OBJECTIVE To increase understanding of the internal processes of recovery in psychosis, with particular consideration given to self-compassion and self-criticism. METHOD Qualitative data were collected by semistructured interviews, from 10 participants with psychosis, and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULTS Five superordinate themes emerged: (a) "my mind can't t...

The paper attempts to examine the relationships of the states of mind with brain activity with regards to reports and empiri cal studies available in the subject literature. Questions were asked about the processes that occur in the brain and the cognition to produce basic states of mind, which were termed: state of readiness attention (conscious attention), state of attention engagement (autom...

Social cognitive skills such as empathy and theory of mind are crucial for everyday interactions, cooperation, and cultural learning, and deficits in these skills have been implicated in pathologies such as autism spectrum disorder, sociopathy, and nonverbal learning disorders. Little research has examined how these skills develop after early childhood and how they may be trained. We tested the...

BACKGROUND Depression that occurs during the perinatal period has substantial costs for both the mother and her baby. Since in-person care often falls short of meeting the global need of perinatal women, Internet interventions may function as an alternate to help women who currently lack adequate access to face-to-face psychological resources. However, at present there are insufficient empirica...

PROBLEM Medical students face rigorous and stressful work environments, resulting in high rates of psychological distress. However, there has been a dearth of empirical work aimed at modifying risk factors for psychopathology among this at-risk group. Distress tolerance, defined as the ability to withstand emotional distress, is one factor that may be important in promoting psychological well-b...

We tested the effects of practicing compassionate reappraisal versus emotional suppression as direct coping responses to victims’ ruminations about a past interpersonal offense. Participants (32 females, 32 males) were randomly assigned to learn one coping strategy which immediately followed three of six offense rumination trials (counterbalanced). For both strategy types, coping (vs. offense r...

The death of a child is perhaps the worst tragedy a family ever has to endure. The communication that occurs among children, parents, and healthcare professionals at the end of a child's life must be grounded in caring, and compassionate relationships. These relationships require particular skills, knowledge and attitudes that are not fully addressed in many approaches to communication training...

BACKGROUND The medical humanities is a broad area of study and practice encompassing all nontechnical or 'human' aspects of medicine. OBJECTIVE This article introduces a series in the medical humanities in Australian Family Physician. DISCUSSION The medical humanities serve three main goals: the study of the human aspects of medicine from within traditional arts disciplines of history, phil...

This paper is about higher-order theory of mind such as “I think that you think that I think ...”. Previous studies have argued that using higher-order theory of mind in the context of strategic games is difficult and cognitively demanding. In contrast, we claim that performance depends on task properties such as instruction, training, and procedure of asking for social reasoning. In an experim...