I wrote yesterday about the "European Positive Psychology conference: 1st day - a disappointing start & caution on over-selling mindfulness" ... but today's conference presentations rapidly kicked my doubts about being here into touch. We started with a couple of fine keynotes ... Claudia Senik on "The cultural dimension of happiness" and Willibald Ruch on "Character strengths: Unresolved issues, new frontiers".  Both talks were excellent.  

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.

"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion."  Dalai Lama 

It's the third and last day of this annual BABCP conference (although I'm posting this a day after writing it).  I wrote yesterday about a symposium I went to on the second day.  Today I was more settled - I got out for a pre-breakfast run and then had a chance to meditate.  There's nothing that really grabs my attention in the first set of symposia this morning, so I'm taking the opportunity to review how the conference has been so far and what my plans are for the rest of the day. 

I blogged yesterday about the second full day of this "5th European conference on positive psychology".  So how was the last morning of the conference?  In order to catch my flight I only went in for the final two plenary presentations and then left at the coffee break - a pity, but I already have plenty new to chew over from this conference and I don't think I was missing anything too crucial - for the kind of work - I do by coming away a little early. 

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 six studies relevant to improving psychotherapy outcomes.  Brewin et al report on using imagery-based interventions to help people with depressioin.  Lydiard et al highlight the importance of sleep-related disturbances as a treatment target in PTSD.  McCrady and colleagues show that working with couples rather than just individuals seems more effective when using behavioural therapy to help women with alcohol use disorders.  Geerts et al describe rather amazing research investigating "The role of parental bonding and nonverbal communication in the short-term treatment response was investigated in 104 depressed outpatients. At baseline patients completed the Parental Bonding Instrument. We registered the nonverbal involvement behaviour of patients and interviewers from video recordings of baseline clinical interviews and calculated the convergence between patient-interviewer behaviour over the interview ... As hypothesized, low maternal care and high paternal overprotection predicted a poor response to an 8-week treatment.  Maternal care was positively correlated with nonverbal convergence. Moreover, convergence moderated the relationship between maternal care and the response to treatment: Lack of convergence between patients and interviewers turned out to annul the positive effects of maternal care on the treatment response.

Here are three good, recently published books that are all highly relevant to the fields of stress, health & wellbeing.

Hodge, D. R. (2008).