This is a quick overview of the first full day of the annual BABCP summer conference in Birmingham.  I intend to return to some of the key learning points in later posts.  I've already written about the pre-conference workshop I went to on "Emotion regulation" in a couple of earlier posts. Apparently the conference itself offers 37 symposia, 5 panel discussions, 3 clinical roundtables, multiple poster sessions, 13 skills classes, numerous special interest group & branch meetings, and 18 keynote addresses - all over the course of two and a half days here on the University of Birmingham campus. The freely downloadable 101 page abstracts book gives a great sense of what's on offer.

Yesterday morning I wrote about the BABCP pre-conference workshop that I was going to on "Emotion regulation therapy".  I cut & pasted information from the workshop publicity into the blog and many further details about this approach are available from their website "Emotion regulation therapy for chronic anxiety and recurring depression".

Well ... here I am again at one of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) annual summer conferences.  It's before breakfast on the first morning and I'm a bit wrapped in a funny mix of feelings.  It's about 6.30am on a stunning morning.  The view from my room is of a lovely sun-splashed green lawn leading to a lake.  I'm really looking forward to the conference too.  It's got all kinds of goodies in it. Fascinating.  But in the train on the way down from Edinburgh yesterday, I 'tweaked' my back.  It stiffened up overnight and when I first got going this morning, I wondered if I was going to be able to make it to the conference today.  Well, it seems to be loosening up.  Dignified cautious posture & movements are on the menu just now.

I have written a series of blog posts about the 7th European Conference on Positive Psychology held in Amsterdam earlier this month ... "Positive supervision and positive relationships", "Love, national happiness comparison tables, & life satisfaction assessment", "What proportion of well-being is genetically determined?" and "Self-determination,

I have already written three blog posts about early July's 7th European Conference on Positive Psychology in Amsterdam ... firstly on pre-conference workshops "Positive supervision and positive relationships", then on "Love, national happiness comparison tables, & life satisfaction assessment" and most recently on "What proportion of well-being is genetically determined?" After lunch on the first full day of the conference, I was faced with choosing from fifteen different workshops, symposia & paper sessions. I picked a "paper session" on "Self-determination theory (S-DT)". S-DT is a bit of a passion of mine ... absolutely central to my clinical and personal understanding of eudaimonia, well-being & positive psychology.

I have already written a couple of blog posts about this 7th European Conference on Positive Psychology - the first on pre-conference workshops about supervision & about relationships and the second on love, national happiness league tables, and life satisfaction assessment. After the coffee break I went on to, what for me turned out to be, one of the most interesting sets of presentations at this conference - an invited symposium on "Biological aspects of wellbeing and resilience".

I wrote yesterday about the two pre-European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP) workshops I went to on "Positive supervision" and on "Positive relationships".  Then in mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the conference proper began.  It was heralded by Taiko drummers and a cluster of brief welcoming speeches.  Apparently there are 920 people at the conference from about 50 different countries.  The country spread is similar, but the numbers are up 50% on the approximately 600 attendees at the 5th ECPP I went to in Copenhagen four years ago.

The 7th biennial European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP) began here in Amsterdam yesterday.  Four years ago, I went to the 5^th European Conference in Copenhagen.  It was pretty special and I wrote extensively about it in this blog - see, for example "European positive psychology conference in Copenhagen: arriving, opening speeches & reception".  

(this blog post is downloadable as a handout both in Word doc and in PDF format)

Professor Ken Sheldon is a bit of a hero of mine.  I've followed his research for many years and have great respect for his work and what I've gleaned about the way he leads his life.  I have just been looking at the recording of a lecture he gave at the University of Missouri a little while ago. The points he makes about how to flourish more fully are still pretty much bang on.

I'm just back from four days away with friends down in Cumbria.  I have been going to these long residential Spring weekends on the edge of the Lake District for well over twenty years and have written a lot about them too ... see for example the sequence of posts from a couple of years' ago beginning "Peer groups, Cumbria spring group: first morning - arriving".