Department of Psychology
Dr Doris McIlwain
My research interests are broadly in the field of emotion, memory and personality. I am interested in and have written about the Dark Triad: narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy. I do research with Dr John Lambie on reflection and rumination. I have an interest in charisma and those who get involved in New Religious Movements. I have a book on charisma which came out at the end of 2009. I have a chapter on Charismatic Political Leaders under review for the Encyclopedia of Global Studies.
The kind of doctoral and masters work I supervise is exemplified below:
My doctoral student Parvani Pinnewala has recently successfully completed doctoral work on the attributes of women who are resilient in the face of domestic violence. I work on internet scams with doctoral student Manny Aston. Andrew Geeves and I (with Prof John Sutton) are exploring the performer's emotion in music. Barbora Nevicka began her research on narcissism in leaders with me before going to the University of Amsterdam to complete the work as part of a co-tutelle. She has published that work with her supervisory team from Amsterdam. Rachael Burton and I are looked at metrosexuality as a disruptive gender category. Lana Gilmour and I are researching benign forms of splitting in interpersonal styles on the web. Cathy Hicks has just commenced work with me on Migration as Flight with South African migrants and emotional responses to post-apartheid migration. Christine Segran and I are exploring cross-cultural conceptions of the appropriateness of different emotional styles. Madeleine Fraser (co-supervised by Dr Nicole Vincent in Philosophy) is looking at how neuropsychological evidence is used within legal settings regarding psychopathy. Madeleine recently features in the news. Penelope Faure is researching with me resilience in the face of redundancy, and Caryn Cridland has done research on mindful and compassionate mediation practices. I am also working with Caroline Dale on children's experiences of painful treatments and with Charis Martin-Ross the determinants of positive spillover from work to family life. I am working with Dorian Richards on exploring the attributes and well-being of those who practise yoga. I co-supervise work (with Prof Ladd Wheeler) by Beatrice Alba on social dominance and Giselle Bill on innovative sexualities; with A/Prof Amanda Barnier by Misia Temler on repetition in memory; with Dr Cathy McMahon by Wendy Roncolato on maternal characteristics in the attachment relationship, and a few others whose projects are just forming.
My research focus is the reciprocal influences on personality style of affects and unconscious processes, spanning psychology, philosophy and cognitive science forming the basis for three research topics: I profile personalities in terms of their sensitivity to inner and outer affective cues; their awareness of the personal links between rage and tacit ideals (conference presentation); and I explore the link between certain personality attributes and proprioceptive skill. This last topic emphasises Personality, Temperament and Yoga and I have been invited to give a talk in the Department of Anthropology on this in October.. It suggests sensitivity to inner cues shows individual and contextual variation; and can form the differential basis of skill. My survey research of correlates of temperament type established the relevance of temperament scales to practitioners and established local Australian norms for Pavlovian measures, relevant to withstanding stress, and responding quickly, with skill, to changing environmental contingencies. My interdisciplinary reach has been recognized in my involvement in a number of closed ARC workshops hosted by philosophers. I have experience administering small grants at Macquarie researching expert movement with Prof Sutton, as principal investigator in field research assessing stress in Aboriginal women in Sydney, funded by AIATSIS, while at the Department of Behavioural Sciences University of Sydney, where I was director there of the Sydney Stress Research Group, and a participant in the Tomkins Research group.
I have recently been asked to join CAVE the Centre for Agency Values and Ethics, and was invited to be part of a Faculty Research Centre CEPET - the Centre for Elite Performance Expertise and Training.
Recent Talks
Intivited talk to COFA about my article: Living Palely [my contribution starts at 21:21] -
In 2011 I gave invited talks to:
1) ) Center for Advanced Studies in Psychotherapy and Counseling on ‘Scaffolding Clinical Insight: Affective Profiling and the Creative Use of Clinical Assessment’, Thursday 10 March 7.45 - 9.00pm Pilone room, Crows Nest Community Centre, 2 Ernest Place, Crows Nest
2) Agent Tracking and its Disorders: A Multidisciplinary Conference on the Identification and Tracking of Human Individuals 17-18, 20-21 June 2011 Macquarie University Invited respondent to a paper presented by Prof Jeanette Kennett (Philosophy, Macquarie) & Dr Nicole Vincent (Philosophy, Macquarie) Not skin-deep: Does Botox Impair AgencyTracking?
3) Character, capacity, and personality: A one day workshop sponsored by the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE) and the Agency and Moral Cognition Network Date: July 21 2011: a symposium entitled: Emotion, Rationality and Self
4) Westmead hospital staff and interested professionals as part of the Behavioural Medicine Lecture Series, Department of Medical Psychology, Sydney West Area Mental Health Service, Monday, August 29th, 2011, a talk entitled 'Pale affect, empathy, morality & mental time travel in psychopathy’;
5) The Psyche at Work: A Seminar with Christophe Dejours, 8 November, 2-5pm (Macquarie University, W6A 107). I was invited by Associate Professor Jean-Philippe Deranty of the Department of Philosophy, Macquarie, to give a commentary as part of a day-long workshop.
6) Work and Self-Development Conference: 10-11 November 2011 (with Penelope Faure) a paper on ‘Retrenchment: hitting the reload button rather than the panic button’.
7) Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, Sydney Lacan Workshop 2011 Lacan: On Anxiety, an invited talk about explosive charismatic relationships entitled: ‘In-you-out-there: the uncanny as moebius strip’.
Recent Publications
In Press
- McIlwain, D. (in press) Charismatic Political Leaders the Encyclopedia of Global Studies, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer and Helmut Anheier. SAGE Publications Inc, Thousand Oaks, California.
- McIlwain, D. (in press) Minding the Gap: repression and dissociation in the writings of Paul Valent, Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy.
- Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil, John Sutton, Amanda J. Barnier, & Doris McIlwain (in press) We Remember, We Forget: Collaborative Remembering in Older Couples, Discourse Processes.
Book
McIlwain, D. (2009). Impatient for Paradise: Charisma, Personality & Charismatic New Religions. VDM –Verlag.
Chapters
McIlwain, D., Evans, J., Caldis, E., Cicchini, F., Aronstan, A., Wright Taylor, A.(2012) Strange moralities: Vicarious emotion and Moral emotions in Machiavellian and Psychopathic Personality Styles In Robyn Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning.
McIlwain, D. (2011) Young Machiavellians and the traces of shame: coping with vulnerability to a toxic affect. In pp. 213-232, C. Barry, P. Kerig, K. Stellwagen, & T. Barry (Eds). Narcissism and Machievellianism in Youth: Implications for the development of Adaptive and Maladaptive Behavior. APA.
McIlwain, D. (2009) Returning by an unused path: Charismatic New Religions, primary narcissism and the denied wish. In pp.544-572, McIlwain, D. (2009). Impatient for Paradise: Charisma, Personality & Charismatic New Religions. VDM –Verla.
Invited keynote articles
McIlwain, D. (2009) Living Palely: On the Rationality of a certain fullness of feeling, ArtLink, vol 29 no 3, pp 15-23.
Publications - Journals
McIlwain, D. (2011) Transplanting life: The distributed media of embodied selves. Artlink, Volume 31 (4), pp December issue.
Jonna K. Vuoskoski, William F. Thompson, Doris McIlwain, and Tuomas Eerola( 2012) Who listens to sad music and why? Music Perception, forthcoming
Nevicka, B., De Hoogh, Van Vianen, Beersma & McIlwain, D. (2011) All I Need Is a Stage to Shine: Narcissist’s Leader Emergence and Performance. Leadership Quarterly.
Given-Wilson, Z., McIlwain, D., & Warburton, W. (2011) Meta-cognitive and interpersonal difficulties in overt and covert narcissism. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 50, Issue 7, pp 1000-1005.
John Sutton, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen & Andrew Geeves (2011) Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes. The Journal of the British Society for Phenomneology, 42 (1), pp78-103.
McIlwain, D. (2010) Living Strangely in Time: Emotions, Masks and Moral in Psychopathically-inclined people. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy,Volume 6, No. 1, pp.75-94..
Geeves, A. & McIlwain, D., Sutton, J. & Christensen, W. (2010) Expanding Expertise: Investigating a Musician’s Experience of Music Performance
McIlwain, D., Taylor, A., & Geeves, A. (2010) Fullness of Feeling: reflection, rumination, depression and the specificity of
autobiographical memories,
Geeves, A., Christensen, W., Sutton, J & McIlwain, D. Critical Review of Practicing Perfection, by Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford, in Empirical Musicology Review 3 (3), August 2008, 163-172.
Baikie, K., & McIlwain, D. (2008). Who does expressive writing work for? Examination of alexithymia, splitting, and repressive coping style as moderators of the expressive writing paradigm. British Journal of Health Psychology, 13, 61–66
McIlwain, D. (2008) Cascading Constraints: The development of Machiavellianism and Psychopathy In S. Boag (Ed.), Personality Down Under: Perspectives from Australia. New York: Nova Science publishers.
Tychsen, A., Hitchens, M., Brolund, T., McIlwain, D., & Kavakli, M. (2007). Group Play: determining factors of gaming experience in multi-player role playing games. ACM Journal of Computers in Entertainment. (Accepted August 2007).
Tychsen, A., McIlwain, D., Brolund, T. & Hitchens, M., (2007) Player-Character Dynamics in Multi-Player Role Playing Games. Proceedings of DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association) 2007: Situated Play, September 2007, pp. 40-48
McIlwain, D. (2007) Rezoning Pleasure: drives and affects in personality theory, Theory and Psychology.
McIlwain, D. (2007) Edited special issue, Theory and Psychology, on the influence and significance of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins Introduction: "Pleasure in Mind: Tomkins' Affect Theory in Aesthetics, Personality Theory and Culture
McIlwain, D. (2006) Substitute Objects, Substitute Acts: Commentary on Freudian Dream Theory, Dream Bizarreness and the Disguise-Censor Controversy Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis, 8 (1), 42-47.
McIlwain, D. (2006) The Charisma of Fallible
leaders and the limits of self-help. Australian Review of Public Affairs.
May 2006.
McIlwain, D. (2006) Already filtered: affective immersion and personality differences in accessing present and Past, Philosophical Psychology 19, 381-399.
W. Warburton and D. McIlwain, The Role of Early Maladaptive Schemas in Adult Aggression, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Mental Health Monographs 2 (2005), 17-34.
McIlwain (2004) Therapists with Fur. Meanjin, vol 63, no. 4.
McIlwain, D (2004) Can the science of love catch up with common sense. Australian Review of Public Affairs, June 2004.
McIlwain (2003) Yoga and Psychology, Metapsychology Online Book Reviews. article is here
McIlwain, D. (2003) Bypassing Empathy: Mapping a Machiavellian Theory of Mind and Sneaky Power, in Betty Repacholi and Virginia Slaughter (Eds). Individual differences in theory of mind: Implications for typical and atypical development. Psychology Press series "Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science"
McIlwain, D. (2002) Sigmund Freud in pp155-156, Editor(s): Neil J. Salkind & Lewis H. Margolis Encyclopedia of Child Development, MacMillan Reference USA: MI, USA. LINK HERE
McIlwain, D. (2001) The Dynamic Unconscious Revisited in pp.379-392, Eds. John R. Morss, Niamh Stephenson, Hans Van Rappard Theoretical Issues in Psychology, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Boston, USA.
McIlwain, D. (1999) Losing Ourselves: the Burden of Consciousness in the Writings of Jenny Diski, Corporealtiies: Energies, Affects, Selves. Collected Papers Number 4, Sydney: Australia.
McIlwain, D., Sutton, J. & Cooke, S. (1996) Stress and Social Connectedness: Urban mental health in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women, in Dianna Kenny [ed] Proceedings of the International Congress on Stress and Health, p156.
Westbrook, M.T. & McIlwain, D (1996) Living with the late effects of disability: A five year follow-up survey of coping among post-polio survivors Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 46, 60-71.
McIlwain, D (1996) Review of Passion in theory by Robyn Ferrell, Routledge, in Australian Journal of Feminist Studies, vol 13, no 28, pp367-369.
McIlwain, D (1995) The Gods are Libido: a review of Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1994), in Metascience, New Series (issue 7), pp212-215.
McIlwain, D. (1994) A personality approach to involvement in new religious movements (pp 235-242) in Boele de Raad, Willem KB Hofstee & Guus L van Heck [eds] Personality Psychology in Europe (Volume 5), Tilburg University Press: Tilburg.
McIlwain, D. (1994) "Exiles at home: a psychological profile of affiliates to innovative, imported new religious movements in Australia", in pp 216-136, Bouvy, A.M., van der Vijver, F.J.R., Boski, P and Schmitz, P. [eds] Journeys into Cross-cultural Psychology, Swetz & Zeitlinger: Amsterdam. ISBN Number 90 265 1403 4.
McIlwain, D. (1994) "Embedded Women: The Freudian Legacy and women's self-image and morality in the work of Gilligan and Brown", Proceedings of the Pacific Meeting of Women in Psychology, Wellington, NZ.