Robert O. Pihl

Robert O. Pihl (born February 2, 1939 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States) is an award-winning psychology researcher, professor and clinician. Since 1966, he has worked at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Pihl has made major contributions to the fields of clinical and health psychology in his more than 250 publications on various topics such as alcohol aggression, substance abuse, and pharmacology. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association, as well as a member of many other academic organizations. In 2009, Pihl received the Canadian Psychological Association’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology.^[1]

Education

When deciding which Master’s degree to pursue, Pihl was torn between his main interests of economics and psychology. Pihl earned his Master’s degree and his Ph.D. at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. At the time, he worked in a neurological hospital and became interested in impulse control. He received his Ph.D. in 1966 under the supervision of Joel Greenspoon, a clinical psychologist and leading researcher in behavioral analysis.^[2] Pihl completed his clinical internship from 1964 to 1966 at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Professional Life

Research and Publications

Robert Pihl’s research includes over 250 publications, on which he has collaborated with over 200 co-authors from around the world. His work has been cited over 6000 times (as of November 4, 2014). He is also on the board of reviewing editors for Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Pihl’s research addresses psychopharmacology, alcohol, aggression, substance abuse, behavior modification, the cognitive consequences of addiction, and several risk factors for disorders. Some of Pihl’s early research projects involved the hair analysis of children with learning disabilities. He found that children with learning disabilities had higher levels of lead and cadmium in their hair compared to children without these disabilities.^[3] These findings influenced the U.S. Congress to mandate that lead be removed from paint in the 1970s. Pihl later conducted similar analyses in which he also found greater levels of lead and cadmium in the hair of violent criminals, compared to the normal population.^[4] Pihl has extensively studied the link between alcohol and aggression, namely that alcohol consumption increases aggression. He has also studied other predictors of aggression, such as pain sensitivity, levels of cognitive functioning, and one’s social environment.^[5] His investigations of the link between tryptophan depletion and aggression suggest an association between disturbances of the brain’s serotonin system and one’s aggression.^[6] Pihl linked this research to alcohol intoxication, finding that intoxicated subjects with lower tryptophan (and thus lower serotonin) levels in the brain were more aggressive than those with higher serotonin levels.^[7] Pihl has also researched motivational, physiological and cognitive factors that predict substance abuse. Pihl looked at people’s varying reactions to substance consumption, and how this affects their behavior when intoxicated. He investigated the risk factors for abuse of different substances, and in 2000 Pihl and colleagues created The Substance Use Risk Profile Scale, a scale for classifying substance abusers on the basis of personality and motivational risk factors for substance abuse, such as hopelessness, impulsivity, and sensation-seeking.^[8] Currently, Pihl’s research is exploring motivational profiles and neuropsychological predictors of medical errors using neural imaging. He also is part of a large study on a drug abuse prevention program with 4000 children in Montreal.

Some of his most notable research publications include:

• Experimental analysis of the placebo effect (Pihl & Altman,197l)^[9]
• The problem of drug abuse: Has Canada found some answers? (Milstein,Pihl, & Smart, 1974)^[10]
• Effects of alcohol and behavior contingencies on human aggression (Zeichner, & Pihl, 1979)^[11]
• Measurement of Psychological and Heart Rate Reactivity to Stress in the Real World (Dobkin & Pihl, 1992)^[12]
• Cognitive deficits and autonomic reactivity in boys at high risk for alcoholism (Harden & Pihl, 1995)^[13]
• The effect of altered tryptophan levels and alcohol on aggression in normal human males (Pihl, Young, Harden, Plotnick, Chamberlain, & Ervin, 1995)^[14]
• Hair element content in learning disabled children (Pihl & Parkes, 1977)^[15]
• Motivational model of substance abuse risk (Conrod, Pihl, Stewart, Coté, & Dongier, 1997)^[16]

Clinical Work

Robert Pihl previously directed the department of psychology at the Lakeshore General Hospital in Montreal. He was also a co-director of the Alcohol Studies Group at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal. He was a consultant for the psychology department at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, and for the Montreal’s Centre Pour Enfants avec Problèmes d'Apprentissage. Pihl is on the advisory committee of the McGill-Montreal Children's Hospital Learning Center. Additionally, Pihl has experience working with all types of clinical patients.

Committees and Organizations

Pihl is a member of several psychological committees and organizations, including: the International Society for Research on Aggression, the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Neuropharmacology Subcommittee of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Violence and Traumatic Stress Committee, the Working Group on Alcohol-Related Violence, the Review Committee for Alcohol and Drug Abuse for Health and Welfare Canada, the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, and the International Society for Research on Aggression.^[17] He is a fellow in the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association’s Psychopharmacology, Addiction, Clinical Psychology, and Learning Disability Divisions, the Behavioral Science Foundation, and others. For Health and Welfare Canada, Pihl is a member of the Scientific Review Committee for Behavioral Research and the Non-medical Use of Drugs, and he is also an advisor for a group on Parent Drug Education.

Honors and Awards

Robert Pihl has received several honors and awards throughout his career. These include: the Lehmann Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1994),^[18] the Canadian Psychological Association’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology (2009),^[1] the National Patient Safety Award from the Drug Safety Institute (2013), the David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision from McGill University (2014).^[19]

Past Students

Pihl has supervised the doctoral research of a large number of graduate students in Psychology at Mcgill. Many of his former students have gone on to successful academic careers. Some of his students include:

• Jordan Peterson is currently a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University from 1993-1998. He completed his graduate and post-doctoral work at McGill under the supervision of Dr. Robert Pihl, studying alcoholism and aggression.
• Sherry Stewart is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia^[20]
• Peter Finn is a professor of psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. He studies substance use, abuse and dependence at the Biobehavioral Alcohol Research Laboratory^[21]
• Jean Seguin is a professor of psychiatry at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on developmental psychopathology, adolescence, substance use, ADHD, and aggression^[22]
• Patricia Conrod is a clinical psychologist and research professor at Université de Montréal. Her research emphasizes cognitive, personality, and biological risk factors for drug abuse, and the findings have contributed to the development of new substance abuse treatments and prevention programs that target the motivational underpinnings of drug use^[23]

References