Prepare your students to appropriately identify, understand, and respond appropriately to the phenomenon of emotional release during massage and bodywork! This new edition continues to provide a crucial basis of knowledge for massage therapy and students regarding the emotional impact of effective massage therapy. With a new, more colorful layout, this new edition has been fully revised to address the latest science around this topic. Furthermore, in-text features aim to help students apply their learning to actual practice as a massage therapist.
The body has come to provide a central site for theory and debate from social theory to cultural studies. This important and compelling book looks beyond psychology′s traditional biological body to explore what insights can be gained from recent theories of embodiment. Taking the body as inscribed by social and disciplinary practices, leading contributors explore a wide range of psychological topics in new and challenging ways. Questions surrounding health, gender, history and culture are addressed in contexts such as the psychology of pain, the treatment of anorexia nervosa, and psychology′s relationship to transgender activists. The material in this volume was previously published as a Special Issue of the journal Theory & Psychology.
This book brings attention to the interface of psychotherapy and psychological theory with the somatic practices of bodywork and movement therapy. To offer a client only psychotherapy, or only bodywork may subtly or directly reinforce the body-mind split from which so many of us suffer; in some cases this will be a reinforcement of a dilemma central to the client's problems. Hartley views body psychotherapy and transpersonal psychotherapy as building bridges between the once separated processes of psyche, soma, and spirit. Today the emerging field of somatic psychology is also contributing to the expanded field of psychology a subtle differentiation of bodymind process, developed through almost a century and a half of research and practice in somatic therapy and education. Originally trained as a dancer, movement therapist and bodywork practitioner, Hartley continues to use movement and somatic process as an important foundation for her own work. Training in Dance Movement Therapy, the transpersonal psychotherapy of Psychosynthesis, and Process-Oriented Psychology have further deepened Hartley's awareness of the relationships between psyche, soma and spirit, and the need to respond to all levels of experience in therapeutic work.
This book introduces readers to the many facets of body/mind psychology such as its history and its basis in physiological processes; the framework of its theories and models; its clinical application in counseling, psychotherapy, and the treatment of psychosomatic disorders; and its growing impact on our understanding of healing, communication, and conscious living. From Freud, Reich, and Lowen to holography and Tibetan Buddhist theories of madness; from Perls, Laslow, and self-actualization to acupressure, Rolfing, and insight medication; Marrone provides a challenging and sophisticated synthesis of highly diverse and powerful ideas in an exciting and readable style.
Are scientific 'facts' about body image enough to define conceptions of normality? Reassessing Experimental Psychology from a critical perspective, Sylvia Blood demonstrates how its research into Body Image can be misused and prone to misuse. Classifying women who experience distress and anxiety with food, eating and body size as suffering 'body image disturbance' or 'body image dissatisfaction', it can reproduce dominant assumptions about language, meaning and subjectivity. Experimental psychology's discourse about body image has recently become more widely influential, becoming popularised through domains such as women’s magazines, in which psychological experts provide 'facts' about women's 'body image problems', and offer advice and psychological treatments. With acute cross-disciplinary awareness Body Work: The Social Construction of Women's Body Image exposes the assumptions at work in the methods and status of experimental approaches. Penetrating beyond the usual dichotomy between experimental and popular psychology, this book illuminates some of the ways in which women's magazines have embraced experimental psychology's treatment of the issue. Drawing on her experience in Clinical Psychology, Sylvia Blood highlights the damaging effects of uncritically experimental views of body image. She goes on to elaborate not only an alternative model of discursive construction but also the implications of such a theory for clinical practice. Merging theory and clinical experience, Sylvia Blood exposes the fallacies about women’s bodies that underpin experimental psychology's body image research. She demonstrates the dangerous consequences of these fallacies being accepted as truths in popular texts and in the talk of 'everyday' women.
Learn how to apply the psychology of health and fitness to your exercise programs and to solve the motivational and behavioral problems you’ll encounter every day in practice. You’ll explore the scientific principles and variables that influence behavior as you develop the confidence to design effective lifestyle interventions for disease prevention and develop individualized exercise programs that promote optimal health.
British Psychology Society Textbook of the Year 2020 Why do people who are more socially connected live longer and have better health than those who are socially isolated? Why are social ties at least as good for your health as not smoking, having a good diet, and taking regular exercise? Why is treatment more effective when there is an alliance between therapist and client? Until now, researchers and practitioners have lacked a strong theoretical foundation for answering such questions. This ground-breaking book fills this gap by showing how social identity processes are key to understanding and effectively managing a broad range of health-related problems. Integrating a wealth of evidence that the authors and colleagues around the world have built up over the last decade, The New Psychology of Health provides a powerful framework for reconceptualising the psychological dimensions of a range of conditions – including stress, trauma, ageing, depression, addiction, eating behaviour, brain injury, and pain. Alongside reviews of current approaches to these various issues, each chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which theory and practice can be enriched by attention to social identity processes. Here the authors show not only how an array of social and structural factors shape health outcomes through their impact on group life, but also how this analysis can be harnessed to promote the delivery of ‘social cures’ in a range of fields. This is a must-have volume for service providers, practitioners, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines and fields, and will also be essential reading for anyone whose goal it is to improve the health and well-being of people and communities in their care.
An exploration of embodied intelligence and its implications points toward a theory of intelligence in general; with case studies of intelligent systems in ubiquitous computing, business and management, human memory, and robotics. How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment—in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies. This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence—"understanding by building"—to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.
