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The relationship between personality traits of parents of gifted children and their families to perceived personality development and adjustment was re- viewed. Little research has been conducted on personality traits of the parents of the gifted and how these may relate to the personality development of the children themselves. An issue still left unanswered in the recent research is the origin of the unique personality characteristics of gifted children. Are these children learning these characteristics from the parents' approach to child rearing, or are they genetically endowed? More research is necessary to draw definite conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the short and original scales of the Personality Inventory for Children (PIC). In its original form PIC contained 600 true-false items. Psychologist D. Lachar revised PlC format so that the original 16 profile scales could be obtained from the first 420 items. The revised format and the short PlC scales allow a 64% reduction in test length. Because the original version is lengthy, this reduction has substantial clinical appeal. Under normal circumstances, a shortened scale is never as reliable as the original. Because the original scales are more reliable and present more items for clinical analysis, the original PlC scales are usually preferable to the short versions.

The article focuses on a study that will examine the clinical utility of their fake good and fake bad criteria in a sample of emotionally or behaviorally disturbed children. The Personality Inventory for Children (PlC) profiles were obtained from 100 , age 6-0 to 12-11 children seen in a private, fee-for-service practice of clinical child psychology. Because less than 4% of the practice consisted of children who were not Caucasian, non-Caucasians were excluded to produce a more homogeneous sample. This study indicates that it is extremely hazardous to generalize results from experimentally manipulated PlC profiles obtained on normal children to profiles obtained from private, fee-for-service clients.

This article presents a study, which was undertaken to investigate the usefulness of the Personality Inventory of Children (PIC) in making special education placement decisions. More specifically, the discriminant validity of the PIC between learning-disabled and behavior-disordered children was examined. Results showed that learning-disabled and behavior-disordered children could be differentiated clearly on subtests that comprise the Cognitive Development and Conduct Disorder factors. However, less differentiation was found on the Internalization factor. Further examination indicated a possible diagnosis X scale interaction within the Internationalization factor. Those learning-disabled children who also experienced internal difficulties tended to score high on the Somatic Concern Scale, while behavior-disordered children typically scored high on the other Internationalization scales.

The article cites a study which focused on the effectiveness of various techniques for the identification of faking on the Personality Inventory for Children (PIC). Under an experiment conducted as a part of the study, seventy undergraduates completed two PIC protocols on their offspring. All students were volunteers who were given extra credit for participating in the study. Also, all were the parents of the child and/or adolescent in question. Under another experiment conducted as a part of the study, psychological evaluations that included PICs were reviewed from the files of an outpatient clinic. The procedure yielded eleven cases that were judged as faking bad, fourteen cases judged as faking good, and sixteen cases judged as taking the PIC in an appropriate or legitimate manner. According to the results of the study, a clinician cannot be absolutely certain that any given PIC profile is faked or legitimate. The reason for this is that false positives and false negatives are known to occur.

The article discusses cross validity of the behavior style questionnaire and child personality scale in nursery school children. W.B. Carey developed a temperament questionnaire on a sample of 200 mothers of infants in his pediatric practice. Temperament categories and constellations were defined according to the NYLS concepts. In a revision of the infant temperament questionnaire, W.B. Carey and S.C. McDevitt reported changes in instrumentation. They established category norms on a new sample of infants. Later, they developed a clinical research instrument for 3- to 7-year-olds called the Behavior Style Questionnaire (BSQ), which enabled a temperament profile to be plotted on the basis of the mother's responses.

The article reports on the locus of control and personality functioning of learning disabled children. Learning disabled children currently are receiving considerable attention in federal legislation. At the present time there does not appear to be a consensus of opinion with regard to whether psychological difficulties cause learning problems or whether learning problems precipitate psychological difficulties. Locus of control of reinforcement is another personality variable on which it was predicted that learning disabled children would differ.

The article discusses mental health morbidity in a suburban community. It reports the prevalence of mental disorders in the population served by the agencies responsible for the public mental health sector of services in a rapidly growing suburban area. In the course of one week 1,516 individuals with mental or emotional disorders were reported. Analyses of the age by sex by type of disorder revealed differential morbidity rates among children and adults. Among children, males exceeded females but among adults the ratio was reversed. Married females were reported twice as frequently as married males. Psychoneurosis and personality disturbances were the two predominant disorders among adults whereas mental deficiency and personality disorders were predominant among children.

The article presents information on emotional indicators on human figure drawings of shy and aggressive children. A recent study showed that 30 signs on human figure drawings (HFDs) are valid emotional indicators for children age 5 through 12. It is now in order to interpret the clinical meaning of the nine emotional indicators that occurred primarily on the HFDs of the shy and the aggressive Ss, and to compare these findings with those of other investigators.

The article presents information on Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profiles of the parents of behaviorally disturbed children and parents from the general population. Demographic data and MMPI profiles were obtained from the parents of 544 behaviorally disturbed children. An analysis of the demographic variables indicated that our sample was representative of upper midwest parents relative to age, marital status, family size, paternal occupation, religion, and rural-urban residence. The parents of the behaviorally disturbed children were compared with the MMPI standardization group, largely parents themselves, on 13 MMPI scales.

The article cites a study to explore further the construct validity of the Miniature Situations Test (MST) using clinical groups and controls. It was assumed that brain damaged, orphaned, and public school children represented different life experiences and accordingly different global personality make-ups. It was further assumed that if differences in behavioral responses, as measured by the MST, were found to be consistent with personality attributes commonly associated with each of these groups, then support for the constructs presumed to be measured by the MST would be obtained.

The article presents a study that investigated the manner and extent to which certain inner dynamics of personality are elicited by the Children's Apperception Test (CAT). Four groups of kindergarten children in Winnipeg, Canada schools were studied. Since apperceptive responses might give some indication of the inner dynamics of personality that were operating, all apperceptive responses were further classified according to the dynamics suggested by psychoanalysts Leopold Bellak and Sonya Bellak.

The article deals with personality factors in nursery school children as derived from parent ratings. The present study is part of a much larger project designed to obtain descriptive information on personality structure among children in three different age ranges, and to relate that information to previously established knowledge about personality structure in adults. The study concerns ratings by parents, which are less clearly objective than actual behavior observations, or even teacher ratings, but which are based on a long and intimate relationship which no other observers can duplicate.

The article presents an account of the studies carried out to assess the personality factor structure of 11-year old children in terms of behavior rating. The subjects for the experiment were 173 children, of which, 81 were boys and 92 girls. A set of 36 traits was used in these studies. The testing procedure was as follows. Traits were dealt with one at a time, only two or three coming up for consideration on one day, and the rating was spread over four weeks. On each trait the children were given printed statements together with illustrative and summarizing material which space prohibits here. Critical incidents were discussed. They were asked to cooperate in honesty and anonymity to forget any other rating they had made on the subjects. They were also instructed to assign only the approximate half of their cottage peers to the medium category and split the remaining half up evenly into the high and low category on each trait.

The article reports on Negro and White children's personality. In a recent study it was found that the mean IQ for a group of 207 Negro children and adolescents was significantly lower than the accepted white norms for intelligence tests. The average adjustment rating achieved by the white group is 2.48, representing a mean adjustment about halfway between "mildly neurotic" and "neurotic." In addition to the quantitative adjustment ratings, certain qualitative differences were apparent. In the drawings of the Negro children all three examiners were struck by the stark bleakness of many of the Trees and their shortened branch structures. Since the results of this study were obtained from the students in only two schools of one community, the validity of the results should be tested on other pairs of comparable groups.

The article presents a study in which forty-six children and adolescents, and their parents were studied by means of a specially devised rating scale in the rating of which Rorschach protocols were used as the sole source of information about their personality structures. The data obtained from the rating scales were analyzed by means of analysis of variance techniques in order to test the hypothesis that the individual family members are homogeneous on the several variables studied. A second hypothesis derived from the data concerned the question of whether or not the early socialization conditioning and inherited characteristics of children of pathological parents bad a cumulative conditioning effect upon the nature of personality development in the children.

This article presents a study on the generalization of children's verbally conditioned personality judgments. For this study, subjects were 30 fifth grade elementary school girls. Two adult females served as experimenters and each tested an equal number of subjects in each experimental condition. All subjects participated individually in two experimental sessions two weeks apart in time. During the initial session, subjects rated each of a series of photographs on three bipolar seven-point semantic differential scales. The bipolar adjectives of the scales used are: pleasant-unpleasant, foolish-wise, and good-bad.

The article informs that the personality assessment of gifted adolescents is significant for at least two essential considerations, to understand the concomitant personality variables of giftedness, and to establish a base line from which to compare an individual gifted child presenting diagnostic problems relevant to emotional stability. Although the literature on gifted children is extensive, there are very little normative data on personality characteristics as measured by standard, objective instruments, and virtually no personality descriptions regarding gifted adolescents who are also highly productive in academic and professional achievement. It would appear, then, that when using the Rotter Incomplete Sencence Blank as a diagnostic instrument on very superior adolescents, the tendency for the group mean to be slightly elevated should be considered. Thus, for an individual to be considered maladjusted, his cut-off score should be somewhat higher than that of the normal population.

The article presents information on sex-change in successive drawings of personality tests in children. This study attempted to replicate the finding of psychologists H. Hammer and A. Kaplan that on the Draw-A-Person test, children who draw an opposite sex figure first do not do so reliably on a retest, thus casting doubt on K. Machover's hypothesis that the drawing of an opposite sex figure first indicates sexual identification problems. To check this finding, the DAP was administered to 341 5th grade children, and the 65 Ss drawing an opposite sex figure first were retested twice, one and two weeks later.

The article presents information on several books in the field of psychology. Some of the books included are: "Personality in Young Children," by Lois B. Murphy, "Biology of the Laboratory Mouse," edited by George D. Snell, "The Rape of the Mind," by J.A.M. Meerloo.