The results emphasize the importance of psychosocial risk factors for postnatal depression and suggest that most obstetric factors during pregnancy and birth do not significantly increase risk for this depression. Early identification of potential risk for postnatal depression should include assessment of sociodemography, personality, psychiatric history and recent life events, as well as past and present obstetric factors.
Neurotic syndromes are defined by characteristic patterns of symptoms, but the validity of the distinction between one syndrome and another depends on associations between the syndromes and clinical history, or treatment response factors that are independent of the defining phenomena. In both a group of twin volunteers and a group of patients with panic disorder/agoraphobia, the lifetime experience of more than one diagnosis of a neurotic syndrome was common but there was no evidence of patterns of co-occurrence of diagnoses being associated with particular syndromes. Receiving a diagnosis was associated with abnormal scores on measures of neuroticism and locus of control, the extent of the abnormality increasing with the number of different diagnoses satisfied. It is argued that the concept of a general neurotic syndrome depends in part on the presence of such predisposing personality factors, and that reduction in this predisposition to neurosis should be the focus of treatment.
The authors examined agreement between parent and child ratings on the Child Behaviour Checklist in a sample of 1299 referred adolescents over a period of three years. Correlations ranged between 0·72 and 0·08 (mean = 0·28), while agreement using kappa was similar but slightly lower (mean = 0·24; range 0·71‐0·07). Agreement on externalizing was higher than on internalizing items, and concordance increased with age for boys, while there were no differences in parent‐child agreement between boys and girls. Agreement was higher for dimensions of behaviour, e.g. depression (r = 0·40).
We asked a sample of 343 adult same-sex twin pairs a number of questions about the similarity of their social environment during childhood and early adolescence. A factor analysis of their responses indicated that their common environment was derived from two sources, one being similar treatment "imposed" upon them by their parents, the other being "elicited" by the twins' similar interests and behavior. Monozygotic (MZ) twins reported experiencing more similar "imposed" and "elicited" environments than dizygotic (DZ) twins. The extent of imposed similar treatment received during childhood and early adolescence was unrelated to either MZ or DZ twins' current behavioral similarity, as indicated by absolute intrapair differences in their Neuroticism, Anxiety, and Depression scores. Similar treatment imposed upon MZ twins on the basis of their zygosity alone is therefore not a threat to the validity of the twin method.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.