Mental Development

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, the brain changes in important and, at times, challenging ways. In Brainstorm, the renowned psychiatrist and bestselling author of Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole-Brain Child, and Mindsight, Daniel Siegel busts a number of commonly held myths about adolescence — for example, that it is merely a stage of “immaturity” filled with often “crazy” behavior — to reveal how it is in fact a vital time in our lives in terms of charting the course for the adults we ultimately become.

This lucid, compassionate audiobook has introduced tens of thousands of listeners to expressive writing, a simple yet powerful self-help technique grounded in scientific research. Leading experts James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth describe how taking just a few minutes to write about deeply felt personal experiences or problems may help improve our mental and physical health.

Two New York Times best-selling authors unveil new research showing what meditation can really do for the brain. In the last 20 years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us.

Dr. Kirren Schnack is here to tell you that your anxiety isn’t here to stay. Whether you’re going through something and need support to feel like yourself again, or if you have been dealing with anxious thoughts for a long time, Ten Times Calmer has the help you’ve been looking for. Dr. Kirren is an Oxford trained clinical psychologist with twenty years’ experience. In Ten Times Calmer she offers a first aid kit of tools to help you understand what you’re going through and change how you’re feeling—and it might just be easier than you think.

Tackling relationships, career, and family issues, John Kim, LMFT, thinks of himself as a life-style designer, not a therapist. His radical new approach, that he sometimes calls “self-help in a shot glass” is easy, real, and to the point. He helps people make changes to their lives so that personal growth happens organically, just by living.

The death of someone we hold dear may be inevitable; being paralyzed by our grief is not. A growing body of research has revealed our capacity for resilient grieving, our innate ability to respond to traumatic loss by finding ways to grow - by becoming more engaged with our lives, and discovering new, profound meaning.

Writer and therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli grew up knowing exactly what it means to straddle multiple cultures at once. Like many children of immigrants, she has often found herself plagued by questions: Can I establish my own values and embrace where I come from? Is prioritizing my mental health really rejecting my culture? How do I set boundaries and care for myself when family and community mean everything? Even after becoming a therapist herself, she saw those same gaps in the mental health world, leading her to wonder, like so many children of immigrants: what about us?

Being in a relationship without knowing how to share your feelings and receive your partner’s feelings in useful ways is like jumping into a pool without knowing how to swim. You can flail around all you want, but it’s not going to keep you afloat for very long—you need to be able to move in any direction at will. Like swimming, knowing how to share your feelings and respond to your partner's feelings will move your relationship in the direction you want: toward more intimacy, closeness, connection, and trust.

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar 21st-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong - it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too. Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way.

Unlike many other books on lie detection and behavioral analysis, this revolutionary guide reveals the FBI-developed practice of elicitation, the field-tested technique for detecting deception and encouraging people to provide information they would otherwise keep secret. Now you can learn this astonishing method directly from the expert who created this technique and pioneered it for the FBI.

This classic work on the rules of sex - updated for a new generation - is still as provocative as the day it was published, providing simple explanations for any and all questions about what happens in the bedroom.

Shame is one of the most destructive of human emotions. If you suffered childhood physical or sexual abuse, you may experience such intense feelings of shame that it almost seems to define you as a person. In order to begin healing, it's important for you to know that it wasn't your fault. In this gentle guide, therapist and childhood abuse expert Beverly Engel presents a mindfulness and compassion-based therapeutic approach to help you overcome the debilitating shame that keeps you tied to the past.

Since its original publication in 1996, this volume has been a helpful guide to therapists in the practice of emotionally focused therapy. This second edition addresses the many changes in the field of couples therapy, including updated research results linked to clinical intervention and new information on using EFT to address depression and PTSD. A new section covers the growth of couples therapy as a field and its overall relevance to the mental health field, accompanied by coverage of how recent research into the nature of marital distress is consonant with EFT.

Everyday life is so frantic and full of troubles that we have largely forgotten how to live a joyful existence. We try so hard to be happy that we often end up missing the most important parts of our lives. In Mindfulness, Oxford professor Mark Williams and award-winning journalist Danny Penman reveal the secrets to living a happier and less anxious, stressful, and exhausting life.

A new, comprehensive approach to help you identify, challenge, and overcome all types of worry. This empowering seven-step program, includes practical, easy-to-follow advice and techniques.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) has a profoundly dehumanizing effect on those subject to its distortions, manipulations, and rage. The Narcissist in Your Life illuminates the emotionally annihilating experience of narcissistic abuse in families and relationships, acknowledges the complex emotional and physical trauma that results, and assists survivors with compassionate, practical advice on the path of recovery.

Overwork is the new normal. Rest is something to do when the important things are done - but they are never done. Looking at different forms of rest, from sleep to vacation, Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang dispels the myth that the harder we work the better the outcome. He combines rigorous scientific research with a rich array of examples of writers, painters, and thinkers - from Darwin to Stephen King - to challenge our tendency to see work and relaxation as antithetical.

Trust can be rebuilt in your marriage! With patient, loving, self-sacrificing effort, it's possible that one day your wife will risk her heart with you again. And she may even have more respect and love for you than before. In Worthy of Her Trust, Jason Martinkus relates how he repaired his own marriage after revelations of sexual addiction. Along with Stephen Arterburn, Jason offers exercises and tools to help your marriage begin again.

Rex Forehand, PhD, and Nicholas Long, PhD, have helped thousands of parents achieve discipline using positive reinforcement, without yelling or harming the child's self-esteem. Their clinically proven, five-week program gives you the tools you need to successfully manage your child's behavior, giving specific factors that cause or contribute to disruptive behavior, ways to develop a more positive atmosphere in your family and home, and strategies for managing specific behavior problems.