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A Yale Psychologist Calls for the End of Individual Psychotherapy
TIME: Is individual therapy overrated and outdated? Yes, says Alan Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University, writing in the leading journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Kazdin contends that treatments for mental health issues have made great strides over the last few decades, but the problem is that these evidence-based therapies aren't getting to the people who need them. Nearly 50% of the American population will suffer some kind of mental illness at least once in their lifetimes, but the mental health field, which relies largely on individual psychotherapy to deliver care, isn't equipped to help the vast majority of patients.
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
The New York Times: Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx.
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SpongeBob impairs little kids’ thinking, study finds
Los Angeles Times: Watching just a short bit of the wildly popular kids TV show "SpongeBob SquarePants" has been known to give many parents headaches. Psychologists have now found that a brief exposure to SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and the rest of the crew also appears to dampen preschoolers' brain power. Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson, both of the University of Virginia's department of psychology, wanted to see whether watching fast-paced television had an immediate influence on kids' executive function -- skills including attention, working memory, problem solving and delay of gratification that are associated with success in school.
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Hardcore gamer kids tend to have low opinions of parents: Study
The Vancouver Sun: If your kids play a lot of video games, does it say something about you as a parent? It might, according to the results of a study that assessed correlations between how much time pre- and early-teen youths spend playing video games and the opinions they hold of their parents. The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University and involving more than 500 middle-school students, found that those who played more video games were more likely to hold negative views of their parents. Some of the perceptions heavy video-game players tended to have of their parents were that they nagged a lot or did not provide adequate supervision.
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How to Improve Your Life with Story Editing
Scientific American: People can change — but how? This is the central concern of “Redirect,” a new book by Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson offers a tour of recent scientific work on psychological change, with a focus on techniques that help a person who is struggling — bad behavior, bad grades, bad attitudes — find a new, better path. Again and again, Wilson asks: What actually works? The answers can be surprising. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. COOK: A central concept in your book is “story editing.” Can you please explain what you mean by this?
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Rebooting Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy has come a long way since the days of Freudian psychoanalysis – today, rigorous scientific studies are providing evidence for the kinds of psychotherapies that effectively treat various psychiatric disorders. But Alan Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University, believes that we must acknowledge a basic truth – all of our progress and development in evidence-based psychotherapy has failed to solve the rather serious problem of mental illness in the United States.
