The electrical discharge of neurons associated with seizure activity stimulates a marked rise in cerebral metabolic activity. Estimates from animal experiments indicate that energy utilization during seizures increases by more than 200", while tissue adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels remain at more than 95" of control, even during prolonged status epilepticus. The brain generally withstands the metabolic challenge of seizures quite well because enhanced cerebral blood flow delivers additional oxygen and glucose. Mild to moderate degrees of hypoxemia that commonly accompany seizures are usually harmless. However, severe seizures and status epilepticus can sometimes produce an imbalance between metabolic demands and cerebral perfusion, especially if severe hypotension or hypoglycemia is present. A marked increase in glutamate release, which occurs during a prolonged seizure, is likely to result in the activation of all types of glutamate receptors. Although kainic acid produces seizures in the immature brain, it produces little cytotoxicity.

This chapter demonstrates how social work ethics apply to ethical and legal decision making in forensic social work practice. It discusses the context of social work practice in legal systems. The chapter also details the basic structures of the United States (U.S.) civil and criminal legal systems. It lays the foundation for the criminal and civil court processes in the United States and introduces basic terminology and a description of associated activities and progression through these systems. The chapter focuses on providing an introductory, and overarching, picture of both civil and criminal law in the U.S. and introduces the roles social workers play in these systems. It focuses on the ETHICA model of ethical decision making as a resource and tool that can be used to help forensic social workers process difficult and complex situations across multiple systems.

This chapter explains the theoretical basis for motivational interviewing (MI). It reviews the empirical evidence for the use of MI with diverse populations in forensic settings. MI involves attention to the language of change, and is designed to strengthen personal motivation and commitment to a specific goal by eliciting and exploring the person’s own reasons for change within an atmosphere of acceptance and compassion. It is now internationally recognized as an evidence-based practice intervention for alcohol and drug problems. MI involves an underlying spirit made up of partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation. The chapter discusses four key processes involved in MI: engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. It also describes five key communication microskills used throughout MI: asking open-ended questions, providing affirmations, offering summarizing statements, providing information and advice with permission, and reflective statements.

As everyone knows, true creativity comes from simple formulas and the memorization of data. This chapter focuses on divergent thinking tests, which are still the most common way that creativity is measured. Guilford derived the core ideas behind divergent thinking as well as many popular measures. The people who score the Torrance Tests are specifically trained to distinguish responses that are truly original from those that are just bizarre. There are other tests that measure creativity, but most are either a variation on divergent thinking or use some type of raters. For example, the Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPOC) has begun to be used in some studies and may be promising, but is still largely rooted in a mix of divergent thinking scoring and raters. Another test is the Finke Creative Invention Task, which is clever but also requires raters for scoring.

The Big Five, which this chapter discusses in more detail, are extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Each of these five factors represents a continuum of behavior, traits, and inclinations. There are some popular personality measures that use different theories, such as Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire, which looks at extraversion and neuroticism as well as psychoticism. The personality factor most associated with creativity is openness to experience. Indeed, one way that researchers study creativity is by giving creative personality tests. Being open to new experiences may also help creative people be more productive. King found that people who were creative and high on openness to experience were more likely to report creative accomplishments. DeYoung and S. B. Kaufman, of course, are not the only people to blend or split different factors of personality to present new models. Fürst, Ghisletta, and Lubart suggest three factors: plasticity, divergence, and convergence.

This chapter explores three ’classic’ studies of creativity and mental illness. The first is Jamison whose focus is on the connection between bipolar disorder and creativity. The second is Andreasen, who used structured interviews to analyze 30 creative writers, 30 matched controls, and first-degree relatives of each group. The writers had a higher rate of mental illness, with a particular tendency toward bipolar and other affective disorders. The third major work is Ludwig, who utilized the historiometric technique. All three studies have come under serious criticism. Many of the studies of Big-C creators are historiometric, akin to Ludwig’s work. Some such studies claim that eminent creators show higher rates of mental illness. A much more common approach is to look at everyday people and give them measures of creativity and mental health. Typically, researchers look at what are called subclinical disorders—in other words, they’re not clinically significant.

One school admissions area that already uses creativity is gifted admissions—which students are chosen to enter gifted classes, programs, or after-school activities. Both education and business play great lip service to creativity. Puccio and Cabra review the literature on creativity and organizations and do a nice job of highlighting how every couple of years, a new report from industry emphasizes the importance of creativity. It is important to note that there is a large inconsistency between gender differences on creativity tests and actual creative accomplishment. Although gender differences on creativity tests are minor or nonexistent, differences in real-world creative accomplishment are large and significant. This chapter shows how creativity can play a role in admissions and hiring. Hiring measures tend to have better validity, even the general mental ability (GMA) measures; even if minorities score lower, the accuracy of prediction is consistent by ethnicity.

Creative people are also often seen as being outsiders and eccentric. Sen and Sharma’s examination of creativity beliefs in India tested beliefs about the Four P’s and found that creativity was more likely to be described as a holistic essence of an individual, and less likely to be focused on the product or process. Romo and Alfonso studied Spanish painters and found that one of the implicit theories that the painters held about creativity involved the role of psychological disorders. Plucker and Dana found that past histories of alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco usage were not correlated with creative achievements; familial drug and alcohol use also was not significantly associated with creative accomplishments or creative personality attributes. Humphrey, McKay, Primi, and Kaufman did find that illegal drug use predicted self-reported creative behaviors even when openness to experience was controlled.

Depression is sometimes referred to as the common cold of psy-chopathology. Consistent with this aphorism, epidemiological studies demonstrate that depressive disorders are indeed rather common across the life span. Given the importance of the social relationships and context to understanding depression, it seems likely that culturally informed and diverse research will yield important findings about those critical components of human cognition, emotion, and social relationships that underlie risk for depression, as well as those that serve to aid in recovery from these disorders. Most researchers believe it is unlikely there is a direct effect of hormones on depression, but rather that they indirectly increase risk via any one of several mechanisms, including: the effects of hormones on brain development, the development of secondary gender characteristics that are generated by these hormones, or the hormonal changes that occur during the pubertal transition may interact with life events and the social context.

Depressive disorders are characterized by etiological heterogeneity, which means that many diverse causal factors or causal pathways can lead to the same clinical outcomes. Women are at higher risk for depressive episodes beginning at early adolescence and then throughout the life span. Unipolar depressive disorders can onset at any point in the life span, but are most prevalent in late adolescence through early to mid-adulthood. Bipolar disorder (BD)s generally onset before mid-adulthood; new cases are rare thereafter. More severe cases of unipolar and bipolar disorders are characterized by a chronic/recurrent course. Both unipolar and bipolar disorders are commonly comorbid with other forms of psychopathology; overall severity and poorer outcome over time is associated with comorbidity. If gender differences are of interest, the effects of potential etiological factors are measured in persons of both genders and their associations with depressive disorders are statistically compared across genders.

Recent advancements in molecular genetics have expanded our understanding of the etiology of many neurological diseases and neurodevelopmental abnormalities. Having a comprehensive understanding of genetics is essential in treating patients with metabolic epilepsies. Genetic counseling has been defined as a process of helping people understand and adapt to the medical, psychological, and familial implications of genetic contributions to disease. Some of the components of a genetic counseling interaction include interpretation of family and medical histories to assess the chance of disease occurrence or recurrence; education about inheritance, testing, management, prevention, resources, and research; and counseling to promote informed choices and adaptation to the risk or condition. The genetic counselor may also educate patients and their families about the underlying genetics of their epilepsy and the relevance of a genetic cause of epilepsy for family members, including recurrence risk, reproductive options and the possible teratogenic effect of antiepileptic drugs.

This chapter presents a brief review of the enzymes, transporters, and cofactor producers of the urea cycle. Seizures have long been associated with urea cycle disorders (UCDs), thought to be caused by high levels of ammonia. Furthermore, the brain damage obtained during metabolic crisis has been thought to damage critical structures, leading to epilepsy after the conclusion of the crisis. The first and most critical step of successful treatment of UCDs is recognition. Neurologic monitoring is an essential part of the emergency management of UCDs. The neurological abnormalities observed in patients with urea cycle defects are vast. Controlling ammonia levels by dialysis and complementary medication are needed. EEG monitoring should be initiated early, as this may be very useful for clinical management and indication of untreated metabolic crises. Furthermore, aggressive treatment of clinical and subclinical seizure activity may be helpful in optimizing outcomes for these patients.

One of the best known psychologists of the 20th century was Jean Piaget. The memory he described was from when he was about 2 years old, a kidnapping attempt in which his nurse tried to protect him. According to the storehouse metaphor, memory is kind of a warehouse. When one remembers an event from one’s life, one looks through this warehouse. Remembering a past event is also a kind of simulation, a simulation of what happened in the past, rather than a veridical reproduction of the past. In fact, our best understanding is that brains are massively parallel simulation devices. Constructive theories deal with filling in gaps at encoding as the event transpires, whereas reconstructive theories deal with filling in gaps at retrieval as one tries to remember the event. When thinking about memory illusions it is important to make a similar distinction.

This chapter describes many of the theories that involve taxonomies. Most taxonomies of love begin in the same place: The language of love is examined, whether through an examination of film, literature, music, or firsthand accounts of people about their love life. The three primary love styles are eros, storge, and ludus. Eros is a passionate kind of love that is characterized by strong emotions and intense physical longing for the loved one. With storge, should the lovers break up, there is a greater chance than with other love styles that they remain friends. Ludus commonly is displayed by people who prefer to remain single and who see love as a game of conquest and numbers. A pragmatic lover hesitates to commit to a relationship until he or she feels confident of finding the right partner. The different love styles also correlate with some other personality traits.

This chapter focuses on an area that has been at the center of the debate between the approaches: processing ambiguous words and sentences. Interestingly, an important factor for ambiguity resolution appears to be the frequency of the different meanings of the ambiguous words. Subordinate- bias effect is as follows: in a neutral, nonbiasing context, words that are balanced cause longer reading times than words that are either unbalanced or unambiguous. Different languages impose different rules about how grammatical categories may be combined. In the garden path model, sentence processing happens in two stages: an initial structure building stage in which the only information that is used is syntactic, and then a second stage in which the structure is checked against semantic and pragmatic information. Constraint-based models take a very different approach to how sentences are initially parsed and how mistakes are sometimes made.

The researchers were specifically interested in whether they would get more incorrect responses depending on the type of sentence. From a certain perspective, passive sentences are more complicated than active sentences and so perhaps it is the case that passives are more difficult simply because they are more complicated. It appears that the important difference between subject cleft and actives on one hand, and passives on the other, is that the order of the roles is reversed between them: in active sentences, the agent comes first. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence that languages allow English speakers to structure their utterances in a way that can flag certain parts of the sentence as particularly important or worthy of special attention. Recently, psycholinguists have been interested, too, in how information structure influences language processing.

This chapter links facets of personality, and other individual differences among people, to aspects of their sense of humor, including the way that they use comedy in their lives and the kinds of jokes they generate and appreciate. The study of personality back in the 1940s had grown quite convoluted. It had started in ancient times, when Hippocrates, of the legendary oath, proposed four temperaments. He thought that personality arose from different proportions of fluids in the body, creating a popular link between personality and physiology. By the late 1800s, Sir Francis Galton, brilliant half-cousin of Charles Darwin and noted polymath, reasoned that any important aspect of personality ought to make it into the language. He fashioned a taxonomy based on a dictionary. Humor and creativity relate to each other in curious ways. But both are also correlated with extraversion and intelligence.

The study of the properties of language can be divided up into roughly five, somewhat overlapping categories: sound system, word structure, sentence structure, meaning, and real-world use. In spoken languages, segments are sounds—each language has a set of sounds that are produced by changing the positions of various parts of the vocal tract. The sound system of language is actually studied in two main parts: phonetics, phonology. Phonemes can be combined to make words, and words themselves have an internal structure and can even be ambiguous based on this structure. Syntax is the study of how sentences are formed. There are two noun phrases (NPs) in the sentence—the artist and a paintbrush. The field of semantics is concerned with meaning in language and can be divided into two major parts: lexical and propositional.

Coverage of obesity in the popular press has reached a fever pitch in recent years. By far, the most common definition of obesity uses the body mass index (BMI) to determine who is overweight or obese. A person's BMI is a ratio of his or her weight to height. Many times BMI is criticized for the false positives, where very muscular people are deemed to be obese despite ultralow body fat levels. Waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) measures something called “abdominal or central obesity”, a condition that is closely related to negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease. The costs to society of obesity and related health issues are tremendous. Women, ethnic and racial subgroups, and those of low socioeconomic status (SES) all display higher rates of obesity than the overall population. Obesity is much more common in certain racial and ethnic subpopulations, as compared with Caucasian Americans.

The idea of the mad genius persisted all the way to modern times and was even promulgated in scientific circles. Not only was genius mad, but it was associated with criminality and genetic degeneration. The empirical research relevant to the mad-genius issue uses three major methods: the historiometric, the psychometric and the psychiatric. The historical record is replete with putative exemplars of mad genius. The mental illness adopts a more subtle but still pernicious guise-alcoholism. In fact, it sometimes appears that alcoholism is one of the necessities of literary genius. Psychopathology can be found in other forms of genius besides creative genius. Of the available pathologies, depression seems to be the most frequent, along with its correlates of suicide and alcoholism or drug abuse. Family lineages that have higher than average rates of psychopathology will also feature higher than average rates of genius.

This chapter talks about questions related to how speakers and hearers influence each other. It looks at research on dialogue, and especially how a dialogue context influences speakers. Speakers have an impact on their listeners. The goal of a dialogue is successful communication and so it would make sense that a speaker would pay careful attention to the needs of a listener and do things like avoid ambiguity and package information in a way that flags particular information as important or new to the listener. Ambiguity may be avoided depending on the speaker’s choice of words and so a natural question is whether, and when, speakers appear to avoid ambiguous language. In terms of pronunciation, speakers reduce articulation and intelligibility over the course of a dialogue. There are some constraints and preferences on how to interpret pronouns and other coreferring expressions that appear to be structural or syntactic in nature.

Unlike laypeople, psychologists believe people can measure personality using reliable scientific tools. Indeed, the whole field of psychometrics is dedicated to measuring differences between people in various psychological concepts, including personality. Personality assessment combines a variety of theories and methods, including common sense, probability theory and statistical testing. Life record data (L-data) deals with a person’s life history or biographical information. The main task of personality psychologists is to demonstrate that the assessment methods they use are, in fact, measuring specific personality traits, and that they are accurately doing so. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in alternative methods for objectively assessing personality. One compelling example is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). An aim of psychophysiological measurement is to elucidate the biological processes underlying factor-analytically derived dimensions of personality. There are several scientific investigations of the reliability and validity of astrology as a tool to assess personality.

This chapter presents the most salient psychological theories of personality. Personality is a core determinant of individual differences in everyday behaviors. The chapter discusses the difference between what psychologists broadly refer to as normal and what they regard as abnormal or clinical/mental illness. If one looks for an Elvis among personality psychologists, Sigmund Freud would be the one. During the mid-20th century, behaviorism emerged as a dominant paradigm for understanding human behavior, including personality. Although the social cognitive theory of personality has its origins in the radical behaviorist tradition, it emerged in clear opposition to it. According to the lexical hypothesis, historically, the most important and socially relevant behaviors that people display will eventually become encoded into language. Indeed, personality disorders are defined as long-standing, pervasive, and inflexible patterns of behavior and inner experience that deviate from the expectations of a person’s culture.

This chapter differentiates intelligence and related constructs such as creativity and intellectual giftedness, which helps people to better understand each construct. Sternberg proposed a way to classify the various approaches to studying the intelligence-creativity relationship. Guilford’s Structure of the Intellect (SOI) model is probably the most explicit, with divergent thinking specifically identified as one of his five cognitive operations. The relationship between intelligence and giftedness has also received substantial attention. Every gifted education program has a formal assessment procedure to identify potential participants, and creativity assessments are often included in the battery of measures in these identification systems. The Marland Definition suggests that giftedness and talent are manifest in six areas: general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual and performing arts, and psychomotor ability. It has been extremely influential and is still used by many school districts in their identification of talented students.

This chapter shows an overview of the techniques that are used to measure language processing. It shows at the things psycholinguists do when designing experiments in order to ensure that their results are valid. Online measures include any measure considered to give information about language processing as it happens. The prototypical off-line measure is the questionnaire—literally asking people for their judgments about what they’ve just encountered. In fact, all kinds of data can be collected from questionnaire studies. The button press task is perhaps the most versatile of all the things that people can do to collect data involving response times. The conscious responses discussed about here are vocal response. Like eye-tracking, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) help to understand the technique if people know a bit about the response measured—in this case, the brain. In many ways, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) can be considered the complement to ERPs.

This chapter discusses the social psychology of humor, starting with a walk through how the presence of other people can make things seem funnier. It shows how humor can have a positive or a negative tone and it can focus on ourselves or on those around us. Self-enhancing humor makes stress tolerable. It can keep folks from viewing minor annoyances as unbearable disasters. The chapter sketches how humor can function to maintain the status quo. People who report using self-enhancing humor show less anxiety, neuroticism, and depression; better psychological well-being and self-esteem, and more extraversion, optimism, and openness to experience. When it comes to hierarchies, getting a feel for who’s cracking jokes and laughing can communicate who’s top dog. The chapter finally focuses on gender differences, and then sees how humor contributes to developing friendships, finding a date, and maintaining an intimate relationship.

The genetic causes of obesity are often separated into to two types: monogenic and polygenic. Monogenic obesity refers to forms of obesity that result from very rare mutations in single genes. In the case of polygenic obesity, any single gene susceptibility would have a very small effect, but taken together, the cumulative effect of several susceptibilities leads to a substantially increased risk of obesity. There are many other pieces of compelling evidence for the environmental causes of obesity. The prevalence of obesity in the United States has been the highest in the world, though the prevalence of obesity is rising in both developed and developing nations around the globe as they adopt “Western” lifestyles of decreased physical activity and higher consumption of cheap, calorie-dense foods. There is another theory that “genetic drift” and “predation release” caused obesity to simply become neutral to our ancestors, as opposed to detrimental.

So here the authors are, caught between two worldviews. In one camp, they have educators and academics, attempting to overthrow the “old guard”—those of them who define giftedness through the narrow lens of IQ tests. They are hoping to establish a raison d’etre for gifted education—a field with a wobbly foundation. In the other camp, the authors have parents and the psychologists who specialize in working with the gifted, railing against the externalizing of giftedness. They want the inner world of the gifted to be recognized and appreciated. Controversy has dogged the study of giftedness since its inception, and is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Multiple views will somehow have to learn to coexist. The psychology of giftedness is a fledgling. An impressive number of people think they know more about the gifted than one does and they are delighted to share their opinions.

This chapter provides some questions and answers so that people can see for themselves. Most theories of love predict that, as time goes on, the passion in a relationship will begin to falter. According to the triangular theory of love, passion is the quickest component of a relationship to develop but also the quickest to die down. If they always need the thrill of the early days of a relationship, they may find themselves flitting from one relationship to the next without ever experiencing any deeper satisfaction. A mismatch of stories is not as obvious as disagreement over political beliefs, the desire to have children, or religious affiliation, but it can be just as challenging to a relationship. When people end serious relationships, they often go through a period in which they are just not ready to enter a new relationship.

Psycholinguist is someone who studies phenomena in the intersection of linguistics and psychology. The whole endeavor of psycholinguistics often finds a home in the broader research field of cognitive science—an interdisciplinary field that addresses the difficult question of how animals, people, and even computers think. The centrality of language in the daily lives means that any disruption to the ability to use it may be keenly felt—the worse the disruption, the more devastating the impact. From the beginning of psychology, there has been an interest in language. In psychology, behaviorism was a movement in which the study of mental states was more or less rejected, and the idea that one could account for human behavior in terms of mental states or representation was discounted. This book covers a number of topics that are very much relevant in current psycholinguistics, including child language acquisition, sign language, language perception, and grammatical structure.

Most school-based interventions aimed at preventing obesity have focused on a few key areas: improving the food offered in school, increasing opportunities for physical activity, health and nutrition education curricula, and screening youth for overweight and obesity. Positive effects on physical activity are encouraging because developing good habits early may help prevent obesity later in life. Many obesity prevention programs have looked at adding health, nutrition, and physical education courses to the school day. One initiative that has been proposed is to screen children and teens for obesity in schools, similar to the hearing and vision screenings that already take place. Some schools also collect body mass index (BMI) data on students for surveillance purposes, where information is anonymous and used to track whether certain school policies are effective in reducing rates of obesity for the school, district, or state as a whole.

To truly understand how important and central memory is to us, it is important to understand what life is like for people who experience memory loss, or amnesia. This chapter examines the amnestic syndrome, which has been widely studied and the knowledge of which has significantly influenced theories of memory. The abilities and nonabilities of those with amnestic syndrome demonstrate that there are multiple independent systems of memory. The chapter also examines two controversial diagnoses, the main feature of which is memory loss dissociative identity disorder (DID) and psychogenic or dissociative amnesia. It discusses a form of memory loss that does not fit the technical definition of amnesia because it eventually affects not just memory but all cognition: Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is common among older adults and demonstrates how a worsening loss of memory and cognition can lead to a complete disruption of everyday life.

In our success-oriented culture, optimal development of giftedness often is construed as fulfilling one’s potential for greatness. In humanistic psychology, optimal development has been conceptualized differently. Self-realization can be understood in terms of Maslow’s self-actualization, Dabrowski’s secondary integration, Jung’s individuation, or other theoretical perspectives of human development. The goals of inner development involve deepening the personality, overcoming conflicts, and actualizing one’s potential for becoming one’s best self. Many parents of the gifted complain that their children are the ones exerting the pressure. Their speed of learning and quest for knowledge often exceed their parents’ comfort level. The purpose of parent guidance is to foster “optimal development” through early intervention and prevention of social and emotional problems. Assessment can act as a prelude to family therapy. Family therapy usually involves a commitment to several successive sessions to deal with family interactions.

This chapter explores how a love researcher goes from having a conception or even a theory of love to actually constructing a love scale. A love scale provides a way to test the validity of a theory. A love scale enables couples to assess one aspect of their compatibility. A love scale provides individuals and couples an opportunity to enhance their love relationships. The one important thing to remember is that as measuring instruments love scales are far from perfect. Love scales are no different from scales for measuring intelligence or personality. An investigator might simultaneously measure intimacy with the intimacy subscale of the Triangular Love Scale and observe a couple in interaction, looking for behaviors signifying trust, caring, compassion, and communication. No scientist today believes that it is possible to capture the entire phenomenon of love through scientific study or through scales that are geared to measure love.

This chapter focuses on the whole life span of a relationship. It reviews some of the kinds of love and discusses how researchers understand the temporal course of those kinds of love. The chapter considers the effects of cohabitation on couples and what happens as these couples move on to marriage. It also discusses mechanisms that help or hinder couples in the maintenance of their relationships. The chapter examines the usual means of ending relationships: breakup and sometimes divorce. Compassionate love has been called “pure love”, “selfless love”, and “altruistic love”, as well as many other things. It features prominently in religion as well as in literature about love, and often can be found in caregiving relationships. A negative relationship also existed between cohabitation and marital quality. Edenfield and colleagues conducted a study that relates these relationship maintenance strategies to adult attachment styles.

This chapter discusses the implications of using personality inventories in the context of identifying bad or problematic traits, such as narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Evolutionary theory states that behaviors, traits, and genetic materials survive only if they are adaptive to the environment the organism finds itself in. As evidence has revealed, conduct disorder in children is a good marker for predicting psychopathy and antisocial outcomes in later years. Although personality tests are rarely used for the purpose of educational selection, scores on these tests correlate with several educational performance outcomes. The chapter examines current trends in online personality profiling in the context of consumer behavior. The market for online dating is huge and growing and an increasing number of single individuals subscribe to these services in order to find their ideal partners. Faking is an important criticism as many organizations will ask new applicants to undergo a personality assessment.

Intelligence is a hypothesized quality whose ontology, etiology, and scale must be inferred through indirect means. Personal definitions of intelligence are not the same as constructs of intelligence. Psychological constructs are highly technical, painstakingly crafted, and subjected to rigorous theoretical examination and empirical testing. Intellectual abilities are organized at a general level into two general intelligences, viz., fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Intelligence is the sum total of all cognitive processes. It entails planning, coding of information and attention, as well as arousal. Given his personal history and society’s attitudes toward heredity, that Galton concluded that the development of genius, must be understood in terms of hereditary processes. The chapter concludes with two tables presenting definitions of intelligence provided by several prominent historical and living intelligence theorists. They convince readers that human intelligence is a fascinating and complex subject, and to provide a foreshadowing of many of the essential issues.

This chapter suggests some new directions that personality research is, or should be, taking as well as the future agenda of this research. In contrast, personality psychology provides us with a solid evidence base that people can lean on when searching for answers about human nature. Personality refers to the stable and consistent patterns we observe in how people behave, feel, and think. Associations between personality and intelligence have been found on the measurement level and hypothesized at a conceptual level. It is supposedly human nature not to trust humankind to provide the unselfish responses in questionnaires, or to possess an adequate level of self-awareness. Admittedly, this trend has been changing. An increasing number of organizations are using self-report personality measures and even laypeople seem to accept the notion of questionnaires more kindly than before.

In theory, the construction of an autobiographical memory begins with a retrieval model being generated in the brain. This retrieval model activates general knowledge about the self, which is used to retrieve episodic memory details consistent with the desired memory. Autobiographical memory is a complicated skill that results from the union of episodic memory and an abstract concept of self laid out over time. This transformation of episodic into autobiographical memories results in forgetting of some incidents, and mashups the details from two or more separate incidents into a single memory that feels like it happened to the self at a particular point in time. Autobiographical memory is said to serve at least three important functions: identity, directive, and social. Autobiographical memories also serve as guides for future behavior. A function of autobiographical memory is to create and strengthen bonds between people.

The ideas of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato all contribute to the foundation of our understanding of the nature of human intelligence. Their ideas on topics as diverse as the origin of ability, the mind-body relationship, and general inquiry methods continued to inspire thinkers centuries later and influenced those who shaped modern psychology and intelligence theory. This chapter provides an overview of recent research on how people’s beliefs about intelligence impact their behaviors, a body of research that has significant implications for education. The emergence of reliable genetic and neurological research methodologies is creating a new area of study in which environmental, biological, and psychological facets of intelligence are studied simultaneously. Structure of Intellect (SOI) model represents a very different approach to theories of intelligence. Recent technological advances have encouraged explorations into the relationship between brain function and specific types of cognitive functioning.

This chapter talks about the representation of language in the brain— including what parts of the brain are known to be involved in language. It talks about how multiple languages are represented and interact in bilingual speakers. The most important lobes for language are the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe. In terms of language, in right-handed people it is the left hemisphere that supports the majority of language function. There are two areas in particular that appear to be especially important for language: an area toward the front of the brain in the frontal lobe that includes Broca’s area and an area more or less beneath and behind the ear toward the back of the temporal lobe called Wernicke’s area. Broca’s aphasia is characterized by difficulty with language production—with effortful, slow speech, and the striking absence of function words like prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, and grammatical inflections.

Research on both sign language and how it is processed has been growing quickly over the last decade, with researchers from a number of different fields increasingly interested in it. This chapter addresses two common misconceptions about sign language to understand exactly what sign language is. French sign language is just a version of spoken French, British Sign Language (BSL) is just a version of English, and so on. Variations in hand shape and other differences can differentiate dialects of sign language. Sound symbolism shows that there are cases in spoken language when sounds are linked in a nonarbitrary way to meaning. Further, there are phonotactic rules that differ from language to language about how signs may be formed. Speech errors are mistakes that speakers make when they intend to say one thing but something else comes out instead.

This chapter identifies how psychological frameworks can be integrated into a cohesive, multigenerational intervention to connect children with their incarcerated parents. It describes scenarios through which televisiting develops resiliency in children. The chapter delineates how geographic, financial, temporal, and intergenerational barriers can be reduced or removed via televisiting. It describes supportive televisiting services as an innovative, psychologist-directed, multidisciplinary program that connects children and teenagers with their incarcerated parents via secure, live, interactive video teleconferencing. The chapter also discusses the seven main pillars that make up the theoretical foundation of the televisiting program: child-focused; the attachment theory; trauma-informed care; resilience and strengths-based perspective; mental health challenges; the developmental, life-span, and intergenerational approach; and yellow flag not red flag policy.

This chapter introduces the theoretical basis for restorative justice (RJ). It assesses the empirical evidence for RJ programs, and explores the challenges and opportunities associated with applying core competencies. The chapter describes competencies of specific interest which include: engaging diversity and difference in practice, and engaging with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. It also discusses skills essential to the success of RJ which include supporting processes that value the experiences of people associated with a crime or harm. The chapter suggests the importance of practical and context-specific knowledge and skills relevant when individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities find themselves in conflict and require support. Programs that rely upon restorative principles have been used at a variety of points in the criminal justice process. The chapter discusses a practice, a family group conference, which was first developed in New Zealand involving social workers considerably.

The term genius is peculiar. It can be applied to a diversity of phenomena or confined to just one or two. The tremendous range in usage reflects the fact that genius is both a humanistic concept with a long history and a scientific concept with a much shorter history. The word genius goes way, way back to the time of the ancient Romans. Roman mythology included the idea of a guardian spirit or tutelary deity. This spiritual entity was assigned to a particular person or place. Expressed differently, geniuses exert influence over others. They have an impact on both contemporaries and posterity. The exemplars of intelligence have a feature in common: They are called as exceptional creators. The favored definition is that creativity satisfies few separate requirements. First, to be creative is to be original. In main, genius in the leadership domain of achievement appears to fall into several groups.

This chapter discusses the concepts, underlying principles, benefits, and challenges of using “whole-family” approaches in social work. It articulates the theory and skills associated with family engagement as part of a human rights and social justice framework for social work practice in forensic settings. The chapter describes the ethical imperatives and evidence base supporting the use of family group decision making (FGDM) in regulatory settings. It engages whole families as partners in the use of FGDM in child protection and youth justice. The chapter also describes the theory, empirical support, and skills in use of FGDM, or family group conferencing (FGC). It concluded with an example of how alert forensic social workers must be to the potential for their best intentions to collide with the tenants of responsive practice and a quote from a child protection social worker who worked closely with the author on a pilot project using FGC.

This chapter presents ways in which forensic social workers respond flexibly, collaboratively, and effectively to situations of domestic violence. It describes ways to engage men who abuse in becoming better fathers and partners. The chapter examines how social workers can foster culturally respectful partnerships with and around families that safeguard all family members. Few services are available for men who abuse to learn how to become responsible parents, and evaluations of these programs are even more limited. Two exceptions are a Canadian program called Caring Dads and a North Carolina program called Strong Fathers. These responsible fatherhood programs seek to raise the men’s awareness of the deleterious impact of children’s exposure to domestic violence and to enhance the men’s skills in communicating and parenting.

This chapter emphasizes the importance of improving health literacy. It describes the incorporation of cultural competence standards in forensic social work practice perspectives. The chapter also explains how to promote engagement of informal support networks in promoting health and well-being among diverse groups. Disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the United States have long been overrepresented in the criminal justice systems. The elimination of health care disparities and ensuring the health care delivery system is responsive to minority groups is a social justice issue. The roles and function of forensic social workers that provide services to persons with these cultural norms can be expanded using a broader ecological framework and the applied social care model to develop intervention strategies and care plans with incarceration persons. Identifying and incorporating culturally appropriate practice approaches are challenging, yet necessary undertakings for forensic social workers.

Substance abuse is a significant problem among persons who are homeless. This chapter explores the application of addiction recovery management (ARM) principles for developing practice skills in the recovery process among vulnerable populations. It examines demographic and social action factors that may impede or foster successful completion of this long-term recovery for persons who are experiencing home insecurity. The chapter offers insight for forensic social workers about how to engage diversity and differences in practice, as well as advance human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice. Analytic concepts in forensic social work can enhance the capacity of educators to prepare practitioners to be effective in closing the gap that exists for racial disparities in treatment approaches and programs. Critical race theory can be used to develop guiding principles for competency-based education and outcomes that address the gaps in existing systems of care.

This chapter promotes a better understanding of women’s experience of abuse. It articulates strategies used in victim advocacy, and addresses the experiences and needs of female victims of intimate partner violence. The chapter examines common practices used and issues faced by victim advocates–who are often trained social workers–who work with women who have been victimized by a male intimate partner. It also highlights firsthand experiences of a victim advocate for female victims of intimate partner violence. Many women continue to be victims of intimate partner violence, and the work of victim advocates who serve these women is challenging. Advocates must be able to assess the needs of victims, refer them to appropriate services, protect their rights, empower them, and help them navigate the criminal and civil justice systems. These responsibilities require advocates to possess various personal and professional skills and to collaborate with many different professionals.

This chapter describes how forensic social workers can develop their expert witness testimony skills. It explains how to advocate on behalf of vulnerable racial and ethnic populations generally underrepresented in American legal system, to increase advocacy from a human rights perspective. The chapter explores how to use expert testimony to highlight a range of social justice issues including human trafficking, death, and persecution. It introduces forensic social workers to integrating narrative methods with evidence-based trends that can best support any legal claim for hardship. Expert witness testimony comprises core mitigation components: client interviews; collateral interviewing; obtaining institutional records; identifying core themes of hardship that have directly impacted the individual or family; identifying intergenerational patterns of illness and/or systemic traumas that impact family; identifying environmental and country conditions; writing a report; and preparing for direct testimony and cross-examination.

This chapter aims to disseminate theoretical and practical knowledge of practice using an empowerment and feminist perspective specifically when working with marginalized and oppressed forensic populations and in forensic settings. Forensic social work focuses on both victims and offenders, and strives to integrate the skills and knowledge of empowerment and feminist theory and practice with principles of social justice and human rights. The chapter discusses empowerment and feminist theories and their relevance to practice with forensic populations. It highlights a case example of group work with women, who were sexually abused, that was first presented in the 1990s and told from a strengths-based approach, but could very much be considered both a feminist and empowerment process of working. The chapter also highlights applying an empowerment approach to working with female and male prisoners in London.

This chapter describes the life course pathways of cumulative health and justice disparities experienced by historical and emerging diverse groups, which is often found among forensic populations. It helps readers articulate a life course systems power analysis strategy for use with forensic populations and in forensic settings. The chapter demonstrates how a data-driven and evidence-based assessment and intervention plan can be used to address clinical and legal issues using case examples of an aging prison population. It uses older people in prison to illustrate the complex life course of health and social structural barriers and needs of incarcerated people who have histories of victimization and criminal convictions. Information about trauma and justice, especially related to the trauma of incarceration, which in itself is often a form of abuse, especially when frail elders are involved and they are at increased risk for victimization, medical neglect, and “resource” exploitation is presented.

This chapter defines restorative justice and discusses the various forms that this approach to wrongdoing and offending may take. It reveals the relevance of restorative interventions to social work practice. The chapter recognizes pioneers in the field of restorative justice with special emphasis on social work theorists. It describes the various forms of restorative justice from micro level victim-offender conferencing to community-level healing circles to macro level reparative justice. The chapter argues for greater social work involvement in shaping policies that include restorative justice options in situations of wrongdoing and social work involvement in facilitating victim–offender and anti bullying conferencing. The chapter also describes aspects of restorative justice that address competencies related to advocacy for human rights and issues of spirituality.

This chapter illustrates how factors outside of families affect lives of people within families. It examines the potential impact that two major issues—work-family conflict and mass incarceration—can have on the lives of family members. The chapter describes ways in which laws governing systems external to families, particularly work and criminal justice, can disrupt families in ways that may lead them to use social workers. It aims at providing necessary understanding of how social workers can help support such families, keeping in mind that family needs often develop from the social and economic context in which each family is situated. The chapter discusses the relevant ethical, legal, and policy issues facing work-family conflict and mass incarceration. It encourages social workers to look beyond the individual—to the systems in which individuals are situated, to better understand the behaviors, decisions, and mental health of individual clients.

This chapter aims to provide social workers with a historical and contemporary understanding of mass incarceration in the United States. The goal is to facilitate informed forensic social work practice and advocacy with individuals, families, and communities impacted by this destructive phenomenon. The chapter examines the prevalence of jails and prisons, as well as an overview of the people who inhabit them. It discusses the core roles and functions of forensic social work. Restorative justice is often hailed as a prevention, and/or intervention, in justice settings. High levels of suspensions have seen schools become feeders not for college, but for the juvenile, and adult criminal justice systems. This phenomenon has been titled the school to prison pipeline; its impact can be felt predominantly among poor students of color. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of restorative justice in both juvenile justice and school settings.

This chapter discusses in detail the scope of the problem of child maltreatment, and current evidence-based assessment and interventions in the child welfare system. It covers the history of child protection legislation, and describes the foster care crisis in the United States, including the foster care to prison pipeline, the impact of parental incarceration, and current policies such as reforms in the juvenile jurisdiction system. Additionally, trauma-informed care and the juvenile jurisdiction system is examined in light of recent trends to more closely align systems of care with neuroscience research and best practices for serving children and adolescents. The chapter reviews the relevant theoretical and practical approaches, including the application of neuroscience research, trauma-informed care, father engagement, and addressing secondary trauma among child welfare professionals. It also presents a case study and challenges of working with incarcerated fathers who may have children in the child welfare system.

This chapter provides an orientation to the critical issues, history, trends, policies, programs, and intervention strategies of the juvenile justice system. It reviews the types, functions, and legal responsibilities of the various juvenile justice agencies and institutions. The chapter describes the case flow within the juvenile justice system. It also discusses systems of care in juvenile justice, and specialized assessment and treatment issues with adolescents, including sexually abusive youth. It explores the foundation and groundwork for the study of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice system while delineating the legal definitions of juvenile status offenses and juvenile delinquency, examining the nine steps in the juvenile justice case-flow process. The chapter also gives attention to systems of care, the link between trauma and delinquency, as well as the assessment and treatment considerations for forensic social workers when addressing the specialized needs of juveniles in the justice system.

This chapter describes a forensic practice framework using a human rights and social justice systems approach. It articulates the definition and theme-based strategies that distinguish forensic social work from social work practice as usual. The chapter then proposes an integrated theoretical perspective that the authors refer to as a human rights and social justice systems (HR-SJS) approach. This approach helps to visualize forensic social work practice in any practice setting. The chapter also reviews the history of forensic social work using the United States as the case example to illustrate how a two-pronged approached to practice was integrated throughout this specialized arena of practice. A review of forensic social work history shows that well over 100 years ago, social workers understood that government, as author and institutor of policy, can and should be an arena for reform.

This chapter promotes understanding of the intersection of social work case level practice skills and social welfare programs and policy. It describes the social work advocacy process, and explores how social and political values impact accessibility to social welfare programs. It assists social workers in developing competence in policy practice and in case and policy advocacy. The chapter also helps social workers recognize when social welfare and economic policies are not fairly distributed, and to become skilled in taking action at the micro-, mezzo, and/or macro level. It discusses the interaction of direct practice with case advocacy to underscore the critical need to understand and interpret policy to achieve social justice. The chapter further highlights the importance of social workers engaging in case and policy advocacy to achieve a socially just outcome for any individual or group, especially those impacted by involvement in the criminal justice system.

This chapter enhances the understanding of the multifaceted challenges that individuals, especially older adults, seeking housing with a criminal background face. It reviews the ways in which individuals, especially older adults, can be vulnerable in terms of safety and security in their housing settings. Older adults may be particularly concerned about security and safety at home because their homes have been shown to be places where they can be victimized, either by telephone scams, door-to-door solicitation, bullying in age-congregate settings, and witnessing other crimes occurring in their residences. The chapter discusses ways in which forensic practitioners can support vulnerable populations, including older adults. It also discusses the complexities of affordable and safe housing using case examples and descriptions focusing on the older adult population. The chapter provides further recommendations on other areas of assessment and intervention that forensic social workers can conduct.

This chapter explains the paths and obstacles that immigrants face when they navigate the justice system in an attempt to stay in the United States. It provides an overview of what happens to an immigrant who seeks to enter the country “legally”, as well as the challenges for an immigrant who enters the country without authorization. The chapter also discusses paths to authorized immigration, including application for resident visas using the family- or merit-based immigration systems. It provides an insight into why 11.9 million immigrants have entered the United States without authorization rather than attempt legal means to immigrate. The chapter primarily focuses on those who either crossed the border without authorization or who remained here despite the expiration of their visas. It further explores how social workers can support immigrants who are involved in the immigration justice system.

This chapter examines the significance for vulnerable groups of social welfare policies and advocacy to meet basic human needs. It identifies key policies and programs established to meet needs of income, food, and shelter. The chapter encourages students to begin using research and statistical data to assess needs and adequacy of programs. It also identifies social work’s role and skills in addressing needs of vulnerable groups. The chapter focuses on the key role of social work professionals in establishing, maintaining, and improving programs needed to ensure a basic level of income for families with children (i.e., income security), access to adequate nutrition (i.e., food security), and access to adequate shelter (i.e., housing security). It also discusses the challenges faced by social workers who serve populations with the basic human needs, including offenders and victims of crime.

This chapter deals with interviewing techniques that have been empirically found to elicit the most detailed and accurate information when conducting a forensic interview. It describes three evidence-based best practices for forensic interviewing. The chapter also delineates the ways in which interviewer beliefs and expectations can bias the interview. It describes forensic interview as the first step in the investigation, when an allegation of child sexual abuse is referred to Child Protective Services. Although there are a number of forensic interviewing models, all consist of sequential phases or stages and include the following: rapport building, substantive phase, and closure. Forensic interviews should be video- or audio-recorded, so that a clear record of the interview is preserved. The chapter also discusses some of the main points in the NICHD protocol and the Michigan protocol for best practices.

This chapter describes how mental health and substance use interact with criminal justice involvement. It examines the common assessment and intervention strategies for co morbid mental health and substance abuse in forensic population and settings. The chapter gives a brief review of how substance use disorders co-occur with psychiatric disorders. The chapter describes prevalence of co-occurring disorders such as anxiety/depression, bipolar disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder in general. It then discusses prevalence of psychiatric disorders in the prison/jail systems. The chapter also describes medication-assisted therapies for opioid use disorders and, treatment and aftercare services. It explores two of the most common types of treatments for those in the CJS, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and 12-Step groups. The chapter further reviews two CBT programs, aggression replacement training and strategies for self-improvement and change.

This chapter discusses the history of forensic research atrocities. It promotes the use of National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics as a foundation for forensic research. The NASW Code of Ethics purports that social workers should promote and facilitate evaluation and research to contribute to the development of knowledge. This underscores both an ethical and a human rights obligation for the need for more prevention and intervention studies with incarcerated individuals. The chapter describes national and international responses to historic forensic research, and aims to build awareness of the need for new research to serve forensic populations and to increase familiarity with forensic research methodologies. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects identifies three categories of research in prison settings: convenience research, prison-oriented research, and treatment-oriented research.

This chapter articulates a basic understanding of human rights and how they relate to social work. It describes some of the changes that are needed in social work practice in the United States in order to adhere to human rights principles. The chapter then addresses the implication of human rights for social workers. It offers some background on the concept of human rights, with emphasis on the relationship between human rights and social work and human rights and the law. The chapter further discussed the implication of human rights for social work education and social work practice, with a focus on building community. It discusses obstacles to social work practice from a human rights perspective, and concludes with a discussion on how social work needs to change to have consistency between discourse and action.

This chapter focuses on the role that Adult Protective Services (APS) and related service systems play in protecting vulnerable older adults and adults with disabilities from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. It articulates policy issues connected to elder justice. The chapter also explores human rights issues related to elder abuse, aging, and disabilities, particularly how to balance rights to self-determination and safety when working with abused, neglected, and exploited older adults. APS operate within a continuum of services that challenge social workers in their efforts to respond effectively to elder abuse. In addition to knowledge of aging, disabilities, the dynamics of family violence and care giving, and community resources and skills in capacity assessment, working in multidisciplinary teams, advocacy, and systems navigation, social workers need commitment to values of self-determination and empowerment to guide their work in this system.

This chapter describes the importance and need for interdisciplinary collaboration in forensic settings. It discusses how the evidence-based principles of risk, need, and responsivity (RNR) model can guide interdisciplinary collaboration with justice-involved individuals. The chapter highlights a treatment program for high-risk justice-involved males demonstrating interdisciplinary collaboration and specifically the role of the forensic social worker. Interdisciplinary collaboration is an essential core skill in evidence-based forensic social work practice. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be multidimensional, interactional, and developmental, and the following strategies have been identified as most important in achieving a best practice: preplanning, commitment, communication, strong leadership, understanding the cultures of collaborating agencies, and structural supports and adequate resources for collaboration.

This chapter helps forensic social workers (FSWs) understand how to incorporate research into their practices. It clarifies the terms associated with evidence-based practice (EBP), and demonstrates three different approaches that FSWs can use in their practice settings. The chapter focuses on clinical interventions within forensic settings. It provides a brief summary and overview of some of the intervention models used in forensic settings with established empirical support, along with a discussion of their strengths and limitations. The chapter highlights commonly used forensic intervention models such as risk-needs-responsivity models, motivational interviewing, trauma-informed care, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, schema-focused therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy. It concludes with a case example to illustrate how to use EBP in order to ensure that FSWs are providing interventions that are the best combination of art and science.

This chapter aims to enhance understanding of the justice-involved veteran population including the extent of involvement, risk, and protective factors associated with offending, and the impact of criminal justice involvement on the veteran and the veteran’s family system. It discusses the targeted programs and services for justice-involved veterans, how social workers assist this population, and the specific skill set required for effective intervention. The chapter also deals with health and mental health of incarcerated veterans, causes and consequences of arrest among veterans, and the use of trauma-informed care models and other interventions designed to address trauma that are critical for addressing the complex needs of justice-involved veterans. It further discusses jail-diversion programs, and jail and prison-based programs and services.

This chapter describes how forensic social workers can use the knowledge and skills of intervention development to design or evaluate existing interventions with forensic populations or settings, and about funding for their cause. It articulates the language of program and proposal development to prepare forensic social workers to be the creators of programs needed for forensic populations. The chapter enables preparing forensic social workers to possess basic competencies for understanding the language and practice of program development and evaluation of forensic social work interventions. The chapter provides an overview of the different parts of the logic model and how it can be linked to program development and evaluation. It provides questions related to the common types of evaluation, which include a needs assessment and process, outcome, or efficiency evaluations. The chapter also reviews forensic intervention development using a human rights and social justice systems approach.

Working with justice-involved youth and employment-related services requires a wide range of social work and systems knowledge, skills, and expertise. This chapter enhances understanding of the role employment services play in forensic social work with youth. It presents relevant findings from recent research on employment services for justice-involved youth and their effects on recidivism. The chapter discusses the targeted programs and services for justice-involved youth, providing case examples and discussion of how social workers assist this population, and the skills required for effective intervention. It also provides a basic understanding for how employment services fit within the system. The chapter aims to connect research with real-life examples. It outlines two of the ways inequality and oppression impact juvenile justice and employment. The chapter also discusses two evidence-based employment intervention strategies that are available to justice-involved youth in New York.

This chapter discusses the complexity of the role of the school social worker. It describes how to respond collaboratively and effectively to the variety of issues presented within public schools. The chapter provides a brief history of social work services in schools. It addresses recent demographics and trends and the scope of the problems in this specialty area. Specific legal and ethical issues of concern in the practice of school social work, and issues of assessment, prevention, and intervention are also discussed. The chapter describes the types of services provided through social work in schools, ranging from traditional child study team work to reentry services for students returning from correctional and/or treatment facilities. The chapter further examines the origin and development of school social work services in the United States.

This chapter focuses on a snapshot of current immigration patterns and a profile of the US immigrant population. It discusses the impetus behind immigration. Immigration is not only a current national issue. Given the great diversity and myriad needs of the growing immigrant population, it is essential that social workers understand the legal and political as well as psychological and social issues surrounding immigration. Chain migration is a process of movement from immigrants’ homelands that builds on networks of familiar social relationships to construct neighborhoods or communities within the places of habitation, which reflect the cultural norms and societal expectations of the homelands. Social workers who work with immigrants need to understand the personal immigration history of their clients in order to best help them. At many schools of social work, students have learned to view immigrant issues through a human rights lens.

This chapter explores positive psychology’s attempt to identify significant human virtues. Early in the positive psychology movement it was recognized that in order to advance research on human excellence, there was a need to develop a classification system complete with measurable strengths that would be meaningful to the good life. The chapter describes and defines the six core virtues, and also explores some of the more specific human strengths thought to be clustered with each virtue. The author believe that the most significant achievement of the Values in Action (VIA) project was to identify virtues and strengths that appear to transcend time and culture. Finally the chapter emphasizes and recommends two other attempts to identify transcendent virtues that come from outside of psychology. To emphasize one virtue without the others is bound to result in an imbalanced life.

This chapter deals with major health care issues that social workers need to be familiar with in working with immigrants. It provides an introduction to the many complex, interconnected issues that social workers and their immigrant clients face as they navigate the US health care system in an attempt to obtain quality health care. The chapter focuses on some of the implications for social work practice that arise from public health issues and provides discussion questions and several case studies. Social workers can and should be vigilant in advocating for increased translator and interpreter services at their agency or medical setting, not just for the convenience of the patient, but for his or her safety and improved health. Social workers in the field of health care must actively address the issues of language, culture, and income/health insurance status as well as legal status when working with immigrants.

This chapter explores the circumstances of happiness. It evaluates whether things such as gender, age, income, work, and leisure have an impact on happiness. It shows that the circumstances of our gender, where we live, our age, and our income don’t contribute much to our subjective well-being (SWB). The first circumstance is whether one’s gender has any impact on one’s happiness. The chapter examines whether geography is related to happiness. It looks at the relationship between income and happiness, there is one important interpretation to consider: It is possible that happiness actually creates more income. The natural interpretation of the positive relationship between wealth and well-being is to assume that prosperity produces SWB, but it is important to consider the reverse direction of causation. The chapter focuses on the circumstances of work that predict job satisfaction but there are factors within the person that are at least as important.

Relationships are important to our happiness but, as it turns out, things are not quite as straightforward as this proposition would seem to imply. The first important observation that we can make of this association is that the perception of social support appears to be more significant to happiness than objective indicators of social support. Objective indicators of social support such as number of friends and frequency of social activity show small and sometimes nonsignificant relationships with happiness. One possibility is that the correlation between satisfaction with one’s relationships and satisfaction with life is simply a product of method invariance. The chapter focuses on how different types of relationships affect happiness. But this approach has a tendency to ignore the common relationship dynamics that might impact happiness across relationships. It also focuses on three dynamics of happy relationships: capitalization, gratitude, and forgiveness.

This chapter explores the connection between cognition and happiness and describes the cognitive characteristics of happy people. It examines each of three stages of cognition such as attention, interpretation, and memory in turn, and discusses how they relate to happiness. It follows this discussion with research on affective forecasting, and how inaccurately forecasting our emotional future might inhibit our happiness. Research also suggests that happiness might help us get out of the shackles of self-preoccupation so that we can see beyond ourselves. Moreover, the relationship between negative emotion and self-preoccupation appears to be reciprocal: When we are in a negative mood we tend to be more self-preoccupied; but when we are focused on yourself this tends to promote negative moods. Finally, the chapter explores how affective forecasting errors can impact our happiness.

Stroke is the fifth major cause of death in the United States. Eighty seven percent of strokes are ischemic and thirteen percent are hemorrhagic. The incidence of cerebral edema in ischemic stroke is reported to be about 10% to 15% in large retrospective case studies. Cerebral edema in ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke remains a significant complication/sequel of the underlying disease and prompt diagnosis and management remains of utmost importance. Time tested medical management has not changed significantly over the past two decades. However, the use of minimally invasive surgery could change the paradigm for the surgical management for intracerebral hemorrhage. The use of hemicraniectomy for malignant middle cerebral artery infarcts complicated by life-threatening edema remains the best treatment in selected patients. More research is needed to explore the role of potential molecular targets for the management of cerebral edema in patients after acute stroke.

This chapter explores whether it is possible to improve the happiness. If boosting people’s happiness is achievable, this begs the question of how: how can people change their happiness. The chapter explains some of the most effective techniques found by psychological science to increase happiness. But before that it examines successful treatments for happiness. Religious traditions from both the East and the West have emphasized meditation and contemplation as paths to spiritual well-being. One meditation practice has shown great promise, however, for enhancing happiness: Loving-kindness meditation. Happy people deal with the unpleasant circumstances in their lives in a healthy way, and one effective way to deal with the bad stuff in people’s life appears to be grateful reappraisal. The chapter considers comprehensive treatment packages, also referred to as “shotgun” treatments, designed to improve one’s happiness.

This chapter helps the reader to learn happiness matters. Happiness is not simply a nice consequence of a successful life. Indeed, happiness itself is consequential. Research has shown that there are a number of beneficial by-products to experiencing positive emotions frequently: better relationships, better health, and better occupational success. Lyubomirsky’s theory highlights the importance of the intentionality of positive activities and this brings up an important point about happy people’s pursuits. As positive psychology and the study of happiness come more and more into the public eye, the author increasingly see the need for science to be at the heart of positive psychology. The positive psychology movement has identified six primary virtues that are essential to the good life: wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Although these virtues vary somewhat in their relationships to subjective well-being (SWB), they all may be seen as critical to the life well lived.

This chapter shows that how positive psychology is in fact important to psychology as a whole. It attempts to explain the foundations of positive psychology. It looks at basic conceptions of happiness and subjective well-being (SWB) including all the debates therein, it explores the history of happiness, it debates the criticisms of positive psychology, it examines important theories of SWB and positive emotion, and finally it gives a taste of research in positive psychology. The chapter demonstrates the importance of the study of happiness and SWB. Moreover, as Fredrickson’s theory has shown, positive emotions are crucial, in that they broaden the authors’ momentary thought/action readiness and build essential personal resources for the future. Happiness and joy are consequential, as Helen Keller affirmed, “Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow”.

Cardiac complications following ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke occur frequently. The time frame for these complications includes the days following the event. In addition, patients who suffer from stroke also have an increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in the months and years following stroke. Complications include myocardial infarction and cardiac arrhythmias. This chapter discusses the frequency of these events, their diagnosis, and potential prevention. Potential mechanisms underlying myocardial injury and electrical abnormalities detected on ECG include hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis alteration, alterations in immune system function, and gut microbiome dysbiosis. Prevention of arrhythmias after stroke has not been studied to the same extent as arrhythmias after myocardial infarction. Identification of arrhythmias immediately following stroke is accomplished by monitoring patients on telemetry. Future studies are needed to identify early interventions that may reduce the likelihood of these events.

Each year, the United States (US) Department of Homeland Security removes hundreds of thousands of people from the US. Increasingly, the federal agency tasked with removing noncitizens has prioritized removal of those who have had contact with the criminal justice system. Those who are not citizens of the US may face additional consequences related to their immigration status, such as ineligibility to adjust their status to that of lawful permanent residents, inability to travel abroad, ineligibility for US. citizenship, mandatory detention in an immigration facility, or removal. The three primary sections of immigration law affecting noncitizens charged with crimes are grounds of inadmissibility, grounds of deportability and good moral character. Further complicating matters for noncitizens, immigration consequences may be triggered absent a final disposition of guilt in a criminal court. Civil practitioners are invaluable advocates to immigrants and refugees who encounter the criminal justice system.

This chapter investigates the genetic makeup of happy people, and draws some conclusions about biological contributions to happiness. It discusses the behavioral characteristics of those who are happy. The chapter delves into an important area of research in positive psychology: looking at the personality traits that predict happiness. It shows that happy people are active in their work and leisure life, and extends this to a more general conclusion: Happy people tend to be active people. Contrary to the stereotype of happiness producing “contented cows”, happy people appear to be actively engaged in life. Religious and spiritual people tend to be happier than those who are not. A healthy humility may have an important role to play in our happiness. Humility helps us accept who we really are, so we can get past ourselves to focus on others and the beauty all around us.

The treatment for ischemic stroke rests upon early revascularization of occluded arteries to restore blood flow and oxygen to ischemic but salvageable cerebral tissue and prevent impending neuronal cell death. Cerebral ischemic reperfusion injury (CIRI) is the biochemical cascade that occurs as a result of recanalizing an occluded artery, causing further tissue damage that parallels and antagonizes the benefits of restoring blood flow to the ischemic tissue. CIRI can worsen brain ischemia, cause hemorrhagic transformation, blood–brain barrier (BBB) disruption with subsequent cerebral edema, and is associated with worse outcomes. Clinical management of CIRI continues to hinge on prevention, early recognition, blood pressure reduction, and optimal glucose management. As recanalization becomes more common, understanding what happens to the parenchyma, cerebrospinal fluid, microglia, BBB, and vasculature after mechanical thrombectomy and pharmacologic clot lysis is vital. CIRI will become more common and mitigating its response will become a top priority.

Any pathological process can have complications, from common cold to cancer. As with any acute illness, patients with acute stroke are at high risk of complications. Complications in the setting of acute stroke can be grouped into two broad categories: cerebral and extracerebral; or neurological and medical, respectively. Both types can place the patient at risk for death and influence functional outcomes after stroke. Complications not only measure the success and quality of care, but also underscore the necessity for proper surveillance and preventive therapy. In an acute stroke patient, physical deterioration is probably the most early and sensitive sign of disarray. Acute stroke care units are particularly proficient in recognizing and acting upon symptoms of clinical or neurological deterioration due to complications. Management of acute stroke complications depends upon the type and the number of coexisting complications.

Hemorrhagic transformation (HT) is a frequent, spontaneous, and natural consequence of infarction and reperfusion characterized by a range of ischemia-related blood extravasation. This chapter defines the physiopathology, epidemiology, classification, and risk factors involved in the incidence of HT of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) after thrombolytic therapy. It discusses different predictive tools using imaging, clinical scores, and blood markers currently under research that will be able to predict the risk of symptomatic intracerebral bleeding after thrombolytic therapy. The chapter establishes the recognition and management of symptomatic intracerebral bleeding after thrombolytic therapy. The best ways to prevent the development of symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage is adherence to treatment guidelines. However, additional validation studies are needed to confirm the utility of these methods before they should be used in clinical practice.

Creativity and intelligence, like bacon and eggs, certainly seem like they should go together. But exactly how they do, or whether intelligence is part of creativity or creativity is part of intelligence, is still debated. At one point in time, a ‘threshold’ theory was popular, which argued that creativity and intelligence are positively related up until an IQ of approximately 120. Some studies have found that although creativity does predict GPA, other variables do it better or more directly, such as cognitive style, mental speed and short-term memory, or reasoning ability. An additional way of considering how creativity relates to intellectual abilities is to consider how creativity is connected to learning disabilities (LD). Another learning disability with a relationship to creativity is Williams syndrome. Healey and Rucklidge found that although 40” of a creative group showed symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), none met the level for actual diagnosis.

Throughout history, creators have used their skills in ways that have led to tremendous negative impact. Clark and James describe ’negative creativity’ as something that ends with a bad outcome even without a bad intention. If negative creativity is someone taking office supplies without wanting to hurt the company, then malevolent creativity is someone stealing essential company secrets to sell to its competitors with the specific desire to do harm. Malevolent creativity can be seen in terrorism and criminal behavior. Creativity is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. The flip side of the coin is that there are arrays of studies that show the healing powers of expressive forms of creativity. Indeed, if there is a genuine connection between creative genius and mental illness, it could easily be the creativity in their lives that kept some of the geniuses afloat and as healthy as possible.

This chapter addresses how creativity operates on individual and social/environmental levels, and the effects and outcomes of the creative mind. Within creativity, however, there are four P’s, person, process, product, press or place, that are used to help shape how we conceptualize this broad concept. Another way of conceptualizing how to approach creativity is the idea of C’s. A core distinction is made between little-c and Big-C. Big-C is the kind of creativity that will last for generations; it may be remembered, used, or enjoyed a hundred years. In contrast, little-c is everyday creativity. Beghetto and Kaufman proposed mini-c and Pro-c. In mini-c, the initial spark of creativity does not have to be held up to the same standards that we use for typical everyday creativity. An interesting aside is that an implication of the model is that a Pro-c creator should be able to make money with his/her creativity.

One way of thinking about the question of creativity and domains is to ponder the lack of renaissance men and women—people who are truly creative in multiple arenas. It is important to note that both a domain-general and domain-specific point of view would allow for polymaths—a domain-generalist would say that these polymaths are using the same creative processes to paint and sculpt and be an accountant, whereas a domain-specificist would argue that they use different processes. Within creativity research, many studies have categorized creative domains. One key work is that of Carson, Peterson, and Higgins, who devised the creativity achievement questionnaire (CAQ) to assess 10 domains. They broke the domains down into two larger factors: the Arts and Science. A recent study by S. B. Kaufman did find cognitive differences by domain; general cognitive ability was a stronger predictor of creative achievement in the sciences than in the arts.

This chapter focuses on a key issue, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and their relationship to creativity. Learning goals are associated with intrinsic motivation. Performance goals are associated with extrinsic motivation. One way to think about the link between intrinsic motivation and creativity is in Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of Flow, or optimal experience. Flow represents the sensations and feelings that come when someone is actively engaged in an intense, favorite pursuit. Controlling evaluation emphasizes the specific task performance, triggering extrinsic motivation. Informational evaluation is more concerned with feedback and the chance to learn, and thus increases intrinsic motivation. It is found that informational evaluation led to more creative ideas than did controlling evaluation. The two self-oriented motivations are in essence intrinsic and extrinsic; growth is the personal enjoyment of the creative process, and gain is being driven by traditional rewards.

Most creativity researchers consistently focus on two key determinants. First, creativity must represent something different, new, or innovative. It is not enough to just be different-creativity must also be appropriate to the task at hand. Kharkhurin’s Four-Criterion Construct of Creativity attempts to integrate both Western and Eastern conceptions of creativity. In addition to the basic two constructs, novelty and utility, Kharkhurin proposes the more Eastern-related ideas of aesthetics and authenticity as being part of the creativity equation. The word innovation is sometimes used interchangeably with creativity, but usually conveys a greater emphasis on application and is more associated with the worlds of business, management, engineering, and industrial/organizational psychology. One distinction between creativity and innovation that has been proposed is that creativity is thinking of new ideas and deciding on which ones are best, whereas innovation also entails implementing these ideas.

Psychologists need to be alert to the phenomenon of avoiding discussing sexuality with older adult patients because they embrace the idea that older adults are asexual, or because they lack the knowledge of older adult sexuality. Heterosexual women who remarry in later life report higher levels of sexual activity that transition to higher levels of emotional intimacy as compared to prior married life when they were younger. Men in general tend to maintain sexual interest and sexual activity throughout their adult developmental stages, from 35 years of age to the old-old adult developmental stage. Sexual interest remains high throughout these developmental stages, but sexual activity declines in most men as they age. Approximately 16.5" of sexually active older adults have a diagnosis of HIV infection. HIV-infected older adults are heterosexual older adult men and older adult women, gay males, lesbians, and transgendered older adults.

Contemporary psychotherapy addresses behavioral issues of an older adult by focusing on the degree to which an older adult is able to cope positively with the environmental stressors converging on him or her. An environmental geropsychologist focuses on the environment component of Lewin’s equation and develops interventions to change older adults’ interpersonal and intrapersonal experiences with psychosocial stressors with interventions aimed at the environment. The theory of affordances states that the perceptions that older adults have of their physical environments have functional significance for older adults, and shape older adults’ behaviors. The tri-dimensional intervention model states that there is a comprehensive interaction among the cognitive, conative, and affective components in an older adult’s environment. All three components are the targets for intervention by an environmental geropsychologist. The conative component is the aspect of the brain that acts on one’s thoughts and feelings.