An interview with Professor Ray Novaco

A Distinguished Career: An Interview with Dr. Ray Novaco

WRITTEN BY DAVID CENKNER

Dr. Ray Novaco happily met with me at his favorite coffee shop & bakery, C'est si Bon, in Newport Beach. As we walked up to the counter, not only did the employee who was taking our order know Ray by his name, but many of the staff buzzing around the bakery took time to say hi to Ray. I asked him how he became so close with the bakery crew, and he said, "It all starts with paying attention to people. ” Dr. Novaco was asked to participate in this spotlight interview because of his 40+ years career at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and because he was instrumental in the creation and development of the Clinical Psychology PhD program at UCI. He discussed the longstanding mental health needs in the community and stated, “It was only over the past few years that our department could get the resources to support a clinical program. ” After resources were accrued and with, "great clinical faculty, and an extraordinary DCT in Dr. Jason Schiffman, " UCI was able to move forward with recruitment of its first class.

I started the interview asking Dr. Novaco about his lab. He talked fondly of his three current graduate students, Klaudia Kosiak, Isaias Contreras, and Kaitlyn Hardin, that are a part of his Anger, Violence, and Psychopathology research team. To understand how Dr. Novaco became interested in anger, we took a brief dive through his educational history. When he enrolled at the University of Notre Dame as an undergraduate, he wanted to be a lawyer or a medical doctor. However, after taking a psychology class as a sophomore, his interests changed, and during his junior year he became immersed in psychological science, and he began to,

“live and breathe psychology to understand human behavior. ” Dr. Novaco was at the top of his class in the psychology department and was selected for Notre Dame's interdisciplinary Collegiate Scholar program, comprised of 6-7 students from various undergraduate majors. In this year-long program, the Scholars met weekly, along with a member of their individual faculty committees, in post-dinner 3-hour sessions to present their work. Debate was lively, and Dr. Novaco stated he, “Enjoyed the challenge of hard questions that came from the philosopher, the historian, and the political scientist. " He continued,

“You learn to ask yourself, how well grounded am I, and how well have I thought through these issues?”

Dr. Novaco started doctoral studies in clinical psychology at the University

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of Texas, then transferred to the doctoral program at Indiana University. There, during a developmental psychology course, he discovered a lifelong research interest in anger, violence, and psychopathology. This led to him doing his second-year project with an experimental lab study on human aggression. After comprehensive exams and various practicum placements, he did his clinical internship at the Volusia County Community Mental Health Center in Daytona Beach Florida. There he observed that the people he served in outpatient therapeutic treatment were mostly troubled by how they felt -- i.e., it was their distressed emotions that bothered them -- which led him to notice that research on aggressive behavior lacked attention to the affective dimension. He stated, “What was missing from our knowledge base on violent behavior, and what to do about it, was attention to anger. ” Dr. Novaco sought to fill this need by developing and testing a cognitive behavioral treatment for problematic anger for his dissertation. He coined the term “anger management” and, over the course of his career, he has created several psychometric measures for anger, including the Novaco Anger Scale and Provocation Inventory (NAS-PI).

After completing his PhD at Indiana University, Dr. Novaco accepted a position at the University of California, Irvine in the Program of Social Ecology, which eventually became a School with four Departments. The interdisciplinarity had high appeal. He stated, “The exciting thing was that there were criminologists, social and developmental psychologists, urban planners, public health scientists and a few clinical psychologists who thought ecologically. ”

Curious about the NAS-PI, I asked Dr. Novaco why and how he developed it. He started in 1992 when “Existing anger measures were of no use for people with serious mental disorders. Most items were developed using college students, weren’t useful for clinical assessments, and had no clinical intervention utility. ” Preliminary work for the measure was done at three California State Hospitals, where he conducted interviews with staff and with inpatients who had a history of violent behavior. Through these interviews and psychometric testings, the NAS-PI was finalized with 48 items. It was then utilized in the famous MacArthur Foundation project on Violence & Mental Disorder. Later, after a national standardization study, the NAS-PI was formally published in 2003. The instrument's items, which are generated from theory, constitute cognitive, physiological, and behavioral domains. Its clinical utility is that “The therapist can see areas of anger regulation deficits that can be targeted for treatment. ”

Dr. Novaco's research on anger has been enhanced by an eclectic clinical career. He has worked with military veterans in Hawaii and Washington and at psychiatric forensic institutions in England, Scotland, and Denmark, as well as California. When asked what his most important clinical experience was, he stated, “Many, but one in particular that I am grateful for is the State Hospital in Scotland that serves all of Scotland and Northern Ireland. ” He indicated that many patients there had, “Very serious violence and psychiatric issues. ” When I asked Dr. Novaco what advice he would give to the inaugural clinical psychology class he responded, “Don’t be a robot. ” He continued, “Develop a core interest, while also getting breadth in training. Become very skilled in assessment, interviewing, psychometrics, and possibly neuropsychology. Assessment and treatment go hand in hand in that proficiency in assessment makes for optimal treatment. ”

Finally, I asked Dr. Novaco what has been the most personally rewarding aspect of his 40 plus year career at UCI. Unsurprisingly, he stated, “Working and mentoring students and seeing them be successful. ” This was evident when Dr. Novaco informed me that he needed to finish our interview in a few minutes because his first PhD student mentee, David Marrero (1982 graduate), was driving from Arizona to have a cup of coffee and chat. “We’ve kept in close touch throughout the years. ” Dr. Marrero, who soon joined us, became Distinguished Professor at Indiana University's School of Medicine and President of the American Diabetes Association.