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

I have already written blog posts about the great half day pre-conference workshop I went to - "Glasgow BABCP conference: Pre-conference workshop - the excellent Michelle Craske on 'Exposure therapy in the 21st century'" - and the first full day of the conference - "Glasgow BABCP conference: 1st day - lecture rant, Anke Ehlers on PTSD, a workshop on 'the strong & curious therapist', and more".  Sadly I didn't get to the second day of the conference, but I certainly went to the final half day attending a very fine two hour 'clinical skills' class with Jaime Delgadillo on&nb

Yesterday was the first full day of the two & a half day (plus one day of pre-conference workshops) BABCP summer conference in Glasgow.  It feels like I've been going to these annual BABCP get-togethers for a thousand years.  In so many ways, I think they're great ... although, for a society that prides itself on being evidence-based (more on this later in this post), I do think that the way these conferences are delivered is pretty dusty & traditional.  Basically we sit in large tiered lecture halls and listen to major plenary lectures or we sit in smaller rooms for workshops that are very largely just lectures in more extended formats. 

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.

When assessing and monitoring progress with OCD sufferers, originally I used the Y-BOCS questionnaire.  Then some years ago I switched to using the OCI (distress scale).  This is fine ... it's the officially recommended OCD questionnaire by IAPT, the English Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies initiative (see pages 39-41 of their freely downloadable Appendices and helpful resources manual).  But a hassle about the 42-item OCI is that it's time consuming, taking about 12 minutes to complete and a fair amount of time to review & score.  I've now shifted to using the 18-item OCI-R (see Veale et al, 2016 below). 

A couple of recent research papers caught my attention - Kashdan & colleagues' "Sexuality leads to boosts in mood and meaning in life with no evidence for the reverse direction: A daily diary investigation" and Gerbild et al's "Physical activity to Improve erectile function: A systematic review of intervention studies".  The two papers are a good reminder of how sex can often be an important contributor to wellbeing, that sexual difficulties are common, and that much can be done to help this kind of problem. 

I was intrigued to see the recent paper by Ghazizadeh-Hashemi et al - "Palmitoylethanolamide as adjunctive therapy in major depressive disorder: A double-blind, randomized and placebo-controlled trial" - with its abstract reading: "Experimental studies provide evidence for antidepressant effects of Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) in animal models of depression.  We aimed to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of PEA add-on therapy in treatment of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD).  Methods In a randomized double-blind, and placebo-controlled study, 58 patients with MDD (DSM-5) and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D) score ≥ 19 were randomized to receive either 600 mg twice daily Palmitoylethanolamide or placebo in addition to citalopram for six weeks ...

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