Legal applications of developmental psychology are an increasingly important research topic. A symposium examined children as witnesses, offenders, and participants in the legal process. Children's reporting of events is affected by long delays, interview format, and motivational factors, and their understanding of the meaning of truth develops prior to their definition of lying. The fairness of the law and its processes shows developmental changes in perceived justice. The process of sentencing shows that extralagl factors such as offender age, gender, and employment status affects the penalties imposed by magistrates.

Research into the cognitive and behavioural sequelae of traumatic brain injury in children has frequently noted difficulties encountered by these children when they begin school or re-enter the education system following injury. However, these difficulties have seldom been linked to underlying specific cognitive deficits as traditional educational assessment is not sufficient to determine the pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses exhibited by these children. The return of the brain injured child into the classroom requires planning and monitoring as well as liaison between parents, teachers, hospital personnel, therapists, and psychologists. This paper briefly reviews the literature regarding academic performance in children following traumatic brain injury and outlines elements of an effective reintegration program. Possible reintegration problems are discussed.

While there is the likelihood that student, teacher, and psychologist will benefit from neuropsychological work carried out in classrooms, experience suggests that there is often a problem of communication of information between neuropsychologist and teacher. The nature of this problem is discussed here and a means of resolution is suggested. An infomation-processing model of cognition is presented which has been used with parents and teachers in order to provide a means of translation between the brain/processing schema of the neuropsychologist and the teaching schema of the teacher. A checklist of questions that focuses the attention of both teacher and psychologist on potential problem areas in each of the phases of the model is also presented.

A longitudinal study of early emotional development is in progress in Sydney, and preliminary results from the first three years of the study are reported. Antenatal assessment of parental personality, interpersonal relationships, and parental expectations identified different habitual ways of managing negative affect. Thus far, postnatal assessment of a subsample of the infants has differentiated emotion regulation at 4 months and empathy and mother-infant attachment quality at 12 months. Coping styles to manage emotionallly distressing or challenging situations showed individual differerences. Some 4-month-old infants used an immature strategy to cope with the stress of a non-responsive mother in the Still-Face Procedure, withdrawing and engaging in arousal-containing behaviours. At 12 months of age, these infants also tended to respond with immature personal distress reactions to a videotape of a distressed peer and to demonstrate insecure attachment. Assessment of coping behaviour at 30 months in a semistructured play situation aims to determine whether earlier continuity of withdrawal and emotionall containment versus engagement and emotional coping is maintained.

Learning difficulties affect up to 20 percent of school-aged children. While many children “grow out” of their disability, a significant proportion experience ongoing problems which can hinder academic, social, and emotional development.

Neuropsychological models suggest that these children may suffer from subtle deficits in memory and organizational abilities, which make them vulnerable within a classroom environment. Understanding the specific neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of children with learning difficulties may provide information regarding the most appropriate form of intervention and the likelihood of its success.

In recent study at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, 160 learning disabled children were evaluated. Findings from the group suggested a high frequency of general health problems as well as mild episodes of central nervous system dysfunction. Neuropsychological data showed that the sample, as a whole, performed within the average range on standardized intellectual measures, but achieved poor results on measures of new learning and executive function. Furthermore, data supported the presence of a number of patterns of learning disability, including linguistic deficit, non-verbal deficit, and information processing deficit. These subtypes are discussed with reference to educational characteristics, and models of intervention are suggested.

A symposium on ageing research was held at the 7th Australian Developmental Conference in July 1992. The theme of the symposium was the effect of ageing on cognition. Empirical and theoretical papers presented evidence for cognitive decline in late adulthood. However, discussion of the modifiability of cognition tempered the pessimistic view of cognitive ability in old age. Interdisciplinary studies such as the Berlin Aging Study provide hope for the discovery of factors affecting successful ageing by examining the interaction between health, personality, social factors, and cognition.

The technique known as facilitated communication training involves a disabled person being physically assisted to point to letters or words in order to communicate a message. Use of the technique is controversial in that it is difficult to determine if the person providing the physical assistance is also influencing the message. The literature reports little empirical evaluation of the validity of communication using the technique. The current paper outlines a methodology which can be used to investigate whether the messages relayed using the facilitated communication technique actually are generated by the disabled person. The methodology invoves both quantitative and qualitative procedures.

Children who suffer traumatic brain injury frequently experience difficulties in those behaviours represented as “executive” or prefrontal lobe functioning. In an educational setting these may involve disorganisation, difficulty moving from one activity to another, following rules, and staying on task to complete activities. Return to school involves a three-phase process: (1) an assessment period where school is viewed as a vehicle for stability; (2) modification of the school environment; and (3) student strategies. For the assessment phase, checklists are based on neurobehavioural sequelae of brain injuries in children and classified according to functional categories of Personal/Social, Work Habits, and Cognitive/Communicative behaviours. These are used to generate teaching and learning strategies for the second and third phases. One approach presently under trial is the development of executive skill training involving student plans. Student plans provide a framework for training students to generalise from one activity to another. Recent research provides some promise for the efficacy of this approach. The challenge to those working in rehabilitation of students with brain injuries, particularly where the frontal lobes are implicated, is to develop a process where students can recognise there is a problem, apply strategies across settings, unprompted, and monitor their performance. These are the very dysexecutive behaviours typical of students with brain injuries.

Interpretation of a child's comprehension score on the Neale-R is usually done independently from the reading accuracy score. Such a procedure can result in erroneous conclusions about the comprehension skill level of a child. When the child has both accuracy and comprehension reading ages below his/her chronological age, the comprehension data needs to be analysed only for those passages successfully read, rather than being compared directly with the recommended normative data.

This article reviews the relatively scanty literature on students' perception of transition from primary to secondary school. Students at one particular nonmetropolitan Queensland secondary school were surveyed for their reactions to an induction program, modelled on the Queensland Inter-year Program (McQuade, 1987). Specific aspects taken from the program included preparatory discussions led by the primary school class teacher, contact visits by staff and students both from and to the high school, and the consequent program. Recollected anxieties or concerns are explored in the light of students' perceptions six months after transition. Unanticipated problems from the students' perspective are also reviewed, as are the major support sources as perceived by students. Some suggestions are made for such programs in the light of this survey and the literature.

The literature on normative fear in children and adolescents outlined in this review spans almost a century from the work of Hall and Hagman in the late 1800s and early 1900s to the more recent contributions of researchers such as Ollendick, King, and Gullone. Methodologies range from unstructured open-ended inteview formats to soundly validated research instruments enabling meaningful comparison of different subject populations. Developmental changes occur in the content, intensity, and frequency of normative fear. Fearfulness has been related to chronological age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Recently the nature of what children and adoloscents find fearful has changed. Developmental changes in what children are prepared to find fearful contributes to the distribution of their fears and warrant the attention of caregivers.

The reliability of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children - Revised was examined for a sample of Australian children (N=79). All subjects were individually assessed on two occasions (2 week interval). Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were found to be satisfactory. These findings are consistent with previous research on the instrument using American children (Ollendick, 1983).

Providers of alternative educational programs for adolescents who are not coping with mainstream secondary education have relied historically on behavioural and cognitive theories for intervention rationales. However, psychologists are increasingly turning to the motivational role of the self-system, particularly to the developmental and multidimensional construct of self-perception, for theoretical guidelines to educational practice. Self-verification, self-complexity, and self-handicapping are three theoretical constructs within a social psychological perspective that help to explain non-compliant and unusual adolescent behaviour and provide direction to service providers for its management.