We describe an innovative approach to teaching homeless men the critical thinking skills underlying adaptive decision making and self-regulation needed to bolster resilience in the face of multiple and complex personal challenges. Single men living in a transitional housing facility for the homeless were taught the BrainWise curriculum (n = 210) along with other educational, career, and life skills programs, and tested 4 months later. This group was compared with a smaller control group (n = 61) of men from the same and similar facilities. Outcomes were measured through self-reports of executive functions (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function [BRIEF]), problem solving (Wasik Problem Solving Rating Scale [WPSRS]), coping (Coping Self-Efficacy [CSE]), and knowledge of the thinking skills taught through BrainWise (BrainWise Knowledge Survey [BKS]). All measures showed adequate internal consistency reliability and less strong, but significant, test-retest stability. As expected, self-reported skills in executive function, coping self-efficacy, problem solving, and BrainWise knowledge covaried in predictable ways. The attrition between the pretest and posttest was not predicted by any of the major outcome measures. The sample of 108 men in the Treatment Group who were still in the program 4 months later exhibited significant improvements on all BRIEF composites and subscales, CSE, and the BKS, but not on the WPSRS. In contrast, the remaining 37 Control Group men showed many fewer improvements in the BRIEF scores and a decrease in the WPSRS score. The results suggest the efficacy of BrainWise and measurement of these skills in the vulnerable population of homeless individuals; however, challenges of this type of research and limitations of this study are discussed.

This chapter describes a program for grades K-12 that teaches emotional and cognitive control of behavior and general problem solving skills. The program, called BrainWise, uses metaphors taken from neuroscience to help children understand how their brains work and how they can control stressful situations in which they might otherwise make hasty and maladaptive choices.

The chapter describes inhibitory control in the context of broader and related constructs, executive function and self-regulation. We discuss the adaptive functions of inhibitory control, as well as evidence that life stress, such as poverty, maltreatment, homelessness, and mental illness, negatively impacts individuals' inhibitory control and overall self-regulation skills. Moreover, these stressors are known to disrupt the development and functioning of crucial brain systems underlying inhibitory control. Following this review, we discuss a critical thinking skills intervention, BrainWise, which is designed to teach inhibitory and self-regulation skills to children, youth and adults. We describe the implementation of the program, and review evidence for its effectiveness with various populations, including our recent study that demonstrated the success of BrainWise in teaching these skills to homeless men living in transitional housing. Finally, we describe our proposed future applications of this intervention to veterans suffering serious mental health challenges. Our overarching goals are to highlight the importance of inhibitory control and overall self-regulation, the vulnerability of these important skills to life stress, and the promise held by one neurocognitive intervention for improving inhibitory control in high-risk populations.