Brandon Weiss

Who they are

Weiss was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston when the study was carried out, working in the same anxiety-disorders group as Norton. That is what the published record supports, and this page will not go beyond it. Two-author papers do not report who did what, and a page that invented a division of labour, or a career narrative, would be doing the thing this publication exists to correct.

One caution for readers following the citation trail: more than one researcher publishing in psychology shares this name, and work on other topics under a similar byline should not be attributed here without checking the affiliation on the paper.

What can be said about his contribution is the contribution itself. The 2009 paper did something the courage literature had almost entirely failed to do, which was to take a self-report instrument and put it against an actual behaviour with a real, if modest, cost attached. The result held. The authors described it, in their own title, as a proof-of-concept pilot study, and that honesty is part of why the paper is worth citing.

Key papers

Norton, P. J., & Weiss, B. J. (2009), "The role of courage on behavioral approach in a fear-eliciting situation: a proof-of-concept pilot study," Journal of Anxiety Disorders. N = 32; the Courage Measure predicted approach distance in a behavioural approach test after controlling for spider fear.

Key ideas

Courage, in this work, is defined as persistence despite fear rather than the absence of fear.

A self-report measure is worth little until someone puts it against behaviour. This paper did that, on a small scale, and the field has not improved on it.

The paper's own framing is a pilot. Later citations have treated it as a foundation, which is not the authors' fault.

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