Program

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European Winterschool 2013

Thursday, January, 31 2013

 
15.00-16.00h arriving at Monastery Seeon

16.00-16.30h welcome address
16.30-18.00h Keynote

 
19.00-21.00h workshop 1: Attention                                                                General expert: Jan Theeuwes (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Forensic expert: Joe Newman (University of Wisconsin, USA)

Friday, February, 1st 2013

 
8.30-10.30h workshop 2: Learning                                                                    General expert: Bram Vervliet (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Forensic expert: Adrian Raine (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

 
11.00-13.00h workshop 3: Inhibition                                                                General expert: Gordon Logan (Vanderbilt University, USA)
Forensic expert: Veena Kumari (King’s College London, UK)

                                                                        
16.00-18.00h workshop 4: Motivation                                                               Forensic expert: Carl Hanson (Public Safety Canada, Canada)

 
19.00-21.00h poster session

Saturday, February, 2 2013

 
8.30-10.30h workshop 5: Emotion                                                                    General expert: Harald Schupp (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Forensic expert: Christopher Patrick (Florida State University, USA)

 
11.00-13.00h workshop 6: Resilience                                                                General expert: Richard Jessor (University of Colorado, USA)
Forensic expert: Corinne de Ruiter (University of Maastricht, The Netherlands)

 
16.00-18.00h workshop 7: Moral reasoning                                                      General expert: Fiery Cushman (Brown University, USA)
Forensic expert: James Blair (NIH, USA)

Closing remarks

Sunday, February, 3 2013
8.00-9.00h farewell

Workshops

Workshop 1: Attention
Attention is a critical cognitive or executive function. Importantly, it has been repeatedly found that externalizing behavior disorders are associated with deficits in executive functioning, including attention. Externalizing or disruptive behavior disorders are highly prevalent among forensic populations in terms of: ADHD, child conduct disorder and adult antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and substance abuse. Inattentiveness and lack of concentration may easily lead to problematic (e.g., school) problems in individuals with externalizing behavior disorders.

Workshop 2: Learning
Learning processes are the basis for human behavior and thus play a major role in behavior research. Fundamental are classical and operant conditioning. It is by these essential processes that humans and animals adapt to the environment during their lives. Learning can be influenced by different variables such as context, content, emotions or of course personal variables, such as personality disorders. Additionally, extinction and inhibitory processes are influencing the outcome of a learning process. If learning capacities of individuals is somehow disturbed, adaptation to the environment cannot be done successfully leading to problem of interaction with the environment. For example, in Antisocial Personality Disorder, learning by negative consequences seems to be impaired, leading to persistent antisocial behavior in spite of punishment.

Workshop 3: Inhibition
Certain stimuli or situations (e.g., frustration) may automatically elicit a certain behavioral response (e.g., aggression). The automatically elicited tendency to react is, however, not always appropriate given the context. A negative critique by your employer, for example, should not be answered with a fist. Response inhibition, is the cognitive function, that allows one to suppress a dominant, automatic or prepotent response. Deficits in response inhibition are closely linked to impulsivity. Response inhibition deficits are considered a key deficit in ADHD, but also play an important role in other externalizing behavior disorders such as psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder and substance abuse.

Workshop 4: Motivation
Motivation, thus the question how goals and plans affect cognition and behavior is one more important aspect for understanding human behavior. The main aim in studying motivation is to get more information on how conscious and non-conscious processes like plans, goals and fantasies interact in influencing people’s thought, emotion, and behavior. This is an important question also for the field of antisocial behavior, as understanding the motivation for acting in an antisocial way could be an important basis for treatment approaches. Recidivism has a strong relationship to motivational aspects as recidivism instruments in big parts refer to motivational aspects in the offender and therefore is the most prominent use of motivation research in forensic psychology and psychiatry.

Workshop 5: Emotion
Since decades emotion research has been playing a prominent role in general psychology. Emotions influence both the normal functioning as well as the development of many psychiatric disorders. That is why emotions play such an important role in psychology research. Also in the forensic research area deviant emotional processes have been related to psychiatric disorders relevant to the respective field (e.g. antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy) and delinquent behavior (e.g. aggression).

Workshop 6: Resilience
A universal finding in all studies of psychosocial adversity is that there is huge heterogeneity in outcome. This heterogeneity seems to partially be a reflection of individual differences in resilience. Resilience refers to the phenomenon that some individuals have relative good outcome despite suffering risk experiences (e.g. child abuse) that would be expected to bring about serious consequences (e.g. psychopathology) for the respective individual. Resilience implies relative resistance to environmental risk experiences or the ability to overcome stress or adversity. The scientific acknowledgment of the resilience construct has opened up new interesting avenues for both research and clinical interventions.

Workshop 7: Moral reasoning
Moral reasoning is trying to determine the difference between what is right and what is wrong. There are several aspects to moral behavior including moral sensitivity (the ability to appreciate a situation as an ethical dilemma), moral judgment (the ability to understand what is the right thing to do), and moral motivation (a commitment to moral action).

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