This paper explores the relationship between ego development and psychiatrically relevant behaviors in a group of hospitalized adolescents. Building on Loevinger's model of ego development, we administered the Sentence Completion Test to 114 adolescent girls and boys. To study psychiatric symptoms, Achenbach and Edelbrock's Child Behavior Checklist was used. With these procedures, the Achenbach and Edelbrock factor scores were compared to ego stage using correlational and multiple regression analyses. Findings indicate significant negative correlations with the externalizing and internalizing factors as well as a variety of behavioral subscales. A significant relationship also exists between the total number of symptoms and ego development. Ego development is found to be an important predictor for the externalizing factor and 2 subscales after the background variables of age, sex, and SES are partialed out. Our discussion addresses the question of the relationship between stages and transitions in ego development in relation to psychopathology. In addition, "age-stage dysynchronies" are discussed as ways of understanding psychopathology from a developmental perspective.

This paper explores the relationship between ego development and psychiatrically relevant behaviors in a group of hospitalized adolescents. Building on Loevinger's model of ego development, we administered the Sentence Completion Test to 114 adolescent girls and boys. To study psychiatric symptoms, Achenbach and Edelbrock's Child Behavior Checklist was used. With these procedures, the Achenbach and Edelbrock factor scores were compared to ego stage using correlational and multiple regression analyses. Findings indicate significant negative correlations with the externalizing and internalizing factors as well as a variety of behavioral subscales. A significant relationship also exists between the total number of symptoms and ego development. Ego development is found to be an important predictor for the externalizing factor and 2 subscales after the background variables of age, sex, and SES are partialed out. Our discussion addresses the question of the relationship between stages and transitions in ego development in relation to psychopathology. In addition, "age-stage dysynchronies" are discussed as ways of understanding psychopathology from a developmental perspective.

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Cognitive Control Therapy (CCT) is designed to treat children whose cognitive dysfunctions are a source of school failure and serious adjustment problems and who lack cognitive structures necessary to learn within verbally oriented psychotherapy. CCT techniques address three goals: a) restructuring hierarchically ordered cognitive functions so that information from external and internal environments is produced efficiently; b) restructuring the pathological cognitive orientation so that external information is balanced and integrated with fantasies and feelings (metaphors); and c) connecting thought and action so that a balanced integration of perceptions and metaphors results in adaptive actions which are assimilated to influence the original cognition. To restructure cognitive functions, the child is asked to work on a series of tasks graded developmentally in terms of complexity, emotionality, and delay, and requiring nonverbal and, later, verbal cognitive activity. To promote integrating internal and external information, and assimilating the results of actions into cognitive

Clinical child psychology is in dire need of advances in diagnoses and treatment. The author suggests several ways this goal can be achieved through the application of developmental psychology. Clinical Child Psychology: The Need for Developmental Principles Sebastiano SantostefanoThe clinical child psychologist is in dire need of advances in diagnostic and treatment techniques and in concepts that guide what-is observed and how to understand these observations. Compared to earlier clinicians who worked primarily in child guidance clinics and with children suffering from neuroses, the clinician today confronts a broader array of ages and social-psychological problems. For example, the clinician may see a six-year-old who is hyperactive and restless with no organic cause, a twelve-year-old who has been a slow learner since the first grade in spite of adequate intelligence, and a fifteen-year-old who, although usually shy and passive, occasionally explodes in violence.Approaching these problems with the techniques they have inherited, clinicians are finding more and more that diagnostic methods (traditional intelligence, perceptual, and projective tests) and treatment methods (psychotherapy) are insufficient. Clinicians find, for example, that the aggression an adolescent shows on projective tests does not always correspond to the aggression he or she shows in the school yard and that the learning disability handicapping a child does not always respond to psychotherapy. New Directionrfm Child Deuelopmmt, 7, 19801 2 How should the clinician proceed to search for technological advances? The recommendation made here is that the child clinical psychologist introduce developmental principles into clinical concepts and techniques. At first glance this recommendation may appear strange. Is clinical child psychology not synonymous with developmental psychology? If a psychologist works with children, is the work not routinely conducted through the lens of developmental psychology? The answer to both questions is no.