Originally published in 1986, the impetus for this volume developed from a conference organized by Barbara Snell Dohrenwend and the editors on behalf of the Society for Life History Research in Psychopathology, the Society of the Study of Social Biology, and the Center for Studies of Mental Health of Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health. The theme of the conference was life span research on the prediction of psychopathology, and the goal was to bring together outstanding researchers who were engaged in longitudinal investigations at the time and whose work, collectively, covered the entire life-span, from infancy to old age. The papers that were presented at the conference were updated, so that the chapters that follow represented current, state-of-the-art considerations in some of the best ongoing studies concerned with the prediction of psychopathology at that time.