Which ColorCards (Emotions or Feelings) are better for upper primary school aged children?

Emotions are more suited to upper primary aged children as the photos include more age appropriate situations.  Use the Feelings ColorCards if you work with preschool and younger primary aged children.

Three essential steps to help create the best environment to help adolescents start talking.

Building rapport with a reluctant teen can have the most experienced therapist feeling under pressure.

One of my colleagues has just ventured into treating adolescents and asked me "How do you do that all the time?" after a particular long session with very little communication from his adolescent patient.  There are never any guarantees when it comes to helping teens to open up but there are some things that will help the process.

Unwarranted public anxiety about vaccinations can have deadly consequences. Unfortunately, the challenge of communicating health risks is full of psychological complexity. A new German study brings this home, showing how messages that deny vaccination health risks in unequivocal terms can backfire, actually increasing concern among parents.

Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse recruited 115 participants online (mean age 34; 34 per cent were male; 43 per cent had one or more children). The participants were asked to imagine they were a parent of an 8-month-old and to read an account of a fictitious illness Phyxolitis pulmonis. They were further told that their paediatrician had advised vaccinating their child against this condition. Next, the participants were presented with anti-vaccine statements that they'd ostensibly found on the internet (e.g. "Multiple vaccines overwhelm the infant's immune system"). Finally, they read statements of reassurance about the vaccine, which claimed any risks were low - half the participants read weak versions (e.g. "There is only sporadic evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system") and half read strong versions of these statements (e.g. "there is no evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system").

Answers to the confidential survey on the challenges faced by therapists who work with children and adolescents are below.

The main themes were

♦  finding suitable resources for some of the more difficult concepts
♦  working with children and adolescents who don't want to be there 

♦  medicare doesn't allow me to talk to parents without the child present 

♦  adolescents not talking 

♦  coming up with simple explanations for common problems e.g. social anxiety, OCD, 

♦  trying to keep the number of sessions to a minimum, so crowding too much into individual sessions 
♦  parents who continually talk about the negative aspects of their child, in front of their child 

♦  teaching CBT to children under 12, both with and without intellectual delays 
♦  helping adolescent boys express themselves 

The ability to tell where our bodies end and the rest of the world begins comes so naturally we tend not to give it much thought. In fact the brain mechanisms underlying bodily-identity are a vital part of basic social functioning. Given that social difficulties are a central part of autism, a team of US researchers led by Carissa Cascio wondered whether autism might be associated with differences in these basic mechanisms underlying body ownership.

To find out, they performed the first ever published test of how children on the autism spectrum experience the rubber hand illusion - a well-known procedure in psychology that exploits the mechanisms that give rise to feelings of body ownership.