This text offers clinicians a comprehensive paradigm for assessing object relations functioning in disturbed younger and older adolescents. It gives a sense of how object relations functioning is manifest in different disorders, and illuminates how scores on object relations measures are converted into a therapeutically relevant diagnostic matrix and formulation. Outlining the process of object relations assessment, Kelly presents detailed cases of a range of disorders including anorexia nervosa, borderline states, depressive disorders and trauma. The cases portray the vicissitudes of object...

This book reports the first attempt in the child development literature to examine the structure of early personality based on parents' free-descriptions of their children. It is an important piece of research because of its cross-national focus on personality development.

The authors present a data set that reveals considerable consistency in the parental descriptions of child personality in both western and nonwestern countries. This consistency supports the cultural universality of the "Big Five" personality factors. The authors' findings lay the foundation for an examination of how...

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nietzsche)
The phenomenon of positive personal change following devastating events has been recognized since ancient times, but given little attention by contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists, who have tended to focus on the negative consequences of stress.
In recent years, evidence from diverse fields has converged to suggest the reality and pervasive importance of the processes the editors sum up as posttraumatic growth. This volume offers the first comprehensive overview of these processes. The authors address a variety of...

This volume aims to fill the gap between teaching and learning in the literature and in the associated training programmes. The contributors present techniques for teaching assessment and explore the skills involved. It aims to give an understanding of the administration, scoring, and interpretation of responses on various personality assessment instruments and to examine the ability to put that understanding into words and communicate it effectively to referral agents and patients themselves.

In this book, Calhoun and Tedeschi construct the first systematic framework for clinical efforts to enhance the processes they sum up as posttraumatic growth.

Posttraumatic growth is the phenomenon of positive change through struggle with even the most horrible sets of circumstances. People who experience it tend to describe three general types of change: realistically stronger feelings of vulnerability that are nonetheless accompanied by stronger feelings of personal resilience, closer and deeper relationships with others, and a stronger sense of spirituality.

Posttraumatic growth...

Offering a social scientific look at humor's role in medical transactions, this volume is based on extensive field study in seven medical settings. It includes excerpts from dozens of actual conversations between patients and caregivers. Analysis of these episodes reveals that humor is a practical tool used to meet many medical objectives. It is used by patients to good-naturedly complain and to campaign for more personal attention, and by caregivers to get attention, make amends, insist on unpleasant routines, and establish rapport.
Examining humor from many angles, the book begins with...

The past decade has seen more and more clinicians involved in the assessment and treatment of abused and traumatized children. They have contributed to an impressively large body of literature on the impact of abuse and trauma at all ages, the focus of which has been the short and long-term sequelae apparent in the child's behavior, emotional experience, and social interaction. But there have been few efforts to investigate the ways in which abuse and trauma damage the intrapsychic systems and structures that often guide, direct, and inform the child's manifest adjustment and functioning. The...

Memories are the ultimate foundation of testimony in legal settings ranging from criminal trials to divorce mediations and custody hearings. Yet the last decade has seen mounting evidence of various ways in which the accuracy of memories can be distorted on the one hand and enhanced on the other. This book offers a long-awaited comprehensive and balanced overview of what we now understand about children's and adults' eyewitness capabilities--and of the important practical and theoretical implications of this new understanding. The authors, leading clinicians and behavioral scientists with...

This volume offers a comprehensive treatment of the study of personality and communicated social competency.