This refreshing teaching/learning narrative, based on actual life events and research-supported principles, begins with the lead character (Joanne Cruse) losing her job as the Safety Director for a large manufacturing company. Subsequently, her former psychology professor, Dr. Pitz ("Doc"), invites her to try out for a position as leadership consultant with his firm, Make-A-Difference, Inc. (MAD) that helps companies cultivate a self-motivated and personally-engaged workforce. Throughout her probationary period, Joanne travels with the top consultant at MAD (Mickey Vasquez) to visit a number of organizations struggling with various occupational issues related to the human dynamics of self-motivation (i.e., working to accomplish an organization's milestone from a self-directed or self-accountability mindset). The interpersonal and group interactions Joanne experiences at diverse organizations, accompanied by Mickey’s professional coaching, reveal twenty practical and profound leadership lessons to nurture an actively caring for people work culture in which employees put forth their best efforts on behalf of their company's mission.

Integrating humanism and behaviorism, this volume presents evidence-based techniques for improving health, safety, and well-being in all walks of life.

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that can be used to improve the human dynamics of any situation involving behavior. Fundamentals from humanism are integrated strategically to show how an ABS intervention can be more acceptable, influential, and sustainable. The following twelve chapters detail the deployment of ABS interventions to optimize performance in a wide variety of fields, including occupational and transportation safety, quantity and quality of organizational work behavior, healthcare, athletic coaching, parenting, pre-school and college education, environmental sustainability, and the control of obesity and alcohol abuse. Applied Psychology provides a thorough review of the latest research in relation to these domains and explores issues for future investigation.

Motivation is key to substance use behavior change. Counselors can support clients' movement toward positive changes in their substance use by identifying and enhancing motivation that already exists. Motivational approaches are based on the principles of person-centered counseling. Counselors' use of empathy, not authority and power, is key to enhancing clients' motivation to change. Clients are experts in their own recovery from SUDs. Counselors should engage them in collaborative partnerships. Ambivalence about change is normal. Resistance to change is an expression of ambivalence about change, not a client trait or characteristic. Confrontational approaches increase client resistance and discord in the counseling relationship. Motivational approaches explore ambivalence in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way.

This volume covers the current status of research in the neurobiology of motivated behaviors in humans and other animals in healthy condition. This includes consideration of the psychological processes that drive motivated behavior and the anatomical, electrophysiological and neurochemical mechanisms which drive these processes and regulate behavioural output. The volume also includes chapters on pathological disturbances in motivation including apathy, or motivational deficit as well as addictions, the pathological misdirection of motivated behavior. As with the chapters on healthy motivational processes, the chapters on disease provide a comprehensive up to date review of the neurobiological abnormalities that underlie motivation, as determined by studies of patient populations as well as animal models of disease. The book closes with a section on recent developments in treatments for motivational disorders.