2nd Friday of every month from 2:30-4:00 pm
4400 East-West Highway
Bethesda, MD 20814

The focus of the group will be the aging process and treatment of older adults. We will be reading books that discuss clinical phenomena and therapeutic approaches as well as fictionalized accounts and other literary works about the aging process. Group discussions will be informed by members’ work with older adults and their ways of dealing (or not) with their own aging and mortality.

Members who attend this study group will be able to:

  1. Discuss why homo prospectus is a more accurate name for human beings than homo sapien.
  2. Describe the role that emotion and empathy play in guiding our behavior.
  3. Identify 3 similarities between intuition and computer search engines.
  4. Define the concept of model-building and explain how it is involved in generating predictions regarding behavioral outcomes.
  5. Define the separate processors view and the episodic prospections view of guiding action and state how they are related.
  6. Describe Affective Redeployment and summarize Damasio’s et.al.’s research supporting this theory.
  7. Identify four of its characteristics of Mind Wandering and explicate its purpose.
  8. Describe the Complementary Learning System of memory and four lines of support for the model.
  9. Differentiate the Physical and Socially Constructed Reality and articulate the implications of each.
  10. Identify at least two benefits of trust to individuals and to the group/culture.
  11. Explain the differences between the two theories about the future: Determinism and the Pragmatic Prospection Principle.
  12. Discuss the role of death in human thought and action within the context of the pragmatic prospection perspective.
  13. List and describe the four factors that work together to help to explain the productivity of human option construction.
  14. Explain the proposed view that the distinctive mark of free will is that it “consists of having the latitude to express one’s self in numerous and diverse ways.”
  15. Compare two types of emotion (full blown feeling and automatic or intuitive feeling).
  16. Describe research illustrating that behavior is much more reliably based on how people expect to feel in the future than how they feel at present.
  17. Identify at least two functions of moral norms, attitudes and assessments.
  18. Describe social psychological research that makes the case that intuitive moral judgment involves developed capacities for empathic social evaluation and prospective assessment.
  19. Describe how dysfunctional projections into the future create depression and other types of psychopathology.
  20. Discuss how CBT and other therapy techniques address and improve faulty prospection.
  21. List and define five aspects of creativity and how they relate to prospection.
  22. Identify mental attitudes and abilities that increase or remain stable with age that promote creative living.