Professor dr. Ilan H. Meyer Williams, Institute for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law

In this workshop, Dr. Meyer will describe the context for the study of health and health disparities in sexual and gender minorities. The topics covered will include: (a) Theoretical concepts (prejudice and stigma, stress theory) related to the origins of minority stress as a theory as a cause of adverse health outcomes in the context of other theories (biological, socioeconomic); (b) Methodological implications of this perspective, especially the need to distinguish aims for the study of within LGBT populations versus between LGBT and heterosexual/cisgender populations. The framework for understanding health disparities requires understanding of the principles of minority stress as a cause of differences in health outcomes between populations but sometimes researchers are more interested in understanding patterns of stress and resilience within a population; (c) Understanding stress processes, coping processes, social support and community affiliation, and resilience as predictor, mediator, and moderator factors in the study sexual and gender minorities health; (d) Methodological issues in sampling LGBT populations and measurement of minority stress components; (e) The role of history and the social environment (e.g., lifespan perspective) in understanding health and how social changes currently taking place in many societies should impact the study of minority stress; (f) Understanding intervention and prevention research from the perspective of minority stress—a research area that has lagged behind in the study of minority stress.

Max number of participants: 50
Duration of the workshop: Half-day (3 hours)
Language: English
Price: 25 €

• Prof Illan Mayer bio [PDF] 

Professor Cecilia A. Essau, University of Roehampton, London, UK

Overview
Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric disorders affecting children and adolescents in the general population. It is estimated that up to 10% of children and up to 20% of adolescents meet the criteria of an anxiety disorder. In addition to being prevalent, anxiety disorders co-occur frequently with numerous other psychiatric disorders. When left untreated, anxiety disorders that begin early in life can become chronic and are often associated with a negative course. In response to the growing awareness of the significance of the problem associated with anxiety disorders, various prevention and intervention programs for childhood/adolescent anxiety have been developed in recent years. This workshop is designed for researchers and clinicians who are interested in anxiety disorders. It will begin with a brief description of “normal” and “pathological” anxiety, followed by presentation of findings of recent studies on the prevalence, course, and risk factors of anxiety disorders. The second section of the workshop will include presentation of a newly developed prevention/intervention program for childhood anxiety (“Super Skills for Life”). “Super Skills for Life” is a trans-diagnostic treatment protocol that is based on the principles of CBT, behavioural activation, social skills training, and uses video-feedback and cognitive preparation as part of the treatment.

Key Learning objectives
At the conclusion of the workshop, participants should have a good knowledge of:
- the prevalence, comorbidity, and course of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents
- the risk and protective factors of anxiety disorders
- various psychological prevention/intervention programs for anxiety disorders
Participants will also have an opportunity to practice the major components of the “Super Skills for Life”.

Training Modalities
The training methods will include didactic teaching, case examples, role plays, exercises, and small group work.

Max number of participants: 40
Duration of the workshop: Half-day (3 hours)
Language: English
Price: 25 €

• Prof Cecilia A. Essau bio [PDF]

Prof. Dr. Rita Rosner, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany

The goal of this workshop is to enable therapists to differentiate between pathological and painful but normal grief reactions. Participants will learn about interviews and questionnaire focusing on prolonged grief disorder. Furthermore I will present an overview of the two interventions designed by us – the inpatient group therapy manual and the individual outpatient manual. Both treatments have been evaluated successfully. Both manualized treatments can roughly be described as consisting of three phases: In phase I patients receive psychoeducation concerning their prolonged grief symptoms. As prolonged grief patients are often ambivalent about treatment, motivation needs to be addressed. In phase II patients are exposed to their most distressing memories of the loss and its circumstances. Cognitive restructuring may be necessary if patients feel guilty or display other secondary emotions about the loss or going on with their lives. In phase III patients aim towards transformation of the loss to enable change.

Expected outcome for the audience: To learn about the diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder to gain knowledge about grief treatments and the necessary therapeutic techniques used.

Duration of the workshop: Half-day (3 hours)
Max number of participants: 30
Language: English
Price: 25 €

• Prof Rita Rosner bio [PDF] 

Dr. Blaž Rebernjak, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

The goal of this workshop is to introduce participants to modern approaches to dealing with mediation and moderation and implement them in R (https://cran.r-project.org/). No prior knowledge of R is required to participate in the workshop. The methods presented here use a general approach (path analysis) to deal with mediation, moderation and mediated moderation (moderated mediation). The workshop is divided into three distinct parts (about 90 minutes each), with each part consisting of a short theoretical introduction and in-depth exercises accompanied by empirical examples. In the first part, the general logic of R will be introduced with exercises aimed at importing data and descriptive statistics. The fundamental basics of path analysis will be introduced, as well as their implementation in the lavaan (http://lavaan.ugent.be/) package of R.
    The second part of the workshop will focus on mediation. A short theoretical introduction to mediation will be given, as well as a historical overview of the relevant issues. Using empirical data, lavaan will be used to specify simple mediation models. Participants will learn how to define direct, indirect and total effects, as well as how to use bootstrap to estimate standard errors associated with them. To fully understand the flexibility of the path analytical approach, participants will be introduced to more complex mediation models (with several mediators and more than one outcome variable). The third part of the workshop will focus on moderation, as well as on combining moderation and mediation. Moderation with continuous as well as moderation with dummy variables will be introduced. Participants will learn how to plot simple interaction plots as well as estimate the interaction effects. Modern approaches to mediated moderation and moderated mediation will be discussed and demonstrated.

Max number of participants: 20
Duration of the workshop: 5 hours (from 14.30)
Price: 25 €

Professor Shulamith Kreitler, School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University

The workshop will present a new approach to stress vulnerability, based on the cognitive orientation theory. This approach provides the conceptual tools for defining and identifying stress vulnerability and a methodology for its assessment. The workshop will include two parts: a theoretical part and an empirical-experiential part. The first part of the workshop will be devoted to presenting the theory and its empirical basis. The basic approach consists in identifying the major cognitive contents that contribute to the evocation and maintenance of stress. These contents refer formally to four types of beliefs (beliefs about self, beliefs about goals, beliefs about norms, and general beliefs about reality) representing themes specific for stress vulnerability, such as assuming responsibility for everything including things for which one is not necessarily responsible, being constantly on the alert in regard to things that happen around oneself, feeling as if one were constantly in a test, planning things only in general terms without delving into the details, etc. Studies in which this approach to stress and stress vulnerability have been applied in different settings (e.g., work, school, hospitals) will be presented. The second part of the workshop will be devoted to providing acquaintance and experience with the constructs and methodology of the cognitive orientation approach. An assessment instrument will be presented to the participants who will have the opportunity to apply it and learn to administer and score it. In the final part of the workshop the participants will learn an intervention method designed to cope with stress and overcome stress vulnerability so as to moderate its effects, reduce them or altogether prevent them. The workshop will be based on presentation by the convenor (and assistant), discussions, and exercises presented by means of handouts and role playing.

Duration of the workshop: An hour and a half (90 minutes)
Max number of participants: 50+
Language: English (with additional help when needed in German, French and Russian)
Workshop type: in-conference workshop
Price: free