"You've got to spread joy up to the maximum.  Bring gloom down to the minimum.  Otherwise pandemonium ... Liable to walk upon the scene".  Bing Crosby sings

"You've got to accentuate the positive.  Eliminate the negative.  Latch onto the affirmative.  Don't mess with Mr In-Between".  Bing Crosby sings!

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

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 days ago I ran a one day workshop on Couple Therapy for final year Counselling Psychology students at Glasgow's Caledonian University.  Although I've run many workshops over the years around relationship themes, this is the first time I've taught one specifically on Couple Therapy.  It's hard work building a full day workshop from the ground up.  I think the students were kind to me as I'd run a five day workshop for them on Group Work last November and so we knew each other a bit. 

Just about to start the second day of this two day workshop led by Professor Don Baucom on "Couple-Based Interventions for Anxiety Disorders".  We're here at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in London's East End.  St Katharine's aims to provide a "sense of an oasis in the city" and I think it succeeds really well.  I've been to workshops here before and I would thoroughly recommend it.  But how was yesterday's first day of this workshop?

Yesterday was the second full day of the BABCP summer conference in Warwick.

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.  Craske's list of publications & research presentations runs to 31 pages and begins with a study on musical performance anxiety published in 1984.  As the presentation titles on her list show, for some years the majority of her many lectures at prestigious conferences all over the world have revolved around the theme of how to take evolving scientific findings about fear learning and use them to optimize exposure treatments for anxiety disorders.