Western Washington State CollegeResults of research dealing with identification of cerebral impairment have almost uniformly supported an actuarial approach. The present effort looked at this issue as it applied to clinical human neuropsychology and found that the Halstead-Reitan battery of neuropsychological tests interpreted by inexperienced clinicians yielded the best hit rate when compared to actuarial approaches or experienced clinicians using more traditional clinical batteries. The findings suggest that any prediction scheme, clinical or actuarial, based on instruments that have no claim to validity for the particular task at hand will always do poorly. Finally, schemes based on a combined clinical actuarial approach, using valid instruments, will have a generally good hit rate.

Relationships beteen social decentering, personality variables, and social competence were investigated for children attending a seven-week therapeutic summer camp. Ss were 23 males and females ranging in age from 10 to 13 years old had been referred to the camp because they lacked age-appropriate social skills. Feffer's Role Taking Task was used to measure social decentering, and counselor ratings of camper adjustment were measures of social competence. Predicted positive relationships between decentering and competence were found. Striking sex differences were found, however, when comparisons were made between social decentering and two personality variables--the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale and the Kiddie Mach. Predicted negative correlations were found between Role Taking Task scores and externality and machiavellianism for females, but not for males. Implications concerning age by sex interactions in the study of personality correlates of social decentering were discussed.

The Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Children's Revision (LNNBCR) was used to investigate differences between reading disabled (RD) and academically normal children. The groups of 32 subjects each were equivalent with regard to age, sex, race, IQ, and SES of primary wage earner in the family. RD subjects, all of whom had been identified as learning disabled by the school, were moderately to severely impaired in reading, but not in math. Performance of the groups was significantly different on the battery as a whole and on an abbreviated form of the battery which excluded scales composed of items measuring language, reading, and arithmetic. With the abbreviated battery, the largest group differences were found on the Rhythm scale. It is hypothesized that poor performance on the Rhythm scale may reflect impaired auditory processing, which has a negative impact on the development of basic skills required for reading. A stepwise discriminant function analysis using the abbreviated battery correctly identified 84% of subjects. Evidence supporting discriminative validity of two methods of identifying RD children was found. Performance on an Experimental scale composed of nonreading items presumed to assess the integrity of areas of the brain mediating basic reading skills was no worse than on an equivalent randomly selected pool of items. The LNNB-CR may be a potentially valuable instrument for investigating neuropsychological differences between RD and normal children in that it provides relevant information to educators who must formulate remediation programs for RD children.

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