Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by George Brown

Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to be here.   I have had an enjoyable time since I arrived yesterday, meeting all sorts of very interesting people.  But I am somewhat overwhelmed by the generosity of your orator and, I have also to confess, I have found this a difficult talk to prepare.  I assumed that really what was required was not to talk about my work, but to reveal something about myself, bearing in mind that I belong to the producing side of the University life, rather than that involved in conveying knowledge.

So what to talk about I didn’t decide until a few days ago. I was reading to my son, who is seven, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. It opens with a meeting in a University common room, and it is fair to say that the intricacies of academic life left my son puzzled.  There was talk of a very nasty king, in a place that appeared to be Lapland, that the staff wanted to influence, and a someone comments, “Do you know what he wants above all else – even more than an honorary degree?”  I will not reveal to you the even greater prize that he envisaged. But the mention of honour reminded me, although I didn’t really need reminding, of the overwhelming importance of emotion, particularly pride and shame, in all things social.  Of course today is, as the Vice-Chancellor said, one of pride. But sadly shame and humiliation are also everywhere. What I would like to convey is that what modest success my colleagues and I have had in beginning to understand the origins of various psychiatric, and to some extent physical, disorders would have been impossible without a focus on the emotions brought about by events in every day life, and the various family settings in which we spend much of our time.

So the Pullman book made up my mind.  I would first note the extraordinary fact that the study of emotion, despite Darwin and Freud, has with a few notable exceptions, been almost entirely ignored in sociology, and has only recently gained a toe-hold in psychology, a discipline still dominated by matters cognitive.  I should add though that this situation is beginning to change.

I decided I would couple this point about emotion with noting the widespread sense that the social sciences, following their extraordinary expansion of the last thirty or forty years, have not really entirely delivered on their promise.  These two points fortunately allow me to make a kind of optimistic prediction appropriate on such an occasion: that one of the things which will begin improve the quality of social research is greater attention to the systematic study of emotion.

One important fact about the study of emotion is that it is difficult to measure, although it’s all around us. It hardly leaves us. And here it is intriguing that, by and large, we do not yet have a better way of studying it other than using ourselves as the measuring instrument. We need, for example, to take into account paralinguistic signs such as tone of voice and this can only be done by making a judgement about the presence of, let us say, warmth or criticism.

When I was a young research worker a colleague suggested we should transcribe one or two of the tape recordings of the lengthy family interviews we were carrying out.   We had not considered doing this routinely because of the cost with such long interviews. To my great surprise I found it difficult to recognise the interview I had made with the mother of a seriously ill child. It just did not resonate with my memory of what occurred.   I found myself wondering “Did I really do this interview?”   It took me some time some to work out what was wrong; the transcript was lacking anything about the way things were said.  Consideration of emotion in this sense is crucial if we want to begin to understand some of the implications of what is recorded in such a transcript – a mother may convey concern in a way that lacks any warmth, or another mother show discontent in the complete absence of hostility anger or criticism - and, of course, in both instances the reverse.  

Therefore, perhaps an unexpected bonus of the study of emotion with the need to rely a good deal on ourselves as investigators to make the measurement, will be to reduce our dependence in the social sciences on the ever present and meretricious standardised questionnaire, which not only omits such information but in more general terms does so much to keep us from what is really going on in the world.

So let me begin to finish. It seems clear to me that to tackle successfully research on many of the problems we face today, as academic disciplines and as a society, will require much more collaborative research.  Here I have in mind taking into account not only neglected phenomena such as emotion, but even, dare I say it, the likely fruits of molecular genetics, represented yesterday by another honorary graduand, John Sulston.  With collaborative research in mind I have to say, I have been impressed with the mix of disciplines here today, and with your new Department of Health and Human Sciences, where clearly such collaboration is planned.

A psychologist whom I have much admired, D T Campbell, wrote some years ago about a fish scale model of research, and how truly productive research often takes place on the edge of disciplines and where they overlap. So as a kind of fishy character myself whose academic title is , as the orator pointed out, professor of sociology, but whose first degree was in anthropology, and a good deal of my interest and reading have been in psychology, psychiatry and to some extent biology, I would to leave you the thought that a genuine bio-psychosocial approach to some of the problems we face in our quickly changing world has been rare and has proved  far from easy. But it is one on which I place a great deal of hope for the future, and one I trust that Essex might in time make some contribution.  Thank you.