What’s it really like to feel depressed? What can you do to help them through hard times? How will their symptoms and treatment affect your relationship? While every person’s experience with depression is unique, here are a few things you can do to help your loved one and yourself. Anxiety and Depression Association of America Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance Mental Health America National Alliance on Mental Illness National Institute of Mental Health...

Here are 10 of the top clinical psychology programs ranked according to U.S. News and World Report. APA Accredited? Yes Separate Master’s or Psy.D. Program Available? No Prerequisites: A bachelor’s degree from an accredited university, a minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.0, and completion of the GRE Psychology Subject Test. Number of Applicants: Approximately 900 per year Number of New Enrollments: Approximately 40 per year Length of Program: 5 Years...

Partners are asking each other “Are you there for me?” Johnson offers partners a road map to secure relationships through EFT to help them answer the question “are you there for me” affirmatively. She notes the three factors that must be present in order to answer “yes” to that key question and makes it easy to remember with the acronym A.R.E. The key factors in healthy relationships are: accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement....

Understanding social psychology can be useful for many reasons. First, we can better understand how groups impact our choices and actions. There are some basic aspects of social behavior that play a large role in our actions and how we see ourselves. Social Behavior Is Goal-Oriented Our interactions serve goals or fulfill needs. Some common goals or needs include the need for social ties, the desire to understand ourselves and others, the wish to gain or maintain status or protection, and the need to attract companions....

This article discusses why change is so difficult and what you can do to become better at dealing with change. Why Dealing With Change Isn’t Easy Change requires adjustments. Sometimes these can be small things like finding a new way to do something or adding a new step to some of your daily routines. In other cases, you might find that change introduces significant disruptions to the way you live your life....

Many people raised in alcoholic homes must address the repercussions of their upbringings throughout their adult life, especially in their careers, relationships, and decision-making processes.The list of books that follow offer insight into the characteristics that adult children of alcoholics typically develop as well as practical advice for learning how to make better decisions to lead healthier lives. You can now purchase a complete collection of Dr. Jan’s groundbreaking books in one volume: The Complete ACOA Sourcebook: Adult Children of Alcoholics at Home, at Work and in Love....

Active listening techniques include: Being fully present in the conversationShowing interest by practicing good eye contactNoticing (and using) non-verbal cuesAsking open-ended questions to encourage further responsesParaphrasing and reflecting back what has been saidListening to understand rather than to respondWithholding judgment and advice In communication, active listening is important because it keeps you engaged with your conversation partner in a positive way. It also makes the other person feel heard and valued....

A person with this condition will experience a lack of concentration and activeness, apathy, and poor memory. The condition was first observed in the 1960s amongst people who had a long history of cannabis use. It has since been linked to the use of other psychoactive drugs such as methamphetamines and some over-the-counter cough syrups. If you’ve been feeling unmotivated and uninterested in things that would usually bring you joy, you might be living with this condition....

Friday Fix: Episode 204 We all imagine catastrophic things happening sometimes. Maybe whenever a loved one doesn’t reply to a text message right you automatically think something terrible has happened to them. Or perhaps every time your boss asks you to meet, you assume that you’re about to get fired. You might tell yourself that you’d be completely destroyed if you got laid off or that you’d never recover if your love interest broke up with you....

Who Was Anna Freud? Anna Freud did more than live in her father’s rather long shadow. Instead, she became one of the world’s foremost psychoanalysts. She is recognized as the founder of child psychoanalysis, despite the fact that her father often suggested that children could not be psychoanalyzed. However, she strongly believed that psychoanalysis was not appropriate for children under the age of six, who could be better served through other methods....

Extraversion is sociability, agreeableness is kindness, openness is creativity and intrigue, conscientiousness is thoughtfulness, and neuroticism often involves sadness or emotional instability. Understanding what each personality trait is and what it means to score high or low in that trait can give you insight into your own personality—without taking a personality traits test. It can also help you better understand others, based on where they fall on the continuum for each of the personality traits listed....

Although they are not each specifically indexed in the DSM-5, these oft-overlooked behavioral difficulties can cause a great deal of distress and functional impairment in the lives of those who struggle with them. Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) include any repetitive self-grooming behavior that involves biting, pulling, picking, or scraping one’s own hair, skin, lips, cheeks, or nails that results in damage to the body and have been met with multiple attempts to stop or decrease the behavior....

Emotional Blunting SSRIs work by raising your levels of serotonin, but they can also decrease dopamine transmission. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for many of those feel-good emotions you get when you fall in love. This effect, sometimes called emotional blunting, can also include such symptoms as feeling less empathetic, less able to cry, and less able to experience the same degree of positive emotion as one normally would. SSRI antidepressants are sometimes associated with emotional blunting....

Is Bipolar Disorder Hereditary? We have known for some time that bipolar disorder can run in families, and now, with genomic sequencing, we are learning about the possible role of genetic factors in the disorder. While the role of heredity is clear from family and twin studies, further research is needed. Let’s look at what we know about family history and bipolar disorder, and then at what genetic specialists have discovered about the role of individual genes in both bipolar disorder and other mental health disorders....

Ego Strength Background According to Sigmund Freud, personality is composed of three elements: the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id is made up of all the primal urges and desires and is the only part of personality present at birth. The super-ego is the part of the personality that is composed of the internalized standards and rules that we acquire from our parents and society. It is part of the personality that pressures people to behave morally....

According to research on this topic, even when you don’t get what you want, there’s a strong chance that you won’t even notice. And you may even defend a choice just because you think it’s the one you made. For example, let’s say you’ve been asked to taste two different types of jams and choose your favorite. You are then offered another taste of the one you selected as your favorite and asked to explain why you chose it....

Put another way, classical conditioning involves placing a neutral stimulus before a naturally occurring reflex. In Pavlov’s classic experiment with dogs, the neutral signal was the sound of a tone and the naturally occurring reflex was salivating in response to food. By associating the neutral stimulus (sound) with the unconditioned stimulus (food), the sound of the tone alone could produce the salivation response. Although classical conditioning was not discovered by a psychologist, it has had a tremendous influence over the school of thought in psychology known as behaviorism....

As host of her new podcast Mentally Strong People, Morin speaks with award-winning musicians, athletes, authors, and more to find out how they’ve harnessed their mental strength to overcome adversity and achieve great personal and professional success. We spoke with Morin about cultivating mental strength, and to find out what listeners can expect to hear on the show, from inspirational stories to actionable advice that can help people affect positive change in their own lives....