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.

This chapter presents an overview of the restorative justice movement in the twenty-first century. Restorative justice, on the other hand, offers a very different way of understanding and responding to crime. Instead of viewing the state as the primary victim of criminal acts and placing victims, offenders, and the community in passive roles, restorative justice recognizes crime as being directed against individual people. The values of restorative justice are also deeply rooted in the ancient principles of Judeo-Christian culture. A small and scattered group of community activists, justice system personnel, and a few scholars began to advocate, often independently of each other, for the implementation of restorative justice principles and a practice called victim-offender reconciliation (VORP) during the mid to late 1970s. Some proponents are hopeful that a restorative justice framework can be used to foster systemic change. Facilitation of restorative justice dialogues rests on the use of humanistic mediation.

This chapter describes some of the recent restorative justice innovations and research that substantiates their usefulness. It explores developments in the conceptualization of restorative justice based on emergence of new practices and reasons for the effectiveness of restorative justice as a movement and restorative dialogue as application. Chaos theory offers a better way to view the coincidental timeliness of the emergence of restorative justice as a deeper way of dealing with human conflict. The chapter reviews restorative justice practices that have opened up areas for future growth. Those practices include the use of restorative practices for student misconduct in institutions of higher education, the establishment of surrogate dialogue programs in prison settings between unrelated crime victims and offenders. They also include the creation of restorative justice initiatives for domestic violence and the development of methods for engagement between crime victims and members of defense teams who represent the accused offender.

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.

This chapter aims to give the behavioral health specialist (BHS) a basic understanding of pain, knowledge about how to effectively evaluate chronic pain, and a description of effective pain management techniques. Knowledge of the biological and psychological basis of pain is important to understanding the experience of chronic pain. A biopsychosocial assessment is the foundation for providing behavioral health treatment to the chronic pain patient. Chronic pain is less responsive to treatments commonly used for acute pain such as opioid analgesia and avoiding physical activity. A multidisciplinary team approach can substantially improve outcomes in chronic pain treatment. Whatever the format of service provision, utilizing multiple interventions such as physical therapy/exercise, emotional management, pacing, and medication, rather than a single modality can substantially improve outcomes for chronic pain. Providing psychoeducation about chronic pain can be an important strategy.

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.

The learning landscape continues to evolve as new technological tools enable teachers to deliver robust learning experiences. It is important to help teachers, administrators, and students know where to begin so that the transition to virtual learning is smooth, without educational loss. This chapter consists of two sections: current trends and issues in technology integration and technological pedagogical content knowledge. The first section briefly reviews the trends in instructional or educational technologies that are causing administrators, teachers, and students to reflect on and modify their thinking about learning and educational content delivery. The second section explores constructivism, the scientific underpinnings of nursing informatics, and ethics. Nurse educators must also address the ethical challenges brought about by this evolving learning landscape. After reading this chapter, one can understand current trends and issues, as well as the influence of nursing informatics and ways to approach new ethical dilemmas.

Healthcare is in a state of rapid change. Although practice environments have become more complex, educational delivery methods have remained stagnant. Innovative technologies provide opportunities to enhance nursing student learning and help nursing programs become more responsive to changes in the practice environment; however, obstacles may hinder successful implementation. With the increasing complexity of today’s health care environment, innovations in nursing curricula are necessary. This chapter explores some of the general challenges associated with the integration of innovative educational technologies, as well as some challenges unique to virtual simulation. It helps the reader to analyze the challenges of integrating educational technologies into nursing education associated with faculty, administrators, and students. It also helps the reader to examine practical and philosophical barriers related to technology integration and explores challenges unique to the adoption of virtual simulation.

Simulation has many advantages for nursing education, some of which include creating safe learning environments for students and reinforcing information learned in the classroom; it also has the advantage of being available in inclement weather as well as 24 hours a day for student access. Simulation in nursing is one of many methods used for teaching students. Teaching and learning in a virtual learning environment has many advantages for administrators, faculty, and students. One of the advantages includes the use of other disciplines to help create or participate in a virtual world learning experience. The virtual learning environment can be created to look similar to real communities, disaster areas, or homes, with avatars populating that environment. The advantage to using virtual reality, rather than a real-life experience, is that in real life, students could be immersed in an environment that could cause them harm.

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 the relevance of critical thinking and the related process and philosophy of evidence-based practice (EBP) to cognitive behavior therapy and suggests choices that lie ahead in integrating these areas. Critical thinking in the helping professions involves the careful appraisal of beliefs and actions to arrive at well-reasoned ones that maximize the likelihood of helping clients and avoiding harm. Critical-thinking values, skills and knowledge, and evidence-based practice are suggested as guides to making ethical, professional decisions. Sources such as the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations and other avenues for diffusion, together with helping practitioners and clients to acquire critical appraisal skills, will make it increasingly difficult to mislead people about “what we know”. Values, skills, and knowledge related to both critical thinking and EBP such as valuing honest brokering of knowledge, ignorance and uncertainty is and will be reflected in literature describing cognitive behavior methods to different degrees.

This chapter describes the Coping Skills Program, an innovative, school-based, universal curriculum for elementary-school aged children that is rooted in cognitive behavior theory. Rooted in cognitive behavior theory, the Coping Skills Program consists of carefully constructed metaphorical fables that are designed to teach children about their thinking; about the connections among their thoughts, feelings, and behavior; and about how to change what they are thinking, feeling, and doing when their behavior causes them problems. The chapter provides a thorough description of the Coping Skills Program and how it is implemented through a discussion of relevant research-based literature, and the theoretical underpinnings underlying this cognitive behavior approach with school-aged children. It also includes the results of preliminary testing of the Coping Skills Program. The research-based literature shows that cognitive behavior approaches are among the interventions commonly used by social workers to help young children in school settings.

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.

This chapter describes the current trends toward greater gender equality in couple relationships, what keeps old patterns of gendered power alive, and why equality is so important for successful relationships. Relationship vignettes like the ones just described are common. Sharing family and outside work more equitably is only part of the gender-equality story. Gender ideologies are replicated in the way men and women communicate with each other and influence the kind of emotional and relational symptoms men and women present in therapy. Stereotypic gender patterns and power differences between partners work against the shared worlds and egalitarian ideals that women and men increasingly seek. The concept of relationship equality rests on the ideology of equality articulated in philosophical, legal, psychological, and social standards present today in American and world cultures. The four dimensions of the relationship equality model are relative status, attention to the other, accommodation patterns, and well-being.

Adolescence is a particularly intense stage of development. During the time of life between prepubescence and young adulthood, youth are challenged by accelerated mental, emotional, cognitive, and physical changes. The ordinary biopsycho-social stressors of adolescence, in conjunction with extraordinary environmental conditions, harmful external stimuli, and the dearth of resources that are associated with lower class and ethnic social status, tend to disrupt homeostasis and thwart positive youth development (PYD). Poor, ethnic minority youth are at disproportionate risk of negative social outcomes. The majority of these disparities involve externalizing factors, such as teen pregnancy, academic underachievement, and antisocial peer-group affiliation, as well as violent victimization and offending. The basic mission of F.I.T. an acronym for Focus, Initiative, and Tenacity Camp is to empower disadvantaged, ethnic minority youth by means of fostering positive social and emotional development.

This chapter explores the relationship between gender and power. Gendered power in couple relationships arises from a social context that has given men power over women for centuries. When practitioners fail to take account of social context, however, they may run the risk of inadvertently pathologizing clients for legitimate responses to oppressive experiences. The term gender is a socially created concept that consists of expectations, characteristics, and behaviors that members of a culture consider appropriate for males or females. Consequently, an individual’s ideas about gender may feel deeply personal even though they are a product of social relationships and structures. Strong social forces work to keep social power structures, including gender inequality, in place. The continued presence of gendered power structures in economic, social, and political institutions still limits how far many couples can move toward equality. Today, ideals of equality compete with the institutional practices that maintain gender inequality.

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 examines the cultural and relational contexts of postpartum depression. Postpartum depression (PPD) is a debilitating, multidimensional mental health problem that affects 10"-15” of new mothers and has serious consequences for women, children, families, and marriages. Although women’s experience of postpartum depression has been the subject of considerable recent study, nearly all of this work has been interpreted within a medical or psychological frame. The chapter looks at a social constructionist lens to this body of research through a meta-data-analysis of recent qualitative studies of PPD. Though hormonal changes as a result of childbirth are related to depressive symptoms after childbirth, biological explanations alone cannot explain postpartum depression. A social constructionist approach to postpartum depression focuses on how the condition arises in the context of ongoing interpersonal and societal interaction. Climbing out of postpartum depression is an interpersonal experience that requires reconnection with others.

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.

Clinical social workers have an opportunity to position themselves at the forefront of historic, philosophical change in 21st-century medicine. As is so often true for social work, the opportunity is associated with need. For social workers, in their role as advocates and clinicians, this unmet need would seem to create an obligation. This chapter argues that, if choosing to accept the obligation, social workers can become catalysts for vitally needed change within the medical field. While studies using the most advanced medical technology show the impact of emotional suffering on physical disease, other studies using the same technology are demonstrating Cognitive behavior therapy’s (CBT) effectiveness in relieving not just emotional suffering but physical suffering among medically ill patients. While this chapter discusses the clinical benefits and techniques of CBT, it also acknowledges the likelihood that social work will have to campaign for its implementation in many medical settings.

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.

School social workers provide direct treatment for a multitude of problems that affect child and adolescent development and learning; these problems include mood disorders, attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), disruptive behavior disorders, and learning disorders, as well as child abuse and neglect, foster care, poverty, school drop out, substance abuse, and truancy, to name but a few. This chapter examines four constructs that are important when working with students. These constructs include: assessment and cognitive case conceptualization, the working alliance, self-regulated learning, and social problem solving. The chapter discusses the development of attainable and realistic goals is a critical component both of self-regulated learning and social problem solving. The chapter examines the problem of academic underachievement and four constructs that are critically important when working with children and adolescents in school settings. Academic underachievement is a serious problem affecting the lives of many children.

This chapter offers a review of selective literature on complex childhood trauma. It explains a case study demonstrating the use of meditative dialogue, a collaborative practice through which client and therapist are able to work together to develop empathy and compassion toward self and others during psychotherapy sessions. Thompson and Waltz described an inverse relationship between exposure to trauma and subsequent posttraumatic stress disorder symptom severity, and self-compassion. Recent neuroscience research has begun examining the effects of meditation practices on specific areas of the brain through neuroimaging studies. Clinical trials on the use of meditative dialogue in psychotherapy with survivors of complex childhood trauma, looking at the brains of the clients, and using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure changes, would help to demonstrate its efficacy and move it into the realm of evidence-based practices.

This chapter explains a set of guidelines to help mental health professionals and clients move away from the gender stereotypes that perpetuate inequality and illness. Identifying dominance requires conscious awareness and understanding of how gender mediates between mental health and relationship issues. An understanding of what limits equality is significantly increased when we examine how gendered power plays out in a particular relationship and consider how it intersects with other social positions such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. To contextualize emotion, the therapist draws on knowledge of societal and cultural patterns, such as gendered power structures and ideals for masculinity and femininity that touch all people’s lives in a particular society. Therapists who seek to support women and men equally take an active position that allows the non-neutral aspects of gendered lives to become visible.

One of the emerging approaches to explaining the normative spike in adolescent risk-taking, with delinquent/antisocial behavior as one expression, is based on recent advances in developmental neuroscience. Brain imaging studies have identified two main processes for which co-occurrence in the healthy adolescent brain directly impacts delinquent behavior. The first neuropsychosocial process implicated in heightened risk-taking involves sudden and dramatic changes in activity in the limbic system that coincides with puberty. The second process is associated with a developing ability to self-regulate behavior that continues to mature into the early 20s. Mindfulness meditation may be an effective method for reducing delinquency in juvenile justice involved youth because of its association with increases in self-regulation. The juvenile justice system was built on the argument that children and youth are less culpable for criminal and delinquent behavior than adults, making adolescence a mitigating circumstance in determining the state’s response to youth criminality.

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.

Most Behavioral Group Therapy (BGT) with children and adolescents include aspects of problem solving or social skills training or both. This chapter describes group workers can make an important contribution to children, families, and schools through preventive and remedial approaches. Social skills training grew out of the clinical observation and research that found a relationship between poor peer relationships and later psychological difficulties. The social skills program taught the following four skills: participation, cooperation, communication, and validation/support. The chapter focuses on the unique application of behavioral treatment using groups with an emphasis on assessment, principles of effective treatment, and guidelines for the practitioner. It also focuses on the use of the group in describing these aspects of BGT. The primary goal of using BGT with children is enhancing the socialization process of children, teaching social skills and problem solving, and promoting social competence.

This chapter describes the toxic stress often experienced by young homeless children and the effect that this type of stress can have on brain development, behavior, and lifelong health. Mental health and cognitive challenges are abundant among homeless families. Stress can affect maternal cardiovascular function and restrict blood supply to the placenta, potentially reducing fetal nutritional intake or oxygen supply, and lead to reduced fetal growth, increased risk of placental insufficiency, preeclampsia, and preterm delivery. Trauma in early childhood has clear neurological and developmental consequences, especially with regard to brain development and executive functioning. The chronic release of two stress hormones glucocorticoids and cortisol can have damaging effects on neurological functioning and lifelong health. Similarly, exposure to high levels of cortisol inhibit neurogenesis in the hippocampus, further impacting executive functioning and the ability to distinguish safety from danger, a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The case for major depression being an inflammatory condition has been advanced in the literature on neuroscience as well as in the literature on psychiatry. The correlational data suggested that depressed persons exhibit signs of systemic inflammation. One way to induce inflammation in the blood is to place a piece of the wall of a bacterium in the paw of an animal. There are other ways to induce systemic inflammation besides introducing fragments of a bacterial cell wall. Consistent with the view that behavioral depression involves inflammation, particular alleles for genes involved in the immune system have been identified as risk factors for depression. Mediterranean diets are associated with lower levels of inflammatory factors and lower levels of depression. Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) releases factors that will inhibit the release of inflammatory factors from white blood cells and from the liver.

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 provides insight into the dilemmas couples face when ideals of equality intersect with societal structures that maintain gendered power. It examines how Iranian couples construct gender and negotiate power within their culture, political structure, and Islamic values. Gender equality may express itself differently in a culture such as Iran that not only emphasizes collective goals and achievements, strong feelings of interdependence, and social harmony. Collectivism typically maintains social order through a gender hierarchy. Contemporary Iranian couples draw from diverse cultural legacies. Although some couples seemed to accept the traditional gender hierarchy and a few others appeared to manage relatively equally within it, other couples were quite aware of gendered-power issues and attempted to address them in their personal lives. Some couples describe trying to maintain an equal relationship in their personal lives despite men’s greater legal authority.

This chapter examines how 12 White, middle-class couples negotiated the issue of equality in their relationships during their first year of marriage. The social context both supports and inhibits the development of marital equality. To be included in the present study, complete transcripts with both the husband and wife present had to be available, both members of the couple had to express ideals of gender equality, and both had to express commitment to careers for wives as well as husbands. Most of the couples classified as creating a myth of equality, spoke as though their relationships were equal but described unequal relationship conditions. The other couples classified in the myth-of-equality category described similar contradictions between their ideals of gender equality and their behavior. Gender-equality issues raise political and ethical concerns for all of us who are family practitioners and teachers.

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 presents advances in the understanding of adolescent brain development that can inform and improve social work practice with youth leaving foster care. Foster care populations have a high rate of mental health disorders, and the association of types of child maltreatment with elevated risk for such disorders is well known; discussion of specific mental health problems and their treatment can be found elsewhere. Conventional mental health approaches have often targeted the innervated cortical or limbic neural systems, rather than the innervating source of the dysregulation. Psychotherapy, whether psychodynamic or cognitive, acts on and has measurable effects on the brain, its functions, and metabolism in specific brain areas. The ethical response is a sharing of the dilemma, and of information about the neurobiology of the client’s struggle, to enable the client to make as informed a decision as possible. In addition, neuroimaging techniques themselves lead to other ethical dilemmas.

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.

This chapter provides a summary of the social-cognitive neuroscience conceptualization of empathy. It discusses the application of neuroscience research to social work education, practice, and research. Empathy activates neural networks, groups of nerve cells that are connected by synaptic junctions. These three cognitive abilities, self-other awareness, perspective-taking, and emotion regulation, are critical components in the inductive process that results in the experience of affective empathy. Without these three cognitive abilities, people are more likely to be overwhelmed by the effects of the Shared representation System (SRS) and experience emotional contagion rather than affective empathy. Underlying the cognitive empathy appraisal process is the concept known as theory of mind (ToM). The affective empathy induction process relies heavily on a part of the brain known as the limbic system, which is near the center of the brain and evolved first in early mammals.

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.

This chapter focuses on mirror neurons, which were discovered in the 1990s in Italy. It describes the relevance of mirror neurons for social work practice and addresses some research implications of this topic. The chapter explains the functions of the mirror neuron system (MNS), which includes a discussion of imitation, action understanding, intention understanding, theory of mind (ToM), and empathy. It includes sections on the neuroscience contributions to attachment theory, the concept of the social brain, micro-practice and policy implications, and research implications. Mirror neurons are a specialized kind of brain cells that form a network located in the temporal, occipital, and parietal visual areas, and two additional brain regions that are mainly involved with motor actions. The auditory motor neurons found in the high vocal center (HVC) of swamp sparrows are considered to be very similar to the visual motor mirror neurons that have been discovered in primates.

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.

The clinical social worker typically interfaces with older adult clients and their families in a variety of settings, providing diverse services ranging from assessment to clinical treatment to referral. This chapter discusses the ways in which cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) techniques can be used by social workers across different milieu to assist elderly clients who may be suffering from depression. These settings include the client’s home, an inpatient or outpatient mental health facility, a hospital or medical setting, a long-term care facility, or a hospice setting. The chapter provides an overview of how cognitive behavior techniques can be integrated throughout the range of services social workers may provide to elderly clients. Clinical examples demonstrate the use of CBT in a variety of settings. For many older adult clients, issues related to the need for increasing dependence on family, friends, and paid caretakers may become the central focus of counseling.

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.

Community-based epidemiological studies find that when grouped together, anxiety disorders are the most common mental health conditions in the United States apart from substance use disorders. Anxiety disorders are also associated with substantial impairments in overall health and well-being, family functioning, social functioning, and vocational outcomes. This chapter includes a brief description of the anxiety disorders followed by a more detailed review of the cognitive behavior interventions indicated for these conditions. Social phobia is the most common anxiety disorder in the United States. Panic attacks are sudden surges of intense anxiety that reach their peak with 10 minutes and involve at least 4 of a list of 13 symptoms. Another somewhat less common anxiety disorder is obsessive compulsive disorder. The chapter discusses the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two anxiety management procedures, breathing retraining and deep muscle relaxation, have been subject to some level of empirical investigation for certain anxiety disorder.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book serves as a practice resource for social workers by making accessible the vast territory covered by the social, cognitive, and affective neurosciences over the past 20 years, helping the reader actively apply scientific findings to practice settings, populations, and cases. It helps readers gain a deeper understanding of how neuroscience should and can help the design, development, and expansion of therapeutic interventions, social programs, and policies for working with our most vulnerable populations. The book considers the neuroscientific implications for social work practice in child welfare and educational settings across system levels. It highlights the neuroscientific literature that can inform social work practice in health and mental health. The book concludes by discussing the neuroscientific implication of social work practice in the criminal justice system.

This chapter focuses on six maladaptive processes that underlie a wide range of emotional and behavioral problems commonly addressed by social work practitioners in the mental health field. First, it explicates how a focus on transdiagnostic processes differs from traditional views of psychopathology and accords more closely with neuroscientific evidence. Next, the chapter reviews current research in the fields of experimental psychopathology and neuroscience to detail the cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological features of these six core transdiagnostic processes: automaticity, attentional bias, memory bias, interpretation bias, suppression, and stress reactivity. Then it discusses how these processes may be assessed by clinical social workers in the field, and offer six case vignettes that depict how they manifest in human suffering and impaired psychosocial functioning. Finally, the chapter discusses mindfulness-based interventions as a means of targeting transdiagnostic processes in clinical practice.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with children addresses four main aims: to decrease behavior, to increase behavior, to remove anxiety, and to facilitate development. Each of these aims targets one of the four main groups of children referred to treatment. This chapter suggests a route for applying effective interventions in the day-to-day work of social workers who are involved in direct interventions with children and their families. An effective intervention is one that links developmental components with evidence-based practice to help enable clients to live with, accept, cope with, resolve, and overcome their distress and to improve their subjective well-being. CBT offers a promising approach to address such needs for treatment efficacy, on the condition that social workers adapt basic CBT to the specific needs of children and design the intervention holistically to foster change in children. Adolescent therapy covers rehabilitative activities and reduces the disability arising from an established disorder.

This chapter discusses the impact of trauma and its treatment through discussion of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its neurological components-especially those affecting memory, evidence-based therapies (EBTs) for the treatment of PTSD, and the implications for practice, policy, and research. Two primary predictors exist for a person developing PTSD. The first one is experiencing dissociation during the trauma. The second predictor is the person developing acute stress disorder. Specifically, neuroimaging shows how PTSD affects neurological functioning in the brain. The primary regions of the brain affected by PTSD are the medial prefrontal cortex, the left anterior cingulate cortex, the thalamus, the medial temporal and hippocampal region, and the amygdala. The different regions of the brain associated with memory encoding are: left prefrontal cortex, left temporal/fusiform, anterior cingulate, and hipocampal formation. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been used extensively to treat PTSD.

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.

Social work professionals are in key roles for providing effective education, treatment, training, and services for adult survivors. This chapter helps the social workers to equip with an evidence-based treatment framework to effectively enhance their work with this population of adult survivors. A community study of the long-term impact of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children concluded that a history of any form of abuse was associated with increased rates of psychopathology, sexual difficulties, decreased self-esteem, and interpersonal problems. There is well-established and increasing empirical evidence that cognitive and cognitive behavior therapies are effective for the treatment of disorders that are typical among adult survivors of sexual and physical abuse. The chapter presents some basic cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) strategies that social workers can use in whatever roles they play in working with the multidisordered adult survivor. There are three types of schema avoidance: cognitive, emotional and behavioral.

When Charles, a 46-year-old divorced male with an extensive psychiatric history of depression, substance abuse, and disordered eating resulting in a suicide attempt, erratic employment, and two failed marriages, began treatment with a clinical social worker trained in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), he was an angry, dysphoric individual beginning yet another cycle of destructive behavior. This chapter provides the reader with an overview of the standard DBT model as developed by Linehan. Dialectical behavior therapy, which engages vulnerable individuals early in its treatment cycle by acknowledging suffering and the intensity of the biosocial forces to be overcome and then attending to resulting symptoms, appears to be the model most congruent with and responsive to the cumulative scientific and theoretical research indicating the need for the development of self-regulatory abilities prior to discussions of traumatic material or deeply held schema.

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.

This chapter offers a brief and focused review of human development, with specific emphasis on cognition and emotion. It is essential that the reader distinguishes between cognitive development, cognitive psychology, and cognitive therapy. Both short-term and long-term memory improve, partly as a result of other cognitive developments such as learning strategies. Adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses, or guesses, about how to solve problems. The pattern of cognitive decline varies widely and the differences can be related to environmental factors, lifestyle factors, and heredity. Wisdom is a hypothesized cognitive characteristic of older adults that includes accumulated knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to practical problems of living. Cognitive style and format make the mysterious understandable for the individual. Equally, an understanding of an individual’s cognitive style and content help the clinician better understand the client and structure therapeutic experiences that have the greatest likelihood of success.

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.

Social workers are committed to the protection and empowerment of weak populations, of those people who are least powerful. Gradually, social work started to rely more on problem-solving methods, client-focused therapy, family theories, and, more recently, cognitive behavior theories, constructivist theories, and positive psychology developments. Clinical social work today operates in a variety of settings in the statutory, voluntary, and private sectors. Clinical social workers have always been interested in helping clients change effectively. The importance of empirical study, valid information, and intervention effectiveness has always been accentuated by the social work field’s central objectives of increasing accountability, maintaining exemplary ethics and norms, and establishing clear definitions and goals. Cognitive behavior theory emphasizes several components. First and foremost, human learning involves cognitive mediational processes. Social workers need to look for effective methods for change, and CBT methods are very promising in this respect.

Research on brain structure and function in white-collar criminals is a notable gap in the neurolaw literature, a gap that was addressed for the first time in one recent research report. Neuroscience is suggesting a link between brain abnormalities and some types of criminal behavior, but it is not yet clear exactly what those abnormalities are. Research on brain function and criminality focuses primarily on levels of hormones and neurotransmitters involved in neuronal communication. The findings regarding connections between the brain and adult criminal behavior, preliminary as they are, have implications for social work practice, including prevention of criminal behavior as well as intervention with offenders. The consistent finding that the likelihood of antisocial behavior is greatest when genetically based brain abnormalities encounter harsh environments has implications for social policy beyond the criminal justice system.

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.

Progress in neuroscience over the past several decades has led to a greater understanding of how the brain functions as a child or adult learns. This chapter focuses on disorders of the brain as applied to school settings. It explores learning disabilities (LD) as they pertain to practice in schools, as well as policy and research implications, and ethical and legal issues. Social workers must understand how the brain develops during various developmental ages and how this affects the learning of individuals. Research by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) have detected that the causes of LD are diverse and complex. New brain cells and neural networks continue to be produced for a year or so after the child is born. Electroencephalogram (EEG) can provide accurate timing information but provides little impression of where in the brain a particular activity is occurring.

Over the past 25 years there has been a growing recognition of the importance of working with families of persons with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and treatment-refractory depression. Family intervention can be provided by a wide range of professionals, including social workers, psychologists, nurses, psychiatrists, and counselors. This chapter provides an overview of two empirically supported family intervention models for major mental illness: behavioral family therapy (BFT) and multifamily groups (MFGs), both of which employ a combination of education and cognitive behavior techniques such as problem solving training. Some families have excellent communication skills and need only a brief review, as provided in the psychoeductional stage in the handout “Keys to Good Communication”. One of the main goals of BFT is to teach families a systematic method of solving their own problems.

This chapter discusses the treatment of comorbid chronic depression and personality disorders. It then discusses recent treatment advances in the cognitive behavior field relevant to this population. Recently, research has been done comparing schema therapy to Otto Kernberg’s latest model. Because of severe emotional distress, patient often experience suicidal and/or parasuicidal behaviors. The chapter explores the benefits of mode work with these particular difficulties while maintaining a therapeutic approach of connection and compassion; this alliance is crucial for the approach to be effective. It focuses on the five most common modes for those with chronic depression and personality disorders namely the abandoned/abused mode, the detached protector mode, the angry mode, the punitive mode and the healthy adult mode. The interventions described in schema mode therapy have cognitive, experiential, and behavioral components. Identification of the mode the patient is in when suicidal is essential when managing a crisis.

This chapter reviews the basic tenets of evidence-based practice (EBP), and discusses the potential applications of this model of practice and training for the field of clinical social work. It also presents some actual illustrations of its use. The chapter describes the major forms of clinical outcome studies: Anecdotal Case Reports, Single-System Designs With Weak Internal Validity, Quasi-Experimental Group Outcome Studies, Single, Randomized Controlled Trial, Multisite Randomized Controlled Trials and Metaanalyses that comprise the priority sources of information underpinning EBP. As the human services increasingly develop robust evidence regarding the effectiveness of various psychosocial treatments for various clinical disorders and life problems, it becomes increasingly incumbent upon individual practitioners to become proficient in, and to provide, as first choice treatments, these various forms of evidence-based practice. It is also increasingly evident that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and practice represents a strongly supported approach to social work education and practice.

Comparison studies have long found that same-sex partners maintain more equal relationships than their heterosexual counterparts, largely because they do not divide roles and responsibilities based on gender. Thus the study of samesex couples offers the ability to examine the processes that create and maintain equality when gender differences do not organize couple relationships. However, same-sex partners emphasize the satisfaction of intimacy needs, rather than moral obligation or societal expectations, as their reason for maintaining the relationship. This primary focus on the relationship itself, which is also becoming more common among heterosexual couples, tends to be associated with egalitarian ideals that are not necessarily easy to translate into practice. A distinguishing characteristic of couples who were classified as demonstrating attuned inequality is the indebtedness that the benefiting partner feels to the other. Attuned couples describe conscious strategies for managing their relationships.

Over the years, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) has been applied to a variety of client populations in a range of treatment settings and to the range of clinical problems. This chapter provides a general overview of the cognitive behavior history, model, and techniques and their application to clinical social work practice. It begins with a brief history and description, provides a basic conceptual framework for the approach, highlights the empirical base of the model, and then discusses the use of cognitive, behavior, and emotive/affective interventions. Cognitive behavior therapy is based on several principles namely cognitions affect behavior and emotion; certain experiences can evoke cognitions, explanation, and attributions about that situation; cognitions may be made aware, monitored, and altered; desired emotional and behavioral change can be achieved through cognitive change. CBT employs a number of distinct and unique therapeutic strategies in its practice.

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 presents a combined creative-corrective approach to working with the bereaved by emphasizing on cognitive assessment as a tool for social workers. It determines how best to facilitate an adaptive grief process with individuals who experience traumatic loss or complicated grief. Cognitive therapies (CT) and cognitive behavior therapies (CBTs) were found suitable with individuals suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and chronic or traumatic grief. Grief as a process of reorganizing one’s life and searching for a meaning following a loss through death is a painful experience. The Adversity Beliefs Consequences (ABC) model is based on a cognitive theoretical model to be applied in treatment of bereaved individuals. Like other cognitive models, rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) emphasizes the centrality of cognitive processes in understanding emotional disturbance, distinguishing between two sets of cognitions that people construct, rational and irrational ones and their related emotional and behavioral consequences that differ qualitatively.

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.

The current common combat era casualties have been posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), head injuries, hearing loss or impairment, and polytrauma. Common causes of military traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are blasts, falls, vehicular accidents, and penetrating fragments or bullets. Mild TBIs (mTBIs) usually are not detectable by lab tests or scans, which typically show normal results. The most common assessment instrument used for TBI is the Glasgow Coma Scale, which scores eye opening responses, motor responses, and verbal responses. Findings of effectiveness of psychosocial rehabilitation models for civilians with TBI and their families suggest that developing models of supported education and employment for injured veterans may be similarly helpful. Stigma, military stoicism, mTBI-related executive function compromise, and PTSD-related avoidance symptoms are barriers to care for neurological disorders, but disclosure of care is still perceived as possibly leading to loss of career or current employment, both among active duty and veterans.

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 discusses some of the critical issues surrounding culture and cognitive behavioral methods in order to better inform the advancement of culturally responsive social work practice. It focuses on one such treatment modality, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The chapter reviews relevant theoretical frameworks, existent empirical studies on CBT with diverse cultural groups, strengths and limitations of this modality across cultures, and suggestions for culturally responsive CBT practice, in order to better inform social work practice. While cognitive behavior therapy was developed with universal assumptions and without consideration to the diversity of the cultural contexts of consumers, it is grounded in theory that is likely to have “some universal basis across populations”. Several studies have described the use of cognitive behavior methods with gay and lesbian clients, particularly the use of rational emotive therapy, cognitive restructuring, and behavior experiments.

The treatment of the suicidal individual is perhaps the most weighty and difficult of any of the problems confronted by the clinical social worker. Some frequent comorbid pathology with suicidal behavior includes alcoholism, panic attacks, drug abuse, chronic schizophrenia, conduct disorder in children and adolescents, impulse control deficits, schizophrenia, and problem-solving deficits. Suicidal harmful behavior appears in all ages and characterizes clients in a large spectrum of life. There are four types of suicidal behavior namely rational suicider, psychotic suicider, hopeless suicider and impulsive or histrionic suicider. This chapter presents some primarily cognitive techniques for challenging suicidal automatic thoughts. Recent reports suggest that individuals suffering from alcohol or substance abuse are at an increased risk both for attempting, and for successfully completing, a suicidal act. The therapist must develop an armamentarium of cognitive techniques, and the skills to use these effectively in ways that are appropriate for each individual client.

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.

Attention to the dimensions of culture in restorative justice practices refers to differences among peoples and also to the broader contextual issues including societal prescriptions and the vicissitudes of power, privilege, and oppression that earmark relationships between peoples. The first dimension focuses on issues practitioners must be sensitive to when they are working with people who are different from themselves and different from each other. The second dimension centers on the nature of the crime or wrongdoing, specifically hate crimes and interethnic conflict. The third dimension concentrates on the emerging interest in restorative justice by non-Westernized cultures often located in diverse corners of the world. Paralanguage or other vocal cues, such as hesitations, inflections, silences, loudness of voice, and pace of speaking, also provide ample opportunity for misinterpretation across cultures. Asians and Native Americans will often use many more words to say the same thing as their White colleagues.

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.

This chapter covers the history and development of the practice, the issues involved in implementation of a victim-offender mediation (VOM) program. Experimentation in bringing together victims and offenders with a trained mediator to talk through what happened and to decide together what to do about what happened began in the early 1970s and 1980s. These efforts to humanize the restorative justice process through holding young offenders directly accountable to the victim of their crime were called Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORPs). A broad base of community support is necessary to counter the predictable initial skepticism that accompanies the start of a new program that allows the victim to meet with the person who victimized them. Securing public funds is one of the most difficult jobs. VOM programs report that 34” of case referrals are true diversion, occurring after an offender has been apprehended but prior to any formal finding of guilt.

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 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 examines the differences in facilitating a settlement-driven versus dialogue-driven mediation. It also examines the concept of introducing a humanistic approach to mediation and dialogue. The chapter presents the characteristics and qualities of an effective mediator in relation to the victim and offender, the facilitator’s responsibilities during preparation, the dialogue itself, and follow-up, including the significance of self-care. Nowhere else in the restorative justice process is the principle of respect and being non-judgmental more critical than in how the facilitator treats victim, offender, and other key stakeholders. Settlement-driven mediation is generally practiced within a conflict resolution context. In contrast, dialogue-driven mediation recognizes that most conflicts develop within a larger emotional and relational context characterized by powerful feelings of disrespect, betrayal, and abuse. Besides the governing values that define humanistic mediation, mediators must cultivate their emotional commitment to and connection with the highest principles they assign to the dialogue work.

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.