends by investigating the mechanisms that could explain the statistical gene–environment interactions. The chapter was written as an introduction to the new and vibrant version of a relatively old concept, epigenetics (Tremblay, 2005, 2008b). The first author, Moshe Szyf, spent most of his career applying epigenetics (environmental programming of gene expression) to cancer research before turning to the effects of the environment on non-human and human behaviour through gene expression. The chapter starts with a detailed discussion of epigenetics (i.e., how the environment has an impact on gene expression) and then summarizes groundbreaking work that explains the long-term epigenetic effects of maternal care on the behaviour of rats. It ends with an incursion in no less groundbreaking work on human aggression.

Chapter 4 is an excellent introduction to human studies of gene– environment interactions aiming to understand numerous long-term outcomes of maternal behaviour during pregnancy. Tomas Paus, a brain imaging specialist, and Zdenka Pausova, a hypertension geneticist, initiated this retrospective study to understand the extent to which maternal smoking during pregnancy has an impact on brain and behaviour development as well as on cardiovascular and metabolic health in adolescence. The study is a good illustration of the broad interdisciplinary work needed to link complex interrelated causal factors such as genes and environment with a host of interrelated outcomes such as brain development, cardiovascular functioning and behaviour. Too often we forget that “mental” health is based on health of a physical organ, the brain!

With Chapter 5 we turn to prospective longitudinal studies of behaviour development to highlight the importance of long-term descriptions of the phenotypes we want to “explain”. The mechanisms that control the development of a phenotype can be understood only if we have a good description of that specific phenotype’s development. Richard Tremblay describes a series of longitudinal studies that showed we had been asking the wrong question when, for decades, we tried to find “how children learn to physically aggress”. The chapter also summarizes a series of studies that tested the genetic and environmental contributions to the development of a chronic physical aggression trajectory. The story about the long-term follow-up of thousands of children maps well on the rhesus monkey results in Chapter 2, on the maternal smoking during pregnancy issues of Chapter 4, and extends the last part of Chapter 3 on epigenetic differences between boys on a chronic trajectory of physical aggression and boys on a “normal” trajectory.

The focus of Chapter 6 is on individual differences in temperament and personality among children. The debate over the genetic and environmental origins of temperament and personality is as old as research in psychology. Marcel van Aken summarizes studies on the stability of personality from childhood to adulthood, which also highlight how personality, together with environmental factors, influences children’s social adjustment and mental health. Several possible connections between personality and psychopath-ology in children are illustrated. The chapter ends by showing how temperament and personality are useful concepts for thinking about interventions with children.

Chapters 7 and 8 review research on two very well known facts that have led to numerous hypotheses and studies: males physically aggress more than females and antisocial behaviour (disruptive behaviour, rule breaking, delinquency, criminality) runs in families. In Chapter 7 Sylvana Côté takes a developmental perspective to sex differences in aggression showing that although males generally use aggression more often than females, the magnitude of the difference between the sexes varies widely according to the type of aggression that is considered (physical versus indirect), and according to the developmental period studied. She also reviews biology and social learning hypotheses that attempt to explain these complex differences between males and females who are essentially brought up by the same parents in the same environments. In Chapter 8 Sara Jaffee reviews the large body of studies that attempted to understand why antisocial behaviour is concentrated in families. She first reviews the studies that took a psychosocial perspective aiming to show that children learn from their environment to behave in an antisocial way (e.g., antisocial parents and deviant friends) and concludes that the studies provide at best inconclusive results. She then summarizes recent studies that take into account genetic and environmental factors and concludes that they need replications but hold promise of providing more useful results for predictive purposes and hopefully for preventive purposes.

The last three chapters link developmental research with policy issues. In Chapter 9 Marianne Junger and colleagues address policy issues from the perspective of violence prevention. They first summarize research on the development of physical aggression, followed by research on the early prevention of chronic physical aggression. Subsequently, they discuss a series of policy options based on supporting evidence from experimental research. Finally they describe social policy choices that have been made by different countries.

Chapter 10 by Jacques van der Gaag links with the early childhood story developed in Chapter 9, but marks an important change of perspective and language. Jacques worked for a long time at the World Bank as an economist. We invited him to contribute a chapter that would help take a broad social view of efforts to prevent children’s behaviour problems. In this chapter he shows how programmes that foster early childhood development are a first step in a global human development perspective. He argues that four pathways link early childhood development to human development: education, health, social capital, and equality. He concludes that each of the four pathways to human development leads to economic growth. We must admit that economic issues have rarely been on the mind of behaviour problem investigators, let alone their research projects. However, the times are changing. As can be seen from Jacques’ chapter, economists are starting to pay attention to developmental work (see also Heckman, 2006).

In the final chapter Anne Petersen makes use of her dual experience as a social scientist and her close collaborations with social policy makers. Her ultimate aim is to get policy makers to use research results, but here she writes for investigators to help them get their message across to policy makers. She does this by exploring the relationships between research and social policy and by describing some promising examples of research that managed to influence policy.

References

Albright, T. D., Jessell, T. M., Kandel, E. R., & Posner, M. I. (2001). Progress in the neural sciences in the century after Cajal (and the mysteries that remain). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 929, 11–40.

Caspi, A., McClay, J., Moffitt, T., Mill, J., Martin, J., Craig, I. W., et al. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children. Science, 297, 851–854.

Farrington, D. P., Loeber, R., Elliott, D....

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Research on the development and prevention of behaviour problems
• 2 How gene–environment interactions shape biobehavioural development1
• 3 Epigenetics and behaviour1
• 4 Maternal smoking, genes and adolescent brain and body
• 5 The development of chronic physical aggression1
• 6 Personality in children and adolescents1
• 7 A developmental perspective on sex differences in aggressive behaviours*
• 8 Intergenerational transmission of risk for antisocial behaviour
• 9 Policy implications of present knowledge on the development and prevention of physical aggression and violence
• 10 From child development to human development1
• 11 Inconvenient truths: Behavioural research and social policy1
• Author index
• Subject index