Psychology

The book introduces and evaluates the conceptual models of mental health problems and their treatment, and provides valuable analyses of various disorders, such as schizophrenia and paedophilia. Each disorder is considered from a psychological, social and biological perspective and different intervention types are thoroughly investigated.

This book looks at how our understanding of the brain and mind has developed. It describes in detail the workings of the brain, and investigates how our perceptual systems and the brain work to interpret the sensations we experience. The concept of mind and consciousness, and the role that emotions play in both mental health and our everyday lives, are also discussed in detail.

This book presents current research in the field of abnormal psychology. Topics discussed include self-harm in adolescence and young adulthood; depression and a parenting intervention; a hermeneutic approach to culture and psychotherapy; psychotic symptoms in children and adolescents; treatment approaches to aggressive behavior in schizophrenia; fetal origins of antisocial personality disorder; neurobiology of borderline personality disorder; patterns of interpersonal behaviors and borderline personality characteristics; the psychology of body image and borderline personality and sexual impulsivity.

This title features more than two thousand entries (over fifteen hundred primary and more than five hundred subentries) on specific symptoms and disorders, general syndromes, facets of personality structure, and diagnosis.

This book contains 26 chapters presented in five parts, each part preceded by an editors' introduction. The chapters reflect updates in the classification of disorders (i. e. , DSM-IV). In Part I (Basic Concepts and Models), the chapters include diagnosis and classfication, assess­ ment strategies, research methods, the psychoanalystic model, the behavioral model, and the biological model. Parts II (Childhood and Adolescent Disorders) and III (Adult and Older Adult Disorders), each containing seven chapters, represent the bulk of the book. To ensure cross-chapter consistency, each of these chapters on psychopathology follows an identical format, with the following basic sections: description of the disorder, epidemiology, clinical picture (with case description), course and prognosis, familial and genetic patterns, and diag­nostic considerations.

This review of recent evolutionary theories on psychopathology takes on controversies and contradictions both with established psychological thought and within the evolutionary field itself. Opening with the ancestral origins of the familiar biopsychosocial model of psychological conditions, the book traces distinctive biological and cultural pathways shaping human development and their critical impact on psychiatric and medical disorders. Analyses of disparate phenomena such as jealousy, social anxiety, depressive symptoms, and antisocial behavior describe adaptive functions that have far outlasted their usefulness, or that require further study and perhaps new directions for treatment. In addition, the book's compelling explorations of violence, greed, addiction, and suicide challenge us to revisit many of our assumptions regarding what it means to be human.

This book gives readers critical insights into the human impact of extreme trauma, and the various levels of mental impairment suffered by both victims and survivors. Renowned trauma experts William Dorfman and Lenore Walker give this book immediate relevance through the use of real-life examples from a wide range of crisis situations. They have also deliberately minimized research citations within the text for greater readability.