Abstract
Barney is a 15½-year-old boy who for many years has had a serious “attitude problem”; more recently, however, his attitude has improved. For the past 8 years he has attended a special day school for children and early adolescents with behavioral and/or social-emotional difficulties. The year Barney has just completed will be his last at the school; the joint educational-clinical team that monitors his progress has decided he is ready to try a return to public high school. Barney has improved considerably during the last 2 years in both his academic performance and his behavior. The change in Barney’s academic work is apparent in standardized achievement test scores and teacher reports. The change in his interpersonal thought and behavior—in the way he deals with his teachers and peers and with his own feelings under stress—is more uniquely documented. For the past 3 years Barney has participated in two research projects based on separate (though related) aspects of psychosocial development. These projects have tracked Barney’s progress in both interpersonal “thought” by which we mean social-cognitive capacity or understanding of hypothetical conflicts, and interpersonal “action,” meaning actual conduct or social behavior.
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Selman, R.L., Schultz, L.H. (1988). Interpersonal Thought and Action in the Case of a Troubled Early Adolescent. In: Shirk, S.R. (eds) Cognitive Development and Child Psychotherapy. Perspectives in Developmental Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3635-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3635-6_8
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