This article underscores the need for self‐report instruments for children to complement the teacher and parent questionnaires traditionally used to assess various aspects of children's psychological lives. Some of the problems inherent in using teachers, parents, and children as informants are delineated. Many self‐report instruments, in particular those that are used to assess children's self‐concept, anxiety, depression, and personality, are reviewed. The Children's Self‐Report Questionnaire (SRQ) was designed to assist in the diagnosis and detection of psychological deviance in 7‐ to 12‐year‐old children. The SRQ is easily administered, has broadly based norms, and has acceptable reliability and validity. The SRQ can be used as an aid to both research and clinical assessment and may provide insight into the inner world of the child.

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There have been few attempts to standardize assessment methods in Child Psychiatry. This paper describes a semi-structured approach to diagnostic interviewing of the child. Thirty-four children six to 13 years of age, and their parents, were interviewed two weeks apart by two different psychiatrists. A diagnostic coding form consisting of 29 clinical symptom items, eight summary items, and nine positive health ratings was used. Three diagnostic items were also included: "severity of clinical condition," "probability of disorder," and "adjustment status." Twelve of the Time 2 interviews with the child and parent were videotaped and rated by three different psychiatrists. Results indicated that summary items had higher reliability than individual symptom items and the three diagnostic items had the highest reliability, suggesting reliability is better for broad classes of behaviour. Interrater reliability was higher for the face-to-face rating than videotaped ratings. This suggests first that face-to-face interviews are reasonably stable over a two week period and second, since videotaped ratings had lowest reliability on items that depended on inferences about the child's feedlings, an important source of variance in assessment may be the clinician's ability to empathize with the child and draw inferences about internal feeling-states. It was concluded that this interview schedule can be a part of routine clinical practice. It ensures a reasonably standard, yet flexible and reliable approach to diagnostic interviewing.

The effects of pimozide (0.2 and 0.4 mg/kg) on discrimination learning were evaluated by a water-escape paradigm in which the degree of motor difficulty was manipulated by varying water temperature. Treatment with the drug marginally affected escape latencies in relatively warm water (25 degrees C) but markedly disrupted escape latencies when the task was more demanding (e.g., 15 degrees C and 20 degrees C water). The escape deficits, however, were not accompanied by disturbances in the acquisition of a position discrimination response or of a cue discrimination response when mice were required to make the highly prepared response of swimming to light or the contraprepared response of swimming to dark. These data were taken to suggest that in tasks involving aversive motivation pimozide influences performance through its effects on response maintenance but does not appear to affect either associative or motivational processes.