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.

Reappraisal (changing the meaning we give to experiences) has been repeatedly shown to be one of the most effective ways we have to regulate our emotions.  It's one of the star components of effective emotion-regulation, coping-skill toolkits ... and it's important to realise that these toolkits can be very helpful (De Castella, 2017).  Reappraisal is important across a variety of difficult states ... depression (Cheng, 2017), anxiety (Goldin, 2017), anger, interpersonal conflict, minor hassles (Richardson, 2017), and major life difficulties.

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.

I recently wrote a post on using video in the most effective treatment we have for social anxiety ... "Treating social anxiety disorder: video (and still) feedback (6th post)".  Typically with social anxiety there are several "layers" to a sufferer's fears about potential negative judgements from others. For example they might be anxious that 1.)  They will blush.  2.)  Other people will notice that they are blushing.  3.)  They will then be judged negatively for blushing.  CBT treatment aims to reduce this anxiety by showing sufferers that their fears are exaggerated and that the methods they have developed for managing their difficulties are mostly making the problem worse.

Back last autumn I wrote five detailed blog posts about CBT treatment of social anxiety disorder and also a further post giving access to a series of assessment & monitoring questionnaires - "Self-practice, Self-reflection (SP/SR) & David Clark's treatment for social anxiety: introduction (1st post)", "David Clark's treatment for social anxiety: assessment (2nd post)", "Treatment for social anxiety: personal aims (3rd post)"

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.

I went to a workshop on the treatment of social anxiety disorder with David Clark in July.  It was very helpful.  I've listed assessment & monitoring questionnaires that he recommended below:

As a general measure to assess and track changes in social anxiety severity, the freely available Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) is the questionnaire recommended by the England & Wales NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) "outcomes toolkit".  Interestingly David seems to prefer the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) probably because it makes a pretty full job of assessing both anxiety and avoidance.  

Yesterday I wrote an introductory post on using self-practice & self-reflection (SP/SR) to improve my understanding of David Clark's treatment for social anxiety.  In today's post I want to look at assessment - of social anxiety disorder, of skill with Clark's CBT approach, and at SP/SR initiation.

Self-practice/Self-reflection (SP/SR) is an approach to training in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) that involves practising CBT methods on oneself (self-practice - SP) and then reflecting on what one can learn from this experience (self-reflection - SR).  SP/SR is at the interface between more standard training approaches (such as lectures, videos, role plays) and personal therapy (recommended as part of therapist training by many - particularly non CBT - psychotherapy schools).  In the current draft copy of their "Self-practice/self-reflection workbook", authors James Bennett-Levy, Richard Thwaites, Beverly Haarhoff & Helen Perry write "While the primary focus of personal therapy is on personal development, the rationale and purpose of SP/SR is to use your personal experience of CBT to develop better understanding and use of CBT with pati