Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were given vignettes describing experiences that were likely to produce emotional states, and their consensus about the probable affective reaction was determined. A sample of eight social and personal (private) experiences was utilized in the vignettes: success, failure, dishonesty (caught or not caught), experiencing nurturance or aggression, and experiencing justified or unjustified punishment. The potential affective reactions that children were asked to choose among included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutral affect. There were no sex differences. Children of all ages agreed that relatively simple experiences such as success and nurturance would elicit a happy reaction. For other categories of experience, multiple consensuses appeared for more than one affective reaction. There were developmental differences in the affective reactions anticipated to five of the eight experience categories. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning determinants of knowledge about the experimental antecedents of emotion for oneself and others.

Two experiments with children are presented that illustrate the effects of emotional states on learning and validate experimental affect-induction procedures in which individuals dwell upon thoughts of affect-provoking experiences. Positive affective states enhanced learning, and negative states retarded it dramatically. Ratings of children's facial expressions confirmed that positive affectinduction procedures elicited happy expressions, and negative inductions elicited sad ones. Additionally, positive affect inductions enhanced children's apparent interest, involvement, and arousal, and negative inductions decreased them. These measures were related to learning but proved not to be the sole mediators of the impact of affective states on learning. The thoughts children generated for affect induction illustrated their recognition of naturalistic experiences that induce affective states. These results indicate that young children possess the potential for the cognitive self-control of their own affective states, and the effects on learning indicate that even transient mood states may produce lasting changes in behavior.Preliminary versions of this experiment constituted an undergraduate summa cum laude honors thesis by the second-named author. The able assistance of Craig Binger is gratefully acknowledged.

The authors discussed to what degree testimony from social science and mental health experts (psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, therapists, others) meets admissibility requirements expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Daubert (1993), Joiner (General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 1997) and the recent Kumho (1999) decision. They reviewed data on Daubert/Kumho indicia of reliability using 2 exemplar areas of mental health testimony: psychodiagnostic assessment by means of the Rorschach and other "projective" assessment techniques and the diagnoses of posttraumatic stress disorder and multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder). They concluded that some testimony offered by mental health professionals relating to these concepts should not survive scrutiny under the framework of Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho. Prior to the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), testimony from mental health and social science experts was largely unregulated by the legal system. The Frye (Frye v. United States, 1923) standard had been in place for decades (Gianelli, 1980), requiring that to be admissible, the scientific bases of testimony must be "generally accepted" in the "field" to which they belong. This is a very lenient standard; experts can always be found who will swear that a theory is "generally accepted." Under Frye, the expert is not required to substantiate the scientific soundness of the theory by reference to proper research documenting other hallmarks of a reliable theory, such as the theory's survival of Popperian risky tests, survival of peer review, or calculable error rates. Moreover, "general acceptance" itself is usually established by the expert's say-so (subject to the finder of fact's judgment about the expert's credibility); citation of survey studies that document such acceptance are usually not required. Hence, testimony by mental health professionals regarding all sorts of controversial theories and methods has very often been admitted under Frye. The 1993 Daubert ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court changed this unfortunate situation and heightened interest in, and concern about, expert testimony based on "junk science." In Daubert, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that scientific expert

Although the recognition of the affeetive.experiences of peers is an important prerequisite for social adaptaiop."-children's ability to'recognize peers' facial displays Wemotiow remains unexamined. 'To investigate the degree to which-young children were able.'to enact expressions of emotion that were recognizable by peers and adults, and to examine the accuracy Of recognition 'as a , .function Oragend expressions-as poSad,Or-kpontaneous,'two samples (N=91 and-N=60) qf Thadrenuaged.four and fiVe,, and two samples (N=71 and-N=32) (Apr:adult university undergrailuatet rated slides of the facialAexpressiong of .,eight young-children foifouraffective sttates-happineis, sadness, anger,'and'neutrelity,-Adults were more accurate than children in'recognizing nearalstates, less accurate for 'happiness and anger, and wer'e.not superior in recognizing 'sadness. The sex and ethniCity of 'the chilazappearing:On the slides influenced only the' adult recognition of anger: The results 'indicate that hoth.acCuraoy and inacCuracy in recognizing emotional expressions are influenced by processes other than recognition. .(MCF)

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that the remediation of negative emotion will be most effective when the remedial procedure matches the experience or cognition that induced the negative state--process-specificity hypothesis. Other hypotheses examined were that negative states induced by cognitive reflection related to the self would be resistant to remediation, even by a same-process positive procedure, and that changes in emotional expressions may make it appear that a negative state has been effectively remediated when lingering effects on behavior and cognition indicate that it has not. Negative emotional states were induced in second-grade children by one of four processes, all of which involved social rejection content: cognition that focused on (a) the self (thinking about oneself being rejected by a peer) or (b) another person (thinking about a peer being rejected); or experience that related to (c) oneself (actually being socially rejected) or (d) observing another (vicarious: seeing a peer be socially rejected). These inductions were then followed by a positive, remedial induction whose content was the reverse (social acceptance) and whose process did or did not match that of the negative induction. As predicted, except for negative self-cognitions, it was found that the behavioral (altruism) and cognitive (performance on a block design task) consequences of negative emotion were alleviated when the positive remediation was of the same type as the original induction. Emotional expressions were consistently positive following remediation, regardless of their type. The results are discussed in terms of differing processes for maintaining negative emotion as a function of the character of induction, and the implications for the understanding of clinical depression in children are noted.

Little is known about the specific and potentially interactive impact of successive affect-inducing experiences. In the present study preschool children experienced two standard experimental affect inductions in succession and the effects were assessed on self-gratification, altruism, cognitive processing, and expressed affect. The states induced were happy, sad, or neutral, and the repeated inductions were either consistent (e.g., +/+) or inconsistent (e.g., +/-, -/+). The findings were as follows: (a) Only the first of the two affect inductions had an effect on selfgratification or altruism, with sad states increasing self-gratification and decreasing altruism. There was no indication that a second affect-inducing experience could remediate the behavioral consequences of a prior one. (b) Generative cognitive processing (producing a thought of an affective valence) was increased by both the ongoing affective state and the affective content of the material to be generated. Positive affect states or content increased the speed of processing, (c) Finally, children's memory for the thoughts they had produced was influenced also by affective state, with sad states increasing the latency for recall.

Self-report and behavioral observation procedures were used to assess the quality of mothers' interactions with facially deformed infants. This assessment strategy also provided an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that parents of facially deformed infants may deny or be unaware of deficits in their relationships with these children. 10 mothers, 5 with unattractive/craniofacially deformed infants and 5 with normal infants, completed self-report measures of stress, social support, satisfaction with parenting, and general life satisfaction. Mother-infant interactions were videotaped and rated on discrete and global behavioral measures. Results revealed that mothers of deformed infants rated their parental satisfaction and current life satisfaction more positively than did mothers of normal infants. However, these same mothers were observed to behave in a consistently less nurturant manner than mothers of normal children. These results suggest that infant facial deformity/unattractiveness may affect the quality of infant-caregiver interactions without parental awareness.

The Comprehensive System for the Rorschach (RCS) is currently the subject of intense scientific criticism. The normative data for many RCS scores are seriously in error and tend to make normal individuals appear maladjusted. Reliability is inadequate for many RCS scores, and validity for the great majority of RCS scores has not been adequately demonstrated. In addition, a substantial number of Rorschach Workshops studies, cited by B. Ritzler, R. Erard, and G. Pettigrew (2002) as supportive of the RCS, are unavailable for examination. Finally, B. Ritzler et al. misinterpret central issues of the relevant legal analysis, including crucial legal standards. The RCS clearly fails to meet the standards for admissibility set forth in the Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho decisions. Should expert testimony based on the widely used Comprehensive System for the Rorschach (RCS) be admissible in court? In an earlier article that appeared in this journal (Grove & Barden, 1999), two of us discussed the admissibility of testimony from mental health experts. We concluded that some types of testimony, commonly offered by mental health professionals, do not meet the current standards that govern the admissibility of scientific evidence in federal and many state courts (Daubert v.