Savoring is the purposeful enjoyment of positive emotion. It involves generating, amplifying, and sustaining pleasant emotions from enjoyable experiences. Those with anxiety disorders and depression not only have deficits in positive emotion and reward response (e.g., LaFreniere & Newman, 2019), but also tend to dampen pre-existing positive emotions (e.g., Eisner et al., 2009). Intentional engagement with positive emotions may counter core symptoms and maintenance factors of psychopathology. Recently, savoring practices have shown significant clinical benefits when compared to active treatment controls in both randomized controlled trials (RCTs; e.g., Craske et al., 2019; LaFreniere & Newman, 2023a) and single-session experiments (e.g., Rosen & LaFreniere, 2023). Savoring practices have significantly reduced pre-existing worry, anxiety, depression symptoms, and “kill-joy thinking” in clinical samples. They have also increased positive emotion, prioritization of positive activities, and optimism (LaFreniere, & Newman, 2023a; 2023b; 2023c), which have a host of benefits across life (Fredrickson, 2013). Savoring practices can feasibly complement existing behavioral techniques, weakening symptoms while strengthening joy. In this virtual clinical training workshop, attendees will develop skills for the clinical use of intentional engagement with positive emotions. They will first learn about the theoretical foundations, mechanisms, and empirical support of savoring. Clinical outcomes of savoring practices for anxiety and mood disorders in scientific research will be emphasized. The majority of the workshop will then focus on active training in a variety of savoring practices, tools, and tips. Attendees will also participate in savoring exercises themselves.

Despite the proliferation of evidence-based psychological interventions and other effective services in global mental health, there has been a lack of standardized approach to measure competency of non-specialist and specialists providing mental health services. Moreover, governments, national professional organizations, and training institutions have not had a mechanism to ensure that providers are delivering safe and effective care. To address this gap, the World Health Organization and UNICEF have developed Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support and Mental Health Services (EQUIP). EQUIP is an initiative with a suite of easy-to-use competency assessment tools in standardized role plays and a digital platform for providing real-time visualizations and feedback to improve training and supervision. In this webinar we will provide an introduction to EQUIP and provide examples of its use in various contexts and sectors, including in pre service education settings.

Today's youth are faced with a multitude of stressors that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The social, emotional, behavioral and academic functioning of young people have been dramatically impacted. Dr. Alec Miller and his colleagues’ adaptation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy has become the only well-established evidence-based treatment for adolescents presenting with suicidal behavior along with a variety of emotional and behavioral challenges. DBT teaches youth and their caregivers a variety of acceptance-based and change-based skills to use to cope more effectively in their lives. This webinar will provide participants with an overview on DBT with adolescents as well as a deeper dive into two critical acceptance-based skills used with teens: Mindfulness skills and validation skills. Validation skills might be the most effective tool you will learn to help regulate your client’s emotions (and your own).

Almost all of us experience painful and difficult emotions such as anxiety, sadness, anger, hopelessness, regret, jealousy, envy, boredom, or ambivalence, but only some people develop lasting psychological disorders. The Emotional Schema Model is an integrative CBT model that proposes that our individual theories about and strategies to cope with our emotions and the emotions of others will determine how problematic these emotions are in our lives. In this workshop we will examine how evolution has led to the universal nature of emotions and how our evaluations of emotions—such as beliefs in duration, controllability, danger, shame, comprehensibility, and acceptance can lead to suppression, fear, avoidance and catastrophizing of emotional experience. Specific techniques will focus on normalizing and validating emotions, linking emotions to values, and accepting that these temporary but painful experiences can assist clients in enriching their emotional lives and deepening the nature of therapy. Brief examples will include jealousy.

Multitiered systems of supports, or MTSS, is the most effective strategy for delivery of comprehensive school-based mental health services. However, this framework is only as effective as the interventions used. Given the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity among the school-aged population, it is critical that school-based mental health providers (SBMHPs) use adopt approaches that consider cultural and contextual-based factors impacting students’ wellbeing. Culturally responsive practices can result in greater student engagement in mental health services, healthier therapeutic relationships, and better treatment outcomes for youth with marginalized sociocultural identities. In this webinar, participants will (1) identify barriers and facilitators to mental health services for youth with marginalized social identities, (2) consider how microaggressions impact students’ mental health, (3) define culturally responsive mental health services, and (4) describe how to integrate the tenets of culturally responsive practice into a mental health MTSS model.

There real "autism epidemic" is not that one in 36 children are identified with autism (CDC, 2023), but rather that autistic individuals are often unable to access mental healthcare, including Cognitive Behavior Treatment (CBT). Autistic individuals across the lifespan experience higher rates of anxiety, OCD, depression, and other mental health conditions compared to the general population (Braconnier et al., 2022; Maddox et al., 2017). Recent studies show extremely high rates of death by suicide in autistic youth and adults (South et al., 2021), with mental health concerns identified as a top priority of need by the autism community (Benevides et al., 2020). While many clinicians want to use CBT to address mental health needs of autistic clients, they incorrectly believe that CBT's use with autistic individuals is inherently different (vs. a modified/tailored approach), and that treating this population is out of their competency. Research suggests that CBT is efficacious in reducing psychiatric symptoms in those with autism (Benevides et al., 2020, Braconnier et al., in press; Wang et al., 2021, Wood et al., 2020), and the reality is that most CBT practitioners will encounter autistic clients—diagnosed or not— within a therapy setting at some point in their career. This talk will bridge gaps for CBT practitioners who want to increase their knowledge and confidence in working with autistic clients. The intended audience for this workshop are professionals with basic knowledge of autism and direct CBT clinical experience. The talk will explore topics on applying and modifying CBT (e.g. incorporating autistics' experiences into therapy, balancing "good accommodation'' to address autism related needs with not accommodating negative emotions and thoughts/pursuing “opposite action”). Attendees will learn about relevant autism information-processing differences that may impact symptom presentation and treatment, along with some practical strategies and modifications for both behavioral and cognitive interventions of CBT for this population.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common gastrointestinal (GI) disorder seen by primary care and GI physicians, accounts for considerable personal suffering, and is largely refractory to medical therapies. Its physical symptoms (pain, diarrhea and/or constipation) commonly co-occur with other psychological complaints (e. g. GAD, depression) that behavior therapists effectively treat and thus offer a gratifying way of expanding one’s clinical practice. In the absence of any organic cause, IBS is best understood from a biopsychosocial perspective (Van Oudenhove et al., 2016, Gastroenterology) that emphasizes the reciprocal and interactive relationship among a person’s biology (e. g., GI motility, pain sensitivity, stress reactivity), behaviors (e. g., avoidance), and higher order central processes (rigid cognitive style characterized by perseverative thought manifested in restricted coping and perceptual biases to threat) that influence GI symptoms. Clinical trials assessing the efficacy of CBT for IBS have established it as a gold standard psychological treatment, yielding dramatic, rapid, broad, and sustained symptom improvement that compares favorably to pharmacological or dietary treatments (Mayer, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine). After a brief overview of IBS, this workshop will describe the conceptual underpinnings of CBT for IBS, its rationale, goals and technical components using didactic instruction and detailed case examples from actual patients enrolled in a landmark NIH trial (Lackner, Jaccard, et al., Gastroenterology, 2018) that affirmed CBT’s status as the most widely endorsed empirically validated psychological treatment (Black. et al., GUT, 2020) and arguably the most effective behavioral treatment for any chronic pain disorder. Attendees will learn practical strategies to trouble shoot around difficult clinical issues to maximize outcome, patient engagement, and clinician satisfaction.