Sixty-five moderately disturbed male and female adolescents and their parents participated in the study. Findings were derived from a discussion between the adolescent and his/her mother, a discussion between the adolescent and his/her father, and a family discussion involving the adolescent and both parents. In these discussions, the participants were asked to explore a problem that had been previously identified as unique to their family situation. The procedure was designed to elicit an emotionally charged discussion between the participants. There was a modest relationship found between the form of adolescent psychopathology and type of early adult psychiatric disturbance. Persons with antisocial features were likely to have been actively aggressive as teenagers. A second finding was that a relatively benign or low-key style of expressing affective messages to the child is characteristic of both the mothers and fathers of cases who were in neither the antisocial group or the schizophrenia-spectrum group. Finally, the different patterns seen in the data for the two poor-outcome groups suggests that both parental and child characteristics are important in predicting outcome. Tabular data and seven references are provided.