Creativity must represent something different, new, or innovative. It has to be different and also be appropriate to the task at hand. The first chapter of the book deals with the Four-Criterion Construct of Creativity, which attempts to integrate both Western and Eastern conceptions of creativity. This is followed by a chapter which addresses how creativity operates on individual and social/environmental levels, and the effects and outcomes of the creative mind. Chapter 3 discusses the structure of creativity. A key work on creative domains is that of Carson, Peterson, and Higgins, who devised the creativity achievement questionnaire (CAQ) to assess 10 domains. The fourth chapter discusses measures of creativity and divergent thinking tests, Torrance Tests, Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPOC) and Finke Creative Invention Task. Some popular personality measures use different theories, such as Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire, which looks at extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism. Chapter 6 focuses on a key issue, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and their relationship to creativity. While the seventh chapter deals with the relationship between creativity and intelligence, the eighth chapter describes three ’classic’ studies of creativity and mental illness which focus on the connection between bipolar disorder and creativity, usage of structured interviews and utilization of historiometric technique. One school admissions area that already uses creativity is gifted admissions—which students are chosen to enter gifted classes, programs, or after-school activities. The book also talks about creative perceptions and dwells upon the question whether creativity is good or bad.

Grief counseling refers to the interventions counselors make with people recent to a death loss to help facilitate them with the various tasks of mourning. These are people with no apparent bereavement complications. Grief therapy, on the other hand, refers to those techniques and interventions that a professional makes with persons experiencing one of the complications to the mourning process that keeps grief from progressing to an adequate adaptation for the mourner. New information is presented throughout the book and previous information is updated when possible. The world has changed since 1982; there are more traumatic events, drills for school shootings, and faraway events that may cause a child’s current trauma. There is also the emergence of social media and online resources, all easily accessible by smart phones at any time. Bereavement research and services have tried to keep up with these changes. The book presents current information for mental health professionals to be most effective in their interventions with bereaved children, adults, and families. The book is divided into ten chapters. Chapter one discusses attachment, loss, and the experience of grief. The next two chapters delve on mourning process and mediators of mourning. Chapter four describes grief counseling. Chapter five explores abnormal grief reactions. Chapter six discusses grief therapy. Chapter seven deals with grieving for special types of losses including suicide, violent deaths, sudden infant death syndrome, miscarriages, stillbirths and abortion. Chapter eight discusses how family dynamics can hinder adequate grieving. Chapter nine explores the counselor’s own grief. The concluding chapter presents training for grief counseling.

The therapeutic community (TC) for addictions descends from historical prototypes found in all forms of communal healing. A hybrid, spawned from the union of self-help and public support, the TC is an experiment in progress, reconfiguring the vital healing and teaching ingredients of self-help communities into a systematic methodology for transforming lives. Part I of this book outlines the current issues in the evolution of the TC that compel the need for a comprehensive formulation of its perspective and approach. It traces the essential elements of the TC and organizes these into the social and psychological framework, detailed throughout the volume as theory, model, and method. Part II discusses the TC treatment approach, which is grounded in an explicit perspective that consists of four interrelated views: the drug use disorder, the person, recovery, and right living. The view of right living emphasizes explicit beliefs and values essential to recovery. Part III details how the physical, social organizational, and work components foster a culture of therapeutic change. It also outlines how the program stages convey the process of change in terms of individual movement within the organizational structure and planned activities of the model. Part IV talks about community enhancement activities, therapeutic-educational activities, privileges and sanctions, and surveillance. The groups that are TC-oriented, such as encounters, probes, and marathons, retain distinctive self-help elements of the TC approach. Part V depicts how individuals change through their interaction with the community, provides an integrative social and psychological framework of the TC treatment process, and outlines how the basic theory, method, and model can be adapted to retain the unique identity of contemporary TCs.

Understanding a student’s ethnic identity process coupled with the student’s sexual identity and psychosocial identity can provide a much more useful and informative portrait of his or her circumstances than merely knowing the student as a “19-year-old sophomore”. This book was developed with both the student affairs professional and the student affairs graduate student in mind. After a brief introduction, it discusses various human development theories such as Schlossberg’s transition theory, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, Perry’s theory of moral development, and Kolb’s theory of experiential learning as well as personality types based on the Myers–Briggs type indicator. In the subsequent section of the book, the focus is on identity development in college students, with chapters covering Chickering’s Theory and the seven vectors of development, Black and biracial identity development theories, White identity development, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identity development as well as disability and identity development. and career development theories. The final section of the book describes the factors that impact the selection of careers with chapters discussing the Holland’s theory of career development and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, among other issues. Theory-based chapters open with a vignette in which the reader is presented with specific details of a case study for consideration. At the end of the chapter, the case is revisited and considered using a theoretical framework. Each case vignette provides the reader with immersion into a diverse perspective, and the chapter authors provide a clear discussion of their conceptualization of the student.

This book provides a multidisciplinary compendium of research pertaining to aging among diverse racial and ethnic populations in the United States. It focuses on paramount public health, social, behavioral, and biological concerns as they relate to the needs of older minorities. The book is divided into four parts covering psychology, public health/biology, social work, and sociology of minority gang. The book focuses on the needs of four major race and ethnic groups: Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, black/African American, and Native American. It also includes both inter- and intra-race and ethnic group research for insights regarding minority aging. The chapters focus on an array of subject areas that are recognized as being critical to understanding the well-being of minority elders. These include psychology (cognition, stress, mental health, personality, sexuality, religion, neuroscience, discrimination); medicine/nursing/public health (mortality and morbidity, disability, health disparities, long-term care, genetics, nutritional status, health interventions, physical functioning); social work (aging, caregiving, housing, social services, end-of-life care); and sociology (Medicare, socioeconomic status (SES), work and retirement, social networks, context/neighborhood, ethnography, gender, demographics).

The purpose of this book is to dispel many of the myths about the gifted, define the term in a nonelitist manner, explore how it manifests in individuals, describe why it is important, consider its origins, examine its psychological implications, and provide guidelines for its recognition, assessment, and development. It provides a cohesive conception of the psychology and development of a group with special needs. This perspective was shaped through 50 years of concentrated study and is informed by the author’s experience as a teacher of gifted elementary students, a counselor of gifted adolescents, a teacher educator of graduate students in gifted education, a psychologist specializing in the assessment of giftedness, a clinician with gifted clients, the creator of a refereed psychological journal on adult giftedness, and a researcher. 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. Families, educators, and psychologists can support inner development or they can act as agents of socialization, exhorting the gifted to "work harder" to attain external trappings of success.

This book is intended for school and clinical psychologists who work with children and adolescents, as well as for graduate students who are taking advanced courses in psychological assessment or the assessment of culturally and linguistically diverse children and adolescents. The strategies described in the book are based on up-to-date research on typical cognitive, language, emotional, and social development of culturally and linguistically diverse children and adolescents, including those who are studying in their second language; cultural differences and acculturation; culturally based perspectives on disabilities and disorders; and disorders that might develop due to the challenges experienced by some immigrants and refugees. It discusses demographic, socioeconomic, policy-related, and educational contexts of cultural and linguistic diversity that pertain to the academic achievement of children of immigrants and refugees and other marginalized groups in countries that have high levels of immigration. The book addresses research on the typical developmental trajectory of language and literacy of children and adolescents who must learn in a language that is not the language of their home. It describes methods for assessing children and adolescents’ oral language proficiency (OLP) in their first and second languages, and discusses the issues involved and methods for assessing intelligence, academic achievement, and behavioral, social, and emotional functioning. Strategies for communicating assessment results to culturally and linguistically diverse children and adolescents and to their parents, teachers, physicians, and other professionals who work with them as well as consultation, advocacy, and report writing issues are also described.

The growing public awareness of bias and discrimination and the disproportionate involvement of minority populations, especially based on race, class, and gender, have affected the social work profession with a call to fulfill its long-forgotten mission to respond and advocate for justice reform and health and public safety. Forensic social workers practice far and wide where issues of justice and fairness are found. This book emphasizes on the diversity of populations and settings, social workers would best serve their clients adding a forensic or legal lens to their practice. It targets the important and emerging practice specialization of forensic social work, a practice specialization that speaks to the heart, head, and hands (i.e., knowledge, values, and skills) of social work using a human rights and social justice approach integrated with a forensic lens. The book defines forensic social work to include not only a narrow group of people who are victims or convicted of crimes and subsequently involved in the juvenile justice and criminal justice settings, but broadly all the individuals and families involved with family and social services, education, child welfare, mental health, and behavioral health or other programs, in which they are affected by human rights and social justice issues, or federal and state laws and policies. Practitioners who read this book will learn and apply a human rights legal framework and social justice and empowerment theories to guide multilevel prevention, psychosocial assessments, and interventions with historically underserved individuals, families, and communities, especially using the life course systems power analysis strategy and family televisiting. The book fills a critical gap in the knowledge, values, and skills for human rights and social justice–focused social work education and training.

This book presents information about brain function and its chemical underpinnings in a way that contributes to a conceptual understanding of distress and subjective well-being. Chapter 1 of the book provides a history of thought in psychiatry and explains how we arrived at our current system for categorizing distress. The second chapter offers information on physiology, including brain circuits undergirding anxiety and depression, circuits for emotional or impulse regulation, and circuits for robust motivated behaviors. Information on pharmacology, including the major classes of drugs used to influence behaviour, and the issues over the regulation of pharmaceuticals are presented in the third chapter. This is followed by five chapters that consider categories of distress that afflict adults, namely, depression, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, bipolar disorders and addictions. Chapter 9 focuses on categories of distress in children such as pediatric bipolar disorder and depression. The last chapter of the book considers whether current diagnostic practices have served us well, looks at an alternative focus for delivering mental health services, and deals with those behaviors that promote flourishing and well-being.

This book is about all the exciting aspects that have been investigated in the science of positive psychology. One of the reasons that the interest in positive psychology has increased so much in recent years is that people are interested in happiness, and they’re interested in enhancing their well-being. All conceptions of positive psychology involve something to do with the “positive side of life”, which is clearly contrasted with the negative side of life. The positive side of life seems to go by many names, such as happiness, flourishing, thriving, a worthwhile life, a meaningful life, a fulfilling life, or “what goes right in life”. The study of positive subjective states involves two related but distinct areas of study: positive emotions and subjective well-being (SWB). Positive psychologists often refer to two types of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic. Any treatments of the history of happiness spend little time on ancient Jewish contributions to our understanding of well-being. From the early Christian tradition, writers encouraged enduring suffering now in the light of future happiness in the afterlife. The book focuses on two theories that are both representative and helpful to the field of positive psychology: the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) model. Gratitude and compassion are very important to the good life; however, when we also emphasize strengths such as prudence, humility, self-control, and integrity, we are much more likely to flourish. The issue of Internet relationships also brings up an alternative form of relationships: Our relationships with our pets. The book attempts to describe the cognitive characteristics of happy people.