Conflicts across family settings, schools, neighbourhoods, work place, and wider communities and nations, social media, etc. can all exert an adverse impact on individuals, threaten their identity, undermine their quality of life as well as harm their mental and physical health. Such conflicts can be further exacerbated due to environmental pressures, such as poverty, climate change, economic crises, international shake-ups (e.g., Brexit), etc.

Based on recent advancements of social psychological theory and research, we have identified seven major hot topics which are key to understanding difficult relationships. These are: forgiveness, apology, justice, trust, respect, hope, and power.

 

Currently, researchers disparately theorise and produce empirical work on one or at most two of these concepts. Bringing together researchers and practitioners from around the world and providing them with a space in which they can integrate their theories and see the bigger and more complex picture framing difficult relationships is what is required to galvanise this field towards the next step in developing meta-theoretical approaches to and social psychological taxonomies of such challenging relationships.

This Small Group Meeting seeks to create an important space for the multifaceted analysis of different perspectives on the psychology of challenging relationships. This broad focus offers researchers who study some of the above concepts from an intergroup perspective to converse and exchange with scholars with interests in similar topics but from an interpersonal perspective. Similarly, scholars who study these concepts among children will be afforded the opportunity to discuss their theories and empirical work with scholars who focus on adults, and vice versa. We encourage both senior and junior scholars to join us, including Ph.D. students.

 

Registration 

A fee of 150 EUR per participant (but 100 EUR for Ph.D. participants) will apply. We cover the costs of meals and accommodation.

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Submissions

Participants wishing to present empirical research during this meeting will have the opportunity to do so during regular paper sessions (15min + 5 min Q&A), data blitz sessions (10min), or poster sessions.

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If you are interested in participating, email an abstract and your contact details to Masi Noor (m.noor@keele.ac.uk) before or on March 1, 2018 (extended deadline). 

 

The selection panel would appreciate if you could expand your abstract, providing details about your participants, method, and main bulk of results. Remember that your abstract can be up to 300 words long. Please also indicate your preference for how you want to present your work (i.e., regular 15 min talk, 10 min data blizt session, or a poster).