Principle of Charity

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity.

~~

You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com & @JonahPrimo on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin’s book Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are has changed lives. Robert is arguably the leading figure in behavioural genetics, working across the field for many decades. In his book Blueprint, he shows us the extraordinary evidence for our genetic nature being the absolutely dominant force in predicting who we are and will become. In fact about 50% of everything we care about is predicted by our genes. Not just our weight and height, but schizophrenia, anxiety and depression, to personality traits like agreeableness, grit, and love of learning, through to general intelligence and even university success.

Emile and Lloyd probe Robert for the implications his research has for how we approach parenting. Outside of loving and protecting our children, Robert says parents can let go a bit of that inner panic that tells them that their role is to mould their kids, that their actions are crucial determinants in their children growing up to be smart, resilient, growth mindset, kind, enthusiastic, healthy, non-anxious or depressed, adults. Parents are just not that important, except in the genes they’ve passed on. Most radically of all, Plomin entreats us to focus on enjoying our time with our children, saying that parenting matters most just through the quality of our experiences together.

Robert Plomin

Robert Plomin is Professor of Behavioural Genetics in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. His research brings together genetic and environmental strategies to investigate the developmental interplay between nature and nurture. In 1994 when he came to the UK from the US, he launched the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which continues to thrive. He has published more than 900 papers and a dozen books, which have been cited more than 130,000 times. His latest book is Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Penguin, 2019).

After 50 years of research, Robert has come to the view that inherited DNA differences are the major systematic force that makes us who we are as individuals – our mental health and illness, our personality and our cognitive abilities and disabilities. The environment is important, but it works completely different from the way we thought it worked. The DNA revolution has made it possible to use DNA to predict our psychological problems and promise from birth. These advances in genetic research call for a radical rethink about what makes us who we are, with sweeping, and no doubt controversial, implications for the way we think about parenting, education and the events that shape our lives.

~~

You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com & @JonahPrimo on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With guests, Caroline Lambert and Matt Tyler

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity.

~~

You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com & @JonahPrimo on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity.

~~

You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com & @JonahPrimo on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trigger warnings have become common practice these days, not just in university campuses, but across the media landscape, in film, television, online and social media. They warn us that the material we’re about to see or hear might trigger distress. But what actually is a trigger? And what’s it meant to protect us from?

Trigger warnings were originally linked with post traumatic stress disorder - the idea being that those who have been through a traumatic event, for example sexual violence, and who then suffer from PTSD, can be triggered into re-experiencing that distress when exposed to related content. These days, however, trigger warnings seem to capture any sort of potentially distressing content, and are aimed at everyone, whether we have clinical PTSD or not. The idea is that we should be (or maybe even we have the right to be) warned about distressing content in advance.

But do trigger warnings work effectively? Do people in practice avoid content that may be triggering and if they choose to watch, are people able to prepare themselves emotionally, to reduce the impact of the material. Or, does the opposite happen - is there an ‘anticipatory effect’ where people get more distressed as they wait for and brace for the traumatic content.

Our guests on this podcast bring two different views to the table. Victoria Bridgland is a psychologist who has done detailed data based research into trigger warnings and has concluded not only that they don’t work, but that they are likely to exacerbate distress. Sociologist Nicole Bedera sees trigger warnings as important but not enough. She believes we need institutions that do much more to support those who’ve been through trauma, particularly sexual assault, otherwise they’re at risk of a secondary trauma caused by ‘institutional betrayal’.

Guests:

Nicole Bedera, Ph.D. is a sociologist at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming book On the Wrong Side: How Universities Betray Survivors to Protect Perpetrators of Sexual Assault.

Her research broadly focuses on how our social structures contribute to survivors’ trauma and make sexual violence more likely to occur in the future.

Her scholarship has influenced sexual violence prevention programming across the United States, including for Planned Parenthood, and her work has featured in media including The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC.

Victoria Bridgland

Victoria graduated with a research PhD in 2021 from Flinders University.

Victoria’s research interests include expectancy effects, emotional regulation, and memory for traumatic events. Her main body of work concerns trigger warnings, and what benefit – if any – they have for people encountering negative material.

Victoria currently serves on the Student Caucus Executive board for the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

In 2019 Victoria won a South Australian Postgraduate Fulbright Scholarship.

Victoria is currently at Harvard, with her research focussing on trigger warnings in art spaces.

~~

You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Bronwen Reid

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.