SWAP (Section for Women and Psychology)

The year is 1976. Martha Lear has just coined the term ‘second wave feminism’ in New York Magazine, and that movement is in full swing. In the United States, Title IX has just passed, prohibiting sex-based discrimination at any school that receives federal funding. In Sweden, Group 8 has just been founded, advocating for equal pay, kindergarten expansion, and a 6-hour work day. And in Canada, the CPA is hosting their annual convention at a hotel in Montreal.

There is a different hotel across the street from the CPA convention. While that hotel is unaffiliated with the one where the convention is taking place, the two are connected by an underground tunnel beneath the street. While the convention is in full swing, many women are stealing away, passing quietly through that tunnel to have a clandestine meeting of their own just across the street. These graduate students and untenured feminist researchers are there to present papers - to one another. These papers are on topics relevant to the psychology of women and girls, and they have one more thing in common. When they were submitted to the CPA for inclusion in the convention, they had all been summarily rejected.

This off-site, convention-adjacent meeting became known as the Underground Symposium. Not so much because it was clandestine – there was in fact a fair amount of media attention – but more likely because it was accessed through that underground tunnel between the two hotels. The event was a huge success, where ideas were flowing and the room was overflowing. It was that success that led, four years later, to the designation of an “interest group” known as “on Women And Psychology”. This later became the Section for Women and Psychology, or SWAP – and that is where we are today.

Members of SWAP need not identify themselves as feminist scholars, but many still do. Section chair Dr. Lorraine Radtke certainly maintains the tradition of that origin story. Dr. Radtke is a professor emerita in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, where she worked for close to 40 years. She says,

“I identify as a feminist psychologist. It’s because I put women and girls first, and I take a critical perspective when it comes to the status quo. I’m focused on social change and improving the lives of women and girls.”

Feminist psychology has changed over the years. One of the biggest ways it has changed is that research and clinical practice is now conducted in an intersectional framework. This means being open to both the commonalities and the differences among women and girls. It also means being attuned to how their social circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and socioeconomic situation affect their experiences. Dr. Charlene Senn is a professor at the University of Windsor affiliated with the Applied Social Psychology program, and she says her research, and that of her colleagues is always conscious of that intersectional framework. She also says that the study of women and psychology is a broader topic than many may think.

“I am a feminist social psychologist – the distinction I feel is important because psychology is seen as being individual, when in fact it’s also concerned with environmental, cultural, and social forces. I teach a graduate course on feminist psychology and the psychology of women and gender. We look at the tremendous work being done by feminist psychologists in so many different fields, where psychology is being transformed by the work that’s happening in those areas.”

SWAP was not limited from the beginning to feminist psychologists, and today has a membership that involves researchers across all fields, students from various departments across Canada, and clinical psychologists, some of whom work primarily with women and girls. Says Dr. Senn,

“Parallel to feminist work, or work related to women and girls, there is feminist research on a variety of topics - masculinities, for example, and a thread of research also looking at the status of women in psychology, looking at things like inequalities in the field. So there is a real variety.”

Dr. Radtke agrees, and says that this kind of wide variety of work from the lens of women and girls’ psychology forms a big part of SWAP’s history.

“In the early years, members of SWAP were very active in the CPA and other professional associations in Canada, pressing for gender equality and for women to be involved. They advocated for changes to ethical standards that would incorporate a sensitivity toward the concerns of women and girls. It has always had an activist side, and to this day SWAP has a Status Of Women Committee to ensure that all genders and all sexes have equality within the discipline and that those standards continue to be upheld.”

It’s because of the broad approach and diverse membership of both the SWAP section and the Status of Women Committee that they were able to collaborate with the Indigenous Peoples’ Psychology section, the Student section, and the Rural and Northern Psychology section to organize a virtual panel at the 2021 CPA Convention to address the findings of the final report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the implications for psychology in Canada. Says Dr. Radtke,

“It was a big collaboration, and very successful. It was decided that they would follow up that panel with a report not only on the panel itself but also with some recommendations. It’s quite an undertaking for a relatively small committee, and they’ll be focused on that in the coming year.” Editor note – as this will be published in February, check back to see if the report has been sent out by then, include an update if it has.

The panel discussion on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women was a central event at CPA 2021, no one had to sneak across the street to have their voices heard. Dr. Radtke points out that progress has been made both in the discipline and in the organization itself.

“Obviously CPA has become more egalitarian. We’ve seen more women presidents of CPA, we see more women serving on the Board of Directors than was historically the case. Although these problems are less significant in current times, there are still a few issues that require attention, for example, the nomination of more distinguished women for CPA awards.”

These issues will never disappear altogether, and there is a lot more work to do for the members of SWAP and psychologists who work in this space. During the pandemic, the jobs of husbands have taken precedence over the jobs of wives – even when the wife is an academic, even when she out-earns her husband – as childcare is still seen too often from a traditionally patriarchal lens. Instances of violence against women continue to rise as too many are trapped at home with their abuser. Dr. Senn’s specialty is campus sexual violence prevention, and she says that when campuses reopen the rates of sexual assault will likely go right back to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, they have not declined since the 1980s.

The field has come a long way since the Underground Symposium, but getting their work acknowledged remains a work in progress. Dr. Senn says, “we still have to push to have the knowledge we have from the incredible research being done by feminist psychologists incorporated more into the mainstream.” She pauses and exchanges a knowing glance with Dr. Radtke. “Including intro To Psych textbooks.”

Industrial Organizational Psychology

When I was in high school, I went for a job interview after responding to an ad I had seen in the newspaper. I was hired on the spot and immediately onboarded, working my first shift an hour later without fully understanding what the job entailed. The very first thing they had me do was stand in a circle with my new co-workers, arms around each others’ shoulders, while they turned off all the lights and played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in its entirety. Then, presumably adequately motivated, we were sent off – to sell Meat Of The Month subscriptions door-to-door. I learned that this was the process every single day. ‘Eye of the Tiger’. Every single day. I walked home midway through that first shift and never returned.

It was the 90s – you can tell, perhaps, because job ads still came in the newspaper, and people still thought ‘Eye of the Tiger’ was the ultimate pump-up song because Jurassic 5 had yet to release ‘Jayou’. It was also before Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psychology became more formalized in Canada. Dr. Joshua Bourdage is an associate professor at the University of Calgary, and the current chair of the Canadian Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (CSIOP), the CPA Section for Industrial/Organizational psychology. The discipline dates back many decades, the section was founded in the mid-70s, and Dr. Bourdage says the discipline really took hold in Canada in the early-90s.

“A lot of it traces back to the idea of scientific management and Frederick Taylor [an American mechanical engineer who was known for improving industrial efficiency around the turn of the 20^th century] and how we can optimize people and tasks to be done in the most efficient way possible. So a lot of our early work was around selection, assessment, sorting, and increasing productivity. Then we adapted, alongside the rest of psychology, with things like the human relations movement – the idea that people have feelings and emotions and internal states. We then started to think about things like whether happy workers are productive workers, or what are the things that actually motivate people beyond just carrot-and-stick – intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and that sort of thing. That’s where we branch more into the studies of leadership, and change, and politics and so on.”

Dr. Winny Shen is an I/O psychologist working at York University in the Schulich School of Business. She is the Past Chair of CSIOP, and her studies deal with diversity and inclusion, leadership, and worker well-being. She points to the first two World Wars (to date, the only two World Wars…) as the moment when I/O psychology was really created as a formal discipline.

“The desire to apply psychology to solve practical problems has been around from the very beginning. One of the catalysts for the growth of I/O psychology as a discipline was the two World Wars. The military and also the government realized they had a massive number of people with a ton of jobs that needed filling, and they didn’t actually know what was the best way to allocate people to the right job, to make sure we’re making the most of the people that are in these important military positions. That became the basis of a lot of I/O psychology – assessments, intelligence testing, personality assessment, and job analysis. After the wars, there was a recognition that a lot of these processes and skills could be applied to private organizations and industries, and there were all these people who had been trained in doing it as part of the war effort, so it grew from there.”

Put very simply, I/O psychology is the study of psychology in the workplace. Put a little less simply, it’s the application of psychological principles to study the world of work – workers in the context of teams, in the context of the organization as a whole. It’s a field interested in work at multiple levels and in multiple perspectives. This means that I/O has a vey broad range of perspectives and specialities. Dr. Shen explains,

“You can find us in a wide array of places. Some folks are academics like me and Josh. We do a lot of the research in terms of understanding workers’ experiences and organizational phenomena. You can also find I/O psychologists in a lot of applied settings. We’re typically trained as scientist-practitioners so we do both. We might work for an organization – for example, making sure their hiring processes are scientifically supported, or maybe helping with their training in terms of making sure their employees have the knowledge and skills required to succeed in their jobs. It could also involve issues of motivation, or climate – some of those softer-side things that make sure workers have positive experiences on the job and that they have a good relationship with their co-workers and the organization as a whole. We can also be coaches. We can work in analytics. Some work in very specific fields – for example, there are a large number of I/O psychologists working in health care right now. A lot of us work in collaboration with educational psychologists around issues like credentialling and licensure. Once you know where to look, you can find us in a ton of places!”

A previous Chair of CSIOP is one of the I/O psychologists contributing to understanding workplace issues in health care, where collaboration with many other psychological disciplines is very much a part of the job description. Dr. Bourdage explains a little more.

“One of our previous chairs, Dr. Tom O’Neill, does work with teams in a healthcare settings. Specifically, he works with resuscitation teams to maximize their performance. A human factors person, like an environmental psychologist, might look at the layout of the room and the equipment in it to see how it influences the work, whether some of it impedes people. Whereas Tom is looking more at communication, conflict, those sorts of things.”

When I first started working in radio, my job was as a producer for a show called Sentimental Journey on the local Oldies station. The host of the show would record his show on a reel-to-reel machine, then provide a list of the songs he had mentioned in the show. Some were on CD, some on the computer, and some on vinyl. I would have to make sure that there were 60 minutes of music and talk in any given hour – but the host was less concerned. Sometimes an ‘hour’ contained 35 minutes worth of music and talk, other times 85 minutes. I am likely the last person in radio – at least in Ottawa – who actually played music from a turntable on the air, and who had to splice reel-to-reel with a razor blade and scotch tape. I tried to teach the host how to use the computerized ‘voice tracking’ software, which involved booting up the program, then pressing the space bar to record and pressing it again to stop recording. I could really have used an I/O psychologist to help me convince him that pressing a space bar did not make one a ‘computer geek’, and that technology sometimes helps and makes things easier!

Technology, and its rapid advancement in the workplace, has been a big topic of discussion for I/O psychologists over the past ten plus years, but Dr. Bourdage says that it is just one small part of the work and research being done into workplace culture and enhancement.

“It’s extremely broad – the types of work that were presented even just last year at the CPA convention were very diverse. We had presentations about personnel selection – how do we enhance hiring and recruit the right people to apply for a job? How do personality and different situational elements like leadership impact employee attitudes and behaviours? We also covered more current and urgent topics like gender and diversity in the workplace, and the use of technology in the workplace. And there are a lot of people rising to the challenge of understanding how work and the practices we engage in are changing because of COVID. How do we still foster good team dynamics through the move to remote work? How do people cope with remote work productively? And of course we have a lot of people interested in mental health. We have members who work with healthcare workers to get a better understanding of burnout and stress, and their impact in the workplace. How can we intervene to help workers and organizations in that realm?”

When I was in college, I had my first taste of virtual work. I got hired by a promotional company, and after the first interview I never again saw a single one of my co-workers. I would get a phone call telling me where the ‘product’ was. (I always joked with the voice on the phone about the dangers of talking about ‘product’ on a cell phone, but I don’t think he ever understood what I was getting at.) I would then show up to the address provided, where there was a big truck. I’d get in, see what the ‘product’ was, and then spend the day offering free samples of the new Dempster’s bread at a local grocery store, or Dasani water at a gym, or Miller Genuine Draft at a bar. Okay, this is not ‘virtual work’ as such – just work without any co-workers!

There has got to be a study in motivation around a setup like this. There was absolutely no way to know for sure how well I had done my job – or, in many cases, whether I had done it at all! I also had no contact with co-workers, so I had no frame of reference to know whether they were doing their jobs to the absolute best of their abilities, or whether they were taking that extra case of Corn Nuts they hadn’t distributed home at the end of the day to share with a bunch of equally poor and starving college roommates. As with all virtual work, there is probably some good and some bad, as Dr. Shen maintains.

“This large-scale move to virtual work is complicated! There might be some good things, like a more objective evaluation of employees’ work as you see the work sort of divorced from the person doing it. But there are also negatives, like managers feeling like they don’t have control anymore because they can’t physically see people working. Additionally, the lines between what is work and what is private are issues that companies are trying to manage because it hasn’t really been as big of an issue in the past.”

Dr. Bourdage says that while this move to virtual work and the embrace of new technologies has been a major shift – both in the workforce and for psychologists – the expertise of I/O psychologists provided the groundwork for an easier transition to this new reality.

“We had already seen a move toward new technology, whether that’s machine learning or AI, in a decision-making capacity or hiring or moving toward more virtual work. In some ways COVID has just accelerated certain things, the same way it has accelerated or highlighted certain inequities – like who is more likely to be bearing the brunt of childcare responsibilities, for example. A lot of the work and research we’ve been doing for decades does inform some of these things – we’re lucky to have expertise on things like mental health and stigma in the workplace, workplace safety, selection, hiring, and recruitment. So we already have this expertise and it’s just sort of shifted to this new application, I’d say.”

When it comes to equity, diversity, and inclusion, one of Dr. Shen’s specialties, she says that the pandemic has been something of a double-edged sword when it comes to making workplaces more welcoming and comfortable.

“I think that on one hand this virtual working capacity has been something that disability advocates, for example, have pushed for a long time as it would make the workplace much more inclusive and serve as a kind of accommodation that would be helpful for a wide range of disabilities. But it’s one that many companies have felt like was not a “reasonable” accommodation for many of the jobs in their repertoire. But now the pandemic has highlighted how some of our assumptions about how work gets done or what kind of work can be done virtually – often quite effectively – have been too conservative. Companies and organizations might have previously been too reticent to try some of these things.

The other side of the coin is that we have to be a little careful in terms of the balance between what is an employee responsibility and an employer responsibility. That becomes a little more of a grey area. Things like if I need very expensive internet in order to do my job, who pays for that? Or you get injured at home doing something related to your work – is that a workplace injury? There’s a little bit of research that suggests we’re not as careful in our email communication as we would be saying things face-to-face, and that can contribute to feelings of being bullied.

There are a lot of issues we have to work through. There is definitely the opportunity to reshape work more equitably, but there are also a lot of potential issues that are more invisible in some ways. Sometimes people might not feel comfortable sharing some of those aspects of their virtual or personal space. Companies have to be really diligent in not assuming that all employees have the same kind of resources or the same kind of setup.”

Dr. Shen did a study with colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic into the experiences of Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians in the workplace, as xenophobic sentiment started to show itself. She is currently doing research that looks at the division of labour in households during the pandemic, and how that impacts workplace attitudes. In particular, women’s tendencies to feel like they have to downshift their careers in order to accommodate changes in household responsibilities. More generally, because of social movements like Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters, I/O psychologists have a renewed interest in studying the experiences of Black and Indigenous workers. Dr. Shen says it is very important that evidence-based practices remain at the fore when considering issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

“I’m involved in a big consortium where we’re trying to help employers develop toolkits for both employers and employees to try to help with disability disclosure conversations during the hiring process. There are a lot of employers who want to be involved, but don’t necessarily know how to proceed if an employee or an applicant discloses a disability. There is a wide range of issues that stem from the notion of ‘we want to create an inclusive atmosphere, what does that mean, and what does that look like?’

As we become more aware, there are a lot of people who want to make changes. But a lot of these things can be misinterpreted and lead to cascading effects. As an example, there’s a growing body of research that shows some of the policies around hiring and employment equity can be interpreted by people as ‘the standards are different’ or ‘they’re only here because of X’, and that can have pretty insidious and negative consequences for people who are perceived to have benefited from these policies in the workplace. It’s very important, but very complex.

There’s often a tendency to focus on representation rather than inclusion. That can create issues because the focus is on bringing people in, without realizing that the environment into which you’re bringing people is not very supportive. This can ultimately lead to retention issues where there’s this revolving door of under-represented groups.”

The importance of basing your policies and procedures on quality science is echoed by Dr. Bourdage.

“One of the things we espouse is evidence-based practice. I think there’s this notion that a lot of these things are common sense, but I think there’s a lot of knowledge and training and expertise that is required to understand not only equity, diversity, and inclusion but also organizational change, organizational culture, how reward systems impact people, or organizational politics. These are all areas that I/O psychologists dig into with different lenses to understand these things and inform evidence-based practice.

Basically everything from the time you decide to apply for a job, to what questions you’re getting asked in an interview, to how you get socialized and onboarded at the new office, your day-to-day interactions are all guided by and investigated by I/O psychologists. It will tangibly affect almost everyone, every single day, for a huge chunk of their lives.”

When I was in university, I answered a job ad looking for lifeguards to work at Ottawa apartment pools throughout the summer. By the time my job interview was over, I had been hired not only as a lifeguard but as middle management at a security company, working alarm dispatch and supervising security guards across the city. It was a company that took on every contract that it possibly could – I was also answering employee complaint lines for a variety of Canadian clothing stores and keeping records for building maintenance companies…among dozens of other things. Lifeguarding paid minimum wage, middle management in the control centre paid $0.15/hour more. The job ad at the time, 1999 or so, said only ‘lifeguard’ and included a phone number. Things are a little different now, says Dr. Shen.

“Every time you go online and look at a job ad, it has probably been created through some sort of job analysis that I/O psychologists do to understand what is at the heart of a job. The basis we use for how to match a person to a job is to first understand exactly what that job is and what it entails.

The annual performance appraisal that maybe you hate or maybe you love – there’s a lot of science there. Maybe your workplace has a 360-degree feedback where you rate your boss and your co-workers. A lot of I/O psychologists were involved in that, and in popularizing it.”

When I worked in radio, I had an annual performance review where a series of bosses would sit down with me to set goals for the following year and review my progress toward the previous year’s goals. It would invariably go something like this – ‘you have exceeded expectations on four of your five goals, and met the fifth. Great work! I’m going to give you 4/5 across the board’. Why was I getting 4/5 when I had exceeded the goal? And also when I had met the goal? It turns out there was a company policy that said if an employee got a 5/5 on the report turned in to head office, they had to be given a raise. Dr. Bourdage says, “I/O can provide the tools, but whether people use them well or not is kind of on them! The job of I/O psychologists is to work with organizations to help guide them in adopting these tools and best practices”

The Oldies radio station I worked at no longer exists, the security company no longer does security or lifeguarding, and the promotion company is defunct. I am not certain about the door-to-door meat subscription company, as I no longer remember their name. I am guessing they too no longer exist. I wonder though, were they still around, how they’d be doing. On the one hand, the pandemic might have created a demand that hadn’t existed previously for a meat-subscription service, but it also would have made the door-to-door sales model something of a non-starter. By now though, some of the work of I/O psychologists would likely have trickled down to them, and they would probably have a better work environment – if only replacing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ with ‘Turn Down For What’. Dr. Bourdage thinks most companies are moving in a better direction.

“As the current Chair of CSIOP, I look around at the work being done and I feel like our field is uniquely situated to help with the problems of the day.”

Social and Personality Psychology

Dr. Cheryl Harasymchuk is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Carleton University, where her research focus on relationships from a social-psychological perspective. She is the Chair of the CPA’s Social and Personality Section. Dr. Katherine Starzyk is an associate professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Manitoba, where she studies how people respond to social injustice. Dr. John Zelenski is a professor of psychology at Carleton University, where personality psychology is the longest-running of his many research areas.

If you are following along with our Psychology Month series, you might remember Dr. Zelenski as having also participated in our spotlight on Environmental Psychology. As with so many psychological disciplines today, there is a huge amount of crossover between social/personality psychology and other fields of study.

“My first work in environmental psychology was to try to measure this individual difference that we call ‘nature-relatedness’. It refers to the degree to which people feel connected to, and part of, nature and the environment. The way we think about it is almost like a social relationship, and so we borrow some techniques and measurements from social psychology. Since ‘nature-relatedness’ is related to good things, like happiness and sustainable behaviours, it would be nice to increase it.”

This mirrors something that’s going on in personality psychology more broadly. 20 years ago the field was trying to sort out which were the most important personality dimensions. There of course thousands of potential individual differences, so they were trying to make some sense of it. That work remains ongoing, but personality psychologists have come to at least a bit of a consensus in the past couple of decades. Now they can start to ask questions about how behaviours and traits change over time, or how to increase desirable traits and appeal to some kinds of people. Says Dr. Zelenski, “I feel like personality psychology is getting on to these more interesting questions of substance and change and stability, rather than just figuring out what we’re talking about.”

There is a difference between ‘personality psychology’ and ‘social psychology, and at one point the two were not very sympatico. Some say (like Dr. Zelenski) that it was akin to a sibling rivalry. Others say it was a battle of extremes. Either way, there has been a rapprochement over the years to the point where the two now form part of the same team and are in many ways inextricably linked. Like when Nas and Jay-Z finally stopped writing diss tracks to each other in their songs, and joined together to make beautiful music on the (in-aptly named) ‘I Declare War’ tour. Dr. Harasymchuk makes the distinction.

“Psychology is the study of why and how we behave as we do. Social psychologists study how people are shaped by the people around them and the larger environment. And personality psychologists study how to define and measure the important differences between people – ranging from genes to cultures.

In the beginning there were some extreme positions, where two camps were at odds. One said it was only the context, the other said it’s only how you were born that would shape your behaviour. Since that time there has been a lot of evidence that it isn’t one extreme or the other. As an example, I study relationships from a social-psychological perspective, which means I’m mainly interested in how a person’s partner, or best friend, shapes their behaviour. But in all my research, I also examine individual difference variables. Situations depend on that person’s personality, and how they might respond to their partner or best friend. If they have a history of responding very negatively to stressors, then in the context of a relationship where they’re having a fight, their behaviour might be more negative and exaggerated than it would be for someone better able to cope with their emotions.”

The integration of social and personality research has many tangible benefits. Dr. Starzyk has worked with collaborators and partners to increase government motivation to act in response to the First Nations clean water crisis. The group includes social/personality psychologists, sociologists, economists, legal scholars, soil scientists, and more, all thinking about ways they can apply pressure to alleviate the crisis, and all supporting the work of the advocate organizations who are the public face of the effort. It’s a multi-pronged approach, where the social and personality psychologists are the ones working on influencing public opinion.

“Some of our research is on understanding things like when, and why, people will start supporting better access to clean water for First Nations in Canada. Or at what point will people become concerned about racism, or the things that are necessary to move (re)conciliation forward. Even in this context, where we’re studying things that seem very group-based, this year we’re looking at how most of the individual personality variables predict each of these things together. So once again we’re dealing with a real integration of the social and the personality science. While we can set up frames that are more likely to make people act and be concerned about these things, we’re also interested in understanding who those frames will influence more, who can we move more easily, and maybe who requires a different approach. It’s taken a long time, but the intersection is finally here!” Integrating her work in psychometrics and intergroup relations, in February 2022, the Canadian Reconciliation Barometer has released their first report (https://reconciliationbarometer.ca).

Another big shift in the last couple of decades has been toward a different outlook on the way the science itself is conducted. Dr. Harasymchuk explains,

“One of the major changes that has impacted psychology in general, as well as social and personality psychology, is a greater emphasis on promoting practices in our research through transparency and replication. It’s more common in our field now to see researchers pre-register their study hypotheses. Meaning that before they start conducting the study and collecting data, they state publicly what they expect the study to find.

Related to that is the shift we’ve seen toward a more collaborative science. If you need to get enough participants to be more confident in your results, you need to pool across many labs and resources. We were always committed to doing good science, but in the last 20 years we’ve learned so much about the importance of replication and strong sample sizes.”

The work of social/personality psychology has not only undergone many changes in the last 20 years, but it has also contributed enormously to the changes we see around us in our everyday lives. Any ad you see online or on TV, any social media platform or interactive app, is built around the way people think. Dr. Starzyk says she sees this directly quite often, “Facebook and Google and ad companies explicitly recruit graduates from social and personality psychology – we see their booths at our conferences!”

While a lot of what surrounds us is informed by social and personality psychology, our own behaviours can be explained (or perhaps studied) by researchers in the field – every decision we make, every action we take, is probably of interest to a psychologist somewhere! Dr. Harasymchuk offers an example.

“There is a subdiscipline that concerns judgement and decision-making. It’s not about the objective things we experience in a situation, it’s about our perception of them. Our perception can shape whether we decide to drive an extra ten minutes to a gas station where we know we can save a few cents per litre rather than going to the station closest to us.”

The role of social and personality psychologists has come under a bit more scrutiny this past year, as they are at the forefront when it comes to finding ways to get people to adhere to public health measures. It is certainly not as simple as ‘craft your message this way and everyone will wear a mask and get vaccinated’. It’s more about what kind of messaging, imagery, and rhetoric will encourage the most people to take the necessary precautions. Dr. Zelenski says that this process is certainly a complicated one.

“In one of my graduate seminars just last week, we were considering these competing articles in a very high-profile journal, and one of them said ‘here are all the things social psychologists have learned, apply it to the pandemic!’ and the other one was from a group that contained mostly social and personality psychologists who said ‘wait a second there – we’ve done a ton of studies, but mostly on students. This science might not be game-day ready just yet.’ Then between those, you have politicians and policy-makers who have to make a decision right now who are demanding to know if this science is helpful or not. So even within the field, I think you have some debate. We’re certainly asking and addressing those questions, and while our advice is not as good as it might be five years from now, a lot of people would say that at least it’s good enough to be helpful in the moment.”

Dr. Starzyk says a big part of the difficulty is maintaining peoples’ trust in government in order to get them to trust the public health measures being advocated by that government.

“Governments don’t always translate research into policy, and they behave really inconsistently. We know a lot about what causes trust in government. When they say you can go mask free wherever you like, and then three days later have a different guideline, people start to question whether that policy is grounded in some good reasoning.

Even though we know the contact issue is not so important, and you don’t need to sanitize everything in your home anymore, one of the reasons governments were reluctant to repeal that kind of advice is because then people might trust them less. I feel that’s probably not so wise, you want to go with what’s the best science at the time and avoid having people spend money on things they don’t need.”

The science of personality and social psychology has come a long way, but remains a little misunderstood among the general public. Hopefully this will change going forward. Social and personality psychologists help us address racism, behave in more environmental ways, and try to convince us to wear masks and get vaccinated. To live better lives.

International and Cross-Cultural Psychology

When I was eight years old, I moved with my family to Winnipeg. It was a bit of a shock the first time schools were closed because of the cold – I was pretty used to snow days in Ottawa and the thought of having one without any snow was a little odd. But my friends seemed to think this was quite normal and I did agree that being outside at that time was unpleasant enough that I too would prefer not to be in school. But the day in the spring when school was closed – because of mosquitoes – was a lot more stunning. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my friends were treating this like it was normal. “Oh yeah, let’s hang out in the basement and pretend to play Corey Hart songs in our air band. It's a mosquito day!”

Even a move from a city like Ottawa to a very similar city like Winnipeg can, for some of us, produce a small amount of culture shock. Imagine how different Winnipeg must feel to Rohit Gupta, an elite cricket player from India who moved there to study psychology at the University of Manitoba. Cultural differences, and the psychology that comes along with them, can be vast or minute – and they are all around us.

Dr. Randal Tonks is a psychologist and an instructor at Camosun College in Victoria, BC where he does a lot of research into identity and adjustment. He is the Chair of the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA and says that while there is a lot of overlap, International and Cross-Cultural are really two different areas.

“International psychology is really an umbrella term that describes the fact that a lot of psychologists work internationally on global issues. Cross-cultural psychology examines the similarities and differences of peoples’ psychological abilities and traits and so on as can be seen across different cultures.”

It was an inter-Canadian cultural difference that started Dr. Tonks down the path of cross-cultural psychology, as he too moved across the country to experience a different part of our large nation.

“I grew up in Vancouver and went to UBC as an undergrad, but I always had a passion to go to Montreal, so I moved there after I graduated from UBC. Living in that Quebec culture in the mid-1980s, things were arguably a bit more polarized even than they are today. I suddenly became aware of the role of culture and the issues I was going through. I could pass as a local as long as I didn’t open my mouth. But as soon as I spoke, I was immediately identified as someone from ‘somewhere else’. I came to see all these prejudices and biases and expectations about who I was. From those experiences, when I then decided to apply for graduate school, I came to be very interested in the processes around acculturation when people move from one place to another, and our sense of identity in the way we think of ourselves in cultural terms.”

I once spent a few days in Dalhousie, New Brunswick, where I ended up being part of a softball game against the local city council. There were no bases, but rather beer kegs that appeared to be permanent fixtures of the softball diamond. It seemed to be well-known to everyone there that if you hit a home run, the opposing team had the chance to jump over the fence, chase down the ball, and return it to the infield. If they did so before you were able to drink a beer at every base and then cross home plate, you were out. There was a self-contained limiting factor to the drinking, which was that once you had rounded the beers once there was a marked increase in the chance you would strike out the following time up. I asked what they called this sport, and they looked at me as though that was a very strange question and said ‘baseball’ with a shrug.

Dr. Gira Bhatt teaches psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. She has spent almost 2 decades involved with the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA. Her research involves culture, identity, acculturation, and prejudice – she is currently doing applied community research with ethic minorities in Canada, exploring the dynamics that pan out around them. She says one of the things cultural and cross-cultural psychologists must keep top of mind is translation. It's one of the reasons that researchers who come from the community where the research is taking place is so important.

“I was involved in one research study where we were comparing individuals from China, India, and Canadians with European backgrounds. One test item was ‘what’s your profession’? A ton of the participants in India wrote ‘service’. My colleague in China said ‘wow, isn’t that humble, that they all say they’re doing service!’ and I said ‘no no no – it doesn’t mean that. It’s just that when you have a paid profession in some companies, they call it service. It’s a distinction between running a business and doing a paid job, and it’s just the expression they use.’ If the local researchers are not involved, it can lead to those kinds of miscommunications, poor translations, and misinterpretations.”

In the past two years, there has been a renewed media focus on cultural differences, especially in terms of the pandemic. What countries are handling it best? What communities are most likely to adhere to public health guidelines? Of course, it isn’t that simple as every country and every community is made up of individuals with their own ideas and their own value systems. Dr. Bhatt says these ideas have led to a huge amount of new cross-cultural research.

“Michele Gelfand has received a lot of media attention for her work on tight culture and loose culture, especially in the context of COVID. People in China seemed very compliant, they shut themselves inside their homes and didn’t leave for three weeks, whereas here we have an anti-vaxx movement, and all these protests happening. This difference has been studied very deeply now, as to how culture shapes us in terms of compliance where social norms are more important in terms of how people adhere to public health measures. Whereas here, we have the mindset of Western individuals that ‘I do exactly what I want to do’. That’s been very relevant for us to understand.”

In something that would be unthinkable in, say, South Korea, the last few weeks have seen protests all over Canada demanding ‘freedom’ from public health measures. Along with those protests has come an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. These are things that have been on the rise since COVID first became a global pandemic, with anti-Asian hate crimes and other racist incidents happening across the country. Dr. Bhatt and Dr. Tonks were involved with several others in preparing the fact sheet on racism for the CPA, describing the underlying psychological dynamics of prejudice, hate, and discrimination. Dr. Tonks says this is a big topic in cross-cultural psychology.

“I don’t actively research prejudice, although of course in my teaching that’s one of the really big topics I bring up. When teaching cultural or cross-cultural psychology, I bring up issues around prejudice and things like colonialist perspectives in psychology. In some of my courses now I’m working on decolonizing the curriculum to bring in more Indigenous perspectives that show respect to other ways of thinking and forms of knowing. This kind of thing can contribute to change in the greater academy and the large body of psychologists carry out research across different cultures.”

A lot has been made in recent years of the breadth of psychological science, and how the vast bulk of scholarship over the history of the profession has been from a Western lens. Some of the people trying to redress this deficit, and correct for it, are cross-cultural psychologists like Dr. Bhatt.

“For a very long time, psychology was very Euro-centric. Now we understand that different cultural practices pertaining to mental health contain so many variations. So if you want culturally competent counselling, which is now kind of a buzzword, how do you prepare those therapists to be culturally competent? We can’t have a list that says ‘if someone is from X background, this is what they will be like’, because they’re living here! Their adaptation to Canada changes from one individual to the next, and we can’t have one-size-fits-all. The work on this is ongoing in the counselling and clinical fields, and a ton of work has been done – but the potential for growth is enormous.

Sometimes there are accusations that Western psychologists are ‘creating’ a syndrome. You heard this for a long time with attention disorders, and now we know there is some biological basis for these. But you come up with these terms and people from other cultures never heard of it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that it may be labeled differently. And there are syndromes that exist in other parts of the world that Western psychologists don’t know about.”

This might be the crux of cultural psychology. When culture is a variable, it affects the diagnosis, the treatment, and even the onset of psychological syndromes. There are few diseases that affect only one group of people but not others, but this does happen in psychology. Depression has been shown to manifest differently across different cultures. People from more Western, North American, or European cultures complain more about the psychological components of depression – feeling down, low energy, that kind of thing. But depression has often been identified among many of the Asian and some of the Middle Eastern cultures as more of a somatisation [a maladaptive functioning of an organ system, without underlying tissue or organ damage]. It manifests more in terms of bodily complaints, and people don’t so much report their feelings but rather these conditions affecting their bodies. Dr. Tonks provides a few more examples.

“There’s something called TKS, or Taijin Kyofusho Scale, which is a Japanese condition that has to do with a type of anxiety, with maybe a little bit of depression mixed in. It’s a fear that one is offending others with one’s presence. They may develop delusions that, for example, they have a foul body odour and that this is offensive to other people around them. This is a condition that has been well recognized within the Japanese psychological circle, and maybe starting to be recognized a bit in a few other places. This is one of those conditions that doesn’t really show up in other cultures but very clearly exists in Japan.

On the flip side, something like anorexia nervosa might be a Western kind of disease that isn’t really seen across other cultures, and it might be in part due to the socialization and cultural factors that people in North America and Europe tend to live with. In recent years, we’re beginning to see a bit of a rise in this syndrome in some other places where they have become more Westernized, and exposed to more Western media and Western culture.”

I was visiting a farmer’s market in Bangkok many years ago when an elephant sidled up next to me and took a melon. The stall keeper looked up, unperturbed, and the elephant walked away with her melon, equally unperturbed. I figured this was probably quite normal in Thailand, and farmers are likely quite willing to give up some of their produce to the local fauna – it almost certainly beats the alternative of trying to fight them for it. What seemed a little less Thai was the graffiti. The elephant was spray-painted with tags. This seemed like a very American thing to me, something that started in New York subways in the 70s, but it had obviously made its way to Thailand. I’m not sure of the effectiveness, as I understand graffiti tags being a way to mark one’s territory – and an elephant is rather mobile. But there were few elephants wandering the downtown squares unvandalized. Dr. Bhatt says that as Western culture spreads around the world, so too do the good things – and the problems – that come with it.

“The world is coming closer and closer through technology, and because of the pandemic we’re doing Zoom all the time. We’re finding that the various parts of the world which were so far away are now really close. Teenagers in other parts of the world know exactly what American teenagers are doing, and they’re very aware of where trends are going. So a lot of issues are not limited to just one culture, they’re spreading all across the globe and everyone is impacted. We know that body image is changing across time and across cultures. What’s considered attractive keeps changing, and it’s really fascinating.

I’ve learned that women in Middle Eastern countries are now wearing all kinds of expensive Western makeup under their niqabs. There have also been some sad cases where someone in Europe lures a teenager in Canada to take their own life. These are alarming times for us now. Technology has given us lots of good things, but it’s also something to worry about, as the insularity of culture does not exist the way it once did.”

Although its roots and origins can be traced back much further, cross-cultural psychology really got going in Canada in the 60s, when pioneers like Dr. John Berry (one of the founders of the International and Cross-Cultural Section of the CPA) started publishing their research. The push toward multiculturalism in the 60s and 70s led the field to grow and develop. We started to see a lot of studies on identity, and language – in particular French and English as a lot of the issues came from the politics of Canada. Dr. Bhatt and Dr. Tonks, along with Dr. John Berry, wrote a paper tracing this history, but stopped when they got to about 2000. Dr. Tonks says,

“All of a sudden, around that time, it seemed like everyone was talking about culture in one way or another. People who were not traditionally doing cross-cultural research now wanted to look at culture as a variable in their studies. Maybe the biggest change in this discipline is not the growth in the number of cross-cultural psychologists themselves, but that psychologists and other researchers outside the field are looking at facets of the way in which culture comes to play a role in, say, education or childcare or criminal justice.”

Some of those researchers outside the field of cross-cultural psychology are evolutionary psychologists, who are now looking at the role culture plays in human evolution. Others are neuroscientists, who are looking at differences in cognition between one culture and another. There have been countless examples making the news recently – when people were shown an optical illusion with two lines of identical length, African people knew right away that they were the same length, where North American people thought one was longer than the other. Another study showing people an aquarium screen saver showed that Americans saw three big colourful fish first, while Japanese people saw the water and the rocks first. Dr. Tonks says there are even a few brain studies that are starting to yield some results.

“Steve Heine from UBC in his book Cultural Psychology identified that if you do fMRI scans of Americans versus Chinese individuals and you get them to think about themselves, and then to think about their mothers, the Americans have two separate areas of their brain that are lit up – one for themselves and one for their mothers. Whereas for the Chinese participants they have the same areas of the brain lit up. It suggests that neurologically, they’re coding information about their sense of self as being connected to family in a single site, as opposed to North Americans encoding themselves separately within our brains. So some of these properties that we talk about – individualism and collectivism, for example, can arguably be seen in some neuropsychological evidence.”

We may have different brains as a result of our cultures, different syndromes and different experiences and a wide variety of mental health outcomes. But we do have a common goal – that of a collective humanity striving continuously to be better. Dr. Tonks says that cross-cultural psychology promotes “awareness of ourselves, and what our cultural biases are. Learning how other people operate culturally leads to greater sensitivity when interacting and communicating across different cultural lines. The goal a lot of cross-cultural psychologists strive toward is working in a cooperative way to build a better society.”

Preferably, a society with very few mosquitos.

Extremism and Terrorism

“I had a classmate in high school who was extremely intelligent. He wasn’t religious at that time – most Kurdish people are secular; they don’t believe much in the way of fundamental or extremist religion. When I was a Master’s student at university, I heard that he had joined Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At the time, I was wondering why some people wanted to join Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Especially when most of my friends and I were always against those groups in my province. About a year later, I heard the news that he had been killed in Afghanistan along with Abdullah Masood. I was shocked – why? Why did he join? What was the psychological root of this process?”

Dr. Yusef Karimi is Kurdish, and came here to Canada from Iran two years ago. He finished his Ph.D. in counselling psychology in Iran, where he was particularly interested in understanding what make people join groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. He went to villages at the border of Iran and Iraq for Friday prayers and then through the rest of the weekend, interviewing members of extremist groups over the course of about 4-5 years.

“I communicated with them, gathered lots of information about them, and interviewed 16 Salafi Jihadists. Unfortunately, after these interviews, three of them joined ISIS in Syria and were killed there. As a human being and as a psychologist, I had got to know these people for a while. I became depressed after they were killed. My main idea at that time was to find a way to convince people not to join these extremist groups in the first place. To this day, I’ve been still trying to find an answer for this question.”

The answer, says Dr. Karimi, is most definitely not what the West has been doing in terms of counter-terrorism, invading Afghanistan and Iraq with the goal of ‘nation-building’, drone strikes in Syria and Somalia, and all the other interventions that start with military aggression and occupation. He points to the recent events in Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban after the US withdrawal, as a good example of this flawed strategy.

“I think what has been done in the Middle East in terms of understanding and fighting extremism is doomed to failure because of the use of ineffective methods. The attempts for understanding and dissolving such extremist groups require phenomenological approaches that get to the roots of the problem. Politicians and decision-makers usually prefer to define and evaluate current extremist groups in the Middle East in terms of their existing organizational capacity rather than the actual threats posed by that group.

As a psychologist, as someone who has been in those countries in the Middle East and has been a part of that culture, what we have observed in recent months in Afghanistan is the failure of the ‘nation building’ efforts of the past 20 years. We can consider lots of factors that have led to this failure, but in my opinion, there is one factor we should consider most seriously. That is, a lack of knowledge of the psychological characteristics of the Afghan people. Psychology, in this circumstance, can provide us with a great amount of knowledge of the characteristics of an individual in a community. That can go a long way toward peace making and conflict resolution.”

The Taliban, now back in charge in Afghanistan, made headlines in recent weeks when they joined the rest of the world in calling for a peaceful resolution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This, in itself, caused a lot of reaction around the world ‘when the Taliban calls for peace, you know this is a terrible thing…’ that lacks a lot of nuances and understanding of the region.

Back in 1989, the Afghan mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union, driving them out of Afghanistan after a long and costly war. They then managed to topple the communist-backed Afghan government in place at the time, but soon fractured and, following a second civil war in Afghanistan, ceded power to the Taliban. The splintered mujahideen went off in all directions, one of which was that of Osama Bin Laden, who had been the most well-known backer of the mujahideen.

The Soviet, and now Russian, aggression is nothing new. Prior to their abhorrent invasion of Ukraine recently, Putin’s Russian military and bot farms had been engaging in cyber terrorism across the world, which could have been a signal to the rest of the world that they were building up to something more traditionally violent.

Dr. David Nussbaum is the Chair of the Extremism and Terrorism Section of the CPA. Dr. Nussbaum has a PhD in biological psychology, but says he really learned clinical psychology by driving a  cab a couple of nights a week for four years while finishing his PhD. Following his PhD, he did a postdoc in neuropsychology, where he got interested in forensic psychology. He joined the Criminal Justice section of the CPA, and headed it for 7 years. There he met Dr. Wagdy Loza, who was the chief psychologist at the Kingston Penitentiary at the time. Dr. Loza started the Extermism & Terrorism Section, and when he did Dr. Nussbaum was one of the signatories who got it initial status. This gave him an orientation in middle eastern terrorism, but he has been talking about the link between communism, extremism, and terrorism for many years.

“People are lured by this promise of a Communist utopia, the paradise of the working man. Except once they’re five years into a Marxist economy, they’re lucky to be eating. They might then say they’re experiencing buyer remorse and they want to get rid of this government. That’s when the totalitarian, draconian nature of the statist comes out. You have Russian gulags, and so on.”

The totalitarian, draconian nature of Putin the statist is currently on full display, as the world responds to the invasion of Ukraine with almost universal condemnation. It is, however, interesting to see the difference between the world’s reaction to this invasion when contrasted to the US invasion of Afghanistan, or the Saudi Arabian offensive against Yemen. War is war, whether it takes place in the Middle East or in Europe, and Dr. Nussbaum is clear that there is no one location where terrorism, or the ideologies that produce it, thrives.

“Terrorism is not limited to one geographic location, one specific ideology, there are terrorists around the world and there have been for millennia. Now, in the last 25-30 years it has become a major issue because of various ideologies that seek to take over the Globe (or huge parts of it). One of the things they do to influence governments and citizens is the use of terrorism to instill fear, so that people will comply with their dictates. It’s always done for a political end.”

Dr. Karimi points out that over the course of history, we have often had to recalibrate what we thought we knew, thanks to extremist violence that we had not previously considered.

“We had some experience with fascism and racism in Germany before World War II. In the 20^th century Hannah Arendt said with rising totalitarianism we were faced with a new phenomenon, and a new reality. The political thought had never faced this before, so she said we had to establish a new science of politics to explain and interpret totalitarianism. Like what Alexis de Tocqueville said in the 18^th century after the French Revolution. Today, psychology – and political psychology in particular – is faced with yet another new phenomenon, and a new reality. It raises many questions, like how can we understand the individual in a society like Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq, where social order is established mostly on a tribe structure? Trying to ‘build a new nation’ in Afghanistan was not at all in line with that culture.”

After 9/11, extremism started to become a serious problem in North America, with far-right groups springing up with an anti-Islamist foundation. Western efforts to suppress those groups and avoid giving them a platform worked only so long, and in the last few years that extremism has reached new heights as it has grown in power. We have seen tendrils of those extremists reaching into events like Charlottesville, the January 6^th attack on the US Capitol, and more recently the ‘freedom convoy’ that occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks this year.

For Dr. Karimi, the solution to this problem is similar to the solution to Middle Eastern terrorism – get to people before they become extremists. It will be a long process, and can’t happen overnight, but understanding the culture and embracing it will sow the seeds for a de-escalation of extremism in the future. He says of Canada, his home for the last year,

“Lots of immigrants come to Canada, which is good because they bring a lot of external knowledge with them. But we should have a plan to integrate these people and their culture. It’s all well and good to take in a lot of immigrants, and refugees, and so on – but there has to be a plan to integrate them into the Canadian society. To have them live together with other Canadians in an integrated way so they are not seen as ‘the other’ the way so many currently do. It’s good that we have a multicultural country, but we could be doing so much more to use this multiculturalism to improve Canada.”

Psychology in the Military

In the mid-1980s, “a real military exercise was taking place in Europe, involving countries from all over the world. The West Germans were put in charge of ‘psychological warfare’. Although it was a training exercise and everyone involved knew that it wasn’t a real war, they put a single pamphlet together that ground the entire exercise to a halt. They waited until about late in week two of this exercise. The soldiers who were ‘front line’ had been sleeping in mud, they were filthy, and they were tired. If they were sleeping at all, they were sleep deprived – basically feeling absolutely miserable. The pamphlet the West Germans dropped looked exactly like an advertisement from a nearby pizza parlour – offering to deliver free pizzas to the rear echelon folks - the medics, the supply people and those who weren’t on the fighting end. When the soldiers in the field saw that while they were living in filth and eating ration packs, their fellow soldiers were back there eating free pizzas, they said screw it and they quit. You wouldn’t do that in an actual wartime scenario, but in this peacetime scenario this huge discrepancy between how they were living and how they perceived others were living was enough for them to say they weren’t playing anymore.”

Dr. Allister MacIntyre spent 31 years in the Canadian Armed Forces as a Personnel Selection Officer. He has a PhD in social psychology, but his dissertation was more concerned with work behaviour – culture, climate, and leadership in the Canadian Air Force. When he was still in uniform, he spent time in West Germany completing their army’s psychological warfare course for NATO Officers, and now brings some of the principles he learned there into the influence and persuasion course he teaches at the military college.

When many of us think of ‘psychological warfare’ we think of the US military playing Van Halen at full blast for days on end to torture Manuel Noriega out of his fortress in Panama. (Playing Panama by Van Halen in this scenario was, in this writer’s humble opinion, cheesy and way too on-the-nose.) Recently the so-called “freedom convoy” that gridlocked Ottawa for three weeks was accused of ‘psychological warfare’ by politicians, judges, and law enforcement for constantly honking horns and blaring sirens that disrupted the sleep patterns and daily lives of residents in the area. Dr. MacIntyre says the general concept is a lot broader than that.

“’’Psychological warfare’ is not viewed as a discipline in psychology, it’s much more of a military discipline that uses psychological principles. It involves things like propaganda – to influence your enemies and also to gain support on the home front. People think psychological warfare is all about doing something to the enemy, but a lot of it is garnering support from your own nation to say ‘we’re really doing some legitimate work here’. Some of the things I learned on that course were really quite fascinating, in terms of getting to know the culture of the group you’re trying to influence so you know what triggers to use to get them to sway one way or the other.”

Dr. Damian O’Keefe has his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, studying human behaviour in the workplace. Like Dr. MacIntyre, he has 30 years military service, and he currently works as a civilian Defence Scientist in the personnel research and analysis division of the Department of National Defence where he conducts applied research to support personnel policy for the Canadian Armed Forces. He’s quick to point out that Canadian psychologists do not engage in psychological warfare.

“Almost all of us would have done our psychology degree in Canada, and so we all follow the CPA code of ethics. Do No Harm is the fundamental principle by which we guide ourselves.”

The most common job for a uniformed psychologist in the Canadian military is as a Personnel Selection Officer. Psychology has been part of the Canadian military since the Second World War, when psychologists helped the army come up with an efficient way to choose volunteers who would be taking up a number of different positions within the military. Ever since then, psychologists have been involved in selecting military personnel. You can learn more about the origins of psychology in the military, and the associated jobs psychologists currently do, in a chapter of the Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science, co-authored by Dr. O’Keefe, Samantha Urban, and Dr. Wendy Darr.

Dr. Wendy Darr is also involved in selection and assessment, and she recently took over (from Dr. O’Keefe) as the Chair of the CPA’s Psychology in the Military Section. She is also a civilian Defence Scientist who conducts personnel research and analysis for the military. Dr. Darr’s research involves developing new selection tools to screen and recruit people who want to become soldiers, sailors, and aviators. She describes the criteria for being accepted into the military in Canada.

“We are largely looking for what 100 years of research shows is the best predictor of job performance, which is general cognitive ability. The Canadian Armed Forces trains everyone, and a lot of that training is expensive. So we want to make sure we’re investing in someone who has the aptitude and the capacity to succeed, especially in some of the more technical jobs. So at the very basic level we’re looking to see if you’re of sound mind and have the ability to learn. The second thing is personality. Do you fit in with the demands of the military environment? We are looking for those who espouse military values. Does someone have the innate ability to succeed in a rules-based environment, to be organized and structured, and to lead when necessary? We’re also looking for people who have what it takes to perform in this adverse environment. Are you emotionally stable? Military training can be tough, so we want to make sure they have what it takes to handle the pressures of training.”

The military relies on disciplines across psychology. They have industrial, organizational, and social psychologists as well as clinical psychologists to help military members who struggle with mental health issues These psychologists work in military health care clinics and certain specialized units. The vast majority of psychologists work in the 31 military health care clinics located across Canada, which include seven Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centres (OTSSCs) and provide mental health services very similar to what is delivered in hospitals. (Also taken from the Canadian Handbook for Careers in Psychological Science.)

Dr. Susan Dowler is the Chief Clinical Psychologist at the Directorate of Mental Health within Canadian Forces Health Services. She is the senior practice leader for psychology, which means she is involved in establishing the practice guidelines and compliance, doing investigations if there are problems, and setting up educational training. Unlike personnel selection officers, clinical psychologists are always civilians.

“As far as  clinical psychologists are concerned, they’re not military members, they’re not in uniform. They’re either public service employees or they’re contracted resources. Some other countries have clinical psychologists embedded in units – the US for example does this – but this is generally not done in Canada.”

In January of 1994, Romeo Dallaire sent a now-famous ‘genocide fax’ to the headquarters of the UN, warning that a genocide was being planned in Rwanda. A few months later, the genocide began as between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis were killed over a period of about 100 days. Dallaire, feeling abandoned and ignored by the UN and having witnessed months of unimaginable horrors, suffered greatly from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after Rwanda. He pushed to create specialized mental health services for individuals suffering from operational stress injuries.  Dr. Dowler says the first OTSSC was created in 1999.

Clinical psychologists have become more and more involved with the military over the years, and play an essential role when problems present themselves. The stigma associated with seeking mental health help has always been prevalent in society, but especially in the military where, as Dr. MacIntyre says, “people are expected to be strong”. He and Dr. O’Keefe both did tours in Australia, working with the Australian army. They noted many years ago that every single soldier who had been deployed for any reason had to visit a psychologist upon their return to Australia. It was just for a screening, but it eliminated some of the stigma of going to talk to someone because everyone had to do it. Dr. Dowler says there is a similar practice in the Canadian military as well.

“We have had mandatory post-deployment screens for a very long time. Within 3-6 months after deployment, soldiers fill out some questionnaires and have an interview with a clinical social worker. If any information is flagged as potentially problematic, they are referred to mental health services.  To see a psychologist you have to be referred from the medical personnel.”

The post-deployment screenings are just part of a process for soldiers after experiencing combat. Psychologists have added another step to make returning to Canada and home life a little easier and more successful. Dr. O’Keefe explains,

“When soldiers come back from overseas deployment, they go through ‘third location decompression’. That’s a two or three day period in which they come out of theatre which has been potentially very bad. They go to a very calm, mostly warm location where they get briefings from people like Susan (clinical psychologists) and other professionals who  tell them ‘if you’re experiencing this symptom, here’s what you need to do’. You can’t put soldiers on an airplane and send them straight home from Afghanistan. They need to have time to decompress and to process what happened. And, of course, to get professional help if they need it.”

Psychologists are involved in the military process from the moment someone enlists right up to all the years after they complete their last tour. Helping them train, perform, and heal so that they will be as healthy, adjusted, and emotionally stable as possible when they head out to that pizza party.