On 28 November, our guest speaker in the SWE Colloquium is Professor June P. Tangney, Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax Virginia, USA.

Borrowing from social psychology: A clinical psychologist’s tale

In this talk, I emphasize the ways in which social and personality psychology can inform clinical practice in community and criminal justice settings. Trained as a clinical psychologist, I initially “defected” to social and personality psychology to examine basic research questions about shame and guilt. I’ll summarize key findings from this line of work, and then present a framework for thinking about the many different kinds of events that evoke these moral emotions. I’ll also describe our most recent TOSCA-4, with some findings that illustrate its increased flexibility and discuss of its limitations.

I then describe how I became interested in the plight of jail inmates, a large, high-risk, underserved population, in effect reclaiming my identity as a clinical psychologist. In our studies of inmates, we initially focused on shame and guilt as potential points of intervention to reduce recidivism, but have since looked more broadly at how social psychological theory and methods can inform the development of a range of brief novel interventions for incarcerated people soon to join the community.