Psychology

Human emotional suffering has been studied for centuries, but the significance of psychological injuries within legal contexts has only recently been recognized. As the public becomes increasingly aware of the ways in which mental health affects physical—and financial—well-being, psychological injuries comprise a rapidly growing set of personal injury insurance claims. Although the problems that people claim to suffer from are serious and often genuine, the largely subjective and unobservable nature of psychological conditions has led to much skepticism about the authenticity of psychological injury claims. Improved assessment methods and research on the economic and physical health consequences of psychological distress has resulted in exponential growth in the litigation related to such conditions. Integrating the history of psychological injuries both from legal and mental health perspectives, this book offers discussions of relevant statutory and case law. Focusing especially on post-traumatic stress disorder, it addresses the current status and empirical limitations of forensic assessments of psychological injuries and alerts to common vulnerabilities in expert evidence from mental health professionals. In addition, it also uses empirical research to provide the best forensic methods for assessing both clinical conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and for alternative explanations such as malingering.

Meditation is becoming a daily practice for more and more people, and is used by clinical psychologists, counsellors, and therapists to heal themselves and their clients. This book provides a psychological appraisal of meditation, summarizing fifteen years of psychological research in the area, signposting new research and theoretical directions. The contributors are among international writers and researchers on the psychology of meditation. This collection represents an overview of research in the field. Readers will also gain knowledge of meditation and find new perspectives for understanding human behaviour more generally.

This book takes a critical look at the evidence concerning nonverbal quantification in infants and young children. For the first time since research on this topic exploded in the 1980s, the entire literature covering birth to school age is considered together. Instead of finding support for the claim that number concepts are inborn, the authors conclude that quantification originates in an approximate sense of overall amount. From this perspective, several new questions arise. How does the concept of discrete number diverge from this amount-based beginning? How well do different models of nonverbal numerical representation fit the data when the entire period from birth to school age is included? If infants represent quantities in terms of amount, are these representations absolute or relative? In addition to addressing these questions, the authors consider how early quantitative concepts fit into the broader context of cognitive development. They also discuss how conventional mathematics builds on preschool quantification and how quantitative development relates to categorization, language, and spatial reasoning. The resulting overview highlights not only the impressive quantitative accomplishments of early childhood, but also the intricate conceptual relations that must be worked out to produce them.

This book examines aspects of aging that are commonly overlooked by dominant conceptual models in gerontology, which focus on the observable, measurable, or “outside” dimensions of aging. Drawing on the emerging field of narrative gerontology, it provides conceptual-theoretical support to scholars of aging who are interested in bringing such topics as reminiscence and life review more into the center of gerontological inquiry. Although aging has often been framed in terms of a narrative of inevitable decline, a more positive portrayal of aging becomes possible as the focus is placed on the intricate psychological dimensions or “inside” of aging, and as the storied nature of human experience is taken explicitly into account. The book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poeisis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating, ever-thickening texts — memories and reflections — that constitute our inner worlds. At its center is the conviction that, although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful manner is critical to our development, or growth, in the second half of life. The book employs a narrative, and thus interdisciplinary, perspective to link together topics that have tended to be of marginal interest within mainstream gerontology, specifically memory, meaning, wisdom, and spirituality. It does this by exploring the convergence of ideas from literary theory regarding reader-response; of advances in neuroscience regarding the narrative basis of consciousness itself; and of thinking about narrative development and narrative identity within psychology, in particular the psychology of aging.

While the subject of play may seem trivial for behavioral science, E. O. Wilson noted that understanding the significance of play is an important challenge facing scholars in these fields. Play is observed among juveniles across a number of animal species and is especially prevalent in young mammals, yet it is difficult to define or to attribute functional significance to it. This book argues that play is an excellent example of the ways in which biology and culture influence each other, especially during childhood. Specifically, the innovative possibilities associated with different forms of play behavior during the juvenile period can influence individuals' skill acquisition, and possibly influence the development of the species. In order to understand play in this broad sense, it is necessary to understand its phylogenetic development (across monkeys, great apes, and humans), its place within human development, and its function(s) and antecedents. Such an understanding of the role of play in childhood has implications for a deeper understanding of the role of development in the human experience. This book takes an explicitly theoretical orientation as it is applied to human play, in an evolutionary context. This volume provides a theoretical framework addressing the role of play in development. In the concluding chapter, the author synthesizes his arguments and theory, and speculates about directions for future research in the area.

What is the shoulder-to-the grindstone work of transforming underperforming schools into higher performing schools? What makes this work so difficult? This book sheds light on these questions from the perspective of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools to enact a common strategy for comprehensive school reform, all in an effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. This story of SFAF spans twenty turbulent years. It begins in 1987, with the strategy of improving reading achievement by improving students’ cooperative learning in classrooms. It stretches through 2008, with efforts to influence federal education policy to support that strategy. There is nothing in the story to suggest a quick fix. Rather, the theme that emerges is that the problems and possibilities of effective, large-scale, sustainable education reform lie in the complexity of public education: in interdependencies among underperforming schools, programs of reform, the organizations that advance those programs, and the environments in which all operate. The story ultimately locates the problems of education reform not in schools but, instead, in reformers, themselves. By tracing SFAF’s deep push into public education, the purpose of the book is to assist a wide array of reformers in seeing, understanding, and ultimately confronting its complexity.

New research on children's executive functioning and self-regulation has begun to reveal important connections to their developing social understanding (or “theories of mind”) and emotional competence. The exact nature of the relations between these aspects of children's social and emotional development is, however, far from being fully understood. Considerable disagreement has emerged, for instance, over the question of whether executive functioning facilitates social-emotional understanding, or vice versa. Recent studies linking the development of children's social understanding with aspects of their interpersonal relationships also raise concerns about the particular role that social interaction plays in the development of executive function. Three key questions currently drive this debate: Does social interaction play a role in the development of executive function or, more generally, self-regulation? If it does play a role, what forms of social interaction facilitate the development of executive function? Do different patterns of interpersonal experience differentially affect the development of self-regulation and social understanding? In this book, the contributors address these questions and explore other emerging theoretical and empirical links between self-regulation, social interaction, and children's psycho-social competence. It will be a valuable resource for student and professional researchers interested in executive function, emotion, and social development.

More than 1.46 million people in the United States have hearing losses in sufficient severity to be considered deaf; another 21 million people have other hearing impairments. For many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, sign language and voice interpreting is essential to their participation in educational programs and their access to public and private services. However, there is less than half the number of interpreters needed to meet the demand, interpreting quality is often variable, and there is a considerable lack of knowledge of factors that contribute to successful interpreting. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a study by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) found that 70% of the deaf individuals are dissatisfied with interpreting quality. Because recent legislation in the United States and elsewhere has mandated access to educational, employment, and other contexts for deaf individuals and others with hearing disabilities, there is an increasing need for quality sign language interpreting. It is in education, however, that the need is most pressing, particularly because more than 75% of deaf students now attend regular schools (rather than schools for the deaf), where teachers and classmates are unable to sign for themselves. In the more than one hundred interpreter training programs in the U.S. alone, there is a variety of educational models, but little empirical information on how to evaluate them or determine their appropriateness in different interpreting and interpreter education-covering what we know, what we do not know, and what we should know. This book synthesizes existing work and provides a coherent picture of the field as a whole, including evaluation of the extent to which current practices are supported by validating research.

Sleep deprivation, poor sleep quality, and erratic sleep schedules are highly common among children and youth. Although sleep is a fundamental biological process that affects the health and well-being of persons of all ages, it is also a social phenomenon. There has been a recent surge in research paradigms that document important relations between family processes, the socio-cultural milieu, and multiple facets of children's sleep and adaptation. These novel discoveries bridge important gaps in research across various disciplines and are the focus of this volume. Contributors have come to the topic of sleep from diverse academic disciplines and areas of inquiry that relate to sleep, culture, and families including anthropology, pediatrics, nursing, human development and family studies, education, developmental psychology, developmental psychopathology, epidemiology, and clinical interventions. Bringing them together to contribute to this volume has been accomplished in the context of a belief that integration of knowledge and approaches across disciplines is fundamental for a vigorous comprehensive science of sleep as it relates to the individual's multi-faceted development and adaptation. In various sections of this book, chapters address: current state of knowledge, and various linkages between sleep, family processes, and development; sleep from an anthropological perspective and in a societal and cultural context; important methodological issues pertaining to the assessment of sleep, family functioning, and the ecology of economic disadvantage with an eye towards bridging important gaps in research methodology used by disparate scientific groups; and family based interventions for sleep problems of children.