One hundred patients, referred for the management of intractable pain, completed a 52-item Illness Behaviour Questionnaire (IBQ). Responses were scored on 7 scales: general hypochondriasis, disease conviction, psychological versus somatic perception of illness, affective inhibition, affective disturbance, denial and irritability. IBQ scale profiles were used to study the relationship between chronicity of pain and pattern of illness behaviour reported. Except in the case of one scale, no significant correlation emerged. This overall lack of association between chronicity and illness behaviour remained even when the patient sample was restricted to those 20 patients having substantial organic pathology associated with their pain. These findings suggest that degree of chronicity is unlikely to play a major role in determining the illness behaviour manifested by patients with intractable pain.

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SummaryUric acid clearance studies were carried out on a lowpurine diet in 22 trans-sexual men before and during oestrogen therapy for this condition (stilboestrol in 21 cases, ethinyloestradiol in one). Plasma uric acid fell in 15 of the subjects and urinary uric acid rose in 17 of 20 subjects in whom satisfactory collections were obtained. These changes are significant and it is suggested that hormonal influences are responsible for the known age and sex differences in plasma uric acid.

A four-way split-plot design was used to investigate the effect on eyewitness accuracy of the nature of the witnessed incident (violent, nonviolent), mode of initial questioning (narrative, interrogative), sex of witness, and type of information probed (actions, descriptions). Groups of six male or six female nonpsychology undergraduates were each randomly assigned to one of the resulting eight conditions. Leading questions, personality and accuracy, and confidence ratings were also examined. Accuracy was poorer under the violent condition, and females performed more poorly than males in this condition. Actions were better recalled than descriptions. Although type of initial questioning had no effect on later accuracy, subjects were misled by leading questions. No relationship was found between either personality and accuracy or confidence in correctness and objective accuracy. Implications for police procedure are indicated.Although our awareness of the factors that can potentially influence eyewitness testimony is fairly comprehensive (see Buckhout, 1974Buckhout, , 1977Clifford & Bull, 1978), our knowledge of how these factors interact is extremely scant. Unless and until such interactive effects are studied, the information that law enforcement agencies receive from psychologists will be essentially incomplete.As an example of incomplete information, one question for which there is at the moment no answer is whether all types of criminal incident are recalled with equal accuracy. It could be argued that crimes range along a continuum of emotionality or arousal and that the recall abilities of witnesses to such different incidents may closely parallel that continuum. Support for this speculation comes from a survey of 100 cases on police files by Kuehn (1974), in which he found that the type of crime was a significant factor in completeness of report. Victims of robberies provided a significantly fuller report of their assailant than did rape or assault victims. Although a number of possible explanations of this finding Requests for reprints should be sent to

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