The Norwegian Cardiac Exercise Research Group was established early in 2008 with funding from the Norwegian Research Council and other grant organizations. The work of their team of 36 research scientists "focuses on identifying the key cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of physical exercise on the heart, arteries and skeletal muscle in the context of disease prevention and management through experimental, clinical and epidemiological studies. Identifying the cellular and molecular mechanisms associated with aerobic fitness is important, because it may help us develop new and better methods to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease.  The relationship between physical activity and health can be studied by either top-down or bottom-up approaches.

I have written three posts recently on Self-practice/Self-reflection (SP/SR) and cutting edge CBT for social anxiety disorder - the most recent went onto the website yesterday.  There is also a further associated post - "Assessment & monitoring questionnaires for CBT treatment of social anxiety disorder" - which gives ten or so relevant downloadable questionnaires & handouts.  I mentioned that David Clark suggested (at the workshop I attended with him) that there are "five treatment innovations" in his approach to social phobia treatment - 1.) self-focused attention & safety behaviours experiments; 2.) video (and still) feedback; 3.) atten

Common sense on improving outcomes:  It only takes a little reflection to realise that, if we want to become more successful at doing something, it’s likely to help immensely if we know where we’re starting and can track if we’re improving or not.  The research literature is very clear about the importance of this approach – see, for example, the major text book “Development of professional expertise: Toward measurement of expert performance and design of optimal learning environments” – but common sense already makes this pretty obvious.  Imagine that we are trying to improve our skills at playing darts.

The Scottish branch of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) organized a two day autumn conference over the 12th & 13th of September on "Current trends in CBT".  Interestingly what was on offer consisted almost entirely of workshops (apart from one brief symposium on the first evening).  On the first day Avinash Bansode gave a workshop on "MBCT" and John Swann taught on