This book is a theoretical and practical guide in the field of social skills and social competence, based on decades of experience gained by the authors as researchers and professionals in psychology. The book was written for students and professionals who are involved in some way improving individuals social skills in different contexts, such as clinical, educational, organizational and community settings. The authors present the conceptual foundations, procedures, techniques, strategies and practical guidelines for planning and conducting effective programs aimed to social skills and social competence. In the first part of the book, key concepts and fundamentals on the area are presented, as well as the basic behavioral classes of social skills and their non-verbal and paralinguistic components. The authors also propose a portfolio for the assessment of clients' social skills deficits and strengths to thereby define the aims and procedures of interventions.The second part focuses on guidelines to select and use procedures and techniques for promoting social skills and social competence. The authors present experiential activities that they created in previous interventions and that were tested in their research, showing evidence of effectiveness. Suggestions on how to evaluate participants' repertoires and how to use these ideas in intervention planning are also described. Finally, in the third part of the book, the authors go further presenting practical guidelines for planning and conducting programs and sessions to promote social skills and social competence, in either group or individual settings.

In this first compendium in the growing literature of behavioral teratology, readers will discover an easy-to-access, concise presentation that covers a huge range of subjects. The book synthesizes important findings that help explain why prenatal events may result in abnormal behavior and learning disabilities later in life. It goes further to examine the role of prenatal perturbations in conditions as varied as dyslexia, schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, and autism.

This provocative book takes a look at children's consumption of sexualized media messages while providing parents, teachers, and professionals with strategies for abating their influence. In this eye-opening book, experienced child psychologist Jennifer W. Shewmaker contends that the manner in which a child is raised influences how they respond to media messages, particularly those shaded by sexual overtones. This text takes a hard look at the impact of advertisements, products, and entertainment on a child's psyche and offers strategies for helping kids become critical, active media consumers. Drawing from research in a wide variety of disciplines, this book explores the interpersonal factors within children's lives that impact how they learn to process sexualized media messages. The book argues that an increase in marketing to children along with media-based fabrications of beauty, masculinity, and femininity impact the confidence and character of young children who are often greatly affected by what they see and hear. The author shares invaluable tips for promoting strengths in children and adolescents of both genders and presents the protective influence of communities to help children dismiss distorted media images. Provides a quick overview of previous works in child development, communication, and education Discusses four mediating variables influencing children's values: culture of celebrity, family factors, gender, and community systems Includes an "In Their Voices" section featuring specific responses from children, adolescents, parents, and professionals Covers television, movies, music, and other media Demonstrates the impact of both positive and negative media messages

This new collection of writings describes the recent thinking of psychologists and educators regarding interactive development across the spectrum of competency domains within the individual. Significant research efforts emphasizing innovations in qualitative methodology, pedagogical refinements, and therapeutic interventions--both remedial and prophylactic--are presented to illustrate recent applications of current life-span development theorizing.

The volume begins with a section devoted to theory and practice in educating for human development; this is followed by sections examining counseling for development, and educating for morality, religion, and citizenship.

This handbook addresses universal developmental and cultural factors contributing to child and adolescent mental health and well-being across the globe. It examines sociocultural contexts of development and identifies children's and adolescents' perspectives as critical to understanding and promoting their psychological well-being. It details the Promoting Psychological Well-Being Globally project's methodology for data collection and analysis, provides cross-cultural analyses of its findings, and offers a practical model for clinicians and other professionals seeking to apply this knowledge to real-life settings. Featured topics include: Sexual health, gender roles, and psychological well-being in India. Psychological well-being as a new educational boundary in Italy. Mapping psychological well-being in Romania. Youth perspectives on contributing factors to psychological well-being in Sri Lanka. Culturally specific res ilience and vulnerability in Tanzania.Longing for a balanced life - the voices of Chinese-American/immigrant youth in the United States. The International Handbook of Psychological Well-Being in Children and Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps Between Theory, Research, and Practice is an invaluable resources for researchers, clinicians, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in child and school psychology, social work, public health, positive psychology, educational policy and politics, and maternal and child health.

This book brings together authoritative information about the child/dog bond as it is manifested with family dogs, visiting therapy dogs, and service dogs trained to assist children with disabilities. Despite the widely accepted view that participating in a dog's care and interacting with dogs in behaviorally healthy ways is a route to becoming responsible and compassionate, research on this complex dynamic is difficult to design, time-consuming to collect, and challenging to analyze. This volume synthesizes theory, research, and practice, bringing all to bear upon child/dog interactions in homes, schools, libraries, and the community at large. Children, Dogs and Education serves as a handbook for a diverse group of adults who seek to build positive relationships between children and dogs-parents/families, professional dog trainers, teachers, librarians, mental health professionals, health care professionals, and university faculty. The study of interactions between human and nonhuman animals has captured the imagination of an international community of researchers from many different fields and professions. Even though dogs are ubiquitous in the lives of most children, studies of children's interactions with dogs in families and communities are lacking. Most of the previous research on the human-canine bond has focused on adolescents and adults or, even when younger children are the focus, it has tended to rely on parents to speak for children. There are three features of this book that make it unique. First, it goes beyond exploring the child/dog bond to examine additional important issues, including: children's concepts of responsible care, their ability to interpret dogs' behavioral cues, and their ideas about canine behavioral issues/training. Second, unlike most other work to date, it represents children's voices through cases, interviews, and drawings. Finally, the contributors to this edited work use their collective wisdom to draw educational implications and suggest direction in preparing the next generation of dog guardians.

In the past decade, psychology has increasingly acknowledged the importance of considering the role of culture for understanding human development. One of the major issues now confronting those interested in this issue is how cultural meanings, values, and practices are appropriated by persons growing up and living in concrete contexts. The general theme addressed in this volume concerns how enactments of cultural understandings in social interactions form the fabric of individual experience and the specificities of individual development.

This volume examines children's and young people's emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and to provoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emotions in policy and practice, relevant to readers' own context.

This groundbreaking volume introduces the theoretical base and clinical methods of Neurocognitive Learning Therapy, an integrative framework for client-centered intervention. The model unifies psychology and neuroscience in revisiting the connections between brain and behavior, replacing the cognitive-versus-affective binary traditional to clinical thinking with a scenario of the cognitive and emotional learning processes that work together to shape adaptive and pathological behavior. This foundation in learning theory illuminates the therapeutic relationship, synching how therapists teach with how clients learn, with guidelines for educating to encourage change. The unique flexibility of the NCLT model allows practitioners across clinical orientations the freedom to apply eclectic intervention strategies that fit clients' learning styles and therapeutic needs. Included in the coverage: Neurocognitive Learning Therapy and Life Course Theory. Reward recognition in Neurocognitive Learning Therapy. Memory reconsolidation and Neurocognitive Learning Therapy. How to be an NCLT therapist. Neurocognitive Learning Therapy clinical procedures. Treating children with Neurocognitive Learning Therapy. Plus practice handouts and forms for therapists and patients. Neuropsychologists, child and school psychologists, and social workers will welcome Neurocognitive Learning Therapy not only as a source of theoretical insight into the brain and behavior, but also as an innovative system for enhancing their capacity for therapeutic teaching and their clients' capacity for learning.

This open access book details tools and procedures for data collections of hard-to-reach, hard-to-survey populations. Inside, readers will discover first-hand insights from experts who share their successes as well as their failures in their attempts to identify and measure human vulnerabilities across the life course. Coverage first provides an introduction on studying vulnerabilities based on the Total Error Survey framework. Next, the authors present concrete examples on how to survey such populations as the elderly, migrants, widows and widowers, couples facing breast cancer, employees and job seekers, displaced workers, and teenagers during their transition to adulthood. In addition, one essay discusses the rationale for the use of life history calendars in studying social and psychological vulnerability while another records the difficulty the authors faced when trying to set-up an online social network to collect relevant data. Overall, this book demonstrates the importance to have, from the very beginning, a dialogue between specialists of survey methods and the researchers working on social dynamics across the life span. It will serve as an indispensable resource for social scientists interested in gathering and analyzing data on vulnerable individuals and populations in order to construct longitudinal data bases and properly target social policies.

Infants' Sense of People focusses on infants during their first year of life, exploring how they begin to think about other people, their feelings, emotions and intentions, and how they become aware of these aspects of their own development. Drawing on a broad range of research and developmental theory, Maria Legerstee takes the view that infants have an innate sense of people at birth, which is activated through sympathetic emotions. She questions the idea that infants use physical parameters such as contingencies or motion to distinguish people from objects, and rejects the assumption that infants are mechanical creatures before they become psychological ones. She argues persuasively that before infants learn to speak, interactions with others are possible because infants have a primitive pre-linguistic 'theory of mind'. This accessible book provides a valuable synthesis of current thinking on early social and cognitive development and the origins of theory of mind.

Whether you are a seasonal volunteer, group leader or full-time professional, you need practical advice on how to provide young people with the tools they need to succeed.

Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals-E-QYP for short-provides best practices to help young people ages six to eighteen reach their potential. It also offers age-appropriate ideas that you can translate to your specific child and youth program.

E-QYP is a handy reference for individuals, as well as a powerful volunteer and staff development tool when adopted by organizations. It also serves as a great supplement to college textbooks on child and youth development. With easy-to-read information and sample activities that really work, this guide can help you help the young people in your life.

"Youth agencies serve huge numbers of kids in the United States, but few youth workers have specific knowledge about youth development, and agency budgets tend to have few dollars for staff training. Although the training and credentialing of all youth workers remains an aspiration, workers with and without training need ready access to research-based knowledge and practices. Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals provides both. Whether read as a whole or accessed for just-in-time information, Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals is a timely, valuable, and much-needed resource."

-Irv Katz, president and CEO, National Human Services Assembly and National Collaboration for Youth

This classic monograph on pathological lying, accusation, and swindling from 1915 contains a review of the literature to date, a series of twenty-seven case studies, and conclusions. The Healys were the first to concentrate almost exclusively on juvenile cases, and explore and analyse their causes and antecedents, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. Although outmoded in terminology and social attitudes, this work offers a fascinating insight into the realm of pathological lying and approaches to forensic psychology in the early twentieth century. This volume has been carefully hand-edited and re-indexed to be clear and complete.

Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-oriented view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychological research. Instead of characterizing abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and learning that evolve through time to determine progressive changes. With contributions from the foremost researchers in the field, this study will be essential reading for all interested in cognitive and developmental science.

In this new, revised edition of his landmark book, Montagu compels us to reevaluate the way we think about growth and development, in all its phases, throughout life. Humans are designed to grow and develop their childlike qualities, and not to become the ossified adults prescribed by society. Montagu demonstrates how our culture, schools, and families are in conspiracy against such childlike traits as the need to love, to learn, to wonder, to know, to explore, to think, to experiment, to be imaginative, creative and curious, to sing, dance, or play. He also reveals the many links between physical and mental aging and tells how to prevent psychosclerosis, the hardening of the mind, so that we can die young--as late as possible. The best statement ever written on the most important, neglected theme of human life and evolution. "Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University"

In this new, revised edition of his landmark book, Montagu compels us to reevaluate the way we think about growth and development, in all its phases, throughout life. Humans are designed to grow and develop their childlike qualities, and not to become the ossified adults prescribed by society. Montagu demonstrates how our culture, schools, and families are in conspiracy against such childlike traits as the need to love, to learn, to wonder, to know, to explore, to think, to experiment, to be imaginative, creative and curious, to sing, dance, or play. He also reveals the many links between physical and mental aging and tells how to prevent psychosclerosis, the hardening of the mind, so that we can die young--as late as possible.

This book takes a close look at how girls of color think, talk, and learn about sex and sexual ethics, how they navigate their developing sexuality through cultural stereotypes about sex and body image, and how they negotiate their sexual learning within a co-ed sex education classroom. While girls of color are often pictured as at risk or engaged in risky behavior, the analyses of focus groups and classroom discussions, show not only girls' vulnerabilities but their strengths as they work with integrating diverse identities, media messages, school policy and history into their understanding of the sexual world they are exposed to and a part of.

Information from neuroscience is growing and being properly used, and misused wich makes it imperative that educators receive accurate and practical information. This book provides the accurate and practical information educators (pre-service and in-service) and caregivers serving children birth through age 8 need to know. This volume takes a practical and cautionary stance. It reminds educators to consider the ethical implications of neuroscience when it is applied to education, reviews current findings from neuroscience and reveals the dangers of oversimplification and inappropriate extensions of neuroscience into curricula. It brings together a group of authors with varied expertise writing on an array of inter-related educational topics that will help educators use neuroscience to understand and address the cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral needs of all young children, including those with exceptionalities. They believe neuroscience can be insightful and useful to educators if applied ethically and with care. The book offers strategies educators and caregivers can use to affect children today and the adults they can become.

Lists and describes articles about child abuse and its prevention, causes, manifestations, and legal issues.

The complexities and tragedies arising from teen violence are problems faced on every continent in the world. Fourteen case studies of carefully selected countries, representative of every region of the world, are presented in this absorbing volume that is the first to examine the causes and possible solutions for the problem of teen violence around the world. Students and teachers can make cross-cultural comparisons to discover how the problem is viewed in different countries, how the problem is changing, which factors seem to contribute to the rate of teen violence in almost all of the countries and which are unique to specific countries. Readers can also take a fascinating look at the various solutions to the problem that have been proposed and tested throughout the world.

Each chapter is divided into similar subsections, so students can easily compare specific topics among different countries and cultures. They will find that the perception of teen violence in different countries does not always reflect the reality. They can discover how such factors as drug use, family dynamics, and educational settings play an important role in teen violence across many different cultures, while also discovering the unique settings and situations that contribute to violence in unfamiliar cultures. This world view will help build better understanding of how social issues affect all societies.

This book presents an emerging rehabilitation program for improving the reading abilities of individuals with low vision who undergo therapy for visual impairment. Its interdisciplinary framework for visual training through reading skills development aligns its goals with those of special education programs and features anatomical and psychological background chapters, diverse perspectives on rehabilitation, and empirical supporting data. Program details span theoretical bases, strategies and planning, pedagogical considerations, use of assistive technologies, and assessment of client progress and program efficacy. And by locating rehabilitation in the psychosocial experience of visual disability, the program can be used as a means of building confidence and motivation, contributing to improved quality of life. Included in the coverage: Visual impairment and its impact on development. Rehabilitation of individuals with visual impairment in the Czech Republic. Innovative vision rehabilitation system: theoretical postulates, meanings, and objectives. Reading as a main objective of vision rehabilitation. Verification of effectiveness of the reading performance experimental rehabilitation program. Reading Rehabilitation for Individuals with Low Vision is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians/practitioners, and graduate students in varied fields such as cognitive psychology, rehabilitation, literacy, special education, child and school psychology, visual therapy, and public health.

This handbook examines state-of-the-art research and clinical findings on attenuated psychosis syndrome (APS) across the globe. It addresses symptoms, assessment methods, and treatment approaches as they differ and converge across countries and cultures. The handbook explores how the illness impairs many aspects of daily functioning, with high rates of suicide and a reduced life span. It details how early detection is critical and may greatly reduce the public health burden of the illness. Chapters describe the early identification and intervention efforts that are currently underway across the world. The book offers international findings from prominent researchers, elaborating culturally relevant illness symptoms, help-seeking behaviors, and assessment and intervention strategies. In addition, chapters illustrate wide variations in symptom expression and experience, reinforcing the necessity of culturally attuned practice in patient-centered care. The book concludes by examining the implications - challenges and opportunities - for future research and clinical practices from an international perspective. Topics featured in the Handbook include: Barriers to service in low-resourced countries. The role of traditional or culturally acceptable care in developing early intervention models. The reliability and validity of tools for assessing and identifying APS. Possible medical diagnoses that can present with APS symptoms and how to differentiate these conditions from APS. The Handbook of Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome Across Cultures is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, and related professionals as well as graduate students in child and school psychology, psychiatry, social work, and related disciplines.