Using an extended fear survey schedule, 72 per cent of a sample of 8 to 16 year old children and adolescents in Australia reported a lot of fear of nuclear war. Although a high proportion of respondents in all age groups expressed a lot of fear of nuclear war, significantly more respondents in the middle age group (11-13 years) were found to be afraid. Consistent with the findings on children's fears in general, significantly more females than males reported fear of nuclear war. Further research should be undertaken on the impact of the fear of nuclear war on the psychological development of children and adolescents.

Several studies are reviewed which evaluate the efficacy of training social problem-solving. Most of these studies reported assessing whether transfer of training took place following training. The means by which these assessments were made are examined and conclusions drawn concerning their validity. Attention is also drawn to the findings reported from several recent studies that question the efficacy of the step-by-step process model of training and propose an alternative model based on content analysis. Finally, the role of verbal cues in training social problem-solving is examined and a call made for the empirical analysis of competent behaviour in natural settings prior to training.

Time Out (TO) and Trained Play Sessions (TPS) of basketball/football and computer games were used to reduce the self-stirnulatory behaviour of a higher functioning autistic child in an integrated classroom setting. The self-stimulatory behaviour took the form of inappropriate vocalization while gazing at the classroom clock. The client participated in sessions in an A-B-A-B design where A is the baseline and B the intervention. In addition, there was one continuation phase and an additional phase with a different condition. It was found that: (a) during baseline, inappropriate vocalisation was very high with the clock on the wall, (b) the percentage of inappropriate vocalisation dropped during the intervention and continuation phases when the clock was removed from the wall and TO and TPS were introduced and (c) the reduction in inappropriate vocalisation was found to be maintained when TPS were conducted with the clock on the wall and without TO.

The range and incidence of responsivity to the onset of a stressful event was investigated with two different age groups of teenagers. There was a wide degree of responsivity to the stressor used and this responsivity was not found to be related to performance on the stressful event, sex of respondent, or physical fitness as measured by resting heart rate. Implications for effective stress-management of secondary school students' hyperresponsivity to similar stressors are discussed, with several suggestions given for implementation of these procedures.

Since the discovery that children's human figure drawings followed a clear developmental progression with increasing age, they have been used extensively as estimates of intelligence. From its development in 1926, the Goodenough Draw-a-Man Test provided psychologists and educators with a simple mental age score of a child's cognitive maturity. Its attraction lay in the fact that the test's non-verbal nature and brevity allowed it to be used with those whose language skills or attention span was problematic.

In 1963, Harris revised the Draw-a-Man and published his work as the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. The test was normed on nearly 3,000 school children aged between 5 and 15 years who were attending regular school classes. The sample was drawn from 10 states covering 4 regions of the United States; the Mid-Atlantic and New England area, the South, the West and the upper Mid-West. However, there was no control for racial distribution. The tendency for girls to perform consistently better than boys of the same age resulted in the development of different norms for the sexes, but with each having a mean standard score of 100, with a standard deviation of 15 at each age level. Harris also devised different scoring standards depending upon whether the drawn figure was a male or female, with 73 scoring points for a male figure and 71 for a female figure.