Social skills training (SST) is implemented to improve adaptation in everyday life situations, by elevating self-esteem through repeated experience of success with social skills such as inviting, conversation, and emotion-control. A certain degree of efficacy has been reported for SST in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, the majority of such studies have been in the form of behavioral assessments by caregivers and other such individuals, with few if any reports on evaluation in terms of biological indicators. Study of event-related potentials (ERP) in children with ADHD has shown prolonged latency and reduced amplitude of P300 as well as reduction in amplitude of mismatch negativity (MMN) compared to normal controls. We measured both P300 and MMN before and after SST in 15 children diagnosed with ADHD, and found significantly greater MMN amplitudes after SST at C4, demonstrating efficacy of SST for children with ADHD from the biological perspective.

A case of a Japanese girl, born and spending the first five years of life in an English/ Japanese bilingual environment outside Japan, was presented in way of discussing possible effects of bilingual environment on a child's language development. The girl's early language milestones were delayed for both English and Japanese. Although a specialist attributed the delay to bilingual exposure, the girl's parents continued to harbor concern and visited a child psychiatrist for evaluation upon returning to Japan when the child was in first grade. Upon examination, it was apparent that the girl was experiencing difficulties in both social interaction and imagination apart from her language problem, culminating in a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Her development of the Japanese language was characterized by limited vocabulary, morpho-syntactic errors, and conversational breaches. Evaluation of these problems in relation to the linguistic characteristics of bilinguals such as transfer, profile effect, and code-switching, led to the conclusion that in this case, the girl's language delay was the result of developmental and intellectual disabilities, and not the exposure to a bilingual environment.

This paper reports on a girl with anorexia nervosa in long-term hospitalization. Treatment progress fluctuated greatly due to severe psychopathology of anorexia nervosa and perfectionism. However, she gradually regained both mental and physical health, and an independence of spirit befitting her age. The process of symptom formation are discussed alongside the psychopathology that underlay the need for extensive hospitalization. Furthermore, the significance of multiple functional child and adolescent psychiatric wards are discussed, not only in terms of physical management and life protection, but as an environment for nurturing basic trust with medical staff, and interacting with peergroups. Moreover, the implementation of family therapy allowing the therapist to evaluate the child's symptoms from diverse and multi-layered perspectives, and enabling the parents to resume their supportive functions, in particular, through vivid restoration of emotional availability in the patient's mother, were noted as the keys to the child's recovery.