Book Description

Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology, Volume 1 reviews advances in clinical and community psychology. Topics covered include theory and research in areas such as psychological assessment of intelligence, personality, and abnormal behavior; psychotherapy, broadly defined to include counseling and behavior modification; and psychophysiological and neurological determinants of personality and psychopathology. Comprised of five chapters, this volume first illustrates how reinforcement and modeling techniques can enable psychologists to function effectively as mental health consultants and agents of social change in an institution for delinquent children. The second chapter describes a unique program designed to prevent emotional dysfunction in school children by combining effective therapeutic intervention with relevant research and evaluation. The third chapter challenges the relevance of psychological research that does not take into account the relationship between the experimenter and his subjects, and instead demonstrates the impact of experimenter self-disclosure on the responses given to psychological tests and on subjects' behavior in psychology experiments. The fourth chapter proposes a behaviorally oriented model for the assessment of positive mental health and describes a successful application of this model in the assessment of the competence of college freshmen. The final chapter relates research on human psychophysiology to problems of psychological assessment and psychotherapy that are of central concern to clinical psychologists. This book should prove useful to practicing clinical and community psychologists, graduate and undergraduate students of psychology, and members of other mental health professions.