Psychopathology among children is a topic of considerable interest, concern, and importance for both the scientific and lay communities. Substantial effort has been devoted to describing, classifying, and identifying the conditions associate with psychiatric and behavioral problems of children. Unfortunately, considerably led effort has focused on resilient children, or those youth who function well despite exposure to chronic stress, trauma, or high-risk environments. The proposal is designed to identify children who are living in a high-stress environment but are resilient and contrast them to children from the same environment who are not resilient, in order to identify family variables which differentiate the two groups. Of particular importance, a group of children living in the same environment but exposed to an additional stressor, maternal HIV-infection, will be studied. Previous research indicates that this group is not functioning as well as children whose mothers are not HIV- infected. The proposed studies will examine, cross-section and longitudinally over four years, if the same family variables differentiate resilient and non-resilient children in families with maternal HIV-infection and in families without HIV- infection.
