1) Anorexia Nervosa In Young Children
This article starts by looking at anorexia nervosa in pre-pubescent children and moves on to a more general and authoritative overview of what anorexia nervosa is and isn’t. The article focuses on family therapy while playing down the validity of family systems theory. Whilst social pressures and traumatic events may provide a trigger, the illness is seen as internal, not external.
2) TV Dinners
For the webpage for the old specification on psychological explanations of obesity, I used images of adverts for TV dinners. This article sets the development of TV dinners in its cultural context. They brought with them changes in how women spent their time. This context could, I suppose, be considered as a cultural influence on food preference.
3) Online Stress Programmes
This article looks at evidence about online stress programmes. It suggests that guided online interventions based on CBT are effective. It uses the term “Third Wave CBT” to use the form of CBT commonly employed in these contexts. Third Wave CBT makes use of mindfulness. It focuses on the process rather than the content of thought. We’ve been struggling in revision lessons to come up with a sound and clear description of CBT. The descriptions we have managed now seem out of date.
4) Addiction At A Socio-Cultural Level
The explanations of addiction we study function at a physiological or psychological level. This video, based on the work of Johann Hari, looks at addiction in a socio-cultural context, arguing that it arises from disconnection.
5) Mind And Brain
Here is Vaughan Bell talking about how we still classify some disorders as “organic” while others are “functional”. He argues that this distinction, which goes right back to the start of Psychology in the late nineteenth century, is unhelpful.
6) A Sense Of Direction
On our course, we don’t study sense of direction but we do study ways of studying the brain. We also think about implications and applications. This short lecture includes both.
7) Treating Children With ECT
This article explains how ECT is used for children at risk from serious behavioural disorders. There are two things behind this story worth noting. Firstly, people in the second half of the twentieth century assumed that drugs would overtake ECT as an effective treatment of severe mental disorder. That hasn’t happened. Secondly, it illustrates the urgent need for better understanding of methods for stimulating the brain which are more refined than ECT.
DHSB/DHSG Psychology Research Digest 