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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

‘counselling & therapy’

Glossary N

Nos   A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z National Identity: a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture and language. It may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation, regardless of one’s legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as ‘an awareness of difference’, a ‘feeling and recognition of we and they’. However, Benedict Anderson (1981) depicts a nation as an imagined community,  a social construction imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Nationalism: Nativism: any orientation in Psychology or Philosophy that stresses the genetic, inherited influences on thought and behaviour over the acquired, experiential influences. Nature-Nurture Debate: the issue of how much of human behaviour is innate and how much is learned has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries. However, more recent understanding of the brain’s ‘plasticity’ – the way it develops structurally in response to external stimuli – is beginning to render the ‘nature vs nurture debate’ obsolete. Negative Correlation: see Correlation. Negative Punishment: one of the… Read More

2016

A Bit of This, a Bit of That…. 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January-March: Ran a 9-week version of Psychology Topics 2: Stress, Change concurrently at Rossett (Wednesday evenings) and Shipley College (Thursday evenings). Gallery: Rossett participants, March – click on photo to enlarge. January-June: After a very slow start to the academic year in Autumn 2015, my tutoring work picked up rapidly at the start of the year and kept me fairly busy right through to late June. Commentary: While the tutoring never quite reached the frenetic levels of the previous year, it was hard work because I was teaching the old A-Level specifications to Year 13 A2 candidates and AS resitters while learning the new specifications to teach Year 12s. Whilst I had tutored in all the old specifications, I took the decision just to tutor the new AQA and Edexcel specs in Psychology and the new AQA Sociology spec going forward. February: Invited by Marc Lucas of the University of Cologne Psychology Department to be part of… Read More

Older Comments

Comments from letters, emails, evaluation forms, etc, about my work 1998-2015. Newest comments at the top; oldest at the bottom. Go to Comments for remarks about my work from 2016 onwards. “We didn`t actually use Keith in the end but only because my daughter changed her plans and went to college to start completely new courses. Bu5r what I can say is Keith was super efficient with his communications, he considered both my daughter and my concerns in planning his first lesson – ie: that I would go for at least half the first session to see what I was paying for and check out who was tutoring my daughter. He was clear about what he needed in order to plan her lessons and his qualifications speak volumes. I am sorry we never got to actually take Keith up on his tutorship but first impressions count and they were excellent!” – Ingrid Lee, parent (2015) “Just wanted to drop you a line to thank you so much for all your help last year. We were thrilled with how well Natalie had done and she has started university with confidence in her own ability….she was only 3 marks off an overall A… since… Read More

Can vMEMES cause Clinical Depression..? #2

PART 2 The frustration of needs Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs (1943, 1971)  effectively describes the sequential levels of needs/goals of the emerging vMEMES. Eg: PURPLE wants to find safety in belonging; RED craves esteem; etc. As Maslow theorised mainly from case studies, rather than the kind of methodological research Clare W Graves undertook, it’s hardly surprising that his Hierarchy does not match exactly to Graves’ Spiral. However, the match is close enough  – see the Comparison Map – for us to consider Maslowian concerns and principles from the perspective of vMEMES. By doing this, we see not the ‘theoretical needs’ so often associated in a rather abstracted way with Maslow’s Hierarchy but living neurological systems within us desperate to be fulfilled. Maslow’s Hierarchy is looked upon by a number of psychologists as a guide to ‘ideal mental health’. In other words, if an individual is able to progress up the Hierarchy, with their needs met at each level, then they will move beyond the lower subsistence/deficiency levels and start to meet their ‘growth needs’ and eventually their ‘being needs’. According to Marie Jahoda (1958), Self-Actualisation – YELLOW in the Graves construct – is  a key element of ideal mental… Read More

‘Shirley’

September 2004 ‘Shirley’ was a middle manager who came to me for therapy because she was being made redundant and her sense of self-esteem was rather low. On the one hand she could see that her organisation was in turmoil. It was run by a Self-Referencing RED ‘king’ who recognised intellectually the need for the organisation to enter what Adizes calls ‘Adolescence’ but couldn’t bring himself to share control emotionally. The result was an aggressive, almost brutal personal management style, an organisation that lacked the structure to support its expansion, and staff either leaving or being pushed out. (Ichak Adizes (1987) typifies this state as ‘Pathological Go-Go’.) On the other hand, Shirley, who was one of those being pushed out, blamed herself for her redundancy. She told me she was under-confident with “people who matter” work-wise – eg: bosses – and did not project herself well. She had even “crumbled” under questioning at some recent presentations. Her fear of not living up to the RED king’s expectations turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy when she failed to meet certain targets. Despite the lack of management support and the turmoil the organisation was in, Shirley roundly blamed herself. “I’m not good enough!” was her summation of her experience with this organisation and she was worried that… Read More

‘Susan’

 Updated: 15 September 2010 ‘Susan’ first came to me because she wanted rid of a phobia she had about having men in the front passenger seat of her car. This was proving particularly problematic as she had recently struck up a new relationship, resulting in them always having to travel in the boyfriend’s car because she couldn’t bear to have him in the passenger seat of her car. When I meta-modelled her, it soon emerged that the phobia was rooted in the partly-repressed memory of a traumatic experience several years back. Then a man sitting in the front seat of her car had tried to rape her. Since the event was a clear-cut single traumatic episode, I used the NLP Trauma Care to recode the patterns of that memory so they were far less immediate and thus far less threatening to her. I future-paced Susan driving with a man sitting next to her and she now seemed quite comfortable with that thought. A few days later she rang me to report that she was indeed now driving her boyfriend about quite happily. So all seemed well; yet I suspected there were more deep-rooted problems. The amount of guilt she had expressed… Read More

The Process of Change

Updated: 5 April 2019 A French translation of this article by Luc Taesch is available at https://www.taesch.com/cognitive/changemanagement/le-processus-de-changement-keith-rice What is it leads us to change? Do we just suddenly wake up one morning and decide to change? Do we change because we want to or because we have to? Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996), co-developers of Spiral Dynamics, identified 7 factors which are part of the change process. Beck (2009) later identified another 3 factors; and this article will use Beck’s 10 factors to set a broad frame for understanding change and how and why it takes place. 1. Potential The individual – or, for that matter, the organisation – has to have the capability to change. Beck & Cowan, from the seminal work of Clare W Graves, identified that someone could be in one of 3 states:- Open to the possibilities of change – they are ready for something new. The Open state is often characterised by the acceptance that change is inevitable and a relatively non-judgemental tolerance of differences. Arrested – caught up so much in their present way of thinking and being that change – without the introduction of dissonance – simply will not occur. This is particularly… Read More

Services FAQs

Click the question to go to its answer… 1. What is Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and why is it the only form of psychotherapy funded through the National Health Service in the United Kingdom?  2. Which therapy is more effective: NLP or CBT? 1. What is Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and why is it the only form of psychotherapy funded through the National Health Service in the United Kingdom? Updated: 05/06/14 Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an umbrella term for a wide range of therapies which all share the same roots and principles. Essentially all CBT combines efforts to adjust ‘faulty thinking’ (maladaptive schemas) whilst using behaviour modification techniques to stop behaviour that would reinforce the faulty thinking. The focus then is on developing positive, enabling thinking processes with behavioural strategies that reinforce the new thinking. A large number of significant studies have shown CBT to be consistently effective in treating conditions such as Bulimia Nervosia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In conjunction with medication such as serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors like fluoxetine (‘Prozac’), CBT is now recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) for the treatment of mild-moderate Clinical Depression. There have even been a number of reports of it being used successfully… Read More

Selfplex

Updated: 19 December 2016 ‘Selfplex’ is the term used by Susan Blackmore (1999) to depict ‘self’ effectively as the key confluence of schemas – ‘the ultimate memeplex‘ – which provides the concept of ‘I’, the cognitive awareness of who I am, how I think, what I feel, what I believe…why I am the way I am. Someone’s sense of identity or identities. The term ‘ego’ is widely used in Psychology and the other behavioural sciences as a cipher for ‘self’. It has even entered mainstream popular language in usages such as: “That’s egocentric” or “He’s got a lot of ego”. The very diversity of usages makes it too vague to use as a term for ‘self-concept’ – though it is often used in that context – which is why ‘selfplex’ is preferable. Sigmund Freud (1923b) used ‘Ego’ in a very specific yet cohesive sense. It is a force which attempts to balance the motivations of the Id and the Superego where they compete for dominance and restrains the more socially-unacceptable demands of the Id. This latter function can be seen in the way the PURPLE vMEME submits to the family or group to gain acceptance. Yet Freud also perceived the Ego as… Read More