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Background  This longitudinal study of 20 average and bright adults with parents with cognitive difficulties follows a study 20 years earlier of their childhood adaptation to their parents. Method  Semistructured interviews about life situation and changes and perception of family‐of‐origin. Results  The participants’ socioeconomic status changed from poverty to a bell curve from upper middle class to underclass, with working class the mode. There was a high incidence of psychological disorders, especially depression and drug disorders, but two‐fifths were currently diagnosis‐free and one‐fifth lifetime diagnosis‐free. Three‐fourths expressed a realistic view of their parents’ difficulties. Nearly half the parents have received social support from their adult children, both those without and those with cognitive difficulties. Conclusion  Professionals should recognize the potential of children of parents with cognitive difficulties and their need for opportunity and family guidance on their behalf.

Perceptual rotations are responses in which the percept is upside‐down or sideways from the usual position. In a population of 79 children, ages 3 to 15, 75% male, referred to the school psychologist for personality assessment for emotional, behavior, or learning problems; 1 in 9 Rorschach protocols contained at least one rotation. Rotations were not related significantly to reason for referral, learning disabilities, more general learning problems, or organic indicators. Responses showed individual differences in complexity, awareness, comfort with rotation, and aspects of righting the card to correspond with orientation of percept. Findings suggest that perceptual rotations do not matter as much as do strategies for coping with them.

Disagreements over clinical interpretations are very hard to resolve. If two psychologists were to argue over differing clinical opinions, each would probably cite those behaviors supporting his conclusion. Each might have chosen a different group of behaviors to interpret. But they might cite the same behavior as pointing to divergent conclusions. The locus of disagreement would then appear to be in the process of inference leading from the behavior to the psychologist's conclusion. This paper examines the relationship between subject behavior and clinical interpretation to facilitate communication about clinical interpretations and the process of clinical inference. It will deal only with the interpretation of one unit of behavior at a time, and pass over the problems of selecting behaviors for interpretation and combining these initial acts of inference into a final, more inclusive inference. CLINICAL INFERENCEClinical inference is often treated as a unitary process(** p -' R 8 * PP. 4 6 1 b7; s* p. 208).