VOL. 13, NO. 3,1987 Risk Factors in Schizophrenia: The Stony

Risk Project are to identify precur-sor patterns, environmental stressors, and protective factors that are differentially predictive of psy-chopathology. In phase I we as-sessed 219 families and 544 children aged 7-15, including 31 families and 80 children with a schizo-phrenic parent, 70 families and 154 children with a unipolar depressed parent, 58 famines and 134 children with a bipolar parent, and 60 nor-mal control families with 176 chil-dren. A 3-year followup was conducted on 84 percent of the sam-ple, and an additional followup is underway. Our data include meas-ures of: (1) psychological function-ing of the parents; (2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, and parenting practices; (3) child adjustment, including peer, or teacher, parent, and self-ratings; (4) early signs or precursors to the development of schizophrenia or af-fective disorder, including cogni-tive slippage, attentional deficits, hedonic capacity, depressogenic at-tributional styles, and subsyndro-mal affective patterns. Considerable deviance in family functioning, ex-pressed in conflict, marital discord, and parenting skills, was charac-teristic of the families with an ill parent, and this discord was related to child adjustment. Children with a schizophrenic parent showed mul-tiple and extensive cognitive, atten-tional, and social impairments, and at the 18 + followup, 22.8 percent of them compared with 9.6 percent of the normal controls were assigned a DSM-III diagnosis. The goals of the Stony Brook High-Risk Project are to identify precursor patterns, environmental stressors, and protective factors that are dif-ferentially predictive of psycho-pathology. Children with a schizophrenic parent, a unipolar parent, a bipolar parent, and par-ents free of diagnosable psycho-pathology have been longitudinally studied, beginning in 1971. Approx-imately 50 percent of children with a schizophrenic parent will be malad-justed in adulthood, and their risk for schizophrenia is 10-16 times greater than that for the genera