A 12-item instrument was designed to quantify the views of 62 nurses on how the wearing of nurses' uniforms vs street attire might affect their performance of routine nursing duties, effectiveness of their therapeutic efforts, their role concepts, and interpersonal involvement with patients. Factor analysis indicated that the instrument had high internal reliability and unifactor content. Suggestions were offered for the instrument's utility as a research tool and as an aid in selection of nursing personnel in applied settings where attire worn is considered an important environmental factor or where the attitudes of nursing staff may have bearing on treatment and response to treatment of selected populations.

An ABAB reversal design with matched placebo was employed to assess the acetylcholine precursor, deanol, in the treatment of tardive dyskinesia. Oral dyskinesia was monitored by electromyography in four patients with tardive dyskinesia. A battery of psychological rating scales was also utilized to determine effects of deanol on psychological functioning. Improvement ranged from 35 to 70% dyskinetic symptom reduction in three patients given deanol. The decrease in symptomatology, however, did not reach the level of oral EMG activity observed in a normal control subject. Psychological functioning was generally unaffected, but slight improvement was seen in two subjects.

Neuroleptic drugs were gradually reduced from 25 hospitalized chronic schizophrenics while 23 such patients were maintained on matched dosages of neuroleptics. At the end of 15 weeks, 74% of the drug-reduced subjects and 80% of the drug-maintained subjects were rated to have decompensated. Drug-reduced patients decompensated while receiving a mean of 75 mg equivalent of chlorpromazine. Clinical stability was obtained at 150 mg equivalent of chlorpromazine. Twenty-six percent of the drug-reduced patients showed no signs of clinical relapse at the end of the 15-week trial and were receiving a mean of 8 mg equivalent of chlorpromazine. The results suggest that gradual and successive reductions in maintenance antipsychotic drugs can be implemented with minimal risk to the clinical status of the chronic mental patient.

Discrepant findings on the effect of nursing personnel attire on the social behavior of psychiatric inpatients may be the result of methodological flaws. An ABBA design experiment with statistical controls for relevant variables was conducted on a 28-bed inpatient psychiatric ward for adolescents and young adults to assess the effects of nursing staff attire (uniforms vs. street clothing) on net positive social approaches directed toward nursing personnel by patients. Results demonstrated that net positive social approaches of six male and six female late adolescent and young adult patients directed toward uniform-biased and street-clothing-biased nursing staff were greater when staff were attired in street clothing than when they were attired in uniforms.

This paper describes a new approach to the evaluation for reduction of maintenance neuroleptic dosages. The proposed methodology reduces the ethical and experimental problems associated with the two design strategies employed in the past studies of drug reduction, the end point and interrupted designs, respectively. The proposed procedure, an interrupted design with statistical criteria for clinical relapse, uses double-blind objective ratings of patients' psychiatric status. The mean level of function and degree of variability for each subject are statistically determined and an a priori probability for clinical relapse is applied across all subjects. Unlike end-point designs, this procedure is responsive to the clinical decompensation of patients. In addition, the use of statistical criteria for clinical relapse reduces the introduction of experimenter bias of results, common to past interrupted designs which relied on subjective decision processes of the experimenter to define clinical relapse.