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The ability of children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders to recognize facial expressions was investigated in a sample of patients receiving in-patient psychiatric services. Results revealed that accuracy in identifying expressions increased with age. Patients diagnosed with mood disorders, adjustment disorders or disruptive behavior disorders were more accurate than those without diagnoses. Likewise, subjects with mood disorders were more accurate in identifying sadness than patients without this diagnosis.

This study sought to identify which syndromes of initial problems predicted later syndromes among children and youths referred for mental health services. Standardized parent reports on the Child Behavior Checklist obtained at intake were compared to standardized parent, teacher, and self-reports obtained at follow-up. There were 1,103 subjects (774 males and 329 females) 4 to 18 years old, followed up an average of 6 years after referral. High quantitative and categorical stability was found for cross-informant syndromes within samples of younger and older subjects. Throughout childhood and into young adulthood, parent ratings of most syndromes at the time of referral predicted the counterpart cross-informant syndrome construct at follow-up, controlling for other types of problems at referral. There were multiple additional independent predictors of many syndromes, including Delinquent Behavior, Aggressive Behavior, and Shows Off for young adult males. Time I Social Problems and Attention Problems independently predicted diverse problems at Time 2 for younger males. A wide variety of problems also predicted younger males' self-ratings of withdrawal, anxiety, and depression. The stability of problems for the referred sample was similar to that found for demographically matched nonreferred subjects drawn from a national sample.

Differential emotions theory (Izard, 1972) provides a conceptual framework for the role of emotions in affective disorders. The present study investigated the relation of emotions to depression in a sample of child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients (N = 145). Findings indicate that shyness, anger, enjoyment, and shame explained 51.4% of the variance in depression scores. Furthermore, profiles of emotions experienced by youths with a depressive disorder differed significantly from emotion profiles of nondepressed youths on the following emotions: enjoyment, surprise, sadness, anger, shame, shyness, guilt, and self-directed hostility. Differential emotions also correctly classified 80.0% of depressed and nondepressed subjects into their respective groups.

We examined seasonality effects in a controlled study of children and adolescents with psychotic states. There was a peak of psychotic births between February and March but this pattern did not differentiate psychotics from psychiatrically disturbed controls. Onset of illness was found to be significantly more common in the summer months (June to August) in psychotics than in controls. We discuss possible explanation for this phenomenon.