Robert Coles, one of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s early leaders, spoke often of the importance of moral development and its relationship to social risk factors. He felt strongly that moral development had been ignored in contrast to social-emotional and cognitive development in both research and training in child psychiatry. Others have noted the decline in religious attendance in Western countries as possibly contributing to increases in violence, marital breakdown, and substance abuse. Morality often implies acting in a principled way but also carries the notion of there being a “right” and a “wrong” way. This slant inevitably raises questions of who decides what is “right” and “wrong”, a complicated question in our multicultural society. Further, the evidence that morality, or lack thereof, is particularly connected to psychopathology is slim.

In this lecture, Susan J. Bradley, M.D. discusses the complexities inherent both in examining these notions and in attempting to promote moral training. She concludes that, although being a moral person appears to be valued across cultures, we do not appear uniquely trained nor well placed to presume that we should provide leadership in this area. In contrast, however, she argues that we are uniquely qualified to lead in the understanding of factors known to contribute to disorders, such as social-emotional development, in our quest to prevent and treat mental health disorders in children and adolescents. Dr. Bradley discusses several exciting new lines of research that are beginning to integrate genetics, early experience, and nurturing to help us understand the basics of emotion regulation capacity, and how we may be able to strengthen that capacity to promote later social-emotional development, a clear building block of later mental health and academic achievement.