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A multitude of services are utilized in efforts for assisting youth-at-risk to re-establish a pro-social lifestyle. While cooperation and multi-level interventions are needed since there are multiple causes for youth-at-risk problems, conventional approaches include working with youths-at-risk individually, their peers, their families, their schools, and their communities. The three perspectives traditionally employed in examining deviance and youth problems are the sociological perspective, the psychological perspective, and the physiological perspective. This chapter suggests that “user or client participation” may be the most effective way at working at the individual level since youths-at-risk feel encouraged to participate in the helping process when given the chance. Also, the chapter presents the criminalization process as a method for better understanding gradual engagement in crime and delinquency.

Psychology differs from many other disciplines in that students can readily connect course material to their own lives (Goldstein, 2010). This distinction is at the root of the idea of psychological literacy as defined by McGovern et al. (2010). Promoting psychological literacy entails reorienting what and how we teach students in a way that emphasizes psychology’s relevance. To the extent that the acquisition of core psychological knowledge takes place in the classroom, we believe that the obvious channel for cultivating psychological literacy is the undergraduate psychology curriculum. This chapter reviews the history of psychology curricula in the U.S.A. and then considers how student learning outcomes related to psychological literacy might shape disciplinary curricula for undergraduates. Such curricular change must address the necessary balance between graduate and undergraduate needs, and the balance between cutting-edge and core knowledge; for these reasons, the chapter specifically discusses the range of learning outcomes a psychologically literate curriculum should comprise. The chapter then turns to the competencies that should appear in psychologically literate curricula and addresses ways to give courses a more global perspective. The chapter also focuses on practical ways to make a departmental curriculum more psychologically literate and offer advice on assessing literacy. The chapter concludes with a call to develop a psychologically literate citizenry.

This chapter reviews the ways in which a psychological perspective informs an understanding of how plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers, judges, and jurors make decisions. It then explores how a psychological analysis of the tort system can contribute to the ongoing debate about tort reform, with psychology offering insight into why notions of frivolous lawsuits and litigiousness have become a common part of the public’s torts nomenclature and how tort reform implicates widely cherished values such as the value of personal responsibility. Finally, the chapter raises a number of questions and topics that deserve further systematic study, including causal reasoning within the adversary system; the impact of psychological heuristics; the interaction of liability, compensatory damages, and punitive damages judgments; settlement processes in mass tort;, and the objectives of tort law.

This chapter introduces Orthodox Judaism, which is viewed phenomenologically, defined broadly, and recognized in the systems of beliefs and practices maintained by Orthodox Jews. It mentions the halakhah or Orthodox religious law that conceives the ‘practices’ part of the Orthodox Jewish system. It also reveals Orthodox Jewish practices that are not pursued to accord with halakhah but can be characterized as minhag or custom. The chapter looks at Orthodox Judaism in America since the nineteenth century and examines a series of halakhic changes or changes in what is deemed to be proper Orthodox conduct. It explains the various directions in which ‘acceptable’ Orthodox behaviour is developing from a social and psychological perspective.

This chapter explores debates about mixed marriages between Burmese Buddhist women and Indian men in the rapidly changing social, psychological, political, and economic contexts of 1930s Burma. It employs a social psychological perspective to examine the motivational and psychological processes underlying public reactions towards Indo-Burmese marriages. Against the backdrop of an emerging national identity in colonial Burma, such marriages exacerbated national anxieties. Nationalists perceived Indo-Burmese marriages as a breakdown in the homogeneity of the Burmese race and the Buddhist religion, both of which were at the core of their national identity. An analysis of the print media in the 1930s demonstrates how this crisis of national identity influenced nationalist writers’ reactions to mixed marriages. Although they advocated for women’s education and participation in public life, nationalists confined women to the roles of wife and mother, assigning them the responsibility of preserving Burmese race and religion.