"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. "


Posts tagged with 'emotions'

Our life stories: needs, beliefs & behaviours

14th February 2010

This post describes the "Needs, beliefs & behaviours" diagrams, best viewable on screen in PDF format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4), but also downloadable in Powerpoint format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4). The post below is downloadable as a Word format handout. …

Training in group facilitation

1st November 2009

I'm facilitating a group today on "Relationships & emotional intelligence". When explaining why someone might want to come to the group, the initial publicity leaflet reads "It's worth taking the time to look at our relationships because they are such a huge part of our lives. Past relationships deeply affect …

Recent research: six studies on depression – pregnancy, young children, antidepressant side effects, SAD & CBT, and suicide risk

29th October 2009

Here are half a dozen recent research papers on depression (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting). Yonkers et al's publication is a very welcome one - "The management of depression during pregnancy: a report from the American Psychiatric Association and the American …

Recent research: six studies on emotional & relationship ‘intelligence’ – placebo, warmth, mindfulness, & emotions

22nd October 2009

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting). Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in …

Recent research: NICE guidance on social and emotional wellbeing in secondary education

1st October 2009

NICE is the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health." Although their guidance applies particularly to England and Wales, the opinions they come up with are …

Four aspects model & some associated evidence for relaxation, meditation & imagery

13th September 2009

Relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, imagery and other associated methods form a complex, loosely interlinked field. The "Four aspects of helpful inner focus" model, that I've put together to help me make more sense of this territory, looks like this: For a downloadable copy of this diagram click here. There is …

Autogenic training: fifth session

7th September 2009

Here are the handouts and other materials for the fifth Autogenic training session. Start this exercise once you have worked through the first four lessons. Take your time. If you have conscientiously worked your way through to this fifth session, you're doing really well. Congratulations. Don't feel you have to …

Stanford psychophysiology lab: social anxiety, mindfulness with kids, & loving kindness

7th June 2009

Emotional reappraisal (changing the way we see a situation) and emotional suppression (inhibiting our already present emotional response) have very different effects on our feelings, relationships and wellbeing. As a generalisation, reappraisal tends to work well, while suppression comes at higher cost. I wrote about this last month in a …

Reappraising reappraisal

31st May 2009

The research I reported on earlier this month, in blog posts about Oregon University and Stanford University psychology labs, really got me thinking. "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." Over the last several years, I've moved further and further away from traditional cognitive therapy techniques like cognitive restructuring …

Stanford psychophysiology lab research on emotion regulation

24th May 2009

Last week I talked about coming across Srivastava and colleagues' paper (Srivastava, Tamir et al. 2009 - see below) on the social costs of emotional suppression. This led me to Srivastava's lab at the University of Oregon. It's then an easy jump to James Gross's Psychophysiology lab at Stanford University …