In an attempt to develop an instrument to screen emotionally disturbed children, a study was designed to verify and extend previous research findings. These findings indicated that adjusted children in kindergarten exhibited greater conditionality on a simple discrimination learning task than maladjusted pupils under a process of continuous mild verbal punishment for every undesirable response. Of the 224 children randomly selected with stratification for sex, 30 were chosen for each group (adjusted and maladjusted) on the basis of extreme scores on three personality scales, the Problem Checklist, the Behavior Checklist, and the Minnesota Scale. The experimental task itself involved a choice between a picture of a human and a picture of a toy with a verbal "that's bad" from the examiner contingent on each toy choice. A subject's score was his increase in human choices from his first to his fourth block of 25 trials. The influence of several intervening variables was evaluated: verbal reinforcement as an effective punishment (significant and cummulative in effect); correlation of mental age, as reasured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, to task score (insignificant); examiner effects (insigificant); and correlation of task score to socioeconomic status (insignificant). A reevaluation of the data after the study partially supported the main hypothesis. (MH)