EASP Meeting: Understanding and Transforming Challenging Relationships: Setting a Research Agenda for a 21st Century Social Psychology

Conflicts across family settings, schools, neighbourhoods, work place, and wider communities and nations, social media, etc. can all exert an adverse impact on individuals, threaten their identity, undermine their quality of life as well as harm their mental and physical health. Such conflicts can be further exacerbated due to environmental pressures, such as poverty, climate change, economic crises, international shake-ups (e.g., Brexit), etc. Based on recent advancements of social psychological theory and research, we have identified seven major hot topics which are key to understanding difficult relationships. These are: forgiveness, apology, justice, trust, respect, hope, and power. Currently, researchers disparately theorise and produce empirical work on one or at most two of these concepts. Bringing together researchers and practitioners from around the world and providing them with a space in which they can integrate their theories and see the bigger and more complex picture framing difficult relationships is what is required to galvanise this field towards the next step in developing meta-theoretical approaches to and social psychological taxonomies of such challenging relationships.