Conference

Now that I'm back in the States, I can finally write about the conference and this particular aspect of my time in Berlin!



I owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Hugh and Dr. Doris Van Auken for putting up with us for 10 days and for taking us to this eye-opening experience. In addition I would like to thank Holy Cross College for offering this opportunity to us and essentially "fronting" the bill to what would have been otherwise an impossible venture across the Atlantic.

I suppose it is a good idea to talk about the symposia, paper sessions, and the like that I attended first, but I'm going to talk about about my observations about the presenters first. It is quite amazing the difference between presenters. Take for example the folks from the Ukraine. I was utterly amazed on the studies they were presenting one in specific about the schizophrenic population there. Most of the information they were talking about seemed to be years behind the studies of the western influenced countries like UK and Germany. The lady was talking about how they have developed a stigma toward that population in their midsts. Although we all well know that any "disorder" group like schizophrenics tend to be stigmatized by the population due to a multitude of different reasons: media, experience, and lack of education on that particular population. Moreover their presentation was so robotic and it seemed as though they were reading there speeches off of a script. With that in mind I while attending some of the US or German presenters they were quite animated and enjoyable to listen to. I don't mean to pick on the Ukraine in specific but that was the first symposia that came to mind.

After that note I'll walk you guys Day by Day in a very brief run through of my time at the conference.

Monday: We arrived at the congress by the U2 in Kaiserdamm and got to the conference by 8:00. After registering for the conference (which too too long if you ask me) we could finally get into the symposia (an hour later!) After sitting in a lecture titled "Motives: measures, mechanisms, management (part 1)" I started hammering out the next 5 days of lectures. I attened a lecture on "Psychophysics" which was actually quite interesting. Essentially the topic covered the Fechners "inner pscyhophysics" concepts and the relationship between the phsyical, phisological, psychological. It was especially interesting to me because a friend of mine Stewart Madon from Canada was presenting and he and I met at APS in May so I had a great deal of insite on his topic. Later I attened a symposium entitled "Tolerance for ambiguity, creativity, and personality." This is where I discovered that some speakers were really quite boring. Tons of information, zero personality. To sum that up pending on the individuals predisposition to ambigous enviroments would determine their ability to work with new ambigious material. After a quick jog across the ICC attempting to see a Zimbardo lecture I discovered I wasn't the only one who wanted to see that particular address. So I ended up hanging out with a German gal who was in the elevator with me and who happened to be interested in the same topic, so we jogged over to another address entitled, "Conceptural and methodoligal issues in logitudina studies of job performance." Sounds interesting right? Not even close. I was so bored and hot in that lecture that I think I forgot how to even run a logitudinal study! After 50 minutes of that wasted time I poped over to see something I thought would be facinating, "Ethic behavior and trust." I had no idea it was about business ethics and job performace! Ugh. Who would have thought I would pick two I/O psychology lectures. So tired from that boring stuff, I had to have a cup of coffee.

If anyone tells you "yeah most places in Berlin take a visa" they are liars! HORRIBLE LIARS! I just wanted a cup of coffee to get my head back into some form of thinking. I go to pay and the man is like, "we don't take visa" (but image it was in very poor English...). So I ended up buming 3 euro from the gal I grabbed a cup of coffee with (gal from Switzerland).

Because I was having such bad luck with finding addresses that were engaging I decided lets see what the psychopathologist symposium would be like. I sat down about midway through the "Psychological disorders II" lecture and was stunned into a stupor. This gal went on and on about paranoia and essentially came to the conclusion that its a maladaptive coping process. So I asked her, "Do you think the people in your study developed this from experience, that is from their parents and peer groups; or do you think feature of your study group (Netherlands)." Her study group was rather small, 39. She kinda looked at me and said, "I think it is a maladaptive coping technique that is escaerbated by sleep deprevation..." After that I didn't want to bother asking any more questions.

I tried to get into the "research in fields of enviromentally relevant behavior" talk but that was jam-packed so I had to find something else to do. More coffee.

I finally ended up at a symposium that was worth the days loss of time. John Jost. He's a professor out of NYU and was exceptionally interesting, but I wasn't the only one who thought that. People were actually filling every possible spot just to see this topic, "Why people care about justice (and sometimes they don't)." By some luck I sit next to a fella and when I leaned over to share my thoughts on the topic he spoke back in clean and clear Englisht. Surprized because I had yet to find anyone that spoke with that kind of clarity I looked down at his name tag and he was from Germany. So I asked him where he learned English and he actually studied a year in America. He actually studied for a year in a city that is right down the road from where I live and we even knew the same people! Small world!

Between the symposiums I attened the two poster sessions which was either a hit or miss presention. One was stand out interesting. "The influence of IQ on early mortality is explained by SES: National logitudinal study of youth. Markus Jokela (Finland)." His presentation was solid, as was his methodology it also helped he really knew his topic.

After a day of learning some quite esoteric information it was time to eat. I ended up going out to eat with the Van Auken's, then going for a swim in our wonderful hotel--the Marriott.

For the sake of making this readable in bites I'll end this post with a simple retrospecitve observation. Read the abstracts before attending symposiums!