How we spent our summer at Hogrefe (2024)

It has been another busy summer for us here at Hogrefe! Amongst the typical chaos of publishing, research, and working with our clients, we were delighted to attend various psychology conferences around the UK and Europe, welcoming the return of in-person events together with the new familiarity of online meet-ups.

First came the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology (DOP) Annual Conference held in Sheffield in May. The theme of the event was The value we bring, noting the commitment of the occupational psychology community to be a ‘positive force for change’ including sessions and workshops covering wellbeing, psychological assessment and national and global challenges, and the role of occupational psychologists in addressing them.

Hogrefe held a workshop on the Leadership Judgement Indicator – 2nd Edition (LJI-2) and a presentation on the Emotional Processing Scale – Wellbeing (EPS-W). These were both presented by Hogrefe associate and CPsychol & Accredited Coach, Ken Rowley, and the team was pleased to have conversations with delegates interested in our range of psychometric assessments, in particular the NEO-PI-3 UK, LJI-2 and TOP.

We next attended The Association for Business Psychology (ABP) Conference, held inUxbridge, London in June. The conference theme was Minds and Machines Unite – The human side of the augmented workplaceand over two days there were a myriad of presentations and discussions around how to navigate AI in the workplace and how, as business psychologists, we are absolutely pivotal to the rapidly changing landscape of work. The event was also a great opportunity to showcase best practices in assessment.

Together with Ben Vernazza from Edgecumbe Consulting, we held a presentation entitled “We don’t need another theory – putting the rigour back into assessing leadership potential”. This was a very nice lead-on from Professor Adrian Furnham’s keynote presentation the previous day in which he talked about the value of scientific rigour in psychometric assessments. Interesting discussions followed with attendees and also throughout the conference. At the Hogrefe we had lots of great conversations with practitioners from across the business psychology field about assessments and training.

In July, Hogrefe Group employees from across the globe came out to attend the International Congress of Psychology (ICP)inPrague, Czech Republic. The theme of the event, Psychology for the Future: Together in Hope,couldn’t have come at a better time with psychologists from across the globe brought together to talk about the issues facing the planet and its people. The range of areas of psychology was truly staggering.

Over 3,000 people attended the event; we got to speak to some of them at the Hogrefe booth and during our joint symposium on Advances in Psychological Assessment: Test Fairness.At this session, Dr Antonia Hogrefe, together with members of her Research and Development team from Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, plus invited guests Alexander Grob (from the University of Basel) co-author of the Intelligence and Development Scales – 2nd Edition (IDS-2), Diana Fecenec (Practest, Poland) and Simon Kirchhof (MSH Medical Group, Hamburg) spoke about fairness and accessibility in testing. The symposium covered topics looking at ADHD, executive functions, cognitive assessments, dyslexia testing, neurodiversity, and developments in digital testing.

Other Hogrefe presentations included the role of emotion regulation strategies in children and adolescents, advances in ADHD and executive functions assessment, and cross-cultural assessment and psychometric requirements. The Hogrefe booth had on display just some of the huge array of books, journals, and assessments that we publish.

In June we attended The Psychometrics Forum (TPF): The Sundance Film-Clip Festival. Chaired by Tameron Chappell (Athinka), this featured a series of themed film-clip sessions on various topics. This was a great opportunity to take a step back and think about how psychologists can improve our practice and learn from each other. The event concluded with a Hogrefe book giveaway to three worthy winners who each took home a copy of Danny Wedding’s new book ‘Movies and Mental Illness – Using Film to understand Psychopathology’ (5th edition 2024) published by Hogrefe earlier this year.

Finally, the theme of leadership potential continued in a Hogrefe webinar held in our Oxford office in June, with invited speakers Ben Vernazza and Tameron Chappell. We further explored the topic of Leadership Assessment 2024.0 with a large group of practitioners and discussed the roles and consequences of personality, burnout, and AI in organisations. Assessments are central to supporting organisations going forward, and identifying good leaders is perhaps the most important element of all.

And that’s just a snapshot of our summer at Hogrefe. The team has also been beavering away on developments in our test and training portfolios, ready to bring to you over the next few months.