Invited Speakers and Conversation Hours



In addition to the special symposiums and Jubilee Speaker Series the Scientific Program Advisory Committee is pleased to feature several other individuals. These people will contribute to the Congress in significant ways. They are listed below in chronological order of their appearance on the Program.


TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 1:00-2:00 P.M., ROOM: SL-150
Acculturation strategies: Theory, measurement and application

John W. Berry of Queen's University in Canada is a past president and an Honorary Fellow of IACCP. A frequent contributor to the cross-cultural psychological literature for many years, he is also the chief editor of the three-volume second edition of the Handbook of cross-cultural psychology. During the past decade his particular research interests have focussed on acculturation, immigration, and various policy issues involving native Canadian peoples. He organized IACCP's second international congress, held at Queen's University in 1974.

Acculturation refers to changes that result when people of different cultures come into contact. Early conceptualizations, based on colonial experiences, were that the non-dominant culture and its members would inevitably change to become more like those in the dominant society. This unidimensional and unidirectional conceptualization lingers, but is no longer an adequate conceptualization of how people change when they live together in various cultural communities in contemporary plural societies. Rather, the process of cultural and psychological change is a complex, multidimensional and variable process, depending on many factors. One factor is what people (both collectively and individually) are attempting to do during their acculturation. These acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, separation, marginalization) are defined, and evidence for their role in acculturation is reviewed. The application of these concepts and empirical findings to helping individuals and societies achieve some mutual accommodation is discussed.


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 10:00-11:00 A.M., ROOM: SL-140
The health of nations and the abilities of mankind

Sidney H. Irvine of the United Kingdom's Plymouth Polytechnic University made many significant early contributions to the problems associated with psychological testing across cultures, especially in the area of intelligence and abilities testing. His earlier field research in Africa has been cited widely as seminal in efforts to understand the structure of human intelligence. Among his numerous books is Human assessment and cultural factors (Plenum, 1983), which he co-edited with John Berry.

Health-related Quality of Life was the fastest-growing medical field of the 80s and 90s. Like early attempts to define and measure abilities, the work was empirical and product-driven. During the last six years, however, extensive cross-national European research with very large representative samples centered on Italy, was conducted in three chronic illness domains, asthma, hypertension and gastric disease. Consequently, a theory of Quality of Life measurement has emerged with strong predictive power. This theory resembles Spearman's schema for general intelligence in positing a strong general factor of perceived Quality of Life. This is defined as Q, whose existence can be inferred from three primary factors, Qj (physical) Qy (emotional) and Qd (daily-living/social). Unlike g, general intelligence, the percept Q is the outcome of the three primary determinants in patients: it does not itself appear to have any causal influence. Comprehensive data from the three disease domains is available to support the theory that Quality of Life can be accurately measured from disease-specific inventories using hierarchical methods of construction and psychometric methods of analysis.


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1:00-2:00 P.M., ROOM: T-1
Community psychology for family services in schools

Wayne Holtzman of the University of Texas served for many years as the President of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and for several years as Dean of the College of Education at the University of Texas. He has served as President of the Interamerican Society of Psychology and the International Union of Psychological Science. He currently serves as Chairman of the Menninger Clinic's Board of Directors. He has done extensive collaborative collaborative research in Mexico, especially in the area of child-rearing, and is author of the Holtzman Inkblot Technique.

Representative of new approaches in community psychology is the School of the Future Project launched in 1990 in ethnically different neighborhoods of four Texas cities. Completed in 1997, this major project involves the development and evaluation of experimental human-service programs for neighborhood families using the school as a site for delivery of the services. Key features of the program are described. Strategies for psychologists working on similar social issues of human development in diverse cultures and different countries are presented.


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 6:30-7:30 P.M., ROOM: T-1
Seventy five years of cross-cultural psychology in New Zealand

James and Jane Ritchie have done extensive fieldwork in their native New Zealand, and particularly among the Maori. James's 1992 book, Becoming bicultural, is a classic autobiographical report in his long process of becoming a tribal consultant and expert on Maori affairs. James is Foundation Professor of Psychology at Waikato University. Jane is the daughter of Ernest Beaglehole, a pioneering New Zealand anthropologist. Also a professor of Psychology at Waikato University, she and James have co-authored many writings on child-rearing.

The Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, had a well developed psychology to explain and govern human behavior. On contact with Western thought a cross-cultural awareness developed. Early records from missionaries, travelers and gentlemen scholars reveal a curiosity about the metaphysics of both cultures. In the 1920s the inter-cultural dialogue entered the universities and laid the foundation for cross-cultural psychology in New Zealand. Scholars such as Ernest Beaglehole and Margaret Mead in the 1920s used the Maori example in laying the theoretical foundations for this area of study. For seventy five years New Zealand has had its own distinct tradition which grew from both culture and personality within anthropology and from the psychological study of culture and the individual. Currently, a new theme emerges as Maori psychologists balance the dialogue as they develop an explicit Maori ethnopsychology. In this presentation we will review this history and indicate its likely future development.


THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 12:30-1:30 P.M., ROOM: O'Keefe Room, Cafeteria
Primary health care: Expanding our services beyond mental health

Richard M. Suinn, ABPP, professor of psychology, Colorado State University is president-elect of the American Psychological Association. He was head of the Psychology Department at CSU for 20 years, served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, was a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee's Sport Psychology Committee, on the Board of Directors of the Asian American Psychological Association, and was city councilperson and mayor of Ft. Collins, Colorado.

Research and practice data document the major services which psychology provides regarding physical disorders such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis-disorders which affect people across all nations. This address will confirm that psychologists should be expanding their efforts to primary health care rather than simply to mental health care. Valuable information on these techniques and some illustrative results will be summarized in this presentation.