News in the School of Behavioural Science

2007

Book Launch - Yearning to Breathe Free: Seeking Asylum in Australia

On Monday 12 November 2007 the edited book " Yearning to Breathe Free: Seeking Asylum in Australia " was officially launched to an audience of over 100 people at the University of Melbourne . Invited speakers Professor Henry Jackson (Head, School of Behavioural Science ) and comedian Corinne Grant espoused the worth and need for a book which explores Australian government policies to asylum seekers up to mid 2007. Mr Lindsay Tanner MP , current Minister for Finance, officially launched the book.

Yearning to Breathe Free presents an overview of the historical, social and political contexts that have shaped Australia 's recent treatment of asylum seekers . It offers a clear-eyed view of the many dimensions of the asylum seekers' predicament, including its psychological and humanitarian consequences, and lays out an agenda for a change in policy. It demonstrates the richness of thinking and analysis that can result from an exchange between academics, politicians, the media and activists, and asylum seekers themselves.

The book is edited by Dr Dean Lusher and Associate Professor Nick Haslam - both members of the School of Behavioural Science , and Coordinator and Director, respectively, of the Researchers for Asylum Seekers (RAS) group here at the University of Melbourne .

For those wishing to purchase a copy of the book, they are available from The Federation Press website , or from a bookstore near you.

Dr Dean Lusher, Lindsay Tanner MP, A Prof Nick Haslam

Read and listen in to the latest research findings and expert commentary by the following staff and students:

• Professor Margot Prior's interview on Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Updated Look
• Associate Professor Jenny Boldero's research on mums as significant others for youths
• Associate Professor Nick Haslam and PhD student Stephen Loughnan's research on stereotyping and dehumanisation
• Findings on footy culture by Dr Dean Lusher and Associate Professor Garry Robins
• PhD student Warwick Hosking’s research may prove a key to longer lasting relationships.
• Associate Professor Mike Nicholls' research which may have important implications for road, industrial and maritime safety.
• Dr Lisa Phillips who was interviewed re fears and phobias on a German radio station.
  

Outstanding Achievements

Staff (2007)

• Congratulations to two of our postdoctoral fellows, Dr Dean Lusher and Dr Brock Bastian, who have both won the highly-competitive Melbourne Early Career Awards each.

• Associate Professor Stephen Bowden has successfully obtained the Knowledge Transfer Visiting Scholar Grant to invite Professor David Faust, University of  Rhode Island, USA to visit and deliver public lectures in 2008.

• Associate Professor Jeanette Lawrence together with Senior Lecturer Agnes Dodds (Medical Education Unit) and Jane Hunt (Mission Australia Victorian Community Services Operations Manager) won the Knowledge Transfer Project Grant on the project “Knowledge Generation in a Research/Practice Partnership”

• With effect from October 2007, Associate Professor Bob Reeve has been appointed a "Consulting Editor" for Child Development which is the leading journal in developmental science.

• With effect from July 2007, Associate Professor Mike Nicholls has been appointed Editor of the international Journal “Laterality” which is a journal devoted to research investigating asymmetries of body, brain & cognition. Laterality is published by Psychology Press.”

• As of 1 March, Associate Professor Garry Robins is the editor of the Journal of Social Structure (JOSS), an electronic journal publishing empirical, theoretical and methodological articles relating to social networks and social structure. JOSS is published by Carnegie Mellon University under the auspices of the International Network for Social Network Analysis.

• Congratulations to Dr Diane Stapleton Bretherton, Honorary (Principal Fellow) with the School, for being appointed a Member of the Order of Australia on Australia Day, 26 January 2007! Dr Bretherton was honoured for her services to psychology as an academic, particularly through the advancement of scholarship in the areas of peace, mediation and conflict resolution, and to the community as an advocate for the prevention of violence.
  
  

• Prof Henry Jackson has been invited by the Australian Psychological Society (APS) in January 2007 to be a member of their Science, Academia and Research Advisory Group (SARAG) – their key strategy group as regards scientific and academic matters.

• Congratulations to Associate Professor Nick Haslam on the publication of his book - " Introduction to personality and intelligence". He hopes to write an engaging and accessible introduction to the psychology of individual differences, pitched to 1st and 2nd year undergraduates. The book provides an introductory overview of research and theory in the psychology of personality and intelligence. It covers the study of personality traits; alternative models of personality description; biological, cognitive and psychoanalytic theories of personality; personality change and development; personality assessment; links between personality and mental disorder; psychobiography and the study of life narratives; and the structure and biological basis of cognitive abilities.

Students and Alumni

• Congratulations to PhD Graduate Dr Sarah Whittle who has been awarded an ARC Fellowship position with the Department of Psychiatry.

• PhD candidate, Galina Daraganova has won a best paper award at Complex07, the 8th Asia Pacific Complex Systems Conference, for her paper entitled "Social Influence Models".

• Combined Master of Psychology/PhD student Rachel Cameron has been awarded the Dowd Foundation Research Scholarship valued at $15 000 a year for three years commencing March 2007.

• Dr Kim Peters, PhD graduate from the School has taken up a position as a postdoctoral research fellow with the University of Exeter in the UK.

• Julian Dooley (PhD candidate) won the Luria Award for the most outstanding presentation based on a PhD project at the 30th Annual Meeting of the Australian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment held in Brisbane in 2007.

• Alumnus, Dr Susan Kelly, has been appointed President of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles . Dr Kelly is the first woman to head the institution. Dr Kelly was a Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University and headed Relationships Australia. She was also President of the Australian Psychological Society. She left Australia in 1998 to become Dean and Associate Provost at the University of Wisconsin , Milwaukee . The School congratulates Dr Kelly on this outstanding appointment.

• Dr Sue David, who completed her PhD in the Department under the supervision of Professor Henry Jackson, is taking up an NHMRC Overseas Postdoctoral Training Fellowship at Yale University. Sue will undertake further work on emotional intelligence under the supervision of the Dean of Yale, Professor Peter Salovey, until 2007. The fellowship will continue at the University of Melbourne until 2009.

• Congratulations to Dr Anina Rich who has been awarded the 2005 Excellent PhD Thesis in Psychology Award by the Australian Psychological Society.  The purpose of this award is to encourage and reward outstanding research in psychology by students who have completed a PhD from an Australian University within the last two years.  Anina was awarded her PhD titled An investigation of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying lexical-colour synaesthesia in March 2005.

• Congratulations to Dr Helen Fawkner for her outstanding achievement in receiving an international research award for her PhD. A recent graduate of the department, Doctor Fawkner has been awarded the second annual Seymour Fisher Outstanding Body Image Doctoral Dissertation Award. Her PhD has been acknowledged for expanding our understanding of male body image.
  

Grants & Awards (awarded in 2007)

Congratulations to all the following staff for their success in obtaining research grants in 2007:

• Associate Professor Nick Allen, Dr Paul Dudgeon and colleagues have won a 5-year Discovery Grant for "Brain development during adolescence and the emergence of depression: A longitudinal MRI study" totalling $438, 000. Project Summary: Traditionally mental health services have focused on established disorders. Whilst significant gains in outcomes have been obtained in other areas of health by focusing on early intervention and prevention, in the mental health field this approach has been limited by the inability to predict who is likely to go on to develop serious mental disorder. This study will provide critical information for understanding the risk processes that are operating during the critical phase of early adolescence, and will therefore make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of who, and what, to target in early intervention and prevention strategies.

• Associate Professor John Gleeson (Principal Investigator) together with 3 colleagues Dr David Collins, Pamela Nathan and Gail Bradley from the Inner West Area Mental Health Service were awarded the following grants by:
  - William Buckland Foundation. Project title: "A Prevention Program for Violent Offenders with a Mental Illness Living in the Community". $136, 131 (over 3 years).
  - Australian Rotary Health Research Fund - Evaluation of Mental Health Service Provision.  Project title:" A Cognitive Behavioural Intervention Program for Offenders with a Psychiatric Disability in a Community Mental Health Service".  $45,350 (2007).
  

• Professor Yoshi Kashima together with Dr Sarah Durkin and Professor Melanie Wakefield at The Cancer Council Victoria has won the ARC Linkage grant for their project on “Influence of Narrative Content and Context of Anti-smoking Public Health Messages”, totalling $132, 351. Project Summary: Mass media has been used for public health campaigns with varying degrees of success. In this project we aim to contribute to the prevention of life-style diseases – especially cancer, cardiovascular disease and other illnesses attributable to smoking. The project investigates the extent to which narrative-based anti-smoking messages and the context in which they are viewed, might improve the likelihood of favourable changes in smoking-related attitudes and behaviours. Narrative messages may be an effective means of communicating risks, and also encouraging people to disseminate the message to others, so that the community also acts as an agent of social influence

• Professor Mara Olekalns, a professorial fellow with the School, won a 3-year Discovery Grant with Carol Kulik for "Competent but less likeable: Social stereotypes and strategic choices in negotiation." with a total amount of $114 000. Project Summary: Women may be disadvantaged by the greater opportunities for negotiating employment conditions that Work Choices provides. Relative to their male peers, women receive lower starting salaries and smaller increases. This is costly for women, who leave the workforce with less financial security. The gender gap is also costly for organisations, who face increased dissatisfaction and turnover. Woman can improve their outcomes through negotiation, but the assertive tactics that improve their economic outcomes are likely to generate social reprisals in the workplace. This project will benefit employers and employees alike, by identifying strategies that assist women to improve their economic outcomes while buffering them from social reprisals.
  

• Dr Fiona Reynolds received a grant from AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) to continue research begun in 2002 under a Leverhulme Grant held by Associate Professor Robert Reeve and Professor Brian Butterworth. The research investigates developing mathematical reasoning in children in a remote indigenous community whose language has few words for number and quantity. Fiona , who completed her PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor Bob Reeve and Professor Pip Pattison has been associated with the project since 2003.

• Associate Professor Garry Robins and Professor Pip Pattison have embarked on a project entitled “Modeling cross-level interactions in complex networked social systems” to build on and further develop recent innovations in statistical models in social networks, in collaboration with overseas investigators.  The goal is to enhance our understanding of local network-based processes and their consequences for social systems.  These new methods will be applied to the complex multi-level social research problems being investigated by the overseas investigators. Exchanges under the program at the postdoctoral and PhD level will help train the next generation of researchers in the field of complex social modelling.   The four Overseas Investigators are: Professor Tom Snijders , University of Oxford and University of Groningen, Professor John Padgett , University of Chicago, Santa Fe Institute and IMT, Professor Emmanuel Lazega , University of Paris, Professor Alessandro Lomi , University of Bologna. The advances of this collaboration will add to Australian capacity in the modelling of complex social systems. Potential applications from ongoing national collaborations include: Hepatitis C spread through sexual and needle sharing networks; labour market dynamics; mental health and social support in rural communities; defence applications; and environmental governance. The funding amount for these projects is $37,000.
  
• Professor Philip Smith and Professor R Ratcliffe have won an ARC Project Grant for “An Integrated Theory of Attention and Decision-Making”, totalling $222,000. Project Summary: Biologically, the fundamental computational task carried out by the human brain is the translation of perception into action. To perform this translation, attentional processes select relevant stimuli from the environment and decision processes then identify the selected stimuli. This project develops an integrated theory of attention and decision making in simple visual tasks, which will help us understand how these tasks are carried out in the brain. Understanding how these tasks are performed biologically will aid in the design of autonomous information-gathering and decision-making agents whose actions simulate human behaviour.
  
• Professor John Trinder, together with Christopher Worsnop and David White obtained the NHMRC grant of $316,875 (2007 - 2009) for their project on " Regulatory control of the upper airway muscle genioglossus during sleep".
  

• Dr Sarah Wilson together with Prof Ingrid Scheffer I (Medicine – Austin Health and Northern Health), and PhD student, Dr Natasha Brown (School of Medicine) have been awarded the Pfizer Neuroscience Grant, 2007 ($45,250) for their project on "Family and community study of the genetics of Autism Spectrum Disorder".

• Dr Peter Anderson, together with the respective colleagues have won the following three NHMRC grants:
  - A/Pr Terrie Inder, Prof Lex Doyle, Dr Rodney Hunt, Prof Jeffery Neil and Dr Jeanie Cheong for their project on "Determining the Mechanisims leading to long-term impairment in very preterm children: the vibes longitudinal study" (2008 – 2010) totalling $1,018,850 (Administered by Murdoch Childrens Research Institute). Project Summary: Approximately 50% of children born very preterm will develop significant problems.  The objective of this project is to determine the mechanisms leading to these problems.  We will do this by assessing at school-age a unique and valuable cohort of vry preterm infants (VIBeS cohort) who had state-of-the-art brain scans shortly after birth and neurobehaviour assessments across early childhood.  This school-age follow-up will involve repeat brain scans and detailed neuropsychological assessments.  This unique study will enhance our understanding of brain and neurobehavioural development in this vulnerable population, and this knowledge will directly affect clinical care.
  - Prof Lex Doyle, Dr Stephen Wood, Prof Colin Robertson, Dr Sarah Hope and Dr Douglas Hacking on "Determinants of Health in Adolescence of Extremely Low Birth Weight or Extreme Prematurity" ( 2008 – 2010) Project Summary: We will uniquely determine the health outcomes at age 16 years of 298 very tiny (birth weight <1000 g) or preterm (<28 weeks' gestational age) children born in Victoria in 1991-92, compared with 262 normal birthweight children.  We will track the pathways to the various health outcomes from a combination of social, biological, genetic and environmental influences, some of which have been obtained from detailed assessments of the children earlier in life, at birth, 2, 5, and 8 years of age.
  - M.Makrides, R.Gibson, L.Doyle, P.Ryan, and C.Collins on the project "Long-term follow-up of children born preterm who received high dose DHA: The DINO trial follow-up". (2008 – 2012) Project Summary: Children born prematurely are more likely to need help at school and to repeat a grade. One of the factors that may be responsible for the poor development of children who were premature may be the lack of an omega-3 fatty acid, called DHA. We have done a study in which feeds of premature infants were supplemented with DHA at a level equivalent to what a baby would recieve in the womb. We now want to see if these children have improved development at  school age.

• Dr J Anderson and colleagues Paul Fitzgerald and Jayashri Kulkarni from The Alfred have won a grant from the Victorian Neurotrauma Initiative to look at " The treatment of depression following traumatic brain injury with bilateral sequential repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation". Project Summary: Depression is very common in people who have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Few treatments have been found to be effective in treating depression in this population. We intend to investigate the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which has been found to be effective in treating depression in people who have not sustained a brain injury.  Problems with aspects of thinking are commonly present post brain injury. TMS has been shown to have a positive effect on cognition and so we also intend to investigate whether TMS has a positive cognitive effect in individuals with a TBI.

• Associate Professor Stephen Bowden and colleagues at the University of Adelaide have won a $839,250 NHMRC Grant with the project title: "Diagnostic and prognostic evaluation of diffusion tensor imaging and cognitive function after traumatic brain injury". Project Summary: This study will evaluate the diagnostic and prognostic benefits of new methods for assessing the structural (DTI) and functional (cognitive) consequences of TBI when compared to conventional clinical practice (MRI, standard cognitive tests).
  
• Dr Christina Bryant with colleagues Dr Donita Baird (Senior Psychologist HARP, Southern Health) and Harjit Bagga (Psychologist, HARP, Southern Health) have successfully obtained a 1-year Beyondblue grant of $39,480 on their project, "An investigation into the effectiveness of CBT Group on anxiety and depression in a disease specific versus a generic chronic disease management model".
  
• Dr Paul Dudgeon together with colleagues, Peter MacCallum (Cancer Centre), Drs. Penny Schofield & Mariko Carey and Professor Sanchia Aranda, School of Nursing have been awarded an NHMRC grant of $503,050 for the project, "A trial of a multidisciplinary, group based intervention to meet the needs of men with prostate cancer". Project Summary: This project will investigate the effectiveness of an innovative approach to meeting the physical and psychosocial needs of men with early stage prostate cancer using a randomised control trial design. The new treatment involves a combination of individual and group- based consultations which encourage peer-to-peer support, promote self-care, and enhance appropriate referrals and communication among multidisciplinary treatment teams. It will provide a new model of care for patients with chronic disease that can be translated into clinical practice."
  
• Dr Eoin Killackey has successfully won an Australian Rotary Health Research Fund grant of $51, 975 for 2008 for his project entitled " Vocational Recovery in Young People with First Episode Psychosis: A Randomised Controlled Intervention Trial Examining Vocational, Health, Economic & Social Outcomes".

Back to the news and achievements in 2008!