The assessment of mood and affect in developmentally disabled children and adolescents: the Emotional Disorders Rating Scale.

There is an unmet need for a reliable method of evaluating disorders of mood and affect in developmentally disabled children and adolescents. Such a measure is required for both accurate diagnosis and treatment monitoring in this population. An extensive review of existing assessment techniques confirms that: (a) current techniques for the evaluation of emotional disorders in cognitively normal individuals are inappropriate for most children with developmental disabilities; and (b) current instruments designed for the assessment of developmentally disabled children pay inadequate attention to affective symptoms.

Psychological-Mindedness, Psychological-Construing, and the Judgment of Deception.

This study examined the relationships among several measures of psychological thinking which, in a figurative sense, required "reading between the lines of behavior." Primary measures included psychological-construing (describing another person in psychological terms), the ability to "see through" and explain defense mechanisms, and detecting a bogus thief by means of "suspects" responses to a word association test. Secondary measures were personality-trait measures of psychological-mindedness.