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Objective: This article first summarizes key research findings from the Pittsburgh Youth Study from 1987 to the present, and focuses on delinquency in 1,517 young men who have been followed up from late childhood into their 20s. Second, the article addresses how indicators of self-control prospectively predict later offending, and whether the prediction shows individual difference in the age-crime curve, particularly the up-slope, peak, and down-slope of that curve. Method: Longitudinal analyses were conducted on a sample of boys in the middle sample of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (n = 422), whose cognitive impulsivity and intelligence were assessed at about age 12 years. Criminal records on the sample were until age 28. Results: The results show that cognitive impulsivity and intelligence, measured between ages 12 and 13 by means of psychometric tests, predicted the age-crime curve. The age-arrest curve was substantially higher in boys with high cognitive impulsivity and in boys with low IQ. However, there was a significant interaction between cognitive impulsivity and intelligence. For boys with high IQ, cognitive impulsivity was associated with a greater escalation in the prevalence of offending during early adolescence, followed by a more rapid decline in offending as boys entered early adulthood with a slight subsequent increase in criminal offending then occurring late 20. In contrast, there was no evidence that cognitive impulsivity independently influenced criminal offending at any developmental period for boys with low IQ. Conclusions: The results are discussed in terms of interventions to reduce individuals' delinquency from childhood through early adulthood and lower the age-crime curve for populations. However, the association was complex because it was moderated by both age and intelligence. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Background: Studies have demonstrated a robust association between interpersonal callousness (IC) and the development of severe and chronic conduct problems (CP) in youth. Although children exhibiting IC are also believed to be at particularly high risk for developing psychopathic personality features in adulthood, there is little longitudinal evidence supporting this assumption, particularly after controlling for co-occuring CP severity. Methods: This study used data collected on a longitudinal cohort of boys (n = 508), with an oversampling of youth exhibiting elevated conduct problems. Analyses examined the unique and interactive association between latent growth curve trajectories of IC and CP assessed bi-annually from late childhood to early adolescence (~ages 10-13) and features of psychopathy in early adulthood (age ~ 24) assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist - Short Version (PCL:SV; Hart, Cox, & Hare, 1995). Results: Growth curve analysis indicated that initial levels of IC and CP in childhood (~age 10 intercept) both uniquely predicted the development of the interpersonal/affective features of adult psychopathy, and boys with a combination of high initial levels of IC and CP were at particularly high risk for developing the impulsive/antisocial features of the disorder. Boys who exhibited systematic increases in CP from late childhood to early adolescence also demonstrated higher adult psychopathy scores, but changes in IC across this developmental period did not significantly add to the prediction of adult psychopathy. Conclusions: Findings highlight the importance of developing targeted interventions for boys exhibiting severe IC and CP in childhood, as they appear to be at high risk for developing adult psychopathic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current diagnostic system suggests that personality disorder categories be applied to children and adolescents in rare circumstances because of expected changes in personality pathology across development. The present study examined the stability in personality pathology, specifically psychopathy, across childhood and adolescence. Using a short form of the CPS and mixed models incorporating fixed and random effects, we examined the reliability, individual stability, mean-level stability, and predictive utility of juvenile psychopathy as a function of age (i.e., from 7 to 17 years old) in over 1,500 boys from the three cohorts of the Pittsburgh Youth Study. If adolescent development contributes to instability in personality pathology, large age-related fluctuations in reliability, stability, and predictive utility should be observed, particularly in the latter part of adolescence when normative changes are hypothesized to influence levels of psychopathy. Such fluctuations were not observed. In general, juvenile psychopathy could be reliably assessed beginning in childhood, was fairly stable across short and long intervals, showed little mean-level fluctuation, and predicted delinquency across adolescence. These results suggest that concerns about large changes in personality pathology across childhood and adolescence may be overstated. Implications and future directions are discussed.