Here are a couple of good psychology websites that I've come across recently.  One is the British Psychological Society's Research Digest Blog with its tag line "Bringing you reports on the latest psychology research."  The site provides an almost daily, brief description of a particularly interesting recent psychology research paper.  Examples in November include "Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity", "How to increase altruism in toddlers", and "Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific".  The site also provides "taster pages" from the monthly magazine "The Psychologist", a list advertising jobs for psychologists, links to a variety of other psychology websites, a whole variety of learning resources, and a bunch of other fun things like "What is the mos

NICE - the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - recently published guidance on "Depression in adults (update)" and on "Depression with a chronic physical health problem".  The "Depression in adults (update)"  replaces guidance originally published in 2004 and amended in 2007.  The 28 page Quick reference guide provides a helpful overview.  Interestingly NICE here use the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for depression rather than the ICD-10 criteria (used in their earlier publications).  A four step approach is charted - each step is described both by who the intervention is for (e.g.

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.

Here are three studies (for all abstracts & links see below) highlighting the increasingly encouraging results being reported for internet-delivered psychological interventions.  Van't Hof, Cuijpers et al report on " ... a systematic review of meta-analyses on the efficacy of self-help interventions, including internet-guided therapy, for depression and anxiety disorders". They conclude that the 13 meta-analyses indicate "self-help methods are effective in a range of different disorders, including depression and anxiety disorders. Most meta-analyses found relatively large effect sizes for self-help treatments, independent of the type of self-help, and comparable to effect sizes for face-to-face treatments" (see below for abstracts and links to the six research papers mentioned).  Riper, Kramer et al describe how an experimental internet-delivered self-help alcohol reduction intervention transferred well to being made more generally available.  The authors conclude that " ...

This set of five papers documents, in part, our mixed viewpoints on depression.  Worryingly, Mehta & colleagues show deteriorating public attitudes towards mental illness in England (and to a lesser extent Scotland) between 1994 and 2003.  Meanwhile Blumner et al demonstrate a shift towards a more biological view on causes and treatment of depression in the US between 1996 and 2006.

In contrast, Miranda et al's editorial (and Grote et al's research) highlight the growing evidence showing psychotherapies for depression can be "very effective for low-income and minority populations in the United States and abroad" - extending their validity well beyond more privileged groups in developed countries.  Andersson too discusses a further way to make psychotherapies more widely available and helpful - in this case, the increasing literature documenting the widespread value of delivering cognitive behavioural therapy via the internet.     

Here are half a dozen papers with anxiety relevance.  The first couple are about the interaction between genetic vulnerability (or resilience) and childhood experience.  The Stevens et al paper is an update on the large body of research looking at psychological genetic vulnerability/resilience in macaque monkeys and how this interacts with parenting quality to lead, or not lead, to emotional and neurophysiological disturbances in adulthood.  The Battaglia paper particularises this gene/environment investigation by looking at the connections between early human childhood separation anxiety, loss of a parent, and panic disorder in adulthood.  

Good stuff!  The British Medical Journal Group have just launched their Evidence Centre.  It's a fine evidence-based resource providing excellent information for doctors, patients and organizations.  Most of the services however seem to cost money to access.  The Best Health resource for patients, for example, costs £9.99 plus VAT for a 30 day subscription (or £3.00 plus VAT to look at information on a single condition).  The good news for searches to the Best Health resource from the UK and Republic of Ireland is that Boots have linked with the BMJ Group to give access to this service free of charge.  Visit Ask Boots to see how helpful this can be.  Key features include:

• In-depth information on more than 180 common conditions
• Evaluation of over 1500 treatments
• Assessment of 23 common operations and tests
• Decision-support guidelines to help patients assess their options
• Search tips to help them navigate to the right information
• Regular updates to include new evidence and drug guidelines

For much too long it has been hard to access published research without having to pay large amounts of money for journal subscriptions or single article fees.  Since a large proportion of this research is government, hence taxpayer, funded, it seems very wrong that we should then have to pay a lot to find out what the research discovered.