Recent research: relationships & fairness – 3 papers on large social groups, 2 on bullying, and 2 on generosity
27th January 2011
"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." Dalai Lama I really value how quotes about caring, like this favourite of mine from the Dalai Lama, are increasingly backed up by emerging research. Here are seven further papers in the general …
Setting up a therapists' support group 2
25th January 2011
I wrote yesterday about the email that was sent out last autumn asking several fellow psychotherapists up here in Edinburgh whether they would be interested in forming a Therapists' Support Group. What was some of the thinking behind this initiative? Back in 2008 I lectured at the British Association for …
Setting up a therapists' support group 1
24th January 2011
Seven of us got together yesterday afternoon to talk about possibly setting up some kind of therapists' support group. We're all therapists ourselves, and some of us are close to or on the mature side of 60. All male therapists, so we're kind of "the Grizzlies". Why do it? It's …
Two new, easily usable scales for assessing wellbeing
23rd January 2011
The two scales described are downloadable as "Flourishing scale" Word doc and "Flourishing scale" PDF, and also "SPANE" Word doc and "SPANE" PDF. This post, which provides background advice on using the FS and SPANE, is available to download both as a Word doc and as a PDF. For completeness …
The spectrum of mental health: part 2 - moderate & full wellbeing
16th January 2011
(a slightly abbreviated version of this blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc & a PDF file) Mental illness & mental health: In "The spectrum of mental health: part 1", I wrote "As the diagram (below) illustrates, mental health is distributed as a spectrum across the population. The …
Recent research: six lifestyle & health studies - two on sleep, two on smoking, one on diet & one on weight
13th January 2011
Here are half a dozen recent research papers on lifestyle and health - fuller details, abstracts & links to all studies mentioned are listed further down this post. The first couple are on sleep. I live a pretty healthy life, but I do "short change" myself a bit on sleep …
Antonio Damasio’s “Self comes to mind”: memory and the autobiographical self 1
10th January 2011
"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Mark Twain I wrote last month about "Antonio Damasio's 'Self comes to mind': overview" saying that I wanted to think a bit more about three of the areas covered in his recent book - "Emotions and …
The spectrum of mental health: part 1 - full & partial syndrome disorders
9th January 2011
This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc & a PDF file. Different degrees of "mental health": At any point in time, a proportion of people are suffering from some type of formally diagnosable mental disorder. Others are subsyndromal - struggling although not qualifying for the full criteria …
Recent research: articles from December journals
6th January 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 15,400 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Antonio Damasio’s “Self comes to mind”: emotions and the body 2
3rd January 2011
I wrote an initial blog post last month on "Antonio Damasio's 'Self comes to mind': overview". I commented that I wanted to think a bit more about three of the areas covered in the book - "Emotions and the body", "Memory and the autobiographical self" and "Mindfulness, protoself, core and …