Faculty Reads: Psychologist Adds Heart to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Techniques

What we think affects how we feel, and how we feel affects how we behave, and how we behave then affects what we think about ourselves…

If one or all facets of this thoughts-feelings-behavior triangle become dysfunctional, though, life can fairly quickly turn chaotic. Luckily, therapeutic techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy help restore our inner life to harmony and break the cycle of disorder.

The question is: Are these techniques doing enough?

Psychology Professor Dean McKay, Ph.D. recently published Working with Emotion in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Clinical Practice (November 2014), a book he co-edited with his former doctoral student Nathan Thoma, Ph.D., GSAS ’08, ’11, a clinical psychologist in New York City.

The book features writings from leading psychologists on the role of emotion in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a psychotherapy that focuses on the relationships between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. This short-term, goal-oriented, and empirically validated treatment aims to change a client’s problematic behaviors and thinking patterns, which thereby improve how the client feels. It has proven to be effective for a range of psychopathologies, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The problem, McKay says, is that the emotional aspect does not always get its due, which means that clients sometimes leave treatment with a reduction in symptoms, but without fully resolving the issue at hand.

“Clients often seek treatment due to a range of emotional struggles, ones that might linger after successful treatment for behavioral problems and [improving] patterns of thinking,” said McKay, who specializes in treating people with anxiety disorders. “While emotion has never been neglected in CBT, the emphasis on emotional processes has not been as high as it is for the other two domains.”

The book offers information about emotional processes and includes techniques that clinicians can use to better address emotion in therapy. Topics covered include the use of mindfulness therapy and the importance of exposing clients to difficult emotions so that they learn to face uncomfortable feelings rather than use maladaptive behaviors to escape them.

“CBT has long emphasized behaviors and thoughts (or cognitions) as centrally important in psychopathology,” McKay said. “But [we] developed the book in an effort to fill an important gap in the available sources for clinicians.”

— Joanna Mercuri

Faculty Reads: Advertising to Children

When it comes to advertising tactics, it’s challenging enough for adults to spot the schemes and resist buying into sales pitches. Do the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society even stand a chance?

That question is at the heart of Dr. Fran Blumberg’s newly-published Advertising to Children: New Directions, New Media (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), which was co-edited by Drs. Barrie Gunter (University of Leicester, U.K.), Mark Blades, and Caroline Oates (both University of Sheffield, U.K.).

“Vulnerable audiences, such as kids, may not be aware that they are being subjected to advertising,” said Blumberg, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education. “[It’s now] another aspect of the child's environment that they are increasingly exposed to which probably requires their understanding of the goal of marketers — that is, that they want you to buy their product and may make false claims or present unrealistic imagery associated with their product to make it desirable.”

Because of this increased exposure, especially to new “stealth techniques” that target youth, there is an urgent need to study how advertising affects development, Blumberg said. And yet, despite this growing need, there is a dearth of information about the impact of new-age advertising on kids.

“The goal of the text is to understand the factors that contribute to children’s understanding of advertising, and elucidate at which point in [their growth] that [they develop an] understanding of advertising messages,” she said.

The book covers an array of topics surrounding children and advertising, including how children are affected by advertising for food and alcohol products, whether children are developmentally capable of identifying messages as persuasive, and what parents and educators can do to teach kids to become more critical of advertisements.

The book also discusses the ramifications of “stealth advertising,” such as embedded commercial messages in television shows and new forms of media that influence children without their conscious awareness. An example of the latter is the practice of “advergaming,” or the use video games to promote products or services — for instance, a cereal company that makes a game involving collecting pieces of the cereal for points.

“The message [in the book] is that children and adolescents… may be best served through media literacy, which includes understanding the persuasive intent of advertising and advertisers,” Blumberg said.

— Joanna K. Mercuri

Faculty Reads: Charting Hegel’s Philosophy

German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is one of the discipline’s most influential thinkers. Unfortunately, his comprehensive, systematic philosophy is so complex that some contemporary philosophers never fully grasp it.

Thankfully, Fordham professor Michael Baur, Ph.D. has helped to make Hegel’s worldview more accessible. G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts (Routledge, 2014), which Baur edited, provides an introduction to both Hegel’s thought and the later philosophical movements that Hegel inspired.

“Hegel was a very comprehensive and systematic thinker, [so] in order to grasp the full meaning of any particular part within Hegel’s system, it is necessary to appreciate the context of the whole,” writes Baur, an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor at Fordham Law.

“[In addition,] Hegel developed his innovative and systematic philosophy in continuous dialogue with his own contemporaries. Thus, in order to understand Hegel, it is necessary also to understand the historical context within which, and in response to which, Hegel was developing his own philosophical views.”

The book is divided into two parts. First, it covers the main philosophical themes Hegel addresses, namely, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history.

The second section deals with post-Hegelian movements in philosophy, including Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and French post-structuralism.

G.W.F. Hegel his the shelves this week. Click here to read the publisher's synopsis of the book.

— Joanna K. Mercuri

Faculty Reads: Neuroplasticity — Rewiring the Brain to Lower Anxiety

A Fordham professor is using pioneering neuroscience research on the brain’s ability to change to help pastoral counselors address clients’ anxiety.

In his latest book, The Power of Neuroplasticity for Pastoral and Spiritual Care (Lexington Books, 2014), Dr. Kirk Bingaman, an associate professor of pastoral care and counseling, explores the impact that an adaptive mechanism known as “the negativity bias” has on our wellbeing. An evolutionary cousin of the “fight or flight” phenomenon, this bias describes the brain’s propensity to experience negative events more intensely in order to alert us to potential danger.

A built-in negativity bias was vital when humans lived as hunter-gatherers ever-at-the-ready to flee from a hungry lion. In today’s world, however, this bias tends to cause excessive negativity and anxiety.

“Today [this] anxiety spills over into our relationships with others and with ourselves,” said Bingaman, who teaches in Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. “It causes us to assume the worst, to overact to situations in ways such as, ‘Why did you look at me this way? Why did you use that tone?’”

Fortunately, Bingaman says, we are not condemned to primal negativity, thanks to the human brain’s capacity to change across the lifespan. With every new experience — learning new information, creating a memory, or adapting to a new situation — the brain undergoes structural changes, generating new neural pathways and reshaping existing ones. This ability, known as neuroplasticity, forms the crux of Bingaman’s book.

He argues that the most effective way to harness the power of neuroplasticity is through mindfulness meditation and contemplative spiritual practice. Through these therapeutic techniques and spiritual practices, clients learn to become aware of their thoughts and feelings. Rather than reacting to or trying to eliminate them, clients simply observe them as they come and go.

“Thoughts and feelings have a 90-second shelf-life biochemically. So when we experience an anxious thought or feeling, it will dissipate from the blood in 90 seconds — unless we feed the thought or judge ourselves for feeling that way,” he said. “The key to mindfulness-based therapy is to let thoughts and feelings come and go without fighting them. This then reduces the limbic activity in our brains and calms the amygdala.”

Himself a pastoral counselor, Bingaman says that the science of neuroplasticity will “necessitate a paradigm shift” in the way pastoral and spiritual caregivers approach their work with clients and congregants.

“Whether it’s therapy or theology, we need to really look at the frames of reference we are using to help the person in our care to calm their anxious brain. Some of our approaches are going to fire up the limbic region, and others will do the reverse.

“We have to make more use of it in religious and spiritual circles,” he continued. “Finding a regular contemplative practice is not something just for the mystics off in the desert. It’s for you and me and everyone else.”

— Joanna Mercuri

Faculty Reads: East and West Converge on Moral Grounds

Western moral philosophy is built on the works of thinkers such as ancient Greece’s Aristotle and modern Germany’s Immanuel Kant. But in recent decades, many scholars have turned eastward, looking also to Buddhist thought to enlighten important moral and ethical issues.

The scholarship that has followed is copious, but disjointed, said Fordham Professor of philosophy Christopher Gowans. His solution is Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2014).

“There has been a lot of work lately interpreting Buddhist thought in terms of Western moral philosophy, and there is no book that brings this together in a single volume,” said Gowans, who specializes in contemporary moral philosophy and Buddhist philosophy.

“Since there is little that can be considered moral philosophy in the [Buddhist] tradition, this is really a new field. I’m trying to introduce the reader to it.”

He explained that the Buddhist tradition does not approach the subject of moral philosophy like the West does. Although Buddhist thought centers on ethics (namely, how we should live our lives), its philosophical reflections are primarily metaphysical and epistemological—not explicit, how-to guides to morality.

Nevertheless, contemporary scholars find value in examining Buddhist works through a Western lens, drawing on the likes of Aristotle and Kant. But because this scholarship is still evolving, the upshots of uniting Buddhist and Western moral traditions remain unclear.

“An optimistic response might envision these two enterprises as partly overlapping circles… Despite significant differences, there is enough common ground to generate a reasonable expectation that something valuable will come from examining Buddhist thought through the perspectives of Western moral philosophy,” Gowans writes in the book’s introduction.

“A more pessimistic response may [say] any such examination is, in the end, basically a futile effort to fit square pegs into round holes… Readers are invited to determine which of these responses is most appropriate.”

Broken into three sections, the book:

• presents the teaching of the Buddha and developments in Buddhist traditions (mainly the early Mahayana schools);
• examines the main areas of Buddhist moral philosophy (such as well-being, the problem of free will, normative ethics, issues about moral objectivity, and moral psychology) and the concerns that many Western thinkers have concerning karma, rebirth, nirvana, and related topics; and
• introduces readers to a contemporary movement known as socially engaged Buddhism, which delves into ethical issues such as human rights, war and peace, and environmental ethics.

Buddhist Moral Philosophy comes out today.

— Joanna Klimaski Mercuri

Faculty Reads: Jonathan Edwards’ Passionate Pursuit of Rational Truth

Think “Jonathan Edwards,” and images such as a zealous preacher at a pulpit or a spider dangling over a fire might come to mind.

But as Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D. reveals in her new book, Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2014), the Jonathan Edwards of the Great Awakening was about much more than fire-and-brimstone.

Reklis, an assistant professor of theology, contends that Edwards is key to a problem plaguing many contemporary theologians: How theology can save itself from irrelevance in the postmodern world.

She explains that by the mid-20th century, many Christian theologians were growing dissatisfied with the way theology had been conducted over the previous two centuries.  The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” prompted theologians to approach their discipline in a rationalistic way, treating Christian doctrines like logical propositions in an attempt to cast theology as a science.

However, this “rational pursuit of ultimate truth” left some concerned that theology had abandoned its true strengths, such as an emphasis on the roles that beauty, bodily experience, desire, and emotions play in Christian life.

Reklis argues that 18th-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards strikes that balance between those domains. A follower of John Locke and Isaac Newton, Edwards strived to pursue truth through a rational, scientific method. And yet, Edwards was also devoted to a more visceral pursuit of truth. He defended the intense religious revivals (passionate preaching experiences that often inspired intense emotional reactions in listeners) of the Great Awakening, and believed people could know God through a “‘spiritual sense’ as true and reliable as one of our five senses.”

“He was committed to ‘the new science’ of his day—meaning, truth arrived at through experience and deduction, or what we might think of as the scientific method,” Reklis said. “At the same time, he was a strict Calvinist […] To defend his understanding of Christianity, he turned to concepts of human desire, emotion, and bodily experience as proof of first-hand experience of the divine.

“So he was this strange figure who was embracing modernity—science, rationality, etc.—and who was also using those new tools to defend a very ‘old-fashioned’ view of Christianity.”

Herself a blend of historical and contemporary theological training, Reklis aims to use Edwards’ “alternative modern” approach to explore the question of contemporary theology’s relevance and how concepts such as beauty, body, and desire might serve to revive contemporary Christian theology.

“In [Edwards’] day, evangelical Christians split from ‘rational’ Christians, or what we came to call the mainline Protestant denominations in the United States,” she said. “I try to show that the same concepts many mainline academic Protestant theologians want to rescue now—such as the importance of beauty, bodily experience, and desire—are the ones Edwards used.”

— Joanna Klimaski Mercuri