Children's drawings on their own are too complexly determined and inherently ambiguous to be reliable sole indicators of the emotional experiences of the children who drew them. Further research is needed to establish the extent to which such drawings can usefully facilitate assessment of children by other means or provide useful support as one of several converging lines of evidence.

There is research evidence to suggest the presence of dysfunctional cognitions in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa that are not related to food, weight, or shape. These maladaptive cognitions have not been addressed by the conventional cognitive behavioral models of etiology or therapy. This study aimed to assess the impact of unhealthy core beliefs on eating disorders and their symptoms. Twenty restricting anorexics, 10 bulimic anorexics, 27 bulimics, and 23 normal controls completed Young's Schema Questionnaire. Eating behaviors and attitudes were also measured. The results indicate that both anorexic and bulimic women had significantly higher levels of unhealthy core beliefs than comparison women, but the clinical groups only differed on one individual core belief (entitlement). However, there were different patterns of association between core beliefs and eating psychopathology in anorexic and bulimic women. It is suggested that future clinical practice should incorporate core beliefs as a potential element in the assessment and treatment of eating disorders.

Rats were trained on spatial discriminations in which reward was delayed for 1 min. Experiment 1 tested Lett's hypothesis that responses made in the home cage during the delay interval are less likely to interfere with learning than responses made in the maze. Experimental subjects were transferred to their home cages during the delay interval, and control subjects were picked up but then immediately replaced in the maze. Contrary to Lett's hypothesis, both groups learned. Further experiments suggested that handling following a choice response was the crucial variable in producing learning: No learning occurred when handling was delayed (Experiment 2) or omitted (Experiment 3). One possible explanation for the fact that handling facilitated learning is that it served to mark the preceding choice response in memory so that subjects were then more likely to recall it when subsequently reinforced. In accordance with this interpretation, learning was found to be just as strong when the choice response was followed by an intense light or noise as by handling (Experiment 4). The implication of marking for other phenomena such as avoidance, quasi-reinforcement, and the paradoxical effects of punishment is also discussed.

Longitudinal research is needed to confirm these findings among anorexic and bulimic women. Clinically, these findings provide insight into the possible origins or core beliefs, and hence might aid their challenge in schema-focused cognitive therapy.

Two experiments investigated the effects of the significance given to a topic on the size it was drawn by children aged between 4 and 7 years. In Expt 1, children were asked to copy the outline of a man. Immediately afterwards, all the children were asked to make a second drawing of the outline, either imagining that the outline was of a nice person or a nasty person, or so that the second drawing was the same as their first. Compared with the control condition, drawings of the nasty man were made reliably smaller, and drawings of the nice man were made non‐reliably larger. In Expt 2, children were asked to make drawings of an apple which was then characterized as ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’ for different groups of children. The nice characterization reliably increased the size of apple drawings; however, nasty apples, unlike nasty men, were not drawn significantly smaller than in the control condition. We discuss the implications of these results for the hypothesis that the significance of a topic is reflected in the size of the drawings children make of that topic.

We report a systematic study of children as photographers at three age levels across five European countries. 180 children, aged 7, 11 and 15, were given single-use cameras and asked to use them in any way they pleased over a weekend. The children were then interviewed about their photographs and the process of taking them. The photographs and related commentary were analysed by means of specially developed coding schemes for image content and photographer's intentions. The study has identified marked differences in children's understanding, behaviour and intentions as photographers across the three age groups. These have been described from interactional, socio-cultural and control perspectives. Children across the age groups showed an increasing ability to distinguish the properties of the image from the world it represents, and a developing reflective awareness of the equipment, the surroundings, the image and the effect of the act of photography on others. The older children were generally scathing of adults' attempts to produce posed idealized images and they valued authenticity and informality rather than technical proficiency. Thus, children are not simply apprentice adult photographers, but exhibit distinctive intentions and products that vary with age.

A 35·item questionnaire concerning writing habits, experiences of writing and productivity was sent to 228 full·time, U.K. domiciled, social science research students. One hundred and one complete responses were received. Cluster analysis was used to identify three distinct groups of students in terms of the strategies they used when writing: "Planners", who planned extensively and then made few revisions. "Revisers", who developed content and structure through extensive revision, and "Mixed Strategy" writers. who both planned before starting to write and revised extensively as part of their writing processes. The Planners reponed higher productivity than both the Revisers and Mixed Strategy Writers. Planners and Revisers did not differ significantly in how difficult they found writing to be; Planners found writing less difficult than did the Mixed Strategy Writers. We conclude that working from a plan can be an effective writing strategy for some, but that planning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for writing success.Academic writing is difficult. It requires a complex combination of generating ideas, selecting the ideas that are appropriate to the writing task, translating these into text and polishing the text to produce a presentable document. In doing this the writer has to attend not only to his or her own thoughts, but also to the content and style conventions of the community for whom the piece is being written.For all but the simplest writing task, it is probably not possible to manage this number of constraints simultaneously (Bereiter 1980). Writing most documents will only be possible if the task is first divided up into more manageable sub-tasks. These sub-tasks may then be performed in series (rather than concurrently) to produce a finished piece of text. For the purposes of this paper we will call the way in which a particular writer partitions and sequences the writing process his or her "writing strategy". This paper examines the writing strategies of graduate research students with a view to exploring the relationship between writing strategy and success at thesis writing. Few new research students will have had previous experience of writing a document as long or as complex as a research thesis. Also, more so than with most undergraduate writing, a thesis should be written in a style that conforms to that expected by the academic audience at which it is aimed. It is likely, therefore, the process of writing a thesis will present a major challenge to most research students, and research suggests that an appreciable number of students find thesis writing very difficult (Rudd 1985;Torrance, Thomas and Robinson 1992). Despite this, however, writing instruction for graduate research students is often afforded a low priority within doctoral degree courses. StUdying the writing strategies of research students is interesting, therefore, for two reasons. It offers insight into the writing

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