It has been suggested that women experience depression most commonly in the childbearing years and that reproductive events such as pregnancy and child birth may coincide with the onset of mood and anxiety disorders in women. Therefore, a brief screening tool, with good sensitivity/specificity for psychiatric diagnoses that could be administered to pregnant women would be a valuable and useful proxy measure. We assessed the validity of the K-10, using the SCID as the gold standard, in a sample of 129 healthy pregnant women who presented for care at midwife obstetric units in Cape Town, South Africa. A receiver-operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis indicated that the K-10 showed agreeable sensitivity and specificity in detecting depression (area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve, 0.66), posttraumatic stress disorder (0.69), panic disorder (0.71), and social phobia (0.76). The K-10 may be a useful screening measure for mood and anxiety disorders in pregnant women.

The prevalence of anxiety symptoms among South African children is reported to be significantly higher than in other parts of the world. The need for an effective anxiety prevention and early intervention program for use with South African children is urgently needed. The aim of the present study was therefore to determine whether the Australian FRIENDS program could effectively reduce the anxiety symptoms, as measured by the Spence Children's Anxiety scale (SCAS), among a sample of South African children from low socioeconomic background. The program evaluation employed a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design that followed participants (N = 46) over a course of 10 months. Within group effects and between group effects revealed that the FRIENDS program had little statistically significant postintervention effect on the anxiety symptoms of this sample, but had significant effects in the longer term, at 4 months and 6 months follow-up. The implications of these results for the South African context are discussed.

The present study explored the relationship between South African preschool children's intelligence scores achieved on the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (GHD), and the accuracy of teachers' ratings of the human-figure drawings and teachers' general perceptions of children's intellectual maturity. The GHD was administered individually to 30 boys and 30 girls between the ages of 4 and 6 years (M = 4.5. SD = 0.7) from a multicultural (Black, Colored, and White) preschool near the Cape, South Africa. The three class teachers of these preschoolers provided the ratings and perceptions of each child's intellectual maturity. Results indicated that the teachers' assessments of children's intellectual maturity were fairly similar to the formal measures of children's intellectual maturity using human figure drawings and their own perceptions. It appears that teacher ratings of drawings could be relied upon as a means of assessment. General perceptions of children's intellectual maturity should not be solely relied upon, but instead these perceptions should be used as an aid for enhancing the teachers' assessment of children's intellectual maturity in addition to the rating of human figure drawings.