Graham Davey

Graham Davey is a British psychologist and an academic. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Sussex.

Davey's research interests include anxiety disorders and experimental psychopathology, with a focus on conditioning models of fear and anxiety, pathological worrying and obsessive-compulsive checking, perseverative psychopathologies, the role of the disgust emotion in psychological disorders, and embodied emotion. He has written and edited books such as Clinical Psychology, Applied Psychology, Psychopathology: Research, Assessment & Treatment in Clinical Psychology, and Phobias: A Handbook of Theory, Research & Treatment.

Davey is the former president of British Psychological Society.

Education Davey completed his early education from Hinckley Grammar School, Leicestershire and Hastings High School, Burbage. He went on to earn a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Wales at Bangor in 1971 and in 1975, completed a Ph.D. in Psychology from the same institution.

Career In 1976, Davey joined The City University in London as a lecturer in psychology, and in 1991, was promoted to professor of psychology at The City University. He was then appointed professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, where he remained from 1994 to 2016. Since 2016, he has been an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. Subsequently, in 2005, he was appointed chair of the Society's Publications & Communications Board. He defined the psychological characteristics which are specific to the worrying process and are independent of other psychopathological processes such as anxiety. The characteristics he identified that can lead to pathological worrying included abortive problem-solving and information seeking, vacillatory worrying, and catastrophic worrying. He also investigated if worrying is related to poor problem-solving abilities and established that pathological worrying is not generated by poor problem-solving skills per se, but by an individual's lack of confidence in their problem-solving abilities. He also explored the beliefs that people have about the consequences of worrying and grouped these into five categories, representing two positive and three negative consequences. The negative consequences related to worry disrupting effective performance, worry exaggerating the problem, and worry causing emotional distress, whereas the positive consequences related to the motivational influence of worry and worry helping analytical thinking.

Davey has also helped to develop the mood-as-input model of perseverative psychopathologies such as OCD checking and perseverative worrying. His work demonstrated that people who develop such compulsive conditions tend to use their mood as information about whether they have achieved the goals of their checking and worrying, but they interpret their negative mood (usually anxiety) as information that they have not achieved those goals and that is one reason why they persist with their checking and worrying.

Davey was also involved in developing the disease avoidance view of common animal fears and identified the relationship between disgust sensitivity (an emotion whose function is to help avoid disease, illness, and pathogens) and fear of a variety of animals. Based on this theoretical view, he suggested that common, non-clinical animal fears may be closely associated with the human disgust reaction and that relationship may explain why many small, non-predatory animals are some of the most feared animals worldwide. Furthermore, he also explored the prominence of animal phobias in different cultures and found that there is consistency, rather than diversity, in the categories of animals that evoke disgust across different cultures. He has argued that the association of some animals such as rats and spiders with the spread of disease, plagues and epidemics across Europe in the Middle Ages is the main cause of pervasive fear of such animals in many modern Western societies. In related research, he also identified conditioning processes that are relevant to humans and demonstrated their potential in providing a model of fears and phobias.