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October 26, 2013
Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors Continuing Education
Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors Continuing Education (CADC CEUs, CPS CEUS, CCS CEUs, CADCA CEUs)
Aspira Continuing Education is a California Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors-Approved Continuing Education Provider (ACEPTM) and offers CAADAC-approved clock hours for events that meet CAADAC requirements. The ACEP solely is responsible for all aspects of the program. (Provider # 2C-09-123-0811).
Aspira Continuing Education offers online CE courses for the various certifications provided by CAADAC. Such as CADC I, CADC II, CPS, CCS and CADCA.
View our Board Approvals and Accreditations page for provider numbers.
Click here for: CAADAC Website
View Aspira’s CE courses to see the variety options you have to satisfy your CAADAC requirements.
View Aspira's CEU Pricing page to see how to pay for Aspira's CE courses.
View Aspira's CEU Offers page to see the latest offers and discounts available. Also, see how to earn free CEUs.
**CADC I & II Continuing Education
For your information, here is an excerpt from the CAADAC website:
“Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor (CADC I & II) Requirements:
•Meet all requirements of the CADCA formerly (RADI)
•Provide documentation of 4,000 hours or two (2) years full-time supervised work experience as an alcohol and drug counselor (supervised by at least a CADC-II)
•Pass IC&RC Case Presentation Method of Oral Review Examination (see manual for additional information and requirements)
•Submit appropriate fees
Download the CADC I & II Manual and Handbook now! CADC I/II Manual CADC I/II Handbook
Click here for: CADC I & II Certification Requirements
Aspira Continuing Education is an approved CE Provider for CAADAC licensees. Some of the online courses Aspira offers can be used toward necessary CE requirements others can be used toward Professional Development requirements.
View the table on each course description page to see if that particular course is approved for Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors CADC I & II. If the course is indicated as approved for CAADAC professionals, then that course can be applied toward CE requirements. If not, then that course can be applied toward Professional Development requirements.
View our CE Courses today!
View Aspira's CEU Pricing page to see how to pay for Aspira's CE courses.
View Aspira's CEU Offers page to see the latest offers and discounts available. Also, see how to earn free CEUs.
View our Board Approvals and Accreditations page for provider numbers.
Ability to delay gratification may be linked to social trust, new CU-Boulder study finds
A person's ability to delay gratification—forgoing a smaller reward now for a larger reward in the future—may depend on how trustworthy the person perceives the reward-giver to be, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A body of research that stretches back more than a half-century has shown that the ability to delay gratification is linked to a number of better life outcomes. On average, people who were able to delay gratification as children go on to have higher SAT scores, for example. They also tend to be more socially conscious as adolescents, less obese as adults, and less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.
But despite the long history of studying delayed gratification, little research has focused on the role of social trust in a person's ability to wait for a larger payoff in the future.
"Most of the time, when people talk about delaying gratification, they talk about basic processes of evaluation and self-control," said Laura Michaelson, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and co-lead author of the new study appearing in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology.
In general, people who choose not to delay gratification have often been characterized as irrational and as having poor impulse control. But if the role of social trust is considered, it introduces the possibility that the person who is choosing not to delay gratification may be acting rationally after all, the researchers said.
"If you don't trust someone, it's rational not to wait for them to give you $20 in a month instead of $15 now," said study co-lead author Alejandro de la Vega, also a doctoral student in CU-Boulder's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
To determine the role of social trust, the research team—which also included Christopher Chatham, a former CU-Boulder doctoral student now at Brown University, and psychology and neuroscience Professor Yuko Munakata—recruited participants using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online tool that can be used by scientists to quickly connect with a large number of people from a broad range of backgrounds.
The researchers paid participants up to $1 to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to read the profiles of three fictional characters and then rate them on their trustworthiness. Participants were then asked whether they would opt to take a smaller amount of money offered immediately from each character or a larger amount of money that they would have to wait to collect.
The results showed that the participants were less likely to delay gratification when they distrusted the person who was offering the reward. A second experiment—which relied on a larger group but asked each participant to read the profile of only one character—had similar results. The second study also paired one of three sketches of a face with each character.
"This offers an alternative explanation for why certain populations might be notoriously bad at delaying gratification or notoriously impulsive, like criminals and addicts," Michaelson said. "It had been chalked up to a lack of self-control. But it may be the case that they are poor at delaying gratification because they have low social trust."
The findings could have implications for determining the best intervention strategies to use with children who find it difficult to delay gratification. Creating environments in which children can develop social trust, for example, could be more effective than having those children work solely on self-control, Michaelson said.
The findings also may be important for adults, especially in terms of economic decision-making, de la Vega said. Economists are interested in delayed gratification as it relates to making investments or building up savings instead of spending money immediately. The new CU-Boulder study suggests that how much a person trusts an investment banker or an economic adviser could affect the person's decisions about saving and spending Social Worker Continuing Education
"These economic decisions are not being made in a complete vacuum," de la Vega said. "They might really be affected by how you perceive the person you're interacting with."
The research team plans to follow up this study with research that involves participants interacting in person with the people who are offering the rewards.
"There is a very real possibility the this relationship between social trust and delaying gratification might be even more strong and even more salient when you're in a real situation," Michaelson said.
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Read the full study online at http://www.frontiersin.org/Cognition/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00355/abstract.
October 24, 2013
Abusive parenting may have a biological basis
Research led by University of Oregon professor unveils a potential neurobiological trigger
EUGENE, Ore. -- Parents who physically abuse their children appear to have a physiological response that subsequently triggers more harsh parenting when they attempt parenting in warm, positive ways, according to new research.
Reporting in the quarterly journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, a five-member team, led by Elizabeth A. Skowron, a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Human Services in the University of Oregon College of Education, documented connections between the nervous system's ability to calm heart rate -- via electrocardiogram (ECG) measures of parasympathetic activation -- and the type of parenting mothers displayed during a laboratory interaction with their preschool child LCSW Continuing Education
Studies of child maltreatment have consistently found that parents who physically abuse their children tend to parent in more hostile, critical and controlling ways. Skowron's team appears to have found evidence of a physiological basis for patterns of aversive parenting -- the use of hostile actions such as grabbing an arm or hand or using negative verbal cues in guiding a child's behavior -- in a sample of families involved with Child Protective Services.
For the experiment, mothers and children were monitored to record changes in heart rate while playing together in the lab. Parenting behavior was scored to capture positive parenting and strict, hostile control using a standard coding system.
What emerged, Skowron said, were clear distinctions between abusive, neglectful and non-maltreating mothers in their physiological responses during parenting. When abusive mothers were more warm and nurturing, they began to experience more difficulty regulating their heart rate and staying calm. This physiological-based stress response then led the abusive mothers to become more hostile and controlling toward their child a short time later in the interaction.
The same was not the case for mothers who had been previously identified as being physically neglectful or for mothers with no history of neglectful or abusive parenting.
Participants in the National Institutes of Health-funded study were 141 mothers -- 94 percent Caucasian with a high school degree or less and incomes at or below $30,000 -- and their children, ranged in age from 3 to 5 years old. The research focuses on tracking the effects of physiology on parenting in real time.
"Abusive mothers who try to warmly support their child when the child faced a moderate challenge displayed a physiological response that suggested they're stressed, on alert and preparing to defend against a threat of some kind," said Skowron, a researcher at the Child and Family Center/Prevention Science Institute at the UO. "This kind of physiological response then led to a shift in an abusive mother becoming more hostile, strict, and controlling ways with her young child, regardless of how her child was behaving."
The findings, she added, suggest that when physically abusive mothers experience being a nurturing parent they find it to be hard work. "It appears to quickly wear them out, perhaps because it challenges them in ways that lower-risk mothers don't experience," she said. "An abusive mother appears caught: When she does a good job with her child, it costs her physiologically, and it negatively affects her because it leads to more aversive parenting."
The team's findings help to explain why abusive parenting is so resistant to most interventions, Skowron said. "Most parents who struggle with child maltreatment really love their children and want help improving their parenting skills. Our findings suggest that many are experiencing a biological response during parenting that actively interferes with their efforts to parent in warm and nurturing ways."
The next step, she said, is exploring how to translate the new discovery into interventions specifically designed for parents struggling with child abusive. "We have to figure out how to help these high-risk parents calm themselves down more effectively and enjoy the experience of supporting their children in warm, positive ways. First, she noted, it will be important for other researchers to replicate the findings.
"Researchers at the University of Oregon continue to yield critical insights that result in more effective prevention strategies," said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation and dean of the UO Graduate School. "This research by Dr. Skowron revealing a potential neurobiological trigger involved in abusive parenting may lead to new interventions that could help to improve the lives of children."
###
Co-authors with Skowron were Elizabeth Cipriano-Essel and Aaron L. Pincus, both of Pennsylvania State University where Skowron conducted this research, Lorna Smith Benjamin of the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute, and Mark J. Van Ryzin, research associate in the UO Child and Family Center and researcher at the Eugene-based Oregon Social Learning Center.
NIH grant RO1 MH079328 to Skowron supported the research through the National Institute of Mental Health. Additional funding was provided by the Administration for Children and Families, through its Children's Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, as part of the Federal Child Neglect Research Consortium.
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633 U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of two Pacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities.
Source: Elizabeth A. Skowron, associate professor of counseling psychology, 541-346-0913, eskowron@uoregon.edu
Links:
Skowron faculty page: https://education.uoregon.edu/users/elizabeth-skowron
Counseling psychology and human services: https://education.uoregon.edu/department/counseling-psychology-and-human-services
Child and Family Center: http://cfc.uoregon.edu/
College of Education: https://education.uoregon.edu/
Audio:
1) Skowron on main finding, 20 seconds: http://uonews.uoregon.edu/sites/uonews.wc-sites.uoregon.edu/files/uploads/AbusiveParenting-Response.mp3
2) Skowron on the challenges of intervention, 66 seconds: http://uonews.uoregon.edu/sites/uonews.wc-sites.uoregon.edu/files/uploads/Intervention%20Challenges.mp3
Follow UO Science on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UniversityOfOregonScience
UO Science on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UO_Research
More UO Science/Research News: http://uoresearch.uoregon.edu
Note: The University of Oregon is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. In addition, there is video access to satellite uplink, and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews.
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October 23, 2013
LPCC Continuing Education
LPCC Continuing Education
For California LPCCs:
For those interested in the new California LPCC license, there are a few different paths from which to choose. If you want an overview look at the different paths in a side by side comparison then click here on the LPCC LICENSURE PATHWAY OVERVIEW.
To view the most recent information regarding this license and all corresponding links go to the CA BBS LPCC page at CA BBS - LPCC or the California Association for Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors at CALPCC - LPCC.
AspiraCE is approved by the CA BBS (provider # PCE 4374) to offer online courses for LPCCs in California. To view the list of AspiraCE’s approvals and corresponding provider numbers click on AspiraCE's Approvals and Provider Numbers.
For all other states with LPCCs:
You can view our State Board Approved List to see if Aspira is an approved CE provider for LPCCs in your state.
Aspira Continuing Education is an NBCC-Approved Continuing Education Provider (ACEPTM) and may offer NBCC-approved clock hours for events that meet NBCC requirements. The ACEP solely is responsible for all aspects of the program. (Provider #6416)
Aspira Continuing Education is a California Board of Behavioral Sciences-Approved Continuing Education Provider (ACEPTM) and offers CA BBS-approved clock hours for events that meet CA BBS requirements. The ACEP solely is responsible for all aspects of the program. (Provider #PCE 4374)
View our CE Courses today!
View Aspira's CEU Pricing page to see how to pay for Aspira's CE courses.
View Aspira's CEU Offers page to see the latest offers and discounts available. Also, see how to earn free CEUs.
What a difference a grade makes
First-graders with attention problems lag for years afterward; second-graders, less so
DURHAM, N.C. -- When it comes to children's attention problems, the difference between first and second grade is profound, says a new study from Duke University.
The study, which appears online in the November issue of the Journal of Attention Disorders, says the age at which attention problems emerge makes a critical difference in a child's later academic performance.
When the problems emerged in first grade, children's performance suffered for years afterward. For instance, those children scored lower than their peers on reading achievement scores after fifth grade. The poor performance occurred even if the attention problems were fleeting and improved after first grade.
By contrast, children who developed attention problems starting in second grade performed as well as their peers in later years.
Other studies have noted the link between early attention problems and academic achievement. But the new study is the first to identify the impact of attention problems that emerge in first grade versus those that emerge just a year later.
The research was conducted by Duke psychologists David Rabiner, Madeline Carrig and Kenneth Dodge, the William McDougall Professor of Public Policy and director of Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy. It draws on data from the Fast Track Project, a longitudinal study of the development of conduct problems that has followed 891 individuals in four different locales from kindergarten into adulthood.
The attention study examined academic performance among a subsample of 386 children by looking at grades as well as reading and math scores before and after first grade, and again after fifth grade.
The results may reflect the critical importance of first grade as an academic building block, Rabiner said. Children who suffer from attention problems in first grade fail to acquire key academic skills, and their performance suffers in later years as a result.
Not all first-graders who struggle to focus in school have ADHD, Rabiner added. But whether they have diagnosable ADHD or not, he said it's important to help them at the outset of their academic careers, when they are acquiring essential building block skills.
"Even when these children overcome their attention problems, they continue to struggle in school," Rabiner said. "The earlier we can identify children who are struggling with sustaining attention in the classroom and intervene to help them, the better." Professional Counselor Continuing Education
The study emphasized first and second grades, but Rabiner noted that future researchers would do well to look at kindergarten as well. Data for the study was collected beginning in the early 1990s. Since that time, kindergarten has assumed a more important academic role in many schools.
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The research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Grants R18 MH48043, R18 MH50951, R18 MH50952, R18 MH50953, K05MH00797, and K05MH01027; National Institute on Drug Abuse Grants DA016903, K05DA15226, and P30DA023026; and Department of Education Grant S184U30002. The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention also provided support through a memorandum of agreement with NIMH.
CITATION: "Attention Problems and Academic Achievement: Do Persistent and Earlier-Emerging Problems Have More Adverse Long-Term Effects," David L. Rabiner, Madeline M. Carrig and Kenneth A. Dodge, Journal of Attention Disorders, October 18, 2013. DOI: 10.1177/1087054713507974
October 22, 2013
Anger Management: A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Manual
Anger Management: A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Manual
This course is designed to help you:
1. Recognize the dynamics of anger and related anger management challenges
2. Utilize appropriate cognitive behavioral anger management interventions.
3. Analyze anger management cases for power and control dynamics.
4. List potential services and interventions.
5. Promote an interdisciplinary approach.
6. Increase familiarity with group dynamics involving anger management
Course Description: This manual was designed for use by qualified substance abuse and mental health clinicians who work with substance abuse and mental health clients with concurrent anger problems. The manual describes a 12-week cognitive behavioral anger management group treatment. Each of the 12 90-minute weekly sessions is described in detail with specific instructions for group leaders, tables and figures that illustrate the key conceptual components of the treatment, and homework assignments for the group participants.
MFT, mft, lpc, lpcc, LCSW, lsw, CA BBS, online ceus, board approved, mental health ce courses, online ceus, ceus for MFTs, ce courses for counselors, Social Worker ceus, continuing education units for LPCs, MHC ceus, LCSW, ASW and MFT Intern ceus, Board approved ceus in many states, national board approval ceus, alcohol and drug abuse counselor ceus. See chart below for your
Research uncovers new details about brain anatomy and language in young children
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have gained surprising new insights into how brain anatomy influences language acquisition in young children.
Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin — the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain — developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. But that is not what the research showed.
"What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time."
That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language.
O'Muircheartaigh is currently working in Brown University's Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. The lab uses a specialized MRI technique to look at the formation of myelin in babies and toddlers. Babies are born with little myelin, but its growth accelerates rapidly in the first few years of life.
The researchers imaged the brains of 108 children between ages 1 and 6, looking for myelin growth in and around areas of the brain known to support language.
While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages.
"Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important in older children, about the time they start school," O'Muircheartaigh said. "As language becomes more complex and children become more proficient, it seems as if they use different regions of the brain to support it."
Interestingly, the association between asymmetry and language was generally weakest during the critical language period.
"We found that between the ages of 2 and 4, myelin asymmetry doesn't predict language very well," O'Muircheartaigh said. "So if it's not a child's brain anatomy predicting their language skills, it suggests their environment might be more influential."
The researchers hope this study will provide a helpful baseline for future research aimed at pinpointing brain structures that might predict developmental disorders.
"Disorders like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD all have specific deficits in language ability," O'Muircheartaigh said. "Before we do studies looking at abnormalities we need to know how typical children develop. That's what this study is about."
"This work is important, as it is the first to investigate the relationship between brain structure and language across early childhood and demonstrate how this relationship changes with age," said Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering, who oversees the Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. "The study highlights the advantage of collaborative work, combining expertise in pediatric imaging at Brown and neuropsychology from the King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, making this work possible."
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Other authors on the paper include Douglas Dean, Holly Dirks, Nicole Waskiewicz, and Katie Lehman from Brown's Baby Imaging Lab, and Beth Jerskey from Brown's Alpert Medical School. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Wellcome Trust.
Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476 ASW Continuing Education
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