Children and adolescents who commit callous and unemotional acts against others are making recurrent headlines in the news media.
Often labeled as child psychopaths these young people invoke terrifying images to others, but not to Winthrop Professor Stephen Houghton.
Winthrop Professor Houghton is a registered psychologist in the Faculty of Education, where he is Director of the Centre for Child and Adolescent Related Disorders. The developmental trajectories related to psychopathy and other forms of antisocial behaviour have been a major focus of Winthrop Professor Houghton’s research since he arrived at UWA.
The calibre of Winthrop Professor Houghton’s research in this area, and other areas of child and adolescent psychopathology, is reflected in 20 grants he has received from the Australian Research Council, The National Health and Medical Research Council, Healthway and the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health.
He is an invited member of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, and the only non-European-based invited member of the European Network on Hyperkinetic Disorders.
In 2004 Winthrop Professor Houghton was listed as one of the 75 leading international researchers in the field of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. In 2008, he was one of only four non-European-based researchers and clinicians invited to present at the 10th anniversary of the European Congress of Child and Adolescent Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology.
To date, Winthrop Professor Houghton has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to three books and seven book chapters. Recently, he published the PsychProfiler - a screening test that can be used in the early identification of disorders - with one of his former PhD students, Dr Shane Langsford. He is an editor of the British Journal of Educational Psychology and an editorial board member of three other international journals.
Winthrop Professor Houghton integrates research theory with practice, and this was recognised when he was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Excellence in Teaching Award. His enthusiasm for his subject is reflected in an active student research group in the field of child psychopathology, from which more than 100 postgraduate students have successfully graduated. Of the 25 PhDs supervised by Winthrop Professor Houghton, six have received distinctions.
Research should be applicable to the real world, and in Winthrop Professor Houghton’s case it is. Intervention programs which seek to change the trajectory of young people towards psychopathy and other antisocial behaviours are currently being evaluated.
