"Friendship" - a three day residential workshop
28th August 2010
Why a workshop on friendship? Relationships are so important - whether we look at wellbeing & happiness, resilience under stress, or surviving to have a long, healthy life. The diagram below is based on a series of studies that have been around for a while - Berkman & Syme's "Social …
Recent research: six studies on money, happiness, romance, leadership, self-compassion & avoidance
26th August 2010
Here are half a dozen recent research studies that caught my eye. Diener et al, in a large sample of people round the world, found intriguingly that wealth tends to increase life satisfaction, while it is the fulfilment of psychological needs - learning, autonomy, using one's skills, respect, and the …
Manchester BABCP conference: disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can be used with positive experiences too (ninth post)
24th August 2010
Yesterday I wrote a post "Disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can help past, present & future concerns". I ended it with the words "In tomorrow's post I'll argue that therapeutic writing (although not so much expressive writing) is also potentially beneficial when the focus is on positive experiences as …
Manchester BABCP conference: disagreeing with Jamie Pennebaker - writing can help past, present & future concerns (eighth post)
23rd August 2010
I've already written a couple of appreciative posts about Jamie Pennebaker's fascinating talk at the BABCP Manchester conference - one on "Expressive writing & emotional suppression" and another on "Expressive writing & timing issues". I'm now going to write a couple of posts disagreeing with points Jamie appeared to make …
Manchester BABCP conference: Jamie Pennebaker, expressive writing & timing issues (seventh post)
22nd August 2010
I wrote yesterday about Jamie Pennebaker's talk at the Manchester BABCP conference and explored various issues including the importance of emotion regulation and the unhelpfulness of high levels of emotional suppression. In today's post I would like to enlarge on the the important issue of timing and how the values …
Manchester BABCP conference: Jamie Pennebaker, expressive writing & emotional suppression (sixth post)
21st August 2010
I've already written a series of five blog posts about the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) conference in Manchester last month. One of the plenary presentations I went to was given by Jamie Pennebaker who spoke about "Expressive writing in clinical practice". The entry on page 28 …
Improving treatments for complex PTSD and for survivors of child abuse (third post)
9th August 2010
I wrote a couple of days ago about Marylene Cloitre & colleagues's recent research paper "Treatment for PTSD Related to Childhood Abuse: A Randomized Controlled Trial", and yesterday I explored three questions that had struck me on thinking about this work - about the applicability of this approach to other …
Improving treatments for complex PTSD and for survivors of child abuse (second post)
8th August 2010
I wrote yesterday about Marylene Cloitre et al's fine recent research study "Treatment for PTSD Related to Childhood Abuse: A Randomized Controlled Trial." I ended the post with the paragraph: For me, her work is both exciting and also raises a whole series of questions. These include 1.) Would her …
Improving treatments for complex PTSD and for survivors of child abuse (first post)
7th August 2010
I've just come across a very interesting research study published in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry: Cloitre, M., K. C. Stovall-McClough, et al. (2010). "Treatment for PTSD Related to Childhood Abuse: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Am J Psychiatry 167(8): 915-924. The abstract reads: "Objective: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related …
Recent research: articles from July journals
5th August 2010
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 14,800 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …