Faculty Books and Book Chapters
This is a select list of works produced by the faculty of the College of Psychology at Nova Southeastern University
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Working with Psychopathy: Lifting the Mask
Thomas D. Kennedy, Elise Anello, Stephanie Sardinas, and Scarlet Paria Woods
This brief explores the research on psychopaths in various settings and in everyday life. Psychopaths are often predatory by nature but may appear normal to laypersons. Individuals working in health professions, forensic occupations, education and corporate environments are likely to encounter a person with psychopathic traits at some point in their respective careers; this brief highlights the value of being able to identify a person with psychopathic traits, to understand the implications, and to navigate any interactions.
With recommendations for assessment and for guiding future interactions, this brief will be beneficial to mental health professionals, practitioners and researchers in psychology, forensic occupations, corrections, education, healthcare, and professionals in corporate environments.
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Understanding and Responding to Sexual and Gender Prejudice and Victimization
C Viehl, M Ginicola, Amy E. Ellis, and R J. Charette
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Big Brain Book: How It Works and All Its Quirks
Leanne Boucher Gill
Readers are welcomed to the Lobe Labs and Dr. Brain activities in this brightly illustrated, highly engaging book that uses science to answer interesting questions that kids have about the brain and human behavior.
This is a fun primer on psychology and neuroscience that makes complex psychological phenomenon and neural mechanisms relatable to kids through illustrations, interesting factoids, and more.
Chapters include: What is the brain made up of and how does it work? Why can’t I tickle myself? Why do they shine a light in my eyes when I hit my head in the game?
Answers draw from both psychology and neuroscience, giving ample examples of how the science is relevant to the question and to the reader’s life experiences.
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Lobe Your Brain: What Matters About Your Grey Matter
Leanne Boucher Gill
Kids know that their brain does a lot, like make them move, smile, remember, think, feel, and emote.
But do they know how it really works? Readers will take a tour of the lobes of the human brain to discover all the cool things that it can do in this must-have introduction for all nonfiction collections.
Includes kid-friendly examples, simple explanations, and basic anatomy illustrations that show different parts of his brain and central nervous system, basic neurological function, and how everything flows.
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Applying the Attribution‐Value Model of Prejudice to Fat Pedagogy in Health Care Settings
Paula M. Brochu and Roya A. Amirniroumand
There is a need for weight bias to be effectively addressed in health care training programs. Health care professionals often report negative attitudes and stereotypes about fat people, reducing the quality of health care provision (Brochu et al., 2018; Phelan et al., 2015). Some researchers have begun testing interventions to reduce weight bias in health care training settings, with limited success (Alberga et al., 2016). In general, research shows inconsistent outcomes of such interventions for weight bias reduction (Daníelsdóttir et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2014). One mechanism that underlies weight bias is weight controllability beliefs (Crandall, 1994). Interventions that seek to change people's beliefs about the causes of weight and the ability to control body weight are known as controllability interventions. In this chapter, a critical analysis of weight bias reduction interventions that focus on changing controllability beliefs is conducted from the perspective of the attribution-value model of prejudice (Crandall et al., 2001). This analysis is conducted in order to better understand the mechanisms underlying the effective incorporation of fat pedagogy (Cameron & Russell, 2016) in health care training programs.
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Afterword: We Must Be Champions for the Emotional Well-Being of Our Youth
Philip J. Lazarus and Ralph Eugene Cash
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Lessons Learned From School Shootings: Perspectives from the United States of America
Scott Poland and Sara Ferguson
This brief investigates school shootings and their impact on individual, community, and societal levels. It includes professional and personal perspectives from individuals directly involved in and impacted by school shootings. These novel perspectives will help inform best practices necessary to strengthen school safety measures, as well as prevention and response efforts. This brief will serve as helpful guide to mental health professionals, school administrators, psychology students and educators, law enforcement, and threat management and crisis response teams, aiding in better understanding of the many factors surrounding school shootings.
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Florida School Toolkit for K-12 Educators to Prevent Suicide
Scott Poland and Catherine Ivey
The Florida School Toolkit for K–12 Educators to Prevent Suicide (Florida S.T.E.P.S.) carefully follows the best practices model for suicide prevention released in 2019 by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), and the Trevor Foundation. Scott Poland, Ed.D., served as a key advisor in the making of the model, which can be found on the AFSP website and at afsp.org /model-school-policy-on-suicide-prevention. Additionally, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the best practices model and components of a comprehensive suicide prevention program are prevention, intervention, and postvention. Accordingly, Florida S.T.E.P.S. provides guidance on all three components.
Where Florida S.T.E.P.S. differs, however, is with its unique focus on Florida schools. With more than 300,000 students (Common Core of Data, 2019), Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools ranks as the nation’s fourth-largest school district. Other school districts in Florida, such as Union County School District, have fewer than 2,500 students. Combined, Florida boasts 74 public school districts and approximately 2,700 private schools. Florida S.T.E.P.S. is designed to assist all Florida K–12 schools, both public and private, in suicide prevention, and includes both national and Florida-related statistics and related legislation.
The Florida S.T.E.P.S. framework establishes the driving principles and guidelines of a comprehensive suicide prevention program addressing prevention, intervention, and postvention.
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Incorporating Fat Pedagogy into Health Care Training: Evidence-Informed Recommendations
Alexandria M. Schmidt and Paula M. Brochu
In recognition of the problem of weight bias in health care training and among health care professionals, some researchers are examining the efficacy of interventions to reduce weight bias and improve interactions with fat patients. In a review of 17 studies, Alberga et al. (2016) reported a lack of evidence for efficacious weight-stigma reduction interventions among health care professionals. In this chapter, we comprehensively review the efficacy of existing interventions to reduce weight bias among health care professionals and trainees and critically examine them from the perspective of fat pedagogy (Cameron & Russell, 2016). This is done in an effort to provide evidence-informed recommendations to educators and practitioners that are ethical and weight-inclusive. Fat pedagogy views weight oppression as a serious problem and education as an important intervention (Cameron & Russell, 2016). At its core, fat pedagogy is a radical endeavor to disrupt the status quo: it seeks to increase visibility of interlocking systems of weight oppression and make a positive difference in fat people's lives. Fat pedagogy is built upon basic tenets of size acceptance (Cameron, 2015). In this way, fat pedagogy is distinctly weight-inclusive in recognizing that fatness is not inherently unhealthy and that weight and health are distinct concepts (Tylka et al., 2014).
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From Striving To Thriving: How Facing Adversity across the Lifespan Can Foster Workplace Resilience
Ashley M. Stripling and Jodie E. B. Maccarrone
As women in the workforce age, they face a number of new challenges that intersect with previously experienced hurdles. These challenges are more pronounced in the case of older women, who may already experience discrimination based on other identities such as ethnic background or sexual minority status. This chapter illustrates how challenges for older working women such as ageism, lookism, and caregiving intersect with previously experienced hurdles and how these may be more pronounced for women who already experience discrimination based on race, ethnicity, country of origin, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. It provides key insights into resilience and the mechanisms by which adversity can promote late-life psychological well-being. The chapter then outlines pathways through which these challenges can facilitate growth and proposes a model of resiliency factors to inform gerodiverse women, professionals, and organizations about how to promote psychological well-being among our diverse and flourishing late-life female workforce.
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Art Therapy Interventions with Syrian Refugee Youth and Families
Mercedes Ballbé ter Maat, Soraya Hage Obeid, Natacha Pirotte, and Laurence de Groote Vandenborre
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Action Research
Eric S. Thompson
Action Research (AR) is a “form of collective, self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality, coherence, adequacy or justice of their own social or educational practices, as well as the understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out”. AR is a rich methodology and is a powerful approach for counselors to consider while improving their personal lives, counseling practice, and work with communities. This chapter introduces counselors to historical influences, key concepts, and essential approaches to AR. It discusses various approaches to inquiry in AR including first, second and third person approaches, participatory AR, and practitioner AR. First-person inquiry is a uniquely reflective process of inquiry. Through first-person inquiry one can develop their personal lives or professional practice through cycles of reflection, action, and evaluation.
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Handedness
Huda Abu-Suwa
Excerpt
Handedness is a poorly understood phenomenon, that can be defined in many ways. Some consider handedness to be the hand that is used for writing. Others define handedness as the hand that is preferred to be used, or the hand that performs better on manual tasks (Markou, Ahtam & Papadatou-Pastou, 2017). Individuals are generally considered to be right-handed or left-handed, however some individuals may be ambidextrous, or able to use both hands. Finally, some consider handedness to be along a continuum, and not summed into these three categories.
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Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Huda Abu-Suwa, Lisa K. Lashley, and Charles J. Golden
Excerpt
Stem cell research is a controversial issue that has received considerable attention over the last three decades. Stem cell research began in the early 1980’s, when stem cells were obtained from mice embryos and utilized to understand the functioning of stem cells (Grivennikov, 2008). In 1998, researchers discovered techniques for obtaining embryonic stem cells from human and growing them in laboratories. Since them, substantial research has been conducted on stem cells and their potential uses, which includes increasing our understanding of diseases and how they occur, treating various diseases, and testing new medications for safety and efficacy (Taylor, 2005).
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Prenatal Development
Huda Abu-Suwa, Lisa K. Lashley, and Charles J. Golden
Excerpt
Prenatal refers to the period of time between conception and birth. As such, prenatal development is the process in which a fetus develops in its mother’s womb. This period typically lasts nine months. Prenatal development can be divided into three stages: the germinal stage, the embryonic stage, and the fetal stage (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019).
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Preoperational Period
Huda Abu-Suwa, Lisa K. Lashley, and Charles J. Golden
Excerpt
The preoperational period is part of Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019). Piaget was a cognitive psychology, who in 1936 created a model to explain how children understand the world and develop cognitively. While other contemporary theorists believed that intelligence was a fixed trait, Piaget believed that cognitive development was a process that occurred in distinct stages, and that maturation brings about changes and growth in development, rather than training (Lally & Valentine-French, 2019). Piaget posited that each stage occurred at a specific time and in a specific sequential order, such every child goes through each stage in the same order. The order of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development are as follows: sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), preoperational stage (age 2 to 7), concrete operational stage (age 7 to 11), and formal operational stage (11 to early adulthood).
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Rachel Barr
Huda Abu-Suwa, Lisa K. Lashley, and Charles J. Golden
Excerpt
Dr. Rachel Barr is a developmental and clinical psychologist, and a leading expert on early learning and memory. She has published and presented on over 200 articles, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and poster presentations on subjects related to child development and psychology and continues to do research in these fields (Rachel Barr, 2019).
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Robert Stoller
Huda Abu-Suwa, Lisa K. Lashley, and Charles J. Golden
Excerpt
Robert Stoller was an American psychiatrist who studied gender identity and sexuality. Stoller was born in 1924 and died in 1991 (Green, 1992). He died in a car accident near his home, at the age of 66 (Cook, 1992). Stoller received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his medical degree in 1948 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (Goleman, 1991). Stoller also completed psychoanalytic training at the Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where he worked under psychoanalyst Hanna Fenichel.
