Avant-Garde Psychology Arrives at IDC:
Interviewing Dean Mario Mikulincer
By Joy Pincus

The following article was published in the Herzliyan, winter 2008 issue.

New School of Psychology aims to promote a better society, happier people and a healthier world 

THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY IN ISRAEL, largely unchanged for the last forty years, is undergoing a reformation at IDC Herzliya. Led by Prof. Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology, the new program combines the latest in world trends with a State of the Art facility to create a program unequaled in the world.

Prof. Mikulincer is a leading figure and author in the world of psychology and recipient of both the E.M.E.T. Prize in Social Science for his contribution to psychology and the Berscheid-Hatfield Award for Distinguished Mid-Career Achievement. He spent over two decades at Bar Ilan University, as Full Professor of Psychology as well as Chair of the Psychology Department and Chair of its Interdisciplinary Studies. Now in charge of the new program at IDC, Mikulincer feels the sky is the limit.

“It’s a challenging opportunity, to renovate and energize psychology in Israel,” said Mikulincer in a recent interview. “Because of the university system in Israel, it’s hard to make real changes. Here I’ve been given an opportunity to make a new program that better fits the 21^st century with that is happening in science and appearing in psychology programs at the highest universities in the States.”

The program not only reflects the many changes happening in the world of psychology – it’s also leading the change. For one thing, it offers the world’s first mandatory course of positive psychology, which focuses on human strength, virtues, ideals and happiness. The course is taught by Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, author of Happier (McGraw-Hill, 2007) and one of the most popular teachers in Harvard’s recent history.

In addition, students are introduced to applied fields of psychology normally reserved for master’s studies. “For example,” explains Mikulincer, “in the second or third year, students receive training from organizational or clinical psychologists on what skills are needed to work in the real world. So our students will finish their BA not only with science and theory about the discipline of psychology, but with an understanding of what’s needed to be a good psychologist.”

Prof. Mikulincer’s projections for the next ten years see the school developing in stages. The first four years will focus on consolidating the bachelor’s program, both the regular track and the English track for international students. Following that, he envisions launching the master’s program, with studies oriented towards treatment, psychotherapy, education, social, organizational, health and developmental psychology. The main innovations there will be the integration of different branches of psychology and the introduction of new interdisciplinary programs such as political psychology or psychology and law. The final step will be a doctoral program in psychology, allowing students not only to do empirical research but also to widen their theoretical work, towards the goal of broadening the profession of psychology and creating new job opportunities.

The New School’s innovative facilities are expected to become one of the largest psychology laboratories in Israel. Faculty and students are already conducting research in which they observe interactions between couples, parents and children and small groups, and then analyze the participants’ verbal and nonverbal communication.

“We hope next year we will open electrophysiology labs to measure brain potential and psycho-physiological responses,” says Mikulincer with obvious enthusiasm. “Both of these are very important to understanding how the brain and body respond to different kinds of stimuli.” 

Perhaps one of the most exciting advances is the school’s research to discover how to foster pro-social behavior such as compassion, altruistic behavior, generosity, forgiveness and gratitude.

Prof. Mikulincer, in one experiment, asks his subjects to remember moments of receiving comfort, support and love, and to then feel what those moments illicit in them. While recently attending a conference organized by the Dalai Lama, Prof. Mikulincer and a colleague, Prof. Phillip Shaver from University of California at Davis, described the experiment, only to learn of its similarity to a known Buddhist meditation:

“The Dalai Lama told us that a person will be asked to focus on moments in which he felt loved by another person, and then to try and feel compassion towards other human beings. And this is exactly what we are finding in our experiments - that when you ask people to remember moments in which they felt loved, they act more compassionate towards the suffering of others.”

Pro-social Motifs will be the subject of the New School of Psychology’s First Annual Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology, to be held in March 2008. Scholars from around the world will join their Israeli colleagues for four days and their lectures will be published by the American Psychological Association.

This year’s class numbers eighty students; phenomenal considering the school had only four months of registration, having only received its license to operate in June. Next year’s class is projected to run nearly twice that amount, not including an additional 80 international students.  

Looking at the impact the new school can have outside the walls of IDC Herzliya, Prof. Mikulincer is confident that it can have far reaching consequences, well beyond that which it offers to each student:

“This research is trying to see how security and love can make one a better, more pro-social person who is more peaceful towards conflict, and to see how this experience can create a more harmonious society. When I encountered Prof. Reichman I saw that what he wants for the School of Psychology is to make a change, not only at the level of the individual but at the level of society, and so it was synchronicity that our work came together.”