UPCOMING SCHOOL WIDE
RESEARCH SEMINAR
ONE WEEK TO GO!
WEDNESDAY
7th AUGUST 2019
GUEST SPEAKER: Professor
Thomas F. Denson
AFFILIATION: School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
TITLE: Four psychological manipulations that (sort of) reduce
anger and aggression
Location: Room-L326 in Auchmuty
Library and via Zoom link to Ourimbah HO-173
Zoom
link:https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/ j/257709588
Date: Wednesday 7th August 2019
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
No rsvp required
Light
refreshments will be provided
Thomas F. Denson is
a Professor in the School of Psychology at UNSW. He is an experimental social- personality psychologist. His primary interests are anger- driven aggression, the social, cognitive and affective neuroscience of anger and aggression, and psychoneuroendocrinology. Tom received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Southern
California, after which he received a lectureship
at the School of Psychology. He has won several awards for
his research including the Association for
Psychological Science’s ‘Rising Star’
Award, the NSW Young Tall Poppy
Science Award, and the Society for
Australasian Social Psychologists’ Early
Career Researcher Award. He is a Fellow
of the Association for Psychological
Science and a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He has received over $3 million in funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical
Research Council (NHMRC). He was an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and an ARC Future Fellow. He is also an associate editor at
Aggressive Behavior and has published over 95 articles and book chapters. In his spare
time, he enjoys cooking, playing
guitar, and walking his fluffy white dog.
Anger-driven aggression is difficult
to prevent. This talk will review
recent experimental basic science research on four interventions designed to reduce
anger and reactive aggression:
cognitive reappraisal, self-control training, cognitive control training, and
mindfulness meditation. Cognitive
reappraisal involves thinking about a provocation
in a less personal, more objective
manner. Self-control training involves practicing small acts of self-control over an extended period, usually for two weeks or more.
Cognitive control training involves repeat practice of response inhibition tasks tailored to hostile situations. Mindfulness involves
acceptance of angry feelings and
not reacting to these feelings.
Although my initial
review concluded that results were promising for all four strategies (e.g., Denson, 2015), subsequent
work from my own laboratory found
that cognitive reappraisal and mindfulness
are likely to be the most effective in reducing anger and aggression.
The data for self-control training are mixed and the evidence is weak to
non-existent for cognitive control
training. Interestingly, the two strategies
which rely on higher-order, abstract
cognition (cognitive reappraisal and mindfulness)
were most effective. These findings suggest that using these strategies in
anger-prone and violent populations may prove challenging as they often lack the requisite abilities to engage in these strategies
