1st Biennial Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology (BSPSP) was held on September 21–23, 2006 in the main building of Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. The co-organizer of the conference was the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The 1st BSPSP was held under the title “Personality and Neuroscience. Between Brain and Self: What is Between?”
Invited neuroscientists and psychologists discussed the neuronal bases of personality and brain-personality interactions. The conference brought the neuroscientific and psychological perspectives together with the aim to better understand the biological bases and correlates of personality.
The participants of the meeting had the opportunity to listen to the keynote lectures of such leading researchers in the field as:
- Jan Strelau - How far are we in searching for the biological background of personality?
- Jan Kaiser - Psychophysiological approach to concept of self
- James Pennebaker - How everyday language use reflects personality and social processes?
- Ernst Pöppel - Time travel to one’s past - establishing personal identity
- Lars Göran Nilsson - Genetic Contributions to memory function and personality
- Fiona Newell - Combining sensory information for spatial cognition
- Andy Calder - Understanding Facial Expression Recognition
- Frank van Overwalle - Neural components of spontaneous trait inferences
- Risto Näätänen - Mismatch negativity in schizophrenia
- Tadeusz Marek - Attention and eye movements
- Piotr Jaśkowski - Straight and inverse priming of motor reaction
Another form of conference activities were four workshops run by:
- Mirosław Wyczesany (Verbal self-description of mood and its relation to psychophysiological measures),
- James Pennebaker and Ewa Kacewicz (Language disclosure and interpersonal processes),
- Ernst Pöppel (Brain and identity),
- Göran Söderlund (Dopamine related cognitive performance and personality).
The additional attractions were a poster session and the Conference Dinner which took place in the Fabryka Trzciny club.
Participants, as well as the invited guests and organizers admit that the 1st Biennial Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology was an excellent opportunity to integrate the perspectives of the neighboring disciplines of psychology. It opened up a forum for a further discussion of the issues concerning personality and social psychology.
My experience with the conference and Warsaw in general was extremely positive. The SWPS faculty and students were wonderful to talk with. The conference was intellectually stimulating in all respects. I also came away with a new respect for Poland and the work that is being done in psychology there.
prof. James W. Pennebaker
I want to thank you very much for the wonderful conference at your university. I think it was an excellent meeting with interesting talks, and it was also perfectly organized. No problems at all.
prof. Ernst Pöpppel
Dear Organizers,
Thank you for the invitation to participate as a keynote speaker. It was a great honor for me. Everything was well organised, and we were very lucky to have you and your students as hosts.
prof. Frank Van Overwalle
Dear Organizers,
Thank you very much for your kindness during the congress as well as the congress itself which was highly enjoyable.
prof. Risto Näätänen
The 2nd BSPSP took place in September 2008, and it gathered some of the most prominent researchers of Personality, Cognition and Emotion.
One of the major aims of the 2nd Biennial Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology was to maintain and develop a common language to discuss personality, emotion and cognition. The conference provided an opportunity to exchange ideas and to work out an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the considered processes and phenomena within the following study fields: foundations of personality, cognition and emotion; intraindividual dimensions and unconscious processes in cognition and emotion; the role of self in cognition and emotion; individual differences, attentional processes and emotion; individual differences, memory and emotion; individual and procesual perspectives on emotional disorders, and therapy of emotional disorders.
The participants listened to the lectures:
• Michael W. Eysenck, Anxiety and cognitive performance: An attentional approach
• Edward Nęcka, Affective mechanisms of executive control
• Tim Dalgleish, Mental life in the fast lane: Cognitive efficiency, self-regulation and emotional disorder
• Keith Oatley, How emotions give structure to individual minds and social relationships
• Gerald Matthews, The Energetics of Emotional Intelligence
• Nico Frijda, How emotions work
• Arne Öhman, Fear and anxiety: conceptual, neuroanatomical, genetical, psychophysiological, and attentional distinctions
• Bogdan Wojciszke, Agency and communion as basic dimensions of social cognition
• Grzegorz Sędek, The Influence of Depression, Aging, and Prejudice on Context Reasonin
• June Price Tangney, A Cognitive-Affective Model of Moral Motivation and Behavior: Identifying Mechanisms of Change
• Alina Kolańczyk & Tomasz Maruszewski. On Building Bridges
Workshops:
• Nazanin Derakhshan: Why are repressors important in anxiety/emotion research? What can they tell us about emotional information processing styles?
• Lucyna Kirwil: Can Electrodermal Response Indices Predict Aggression?
• Rafał Krzysztof Ohme & Aneta Brzezicka: How understanding of emotions can benefit from neurophysiology?
The Warsaw Lectures on Personality and Social Psychology series, published by Eliot Werner Publications make the contents of the meeting available for a wider scientific public.
It was a superb conference, and I feel privileged to have attended it.
prof. Keith Oatley
You must be very proud of yourself for having organised such a brilliant conference, and the conference dinner in the old factory was perfect in every way. I thoroughly enjoyed the conference.
Prof. M. Eysenck
Many thanks. It was a wonderful experience – personally and professionally. Thank you for including me in this memorable meeting.
Prof. June Price Tangney
I enjoyed the 2nd BSPSP meeting very much, and I appreciate your kind invitation to participate.
Prof. Gerald Matthews
 The 3rd BSPSP took place in September, 2010, under the title "Personality dynamics: Embodiment, meaning construction, and the social world". Below you can read a short introduction and summary of the conference's focus, written by prof. Daniel Cervone - head of the Scientific Committee:
The 3rd BSPSP highlights multidisciplinary advances that have reshaped psychological science. Not long ago, much inquiry in the field was relatively fragmented; studies of individual differences, social influence, biological bases of behavior, and intrapsychic processes of meaning construction were only weakly interconnected. Today, however, investigators cross old disciplinary boundaries, attack questions at multiple levels of analysis, and thereby create lines of theory and research that interconnect these topics. In so doing, they bring contemporary scientific tools to bear on a classic question: the question of personality dynamics, that is, how cognitive and affective processes – which reflect both the biology of the brain and the social practices of one’s culture – give rise to the distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic characteristics of the individual person.
The 3rd BSPSP will feature an outstanding roster of speakers that includes international renowned scientists from both Europe and the United States. In addition to symposium presentations, there will be special workshops on experimental methods in the study of emotion and cognition.
prof. Daniel Cervone,
head of the Scientific Committee
The keynote speakers list included:
- Susan Andersen, The relational self: Advances in research on signifcant others and transference Processes
- John T. Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human nature and the need for social connection.
- Daniel Cervone, From metatheory to theory: specifying the Architecture of Personality
- Klaus Fiedler, Mood and the regulation of cognition and behavior: the role of Assimilation and Accommodation
- Hubert J.M. Hermans, The dialogical self: Positioning and counter-positioning in a globalizing world
- Jerzy Karyłowski, Thinking about people and thinking about traits
- Małgorzata Kossowska, Motivation towards closure and cognitive resources: An individual diferences approach.
- Paula Niedenthal, The simulation of smiles (sims) model: A Window to general Principles in Processing facial expression
- Janusz Reykowski, Social identity can suppress personality... but under some conditions and to some extent.
- Krystyna Skarżyńska, Interpersonal trust: the efect of personality or/and social experiences
- Robin Vallacher, Dynamical social Psychology: finding order in the flow of Human experience.
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