This research investigated whether it is possible for charity advertising campaigns to stimulate donations successfully as well as to represent people with disabilities as valued human beings. Thirty-eight subjects were required to rank 10 MENCAP posters along 15 bipolar constructs using a variation of the Q sort procedure. Constructs included feelings such as pity, guilt and sympathy, constructive helping behaviours such as giving money and time, and perceptions such as having rights, value and capabilities. Correlational, cluster and factor analyses suggest that images which elicit the greatest commitment to give money are those most closely associated with feelings of guilt, sympathy and pity and are negatively associated with posters which illustrate people with a mental handicap as having the same rights, value and capability as non-handicapped persons. The implications of these findings with regard to advertising and the principle of normalization (social role valorization) are discussed.

The use of procedures which minimise the making of errors is a popular method of teaching skills to people with learning disability. The origin of this approach can be traced to two distinct sources: the work of B.F. Skinner on programmed learning, and the work of H.S. Terrace on discrimination learning. This early work is reviewed and research findings which highlight the negative side affects of an ‘errorless’ approach are discussed. The role of prompting, attention, reinforcement and generalisation is outlined. Recommendations for the development of teaching programmes are made.

Developments in behavioural group therapy over the past decade are described, with particular reference to a change in focus from administering individual treatment techniques to teaching coping skills for the management of anxiety. In spite of this growing interest there has been little empirical research reported. The current study was an attempt to develop a coping skills package and to evaluate it against the more traditional approach of group relaxation training. Three experiments were conducted, comprising a total of seven groups and they were run in either an N.H.S. psychiatric hospital outpatient setting or in General Practice.Results were equivocal, both experimental and control groups showed treatment gains. These were superior in the coping skills group on one measure. Reasons for these findings are discussed in the light of the curriculum and the experimental design. And ways of making the coping skills package more potent are suggested.

Early intervention programmes have grown rapidly over the last 30 years. Despite numerous attempts to answer the apparently simple question of whether or not early intervention works, results to date have been equivocal. This paper looks at the reasons why this question has not been answered satisfactorily and suggests that this question may not, in fact, be possible to answer in a global sense. It is suggested that questions must be addressed to the evaluation of specific services rather than to the evaluation of early intervention as a whole.