Background Emotional management therapy (EMT) aims to improve handling of emotional stress in schizophrenia. It consists of two sub-programmes: the first includes relaxation techniques, the second stress coping skills.Method A pilot study of EMT in 19 patients with early psychosis produced positive results and a post-hoc study of 16 patients was commenced.Results EMT showed positive results, with chronic patients improving more than patients with early psychosis.Conclusion EMT can be effective in early psychosis, especially for cognitive functioning.

The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) were administered to 50 bilingual, Mexican-American children in grades 3-5. The students' relative performance on these two vocabulary tests, as well as their error patterns, was examined. The results revealed that the EOWPVT has adequate concurrent validity with the PPVT-R, and that on both tests the students' scores were almost two standard deviations below the normative mean. The outcome indicating that the expressive vocabulary score was higher than the receptive vocabulary score is explained in terms of differences of item content and in the composition of the norm samples for the two tests. Items that generated high error rates are identified to facilitate appropriate interpretation of the EOWPVT when used with Mexican-American children.The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) (Gardner, 1979(Gardner, , 1983) offers a potentially useful complementary test to the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Whereas the PPVT-R has been the subject of numerous validity studies that cut across age levels, ethnic groups, and clinical samples (Bracken, McCallum, & Prasse, 1984), the EOWPVT has received limited validation. The EOWPVT manual (Gardner, 1979) suggests that this expressive vocabulary test can be administered to Mexican-American children, but reports validity coefficients of .67, .70, and .77 between the EOWPVT and the PPVT-R for only three samples of nonminority preschool children. In one other study, Furlong and Teuber (1984) found concurrent validity coefficients of .80 and S8, respectively, between the EOWPVT and PPVT-R for younger (6-9 years old) and older (10-12 years old) learning disabled students. However, the learning disabled students actually obtained higher scores on the EOWPVT than on the PPVT-R, a counterintuitive finding. Thus, although moderate concurrent validity coefficients for the EOWPVT have been found, it still remains to verify these findings for special populations such as Mexican-American children.In evaluating the validity of the EOWPVT, Furlong and Teuber (1984) suggested that the disproportionate number of nouns in the EOWPVT (97%) compared with the PPVT-R (Form L: 80%; Form M: 72%) confounds attempts to evaluate the test's construct validity. With vocabulary tests of equivalent difficulty, one would ordinarily expect higher scores on a receptive measure than on its expressive counterpart. This is due to the more complex response requirements of a recall (expressive) vs. a recognition (receptive) task (Ellis, 1978). The fact that the EOWPVT consists almost entirely of nouns may affect its difficulty level when contrasted with the PPVT-R's higher percentage of adjective and verb forms. This item content difference could obscure performance differences attributable to the response modalities of these two vocabulary tests and lead to erroneous interpretations, particularly when assessing the unique language abilities of bilin...

This study examined the concurrent and construct validity of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) vis-à-vis the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Revised (PPVT-R), the Similarities and Vocabulary subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), and the Auditory Reception and Auditory Association subtests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA). The subjects were 97 learning-disabled students (age range = 72-143 months) in the Honolulu area who were administered all tests as part of a multidisciplinary psychoeducational evaluation. The results indicated that the EOWPVT had acceptable concurrent validity, but the construct validity of the test was questionable. The EOWPVT scores were also found to be consistently higher than the PPVT-R scores. Implications for the assessment of learning-disabled children's expressive and receptive semantic skills are discussed.

Introductionby the column editors: