Colloquium Program, Semester Two 2009
The University of Melbourne, Department of Psychology
Unless otherwise stated all colloquia are held at Tuesdays from 1 – 2pm. in ROOM 516 Redmond Barry Building. Anyone interested is welcome to attend.
Date |
Speaker |
Title |
| 18 Aug 09 |
Prof Elizabeth Waters, Jack Brockhoff Chair of Child Public Health, The McCaughey Centre, Melbourne School of Population Health, The University of Melbourne |
Applied intervention research to promote health and wellbeing of children and communities |
| 1 Sep 09 |
Dr Peter Kuppens, University of Leuven and University of Melbourne
Our emotional lives are characterized by ups and downs, changes and fluctuations following the ebb and flow of daily life. This dynamic nature lies at the very heart of emotions: emotional changes inform us about important events in the environment that present a threat or opportunity to our well-being and allow us to respond to these changes with appropriate actions. In other words, our emotional life only has meaning because it changes. Studying the patterns and regularities of these changes gives researchers insight into the temporal dynamics of emotions and how people regulate their emotions. I will present findings from a research program that aims to uncover the major sources of individual differences in the dynamics of emotional experience, and establish how these differences are related to personality and psychological adjustment. Special attention will be given to the concept of emotional inertia as a potentially fundamental feature of the emotional dynamics characterizing psychological maladjustment in depression and low self-esteem. |
Feelings change: Exploring the dynamics of emotions |
8 Sep 09
|
Dr Malcolm Macmillan, Professorial Fellow, Dept of Psychology, University of Melbourne
In late 2008 Jack and Beverly Wilgus, a Baltimore husband and wife team of photographers and photographic collectors, identified the subject of a daguerreotype they had owned for some 30 years as Phineas Gage. They have since made copies of the image available, published a paper on it in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, and set up a website dedicated to it [http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage]. The image has also been the subject of stories in major US newspapers (Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and New York Times), a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview, and a British Psychological Society research-digest blog spot.
The image will be exhibited in the Colloquium and a description given of how the Wilguses identified the image. I will give an account of M. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 19th Century process particularly as it bears on the possibility of the image being a fake or a hoax. In this connection I shall exhibit a photograph recently sent to me of a similar daguerreotype in the possession of the Gage family.
I will conclude with a brief outline of the evidence that suggests that Phineas Gage made some kind of ‘social recovery’ and did not exhibit the syndrome of frontal disinhibition (sometimes quite misleadingly called the Phineas Gage Syndrome or the Phones Gage Matrix) for more than about 3 years. |
The recently discovered daguerreotype of Phineas Gage |
| 6 Oct 09 |
Dr Kerstin Preuschoff, Senior Research Associate, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich in Switzerland. |
TBA |
| 20 Oct 09 |
A/Prof David Andrewes, Dept of Psychology, University of Melbourne |
Did Phineas Gage suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? |