For some time, the Editors have been considering the wisdom of devoting one issue a year of the Journal to a specific theme, with a call for papers on that theme, in line with the policy of several comparable journals from North America. We have recently decided to go ahead next year with the first such issue, but readers might wonder if we've jumped the gun this month. With just a handful of exceptions, the papers in this issue concern just two main themes. Before considering those, mention should be made of the annotation by Linda Dowdney on the subject of how children respond to the death of a parent. This is a topic of direct clinical importance, and her conclusions are clear. Children who have been bereaved can experience the same range of symptoms characteristic of bereavement reactions among adults, but their usual reaction is a nonspecific emotional or behavioural disturbance. A significant minority becomes so disturbed that professional advice on management would be appropriate, although the evidence points to this rarely being sought or available.

The Editors of the JCPP have decided to initiate a series of Special Issues on topics for which there is a particularly high level of research activity. Topics have been selected where findings are published in a wide range of journals and where there would be special benefit from publishing a collection of high-quality empirical papers in one issue of the Journal.

The first topic selected is that of Social Cognition and will be edited by Jim Stevenson. The Editors request the submission of empirical and theoretical papers on this topic applied both to normally developing children and to clinical populations. The papers will be subjected to the normal refereeing process and if accepted for publication will appear together in one special issue of the Journal. The usual guidance on manuscript preparation should be followed—see Instructions for Contributors at:

http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/journals/cpp/cppifc.htm

Manuscripts should be submitted by 31 March 2001 and should be marked “For consideration for Special Issue on Social Cognition”.

Psychological outcomes in children who have experienced the death of a parent are heterogeneous. One child in five is likely to develop psychiatric disorder. In the year following bereavement, children commonly display grief, distress, and dysphoria. Non-specific emotional and behavioural difficulties among children are often reported by surviving parents and the bereaved children themselves. The highest rates of reported difficulties are found in boys. This review identifies the moderating and mediating variables that lead to some children being more vulnerable to disturbance than others following parental death. Limitations and gaps in the recent bereavement literature are identified. Theoretical and methodological advances that are necessary for a coherent account of childhood bereavement are outlined.

More able individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome (AS) have been shown to pass relatively high level theory of mind (ToM) tasks without displaying commensurate levels of social adaptation in naturalistic settings. This paper presents a social cognitive procedure—the Social Attribution Task (SAT)—that reduces factors thought to facilitate ToM task performance without facilitating real-life social functioning. Sixty participants with autism (N = 20), AS (N = 20), and normally developing adolescents and adults (N = 20) with normative IQs were asked to provide narratives describing Heider and Simmel's (1944) silent cartoon animation in which geometric shapes enact a social plot. These narratives were coded in terms of the participants' abilities to attribute social meaning to the geometric cartoon. The SAT provides reliable and quantified scores on seven indices of social cognition. Results revealed marked deficits in both clinical groups across all indices. These deficits were not related to verbal IQ or level of metalinguistic skills. Individuals with autism and AS identified about a quarter of the social elements in the story, a third of their attributions were irrelevant to the social plot, and they used pertinent ToM terms very infrequently. They were also unable to derive psychologically based personality features from the shapes' movements. When provided with more explicit verbal information on the nature of the cartoon, individuals with AS improved their performance slightly more than those with autism, but not significantly so.

It is well established that people with autism have impaired face processing, but much less is known about voice processing in autism. Four experiments were therefore carried out to assess (1) familiar voice-face and sound-object matching; (2) familiar voice recognition; (3) unfamiliar voice discrimination; and (4) vocal affect naming and vocal-facial affect matching. In Experiments 1 and 2 language-matched children with specific language impairment (SLI) were the controls. In Experiments 3 and 4 language-matched children with SLI and young mainstream children were the controls. The results were unexpected: the children with autism were not impaired relative to controls on Experiments 1, 2 and 3, and were superior to the children with SLI on both parts of Experiment 4, although impaired on affect matching relative to the mainstream children. These results are interpreted in terms of an unexpected impairment of voice processing in the children with SLI associated partly, but not wholly, with an impairment of cross-modal processing. Performance on the experimental tasks was not associated with verbal or nonverbal ability in either of the clinical groups. The implications of these findings for understanding autism and SLI are discussed.

The main aim of the present study was to compare pictures and words with respect to access to semantic systems in autism using a semantic priming paradigm. A word completion task was conducted using both within-modality (word–word, WW) and cross-modality (picture–word, PW) conditions on a group of high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism (N = 20) and a control group (N = 20) matched on chronological age, mental age, Verbal IQ and Performance IQ. Both groups showed semantic priming effects in both modality conditions, generating significantly more responses for related prime-target pairs than for unrelated pairs. Although the control group performed similarly on both priming tasks, the autistic group performed significantly better on a PW task than on a WW task. These findings suggest the possible advantage of pictures over words in access to semantics in autism. The theoretical implications are discussed in terms of functional asymmetry between verbal and pictorial semantic operations that may be specific to autism.

The reading and oral language scores of 110 children with a specific reading disability (SRD) and 102 children with a specific language impairment (SLI) indicated that approximately 53% of children with an SRD and children with an SLI could be equally classified as having an SRD or an SLI, 55% of children with an SRD have impaired oral language, and 51% of children with an SLI have a reading disability. Finding that a large percentage of children can be equally classified as SRD or SLI has repercussions for the criteria used to define an SRD, for conceptualising subgroups of learning disability, and for estimates of the incidence of SRD. Further, it highlights the need for future studies to assess both the reading and oral language abilities of SRD and SLI participants to determine how specifically impaired and homogeneous samples really are.

This study is a prospective, longitudinal attempt to explore behavioral self-regulation, private speech, and speech-action coordination in a sample of behaviorally at-risk preschool children. Preschoolers (N = 72) were classified at age 3 years into a behaviorally at-risk group or a comparison group on the basis of preschool teacher behavioral ratings. Children were videotaped on four different occasions across the span of almost 2 years as they completed problem-solving tasks, and private speech, task performance, executive functioning, and speech-action coordination were analyzed. Children identified 2 years earlier as being hard to manage were at risk for continued behavior problems at elementary school entry. Behaviorally at-risk children consistently used more spontaneous private speech than comparison children across all observations. Both groups of children demonstrated a pattern of increasing silence with task success over time. No group differences were observed in children's speech-action coordination at age 5 years. Intraindividual developmental changes in private speech for both groups were associated with task performance, speech-action coordination, and executive functioning at age 5, but not with teacher- and parent-reported problem behavior.

Objective: To use the Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) to assess Expressed Emotion (EE) in various samples of children with asthma in order to clarify (1) developmental and validity issues for the EE construct and (2) the use of the FMSS technique, specifically, in children with chronic medical illness.

Method: Data were collected on a sample of 84 adolescents with severe, chronic asthma who had failed outpatient management. In addition, a sample of 30 children with asthma, ages 6–9, were recruited from an outpatient pediatric clinic. A comparison sample of 15 children without any chronic illness, ages 6–9, were recruited by notices posted in the community. The primary caregiver of each child was assessed using the FMSS.

Results: FMSS interviews were reliability coded in all samples. Rates of high Criticism (FMSS CRIT), Emotional Overinvolvement (FMSS EOI), and EE were comparable to rates previously reported in child and adolescent samples. Although the validity for ratings of FMSS CRIT was well supported, the validity of FMSS EOI ratings and the overall EE construct were more problematic.

Conclusions: The FMSS is a useful and largely valid measure in children with asthma. Ratings of FMSS CRIT were found to have strong validity. There was little problem shifting the context of FMSS administration from chronic mental to chronic medical illness, but a variety of developmental considerations arose, especially regarding FMSS EOI ratings. Although we raise concerns about viewing EE as a valid construct, it may remain a useful predictive index.

Using a longitudinal sample of children, this study examined the relation between maternal Expressed Emotion (EE) and mother–child attachment disorganization at age 6 years. A nonclinical sample of 33 children (at ages 12 months and 18 months) from Berlin, Germany participated with their mothers in Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Thirty-two children were again observed with their mothers at age 6 years in a standard laboratory attachment observation. At the time of the 6-year assessment, maternal EE was assessed based on a Five-Minute Speech Sample. Mothers also completed the Life Events Questionnaire, a measure of family stress, and the Present State Examination, a measure of maternal depression.

Maternal Expressed Emotion was significantly linked to mother–child attachment security at age 6 years. Further analyses revealed that High EE was most closely linked to the disorganized attachment pattern at age 6 years, an at-risk attachment pattern that has been associated with intrusive and hostile maternal behavior. The relationship was upheld when other relevant variables, including infant attachment disorganization and a measure of perceived family stress, were simultaneously considered. The study provides independent validation of Expressed Emotion as a measure of relationship quality in early childhood. It also provides a basis for the further investigation of the nature of the relation between maternal Expressed Emotion and attachment disorganization.

Expressed Emotion (EE), a measure of the emotional climate of the family, predicts subsequent adjustment of adults with mental disorder (Leff & Vaughn, 1985). Despite the acknowledged importance of the family in childhood disorders, there have been relatively few studies of expressed emotion with adolescents and school-aged children and virtually none focused on preschoolers. The present study utilized the Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) to examine how Expressed Emotion relates concurrently and longitudinally to child problem status in a community sample of 112 preschool-aged children. At preschool, the proportion of high EE increased significantly across three child groups: Comparison (8.1%), Borderline Problem (15.8%), and High Problem (41.2%); however, preschool EE was not predictive of subsequent child status at 1st grade. Expanded FMSS codes, tapping positive affect and worry about the child, were also related to child problem group at preschool and were predictive of subsequent child status at 1st grade. Because parents' stress and adjustment were also highly related to child problem group status, we examined whether the FMSS codes were essentially a proxy for these or whether they explained unique variance. In two stepwise regressions on preschool child group status (divided by total problems and by externalizing problems), maternal stress was the only variable to enter. Also, in predicting to 1st grade externalizing child group status, only maternal stress entered. Discussion focused on the extension of the EE construct and other FMSS coding to young children, and the need to recognize that to some extent these variables may reflect maternal stress and adjustment.

The modulators of maternal separation anxiety were examined in a longitudinal study with 97 mothers of infants from 3 to 9 months of age. The objective of the study was to examine the joint contribution of the mother's attachment concerns as related to her husband together with the perception of the infant's temperament to her concerns over separation from her child. Maternal worries about separation from 3-month-old infants predicted maternal separation anxiety when infants were 9 months old. Mother's attachment to her husband and her perception of her child's temperament further predicted maternal separation anxiety at 9 months over and above the worries at 3 months. Mothers who feared dependent relationships with their husbands experienced high levels of maternal separation anxiety. This tendency was particularly marked when the infant was perceived as adaptable at 3 months. In addition, secure mothers, namely, mothers low in fear of abandonment and in fear of being dependent, increased their maternal separation anxiety as a function of their infant's perceived unadaptability.

Fears and phobias are relatively common in childhood. Both environmental and genetic theories have tried to explain the etiology behind these conditions. However, data supporting the different theories are sparse. To investigate the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences on specific phobias and fears, parental reports of animal, situational, and mutilation fears and phobias were completed for 1106 pairs of 8- to 9-year-old Swedish twins. The prevalence of specific phobias was 7.3% for boys and 10.0% for girls. Genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental effects contributed to individual differences in fears and phobias in young children, but the magnitude of the effects differed between sexes. Shared environmental effects contributed to a general susceptibility for fearfulness. Genetic and nonshared environmental effects, on the other hand, contributed both to the general susceptibility and specific fearfulness, even though these effects primarily were fear specific. These results indicate that both heritable factors as well as environmental factors such as trauma, vicarious learning, and/or negative information are important for differences in fearfulness and phobias—at least in children.

This paper examines the impact of a 12-episode television series, “Families”, on disruptive child behavior and family adjustment. This media intervention comprises the first of a five-level early intervention parenting and family support strategy, known as Triple P (Positive Parenting Program). Fifty-six parents of children aged between 2 and 8 years were randomly assigned to either watching the television series or to a waitlist control group. Compared to the control group, parents in the television viewing (TV) condition reported significantly lower levels of disruptive child behavior and higher levels of perceived parenting competence, immediately following intervention. Prior to intervention approximately 42.9% of the children in the TV condition were in the clinically elevated range for disruptive child behavioral problems. This had reduced to 14.3% following intervention. In addition, a high level of consumer acceptability was reported by parents in the TV condition. All post-intervention effects were maintained at 6-month follow-up. Implications for public health approaches to family mental health are discussed.