For a joint family story‐telling task, families with a schizophrenic offspring were compared to normal families on the completeness and clarity of the final composite stories and on their interactional behavior. The composite stories from schizogenic families were more “vague and confused”, fragmented, and less complete as to the five components required to satisfy the task instructions. Schizogenic families displayed more conflict, failure, and confusion during the interactional task than control families, and, fathers and mothers of schizophrenic offspring displayed more “anxiety and tension”, “depressive mood”, “evasiveness” and “lack of interest” than fathers and mothers of normal families. Mothers of schizophrenic offspring were also described as more “hostile” than control mothers. Comparing schizogenic families from which the patient was absent during the task with schizogenic families with the patient present, and with control families, indicated that the central findings were not attributable to the immediate presence and participation of the schizophrenic member.

Psychosocial factors in phenylketonuria were studied through observations of parent‐child interaction in a simulated eating situation, questionnaires tapping parental understanding of the disease and interviews exploring problems in diet control. The importance of the findings to the prediction of outcome, management and understanding of the disorder was discussed.

No abstract

A methodological study for quantifying the construct of role on three dimensions of a Semantic Differential: Evaluative, Potency, Activity. Male and female university students rated 8 social roles on a standard 25-item Semantic Differential under two instructional procedures. Support was obtained for a central assumption embraced by role theorists, that there is consensual agreement as to characteristics associated with certain roles. Ratings of the roles for the two instructional conditions, actual and ideal, closely paralleled the concepts “role” and “position,” respectively. Each of the three semantic dimensions significantly differentiated the 8 roles, indicating that three semantic dimensions provided greater precision in measurement than only an attitudinal dimension.