Using development and psychopathology principles to inform the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework

Abstract

In 2010, the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) were developed to advance our understanding of the pathophysiology of mental illness across multiple levels of analysis, ranging from cells to circuits to self-report instruments. Several conceptual RDoC-informed manuscripts have highlighted the importance of studying how developmental processes give rise to psychopathology. However, there are few empirical studies that integrate the RDoC framework with development and psychopathology principles. This special issue was developed to fill this empirical gap. In this introduction to the special issue, we describe how the developmental psychopathology field predates and informs the RDoC framework. We highlight three important ways in which developmental psychopathology and the RDoC framework can mutually inform one another, leading to novel discoveries to identify, prevent, and treat mental health problems across the life span.

The developmental psychopathology of detection and dual control – a commentary on Fox et al. (2023)

“…The Detection and Dual Control model provides a framework, consistent with developmental psychopathology principles, to understand the etiology of anxiety problems. Moreover, by modeling attention and control processes as emerging early in life and changing in quality with inputs from other individual characteristics and environmental experiences, which themselves develop and influence each other, Fox et al's DDC framework is consistent with the call for the integration of developmental psychopathology principles with Research Domain Criteria‐relevant constructs in improving etiological science (Conradt et al, 2021). With the DDC model's focus on moderators of development from behavioral inhibition to anxiety, the possibilities for future directions are both broad and deep.…”

“…For decades, developmental psychopathologists have argued that, rather than being born with the determined fate of psychological disorder, individual differences in risk and resilience emerge along coherent, cumulative, and probabilistic pathways while the individual dynamically engages with multiple environmental systems (e.g., Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996; Conradt, Crowell, & Cicchetti, 2021; Sroufe, 2009). So complex are these pathways and interactions that to truly understand the emergence of psychopathology, investigations must begin in infancy, prospectively measure multiple systems both within and outside of the individual, and use patterns of typical development to contextualize risk.…”

Maternal immune activation as an epidemiological risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders: Considerations of timing, severity, individual differences, and sex in human and rodent studies

“…This practice is in line with the RDoC initiative from the NIMH, as described previously in Section 2. The reason for this is that symptoms of NDDs and other disorders are often overlapping, suggesting a potential for commonality in the neurobiological origins of the disorders ( Conradt et al, 2021 ; Auerbach, 2022 ). MIA is often used as a solitary manipulation in animal models to examine how perturbations of the developing immune system (a risk factor for NDDs) may contribute to specific symptoms of NDDs, such as disturbances in learning, social, and sleep behaviors.…”

Restoring the missing person to personalized medicine and precision psychiatry

“…The third critique concerns the lack of attention to developmental trajectories and contexts (Garber and Bradshaw, 2020;Conradt et al, 2021;Hitchcock et al, 2022). The architecture of the brain results from neurodevelopmental processes involving ongoing interactions with the immediate environment at each step or stage (Hiesinger, 2021).…”