I recently wrote a first blog post introducing the excellent workshop that Michelle Craske ran before this year's BABCP annual conference.  It's easy to see Michelle's work as only relevant for improving outcomes in exposure therapy of anxiety disorders.  However I think these ideas are important much more widely than this.  Probably most of us have significant areas of our lives where we would benefit if we had the belief & courage to change.  Self-determination theory research has underlined the wellbeing benefits of living more autonomously, while Shalom Schwartz's work on values highlights how self-direction in thought & action (when balanced with warm-heartedness & kindness) is so widely respected all around the world (for more on this important balance, see the se

This pre-conference workshop with Michelle Craske on "Exposure in the 21st century" was great.  A few years ago - in the blog post "Maximising exposure therapy" - I wrote "Michelle Craske & colleagues from the Anxiety Disorders Research Center of UCLA have, for many years, been publishing careful, challenging research on underlying mechanisms & on ways of boosting the effectiveness of exposure therapies for different forms of anxiety.  Michelle's list of publications & research presentations runs to 50 pages and begins with a study on musical performance anxiety published in 1984.

This "Further background ... " post adds to the "Initial background for the colouring in exercise: assessment, maps, emotional intelligence & emotion discrimination" in supporting the "The 'emotion colouring in exercise': how to do it".  

gratitude writing:  The second 3-minute section of ...

expressive writing:  Returning to the ...

emotion processing:   Denise ...

taking it forward:  So ...

More to follow ...

This "Initial background" post provides important information to support use of the brief 6-minute "Emotion colouring In exercise".  There is additional useful information in the companion post "Further background for the colouring in exercise: gratitude, expressive writing, emotion processing & taking it forward". 

Emotional intelligence:

Emotion differentiation:

More to follow ... 

The "Emotion colouring In exercise" is a deceptively simple 6-minute writing exercise where we practise identifying and describing our feelings.  For important additional information about this process, see the "Initial background for the colouring in exercise: assessment, maps, emotional intelligence & emotion differentiation" and the "Further background for the colouring in exercise: gratitude, expressive writing, emotion processing & taking it forward&q

Excessive health anxiety is associated with high levels of distress, disability and increased health care use.  It is common.  A recent study - "Health anxiety in Australia: prevalence, comorbidity, disability and service use" - reported "Health anxiety affects approximately 5.7% of the Australian population across the lifespan and 3.4% met criteria for health anxiety at the time of the interview ... Health anxiety was associated with significantly more distress, impairment, disability and health service utilisation than that found in respondents without health anxiety.

Just about to start the second day of this two day workshop led by Professor Don Baucom on "Couple-Based Interventions for Anxiety Disorders".  We're here at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in London's East End.  St Katharine's aims to provide a "sense of an oasis in the city" and I think it succeeds really well.  I've been to workshops here before and I would thoroughly recommend it.  But how was yesterday's first day of this workshop?

I wrote a blog post yesterday morning setting the scene for a two day workshop I was about to go to with Professor Kathy Shear on her treatment approach for complicated grief.  Well, how did the day go?  It was very interesting, inspiring, and also a little too much "simply sitting listening" for my tastes. It's hard to know what the best design for this kind of two day seminar should be. I strongly suspect though that just sitting taking in, even such excellent information with the opportunity for regular questions, isn't the most effective way of transferring knowledge.  Hard to do it, but more active audience participation would probably serve the workshop's goals even better.  Despite this, the material being shared was great ... really fascinating and important.

I was struck by a couple of papers on grief that I read last year.  One was Kathy Shear & colleagues' "Treatment of complicated grief in elderly persons: a randomized clinical trial" and the other was Bryant et al's "Treating prolonged grief disorder: a randomized clinical trial."   I was impressed because Shear's paper showed clear benefits of one treatment over a valid active comparison treatment.  Trials showing better outcomes of treatments that have been compared with "treatment as usual" (TAU) or "waiting list control" are two a penny.  However an intervention that produces an obviously better outcome than a valid alternative intervention makes me sit up and take notice.

A couple of recent research studies have underlined the value of specific forms of psychotherapy for complicated grief reactions: