See here for details.

From the programme:

How to Not Die: Insights from Psychology

Everyone knows that mental stress affects physical health, both directly and indirectly. For example, stress affects blood pressure, and fluctuations in blood pressure in turn play a part in the development of cardiovascular disease. Demonstrating the link between stress and heart disease has been one of psychology’s most impactful contribution to health sciences and human welfare. The stress-health link is often discussed in terms of the way stress elevates cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) such that disease becomes inevitable. However, the stress-CVR association is not as straightforward as we first thought. Many anomalies exist: (a) elevated CVR is not always bad; (b) deflated CVR is not always good; (c) individual differences suggest that CVR might in fact be a secondary outcome of risk mechanisms; and (d) laboratory models tend to ignore the role of stress habituation. This lecture will attempt to show how recent studies help resolve these anomalies, supporting a unified model of stress-related cardiovascular ill-health. Tips on not dying will be incorporated.  

Bio

Brian Hughes is a Professor of Psychology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is a former President of the Psychological Society of Ireland, and was the founding chair of its Division of Health Psychology. He is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychophysiology and a past president of the international Stress and Anxiety Research Society. He has held visiting academic appointments at University of Leiden, King’s College London, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Missouri. He is a prominent advocate for scientific psychology, evidence-based policy, scientific outreach, and the role of psychology in society. His books include Rethinking Psychology: Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience (Palgrave, 2016) and Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology (Prentice-Hall, 2012). His latest book, Psychology in Crisis, was published by Palgrave in 2018.

Brian tweets as @b_m_hughes.

From MentalHealthReform.ie:

eMental Health: The Next Big Thing in Psychological Practice?

Register now for the FREE international seminar on eMental Health in Psychological Practice, organised jointly by Mental Health Reform and the Psychological Society of Ireland.

The event will be held on the 9th October 2018, 8:30 AM – 4 PM in the Hilton Hotel, Charlemont Place, Dublin 2.

This seminar is part of the eMEN project – funded by Interreg North West Europe and the HSE.

The seminar will focus on the implications of technology-supported therapy for psychological practice…is this ‘the Next Big Thing’ for psychology in Ireland?

The seminar will be addressed by the Minister of State for Mental Helath and older People, Jim Daly T.D.

Updates and announcements will be made on this webpage on the eMental Health Reform Twitter – follow us @eMHReform

Registration is now open!

AGENDA

8:30 – 9:00 AM – Registration, tea and coffee

9:00 – 9:35 AM – Welcome and seminar opening

• Shari McDaid, Mental Health Reform
• Terri Morrissey, Psychological Society of Ireland
• “eMental Health State-of-the-Art”, Kevin Cullen, Work Research Centre

9:35 – 10:30 AM – Session 1: Telemental health: eTherapy: psychological therapy sessions at a distance

• The session will combine a number of short presentations of online services – including MyMind, Turn2Me, and Helplink – followed by a panel discussion.

10:50 – 11:20 AM – Tea and coffee break

11:20 – 1:15 PM – Session 2: eTherapy: Technology-supported therapy

• eTherapy: What the evidence shows…and doesn’t show, Prof. Brian Hughes, NUI Galway
• The importance of personalised experience in eTherapy, Dr. Conal Twomey, UCD
• Address of the Minister of State for Mental Health and Older People, Jim Daly T.D.

1:15 – 2:00 PM – Lunch 

2:00 – 4:00 PM – Session 3: The future – Utopian or dystonia?

• Virtual Reality for Anxiety Disorders, Prof. Youseff Shiban, University of Göttingen, Germany
• The Future: Utopia or Dystopia, Dr. Marie Murray, University College Dublin
• Woebot, Dr. Alison Darcy, Woebot
• Youth Panel discussion

4:00 PM – Seminar closes

REGISTER via EVENTBRITE

DATE AND TIME

LOCATION

From Eventbrite:

THE PACE TRIAL

Dr. David Tuller and Professor Brian Hughes have investigated and written extensively on the subject and will provide attendees with a unique opportunity, of the importance of their investigations being made available to decision makers, healthcare providers, academics and patients alike.

A controversial medical trial for the treatment of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), known as the PACE trial, has been found to be ‘not reliable’ by a major new study. Described during the recent 3 hour Westminster Parlamentary Debate, as “One of the greatest medical scandals of the 21st Century.”

The large-scale, government-funded PACE trial cost £5 MILLION made claims that psychotherapy and exercise helped the estimated 250,000 sufferers of ME. Also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, ME presents symptoms such as unrelenting fatigue and profound pain. It has no known cure and can be exacerbated by physical exertion.

The PACE trial was funded by the UK Medical Research Council, Department of Health and Social Care (UK) for England, Scottish Chief Scientist Office, it is the most expensive piece of research into ME/CFS ever conducted. The trial dominates clinical policy in the United Kingdom and other countries, in both government funded health care and private medical insurance.

PACE stands for “Pacing, graded activity and cognitive behavioural therapy; a randomised evaluation“

Refreshments are included in all ticket options, will be provided after the speaker’s presentations

More on the speakers.

David M. Tuller, DrPh, is a Senior Fellow in Public Health in Journalism at the Center of Global Public Health, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, California. Previously to this appointment in July 2017, he was of academic coordinator of the University of California, Berkeley’s joint masters program in public health and journalism. He’s worked as a reporter and editor for ten years at the San Francisco Chronicle, served as health editor at Salon.com and frequently writes about health for The New York Times.

David covered the PACE trial results for The New York Times in February 2011. However he became concerned about the trial and wrote a further article regarding case definitions which resulted in an immediate response from the PACE trial authors which resulted in him investigating the trial and its authors further after contact with others in the patient community.

Brian Hughes is a Professor in Psychology, and a specialist in stress psychophysiology. He is the author of Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology (London: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2012), Rethinking Psychology: Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience (London: Palgrave, 2016) and Psychology in Crisis (London: Palgrave, 2018).

He serves as Dean of International Affairs at NUI Galway, and sits on the university’s Academic Management Team. He sits on the editorial boards of a number of international journals of psychophysiology, health psychology, and behavioural medicine, and is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

DATE AND TIME

LOCATION

Keynote Lecture at the 2018 Psychological Society of Ireland Annual Conference

‘Time for Psychology 2.0?’

Abstract: After its formalization as a science in the late 1800s, psychology went viral. Suddenly there were psychology departments in universities around the (Western) world, and exciting new psychological professions offering services to a diversity of clients. Given this energy, the map of psychology’s subject area was rapidly embedded and its main research and analytic approaches firmly established. While psychology has certainly changed in the interim, its Victorian architecture remains visible today.

In more recent times concern has grown about whether Psychology 1.0 is fit for purpose in the modern world. There appears to be widespread systematic error in psychology research, and unease about the arbitrary ways in which psychologists draw conclusions from data. As mainstream culture becomes more psychologized, psychology faces increased pressure to supply answers to political questions and to produce evidence in support of public policy. Psychology faces a host of challenges relating to reproducibility, coherence, measurement, statistics, sampling, and systematic exaggeration. To make things even more interesting, the way science as a whole is produced and published is currently in the throes of a modern revolution.

This talk assesses whether our field is quite ready for this helter-skelter twenty-first century. I ask, do we now need a ‘New’ Psychology: a Psychology 2.0?

About the Author

Imprint: 2018
Psychology in Crisis
Author: Brian M. Hughes
Publisher: Palgrave, London

ISBN-10: 1352003007
ISBN-13: 978-1352003000

Click here to view on Palgrave Macmillan
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From the cover: Throughout the history of psychology, attempting to objectively measure the highly dynamic phenomenon of human behaviour has given rise to an underappreciated margin of error. Today, as the discipline experiences increasing difficulty in reproducing the results of its own studies, such error not only threatens to undermine psychology’s credibility but also leaves an indelible question: Is psychology actually a field of irreproducible science?

In this thought-provoking new book, author Brian Hughes seeks to answer this very question. In his incisive examination of the various pitfalls that determine ‘good’ or ‘bad’ psychological science – from poor use of statistics to systematic exaggeration of findings – Hughes shows readers how to critique psychology research, enhance its validity and reliability, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the way psychology research is produced, published, and promulgated in the twenty-first century.

This book is essential reading for students wanting to understand how to better scrutinise psychological research methods and results, as well as practitioners and those concerned with the replication debate.

“Psychology in Crisis is an unflinching tour of the challenges of doing psychological science well. Brian Hughes describes six crises facing psychology that could make one think that all is lost. But it is not. At their core, the crises are illustrations of just how hard it is to study human behavior and, simultaneously, why it is worth doing. Hughes closes with a path toward a science that is robust, transparent, and self-skeptical to help accelerate discovery and ensure that psychology meets its potential as a scientific enterprise.” — Professor Brian Nosek, Professor in psychology at the University of Virginia and Executive Director for the Center for Open Science

Contents

Keynote Lecture at the Annual Congress of Psychology Students in Ireland

‘Is it Time to Rethink Psychology? (Spoiler alert: Yes)’

Abstract: Given recent political upheavals, it is suddenly fashionable for intellectuals to bemoan fake news, the post-truth society, and the wanton rejection of expertise. In reality, psychologists have been grappling with (if not performing) these activities for years. Psychology has long co-existed with pseudoscientific practices and is often happy to be mistaken for them. But more worryingly, mainstream psychology regularly promotes its own forms of fake news, post-truth conspiracies, and expert-baiting. In other words, academic psychology regularly offers “alternative facts” (by overselling findings produced by poor research) while practitioner psychologists regularly behave as though they “have had enough of experts” (by rejecting or ignoring empirical evidence concerning their work). In short, the demise of logic in public politics simply mirrors that seen within academia. The future of psychology – and by extension that of public rationality – lies in the hands of the next generation.