By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

On a hill at the northern edge of the National Institutes of Health campus, an old Tudor House sits strikingly out of place among the large multistory concrete buildings that surround it. Once the retirement home of a wealthy Washington family, it now houses a research program that is beginning to seem as anomalous within the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as the house is at NIH.

Run by psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, PhD, the Section on Developmental Psychopathology represents the only behavioral research left in NIMH?s intramural research program, the institute?s on-site laboratories that receive long-term, stable funding from the institute.

Zahn-Waxler?s work on how emotional development affects disruptive disorders in children is absolutely outstanding, says psychologist Joseph Campos, PhD, who studies the development of emotions in children at the University of California at Berkeley. ?She?s doing exactly the type of research that people should be doing?detailed longitudinal work with a programmatic, systematic theme that fits into a central flow of ideas.?

But unfortunately, ?she?s a seed that has fallen on unfertile loam,? he adds. Zahn-Waxler survives within a program that has become increasingly focused on biology. In recent years, she?s had to look outside NIMH to find colleagues with whom to collaborate and exchange ideas. One such collaboration has been with researchers at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics in Colorado, with whom she?s studied genetic and environmental factors that contribute to behavior problems in kindergarten children.

The institute recognizes the intrinsic value of behavioral research in its NIMH intramural program, says Susan Swedo, MD. She has diligently supported Zahn-Waxler?s research as acting director of NIMH?s intramural research program. And, with any luck, the institute will begin recruiting several new behavioral researchers over the next year or two, she says.

A home for research
In 1995, when NIMH closed its intramural Developmental Psychology Laboratory, Zahn-Waxler was worried about the future of her research program as well as her lab space. The Tudor building that housed her research was dilapidated, its ceiling leaking, its paint peeling and its rugs worn. But Judith Rappoport, MD, chief of the Child Psychiatry Branch, offered to shelter Zahn-Waxler under her administrative umbrella, and Swedo salvaged the house.

Now, the newly renovated building, filled with old wooden desks and comfortable chairs, lends the perfect atmosphere to Zahn-Waxler?s research with children and families. The rooms where she and her staff study children and their parents look more like living rooms than laboratories. Study participants can feel a little more comfortable opening their lives to the researchers, Zahn-Waxler believes. And she needs them to open up, for years at a time.

She and her staff conduct in-depth longitudinal studies that track the evolution of disruptive behavior disorders, such as conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder and the anxiety and depression that often accompany these behavioral problems. One study has followed the same group of 80 antisocial preschool children from early childhood into adolescence. Through a methodical process of interviews with children and their parents, tests of physiological reactivity in emotionally challenging situations, and videotapes of observations made in the laboratory and at home, the researchers have identified a number of risk and protective factors that determine whether children will develop mental health problems.

Last spring, Zahn-Waxler, along with Bonnie Klimes-Dougan, PhD, Kim Kendziora, PhD, and Paul Hastings, PhD, began another large-scale study of emotion regulation in adolescents to better examine the relationship between emotions and internalizing and externalizing behavior. They are using the same procedures as in a follow-up study of the group of 80 children Zahn-Waxler has followed since preschool. The combined sample of more than 300 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14 will permit them to examine the role of emotion regulation in the development of different forms of psychopathology in adolescence.

During adolescence, clinical problems increase; girls begin to show more internalizing problems, in the form of depression and anxiety, and boys show more externalizing problems, says Zahn-Waxler. The researchers hope to identify socialization experiences and patterns of physiological reactivity that contribute to these different developmental pathways. They also hope to collaborate with neuroscience researchers within the intramural program to study brain mechanisms that may be involved in dysregulated patterns of emotion.

Researchers would have a hard time conducting this kind of research outside an intramural research program, says Campos. The average grant is only five years. Factoring in start-up time, and time to analyze data and write up findings, such short-term grants are inadequate for scientists interested in questions that can be answered only through long-term observation. And they can?t guarantee their funding will be renewed.

Fighting for survival
In recognition of the important work Zahn-Waxler is doing, Swedo has increased her program?s resources over the past two years, giving it its own budget.

Although it appears as though NIMH has purposefully siphoned behavioral research out of its intramural program, Swedo insists that much of the decline in behavioral research is, in large part, the result of bad timing. The intramural program has been without a permanent director for five and a half years, which has left the program with little programmatic focus. The behavioral laboratories closed, due to a retirement in one case and scientific troubles in another, during a time when no one was in a position to recruit new researchers to fill the void left by their closures.

NIMH Director Steven Hyman, MD, is interviewing for the new scientific director of the intramural program, and Swedo expects he?ll choose someone by March or April. APA has been working to encourage NIMH to select a new director who will support behavioral research, says APA legislative and federal affairs officer Paula Trubisky.

The new director may recruit for behavioral researchers as soon as he or she is on board, says Swedo, who will then resume her research in the Section on Behavioral Pediatrics.

The intramural program may get another boost from Hyman, who has expressed interest in recruiting senior behavioral scientists to serve as visiting scientists to the intramural program, NIMH officials say.

Norman Anderson, PhD, director of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, says he will continue to monitor the amount of behavioral research supported by the intramural program.

The intramural research program provides researchers with the opportunity to conduct research that may otherwise not get funded, says Anderson. And if behavioral science is edged out, it will miss critical opportunities to expand its theories.