PBB Board of Director featured in an UC-Irvine online article

Psychology Beyond Borders’ Board of Directors member, Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver is featured in the University of California-Irvine’s website with an article titled “Taking Coping Skills Global”. The UC-Irvine article addresses Dr. Silver’s work with PBB on teaching coping skills to communities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia impacted by the 2006 earthquake.  Dr. Silver is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior and the Department of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. An international expert in the field of stress and coping, Dr. Silver is a member of the Academe and Policy Research Senior Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security where she provides ongoing advice to the Department of Homeland Security on the psychological impact of terrorism and disasters. She is a leading researcher on both the acute and long-term physical and psychological impacts of fear and terror. PBB greatly appreciates Dr. Silver’s contribution to our work and mission! Click here to read the article about Dr. Silver’s work.

On the vagaries of translation

By Conor Seyle, PBB Research Officer

Here is a thought experiment for you. Define “happiness,” “affection,” ”joy” and “caring” without making the definitions overlap significantly. It’s hard. It’s difficult to take such basic concepts – particularly words like this, that refer to our internal emotional experiences – and break them down into specific definitions that really capture the distinction between the different ideas. This difficulty was something that the PBB team in Indonesia ran into recently. As a part of the trip to Indonesia, one goal was to make sure that the scales and instruments that we’re using are accurately translated into Indonesian. To do that, we had to make sure that the subtle differences between words were accurately reflected in the Indonesian terms we used.