Psychology

This edited volume seeks to highlight the development of play therapy in various countries and cities in Asia. The editors discuss how mostly Western play-therapy approaches are adapted for use in Asian countries. Contributors to the volume, who are experts in using play therapy to work with clients from their own cultures, offer unique discussions using a case-study approach to integrate the theory and practice of play therapy across different Asian countries.

Having existed for years in the West, play therapy is still in its early stage of development in most Asian countries, including mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. This is the first play-therapy book written by experts from specific Asian cultures for practitioners and students who are working in the mental-health field for Asian groups. Each chapter first describes play-therapy development in that particular culture and then uses a case study to illustrate how play therapy can be adapted to suit specific cultural beliefs and environments in order to connect parents with their children or to address clients' needs.

Over a ten-year period, Professor Ma carried out cross-disciplinary research in Hong Kong focused on the effectiveness of structural family therapy for Chinese patients suffering from anorexia nervosa. She found that though the Chinese patients received the same diagnosis as their Western counterparts, their experiences throughout the stages of the disease differed significantly due to interpersonal contexts and subjective cultural factors. The present collection synthesizes this clinical experience into a culturally specific, socially relevant, and clinically useful family treatment model for patients.

Despite an increase in the investigation of Hong Kong's drug problem, little has been published concerning the causes of continuous drug use or the recovery process experienced by chronic drug abusers. A Brighter Side documents a pioneer longitudinal study of chronic drug abuse in Hong Kong, using an analytical framework to explore the protective and risk factors affecting relapse or abstinence from drugs. The findings have significant implications for theories of drug use and rehabilitation, especially in regards to the role of social capital, self-efficacy, short-term abstinence, and harm reduction in the road to recovery. The findings also have practical implications for services aimed at chronic drug abusers in Hong Kong and other Asian societies.

The Chinese people constitute more than a quarter of the world's population, yet until now there has been no single volume that summarizes and integrates the wealth of data available, in English and Chinese, on the psychological functioning of Chinese people. The Psychology of the Chinese People emphasizes the prime areas of research, both past and present, the theoretical models used to integrate these findings, and areas for future research. The book also provides a cross-cultural comparative perspective on the data. The authors are all scholars who are major contributors to the theoretical and factual basis of their disciplines. The topics covered include socialization, perception, cognition, personality, psychopathology, social behavior, and organization.

This case book provides an overview of two increasingly related aspects of contemporary applied psychology: the exploration of computer-based psychological assessment strategies across cultures and the cross-cultural generalization of psychological constructs and procedures, particularly psychological assessment. In particular, this book is devoted to exploring the cultural generalizability in a Chinese context of the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) and the use of the Minnesota Report for the MMPI-2, the most widely used computer-based MMPI-2 interpretive system. Clinical case examples from Hong Kong highlight the cultural convergences and divergences that occur when using the Chinese version of the MMPI-2 versus the Minnesota Report.

This book investigates the psychological changes that take place after Christian conversion in chronic heroin-addicted individuals attending a religious programme. Drawing on the data collected in the programme, the author throws light upon questions regarding drug addiction and rehabilitation, religion and healing, and religious conversion in a Christian context.

This is a practical book written in a concise yet scholarly fashion, and it is suitable for religious organization, social welfare/services policy maker, front-line helping professionals, and social work/psychology students in general.