Editorial: Closing in on causal links between environmental exposures and human development using observational data – “confound those confounders!”

Abstract

A central goal of developmental psychopathology research is to understand the mechanisms linking environmental exposures in childhood to variations in mental health and development across the lifespan. The Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry has featured many influential studies and reviews addressing this important topic. This month's issue of the journal presents papers which address several specific environmental exposures, including prenatal factors, parenting and adverse childhood experiences, and illustrate important principles that should be used as a basis for taking the field forward.

Look duration at the face as a developmental endophenotype: elucidating pathways to autism and ADHD

“…As recurrence might change by degree of relatedness and different mechanisms be involved in this process, as discussed above, future studies aiming to investigate these should consider eliminating or controlling for this difference. Using registries of routinely collected health data in large-scale cohorts might help to understand family-level differences and to identify potential confounders when examining effects of familial liability (Fearon, 2019).…”

“…This proof-of-principle study highlighted the importance of measuring multiple traits and having long-term follow-up data to uncover the role of developmental endophenotype on the trajectory to psychopathology. Future studies should use neurocognitive marker tasks (Beauchaine & Constantino, 2017) and longitudinal models (Dick, 2018; Fearon, 2019; Johnson et al, 2014) to evaluate the relationship between domain-general processes and early signs of divergent developmental trajectories.…”