PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY LESLIE RESCORLA TO LECTURE ON AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR IN CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Professor of Psychology Leslie Rescorla will discuss research on the stability over time of externalizing antisocial behavior in a lecture titled "Empirically Based Assessment of Aggressive and Rule-Breaking Behavior in Children, Adolescents, and Adults" on Tuesday, March 2, in Thomas 224 at 4:15 p.m. The talk, part of the G. Mildred and A. Foster Scott Lecture Series sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research's Center for Child and Family Well-Being, is free and open to the public.

Empirically based assessment, says Rescorla, involves evaluating children or adults using behavior checklists that are completed by several observers for each subject. This approach allows an evaluator to determine the types and severity of an individual's problems from the perspectives of several people. In the traditional psychiatric approach, panels of experts define diagnostic categories, assignment to diagnostic categories is dichotomous, and diagnostic criteria are the same regardless of age and gender. In contrast, empirically based assessment identifies syndromes on the basis of behavior clusters that emerge from statistical analysis of the data, scores are continuous rather than dichotomous, and individuals receive normed scores relative to others of the same age and gender in the nationally representative standardization sample.

In her talk, Rescorla will review research on patterns of aggressive and rule-breaking behavior from both the psychiatric and empirical perspectives. She will focus on the consistency of aggressive and rule-breaking behavior over time, summarizing research from both approaches demonstrating a high likelihood that children who exhibit aggressive or oppositional behavior will continue to engage in those behaviors as adults.

Rescorla is the chair of the Psychology Department, director of the Clinical Developmental Psychology doctoral program, and director of the Child Study Institute, where she maintains a clinical practice serving children and families. The author of numerous publications on language delay in young children, she has more recently been collaborating with her husband and research partner, Thomas M. Achenbach. Over the past five years, they have developed and published checklists for preschoolers, school-age children and adults that constitute the family of instruments in the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA).

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