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 presents a case study on performance development with the case of a man who reported that he had been “ultra successful” in every facet of his business life and was happily married and living with his wife of three years in a large suburban home. He described himself as “feeling stuck”, which he described as the belief that he had gone as far as he could go without improving in fundamental areas in his life. The consequences of the avoidant behaviors led him to feel quite overwhelmed. Preintervention psychological functioning was assessed with a standard semi-structured interview and three self-report measures selected based on specific processes that appeared most likely to be relevant to the performer’s referral issue. The measures utilized included the Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form, the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-Revised, and the Profile of Mood States.

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 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.

This chapter and the intervention protocol that follows seek to better understand and ultimately influence human performance through understanding how internal processes interact with external demands. Many factors determine the effectiveness of human performance. The myriad of factors contributing to functional as well as dysfunctional human performance can be summarized as follows: instrumental competencies, environmental stimuli and performance demands, dispositional characteristics, and behavioral self-regulation. The chapter presents the model of functional and dysfunctional human performance that involves three broad yet interactive phases, namely performance phase, postperformance response, and competitive performance. The professional literature in both clinical and cognitive psychology suggests that individuals develop an interactive pattern of self and other mental schemas. The accumulated empirical evidence has led to similar findings in studies across many forms of human performance. Chronic performance dysfunction is much more likely to be associated with an avoidant coping style.

Geniuses have been around for a very long time. Genuine scientific inquiries into the psychology of genius came much later. The investigators engaged in these inquiries adopted two main approaches: psychometrics and historiometrics. Not only was Francis Galton the first psychometrician to study genius, but he himself was a genius. Psychometric research represents the most common way that research psychologists investigate genius. The principal alternative is a technique known as historiometrics. Frederick Woods also conducted historiometric research of his own. In 1906, he had studied the inheritance of intellectual and moral genius in royal families, and in 1913 he examined the influence of political genius on the welfare of the nations ruled. Lewis M. Terman had also explored a method of calculating intelligence quotient (IQ) scores using historiometric methods. Unlike psychometrics and historiometrics, psychobiography constitutes a single-case qualitative approach.

Students and professionals in the field of psychology are encouraged to understand diverse populations. Life scripts are formed in childhood, and feelings of alienation seeded in their early years can haunt the gifted throughout their lifespan. Gifted individuals need professionals who understand their striving, their search for meaning, their yearning for connection, and their complexity, sensitivity, and intensity. They need professionals alert to the issues of giftedness—who use this template to help their clients develop greater self-awareness. Those who are interested in success equate giftedness with eminence. The Great Divide in the field of gifted education and psychology stems, in part, from polarized perceptions of IQ testing. Gifted behavior occurs when there is an interaction among three basic clusters of human traits: above-average general and/or specific abilities, high levels of task commitment, and high levels of creativity.

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is the third leading cause of dementia in large pathological series but tends to have an earlier age of onset than Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Lewy body dementia, the most frequent and second most frequent forms of dementia. Semantic dementia (SD) includes impairment in the understanding of the meanings of words and difficulty in identifying objects. Semantic primary progressive aphasia, also known as SD, includes difficulties with naming and single-word comprehension although grammar and fluency are often spared. SD is a disorder that involves loss of semantic memory, anomia, receptive aphasia, and an actual loss of word meaning. The chapter presents some assessment tools that are those conducted by a psychologist or a neuropsychologist. Such an evaluation should include a clinical interview and neuropsychological examination. SD has been associated with ubiquitin-positive, TAR-DNA-binding protein-43 (TDP-43)-positive, tau-negative inclusions.

This chapter discusses the effects of personality with respect to the other, that of getting ahead. The literature examining the impact of personality on career-related outcomes is vast and stretches back to the beginnings of psychology. The chapter reviews the most important research and paradigms concerning the areas of: academic achievement, work performance, leadership and entrepreneurship. Early reviews of the relationship between personality and job performance seemed to suggest that personality was a trivial or insignificant predictor of job performance. Psychological theories focusing on leaders’ personality or traits were influenced by Carlyle’s ‘Great Man‘ theory of leadership, which posited that ‘the history of the world was the biography of great men’. Over the past 20 years, an increasing amount of attention has been given to the area of bad leadership. The literature on personality and leadership suggests that a leader’s personality has a substantial influence on how the group performs.