Observations of two groups of severely and profoundly retarded children (6-14 years old, n=28) residing in a state institution were carried out to determine what naturally occurring environmental events appear to control the children's behavior. After observing the children from Ward A in two settings, and the children from Ward B in three…

Adaptive behavior was measured for 79 institutionalized retarded persons (11 to 48 years old) to investigate patterns of levelling off in developmental progress, as measured by the American Association on Mental Deficiency Adaptive Behavior Scale (ABS). Total scores for part 1 (adaptive behaviors) and part 2 (maladaptive behaviors) were analyzed…

Predicting occurrences of violent behavior in the population of emotionally disturbed criminal offenders was investigated by identifying a pattern of characteristics that significantly discriminates between violent and nonviolent offenders. Subjects were 149 current and former male patients in the Forensics Division of St. Elizabeths Hospital in…

Two papers, one on child abuse and the other on effects of preinstitutional history and institutionalization on the behavior of the retarded, are presented. In the first paper the author stresses the need to document the scope and nature of child abuse in American society and discusses the difficulties in defining where on the continuum discipline…

The effects of labels, "mentally retarded" and "institutionalized" on the evaluations and causal attributions of nonretarded persons, and on the social distance preferences of EMR persons, were assessed. In addition, each group was asked to predict the likelihood of a labeled (mentally retarded) or a nonlabeled target person achieving success at a…

One of the major problems in measuring community mental health status is the lack of consensus among mental health workers in psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and epidemiology as to what constitutes mental illness. Additionally, changing social mores preclude a definition of mental illness in behavioral terms. An operational definition of mental…

A five-month ethnographic study of conversations in a Philadelphia nursing home revealed some of the rules governing situationally appropriate conversational behavior. The social communicational perspective of the study differed from both psychological and discourse analysis approaches. Analysis of the data indicated that sustained…

The study sought to determine if there are differences between shifts of workers in Intermediate Care Facilities in their ratings of the daily living skills of mentally retarded residents, and whether these differences reflect actual differences in performance by the residents. Staff were interviewed concerning the level of prompt required to…