This doctoral thesis aims to extend narrative research by developing an original method for the study of maternal speech. More specifically, the aim is to design and test a new narrative measure, assessing the way mothers formulate and structure descriptions of their children, which is valid, accessible and quick to both administer and code, whilst potentially adding an extra dimension to the information captured by existing coding procedures. This objective was achieved by developing and validating a new coding scheme to assess structural features of maternal narratives and investigating whether these new maternal scales were associated with mothers’ characteristics, children’s emotional and behavioural problems and cognitive development. Research was carried out using data from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-Risk Study), a nationally representative cohort of 1,116 families with twins. Maternal narratives were prospectively collected at ages 5 and 10, whilst reports on mothers’ and children’s characteristics were collected from multiple informants on follow-up visits when the children were aged 5, 7, 10 and 12 years. Findings showed that two of the four new scales validly measured maternal narratives’ structural features. Importantly, these new scales were associated with mothers’ personality features, children’s externalising and internalising behaviour and children’s cognitive development. These associations remained when controlling for socio-demographic cofounders, parenting behaviour and the children’s own previous history of behavioural problems and intellectual ability. This research project, therefore, makes an original contribution to research methods that could be readily transferred to clinical practice by developing and testing an innovative and valid measure of maternal narratives’ structural features from existing narratives, adding further depth and texture to the existing coding procedures and extending the scope and utility of narrative research.

Background: Despite evidence of an increased risk of violence among adults with psychosis, little is known about the relationship between psychosis and aggression in young people. Aim: To compare clinical characteristics and associated features in young people with co-occurring psychosis and aggression to those with psychosis or aggression alone. Hypothesis: Those with both psychosis and aggression will share risk factors and correlates with both ’pure’ groups. Method: Three samples were examined. The first (n=6,770), involved secondary data analysis and used information routinely collected on young people referred to the Maudsley Hospital over a 40 year period; the second study involved new data collection by the author, and focused on young people admitted to inpatient units (n=106); the third (n=2,232) involved secondary data analysis and used data from the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a non-referred community sample. Results: Comparisons of co-occurring cases with those with psychosis or aggression only suggested that co-occurring cases showed symptom profiles and risk factors typical of both ’pure’ conditions; in addition, they had higher rates of callous/unemotional traits and parental antisocial behaviour than either ’pure’ group. Independent predictors of psychosis and co-occurring aggression were low IQ, lower scores on theory of mind tasks, internalising problems, exposure to maltreatment, poor educational attainment and oppositional behaviour. Discussion: Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, young people with psychosis and co-occurring aggression shared risk factors and correlates with both ’pure’ groups and showed some additional distinctive features. Conclusions: It is possible to identify psychosis and co-occurring aggressive behaviour in child and adolescent samples; many of the risk factors for the co-occurring pattern appeared similar to those identified in adult studies. Implications for practice: It may be possible to identify early risk factors for this dual pattern of difficulties that could inform risk assessment, prevention and early intervention strategies.

This review examines studies on the impact of parenting on the development of children's sibling relationships. The studies link several parenting factors to sibling relationship development. The main findings are that differential parenting, marital discord and the expression of emotion through anger or depression can have an adverse impact on siblings. However, most of the research is primarily correlational and the causal factors involved in the nature of sibling interactions are both nuanced and complex. Researchers have used two main theoretical models, social learning theory and attachment to explain their findings. However, generalisability is weakened by a lack of diversity in the samples with white middle class participants predominant. More recent studies have examined bi-directional processes, the role of the wider system and the influence of a developmental psychopathology framework in understanding the nature of parental influence.

This project is primarily a study of experience of growing up with a gifted level IQ. The primary aim is to triangulate, in a number of ways, with a study by Freeman (1991). Triangulation is important to prevent spurious knowledge developing and being compounded as a result of method-boundedrness, sample-boundedness, theory boundedness and investigator-boundedness of studies. This field appears to be particularly at risk of this because the subject is value-charged and research is often politically motivated. Several kinds of triangulation were attempted, in addition to the obvious investigator triangulation involved, including: triangulation of theory, in which alternative interpretations were considered, triangulation of data, in which a different working universe was used and triangulation of method, in which complementary methodology was employed. The main methodology of the present study amounted to a questionnaire survey, the results of which were statistically analysed, but there were also some group and individual interviews. In the main, it proved impossible to triangulate Freeman's study and the minority of findings which were not challenged featured only very slight associations, many of which are not peculiar to gifted children anyway. This suggests that the findings of that study may have been largely artifacts of the theory, methods and assumptions employed and riot a valid representation of the general population of gifted children's experience of growing up at all. It appears, therefore, that the recommendations that report made to the educational communities of the U. K. and the world in general, based on such findings, may be unfounded.

Backgound. Pyramid Plus is a group based pycho-social intervention for anxious solitary 7-8 year school children. It is co-ordinated by Barnardo’s and runs in conjunction with participating schools across Northern Ireland. The intervention aims to increase the participants’ social and emotional competence and to promote their resilience processes. Method. The study employed a non-equivalent group design. Pyramid participants were selected based on teacher ratings of their internalising symptoms on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, Goodman, 1997). The comparison group comprised the class children who did not receive the intervention due to a lack of need or due to their display of externalising symptoms. .In order to elucidate the effects of the intervention, Pyramid SDQ scores were compared with the comparison group using a mixed ANOVA and chi-square tests of independence. Linear regression was also used in order to estimate if self-regulation played a role in predicting internalising psychopathology at baseline and aptitude for change. The effects of the intervention on various child profiles were then considered. Results. The mixed ANOVA revealed a significant group by time interaction for Peer Problems. Pyramid participants were rated by their teachers as happier, more fulfilled in their personal relationships and had higher levels of self-esteem than the comparison group immediately following the intervention (time 2). The analysis revealed that Pyramid was used as an intervention by teachers for two distinct profiles of students displaying internalising symptoms. Children high on Assertive Expression showed a resilient trajectory at time 3 (12 week follow up), while Anxious Solitary children showed a significant decreasing Pro-social trajectory, associated with an inability to successfully regulate emotions. Conclusion. This evaluation found support for the effectiveness of Pyramid Plus in reducing Peer Problems in all participants. It highlighted that Pyramid is an effective mode of intervention for highly assertive children who were presenting with Emotional Symptoms and Peer Problems. It is suggested however, that some modifications to the current intervention strategy may be necessary if the vulnerabilities and needs of anxious solitary children are to be addressed. In particular, Pyramid Plus must directly address the need to promote self-regulation in participants and in particular to introduce cognitive regulation strategies to address the inhibition of threat perception in ambiguous social situations. These modifications are necessary if this intervention is to be considered an empirically grounded intervention for anxious solitary children.

As If/Childhood as Metaphor takes as its critical method a kind of over-determined 'performative' dialectic: the presentation and discussion of diverse yet interrelated ideas without privileging one above the other in the light of a principle, rather than the quest for a single proof, or truth. The principle is that childhood is peculiarly accessible to metaphoric representation, where it features as 'unique experiences accessible to adults only as knowledge and memory', and the discussion illuminates how metaphor serves this purpose with reference to selected texts. The objective is to test each reading as a new dialectical experience, employing psychoanalytic theory also as a dialectic. The Introduction examines metaphor and literary analysis as critical method in two parts. Part 1. presents a defence of the application of psychoanalytic theory which has developed 'grammars' with which to comprehend the human psyche, of which metaphor is one of central significance, and where in analysis, the notion of transference may fruitfully be applied. Part 2., via a survey of diverse texts, examines the discourses of childhood and children's literature with the objective of questioning fixed categories. Chapter one, part 1, sets a context for childhood figured in the garden, and parts 2. and 3., through close readings of The Secret Garden, The Go-Between and Tom's Midnight Garden, suggest that metaphors of time suspension, development in articulacy and psychic growth demonstrate the child aspect of the adult. Chapter two, part 1, with Kindergarten as a bridging text and exemplification of the 'change by conflict' of the dialectic, sets a context for childhood figured in school, and parts 2. and 3., through close readings of The Pupil, The Rainbow, A Kestrel for a Knave and Matilda, argue that metaphors of inarticulacy, unreality, combat and damage, demonstrate the adult aspect of the child. Chapter three links the 'erotics' of the transference situation (where the analyst and patient can 'bind' together intimately), to the sexual curiosity of the child and Cupid figure. The metaphor of the putti figure, in an upward or downward flight, exemplifies the movement made by the author and reader in reading metaphors of childhood in the garden and school. The upward flight of eros or libido is sited in the garden and the downward fall of thanatos in the school. These transferential spaces, when depicting childhood, are bound by metaphoric interpretation, including a psychoanalytic sense of unreal time in a school space to a sense of the real to which the self can retreat in a garden. The Conclusion reflects how a mixed mode of reading and interpreting representations of childhood which incorporates historical, literary and psychoanalytic models, can generate new insights into metaphors of childhood, in performative convergence. An over-determined dialectic, like a dream, presents material in imaginatively linked circles, or associative chains of connotation, where some metaphors such as 'green' (disguising highly complex transference material through apparently naive childhood motifs), have turned into culture: partly revealing, partly concealing a retrospective Englishness bound to deferred maturity, an innocence at risk, emblematic of cultural life and death.

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Previous behavioural genetics studies have converged in finding a shared influence of maternal sensitivity on attachment security at age 1 but contradictory findings were reached when investigating its non-shared effect on attachment organization. However, to date, no research has investigated this association in adolescence. This study was the first aiming to investigate reflective functioning capacities in both, mothers and fathers of adolescent identical twins, and understanding the nature of its relationship to adolescent attachment coherence. One hundred families were interviewed, with each parent asked to complete the Parent Development Interview twice, once about each twin. Adolescent attachment was assessed using a semi-structured interview, the Child Attachment Interview. This study provided some support for predictions of attachment theory suggesting a shared environmental effect of parental reflective on the shared variance in adolescent attachment coherence. Thus, the similarity between twins’ coherence scores was partially explained by consistencies in their experience of parental reflective functioning. Examining maternal and paternal RF separately, strong associations were found between mothers’ and fathers’ RF scores, which were found to, partially independently, influence twins’ coherence scores at a family level only. This study did not quantitatively identify non-shared environmental influences of parental RF which, it was suggested, could reflect some shared genetic effects from twins to parent. Finally, based on a case study analysis, it was suggested that the interaction between a number of non-shared factors, such as twins’ level of psychological maturity, their potential de-identification from each other and from their parents, their perception of the twinship relationship and the parents’ description of each twin, could explain discrepancies between twins’ attachment classification.