A workshop on Neuro-Linguistic- Programing (NLP)

Amity Institute of Behavioral and allied Sciences
Amity University, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow Campus

A workshop on Neuro-Linguistic- Programing (NLP) is being organized by Amity Institute of Behavioral and Allied Sciences, (AIBAS) at Amity University, Lucknow campus on 7th & 8th March 2008. It will be conducted by Dr. A. Abraham, a certified practitioner in NLP and Meta NLP from U. K., based at Trivandrum, AIBAS offers Psychology at Graduation and Post Graduation level. With a team of committed faculty members it conducts advanced researches and workshops in the area of Applied Psychology and Human Resource Development. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is an established scientific technique for understanding and modifying the subconscious programming of human mind and can be used effectively for influencing how a person thinks and experiences the world.

People who have attended NLP find themselves capable of creating extraordinary results. Business professionals significantly increase their ability to influence others and create new levels of performance results. Anyone participating in this comprehensive and experiential learning process will achieve a heightened sense of power and effectiveness in creating what they exactly desire.

To know more about the master trainer and NLP visit www.mindmasters.org

Workshop Fee:
Before 25th Feb.
2200/-(Org./Corporate Participants)
950/- (Subsidized for Teachers*)
550/- (Subsidized for Students) (Non fellowship)*

25th to 6th March,
2600/-(Org./Corporate Participants)
1200/-(Subsidized for Teachers*)
800/- (Subsidized for Students) (Non fellowship)*

Spot Registration
3000/-(Org./Corporate Participants)
1500/-(Subsidized for Teachers*)
1000 (Subsidized for Students) (Non fellowship)*

* seats for teachers and students are very limited.

Time Schedule:
Org./Corporate Participants
2 Days
March 7th & 8th 2008
Timings- 9:30 AM - 2:30 PM

Psychology students, Practitioners & those interested
3 Days
March 7th & 8th 2008
Timings- 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM

Details can be requested from:
Email: aibas@lko.amity.edu, tsingh2@amity.edu
Mobile: 9415278738 (Tushar Singh), 9335105727 (Manini Srivastava)

Postal Address for nominations/ cheques / drafts.
Organizing Secretary - Manini Srivastava, Amity Institute of Behavioural & Allied Sciences (AIBAS), Amity University, Lucknow Campus, Viraj Khand-5, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow-226010, U.P.

Drafts and cheques to be addressed to-
Amity Institute of Behavioural and Allied Sciences payable at Lucknow.

National Seminar on LEARNING DISABILITIES

National Seminar on LEARNING DISABILITIES

ORGANIZED BY
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF KERALA
KARIAVATTOM CAMPUS
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM- 695581

VENUE: MARIA RANI CENTRE
PALLOTTI LANE
GANDHIPURM - TRIVANDRUM -17

DATES: 29TH & 30TH MARCH

TIME: 9 AM TO 5 PM

Department of Psychology: The Golden Years
The Department of Psychology, University of Kerala, the pioneering institution in the State to impart education in academic Psychology, was started in 1957 in the University college campus at Palayam, and was later shifted to the present place at Kariavattom in 1968. Presently, the Department offers M.A. in Applied Psychology, M.Phil., and Ph.D. It also runs an Interdiciplinary M.Phil. Program on Cognitive Science.

The Department has so far produced over 100 Ph.Ds. Over 150 scientific papers have been published in journals and the Department itself brings out a journal, "The Creative Psychologist". More than 150 Psychological tests have been standardized in the Department.

The Department has a Psychological Testing and Counselling Centre catering to the needs of the academic community and the society, and also a well equipped laboratory and library.

The main thrust area of the Department has been Personality and Personal Growth which spreads across three formal specializations, viz., Clinical, Organizational, and Educational Psychology.


Learning Disability (LD)
The term learning disability is used to describe the seemingly unexplained difficulty a person of at least average intelligence has in acquiring basic academic skills.

In India around 13-14% of all school children suffer from learning disorders. Unfortunately, most schools fail to lend a sympathetic ear to their problems. As a result, these children are branded as failures. In view of all this the Department of Psychology, University of Kerala-which is celebrating its Golden jubilee year of formation-is proud to organize a two day National Seminar on Learning Disabilities.

For what?
The participants are expected to gain sound theoretical knowledge regarding the nature and manifestation of various learning disabilities, methods of assessment, remediation packages, and psychosocial aspects of the problem.

For Whom?
♦ Students of psychology, social work
♦ Professionals like Clinical Psychologists, Doctors, and others in the field of rehabilitation
♦ Parents of learning disabled children
♦ Teachers Leading Professionals who are working in the field of learning disabilities from around the country will take classes on the various aspects of Learning Disabilities.

The panel of experts
♦ Dr. P. A. Suresh (Director, ICCONS, Trivandrum)
♦ Dr. S. Bhasi (Prof., Dept. of Clinical Psychology, SRMC, Chennai)
♦ Dr. Annie John (HOD, Dept. of Learning Support, Mallya Aditi International School, Bangalore)
♦ Ms. Akila Sadasivan (Clinical Psychologist, Research Scholar, University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
♦ Mr. A. Sreelal (Clinical Psychologist, MHC, Trivandrum)

Registration Details
Registration Fee:
P.G. & M.Phil. Students*: Rs.200.00
Research scholars: Rs.300.00
Others: Rs.500.00
Spot registration: Rs.600.00

*Students should send proof of their studentship status along with the registration form and DD.

Demand Draft:
Drawn in favour of Organizing Secretary, LD Seminar 2008, payable at Thiruvananthapuram.
Last date to receive the registration forms: 15th March 2008

Mailing address#:
Organizing Secretary, LD Seminar 2008,
Department of Psychology, University of Kerala, Kariavattom Campus, Thiruvananthapuram-695581.
#Superscribe the envelope “Registration: LD Seminar 2008”

For further details kindly contact
Phone: 0471 2418304
Mobile: 9447221421
E-mail: ldseminar2008@gmail.com

How Poverty Alters the Brain

This morning's *Chronicle of Higher Education* includes an article:
"Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain" by Richard Monastersky.
Here's the article:
Brain studies of poor children reveal that their neural systems develop differently from those of other children, a finding that potentially points the way toward creating methods for ameliorating the effects of poverty on academic achievement.

"Growing up poor is bad for your braina?"we've known that for a long time," said Martha J. Farah, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's new is that neuroscientists have begun to try to understand this problem," she said last week at the annual meeting here of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which ends today.

For generations, psychologists have noted that children raised in poverty perform poorer on cognitive tests, on average, than do students from wealthier families. Some researchers have taken those results to argue that intelligence is determined for the most part by genetics and that certain races are inherently smarter than others. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented that case in their book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

But the new results from neuroscience indicate that experience, especially being raised in poverty, has a strong effect on the way the brain works. "It's not a case of bad genes," said Ms. Farah. She and her colleagues have investigated the issue by trying to tease out which aspects of poverty alter specific cognitive skills, such as memory, language, and the ability to delay gratification. The researchers studied a group of African-American children of low socioeconomic status, who had been tracked from birth through high- school graduation by Hallam Hurt, a pediatrician at Penn.

Over the years, Dr. Hurt's team had assessed the home environments of the children, monitoring how nurturing parents were, and how intellectually stimulating the homes werea?"for example, whether the children had access to books and visited museums.

When Ms. Farah's team tested 110 of those children, they found that particular cognitive skills were linked with certain aspects of the environment. Children with better language abilities were more likely to come from intellectually stimulating homes, no matter how nurturing their parents were. Memory skills, however, matched the nurturing levels in the home, reported Ms. Farah, who will publish her results in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.

Effect of Nurturing on the Brain
To test why, the researchers did MRI scans of the children. They found that students raised in nurturing homes generally had bigger hippocampi, the portion of the brain associated with forming and retrieving memories. The discovery dovetails with previous research in rodents, which showed that rats raised in a stressful environment develop smaller hippocampi.

The results of the new work suggest that "it's worth making intervention and prevention programs because clearly a lot of the action here is experiential," said Ms. Farah. "This points out the fact that these phenomena are the result of adverse environments."

At the science association's meeting, Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oregon's brain-development laboratory, described other experiments on the cognitive effects of poverty. In one study, researchers put a net of electrodes on the heads of children and measured their brain waves. The children were seated between two speakers playing different stories and they were asked to pay attention to only one of the stories.

While the stories were being read, the children heard identical bursts of distracting noise coming from either of the speakers. The brains of the children responded differently to those same noises, depending on whether it came from the side they were listening to or ignoring. It's almost as if the brain has a volume control, turning up the sound on the side it is attending to, said Ms. Stevens.

The study revealed that students from lower-income families were less able to screen out the noises embedded in the stories they were supposed to ignore.

The students in the higher-income group, however, "had more gain on their volume control," she said. "Their brains were able to make a larger distinction between what they were trying to hear versus ignore."

With those results and others suggesting that cognitive skills are strongly influenced by environment, the Oregon team is developing intervention programs to try to counteract the effects of poverty. At the meeting, Ms. Courtney described one experimental program that has shown initial success.

Parental-Interventi on Program:
The program, developed by Jessica Fanning, a doctoral student at Oregon, trains parents to improve their communication skills and provides them with tools to improve their children's behavior, with the aim of reducing stress in the home. To test her program, Ms. Fanning recruited families from a Head Start program.

She found that after eight weekly sessions with parents, they reported less stress in the home, and their children performed significantly better on tests of language skills, nonverbal intelligence, memory, and attention.

The researchers have thus far tested only 14 low-income children and 14 controls. And they are tracking the children to see whether the effects persist. "At the end of the day, what we don't care about is a 5-point difference in I.Q.," said Ms. Stevens. "We care about this measure if it's going to translate into something persistent and useful."

While many of the researchers at the session supported the hypothesis that socioeconomic status plays a strong role in affecting brain development in children, Mabel L. Rice, director of the doctoral program in child language at the University of Kansas, described a new study that goes against the hypothesis, at least in the case of early verbal abilities. In tests of 1,766 children in Australia, Ms. Rice and her colleagues found no correlation between a child's verbal abilities at 24 months old and the parents' socioeconomic status or their education levels.

"The conclusion is that we don't want to assume too strongly that children of poverty are unable to acquire early vocabulary," she told The Chronicle.

Ms. Rice and three other researchers reported their results in December in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.