This chapter discusses comprehensive school crisis interventions, identifies the characteristics that define a crisis, finds ways to assess for the level of traumatic impact, and determines what interventions can be provided to help with response and recovery. It highlights the PREPaRE Model of crisis prevention and intervention. There are six general categories of crises: acts of war and/or terrorism; violent and/or unexpected deaths; threatened death and/or injury; human-caused disasters; natural disasters; and severe illness or injury. Children are a vulnerable population and in the absence of quality crisis interventions, there can be negative short- and long-term implications on learning, cognitive development, and mental health. Evidence-based interventions focusing on physical and psychological safety may be implemented to prevent a crisis from occurring or mitigate the traumatic impact of a crisis event by building resiliency in students. Crisis risk factors are variables that predict whether a person becomes a psychological trauma victim.

Depression is a chronic, recurring disorder that impacts children’s academic, interpersonal, and family functioning. The heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD) is likely to be in the range of 31% to 42%. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the etiology of depression. It presents a description of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention designed to be delivered in a group format, an individual interpersonal intervention, and an individual behavioral activation (BA) intervention that includes a great deal of parental involvement. The ACTION program is a manualized program that is based on a cognitive behavioral model of depression. There are four primary treatment components to ACTION: affective education, coping skills training (BA), problem-solving training, and cognitive restructuring. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of universal therapeutic techniques to be incorporated into work with depressed youth regardless of the therapeutic orientation or treatment strategy.

Divorce is a lengthy developmental process and, in the case of children and adolescents, one that can encompass most of their young lives. This chapter explores the experience of divorce from the perspective of the children, reviews the evidence base and empirical support for interventions. It provides examples of three evidence-based intervention programs, namely, Children in Between, Children of Divorce Intervention Program (CODIP), and New Beginnings, appropriate for use with children, adolescents, and their parents. Promoting protective factors and limiting risk factors during childhood and adolescence can prevent many mental, emotional, and behavioral problems and disorders during those years and into adulthood. The Children in Between program is listed on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices. The CODIP and the New Beginnings program are also listed on the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices.

Children and youth with serious emotional, behavioral, and social difficulties present challenges for teachers, parents, and peers. Youth who are at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) are particularly vulnerable in the areas of peer and adult social relationships. The emphasis on meeting academic standards and outcomes for children and youth in schools has unfortunately pushed the topic of social-emotional development to the proverbial back burner. This chapter emphasizes that social skills might be considered academic enablers because these positive social behaviors predict short-term and long-term academic achievement. Evidence-based practices are employed with the goal of preventing or ameliorating the effects of disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) in children and youth. An important distinction in designing and delivering social skills interventions (SSI) is differentiating between different types of social skills deficits. Social skills deficits may be either acquisition deficits or performance deficits.

Eating disorders (EDs) are a complex and comparatively dangerous set of mental disorders that deeply affect the quality of life and well-being of the child or adolescent who is struggling with this problem as well as those who love and care for him or her. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) outlines specific criteria for the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), binge eating disorder (BED), and other specified feeding or ED. Treatment of eating disordered behavior typically involves a three-facet approach: medical assessment and monitoring, nutritional counseling, and psychological and behavioral treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) are also evidence-based approaches to treatment for AN. The treatment of EDs should be viewed as a team effort that integrates medical, nutritional, and mental health service providers.

Asthma, a pulmonary condition, is a chronic respiratory disorder typified by persistent underlying inflammation of tissues, airway obstruction, congestion, hyperresponsive airways, and the narrowing of smooth airway muscle. Asthma is one of the most common chronic medical conditions in children and is the leading cause of school absenteeism. This chapter describes childhood asthma, including its causes and triggers. It elucidates the extant research supporting treatment of the disorder and provides step-by-step empirically based interventions to ameliorate asthmatic symptomatology in children. The psychological underpinnings of asthma have been investigated in the field of psycho-neuroimmunology (PNI), which examines the interplay of the central nervous system, neuroendocrine, and immune system with psychological variables and their relation to physical health. Researchers have shown that relaxation and guided imagery (RGI), written emotional expression, yoga, and mindfulness therapy improve pulmonary lung functioning, decrease rates of absenteeism, and improve overall quality of life.

This chapter reviews the empirical support for such a multifaceted approach by considering selected neurodevelopmental concerns and medical variables that present as obstacles to healthy neurodevelopment. It discusses select neuro-developmental prenatal complications that can be prevented or ameliorated through behavioral interventions with the pregnant mother. The chapter addresses the deleterious effects of legal substances on the developing fetus, but professionals should be vigilant about preventing or reducing intrauterine exposure to illicit substances as well. Tobacco is a legal substance that, when used during pregnancy, has the potential to harm both the mother and fetus. Of particular concern with tobacco use are the detrimental health risks, such as hypertension and diabetes, which adversely affect the cerebrovascular functioning of pregnant women. The process of neurodevelopment is complex and represents a dynamic interplay among genetics, behavior, demographics, the environment, psychosocial factors, and myriad physiological factors.

This chapter aims to help clinicians learn stabilization interventions for use in the Preparation Phase of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment. Using these interventions will aid clients in developing readiness for processing trauma, learning how to manage symptoms of dissociation, dealing with affect regulation, and developing the necessary internal cohesion and resources to utilize the EMDR trauma-processing phase. Earlier negative experiences stored dysfunctionally increase vulnerability to anxiety disorders, depression, and other diagnoses. When assessing a client with a complex trauma history, clinicians need to view current symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression as reflections of the earlier traumas. The chapter outlines the strategies dealing with dissociative symptoms, ego state work, and internal stability that help clinicians to develop an individualized treatment plan to successfully guide the client through the EMDR phases of treatment.

This chapter describes key steps, with scripts, for the phases of therapy with a dissociative identity disorder (DID) client, and for an eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) session with a DID client. In brief, the method employs the artful use of EMDR and ego state therapy for association and acceleration, and of hypnosis, imagery, and ego state therapy for distancing and deceleration within the context of a trusting therapeutic relationship. It is also endeavoring to stay close to the treatment guidelines as promulgated by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. The acronym ACT-AS-IF describes the phases of therapy; the acronym ARCHITECTS describes the steps in an EMDR intervention. Dual attention awareness is key in part because it keeps the ventral vagal nervous system engaged sufficiently to empower the client to sustain the painful processing of dorsal vagal states and sympathetic arousal states.

One way of thinking about procrastination is to regard it as a form of addiction; an addiction to putting things off. As with other addictive patterns, the client will choose a short-term gratification instead of going for a long-term result that might, in the end, be more satisfying or empowering. As with other addictions, a procrastinating client often suffers ongoing erosion of her self-esteem. Quite often, procrastination may function as a defense as a way to avoid other life issues that are disturbing. With this type of problem, we can use a variation of Popky’s addiction protocol, and the level of urge to avoid (LoUA) procedure. It is also important to use resource installation procedures to help the client develop an image of the benefits that would come with being free of this problem.

The important elements of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Phantom Pain Research Protocol are client history taking and relationship building, targeting the trauma of the experience, and targeting the pain. This protocol is set up to follow the eight phases of the 11-Step Standard Procedure. This chapter presents a case series with phantom limb patients obtained a few before and after EMDR magnetoencephalograms (MEGs) at the University of Tübingen, Germany on arm amputees that show the presence of phantom limb pain (PLP) in the brain images before EMDR and the absence of it after EMDR. In these case series, it is found that PLP in leg amputations is much easier to treat than arm amputations, likely due to the much more extensive and complex arm and hand representation in the sensory-motor cortex compared to the leg and foot representation.

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.

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 “Image Director Technique” was developed to target recurring nightmares or bad dreams and those targets that are directly related to a traumatic experience. This technique is a special module that is embedded in the Standard Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Protocol. The technique begins with the worst image of the dream and then accesses and measures it as in Phase 3 of the Standard EMDR Protocol that includes the image, cognitions, emotions, and sensations. Clients are more likely to work with short clips or films if the subjective units of disturbance (SUD) of the target image is low. This technique can also be considered an imagery exposure method that is based in systematic desensitization, a behavioral approach. Often, clients prefer the tactile bilateral stimulation (BLS) because they can close their eyes in order to be visually undisturbed during the creation of the new images.

This chapter focuses on office automation and systems that are useful in the mental health field, along with principles to be aware of when considering the use or purchase of such systems. Most managers have to rely on input from outside in order to form an opinion about how to resolve complex issues. The complexity of the issue increases significantly when the current federal health care laws are incorporated into the task of choosing appropriate clinical information management software. The significance of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) would seem to dictate at least a brief foray into its content because it lays the foundation for virtually everything that is happening in the clinical information management (CIM) realm. The information provided in the chapter can give a backdrop by which current practices can be examined for goodness of fit with the available client information management systems.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to approaches to coping theory-from its early roots in psychodynamic defense mechanisms, through cognitive and personality approaches to coping styles, to more current work on coping and adaptive processes. The coping process approach recognizes that coping strategies are influenced not only by person characteristics such as personality, values, and developmental history but also by environmental demands and resources. The chapter develops a definition of ‘resilience’ as the ability to recognize, utilize, and develop or modify resources at the individual, community, and sociocultural levels in the service of three goal-related processes: maintenance of optimal functioning, given current limitations; development of a comfortable life structure; and development of a sense of purpose in life. A common assumption of life-span developmental theories is that the increasing physical and sometimes cognitive limitations with age necessitate changes in adaptive processes.

This chapter reviews biodemographic theories of aging that attempt to answer the proverbial ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions in gerontology. Biodemography of aging represents an area of research that integrates demographic and biological theory and methods and provides innovative tools for studies of aging and longevity. The historical development of the biodemography of aging is closely interwoven with the historical development of statistics, demography, and even the technical aspects of life insurance. The chapter also reviews some applications of reliability theory to the problem of biological aging. Reliability theory of aging provides theoretical arguments explaining the importance of early-life conditions in later-life health outcomes. Moreover, reliability theory helps evolutionary theories explain how the age of onset of diseases caused by deleterious mutations could be postponed to later ages during the evolution this could be easily achieved by simple increase in the initial redundancy levels.

This chapter describes the interpretive perspective in all its richness and variability in guiding research and advancing understanding of a wide range of phenomena in aging and life-course research. It discusses the interpretive perspective with other variants of social science theorizing, particularly normative perspectives on aging and life course-placing its development in historical context. The chapter addresses the contentious issue of causal explanation, as understood in diverse disciplinary contexts. It highlights some prominent normative theoretical approaches in social gerontology, by way of providing a comparative context for our primary consideration of the interpretive perspective. A given theoretical perspective in gerontology can focus solely on macro level, structural phenomena, on micro-level behavior and social interaction, or on understanding of the links between macro and micro phenomena.

This chapter traces the development of concepts and theories in the sociology of aging from the 1940s through the mid-1970s through seven themes. The first theme describes the importance of age in social structure and the place of the aged in changing societies. The second theme focuses on the issue of ‘successful aging’: how to define, measure, and achieve it. The third theme highlights the tension between social structure and individual agency in the activity versus disengagement theory controversy. The fourth theme concerns the social meanings of age, age cohorts, and generations, as well as interactions between age groups. The fifth theme focuses on families, aging, and intergenerational relations. The sixth theme of age stratification deals with the interplay between cohort succession and the aging of individuals. The seventh theme addresses the life course as a socially constructed process.

There can be little doubt that older people have today assumed a special place in the American social policy and political landscape. They constitute a large and growing population, they are increasingly well organized, and they are the recipients of public benefits that are the envy of every other social policy constituency in the nation. This chapter reviews and assesses different theoretical approaches that may help account in all or in part for these fairly recent and remarkable developments. The organization here centers on six distinct theoretical avenues for better understanding these political and policy developments: the logic of industrialization and policy development, the role of political culture and values, the presence of working-class mobilization, the impact of individual and group participation, the weight of state structure, and the effects of policy in shaping subsequent events.

This chapter provides some integrative perspectives to some of the enduring conceptual challenges in the area, such as place dimension while we age; what available theories in the ecology of aging are telling us; and what kind of new impulses refinement in this area are needed. It argues that the current trend toward intensive measurement designs in the daily ecology and the related increasing use of ambulatory assessment, taking into account short-term, interindividual variability in areas such as cognitive and emotional functioning, and daily stress experiences, may benefit from environmental gerontology perspectives. As we see it, environmental gerontology rests on three main principles two more related to the concept level and one more related to research strategy: importance of person-environmental (P-E) transaction and developmental co-construction; importance of explicitly considering the environment, with a focus on the physical-spatial dimension; and importance of optimizing ecological validity in research.

The lifelong manifold process of aging implicates biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors that interact over time and across place in complex ways to direct and temporally organize the shapes and boundaries of lives. As such, aging is a long, broad, and deep process: long, because it occurs continuously across the life span; broad, because it continuously integrates diverse factors from across levels of observation; deep, because it is never fully and directly observable as an ongoing generative process. Over the last two decades, theory building in aging inequality has focused on defining the role of health in the aging process. Arguably, health is now the core metric of aging; the diverse and complex patterns of disease, disability, and mortality with age have become the central problem for aging researchers, especially those concerned with social inequality and its pervasive and enduring effects.

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 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 provides an overview of working with clients who present with more complex trauma. Many of the clients that come for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) will have a history of complex trauma or a chaotic childhood. Clients who have experienced complex trauma may lack basic life skills or have missed out on developmental stages due to a chaotic childhood, for example, parents who were absent, neglectful, or abusive. Clients may not have been taught how to regulate their emotions in early childhood. They may present with impulsive, risk-taking, or suicidal behaviors. Before carrying out the desensitization phase of EMDR, individuals need to have an adequate level of resilience and be sufficiently resourced. Clients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) display at least two distinct and enduring “alters” or identity states that recurrently take control of their behavior.

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.

Child psychotherapy requires case conceptualization through the lens of developmental psychology in a multimodal approach to assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical interventions. This chapter outlines a blueprint for therapists to provide treatment for children by integrating these fundamental principles while collaborating with the other people in the child’s life. The chapter guides the therapist through case conceptualization that integrates the most efficacious treatment interventions into the eight-phase template of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Adaptive information processing (AIP) theory drives treatment with EMDR throughout the eight phases of that protocol and provides a template for case conceptualization and treatment planning. The use of the EMDR approach to psychotherapy is well documented and approved as evidence-based practice in Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) and California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC).

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.

Children are exposed to distress, violence, and trauma even before they are born. In-utero and early childhood exposure can contribute to severe medical and psychological consequences. Children who have been exposed to such traumatic events often arrive at the psychotherapist’s office with emotional and behavioral symptoms suggestive of reactive attachment disorder (RAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociation. This chapter reviews relevant theories of dissociation integrated with theories of development to provide a summary of how attachment impacts dissociation. With a developmentally grounded theory of dissociation, the chapter describes clinical interventions for treating the dissociative sequelae of attachment trauma in children. This theoretical framework offers a developmentally grounded and integrative framework for working with children with complex trauma and dissociation. Symptoms of dissociation are common with PTSD, but an extreme response to trauma can be dissociation and dissociative disorders.

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.

This chapter presents how eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and Theraplay can be used together when treating children with a history of complex trauma. Theraplay focuses on the parent-child relationship as the healing agent that holds within it the potential to cultivate growth and security in the child. The chapter shows some core concepts that help define and illuminate the application of Theraplay. Now that a clear review of basic Theraplay principles has been provided, people need to look at EMDR therapy and the adaptive information processing (AIP) model in conjunction with Theraplay and Theraplay core values. Early in its development, Theraplay integrated parental involvement into its therapeutic model. During the reprocessing phases of EMDR therapy, Theraplay can be very helpful in providing different avenues for emotion regulation and for the repairing of the attachment system.

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.

This chapter integrates elements and strategies of internal family systems (IFS) psychotherapy into eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy with complexly traumatized children. It shows a description of healing a part using in-sight with a child. In-sight involves having the client look inside to find and work with parts that he or she sees or senses and describes to the therapist. The IFS therapist starts by ensuring the client’s external environment is safe and supportive of the therapy. In a self-led system, polarizations are absent or greatly diminished, leaving more harmony and balance. However, when and how the self is formed may be seen and conceptualized through different lenses in adaptive information processing (AIP)-EMDR and IFS. According to the AIP model, the human brain and biological systems are shaped by the environmental experiences they encounter.

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 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 focuses on the assessment phase and importance of negative cognitions (NCs) drawing heavily on illustrative case vignettes. Janoff-Bulman introduced the notion of an “Assumptive World Theory” to describe how individuals make assumptions about themselves and the world they live in. According to McCann and Pearlman’s Constructionist Self-Development Theory (CSDT), people give meaning to traumatic events depending on how, as individuals, they interpret them. Person-centered counseling refers to “self-concept” describing the individual’s self-image largely based on life experience and attitudes expressed by significant others, such as family, teachers, and friends. Therapists should familiarize the client at an early stage with the mechanics of DAS and allow them some control in choosing the technique to be used. In choosing the target memory, the therapist and client need to determine the touchstone event, that is, the earliest memory linked to the current pathology.

The inclusion of parents and family caregivers throughout the phases of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is essential for best treatment outcome with highly traumatized and internally disorganized children. Parental responses that create dysregulation in the child’s system also appear to be related to the parent’s capacity to reflect, represent and give meaning to the child’s internal world. This chapter shows a case that exemplifies how the caregiver’s activation of maladaptive neural systems perpetuates the child’s exposure to multiple and incongruent models of the self and other. Helping parents arrive at a deeper level of understanding of their parental role using the adaptive information processing (AIP) model, attachment theory, regulation theory and interpersonal neurobiology principals will create a solid foundation. The thermostat analogy is designed to assist parents in understanding their role as external psychobiological regulators of the child’s system.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book attempts to contribute to improving children’s lives by providing a comprehensive and effective treatment protocol. To enhance treatment efficacy and improve the trajectory for children’s lives, case conceptualization in child psychotherapy must integrate developmental theory, neuroscience, and best practice models into clinical practice. The book reviews some of the latest research on attachment and neuroscience that impacts case conceptualization in child psychotherapy. In 1989, Shapiro proposed a new treatment approach she entitled eye movement desensitization (EMD) and, later, eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) to treat trauma. After reviewing the major theories of attachment and Schore’s current rendition that he labels self-regulation theory, the book offers a foundation for therapists to use develop-mentally grounded theory through the lens of adaptive information processing (AIP) to treat attachment issues in clients of all ages.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter presents several strategies, analogies, and metaphors to address dissociation from different angles and perspectives. Clinicians will have a wide range of methods of introducing and explaining dissociation to children. Analogies and stories that help children understand the multiplicity of the self may be presented during the preparation phase of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. A good way of introducing the concept of dissociation is by using the dissociation kit for kids. Stimulating interoceptive awareness is a fundamental aspect of the work needed during the preparation phase of EMDR therapy with dissociative children. Visceral, proprioceptive, as well as kinesthetic-muscle awareness should be stimulated. The installation of present resolution (IPR) was inspired by an exercise developed by Steele and Raider. In this exercise, the child is asked to draw a picture of the past traumatic event followed by a picture of the child in the present.

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.

During the installation phase, the child can experience a felt positive belief about himself or herself in association with the memory being reprocessed. Children with history of early and chronic trauma have difficulty tolerating positive affect. Enhancing and amplifying their ability to tolerate and experience positive emotions and to hold positive views of the self are pivotal aspects of eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. This chapter shows a script that may be used with children during the body scan phase. Assisting children in achieving emotional and psychological equilibrium after each reprocessing session as well as ensuring their overall stability are fundamental goals of the closure phase of EMDR therapy. The reevaluation phase of EMDR therapy ensures that adequate integration and assimilation of maladaptive material has been made. The future template of the EMDR three-pronged protocol is a pivotal aspect of EMDR therapy.

This chapter focuses on the desensitization phase during which the therapist processes the dysfunctional material. It explores a range of issues that are frequently raised in this phase, including therapist anxiety and abreactions and explores challenges during the desensitization phase, such as blocked processing and the use of cognitive interweaves. It is not only the client who gets anxious about the desensitization phase. It can be very daunting to the new EMDR practitioner. Performance anxiety can be a block for the therapist as well as for the client. The therapists’ role is distinct in this phase and involves supporting the client verbally with minimum intervention unless the client is stuck. They should help the client to focus on the flow of feelings, thoughts, and body sensations as they unfold. The therapist will observe the nonverbal signs, troughs and peaks of sensations, and will monitor the changes.

The primary goals of the assessment phase are to access the memory network containing traumatogenic material and to access and activate the cognitive, affective, and somatic aspects of the memory. Since the reprocessing phases of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy follow immediately after the assessment phase, the clinician should have prepared potential interweaves in case the child’s processing of the memory gets blocked. Children with complex trauma histories may already have sensitized sympathetic systems that make them prone to being in fight flight mode even in the face of safety. The chronically traumatized children present with sensitized dorsal vagal systems. Current caregiving and attachment behaviors have the potential for activating the attachment system, and with it past dysfunctional attachment experiences. One of the best adjunct approaches that can be used within a comprehensive EMDR treatment is sandtray therapy.

The incorporation of a skill-building phase and eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) games can greatly enhance and facilitate the utilization of EMDR therapy with children who have a history of complex trauma. Some EMDR games work with cognitive skills, others work with emotional skills, while others work with the body and the language of sensation. The use of positive cognition cards offers a great opportunity to play and use a wide range of card games. This chapter exemplifies how to use negative cognition games. Feeling cubes contain different basic emotions appropriate for children. Clinicians can purchase plain wooden cubes and write different feelings on the cube. A wide range of card games can be used with the feeling cards. The memory wand offers another playful approach to the process of identifying traumatic events with children. The chapter shows a playful way of exploring and identifying parent-child interactions.

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.

The basic goals of phase one are to develop a working relationship and a therapeutic alliance and to determine if the level of expertise of the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) clinician is adequate for the complexity of the case. Other goals are to develop a comprehensive treatment plan and case formulation. EMDR therapy was developed as a form of treatment to ameliorate and heal trauma. Clinicians working with complex trauma must have substantial understanding of the adaptive information processing (AIP) model and the EMDR methodology. During phase one, the clinician works on creating an atmosphere of trust and safety so a therapeutic alliance can be formed with the child and the caregivers. This chapter shows an example of how medical issues can affect the quality of the parent-child communications. The adult attachment interview (AAI) gives us the view of the presence of the experiences in the parent’s life.

Child psychotherapy is different than any other type of adult-child relationship. A trained mental health professional is using clinical skills to help a child find the answers to the problems he or she has encountered. This chapter outlines the most common symptoms in child psychotherapy. Anxiety is one of the most common symptoms of childhood, but the etiology and manifestation of anxiety varies. Anxiety is a symptom of many other disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), separation anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social phobia and other specific phobias, selective mutism, mood disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Gifted children tend to have higher levels of anxiety because they can think about things they are not yet emotionally prepared to manage. The chapter discusses clinical interventions for common issues of childhood, along with resources for children, directions for parents, and references for parents, caregivers, educators, and therapists alike.

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 explores theories of human development, also referred to as developmental psychology, as a knowledge base for professionals to integrate theory into case conceptualization in child psychotherapy. It provides a brief overview of the significant contributions of developmental psychology to the field of child psychotherapy that impact case conceptualization in the clinical treatment of children. Many theorists have shaped the study of human development, including Buford Jeanette Johnson, Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Jerome Kagan, John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jerome Brunner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Emmy Werner. Collectively, their theories propose explanations of all aspects of human development, including psychosexual, cognitive, social, psychosocial, behavioral, and neurological development, along with memory, information processing theories, and resilience. The chapter includes educational theory in order to understand how children are challenged to learn not only internally, but also externally, as well.

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.

International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)’s professional training institute offers comprehensive courses on childhood dissociation that are taught internationally and online. This chapter briefly cites some of the theories that have emerged in the dissociative field. One system, the apparently normal personality (ANP) enables an individual to perform necessary functions, such as work. The emotional personality (EP) is action system fixated at the time of the trauma to defend from threats. As with the Adaptive Information Processing Model (AIP) in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), each phase brings reassessment of the client’s ability to move forward to effectively process trauma. There are many overlapping symptoms with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and dissociation that often mask the dissociation. The rate of diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder has increased 40 times in the last ten years.

This chapter focuses on case studies of installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). The installation phase is concerned with integrating the positive cognition (PC) with the targeted memory. The PC should be checked for ecological validity and rated on the validity of cognition (VOC) scale. Closure is important at the end of any therapy, and particularly so after EMDR desensitization. As such, it is important to allow sufficient time for closure, debriefing, safety assessment, and homework. As with any therapy, clients will sometimes find that something occurs that disrupts the therapeutic plan. Modeling, education on social skills, and testing out new behaviors will now be the focus of therapy. This may be an unexpected crisis, such as a relationship breakdown or being diagnosed with cancer, and clients will need support in making adjustments in their present life.

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.

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.

Desensitization is a complex and important phase of eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. This chapter covers child-friendly strategies and interweaves that support and stimulates the social engagement system, maintain dual awareness and kindle children’s integrative capacities. It presents advanced strategies and interweaves that can facilitate the assimilation of memories of trauma and adversity as well as to promote vertical and horizontal integration. Shapiro developed a strategy to jump-start blocked processing that she called ‘the cognitive interweave’. According to Shapiro, clients spontaneously move through the three plateaus of information processing: responsibility, safety, and control/power, to a more adaptive perspective during reprocessing. Most children injured and traumatized in the adult-child relationship carry within the responsibility of the event. Mindful awareness in EMDR is pivotal during the reprocessing phases. The use of nonverbal communication strategies can greatly facilitate the process for children working on memories of events occurring pre-verbally.

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 provides information for therapists to integrate theories of neuroscience into the practice of child psychotherapy. Neuroscientists have described how the brain develops, documented the impact of external experiences on the developing brain, and integrated theories of neurodevelopment and neuroplasticity into our understanding of the impact of our interpersonal relationships on our brain. The chapter focuses on developmental trauma disorder and the research on the impact of trauma on children. The majority of the research on trauma in children has focused on the assessment and diagnosis of Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); however, there are a limited number of studies that have documented the efficacy of the treatment of PTSD in children. The chapter reviews diagnoses specific to neurodevelopment, including autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and sensory processing disorders (SPD).

This chapter discusses the client’s ability to self-regulate and handle high levels of affect. The maintaining factors of the effects of trauma- or anxiety-based disorders include fear, avoidance, and loss of control. Building or reinforcing coping strategies allows the client to regain some sense of control over what is happening, which, in turn, can have a positive impact on the fear and avoidance. Many novice Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapists report additional performance anxiety when their client is a mental health professional. Hyperarousal after a traumatic experience is normal. It occurs when a person’s brain believes that person is at risk again because it misreads an external signal or trigger. Grounding techniques can be taught very easily to clients and are another tool to help the client prepare for dealing with a possible abreaction while undergoing EMDR therapy.

The work directed toward increasing the child’s ability to tolerate and regulate affect, so that the processing of traumatic material can be achieved, is initiated during the preparation phase. The process of providing the neural stimulation to improve the child’s capacity to bond, regulate, explore, and play should begin during the early phases of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. The Polyvagal theory presents a hierarchical model of the autonomic system. In complexly traumatized children, the development of this system has been compromised due to the early dysregulated and traumatizing interactions with their environments and caregivers. When describing the various forms of bilateral stimulation (BLS), go over the different options and practice with the child. If the child went through the calm-safe place protocol successfully, motivating the child to actually use it when facing environmental triggers is an important goal.

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.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy was independently designated as a psychotherapy approach, and was validated by twenty randomized controlled clinical trials. Results of meta-analyses show EMDR as an effective and efficacious treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults and children. Childhood complex trauma refers to the exposure of early chronic and multiple traumatic events. The adaptive information processing (AIP) model constitutes the central piece and foundation of EMDR therapy. Affective neuroscience brings up the importance of PLAY as a healing agent. The polyvagal theory emerged out of the work of Stephen Porges on the evolution of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) brings a viewpoint that integrates objective realms of scientific findings and subjective realms of human knowing. The structural dissociation theory of the personality is based on Pierre Janet’s view of dissociation as a division among systems that constitute the personality of an individual.

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.

The Resource Connection Envelope (RCE) derives from the assumption that the dialectical healing movement between negative stored memories or problems and positive stored memories or resources is crucial for adaptive processing. The Assessment Phase in the Standard Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Protocol makes the problem, which is represented by the traumatic image or picture, more accessible for processing. The RCE aims to complement it by making the resource pole accessible as well. The RCE begins with a Past Resource Connection (PRC), collects the Present Resource Connection (PrRC) that comes up during processing, and ends with a Closing Resource Connection (CRC) chosen from the Present Resources or the Past Resource. In the Assessment Phase of the Standard EMDR Protocol, Compact Focusing is performed on a representative picture of the traumatic event. Different therapeutic approaches have various techniques to enhance accessibility or do their own version of Compact Focusing.

Clients need to be aware that the process of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment can be disturbing and that dissociated material may surface during therapy. Because EMDR has the potential for rapid uncovering of this unsuspected material, some of which may be extremely distressing an assessment needs to be made of the client’s ability to handle strong emotions. For some clients there may be ambivalence about recovery from their dysfunction or distress. Common secondary gains include the loss or reduction of a compensation claim or disability pension. It is strongly recommended that EMDR is not used with clients who have dissociative disorders (DD) unless therapists are confident and competent in their EMDR practice as well as in working with this client population. The chapter also presents a snapshot of Emma’s assessment that should be gathered to determine suitability for EMDR.

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 clarifies treatment throughout the similarities as well as the differences between eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and sensorimotor psychotherapy in child treatment. Dysregulated arousal and overactive animal defenses biased by traumatic experience are at the root of many symptoms and difficulties observed in traumatized children. Traumatic or adverse experiences are encoded in memory networks in the brain. The adaptive information processing (AIP) looks at different components of the memory network: cognitive, emotional and somatic. EMDR therapy and its phases access not only the cognitive aspects of the memory, but the affective and bodily states. In working with children, microphones may add a playful approach to translating the body’s language. Oscillation techniques are also useful in helping children to shift their focus from dysregulated states to a more resourced experience, which supports flexibility in state shifting and increases awareness of different states.

This chapter serves as a one-stop resource where therapists can access a wide range of word-for-word scripted protocols for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) practice. The imagery of an “Inner Safe Place” is part of a body of work on stabilization techniques for trauma therapy called “Psychodynamic Imaginative Trauma Therapy (PITT)”. It is used within PITT to prepare clients for EMDR. However, it works very well as a resource for EMDR. It is important to know that clients who live in unsafe circumstances are often not able to develop the images and so seeing what happens while working on installing the inner safe place can tell us something about clients’ external safety. If clients are able to create an inner safe place, the therapist can proceed with the exercise. If clients are unable to create and install a safe place, other stabilization work is used.

The EMDR Accelerated Information Resourcing Protocol (EMDR-AIR Protocol®) is designed to look for that learned generational reaction to trauma that the client is currently using to cope with the current situation while, at the same time, tapping into the historical strengths and resources that enabled survival. These resources are found through the rapid accessing of client history by using Multi-Tiered Trans-Generational Genogram (MTTG). The MTTG seeks to look at family history, birth dates, cultural information, transgenerational behavioral patterns, lifestyle, untold secrets, multi-tiered transgenerational trauma and sexual history, belief systems, historical events, and styles of celebration. The main objectives for the EMDR-AIR Protocol are to recognize potential stuck components in the EMDR processing that are related to trans-generationally transmitted behavioral and emotional patterns and to enable the client to step away from the crisis so as to begin the process of reprocessing with EMDR, with the chronologically most relevant Touchstone Event.

Clients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) live with a multiple reality disorder where parts are often living in the past and are not aware of where they are, the current date, or the time. The goal of this resource is to reduce the anxiety of parts living in the past and increase the client’s ability to differentiate the past from the present. Beginning with the host, adult, or other oriented parts, make a list of information that the disoriented parts need to be oriented and to decrease anxiety. Once the list is developed, install the list using dual attention stimulation (DAS). Useful items tend to be concrete and help differentiate the past from the present. If the client is being abused in some way in the present, often there are ways to differentiate the past from the present.

The most critical therapeutic work with dissociative clients is stabilization. This chapter describes the modified Resource Development Installation (RDI) procedures that can help such clients slowly develop skills that lead to this kind of stabilization. There are many reasons stabilization is a central facet of work with the dissociative disorders. Frequently, there are physical symptoms, visual intrusions, sleep difficulties, nightmares, barraging inner voices, and other negative affects. The chapter conceptualizes the cause of the particular kinds of negative affect listed above as consequent to intrusions from or responses to activated traumatic memory. Managing the intense negative affects associated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is not yet part of the client’s repertoire. Such capacities must be developed for the client to use EMDR effectively. Learning how to support and provide self-care can result in present time satisfactions and the decrease in the experience of negative affect.

This chapter includes scripts for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) treatment of clients with cancer, eating disorders, headaches, somatic disorders, sexual disorders, and more. It also includes summary sheets for each protocol to facilitate gathering information, client documentation, and quick retrieval of salient information while formulating a treatment plan. The treatment of chronic pain is a new and growing application of EMDR. The suitability of EMDR for chronic pain stems from a number of sources. There are similarities and overlaps between traumatic stress and physical pain that would suggest EMDR as an appropriate addition to working with chronic pain. Negative Cognition (NC) is optional when the pain is not related to trauma. If possible, the NC will elicit clients’ attitudes or beliefs about themselves around their pain. Positive Cognition (PC) is about how clients would like to feel about themselves in relation to their pain.

This chapter focuses on self-care for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) practitioners. The protocol was derived from the notes of Neal Daniels, a clinical psychologist who was the director of the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Clinical Team at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. In Dr. Daniels’s words, the procedure is short, simple, effective. Right after the session or later on in the day when it is possible, bring up the image of the patient, do 10–15 eye movements (EMs); generate a positive cognition (PC) and install it with the patient’s image, and do 10–15 EMs. Once the negative affects have been reduced, realistic formulations about the patient’s future therapy are much easier to develop. Residual feelings of anger, frustration, regret, or hopelessness have been replaced by clearer thoughts about what can or cannot be done. Positive, creative mulling can proceed without the background feelings of unease, weariness, and ineffectiveness.

The Butterfly Hug was originated and developed by Lucina Artigas during her work performed with the survivors of Hurricane Pauline in Acapulco, Mexico, 1997. For the origination and development of this method, Lucina Artigas was honored in 2000 with the Creative Innovation Award by the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) International Association. By 2009, The Butterfly Hug had become standard practice for clinicians in the field while working with survivors of man-made and natural catastrophes. The “Butterfly Hug” provides a way to self-administer dual attention stimulation (DAS) for an individual or for group work. This chapter explains many uses for the Butterfly Hug. During the EMDR Standard Protocol, some clinicians have also used it with adults and children to facilitate primary processing of a fundamental traumatic memory or memories. Use of the Butterfly Hug in session with the therapist can be a self-soothing experience for many trauma-therapy clients.