This chapter reviews prevention, including genetic counseling. It discusses genetic testing for diagnosis as opposed to screening and the treatment for genetic disease. Methods of prevention begin with education of the public and health care professionals and identification of those at risk. Genetic counseling is the process of helping people understand and adapt to the medical, psychological, and familial implications of genetic contributions to disease. The malignant cells often exhibit aneuploidy as well as translocations that are found only within the tumor cells. Genetic errors that arise from specific cell lines are somatic mutations. It is suggested that there is a thorough collection of family, genetic, and medical history for children entering the adoption process. Nurses may play a variety of roles in genetic counseling that reflect their preparation, area of practice, primary functions, and setting. The chapter explains the incidence of chromosome abnormalities.

The initial recognition of the need for a genetics referral may arise when a nurse suspects a genetic contribution to disease because of personal or family medical history and/or findings from a physical assessment. Family history is a valuable and cost-effective tool that is often underutilized in clinical practice. Many common genetic conditions result from complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors. It is critical to collect information about potential environmental exposures to help inform a patient’s risk assessment. Health care professionals should become familiar about toxic environmental agents that are common in their specific geographic location. A growing number of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs have labeling that includes pharmacogenomic information, which can be used to optimize drug dosage and prevent adverse and life-threatening drug reactions in a patient or family member.

Nurses working in the field of obstetrics must have a greater depth and breadth of genetic knowledge over any other subspecialty. In gestation, nurses should include education on the effects of teratogens, prenatal screening options, and prenatal diagnoses. After delivery, early recognition of genetic disorders is important for immediate initiation of potentially life-saving therapies. Preconception education is a critical component of health care for women of reproductive age. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that all women of childbearing age consume 0.4 mg of folic acid daily to prevent neural tube defects (NTDs). Counseling can still be useful in terms of optimum pregnancy management in a setting best able to cope with any anticipated problems. Complex and multifaceted maternal and fetal factors influence the consequences of drugs, radiation, and chemical and infectious agents to the developing fetus.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes two injury types: primary and secondary. In infants and young children, nonaccidental TBI is an important etiology of brain injury and is commonly a repetitive insult. TBI is by far the most common cause of acquired brain injury (ABI) in children and is the most common cause of death in cases of childhood injury. In 2009, the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) issued validated prediction rules to identify children at very low risk of clinically important TBI, which is defined as TBI requiring neurosurgical intervention or leading to death. The range of outcomes in pediatric TBI is very broad, from full recovery to severe physical and/or intellectual disabilities. Children and adolescents who have suffered a TBI are at increased risk of social dysfunction. Studies show that these patients can have poor self-esteem, loneliness, maladjustment, reduced emotional control, and aggressive or antisocial behavior.

This chapter includes information related to the clinical evaluation of a concussion that a child might receive in a medical setting. It discusses guidelines for appropriate use of smartphone concussion evaluation apps. This chapter examines a brief section on the future of concussion assessment. The Acute Concussion Evaluation (ACE) can help the school concussion team obtain information regarding the injury, including the cause, severity, any amnesia, loss of consciousness (LOC), and any early signs. The computerized neurocognitive assessment typically measures player symptoms, verbal/visual memory, attention span, working memory, processing speed, response variability, nonverbal problem solving, and reaction time. Neurocognitive tests, sideline assessments, and smartphone apps can help district staff and parents determine the severity of a student’s symptoms. A neuropsychological assessment to assess cognitive functioning, memory, speed, and processing time may also be administered.

This chapter examines pre- and postconference expectations and activities, explores forms to be used by the professor and the students, suggests care plans and patient assignments, and describes sample concept maps and a math skills assessment. A student with no experience in health care may be shy or sheepish when it comes to hands-on care. It may be of benefit for the students to be paired in the first few weeks of clinical classes. The care plan forms can help guide the student through the nursing process. Medication forms will help the student learn about various medications. Nursing education has adopted the use of concepts maps to assist students in gathering patient information. Patient safety is the number one priority for all health care professionals. Dose calculations are a daily activity for nurses.

This chapter discusses basic review of the admission process, and describes an admission assessment exercise that allows students to assume the roles of both patient and nurse. It also describes the role of nurse in which the student learns to collect patient data and record data appropriately, and also explains the role of the electronic medication administration record (eMAR). Preconference begins with a review of the skills previously mastered: hand washing, obtaining vital signs, and performing those daily nursing activities such as taking assessments and collecting data on patients. The student is responsible for making copies of the nursing notes for the required clinical assignments. With the admission assessment exercise, the clinical instructor can discuss the correlation of the vital signs, medications, past medical history, and familial history. New designs in technology have facilitated new medication administration practices that will reduce the number of medication errors in health care facilities.

Multiple physical changes can impair the mental health of the aging individual. These changes include: acid-based imbalances, dehydration, electrolyte changes, hypothermia or hyperthermia, and hypothyroidism. This chapter reviews the most common mental health disorders affecting the elderly population and trends affecting care delivery. Moreover, chronic, unresolved pain has been associated with an increased risk of a mental health disorder such as depression, suicide, or anxiety. The aging individual may exhibit signs and symptoms of insomnia such as sleeping for short periods during the night, sleeping during times of normal social activities, arising early in the morning while others sleep, and experiencing daytime sleepiness. The chapter concludes by applying the nursing process from an interpersonal perspective to the care of an elderly patient with a mental health disorder.

This chapter provides new data and a critical look at the comparative assessment of different ethnic groups’ overall levels of savings given their different experiences in the labor market. It focuses on how employers differentially treat minorities to their disadvantage with a multiple regression analysis that identifies the independent negative impact of being a minority on retirement sponsorship and pension plan participation. Minorities have lesser access to employer-sponsored retirement plans because they are particularly affected by the substitution of defined benefit (DB) plan coverage for less secure and less comprehensive defined contribution (DC) plans. Social Security is an important source of retirement income for all Americans. Minorities are disproportionately employed in lower-paid industries and occupations, which have lower rates of retirement account coverage. Qualitative research and interdisciplinary collaborative studies of minority retirement behavior have emerged.

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 discusses the identification of individual differences in health behaviors and health status among minorities. Sickle cell disease (SCD), a genetic disorder, may serve as an optimal model for understanding issues of aging in minority populations. SCD is an important model of multifactorial conceptualization of genetic-based chronic disease among aging populations. Generally, molecular genetic methodologies are called to mind when people consider the role of genetic factors in health and disease. Behavioral genetic methods will be particularly useful if one begins studying minorities from the perspective that there is significant heterogeneity within populations of minorities. Conceptual and methodological discussions of heterogeneity within minority populations are particularly timely given the changing sociodemographic features of ethnic/racial populations related to health disparities. Socioeconomic status and education have been found to be important variables associated with the development of chronic illness.

Delirium, also known as acute confusional state, organic brain syndrome, brain failure, and encephalopathy, is a common occurrence among medical and surgical patients and causes extensive morbidity and mortality. This chapter provides an updated review of delirium, including pathophysiological correlates, clinical features, diagnostic considerations, and contemporary treatment options. The defining features of delirium include an acute change in mental status characterized by altered consciousness, cognition, and fluctuations. The chapter explores the risk factors for delirium. These can be divided into two categories: predisposing factors and precipitating factors. Imbalances in the synthesis, release, and degradation in gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate, acetylcholine, and the monoamines have also been hypothesized to have roles in delirium. GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) and medications such as benzodiazepines and propofol have known actions at GABA receptors and have been associated with delirium.

This chapter focuses on the following topics: demography, gender, age at diagnosis/onset of cardiovascular disease (CVD), Medicare usage, work and retirement, social support, social context and neighborhoods, ethnography of families, qualitative research, and social policy. These topics constitute some of the key areas that should be the focus of future research on the sociology of minority aging. The chapter provides a rich description of trends in the ethnic and racial composition of older cohorts to illustrate the dramatic changes that have taken place in the United States in the past century. The rising costs of health care and the increasing older minority population, additional reform will be needed to maintain the sus-tainability of the program. Additional work examining within-race group differences is key to understanding minority aging issues given the large amount of cultural diversity in the United States.

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 presents an illustration of the complexities involved in studying ethnic and racial influences on psychosocial processes and how they are intimately tied to physical outcomes in later life. It focuses on psychology as a discipline, minority aging research during the last several decades has revealed the need for multidisciplinary and intersectional conceptual and research approaches. The chapter also focuses on the age, gender, socioeconomic, cultural, and racial and ethnic graded influences on life course development that eventuate in unequal burdens of psychological and physical health morbidity and mortality for certain groups in late life. No section on psychology could be complete without a discussion of religion and spirituality among racial and ethnic minorities. Generational processes are clearly implicated in ideas about the cyclical nature of poverty and health behaviors that are intricately linked with environmental factors and social influence.

This chapter examines the Older Americans Act (OAA) through the prism of the coming nexus of aging and ethnic/racial diversity. It explains that the OAA can serve as a foundation for building a home- and community-based set of services for all older adults and persons with disabilities and for addressing aging in the 2lst century. The OAA is the primary federal program providing a host of services that enable older persons and their families to live in their homes and communities with a measure of dignity and independence. The OAA, Administration on Aging (AOA), and aging network today provide five major categories of services: access to social and legal services, nutrition, home- and community-based long-term social and supportive services, disease prevention and health promotion, and vulnerable elder rights protections. The OAA and the AOA remain secondary players in national agenda setting for an aging population.

This chapter focuses on informal caregiving among minority groups. It also focuses on context of caregiving and discuss the various specific challenges caregivers of minority older adults face. The chapter examines some of the specific caregiving interventions tailored for families of color and discuss the implications for practice, policy, and research. Medical advances and greater longevity point to healthier and longer lives for many, but both formal and informal caregiving remain a concern as individuals age and develop conditions that require care. Caregivers are often able to realize the positive aspects of caregiving when they are not struggling with financial or social support challenges. Despite the vast literature on caregiving in general, research pertaining to the needs and experiences of racial/ethnic minority older adults and their caregivers is limited, particularly for American Indians, Pacific Islanders, specific Asian American and Latino subgroups, and religious minorities groups such as Muslim Americans.

This chapter presents an integrative approach to the psychological study of minority populations and the reduction of health disparities through positive nonmaterial resources. It provides a brief introduction to positive psychology and to the concept of early life origins of disease, highlighting the value of integrating these seemingly disparate literatures as a lens for studying health and broader aging processes among minority populations. Minority status whether based on ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), citizenship, religion, or other factors is a robust determinant of health, well-being, and success across the life span and intergenerationally. Positive psychology is relevant to health and development particularly physiological and psychological adaptation to stress across the life span, and even across multiple generations among humans in general and among minority populations in particular. Health inequalities are the result of unique challenges to successful psychological and physiological adaptation faced by minority group members.

This chapter discusses current thinking in the field of social support and social relationships, and physical and mental health among older racial and ethnic minorities. Social relationships are an important predictor of health and psychological well-being across the life course. Many minority older adults will face the continued challenges of declining functional status due to physical and mental health conditions over the course of their lives. Most empirical studies on social support among older racial and ethnic minority adults explore the association between social support and both physical and mental health. The wealth of studies on social support among minority older adults has much to offer with respect to understanding the correlates of emotional support and patterns of assistance. The biological mechanisms explaining the link between social support and physical health outcomes have been largely unexplored among older racial and ethnic minority groups.

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.

This chapter examines disability identity as a unique area in which the clinician working with individuals with brain injuries must become culturally competent. It begins with an overview of the disability rights movement and its influence on disability identity as a construct. Legislative and regulatory scaffolding for societal responsiveness to and acceptance of individuals with disability exists, but it requires further refinement. Social agencies have been created to support the process of adaptation to disability culture and are attempting to foster development of disability identity through networking resources for employment and socialization. The chapter then discusses critical issues in cultural competence and how these intersect with ethical practice in working with individuals and families with neurorehabilitation needs. It concludes with suggestions regarding cultural competence that transcend individual diagnoses.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is the term applied to a clinical syndrome characterized by insidious progressive language impairment that is initially unaccompanied by other cognitive deficits. This chapter describes several variants of PPA and more than one etiology. It explains three main variants of PPA, namely, semantic Variant of PPA (svPPA), nonfluent/agrammatic variant of PPA (nfvPPA) and logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA), and also describes criteria for their diagnoses. The defining symptom of PPA is the presence of a language impairment for at least 2 years in the absence of any other significant cognitive problem. Assessment of other cognitive domains is challenging because many tests of memory, attention, executive functioning, and visual-spatial skills rely on language processes in some manner. There are no drug therapies proven to arrest progression of signs and symptoms of PPA due to frontotemporal lobar dementia (FTLD) or Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathologies.

This chapter examines racial and ethnic differences in disability in the United States with a focus on their patterns, trends, and determinants. Disability is responsible for massive social and economic costs to individuals, families, and health care systems. Racial and ethnic differences in health are one of the most widely studied topics in U.S. health disparities research. The risk of disability among older Asians is an understudied area, despite the growth of this population subgroup in recent years due to increased volume of immigration from Asia to the United States. There is an ongoing interest in measuring and understanding the patterns and causes of racial/ethnic differences in disability in the United States. Rising obesity may play an important role in the findings for Hispanic women and for the trend in disability for all race/ethnic groups.

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.

Dementia is an umbrella term for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), vascular dementia (VaD), and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Under that umbrella, FTD, also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), can be further categorized to define a group of neurodegenerative disorders resulting from a progressive deterioration of the cells in the anterior temporal and/or frontal lobes of the brain. More specifically, ventromedial-frontopolar cortex is identified with metabolic impairment in FTD. This chapter elaborates on the history, epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical features, treatment, and outcomes of FTD. The history and background section of each of the FTD categories highlights the evolution of the disease conceptualization. The FTD subtypes are conceptualized in three categories: neurobehavioral variant, motor variant, and language variant. The chapter illustrates the features of all three categories of FTD.

Neurorehabilitation has become more of a global phenomenon and is not necessarily limited to industrialized or Westernized societies. Culture often connotes concepts of race and ethnicity when discussed in the context of health care disparities. Socioeconomic and other demographic variables make up the majority of the balance on discussion regarding culture in health care. Multicultural neurorehabilitation must emphasis “multiple”, and do so in a dynamic manner. In other words, at any given time, multiple cultures operate in each interaction and in each therapy delivered in the neurorehabilitation setting. Recently, there has been increased interest and research into the newly developing field of cultural neuroscience. Several models are available to conceptualize the influence of culture in human functioning. The most persuasive model is one that mirrors a dynamic, ecological system.

This chapter examines the history of long-term services and supports (LTSS) programs to document their racially and ethnically disparate impact, and explain the current research on the access and quality of LTSS used by older adults in communities of color. LTSS are a set of health and social services delivered over a sustained period to people who have lost or never acquired some capacity for personal care. The high costs of LTSS have led a smaller number of low-income older adults to consume a large share of Medicaid expenditures. Cultural beliefs about family responsibility to care for older adults as well as attitudes toward the use of formal and/or public health and long-term care services can shape older adults’ use of LTSS. The coming sociodemographic shift of older minority adults calls attention to other structural and cultural issues that facilitate or inhibit the appropriate use of LTSS.

A growing body of research documents racial and ethnic disparities in physical and mental health among older Americans. This chapter discusses larger stress process literature and reviews research on discrimination as a source of stress that is an influential determinant of racial and ethnic differences in the health status of older Americans. It provides a brief overview of disparities in health among older Americans. The chapter discusses the biology of stress, elaborates on key elements of the general stress process framework, and highlights findings pertinent to the health of older minorities. It reviews the research on personally mediated discrimination and health that includes findings from both age-diverse samples and those specific to older adults. The chapter also reviews the literature on coping with discrimination and the contribution of institutionalized discrimination to health inequalities. Lacking are investigations on the joint impact of perceived discrimination and residential segregation.

The concept of Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) makes a lot of sense in that individuals are typically not “normal” one day and “demented” the next. In theory, especially for progressive neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the development of dementia may take months or years. The clinical syndrome of MCI due to AD can be identified via a neuropsychological evaluation or less-sensitive cognitive screening measures. Much of what we are learning about MCI, and therefore refining its diagnostic criteria, is coming from two large-scale studies of cognition and aging: Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL). According to the most recent research diagnostic criteria for MCI due to AD, evidence of beta-amyloid deposition, neuronal injury, and/or other biochemical changes needs to be seen to increase confidence of the etiology of MCI. Cholinesterase inhibitors remain the primary pharmacological treatment for AD.

This chapter provides new insights, direction, and applicability of qualitative research methods in social network analysis, with special emphasis on the minority elder population. It describes how specific qualitative approaches may be applied and contribute to increased understanding in social network analysis. The chapter provides a list of suggested future directions to address issues that are void in the literature on social networks and minority elders. The social networks of older adults provide them with the greatest amount of care and support. Any definition of social networks needs to be grounded in both microstructural and macro-structural perspectives. The social networks of minority elders are uniquely shaped by the cultural norms and values associated with the diverse racial and ethnic groups with which they identify. The conceptual guidance from the life course perspective can also inform understanding the structure and function of social networks among minority elders.

This chapter helps readers to understand the main characteristics of the three major types of eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating. It also examines each disorder from a neurobiological perspective, including genetic factors when known, neuroimaging results, the understanding of neurotransmitter dysregulation, cognitive performance, and various types of treatment. The chapter then presents the consideration of the unique challenges associated with comorbidity, societal pressure, and medical implications. Eating disorders are increasingly common, debilitating, and potentially life-threatening disorders that are clearly linked in their neurobiological basis. Mental health professionals should be aware of the signs and symptoms of eating disorders, as individuals might not disclose their eating habits as readily as their mood, anxiety level, or other symptoms. Treatment is complex, as no medication has been shown to be consistently effective, and each eating disorder will bring with it specific goals.

This chapter suggests that the dysexecutive syndrome associated with vascular dementia (VaD) is caused by impairment in separate but related cognitive concepts; that is, pathological inertia, mental bradyphrenia, disengagement, and temporal reordering. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cerebrovascular dementia was a well-established clinical syndrome. Multi-infarct dementia (MID) generally became associated with all types of vascular syndromes. Recent research suggests the presence of considerable overlap between the neuropathology underlying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and VaD. Patients diagnosed with VaD tend to produce hyperkinetic/interminable perseverations, suggesting an inability to appropriately terminate a motor response. Other aspects of the dysexecutive syndrome associated with VaD revolve around constructs related to interference inhibition, flexibility of response selection, and sustained attention. From the view point of diagnosis, the neuropathology of VaD often differentially impacts the frontal lobes, whereas the neuropathology associated with AD revolves more around circumscribed temporal lobe involvement.

The multicultural movement in counseling and psychology has begun to provide scholars and practitioners with contextually relevant, systems-based ecological approaches to counseling as alternatives to the traditional theoretical models of human behavior and intervention that are based on Western dominant culture. This chapter provides awareness of the complexity of multicultural issues among individuals with disabilities and discusses culturally sensitive strategies to work with people with disabilities (PWDs). It reviews legislative mandates related to diversity and multiculturalism in rehabilitation and addresses the relationship between disability and culture in the scope of rehabilitation practice. The chapter introduces multiculturalism and multicultural counseling models as a therapeutic framework and provides guidelines to help psychologists increase their cultural sensitivity. It also provides strategies to work with individuals with disabilities from minority backgrounds.

This chapter describes maneuvers to access the internal system of the patient as well as means to accelerate or decelerate the work in that process of accessing the self-system. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), ego state therapy, and somatic therapy fit together like hand and glove. An extended preparation phase is often necessary before trauma processing in complex traumatic stress presentations and attachment-related syndromes, particularly when dealing with the sequelae of chronic early trauma. Clinical practice suggests that the adjunctive use of body therapy and ego state interventions can be useful, during stabilization and later on in increasing the treatment response to EMDR. Traditional treatment of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dissociative disorders has usually included hypnoanalytic interventions, during which abreaction is considered an important part of treatment.

This chapter focuses on more integrated approach or process for developing a health intervention for ethnic minority groups that incorporates accepted principles of medicine and scientific methodology. The changing demographic has led to complex challenges in the U.S. health care system. The delivery of effective health care services hinges on health care professionals’ ability to recognize varied understandings of and approaches to health care across cultures. Health care providers may employ different strategies to increase participation of service users by bridging barriers to communication and understanding that stem from these racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences. In the context of health or health care improvement, little debate exists concerning the recognized need to help ethnic minority patients maintain and restore health. There are two general approaches for developing culturally appropriate health interventions. The first approach is from science to practice and the second approach is from practice to science.

This chapter discusses the history, organization, development, and the future of Medicare and applies Andersen’s Behavioral Model of Health Services Use to understand utilization among the elderly and conduct a systematic literature review. It analyzes racial/ethnic disparities in health care utilization among the elderly using Andersen’s model and discuss the implications of the current proposals for changes in Medicare for health care utilization especially among minority aging. Racial/ethnic differences in seniors’ use of medical care were sizable before the Medicare program. The focus on deficits and controlling the cost of government has in turn increased the focus on health care and entitlement programs like Medicare. Medicare is important to ensure access to health care for the elderly, particularly the poor and minorities. However, with the rising health care costs and changing demographics, it is clear that Medicare needs some type of reform to ensure its continuing viability.

This chapter provides selective review of research on religion and spirituality across three groups of racial and ethnic minority older adults African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino. It discusses major denomination and faith traditions, as well as information about types and patterns of participation and their sociodemographic correlates. The chapter examines informal social support provisions within faith communities and the types of assistance exchanged. It also examines associations between religion, spirituality and physical/mental health, and psychological well-being. Religion and spirituality, through a variety of psychosocial mechanisms and pathways are thought to have largely beneficial impacts on physical and mental hea.

Dementia pugilistica (DP) is a form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) that involves gross impairment of cognitive and motor functioning due to repetitive blows to the head from boxing. Rapidly increasing in popularity among fight fans and fighters is mixed martial arts (MMA). In the area of sport-related concussion, there are two other frequently used terms that are necessary to distinguish from DP and CTE: postconcussion syndrome (PCS) and second impact syndrome (SIS). The classical clinical signs and symptoms of DP include combinations of dysarthria, incoordination, gait disturbance, pyramidal and extrapyramidal dysfunction, and cognitive impairment. Some media reports about concussion and the potential link between repetitive concussions and long-term problems include eye-catching and emotionally provocative titles. This chapter has provided an overview of the many complex issues surrounding the effects of repeat concussive trauma, particularly in sports.

This chapter focuses on aging and health issues in all of America’s major minority populations including African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian Americans, as well as Native Americans. It addresses the issues of health inequality and health advantage/disadvantage. The chapter introduces relatively new areas of inquiry including long-term care, genetics, nutrition, health interventions, and health policy issues. In addition to possible genetic factors, the literature has emphasized the influence of poverty and socioeconomic status as well as stressors associated with minority group status. The system of long-term care services will need to be restructured to take into account issues affecting minority populations such as health care coverage, housing and income supports, as well as cultural issues as filial piety and trust. The field of minorities, aging, and health has been dominated by a health inequality perspective that has been illustrated by the application of cumulative disadvantage/cumulative inequality theory.

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 provides a brief historical overview to explain how neuroscience has evolved to what we know it as today. It focuses on the modern history of some of the most relevant aspects of neuroscience. The chapter examines specific, important clinical cases, significant neuroscience milestones, and important treatment modalities that have been implemented and that have led us to this point in our history. Modern neuroscientists have strongly influenced the collective understanding of brain-based functioning and have guided the field to where it stands today. The chapter discusses important ethical considerations in the neurosciences, as well as special areas of focus that generate an increased level of consideration, from the public and often from the media. There are thousands of individual cases that have contributed to neuroscientific understanding throughout history. Examination of behavior and follow-up analysis of brain tissue have helped neuroscientists understand brain-based functioning.

The brain plays a role in influencing the immune system, controlling our sleep, and developing our personality. This chapter provides a straightforward overview of our current knowledge and understanding of normal brain functioning. The nervous system is divided into the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system communicates with the central nervous system to allow for interaction with the environment. The somatic nervous system is responsible for responding to environmental stimuli by connecting the voluntary skeletal muscles with cells that are responsive to sensations, such as touch, vision, and hearing. It comprises afferent nerve cells that connect the eyes, ears, skin, and skeletal muscles to the central nervous system, allowing sensory information to be transmitted to the brain. Healthy brain functioning requires a multitude of stable neurochemicals, structural anatomy, communication among different brain regions in different hemispheres, and an overall healthy nervous system.

This chapter provides a selective review of research on social support among older African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American adults. It focuses on social support as a dependent variable in relation to different sources and types of aid provided to older African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American adults. The chapter highlights the findings in three specific areas: marriage and romantic relationships, extended family and non-kin as sources of informal social support, and black-white differences in informal social support. Informal social support networks are critical for individuals of all ages but especially for older adults who are dealing with difficult life circumstances. Older African Americans depend on informal social support networks of family and friends for assistance in emergency situations, as well as for help with various tasks of daily life. Elderly Asians often utilize kin and social support networks for a variety of reasons.

The Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) form a group of illnesses, characterized by a pathological form of the native prion protein, which results in a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative illness. They also are responsible for Gerstmann-Strâussler-Scheinker (GSS) syndrome and fatal familial insomnia (FFI), and they have been produced experimentally in several other animals. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is the most common TSE in humans. Human prion diseases have three etiologies: (a) sporadic, (b) genetic, and (c) acquired. Human prion diseases are important to understand because of their underlying pathophysiology, public health implications, and clinical features that often result in misdiagnosis. This chapter reviews the historical discovery of prion diseases and the formulation of the prion hypothesis. It explores prion hypothesis and the neuropathogenesis of prion diseases. The chapter ends with a description of the diagnosis, prognosis, and experimental treatment of human prion diseases.

This chapter describes spirituality, religiousness, and indigenous/folk belief systems in a multicultural context. The majority of religion and health research to date has primarily focused on persons with life-threatening diseases and conditions, as persons facing death may use religion to help them accept their condition, come to terms with unresolved life issues, and prepare for death. In contrast, rehabilitation patients who suffer acute injuries or chronic progressive disorders may live for decades after the onset of their condition and use religious and spiritual resources to help them cope with their disability, give new meaning to their lives based on their newly acquired disabilities, and help them to establish new goals. The chapter then explains the different ways rehabilitation psychologists can address religious and spiritual beliefs with individuals from different faith traditions.

This chapter focuses on the factors that intersect with race and ethnicity in shaping the experiences of families from racial and ethnic minority communities. It presents a conceptual framework using a Venn diagram that shows the intersection between aging and having a serious mental illness (SMI) or developmental disabilities (DD), limited services for these aging populations, and being a person of color with SMI or DD. People with DD and SMI are now experiencing increased life expectancy due to improved medical and technological advances. However, understanding the needs of aging adults with DD and SMI from diverse communities in the United States and their caregiving families is particularly challenging, because historically, there have been racial and ethnic disparities in the use of specialty health care services. Older adults with DD and SMI from racial minority groups are disadvantaged on multiple domains.

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.

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a clinical syndrome characterized by progressive dementia, cognitive fluctuations, visual hallucinations (VH), and parkinsonism. In 1961, Okazaki, Lipkin, and Aronson reported two patients with dementia and parkinsonism with cortical neuronal inclusions similar to the brain-stem Lewy bodies (LB) seen in Parkinson’s disease (PD). LBs are intra-cytoplasmic neuronal inclusions containing α-synuclein and ubiquitin. There are other associated pathological features in DLB such as spongiform change neuronal loss, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology includes amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). DLB and other entities such as PD and multiple system atrophy (MSA) have been grouped under the term synucleinopathies due to the existence of &#945-synuclein inclusions in the brain. The central feature required for a diagnosis of DLB is the presence of dementia: a progressive cognitive decline of sufficient magnitude to interfere with normal social or occupational function.

Rehabilitation providers who work with service members and veterans face significant cultural challenges that may impact the rehabilitation process. Part of this challenge is maintaining an awareness that any individual engaged in rehabilitation could have had prior military service that could impact rehabilitation care. This chapter provides an overview of military culture, including specific aspects of this culture that may affect the rehabilitation process, the various co-occurring disorders that are common in military/veteran populations, and resources and programs that are particularly useful when working with service members and veterans. Service members and veterans face unique challenges and stressors that are over and above some of the routine sources of stress that others face in the workplace. Stress can come from participating in combat, including exposure to traumatic events, risk of injury, and fears about deployment.

This chapter describes an overview of the procedures that a neuropsychologist may apply to a range of similar referrals in the area of civil capacities. It explores the presentation of a framework developed by the American Bar Association/American Psychological Association (ABA/APA) working group on capacity issues and provides more specific guidance regarding assessment tools. Decision making is a complex cognitive process that involves multiple brain regions and brain systems. Injuries to the prefrontal cortex are common in dementia and are often linked to changes in decision-making abilities. Key differences between clinical assessments and those for capacity evaluations include knowledge of relevant legal and ethical issues, a functional assessment, and an ability to present neuropsychological data to lay readers. Research on medical consent capacity and financial capacity highlight the importance of the assessment of calculation, executive function, and verbal memory as part of any test battery.