Professor Don BYRNE

PhD (Adelaide), Doctor Honoris Causa (DrHC) (NTNU, Norway), FASSA, FAPS

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About Me
Research and Supervision Interests
Current Teaching
Research Students
Selected Publications

I completed my PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Adelaide having simultaneously gained training and experience as a clinical psychologist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. My first appointment at the ANU was as a Research Fellow with the (then) Social Psychiatry Research Unit where I was actively involved in research on the role of social factors in contributing to mental illness. In 1980 I joined the Department of Psychology at the ANU to establish the postgraduate programs in clinical psychology, and in 1995 I was appointed Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology. In 1994 I was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society, and the following year I was elected to Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia for distinguished contributions to scholarship in the social sciences. I am a Past-President of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine (1997 to 1999) and was given the College’s Distinguished Service Award in 2001.

I currently serve on a number of national committees including the Accreditation Working Group (the national course accreditation committee) of the Australian Psychology Accreditation Council (APAC). From 1995 to 2001 I was Foundation Chair of the ACT Psychologists Registration Board, and I am currently a Sitting Professional Member of the ACT Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the body which adjudicates on matters to do with compulsory mental health treatment orders in the ACT.

At a broader University level I am Director of the Research School of Psychology in the College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, and serve both on the College Executive and on a broad range of College committees. I also represent the College on the Delegated Ethics Review Committee (DERC), a sub-committee of the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).

My Norwegian Connection: At an international level I am a member of the Research Advisory Board of the Research Centre for Health Promotion and Resources at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, and I spend time in Norway each year to advise and to work with that Group. You can explore the work of the Centre on their website (http://www.rchpr.org/Default.aspx). We are engaged in a range of international research and teaching collaborations, and in joint presentations at major international conferences. As a result of this collaboration, the ANU signed a formal agreement with NTNU in November 2011 to offer a joint PhD degree in behaviour and health. My Norwegian colleagues are able to visit the ANU regularly and it marks an especially fruitful collaboration between our two research-intensive universities (ANU and NTNU). The picture below shows some of my Norwegian colleagues, together with a lone Australian (me), at the recent (2009) European Health Psychology Conference in Pisa, Italy.

In 2012 I was awarded the higher doctoral degree of Doctor Honoris Causa (DrHC) by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, to recognise my scholarly contributions to Psychology, Medicine and Health Sciences. The pictures below were taken at the graduation ceremony at the NTNU in Trondheim on 1 June 2012.

My current research interests follow several somewhat loosely related pathways, joined by an enduring interest in the psychological factors associated with risk of illness.

The most longstanding of these areas looks at the nature of the Type A behaviour pattern and the mechanisms through which it might influence coronary risk. In particular, I have recently been interested in this construct in the context of occupational stress, following the notion that frustrating the competitive components of Type A behaviour may reveal the essential mediator between the behaviour pattern and coronary risk. Current studies are examining this in relation to both cardiovascular activation (in the psychophysiological laboratory) and measures of the experience of occupational stress (in the field and in clinical studies). The latter work extends the overall hypotheses to structural aspects of the occupational environment, thus linking health psychology with occupational and organisational psychology.

Another area has to do with adolescent smoking (and other substance use) behaviour. In the field we are looking at the influence of adolescent stressors in relation to the onset of smoking behaviour, and at the extent to which this relationship might be mediated by both personality and by aspects of the social environment. It is hoped that the outcome of this work may link into data we have already published on adolescent smoking prevention to recommend further ways of refining smoking prevention strategies for adolescents.

This work has however led to a broader interest in the measurement and consequences of adolescent stress, and I have recently developed a refined scale of adolescent stress (the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire or ASQ-2), an earlier version of which I published about a decade ago. The work describing this new questionnaire was published in 2007 in the Journal of Adolescence, and currently forms the basis of further research on adolescent stress in relation to the development of health risk. The ASQ-2 is now widely used in international studies of adolescent stress; versions of the ASQ-2 in Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Lithuanian Spanish, Dutch, German and Hungarian are currently available and in use, with translations into Chinese, French, Italian and Arabic presently being worked on.

In 2005 I assumed the direction of the psychological component of a large prospective study (the Lifestyle of Our Kids – or LOOK Study) of children aged 7 to 8 years at intake, designed to examine the development of health promoting behaviours over the course of primary schooling. The study, funded by the Commonwealth Education Trust (London) and the Australian Research Council, involved the comprehensive medical, psychological and fitness assessment of a cohort of around 900 children and their follow-up over 5 years to determine the patterns of development of both health (or risk of illness) and health promoting behaviours. All data have now been collected over intake and follow-up phases, and it is anticipated that further funding will be sought to follow these young people through their high school years. The LOOK Study, incidentally, also generated the development of a stress scale for children, and this was published in 2011 in the International Journal of Stress Management.

Most recently, I have been funded by the NSW Police Department and the Police Association of NSW to undertake work on stress and resilience in police officers. The study has three components: one examining screening procedures for resilience in police recruits, another looking at the training of resilience and coping in this population, and the third focusing on the identification of stress related dysfunctions by police officers in supervisory positions. This work is still in progress.

I currently teach into the postgraduate program in Clinical Psychology; I also give lectures on psychology and medicine to first year medical students.

I currently offer research supervision for students undertaking the PhD, Doctor of Psychology (Clinical) and Master of Clinical Psychology degrees as well as honours supervision. One of the things I enjoy most about being in a major research university is the opportunity to collaborate with and to supervise postgraduate students in their research, and I am happy to talk with prospective students about research proposals in any of the areas outlined above.

Current research students include:

Rachel Lacey (PhD – Clinical): Cognitive impairment during chemotherapy for cancer
Betty Ploskova (PhD – Clinical): Physiology of stress and anxiety
Suzi Keser (PhD – Clinical): Depression in the workplace
Kristen Murray (PhD – Clinical): Stress and body image in adolescents
Jiaqing O (PhD – Clinical): Evolutionary aspects of occupational stress
Olivia Waugh (PhD – Clinical): Perceptions of chronic pain
Jennifer Threader (PhD – Clinical): Nature and management of distress in respiratory cancer
Lisa Olive (PhD – Clinical): Stress and cardiovascular dysfunction in children
Tushara Wickramariyaratne (D Psych – Clinical): Help seeking in the impaired elderly
Karen Blandford (D Psych – Clinical): Distress screening in cancer patients
Andrew Hart (D Psych – Clinical): Occupational stress and depression in the clergy
Caitlin Lance (D Psych – Clinical): Adolescent stress and binge drinking
Kate Fenton (D Psych – Clinical): Adolescent stress, personality and depression
Chris Horan (D Psych – Clinical): Resilience training in police officers
Alicia Franklin (D Psych – Clinical): Stress and romantic relationship breakdown

Books

T. SIVIK, D.G. BYRNE, G. CHRISTODOULOU, D. LIPSITT and
H. DIENSTFREY (Eds) (2002)
Psycho-Neuro-Endocrino-Immunology (PNEI): A Common Language for the Whole Body.
Elsevier Science: Amsterdam (Pp xiii + 375)
ISBN 0-444-509895 / ISSN 0531-5131

M.L. CALTABIANO, D.G. BYRNE and E.P. SARAFINO (2008)

John Wiley & Sons Australia: Milton Qld (Pp xviii + 748)
ISBN 978 0 470 81345 4

Journal articles and book chapters

D.G. BYRNE, S.C. DAVENPORT and J. MAZANOV (2007)
Profiles of adolescent stress: The development of the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire
Journal of Adolescence, 30, pp 393-416

The Second Edition of the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire (ASQ-2) which this paper reports is now in wide international use and has been translated into 12 languages.

J. MAZANOV and D.G. BYRNE (2007)
Do you intend to smoke? A test of the assumed psychological equivalence in
adolescent smokers’ and non-smokers’ intention to change smoking behaviour.
Australian Journal of Psychology, 59, pp 34-42

J. MAZANOV and D,G, BYRNE (2007)
Changes in Adolescent Smoking Behaviour and Knowledge of Health Consequences of Smoking
Australian Journal of Psychology, 59, pp 176-180

D.G. BYRNE AND J. MAZANOV (2008)
Personality, stress and the determination of smoking behaviour in adolescents.
In G. Boyle, G. Matthews and D. Saklofske (Eds)
Handbook of Personality Theory and Testing. Sage Publishers: London Pp 698-719

D.M. LIPNICKI and D.G. BYRNE (2008)
An effect of posture on anticipatory anxiety
International Journal of Neuroscience, 118, pp 227-237

J. MAZANOV and D.G. BYRNE (2008)
Modelling change in adolescent smoking behaviour: Stability of predictors
across analytic models.
British Journal of Health Psychology, 13, pp 361-379

G.A. ESPNES and D.G. BYRNE (2008)
Sex differences in risk of coronary heart disease
Stress and Health, 24, 188-195

D.G. BYRNE and G.A. ESPNES (2008)
Occupational stress and cardiovascular disease
Stress and Health, 24, 231-238

R.D. TELFORD, S. BASS, M. BUDGE, D.G. BYRNE et al (2009)
The Commonwealth Institute Lifestyle of our Kids (LOOK) Project:
The effect of physical activity on health and development of Australian primary school children – Method Outline.
Australian Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 12, 156-163

C. DEANS and D.G. BYRNE (2009)
Development of a scale to measure non-traumatic military deployment stressors
Stress and Health, 25, 53-62

U.K. MOKSNES, D.G. BYRNE, G.A. ESPNES and J. MAZANOV (2010)
Adolescent stress: Evaluation of the factor structure of the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire (ASQ-N)
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 203-209

U.K. MOKSNES, I.E.O. MOLJORD, G.A. ESPNES and D.G. BYRNE (2010)
Leisure time physical activity does not moderate the relationship between stress and
Psychological functioning in Norwegian adolescents
Mental Health and Physical Activity, 3, 17-22

U.K. MOKSNES, I.E.O. MOLJORD, G.A. ESPNES and D.G. BYRNE (2010)
The association between stress and emotional states in adolescents:
The roles of gender and self-esteem
Personality and Individual Differences, 49, 430-435

K. MURRAY, D.G. BYRNE and E. RIEGER (2011)
Investigating adolescent stress and body image
Journal of Adolescence, 34, 269-278

D.G. BYRNE, K.A. THOMAS, J. L. BURCHELL, L. OLIVE and N. COSTIN (2011)
Stressor exposure in primary school aged children: Development of a scale to assess profiles of exposure and effects on psychological wellbeing
International Journal of Stress Management, 18, 88-111

U.K. MOKSNES, T. RANNESTAD, D.G. BYRNE and G.A. ESPNES (2011)
The association between stress, sense of coherence and subjective health complaints
in adolescents: Sense of coherence as a potential moderator
Stress and Health, 27, 157-165
C.I. MOLLER, R.J. TAIT and D.G. BYRNE
Deliberate self-harm, substance use and negative affect in non-clinical samples: A systematic review
Substance Abuse (In Press)

C.I. MOLLER, R.J. TAIT and D.G. BYRNE
Deliberate self-harm, substance use, and psychological distress in the Australian General population
Addiction (In Press)