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A good walk worth watching Marc Jones and David Lavallee on the psychology of golf
Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society
forum 786 news 794 careers 846 looking back 860
fathers and their children’s problems 802 so you think you can dance? 810 interview with Chris Frith 816 an NHS alcohol service 818
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forum the Society’s journals – a question of collegiality; mindfulness; approved clinicians; consultation on whether the psychology degree is fit for purpose; and columns on Marc Hauser and survival
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news, digest and media 794 scanning for autism; scientific misconduct; A-levels; Pakistan floods; psychosis tapestry; the latest nuggets from the Research Digest; Mark Sergeant on media coverage surrounding the trapped Chilean miners; and more
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Fathers’ behaviours and children’s problems Eirini Flouri with an overview
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So you think you can dance? Paul M. Jenkinson and Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou look at an example of good intentions and poor awareness in the motor system
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The man who looks inside people’s heads Chris Frith talks to Lance Workman about schizophrenia, scanning and more
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THE ISSUE Golf: ‘a good walk spoiled’ (Mark Twain), or ‘an interesting sport from a psychological perspective’ (Jones and Lavallee, p.806)? Having tried it a couple of times, I would perhaps describe it as ‘maddening’ rather than ‘interesting’. In fact, I would side with the author John Updike, who described golf as ‘a nonchemical hallucinogen’. Even the pros can find the experience akin to a never-ending, bad ‘trip’. The American Doug Sanders missed an apparently unmissable 3-foot putt at the 1970 Open. ‘Do I ever think about the putt?’ he said 35 years later. ‘Only every four or five minutes.’ Last month’s open access issue seemed to be well-received. Please continue to tell your students and colleagues about it: see tinyurl.com/bpsgift2010 or www.thepsychologist.org.uk, and get in touch if you know of any budding talent for ‘new voices’. Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor)
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book reviews 820 safer surgery; reading development; autism and intensive interaction; stories and analogies; Barbara Tizard; and coaching society 826 President’s column; bipolar report; independent practitioners forum; Society awards; a view from Northern Ireland; and more 846 careers we meet members of the University of the West of England’s Centre for Appearance Research; and hear from Anita Mehay and Zoё Fortune about life as mental health researchers; plus featured and other jobs, and how to advertise looking back 860 when is merely ‘looking’ back not enough? Mark Smith considers the explosion of sensory history one on one …with Jeune Guishard-Pine
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How to apologise Whether it’s a company like BP apologising for causing environmental catastrophe or a political leader expressing regret for her country’s prior misdemeanors, it seems there's barely a day goes by without the media watching hawkishly to find out just how the contrite words will be delivered and what effect they’ll have on the aggrieved. Surprisingly, psychology has, until now, paid little attention to what makes for an effective apology. Past studies have tended to focus instead simply on whether an apology was given or it wasn’t. Now Ryan Fehr and Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland have drawn on research in other disciplines, including sociology and law, to explore the idea that apologies come in three forms and that their impact varies according to the character of the victim. The three apology types or components are: compensation (e.g. I’m sorry I broke your window, I’ll pay to have it repaired); empathy (e.g. I’m sorry I slept with your best friend, you must feel like you can’t trust either of us ever again); and acknowledgement of violated rules/norms (e.g. I’m sorry I advised the CIA how to torture people, I’ve broken our profession’s pledge to do no harm). Fehr and Gelfand’s hypothesis was that the effectiveness of these different styles of apology depends on how the aggrieved person sees themselves (known as ‘selfconstrual’ in the psychological jargon). To test this, the researchers measured the way that 175 undergraduate students see themselves and then had them rate different forms of apology. In a follow-up study, 171 more undergraduates reported how they see themselves and then they rated their forgiveness of a fictional student who offered different forms of apology after accidentally wiping her friend’s laptop hard-drive. The researchers found that a focus on compensation was most appreciated In the September issue of by people who are more individualistic Organizational Behavior and Human (e.g. those who agree with statements like Decision Processes ‘I have a strong need to know how I stand in comparison to my classmates or coworkers’); that empathy-based apologies are judged more effective by people who see themselves in terms of their relations with others (e.g. they agree with statements like ‘Caring deeply about another person such as a close friend is very important to me’); and finally, that the rule violation kind of apology was deemed most effective by people who see themselves as part of a larger group or collective (e.g. they agree with ‘I feel great pride when my team or work group does well’ and similar statements). These patterns held regardless of the severity of the misdemeanour, as tested by using different versions of the disk-wipe scenario in which either an hour’s or several weeks’ worth of data were lost. The message, the researchers said, is that when apologising you should consider your audience. ‘This need to meta-cognize about what a victim is looking for in an apology is particularly important when victims’ and offenders’ worldviews diverge,’ they added. Of course, if in doubt about the character of your victim or victims, the researchers said that ‘detailed apologies with multiple components are in general more likely to touch upon what is important to a victim than brief, perfunctory apologies. Offenders should therefore offer apologies with multiple components whenever possible.’
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Flynn effect for memory? In the August issue of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology In Western countries, scores on IQ tests have been rising for several decades – the Flynn effect, named after the political scientist James Flynn. Now Sallie Baxendale at the Institute of Neurology has provided evidence that a similar effect has occurred for the standardised memory tests that are used by clinical neuropsychologists, a finding with implications for the diagnosis of memory problems in contemporary patients. Baxendale looked at the Adult Memory and Information Processing Battery (AMIPB) – ‘the most commonly used memory battery amongst clinical neuropsychologists in the UK’ – published in 1985, and its successor, the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust Memory and Information Processing Battery (BMIPB), published in 2007. Although different in wording and design, the two tests make equivalent demands: learning and recalling lists of words, and learning and recalling abstract line drawings. Baxendale compared the performance of the two samples that provided the original ‘normative’ data for the two tests. These are the healthy participants spanning four age ranges whose average performance provides the benchmark for assessing patients. The normative data for the AMIPB was provided in 1985, or thereabouts, by 184 British people aged 18 to 75; the normative data for the BMIPB was collected in 2007 or thereabouts from 300 British people aged 16 to 89. There was little evidence of any difference in average performance on verbal learning and recall between the 1985 and 2007 samples. By contrast, visual learning and recall were both superior in the 2007 sample compared with the 1985 sample at all four age ranges. This is consistent with the traditional Flynn effect, which is most pronounced for non-verbal intelligence tests. Baxendale said her findings have implications for diagnosis because present-day patients may, pre-trauma or pre-illness, have had elevated nonverbal learning and recall scores in comparison to the old normative data. Such patients could be impaired relative to their own healthy baseline, and yet appear unaffected compared with the out-ofdate normative data. ‘This may present a confound for neuropsychologists concerned with the lateralising and localising significance of memory test profiles,’ Baxendale said.
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Video protects girls from negative effects of looking at ultra-thin models
Feeling clean makes us harsher moral judges In the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
In the British Journal of Health Psychology ‘No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted’ - that’s the concluding catchphrase of a one-minute video (tinyurl.com/ylzku6) called ‘evolution’ made by Dove a few years ago to show how cosmetics and computer trickery are used to create the unrealistic portrayals of female models on advertising billboards. Now a team of researchers at the University of the West of England, led by Emma Halliwell, have tested whether viewing this short video can buffer young girls against the negative effects of looking at images of ultra-thin female models. Past research found such a benefit when adult women viewed a similar video but this is the first time the idea has been investigated with young girls. One hundred and twentyseven girls, aged 10 to 13, from two schools in the south of England, were recruited for what they thought was an evaluation of ‘attitudes to health, appearance and magazines’. In keeping with the cover story, tests of body satisfaction and esteem were embedded among other questionnaires to try to conceal the true purpose of the study. Consistent with past research, girls who looked at thin models subsequently reported lower body satisfaction and confidence compared with girls who looked at pictures of landscapes (in turn, prior research has linked lower body self-esteem with increased risk
of developing an eating disorder). The key finding was that this negative effect was not seen among the girls who watched the Dove video first, before looking at the ultrathin models. The body selfesteem and confidence of these girls was just the same as among girls who watched the video and then looked at pictures of landscapes. ‘Theoretically, we assume that the intervention disrupted the upward social comparisons that many young girls make when viewing idealised media images,’ the researchers concluded. ‘Moreover, we propose that the comparison is avoided because the media models have been construed as artificial and, therefore, an inappropriate comparison target.’ Halliwell and her team added that future research will be needed to test the truth of this reasoning and whether the benefits of watching the evolution video, or others like it, can be sustained over time.
As the dirt and germs are wiped away, we’re left feeling not just bodily but also morally cleansed – a kind of metaphorical virtuosity that leads us to judge others more harshly. That’s according to Chen-Bo Zhong’s team, who invited 58 undergrads to a lab filled with spotless new equipment. Half the students were asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe so as not to soil the shiny surfaces. Afterwards all the students rated the morality of six societal issues including pornography and littering. Those who’d wiped their hands made far harsher judgements than those who didn’t. It was a similar story in a follow-up study with hundreds of participants recruited via a nationwide database. Those primed to feel clean by reading a short passage that began ‘My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh…’ made far harsher moral judgements about 16 social issues compared with those primed to feel dirty
by a passage beginning, ‘My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks…’ A third study was identical to the second, except that after reading either the dirty or clean passage of text the 136 undergraduate participants also ranked themselves against their peers on several factors including intelligence, attractiveness and moral character. As before, those primed with the clean text made more harsh moral judgements on social issues. Crucially, this association was entirely mediated by their having an inflated sense of moral virtuosity compared with their peers (by contrast, reading the clean vs. dirty text made no difference to self-rankings on the other factors). ‘Acts of cleanliness have not only the potential to shift our moral pendulum to a more virtuous self, but also license harsher moral judgement of others,’ Zhong and his team concluded.
The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.
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A good walk worth watching Marc Jones and David Lavallee on the psychology of the Ryder Cup
T
he Ryder Cup is a biennial golf tournament in which two teams of male golfers from Europe and the United States compete over three days for the 17-inch high solid gold Ryder Trophy. (The Solheim Cup is the equivalent tournament for women and will be held in September 2011). In the Ryder Cup 24 golfers, each of them wealthy individuals, will compete without payment over three days in golf’s most prestigious team event. What psychological factors will be at play both for players and supporters when the 38th Ryder Cup begins on 1 October?
Mark Twain once defined playing golf as a ‘good walk spoiled’, yet for psychologists the Ryder Cup between the USA and Europe is worth watching because of the many different elements of psychology at play. From the idea of home advantage through to the stress of competition, psychological factors play an obvious and important role. How might group processes affect team performance? When and how does stress impact particularly on golfers? And what about the fans who will follow the tournament, especially supporters of either team – what emotional and psychological experiences might be in store for them?
Home advantage?
question
‘Psychology of Golf’ Special issue of Sport & Exercise Psychology Review, 2008, Vol 4, No 2. Thomas, P.R. (Ed). (2001). Optimising performance in golf. Brisbane: Australian Academic Press. www.golfmind.co.uk
references
resources
‘From walking into the ground on the first day the atmosphere was something I had only imagined ever experiencing. The hostility I felt as a member of the European team surprised me.’ – Paul Lawrie on the 1999 Ryder Cup held in Brookline, USA (www.paullawriegolf.com)
If most (and likely all) of the golfers in the Ryder Cup are anxious, why does the anxiety have a negative effect on the performance of only some of the golfers?
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Banyard, P. & Shevlin, M. (2001). Responses of football fans to relegation of their team from the English Premier League: PTS? Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 18, 66–67. Baumeister, R.F., Heatherton, T.F. & Tice, D.M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Beilock, S.L. & Carr, T.H. (2001). On the
Teams perform better at home for a number of reasons (see Carron et al., 2005, for a review), but of particular relevance to golf may be familiarity with the playing conditions, increased confidence and expectations of success by the players, and a perceived benefit from a supportive and vociferous audience. There is emphasis on the perceived benefit because, while performers perceive that a supportive audience helps performance, in laboratorybased studies it either has no effect (Law et al., 2003) or performance is actually worse (Butler & Baumeister, 1998). Thus, while the data from the Ryder Cup supports a home advantage this may not be as a result of a supportive audience. Indeed, performers may even feel more pressure to avoid disappointing a supportive, rather than hostile, audience. An illustration of this is provided by Wallace et al. (2005) from another team golf event, the Presidents Cup. After three days of play in the 2003 competition the teams were level and two of the world’s best golfers, Tiger
Although all team prizes in golf at the time of writing are held by the United States, the European team will likely feel confident of victory as the Ryder Cup is being held in Newport, Wales. Sports teams typically perform better at home and a glance at the Ryder Cup results since 1979 when the competition took its present form of Europe (rather than GB and Ireland) against the USA shows that the home team has won nine of the 15 competitions (60 per cent), with the away team winning five and one draw. This is in line with percentages in other sports.
fragility of skilled performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 701–725. Beilock, S. & Gonso, S. (2008). Putting in the mind versus putting on the green. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 920–932. Bernhardt, P.C., Dabbs Jr, J.M., Fielden, J.A. & Lutter, C.D. (1998). Testosterone changes during vicarious experiences of winning and
Woods and Nicklaus show the pressure during the Presidents Cup in 2003
losing among fans at sporting events. Physiology and Behavior, 65, 59–62. Berthier, F. & Boulay, F. (2003). Lower myocardial infarction mortality in French men the day France won the 1998 World Cup of football. Heart, 89, 555–556. Bray, S.R., Martin Ginis, K.A., Hicks, A.L. & Woodgate, J. (2008). Effects of self-regulatory strength depletion on muscular performance and EMG
activation. Psychophysiology, 45, 337–343. Bruce, D. (1998). Turn up, keep up, and shut up: The role of a caddie in male professional golf in Australia. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Butler, J.L. & Baumeister, R.F. (1998). The trouble with friendly faces: Skilled performance with a supportive audience. Journal of
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Woods from the USA and Ernie Els from South Africa, played in a sudden-death play-off to decide the match. After three play-off holes the team captains, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, felt there was too much pressure on any one individual player and declared the tournament a draw. This was supported by the players’ post-match comments (Wallace et al., 2005, p.434). Els admitted that the playoff was ‘probably the first I’ve ever felt my legs shaking’. He explained, ‘You look over and see your team. You’re like, “I’ve got to look away”. It’s unbelievable pressure.’ Woods called the playoff ‘one of the most nerveracking moments I’ve ever had in golf’. He described how he prepared to putt with his redshirted team-mates in the background by saying, ‘I saw all this red and I was just trying to block that out.’
(Carron et al., 2002). Because of the importance of cohesion for success, sport psychologists utilise a number of interventions to enhance cohesion. Some are focused on enhancing social cohesion (e.g. a mutual-sharing session) while others are focused on enhancing task cohesion (e.g. team goal-setting session). In individual sports like golf, team building interventions are particularly effective in enhancing cohesion as players rarely compete as a team (Martin et al., 2009). ‘On tour, you are an individual. You play only for yourself and you lose it doesn’t bother anybody else. Now, all of a sudden, you are representing the United States of America. When I stand out there and they raise the flag and play the National Anthem, I get goose bumps.’ – American Golfer Raymond Floyd (golftoday.co.uk)
A coactive team game Although the pressure induced by teammates can be onerous, golfers in team events often cite functioning effectively as a team to be one reason why they succeeded.
CREDIT
‘We played as a team, we dined as team, we talked as a team, and we won as a team… The team spirit this week was the best that I have experienced in this my third Ryder Cup.’ – European golfer Darren Clarke on the 2002 Ryder Cup (O’Sullivan, 2002)
The Ryder Cup is an example of a coactive team sport where players perform the skills individually but it is the collective performance of the team that determines success. In this regard the cohesion of a team is important. There is a positive relationship between cohesion and performance, even for coactive teams. Both task cohesion and social cohesion are positively associated with performance, so in sport it is as beneficial to have a commitment to develop and maintain social relationships within the group as it is to be committed to the various task objectives of the group
Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1213–1230. Campbell, M. & Moran, A. (2006). Exploring golfers' visual ability to 'read' slope of greens. Paper presented at the 37th Annual Conference of The Psychological Society of Ireland, Galway. Carroll, D., Ebrahim, S., Tilling, K. et al. (2002). Admissions for myocardial infarction and World Cup football:
The structure of the Ryder Cup means a range of psychological demands on the players. On the first two days of competition the golfers compete in pairs, and in each match two players from the USA take on two players from Europe, whereas players compete individually against an opponent on the final day. In the first two days of competing in pairs players compete in ‘four-ball’ matches, where all four golfers play their own ball and each hole is won by the team whose individual golfer has the lowest score, and ‘foursomes’ in which each pair of golfers plays one ball and each hole is won by the pair with the lowest score. In both team events players will have to work together effectively. For example in the ‘four-ball’ one golfer may play conservatively to allow his team-mate to play more risky shots, while in the ‘foursomes’ format players will take alternate shots and the golfers will have to interact to agree on the best tactics for each hole. In both these types of match, and the final-day singles, the way in which teammates and opponents interact may influence performance. Emotions can be
Database survey. British Medical Journal, 325, 1439–1442. Carron, A.V., Colman, M.M., Wheeler, J. & Stevens, D. (2002). Cohesion and performance in sport: A metaanalysis. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 24, 168–188. Carron, A.V., Loughhead, T.M. & Bray, S.R. (2005). The home advantage in sport competitions: Courneya and Carron’s (1992) conceptual
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contagious among team-mates (Totterdell, 2000), and emotions that help or hinder performance could be transmitted between players. In addition, maintaining positive body language (e.g. erect posture, plenty of eye contact) has been shown to reduce how confident an opponent feels about doing well in a sport setting (Greenlees et al., 2005). The colour of clothing may also be important, and red in particular appears to be associated with success in sport. Red is proposed to have evolutionary significance as a sign of dominance and threat, and wearers of red in competitive sport are more likely to be successful than wearers of other colours (Hill & Barton, 2005) and to be perceived by opponents (Greenlees et al., 2008) and officials (Hagemann et al., 2008) as more likely to succeed. Interestingly, Tiger Woods is famous for wearing red in the final round of every major tournament. Although golf, particularly outside team events, is typically considered an individual sport, this is a misconception. Golfers, at a professional level, do not compete alone. Although the golfer is the one who executes each golf shot, a caddie will be with the player throughout the tournament carrying the golf bag and working with the golfer on the course, often discussing strategy and technique. Many caddies also spend time with their players before and after a competition during warm-up and post-round practice sessions, often playing a role of monitoring and controlling the golfer’s psychological state during competition. The golfer and caddie work together more effectively with increasing familiarity, although this can sometimes lead to an over-reliance by the golfer on the caddie such that the golfer does not take an active role in decision making (Lavallee et al. 2004).
Thinking time ‘When you go to hit your first shot, you can’t see the ball even though you are standing over it. You have to tell yourself to hit it, though you’re looking down and it’s gone all blurred.
framework a decade later. Journal of Sports Sciences, 23, 395–407. Cotterill, S. (2008). Developing effective pre-performance routines in golf. Sport and Exercise Psychology Review, 4, 10–15. Eysenck, M.W. & Calvo, M.G. (1992). Anxiety and performance: The processing efficiency theory. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 409–434. Eysenck, M.W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R.
& Calvo, M.G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7, 336–353. Greenlees, I., Buscombe, R., Thelwell, R.C. et al. (2005). Impact of opponents’ clothing and body language on impression formation and outcome expectations. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 27, 39–52. Greenlees, I.A., Leyland, A., Thelwell, R.,
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The funny thing about the Ryder Cup is that a certain level of pressure stays throughout the whole week. Normally, that sort of pressure comes and goes in tournaments and you really only feel it on the last nine holes. But at the Ryder Cup, it’s there all week, even in the practice rounds. That’s why it’s so intense.’ – European golfer Padraig Harrington on playing in the Ryder Cup (MacGinty, 2002)
Golf is an interesting sport from a psychological perspective, given the amount of time that golfers have to think about the competition. It can take less than a second to swing a golf club and usually no more than one minute to plan and execute a shot. A golfer will be directly involved in planning shots for about 25 per cent of the time and will be physically playing shots for usually no more than 2 per cent of the time on the course (Bruce, 1998). This ‘thinking time’ can contribute to high levels of anxiety among the players. However, anxiety need not necessarily have a detrimental impact on performance; as Sam Torrance has said: ‘If you are not nervous then there is something wrong with you. Nerves create adrenaline and I told them to use that… to make you feel better, get pumped up, just get psyched up.’ When anxious, athletes’ cognitive resources available for a task may be reduced, because of worry (Janelle, 2002) and attention directed to task-irrelevant stimuli (Eysenck et al., 2007). However, if an individual is at least moderately confident of success, performance can be maintained even under high anxiety because an individual allocates extra mental resources to the task (Eysenck & Calvo, 1992). Understanding how anxiety may impact cognitive functioning is important, but in the context of golf the key issue is how anxiety ultimately influences motorskill performance. For skilled golfers performance is better if they do not try to consciously control the movements when executing a shot. However, anxiety makes
& Filby, W. (2008). Soccer penalty takers’ uniform colour and prepenalty kick gaze affect the impressions formed of them by opposing goalkeepers. Journal of Sports Sciences, 26, 569–576. Hagemann, N., Strauss, B. & Leibing, J. (2008). When the referee sees red…. Psychological Science, 19, 769–771. Hellstrom, J. (2009). Competitive elite golf: A review of the relationships
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it more likely a performer will try to control movements, which in turn results in poorer performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Masters & Maxwell, 2008). Golfers are advised to develop an external focus of attention, such as focusing on the anticipated trajectory Darren Clarke (right) celebrates with Henrik Stenson on the of the ball, when 16th green on the third day of the 2006 Ryder Cup executing the shot (Marchant, 2008). Paul McGinley, on Cotterill, 2008, for a review). The aim of holing a six-foot putt to win the 2002 a pre-performance routine is to prepare Ryder Cup, illustrates how a golfer can the golfer psychologically and physically focus attention appropriately during a high for the shot and ensure a consistent (and pressure situation: ‘At no time did I even consider the excellent) standard of performance. mechanics of the stroke. Of course, While utilising psychological I knew what the putt meant and what techniques during competition to maintain it was for, but I became absorbed in performance is on the face of it a worthy the line of the putt… My only job at the endeavour, it may be costly to the moment in time was to set the ball off performer. Nick Faldo illustrates how on the line that I had chosen. That regulating thoughts can be an active was the only thing I could control.’ process, recalling what he was saying out (Morris, 2005) loud during the final round of the 1996 Masters: There are many aspects to maintaining ‘The wheels are going to come off every minute… No, no, no. Don’t you a helpful psychological state during believe it. Just focus on what you have competition, including controlling to do… What shot do you want to hit anxiety, dealing with anger and here?… I want to hit a solid drive, a maintaining confidence. A number of touch of fade… Fine good that’s more strategies can be used such as self-talk, like it… Now, where, exactly, do you breathing techniques, and as American want to land it?… left side of the golfer Jack Nicklaus illustrates, imagery: ‘I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a colour movie.’ (Nicklaus, 2005)
These techniques are not only used before competition and during breaks in play but are frequently combined, along with behaviours (e.g. waggling the club head a set number of times) into preperformance routines to be used as the golfer prepares to strike the ball (see
between playing results, technique and physique. Sports Medicine, 39, 723–741. Hill, R.A. & Barton, R.A. (2005). Red enhances human performance in contests. Nature, 435, 293. Hogg, M.A. & Reid, S.A. (2006). Social identity, self-categorization, and the communication of group norms. Communication Theory, 16, 7–30. Janelle, C.M. (2002). Anxiety, arousal and
fairway.” (Syed, 2008)
Regulating psychological responses draws on, and depletes, a limited pool of resources that is available for controlling all emotions, thoughts and behaviours (Baumeister et al., 1994). Depletion of this self-regulation strength in one area affects performance in another area. For example, the effect of depletion from a cognitive task (Stroop task), negatively affected performance on a muscular
visual attention: A mechanistic account of performance variability. Journal of Sports Sciences, 20, 237–251. Jones, M.V., Meijen, C., McCarthy, P.J. & Sheffield, D. (2009). A theory of challenge and threat states in athletes. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2, 161–180. Kerr, J.H., Wilson, G.V., Nakamura, I., & Sudo, Y. (2005). Emotional dynamics
of soccer fans at winning and losing games. Personality and Individual Differences, 38, 1855–1866. Lavallee, D., Bruce, D. & Gorely, T. (2004). The golfer–caddie partnership: An exploratory investigation into the role of the caddie. Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology, 6. Law, J., Masters, R.S.W., Bray, S.R. et al. (2003). Motor performance as a function of audience affability and
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strength task (Bray et al., 2008). So being able to regulate psychological responses with as few resources as possible (i.e. by perceiving the situation as a challenge) is helpful because it leaves sufficient selfregulatory resources for other demands (psychological or physical) that may subsequently arise in the competition. One framework for understanding how athletes may respond and perform in an important competition is the ‘theory of challenge and threat states in athletes’ (Jones et al., 2009). According to the theory a golfer will experience a challenge state with high self-efficacy, a perception of control and a focus on approach goals. By perceiving the competition as a challenge rather than a threat, the golfer will have less cause to regulate their responses to competition. In short, prevention, in terms of perceiving the event positively so there is less cause to regulate unwanted psychological responses, may be better than cure.
(Campbell & Moran, 2006). Expert golfers also benefit more than novice golfers from imaging a successful putt as quickly as possible before striking the ball (Beilock & Gonso, 2008). Taking longer to imagine the putt does not help expert golfers as it allows the golfer greater opportunity to focus on the mechanics of the putt. The challenge of putting, and doing so under pressure, is recognised by golfers and illustrated in United States golfer Jack Nicklaus’ display of sportsmanship in the 1969 Ryder Cup. With the outcome of the entire tournament resting on this match his opponent Tony Jacklin had a very simple 2½-foot putt to tie the match and the tournament. Rather than let Tony Jacklin make the putt Jack Nicklaus conceded the putt. Jack Nicklaus reportedly said: ‘I don’t believe you would’ve missed that, but I’d never give you the opportunity under these circumstances.’
On the putting green
Just a game?
One area where psychological factors may play a particularly important role is on the green. The old adage ‘drive for show, putt for dough’ illustrates the importance of putting to successful golf performance. Indeed putting is one of the strongest predictors of golfers’ overall score (Hellstrom, 2009). Not only does putting test a golfer’s ability to cope with pressure, it is also reflects a cognitively demanding task. Because golf greens are rarely flat, a golfer is required to ‘read’ the green to determine the ‘break’ (the change in speed and direction of the ball) as it rolls towards the hole. This is a crucial skill and expert–novice differences in visual search patterns have been detected when reading a virtual (3-D) green. Expert golfers display longer visual fixation duration on the ball just before and as the stroke is performed (i.e. the quiet-eye phenomenon: Vickers, 2007), suggesting they display distinctively different periods of visual cognitive activity during the planning of a putt
Sporting events like the Ryder Cup are clearly important for those taking part but they are also important for those watching who identify with the teams involved. People derive part of their selfconcept from the social groups and categories to which they belong (Hogg & Reid, 2006). This social identity is part of ‘who we are’ and contributes, along with our individual attributes to how we see ourselves. We are motivated to maintain a positive social identity and do so by ensuring a favourable comparison with other groups. In the case of the Ryder Cup we have a continent and a
metaknowledge. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 25, 484–500. Lawrie, P. (n.d). Ryder Cup. Retrieved 9 December 2009 from http://bit.ly/d9Z5Ak MacGinty, K. (2002, 26 September). Blind fear of Ryder rookies. Irish Independent, p.19. Marchant, D. (2008). Attentional focus and golf performance. Sport and Exercise Psychology Review, 4, 16–21.
Marc Jones is Reader in Sport Exercise Psychology in the Faculty of Health, Staffordshire University marc.jones@staffs.ac.uk
Martin, L.J., Carron, A.V. & Burke, S.M. (2009). Team building interventions in sport: A meta-analysis. Sport and Exercise Psychology Review, 5, 3–16. Masters, R. & Maxwell, J. (2008).The theory of reinvestment. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1, 160–183. Morris, K. (2005). The mind factor golf newsletter. Retrieved 6 December 2009 from http://bit.ly/ceBwv0
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superpower competing in a sporting arena. For those supporters who identify strongly with the teams involved, the event will not only be an emotional experience but may also have a substantial influence on well-being. While no data has been collected on golf team events there is a large body of research from other sports. Supporters of losing football teams typically report higher levels of negative emotions and lower levels of positive emotions than fans of successful teams (Kerr et al., 2005), and testosterone levels increased in the fans of winning basketball and soccer teams and decreased in the fans of losing teams similar to that which would be expected in the actual competitors (Bernhardt et al., 1998). More seriously, football game outcome has been shown to influence myocardial health negatively in losing fans (Carroll et al., 2002), and positively in winning fans (Berthier & Boulay, 2003). Clinically significant levels of distress have been observed in fans of teams who have been relegated from the English Premier League (Banyard & Shevlin, 2001). While we do not know whether supporters will identify with the Ryder Cup teams in the same way they would local or national teams that compete frequently, it is possible that those watching and supporting will experience similar emotional and physiological changes to those taking part, and the outcome of the competition may influence the well-being of many people in Europe and the United States. Your authors at least, as a European and American respectively, we will experience the full range of responses by the evening of 3 October.
Nicklaus, J. (2005). Golf my way. New York: Simon & Schuster. O’Sullivan, J. (2002, 30 September). Clarke shows his strength as he leads from the front. The Irish Times, p.4 (Sport). Syed, M. (2008, 16 July). New window on life opens for Nick Faldo. The Times, p.66. Totterdell, P. (2000). Catching moods and hitting runs: Mood linkage and
David Lavallee is Professor and Head of Department of Sport and Exercise Science, Aberystwyth University david.lavallee@aber.ac.uk
subjective performance in professional sport teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 848–859. Vickers, J.N. (2007). Perception, cognition, and decision training. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Wallace, H.M., Baumeister, R.F. & Vohs, K.D. (2005). Audience support and choking under pressure: A home disadvantage? Journal of Sports Sciences, 23, 429–438.
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the meaning of the world for contemporaries. Most sensory historians do not assume that what smelled foul to a medieval English nose is the same thing as what modern English noses would deem stinky. Sensory historians correctly understand that the definition and meaning of what was sound and what was noise, what was stench-ridden and Mark M. Smith on when ‘looking’ back makes less sense what was perfumed, what functioned as permissible forms of touch and what didn’t, and what certain foods tasted ‘like’ is and was highly contingent on who was doing the sniffing, tasting, touching and an we really understand how people not obscure its relatively deep genealogy. listening, the various technologies in the past perceived their world in underwriting the meaning attached to Building on early and sometimes tentative sensory terms? Can we ever reach sensory evaluations, and the particular insights by a handful of French historians an understanding of what, say, 18thpolitical, economic and social contexts in particular, historians of all persuasions century Australia sounded like? What that shaped what the senses meant. and periods have started to write some smells meant to 18th-century Parisians? This is as it should be. Historians are not remarkable work on the senses. We now How touch functioned in 19th-century – or should not be – in the business of have, for example, histories of smell in America? Or can we ever uncover the claiming a transcendent, universal classical antiquity (Harvey, 2006) and meanings of taste in a pre-refrigerator age? modern France (Corbin,1986), of touch meaning to anything, let alone the senses, A growing number of historians, myself all of which changed a great deal over in early modern Europe (Gowing, 2003) included, believe they can. And their time. Instead, they are correctly much and 18th-century America (Smith, 2008), arguments are indebted, in no small part, more interested in excavating the various of sound in 20th-century Britain (Picker, to some of their historically minded meanings different constituencies 1999/2000) and colonial Australia (Carter, colleagues in psychology. attached to a particular sense 1992: see p.862), Albeit in tongue-in-cheek fashion, I’d at a particular time and in a of taste in medieval like to take issue with the very title of this England (Woolgar, particular place. “Just looking is not enough section of The Psychologist. Put simply: The second idea uniting 2007) and the to uncover the full sensory I wonder whether just looking back – that 18th-century most sensory histories is a texture of history” is, trying to understand the past through bit more implicit but, transatlantic world the eyes – is really enough to uncover the nevertheless, important. In (Gabbacia, 2005); full sensory texture of history. Is it even part, at least, historians of the and, of course, up to the task of explaining why certain sensate attend to the nonvisual senses there are lots of histories of seeing, things happened and when? Many principally because we have, for so long, visuality, and sight for many regions and historians – and, I might add, assumed the supremacy of the eye in the time periods (e.g. Howes, 2003). Most psychologists – would answer that no, human sensorium. Historical interest in recently, historians have begun to tackle ‘looking back’ is not sufficient to explain smell, sound, touch and taste has been the history of intersensoriality – how the either the past or behaviour in the animated often because of the assumed senses worked together and in concert, present. Just looking – without touching, ascendancy of vision that emerged not in isolation. This and numerous other tasting, smelling and hearing – following the print revolution and the works on the history of the senses are impoverishes our understanding of the developments of the Enlightenment, surveyed in my Sensory History (Smith, past generally and denies us access to all many of which supposedly elevated the 2007, and see ‘Colonising sounds’, p.862). sorts of culturally and historically specific eye as the arbiter of truth, the producer A couple of things unite this often understandings of what the past meant to of perspective and balance (courtesy of disparate work. The first is that these particular people and constituencies at the invention and subsequent sensory histories, written by a variety specific points in time dissemination of visual technologies such of historians in multiple subfields, tend ‘Sensory history’, as it is increasingly as the telescope, microscope and camera) (quite rightly) to stress the preeminent called, has exploded in recent years, and, in the process, diluted the value importance of context for fathoming the although that rapid burgeoning should placed on the nonvisual, often proximate role a particular sense played in shaping
The explosion of sensory history
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Atkins, K.E. (1993). The moon is dead! Give us our money! The cultural origins of an African work ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Carter, P. (1992). The sound in-between: Voice, space, performance. New South Wales: New South Wales University Press and New Endeavour Press. Corbin, A. (1986). The foul and the
fragrant: Odor and the French social imagination (Trans. M. Kochan, R. Porter & C. Prendergast). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davison, G. (1993). The unforgiving minute: How Australia learned to tell the time. New York: Oxford University Press. Gabbacia, D.R. (2005). Colonial Creoles: The formation of tastes in early
America. In C. Korsmeyer (Ed.) The taste culture reader: Experiencing food and drink (pp.79–85). New York: Berg. Gowing, L. (2003). Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harvey, S.A. (2006). Scenting salvation: Ancient christianity and the olfactory imagination. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press. Herz, R.A. (2002). Influence of odors on mood and affective cognition. In C. Rouby et al. (Eds.) Olfaction, taste and cognition (pp.160–177). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Howes, D. (2003). Introduction: To summon all the senses. In D. Howes (Ed.) Sensual relations: Engaging the senses in culture and
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senses of hearing, olfaction, tasting, and accounts for the learned preference: touching. It seems – or, at least, some among a particular generation in the UK, sensory historians now theorise – that the scent of wintergreen was associated this supposed revolution in the senses with medicine and ointments used during was so thoroughgoing that moderns – the Second World War (hardly the best of at least those of the Western 18th-, 19thtimes). Conversely, wintergreen in the US and 20th-century variety – increasingly is the olfactory cognate not of medicine dismissed the other senses as reliable but of candy (a minty smell). indicators of reason and truth and, It is, in fact, difficult to overstate the instead, came to associate them with importance of psychology to the historical emotionalism or, more often than not, study of the senses. It matters a great deal hardly worthy of sustained scholarly and there are real-world contemporary investigation. Ergo, up until quite problems that the historian of the senses recently, most historical writing has attended almost exclusively to the visual, reading the past through the eyes of historical actors. It is only in the past couple of decades that historians have discerned that the same historical texts they have used to understand the past in conventional terms also contain a wealth of information on the nonvisual senses. The tremendous irony is, of course, that that evidence only comes to light when actively looked for (Smith, 2007). Part and parcel of this increasing historical awareness of the senses is courtesy of work by psychologists, which has often been important for helping sensory historians not only sensitise themselves to sensory historical evidence but also contextualise it What did smells mean to 18th-century Parisians? so that place and time become central to understanding the role of and the psychologist can address and, in a given sense or senses. fact, have addressed. Take, for example, work by Rachel S. Such is the case with the history of Herz, whose 2002 essay, ‘Influence of race and racism. Allow me to illustrate odors on mood and affective cognition’ with a brief story (see Smith, 2006), one reveals very precisely the role that history plays in shaping sensory perception – in taken from the early part of the 20ththis case, olfaction. Herz examines the century American South, a place that was olfactory tastes of modern Britons and beginning to invent a system of racial Americans. As Herz explains, two studies segregation that arranged bodies in public – one performed in the 1960s in the UK, and private spaces according to the idea the other a decade later in the US – found of ‘race’ on a daily basis in an effort to that Brits disliked the smell of methyl secure and perpetuate white power. This salicylate (wintergreen) while Americans was a system that was premised on the really enjoyed it. Historical specificity – ability – and the need – to detect racial the context in which noses smell – identity reliably and sustainably.
social theory (pp.3–21). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Morlan, G.K. (1950). An experiment on the identification of body odor. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 77, 263–264. Picker, J.M. (1999/2000). The soundproof study: Victorian professionals, work space, and urban noise. Victorian Studies, 42, 427–453. Smith, M.M. (2006). How race is made:
Slavery, segregation, and the senses. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, M.M. (2007). Sensory history. Oxford: Berg. Smith, M.M. (2008). Getting in touch with slavery and freedom. Journal of American History, 95, 381–391. Woolgar, C.M. (2007). The senses in late medieval England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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On March 6, 1907, white residents of Albany, Georgia ran a man named Peter Zeigler out of town. According to the local newspaper, Zeigler ‘had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man’. Citizens had been fooled, even at close range: ‘He has been boarding with one of the best white families in the city and has been associating with some of Albany’s best people.’ Luck failed Zeigler, it seemed, when ‘A visiting lady recognized him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated and found to be correct.’ But Zeigler returned to Georgia accompanied by ‘a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina’ who verified that he was, in fact, white. Peter Zeigler went from being white to black to white because his ‘race’ could not be reliably fixed. Instances of ‘black’ people passing into ‘white’ society, of whites mistakenly taking black people for white (and vice versa) are not uncommon in American history. And it is surely tempting to frame such instances as illustrating the fundamentally illogical system of segregation, one premised on the putative absolute difference between ‘black’ and white’. But there is more to this matter than, literally, meets the eye. To end with the observation that the Peter Zeigler episode and others like it reveals the operational and intellectual instability of ‘race’ in a period that touted the utter necessity of racial permanence begs too many questions. How did such a system recover from such episodes? How did it function for over half a century if it was built on a distinction that was itself a fiction? Looking alone, in other words, cannot explain the Peter Zeigler case, cannot explain the nature of segregation, and cannot adequately excavate some of the essential underpinnings of race consciousness and racism. But by examining the way that southern segregationists used their sense perceptions – historically condition perceptions about racial sensory stereotypes – we can make sense of the Zeigler episode. In short, whites used their nonvisual senses to fix and stabilise racial identity when sight alone was not up to the task. Psychologists seem to have been more keenly aware of the important role played by sensory perception in creating and perpetuating race consciousness and racism for rather longer than historians.
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The importance of the nonvisual senses to the construction of racial identity was, for example, fully recognised by Harvard psychologist, Gordon Allport. As he argued in his landmark 1954 study, The Nature of Prejudice, race is usually treated as a ‘visual category’, something mediated and framed by the eye. But Allport made a compelling case for identifying other, non visual, ways in which race was socially constructed in an effort to expose the mythology of race and the irrational nature of racial prejudice. ‘Where visibility does exist,’ maintained Allport, ‘it is almost always thought to be linked with deeper lying traits than is in fact the case… [M]any white people try to enhance the “visibility” of the Negro by claiming that he has a distinctive smell, as well as appearance.’ Such ‘sensory aversion’, Allport suggested, was
common, powerful and learned. Prejudice increased if sensory stereotypes were repeated often enough (‘one hears that Negroes… have a peculiar odor’). Sensory stereotypes generally, reckoned Allport, were potent and once acquired ‘bring a shudder and lead us to move away or otherwise protect ourselves from the stimulus’. Psychologists were also active in disproving the race–odor association. The very few scientific studies conducted between the 1930s and 1950s proved as much. An early unpublished experiment in the 1930s comparing the sweat of black people and white people found that not only could noses not distinguish the race of the sweat but that sweat from a black person was often ranked by whites as more pleasant than the smell of white sweat. In 1950 George K. Morlan reported
in the Journal of Genetic Psychology the results of a more detailed experiment in which white students smelled black students. Morlan found that ‘neither the mass nor individual data support the theory that Negroes have a distinctive body odor that whites can identify’. He went on: ‘If a peculiar odor is a racial characteristic that can be noted, it exists in every individual of any given group and can be accordingly identified. If it does not exist in a single member of that group or cannot be identified with complete accuracy, it cannot be considered racial.’ Historians – well, this one at least – have used such insights to some profit. Psychological work that tried to understand the role of smell in the construction of race and the perpetuation of racial prejudice was immensely helpful
Colonising sounds Aurality, meanings of sound, ways of hearing were part and parcel of the cultural baggage European adventurers, explorers, and colonizers took with them on miscellaneous – and deadly serious – imperial quests beginning in the 16th century. Europeans exported well-honed sound technologies (often of medieval origin) and the new commercial and capitalistic cultural values underwriting them to discipline the bodies of natives, principally to exploit their labor but also to tattoo authority on colonized bodies via their ears. This process can be seen in any number of colonial societies and in each the bell, allied with the clock, was often present. The sound of time, in short, stood in the vanguard of colonialism. In 19th-century South Africa, for example, European settlers used clock-regulated bells to introduce Natal natives, mainly Zulus, to ideas concerning wage labor, efficiency, and bodily discipline. In towns especially – public clock time was established in Durban in 1860 – European capitalists, intent on making disciplined laborers out of agricultural Africans who
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embraced a more flexible and less regimented sense of time, ran schools, civic affairs, and labor by the sound of clock-defined time. The use of public time and bells that had begun in earnest in early modern Europe was imported into the 19th-century colonial, capitalist mindset and then re-exported around the globe. It took time and effort to instill a sense of timediscipline among Africans in Natal and many resisted the clock and its aural courier, preferring instead to work on their terms at their pace – not unlike workers and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, North America, and South America who waged similar struggles against the factory bell and what it represented at roughly the same time. But the sound of time and the wage labor economy that it regulated took its toll – as bells often do – and many Natal Africans found themselves firmly ensconced in clock-regulated capitalist social and economic relations by the end of the 19th century (see, for example, Atkins, 1993).
While a similar process seems to have unfolded elsewhere, notably in Australia where colonizers attempted to use clock-regulated bells to discipline not only the nascent Australian working classes but also aboriginal people, the function of sound in the process of colonial encounter in Australia is revealing in other ways. Here, the role of sound in the imperial and colonial project was not simply about imposing authority on various native and aboriginal
peoples; it was also about the definition of selves and the formation of new national identities. As Paul Carter explains in his fascinating study, The Sound In-Between (Carter, 1992), we need to ‘augment the eye with the ear’ to understand the Australian past. Carter examines the history of the ‘word-sound’ ‘Cooee’, a sound now understood as quintessentially (white) Australian. But its history has everything to do with claiming
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to me when it came to, for example, trying to decipher the likes of Peter Zeigler and how he was treated. What the psychologist told me was that white southerners believed they did not need their eyes alone to authenticate racial identity. Whites’ noses and ears, their senses generally, could be used to detect blackness – or so they claimed. So when the racially ambiguous Peter Zeigler’s of their world managed to pass as white, white southerners simply deployed their non-visual senses in an effort to relocate him, to fix him racially. In the Zeigler case, it didn’t seem to have worked too well, but in other cases, it did. In one critical instance it worked perversely well. Arguably the most important legal case having to do with race relations in US history was the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v.
ownership of a sound, its appropriation, and its incorporation. European definitions of the word differed markedly from Aboriginal ones. Explains Carter: ‘the Aboriginal “Cooee” criss-crossed a space where people felt at home, the European “Cooee” was cast out into the unknown, a voice crying in the wilderness.’ In the late 1800s, Europeans adopted Cooee – and abandoned ‘hallo’ – not for any cultural reasons but for purely physical ones: pronouncing Cooee ‘produced a greater volume of sound’ that ‘carried farther than its English equivalent,’ an important consideration in such a large geographic space as Australia. Cooee did not invite cross cultural bonding – although it had the potential to do so since Europeans were plainly mimicking Aborigines. Instead, the European adoption of Cooee, their appropriation of a sound, distanced the two groups. Moreover, Europeans in
Ferguson. It was important – pivotal, in fact – because it was the case that made segregation by race legal in the United States. It was not overturned until the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and even then racial segregation persisted for many years (some might reasonably argue that it is with us still). The basis of the Plessy case was a ruling in Louisiana. In 1890 the state instituted segregation on some of its railroads – black passengers had to sit in one railroad car, white ones in another. ‘Elite blacks’ – many of whom were visually white or very light-skinned – were quick to challenge the legislation and, with the support of some white, lawyers, elected to challenge the very basis of the statute by having Homer Plessy – a man who was seven-eighths
Australia exaggerated the extent to which the sound was a generalized Aboriginal sound and term (chances are it was limited to a few Aboriginal groups but not shared by others until Europeans spread the sound to them) in an effort to authenticate themselves. Cooee did not bring colonizers and colonized closer ‘but, as a term of exclusively local origin, it served to bind the colonists together.’ Cooee became the sound of Australian identity. The Aboriginal sound had become white Australia’s ‘call of the bush.’ It was a sound that allowed Australians to construct their identity at home and abroad, to identify who was genuinely Australian and who was a newcomer by the authenticity of the sound. In this way, white Australians appropriated and then incorporated an Aboriginal sound to form part of their own national identity (see also Davison, 1993). Hearing, listening, sounds, noises, aurality generally, were not simply
peripheral to modernity, existing on the outskirts, but, rather, deeply implicated in its daily elaboration. Hearing had occupied an important post in the ancient and medieval world, where it was considered a reliable sense, a sentinel of sorts, a sense that could reveal truth and had a meaningful intellectual component. The print revolution, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all enthusiastically promoted the power of the eye, but hearing seemed to hold its own, with no discernible dilution of its social and intellectual importance. In fact, hearing, sound, and aurality generally were critical in many ways to the unfolding of modernity and to downplay its importance only deafens us to the meaning and trajectory of key developments of the post-Enlightenment era. © Mark M. Smith, Sensory History, Berg Publishers (an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd)
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‘African’ but visually ambiguous (so light his race could not be reliably ascertained by the eye) – sit in a whites-only car. According to Louisiana law, Plessy was, technically, black because of his proportion of African ancestry; but the train conductor’s eyes couldn’t detect it and Plessy himself had to tell him that he was, in fact, legally ‘black’. In court, Plessy’s attorney maintained that the statute itself was unenforceable because racial identity could not always be seen. The logic was impeccable: if you couldn’t see race, how on earth were people charged with enforcing segregation going to reliably confine black people to exclusively ‘black’ public spaces? Louisiana’s prosecuting attorney, John H. Ferguson, replied by drawing on centuries of racial, sensory stereotypes. It did not matter than the conductor couldn’t see Plessy’s race; instead, Ferguson insisted, he could smell Plessy’s racial identity. The argument, as later psychologists showed, was hardly empirical – there is not, nor has there ever been, an olfactory signature to race. After all, race itself is a social and cultural construction. But that didn’t matter. That whites had the authority to designate, culturally, race as a stable category by appealing to smell was, in the context of 1896, enough to make Homer Plessy black. The specific context of power relations dictated that southern whites could invoke the stereotype, one cultivated under slavery, to effect a stabilisation of race. Here, a specific cultural authority with a very particular history made the nose more powerful than the eye. Context mattered a great deal. Because the association of race with smell is quite ubiquitous (we find examples in many countries across time), because it is so pernicious, and because it can be (and often is) used to perpetuate racial stereotypes and reinforce social hierarchies, the role of the psychologist and of the sensory historian, their sensible inclination to contextualise the meaning of the senses and expose the ends for which sensory stereotypes have been sometimes employed, is really quite invaluable. Their work offers a powerful reminder that the past is not always fathomable by the eye, that it is sometimes hostage to an Enlightenment way of understanding the past. Simply ‘looking’ back can, in other words, be quite blinding. I Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina SMITHMM@mailbox.sc.edu
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