The psychiatric disorders that do and do not aggregate in the parents of COS probands are remarkably similar to the disorders that do and do not aggregate in the parents of adults with schizophrenia in modern family studies. These findings provide compelling support for the hypothesis of etiological continuity between COS and AOS.

The Internet is rapidly developing into an important medium of communication in modern society, and both psychological research and therapeutic interventions are being increasingly conducted using this new communication medium. As therapeutic interventions using the Internet are becoming more prevalent, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct research on psychotherapeutic Internet interventions to assist in the development of an appropriate standard of practice regarding interventions using this new medium. In this article, we examine the Internet and the current psychological uses which are being initiated using this medium. Ethical concerns related to the psychological use of the Internet are discussed, and guidelines are proposed for the conduct of Internet intervention research.

This article summarizes a series of cognitive/neuropsychological studies of children with schizophrenia. One set of studies, which surveyed a broad range of neuropsychological functions, revealed no evidence that children with schizophrenia are consistently impaired in sensory, perceptual, or language functions. Rather, the studies showed that children with schizophrenia performed poorly on tasks requiring sensory, perceptual, and language processing that made extensive demands on information-processing capacity. A second series of studies, which examined visual information processing by manipulating the processing demands of span of apprehension tasks, yielded similar findings. The key characteristic of tasks that elicit impaired performance in children with schizophrenia is that the task makes extensive demands on processing resources. This suggests that these children have limited information-processing capacity. Three hypotheses are proposed concerning the cognitive processes that are impaired in children with schizophrenia: (1) the cognitive processes that seem to be impaired in these children are part of a more general, hierarchically organized attention system; (2) the component processes of the system are subserved by different brain structures; and (3) the structures are part of a network that includes the frontal lobe and thalamus in interaction with the reticular activating system.

A number of practicing psychologists have become victims of threats and/or harassment from clients. This preliminary study provides descriptive information for a group of psychologists and their experiences with clients who have stalked them. Results revealed that (a) there is no specific profile for the psychologists who had been stalked; (b) the stalked psychologists subsequently employed significantly more safety measures than those who had not; and (c) the clients who stalked were usually single, likely had mood and/or personality disorder diagnoses, childhood relationship disturbances, and/or recent major stressors. The findings suggest that psychologists who work with clients may benefit from a heightened awareness of the potential danger that clients pose. The implementation of safety measures to deter unwanted client contact is discussed. Some mental health professionals who deal regularly with individuals having mental or emotional difficulties have become the victims of stalking by their clients (Corder & Whiteside, 1996;Lion & Herschler, 1998;Romans, Hays, & White, 1996). Though data concerning the prevalence of stalking from these studies varies from 5.6 to 13%, the data suggest that further research in this area is needed, as studies show that stalking can lead in some cases to physical violence and even murder (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1997). However, even when stalking does not lead to physical violence, the emotional ramifications of being stalked can be substantial (Brown, Dubin, Lion, & Garry, 1996;Corder & Whiteside, 1996).In 1990, California was the first state to enact an antistalking law as the direct result of the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer and the physical attack on actress Teresa Saldana (Saunders, 1998). The high-profile nature of these two crimes prompted the state to enact the first laws against stalking in January 1991. By 1993, 49 states had passed laws against stalking behavior, and presently all 50 states have some form of antistalking law. Though STEVEN R. GENTILE received his PsyD in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 2001. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital in New Orleans, LA.

The aggregation of neurocognitive impairments in the parents of COS probands provides further evidence of etiologic continuity between COS and AOS. A substantial subgroup of parents of COS probands had a worse neurocognitive performance than that of any of the parents of ADHD and CC probands. Receiver operating characteristic curves showed that when rigorous cutoffs define neurocognitive impairments, the combination of scores on certain neurocognitive tasks produced a level of diagnostic accuracy in the parents of COS probands that is sufficient for use in genetic linkage studies.