Hudson and Fraley's great new article "Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change their personality traits?" still just has "online first" status at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology so it hasn't even got to "hot off the press" yet.  It describes such interesting findings.  The abstract reads "Previous research has found that most people want to change their personality traits. But can people actually change their personalities just because they want to? To answer this question, we conducted 2, 16-week intensive longitudinal randomized experiments.

I'm running a one day workshop in Belfast this weekend entitled "Keeping up with research: does it make any difference to our practice?".  Here's a downloadable copy of the 50 or so slide initial Powerpoint presentation.  I'll also be giving the trainee cognitive therapists a series of exercises to try. Here are a set of these workshop slides.  They overlap considerably with the rather iconoclastic first presentation, but also provide a jumping off point for four major areas we focussed on ... 1.) how expertise is developed (Anders Ericsson's work).  2.) the importance of rapid feedback on how well things are going (balancing evidence-based practice with practice-based evidence).

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 bit over two years ago I wrote a sequence of three blog posts starting with "New research suggests CBT depression treatment is more effective if we focus on strengths rather than weaknesses".  This was triggered by the fascinating paper by Cheavens & colleagues "The compensation and capitalization models: A test of two approaches to individualizing the treatment of depression" - with its abstract reporting "Despite long-standing calls for the individualization of treatments for depression, modest progress has been made in this effort.