A meta-analysis of 172 studies attempted to resolve the conflict between previous narrative reviews on whether parents make systematic differences in their rearing of boys and girls. Most effect sizes were found to be nonsignificant and small. In North American studies, the only socialization area of 19 to display a significant effect for both parents is encouragement of sex-typed activities. In other Western countries, physical punishment is applied significantly more to boys. Fathers tend to differentiate more than mothers between boys and girls. Over all socialization areas, effect size is not related to sample size or year of publication. Effect size decreases with child's age and increases with higher quality. No grouping by any of these variables changes a nonsignificant effect to a significant effect. Because little differential socialization for social behavior or abilities can be found, other factors that may explain the genesis of documented sex differences are discussed.

There has been an increase in the study of insight in schizophrenia in the last 20 years. Insight is operationally defined according to five dimensions which include: the patient's awareness of mental disorder, awareness of the social consequences of disorder, awareness of the need for treatment, awareness of symptoms and attribution of symptoms to disorder. Despite the development of psychometrically sound measurement tools, the results from previous studies have been inconclusive regarding the nature of the relationship between insight and symptomatology. A meta-analysis of 40 published English-language studies was conducted to determine the magnitude and direction of the relationship, or effect size, between insight and symptom domains in schizophrenia and to determine moderator variables that were associated with the variations in effect sizes across studies. Results indicated that there was a small negative relationship between insight and global, positive and negative symptoms. There was also a small positive relationship between insight and depressive symptoms in schizophrenia. Acute patient status and mean age of onset of the disorder moderated the relationship between insight and symptom clusters. The possible reasons for the effect sizes being modest, the examination of the role of moderator variables and directions for future research are provided.

In this study we compared the reactions of mothers of 6-to 11-year-old conduct-disordered boys (MCDCs) with those of mothers of normal boys (MNCs), matched for age and education of mother. Each mother interacted with her own child (CD or normal), with a child, not her own, of like classification, and with a child, not her own, of different classification over three tasks in a laboratory. Mothers' positive, negative, or requesting behaviors and the child's compliance were counted. MCDCs and MNCs did not differ from each other in their three behaviors, but they all addressed more negatives and requests to CDCs than to NCs. CDCs were less compliant, irrespective of type of mother. The statistical Type of Mother X Type of Child interaction did not produce a significant effect on either mothers' or children's behavior. The findings suggest that the child's, and not the mother's, behavioral tendency is the major influence in CD. MCDCs were also more coercive toward their own children than to other CDCs, and this indicates the operation of transaction^ effects arising from cumulative past interactions.For many decades the socialization influences of parents were thought to mold children and their characteristics in general, and this view held also for behavioral disorders. Theorists such as Bell (1968Bell ( , 1977 challenged this received opinion and drew attention to the contributions that the children themselves may make to the ongoing interchanges between parents and children, and to the development of children's own characteristics. This once revolutionary view has now almost become modernday orthodoxy (cf. Belsky, 1981; Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). Child effects in a "normal" population have been inferred from various nonexperimental studies: for example, from the fact that a foster mother may manifest different attitudes to two infants of the same sex and age assigned to her at the same time (Yarrow, 1963). By manipulating the children's behavior, researchers have also demonstrated experimentally that children's behavior affects their parents' responses (Osofsky & O'Connell, 1972;Stevens-Long, 1973). (For further discussion of the literature on parental and child effects in general, see Bell, 1977;Lytton, 1982).Three principal models that would explain the origins of child characteristics (including behavior disorders) can be distinguished (Sameroff, 1975): (a) the main effects model, which, in its two versions, asserts the primacy either of constitutional factors or of environmental factors; (b) the interactional effects model, according to which outcomes can be explained by the This article is based on a master's thesis presented to the University of Calgary by the first author.We thank members of Scouts Canada and of the Mental Health Unit at the Alberta Children's Hospital, Calgary, for their invaluable support and efforts, and Gisela Engels for assistance with the computer analysis.

The Attributional Style Questionnaire was given to three groups of 15 adult patients: a group of paranoid patients who were not depressed, a group of depressed patients who were not paranoid, and a group of patients who were both paranoid and depressed. As predicted, the paranoid patients manifested an attributional style opposite to that of the depressed patients: that is, they tended to attribute good events to themselves and bad events to others or to chance, whereas the depressed patients tended to attribute bad events to themselves and good events to others or to chance. These findings confirm those of Kaney & Bentall (1989). The patients who were both paranoid and depressed fell in between the two other groups with respect to their attributions of good events but did not differ from the paranoid group in their attributions of bad events. In addition, differences among groups were manifest with respect to self-esteem, delusional content and suicidal ideation. The implications of these findings for therapy are discussed.

No abstract