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This volume is a valuable resource for student and professional researchers interested in executive function, emotion, and social development.

Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It's the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed--skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills--yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society. But this is not the case for hundreds of thousands of lucky children who are enjoying the power of play in schools in China, Texas, Oklahoma, Long Island, Scotland, and in the entire nation of Finland. In Let the Children Play, Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and scholar, and Fulbright Scholar William Doyle make the case for helping schools and children thrive by unleashing the power of play and giving more physical and intellectual play to all schoolchildren. In the course of writing this book, Sahlberg and Doyle traveled worldwide, reviewed over 700 research studies, and conducted interviews with over 50 of the world's leading authorities on education. Most intriguingly, Let the Children Play provides a glimpse into the play-based experiments ongoing now all over the world, from rural China, Singapore, and Scotland to North Texas and Oklahoma, as well as the promising results of these bold new approaches. Readers will find the book to be both a call for change and a guide for making that change happen in their own communities.

Neuropsychological Evaluation of the Child: Domains, Methods, and Case Studies, Second Edition, is an updated and expanded desk reference that retains the first edition's organizational structure, strong practical focus, and lifespan developmental perspective. It is a unique compilation of published and unpublished pediatric neuropsychological test normative data that contains extensive discussion of assessment methods and case formulation. Added for the first time are instructive clinical case vignettes that explicate brain-behavior relationships in youth, from preschool-age through adolescence. These cases illustrate immediate and late effects that result from common and rare medical diseases and psychological disorders, and highlight key issues that arise when examining a child's maturational trajectory and brain-behavioral relationships using convergence profile analysis. Part I, Child Neuropsychology: Current Status, contains four introductory chapters regarding definitions, education and training, and professional roles; reasons for referral; typical and atypical brain development; and clinical practice considerations. In Part II, Clinical Issues, discussion covers the procedural steps of neuropsychological assessment, behavioral assessment techniques, observational data, and oral and written communication of results. These chapters are followed in Part III, Domains and Tests, by extended coverage of topics and tests related to the major neuropsychological domains: intelligence, executive function, attention and processing speed, language, motor and sensory-perceptual function, visuoperceptual, visuospatial and visuoconstructional function, and learning and memory. A final chapter addresses deception in childhood, reasons why a child might reduce effort and invalidate assessment, and the use of performance validity tests, symptom validity tests, and embedded validity indicators to assess noncredible effort. Each of the 16 chapters includes definitions, theoretical concepts, models, and assessment techniques that are essential knowledge for clinical and research pediatric neuropsychologists.

The past twenty years have seen an increased interest in the impact of traumatic stress on development. In Neuroscience of Pediatric PTSD, Drs. Carrion and Weems summarize key work done in areas pertinent to function and development. They discuss advances in the neuroscience of executive function, memory, emotional processing and associated features such as dissociation, self-injurious behaviors and sleep regulation. Each chapter is divided into three parts; pre-clinical research, adult research and developmental research. The Authors present Issues such as comorbidity and treatment and their relationship to these neuroscience findings are presented.

It's often assumed that criminologists know a great deal about violent offenders, but in fact, there is little consensus about what distinguishes them from those who commit less serious crimes. There is even less agreement about whether violent offenders can be distinguished from chronic, nonviolent offenders at all. The challenging question remains: why do some individuals commit violent offenses while so many others restrict themselves to nonviolent ones? Thugs and Thieves argues that understanding the differential etiology of violence constitutes a fundamental chasm in the criminological literature. In the introductory chapters, the authors lay out the important theoretical and methodological deficiencies that have obstructed the production of a clear set of findings to answer this question. The authors then share a highly nuanced interpretation of child development research, focused on outlining important features of early life likely to be important in the etiology of serious physical aggression and violence. They also discuss criminal motivation and contextual factors in detail. Together, these lay the foundation for the selection of'good prospects'for predicting violent offending. Separate chapters are devoted to intelligence and executive function; academic achievement and other school factors; parental attachment; parental warmth and rejection; child abuse; poverty; communities; and substance abuse. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the existing evidence on the topic at hand through the'differential etiology'lens, to restructure what we already know from the empirical literature. As such, the book provides a new way forward for understanding this important issue and also serves as a platform for generating hypothesis tests, directing future research, and better designing anti-violence policy. Thugs and Thieves will be of interest to criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, students, policy makers, lawmakers, and readers interested in violence and aggression.