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This study establishes the concurrent validity of the Screening Scale of Developmental Delay II (SSDD-II) with the Bayley Scale of Infant Development II (BSID-II). Three hundred and seventy-nine children referred by pediatricians at the Clinic of Developmental Delay at the Kaohsiung Medical University-Medical Center were tested using the SSDD-II, and about 1 week to 1 month later, they were tested again using the BSID-II. The results indicate that (1) the SSDD-II score increased as age increased, fitting the principle of developmental sequence. (2) The raw scores of the Mental and Motor scales of the BSID-II significantly correlated with the five subscales of the SSDD-II. (3) The three facet scale scores (language, cognitive and motor) of the BSID-II also significantly correlated with the five subscales of the SSDD-II. The SSDD-II has a high concurrent validity, and is a convenient scale to use to screen children for developmental delay in clinical practice in Taiwan.

Asperger's Syndrome(AS) is a severe developmental disorder characterized primarily by marked and sustained difficulties in social interaction and unusual patterns of circumscribed interests and behavioral peculiarities. AS differs from autism primarily in that there is no general delay or retardation in language. A 3. 5 year-old boy with AS was referred for psychological assessment and treatment. When the boy was 23 months old, he was assessed with Bayley Scales of Infant Development (2nd ed.). Both MDI and PDI were within normal limits. After the referral, this boy was assessed with WPPSI-R and then prescribed 5 weekly intervention sessions consisting of communication skills training. At a one week's follow-up the boy was reassessed with Leiter-R. The results of WPPSI-R and Leiter-R showed the boy was in the normal intelligence range. From the second session to the fifth session, the boy's mother recorded 526 of his utterances. According to the analysis of these speech data, the language development for this boy was at Stage V, which indicated that his language development was in the superior range for his age. After 5 intervention sessions, the improvements in the child's communication skills were such that no further sessions were warranted. This boy might represent a case of aberrant neurofunctional organization. He has defects in perceptual organization but has good pattern recognition, which is based on features. It is theorized that his excellent verbal ability competed with the perceptual organization, so that he compensated for perceptual organization with verbal ability. An intervention designed to inhibit verbal compensation and facilitate configural processing is recommended.

This study applied the meta-analysis method to investigate the effectiveness of counseling and psychotherapy. It began with a systematic search of the literature through computer search and previous narrative reviews to locate counseling and psychotherapy outcome studies conducted in Taiwan between January 1971 and August 2000. Salient characteristics of each study were recorded systematically. These study characteristics included type of therapy, type of target problem, therapist experience, and type of outcome measure, among others. In total, 257 studies, which yielded 302 effect sizes, were examined, in which clients who received psychotherapy or counseling were compared with controls. Results demonstrated that the overall mean effect of counseling and psychotherapy was positive and significant. Further categorical model testing indicated that most coded study characteristics were significantly related to effect sizes.