| Specific Network Aims |
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| To strengthen the conceptual and empirical linkages among research in several areas: |
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Physical and behavioral aspects of sexual differentiation in animals and humans. |
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Variations in psychosexual differentiation in humans and implications for general psychological development and the development of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence. |
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Research on child, family, and peer factors that contribute to the development of mental health and illness in children and adolescents with prenatal risk factors of chronic health conditions. |
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| To develop collaborative research programs designed to: |
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Describe the processes through which genes, prenatal sex hormones, and postnatal social experiences jointly contribute to the development of psychosexual differentiation, including gender indentity, gender role behaviors, and developing sexuality, |
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Describe the ways in which varied trajectories of psychosexual differentiation affect overall psychological development with particular emphasis on the mental health consequences of atypical gender indentiy, gender-role behavior, and sexual development, |
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Describe the ways in which the mental health of children and adolescents with disorders of sexual diffentiation (intersex) is influenced developmentally by characteristics of the disorder and its treatment, characteristics of the patient, and characteristics of the family, |
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Develop or refine animal paradigms that model and help to explain the genetic, neuroendocrine, and social processes underlying both normal sex-typed behaviors and pathological behaviors observed in individuals with intersex conditions or gender-atypical behavior. |
