by Alexa Ispas
Our interviewee is Dr. Ulrich von Hecker, PhD, researcher and lecturer in social psychology at Cardiff University. His research interests are in the area of social cognition, in particular the link between cognition and emotion. Dr. von Hecker studies how social schemata shape the way we perceive groups and social relations around us and involving us, and how social perception is affected by states of dysphoria and depression. He is also interested in power processes in small groups, and in the way we use language in the attributions of interpersonal events. His most recent project is on the neural correlates of generative reasoning in subclinical depression.
EJOP: Your publications cover a great number of research topics – from memory and mental models, to neural correlates of generative reasoning. How have you managed to stay on top of so many different areas?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: It is true, I like some diversity among the topics I work on. On the other hand, you will also notice that there are links between those areas. I’ve always been interested in basic processes of memory, perception and more complex thinking. But I find it more interesting to look at these things from particular – and changing – angles. Actually, I don’t see myself so much as a “specialist” in a certain field, although of course you do need a certain degree of specialisation to do research nowadays. What I like best in my work is to contribute a question, a certain angle of perspective, a methodology, to a bigger question that I tackle together with my collaborators. Which partly explains the diversity of topics, since these colleagues come from very different backgrounds in Psychology. Research that I find enjoyable is mostly a dialogue, and after my PhD – which of course had to be a solitary endeavour – this dialogue has been most inspiring to me.
EJOP: Please tell our readers a bit about your research trajectory, and how you have arrived at your current research interests.
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: I started 1984 in Hamburg, working with Kurt Pawlik as his Diploma student. He had, at that time, stimulated a whole new branch of neuropsychological research at Hamburg University. I was then interested in aphasia, that is, acquired speech disorder by trauma or stroke, and how this disorder affects the representations of different kinds of information in memory, such as verbal vs. non-verbal. I have since then remained interested in the issue of mental representations and their dynamics. As any view, the representational view is not universally accepted, and I do see its shortcomings, but it has nevertheless stimulated some of the metaphors I’ve been using to formulate my own questions. For example, still in Hamburg, and later in Berlin working with Hubert Feger, I became interested in the way we construct mental models of our social environment, that is, in what ways patterns of affiliation and interpersonal sentiment are mentally represented. This way, the social psychological angle came in, leading to my PhD thesis. I spent a Postdoc with Hob Crockett, Mary Lee Hummert and Susan Kemper at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, investigating how social cliques are mentally represented. Later, developing this approach further, I started a still ongoing, intense collaboration with Grzegorz Sedek from Warsaw on the construction of complex mental representations in depressed people. We are still working on this, trying to identify more precisely what the nature of cognitive impairments in depression is. Again from this, the more general question has arisen in more recent years at Cardiff, how different emotions influence the way in which we think, use our memory, or control our attentional resources. Currently, we aim at identifying ways in which depressed people might be better able to control their recurring negative ideation. These projects have been extended recently, collaborating with Michael Conway from Montreal, to asking questions about how emotions themselves are represented as mental states, and how their experience and quality changes over time.
EJOP: While being a successful researcher, you are also a violin virtuoso. Is it easy to combine your research career with your passion for music?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: I wouldn’t say “virtuoso”, really not. But in fact, I do my best to stay on top of my practising every day. I’m not always successful with this, but I do try. At a basic level, these two domains are equally important to me. I strive for a balance such that, I would say, neither of them is really possible without the other. Both define a space in which they are mutually necessary. From the perspective of my work in Psychology, practising frees up my mind after intense reading or writing or analysing or lecture preparation. From the perspective of my work as a player, doing research helps me to free myself from being stuck with technical problems. Quite often I also have better musical ideas after a good bit of scientific work.
EJOP: A few years ago, you have made the decision to move from Germany to the UK. How has this move influenced your career as a researcher?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: In 2000, having just finished my “habilitation”, the situation in Germany was difficult, regarding the availability of academic positions, and things have still not changed very much since then. The overall amount of funding in Higher Education, as well as the way how funding was allocated, did not particularly encourage early stages of an academic career. At the time, I was on a fixed-term position at Potsdam University for another year, and my choice was to wait and see whether I could get a professorial position within that time, or to apply for a permanent position outside Germany. I decided for the latter when I heard that Cardiff had advertised a couple of positions in early summer 2000. I already knew some people at Cardiff, and I also knew it was an excellent department, so I was quite excited about it. So far, I have not regretted this decision a single moment. I have much more resources available for research now, and I do my research in a more independent way than I had been able to do in Germany. The way a British department works, with its flat and (mostly) quick decision routes is something I like as a nice contrast to what I was used to. In general, I feel very well supported by the department, and I have good colleagues to talk to, that’s very important for me.
EJOP: Despite being a social psychologist, much of your current work focuses on depression – a subject traditionally related to clinical psychology. Have you had any difficulties in showing the potential of investigating depression from a social psychological perspective?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: Many of the complaints made by people in depressed states indeed refer to problems in social cognition. Depressed people are less able to maintain contact and communication with other people, they are often demotivated to join social activities, and they are much less creative in finding good solutions to problematic interpersonal situations. They are less open and have more difficulties in taking someone else’s perspective. We do address the depressives’ problems from their cognitive side, as I’ve explained, but the social nature of these problems is important in the first place, to inform the direction that our cognitive investigation should take. It appears that the interplay between motivational and cognitive anomalities in depression brings about some of the social problems associated with it. So, if we want to understand these more complex social problems, we have to understand some of those more “basic” problems concerning attentional processes, memory and thinking in the first place.
EJOP: Recently, you have received a grant to investigate the neural correlates of generative reasoning in subclinical depression. In what way do you think a neurological investigation of subclinical depression can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: From my early work at U Hamburg on aphasia I am still familiar with the investigation of neural correlates of cognition. But the advancement since then has been such that I simply have to rely on other people’s experience. In fact, we now have a good team of cognitive and social psychologists, and a physicist with a neuroimaging background as well. The question here still centers around the nature of cognitive deficits in depression. Our hypothesis is that this deficit rather selectively affects the spontaneous construction of mental models, that is, the spontaneous application of generative, integrative steps of thinking. And we hope we can identify certain brain regions, especially in the prefrontal and parietal cortex, that are particularly involved in the integration of piecemeal information into larger units and impressions. We expect those areas of the brain to be less activated in depressed people as compared to the non-depressed, once they are working on a task that requires such an on-line integration. This work could be helpful in clarifying existing behavioural data which point in the direction of such a highly selective deficit, but for which there still are alternative explanations.
EJOP: One of your conference papers is entitled ‘The plasticity of emotions’. What do you mean by this metaphor?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: In large parts of the traditional literature on emotions, and also in the social cognitive literature on the influence of affect on judgments and impression formation, emotions are seen in a uni-dimensional, rather static way. We feel anger, pride, or sadness, and we feel it for a certain time, that’s the general assumption. I do think that the concept of “emotional episodes” that we go through is a useful one. On the other hand, those episodes are very seldom “pure” in the sense of being of one and the same emotion all the time. Rather, what we experience is a mix of emotions that may swiftly change from any point in time to the next. We may feel sadness, but mixed with a bit of anger or guilt, and the salience of those components may shift within the same episode. Thus, emotions appear malleable, multifaceted, and dynamic in their time course, as any experiences are dynamic, in general. Together with Michael Conway I’ve started to investigate this complexity, or plasticity, if you want. In particular, we are interested in factors that might determine certain types of shifts within emotional episodes. For example, what makes us change our emotion from mainly sadness to mainly anger? We found that some people are prone to make shifts that allow them to re-interpret their feelings as rather anger than sadness, as soon as they perceive a plausible source for anger in the environment. We think that this might have to do with personality variables, such as masculinity, which would drive a person to experience or rather not experience certain types of emotion. This research is very much at its beginning, but I’m already very excited about it.
EJOP: How do you think can social psychological research contribute to solving social problems?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: I believe this contribution will always work in a more or less indirect way. Obviously, any research that aims at testing theories is bound to do this under certain limitations from the practical point of view, such as conceptual abstractions, controlled conditions in the laboratory, experimental factors acting in isolation and not in full context, and the like. However let me give two examples of recent social psychological research areas in which I see a more immediate link to existing social problems. First, there is a recent development in research on the attitude-behaviour-link, where one tries to show the effectiveness of so-called “intention implementations”. This has a lot to do with attentional control. People are trained in their abilities to link certain cognitive responses and actions to ideas relating to existing strong attitudes, such as beating desires in drug and alcohol contexts, or fast food avoidance in the context of healthy eating. This type of self-persuasion works by making certain desired behaviours more automatic and more likely to occur. Another example is recent research on aggressive behaviour as perceived in the media. Whereas ten years ago, not much hard data were available to show an influence here, more recent (and more methodologically refined) approaches have managed to more stringently establish the link between prior consumption of media violence and later violent behaviour in young people. I think, the problem with these two examples – and there are others – still is that social psychologists, at least the academic breed, are generally not prepared enough to present and disseminate their findings to the general public. Only by means of a wide discussion of those and other findings within society, and that means: among non-psychologists as well!, can we expect them to have any impact. Other sciences, such as molecular genetics, or physics, already do a far better job in this regard. Many social psychologists still have a professional attitude that they tend to limit themselves too much to “purely scientific” writing. There should be more of us who, for example, would write articles for the science section of the “Times”. I think the way to go here is to be more proactive in striking up public discussion and raising a general awareness of the findings. In doing so, we should not be deterred by the consideration that things might turn out “too complex” to communicate. Sorry, no excuse. Because indeed, this exactly is our remit. Our own horizon has to be broad enough to generate a communicable “read thread” that is understandable to everyone, and that addresses the more practical issues. Kurt Lewin, Leon Festinger and others have shown how this may work.
EJOP: What advice would you give to undergraduate and postgraduate students who would like to pursue an academic career?
Dr. Ulrich von Hecker: First of all, be realistic about your professional career, and understand the risks. I still grew up in the more traditional German academic environment where you tended to expect that the route to professorship was automatically paved once your PhD supervisor had accepted your project. I had to realise, and we all have to realise that this expectation is no longer warranted. Competition is very tough indeed. But of course, as this is true in other professional domains on this planet as well, this point should certainly not deter anyone with a clear determination for the field. Having made the above caveats, if someone has a clear aim of being a researcher in psychology, I would recommend a couple of things. First, try to maintain as broad a horizon as you can, despite the ever-increasing specialization in every field. Indeed, do not specialize too early, and when you do, try again and again to place things and ideas back into a larger context. Try to remain independent and playful in your mind. Keep the ability to distance yourself, try to sometimes think about your issues in a way as if they were “not all that serious”, if you know what I mean. Try to not only read about our immediate topics, but, at least occasionally, topics in all areas of psychology, and if you can, philosophy, biology and other areas. This will hugely improve your judgmental abilities. It will also facilitate your potential future cooperation with colleagues from those other domains, leading to more, and more original, research opportunities. Secondly, try to achieve a good methodological expertise. Keep abreast with recent developments in formal modelling, statistics and research design. I think it is tremendously important to realise that there is no clear separation between “method” and “content question”. In all substantial research, both are intertwined, and only a good methodological understanding will give you the flexibility to understand how much that is the case. Third, try to be an excellent listener. Shouting your opinion towards others is by far less important than understanding theirs. Train yourself in adopting the attitude “What if this other standpoint was the correct one, and not mine”. This will help shape your next question, and will improve the quality of your discussions with fellow students and colleagues. And one more thing, perhaps the most important: Keep up doing other things, contacts and interests than those related to research and science. This will not only help your inner balance, but – maybe magically? – help you doing better research as well!