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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the treatment effects of Quest cognitive hypnotherapy (QCH) on anxiety and depression, and make comparisons with published data from the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) project.

Adult clients of QCH therapists were invited to enrol in a Practice Research Network (PRN) and completed pre- and post-therapy measures of anxiety (GAD-7) and depression (PHQ-9).

Post-treatment scores were available for 83 of the 106 clients reaching caseness (above the clinical cut-off on either or both measures) on their pre-treatment scores. Totally, 59 clients had moved to recovery, representing 71 per cent of cases where post scores were available and 56 per cent of the intent to treat (ITT) population (106 clients). Additionally, including all cases (both above and below cut-offs) 118 clients had post-treatment measures. In total, 86 (73 per cent) clients improved reliably. The mean number of treatment sessions was between three and four. This compares favourably with 2012-2013 IAPT findings using the same measures.

This study was exploratory involving a client group paying privately for treatment. There was no randomised control group or attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of specific components of therapy.

QCH may offer a brief effective treatment for clients with clinically significant levels of anxiety and/or depression, widening client choice.

As the first study to explore the effectiveness of private QCH this study offers an example of how to use a PRN to compare with published IAPT data using the same measurement tools.

Mediation is defined as a process, whether referred and agreed to by the expression mediation, pre-litigation mediation, online mediation, community mediation, conciliation or any other expression of such similar import, whereby party or parties, request an independent third person referred to as mediator or mediation service provider to assist them in their attempt to reach a peaceful settlement of a dispute. The peaceful settlement of any dispute to be initiated, processed, guided and moderated in the process of successful mediation before parties, needs mediator to have four major new skills such as witness-awareness, stillness-concentration, empathy-motivation and a pragmatic-sensibility for fulfilling the aims and outcomes of mediation. These four skills are deeply inward and psychological, which can be accessed and empowered by an exercise of deepening experience called spiritual in content and application. However, a crucial interchange of meaning and value that very often come into this situation between spirituality and psychology is an important one to be mentioned here. The two seemingly distant disciplines of experience, one of psychology and another of spirituality lies in the orientation that an individual and a collective give to life and world as a whole. When life and world are accepted in totality, spirituality can be life-affirmative and world-embracing giving us a direction to the individual psychological states of though-emotion-sensation-behaviour complex to embrace and enhance values of inclusion, harmony and development at the collective and universal level. These psychological states, both individual and collective, gradually open the vision and mission of values to live within and outside, to be and to become, and finally manifest a future world of stability, order, richness and growing perfection by solving challenges that come to our existence. It makes life both spiritual and earthly. This chapter demonstrates that this kind of spiritual meaning, value and experience entering into and operating through psychological capacities give mediator four major new skills for easing the process and purpose of mediation exercise. One, an objective awareness to witness the proceedings of the mediation calmly within the conscious cognition and without having any bias and fixed beliefs towards any issues of the parties. Two, a stillness with sensory concentration to avoid unnecessary reactions or agitations that human nature is prone to in taking sides on issues or become lop-sided in approach and consequently affecting mediation's outcome of peaceful settlement. Three, an empathy that animates and motivates parties to look for win-win situation for both as against the adversarial method currently present in the legal system where one party loses and another party gains grounds, which results in bitterness in parties' relationships, rights and obligations. Four, a pragmatic sensibility or practical responsibility by which costs or damages or injuries of all kinds such as social, economic, profit-loss ratio, psychological or organizational stress etc., can be pre-calculated, meaningfully distributed and harmonized between parties by the mediator. With millions of pending legal cases in the existing system of the courts of law that are supposedly designed to provide access to justice and, unfortunately have become fragile as a result of severe shortage of resources of all kinds to deal with sheer quantity and intricate complexity of issues in the disputes, applied spirituality in mediation can pave way for easy, flexible, quick, cost-effective and satisfactory justice to both sides of the parties when these four major new skills are developed through application of spiritual experience and experiments in the whole process of mediation. The author explains in this article the method of acquiring these four major new skills in experiential form in any mediation scenario and the rationale for infusing applied spirituality in mediation. Author also discusses the Indian situation of mediation in the light of new developments sought for enhancing the alternative dispute resolution. At the end, this chapter demonstrates the bigger picture that represent the need of spirituality using these four major new skills while mediating challenges of sustainable development. It will be shown in the end how spirituality, sustainability and mediation for settlements of disputes of sustainable development have something common, core and collective. This is the premise based on which the relationship between applied spirituality and mediation in overcoming the challenges of sustainability are expressed with the help of intuitive, inspirational, integrative and intelligent actions for a sustaining our future age, new humanity and harmonious space.

The sequence of stress, distress and somatization has occupied much of the late twentieth-century psychological research. The anatomy of stress can be viewed from interactional and hybrid theories that suggest that the individual relates with the surroundings by buffering the harmful effects of stressors. These acts or reactions are called coping strategies and are designed as protection from the stressors and adaptation to them. Failure to successfully adapt to stressors results in psychological distress. In some individuals, elevated levels of distress and failed coping are expressed in physical symptoms, rather than through feelings, words, or actions. Such “somatization” defends against the awareness of the psychological distress, as demonstrated in the psychosocial literature. The progression of behavior resulting from somatic distress moves from a private domain into the public arena, involving an elaborate medicalization process, is however less clear in sociological discourse. The invocation of a medical diagnosis to communicate physical discomfort by way of repeated use of health care services poses a major medical, social and economic problem. The goal of this paper is to clarify this connection by investigating the relevant literature in the area of women with breast cancer. This manuscript focuses on the relationship of psychological stress, the stress response of distress, and the preoccupation with one’s body, and proposes a new theoretical construct.

Draws on a consultancy project designed to reduce accident rates in four Danish sugar factories. Presents examples of metaphor use in the project and documents a steady decline in numbers and severity of accidents over time. Hypothesises that the use of metaphors is part of the explanation. Following a multi‐disciplinary review of the literature on metaphors, suggests that they can be harnessed in three ways: as tools for conscious, creative analysis; as ways of creating emotions; and as ways of fostering unconscious learning processes. Suggests that the effect in the sugar project is due to unconscious learning. Explains how this can happen and stresses the most important. Proposes that consultants use images, stories, narratives, and fairy tales to a larger degree and put less weight on formal conceptual learning when change is the issue.

Inspired by the dynamic changes in our daily lives enabled via quantified-self technologies and the urgent need for more studies on the human-computer interaction design mechanisms adopted by these applications, this study explores the value of user affective experience mirroring and examines the empowerment effect of meaningful gamification in a psychological self-help system (PSS) that aids people in work stress relief.

Based on an analysis of the existing systems and theories in relevant fields, we conducted mixed-method research, involving semi-structured interviews, experience sampling experiments and user bio data triangulations, to identify the benefits of user affective experience mirroring and examine the impact of visual impact metaphor–based (VIM) meaningful gamification on PSS users.

For a gamified PSS, users generally perceive VIM as arousing more feelings of enjoyment, empathy, trust and usefulness, empowering them to gain more mastery and control over their emotional well-beings, especially with relieving their occupational stress and upbringing their level of perceived happiness. Overtime, VIM-based meaningful gamification further boosts such value of a PSS.

Weaving together meaningful gamification and psychological empowerment theories, the results emphasized that successful empowerment of user through gamification in PSSs relies heavily on whether a deeper and meaningful affective connection can be established with the users, in short, “meaningful gamification for psychological empowerment”. Such an understanding, as demonstrated in our research framework, also sheds light on the design theories for persuasive technology and human influence tactics during human computer interactions.

The results of the study demonstrate to practitioners how to make the best use of gamification strategies to deeply relate to and resonate with users. Even without complicated game-play design, meaningful gamification mechanisms, such as VIM facilitate the empowerment of users while gaining their appreciation, establishing a deeper connection with them and eventually generating persuasive effects on intended future behavioural outcomes.

The effective management of work-related stress with handy tools such as a VIM-based PSS can be beneficial for many organizations and, to a large extent, the society.

This study proposed and empirically demonstrated the empowerment effect of meaningful gamification for PSS users. In this cross-disciplinary study, theories from different research domains were synthesized to develop a more thorough and multi-faceted understanding of the optimal design strategies for emerging information systems like this VIM-based PSS.