Professor Caleb Lack

It’s not an illusion - your kid’s attention span has gotten shorter (yours probably has too). This article profiles some really great studies showing how deliberately engaging in focused and challenging tasks (that get more challenging across time) can help to improve your cognitive endurance. Try it with your kids…and probably yourself!

How to build kids’ ‘cognitive endurance’ in an age of distraction The ability to run “mental marathons” is a skill children can learn through simple, but dedicated, practice

Studies like this are why I repeatedly have said that reducing inequality (via strong social safety nets such as universal basic income and healthcare) is key to producing a mentally healthier society.

"Brain function and structure are known to be affected by environmental conditions. Marek et al. mapped brain-wide association studies (BWAS) of 649 phenotypes and exposures to brain function and structure using imaging data from many sources (see the Perspective by Sisk and Satterthwaite). Across adolescents, neighborhood-level socioeconomics showed the strongest brain-wide association, representing a single exposome pattern that explains 34% of all BWAS variance. In their datasets, the classic brain-IQ association largely disappeared when socioeconomic status was properly accounted for. These results provide valuable insights for understanding the effects of the environment on brain development"

Full study - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6213

When you’re an exposure therapist and your graduating master’s student is crafty, you might get an awesome award from her.

That’s right folks, I have been officially given the “Number 1 Toilet Cracker Expert” award! I’ve been working for 20 years to get here!

Thanks Savanna!

I am excited to be guest expert speaker in The Child Therapist Hub this month. Come see some of my shenanigans while we talk about how to help anxious kids who present with aggression and other more challenging behaviors.

www.childtherapisthub.com

If you’ve followed me much or talked to me about it at all, you know I don’t have much love for EMDR. Part of that is certainly due to the fact that it’s just imaginal exposure with response prevention plus some nonsense. But another is due to the constant shifting stories on its origin by Francine Shapiro.

In this article (taken from a larger exposé), we see yet again how Shapiro lied about another aspect of her development of EMDR:

“We cited evidence that Shapiro’s interest in eye movements did not emerge from her alleged walk in the park. Rather, she had an earlier devotion to a pseudoscientific approach called neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which has a strong emphasis on observing eye-movements for clues about mental states.”

And they have the receipts (as the kids say), in the form of a newly uncovered newspaper article and photograph. Read more here:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/04/a-photograph-exposes-emdrs-true-origins/

My colleague Dr Marla Diebler has a great new blog over on Psych Today, with this entry on helping kids who have BFRBs (hair and skin picking) even if they might not want to be helped.

Read it here - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/from-surviving-to-thriving/202605/bfrb-treatment-does-a-child-have-to-want-to-stop

What's that? You want to learn Exposure with Response Prevention (ERP)? From me? At half off?!?

Well isn't it your lucky day, because my two day ERP seminar is now half off from PESI for Memorial Day!

2-Day Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Training Dr. Lack will show you how to deliver ERP in a way that’s safe, manageable and compassionate – so you’ll be guiding clients at a pace that helps them without overwhelming them.

Really well done and interesting new study from labs in Virginia and Sweden on how related (or not) various types of mental disorders are on a genetic level.

"Using family-genetic risk scores, this population-based study applied explanatory and confirmatory oblique factor analysis to split-half samples. The best fit model identified 6 correlated genetic factors: psychotic disorders, externalizing disorders, anxiety disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, mood disorders, and eating disorders."

Read more - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2848975