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.Konečni, V. J., Ebbesen, E. B., & Konečni, D. K. (1976). Decision processes and risk taking in traffic: Driver response to the onset of yellow light. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61, 359–367.Ebbesen, E. B., Parker, S., & Konečni, V. J. (1977). Laboratory and field analyses of decisions involving risk. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 576–589.
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.Konecni, V. J. (1968). Psychological bases of application of the item-hierarchy procedure in behavior therapy. Psihološki Bilten (Yugoslavia), 1, 7–26.Konecni, V. J. (1969). Interaction in the clinical interview: Manipulation of certain formal variables. Psihologija (Yugoslavia), 2, 308–323.Konecni, V. J. (1971). Piaget's concept of egocentrism and some related issues. Psihologija (Yugoslavia), 4, 197–210.
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."University of Toronto Library CatalogueKonečni, V. J. (1975). Annoyance, type and duration of postannoyance activity, and aggression: The "cathartic effect". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104, 76–102. 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,Konečni, V. J. (1972). Some effects of guilt on compliance: A field replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 30–32.Konečni, V. J., Libuser, L., Morton, H., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1975). Effects of a violation of personal space on escape and helping responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11, 288–299.Konečni, V. J., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1975). Effects of the presence of children on adults' helping behavior and compliance: Two field studies. Journal of Social Psychology, 97, 181–193.Konečni, V. J. (1976). Altruism: Methodological and definitional issues. Science, 194, 562. and laboratory and field studies on human physical and verbal aggression.Konečni, V. J., & Doob, A. N. (1972). Catharsis through displacement of aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 379–387.Konečni, V. J. (1974). Self-arousal, dissipation of anger, and aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1, 192–194.Ebbesen, E. B., Duncan, B., & Konečni, V. J. (1975). Effects of content of verbal aggression on future verbal aggression: A field experiment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11, 192–204.Konečni, V. J. (1975). The mediation of aggressive behavior: Arousal level versus anger and cognitive labeling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 706–712.Konečni, V. J. (1982). Aggression. In D. Sherrod (Ed.), Social psychology (pp. 230–267). New York: Random House.Konečni, V. J., Crozier, J. B., & Doob, A. N. (1976). Anger and expression of aggression: Effects on aesthetic preference. Scientific Aesthetics, 1, 47–55.Konečni, V. J., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1976). Disinhibition versus the cathartic effect: Artifact and substance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 352–365.Konečni, V. J. (1984). Methodological issues in human aggression research. In R. M. Kaplan, V. J. Konečni & R. W. Novaco (Eds.), Aggression in children and youth (pp. 1–43). The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.Konečni, V. J. (1979). The role of aversive events in the development of inter-group conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 85–102). Monterey, California: Brooks/Cole.Konečni, V. J. (2013). Revenge: Behavioral and emotional consequences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 25–26.Konečni, V. J. (1991). Psychological aspects of the expression of anger and violence on the stage. Comparative Drama, 25, 215–241.Konečni, V. J. (2002). Psihološki aspekti ekspresije gneva i nasilja na sceni (V. Radovanović Trans.). [Psychological aspects of the expression of anger and violence on the stage]. Psihologija u Svetu, 7, 29–45.
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",Baron, R.A. (1977). Human aggression. New York: Plenum Press.Kaplan, R. M., Konečni, V. J., & Novaco, R. W. (Eds.). (1984). Aggression in children and youth. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. replacing unfocused appeals to sources as diverse as Aristotle's Poetics, Kleinian play therapy, and Albert Bandura's social learning theory.Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 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.
Legal psychology and judicial decision-making From 1973 to 2011 (the year of Emeritus Professor Ebbe B. Ebbesen's passing), Ebbesen and Konečni worked on judicial decision-making in the criminal justice system. Using quantitative methods, they studied how various participants in the system – judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, perpetrators, and others – combine the information available to them into decisions that then become information items for other decision-makers in the system.
This work has been very influentialLösel, F., Bender, D., & Bliesener, T. (Eds.). (1992). Psychology and law: International perspectives. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.Wrightsman, L. S., Nietzel, M. T., & Fortune, W. H. (1994). Psychology and the legal system (3rd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.Lovegrove, A. (1997). The framework of judicial sentencing: A study in legal decision making. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Kapardis, A. (2003). Psychology and law: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. and has been described as "arduous" and "pioneering".