logo

dr-james-hawkins

  • icon-cloud
  • icon-facebook
  • icon-feed
  • icon-feed
  • icon-feed

Social integration and a midsummer potluck lunch

Originally added on 21st June 2009
Last updated on 4th November 2009

We have fifty to sixty people due for lunch today.  I better not hang around writing blog postings for too long.  There's still lots of preparation work to do.  It's great.  I love these midsummer potluck lunches that we've been hosting for many years now.  It's such fun to invite most of our local social network and see them all mixing up together in a chaotic "soup".  Hard work.  Heart warming.  If we invite ninety or so people we normally reckon that about half of them will be able to make it, so today's "catch" is a pretty good one.  Nearly all our closest local friends will be here and mixed up with them will be other friends, acquaintances, new partners, a couple of children.  Fantastic.  There's plenty of preparation and dear Catero has done a lot of cooking but, since it's potluck, we're not trying to feed them all just from our own efforts.

The Ben Lui group (second post): how to know when to change direction on a walk or in treatment for psychological difficulties!

Originally added on 16th June 2009
Last updated on 22nd June 2009

A couple of lines from the Bruce Springsteen song "Hungry heart" kept going through my head - "Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going."  Something was wrong.  I couldn't work out where I'd got to on my map.  The line of pylons shouldn't have been where they were - and certainly not where they were in relation to the stream and rough track I could see across the valley. 

I'd started walking fine in the morning.  I left Edinburgh early and before 9.00am was heading out from Dalrigh on the long walk up the valley to Ben Lui.  Two hours walking saw me at the bottom of the hill.  Then a steady tramp up and into the low lying cloud. 

Walking up into the mist on Ben Lui

The Ben Lui group (first post): the challenge of balancing planning & savouring

Originally added on 15th June 2009
Last updated on 30th May 2025

Tomorrow I hope to head North and West up past Stirling, Lochearnhead and Crianlarich to Strath Fillan.  I should be able to park at a little village called Dalrigh just before Tyndrum.  From there I can walk in by the River Cononish for about 7 km to get to Ben Lui (Beinn Laoigh, calf hill).  The Scottish Mountaineering Club's Munros guidebook describes it as " ... one of the finest mountains in the Southern Highlands; it stands high above its neighbours, and its splendid shape is unmistakable."  They estimate a bit under 4 hours to the summit.  From there it should be straightforward to head on to Beinn a' Chleibh (hill of the creel or chest).  The forecast is mixed - hopefully low cloud will clear somewhat as the day goes on. 

Stanford psychophysiology lab: social anxiety, mindfulness with kids, & loving kindness

Originally added on 7th June 2009
Last updated on 30th June 2009

Emotional reappraisal (changing the way we see a situation) and emotional suppression (inhibiting our already present emotional response) have very different effects on our feelings, relationships and wellbeing.  As a generalisation, reappraisal tends to work well, while suppression comes at higher cost.  I wrote about this last month  in a first post on James Gross's Psychophysiology Lab at Stanford . I went on, in a subsequent post, to put together a handout on reappraisal entitled Getting a better perspective.

Because there is so much interesting research being conducted at the Stanford Lab, I thought it worthwhile to write a further post mentioning some of this other work.  The webpage detailing their current research projects mentions nine different areas.  These include the following descriptions:

Recent research: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on weight, sugared drinks, vitamin D, vegetarianism & climate change

Originally added on 4th June 2009
Last updated on 2nd December 2009

I like the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN).  It comes out monthly and nearly always has an article or two that I find interesting and helpful.  The AJCN May edition produced a bumper crop.  Interesting articles included a report by Chen and colleagues (see below for all abstracts) on the effects of encouraging people to reduce their consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB).  In the 810 US adults they studied, 19% of total daily energy intake came from drinks.  They found "A reduction in liquid calorie intake had a stronger effect than did a reduction in solid calorie intake on weight loss. Of the individual beverages, only intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) was significantly associated with weight change. A reduction in SSB intake of 1 serving/d was associated with a weight loss of 0.49 kg ... at 6 mo and of 0.65 kg ...

Recent research: six papers relevant to psychotherapy

Originally added on 28th May 2009
Last updated on 31st May 2009

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.