‘THERE IS A WAR ON! SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET KILLED’

This paper describes the first three years of work providing consultation at the interface between adult mental health and children's services. It suggests that significant numbers of children, living with parents whose mental illness may be ‘severe and enduring’, remain hidden from services. The author applies psychoanalytic theory in an attempt to understand the unconscious factors, for organizations as well as for individuals, which may contribute to making it so difficult for services to work co‐operatively to recognize these children's existence and their emotional needs. She reviews some of the related fields in which the application of psychoanalytic thinking has occurred and also describes the context in which the work takes place. A series of vignettes demonstrate some of the difficulties encountered and the ways in which the presence of a neutral third or ‘other’ can contribute to their resolution. She suggests working relationships between adult's and children's services are profoundly affected by the psychotic processes operating in the minds of these parents and that the consultant acts as a container enabling staff to manage the fragmentation and splitting which would otherwise be inevitable.     

Surface cues reduce the latency to name rotated images of objects.

Jolicoeur (1985, Memory & Cognition 13 289-303) found a linear increase in the latency to name line drawings of objects rotated (0 degrees to 120 degrees) from the upright (0 degrees) in the initial trial block. This effect was much shallower in later blocks. He proposed that the initial effect may indicate that mental rotation is the default process for recognising rotated objects, and that the decrease in this effect, seen with practice, may reflect the increased use of learned orientation-invariant features. Initially, we were interested in whether object-colour associations that may be learned during the initial block, could account for the reduced latency to name rotated objects, seen in later blocks. In experiment 1 we used full-cue colour images of objects that depicted colour and other surface cues. Surprisingly, given that Jolicoeur's findings were replicated several times with line drawings, we found that even the initial linear trend in naming latency was shallow. We replicated this result in follow-up experiments. In contrast, when we used less-realistic depictions of the same objects that had fewer visual cues (ie line drawings, coloured drawings, greyscale images), the results were comparable to those of Jolicoeur. Also, the initial linear trends were steeper for these depictions than for full-cue colour images. The results suggest that, when multiple surface cues are available in the image, mental rotation may not be the default recognition process.     

Children's use of verbal collaterals in DRL performance

This study examines the effects of a verbal collateral (counting) on a series of three differential reinforcement of low rates of response (DRL) tasks with progressively longer interresponse time requirements (DRL-2, DRL-6 and DRL-12). Forty-eight 10-year-old children, divided according to sex and conceptual tempo (fast-inaccurate vs. slow-accurate) participated in DRL training, half of them being instructed to count aloud between responses. Counting was found to be related to faster learning of all the tasks and to greater efficiency in obtaining reinforcement in most cases. It also eliminated differences due to sex and conceptual tempo except in DRL-12. However, it had the disadvantage of causing inexact temporal discrimination. The results were replicated in a group of 8-year-old subjects performing the same tasks.     

POWER AND THE QUALITY OF SAME-SEX FRIENDSHIPS

Does the quality of same-sex friendship depend on the gender of the friends and the balance of power between friends? Fifty-four men and 60 women undergraduates evaluated two of their same-sex friendships, one equal in power and one unequal in power. The quality of each friendship was rated in terms of emotional closeness, satisfaction, liking, self-disclosure, and rewards. In general, most young adults evaluated their friendships positively. Mixed-model multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) found significant main effects of gender and power on ratings of quality, but no interactions. Consistent with previous research, women generally evaluated their same-sex friendships more positively than did men. Gender differences were relatively small in magnitude and were not found for all indices of relationship quality, however. As predicted, participants rated equal-power friendships significantly higher than unequal-power friendships on all measures of quality. Power appears to be an important but largely neglected element of friendship.     

School Psychology: Training Individuals for One of the Best Kept Secrets in Professional Psychology

Abstract

School psychology training at the doctoral level is discussed. Given the increasing diversity in the schools as well as the varied education and mental health needs of the population, school psychology training is necessarily broad, involving traditional skills such as assessment, intervention, consultation, and counseling, all of which are taught within a context of a changing school population with changing needs. Because there is compulsory education, school psychologists’ interface with a broad cross-section of individual children, their parents, and their teachers. Moreover, school psychological practice is not limited to schools, as doctoral school psychologists are health service providers; many of these individuals work in other settings for which they are trained to provide services. The complexities and challenges of training school psychologists within this broad agenda effectively across domains are discussed.     

Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Forty-two children (2;8–5;7) viewed video-taped “scenes” in which a SPEAKER addressed sentences containing a personal pronoun which refereed...