One-hundred-sixteen white South African preschoolers from severely economically disadvantaged circumstances were divided into four groups: a structured play training intervention group, an unstructured play training intervention group, and attention control group, and a nonintervention control group with twenty-six, twenty-eight, fourteen, and twenty-five children respectively, available for posttraining assessment. Prior to intervention, assessments of play, divergent thinking skills, story-telling ability, verbal and nonverbal IQ and locus of control were made. Intervention according to the groups was carried out and the assessments were repeated a month after completion of training. Analyses of covariance revealed significant increases for both forms of play training over both control groups for all measures except nonverbal IQ and aggression. There was no differential advantage found between the type of intervention used. Neither was imaginative predisposition found to be a factor related to increases in imaginative play. It was concluded that both the question of structure and imaginative predisposition in relation to play training would be better examined in a less extremely disadvantaged group.

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A longitudinal study is described which addresses the question of the course of imaginative play predisposition. Preschool assessments of imaginativeness are related to third grade testing of cognitive and affective variables. A retest sample of seventy-three children were followed up some three years after the original preschool assessments of imaginative predisposition were made. Considerable support was provided for the validity of the earlier factorial multidimensional conception of imaginative predisposition. Further the early assessments were found to be predictive and strongly related to third grade expression of imagination, creativity and other related cognitive and emotional features such as reading, language comprehension, and independence and maturity.

Research on cross-cultural counselling and psychotherapy began to receive emphasis in the 1970s in the United States. In South Africa the need to devise relevant help for the majority black population and to contextualize psychological services is being increasingly addressed in the literature. In the present study differences in world view between black and white South African adolescent pupils ( n = 200) were investigated. The use of a scale to assess world view across culture indicated significant differences in black and white adolescent pupils’ world view in the areas of Human Nature, Human Relationships, People-Nature, Time Orientation, and Activity. The effect of age and sex on individual variation in scores within groups was also investigated. The implications of the findings of the study for cross-cultural counselling are discussed as well as recommendations for further research using the World View Scale.