The teacher interview.

The teachers and caretakers (on kibbutzim) of the index and control children were questioned about a variety of behaviors, including emotional adjustment, school performance and achievement, interests and activities, and relations with others. Index children were rated as more impaired or disturbed than control subjects in the following areas: schoolwork, mood, suspiciousness, daydreaming, antisocial behavior, hypochondriasis, and accident proneness. No differences were seen in anxiety, aggression, phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior, eating and sleep disturbances, shame, and frustration tolerance. There were few differences between assessments of index and control children on kibbutzim and towns. Male index subjects tended to be seen as especially poorly adjusted.

Clinical-subjective evaluation of high-risk children: integration and discussion.

Clinical evaluations of index and control children from the point of view of the clinical interview, observations of the subjects during testing, the subjects' parents, and their teachers were compared. There was general agreement that index children showed more psychopathological symptoms, poorer ego development, poorer interpersonal relations, and poorer use of leisure time than their controls. By contrast, behaviors related to aggression, phobias, shame, sleep pathology, eating disorders, frustration tolerance, sexual behavior, and verbal communication skills failed to show consistent group differences. Index boys showed greater anxiety than their controls, while there were no such differences among the girls. Rearing environment exerted no apparent effect on the psychosocial functioning of the children. Factor analysis disclosed that a general factor, accounting for 32.6 percent of the variance, discriminated between index and control children, while several special factors, which represented rarely seen traits, did not discriminate. Group differences, therefore, appeared to stem from global impairment of psychosocial functioning rather than from several distinct patterns of deficit. The present results are in general agreement with previously reported evaluations of children at risk for schizophrenia.