This chapter explores how practicum training may be enhanced through effective collaboration between trainers and field supervisors. Successful practicum training requires strong collaboration between the trainee’s university or institution and the supervising field psychologist. Successful collaboration between the university and field site includes consideration of site development and maintenance, effective communication, and training and support across settings. Field placement and coordination play a critical role in the training of school psychologists. The individual fulfilling this role may be recognized with a variety of formal titles, such as field placement coordinator, clinical professor, or director of clinical training (DCT). One of the primary responsibilities of the DCT is the coordination and supervision of practica-related activities, including the placement of candidates in appropriate training sites. The chapter focuses on how supervisors can address trainee problems of professional competence, develop and use remediation plans successfully, and help trainees balance fieldwork with coursework.

This chapter addresses the key principles of sport, exercise, and performance psychology. It reflects the broadening of sport psychology studies to encompass more widespread human performance research. The topic of decision making has been covered in psychology, economics, and motor learning but addressed very sparsely in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Rational decision making requires defining the problem, identifying criteria, weighing those criteria, generating alternative solutions, and ultimately computing the optimal decision. The chapter introduces the literature on decision making and provides examples of factors that influence the choices people make. The decision to act, move, or what move to make is decided in the response selection stage, and the final stage is when one’s brain and muscles are organized to make the actual move. The key to improve the decision-making over time is to increase personal awareness of own limitations and keep learning and collecting information from reliable sources.

This chapter provides guidelines for psychologists on the assessment of oral language proficiency (OLP) of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children and adolescents who study in their second language (L2). It discusses the issues that should be considered in the assessment of OLP, including the aspects of oral language that should be assessed in L1 or L2, the factors that should be considered in interpreting assessment data, and the advantages and challenges of assessing children in their L1. The chapter then describes specific methods for assessing OLP. It discusses issues involved in interpretation of data from OLP assessments, including a discussion of the diagnosis of a language disorder. The chapter also explains specific tasks and observational schedules that psychologists might find helpful when conducting assessments of OLP.

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 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 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 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.

One of the most trying aspects of training professionals to work with couples using solution-focused therapy is expecting professionals to go slowly and to develop a connection with their couples before moving on. In fact, the therapist is working to uncover the positive aspects of the couple’s life, and how they were living before their problem. Lipchik calls this process listening with a constructive ear probing for evidence of strengths, resources, and past success, learning what life was like before or without the problem, what the clients want, or anything at all that can be reinforced as a positive aspect of the client’s lives going forward. Every couple comes from a past when the relationship was working much better. The therapist listens for clues about how the relationship was built to understand what worked in the past and continues to work today.

This chapter presents a case study on performance dysfunction in the case of a 21-year-old African American female basketball player entering her senior year at a major Division I-level university. She described regret about not working out harder during the off-season, which she blamed for a poor start to her current season. In addition, she also reported feeling a great deal of worry over the possibility that she may have a poor season and ruin her chance to be drafted in the first round of the WNBA entry draft. According to the case formulation model, there are 10 elements that are necessary to consider prior to making an intervention decision contextual performance demands; skill level; situational demands; transitional and developmental issues; psychological characteristics/performance and nonperformance schemas; attentional focus; cognitive responses; affective responses; behavioral responses; and readiness for change and level of reactance.

This chapter includes the guiding tenets of solution-focused therapy (SFT). Solution-focused (SF) practice differs from other therapeutic approaches in its use of solution building rather than problem solving. The solution-building process is about creating what is most desired by the couple, and not about problem solving. For a couple to be seeking therapy together, there has to have been a time in the past when the relationship was working better for both the parties. By focusing on the relationship and the skills that each partner uses to contribute to the relationship, the therapist conveys a level of hope to the couple. Solution-building conversations must be co-constructed with input from all participants. Motivation should never be in doubt, even if one member of the couple claims that he or she is only there because the other partner “made” them come to therapy.