Early to bed? Tina Pentland: News Editor What does “bedtime” mean? Is it a truly restful time—for children and their parents—or is it a time of restlessness and unease? Without a doubt some parents of young children struggle nightly with their offspring at bedtime and, for them,...

Weekly Report November 15, 2013 NOTES: Shrink Rap Radio #377 – Dispelling The Ghosts Who Run Our Lives with Jungian Analyst James Hollis James Hollis website http://www.jameshollis.net Big Question - Network...

Adult Brain Function Impacted by Childhood Poverty Research is suggesting that circumstances of childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems with emotional regulation as adults. The new study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by a team of...

Psychological interventions halve deaths and CV events in heart disease patients  Research from Athens, Greece, has shown that psychological interventions can halve deaths and cardiovascular events in heart disease patients. This research was presented earlier in October at the Acute Cardiac...

Towards Stem Cell-Based Treatment for Stroke News Editor: Maria Kostyanaya Brain infarction, or stroke, is caused by a blood clot blocking  vessels in the brain causing interruption of blood flow and shortage of oxygen supply to surrounding tissue. According to the World Health Organization,...

Jeffrey J. Magnavita, Ph.D., ABPP and Jack C. Anchin, Ph.D., both on our advisory board, are delighted to announce the very recent publication of their volume, UNIFYING PSYCHOTHERAPY:  PRINCIPLES, METHODS, AND EVIDENCE FROM CLINICAL SCIENCE, by Springer Publishing Company. The intended...

The mu-opioid system: the brain’s natural painkillers Tina Pentland: News Editor Could the brain’s natural pain relievers, the opioids, offer a new way of treating depression and anxiety? The results of a recent study carried out at the University of Michigan Medical School suggest this is...

The Seat of Empathic Bias:  Right supramarginal gyrus plays an important role in empathy    News Editor Maria Kostyanaya Proposed by Carl Rogers and his followers in the 1940s and 1950s, the concept of “empathy” as “the therapist’s sensitive ability and willingness to understand...

BrainWise Leadership: Practical neuroscience to survive and thrive at work by Connie Henson and Pieter Rossouw BrainWise Leadership: Practical neuroscience to survive and thrive at work from The Neuropsychotherapist on Vimeo. The challenge confronting today’s leaders and their teams is...

  Pleasure Maximisation and Distress Avoidance Over the past three blogs in this series on Neuropsychotherapy Basics, we have looked at the basic psychological needs of attachment, control, and self-esteem enhancement. Now we turn our attention to the forth basic need in the consistency...

Bilingualism Encourages Mental Agility  Tina Pentland: News Editor An active brain is a healthy brain. This is the message to be learned from recent studies of advanced bilinguals who use a different kind of mental process, called “parallel activation”, to access a word in two languages...

Self-esteem Enhancement Last time we looked at the basic psychological need for orientation and control. This time we consider another basic need, and that is the need for self-esteem enhancement and protection. This need for self-enhancement or self-esteem has been regarded as a fundamental...

Orientation and Control Last blog we looked at the basic psychological need of attachment—the need for others. This time we are going to look at an equally important and integrally linked need for orientation and control. According to Epstein (1990), the need for orientation and control is...

  Attachment Style Continuing in our series on Neuropsychotherapy Basics, we look at the central, and critically important, need for attachment. I have touched briefly on attachment in the first blog “Basic Needs” and this time will expand on the concept of attachment as a basic...

The World Happiness Report ranks the happiest countries, with Denmark ranking #1, and reveals six key factors supporting happiness Economic and social progress of a nation may well be measured by its level of happiness. The second World Happiness Report, published by the UN Sustainable...

Consistency Theory Last time in “Neuropsychotherapy Basics” we looked at the four basic needs as defined by Klaus Grawe and based on earlier work by Seymour Epstein. In this blog I would like to take you through the consistency model that we touched on last time and consider how this...

Compulsive drinking in rats linked to hyperactive NMDARs in the prefrontal cortex Tina Pentland: News Editor A team of scientists at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco have identified a molecule that can—quite literally—turn off or on the compulsion to drink...

A New Classification System The newly released Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has made a number of modest alterations to the previous DSM-IV, but at the core it remains a dictionary, describing clusters of symptoms, to ensure clinicians and researchers use the...

The Diagnosis of Mental Disorders - the DSM-5 and Neuroscience – Highlights and Controversy Pieter Rossouw B Honns, MClin Psych, PhD, MAPS, MCClin, QCA Director – Unit for Neuropsychotherapy Director – Mediros Clinical Solutions Director – MOC Program - School of Psychology –...

Basic Needs   Klaus Grawe (2004, 2007) developed a view of mental functioning from conceptualizations formed in mainstream contemporary psychology, yet with a particular ‘driver’ that may not be altogether ‘mainstream’. That is, “the goals a person forms during his or her life...