What's on the Blogs

Catching my eye on the psychology blogs this week.

For those of you working in the health service then you are often part of a multidisciplinary team. Ever wondered why some of them worked and some of them didn’t. Sadly mostly didn’t in my experience. BPS Research Digest reports on a study looking at what makes these teams work. Money quote:

Teams with more professions on board only introduced innovations of greater quality when effective group processes were in place – including all team members being committed to the same cause; everyone in the team being listened to; the team reflecting on its own effectiveness; and there being plenty of contact between team members.

Psyblog has a great roundup on emotion, models of emotions and even unconscious emotion. This is useful stuff for us clinicians, given that working with affect is so much part of our day to day work.

The best known modern theory conceptualising emotional states concentrates on two dimensions: valence and arousal. Valence refers to whether you feel positive or negative and arousal refers to physiological 'excitement'. This model has been extremely popular probably because it provides a relatively simple way of researching emotions that can at least provide some answers. Rage, for example, can be considered an emotion that is high on both negative affect as well as arousal.

Read the rest

Psychsplash continues to provide reviews of a range of psychology blogs. Thanks by the way for the very positive review of In the Room. Thanks also for the positive plug at A Clinician’s Journal.

Comments

[Garth Mintun]

I find your blog very interesting and lively! Have you found any psychotherapy blogs dealing with expectations of people during the Holiday season? It would be interesting to me how other psychotherapists interact regarding expectations during the holiday season and what they say to folks when they expect themselves to be "100% happy" during the season. I also would like to know what sites you reccomend for clients regarding expectations during the holiday season. For your information, I made an attempt to write a blog article on Holiday Expectatons with clients in mind and it might be interesting to have a dialogue going on this subject.

[DrX]

I believe that we can only understand offers of gifts by listening to patients on a case-by-case basis. The latent meanings symbolically represented in the patient’s communication are of the utmost importance in terms of understanding the trigger for the gift, the meaning of the gift and the possible meanings of our responses to the offer of the gift.

When we listen to multiple levels of communication in a session, the underlying meanings of these 'acting-in' phenomena may be represented quite clearly, but your crossword puzzle example serves to remind that the gift itself is a communication. The symbolic expression of latent meaning in a gift of crossword puzzles is one of those unforgettable and extraordinary things that can occur in psychotherapy. The patient may have manifestly explored her anger with you, but apparently still felt some anger that was defensively disguised as a 'gift' of 'cross words.' As a 'puzzle,' the gift also seems to contain an invitation for you to decode the patient's cross words.

Unconscious processes are ingenious. I've got to hand it to you for letting the meaning of the gift get through to you as quickly as it did. This is the kind of meaning that can easily elude recognition even as it stares us in the face. We all know that what seems obvious in retrospect is often not on the radar of our awareness as we try to understand what is happening in a session. Yet once we see the meaning, the pieces fall into place. It's a great story. Thanks for sharing it with us.

[wholesale bags]

There is plenty more room in this tote and I foresee it being used for summer outings.

[Coach Factory]

thanks. we are looking forward for your new comments!

[Calvin Klein]

thank you1