We are studying children with a schizophrenia or affectively ill parent. The first phase of the project involved the assessment of 244 families and 539 children, including 31 families and 79 children with a schizophrenic parent, 128 families and 266 children with an affectively ill parent, and 60 normal control families with 152 children. A three-year follow-up was conducted on 84% of the families and 85% of the children. We are now following up the 594 young adults who have entered the age of risk for adult psychiatric disorder. Our data include measures of: 1) psychological functioning of the parents; 2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, parenting practices, and the child's phenomenological ratings of life events; 3) social, cognitive, and personal competence relevant to normal childhood development, including peer, teacher, parent, and self-ratings; 4) early signs or precursors to the development of schizophrenia, or affective disorder, including cognitive slippage, attentional deficits, hedonic capacity, depressogenic attributional styles, and subsyndromal affective patterns. Our goals are to: 1) obtain a detailed picture of the characteristics of children with a parent diagnosed as schizophrenic or affectively ill; 2) related child characteristics to parental diagnosis and environmental variables; 3) identify particularly vulnerable and invulnerable children; 4) assess the ways in which the child and family are affected by the stresses of psychiatric disorder; and 5) identify precursors to schizophrenia and affective disorder.
| Weintraub, S A (1990) Children and adolescents at risk for substance abuse and psychopathology. Int J Addict 25:481-94 |
| Hooley, J M; Richters, J E; Weintraub, S et al. (1987) Psychopathology and marital distress: the positive side of positive symptoms. J Abnorm Psychol 96:27-33 |
| Weintraub, S (1987) Risk factors in schizophrenia: the Stony Brook High-Risk Project. Schizophr Bull 13:439-50 |
| Winters, K C; Newmark, C S; Lumry, A E et al. (1985) MMPI codetypes characteristic of DSM-III schizophrenics, depressives, and bipolars. J Clin Psychol 41:382-6 |
| Harvey, P D (1985) Reality monitoring in mania and schizophrenia. The association of thought disorder and performance. J Nerv Ment Dis 173:67-73 |
| Harvey, P D; Weintraub, S; Neale, J M (1985) Span of apprehension deficits in children vulnerable to psychopathology: a failure to replicate. J Abnorm Psychol 94:410-9 |
