| Off to the APS Conference in Sydney | | Date Created: Sep 30, 2004, 09:51 AM |
 The next series of blog entries are likely to cover the Australian Psychological Society's Annual Conference, being held this year in Sydney, at the Darling Harbour Convention centre.
The National Rugby League Grand Final is on the same weekend so accommodation was not easy to find, but we located the suites of the Somerset in Darling Harbour, with high-speed connection. The Convention centre has an internet cafe especially set up for the conference, but even though I packed the power chargers for my iPod and Powerbook, I forgot to pack my Airport Express. Just as well I have an ethernet cable.
I have no idea of the papers being presented, but I intend to visit a wide variety not all in my specific areas of practice. I'm more interested in some respects in presentation skills and styles, especially when it comes to technology, to see how much progress has been made in the past couple of years since my last conference.
The election for office-bearers as well as various motions up for discussion on Saturday are also of special interest, and I hold several proxies. Since voting often represents less than 10% of the total membership, every proxy counts.
Electioneering is in the air, not just for the APS, but also for Australia, with federal elections next weekend. In the last few years, a number of psychologists have become members of parliament, both federal and state, in one case becoming a rather short-lived federal Minister for Health.
Each time a psychologist is elected, the hopes of the Society soar, in the belief that the "cause" will be advanced. I'm sorry to say that in all these years I've never seen it happen, and in the past few years, two psychologists have been "under a cloud" and hardly shining examples of what psychologists can do for the community when all is said and done.
I'm afraid that the desire of some of us twenty years ago, to have a paid lobbyist to advance the cause of psychologists, still seems like a good idea. We have some high quality paid staff learning their way around Canberra where parliament resides, but the backroom dealings and networking is where the action resides.
Interestingly, the first event I walked into by accident - imagine throwing a dart at a conference timetable - or playing the dice man, and simply following where randomness take me.
As it turned out, I walked into a Division of Independent Practice meeting, and was promptly asked to sign up. Ironically, DIPP had its origins here in Sydney at the 1988 International Convention - the very first convention held at the Darling Habour centre - and, ahem, it was little ol' me who suggested the term "Independent Practice", rather then the more-often used term here in Australia, of private practice.
At the time I was doing a radio show, and figured my work was very public not private, and that it was not a good image for psychologists who worked for themselves. So I offered up the term Independent practitioner and everntually, with the work of lots of others, a new Division of Independent Practice was born.
A number of key APS staff were present, including Drs. Lyn Littlefield and David Stokes, who spoke of the gains made with regards to several federal government incentives, especially as they relate to Medical Practitioners.
It has been a hard slog for them getting themselves better known amongst the power brokers within the Health bureaucracies, and it appears the work is starting to show dividends.
Independent practitioners will still have to do the work of running their own business, and networking with local medicos, but certainly some advanced work has been done on their behalf by the APS. There is a long way to go, and one of the first things I learnt about the APS still holds true - you get out of the APS as much as you're willing to put in.
Yes, members pay their fees and expect returns on investments. But they can maximise those investments by putting more in - joing groups, giving talks, attending workshops, taking on honorary positions and so on. After doing this for 20 years, I can assure new APS members it's worth the effort.
First paper session:
My first session was about on-line behaviour. Three papers were presented in a symposium looking at various issues regarding the internet. Years ago, we wouldn't have seen such papers presented, but clearly the study of the internet has come of age.
Not surprisingly, the papers utilised Powerpoint slides to illustrate numbers and graphs, and most did well at using the slides to illustrate their presentation, rather than be their presentation.
The first paper by Andrea Chester looked at self-perception on-line, looking at relationship between age and self-perceived beauty. "Being on line can help people feel better about themselves" was one of the conclusions and this result occurred very quickly.
Very little aggression was experienced on line, and the paper was fairly positive about people being on the net.
The paper look at self-perceptions and its online effects on learning on line, therapy online, and social contexts.
One audience member asked about conducting questionnaires on line and whether these may not be as accurate as "offline", with the response being research suggests little difference.
Second paper by Carolyn Glass looked at the practice of counselling online.
She covered fears and aspirations of the adoption of the internet for counselling, especially with regard to ethical issues.
She went on to describe original research about "online counselling", citing firstly some of the benefits, including cost reduction, problems of isolation by distance or disability, anonymity, convenience, and easy enabling of record keeping, especially if its using the written word, as in instant messenging.
Carolyn's paper spoke of her research to replicate some work done in 2000 by Marlene Maheu and Barry Gordon, who surveyed by questionnaire online counsellors. She googled and used various discussion lists to gather names, and a final sample of 67 meet her needs for sampling.
Compared to Marlene and Barry's study, now there was a 50/50 split for gender. Before it was 2/3 male. Additionally there was a much greater international spread in this sample, and email was the most common form of online counselling.
Few used videoconferencing. Most online clients were female between 25-44, with about 50% receiving services for one month, and certainly less that 5 months.
In terms of presenting issues, relationships was a major source of concern.
Most were employed in face to face practices, with half reporting mixed face to face and online counselling with clients.
Interestingly, most practised with clients outside their State of registration or licensure, and few used encryption techniques.
57% believed online counselling to be as effective as face to face work.
Quite a few commonalities were found in this study compared to Maheu and Gordon, but there were some contrasts.
These included the gender of counsellors (now more females), how counsellors titled their work, and the presenting problems of clients.
In the third paper presented by Jaime Tan, her group from Melbourne University looked at online Negotiation. After describing conventional ideas of conflict resolution, she looked at synchronous computer conferencing (SCC) as well as email.
She first noted some positive aspects not disimilar to those aluded to in the previous paper about counselling, with the addition of possible reduction in status and power differences.
On the negative side, she noted the absense of "dynamic personal information" such as gender, and less constraints from traditional norms.
Jaime also cited some recent previous findings some of which showed greater competition between online correspondents.
She spoke of her original research using Psychology 101 students, using face to face, SCC, and email comparisons.
Setting up a negotiation simulation using a local Student Union dilemma regarding resource allocation (a donation of $250,000 was up for grabs), a number of possibilities were cited.
The SCC group seemed to find a more win-win outcome, and to explain this Jaime looked at various models of negotiating style, such as a Dual Concerns model - the dual being concern for self and others.
In this case, behaviours can be goal-directed for the self, or the building of relationships.
One of her findings was that the medium of communication does make a difference, with the ability to "focus on what is said, not how it is said."
This was a low conflict situation amongst strangers, so its limits must be considered, according to Jaime.
Powerpoint Index: This is my way of evaluating how the presenters employed their technologies. All three papers used Powerpoint, using white backgrounds and black writing. All graphs were easy to view and understand, and almost all slides kept writing to a minimum, without too much cutting and pasting. None used fancy special effects keeping transitions very simple and straightforward.
Keynote session - 5pm Prof. Forgas "Thinking and Feeling -The role of affect in social cognition and behaviour"
Straight after the internet session. APS president Paul Martin made an award to Prof Forgas for outstanding research.
He then commenced his address, using Powerpoint and some fancy effects - Oh dear! But he did lay out what the next hour would like at - quite a sweeping review of affective influences on interpersonal behaviour.
He cited neuropsychological evidence for the impact of affect on an effective social life, and mentioned how recent is the study of affect having been ignored by behaviourists and cognitivists.
Mood vs emotion - mood states have been his area of study, and a much more unconscious element. So his research looks at everyday mood fluctuations most people experience on day to day basis.
Forgas spoke of two stage experiments: mood induction then evaluation on behavioural and cognitive measures.
On a slide complicated with a rather silly and distracting corner animation, Forgas looked at informational or content effects due to memory and inferences; as well as processing effects, such as negative or positive affect.
Next slide (ugh! too much information) discussed his own Affect Infusion Model (AIM) to show how these two strategies worked. He discussed four strategies, but put simply social judgments or behaviour require substantive processing to then expect affect infusion.
Forgas' next slide (he has a fascination with the SImpsons judging by his animations) has him reading his own slides, perhaps because he was in a rush but wanted to get the information out there.
He then told a story about an older unattractive male and a younger attractive female spotted at a conference dinner suggesting an experiment relating to couples' attractiveness and evaluation of them depending on evaluators' moods.
Forgas then spoke of a series of experiments where subjects moods were manipulated before being exposed to a variety of events, and asking about recall. Other times, their mood was manipulated at the time or recall, well after the event. He tried to tie this series into day to day behaviours to give them some "real-world" basis, such as negotiation and request-making.
The form of request - hard and easy - seemed also determined by mood, and he cited research conducted at his library. Again he used Simpson cartoons which perhaps was also his way to induce mood in the viewer, perhaps to make them happy. Trouble ism can he predict how the viewer will respond to these cartoons? I see it as bad Powerpoint, but on reflection it's a clever parallel for what he did in his experiments? Should I ask a question about this, I wonder?
His last set of slides referred to mood studies based on his theories conducted in organisations.
That was it for day 1 for me. Off to dinner with some friendly psychologists near Cockle Bay, then an early night to catch up with mail, and hopefully an mp3 of Your Mac Life to listen to as well! |
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