Students Win Awards for Studies based on TMT

This week I'm sharing an article from our CU College of Nursing press office, recognizing two students doing research that's connected to Two Minds Theory: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/nursing/about-us/news/Pages/2019/Poster-presentation-covers-it-all.aspx

Two of my students won awards for their poster presentations at the College's research symposium, one for a study of trauma and chronic pain in patients with opioid use disorders, and the other for a study of Intuitive-level variables that predict medication adherence in patients with HIV. Both are topics that I have posted about previously on the blog (HIV treatment adherence here; opioid use disorders here and here), and each is the focus of ongoing research at the college.

The college posted copies of Linda Driscoll Powers's poster on chronic pain and trauma in patients with opioid use (2nd place winner), and Nasser Al-Salmi's poster on predictors of HIV medication adherence (3rd place winner). Nasser is a PhD student at the college, and Linda is in our BSN Honors program that gives nursing students a chance to conduct original research while getting their undergraduate degrees. Congratulations to them both!

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Chatbot Changes and Challenges in 2023

I wrote last summer about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or ...

Inside the Intuitive Mind: Social Support Can Facilitate or Inhibit Behavior Change

This week I'm looking at another concrete tool in the behavior-change armamentarium, social support . I have written previously about the Narrative mind's strong focus on social cues , and indeed perhaps the Narrative system evolved specifically to help us coordinate our behavior with groups of other humans. As a behavior-change strategy, social support can be used in several different ways. Instrumental Social Support . The most basic form of social support is instrumental, the type of help that a neighbor gives in loaning you a tool or that a friend provides in bringing you a meal. This type of concrete support can be helpful for diet change -- e.g., here are some fresh vegetables from my garden -- or exercise -- e.g., you can borrow my tent for your camping trip. Although instrumental support is particularly powerful because someone is actually doing something for you or giving you resources that you don't have, it is also usually short-term (I probably don't want...

The Strange History of "Cognitive-Behavioral" Therapy

The dominant approach to behavior change in 2020 was still "cognitive-behavioral therapy" (CBT). If you pick a therapist at random from the phone book, chances are that they will offer this brand of treatment. Furthermore, the majority of behavior-focused grants funded by the National Institutes of Health use either cognitive-behavioral methods, or the related social-cognitive model, to explain and influence people's health choices. Although CBT is the dominant model of behavior change (having replaced older psychodynamic approaches in the 1980s and 1990s), it has a checkered history that shows its combined and sometimes competing roots in both the Intuitive and Narrative systems. In fact, today's CBT is an amalgam of two earlier schools of thought that were once in fierce opposition. Behaviorism was the earlier approach, developed by laboratory-based American psychologists starting around the turn of the 20th century. This school of thought attempted to change peo...

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