psychology notes.
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Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, and Thomas Szasz at The Evolution of Psychotherapy conference (1985)
via Psych Central:
New research suggests that babies’ brains can process emotional tones of voice, a capability that could potentially lead to problems in dealing with stress and emotions.
Researchers from the University of Oregon found that infants respond to angry tone of voice, even when they’re asleep.
Babies’ brains are very malleable, allowing them to develop in response to the environments and encounters they experience. But this adaptability comes with a certain degree of vulnerability: Research has shown that severe stress, such as maltreatment or institutionalization, can have a significant, negative impact on child development.
Graduate student Alice Graham and psychologists Drs. Phil Fisher and Jennifer Pfeifer wondered what the impact of more moderate stressors might be.
“We were interested in whether a common source of early stress in children’s lives — conflict between parents — is associated with how infants’ brains function,” said Graham.
Graham and colleagues decided to take advantage of recent developments in fMRI scanning with infants to answer this question.
Twenty infants, ranging in age from six to 12 months, came into the lab at their regular bedtime. While they were asleep in the scanner, the infants were presented with nonsense sentences spoken in very angry, mildly angry, happy, and neutral tones of voice by a male adult.
“Even during sleep, infants showed distinct patterns of brain activity depending on the emotional tone of voice we presented,” Graham said.
The researchers found that infants from high conflict homes showed greater reactivity to very angry tone of voice in brain areas linked to stress and emotion regulation, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, caudate, thalamus, and hypothalamus.
This finding is consistent with lab studies on animals that discovered these brain areas play an important role in the impact of early life stress on development.
As such, the results of this new study suggest that the same might be true for human infants.
Researchers believe the findings show that babies are not oblivious to their parents’ conflicts, and exposure to these conflicts may influence the way babies’ brains process emotion and stress.
The study is to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
The Dangers of Self-Diagnosis (Psychology Today)
“Easy access to information does not negate the need for a professional opinion.”
felistella Asks:
psychotherapy Said:
Well, I tend to be a rather obsessive and wide-ranging reader, and as a result my initial impulse is to recommend thousands of books to you, which I know is now what you’re looking for. I think learning goes on forever, and many different kinds of books can offer many different kinds of things to a therapist, aspring or established. Most days I think there’s probably a good deal more to be learned about human nature by reading Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or David Foster Wallace than there is from a psychology text book of any kind.
But since your question was specifically regarding important and/or seminal psychological literature, I will try to keep myself to that. :)
So, for starters, read anything you can get your hands on from Irvin Yalom (especially Love’s Executioner and The Gift of Therapy), Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Karen Horney (especially Neurosis and Human Growth), Erich Fromm, and William James. If you need more specific suggestions than that, feel free to let me know…
corgiceps Asks:
psychotherapy Said:
Well, I guess the first thing I should tell you is that you absolutely don’t need to go to school forever to be a therapist or a counselor. There are many different paths to the career, most of which require an undergraduate degree of some kind (not even necessarily in psychology) and then a graduate degree (typically a 2 year program). You can always go to school longer to obtain a Ph’D or PsyD or become a full-on psychiatrist, but none of these are necessary paths to becoming a licensed therapist.
I’m not sure where you’re currently at in your schooling, so I’m not sure how many years that will mean you have to do, but assuming you’d at least planned to get an undergraduate degree in something already, then you’d only need to consider going to school an additonal two years to get yours Masters in a related-field (an MA in Counseling, an MSW, an MFT, etc). Once you have your graduate degree, you typically have to do a few years of post-graduate work in order to acquire the necessary client and supervision hours required to take the licensure exam for your particular state. And, once you’ve done all that, you will be a licensed therapist.
As far as non-schooling or training-related advice, in general I’d say it’s quite helpful to have a huge and deep curiosity about people if you want to do this work for many years, to view psychotherapy as far more an art than a science in general, and to make sure you can take good care of yourself on a personal level while doing the work (including good self-care habits, building and maintaining a fulfilling life outside of your work, and having your own therapist so that you can be aware of your own issues, struggles and blind spots).
Best,
Chad
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
(via awritersruminations)
