Editorial: Building global science capacity in child psychology and psychiatry – between the etic and emic of cross‐cultural enquiry

Abstract

AbstractRecent progress in neurobiology and genetics is beginning to revolutionise our thinking about the developmental origins of children's mental health problems. Such advances, for instance in relation to neural plasticity and programming, and epigenetics, are moving us away from reductionist models of development and motivating a new enthusiasm to incorporate social factors within biological models of developmental psychopathology. As Burt (2014)1 convincingly argues in the current issue of the JCPP – we ignore the impact of the social environment on child mental health at our peril. By understanding this, and recognising that children from different communities around the world can grow up in radically different environments, we become aware of the need to integrate a thoroughgoing cross‐cultural perspective into mainstream child psychology and psychiatry research.