Depending on the circumstances, the local authority may ask the court to order the temporary removal of a child at the beginning of the proceedings, or they may wait until all the evidence has been gathered. At the ‘final hearing’, some months in, the court considers the evidence and makes a decision about the child’s future:

And if that trauma is what drives the mother’s alcohol or drug problem or her inability to leave a violent partner, nothing much is going to change for her or her child.

The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, legal aid will not pay for the therapy and neither will the cash-strapped local authority – and the court lacks the legal power to order the local authority to do so

The law requires that each case be completed by the court within just 26 weeks (six months) from start to finish, and applications for extensions are closely scrutinised

The parents have often had traumatic childhoods themselves,

‘significant harm’

Beyond the damage to the frontal lobe itself, subsequent investigations into the rod’s path also identified probable damage to pathways between the frontal lobe and other brain structures, including the limbic system.

Although lying in a pool of his blood with brain matter emerging from his head, Gage was conscious and able to get up, walk, and speak. But in the months following his accident, people noticed that his personality had changed

Probably the most famous case of frontal lobe damage is that of a man by the name of Phineas Gage. On September 13, 1848, Gage (age 25) was working as a railroad foreman in Vermont.

People who suffer damage to Broca’s area have great difficulty producing language of any form.

The occipital lobe is located at the very back of the brain, and contains the primary visual cortex

The temporal lobe is located on the side of the head (temporal means “near the temples”), and is associated with hearing, memory, emotion, and some aspects of language.

he brain’s parietal lobe is located immediately behind the frontal lobe, and is involved in processing information from the body’s senses.

he frontal lobe is located in the forward part of the brain, extending back to a fissure known as the central sulcus.

The brain and its parts can be divided into three main categories: the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain.

forebrain (Figure 1),

Electroencephalography (EEG) serves this purpose by providing a measure of a brain’s electrical activity. An array of electrodes is placed around a person’s head (Figure 4).

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) operates on the same principles, but it shows changes in brain activity over time by tracking blood flow and oxygen levels

In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a person is placed inside a machine that generates a strong magnetic field.

Once in the bloodstream, the amount of tracer in any given region of the brain can be monitored.

A computerized tomography (CT) scan involves taking a number of x-rays of a particular section of a person’s body or brain (Figure 1).

Clinical psychologists can test a new pharmaceutical treatment for depression by giving some patients the new pill and others an already-tested one to see which is the more effective treatment.

two different variables are measured to determine whether there is a relationship between them.

researchers gather participants from different groups (commonly different ages) and look for differences between the groups.

n a study of a representative sample of 856 children Eron and his colleagues (1972) found that a boy’s exposure to media violence at age eight was significantly related to his aggressive behavior ten years later, after he graduated from high school

esearchers examine data that has already been collected for other purposes.

ducational psychologists can ask students to report their grade point average and what, if anything, they eat for breakfast on an average day. A healthy breakfast has been associated with better academic performance (Digangi’s 1999).

researcher unobtrusively collects information without the participant’s awareness.

a detailed analysis of a particular person, group, business, event, etc. This approach is commonly used to learn more about rare examples with the goal of describing that particular thing.