Events
Apologies and Reparations: When and Why Are Different Group Members Satisfied?
Tuesday 6 March 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla
To create lasting consensus after conflict, apologies or reparations have to be accepted by the group offering them and the group receiving them. However, findings are mixed on what determines acceptance among receiving group members, and little research has examined offering-group members. I will review data from a number of studies among different populations and issues. One theme in our research is the greater power of shame versus guilt expressions to satisfy recipients. We also show that beyond the strong role of moral image improvement predicted by Shnabel and Nadler's Needs-Based Model, offering-group members can be satisfied if the gesture is seen as fulfilling the ingroup's obligation and shifting it to the outgroup, with quite different implications for attitude toward the receiving group and toward future relations with it. A final study set against the conflict in Northern Ireland finds that while mean levels of satisfaction with a real British apology are different among offering and receiving groups, what determines both groups' satisfaction is not as different as one might think.
Do you feel the same way too? How motor experience changes the way we see dance
Tuesday 13 March 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Corinne Jola
As an audience member of a dance, theatre performance or a film screening, we often wonder what the person sitting next to us feels. Intuitively, we believe that as a result of watching the same thing, you would delve into the same emotions. However, personal experiences clearly affect the way we respond to certain narratives. In the motor domain, neuroscientists found a link between observation and execution in the so-called mirror-neuron network. Neurons in these brain areas are enhanced when we execute an action as well as when we just passively observe the same action. Hence, these areas are supposedly crucial in the process of understanding others. However, do these neurons really let you feel what the other person is doing?
Dance can provide valuable insight into the spectators’ state of mind. I will present my most recent work that investigated how personal factors (embodied practices, personality) affect how spectators’ respond to watching dance. I will also discuss the relevance of the type of stimuli used when studying action observation. In the studies presented, I used movement phrases of the dance company Emio Greco|PC which has a distinguished movement vocabulary that evolves through the lived intentionality articulated in and through the movements.
Combining temporal cues for the synchronisation of motor actions
Tuesday 20 March 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Mark Elliott
When making accurately timed actions, we rely on sensory events in the surrounding environment to synchronise our movements. Often these cues can be complex in their nature – an event can be perceived across multiple modalities (e.g. sound, vision, touch) or occur within a single modality but be defined by different sensory properties within that modality (e.g. sound at different pitch or visual colour and depth information). The central nervous system (CNS) must therefore determine which signals are relevant and moreover, which are most reliable in order to optimally estimate the true temporal onsets of the events and subsequently produce synchronised motor actions.
In this talk, I will discuss our research into how the CNS combines multiple sources of sensory information when we synchronise our movements to temporal events. I will present results from our recent experiments using a paradigm requiring participants to make movements in time to a metronome. We have developed novel methods to present multiple metronomic cues across different sensory modalities and thus investigated if and how participants integrated these cues in order to synchronise to the ‘beat’. We have subsequently developed models that show the integration is statistically optimal and can be described using a Bayesian framework. The talk will further discuss the effects of ageing on multisensory integration and briefly introduce our new research investigating synchronisation of movements within groups of individuals.
Will technology help or hinder ‘green’ behaviour?
Tuesday 27 March 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Niamh Murtagh
In discussions on mitigating climate change, technology is often suggested as a panacea. Humanity has developed technical innovations to improve its condition for the last 250 years, the argument runs, so we will innovate our way out of the current crisis. But some of the technical development in hand today assumes that we will engage with new technology and it will lead us to change our behaviour: Smart Meters are a case in point. On the REDUCE project here at the University of Surrey, our colleagues in Engineering are developing ‘very smart meters’: intelligent, sensing, learning energy monitors. In collaboration, the Environmental Psychology Research Group is investigating the socio-psychological factors which may influence acceptability and use of such technology, and its impact on pro-environmental behaviour. Niamh will present preliminary findings from a range of studies and outline plans for further studies on people and smart meter/smart grid technology.
The Honing Theory of Creativity
Monday 28 May 2012
14.00 to 15.00
Liane Gabora
Liane is using human experiments as well as modelling approaches, to develop a coherent theory of the process by which culture evolves. She aims to bring forward a theoretical framework for cultural evolution that is as sound as out theoretical framework for biological evolution, and apply it to the tasks of reconstructing our past, exploring possible futures, and furthering human wellbeing. A major component of this interdisciplinary enterprise involves explicating the mechanisms underlying creativity and how the complexity and creativity of the human mind came about.
Reducing Cisgenderisms in Relationship and Family Therapy:
Thursday 9 August 2012
13.30 to 15.30
Dr Markie Blumer & Mr Gávi Ansara
Report on Dr Markie Blumer and PhD Candidate Gávi Ansara’s workshop on “Reducing Cisgenderisms in Relationship and Family Therapy: Strategies and insights for improving practice”
Interacting brain systems for learning and memory
Tuesday 2 October 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Bertram Opitz
Much of human cognition is compositional in nature: higher order, complex representations are formed by (rule-governed) combination of more primitive representations. On the one hand, our memories are stored as associations between the different components of single experiences (episodic memory) and generalised across them by the process of consolidation (semantic memory). Such consolidation involves systems-level interactions, most importantly between the hippocampus and surrounding structures, which takes part in the initial encoding of memory, and the neocortex, which supports long-term storage of facts and statistical regularities about the world. This dichotomy parallels the interaction of the hippocampus and inferior frontal brain areas in artificial language learning. Crucially, these studies highlight interesting analogies between language acquisition, semantic memory and memory consolidation, and suggest possible common neural mechanisms across a wide range of cognitive domains. In the present talk I‘ll give some examples of my recent work investigating these interacting brain systems during knowledge acquisition.
Linguistic variety: why psychologists should care
Tuesday 9 October 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Greville G Corbett
Psychologists have invested a good deal of time into research on language. For understandable reasons, this research focuses on one corner of the phenomenon. But language is more varied and interesting than some psychologists (and many linguists) realize. I look at linguistic diversity, and its impending loss, first through the numbers, and then illustrate it by specific features (means of categorization). As a lead in, I give a brief account of Groucho Marx and word hood. This leads naturally to counting lions in Bayso, and the gender of grasshoppers in Bininj Gun Wok. From there we can consider the vast paradigms of Archi and the complexity of paradigms in languages of the Oto Manguean family. The aims are to give an idea of the projects going on in the Surrey Morphology Group, and to alert you to some of the challenges and pitfalls of language.
“Everyone needs to be treated the same”: Children’s Thinking about Rights
Tuesday 16 October 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Harriet Tenenbaum
Using cognitive domain theory, this talk will discuss two studies examining children’s reasoning about rights. In study one, 63 (9, 11-, and 13-year-olds) mixed-race South African children and their mothers responded to hypothetical vignettes in which children’s nurturance and self-determination rights conflicted with parental authority in the home. Participants were required to decide whether they should support the story characters’ right and provide a justification for their response. Findings indicated that both children and mothers were more likely to endorse children’s nurturance than self-determination rights. In terms of reasoning, both children’s and mothers’ responses revealed distinct patterns of thinking influenced by the type of right under consideration. The second study focused on British young people’s understanding of the rights of asylum-seeking young people. Two hundred sixty participants (11 to 24 years) were read vignettes involving asylum-seeking young people’s religious and non-religious self-determination and nurturance rights. Religious rights were more likely to be endorsed than non-religious rights. In general, younger participants were more likely than older participants to endorse the rights of asylum-seeking young people. Supporting a social cognitive domain approach, patterns of reasoning varied with the type of right and whether scenarios involved religious or non-religious issues.
The science of creativity: What we’ve learned from 143 years of creativity research, and where we need to go next
Tuesday 23 October 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Jonathan Plucker
The empirical study of creativity is more extensive, and with a richer history, than many people realize. In 2010, Newsweek even went so far as to publish a cover story suggesting we have arrived at a “science of creativity.” To what extent can this be supported? If accurate, what are the future directions and potential benefits of this burgeoning field? Prof. Plucker will review the status of research on creativity and innovation, discuss needed research, and provide recommendations for how the science of creativity can increase its impact in the real world.
Is hearing perceiving? Auditory perceptual restoration as a ‘sensory repair’ process
Tuesday 30 October 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Naomi Winstone
Maintaining stability of perception in everyday environments is a key task which the perceptual system must undertake. Rarely do we receive auditory signals in optimum conditions; transient noises ranging from background chatter, traffic noise and coughs, to doors slamming and babies crying all have the potential to momentarily mask signals of interest such as speech and music. The operation of ‘sensory repair’ mechanisms that work to fill-in missing or disrupted perceptual input are well-documented in adults, but more recent work has found evidence for the operation of these repair mechanisms in a wider range of listeners (children, non-human animals) and in a variety of sensory domains (visual perception, speech perception, music perception, tactile perception, sign language and written language). In the auditory domain, ‘perceptual restoration’ refers to the filling in of missing or disrupted auditory input given sufficient contextual information and appropriate acoustic conditions. The findings from a series of empirical studies will be presented, which demonstrate that sensory repair mechanisms develop with age, and that there are important acoustic constraints on the operation of auditory perceptual restoration that limit its operation to only those conditions where ‘filling in’ missing information is the ecologically-relevant thing to do. Most importantly, the findings demonstrate that perception is context-dependent; identification of auditory stimuli in noisy conditions relies on different information to that in optimal conditions. The implications of these findings, both theoretical and practical, will be discussed.
UNDERSTANDING TOLERANCE: THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONS AND VALUES ON EVALUATIONS OF ISLAMIC GROUPS
Tuesday 6 November 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Tereza Capelos
Political tolerance implies a willingness to permit the expression of ideas or interests that one opposes. In this era of widespread threat perceptions, physical or ideological, acceptance of the ‘other’ and support for civil liberties is eroding, making xenophobia, discrimination, and political tolerance central challenges for our society. In this presentation, I use political and social psychology theories to gain insights into the emotional, contextual, and political value-dependent antecedents of political tolerance. I examine how a mildly stressful political environment that generates anger or fear can interact with citizens’ values and influence tolerance judgments towards an Islamic group. I focus on manipulations of anger and fear because both are positively linked to perceptions of threat, and play a significant part in forming judgements about society and groups. These emotions however originate from and can result in different behaviours. The experimental study presented here was conducted in the Netherlands and measures changes in the level of reported tolerance for a fictional group named “Youth for Islam”. I manipulated the level of stress of participants (calm vs. stressful scenario) and their emotional appraisals of the event (eliciting fear vs. anger). The findings point to the interaction of the political context, the levels of citizens’ affective awareness and the nature of their civic values for the understanding changes in political tolerance.
Cognitive control in obsessive-compulsive disorder: an fMRI study before and after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation
Tuesday 13 November 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Stella de Wit
The increased emotional reactivity to disease-specific stimuli seen in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may be due a failure of cognitive control mediated by the dorsal prefrontal cortex. Additionally, endophenotype studies in unaffected relatives of OCD patients may uncover heritable traits related to the genetic susceptibility to OCD. In this talk data will be presented on the neural correlates of cognitive control assessed in a sample of 40 medication-free OCD patients, their unaffected siblings and matched healthy controls, that performed a response inhibition, a working memory and an emotion regulation task during functional MRI scanning. Furthermore, the effects of high-frequency (10Hz) and low-frequency (1Hz) repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) versus sham rTMS over left dorsal PFC on emotion regulation in OCD patients and controls, respectively, will be discussed.
The Role of Working Memory in Achievement Goal Pursuit
Tuesday 20 November 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Rachel Avery
Achievement goals can be oriented towards mastery-approach (development of self-referential competence) or performance-approach (demonstration of normative competence). These goal states have been found to differentially impact achievement success but the intentional cognitive processes coordinating how these goal states exert such effects is not understood. Findings from two key experiments will be presented which suggest when working memory is loaded, individuals pursuing a mastery-approach goal experience larger performance decrements than individuals pursuing a performance-approach goal or those in a no-goal control. It is suggested that a motivated focus on developing self-referential competence relies heavily on working memory, facilitated by the use of deliberative, ‘step-by-step’ strategies during goal pursuit. Conversely, a focus on demonstrating normative competence depends less on working memory, facilitated by the use of more heuristic ‘short-cut’ strategies during goal pursuit. These findings show, for the first time, that working memory plays an important, but selective, role in achievement goal pursuit. Contributions to the motivation-cognition interface and future research directions will be discussed.
Other People Exist for Me: Consequences of the Narcissistic Personality for Interpersonal Contexts
Tuesday 27 November 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Erica Hepper
It is well-documented that humans are motivated to feel good about the self: to self-enhance by seeking and maximising positive self-views, and to self-protect by avoiding and minimising negative self-views. We achieve these goals via a multitude of conscious or unconscious strategies. Some strategies capitalise upon other people, for example seeking positive feedback, secretly believing one is superior to most others, and claiming credit for success but blaming others for failure. There are individual differences in the strategies that people rely on to fulfil self-enhancement and self-protection motives; one highly relevant personality variable is subclinical narcissism. Narcissism is characterised by a surfeit of agency (i.e., motivation to self-enhance, succeed, and dominate) and lack of communion (i.e., motivation to affiliate, belong, and gain intimacy). Although narcissists tend to report high self-esteem, and therefore high subjective wellbeing, their interpersonal relationships often fail. In this talk, I will present two lines of research that explore the consequences of narcissism for interpersonal contexts. First, I examine the structure of self-enhancement and self-protection strategies and identify those that might impact upon others. I investigate the types of strategy that individuals higher (vs. lower) in narcissism report relying on, and whether this varies across cultures. Second, I examine narcissists’ lack of empathy for others and ask whether this interpersonal deficit reflects inability or motivation. Recent experimental and physiological data begin to shed light on this question and point to the motives that might underlie narcissists’ low empathy—and perhaps by extension their interpersonal failures.
How should we deliver psychological therapy for young people with OCD?
Tuesday 4 December 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Shirley Reynolds
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a debilitating disorder, which affects between 1 and 3% of young people; and has significant, long term, negative impacts on them and their families. Currently the NICE recommended treatment for OCD in young people is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with parental involvement. However no studies up until now have explicitly compared individual CBT for the child with CBT which includes parents. A recent meta- analysis of psychological interventions for children and young people with anxiety disorders, including OCD, concluded that parental or family involvement in treatment did not improve treatment outcomes. This seminar will focus on clinical and non-clinical research with young people and their families. This includes observational and experimental data as well as data from the ROCKY Trial (Reducing Obsessions and Compulsions in Kids and Young People). This trial compared the effectiveness of individual and parental enhanced CBT for OCD in young people age 12-18 years. In addition young people and their parents were interviewed after treatment to assess the acceptability of both treatment arms and to identify key change mechanisms. We also obtained ratings of the therapeutic alliance in both arms of treatment. The data have clear implications for service delivery and treatment as well as indicating possible research directions.
TAKING THE TREATMENT : HOW CAN HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY HELP?
Tuesday 18 December 2012
16.00 to 17.00
Professor John Weinman
The problem of poor adherence to treatment and advice is now recognised as a major problem in healthcare. In this presentation, there will be an overview of health psychology research which has examined the nature and causes of adherence failure, as well as the potential which this evidence offers for developing effective interventions to facilitate adherence. Using the distinction between unintentional and intentional non-adherence, a range of psychological determinants will be examined. The main focus of the talk will be on the role of illness and treatment beliefs as key determinants of intentional non-adherence, and Leventhal’s Self-Regulation model will provide the theoretical framework for this. In the final part of the talk, examples will be provided of successful intervention studies together with a discussion of key issues for future research.
The bandwagon is officially open: sexing up your grant proposal with a Smartphone App and a lot, lot more.
Tuesday 29 January 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Adam McNamara
A Smartphone goes everywhere with its owner, it is fiddled with on the toilet, and it moves up and down with the springs of the mattress during equally intimate moments. They come with a tonne of sensors and ports for the addition of extra sensors and devices. Their processors are powerful enough to deliver excellent temporal stimulus/response control and recording. It is not surprising they are said to be on the cusp of revolutionizing research into human behaviour.
We have designed a web based platform which allows anyone to design their own experiment. All experiments created on our platform can be ‘played’ by PsyApp. Essentially we remove the need for researchers to create a costly bespoke App for their research. PsyApp has basic logic and handles anything from basic questionnaires to complex cognitive designs. PsyApp can currently capture reaction times, x,y coordinates of screen touches, screen pressure, handset movement direction and intensity, GPS data and the participant can be asked to take a photo or make a sound recording of their environment.
The seminar will discuss how Smartphones can be implemented in human behavioural science (from neuroscience to sociology) and present projects which are currently underway.
Digitally manipulating memory: What can visual trickeries teach us about remembering?
Tuesday 5 February 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Rob Nash
In today’s media-rich world, we are more than used to seeing photographic images that have been tweaked and tampered with, and most people know—at least implicitly—that convincing digital trickeries are easy to produce. Whereas the entertainment value of Photoshopped images is limitless, seeing these images can also have rather more meaningful consequences. Numerous studies published over the past decade have shown that doctored images can change people’s beliefs about major public events, and even about their own personal experiences. In fact, more than this, doctored images can change people’s memories of past events, and can even implant memories of entire events that never occurred at all. In this seminar I will outline a series of studies in which we explored the capacity of fabricated images to alter people’s beliefs and memories. These studies comprise data examining possible boundary conditions of the effect, and also data that begin to tease apart the cognitive mechanisms responsible. With these data in mind, I will discuss the broader question of what the ‘doctored-evidence effect’ teaches us about the (re)construction of autobiographical and episodic memories, and the extent to which belief is necessary for such memories to persist. Finally, I will illustrate some behavioural consequences of falling prey to this trickery.
Using judgment to make forecasts, impose control and decide whether something has happened
Tuesday 12 February 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Nigel Harvey
In many situations, people have to react to streams of data that arrive over time. I shall discuss work on three sorts of task that they have to perform on these data: making forecasts from knowledge of the past; controlling the data stream to ensure it is brought within and stays within acceptable bounds; and making decisions about whether there has been a change in the way the data are produced. In each case, I’ll talk about how good their performance is, what variables influence it, and what we know about the cognitive processes that underlie it.
The Making of the Extraordinary
Tuesday 19 February 2013
7.30pm to 8.30pm
Dr Peter Lamont
Magicians, mesmerists, mediums and psychics performed extraordinary feats for centuries. In the process, they have provoked some extraordinary beliefs. But how does one make an extraordinary feat happen? How does one make it seem truly extraordinary? And what have people made of this? In this talk, I will provide a brief glimpse into how magicians have faked the impossible, how psychics have made it seem real, and how people continue to come to the conclusions that they do.
Psychological aspects of organ donation
Tuesday 26 February 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Ronan O'Carroll
Unhealthy lifestyles (e.g. smoking, alcohol intake, high calorie diet and inactivity) are increasingly leading to organ failure. Recent advances in organ transplantation and immunosuppressant medication mean that many more lives can now be saved. However, demand for organs far exceeds supply. For example, in the UK, approximately 90% of the general public approve of organ donation, but only one third have signed up to the UK organ donor register. Reluctance to register appears to be more determined by affective rather than cognitive attitudes. Affective attitudes include fear of doctors harvesting organs before the patient is really dead (medical mistrust), disgust and “jinx” (the idea that one may be tempting fate by signing up). These all clearly distinguish donors from non-donors. My team are engaged in a programme of research that attempts to understand and overcome some of these important barriers. For example, we are currently conducting a series of studies where we attempt to manipulate the emotion of anticipated regret, to test if this increases intention, and confirmed organ donor registration. In this presentation I will present the results of some of these studies.
Chronic Insomnia and Hyperarousal - State of the Art
Tuesday 26 February 2013
4:00pm to 5:00pm
D. Riemann, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Freiburg University Medical Center
Changing the Cultural Response to the NSS Scores
Wednesday 27 February 2013
16:00 to 17:30
The School of Psychology in the recent past was receiving poor scores on most elements of the NSS. The school examined the cultural factors that could provide an explanation for the poor metrics. The session will discuss the matrix of interventions required to elevate the School’s position in the Tables from interpersonal, inter-relational and pedagogical perspectives.
Aspects of Recovery in a High Secure Hospital
Tuesday 5 March 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Dr Emily Glorney
There are financial and humanitarian consequences to unmet need amongst service users of high secure hospital care. Broadmoor Hospital is one of three publically funded National Health Service high secure hospitals in England and Wales which admit people with serious mental illness and severe personality disorders, often in combination, who pose a serious risk of harm to themselves or others. The goals of the service are to reduce risk and to enable mental health recovery or discovery, within the least restrictive environment and at reasonable and fixed financial cost. Fundamental to streamlining care and reducing length of stay within high secure services is the promotion of quality of life through the meeting of service user need across a range of domains - such as occupation and activity - that are not restricted to formal medical or psychotherapeutic interventions. Quality of life amongst high secure service users is not only an important humanitarian factor but also has been associated with the facilitation of motivation for and engagement in interventions that reduce risk and/or enable mental health recovery/discovery. The implication of this is that promoting quality of life and meeting service user need might contribute towards long-term prevention of relapse into mental ill-health and offending behaviour. In this seminar, examples of the roles of religion/spirituality and music are presented in relation to recovery from mental disorder and offending behaviour. Furthermore, examples of peer mentoring and the use of intelligent computer vision systems are presented as means of promoting service user ownership and recovery.
Top-down control in visual attention
Tuesday 12 March 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Martin Eimer
How do we find and select objects in multi-stimulus visual scenes? Selective visual attention is assumed to be guided by “attentional templates” - representations of currently relevant features or objects which are held in working memory. In this talk, I will first discuss the brain mechanisms that are involved in the top-down control of attentional object selection. In the second part, I will present behavioural and ERP results from recent studies that investigated the properties and the time course of template-guided visual attention.
Children and social exclusion: The role of morality and group identity
Tuesday 19 March 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Adam Rutland
Children show an awareness of morality from a young age. Yet social exclusion within peer groups is also an everyday experience in childhood. In this talk I am interested in social exclusion based upon biased attitudes or group identities (e.g. ethnic or gender based social exclusion). Evidence suggests that his form of social exclusion develops early in childhood and continues into adolescence with many negative psychological and behavioural consequences. I will present research suggesting that children's understanding of social exclusion, their attitudes and behaviours towards those from other social groups develops through a dynamic interplay between morality and group identity. On a positive note, I will also describe research indicating that intergroup factors and group identity can be mobilized to promote attitudes and friendships that facilitate social inclusion.
The dark-side of empathy: The good, the bad and the ugly
Tuesday 30 April 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Eamonn Fergusson
Evolutionary models of traits suggest they survive as they carry both costs and benefit. Within this framework I will explore the construct of empathy and highlight how empathy is linked to pro-social behaviour (helping, social bonding: Benefit), anti-social behaviour (e.g., criminal activity, psychopathy: Cost) and pain perception. I will present a paradigm combining perspective taking manipulations (as well as assessing empathy as a trait and state construct), economic games (e.g., dictator games) and assessments of pain thresholds (cold pressor test) to examine in a single paradigm if empathy can be simultaneously be good for others (i.e., increasing both self-reported helping and altruism as measures in a dictator game) and bad for the self (i.e., reduce pain threshold and increase perceptions of pain). I will then present a model of pro- and anti-social behaviour based on the interaction of empathy and trait alexithymia (i.e., inability to understand emotions) and present evidence in support of this model using dictator games. I will draw conclusions about the evolutionary nature of empathy and traits in general and applied implications for medicine and health care professionals in general.
Everything you may or may not want to know about the role of midfrontal theta-band oscillations in human cognitive control
Tuesday 7 May 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Michael X Cohen
We and others have been studying the role of midfrontal theta-band (~6 Hz) activity in cognitive control. This field is about 10 years old, although it started gaining traction in 2009. I'll briefly review this nascent literature, outline what I think are the main limitations and challenges, and describe what -- in my opinion -- are the important future developments
Social Anxiety
Friday 10 May 2013
10am to 5pm
Dr Gillian Butler
Dr Gillian Butler, Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre
The Psychology of Dictatorship
Tuesday 21 May 2013
16.00 to 17.00
Professor Fathali Moghaddam
For most of history, humans have lived and developed social and psychological skills in the context of dictatorship rather than democracy. Even in so-called 'advanced democracies', there are persistent elements that could pull societies back to dictatorship; we should not assume that change will be only toward more open societies. From the perspective of psychological science, there are potential dictators in every human group. A 'springboard model' is presented to explain the conditions that enable potential dictators to spring to power. This model highlights differences in change at macro (societal) and micro (social and psychological) levels, and the role of these differences in a repeated pattern: the failure of revolutions, from Russia in 1917 to Iran in 1979 to the Arab Spring today, to end dictatorship.
