Neurobiological pathways to childhood psychopathology : Population-based studies of cognition and behavior

In the past few decades, considerable advances have been made in understanding childhood psychopathology. This progress is the result of four primary developments in the field. First, both in the research and in the clinical framework, psychopathology has been conceptualized across a spectrum of severity of symptoms and impairment. Second, psychopathology has been studied in the context of young children’s real life parallel to referral settings. Third, studying child psychopathology in large-scale prospective epidemiological studies offers new insight into the etiology of child psychiatric disorders. And fourth, enormous progress has been made in understanding the nature of psychopathology and its biological underpinnings.