Abstract not found

Developmental psychologists have identified a discrete group of children who, despite similar biological or behavioral sus-ceptibilities, either wither or bloom depending on the environ-ments in which they are reared. The differential-susceptibility hypothesis (Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007) and the related theory of biological sensitivity to context (Boyce & Ellis, 2005) contend that within the right rearing environments, individuals with traits that make them suscep-tible to environmental influences will achieve levels of adap-tation that regularly exceed those of their less susceptible, presumably hardier peers (Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van Ijzendoorn, 2011). However, if susceptible individuals are born into environments that afford constant diets of adversity, their susceptibilities will function princi-pally as vulnerabilities that predispose them to many of the