Vladimir J. Konečni (born October 27, 1944) is an American and Serbian psychologist, aesthetician, poet, dramatist, fiction writer, and art photographer, currently an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. In psychology, he has carried out influential work in several distinct areas, related to each other by strong methodological concerns. Konečni has conducted laboratory and field studies of human emotion and (physical and verbal) aggression, as well as of altruistic behavior, which have been cited in numerous social psychology textbooks. Decision-making has been another major research area in which Konečni has been heavily involved (in close collaboration with Dr. Ebbe B. Ebbesen, a long-time colleague at the University of California, San Diego). Most of their work has been devoted to judicial decisions in the criminal justice system, but they have also conducted a number of frequently cited studies of drivers' decisions in real-world settings. Finally, Konečni has for some forty years worked in the multi-faceted interdisciplinary domains of empirical aesthetics, psychology of art, and music psychology. Notable groups of his studies in these areas have addressed the highly specialized and technical problems of the "golden ratio" (or "golden section") in visual art, the significance of macrostructure in music, peak aesthetic responses, and the relationship between music and emotion.
Biography Vladimir Konečni grew up in Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia, now of Serbia). His parents were Dora D. Konečni (née Vasić), an economist and banker, and Josip J. Konečni, M.D., a Professor of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. Konečni is of Serbian, Czech, and Austrian descent. Konečni is married and has two sons. He lives in San Diego (California, US), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Tallinn (Estonia), and Belgrade (Serbia).
Career Konečni received his Bachelor of Arts degree in experimental and clinical psychology, and philosophy, from the University of Belgrade in 1969; as an undergraduate, he published three refereed articles. In 1970, he began graduate studies in experimental and social psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, receiving an M.A. degree in 1971 and a Ph.D. in 1973. The title of his dissertation was "Experimental Studies of Human Aggression: The Cathartic Effect." Also in 1973, Konečni was appointed Assistant Professor and thus began his 35-year-long uninterrupted association with the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego (Associate Professor in 1978; Professor in 1982; Emeritus Professor in 2008). In the period after 1973, he was at various times a Visiting Professor at a number of renowned universities outside the United States, including the London School of Economics, Sydney University, Hebrew University Jerusalem, University of Cape Town, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Freie Universität Berlin. In the course of his career so far, Konečni has given colloquia on his research at some 150 universities on all continents.
Negative emotions, physiological arousal, and aggressive behavior In the period 1972 to 1984, Konečni carried out, in parallel, field experiments on altruistic behavior, and laboratory and field studies on human physical and verbal aggression. With regard to aggression, on the basis of experimental findings, Konečni distinguished among physical, verbal, play, fantasy and other types of aggression, and proposed the existence of bidirectional causation (behavioral and psychophysiological) between the degree of anger (high arousal antagonistically labeled) and the amount of expressed physical aggression. This theoretical model, which emphasized previously unacknowledged feedback loops, seems to resolve the classical issue of "catharsis". By means of definitional clarity and experimental precision, the model shifts the debate to the many implications of the theoretically sound and empirically observable "cathartic effect", replacing unfocused appeals to sources as diverse as Aristotle's Poetics, Kleinian play therapy, and Albert Bandura's social learning theory. This Anger-Aggression Bidirectional-Causation (AABC) theoretical model parsimoniously accounts for hundreds of experimental findings in the literature. These ideas have also been applied to the role of aversive events in the development of intergroup conflict. Subsequently, Konečni's writing on aggression was extended to the concept of revenge and the expression of anger and violence on the stage and in literature.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
