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The article discusses the papers that were published in the "American Journal of Mental Deficiency" related to social problems dealing with the mentally deficient. The papers contain articles that reviewed the following: practical state program for the care of the mentally deficient, program of control of the mentally deficient, mental hygiene, family care for mental patients, and study of group of subnormal girls successfully adjusted in industry and the community.

The article discusses the study of mental deficiency as a branch of mental medicine. Many regard the field to be of minor importance but it is actually a difficult one. It implies a wide understanding of psychology, neuropathology, sociology and genetics. The training, understanding and care of the high grade cases is a part of the major problem of constructing a sound democratic civilized community, in which every healthy citizen can play a useful part.

The purpose of this article is to study the effectiveness of the three techniques commonly employed for collecting data to be used in evaluating personality adjustment. The interview technique portrays the personality appraisement approach resorted to by most specialists as psychologists, clinicians, and counselors. This technique endeavors to diagnose personality characteristics on the basis of verbal responses, appearance, individual testing, personal contact, and the like. The interview technique as used in this study consisted of a personalized administration of each test during which time ample opportunity was given the student to discuss his understanding of the test situations and the nature of responses made to them. People frequently question the effectiveness of many of the personality evaluating techniques utilized in guidance programs. Since guidance practice generally relies upon the use of one personality evaluating technique, it is essential to know which technique provides the most effective diagnosis of student adjustment not only in the school situation but in other environments as well.

This article provides an overview of the topics discussed in the November 1955 issue of the "Journal of Social Issues." The first paper describes more fully the general area of research, the conceptual framework and the design of a project which aims to study the impact of mental illness upon the family. The second paper discusses the courses of consultation and action which are taken to get the patient to treatment. The succeeding article looks at the responses of others who learn of the patient's illness and the anxieties of the family regarding the reactions others. The final paper in the issue summarizes preliminary findings in areas of the research not covered by the previous papers and examines some of the practical implications of the research for mental health programs.

The article introduces new publications on education. The magazine "Film News," published by the American Film Center, offers a monthly summary of important film news. The Public Affairs Committee's pamphlet entitled "America's Children," distributed to schools, gives facts about children. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene issued a pamphlet about mental hygiene in the classroom.

It was theorized that brain-injured children who have poor handwriting are in fact trying too hard to write and using too much energy in the process. A n audio-taped relaxation program was devised and presented to 32 boys who were in special classes for minimally brain-injured children. A n equal number of randomly selected age mates were chosen as controls. Relaxation training was administered to the experimental group three days a week for four weeks. Results indicated that: (1) the program was effective in enhancing the quality of handwriting; (2) there was transfer effect to nonexperimental situations; (3) the changes were stable over time; and (4) there was very high interjudge reliability of handwriting quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the journal "Sociological Focus." For the last 32 years the official publication of the Ohio Valley Sociological Society has been the "Ohio Valley Sociologist," which primarily carried news and notes of interest to sociologists in the region. In the last few years the membership has become aware of a need for a modified format for the Sociologist. This has been manifest in the increasing publication of occasional papers including the presidential addresses and the winning papers from the student competition. In 1967 the society's members voted to expand the function of the sociologist so that greater space would be devoted to the publication of scholarly papers while maintaining the usual information service. In line with this new emphasis the title and the format of the journal have been changed. The papers in this issue deal with the sociology of academia and higher education. The winter issue will be a special issue on the sociology of mental health, the spring issue will deal with political sociology, and a future number will be devoted to papers on the sociology of religion.

The first part of this paper is a response to several recent critiques of labelling theory. The second part assesses the State of the evidence on the labelling theory of mental illness. The majority of the studies reviewed support the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on psychotherapists, this paper explores the way in which marital status and a strategic professional experience, receiving personal psychotherapy, interact to ailed occupational success among psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in three metropolitan communities. Confining the analysis to male members of these two professions, data are presented to demonstrate that success is strongly related to marriage, but not marital stability. Success is also strongly related to whether or not practitioners hare received personal psychotherapy and, more specifically, to the reasons for hating therapy. Both the likelihood of hating psychotherapy and the extent to which it was undertaken for purposes of professional training varied by marital status. Thus, although stably married practitioners were less likely to undergo personal therapy than practitioners who had experienced marital disruption or never married, if they do receive therapy, it was more likely to be more the purpose of professional training, with the result that the experience has a greater impact on their level of occupational success. The paper concludes that personal relations, professional experiences and occupational success form a network of relationships which integrate the occupational and nonoccupational roles of highly specialized practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is in response to comments by the author G. Harvey on the research paper "Response Biases in Field Studies of Mental Illness." Most of his criticisms, however, concern issues which authors raised in an earlier draft of the paper and in more recent work. The study under scrutiny here was the first of a series of investigations authors have been conducting to explore bias and invalidity in survey research. It is important to note that the paper was not intended to answer all questions concerning response biases. Rather the purpose was to extend the work of author Bruce P. Dohrenwend, who in his provocative 1966 American Sociological Review article raised the spectre of response biases in field studies of psychiatric disorder. Harvey is incorrect when he claims that authors have taken the a priori position that association means error. A closer inspection of the paper will reveal that it was concerned with testing the two hypotheses outlined by Dohrenwend regarding the correlation between "social desirability" and symptom scores.

An earlier paper presented findings which indicated that mentally ill persons described as exhibiting identical behavior were increasingly rejected when they were described as utilizing no help, utilizing a clergyman, a physician, a psychiatrist, or a mental hospital. Controls for age, religion, education, and social class position failed to diminish the relationship between help-source and rejection, but controls for experience with an emotionally disturbed help-seeker and for adherence to the norm of self-reliance tended to specify it. The previous paper was concerned with the stability of the relationship between help-source and rejection within each of the control groups, and not, for the most part, with differences among groups. In this paper, the main focus is on a comparison of the effects of educational attainment on the relation between help-source and rejection. A further focus is on the influence of (a) experience with mentally ill help-seekers, and (b) attitude toward the norm of self-reliance, two variables that serve to interpret the relationship between education and rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the information contained in the author's paper "Soviet Psychology and Psychiatry" discussed at a symposium on Soviet Science. It is in the context of Pavlonian principles that psychology as a major discipline in Soviet Union should stand on, a move which abrogated the concepts of psychology contained in Rubenshtein's book "Bases of General Psychology". The Pavlonian session was a step towards institutionalizing the Pavlovian psychology, however, the result of the discussions was not deemed satisfactory to grant it authority and acceptance in the medical field particularly in Soviet psychiatry.

This paper's thesis is that many adolescent problems, particularly those involving sex, can be strikingly reduced or eliminated by intelligent, rationally planned parental management beginning at birth. Among the principal features of desirable parental management, the paper stresses effective parent-child communication. Of approximately 1,500 couples who received routine medical and psychological preparation for marriage over a period of 35 years, approximately 500 remained under continuing counsel and observation after their children came for premarital service. Thus conclusions could be drawn as to how effective she parents had been in preparing their children for adolescence and for marriage, and what type of parental management reduces problems of adolescence and increases capability for successful marriage. Young people' demand for earlier marriage is seen as acceptable when they have matured under improved standards of democratic process and sex education in the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the psychiatric perspective, social and economic resources facilitate tile disturbed individual's entrance into psychiatric treatment In contrast, the societal reaction perspective views resources as enabling the individual to avoid being channelled into the role of the men tally ill. This paper examines the role social arid economic resources play in mental hospitalization, comparing the societal reaction and psychiatric perspectives. The information contained in the literature, as well as data obtained from 258 state hospital patients, indicates that the psychiatric perspective comes closer than the societal reaction perspective to describing what typically occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, mental health workers (psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers) provide diagnostic evaluations and individual or group psychotherapeutic or casework treatment. With the advent of the community mental health movement, a new role model, that of "mental health consultant," has emerged. This paper outlines the functions of the "mental health consultant" in the Job Corps program as a way of highlighting the functions of the mental health Professional working in this new way. Educational, training, and work programs may be enriched by mental health consultation, and the new directions for interaction between education and mental health are described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been found that smoking is associated with extraversion. The present paper extends this finding by demonstrating that the association holds internationally: in nations where the level of extraversion is high, the consumption of tobacco is also high. It is not certain whether smoking should be regarded as a comparatively superficial manifestation of the extraverted personality, or whether there is some unknown constitutional factor responsible for extra- version, the tendency to smoke, and the predisposition to cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that an effective method of test analysis remains in the correlation of group paper and pencil results of two different instruments which purport to evaluate similar personality traits through different subject matter. This procedure emulates a principle very commonly employed in educational appraisement in which instance several tests are used to provide an inventory of achievement in the same subject. A similar comparison offers an additional approach to effective personality and test analysis. While the elements of the human personality are not as readily accessible as are academic attainments, they nevertheless can be identified sufficiently to contribute basic data for counselling, guidance, placement, follow-up, and other sundry school activities. One has but to mention such common traits as dominance, social adjustment, introversion, school adjustment and the like to realize that personality adjustment occupies a conspicuous place in the school and in the home environment of the student, of the parent, and of the teacher. Since the above and similar traits pattern the personality of the student, the correlation of one test schedule with another should contribute an understanding of the relative merits of various instruments along with their degree of effective personality measurement

This article focuses on a comparison of scores made by students of differing racial ancestry in Hawaii on the Thurstone Neurotic Inventory with an analysis of the different items to discover those showing most marked differences according to sex and race. The schedule was administered according to Thurstone's technique with assurance that the scores made would have no bearing on grades and that the results would be confidential. A device to insure anonymity was added. A detachable slip accompanied each paper on which the student wrote his name and a number corresponding to the number written instead of his name on the test paper. The names were separated only to be reunited by use of the corresponding numbers at the student's request should he desire advice concerning his paper or to discuss it in any way. When the questionnaire was applied to the classes in abnormal psychology or mental hygiene, it was always given during the first days of the semester lest the students recognize too readily its purpose and answer accordingly.

This paper reports on the nature of the health research in progress at Ohio State University. The concern of the paper is with mental health. It discusses the reasons for undertaking health research, the objectives of such research, and the methods used. Studies completed and in process are likewise reported.

The article informs that one of the two most important and influential environments for the child is the classroom in which he lives during a part of each day. His relations with his teacher and with his peers are two major aspects of his school environment. This paper reports a research exploration of the development and maintenance of the classroom socio-emotional structure in a sample of 39 elementary classrooms. The paper also explores some of the mental health correlates of the child's position in this socio-emotional structure, which in turn suggest focal points for diagnosis of socio-emotional problems in the classroom situation and formulation of therapeutic strategy in working toward the improvement of classroom mental health. This brief discussion of teachers' behavior should not be construed to mean that the teachers involved in the study were "playing favorites." Rather, it is thought that teachers, faced with the task of teaching youngsters in classroom groups and necessarily having to maintain order to do so, must respond critically to disruptive behavior, and respond quite naturally with affection to little girls who seem to be asking for it and apparently getting little from their peers.

This paper seeks to assess the utility of the transactional model of individual stress. According to the logic of the model, whether persons manifest stress is a multiplicative function of both situational and individual characteristics. The paper briefly discusses possible advantages of the perspective over other frames of reference. Then it describes a pilot study designed to determine whether hypotheses based on the transactional model could be supported empirically. Utilizing interview data from a small probability sample of all adults in the state of Missouri, scales were constructed by an improved method of item analysis for use as indicators of variations in stress and the situational and individual factors. Comparing stress scores by situational and individual variables produced results indicative of a multiplicative relationship and thus supportive of theories derived from the transactional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The birth of a congenitally defective infant transforms a joyously awaited experience into one of catastrophe and profound psychological threat. The apprehension of failure that is a normal part of the psychic anticipation of parenthood turns into reality—and the family finds itself in crisis. A demonstration treatment program sponsored by the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene provided an opportunity to see clinically 140 families in the process of adjusting to the birth of a mongoloid infant. The study population is, therefore, considered to be reasonably representative of families confronting the crisis of a congenitally handicapped child. Selected cases will be presented throughout this paper to illustrate how the offer of help was responded to in terms of each family's adaptation to crisis and their patterns of coping with it. Grief, mourning, and planning for the future must be lived through simultaneously and can be overwhelming in their impact. Uncomplicated grief has been described as running a consistent course, modified mainly by the abruptness of the loss and the nature of the preparation for the event.

This paper suggests that the emphasis on personality has been responsible for the impasse in national character research. It is suggested that this emphasis rests only on research tradition and that national character need not be viewed exclusively in personality terms. A conception of modal attitude clusters is presented as a fully adequate supplement which overcomes many of the weaknesses which result from the personality perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a survey that attempts to study the approximate amount of instruction and research relevant to community mental health presently included in psychology graduate programs. The questionnaire was sent to the chairmen of the 61 Departments of Psychology listed in 1960-61 as having doctoral programs in clinical or counseling psychology approved by the Education and Training Board. Replies were received from 52 departments, an 85 percent return. The data support the observation that relatively few Departments of Psychology offer much explicit instruction in community mental health concepts or techniques to their doctoral students.

Hypotheses relating family socio-cultural background to behavioral retardation of children are examined in this paper. Data obtained from a stratified-random sample of all Anglo and Mexican-American households in a southern California city of about 100,000 population are used in the research. Generally, the data support the existence of a relationship between family socio-cultural factors of ethnicity, social status, community of origin, and residential mobility and the behavioral retardation of children. When ethnic groups are considered separately, more variance is explained by socio-cultural factors for Mexican-Americans than for Anglos. For both Mexican-Americans and Anglos, the single most important variable explaining families with and without a behaviorally retarded child is mother's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates and describes methods for making psychiatric distinctions. It is by means of psychiatric distinctions that individuals are labeled mentally ill or mentally well. Within the mentally ill category, patients are differentially placed according to the severity and type of their mental illness. The placement of individuals into psychiatric categories is an essential prerequisite not only to the clinical treatment of patients but also to any research where the objective is to determine empirical regularities associated with mental illness. Until the patient is categorized, the practitioner has no logical guide for how to perform treatment or even whether he should treat the patient—i.e, the patient may not be a patient. Similarly, unless the psychiatric researcher has categorized his subjects according to some notion of mental illness he has no way of making comparisons or of assessing change, the two essential processes in research. Thus, the logical first step for arty discovery of new knowledge in the field of mental illness is to appraise the reliability and validity of methods for making psychiatric distinctions. No research findings can be more reliable or valid than the psychiatric distinctions used in carrying oat the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents comments of the author to an article by social scientist Sherman Merle concerning private practice of social work, published previously in the journal. The author likes to congratulate Merle for his forthright and courageous statement in which he takes a strong position of dissent toward the growing trend of privately practiced social work. His chief contribution, rests in his clearing away the debris of rationalization which so often is used to justify private practice. One is then in a better position to consider whether private practice in social work is legitimate, necessary, or inevitable. The author points out, that her paper, "In Defense of Social Work: An Examination of Stress in the Profession" published previously in the journal "Social Service Review," to which he makes reference did not deal with the issue of private practice as such but was limited to an analysis of the stresses inherent in the social work profession. Therefore the author's paper, in its entirety, would not necessarily support his point of view.

This section provides an overview of the book Mental Health and Achievement, edited by E. Paul Torrance and Robert D. Strom.

Hospitalized mental patients are increasingly being discharged into the community. Yet, despite the construction of hundreds of community mental health centers, readmission rates continue to rise. This paper analyzes the reasons for this problem and provides suggestions for its solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 22-item scale developed through the Midtown Manhattan Study is considered from methodological, substantive, and theoretical perspectives. This paper concludes that the instrument is, at best, a very incomplete measure of mental illness. A review of previous literature suggests a more reasonable interpretation is that it measures psychological stress and physical malaise, although even for these purposes it is a less than ideal measure. Use of the instrument examining the relationship between stressful life experiences and mental illness is further discouraged due to a conceptual confounding of the independent and dependent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents abstracts of several research papers related to family research, published in various journals. The paper "Psychoanalsrtic Principles in a Mental Health Clinic for the Pre-School Child and His Family," by Nathan W. Ackennan, published in the journal "Psichiatry," is based upon the author's experience as Director of the Council Child Development Center in its first five years of existence, 1946-1951. He discusses the Center's attempt to integrate psychoanalytic thought into its program. According to the article "The Family Today: Its Needs and Opportunities," by Martha M. Eliot, published in the journal "Pastoral Psychology," the end result which is desired in child rearing is a healthy person&Iity. Parents today are anxious for knowledge about child growth, development, and care. Knowledge about child development has been a slow and gradual accumulation, it will not be complete for some time to come, However, thme who work with families have the task of prescnting to the parents the knowledge available.

This article informs that sociologist L.J. Cronbach suggested in a recent paper that social perception could be fruitfully studied in terms of the "perceptual space" within which an individual distributes persons he perceives. The present study explores certain measures of the perceptual space with particular emphasis on their reliability and their relation to two external criteria, viz., sex and adjustment. Preliminary studies have shown that the means and standard deviations of his ratings of others are the most promising variables for the purpose of describing his perceptual space. The Mean may be interpreted as the Subject's (S's) conception of the average of personality characteristics in other people. The Standard Deviation may be regarded as indicating S's tendency to differentiate along a particular dimension. Eighty 5s took part in this investigation; of these, 40 were "maladjusted" and 40 were "adjusted." Each group consisted of 20 males and 20 females. The "maladjusted" group consisted of adults who had voluntarily sought professional help for their emotional problems from several outpatient centers, except for three of the 40 S's who came from an "open" ward of a VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital which contained individuals receiving maximum psychotherapeutic treatment.

The theory underlying juvenile delinquency is that emotional or social maladjustments are manifested in overt activities termed "anti-social" by society. The latter include: (a), harm to person, self, or others directly or indirectly involved in the social situation; (b) damage or misappropriation of property; (c) refusal to obey either parental, academic, or legal authority; or (d) acts leading to possible danger to self or others. Activities may be premeditated or spontaneous and are often performed without full knowledge of the social consequences. However, most latent inner tensions are directly traceable to distorted parent-child, teacher-pupil, or peer group relationships. In this paper, a consideration of the behavior of Chinese juveniles is paramount and a controlling hypothesis may be stated; viz, that the overt anti-social activities result from (a) cultural conflicts between parents of foreign-born or mixed nativity and native-born children, (b) broken homes and (c) longings for `self expression. Thus, acculturation on the part of children seeking identification and status in, the society wherein they are born may cause tensions which may be absent where two sets of cultural norms do not simultaneously operate. The length of time a given culture has persisted is not as important as the pressure exerted by parents, or their generation, upon the youth who desire submergence with the immediate and prevailing culture. Parents of foreign-born or mixed parentage often unmeaningly alienate their children from the cultural traits which they imported into the American society. Over-anxiety results in constant and insistent ordering and forbidding. In time, both parents and children express and experience emotional confusion. Foreign-born parents feel "ashamed" of their inadequacy and consider any public knowledge of this as evidence of their unsuccessful rearing and control of offsprings. When new-world traits challenge village mores and customs, parents become genuinely bewildered. Moreover, the nearest kin, as an additional authoritarian figure, may. likewise have failed to reinforce them. Thus, a shattering of ideals and values motivates them to exercise greater constraints which but serves to widen the chasm between them and the children. A major problem confronting native-born juveniles is where to seek guidance, counsel, or sympathetic understanding when they believe their parents fail them. The desire to shield their elders deepens the conflict. Often the absence of the proper explanatory terms in another language. hampers effective interaction and the troublesome situation remains when experiences cannot be mutually and sympathetically shared; An added fact is that the children's social world is vastly different from that of the parents and each may participate in totally dissimilar orbits, with neither meeting. Fortunately, maturity is a steadying influence and the "marginal man" may attain stability through the services of preventive and correctional agencies established by the society. Should the Chinese juvenile delinquency rates increase for the future, it is caused by the greater proportion of native-borns who must perforce undergo the Americanization process, disturbing as this may be for some. The ascendancy of dependent and neglected children will be forthcoming as native-born parents reach another phase of Americanization. They have learned that the larger society will provide care for dependent children when (a) they prove inadequate as parents, (5) they are unable to provide for the financial support of offsprings, or (c) the home situation is untenable. Either or both parents may be at fault but so long as the child's welfare is at stake and our society provides substitute parents or renders financial assistance, more will turn to social agencies for aid. The future generations of Chinese juveniles may experience more overt rejection and exhibit emotional disturbances such as are found in other groups in the population. Divorce is increasing among native-born parents, a phenomenon which has produced more emotional problems for children. Moreover, rising incidents of remarriage brings similar social effects. Whether the parents are foreign-born, of mixed parentage, or native-born, a conclusion embraces all of the group under study. Whatever the nature of the anti-social manifestations by juvenile delinquents may be, they are striving toward more acceptable forms of acculturation through devious routes. Parents may hinder rather than help in the process. Where children are abandoned by parents (mainly native-born), the latter have attained acculturation and have accepted prevailing cultural norms. In both instances, children are the victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the Thurstone Personality Schedule, first described in 1929, is too well known to require extensive description at this time. Because of its comprehensiveness and practical value in the identification of neurotic personalities, it has stimulated extensive research into its nature and characteristics. These studies have demonstrated the fact that the questions composing the Schedule are of unequal value in the identification of the neurotic personalities. Indeed, in their original paper the Thurstones showed that the respective questions varied widely in ability to differentiate between the poorest and best adjusted subjects, and published a list of 42 statements which they found most differentiating. In a thorough and painstaking study, R. R. Willoughby treated rather incisively the closely related problems of the relative homogeneity or heterogeneity of the items composing the schedule and the degree to which fairly homogeneous phases or affects of the neurotic personality are over or under-represented in the schedule.

This paper traces the development of interest in family diagnosis and family therapy in the fields of social work and psychiatry. A theoretical basis is presented for an understanding of the family as an organization for the satisfaction of maintenance and developmental needs. It is pointed out that no classification system of family pathology has been developed so far and that, in consequence, a family diagnosis in the technical sense is still impossible. Family treatment, however, produced a new group phenomenon, the family as a therapeutic work group with a significant redistribution of therapeutic roles. Specific personality requirements for family therapists are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the efficacy of the Pain Apperception Test as a research tool by investigating the consistency of individual response as to pain apperception, neuroticism, manifest anxiety, and self-appraisal. The research design involved the PAT, a medical questionnaire, Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and a pain experience questionnaire. Data from responses to these instruments permitted studying the relationship of pain apperception to personality characteristics, and to subjects' ratings of their comparative past pain experience. Relationships also were examined regarding the comparative apperception of pain in the counterpart PAT pictures, thus investigating Anticipation versus Felt-Sensation.

The article presents a comparative evaluation of the Wechsler-Bellevue mental deterioration index for various adult groups. In recent articles the value of the Wechsler Mental Deterioration Index (MDI) in screening patients with brain damage from normal patients has been considered. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the MDI further as a tool for differential diagnosis; that is, to determine whether a significant loss in this index is related solely to deterioration such as is found in subjects who have had organic brain injury or damage. The MDI's for the following seven groups of subjects were compared: brain injured, applicants for vocational counseling with psychoneurotic diagnoses, and with other than psychoneurotic diagnoses, mental hygiene clinic patients diagnosed as anxiety tension state, mental hygiene and hospital patients diagnosed as schizophrenic, and two groups of normals.