Chelsea Mills (left) and Alex Mathison observe snow monkeys at the Minnesota Zoo as part of their psychology project.

It’s a droll contrast to the indoor viewing area, where a thunderous procession of schoolchildren, hopped up in a frenzy of field-trip fever, press their noses to the windows, beseeching the primates to entertain them.

These Japanese macaques, more commonly known as snow monkeys, are the subject of a study conducted by St. Thomas seniors Paige Peterson, Chelsea Mills and Alex Mathison. The trio recorded six hours of video footage of the monkeys over six days in an effort to study the primates’ play behavior. Specifically, they scrutinized the younger monkeys (under 4 years old) and infants to determine how parental interference influences their play behavior.

One logistical challenge the group faced was dodging the aforementioned packs of children – free from watchful parents’ eyes – gone wild. Apparently, they enjoyed monkeying around with their cameras. “There were so many times when our cameras were blocked by a kid standing in front of them − sometimes done on purpose to wave at the camera − or were bumped into, which moved the camera angle around,” Mills said.

When mommy’s away, the children will play

Dr. Sarah Hankerson, a psychology professor at St. Thomas and adviser for the project, said, “This project represents one of the first attempts to understand why Japanese macaque mothers are so protective of their young. By focusing on the circumstances surrounding intervention, we can generate strong hypotheses on maternal concern. We can also examine the frequency, composition and timing of play bouts.”

Before beginning the study, Peterson, the project’s lead researcher and a psychology major, hypothesized that “there will be very few events of play (chasing, light biting and pulling, etc.) behavior inside a 10-foot circle of the mothers.”

Why? The group expected that the juvenile monkeys, much like humans, would feel less pressure to conform to adult social practices the further away they are from their mothers. They chose 10 feet because it seemed to be the easiest distance when making assessments from afar through videos.

Peterson explained that the social structure of Japanese snow monkeys is considered “despotic” (with the alpha male, beta male and older mothers, in that hierarchical order, ruling the roost) and that, contrary to the popular belief that monkeys swing care-free from tree to tree all day, snow monkeys have low levels of social tolerance.

“Based on previous studies,” she said, “it appears that since mothers don’t have good social bonds with other adults, they are going to be more protective with their offspring. This prevents the young monkeys from having contact with other group members. Babies are overprotected and grow into overprotective parents. It’s a cycle. They’ll try to play, but mothers usually keep one hand on their babies.”

Hankerson explained further that “as a result of strong maternal concern, it is possible that Japanese macaque juveniles need to be ‘sneaky’ in order to engage in play behavior.” She added that of any well-studied primate species, snow monkeys are the top party poopers – a fact that sparked Peterson’s curiosity; likewise, much of primate research investigates the connections between humans and or evolutionary predecessors, and according to past research the team scoured before beginning their study, scientists already have determined that both humans and primates spend much less time playing as they become grown-ups.

According to Hankerson, “Non-human primates can tell us a lot about the basic structure of behavior in group settings. We can look at the rudimentary way individuals handle conflict and affiliation. Being highly social animals, Japanese macaques can serve as models of group dynamics. This study looks at play behavior, which may seem a non-functional activity, but infants (both human and non-human) develop skills, improve physical strength and dexterity, and learn a lot about the world around them and their place in it by engaging in play behavior.”

The students’ research of human children found that the tapering of children’s play behavior coincides with the time period when schools eliminate recess from the children’s school day – roughly at the end of middle school.

Furthermore, Mills and Mathison explained, “In humans, authority figures place pressure on children to stop playing, causing play to become less frequent as they grow older. This pressure may be perceived by children that it’s time to focus on school and conform to a more structured schedule. Seeing this sort of behavioral pattern in snow macaques could suggest that we are not the only species to experience these types of pressures.”

What the group found after reviewing the footage was consistent with their hypothesis, with a small twist. Mills said, “The young monkeys played more often, and for longer periods of time, when they were farther away from the mothers. Chasing play tended to happen even if their mothers were close (less than 10 feet away), but a lot of the wrestling and biting play happened when they were farther away (more than 10 feet ). When the mothers were close and the young monkeys started wrestling, the mothers tended to interrupt their play, too.”

She added that while play behavior lets young monkeys practice certain behaviors on their own (such as how to avoid a predator), it can be troublesome to the group as a whole. “Play behavior tends to draw a lot of attention to the group, making them more noticeable to predators,” Mills noted. ”Along these lines we can kind of understand the role it plays in human behavior, too. While playing for a child is really important in their own individual development, it’s only when they reach the age when play stops that they can really start contributing to society as a whole. I think whether that is a good thing or bad thing just depends on how you look at it and what you consider to be more important.”

Although there are many mysteries still to be solved regarding snow monkey behavior, relatively speaking, much has been discovered, as they are among the world’s most studied animals.

The group hopes that “this research could help give insight into the complicated evolutionary pressures we experience today and the reasons behind why we experience them.”

About snow monkeys

Japanese macaques are the northernmost-living nonhuman primate and are native to Japan. Many inhabit northern Nagano, a mountain town in Japan that hosted the 1998 winter Olympics.

They are one of the few animals that are known, like humans, to wash their food before eating it. Their diet includes insects, soil, leaves, fruit and fish.

They also have been known to roll snowballs and fling them at each other in playful fights.

So why weren’t the monkeys, uh, monkeying around much on that cold day in April? Peterson shrugged and took a guess: “I think they’re a lot like us that way. In this weather they just want to hole up and keep warm.”

Tonia Bock

Consider for a moment two extreme historical examples: Martin Luther King Jr. and Adolph Hitler. The degree to which each was a good person is a rather stark contrast. One worked to alleviate gross societal injustices and oppression while the other worked to instigate it. How did each get to be such a person?

We can look to historical biographical sources, of course, to help answer this question. Yet we also want a more general answer that applies not only to these two individuals but also to you and me, and our young generation in particular. How do infants become morally upright adults? Ultimately, psychologists studying morality, such as myself, want to understand moral development so that we can inform teachers how to facilitate, strengthen and support future generations’ moral character. Some psychologists (e.g., the late Lawrence Kohlberg) dedicate their entire career to advance our knowledge of moral development so that we can educate our young to be more like King and less like Hitler.

One of the first generations of psychologists studying moral development (e.g., Kohlberg) focused on understanding how our reasoning about right and wrong changes from childhood to adulthood. The psychologists believed that adults who grow to reason in morally principled ways will behave morally. Plato once said, “To know the good is to do the good.” If we know the morally principled thing to do, then we will do just this. Right? Certainly this early generation of psychologists believed as much. Many studies since have shown that the psychologists weren’t necessarily wrong – there is a positive correlation between moral reasoning development and moral behavior; however, the correlation, even though it is statistically significant, is pretty small, meaning that knowing the right thing to do does not always lead to the person doing the right thing. We have countless examples of this from history as well as from our everyday lives. We regularly see news stories about politicians and Hollywood stars who do things they know are wrong. If we look closely at ourselves, we see that we also sometimes do things we know are wrong, except that unlike the politicians and stars, our wrongdoings are not usually news headlines.

So if people know the right thing to do, why don’t they just do it? This question has inspired some psychologists studying morality to turn their attention away from moral knowledge and reasoning to a concept called moral identity. What is moral identity? It is generally defined as the degree to which moral concerns (e.g., justice, caring, generosity) are a central part of one’s identity (i.e., your sense of who you are). It is a somewhat new concept, with psychologists starting to develop slightly different conceptualizations. Regardless of how psychologists are conceptualizing moral identity, they all assume and are interested in individual differences, meaning that some individuals have a strong moral identity while others have a weak one. Individuals with a very strong moral identity prioritize moral commitments over all other nonmoral commitments, obligating themselves to live consistently with their respective moral concerns; thus, one who has a strong moral identity would feel compelled to be a good person, at least respective to his or her prioritized moral commitments. Theoretically, then, these people would not only know the good but also prioritize and consistently do the good. A person with a weak moral identity, on the other hand, would highly prioritize nonmoral commitments (e.g., having wealth, being attractive, being popular) over moral commitments; thus, he or she would be more likely to know the right thing to do but not act accordingly with their knowledge, presumably because they are more driven by their highly prioritized nonmoral commitments.

Being a psychologist who studies morality, I of course find this notion of moral identity to be quite fascinating. My particular interest in this area surrounds two specific questions: How do we think moral identity is developed over time? How do we best assess people’s moral identity? Given that psychologists are still working on their theoretical conceptualizations of moral identity, there is a lot of work to be done on answering both of these questions. I’ll briefly sketch out some of the ideas and challenges that lie ahead for us.

If psychologists presume that individuals vary in how strong their moral identity is, then they should have some idea about how these differences emerge over time; currently, it seems we have some very general ideas. Some psychologists mention the importance of parenting in early childhood, describing how parents who frequently, consistently and jointly attend to the moral dimensions of situations with their young child will help them to not only build mental images of what it means to be a moral person but also construct memories of morally relevant events and interactions.

Other psychologists have focused on the importance of moral identity formation in adolescence. According to them, adolescence is a time of unique growth in cognitive, social and personal understandings. Individuals in their teens (and early 20s) become better able to construct more complex notions of who they are, now being able to incorporate abstract ideals and traits, possibly moral, into their sense of identity. To date, the most specific theory of moral identity formation argues that individuals must simultaneously develop and increasingly prioritize the values of (a) benevolence and (b) achievement. As the theory goes, these two values are initially independent from one another. As they become increasingly prioritized, the person cannot allocate his or her attention and resources to both – the person either needs to choose one over the other or integrate them. According to this theory, those who integrate the values of benevolence and achievement in their goals and commitments are those who have the strongest moral identity. Initial research has supported such a developmental model, but there is a long road ahead to more fully verifying it. It is hoped that additional explanations and models of moral identity development will also be advanced in the near future to paint a more complete picture of moral identity development from birth through old age.

My other interest in moral identity is how we should best assess it. The currently existing assessments have faced some rather serious criticisms. A few paper-pencil surveys of moral identity exist. The advantages of this type of assessment are that they are very easy for researchers to use and participants to complete. For example, one assessment has several virtues listed at the top of the survey (e.g., caring, fair, generous). Participants are then asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree with several statements about the importance of these virtues. Not surprisingly, all participants rate these virtues as being important to who they are. Individual differences exist, but they are very small.

The main criticism is that surveys such as these underestimate the individual differences in moral identity because, well, who would want to acknowledge that these virtues are not important to them? Psychologists call this social desirability bias, and it is a frequent issue in any research that deals with morality.

The other type of moral identity assessments are lengthy, intensive individual interviews. Social desirability is less of an issue because researchers ask rather general open-ended questions about how the interviewees describe themselves. The main disadvantage, though, is the time and energy it takes psychologists to not only conduct the interviews but also reliably code and analyze the data. Few researchers use this method, and when they do, it takes a rather long time to complete the entire research process.

These are just a few examples of the issues and challenges that researchers currently face in studying moral identity. I am quite confident that exciting theories and research are yet to come. I am most curious about how important researchers will find moral identity to be in doing the good. Maybe one day we can modify Plato’s saying to read, “To prioritize the good is to do the good.”

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I would say that my interest in behavioral neuroscience is both inborn and a product of my upbringing. I grew up on a farm in East Texas. My mother is a veterinarian, and our farm served as a makeshift convalescence home for injured and abandoned animals of all types (horses, pigs, gerbils, cats, dogs, llamas, emus, cows, peacocks, iguanas, turtles, chickens and geese, etc). I accompanied my mom to the vet clinic, rode “shotgun” with her on house calls, observed the necropsy process and watched how she worked to patch up, nurture and train our own brood. I remember asking my mother what specific animals were thinking, and she would answer with such precision that I believed she could literally understand secret languages of animals. She helped hone my process of observation and encouraged me to “notice what happens when… .”

My father was a health physicist and an amateur astronomer. I remember feeling in awe of the enormous range of scale he worked with – gasses measured in the parts per million in the laboratory and a telescope at home trained on objects millions of miles away. I inherited from my father an appreciation for measurement and calculation. The family games we played (Scrabble, bridge and poker) involved assessments of risk versus reward. From my father, I learned to speculate, “what would happen if… .”

Growing up, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you when football season ended and basketball season began, but I did have a sense of natural rhythms like the periodicity of hurricanes, lunar cycles, breeding seasons and blue bonnet blooms. I knew when the chickens went to roost, when the horses would start pawing and snorting for their feed and when the barn rats and cats started their nightly pas de deux. When I travelled, I noticed the different patterns in human activity; e.g., how Spaniards and Moroccans retreat for a few hours each day when the sun is overhead but stay awake long into the night, and how Icelanders reveled in the midnight sun.

When I started college at Transylvania University, a small liberal arts college in Lexington, Ky., I became acutely aware that I was a morning person living in a night owl world. I was bright-eyed for morning classes, but missed out on plenty of social events because I liked to be in bed by 10 p.m. I started off taking science and math classes but quickly became fascinated by the field of neuroscience and designed my own biopsychology major. To quote from one of my favorite hymns, I wanted to know more about “the mystic harmony/ linking sense to sound and sight.”

I enrolled in a Ph.D. neuroscience program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research mentors, a psychiatrist and comparative anatomist, invited me to join them on a project investigating how the rat brain responds to different types of light exposure. After speaking with Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel about his research on how rearing kittens in complete darkness permanently disrupted visual skills like depth perception, I was inspired to investigate what happened to animals’ sleep patterns when they were exposed to all dark or all light (like that of a neonatal ICU ward) for the first few weeks of their lives. In short, our research team found that rats deprived of light early in life were hyper responsive to light cues (like the folks who fall asleep in lecture as soon as the lights are dimmed), whereas the rats who were reared in all light weren’t able to adjust their sleep patterns to new lighting conditions (like people who are more sensitive to jetlag). These behavioral changes reflected actual anatomical differences in the eye-brain connections.

Once I began teaching college full time and I witnessed the delirium and exhaustion of students struggling to stay awake, my research focus switched from rats to students. Sleep is a good indicator of overall health, and college students in the United States are at the center of a major public health crisis. Most psychological and physiological illnesses involve disruptions in sleep, and likewise, disruptions in sleep can contribute to illness. Diagnosed mental illnesses in college students have been on the rise and freshmen are reporting higher levels of stress than any previous generation. My first research endeavor in this field was to document exactly how poorly college students are sleeping and to start to figure out what was most responsible for disturbing sleep in students.

I did an extensive survey of over 1,000 students to evaluate relationships between sleep quality, schedule, “sleep hygiene,” mood, psychoactive substance use and academic performance. Not surprisingly, we found that students weren’t getting enough sleep; however, the reason for their lack of good quality sleep was surprising to me. Feeling stressed provided the largest explanatory power for poor sleep quality, whereas alcohol and caffeine consumption and consistency of sleep schedule were not significant predictors of sleep quality. These data are published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, and to the best of my knowledge, this article has the largest sample size and includes the most extensive survey on sleep behaviors of any published article on sleep in college students in the United States. This study also received considerable attention in the popular media, and was summarized as a press release by Medical News Today.

Now that we know more about how students are sleeping, our next step is to figure out how to improve it. College students in particular are notorious for bad sleep hygiene – sleeping in on the weekends, socializing, studying or playing video games late into the night, and using triple shot lattes and 5-hour energy drinks to fuel their busy lifestyles. Although most contemporary guidelines focus on improving sleep hygiene, my research suggests that teaching students cognitive and behavioral techniques to help manage their stress and anxiety might be a more effective intervention strategy. I currently am partnering with the St. Thomas Student Wellness Center to follow a group of freshmen who have gotten together every morning to enjoy a healthy breakfast and talk about issues that are stressful for students (finances, relationships, time management, etc). We haven’t analyzed the data yet, but I suspect that just taking time every day to meet and talk face to face will have a positive impact on these students’ sleep, stress and health. People love to talk about sleep, and college students are certainly no exception. Students working with me have compared levels of cortisol hormone and immune function of those students with regular schedules versus those with irregular ones; have convinced students to go to bed with their cell phones off and measure differences in their sleep quality; and have studied the effects of energy drinks on decision-making behavior. I have really enjoyed teaching students to apply a critical lens to their own sleep and health. I trained that lens on myself, too and noticed, for example, how my sleep switched to a bi-phasic pattern during the last few weeks of pregnancy to a fragmented delirium during the first week with our newborn daughter. My hope is to figure out ways to make everyone sleep a little better in this frenetic, caffeinated 24-hour world.

Roxanne Prichard is professor of psychology at the College of Arts and Sciences.

From Exemplars, a publication of the Grants and Research Office.

Dr. Susan Huber

The University of St. Thomas is pleased to announce Dr. Elise Amel, College of Arts and Sciences, Psychology Department, has been promoted to full professor. The recommendation was made by the Tenure and Promotion Committee at its December 2012 meeting and subsequently was approved by Father Dennis Dease, president of the University of St. Thomas.

The granting of promotion recognizes the achievements of faculty in their teaching, professional engagement and service to the university. Please join me in congratulating Dr. Amel for her outstanding work.

The fundamental cause of all “environmental problems” is human behavior. These problems are happening because many of the ways humans fulfill their needs (and wants) are incompatible with the natural processes that maintain ecological integrity. As experts in human perception, learning, emotion, thinking and behavior, psychologists will serve a crucial role in redirecting our ecologically destructive trajectory and promoting a sustainable future.

The relevance of psychology to environmental issues is something even colleagues in our discipline only recently have begun to recognize. “Conservation psychology” refers to basic and applied research with the goal of promoting a sustainable future. We tend to refer to ourselves as conservation psychologists but have all served as officers of Division 34 (until recently called Population and Environmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. We have published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology and we are all on the editorial board of Ecopsychology and have published in that journal as well. Whatever it is that we do – conservation psychology, ecopsychology or environmental psychology – we are known among our colleagues nationwide as the Minnesota Green Gals.

We each have lengthy autobiographical narratives of how we became inspired to bring environmental issues into our professional lives. More important is the story of how we became the Green Gals, our collaborative team of the past seven years. Elise Amel and Britain Scott first began a conversation about doing green research together in 2001 while sipping hot cocoa amidst clouds of cigarette smoke in the Café de Flore in Paris. Teaching a J-Term abroad course that was exclusively sited in urban settings (Paris and London), inspired in them a sense of urgency about the environmental crisis. Meanwhile, Manning was living in Germany, where she had been working for several years in a research position at the University of Hamburg. Although she, too, was immersed in urban Europe, she was surrounded by examples of environmentally progressive practices and became interested in environmental research conducted by German psychologists. When she moved back to the United States with her family in 2003, Manning was eager to find like-minded colleagues. Through community networks, she tracked down Scott and came knocking on her office door. Scott took Manning down the hall to meet Amel, and a research program was born.

Following our values and passions was not risk-free. Such significant changes in the direction of our research required substantial time investment in uncharted territory. Conservation psychology was not the area of expertise for which any of us were hired by St. Thomas. The work seemed fringy from a traditional psychology perspective. Luckily, in the years since we’ve engaged in this work, St. Thomas has committed itself publicly to similar ideals and action. In 2008 Father Dennis Dease signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality at St. Thomas by 2035 and making sustainability a priority in student education. The Board of Trustees approved a strategic priority under Catholic Identity pledging that St. Thomas will “cultivate an ethic of environmental stewardship, and will integrate principles of environmental sustainability across the curriculum and in co-curricular activities in order to educate students to appreciate their roles and obtain tools for leadership and innovation in care for God’s Creation.” We are grateful that what we study is fully supported by the university.

To adequately address climate change, some organizations talk about the importance of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, while others talk about the equivalent 2 percent per year until 2050. Which would motivate you?

Working With the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

Students find this work fascinating and relevant (which is handy since we rely on them for data collection at large public venues). Over the years we’ve worked with dozens of student researchers who have scouted potential public data collection venues, run lab experiments, reviewed literature, co-written papers, presented at professional conferences and earned research grants. Students are able to jump in at times when faculty are overwhelmed with other tasks that would otherwise bring the research to a grinding halt. Even though few of our students go on to graduate work in conservation psychology (especially since there are not yet any graduate programs specific to this area), we all benefit from the work we’ve accomplished together.

Our most extensive community collaboration, with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, has been both synergistic and rewarding. We’ve collected data for them at the Living Green Expo and the Minnesota State Fair (nestled between the lumberjack field and the Jacuzzi sales tent). Based on our findings and knowledge of psychology, we’ve suggested strategies for engaging folks at their events to increase sustainable behavior (e.g., practice loading a bike onto an MTC bus, on-site registration for wind-source power and junk-mail reduction). In turn, we get to ask large groups of everyday Minnesotans to participate in our research projects. We also have collected data in other public venues, including the Rondo Days and Grand Old Day street fairs and during a rally on the steps of the state Capitol.

Survey-style research in the field has its challenges (e.g., persuading people to participate, confronting illiteracy) and lacks the comfortable control of laboratory experimentation, but it gives us access to a more diverse population of participants than is typical of most psychology research (which is conducted primarily on college student samples). It isn’t always easy to work outside of the ivory tower, but we believe that application is a vital component of conservation psychology.

It is important to us that we work toward the common good in collaboration with undergraduate students and community partners. It is not only fulfilling but consistent with the mission and values of St. Thomas. We’d like to share some of our recent research findings to give you a flavor of the diverse set of questions psychologists address.

Research HighlightsHow Goal Setting Applies to Climate-Related Behaviors

One robust finding in psychology is that people accomplish more when they set specific, challenging, manageable goals rather than vague “do your best” goals or no goal at all. We expected this same pattern for environmental behaviors, and so we have investigated how goal-setting affects people’s sense of self-efficacy when they are trying to become more sustainable.

To adequately address climate change, some organizations talk about the importance of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, while others talk about the equivalent 2 percent per year until 2050. Which would motivate you? Our results show that people who are trying to live more sustainably do not tend to distinguish between these, believing both are good goals. On the other hand, folks who have not really contemplated living differently find the 2 percent goal more compelling. Another distinction is that, when given a choice of the two goals, people who choose the 80 percent option do so because they sense an urgency that is not represented by the 2 percent goal, while those who choose the 2 percent goal think it is more feasible. Both the 80 percent and 2 percent goals are still what we would consider vague, or distal, goals and people respond to them by thinking they need to learn new skills, which can be a big barrier to behavior change. When more detail is provided, however, such as replacing 30 miles of driving per month with combining trips, taking public transportation, biking, carpooling or walking, people feel like they already have the skills to engage. So, what we know about goal-setting applies to climate-related behaviors.

Can Message Framing Make Climate Change Relevant?

The way an idea is presented makes a difference in how we react to it and what our brains do with it. Variations in source, context and emphasis all can affect how we respond to the very same message. For example, imagine turning on the radio and hearing someone promoting conservation. How would you respond to her message if she was identified as an “environmentalist”? Would you respond the same way if she were called a “concerned citizen”? Our research suggests not.

One of our recent framing studies presented information about climate change. For most Minnesotans, climate change feels like a distant issue. Though the scientific facts tell us it is happening, we have only an intellectual understanding, not an experiential one. Without experience, it is hard to feel that climate change is personally relevant. Thus, we examined whether framing could make climate change less psychologically distant and more personally relevant. We created a scenario describing climate change impacts and varied (1) the geographic distance described (in Minnesota versus in Kenya) and (2) whether or not the focus was on humans (people versus an important bird species). We thus had four scenarios describing climate change impacts on (1) people in Minnesota, (2) people in Kenya, (3) loons in Minnesota and (4) flamingos in Kenya.

Our results were intriguing. As we expected, when the setting was Kenya, participants were more alarmed by the scenario with people than the one with flamingos; however, when the setting was Minnesota, participants felt less psychological distance from climate change (and were more willing to make a donation to help) when the scenario described loons rather than people! One possible interpretation is that reading about negative climate impacts to us and our loved ones is uncomfortably threatening, so participants buffered themselves emotionally against this message. We are designing a follow-up study to test this hypothesis.

Loving nature does not require understanding natural systems or how our actions affect those systems. On the other hand, living sustainably in nature does require such an understanding.

Humans’ Connection to Nonhuman Nature

Ecopsychologists propose that connection to nonhuman nature is good for mental health – and good for the health of the planet – because it keeps us mindful of who we are and of the ecological systems on which we rely for life support; however, contemporary, urban-industrial lifestyles create physical distance, and, therefore, psychological distance, between people and nonhuman nature. The result, they say, is that we find ourselves feeling lost, anxious, stressed, depressed and unfulfilled because we are out of touch with our natural rhythms, needs and identities. We also behave in ecologically inharmonious ways because we are several steps removed from basic realities such as the sources of our food and origins of the raw materials required for our shelter, tools and clothing. In recent years, several researchers have devised measures for assessing individuals’ sense of connection to nature to test these ideas. In our work on this topic, we have identified and attempted to fill a gap concerning the way connection to nature is conceptualized and measured.

A consistent theme running through various researchers’ conceptualizations of connection to nature is that being connected involves both one’s sense of identity and one’s emotions. The more one defines and experiences oneself as part of nature, the more empathy one should feel for other living things and this should, therefore, be positively correlated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Thus, the self-reporting designed to measure connection to nature focuses on people’s feelings. The problem that we see with this is that humans’ connection to nature is not merely spiritual nor emotional – it is a genuine physical link. Without nonhuman nature, we do not survive. The environmental crisis does not just jeopardize our sacred places, our favorite getaway spots or the scenic landscapes and beloved critters that we like to photograph – it threatens our ability to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves. Although an affective or spiritual connection to nature may be the best that most of us urban-dwellers will achieve, we are not convinced that it is sufficient to inspire environmentally conscious decisions. Loving nature does not require understanding natural systems or how our actions affect those systems. On the other hand, living sustainably in nature does require such an understanding.

This is why we devised a new measure that we call “Participation in Nature” (PIN). Items on the PIN describe engagement in the kinds of activities that were routine in ancestral hunter-gatherer groups (e.g., foraging for wild edibles or shelter building). We hypothesize that by participating directly in the fulfillment of our survival needs, we develop a practical, respectful attitude toward the rest of the natural world that is neither unrealistically reverent, nor dangerously domineering. We wondered, therefore, whether individuals who participate in nature more would report greener attitudes and behaviors overall.

To explore this, we collected data from people at the Minnesota State Fair and at the Lake Superior Traditional Ways Gathering. The Gathering is a weeklong encampment on pristine Anishinabe lands where participants offer and attend workshops on earth-living skills (e.g., hide tanning, basket making and fire starting). Collecting data at the Gathering was our most dramatic departure from traditional psychology research; we used to think that only anthropologists got to collect data tentside. We discovered that PIN was significantly and positively correlated with other measures of connection to nature and that both predicted pro-environmental behavior. As expected, the Gathering sample was “greener” overall than the State Fair sample; however, in both samples, there were a few individuals (almost all men) who scored high on PIN but low on other measures of connection to nature, and there were a few individuals (almost all women) who scored low on PIN but high on other measures of connection to nature. The first group reported significantly less pro-environmental behavior than the second group, suggesting to us that, like other forms of connection to nature, PIN may not be sufficient, nor necessary, to inspire ecologically friendly behavior.

A Personal Note

Over the years our collaboration as conservation psychologists has strengthened our friendships and brought our families together. While growing our research program, we’ve been raising children, too: six daughters, two apiece. Each summer our families attend the Traditional Ways Gathering on the shores of Gitche Gumee. We also went on a dogsled and snowshoe adventure in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in December. Between excursions, we feast together on bounty from our gardens and foraging expeditions. We know that our daughters benefit not only from the supportive community we have formed with each other, but from watching their mothers do good works while balancing career and family.

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I, Liz, am a rhetorician, and this is how I began my 2009 book, Burke, War, Words. The book explored the development of modern rhetorical theory by looking at the efforts to “purify war” of a key theorist, Kenneth Burke, who tried to find a way during World War II not to eliminate debate but make it effective. As I read through the 60-year-old letters between Burke and his close friends, I gradually realized that he could develop a theory of debate as “purified war” because he and his friends were so often in conflict. They ranged from communist activists to conservative professors, and they attacked each others’ positions, called each other names, felt genuinely betrayed by each others’ stances, and yet remained friends. It was this feeling of being so passionately engaged with both the issue and the relationship that they just would not give up that served for Burke as a visceral alternative to the real war raging around him. I saw this theme so clearly as I sat in the archives during our current war, pouring over those long-ago letters, because I was at the same time involved in my own engaged, argumentative friendship with Joe.

When the two of us think together about “civil discourse,” we don’t start with what might seem to be the obvious question: “How can we as a society politely get along with each other?” Instead we ask ourselves, “How can we as a society engage in full blown useful debate? How can we believe in each other enough to believe that it’s worth it to keep trying to persuade each other? How can we both acknowledge our real differences and find our common ground?”

As a psychologist and marriage and family therapist, I, Joe, see every day the  importance of respectful, but honest, discourse that persuades without hurting. In my clinical practice, families come in with relationships fractured from a lack of civility. Some people have difficulty handling conflict in a way that remains respectful of the other; they attack and may eventually create enough damage that the relational bonds can never recover. Other people, however, err too far in the opposite direction; they avoid conflict altogether, so the issues and distance grow and the bonds weaken. We all engage in these behaviors to some extent. When Liz and I rekindled our friendship, at first I made many assumptions about who she was based on who I was 25 years ago. We didn’t understand each other, and we had many conversations that were not always civil.

Both of us had what we thought were our own diverse circles of friends, and we thought we were tolerant people. We knew, however, that certain beliefs were either held in common among most of us or they just weren’t discussed. The two of us “renewed friends” assumed similar commonalities and only belatedly realized that we now had profound differences, deeply felt, and perhaps epitomized by our “Ronald Reagan” conversations. Reagan had been president when we were in the St. Thomas social justice groups, and it turned out that we’d both later had personal contact with his policies. Thus, our increasingly uncivil attempts to explain our strong disagreement, demonstrated by Joe’s agonized note to Liz: “Reagan helped bring freedom to my family in the Czech Republic with his tough-on- Communism policies,” and Liz’s equally agonized note back: “Reagan helped kill my former brother-in-law in Guatemala by supporting death squads.” Reagan (his policies, his era) had saved or ruined the lives of people we loved – how could our friend not see that? Did we not care? With this and endless other differences between us, could we really talk?

For some reason, we did not do “the polite thing” and drop all controversial subjects. That would be the response of Joe’s conflict avoiders, who damage the relationship with the false civility of distance. In Liz’s world of public policy, it would be the times we red- and blue-staters decide there’s no point to seriously discuss together energy policy, war, the economy or the myriad other issues debate-weary people skirt. The two of us instead went around in circles, trying hard not to become Joe’s conflict bludgeoners or Liz’s talk-radio pundits, but instead to be more like Burke’s group of friends, trying to persuade each other and, therefore, trying to believe in each other’s potential as good and rational people capable of persuasion.

Sometimes that didn’t work. Sometimes it still doesn’t. But we are lucky – like the successful families that Joe treats, we shared the desire to respect each other’s opinions before we shared our own opinions. And the more our respect for each other’s core values grew, the more we understood – as Burke had predicted – that underlying our differences are many points of common departure for future discussions. We probably still disagree about Reagan, for instance, but now we recognize that disagreement springs from a common love for people, a common hatred of oppression, a difference in the contexts we’ve personally experienced, and probably a different – equally faulty – sense of Reagan’s influence on world events. It does not spring from a knee-jerk naïve leftist worldview versus a selfish, uncaring rightist worldview. As Liz is fond of noting, Burke insisted that “people, taken by and large, are acting reasonably enough, within their frame of reference,” and when the frame no longer fits, the solution is to widen one’s perspective, not think the other irrational – to see the world not as evil but as misguided and in need of our engaged, respectful, persuasive guidance.

However, with our own new, wider frame of reference regarding friends like us, what we increasingly noticed is that society echoes instead our former polarized conversations. The Left, the Right, environmentalists, businesspeople, Palin supporters, Obama supporters, Tea Party supporters: Groups bond by reassuring themselves how “right” they are and how wrong/evil/stupid the opposition is. We see that columnists, pundits and bloggers make a living lampooning the other side. We share a frustration that politicians spend more time attacking than governing. But we also share a growing awareness that the people in our daily lives, the people we agree with, oftentimes lampoon and attack, stereotype and misunderstand opposing opinions just as much as do public figures. And when the other side is evil, not misguided, there’s no reason to try to persuade them.

We see hopeful signs that others also are becoming aware of this dilemma. St. Thomas’ important new initiative in civil discourse is part of a growing trend. Last spring the president of Ohio State University, where Liz works, called for this largest university in the nation to take the lead in promoting civil discourse in public policy. This fall Joe’s professional group, the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, is holding its annual conference with a call to engage in civil discourse about diverse viewpoints on marriage. Liz’s professional group, the Rhetoric Society of America, recently awarded book of the year honors to Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse.

As a nation, we clearly need this kind of civil debate. In Crowley’s book, she cites Chantal Mouffe’s assertion that “a well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions” and adds that when “citizens fear that dissenting opinions cannot be heard … they may replace their allegiance to democracy with other sorts of collective identifications that blur or obscure their responsibilities as citizens.” Liz sees this societally with the rise of alienated internet niche groups; Joe works to overcome it on an interpersonal level in his clinical practice: once people feel they are understood, they soften and become more giving, more able to understand in turn.

But he and other psychologists also point out that it is increasingly difficult in our society to create the kind of safe space where such listening can occur. There are demonstrably increasing levels of narcissism that push us away from citizenship responsibilities toward each other. While we usually think of narcissism as excessive self love, it is actually a condition based in shame: narcissists experience considerable internalized shame, and they therefore need to embellish their accomplishments. They are very threatened by criticism. While healthy people can accept their weaknesses and strengths and can admit to being wrong, narcissists need to always be right and therefore need to devalue others. America suffers from a psychocultural “narcissism epidemic,” according to a recent book, and its authors, psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, note that “narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present.” Among a studied group of 37,000 college students, one in four students in 2006 agreed with most of the standard narcissistic indicators. As our culture becomes more narcissistic, we begin to treat each other as objects rather than equals. Being heard becomes more important than listening or understanding. Thus we continue the vicious pattern where being right, blaming and never taking responsibility for fault become the primary ways of “winning” an argument.

And this leads us to the concern we have with the way “civil discourse” is sometimes discussed today. Rhetoric tells us that persuasion must be predicated on the belief that the other is persuadable – an important first step for civil discourse to occur. However, the two of us worry when the new desire for civility stops there, when what “we” really hope will happen is that “we” will try harder to convince “them,” and “they” will become more open to listening to “us.” (Liz sees this, for instance, even in Crowley’s otherwise fine attempt to open discourse between liberals and the religious.) Our own friendship convinces us that only when we allow ourselves to soften, to also be open to persuasion, can we really engage in the kind of dialogue that strives not to win but to persuade, or in psychological terms not only to be heard but also to listen. This is the kind of discourse that occurs between friends.

Together we tried unsuccessfully to write our ideas about real discourse for several years before we finally found an unusual format that lets us bring both our professional knowledge and our love of writing together: We started a novel. We did it for fun, initially, and so our novel is a murder mystery and an adventure yarn, with as much humor and action and pathos as we can create. It includes a cast of characters ranging from Harry Chapin (the novel is called Cats in the Cradle) to Kenneth Burke to Pope John XXIII, and its “big picture” plot involves the conspiracy over a lost papal encyclical from Vatican II titled We Humbly Seek the Truth. Locales range from the Midwest to Rome to the Philippines. There’s even a scene at St. Thomas. But the novel also allows us to be serious about our growing shared insights into the vital need to disagree and be willing to change while staying in relationship –even when it’s really hard. Its primary protagonists, then, are the dysfunctional, post-modern “family” of a failed scholar and her former friend, a divorced newly ordained priest, his alienated daughter and her Buddhist brother. It is through them – their continual failure to listen to each other and their endless attempts to try again – that we seek to show just what the abstractions of “purified war” mean in our world. Betrayal, redemption, humility, rightness, narcissism, altruism, division and unity – just as in life – are enacted both on the global ideological stage and the local interpersonal one.

As an example, here is a piece of the St. Thomas scene, in which our protagonists, Luke and Ellie, have been brought back together after nearly a decade to try to help solve the “Cats in the Cradle” mystery:

“We were best friends, Luke. Do you even know how much that meant to me?” Her eyes filled with tears and she looked away from him, over the river, silent a long minute before she could go on. “And when things went wrong you couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me why.”

“It wasn’t about you.”

“No, the reason wasn’t about me. Not telling me the reason, that bloody well was all about me.”

“What do you want from me?”

She frowned. “I want you to treat me the way I’d treat you.”

“You want me to abuse you?”

At that she stamped her foot. “You are oblivious. Don’t you get it? If we’re both biking full speed, me north and you south, and we crash into each other, we’re both injured – but I immediately know that it was an accident so I roll over, ribs broken, and say, ‘Are you okay, Luke?’ But you don’t accept accidents, so you get up, bleeding, without looking at me, and you speed away because one of us had to be to blame. You don’t understand that no matter how many broken bones there are, it’s the speeding away that’s the real hurt.”

“I don’t do that,” he shook his head with finality, denying it all.

As we began to write, a funny thing happened: We realized that the tenets of the “better world” we were envisioning were the theological concepts we’d imbibed as students at St. Thomas. At college in the 1980s, we recognized that we were part of a Church going through enormous changes, still struggling with what it meant to become the Church in the modern world. It was a very exhilarating, very frustrating time – a very alive time – to be a Catholic. And so in our novel, Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, plays a key role. In order to write “him” (or really, a character that is based on him – we admit freely to playing with history in this fictional account), we’ve been re-inspired by his life and teachings, and this has been, for us, one of the best parts of our research. His novelistic nemesis is an anti-Modernist secret society (which actually existed at the time of Pius X) that will go to any length to eliminate a challenge to their view of Catholicism.

Here, for instance, is a bit from the first meeting of Burke and Pope John in 1963:

[Pope John XXIII] “I am no scholar, no intellectual. I am a man of the people, a paisano – a farmer, yes, but always I have believed that a peaceful man does more good than a learned one.”

Burke relaxed visibly, grinning broadly at the pope. “I live on a farm,” he said. “I don’t have a college degree. I believe in starting from words and actions, not abstractions. And all my life I’ve tried to say that people act reasonably if you understand their point of view.”

As we write and work in our respective professions, trying to help people engage in “effective dialogue” or “respectful listening” or “civil discourse,” we find that the ideas and ethics we learned a quarter century ago at St. Thomas still inspire us. Liz was at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Memorial Day, using a quick visit home to scope out a scene for the novel. (A good thing too – how did the whole building manage to turn itself in the opposite direction from our perfectly clear memories?!)But some memories were stronger. Up in the choir loft, the ghosts of the Liturgical Choir in which Liz had sung filled their chairs, lifting their voices to sing for a Sunday morning Mass the song of another alumnus, Marty Haugen: “Gather us in the lost and forsaken. Gather us in the blind and the lame. Call to us now and we shall awaken. We shall arise at the sound of our name.” This desire for unity is the lesson we learned from St. Thomas, the reason that we think civil discourse has a natural place at this university. Grounded in the Spirit at its best, religion shows us how to bond together, not in pride but in the hope that we can persuade others of what we believe to be true and the humility to believe that they may already have some of  that truth. “We are the young, our lives are a mystery. We are the old, who yearn for your face. We have been sung throughout all of history, called to be light for the whole human race.”

And so, no longer young, not quite yet old, we write together, striving to bring to life the visions of John XXIII, Kenneth Burke and Marty Haugen and the cloud of witnesses who have made us the people we are today. We won’t always get it right indeed, Joe once said that the thing that makes our friendship like family is that we fight like cats and dogs – but we strive to overcome our failings and continue the dialogue, the unending conversation. It is so easy to be certain that our opponents will never have our morals or be compelled by our logic. But as the University of St. Thomas, our alma mater, taught us, it is better to sing a song together with other imperfect people than to sing it alone perfectly: “Gather us in the rich and the haughty. Gather us in the proud and the strong. Give us a heart so meek and so lowly. Give us the courage to enter the song.”

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While AIDS has killed more than 25 million people worldwide, there are still more than 33 million people living with the HIV/AIDS virus.

Locally, 6,220 Minnesotans were living with the virus at the end of 2008, with another 368 confirmed new cases reported in 2009 (the highest annual number in 17 years).

View the 30 Years 30 Lives project.

Though such statistics are important for describing the seriousness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, they also can create feelings of distress, fear and even hopelessness. Fortunately, an HIV/AIDS project at the University of St. Thomas has statistics that tell a different story. It’s a story of hope and community – our St. Thomas community – that began to see, care and respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In the last six years, more than 1,000 students in 50 St. Thomas classes have contributed to community organizations that provide services to individuals living with HIV/AIDS. And, through a service-learning initiative, the students take up the cause while gaining knowledge relevant to their courses.

In the summer of 2003, Dr. Kimberly Vrudny, professor of theology, participated in a service-learning workshop at St. Thomas, where she worked to incorporate a service component into her Theology of Beauty course. Concerned about the silence in the community surrounding HIV/AIDS, she developed a partnership with Open Arms of Minnesota, an organization that prepares and delivers meals to people living with HIV/AIDS, ALS, MS or breast cancer in the Twin Cities area.

Vrudny explains her motivation for reaching out to people with HIV/AIDS as being rooted in the Christian theological tradition. The Gospels give testimony to how Christ lived his life – compassionately present and open even to those excluded by the social order.

“Trained as an historical theologian,” Vrudny says, “I had written a dissertation about religious response to the Black Death in 1347, when perhaps half of all European men, women and children died in a period of 18 months due to the airborne disease.

“It was a response that haunted me,” she said. “People turned a blind eye to the suffering of those who were, literally, falling dead in the streets. I was troubled by the question of how I would have responded if I had lived then. And so it was only a matter of time before my attention turned to the question of how we, as Americans, as Minnesotans, as people of faith, as human beings, were responding to another plague – one that was being felt all around us, even as we, too, were guilty of turning a blind eye to it.”

In the spring of 2004, Vrudny implemented the service-learning project with Open Arms into her 300-level theology course. She saw clearly that students in her newly revised course gained a deeper understanding of theology – as well as the serious issue of HIV/AIDS – through their engagement in service.

That year, the St. Thomas service-learning advisory board also was thinking strategically in relation to four broad issues that lead to individual, communal and national security: high-quality education, economic stability, access to environmental resources and good health. Vrudny and Dr. Ellen Kennedy, then director of service-learning, set out to address these issues, and Vrudny took the lead in the area of public health.

Vrudny and Kennedy wrote a proposal requesting start-up funding from Minnesota Campus Compact, which supports partnerships between higher education institutions and community organizations to expand civic engagement. Minnesota Campus Compact liked what it saw and supported the university’s request. A service-learning initiative with organizations responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic locally, St. Thomas’ project achieved one dimension of the advisory board’s strategic vision.

With Minnesota Campus Compact’s support, Vrudny created a service-learning program focused on HIV/AIDS. She designed and conducted companion workshops for faculty, and they designed their courses with a service-learning component in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The service-learning program also began to hold an orientation each semester to introduce students to the work of the university’s community partners, as well as a celebration to mark the semester’s accomplishments in service and in learning.

These two aspects of the program have been compelling features for many students. Jillian Wright, a student in Don Beyer’s theology course last fall, learned from speakers and activities that HIV/AIDS can become a chronic condition rather than a terminal one if a patient has access to proper medication. “It [doesn’t necessarily] prevent [victims] from being or becoming successful,” Wright said. “[And] it doesn’t have to define them.”

Wright and others were moved by the comments of a speaker at their closing celebration. As a former client, he reminded students that their work with Open Arms is deeply appreciated. He explained that the only human contact some clients have is with the person who delivers the meal from Open Arms. He knows from experience that to simply see the friendly face of the Open Arms volunteer can make a world a difference.

The program quickly grew, capturing the attention of St. Thomas faculty members in disciplines as diverse as art history, biology, business, communication and journalism, health and human performance, justice and peace studies, music, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology and theology. Kevin Winge, executive director of Open Arms, describes the St. Thomas faculty as “some of the greatest champions of social justice we work with. From the very beginning they realized the power of food and joined us in our efforts to change the world – one meal at a time.” In doing so, faculty developed a wide range of projects that not only contributed to the mission of Open Arms but also to the mission of St. Thomas.

The multitude of collaborations between the faculty and Open Arms provided students with a unique opportunity to apply their coursework to real needs. Lisa Ott, a student of Vrudny’s, learned not only theological perspectives on HIV/AIDS, but also that volunteers “can really make a difference – single-handedly. You can go in and make meals for countless individuals. You have to contribute, whether or not others are with you.” Ott continues to volunteer for Open Arms.

As faculty became more involved in the program, its partnership with Open Arms blossomed. Some students delivered meals to Open Arms clients, while others worked on various projects to assist the agency, such as creating video web profiles of Open Arms volunteers and constructing food-safety kits to provide to the clients. Vrudny also forged new partnerships with local HIV/AIDS organizations, including Clare Housing, which provides housing and medical services, and the Minnesota AIDS Project.

The program has expanded beyond the Twin Cities to include a global component. In 2006, the International Education Center at St. Thomas supported the development of Theological Reflection: AIDS, Apartheid and the Arts of Resistance, a January Term 2008 course in South Africa. Vrudny and Robert Strusinski, assistant professor of music, designed and taught the course in cooperation with Open Arms and one of its international partners, the J. L. Zwane Community Centre in Guguletu.

Twelve students traveled to Cape Town and to nearby Guguletu. The students learned that although apartheid is no longer an official governmental policy of South Africa, its legacy remains. Townships such as Guguletu, which were created by the minority-led government during the apartheid years, have millions of people still living in squalor. More than 70 percent of people are unemployed, and as many as one in three are living with HIV/AIDS.

Students studied how novelists, poets, visual artists, musicians and playwrights resisted oppression through artistic expression which contributed to the fall of apartheid. The students reflected on theological themes in the arts and how these artistic strategies have been used similarly to resist the conditions in which HIV/AIDS proliferates.

Last January, 10 participants in UST’s VISION program participated in another South Africa experience that Vrudny designed. Rebecca Cooke, a VISION student director and the trip’s leader, said the trip inspired her to take action closer to home. For example, she will participate in AIDS Action Day at the Minnesota State Capitol this year. “I’m now more interested in advocacy and public policy,” she said. “HIV/AIDS is a human rights issue that governments can influence. Getting involved in public policy is a way that a lot of change can be brought about.”

The program’s partnerships with the local and international HIV/AIDS organizations are flourishing, with more students each semester contributing to these organizations while building knowledge and skills for their future careers and lives beyond St. Thomas.

This story continues to unfold. Vrudny is working on a sabbatical project in Africa, Asia and Central America, titled “30 Years/30 Lives.” She is documenting the lives of 30 people impacted by HIV/AIDS, and meeting with the organizations devoted to their care. The project aspires to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, and to challenge commonly held assumptions about who is affected by the virus. Vrudny will draw on the rich Christian tradition to encourage a just and compassionate response.

When she completes her project, Vrudny hopes to exhibit the photographs in select cathedral and seminary galleries around the United States and possibly internationally.

In addition to the service-learning and research initiatives under way, a new St. Thomas student club for HIV/AIDS awareness has been formed. The club’s founders and leaders became concerned about the issue through their service-learning courses, and are committed to raising awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and educating St. Thomas students outside of the classroom. Though the club is still in its infancy, students’ initiative to expand awareness of and response to the pandemic outside of the classroom illustrates the university’s growing involvement in the global response to HIV/AIDS.

And that is how more than 1,000 students in 50 different classes with 16 different faculty members have created a story of hope at St. Thomas surrounding the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Though the statistics of individuals infected by and living with HIV/AIDS continues to be startling, the university aspires to be a leader in developing innovative educational programs to contribute to the global conversation about HIV/AIDS and public health.

Now that’s hopeful.

About the Author: Tonia Bock is an assistant professor of psychology and the 2009-10 project director for HIV/AIDS initiatives at St. Thomas.

The feminist surge of the 1970s nourished an explosion of scholarship on historic women contributors in science fields, but I didn’t actually encounter this work until I taught our History and Systems of Psychology course 15 years ago. As I caught up with the literature, I became fascinated by the life stories of early women psychologists. Soon I would discover that one of the most eminent,Florence Goodenough (1886-1959), made her career in Minneapolis.

Goodenough was a child psychologist and IQ expert at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare (now called the Institute of Child Development) from 1925 to 1947. Well known for her “Draw-A-Man” intelligence test (still used today) and her research on gifted children, she published extensively and was the author of the first systematic empirical study of emotion in children (Anger in Young Children, 1931).

I came across Goodenough’s personal papers and correspondence in the University of Minnesota archives while researching the background of the institute. Her letters drew me in immediately as they revealed her striking personality and intellect. She was known, for instance, for the exacting standards she imposed on her graduate students.

Responding to student Theta Wolf’s thesis draft in 1936, Goodenough offered: “To be frank, your accounts bore me almost to tears.” Later she apologized for her harshness, blaming it on Minnesota weather. But when praise was warranted, Goodenough did not hold back. After many revisions, Wolf received, finally,this affirmation: “Dear Theta: Now I like it. In my opinion you’ve done a corking job; one of the best, if not the best that has appeared.” Wolf (1904-1997) went on to teach psychology at Hamline University for 20 years; later she lived in France and produced a brilliant biography of French mental testing pioneer Alfred Binet.

Goodenough was not really anonymous in the history of psychology; she held a powerful academic position – rare for women of her era. But my research on her life and work led to a fortuitous collaboration with another psychologist fascinated by early women in American psychology. For several years I have been working to identify, with Dr. Elizabeth Johnston of Sarah Lawrence College, some of the lesser-known women of that group. Our research focuses on “second-generation” women – those who earned Ph.D.s between 1906 and 1945.

Building careers in the days before protective workplace legislation or social acceptance of working mothers, these women made the best of their circumstances. If married, they often relocated to accommodate spouses’ careers and, like Theta Wolf, developed innovative research projects wherever they went. Anne Roe (1904-1991) contributed important work on occupational choice in the 1950s even while adapting to her husband’s many career moves.

Magda Arnold (1903-2002) faced a different challenge. Her husband opposed her graduate study of psychology so much that he moved away with their three daughters and restricted her access to them. Arnold persisted in building a career, teaching at several Catholic colleges (her Catholic faith was a main life theme) and publishing research on emotion and brain function.

Another Minnesotan in our sample is Sister Annette Walters (1910-1978), who earned her Ph.D. at the U of M in experimental psychology in 1941. She proceeded to build the Psychology Department at the College of St. Catherine and later did the same for the College of St. Ambrose in Iowa. A skilled textbook author and passionate teacher, she initiated one of the early genderdiscrimination suits in higher education when authorities at St. Ambrose refused to grant her a sabbatical in the 1970s. She won – though the ruling was later overturned.

If you were black or Jewish, the obstacles for women mounted; Mamie Phipps Clark (1917 – 1983) faced both racism and sexism as a black woman psychologist on the job market in the 1940s.Frustrated with the low-level positions being offered, she turned her energies toward founding the Northside Clinic in New York, offering psychological services to black youth and challenging racialbias in IQ testing. In 1954, lawyers arguing the Brown v. Board of Education case used Clark’s graduate-school research as evidence against continued school segregation, demonstrating its negative psychological impact on black children. Later, she published work co-authored by her husband,Kenneth Clark, whose fame eclipsed hers. Consequently, people often mistakenly give him credit for her very original contributions.

Compelled to forge complex career paths, these women channeled their love for psychology into unique and lasting contributions. Their professional presence was subtle as they often worked independently and at the margins. As women scientists in the early 20th century, their lives were, by definition, unconventional. Finally, they often were anonymous, and like Virginia Woolf, I find myself intrigued with their various forms of anonymity. Historical research has afforded me a deeper understanding of its source and, I hope, a remedy for it.

Photo Credits: Theta Wolf, courtesy of Hamline University Archives (top photo); Sister Annette Walters, coutesy of the Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet, St. Paul (middle photo); and Florence Goodenough, coutesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron (bottom photo).

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A better way to explain real psychology may be to ask the professors who teach undergraduate classes in the subject at St. Thomas. Four of them – Dr. John Buri, Dr. Mary Anne Chalkley, Dr. Ann Johnson and Dr. Greg Robinson-Riegler – took the time to talk about their interests, stresses they see in students, the advice they give students and how spirituality may be related to psychology.

Buri’s particular specialization is marriage and family life and he has published three dozen journal articles and research reports on these topics. His marriage book for men, How To Love Your Wife , came out in November. Why this interest? “It may have been stated best by Stephen Covey,” Buri said. “I am convinced that if we as a society work diligently in every other area of life and neglect the family, it would be analogous to straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.” Buri is the father of six; Joe and Mark graduated from St. Thomas and James is a junior here.

“Psychology has become quite eclectic,” Buri noted. “There are a variety of different and often diverse areas in the field. Different individuals seem to be key in different areas of the discipline. One topic of increasing interest to students today is whether a happy marriage is possible. They seem to be especially jaded about the prospect of marriage.”

Students have changed
Buri, who has a Ph.D. from Loyola University (Chicago), joined the faculty in 1976 and has seen students change during those 30 years: “I am sometimes asked: ‘Do you see any differences between students today and those of 25 to 30 years ago?’

“One key difference jumps out at me: students today seem to be easily discouraged. They seem to take the path of least resistance when things become difficult. They look for external reasons rather than look at personal responsibility, and seem to lack hope for the future.”

In 2002, an article compared students from the 1960s with students of the early 2000s on a psychological construct called Internal/External Locus of Control. This measures the extent to which individuals view external circumstances (e.g., luck) as important to life successes (the External Locus of Control) versus viewing life success as something that is largely within our control (the Internal Locus of Control.)

The article reported that “Young Americans increasingly believe their lives are controlled by outside forces rather than their own efforts…. The average college student in 2002 had a more external locus of control than 80 percent of college students in the early 1960s…. The implications are almost uniformly negative, as externality is correlated to poor school achievement, helplessness, ineffective stress management, decreased self-control and depression.”

“This gives you a little window into a major emphasis for me in class,” Buri said. “Students who have had me for several classes have told me that there are a few concepts they can count on coming up in each class: (a) be reflective (the author of one study implied that ‘the typical American has all the reflectiveness of a rock’), (b) take responsibility for your behavior and your thoughts, and (c) lean into areas of discomfort in your life (DO those things that you find difficult but which are nonetheless good things to do),” Buri said.

Skeptical about one ‘grand theory’
Dr. Ann Johnson, who became chair of the department in 2003, finds it “interesting that there are no psychologists living today who hold the kind of status formerly held by the giants of psychology’s past: William James, Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget or Abraham Maslow. Part of the reason is, I think is that we’re much more skeptical now about the possibility of a ‘grand theory’ like Freud’s that can wrap everything up. The field has proliferated, diversified and with that growth we’ve seen that the human person is too complex to be wrapped up easily in any one theoretical approach.

“The new and most influential theories out there are biological and cognitive in emphasis. There’s tremendous interest in how the brain and nervous system shape how we experience the world. And new technologies give us information about the brain and its workings that we didn’t have before.”

Johnson, who has a Ph.D. from Duquesne University, has taught at St. Thomas since 1988 and is strongly interested in the history of psychology. “I teach a class on that topic and do research on early women psychologists. I find it fascinating to look at early days of psychology and see how it evolved.” She teaches classes such as Gender and Science (team taught with Dr. Jill Manske, Biology) and researches specifically the history of child psychology.

She recently collaborated on a book on the history of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, which studies “normal” child development, and is now looking at the contributions of Florence Goodenough, a prominent Minnesota child psychologist who developed the Draw-A-Man assessment measuring IQ in children.

“As a parent and psychologist I find it endlessly interesting to hear all the different beliefs that people hold about children and development,” Johnson, the mother of two teenagers, explained. “What’s fascinating about child psychology is how beliefs have changed over time and become institutionalized – in child-rearing techniques, in how we arrange educational environments for children and how we organize home life. Expert advice generated by child scientists has helped to shape our subjective views of childhood and our beliefs about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ developmental outcomes. My research also has a feminist angle, since so much that is written about child development carries implicit judgments about mothers – their shortcomings, their role in contributing scientifically to the study of children, and the impact of their everyday behavior on the child.”

Pursue a major that matters to you
Johnson added, “Students today face a lot of stresses that students of my generation didn’t. They seem to be under more financial stress; many are building up large loans in college and worry about how they’re going to repay them. Also, they have to learn to multitask in college and manage their own time – and for some students that can create huge anxieties.

“Many more students are arriving with diagnosed psychological problems – especially anxiety and depression difficulties,” she said. “I encourage students frequently to make use of our excellent personal counseling services on campus. It’s free and confidential and a great resource for our students.”

Students also carry a lot of stress about their majors and careers. “They believe they haveto have it all figured out by their junior year. I try to encourage them to think long term about a career journey, not a destination. My advice around career issues is to take it easy, listen to your inner voice and pursue a major that really matters to you. Be prepared to work hard and the jobs will come. And I often advise students to pursue a mentoring relationship with a professor he or she knows and likes.”

“My students sometimes kid me about putting on my ‘mom’ hat,” said Dr. Mary Anne Chalkley, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and has taught at St. Thomas since 1989. “I think many of our best students find themselves buried with all they are trying to do. I often encourage students to cut back on their jobs (especially ones off campus) if they possibly can. I also encourage them to slow down their pace.”

Chalkley, who teaches psychology of infants, childhood and adolescence, said that “in the classes I teach, I try to give students practical advice regarding being a parent. Perhaps the advice I give the most often is to let other people help when they offer. Raising children is a very labor-intensive job and parents should get as much help and support as they can.”

As a development psychologist, Chalkley is “interested in everything.” Her research projects include children’s puzzle solving and memory attention. “Frankly, I don’t think there is one answer in psychology,” she said. “I think we are finding out how much individual and cultural differences matter for functioning.

“I started focusing on young children because I had an interest in day care. But I found as I watched my own children grow that I was very curious about their lives and their development. I’m particularly interested in Head Start and families since I think it is a very important intervention program. Right now my primary focus is on learning and how it differs for children as compared to adults.

“I also am interested in parent-adolescent communication. One of the things that makes this more difficult is a lack of time together. Creating opportunities for regular interaction makes it more likely that there is a good rapport when more difficult issues arise. Some families focus on regular family dinners; others have ‘game’ nights. With my two kids, we had our best conversations while driving to various events,” Chalkley recalled.

The fascination of memory
For Dr. Greg Robinson-Riegler, the “fascination is in remembering: How our memory works, why it fails, and what a person’s life story means to him or her. I’m also interested in the mind and consciousness more generally and how they are viewed from different cultural perspectives.”

His specialties are “memory illusions, and memory and emotion. Research projects are cognitive processing of attractive and unattractive faces, false memories for different types of events, and individual differences in the ability to divide attention.”

Robinson-Riegler, who has taught at St. Thomas since 1990 and has a Ph.D. from Purdue University, has the “No. 1 piece of advice for students: Get yourself engaged somehow in the material you are studying. Even the driest class has ideas to get excited about and chew on.

“Apply the information you’re learning to life; think about its implications. Students in introductory psychology are fascinated by many topics but probably the most fascinating are sleep (they don’t get enough), memory (their studying is often ineffective), and psychopathology (many students are interested in becoming psychologists or counselors).”

The field is getting more complicated. “I would say cognitive neuroscience is at the cutting edge of the field,” Robinson-Riegler said. “Cognitive neuroscience involves finding out the connections among brain processes, thought and behaviors. Other cutting-edge areas of study are cross-cultural psychology – which looks at how one’s cultural background influences thought and behaviors – and evolutionary psychology, which looks at how human thoughts and behaviors might have evolved to ensure human survival.

“As for what has ensured human survival over the centuries, I would say it’s an evolved tendency to want to figure things out – to understand why and how things work.”

Spirituality is a hot topic
“Spirituality has become a hot topic in psychology,” Robinson-Riegler explained. “In my area, experimental psychology, researchers are trying to find out fundamental things about spiritual experiences – what they are like subjectively and what’s going on in the brain while we are having them. I’m co-teaching a course with Dr. Steve Laumakis in philosophy titled Buddha’s Brain in which we’re discussing views of mind, consciousness and meditation (i.e., one might say ‘spirituality’) from Western and Eastern perspectives.”

Buri noted that spirituality is a very broad term with a variety of interpretations. “There is a whole area of psychology termed ‘The Psychology of Religion.’ While a number of key figures in their field have been quite anti-religious (e.g., Freud, Skinner and Watson), most psychologists have traditionally been quite religious/spiritual. In the past 10 to 15 years, there is a growing openness to issues of spirituality, although one of the deterrents is that so much of this is not accessible to empirical observation.”

Johnson agrees that the tie-in of spirituality and psychology is a complex question. “It’s now possible for people to be trained as ‘spiritual guides’ or ‘counselors’, and that’s quite different from a psychotherapist.

What is the meaning of this?
“There are some experiences in life that call out for both spiritual and psychological assistance,” Johnson said. “Someone going through a crisis period, dealing with the death of a loved one, loss of a job or divorce often will seek out spiritual answers to the question: ‘What is the meaning of this for me?’

“Many find solace during difficult times in the spiritual writings coming out of their own religious traditions. But people in these situations might also benefit from more pragmatic psychotherapeutic interventions: learning how to use breathing exercises, for example, or cognitive restructuring to manage anxiety and depression.

“Spiritual counseling more often assists people in learning how to endure despair and find meaning in life,” Johnson noted, “while typical forms of psychotherapy are oriented toward problem solving – helping people find strategies that allow them to continue functioning day to day as a student or parent or employee.”