Neuroticism: A New Framework for Emotional Disorders and their Treatment
3.0 hours Continuing Education Credit for Psychologists. Co-sponsored by the Kentucky Psychological Foundation, Kentucky Psychological Association and the Jesse G. Harris, Jr. Psychological Services Center (Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky). Pre-registration is required; register for this Continuing Education workshop at https://psychology.as.uky.edu/ce-2022-register. Registration closes on June 1, 2022.
Workshop Description: Neuroticism—the tendency to experience negative emotions, along with the perception that the world is filled with stressful, unmanageable challenges—is strongly associated with anxiety, depression, and other common mental health conditions. This workshop will demonstrate how targeting this trait in psychotherapy can benefit a broad range of clients and reduce the need for disorder-specific interventions. The presenter will describe and illustrate evidence-based therapies that address neuroticism directly, including her own Unified Protocol for transdiagnostic treatment. She will examine how neuroticism develops and is maintained, its relation to psychopathology, and implications for how psychological disorders are classified and diagnosed.
Workshop Objective 1: Participants will be able to articulate the public health implications of neuroticism, as well as the rationale for target this trait in treatment instead of focusing on symptoms
Workshop Objective 2: Participants will be able to describe the therapeutic strategies (e.g., mindfulness, exposure) that have shown promising in addressing neuroticism.
Workshop Objective 3: Participants will be able to describe how personality traits integrated into cutting edge models of psychopathology, and how this information can be used to craft treatment plans.
Primary Presenter Info: Dr. Sauer-Zavala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kentucky (UK) and is the founding Director of Clinical Services at the UK Clinic for Emotional Health. Dr. Sauer-Zavala received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from UK in 2011; she completed her predoctoral internship at Duke University Medical Center and her postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University. She then spent seven years on the faculty in BU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Science before returning home to UK in 2019. Her research is focused on exploring emotion-focused mechanisms that maintain psychological symptoms (particularly high-risk symptoms such as suicidal thoughts and behaviors) and using this information to develop more targeted, easily-disseminated intervention strategies. Her research has been supported by NIMH, NIAAA, Templeton Foundation, the Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. Dr. Sauer-Zavala has co-authored over 75 peer-reviewed articles, numerous book chapters, and three books. In particular, she is a co-developer of the Unified Protocol and the founding director of the Unified Protocol Institute; she remains involved in consultation and training for this intervention.
Additional details are available at https://www.kpa.org/ceevent-calendar.
Dr. Joan Cook is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of traumatic stress, geriatric mental health and implementation science fields. Dr. Cook has worked clinically with a range of trauma survivors, including combat veterans and former prisoners of war, men and women who have been physically and sexually assaulted in childhood and adulthood, and survivors of the 2001 terrorist attack on the former World Trade Center. She has served as the principal investigator on seven federally-funded grants. She was a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) Guideline Development Panel for the Treatment of PTSD and the 2016 President of APA’s Division of Trauma Psychology. Since October 2015, she has published over 70 op-eds in places like CNN, TIME Ideas, The Washington Post and The Hill.
April R. Smith, Ph.D, is a licensed psychologist and an Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Miami University. Her clinical and research interests are eating disorders, suicidality, and their co-occurrence. She is a member of the Eating Disorder Research Society and the Military Suicide Research Consortium. She was awarded the Academy for Eating Disorders Early Career Investigator Fellowship, and her research has received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Defense.
Ruth Baer is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Kentucky and a licensed clinical psychologist. She completed intensive training in DBT in 1997 and has been teaching and supervising DBT in UK’s doctoral program in clinical psychology since then. Her research focuses primarily on mindfulness and on related psychological processes important in borderline personality disorder, including rumination, suppression and avoidance, and other maladaptive forms of emotion regulation. In addition to DBT, she teaches and supervises several other mindfulness-based interventions.
Heather Davis is a 4th-year doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of Kentucky. Her clinical interests include impulsive behaviors and eating disorders. She currently works individually with DBT clients, leads DBT skills group for adults, and facilitates short-term DBT work with adolescents. Her current research interests focus on understanding mechanisms for the comorbidity between eating disorders and transdiagnostic dysfunction, including depression, anxiety, non-suicidal self-injury and problematic substance use.
Elizabeth Riley is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of Kentucky. Her clinical interests include trauma recovery and PTSD, as well as impulsive behaviors, particularly substance use and abuse. She has led DBT group for adults and has conducted individual DBT therapy with adult clients in outpatient and residential settings. Her current research interests focus on understanding mechanisms of personality change and the downstream effects of intentional personality change as a result of therapeutic intervention, including substance use, disordered eating behavior, non-suicidal self-injury, and risky sexual behavior.
Dr. Jamie Ostroff is a Clinical Health Psychologist and Chief of the Behavioral Sciences Service in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Attending Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Medicine Cornell in New York City. She is Director of MSK's Tobacco Treatment Program. Dr. Ostroff's research has focused on addressing the psychological and behavioral aspects of tobacco-related cancer prevention and control with specific expertise in disseminating and implementing tobacco treatment in cancer care and lung cancer screening settings. Dr. Ostroff is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York trained in cognitive behavioral therapies (CBTs). Her clinical practice targets cancer patients/survivors and she has a keen interest in use of motivational interviewing and acceptance and commitment-based therapeutic approaches for health behavior change. She provides tobacco education and training to community-based health care providers working with low income and other vulnerable populations.
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