ACBS Newsletter - January 2017

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an "I": Webinar with Louise McHugh, PhD and Priscilla Almada, Ph.D.

Relational Frame Theory can be a daunting area of research to comprehend, but is crucial in establishing the theoretical underpinnings of ACT. However, the ACBS Student SIG have partnered up with Louise McHugh and Priscilla Almada to provide a free webinar for ACBS members walking through the relational frames associated with identifying self in the context of others (i.e., deictic relational frames). This accessible, experiential, and empirically grounded workshop guides viewers through a brief primer on RFT, the self/others as conceptualized by RFT and ACT, and the ways in which disruptions in self-other framing can lead to psychological problems. The workshop also introduces the flexible connectedness model that integrates deictic framing, difficulties in empathizing, and experiential avoidance in order to predict socially maladaptive behaviors. The video is available on for watching here, and you can catch up on other webinars on the Student SIG Webinar page. Student ACBS members who are interested in getting connected with others should visit the Student SIG page for information about the SIG and instructions on how to join!

Student Spotlight Winner

We are happy to announce the first student spotlight winner, in conjunction with the ACBS Student SIG! This month's featured student, Corinna Stewart, is currently in her final year of her Ph.D. at NUI Galway, where she has been studying paranoia from a CBS perspective using the IRAP and other RFT-based methods. She is also currently serving as the research team leader with commit and act, a non-governmental organization utilizing ACT, PROSOCIAL, and CBS principles to bring psychotherapeutic support to Sierra Leone. To learn more about Corinna, please visit her Student Spotlight Award Winner page.

The purpose of the Student Spotlight Award is to highlight students who are doing important work in the CBS community, whether for research, clinical, and/or volunteer-humanitarian efforts. This is a way to highlight their achievements, let the ACBS community know the important work students are doing, and to provide a platform for mentoring, collaboration, professional development, and other conversations around highlighted areas.

TED Talks Translations

One of the most important tasks given to researchers, scientists, and academics is the need to disseminate our theories and findings to the community at large. In the modern era, an effective way of doing so is by using the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) platform to film and share talks to reach a wider audience. However, this resource is often limited in scope to English-speaking populations. However, thanks to the commitment of members within the ACBS community, they have created and compiled a list of translated TEDx Talks across 20 languages.

Links to the videos are available on our TedTalk Translation page. We encourage members to share these videos to the international community at large to help spread contextual science ideas on a global scale. And of course, a heartfelt thanks to those who contributed their time and effort to transcribe these videos!

Learn and ACT: Changing Prejudice Towards Mental Illness

One of the most problematic issues facing clients is the stigma that they feel from others for their struggle with mental illness. In a study published in JCBS, Kenny & Bizumic compared an ACT-based intervention to an educational intervention in reducing stigmatizing attiudes towards people with mental illness. Though both interventions were effective at reducing stigma, participants who were given the ACT-based intervention demonstrated greater improvements. The authors also developed a new measure for Prejudice towards People with Mental Illness (PPMI), consisting of four factors (fear/avoidance, malevolence, authoritarianism, and unpredictability) and found the measure to demonstrate reliability, divergent validity, and convergent validity. These findings have implications on the design of future stigma reduction interventions, and the development of new methods to target malevolent attitudes towards mental illness.

To read the full study, or any other studies published in JCBS, please visit the ACBS member portal to JCBS here. If you would like to contribute to JCBS please see our submission information page. If you would like a better resource to cite JCBS content, see our JCBS reference sharing page which includes a downloadable Endnote file for all published and in-press JCBS articles.

2017 Annual Conference Registration and Scholarships Open

ACBS is pleased to announce that registration for our 15th annual conference, held on June 22-25 in Seville, Spain, is officially open! Make sure to register as soon as possible, as early registration rates end on April 7th. We are also collaborating with oneworld® to provide discounted airfare prices for travel - more details can be found on our Travel/Flight Information page.

The Call for Submissions closes February 15 (March 15 for posters) so be sure to submit your best work!

Estamos aceptando presentaciones para conferencias. Se aceptan presentaciones en Inglés o Español.

In addition, ACBS is offering a limited number of travel and/or registration fee awards and scholarships and awards. We urge you to visit our scholarship page to see if you qualify for any of these scholarships! Please note that you will need to be logged into your account in order to access and submit these applications.

Building Bridges

The ancient capital city of Edinburgh in Scotland played host to the most modern advances in Contextual Behavioural Science, ACT, & RFT in late November 2016. This was the third conference, jointly hosted by the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy ACT Special Interest Group and the UK & Ireland ACBS chapter. There were two days of preconference workshops, at an introductory (Joe Oliver and Richard Bennet) and advanced (Robyn Walser) level as well as one day preconference workshops on adapting ACT for people who have been diagnosed with personality disorder (Helen Bolderston) and on creating psychological flexibility in communities and organisations (Ross White). Click here to read more about this exciting conference!

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To be held June 20-25, 2017. Go here for more information.