Professor Don BYRNE

PhD (Adel), FAPS, FASSA

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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 (then) 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 currently serve on a number of national committees including the Professional Development and Accreditation Committee (the national course accreditation committee) of the Australian Psychology Accreditation Council (a joint body of the Australian Psychological Society and the state and territory registration boards). From 1995 to 2001 I was Foundation Chair of the ACT Psychologists Registration Board.

At a broader university level I am currently Head of the School of Psychology (in the School of Health and Psychological Sciences) within the College of Medicine, Biology and the Environment, and serve both on the College Executive and on a broad range of College committees, including the College Research Committee. I also represent the College on the Delegated Ethics Review Committee (DERC) which is a sub-committee of the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).

At an international level I currently sit on the Research Advisory Board of the Norwegian Psychosomatic Group based in Trondheim and travel to Norway each year to advise and to work with that Group. I am also a Past-President of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine and was given the College’s Distinguished Service Award in 2001.

Qualifications

BA (Honours Psychology) – Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide
PhD (Clinical Psychology/Psychiatry) – Faculty of Medicine, University of Adelaide
Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society (APS)
Member of the College of Clinical Psychologists (APS)

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 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 occupational stress (in the field and in clinical studies). The latter work extends the overall hypotheses to structural aspects of the occupational environment, thus attempting to link health psychology with occupational and organisational psychology.

Another area has to do with adolescent smoking 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 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 work 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 in Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese and Lithuanian are currently available and in use, with Chinese, Dutch, French and Italian versions presently being worked on.

More recently I have worked on patterns of coping with a diagnosis of breast cancer and with the various forms of treatment for this disease. These studies address coping in relation to the toxicity of adjuvant chemotherapy in women with an early diagnosis of breast cancer. It is planned, however, to extend this work to women with metastatic breast cancer and also to both early diagnosed and metastatic cancer of the colon. We have recently published a validated measure of symptom load and impact in patients with cancer (the Canberra Symptom Scorecard), and papers are now in press describing the work on coping.

And in the last few years I have assumed the direction of the psychological component of a large prospective 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 Institute in London and the Australian Research Council, involves 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. The first stage of data collection, including detailed bio-medical examinations and extensive psychological testing, is now complete and the cohort has been followed up on two annual occasions. Further follow-up will proceed until the primary school phase is complete, and it is anticipated that further funding will be sought to follow these young people through their high school years.

Undergraduate – PSYC3020 (Health Psychology) offered annually at the third year level and co-taught with Dr Jay Brinker.

Postgraduate – Semester length courses in Presentation of Psychological Abnormality and Health Psychology in the first and second years respectively of the programs in Clinical Psychology.

I was also responsible for the development of the human behaviour components of the ANU Graduate Medical Course and provide regular teaching in that course.

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.

Four of my Doctoral students recently successfully completed their studies and graduated – these were:

Belinda Barker (PhD – Clinical): PTSD and the experience of pain
Sarah Davenport (PhD – Clinical): Stress, coping and cancer
Jo Rouston (D Psych – Clinical): PTSD and perceptions of health risk
Carolyn Deans (D Psych – Clinical): Occupational stress in military peacekeepers

Current research students include:

David Tao (PhD): Cross-cultural determinants of adolescent smoking
Rachel Lacey (PhD – Clinical): Cognitive impairment during chemotherapy for cancer
Gerda Wesseling (PhD): Adolescent stress and risk of suicide
Betty Ploskova (PhD – Clinical): Physiology of stress and anxiety
Suzi Keser (PhD): Depression in the workplace
Unni-Karin Moksnes (PhD): Stress in Norwegian adolescents
(jointly with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)
Tushara Wickramariyaratne (D Psych – Clinical): Help seeking in depressed men
Karen Blandford (D Psych – Clinical): Distress screening in cancer patients
Jenny Coyne (D Psych – Clinical): Determinants of early breast cancer screening
Lauren Wood (D Psych – Clinical): Mindfulness and stress management
Andrew Hart (D Psych – Clinical): Occupational stress and depression
Liz Maloney (M Clin Psych): Burnout in clinical psychologists
Yan Wen Teoh (M Clin Psych): Stress and self-harm in adolescents

Selected publications – past 5 years

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)

Health Psychology: Biopsychosocial Interactions - Second Australasian Edition.

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

Journal articles and book chapters

J. BARRESI, B. SHADBOULT, D.G. BYRNE and R. STUART-HARRIS (2002)
The measurement of symptoms in outpatients with advanced cancer
Proceedings of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, 21, p 249

J. MAZANOV and D.G. BYRNE (2002)
A comparison of predictors of adolescent intention to smoke with adolescent current smoking using discriminant function analysis
British Journal of Health Psychology, 7, pp 185-201

D.G. BYRNE and J. MAZANOV (2002)
Sources of stress in Australian adolescents: Factor structure and stability over time
Stress and Health, 18 , pp 185-192

D.G. BYRNE (2002)
Occupational stress, occupational structure and occupational morbidity
In T. Sivik, D.G. Byrne, G. Christodoulou, D. Lipsitt and H. Dienstfrey (Eds)
Psycho-Neuro-Endocrino-Immunology (PNEI): A Common Language for the Whole Body.
Elsevier Science: Amsterdam Pp 151-154

D.G. BYRNE and J. MAZANOV (2003)
Adolescent stress and future smoking behaviour: A prospective investigation
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 54, pp 313-321

J. BARRESI, B. SHADBOULT, D.G. BYRNE and R. STUART-HARRIS (2003)
The development of the Canberra Symptom Scorecard: A tool to monitor the symptoms of patients with advanced tumours
BMC Cancer, 3, pp 1-9 (32)

D.M. LIPNICKI and D.G. BYRNE (2003)
Inter-relationships between insight problem solving and autonomic arousal
Australian Journal of Psychology, 55, Suppl S 2003, p 22

D.G.BYRNE (2003)
Occupational stress in Australia in the twenty first century: The health and social costs.
Dialogue: Newsletter of the ASSA, 22, pp 44-48

D.G. BYRNE and J. MAZANOV (2005)
Prevention of adolescent smoking: A prospective test of three models of intervention
Journal of Substance Use, 10, pp 363-374

D.G. BYRNE and S.C. DAVENPORT (2005)
Contemporary profiles of clinical and health psychologists in Australia
Australian Psychologist, 40, pp 190-201

D.M. LIPNICKI and D.G. BYRNE (2005)
Thinking on your back: Solving anagrams faster when supine than when standing.
Cognitive Brain Research, 24, pp 719-722

J. MAZANOV and D.G. BYRNE (2005)
An evaluation of the stability of perceptions and frequency of adolescent risk taking over time and across samples.
Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 725-735

J. MAZANOV and D.G. BYRNE (2006)
A cusp catastrophe model analysis of changes in adolescent substance use: Assessment of behavioural intention as a splitting variable
Non-linear Dynamics, Psychology and the Life Sciences, 10, pp 445-470

D.G. BYRNE, S.C. DAVENPORT and R. STUART-HARRIS (2006)
Coping with chemotherapy: The experience of toxicity in women undergoing treatment for early breast cancer
In M Katsikitis (Ed) Proceedings of the 2006 Joint Conference of the APS and NZPsS
Australian Psychological Society, Melbourne, Pp 51-54

D.G. BYRNE (2006)
Adolescent Stress and Health: Reflections on the Neglected Area of Measurement
Psychology and Health, 21, pp 26-27 (Supp 1)

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

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, 12 (In Press)

R.D. TELFORD, S. BASS, M. BUDGE, D.G. BYRNE et al (2008)
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.
Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport (In Press)  

G.A. ESPNES and D.G. BYRNE (2008)
Sex differences in risk of coronary heart disease
Stress and Health (In press)

D.G. BYRNE and G.A. ESPNES (2008)
Occupational stress and cardiovascular disease
Stress and Health (In press)

C. DEANS and D.G. BYRNE
Development of a scale to measure non-traumatic military deployment stressors
Stress and Health  (In press)

U.K. MOSKNES, D.G. BYRNE, G.A. ESPNES and J. MAZANOV
Validation of the Adolescent Stress Questionnaire (ASQ – N) in a Norwegian adolescent sample: A cross-cultural comparison between Norway and Australia.
Stress and Health  (In press)

U.K. MOSKNES, D.G. BYRNE, G.A. ESPNES and J. MAZANOV
The Adolescent Stress Questionnaire (ASQ-N): Testing av et nytt instrument for a male stress hos Norske barn og unge (Test of a new instrument for measuring stress among Norwegian adolescents).
Journal of the Norwegian Psychological Association (Submitted) (in Norwegian)

S.C. DAVENPORT, D.G. BYRNE and R. STURT-HARRIS
Anxiety and depression in women at six and twelve months following adjuvant chemotherapy for the treatment of early breast cancer
Psycho-oncology (Submitted)

S.C. DAVENPORT, D.G. BYRNE and R. STURT-HARRIS
Coping strategies employed by women six and twelve months after adjuvant chemotherapy for early breast cancer (In preparation)

N.J. SPURRIER, D.G. BYRNE, K. THOMAS, G.J. REYNOLDS,
R.B. CUNNINGHAM and R.D. TELFORD
Body image of primary school aged children: Relationship with body mass and physical activity (In preparation)

D.G. BYRNE, K. THOMAS and J. BURCHELL
The measurement of stress in school-aged children: Development of a new scale (In preparation)

D.G. BYRNE, K. THOMAS and J. BURCHELL
Body image, physical activity and psychological well-being in school-aged children (In preparation)