Life-Span and Multicultural Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract This chapter employs developmental psychopathology and an empirically based paradigm for understanding psychopathology across the life span around the world. Developmental psychopathology conceptualizes maladaptive functioning in relation to developmental periods, sequences, and processes. The empirically based paradigm derives taxonomic constructs from multivariate analyses of assessment data, which have yielded hierarchical models spanning from specific problem items, to empirically derived syndromes, internalizing and externalizing groupings of syndromes, and a general psychopathology (p) dimension. Data are obtained from multiple informants to take account of variations in functioning and informant perspectives. Assessment of population samples in more than 50 societies has supported syndrome and item structures originally derived from US data. Multicultural norms are available for societies with relatively low, intermediate, or high problem scores. Instruments are available in 113 languages for intake and subsequent reassessments and are used in many genetic, longitudinal, and other studies, as reported in more than 11,000 publications from more than 100 societies.