Mindcare Counselling Blog

"Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species," says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play. Alison Gopnik takes us into the fascinating minds of babies and children, and shows us how much we understand before we even realize we do. About Dr. Alison Gopnik  Dr. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.  The author of  The Philosophical Baby, The Scientist in the Crib  and other influential books on cognitive development, Gopnik presents evidence that babies and children are conscious of far more than we give them credit for, as they engage every sense and spend every waking moment discovering, filing away, analyzing and acting on information about how the world works. Gopnik’s work draws on psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical develo...

Gestalt Therapy was developed in the 1940′s by Fritz and Laura Perls and further influenced by the likes of Kurt Lewin and Kurt Goldstein (Corsini & Wedding, 2000). It was developed as a revision to psychoanalysis and focuses on an experiential and humanistic approach rather than analysis of the unconscious which was one of the main therapeutic tools at the time Gestalt Therapy was employed. Gestalt Therapy rejects the dualities of mind and body, body and soul, thinking and feeling, and feeling and action. According to Perls, people are not made up of separate components, this is, mind, body and soul, rather human beings function as a whole. In doing so, one defines who one is (sense of self) by choice of responses to environmental interactions (boundaries). The word “Gestalt” (of German origin) refers to a “whole, configuration, integration, pattern or form” (Patterson, 1986). The form of Gestalt Therapy practiced today utilises ideas, data and interventions from multiple sources...

For some people, the glass is always half full. Even when a football fan's team has lost ten matches in a row, he might still be convinced his team can reverse its run of bad luck. So why, in the face of clear evidence to suggest to the contrary, do some people remain so optimistic about the future? In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) show that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to 'faulty' function of their frontal lobes. People's predictions of the future are often unrealistically optimistic. A problem that has puzzled scientists for decades is why human optimism is so pervasive, when reality continuously confronts us with information that challenges these biased beliefs. "Seeing the glass as half full rather than half empt...

The new University of Warwick led research found that in significant numbers of the depressed test subjects they examined by fMRI that this hate circuit had become decoupled. Those depressed people also seemed to have experienced other significant disruptions to brain circuits associated with; risk and action, reward and emotion, and attention and memory processing. The researchers found that in the depressed subjects: A new study using MRI scans, led by Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science, has found that depression frequently seems to uncouple the brain's "Hate Circuit". The study entitled " The Hate circuits were 92% per cent likely to be decoupled The Risk/Action circuit was 92% likely to be decoupled The Emotion/Reward circuit was 82% likely to be decoupled Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer  studies said that: "The results are clear but at f...

Today ,as a weekend special I take a detour and instead of posting a new research study , I'll share a beautiful video of Autistic water boy Jason McElwain in his first game sinking 6 3-pointers in a row!! Watch the crowd go insane when he sinks the buzzer beater!! Image credit :  Autism Awareness Ribbon , a photo by  Cheryl's Art Box  on Flickr.

  Today ,as a weekend special I take a detour and instead of posting a new research study , I'll  share a beautiful video  of Autistic water boy Jason McElwain in his first game sinking 6 3-pointers in a row!! Watch the crowd go insane when he sinks the buzzer beater!!

The drinking habits of the friends of a teenager's boyfriend or girlfriend may have more influence on the youngster's drinking than the habits of the teen's own friends or romantic partner. That's the finding of U.S. researchers who analyzed national data collected from 449 heterosexual couples who were in grades 7 to 12 in the mid-1990s. The study appears in the October issue of the journal American Sociological Review. "Dating someone whose friends are big drinkers is more likely to cause an adolescent to engage in dangerous drinking behaviors than are the drinking habits of the adolescent's own friends or romantic partner," lead author Derek Kreager, an associate professor of crime, law, and justice at Pennsylvania State University, said in a journal news release. "This applies to both binge drinking and drinking frequency." For example, the researchers found that teens whose romantic partner's friends were heavy drinkers were mo...