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This investigation examined children's capacity to decode verbal and nonverbal emotional stimuli. Children with externalizing behavioral symptoms were compared to two types of controls, including chronically ill and normally developing children. Children were requested to identify whether video scenes were happy, angry, sad, or neutral, across four different modalities including verbal, prosody, facial, and combined. Findings were that chronological age was a significant predictor of children's ability to decode emotions with older children having better developed abilities than their younger peers. Verbal intelligence also was found to be a significant predictor of the ability to decode facial expressions and combined scenes. Although the data did not support the original hypotheses that children with externalizing behavior disorders would be less accurate than controls in the decoding of emotions, findings did support a developmental progression of decoding accuracy. Recommendations within the limitations of the study design are provided which support a developmental framework in children's acquisition of the decoding of emotions.

Measures of acoustic startle such as prepulse inhibition (PPI) and startle latency have been found to be impaired in schizophrenia, and are commonly thought to be related to cognitive deficits in this disease. However, findings about the relationship between startle variables and cognitive performance have been equivocal. In this study, we examined correlations between startle measures (baseline startle magnitude, latency, habituation and PPI) and cognitive performance (using the Benton Visual Retention Test, Conner’s Continuous Performance Test, California Verbal Learning Test, Finger Tapping Test, and Wisconsin Card Sort Test) in 107 schizophrenia patients and 94 healthy controls. Overall, there was a lack of any significant relationship between these constructs in both populations when correcting for multiple comparisons. This suggests that alterations in startle measures seen in schizophrenia may not reflect elements of information processing that cause cognitive deficits in the disease.

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