The family interview.

Families of study children were interviewed, with a focus on parents' observations of the personality and behavior of their offspring. The family interview was also the primary source of information about the home environment and possible psychopathology in nonschizophrenic parents. By parental report, index children were more likely than controls to have developed psychopathological symptoms related to mood, social withdrawal, antisocial behavior, eating, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Traits of self-esteem, adaptability, reliability, and degree of task orientation were more poorly developed in index than control subjects. Index subjects also tended to have poorer relationships with both peers and family members. While boys and girls showed similar patterns of psychopathology, boys tended to have somewhat higher levels of impairment. No differences or interactions due to type of rearing were found.

Clinical-subjective evaluation of high-risk children: integration and discussion.

Clinical evaluations of index and control children from the point of view of the clinical interview, observations of the subjects during testing, the subjects' parents, and their teachers were compared. There was general agreement that index children showed more psychopathological symptoms, poorer ego development, poorer interpersonal relations, and poorer use of leisure time than their controls. By contrast, behaviors related to aggression, phobias, shame, sleep pathology, eating disorders, frustration tolerance, sexual behavior, and verbal communication skills failed to show consistent group differences. Index boys showed greater anxiety than their controls, while there were no such differences among the girls. Rearing environment exerted no apparent effect on the psychosocial functioning of the children. Factor analysis disclosed that a general factor, accounting for 32.6 percent of the variance, discriminated between index and control children, while several special factors, which represented rarely seen traits, did not discriminate. Group differences, therefore, appeared to stem from global impairment of psychosocial functioning rather than from several distinct patterns of deficit. The present results are in general agreement with previously reported evaluations of children at risk for schizophrenia.