What we've seen in our work is that most people don't give themselves permission to live until they've been given a terminal diagnosis.                 
Stephen Levine

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in this study was " ... twice as large as the effect attributable to treatment group assignment."  Practitioners assigned to give warm, empathic consultations achieved considerably better outcomes than those assigned to neutral consultations, although the " ...

The autumn edition of the BABCP magazine CBT Today carries information about a wealth of courses & conferences.  Here are half a dozen that look interesting, including three - children & families and a couple of European conferences - that aren't mentioned in CBT Today:

ACAMH-BABCP Conference, Croydon, London.  Cognitive Behaviour Therapy with Children and Families: making CBT work for individuals, families, practitioners and services.  Wednesday, Thursday & Friday, 2nd-4th December, 2009. 

BABCP Spring Conferences & Workshops at the University of Westminster, London.  Relationships and Relating in CBT: Science and Practice.  Thursday & Friday, 8th & 9th April, 2010.

I'm a doctor and psychotherapist who's interested in using attachment ideas to improve how helpful I can be for clients.  Awareness of attachment issues informs therapy, it doesn't dictate it.  An obvious question is whether it's sometimes worth assessing attachment in a "formal" way.  I'm no expert in this area.  I'm an "informed amateur" and, after reading and exploring a good deal around the subject, my impression is that it can be pretty useful at times to assess attachment.  The Wikipedia article on Attachment measures provides an excellent overview of the field while, for much more in depth information, the two attachment books and the various websites that I've described in previous blog post

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be."  They report four studies showing how widely this motivation acts - with political power, public funding, gender demographics, and in attacks on those who are trying to work for change.  There's relevance here to the second paper by Wilper et al on "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" estimating that, even after adjusting for income, education, health status, weight, exercise, smoking and alcohol use, lack of insurance was associated with about 45,000 excess deaths annually in the United States among people aged 18 to 64.  Still in the area of inequality and discrimination, Wexler et al publish on

Here are handouts and recordings for the seventh Autogenic Training session.  The initial "Autogenic relaxation training" page gives introductory details of this method.  In the face-to-face trainings that I run, I would typically start the two hour class by practising last time's Autogenic Training exercise together - in this case it would be the sixth session's belly focus.  I would then collect the trainees' record sheets and go round the group looking at how each individual's practice had been going and trouble shooting/sharing experiences.  This group discussion time can be very valuable.  It brings up all kinds of interesting points, encourages people to interact and help each other, and reinforces the sense that we are all on this learning/exploring journey together.

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains nearly 13,500 abstracts. 

Last week I wrote about "A couple of fine books on attachment".  Today I want to highlight what a fantastic resource the internet is - below are details of half a dozen websites that offer lots of attachment information, and also details of further websites that are helpful but more limited.

NICE is the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health." Although their guidance applies particularly to England and Wales, the opinions they come up with are very carefully weighed and can be of use to health (and education) professionals wherever they work.