"Sexual behavior, sexual attraction and sexual identity"
9th April 2011
(this blog post is downloadable both in Word doc and in PDF format). There's a helpful US National Health Statistics Report that's been published this month entitled "Sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual identity in the United States: Data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth." The authors write …
Recent research: articles from March journals
7th April 2011
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 15,700 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Landscape and human health laboratory: studying how nature affects us
4th April 2011
I just tumbled into Frances Kuo's "Landscape and Human Health Laboratory" website at the University of Illinois. Fascinating. I can remember the past internal admonition to "exercise the children" if we wanted more peace and quiet later in the day. Much the same kind of internal/shared dialogue as we now …
Boosting self-compassion & self-encouragement by strengthening attachment security: twelve practical suggestions (7-12)
27th March 2011
This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. Last week I gave the first six of a dozen ideas for boosting self-compassion & self-encouragement in the blog post "Boosting self-compassion ... twelve practical suggestions (1-6)". Here are a further half dozen ideas. Remember …
Boosting self-compassion & self-encouragement by strengthening attachment security: twelve practical suggestions (1-6)
20th March 2011
This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. Research suggests that self-compassion may be as much as ten times more relevant than mindfulness for improvements in anxiety, depression & quality of life (Van Dam, Sheppard et al. 2011), although the two concepts (self-compassion …
Psychotherapy & positive psychology: outline of a workshop
18th March 2011
I've already written a couple of blog posts on the short day workshop I'm running early next month - "Psychotherapy & positive psychology: why psychotherapists should pay attention" and "Psychotherapy & positive psychology: the assessment dashboard". On the day itself I plan to start with a little background on what …
Recent research: three studies on CBT, one on implementation intentions and two on compassion
17th March 2011
Here are details of half a dozen recent research papers - three on CBT, one on implementation intentions (and CBT), and two on compassion. Fuller details, links and abstracts of all the studies mentioned are given further down this post. The first, by Gulliksson et al, is "Randomized Controlled Trial …
Behavioural systems (attachment, care giving, exploration, sex & power): using imagery & compassion to fine tune them
13th March 2011
A week ago I wrote a post "Behavioural systems (attachment, care giving, exploration, sex & power): hyperactivated, hypoactivated or just about right?" where I talked about Shaver & Mikulincer's model of five behavioural systems - care seeking, care giving, exploration, sex & power - which ideally fire up appropriately when …
Psychotherapy & positive psychology: the assessment 'dashboard'
11th March 2011
Last week I wrote on "Psychotherapy & positive psychology: why psychotherapists should pay attention". This week I look at positive psychological assessment. The very widely used DSM system classifies mental disorders on five axes - clinical disorders, personality disorders/retardation, medical conditions, psychosocial/environmental problems, and global functioning. The US DSM and …
ADHD in adults: diagnosing & treating this common problem
9th March 2011
I only recently came across the important article "European consensus statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD: The European Network Adult ADHD" published in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry last autumn. I suspect that most mental health professionals working with adults are poor at recognising and treating Attention …