Keynote Speaker: John Mehm, Ph. D. 12:30pm
Monday April 25th, 2016, 12:30pm in the Beacon Hall Events Center
An APA statement on human rights and torture dates back to 1986 and affirms APA's endorsement of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. After 9-11, the United States began interrogating detainees at settings such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. In 2005, the APA Board of Directors adopted as APA policy the report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), which stated that psychologists can consult to interrogations related to national security and military action in an ethical manner, even though it was then publicly denied by APA for years. In 2014, a report by investigator David Hoffman found that not only did individual APA members lie and cover up their involvement with post-9/11 torture but also the entire APA organizational structure colluded to keep these lies going. Dr. John Mehm, past president of the Connecticut Psychological Association and board member of the American Psychological Association, will discuss the controversial role that military psychologists played in the enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees following the World Trade Center attacks. He will also discuss how the field changed in response to this situation, how it has effected his work with the professional organizations he is a board member of, and the training he does with doctoral level graduate clinical psychology students.
Dr. Mehm earned his A.B. with honors in psychology and mathematics from Indiana University in 1979, and he completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at The University of Iowa in 1985. He was a predoctoral intern at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Haven, CT. Dr. John Mehm joined the faculty of the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology 1994, after several years as a practicum supervisor. He has held several administrative roles, including the Director of Practicum and Internship Training, and is now the Director of Dissertation Research. Dr. Mehm's professional interests include the community integration of persons with serious mental illness; legal issues in mental health; and training in professional psychology. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Psychological Association as the Coordinator of its Science and Education Directorate. For the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Dr. Mehm is a member of the Peer Engagement Specialist Advisory Board and the Task Force on Seclusion and Restraints..
Keynote Speaker: Kevin Pelphrey, Ph.D. (Harris Professor in the Yale Child Study Center)
Monday April 25th, 2016, 11:00am in the Beacon Hall Events Center
As humans, we are constantly engaging in acts of social cognition, using cues from facial expressions, gaze shifts, and body movements to infer the intentions of others and plan our own actions accordingly. In this lecture, I will describe my laboratory’s research using functional neuroimaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to identify the brain mechanisms for social cognition in typically developing children and adults. Our work has served to characterize the functional properties and development, from infancy to adulthood of a set network of interacting, distributed neuroanatomical structures dedicated to processing social meaning. With this understanding of the typical development of the neural basis of social cognition as a backdrop, I will describe our more recent efforts to chart the development of these brain mechanisms in children with autism, as well as their unaffected siblings. Our work in children with autism and their siblings has revealed three types of neural signatures: (i) state activity, related to the state of having autism that characterizes the nature of disruption in brain circuitry; (ii) trait activity, reflecting shared areas of dysfunction in children with autism and their unaffected siblings, thereby providing a promising neuroendophenotype to facilitate efforts to bridge genomic complexity and disorder heterogeneity; and (iii) compensatory activity, unique to unaffected siblings, suggesting a neural system level mechanism by which unaffected siblings might compensate for an increased genetic risk for developing autism.
Dr. Kevin Pelphery co-directs the Yale Center for Translational Developmental Neuroscience. They employ a range of techniques including structural and functional neuroimaging, genomics, and eye tracking to understand the development of the brain and thereby improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disorders affecting children. He also serves as the Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded multisite Autism Center for Excellence Multimodal Developmental Neurogenetics of Females with ASD network that spans Yale (the lead site), Harvard, UCLA, UCSF, University of Southern California, and the University of Washington. Dr. KPelphrey has received a Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, a John Merck Scholars Award for his work on the biology of developmental disorders, and the American Psychological Association's Boyd McCandless Award for distinguished early career theoretical contributions to Developmental Psychology. He also co-directs Yale’s NIMH T32 Fellowship Training Program in Childhood Neuropsychiatric Disorders. Their program focuses on preparing scientists, including those in clinical sciences as well as those in basic sciences, for independent careers as field-leading investigators, conducting research on childhood neuropsychiatric disorders.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Ronald Rohner
Monday April 25th, 2016, 9:30am in the Beacon Hall Events Center
Dr. Ronald Rohner will be discussing the health benefits of interpersonal acceptance-rejection. He will then connect this data to his current research focus on adults’ (men’s and women’s) remembrances of maternal and paternal acceptance-rejection in childhood and adults’ fear of intimacy, and loneliness.
Ronald P. Rohner is Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Family Studies and of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, USA. There he is also Director of the Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection, and he is Executive Director of the International Society for Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection (ISIPAR). Rohner is also the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology, as well as of the award for being the Outstanding International Psychologist from the USA in 2008. Beyond this, he is founding President of ISIPAR and a former President of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. He also served on the Executive Council of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. In addition, he is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the American Psychological Society, and he is a Fellow and Distinguished Member of the American Anthropological Association. Finally, he is author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and Special Issues of journals, and of approximately 200 articles, chapters, and other publications and electronic media.