Prior research by this project has demonstrated the existence of two distinct forms of dissociation in adults; normal dissociation (distributed in a trait-like fashion in the general population) and pathological dissociation (confined to a small subset of psychiatric patients). Preliminary analyses using child dissociation measures developed by this project suggest that this finding can be replicated in children. A questionnaire based field trial of proposed DSM criteria for the diagnosis of Dissociative Disorder of Childhood (DDoC) has demonstrated good discriminate validity for many of the items.
