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More than ten years after its publication, there has been no prior attempt to investigate the validity of the WISC-IV (Wechsler, 2003) for use in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). This thesis is the first to assess the fit of a cross-cultural interpretive model of WISC-IV (US) measured intelligence in T&T children. The primary objectives were to: ascertain the psychometric properties of the WISC-IV (US); determine how the WISC-IV (US) subtests are associated with specified antecedent environmental variables; examine the relationship between WISC-IV(US) global ability and academic achievement; assess the fit of alternative interpretive models; and determine the predictive validity of adjusted IQ scores. Examination of the correlation matrix corroborated five alternative measurement models, with evidence of best fit for a direct hierarchical framework (Watkins et al., 2006). Multiple regression analyses demonstrated significant positive relationships between parental education and verbal comprehension, and between school performance and verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning and global ability. Additionally, environmental deprivation was found to be negatively correlated with performance on all WISC-IV (US) composites. Children with higher global intelligence scores performed better than their low-scoring counterparts on two national tests of academic achievement. School performance was also shown to predict academic achievement in the sample. The results of the structural equation modelling analyses provided support for three distinct measurement models featuring the Wechsler indirect hierarchical model, the Watkins et al. direct hierarchical model, and an author-defined cross cultural direct hierarchical model. The antecedent variables of parental education, school performance and environmental deprivation and the outcome variable or academic achievement added significantly to the model. Adjusted factors scores that were derived from each path model accounted for a significant portion of variance in national test performance. If replicated, the current findings offer potentially useful alternative frameworks for interpreting test performance in T&T children.

This paper reviews the literature on self esteem / self concept measures for young children (aged 4-7 years). It evaluates previous reviews, as well as relevant measure validation papers. Apart from providing an overview of the field, the paper seeks to carry out a pragmatic function in directing researchers to appropriate instruments. There has been no substantial review looking specifically at measures for children, but previous reviews have highlighted that most measures lack psychometric soundness or a clear theoretical basis. In this review, six measures that met the basic inclusion criteria and possess additional qualities are considered in detail. Apart from expectation that measures should be psychometrically adequate, their efficacy depends upon the aspects of the self evaluation that are relevant to researchers. For this reason, some attention is given to the theoretical underpinnings of the available measures. Alternative and complementary methods of assessing self-concept are briefly considered. The strengths and limitations of currently available measures are outlined and some suggestions with regard to future developments are offered. The paper concludes that considerable progress has occurred since the field was previously reviewed, but that there remain a number of methodological and theoretical issues in measuring young children's self- concept that require further study.

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Police interviewers require a new investigative interviewing tool to facilitate the discrimination between children’s true and false reports. This thesis investigated whether cognitive lie detection techniques could fill this gap in current practice. Chapter 1 introduces the cognitive lie detection paradigm, highlighting the lack of research within the child deception literature and the paradigm’s potential as a means for detecting deceit in children. Chapter 2 explores imposing cognitive load through the use of gaze maintenance to exaggerate differences between child truth-tellers and child lie-tellers. In Experiment 1, maintaining gaze (either with the interviewer’s face or a teddy bear’s face) resulted in truth-tellers providing significantly more detailed reports than lie-tellers. This finding was not apparent for the control condition where children were given no gaze instruction. In Experiment 2, this exaggerated difference between the accounts of the truth- and lie-tellers facilitated deception detection when the children were instructed to look at interviewer’s face, but not at the teddy bear’s face. Poor discrimination for the latter group was discussed with regard to the gaze behaviour of the children being regarded as ‘fishy’ by the evaluators. Chapter 3 investigates whether playing an example of a detailed free recall provided by a peer (referred to as another child’s model statement, AMS) elicits longer statements that contain more cues to deceit in an eyewitness context than when no model statement is used. Both child truth-tellers and child lie-tellers provided more details and more new information following AMS. However, truth-teller accuracy decreased. In Chapter 4, interview clips from Chapter 3 were judged by adult evaluators who found it difficult to differentiate between children’s true and false reports. This could be a consequence of quantity of detail not being a reliable indicator of veracity for this sample of interviews. Chapter 5 tests the use of children’s practice interviews as their own model statements (OMS) compared to AMS and having no model statement (NMS). Only AMS encouraged children to include more details and more new information in their post-model statement true and false reports. Further research is required to understand the socio-cognitive mechanisms that create this behavioural difference. Chapter 6 describes a field study that presented the cognitive lie detection techniques investigated in the previous chapters to police officers who interview child witnesses regularly. Of all the techniques, OMS was considered to be the most viable option, although police officers suggested that all of the interview techniques would require adaptation for use in the real world. The practitioners provided an insightful look at the current child-interviewing context in the UK, which provides a basic framework that could be considered when designing child deception detection strategies in the future. Finally, Chapter 7 summarises the main findings of this doctoral thesis, discusses their theoretical and practical implications, and puts forward ideas for future research.

Emotion understanding is a key foundation of social skills (e.g. Denham et al., 2003; Izard et al., 2001) and thus research into its determinants is a potentially important area for clinical and developmental psychology. This thesis investigates the development of emotion understanding in young children. Part one is a literature review of 23 papers examining the relationship between attachment and emotion understanding in children. A summary of the papers is presented, before reflections on the meaning of the results. Overall, secure attachment appears to be related to superior emotion understanding. However, larger, well-controlled studies are needed to better understand the association. Part two presents an empirical paper focused on the development of a novel Electroencephalogram (EEG) paradigm to investigate emotion understanding in 6-year-old children. The children tested formed part of a cohort of children who had taken part in a previous study, in which their attachment to their primary care-giver was profiled. The study is the first to demonstrate Event Related Potentials (ERPs) associated with emotion understanding in young children. Specifically, a Late Positive Potential (LPP) was found to be an index of emotion understanding. The paper investigates associations between ERPs and social competence measures, and with security of attachment. The empirical research was undertaken with Sarah Carman (Carman, 2013). Part three provides a critical appraisal of the research process. It considers difficulties encountered in producing externally valid research. Issues in the development of the EEG paradigm, methodological difficulties in ERP research, and measure selection are discussed.

The primary aim of this study is to investigate the effects of short term Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving (ICPS) training with pre-school children compared to an alternative treatment of Music Therapy (MT). The MT treatment served to investigate the relationship between creativity and Alternative Solutions Thinking (AST). No treatment control was included in the design (Study I). Seven-month follow-up measures of effects from the treatments are included (Study II), to determine the stability of therapeutic gains. The results reveal a successful elevation of AST and Consequential Thinking (CT) following ICPS training, stable over at least seven months and a sleeper effect from the MT treatment. Behavioural observation revealed improved social interactive behaviours following treatment, but there is some indication that behavioural gains may not be stable. The influence of music on AST and CT was further examined in Study III by comparing AST and CT fluency of children who attended a musically enriched pre-school to that of the children who received short term MT treatment and a non-treatment Control group. The children in Study III proved significantly better at AST and CT than the children in the previous studies were. Finally, in Study IV, an alternative mode of mediating ICPS skills was attempted. This involved a short training of pre-school staff to apply ICPS training techniques in daily dealings with the children. Girls benefited more from this treatment, and only CT skills were elevated. Results are related to previous findings in ICPS research and discussed in terms of developmental theories, especially Vygotsky's conception of thought development and Crick and Dodge's (1994) social information processing model. A developmental relationship between AST and CT is suggested and it is argued that AST may be a form of creative thought. Implications of the results for education and therapy are discussed.

The aim of this research was to identify possible risk factors for internalising and externalising behaviour problems in middle childhood using an attachment theory framework. The mother-child relationship was explored from the mother's perspective and considered the possible influence of parenting attitudes and behaviours and mother's experience of romantic attachment relationships on her child's adjustment. The findings indicated that mothers in the clinical group differed significantly from mothers in the control group in reports of their adult attachment strategies, parenting behaviours and attitudes and their child's behaviour. In the clinical group mothers' high avoidance in romantic relationships was predictive of high reports of their child's externalising behaviours. Parenting behaviours and attitudes did not appear to influence this relationship. In the control group a different pattern of relationships were identified as significant. Mothers' parenting behaviours and attitudes were shown to be predictive of their child's behaviour. In addition low levels of mothers' attachment anxiety were predictive of low reports of behaviour problems in the control group. It was concluded that the current study found some evidence that adult romantic attachment was able to predict parenting attitudes, behaviours and childhood adjustment with reference to internalising and externalising behaviours in middle childhood. The study supports the possibility that conceptually analogous relationships exist between parent-child and romantic relationships. Different significant relationships existed in the clinical and control group. Further examination of these differences when researching potential risk/protective factors for maladjustment in childhood is essential.

Precocity is incongruous with the nineteenth-century ideology of childhood innocence. It is, nevertheless, a prominent subject across discourses in the century’s final decades. This thesis argues that in the late nineteenth century precocious children are depicted and debated in ways that reveal their particularly post-Darwinian significance. Through an analysis of a broad range of literary texts, in dialogue with key contributions to the emergent branch of psychology known as Child Study, this thesis illustrates that the precocious child functions as a problematic origin for narratives of adult selfhood in an era when such narratives were ever more tentative, and ever more tenacious. The thesis first examines precocity and innocence in a scientific overview of the subject, and in a selection of Henry James’s fiction, to suggest that these contradictory qualities are inextricably bound up with the question of adult self-construction. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and E. Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers series are then shown to complicate the assumptions about, and functions of, the precocious child in contemporaneous medical studies of precocity. Following this, the thesis interrogates the extent to which autobiography enables authors and psychologists to create a remembered child who might function as the precocious origin to the adult self. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is then analysed as a study of the ideology and contextual significance of the precocious child. A final chapter discusses work produced by two precocious children themselves. This thesis illustrates that the precocious child emblematises the continuity of the self across time, but only by reflecting an adult to whom it is supposed to be a primitive antecedent. Precocity can thus be read as a study of the idea of progressive selfhood which was so central to the Victorian era after Darwin.

The aims of this research were to explore the characteristics and purposes served by imaginary companions (ICs) featuring in the lives of children from a normative sample, as this has rarely been investigated. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with two samples. The first study comprised of five children including both girls and boys aged between five and ten years of age. The second study involved a sample of girls who were homogeneous by age, (eleven years), gender (female) and ethnicity (White, British). A feature of both studies was to explore all the imaginary companions, both current and previous, that each child had had over time. The data was analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore individual and cross case themes. Whilst children acknowledged their imaginary status, the companions presented as real to the children, and particular characteristics of the ICs and features of the child's interaction with their imaginary companions served to foster this illusion. Qualities and characteristics of animal and human imaginary companions were mostly positive. A number of ICs had unfriendly characteristics, though these mostly served a positive purpose for the child. All children were able to say why their imaginary companions were important and special. Some children were able to explain how their ICs met their needs and a range of purposes served were identified. Some children had more than one current imaginary companion (IC) with each IC meeting different needs. Imaginary companions meeting emotional needs were more private in contrast to those who were primarily playmates, or providing wish fulfillment and entertainment. The imaginary companions of the eldest children were mostly unknown to others, or partially concealed in games. This seemed to be in response to the anticipated responses of others. Methodological issues, psychological applications and research implications are discussed.