the
psychologist vol 29 no 11
november 2016 www.thepsychologist.org.uk
The everyday magic of superstition Ella Rhodes on the widespread and persistent nature of apparently irrational beliefs
letters 810 news 818 careers 862 reviews 870
zombies: life and death at the limits 836 eye on fiction: The Babadook 840 a window to the soul and psyche? 842 the medieval mind 880
Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk
the psychologist... ...features
The Psychologist www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.psychapp.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk
The everyday magic of superstition 832 Our journalist Ella Rhodes speaks to psychologists to understand the widespread and persistent nature of apparently irrational beliefs
tinyurl.com/thepsychomag @psychmag
Life and death at the limits Roger Luckhurst on ‘zombie psychology’
Download our iOS/Android apps
October 2016 issue 51,920 dispatched Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use or recycle.
Eye on fiction: The Babadook and maternal depression Pamela Jacobsen considers a metaphor in the horror film
832
PHOTO BY SNAP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates. CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark, Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB Recruitment Matt Styrka 01223 378 005 matt.styrka@cpl.co.uk Display Michael Niskin 01223 378 045 michael.niskin@cpl.co.uk
836
840
A primer to the soul and psyche? Szonya Durant with a primer on eye tracking
842
New voices: One small, quiet act Holly Kahya on how yogic breathing could enhance psychological practice
854
...reports 836
the needs of asylum-seekers and refugees; can stress ever be beneficial?; from Babylab to baby theatre; Ig Nobel prize; human library; and more 818
ISSN 0952-8229
© Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk. The publishers have endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all illustrations. If we have unwittingly infringed copyright, we will be pleased, on being satisfied as to the owner’s title, to pay an appropriate fee.
The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’.
Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson
Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera
Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Matt Connolly, Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Reviews Kate Johnstone Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus, Asifa Majid
the
psychologist vol 29 no 11
november 2016
the issue ...debates letters music and hearing loss; adults with autism in the criminal justice system; eating disorders; maternal contact; President’s Letter; and more
810
...digests replication; wisdom; memory in infancy; siblings with cancer; and more, in the latest from our free Research Digest. See www.bps.org.uk/digest for more, to download our free iOS/Android app) and to listen to the podcast.
826
...meets 5 minutes with… we hear from medical book award winner Rhona Flin interview our editor Jon Sutton meets Jonathan Haidt at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association
848
822 848
careers 862 we speak to Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School; three research assistants explore academic life and support networks; and Jan Smith on life as a health psychologist in the making
one on one 884 with Maureen McIntosh, Chair of the Society’s Division of Counselling Psychology
As you should be receiving this edition a week or so before Hallowe’en, traditionally a time of superstition and spookiness, we thought we’d make that the theme. Read our journalist Ella Rhodes on the everyday magic of superstition; Corrine Saunders and Charles Fernyhough consider medieval thinking and the origins of Hallowe’en; Pamela Jacobsen turns an ‘Eye on fiction’ for The Babadook; and finally, after 17 years, I manage to get zombies in The Psychologist thanks to Roger Luckhurst. If ghouls and gore aren’t your thing, as ever there’s so much more. Eye tracking, yogic breathing, my interview with Jonathan Haidt and surprising answers to the question ‘Can stress be beneficial?’. And there’s much more online and in our apps, including numerous exclusives. As ever, we need your help to keep all this going: please see the website for information on how to contribute, or just get in touch. Fingers crossed I’ll be hearing from lots of you in the months to come. Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag
...reviews Artists and writers in Reading Prison; Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond; Deepwater Horizon; and books
870
...looks back The medieval mind 880 Scholars are showing that medieval science – in various fields – is more sophisticated than previously thought. Corrine Saunders and Charles Fernyhough show that psychology is no exception.
The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Phil Banyard, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Peter Olusoga, Peter Wright
…more Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our full archive, access to our iOS/Android apps (complete access for Society members), and much more
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
Big picture centre-page pull-out words by artist Steph Singer and psychologist Clare Jonas
NEWS
Exploring the unique needs of asylum-seekers and refugees In the face of increasing numbers of refugees arriving in Europe from places such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, the British Psychological Society’s Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Psychology Section held an event to inform and educate psychologists working with this population. The conference, held in London, explored the unique needs of asylum-seeking people and refugees, and the best ways to work with interpreters, and gave a real feeling of the true extent of the refugee crisis. A person with first-hand experience of the refugee camps in Greece, Dr Jenny Altschuler, who is also a clinical psychologist and family psychotherapist, set up the Refugee Trauma Initiative and spoke about migration, illness and health care. She said this was a critical issue to discuss, although in the midst of polarised debates about ‘Fortress Britain’ there seemed little space to think of ill, disabled and dying migrants. Altschuler said she felt there was insufficient attention paid to the effects of cultural and language barriers on refugees and on healthcare professionals themselves. She spoke about the ‘other’ effect, a bias towards seeing subjugated people as less worthy ‘others’, who are more open to scrutiny and regarded with suspicion. The health of refugees in camps is in jeopardy, she added: many are stuck in cramped warehouses, relying on aid, and are much more prone to communicable conditions such as flu or bronchitis. Many refugees also lack medical records, and in understaffed camps many people have to wait for hospital visits or medication over weekends or overnight. Altschuler emphasised that in working with refugees or migrants it was important to bear in mind the effects of illness or migration itself on a person as well as their sociocultural and economic context. She said we should be open in talking about a person’s journey to the UK to discover the kinds of help they would have asked for at home and their broader experience, to inform treatment in the UK. She concluded: ‘It’s important to place conversations about migration into conversations about illness; it’s about listening and bearing witness to what’s said and what isn’t.’ According to the 2011 census more than 138,000 people in Britain don’t speak English and around 726,000 don’t speak it very well. As a result, psychologists should be more aware of the challenges of working with interpreters in a mental health setting, said Professor Rachel Tribe (University of East London).
818
She pointed out some of our English turns of phrase that would be very hard to translate, for example ‘I want to pick your brains’, ‘I was beside myself’, ‘the apple of my eye’ and ‘bite the bullet’. These phrases may be best avoided while working with an interpreter. As well as the many idioms of the English language, humour is also often lost in translation. Not only this, but many interpreters are open to vicarious trauma, and often are not prepared for the sorts of things discussed in a psychologist’s office. Tribe gave some advice to psychologists working with an interpreter. She said they should be aware that the dynamics of the consultation will change and should discuss the objectives of the meeting with the interpreter beforehand, and debrief them following the meeting. She added that interpreters can teach much about the differences in other cultures and languages prior to a consultation. As well as being aware of a client’s cultural background, Tribe said, it’s also vital to consider what one brings oneself to a consultation: our own biases and background play a role in every interaction. She suggested people need appropriate training for working with interpreters in a mental health setting. Tribe said that, for many refugees, speaking about psychological problems, and trusting a person in a position of authority, may be much more difficult given the countries and cultures they’ve escaped from – secrecy in many countries is a survival strategy. The research in this area is growing and, Tribe said, so far we can see that having the option to speak in one’s mother tongue is very important – perhaps particularly in a mental health setting. Many people find the experience more satisfying and positive if an interpreter is available, they may also feel better understood. Dr Anne Douglas helped to set up a Mental Health Liaison team in Glasgow that works exclusively with refugees and asylum-seeking people. This team was set up to provide advice, consultation, training and supervision across mental health services, and to input into the initial screening of newly arrived asylum-seeking people. The team, originally named Compass, also provides therapy for complex PTSD or culturally complicated problems such as the belief a person has been put under a spell. Compass, now
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
JESS HURD/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK
news
A LIFELINE FOR REFUGEES
called The Anchor, gives therapy to refugees, asylum-seeking people, and those who have been trafficked into the UK. Douglas said many of the common responses by those who are new to working with these populations are a mixture of believing they are the same as us, they are completely different, thinking they’re all traumatised or believing they all just need a nice home and a job. The best approach is somewhere in the middle: people need homes and jobs, but may also need therapy. Douglas gave some advice to those new to working with these populations. Before having a consultation one should read up on their country of origin, religion, language and common human rights abuses in that country. With those seeking asylum it is also important to know which stage of the process they are in: whether they are receiving any interim support for example. The therapy service, she added, should also be traumainformed with a welcoming reception area and staff, including a good and appropriate interpreter, and psychologists should be aware that someone who has been imprisoned might feel more comfortable facing a window during a session. She added that it was vital to consider one’s own race, cultural background, religion and gender and how it may might affect the therapeutic relationship. Douglas also pointed out some of the cultural differences in survivors of rape; many may feel guilt, shame, a loss of honour or even lose the will to live following rape. Clinically, shame seems to be more evident in women from cultures where a woman’s worth lies mainly in her chastity and it is seen as her responsibility not to tempt men. In helping these survivors of rape, Douglas said, one should ask a woman whether women in her culture are allowed to speak about the bad things which happen in war. She added: ‘I might say “In your culture women think there’s no life after a rape, in ours some people try to support women”. CBT needs to start from a person’s own meaning of rape.’ She concluded that while working with asylum-seeking people and refugees, trauma issues should be taken seriously, and an attempt should be made to empathise with clients to help view their difficulties from other cultural contexts. ER I The Society’s Presidential Task Force on Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Migrants, chaired by Professor Bill Yule of the Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Section, will shortly be consulting on guidance in the area. Look out for your opportunity to contribute.
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
A team of psychologists, academics and refugees have created an online portal for asylum seekers and refugees to access a wealth of information, from mental health advice to relaxation techniques. Professor Rachel Tribe (University of East London), who is leading and managing the project, spoke to The Psychologist about the origins of the portal and its value to both refugees and those working with them. Tribe, who also previously set up the Health Archive for Refugees Portal (HAPRweb) and was a member of Psychologists Working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers, said the idea for the current resource came about after a CPD workshop on working with refugees and asylum seekers. Dr Farkhondeh Farsimadan, a Chartered Psychologist with the lived experience of the phenomenon felt, in light of the number of people requiring access to information and financial cutbacks in health and social care provision, that a portal could provide a lifeline. The portal is also aimed at psychologists, social care practitioners, charity, community, statutory, and international organisations working with refugees and asylum seekers. Tribe said: ‘It is hoped ultimately that internally displaced people or people residing or working in refugee camps can now access resources, where there may be few mental health practitioners and without fear of stigmatisation.’ The website can be used as a first-stop resource for refugees and asylum seekers, and mental health and social care practitioners working in the field, to easily access an abundance of information and resources that may be helpful to refugees and their families.’ Farsimadan added that she and the team wanted to promote a social justice perspective in training, research and practice. ‘Refugee populations’, she said, ‘are heterogeneous groups with different experiences and expectations that may require mental health services, organisations and practitioners to be creative in their service provision. During the current social and political climate, the question that we should be asking ourselves is “As practitioners, are we doing enough to contribute to the current situation of refugees?”.’ In creating the portal Tribe and Farsimadan, both members of the British Psychological Society’s Presidential Task Force on Refugees and Asylum Seekers, also worked alongside Paul Dudman, University of East London Archivist, who provided archival support from the Refugee Council Archives. Other members included Dr Lucia Berdondini, Jidong Dung, and Dr Patricia Smith, who all made important contributions to the process, often when working in other countries. At the launch of the portal in June, BPS Vice President Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes gave a speech along with Rani Nagulandram, who spoke about her experience coming to the UK as a refugee. This work follows on from the successful civic engagement funded project in 2015 to establish the Living Refugee Archive (www.livingrefugeearchive.org). Developed in conjunction with the Refugee Council Archive and Dr Rumana Hashem from the UEL Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, the Living Refugee Archive aims to collect life history narratives from migrants and refugees. ER I The portal is at www.uel.ac.uk/Schools/Psychology/Research/ Refugee-Mental-Health-and-Wellbeing-Portal. Professor Tribe and Dr Farsimadan would be happy to receive suggestions of further resources or offers of translations of existing resources. If you would like to contribute, please e-mail them at R.Tribe@uel.ac.uk and Farahfarsimadan@yahoo.co.uk.
819
news
Can stress ever be beneficial? Jon Sutton reports from a joint British Academy/British Psychological Society talk from Professor Ian Robertson (Trinity College Dublin) Why do civil engineers spend trillions of dollars building bends into roads when a straight one would do just fine? Why has the number of prescriptions for antidepressants almost doubled in the past decade? Why do some people perform better under stress? According to Professor Ian Robertson, the answer to all these questions has a lot to do with noradrenaline – ‘a potential candidate for the most remarkable brain-enhancing substance’. Robertson has worked as a clinical neuropsychologist, and written numerous popular and academic books. His latest, The Stress Test, surprised him: ‘I didn't realise how relevant what I had been studying was to this whole realm of stress and psychological injury.’ Robertson’s big idea is that how the brain responds to pressure can sometimes push the brain into a ‘sweet spot’. Increasing the challenge a person faces allows the brain networks to communicate better. ‘A bit of stress, not too much, is good for you.’ Perhaps more importantly, how we reframe stress – as a challenge – can have major impacts on our physical and mental health. Clearly influenced by his time at the Institute of Psychiatry, Robertson describes it as ‘a wonderful institution, ‘but one with a split personality. There were practitioners, and scientists doing basic research. There was almost no interaction between the two, and that continues to this day. I know which side really won.’ Robertson clearly longs to join the dots, in an age of an ‘epidemic of the emotional disorders of life’. ‘Depression is a ghastly thing to suffer from, particularly against all the other improvements in physical health.’ In an age where everyone bangs on about dopamine, Robertson has another focus: ‘I’m very interested in noradrenaline as a neurotransmitter – some say it’s because it’s the only one I can pronounce.’ Why noradrenaline? According to Robertson, it integrates working memory, arousal, awareness and sustained attention. It’s key to a fundamental, 100year old law in psychology, the YerkesDodson law. Fundamentally, it’s when ‘thoughts, perceptions, actions are beautifully represented because there’s just the right amount of background noise.’ If
820
you’re low on the curve, stress or challenge pushes you into the sweet spot – happy days. If you’re already there, it’s only downhill. Imagine you’re really anxious about doing maths. You’re actually as good at it as everyone else, you’re just extra anxious about it. Then you’re put in front of a ‘censorious audience’ (I don’t like them already). According to 2011 research by Mattarella-Micke and colleagues, those who are high in maths anxiety do worse when they secrete more cortisol (a notorious stress hormone). But those The brain needs challenge to sustain attention low in maths anxiety actually do better – the stress, or challenge, boosts their before the Christchurch earthquake, performance. an opportunity presented itself to create What’s going on here? Robertson an ‘Earthquake Induced Cognitive says the high maths-anxiety students are Disruption Scale’. Performance on ‘already up here’ – more stress simply the test of sustained attention highly pushes them over into a negative correlated with the likelihood of people relationship between cortisol and experiencing stress symptoms related to performance. But the low maths-anxiety the earthquake. ‘Stress is a gateway to our students are pushed up into the sweet emotional life’, said Robertson. ‘If you let spot. your mind wander, it will tend to wander What drives this? According to to negative thoughts and memories. Why? Robertson, it’s sustained attention, Because the brain hates unresolved strongly linked to noradrenaline. The conflicts.’ challenge for the brain is to keep itself So, back to those straight roads. internally focused when there’s not much ‘There’s one in Kuwait,’ Robertson says: in the way of external drivers. We all ‘you just see burnt-out wrecks along the wander a little, but Dan Gilbert’s work way.’ Why? Because the brain needs has suggested that a wandering mind is challenge to sustain attention in the an unhappy mind. Even if his participants absence of external demands. And this were doing a boring household chore, if has interesting implications for the tests their mind was wandering their mood was neuropsychologists use. ‘Many of our tests lower – and the paper showed that link automatically switch on this situation. was causal. They challenge, they “help out” the Robertson measures this sustained person unwittingly.’ Robertson referred to attention with his simple ‘SART’ test – just more unstructured tests, for example the press the button for every number except ‘six elements’ test from Tim Shallice and 3. ‘Strangely enough’, he says, ‘people Paul Burgess, that is more unstructured make errors’. It’s a highly specific and and doesn’t obviously involve challenge. sensitive test for people with traumatic Using Tom Manly’s real-life test based on brain injury, but perhaps more things hotel receptionists would need to interestingly it predicts real-life cognitive do, Robertson showed that the simple act failures and absentmindedness in of ringing a buzzer randomly when you everyone. And when one of Robertson’s give the task to brain-injured patients can colleagues had used it in New Zealand normalise performance. ‘It’s pushing them
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
news
up to the sweet spot.’ [O’Connor, Robertson & Levine, in Neuropsychology.] Never straying far from noradrenaline, Robertson showed that SART errors can be predicted according to which copies you hold of the DBH allele which affects the presence of noradrenaline in the brain. And when you ‘up regulate’ noradrenaline with a drug, it activates the frontal and parietal cortex in the right hemisphere: ‘the key to keeping your mind internally directed’. Luckily, you can even measure this noradrenaline activity via pupil dilation. This is where it gets a bit weird. Clever people, their pupils dilate more in response to a difficult problem. They’re generating more noradrenaline. ‘People with above average IQ,’ Robertson says, ‘are constantly infusing their brains with a remarkable drug which has amazing effects in the right quantities. Engaging in challenging activities generates this incredibly enriching substance.’ So that’s why stress can be good. Animal research shows that rich, complicated environments grow the brains of many animals. And it’s not just complexity, it’s the novelty. One new smell every day for 40 days produces neurogenesis in mice. Yet if you block noradrenaline, you lose that effect. ‘There are three sisters,’ says Robertson: ‘rich and complex environments, mediated by novelty, in turn mediated by noradrenaline.’ The implications of this are mindblowing. If you’re smart, this lifetime of boosted noradrenaline activity may affect the disease process itself, protecting the brain from the ravages of time. ‘Take Vietnam vets’, said Robertson – ‘the best predictor of their adaptation to brain injury was the brain that existed beforehand.’
So we’re back to the neuropsychological patients Robertson has spent so much of his career with. Considering the psychological legacy of the Battle of the Somme, Robertson showed a photo of a casualty: ‘He’s been through the far side of the sun… There should be no holds barred in the methods available to him. There’s no easy psychological fix, but that doesn’t mean you can’t contribute.’ And the way psychologists can contribute is surprisingly simple. If the key is sustained arousal, why not train people to give themselves little jolts of arousal? Using adults with attention deficit problems, Robertson and colleagues used skin conductance biofeedback. ‘We literally just clapped hands behind their head, showed them how their skin conductance changed and told them to do it themselves.’ The team were changing brain chemistry, and linking it to real-life problems. Moving back to stress, Robertson covered 2011 research by Hannie and Comijis suggesting that ‘cognitively fragile’ older people who had no significant life events in a two-year period were poor on a retention test, but those who had three more life events in the moderate range were just as good. ‘Moderate stressors jizzed up their brains,’ said Robertson, wheeling out all the technical terms… ‘almost certainly by pushing them up to the sweet spot.’ But it's not just in older people. Research by Mark D. Seery suggests that cumulative life adversity can have a powerful beneficial effect in the face of chronic back pain. ‘The lesson here’, Robertson concluded, ‘is that people need to toughen up a bit.’ Talking of which, what does all this
mean for that ‘epidemic’ of antidepressant use? Robertson, admittedly riffing more speculatively on this theme now, laid the blame on youths being ‘over-sheltered from adversity’, and lacking experience in ‘tolerating and controlling negative emotions – particularly through attention and mislabelling of arousal’. As a result, people don’t feel in control of their negative emotions. This, Robertson argues, is particularly pernicious. Drawing on Carol Dweck’s ideas, he suggested that the medicalisation of mental processes has led to a fixed rather than growth mindset. Does being given a pill for your psychological state convey a powerful message that you are not in control of your emotions? According to Robertson, ‘we do have control over our biological factors’ (although he qualifies that with ‘to some extent, in some cases’). The scientific reality is that we should have a growth mindset about all our processes. ‘The brain is so plastic, the capacity so profound. It’s terrible that people don’t feel they have that.’ So how do we change a mindset? ‘We live in a society with a tendency towards reductionism,’ Robertson concluded. ‘But there’s going to be the kind of kickback that happened with the mass prescribing of Valium.’ Where America leads, the world follows, Robertson suggested, and ‘the Trump supporters, they’re dying’ – through suicide, alcohol misuse, and the huge issue of prescription painkiller use. As psychologists, Robertson concluded, we need to assess different things – arousal, self-awareness, insight. But perhaps more than anything, we need ‘that little rewriting of the software code’ – from potentially harmful ‘stress’, to beneficial ‘challenge’.
Helping the Air Force battle violence A University of Huddersfield psychologist has been working with the US Air Force to help eliminate sexual violence at its bases. Dr Maria Ioannou, Director of the university’s MSc in Investigative Psychology, was invited to visit RAF Lakenheath to provide training to volunteer victim advocates. Ioannou told us that her talk covered investigative psychology, offender profiling and cases in which the investigative approach has
helped solve the psychological serious sexual principles, theories assaults – such and empirical as in the findings that may Manchester be applied to bedsit rapist investigations and case. She the legal process. explained: ‘The I explained how investigative we link offender psychology characteristics to crime Maria Ioannou approach is scene actions and a systematic, behaviour using scientific approach to empirical methods. the analysis of crime and ‘I covered operational criminals. Investigative applications of investigative psychology is concerned with psychology with emphasis on
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
salience, suspect elicitation, suspect prioritisation, crime linking and geographical profiling, all with real cases and examples of sexual assaults,’ she added. Carolina Yepez, the base’s Sexual Assault Response Coordinator, subsequently visited the university where she delivered a lecture to masters students. There are now hopes of further collaboration, including the prospect of USAF personnel taking the Investigative Psychology course. ER
821
news
5 minutes with... Rhona Flin Rhona Flin, Emeritus Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, has received the Chair of Council BMA 2016 Medical Book Award for Enhancing Surgical Performance: A Primer on Non-Technical Skills. She, along with paediatric surgeon George Youngson and psychologist Steven Yule, coedited the book for surgeons to learn about the cognitive and social skills that can influence patient safety during operations. How did this book come about? The book grew out of a series of research projects (involving other psychologists and clinicians) in which we identified the non-technical skills for key members of an operating theatre team. From that work, we developed tools, such as NonTechnical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS), which consists of a defined skill set and a behavioural rating system for surgeons to use while watching another surgeon operating. The book offers guidance on how to train surgeons in the non-technical skills and gives advice on how to make NOTSS ratings for feedback and assessment. It explains what we know from relevant psychological science behind the skill categories, such as decision making or how to cope with stress and fatigue while operating. It demonstrates, using examples from surgeons’ experience or recent research into surgeons’ behaviour, why the non-technical skills can influence both safety and efficiency of surgical procedures. Surgeons and psychologists, from the UK, USA and Australia co-authored the contributed chapters. Can you give me some examples of these non-technical skills? The basic categories of these skills are Situation Awareness, Decision Making, Teamwork, Leadership, and Coping with Stress and Fatigue. Each consists of key elements and for every element, there are examples of more and less effective behaviours (sometimes called behavioural markers). For instance, Situation
The British Psychological Society produced two briefing documents for the 2016 political party conference season – ‘Making Better Decisions’ and ‘Behaviour Change: Voter Apathy’. The briefings are available via www.bps.org.uk/behaviourchange
822
Awareness has gathering information, comprehension and anticipation as elements. These skill sets are similar across a range of higher-risk occupations, although the exemplar behaviours are obviously different. I previously worked on a European research project in which psychologists and pilots identified the non-technical skill set for airline pilots, devising a behavioural rating tool called NOTECHS. Nowadays, pilots usually have their non-technical skills regularly assessed, as well as their technical skills. In the case of NOTSS, experienced surgeons provided the behavioural examples, many of which relate to communication with other team members. What can psychology bring to the (operating) table? The operating theatre is a very private workplace, and psychologists have only recently been granted access to study individual and team behaviour during actual operations. The pioneer in this field was the late Bob Helmreich from the University of Texas at Austin. His research in the 1980s into pilots’ attitudes and their behaviours on the flight deck had an enormous influence on the development of what became the mandated Crew Resource Management (CRM) training that teaches the non-technical skills to enhance flight safety. He subsequently collaborated with clinicians to show that medical errors in operating rooms were influenced by the same kinds of attitudes and behaviours. Until very recently, healthcare workers have had little or no training in the psychological factors that relate to medical errors and patient safety. I’ve found teaching surgeons about concepts such as working memory, its limited capacity and susceptibility to interference, is useful to explain why distractions have to be managed in order to maintain attention. For example, we discuss behaviours that can jeopardise concentration – interrupting someone who’s midtask or turning the music up in theatre because the surgeon has completed the difficult steps of a procedure but the nurses may still be counting instruments and swabs. Essentially the non-technical skills training covers basic aspects of human performance in a team setting, with complex technical equipment. Increasingly, we can draw on research data coming from studies in the operating theatre or from the clinical simulators. Is there any reason your work has taken this direction? I have mainly worked with higher-risk industries looking at safety management and emergency response [see also ‘Reviews’]. With rising concern on the rates of adverse events experienced by hospital patients, industrial psychologists working on safety were encouraged to extend their studies into healthcare. Probably due to my own limitations, I remain intrigued as to how experienced professionals in higher-risk settings learn to function as calm decision makers in life-threatening situations.
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
news
Human Library reveals hidden lives Two psychologists at the a really good way of showing University of Westminster, how we do that. It’s all very Head of Psychology Dr well to have that in a Kathryn Waddington and document or up on the Senior Lecturer and Doctoral website, but what does it Researcher Deborah Husbands, actually mean for students to have been working to hear the be co-creators of knowledge? voices of unheard and For me it’s about working stigmatised groups and break together in a non-hierarchical down barriers. October saw way.’ the university’s third Human Waddington even put Library event to mark Black herself forward to be a book History Month, in which for the International Women’s borrowers can take the time to Day event earlier this year: ‘My listen to the stories of human book title was Only a Woman ‘books’. Would Think of That. The university has already run several of these Human Library events, in collaboration with Ida Kwan, Senior Academic Liaison Librarian for Library Services, to mark International Women’s Day in March and Black History Month last year. The events are open for any of the staff and students at the university to act either as ‘borrowers’ or ‘books’. Waddington said that in a higher education context there is much talk of values, but she asked how these can be put into practice: ‘At Westminster we very much believe that our students are co-creators or coconstructors of knowledge and learning. For me the Deborah Husbands Human Library events are
Importantly it gave me an opportunity to have a discussion with the borrower, who was one of our third-year students. She could ask me questions and reflect on what she’d learned from me, but I also learned a lot from her,’ she said. Husbands emphasised the voluntary, and open, nature of such events. ‘The Human Library goes across all protected characteristics – it doesn’t matter if you’re of a particular ethnicity, everyone has the opportunity of participating. Our International Women’s Day event was open to the whole university where we had a range of people, students, staff of all ethnicities and from all levels in the university. There’s a huge eclectic mix, and this works wonderfully in events such as the Human Library.’ For Black History Month two events were held at the university’s Cavendish and Harrow campuses. Husbands added: ‘People have told us the events gave them the opportunity to talk about things that they wouldn’t normally talk about to people they
Kathryn Waddington
wouldn’t normally talk to. Human Libraries have this fantastic way of connecting communities, breaking down the barriers and giving people the understanding of what it’s really like to live with a certain stereotype, stigma or bias.’ It’s particularly heartening, Husbands said, that the initiative has come from the Department of Psychology. ‘In my own research with black female students many of them said the problem with psychology is sometimes they’re so busy studying it they don’t have time to be people! It has some real value in terms of the discipline.’ ER
Changes to professional development From 2017 the British Psychological Society’s Professional Development Centre (PDC) will be organising its professional development activities and workshops in line with key policy themes, work streams and emergent areas in psychology. There will be a number of core workshops running, for example Supervision Skills, Expert Witness and Working Successfully in Private Practice, which the centre will be looking to add to throughout the year. Working collaboratively with Policy, Boards and Committees across the BPS, the centre will be creating a more strategically focused central professional
development offering that will be relevant to the progress of psychology, the BPS and its members. There will be periodic announcements and calls for proposals in a number of different areas, with deadlines for these, enabling collaborative working with other areas of the BPS and the ability to plan activity around other events, activities, documents and launches. Thomas Elton, Professional Development Centre Manager, said: ‘This approach will allow the PDC to be more flexible and responsive to key policy areas and react more readily to emergent themes. As a result the Professional
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
Development Centre hopes to better align with the interests and needs of members. The team are leading a number of exciting projects over the next few years to progress the area of professional development within the BPS. As part of this we will be looking at how to engage further with members to provide a more varied range of opportunities to engage in professional development provided by the BPS, using technology and a variety of modes of delivery in the learning environment.’ ER I A list of themes the PDC is hoping to have proposals for can be found on p.853
823
news
From Babylab to baby theatre What makes babies laugh? What makes this very high-tech equipment were these Associate Director for Early Years at Polka them spontaneously break into dance? slightly nasty plastic toys!’ Jo Belloli homed in on the projects of Psychologists at Birkbeck, University of This first trip to the Babylab became Addyman, Rocha and Edey. All three went London’s Babylab helped the director of inspiration for the play itself – a single along to Polka Theatre in Wimbledon to new theatre production, made especially performer, Maisie Whitehead, took the tell the creative team what might work on for babies aged between six and 18 babies through a metaphorical trip to the stage, based on their research. months, answer these questions and more lab, with all of its novelty, unexpected Addyman said taking the role of in a truly collaborative project. lights, toys and music. Addyman, Rocha science-adviser was intimidating at first. Shake Rattle and Roll was one of and Edey were on hand to give advice on He said: ‘You do quite quickly start to take several plays premiered at London’s Polka what makes babies laugh, what music is on that role though. We gave advice about Theatre and the Brit School as part of most likely to make babies spontaneously the speed of certain movements or the their Brain Waves Festival. Its programme dance and how they read emotion in body number of repetitions needed to engage of events also included an aerial show language and objects. the babies or make them laugh. One video Depths of My Mind based on recent Argent said the whole process of we have is a father holding his daughter research on the development of the producing theatre with scientists on hand tapping on a window with a coin, maybe teenage brain, as well as Animating the to help had been a fascinating experience scraping paint off the frame… he taps the Brain, which was developed with help that might inform how she works in window then blows and that makes her from neuroscientists from King’s College future. She said: ‘My first piece of theatre laugh. So the show starts with the London, puppeteers and filmmakers. for babies, on the whole, had quite gentle, performer tapping on the door to the We spoke to Sarah Argent, Director of lyrical music. I’d thought a play for babies theatre and blowing. The first few Shake, Rattle and Roll along with Caspar needed to be quite sonically gentle and audiences – of babies and parents – were Addyman (Goldsmiths University of lyrical but when Sinead gave me the pretty amused!’ London and formerly of Birkbeck). He’s playlist that she uses with the babies in Addyman said he had learned a great one of three academics from the Babylab the lab it was all Justin Timberlake and deal working with Argent, and was who helped the theatre’s creative team Jennifer Lopez. It made us realise babies particularly surprised at how she manages throughout production. Also on hand to are a lot more robust than we’d given to hold the babies’ attention for more than advise were Sinead Rocha, a PhD student them credit for!’ 30 minutes. ‘When we’ve got babies whose research looks at how babies learn Dr Addyman, despite having now left coming to the lab we’d give any amount to dance, and Rosy Edey, a PhD student Birkbeck’s Babylab, was asked to come of money to have them that engrossed in looking at biological motion perception along to a meeting with Argent to tell her the tasks! I think we could make it a bit and social difficulties in people with about some of his work. She and more of a performance in the future.’ ER autism. Argent has been working to create theatre experiences for babies since 2007: her first show Out of the Blue has toured for eight years and had performances as far afield as the Sydney Opera House. Peter Glanville, artistic director of Polka, asked her to collaborate with neuroscientists on a new piece for the Brain Waves Festival – she admitted she was slightly terrified at the prospect. Argent said she visited Birkbeck Babylab academics to find out which researchers may be best placed to advise on the project and was intrigued by the experimental setting. She told us: ‘We went into the depths of the building and saw the labs, we were fascinated by the electric bonnets and eye-tracking machines, and the incongruity of all the little Holding the babies’ attention for more than 30 minutes was a challenge plastic toys… in amongst all
824
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
news
Pinocchio paper prompts porkies The 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes, honouring achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think, were awarded in front of more than a thousand spectators at a Harvard University ceremony. This was the 26th First Annual Ceremony, with the prizes handed to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates. Each new winner was permitted a maximum of one minute to deliver an acceptance speech, a limit enforced by three ‘human alarm clocks’ ding-dingdinging in harmony. The event was produced by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, whose founder Marc Abrahams has written for us on funny, thought-provoking research in psychology (tinyurl.com/znzdote). The Psychology Prize was won by a team from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and the USA, for their study asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers. Bruno Verschuere from the University of Amsterdam attended the ceremony. Their 2015 study, published in Acta Psychologica (tinyurl.com/jcyhldo), had been covered on our own Research Digest blog (tinyurl.com/z24vdx7). Bruno told us: ‘I was not told what made them decide to
select my study, but my own hunch is that the publicity such as the excellent piece on the Research Digest blog drew their attention. So thank you!’ Part of the team’s prize was a tentrillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe, and Verschuere told us ‘Being a deception researcher, I find it quite appropriate that I got a fake prize… It was also somewhat paradoxical that I lied repeatedly in the weeks before the ceremony. I had to swear secrecy to the organisers of the event and so I tried to tell nobody was I was travelling to Boston, and actually lied to those who asked explicitly, saying I would be visiting a colleague at Harvard!’
Verschuere told us: ‘All in all, it is a real great honour, and I had people from all over the world to congratulate me. The board of my university sent me their congratulations on a paper airplane (as used during the ceremony). Best of all, tracking ResearchGate, I can see that our scientific paper has been read hundreds of time in just the last week!’ Psychologist Gordon Pennycook and colleagues won the ‘Peace Prize’ for their scholarly study called ‘On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit’ (a topic considered here: tinyurl.com/pmxoeaf). Other winners included neurologist Christoph Helmchen for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa); and Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs. JS I You can watch the ceremony on YouTube tinyurl.com/hxp36tr
Reporting on prejudice and crime University of Kent psychologists have published two research reports on hate crimes and prejudice in the UK for the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The work led by Professor Dominic Abrams, Hannah Swift and Lynsey Mahmood looks at the broad state of hate crime and other law-breaking behaviours that happen due to prejudice. The organisation commissioned the research to examine social categorisation and prejudice, while also looking into the link between prejudice and particular crimes. The researchers examined 228 pieces of evidence, which included 24 evaluations of interventions, and found little evidence linking individuals’ prejudice with particular acts of unlawful behaviour. However, the group did find some interesting connections outlined in their two reports, entitled Prejudice and Unlawful Behaviour: Exploring Levers for Change and Causes and Motivations of Hate Crime. They saw that disability discrimination can be driven by over-simplistic categorisation and patronising stereotypes. There was also some evidence of less prejudice towards black and Asian people compared with Eastern European people. Muslims, the psychologists saw, are the most targeted group
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
for prejudiced attitudes linked with perceived threat. Stereotypes related to age can be damaging to older people who are treated in a patronising way, affecting the way they see themselves and their ability to do some things. Overall the group saw attitudes towards women appearing to be positive, but suggest this may mask benevolent or patronising forms of prejudice. Happily, attitudes towards same-sex relationships and marriage have become more positive over time. ER I The two reports can be found at tinyurl.com/jr3r8zd and tinyurl.com/hmj6no4
MORE NEWS ONLINE Visit www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports for extra news, including the Human Behaviour Change Project; poker-faced at the Manchester Science Festival; homelessness and the brain; a veterinary honour for David Lane; a new interactive exhibition at Staffordshire University; and more.
825
DIGEST
No reason to smile – Another modern psychology classic has failed to replicate The great American psychologist William James proposed that bodily sensations – a thumping heart, a sweaty palm – aren’t merely a consequence of our emotions, but may actually cause them. In his famous example, when you see a bear and your pulse races and you start running, it’s the running and the racing pulse that makes you feel afraid. Consistent with James’s theory (and similar ideas put forward even earlier by Charles Darwin), a lot of research has shown that the expression on our face seems not only to reflect, but also to shape how we’re feeling. One of the most well-known and highly cited pieces of research to support the ‘facial feedback hypothesis’ was published in 1988 and involved participants looking at cartoons while holding a pen either between their teeth, forcing them to smile, or between their lips, forcing them to pout. Those in the smile condition said they found the cartoons funnier. But now an attempt to replicate this modern classic of psychology research, involving 17 labs around the world and a collective subject pool of 1894 students, has failed. ‘Overall, the results were inconsistent with the original result,’ the researchers said. The replication effort which has been published online in Perspectives on Psychological Science attempted to stay extremely close to the original 1988 study, but there were a few differences. For example, the instructions to the participants were delivered by video to avoid experimenters inadvertently influencing the participants. And the participants were videoed during the study to ensure that they held the pen correctly in their mouth. As in the original, the aims of the research were disguised as test of motor control and consistent with this cover story, participants first had to perform some tasks with the pen (such as drawing lines between numbers) before looking at the cartoons.
Overall, nine of the participating labs found results that were in the same direction as the original research – participants with a smiling expression caused by holding the pen in their teeth tended to rate the cartoons as funnier than the pouting participants. But the size of the difference was much smaller than in the original research. And when the results from these nine labs were added to the eight who found results in the other direction, the overall outcome was no effect. The replication researchers, led by E.J. Wagenmakers of the University of Amsterdam, said their results had failed to replicate the original ‘in a statistically compelling fashion’, but they noted that this does not mean the entire facial feedback hypothesis is dead in the water. Many diverse studies have supported the hypothesis, including research involving participants who have undergone botox treatment, which affects their facial muscles. In a commentary published alongside the replication effort, Fritz Strack, lead author of the original 1988 classic, said that he lauded ‘the replicators’ effort in this extensive enterprise’ but that there were several issues with their methodology that cause him to be concerned with the validity of what he considers to be a surprising outcome (note that Strack proposed that his 1988 study be subjected to a replication attempt and he provided all his original materials to the replication team). Among the issues he raises is that being videoed may have affected the students’ emotional experience through causing them to feel selfconscious. ‘…while a first look at the current data seems to suggest that the [1988] SMS facial-feedback study has been convincingly “non replicated”,’ he writes, ‘a closer inspection of the replication studies reveals several methodological and statistical issues that need to be considered before drawing further conclusions on the validity of the method, of the model, or of the underlying mechanism.’ CJ
In Perspectives on Psychological Science
826
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
digest
Wisdom is more of a state than a trait In Social Psychological and Personality Science We all know the kind of person who did really well at school and uni but can’t seem to help themselves from forever making bad mistakes in real life. And then there are those characters who might not be surgeons or rocket scientists but have this uncanny ability to deal calmly and sagely with all the slings and arrows of life. We might say that the first kind of person, while intelligent, lacks wisdom; the second kind of character, by contrast, has wisdom in abundance. The assumption in both cases is that wisdom is a stable trait – how much someone has is an essential part of their psychological profile and remains constant through their life. But a new study says this way of viewing wisdom is mistaken. The research in Social Psychological and Personality Science used a diary approach to gauge people’s wisdom in response to everyday problems, and the results showed that there is more variation in one person’s wisdom from one situation to the next, than there is variation in the average wisdom between people. Wisdom, it seems, is more of a state than a trait. Igor Grossman and his colleagues recruited 152 men and women in Germany (average age 27) to complete a daily diary for nine days. Each day they were emailed and asked to recall a specific negative experience from the previous day and to describe it in detail, including how they responded. Most of the recalled experiences were arguments or disputes of some kind. To look for signs of wisdom the researchers specifically asked the participants to say whether they showed intellectual humility (for example, realising that they couldn’t know for sure what the consequences of the incident would be) and self-transcendence (for example, seeing the situation from the perspective of different people). The researchers found that there was considerable variation in how much wisdom people showed from one situation to the next. Yes, if they averaged a person’s wisdom across the nine-day study period, some people did tend to show more wisdom than others. But this difference between individuals in average wisdom was smaller than the fluctuations in wisdom typically shown by individuals from one situation to the next. What’s more, it was a person’s display of wisdom specific to a given situation, not their average or trait wisdom, that was more strongly associated with the psychological fallout they experienced from that situation. Put differently, handling a situation with greater wisdom than is normal for you is beneficial, for example in
terms of experiencing less negative emotion, seeing the bigger picture and feeling more forgiving, whether your trait levels of wisdom are high or not. And conversely, being a generally wise person is of little benefit for a specific situation if you happen to handle that situation unwisely (which was a common thing for people to do, regardless of their trait wisdom). Another finding was that people generally tended to handle difficult situations with more wisdom when there were other people present, as compared to when they were on their own. The act of keeping the diary also seemed to lead to a general increase in wisdom levels
(especially self-transcendence) as the study progressed, no doubt because the study prompted beneficial self-reflection. Of the various demographic measures that the researchers took, such as gender, education level and age, only age was related to average levels of wisdom shown across the study, with older people showing more wisdom. The researchers said their results dovetail with ‘the recent shifts in views on malleability of other human characteristics that have long been regarded as fixed, such as intelligence, which are now seen as greatly influenced by sociocultural and motivational factors’. CJ
New clues about the way memory works in infancy In Nature Neuroscience
Can we form memories when we are very young? Humans and non-humans alike show an ‘infantile amnesic period’ – we have no memory of anything that happens during this time (usually up to age three or four in humans) which might suggest we can’t form very early memories. But of course it might be that we can form memories in these early years, it’s just that they are later forgotten. The idea that at least something is retained from infancy is consistent with the fact that disorders present in adult life can be associated with very early life events. Now Nature Neuroscience has published a paper confirming that in rats some kind of memories are created during the amnesic period, but that these operate differently and are produced by different brain chemistry from adult memories. What’s more, such events may have a role in kickstarting memory system maturation. The research team from University of New York and Mount Sinai Hospital looked
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
at rats aged either 17 or 24 days – the former still in the infantile amnesic period and who I’ll henceforth refer to as infants, the latter grown to non-amnesic status – and specifically how they were affected by the experience of being electrically shocked when exploring a novel, dark chamber adjoining their brighter home. The infant rats showed almost no indication of being able to retain a memory of the shock. Given the chance, they sometimes returned to the chamber within the next 30 minutes, And after 24 hours, any memory of the unpleasant experience seemed entirely absent, in that they showed no hesitation in re-entering the chamber. This suggests that, at least in rats, infantile amnesia in due to a failure to store memories in the first place. But with further tests Alessio Travaglia’s team showed that some kind of memory had in fact been formed. They first gave the rats an opportunity to wander back into the
827
digest
chamber, which was now a safe place (again they were happy to do this, suggesting they’d forgotten the earlier shocks). A few days later the researchers gave the rats a shock in a different location – crucially, after this unpleasant experience, the rats showed a new, persistent (days long) reluctance to enter the dark chamber when given the chance, even though it was now safe. It’s as if a memory of the earlier shocks in the chamber had been reawakened by the later shocks somewhere else. What was going on? First, whatever was happening involved the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in the laying down of normal memories in mature brains. We know this because, just before the initial shocks, the researchers used a chemical to block normal functioning in the hippocampus of some rats, and for these animals no amount of jogging and reminders were able to bring back any indication of remembering. The researchers also uncovered some signs of learning and memory in the infant
rats’ brains at a molecular level. Infant rats have less of a specific version of a chemical receptor in their hippocampus than mature rats. Analysing the extracts of brain tissue taken from the trained infant rats showed that after the initial training shocks in the dark chamber, they showed a sudden increase in this specific receptor (an effect not seen in the mature rats). Let’s make sense of this. Imagine that we enter the world with just a pared-down version of memory, appropriate to being newborn, where the necessities of life, milk and warmth, are just there without your having to understand much about the world. Within weeks, this system is to be superseded by one using the same functional circuitry but fine-tuned, ready to capture novel information and store it accessibly. Until then, the system operates in a bare way, but still preserves what it can about significant events. Crucially, such events accelerate the transition to the full system, by triggering the development of more of the chemical receptors that are
seen in adults. It’s too late to capture an accurate memory of this threat – the horse has bolted – but the brain gets busy building a better stable for the next one. We don’t know, of course, whether still earlier stages in the amnesic period involve the capacity to capture memory information – it’s hard to do this kind of work with animals too small to explore their environment. But this new research suggests that in rats, and likely in infant humans too, the system is far more active than expected, not only retaining some information (which the researchers dub a ‘latent memory’ to account for its difficulty in retrieval) but also acting as a developmental critical period, akin to the way infant visual systems begin to change themselves in response to light. Given this sensitivity, the researchers speculate that early wrong experiences – or deprivation from experience – may harm us in later life through an upset of this critical period, and may contribute to neuropsychiatric disorders as a consequence. AF
What’s it like to be a child and your sibling is diagnosed with cancer? In Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry When the dreadful news arrives that a child has cancer, understandably the focus of parents and health professionals turns to supporting the sick child as best they can. But also caught up in the nightmare are the child’s siblings. Not only are they likely to be consumed by shock and fear, but they must adapt to the cancer journey the whole family has to embark on. Official health guidance here in the UK and in the USA states that it’s important to provide support to the siblings of children with cancer. Yet the reality is we know relatively little about their experience. A new study in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry helps address this research gap, based on interviews with two brothers and four sisters – now aged 12 to 18 – of children and teenagers with cancer. The results reveal the shock and fear the siblings experienced, and the challenges they’ve faced, but also uncover a silver lining in the form of posttraumatic growth. The researchers, led by Anita D’Urso at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in the UK, interviewed
828
each sibling for between 40 and 80 minutes, including asking them questions about what it was like when they heard their brother or sister had been diagnosed, and whether they’d experienced any positive changes. The interviewees’ siblings with cancer were now aged between 11 and 16 and their diagnoses, for brain tumour or leukaemia, had been made between 18 and 36 months earlier. Two of the siblings with cancer were still in treatment, the other four in remission. The interviews revealed the complex emotions the teens (and 12-year-old) had experienced, from the initial shock of their sibling’s diagnosis (I didn’t even cry, ’cos it was like punch in the face’) to feelings of guilt and sadness and helplessness, and sometimes anger and jealousy (‘X [ill sibling] used to get loads and loads and loads of presents’). Another recurring theme was the positive impact on the interviewees’ relationships, especially with their sick sibling (‘…’cos me and her [ill sibling], since this happened, we are like
best mates … we are well close now’), the family as a whole, with their fathers (because their mothers had become so involved with caring for the sick sibling), and with outside support, including enriched friendships and helpful school counsellors and therapists. While often mentioning the downsides, like being forced to grow up too fast, the interviewees also described how they’d changed for the
better in the wake of their sibling’s illness – such as becoming more mature and empathic (‘I’m more understanding of others, like with children with disabilities… I would think “is there anything I can do to help?” cos I know how their siblings or their mum and dad are feeling.’ They also described their changed priorities (‘It’s only recently that I have had an interest in charity work’) and outlook on life (‘If I
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
digest
The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.bps.org.uk/digest, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett and contributor Dr Alex Fradera. Subscribe to the fortnightly e-mail, friend, follow, listen to our podcast, search our extensive archive and more via www.bps.org.uk/digest New: download our free app via your iOS or Android store to keep up with the latest psychology research every day, on the go!
want to do things now I do them… life can be too short’), though there were also mentions of sustained anxiety. Some practical insights to come out of the interviews include the interviewees’ recurring comments about the lack of any support they’d had in hospitals (in contrast with positive support received at school and elsewhere). The teens also advised others in their situation to not be afraid to ask for help from parents (‘I didn’t want to ask [parents] because I didn’t want to make them more stressed and upset but…when I did ask, it made them [parents] feel better… Be rationally selfish. Everyone in the family is actually important.’
They also spoke of how helpful it had been to keep up their hobbies as a way to maintain some sense of normality. It’s important to note that this study concerned the siblings of children with cancer who had thankfully survived their illness – the researchers cautioned that the experiences of siblings of deceased cancer patients or patients in palliative care is likely to be different. Also, they acknowledged the limitations of their qualitative approach, including the possibility that by asking questions about the potential positive effects of their sibling’s illness, they may have primed their participants to see themselves as ‘survivors’ and to focus on positive outcomes. These issues aside, D’Urso and her team said that their research supported the ‘paradigm shift’ taking place ‘across academic disciplines, from a problem-oriented approach to one which nurtures strengths’. The interviews showed that ‘most siblings were able to uncover some benefit from the ill child’s diagnosis while still acknowledging the distressing side of their situation,’ they said. Crucially, they explained, ‘unpicking of factors that lead to posttraumatic growth may begin to provide guidance for those supporting siblings (including parents, hospital staff and schools).’ CJ
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
DIGEST DIGESTED Full reports are available at www.bps.org.uk/digest A brain scan study has found that dogs attend to the meaning of words, not just their intonation, and that word meaning is processed primarily by their left brain hemisphere and intonation by the right, similar to the lateralisation of function seen in most humans. Science Workplaces with a negative climate – where workers have little autonomy and there is lots of conflict – are more likely to provoke in staff a belief that there’s an office conspiracy. In turn, staff who believe there’s a conspiracy at their workplace are more likely than others to have low job satisfaction and to say they want to leave. British Journal of Psychology In certain contexts, interrupting yourself at work – for example, by browsing the web – can be even more disruptive than an external interruption, such as when someone sends you a message. The reason has to do with the brain power that’s needed whenever you make a decision to pause your main task to do something different. Computers in Human Behaviour A new survey, the largest of its kind published to date, estimates that just over 3 per cent of the population are born with ‘phonagnosia’ – an inability to recognise familiar voices – with many of these people probably not even realising that they have the condition. Brain and Language Experts in the psychology of disgust have claimed many times that humans are disgusted by the anything that reminds them that they are animals, but until recently the claim had not been tested explicitly. A new study did just that and found that animal reminders are not disgusting per se, but only if they make us think about infection. Cognition and Emotion A meta-analysis of 29 relevant studies has concluded that, with training, it is possible to learn to be more optimistic, but usually only a little bit and for a short while. On a hopeful note, interventions that achieved gains in optimism also frequently reported other benefits, for example in pain reduction and better mood. Journal of Positive Psychology
829
FEATURE
becomes a part of its existence; and is carried from generation to generation on the stream of eternity, with the proudest of fames, untroubled with the insect encroachments of oblivion which books are infested with.
The everyday magic of superstition Ella Rhodes speaks to psychologists in an attempt to understand the widespread and persistent nature of apparently irrational beliefs
uperstitions fascinate me. There is something beguiling, folkloric and fantastical about them, mundanely magical. They seem to whisper of pagan rites in ‘Merrye Olde Englande’, to speak of a time we rarely hear about in everyday, metropolitan Britain. Yet they steadfastly remain in our culture. English poet John Clare saw superstition as a long-standing tradition,
S
left behind by ancient civilisations. In 1825 he wrote that these beliefs were ‘as old as England’, and that despite being difficult to trace historically, superstitions remain ‘as common to every memory as the seasons, and as familiar to children even as the rain and spring flowers’. He continued his sentimental appraisal thus: Superstition lives longer than books; it is engrafted on the human mind till it
reading
‘I don’t think a rabbit’s foot will help you win at roulette, because it’s a game of pure chance, but it might help you perform better in a job interview. In contrast, I see no upside to negative superstitions, such as the fear of cats or the number 13.’
Damisch, L., Stoberock, B. & Mussweiler, T. (2010). Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science, 21(7), 1014–1020. Fluke, S.M., Webster, R.J. & Saucier, D.A. (2012). Methodological and theoretical improvements in the study of superstitious beliefs and behaviour. British Journal of
832
Psychology, 105, 102–126. Lindeman, M. & Aarnio, K. (2007) Superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs: An integrative model. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 731–744. Risen, J.L. (2015). Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions. Psychological Review [Advance online
publication]. doi:10.1037/rev0000017 Tobacyk, J. & Shrader, D. (1991). Superstition and self-efficacy, Psychological Reports, 68, 1387–1388. Vyse. S. (2014). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition (Updated edn). New York: Oxford University Press.
Our own audience, with their evidencebased approach to life, may scoff at the very idea of superstitions. Are they silly traditions held by small-minded folk, or can psychology actually surprise us about their use, meaning and even effectiveness? I have been digging out some of the research, and talking to those working in the area, to reveal the everyday magic of superstition.
Where do superstitions come from? Although this might seem a relatively simple question – after all, we can trace the origins of words with some precision – rummaging around in folklore and verbal histories to find out where certain customs, traditions and superstitions stem from is surprisingly difficult. For example, some Icelanders still hold great reverence for a group of elves or fairies called the huldufólk (hidden people). These elves are treated with great respect, and their apparent existence has halted roadworks in their tracks and led to demonstrations against moving certain boulders for fear of inciting the fairies’ wrath. In a 2013 article on the topic (tinyurl.com/o75kf2r), Ryan Jacobs writes that one of many potential origins of this belief was that Vikings were the first settlers on the island, and they may have felt a need to have ‘conquered’ something or someone. Perhaps, he ponders, the beliefs reflect the harsh landscape the new settlers were confronted with – glaciers, geysers and volcanoes – which must have seemed alien and even slightly magical. Happily, some of our superstitions are more historically grounded and have faded from memory – when diagnosing death was even less of an exact science than it is now, and being buried alive was less of a niggling fear than a real possibility, myths of vampires who stalked the night struck fear into the some. Upon death, to avoid any attempt at vampirism, corpses may be impaled on iron rods. One was even found to have been buried with a brick in its mouth just in case (see tinyurl.com/z4bbddt). Thankfully, our only real vampire-related fear these days is the potential for another Twilight novel. Superstitions are not only tricky
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
superstition
to trace but also to define. In the explaining why we might have fascinating Penguin Guide to the superstitions, but are any of us Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, author particularly prone to this sort of belief? Steve Roud points out that the word superstition has often been used as a The superstitious person… derogatory way in belittling another’s or pigeon belief. He counters the suggestion that Superstition is seen in most cultures, superstitions are based in the ancient and isn’t even limited to humans. For histories of Britain and Ireland – many example, the behaviourist B.F. Skinner customs are much more modern. Under famously demonstrated in 1948 that if the broad definition of ‘superstition’ he pigeons displayed a behaviour that includes luck, omens or signs, occult accidentally correlated with the presence powers or beginnings – which he of food, they would continue to show that describes as a belief that the situation behaviour despite food being released at surrounding the beginning of a journey set intervals. One pigeon would turn or project will predict how it will while the other would sway its head in continue, a belief that situations an attempt to get food. In other words, a surrounding the start of a person’s life will superstitious response had revealed itself predict their character or prosperity, and through operant conditioning. the belief that coincidences have a larger But what kinds of amount of significance people are most likely to than random events. be superstitious? Certain In a psychological “Upon death, to avoid any groups have been obvious context, definitions attempt at vampirism, targets for research due to surrounding corpses may be impaled their famously superstitious superstitions become on iron rods” nature – sportsmen, sailors, murkier still. In 2007, gamblers and college students Lindeman and Aarnio in the midst of exams, have all pointed out that the featured heavily. Yet research seeking overall picture of superstition research clear-cut demographics for superstitious is ‘unclear and remains to be adequately people has led to mixed results. It seems described and explained’. They point to that women tend towards being more a lack of conceptual clarity and the superstitious, and education leads to difficulty in differentiating between more scepticism; yet people with many superstition, magical thinking and years of education can still be supernatural beliefs. They put forward superstitious. Those with lower selfa theory that draws on developmental efficacy tend towards superstition, and psychology to suggest that we gain three those with a more external locus of areas of knowledge as children that help control and a propensity for pessimism us to make sense of the world – intuitive are also more likely to have such beliefs. knowledge about physics, psychology and However, due to the small sample biology. They suggest that as adults we sizes and the self-report measures often can still confuse these ontological used in this type research, it is impossible categories – for example by giving to state with certainty that any one group inanimate objects thoughts and feelings. may be more or less superstitious. So we Superstitions seem to be based on move to the main question – why are early intuitions we make about the world, people superstitious? And, importantly, linked more to intuitive than analytical why do smart, logical adults persist with thinking. Lindeman and Aarnio argue superstitions despite regularly that these beliefs, typical of pre-school experiencing their lack of effect? children, are preserved and activated among adults, even though their rational knowledge has devalued those Why are people superstitious? representations. Using a survey they I spoke to Stuart Vyse, author of Believing found that superstitions could be defined in Magic; The Psychology of Superstition as ‘ontological confusions’ – superstitious (2014, OUP) and formerly Professor of people gave more physical and biological Psychology at Connecticut College. He attributions to mental phenomena, such told me he became fascinated with the as agreeing that thoughts can touch question of why such a sophisticated objects. They also assigned more mental species engages in irrational and attributes to water or furniture – seeing occasionally self-defeating behaviour. them as having knowledge, desires and ‘While I was still in graduate school a soul. They also saw certain weather I became fascinated with some early events or computer failures as having experiments done by Barry Schwartz a purpose. showing that when exposed to random All of this may go some way to
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
schedules of reinforcement while working at a computer, intelligent college students would make up fanciful theories about how the rewards were delivered. They made up theories that were similar to superstitions, and eventually I did some similar experiments.’ But why do superstitions stick around? Vyse suggests they give comfort, in the form of illusory control in situations where it may be lacking. He adds: ‘There is evidence that positive, luck-enhancing superstitions provide a psychological benefit that can improve skilled performance. There is anxiety associated with the kinds of events that bring out superstition. The absence of control over an important outcome creates anxiety. So, even when we know on a rational level that there is no magic, superstitions can be maintained by their emotional benefit. Furthermore, once you know that a superstition applies, people don’t want to tempt fate by not employing it. In my book, I cite the case of a famous chain letter that went through the journalistic community in the United States. Many of these journalists knew that it was bunk, but they did not want to tempt fate by not copying the letter and sending it on. As crazy as it was, I am sure passing on the letter made them feel better.’ Vyse distinguishes between positive and negative superstitions. Those that involve carrying a lucky charm or the like are often harmless and may even provide a small psychological advantage; he says: ‘I don’t think a rabbit’s foot will help you win at roulette, because it’s a game of pure chance, but it might help you perform better in a job interview. In contrast, I see no upside to negative superstitions, such as the fear of cats or the number 13. We would all be better off if no one had ever taught us those anxiety-provoking superstitions.’ He also suggests that superstitious belief can, on occasion, be truly harmful. ‘If crystals or homeopathic medicines are chosen over more scientifically valid methods, then there are obvious risks. Some superstitious acts, such as visiting professional psychics, are also expensive.’ On a broader level, Vyse views the study of superstition as another example of how we all are susceptible to irrational behaviour. ‘Intelligent people from all over the world believe in the oddest things. But in showing how normal and easy it is to acquire these behaviours, it may help people understand why they are superstitious and nudge them to begin to question their beliefs. We would all be much better off if more people were to think rationally in their everyday
833
superstition
decisions. It is my belief that scientific study of superstitious behaviour can move us a bit further in that direction.’ Others have also considered the widespread and resistant nature of superstitious beliefs. In a 2015 paper on ‘superstitious acquiescence’, psychologist Jane Risen considers ‘dual-process’ models such as that of Kahneman and Frederick. Such models posit two systems: the first comes up with quick, intuitive and magical answers to questions of judgement we might encounter. The other system is not particularly attentive, is rather lazy and may ignore, override or correct the intuition posited by the first process. In some cases System 2 does not engage: in these cases the magical, intuitive answer given by System 1 is endorsed. For example, a person may realise that they won some money on a scratchcard while chewing gum: System 1 may then suggest the person always chew gum when playing a scratch card to ensure future winnings. If System 2 engages and points out this is not logical, a person won’t try this method. If it fails to engage, a person may make a superstitious habit of gum chewing while gambling. However, Risen points out that sometimes, even when System 2 does engage and we realise our magical intuitions are basically nonsense, we still may carry on with our gum chewing. She calls this superstitious acquiescence. ‘Superstitions and other powerful intuitions are so compelling that people cannot seem to shake them, despite knowing that they are incorrect…. People successfully detect an error of rationality, but choose not to correct it. System 2 acquiesces to a powerful intuition. Thus in addition to being lazy and inattentive, System 2 is sometimes a bit of a pushover.’ Dr Stuart Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, has delved into the psychology of ‘weird beliefs’ since being inspired to join the field by one man and his cat. ‘There are many reasons I was interested in this area, but the one that sticks out most is the discussion I once had with a man who told me, in all seriousness, that every night before he went to sleep he had a long chat about his day with the spirit of his dead cat. As a psychologist, once you’ve had that conversation it’s hard not to become interested in what might be going on.’ Wilson suggests that the stranger things we humans believe are wholly understandable when we look at the ways we naturally process information. He explains that human perceptual
834
Orthodox Jewish women in the northern systems are extremely efficient at Israeli town of Safed. The group of detecting patterns and finding links: women were powerless and could have ‘Knowing that X is linked to Y is the first been killed at any moment, but they step to knowing that X causes Y, which is found ways of coping. They ritually the first step to manipulating X so that Y recited the Book of Psalms, a collection of happens. We are able to make links 150 poems considered to provide strength between disparate concepts and think and protection. The researchers gave the about the causal consequences of women a mood disorder scale and found hypothetical scenarios. This is part of that their practices had measurably what makes human thinking more lowered levels of anxiety – helping them creative than what we see in other to deal with their terrifying situation. species.’ Yet the actual research in this area is Our inclination to automatically as messy as we may have come to expect. detect patterns can result in mistakes; A 2010 study by Lysann Damisch and her similarly, the ways we associate events colleagues that may be completely received much random can also be fooled. media attention Wilson says: ‘Just as a visual “the stranger things we when they illusion makes you see humans believe are wholly appeared to show something that isn’t real, understandable when we a measurable I would argue that one way look at the ways we naturally benefit to to look at superstition is to process information” superstition. think of it as an example of They conducted a a cognitive illusion that series of experiments makes us see causal and found people who had a superstition relationships that aren’t real. Because we activated before a task (being given a are so good at making diffuse associations ‘lucky golf ball’ in a putting game or being between things, then it’s probably easier told ‘we have our fingers crossed for you’ to fool these systems than it is to fool the before a manual dexterity task) performed perceptual systems. The difference is that, better. They also appeared to show that with perceptual illusions, it’s usually quite performance benefits provided by easy to see how you’ve been fooled: it’s superstitions are produced by changes in not so easy with cognitive illusions, perceived self-efficacy. But a 2014 attempt which might be one reason why they are to replicate one of the four experiments, so hard to change.’ by Calin-Jageman and Caldwell, was But why would any of this interest unsuccessful. When told the golf ball psychologists… what does it really tell they had was ‘lucky’, participants in this us? ‘Superstition is part of every human experiment did not perform any better on culture. To understand the allure of a 10-shot golf task. superstition is to understand something Chris French (Goldsmiths, University fundamental about us as humans. If the of London) agrees that a sportsperson’s goal of psychology and related disciplines rituals before a game may increase focus, is to understand human thought and and says the person may well feel anxious behaviour, then understanding if they couldn’t carry out this ritual. superstition is going to have to be part ‘There is also evidence to suggest that of the story,’ Wilson says. superstitious thinking might provide a psychological defence against learned Benefits of superstition? helplessness. In an apparently hopeless We have heard that superstitions are often situation, a superstitious person is more found in situations that inspire feelings of likely to keep trying to achieve success a loss of control, or vulnerability. For than a non-superstitious person. If the example, in his book Kidding Ourselves situation changes in such a way that (2014, Crown) Joseph Hallinan points to efforts to succeed suddenly become the fisherman on the Trobriand Islands in effective, the superstitious person is more the South Pacific. When fishing close to likely to take advantage of this change.’ shore they showed no superstitions, but So superstitions seem to offer a when due out in the open sea they benefit to people who use them, and engaged in elaborate rituals before their presumably more so in those who truly departure to ensure they made it home. believe in them. But what about the Hallinan also recounts an interesting sceptical superstitious among us? Why example from 2006, during the war in am I compelled to salute every lone Lebanon between Hezbollah and the magpie I see, despite being pretty certain Israeli military. Many people in the area nothing dreadful would happen if I fled, but left behind were a group of US didn’t? French suggested one reason – researchers who were working with superstitions are so widely known that we
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
superstition
may use them to communicate our desires, for example by crossing our fingers as a gesture to others to show we want a good outcome. He added: ‘We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by irrational tendencies that probably have their roots in our evolutionary history – such as the idea that good or evil influences can somehow be transmitted by mere physical contact. Many smart, even sceptical, people might find it uncomfortable to wear the jacket of a mass murderer even though they know on an intellectual level that this is irrational. Similarly, many of us would be thrilled to own something that once belonged to one of our heroes.’ Across his varied career French has come across some real ‘characters’, but has he specifically seen any really odd superstitions at work? ‘It is the more personal, idiosyncratic superstitions that often strike us as odd, such as the elaborate and bizarre rituals that many sportspeople engage in. To give but one example, Goran Ivanisevic, the Wimbledon champion in 2001, used to follow a very bizarre daily routine during the competition that involved watching an episode of Teletubbies in the morning, eating soup, lamb cutlets and chips, refusing to shave or have a haircut, and not allowing female family members to watch him play.’
Superstition ain’t the way? Stevie Wonder famously sang ‘When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then we suffer… Superstition ain’t the way’. But psychologists suggest that the everyday superstitions we know and love – knocking on wood, crossing our fingers and carrying lucky charms – may actually may help us out, particularly if we’re feeling a loss of control. But Chris French warns against anything which puts our sense of control outside ourselves in difficult situations: ‘Belief in possession and exorcism can result in tragic cases of child abuse and even death. People can become totally psychologically dependent upon advice from expensive psychic hotlines and middle-class fads like feng shui and crystal power will have a very negative impact on your bank balance.’ Despite such warnings, perhaps we can conclude by returning to poet John Clare. If superstitions are indeed ‘engrafted on the human mind’, they are likely to be a fruitful area for psychological research for many years to come.
Think you need a lucky mascot? Cross your fingers, touch wood, and don’t forget the rabbit’s foot. What leads people to put faith in such habits? Research from Boston and Tulane Universities suggests our goals have a big influence. Luck is the last thing on our minds when we’re concerned with learning. But when we’re focused on external goals, such as scoring a high exam grade, superstitious thinking intrudes. Being superstitious is about invoking some force beyond ourselves to make the other horse stumble, help our guesses fall on the correct answers, or our balls tumble out of the lottery machine. As these examples indicate, a common theme is that there is something about the goal also being beyond ourselves – external – and this is what researchers Eric Hamerman and Carey Morewedge set out to investigate. In one experiment, participants indicated they would prefer to complete a (hypothetical) class assignment using a lucky pen, when their aim was to chase a grade. In contrast, the pen held no attraction when they were told their only focus was to master the subject matter, because flukey guesses won’t actually help you learn any better. The fruits of understanding are internal and impervious to Lady Luck’s ways. The same pattern of superstition was found in a follow-up experiment. When the purpose of the task was to perform as well as possible, participants often chose a ‘lucky’ avatar to represent themselves, one that they’d used earlier when they were told they had performed very well. This was the case even when the ‘unlucky’ alternative would otherwise seem more fitting, such as a scientist avatar for a science quiz. In contrast, those participants tasked to simply see what they could learn strongly favoured the scientist avatar. In a further experiment, Hamerman and Morewedge uncovered another important factor: uncertainty. When a task was introduced as being straightforward and with few surprises, participants weren’t drawn to the previously successful avatar. Only performance-minded participants who were also warned ‘some people intuitively see the right answers, while others do not’ were keen to get lucky. It’s interesting to know when we might fall into superstitious habits, but the authors also point out a parallel insight. Highly successful practitioners in many fields are those people who ‘reframe their objectives as learning goals to focus on the process rather than the results’. What this means is that when we slip into superstitious tendencies, this may be a clue to us that we are looking at an activity in the wrong way, preoccupied with immediate outcomes and not treating the task as an opportunity to develop ourselves and deepen our understanding. Hamerman, E.J. & Morewedge, C.K. (2015). Reliance on luck: Identifying which achievement goals elicit superstitious behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(3), 323–335.
I Written by Alex Fradera for the Society’s Research Digest (see www.bps.org.uk/digest) I Ella Rhodes is The Psychologist journalist
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
835
ARTICLE
Life and death at the limits Roger Luckhurst on ‘zombie psychology’
references
Z
836
Ackermann, H. & Gauthier, J. (1991). The ways and nature of the zombi. Journal of American Folklore, 104, 466–491. Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness explained. London: Penguin. Fanon, F. (1985). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). London: Penguin. Hurston, Z.N. (1931). Hoodoo in America. Journal of American
Folklore, 44, 317–417. Hurston, Z.N. (1938). Tell my horse. New York: Harper Row. Lifton, R.J. (1968). Death in life: The survivors of Hiroshima. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mars, L.P. (1945). The story of the zombie in Haiti. Man, 45, 38–40. Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and social death: A comparative study. Cambridge: Cambridge University
MOVIESTONE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK (2251801B) NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
ombies have no psychology. That’s of the zombie continually cuts across what defines them. They munch the history of modern psychology in contentedly on human flesh from fascinating ways. pure residual instinct, not from any vampiric need. The sheriff in George Zombie origins Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the The folkloric zombie is traditionally 1968 shocker that launched the modern associated with the French colonies of genre, explains simply: ‘They’re dead, they’re all messed up.’ He then tells his posse to shoot another gormless ghoul through the head. You wouldn’t want to talk to any of the anonymous horde of zombies that shuffle through The Walking Dead either. They are low on personality traits. Once you’ve ‘turned’, the self has by definition gone, even if they were family, friend, or lover. This is the post-apocalypse, post-traumatic psychology one must learn. This is why Daniel Dennett could be so provoking as to invert this logic and declare in Consciousness Explained (1991): ‘We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious – not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism.’ The zombie lives on only as a thought experiment in how far psyche can exceed its biological basis. Yet Romero’s mindless horde of zombies is only a relatively late addition to a long tradition of folklore. Earlier versions of this figure that hovered on the edges of custom, belief and superstition in far-flung colonies. These greatly interested early anthropologists and The 1968 shocker that launched the modern genre psychologists. Indeed, the history
the Caribbean, particularly SaintDomingue (which became Haiti in 1804) and the French Antilles. In the 18th century, the slave sugar plantations there produced staggering wealth for the French bourgeoisie, but at appalling death rates in the slaves carried over from West Africa. There is some speculation that the word zombi, as it first appeared in French and English sources in the 19th century, derives from West African languages – ndzumbi means corpse in Mitsogo, zumbi a fetish or spirit in Kikongo (see Ackermann & Gauthier, 1991). The brutal Code Noir, the legal document issued by the French state, demanded that all slaves be forcibly converted to Catholicism. This only resulted in syncretic forms of religion and a thriving world of underground ritual practice. In
Press. Rhodes, G. (2001). White Zombie: Anatomy of a horror film. London: McFarland. Seabrook, W. (1966). Voodoo island. London: Four Square Books. (Original work published 1929 as Magic island)
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
zombie psychology
Jamaica, under the English, this was called Obeah. In Saint-Domingue it was called Vaudoux or Voodoo. The first version of the zombi was said to be a person whose spirit had been captured by a Voodoo priest. The victim was struck down with a paralysis so profound it was mistaken for death. The body was then retrieved soon after burial and revived in a kind of cataleptic state and put to work for his new master. This was an overt echo of the master–slave dynamic. What is called the ‘social death’ of slavery by Orlando Patterson (1982) – where one is stripped of name, kinships and autonomy, and forced to labour beyond endurance – is here rendered as a literal ‘undead’ state. In the paranoid world of the French colonial planters, Voodoo priests were thought to work with poisons, or induce these trance states through mesmerism. While Franz Mesmer claimed to cure his patients by placing them ‘en rapport’ and manipulating flows of ‘animal magnetism’ in the 1780s, the French colonies feared any such influences and banned the practice at once. It was too late: the suggestible slaves were ‘mesmerised’ into rebellion in 1791 by these dark arts, and had overthrown the French by 1804, when Haiti became the first independent black republic. For much of the 19th century, Haiti was demonised as a Gothic nightmare of cannibalism, savagery and the undead, all to make the white European empires feel better about their ‘civilising’ mission.
The shift to America The zombi of folklore became the zombie of popular American culture only in the 1920s. The extraordinary travel writer and adventurer William Seabrook visited Haiti during the colonial occupation by American forces, between 1915 and 1934. In his sensational travelogue Magic Island, first published in 1929, Seabrook not only reported joining a Voodoo cult, attending rituals, and feeling the power of the gods coursing through his veins after drinking sacrificial blood, but also claimed to have been introduced to a group of ‘dead men working in cane fields’: zombies. ‘The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life’ (Seabrook, 1966). Seabrook was fascinated by the occult but usually offered his accounts of witchcraft and the supernatural as a sceptical ‘psychical researcher’ (the term favoured in the 1920s, just before ‘parapsychology’ was coined). The
encounter in the cane fields produced a ‘mental panic’ in him, however: The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. (Seabrook, 1929/1966)
Meet the author ‘I have always been fascinated by moments in the history of psychology where lines blur between knowledge and belief, science and superstition. I wrote The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford, 2002) on the emergence of psychical research as an off-shoot of the new dynamic psychology in the late Victorian period, and have since explored the stories of bad-tempered mummies in the Edwardian period in The Mummy's Curse (Oxford, 2012). Zombies inevitably lurched into view as the next liminal figure, still very much an active “real” folkloric figure around the world today.’
Soon enough in his account, Seabrook decided that these creatures were ‘nothing but poor ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields’, A rational explanation presented itself. He did not have the insight to reflect that it was the American occupiers who had reintroduced forced labour back into plantations after over a hundred years of Haitian freedom. No wonder the local population felt that conditions for the ‘zombie’ had returned. Too late! Seabrook’s book became the primary source material for the first American zombie film, White Zombie, which appeared in 1932. In it, Bela Lugosi, fresh from his role as Count Dracula, plays another evil foreign mesmerist able to control his enemies, enslave workers, and pursue pure white American beauties with his dastardly hypnotic powers (see Rhodes, 2001). Tropes from American and European Gothic literature fused with colonial superstition to create a new heady brew. Actually, the zombie was secured in the American imagination by literally becoming a heady brew: the potent Zombie Cocktail was a sensation in the tiki bar craze of the 1930s. Customers were limited to two; more, everyone was warned, would induce brain death.
Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘real’ zombie Another important visitor to Haiti in the 1930s was the writer Zora Neale Hurston. Best known as a novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston also trained as an anthropologist at Columbia University under Franz Boas, and as a black woman was considered to have great potential as a fieldworker. She wrote up her findings on ‘Hoodoo’ folk medicine practised amongst the black folk of New Orleans for the Journal of American Folklore in 1931. She started
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
Roger Luckhurst is a professor at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Zombies: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015) r.luckhurst@bbk.ac.uk
training as a healer, but apparently broke off after some confounding incidents that she hinted at but which wouldn’t quite fit into academic discourse. This was nothing compared to what she found in Haiti. Hurston wrote the fractured and strange book Tell My Horse about Haiti, which included her outline of Voodoo rituals and beliefs. In her unlucky chapter 13, she not only discusses zombies, but visits one and photographs her terrible, traumatised face. This ‘remnant’ or ‘wreckage’ of a former person was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman who had died in 1907, but allegedly in 1936 had been found naked and stumbling along the road towards a farm where her family had once lived. The family and surrounding village assumed that Felicia had been in bondage to a zombie master who had eventually died, freeing her corpse to its last compulsion: to return home (Hurston, 1938). Felicia is a monstrous creature, outcast and rejected by a social organisation that refuses her personhood. Hurston finds her in a mental hospital, understandably, yet is fully prepared to accept the zombie thesis. Shortly afterwards, Hurston became convinced that she was being slowly poisoned by secret societies that objected to her anthropological investigations and she left the island in fear of her life. In 1945 Louis Mars, a professor of psychiatry in Haiti (and eventually a Haitian government minister) directly addressed Hurston’s findings in Man,
837
zombie psychology
America’s leading anthropological journal. The case of Felicia, he said, was ‘evidently a case of schizophrenia’ and expressed anger that through credulous accounts like Tell My Horse ‘tourists believe that they will be able to see zombies roaming through villages’ (Mars, 1945).
Post-colonial zombies
SOLENT N
EWS/REX
/SHUTTERST
OCK
(1239729 C)
This became the standard mode of post-
war psychiatry in the service of enlightened, progressive nationalism and decolonisation – local superstitions needed to be overcome to bring new nations forward in development. The leading psychiatrist in this arena was Franz Fanon, who came from the French island of Martinique – still technically a colony of the French state. Fanon trained in Paris and developed an influential political theory of the colonised self in the
All together now How did the zombie move from the unlucky lone individual ‘Mesmerised’ by a voodoo priest to become the vast anonymous horde familiar today? The answer lies in the traumatic wake of the Second World War. The atomic bomb put the entire globe at risk and imposed on everyone what Robert Jay Lifton called a saturation in death. This mass ‘death image’ might be one source for our wholesale zombification, as might the accounts that soon emerged after the war of the masses of ‘living dead’ in the German concentration camp system. But it was the early years of the Cold War that really produced an important representation of ‘zombie’ masses. When American troops were sent into Korea in 1950 to prevent the advance of Chinese Communist forces, they were confronted by a horrifying new battlefield tactic: the ‘human wave’. Mao Zedong ordered hundreds of thousands of peasant soldiers forward with the aim of overrunning wellarmed positions simply through force of numbers. Its initial success was ascribed to the horror American soldiers felt at being forced to mow down thousands of peasants. Since Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, the zombie genre always features these undead masses pressing at the windows and doors of the last human redoubt. There was a political tinge to this image, of
838
existential psychology of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon treated traumatised victims of the war for Algerian independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For Fanon, black consciousness needed to free itself from debilitating superstitions – ‘leopard-men, serpentmen, [and] zombies’ – with liberating reason. These beliefs only reinforced subjection under a ‘death reflex’. Yet Fanon was also treating ‘conversion’ symptoms of war trauma, states of paralysis and catatonia that sound like shell-shock cases, but also rather like the classic zombie of the French Caribbean: ‘It is an extended rigidity and walking is performed in small steps… The face is rigid but expresses a marked degree of bewilderment… He is constantly tense, waiting between life and death’ (Fanon, 1985). As if to draw out this implication, Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction proclaimed Fanon’s work a dialectical and revolutionary reversal of white and black power. ‘Turn and turn about,’ Sartre proclaimed to his (presumed white) readers, ‘in these shadows… it is you who are the zombies’ (in Fanon, 1985).
After the end course. One of the early zombie films, Revolt of the Zombies (1936) ended with images of a long-dead Asian army re-awoken from sleep and inexorably advancing. In this case, it fed into American xenophobia about Chinese immigration. After the end of the war, the threat of Chinese Communism in particular was understood as a risk of brainwashing. The Chinese Communist Party was known to use techniques of ‘thought reform’ or political reeducation. The Chinese term Hsi nao was evocatively translated as ‘brainwashing’ in 1950. This stuck rather better than the term suggested in the American Journal of Psychology in 1951: ‘menticide’. American pyschologists, politicians, and popular culture united in a panic narrative that fiendish foreigners might infiltrate the country and turn American citizens into ‘zombies’, potential traitors or assassins without a will of their own. The most overtly psychological rendition of this fear was The Manchurian Candidate, a novel in 1959 about a soldier returning from Korea, zombified into an assassin by his Communist handler. It was released as a film in November 1962, just as Kennedy was assassinated, and the film was rapidly withdrawn. Here is another psychological root of the modern zombie.
The shift from the zombified individual to the indifferent mass might appear to suggest that psychology has been evacuated from the trope. The focus of the Romero paradigm, up to and including The Walking Dead, is on the survivor and models of post-traumatic ‘emergency’ states of consciousness. Right at the beginning of the trauma paradigm, Robert Jay Lifton suggested that in the post-1945 era humanity had become saturated in ‘death imagery’ and had to live with the permanent threat of global extinction (Lifton, 1968). Survivorhood has become a privileged locus of identity since the diagnostic manuals identified post-traumatic stress disorder in 1980. However, there are recent signs that zombies are re-acquiring consciousness in popular culture – a shift back to an interest in what it might mean to exist in a state where the self has been fractured and lost but might yet find a kind of fragile recovery. The TV series In the Flesh and iZombie still find interest in the zombie and keep it as currently the most evocative Gothic form for investigating the limits of life and death and how personhood can be defined.
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
839
BIG PICTURE
BitterSuite symphony Words by Steph Singer and Clare Jonas; image by John Watts Clare Jonas, Psychologist, University of East London: ‘Synaesthesia is a harmless neurological condition in which a stimulus in one sense can spark a perception in another – for example, listening to music might cause a synaesthete to literally see colours. Most people don’t have synaesthesia, but we do make links across the senses, so, for most, high-pitched notes ‘go with’ the taste of lemon better than they do the taste of cinnamon. These kinds of associations, cross-modal correspondences, are not necessarily experienced at a conscious level, but when I first met Director and Artist Steph Singer she was looking at bringing those cross-modal correspondences into conscious awareness in the context of a performance of a Debussy quartet. ‘I met her and some of the other members of BitterSuite in the basement of the Rich Mix in London, and we chatted for several hours about the research on cross-modal correspondences and synaesthesia, and how it might be meaningfully incorporated into an musical and artistic experience. ‘A few months later, I got to experience one of the performances for myself. It was strange, bewildering, profoundly moving – and my first realisation that I, personally, could use my scientific research to create art. ‘Steph and I work very well as a team – a science-minded artist and an art-minded scientist, throwing ideas back and forth between us and moulding them into weird and beautiful shapes. There have now been several iterations of BitterSuite performances, and I’m starting to look at audience reactions to the pieces. We’re also working on an art/science festival for next spring and another cross-modal art idea that we currently refer to as the Sensory Kaleidoscope.’ Steph Singer, Director and Artist: ‘BitterSuite springs from a motivation to take classical music audiences out of their mind to experience an embodied state of listening. Psychology contains a wealth of inspired research on synaesthesia and cross-modality. Clare was my link to this world, uncovering truths and explaining dense academic ideas. She introduced me to key articles that became my foundation in thinking about how the senses interrelate to deepen the experience of the primary sensory modality. ‘In fact, she became more than just a “translator” of psychological ideas, to become an artistic collaborator. Unlike the stereotype of an academic, Clare is free, creative and instinctive within psychology. OK, so the studies may prove high-pitched notes should be paired with bitter tastes e.g. lemon. But to truly create a sensory experience which moves with the music, enhances the ideas rather than reduces the concept of the music to its fundamental elements, we have to look at how the music makes us feel in the moment, beyond its pitch – what is the music saying and how is it saying it? This then becomes the prompt for a decision on the sensory experience to accompany that particular moment of the music. Each and every moment of the music is taken unto itself and on its own terms. Luckily, Clare is all about creative leaps and instincts. She is a creative artist within a psychological world.’ I For more information, including upcoming concerts and a Kickstarter campaign, see www.bittersuite.org.uk
www.thepsychologist.org.uk
INTERVIEW
‘We have to bust up the orthodoxy’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Jonathan Haidt at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association
have just come from the conference Ia Black and not ten minutes ago there was Lives Matter march going through, everybody chanting ‘This is what psychology looks like’. What does psychology look like to you? Mostly a profession of people trying to help others, and then a smaller group of people doing research, and these people are mostly on the left, as with teachers and other caregiver types, and as with other academics. Psychology is one of the most anti-racist professions or places that you can go. And this is one of my concerns about the protests; we have spent so long admiring protesters and saying that protesters are good, racism is pervasive, go protest, go change things. While I think Black Lives Matter certainly has valid points about the criminal justice system, I think it’s unfortunate that the protesters have often been acting in the most anti-racist places there are, namely universities and psychology. Preaching to the converted? They’re turning on the converted, I’d say. They’re not preaching: they’re attacking, they’re demanding, they’re criticising. They are the height of the hypermoralism that I was talking about in my keynote last night. In that, you said that it’s better to try and change things through love. Was that partly aimed at the critics of the APA, over the Hoffman Report on psychologists’ involvement in ‘enhanced interrogation’? It’s aimed at all the self-righteous people who are angry and often using tactics of intimidation. The big split that I think is fairly new, is the gigantic divide between the liberal left and the illiberal left. In America we screwed up the word ‘liberal’: we got it wrong. You Brits and Europeans still use it correctly, to mean you believe in freedom, free markets, freedom of speech, and so liberal parties in Europe are those that generally favour free markets. That’s as it should be. The Economist is a liberal magazine, I love reading The Economist. In America, about
848
a hundred years ago, we began using ‘liberal’ to simply mean the left. But the left can be liberal, or the left can be illiberal. The left, as it was in the Sixties, there were some illiberal tendencies, but they believed in free speech, they fought for free speech. And now those Baby Boomers, those progressive left-leaning Baby Boomers who basically run the Academy, they’re amazed, they don’t know what to say when their students demand protection from speech, safe spaces, fire anyone who says something we disagree with. So we’ve seen an incredible rise of illiberalism on the left, in the Academy, we’ve seen an incredible rise of illiberalism on the right with Donald Trump, anti-semitism, racism. And this is when you refer to Karen Stenner’s ideas of ‘authoritarian conservatism’ as something different from ‘laissez-faire’ or ‘status quo’ authoritarianism. Exactly. Stenner is a great guide to the right, which is popping up in very similar form in Europe and in America. These right-wing nationalist parties attract true racist neo-Nazis. So I saw this all over Europe. I was in Scandinavia and in Sweden, there’s the Swedish Democrats, who seem to be trying to distance themselves from people who focus on race, like being white, but their heritage is linked back to being neo-Nazis. So, in your own research, you’ve found that Trump supporters are characterised by this profile of racial and social intolerance? With Emily Ekins we did research in which we gave the Moral Foundations Questionnaire along with a lot of other questions about politics, to a representative sample of voters, in November of last year, as the primaries were really heating up. People who said that Donald Trump was their first choice, we could predict that by looking at their Moral Foundations Questionnaire – they were low on care and compassion, they were high on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, that’s the blood-and-soil, rally-the
tribe-around-defending-the-homeland… if you read Hitler and Mussolini, it’s all about loyalty/authority/sanctity. And yet one of your main points is that we need more of these people in psychology? No, no, no. My main point is that any field that has only one type is guaranteed to get it wrong. We used to have mostly progressives and then a few conservatives here and there. So at least there were people who would stand up and object if something stupid was said. But over the past 15 to 20 years, we’ve lost everybody who’s not on the left, so now you can say something foolish or demonstrably wrong, but if it’s politically pleasing, people will just accept it. Can you give me an example? The wage gap. Hillary Clinton keeps saying ‘and you know women get paid 78 cents to the dollar for the same work’. That’s complete garbage. It’s true that if you look at all women employed fulltime, they make 78 cents to the dollar compared to all men employed full time. But as soon as you equate for doing the same work, most of the gap disappears. And then you have to look at how many hours a week they work. Men work more hours per week. Men choose more dangerous jobs. As long as women are choosing to major in art history, English and gender studies, and men are majoring in engineering and computer science, yeah, men are going to make more. Is that sexism? So it’s about equality of opportunity rather that complete equality in everything. The big foolish thing that social scientists now do, because of the political homogeneity, is take any gap, any difference, and say, ‘well, obviously it’s sexism/racism’. It’s so surprising because as scientists, if you point at two things and say, ‘they’re correlated, a caused b’, we all instantly say, ‘no, you can’t say that’, correlation does not imply causation, we all know that. But as soon as it’s ‘men earn more than women’: gasp, ‘sexism’. So what I’m trying to say is not that we need more authoritarians – we don’t – but we’ve got to bust up the complete political orthodoxy of the left in psychology, sociology, anthropology. Political sciences is not so bad, economics has diversity. English, history, philosophy, we have to bust up the orthodoxy, the homogeneity. And that’s why I started an organisation called Heterodox Academy. It’s not necessarily about encouraging
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
interview
in my time as editor I’ve been accused of being everything from a ‘warmongering neo-Con’ to ‘bleedingheart liberal’ depending on the content of any particular month. And I don’t know if that’s just the make-up of the profession. I’ve had people who admit to being at the conservative end of the spectrum phone me up and say they’re going to cancel their Society membership because of what’s going
So people aren’t allowed to come and talk in certain academic circles because… …they represent points that are ‘hateful’. And there’s a very serious problem with what’s called ‘concept creep’. I wrote an essay with Nick Haslam, an Australian psychologist, on that. Terms that are useful to the left in prosecuting their war against the right, they creep down and down, so that it’s ever easier to convict the right. For example, violence used to mean actually hurting someone’s body, you had to actually hit someone. Now, simply, like what I just did, questioning the wage gap: well, what if that makes women feel uncomfortable? I’ve ‘committed violence’ against them. Once you can charge professors and students with violence for simply saying something, now you can prosecute them all. So we live in hyper-polarised times. The Academy, as it’s gotten further and further left, have behaved more and more outrageously, and so what few conservatives are left, what few conservatives are reading your magazine, are more and more on edge, more and more angry, and they might overreact, often to things that are innocuous.
Morality is fundamental to that. In your talk last night, I was really impressed by your showing that actually, a person’s moral compass had more impact over their voting Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and decisions in something as major Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York as Brexit than their income level University's Stern School of Business would do. It’s not ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, it’s morality. Exactly. The ironic thing here is that it’s a long-standing error of the left to in the publication, and when you say, interpret everything in economic terms. ‘If you have a different perspective, Of course economics matters. But the left let’s hear it, I’m very happy to publish seems to see everything in a reductionist, it’, it all goes very quiet. Why is that? Marxist, economic framework. The right, Do you think that conservatives are the status-quo conservatives, better feeling like a minority and therefore understand that people have a need to not wanting to come forward? There are very few conservative live in a cohesive moral community. psychologists. Things have gotten really Issues of country, issues of loyalty, purified in the last ten or fifteen years in patriotism, family: these are not economic America. Generally, trends in America are issues primarily. If we had more found in Britain too, your particular conservative social scientists, we’d see political landscape is different, your this. This is the mistake the Democrats conservatives are much more reasonable, in America have made for all my adult centre-right, not the Christian-right of life. Al Gore, John Kerry and now Hillary America, but the trends tend to be similar. Clinton, they’re all trying to explain the I’ve heard from British students that the dissatisfaction in the country by saying, same shift to the purification of the ‘We’ll give you a tax break! We’ll get this Academy is happening in Britain, you’re benefit for you!’ They miss the centre of getting so many of the safe-space the problem. movements, you guys have ‘noThinking about The Psychologist itself, platforming’…
You’ve compared the feeling they have these days, in that position, to coming out in the 1980s or 90s in terms of sexuality. That’s right. If you are a group and you represent 20 per cent of the population, you’re not in the closet, you don’t have to hide. But as your numbers shrink and shrink and shrink, and as the hatred against you rises and rises and rises, I think when you’re down below 10 per cent, certainly by 5 per cent – if you have a room with 10 people, probably none of them there feel free to speak. Psychologists are all immersed in a world not just where the majority hate Trump and conservatives, but where everybody takes it for granted that everybody they’re talking to shares that view. Now we’re in an intense moral matrix, it’s like a giant electromagnet that polarises our thinking, prevents us from thinking clearly, prevents us from thinking new thoughts, and basically renders our thinking useless on anything that’s politically charged.
more of a certain kind of political leaning into a discipline, it’s about all of us. We don’t need everybody, but we must not all be the same. And I can go further – the smartest people out there are libertarians. There’s a lot of arguments, a lot of data about ‘Are liberals smarter than conservatives? Do we dominate the Academy because we’re smarter?’. And in terms of IQ tests and other things, people who are socially progressive are a little bit higher than people who are socially conservative. That’s true. But if you want to go down that road, the people with the highest IQ are people who are, quote, ‘conservative on economic issues’, which means, actually, classical liberals. Libertarians have the highest IQs of all. They’re very analytic, they’re very high-IQ people. So how can you say, ‘Oh, well, we’re so smart, but we don’t have many libertarians’. Libertarians, or laissez-faire conservatives, as Stenner calls them, or the status-quo conservatives, those are very valuable, insightful perspectives. We do need them in the social sciences.
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
You’ve highlighted how technological advances such as the introduction of cable TV have made that even more polarised, in that we can select viewing purely in line with our own political views. In recent years, that must have ramped up – I think of something like
849
interview
DAVID SHANKBONE HTTP://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/3.0, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Twitter as a liberal echo chamber. There’s a lot of conservative Twitter, and right wing and racist and neo-Nazi Twitter. But the two won’t interact, so we’re developing countries where half the country has no idea what the other half is thinking. So many academics don’t know anyone who is planning to vote for Trump. Not only have you got those social networks where it’s natural that people are always going to affiliate with people like each other, but you’ve got algorithms increasing online directing you towards your own particular group, so it becomes more and more polarised. Exactly. We are tribal creatures by nature, and that’s why we love sports, and that’s why kids form gangs, and fraternities. The genius of liberal institutions – and thank you very much Britain – is that in the West, and particularly in Britain and Holland, arose institutions that allowed people to live together and function together with people who weren’t exactly like them. This was the origin of religious tolerance, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and we developed ways of counteracting our tribal tendencies, and boy did everything take off. It’s been a great couple hundred years. I mean, sure, there were world wars, but we’ve made enormous progress and now we’re sharing that progress with the world. Asia is adopting many Western innovations and is thriving. That’s all been great. But now what’s happened, we have this new technology that hyper-activates the tribalism. The metaphor I like to think of about this is – imagine we went back to 50,000 years ago, when human tribes were leaving Africa, colonising the world. It was very bloody, they would fight each other, there’s been tremendous warfare between tribes for a long time. There’s been all these human groups, going around, living with spears for 500,000 years, they’re used to spears. But now suppose aliens came to Earth around then, with all this tribal stuff going on, and then they air-lifted millions of loaded handguns, and they drop handguns all over the world. And some tribes found a basket of handguns. ‘Wow, what’s this? I can just kill you – wow!’ What would life be like in those first years? That was what was behind colonialism, wasn’t it – guns drove colonialism. Okay, sure. That’s right. But the metaphor I want to work with here is this – spears
850
‘…suddenly the whole world was arguing about capitalism, inequality, politics’
played a very important role in human social evolution, but if you get used to one technology, and you learn to live in a way where you’re not killing each other all the time, and then you’re given a brand new technology in which you can kill people relatively easily, there’ll be a lot of killing. And that’s where we are with social media. We had started with cable TV, which perhaps we were adapting to, perhaps not, and then we got something vastly more powerful, which was the internet. And that’s where I think we are. Especially for young people. Young people now have grown up since they were 13 on Facebook, they’re really afraid to stand out and contradict the prevailing sentiment. They’re already established on social media. I wonder if they actually adapt to it a lot better, because they have grown up with it, maybe they’re more adapted to handle it better than we do. I don’t think so. They’re anxious, they are focused on what will happen to them on social media. If you tell me that British young people are now so accustomed to it that they’re pretty fearless about speaking up and saying what’s on their mind, because they know that if they’re condemned on social media, it’s no big deal… if you tell me that, I’ll agree with you. I can’t tell you that. So what’s your next book about? Is it on this kind of topic? No, not really, my next book is called
Three Stories about Capitalism: the Moral Psychology of Economic Life. It picks up where The Righteous Mind left off. Just as I was finishing The Righteous Mind, that’s when Occupy Wall Street broke out. I had just moved to the Stern School of Business, in New York City, I had no interest in business, I didn’t intend to stay at Stern, it was just a one-year visiting position, but suddenly the whole world was arguing about capitalism, inequality, politics, and it got really interesting. We were still going through the global financial crisis. And in Europe, it was amazing, economists on the right were all convinced that austerity was necessary. And economists on the left were all convinced that austerity was the worst thing in the world. And to this day, we don’t know who was right, because it’s so politicised. And I started realising – wow, economic thinking is so crucial to get right. If you do bad economic thinking, like in Venezuela, you’re condemning your people to misery, disaster and ultimately starvation. It’s so important to get economic thinking right, and we can’t do it because we’re political moral creatures. Plus, it’s a good way for you to get a Nobel Prize, isn’t it? You can’t be a psychologist, you have to swap to being a behavioural economist. But seriously on that point, one of the things that’s most impressive about you is that you pull in things from all kinds of different disciplines, from history, to the arts, to
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
interview
politics, economics. I enjoy making connections. All of our brains are pattern matchers, that’s what neural networks are. Some people proceed more by pattern matching, some by logic and deduction. I’ve always been more of a pattern matcher. Academia is not set up to reward pattern matchers. I think the drive to specialise in early career really does make us lose a lot of creative researchers. I think that’s right, but it does depend on the discipline. That’s probably true in economics or mathematics and the sciences, I suppose. I think social psychology is open enough. We like new ideas, we like bold new counterintuitive theories. So despite my concerns that social psychology lacks diversity, I must say in praise of my colleagues that since I’ve been raising the alarm about this, nothing bad has happened to me. Social psych is not so far left that they’ve treated me as a traitor. I talk about diversity, I explain why viewpoint diversity matters, and they mostly say, ‘Huh. That makes sense. Okay, yeah. You’re right. Now what are we going to do about it?’ And you’ve got answers for that. The first thing we have to do is to get our hearts in order, which means we need to really accept the wisdom of the Ancients, that we are moralistic hypocrites, that we are over-judgemental, we are so good at seeing the speck in our neighbour’s eye and can’t see the plank in our own. If we can accept those ancient truths as individuals, then I think we can work on our field and our organisation, and try to welcome viewpoint diversity. Not necessarily authoritarians, but at least I try to make the case that we need – really need – more status-quo conservatives and laissez-faire conservatives, and even moderates. We do have moderates but they’re afraid to speak up. Albert Bandura yesterday was talking about the dehumanising language that Trump uses and how it’s working for him because that’s how the media works. He says, who wants to listen to moderates? Moderates are boring to listen to. Sure, in the news. But the news is driven by outrage. The Academy, or at least the sciences or social sciences, is driven by institutionalised disconfirmation. And so, if somebody says, ‘Oh, women are underrepresented in the sciences, clearly it’s discrimination’, anyone on the left, this includes centrists, will say, ‘Wait, maybe there’s different levels of interest’.
As long as someone can raise that hypothesis, which is amazingly true, the evidence is overwhelming – girls and boys have very different play preferences, very different levels of interest in human versus abstract drive – so as long as somebody is there to question, then the science can work. This is what I mean by viewpoint diversity. It doesn’t have to be people on the far-right. It just has to be people willing to question the left. At an organisational level, with the APA and the BPS, are we at the stage where we need positive discrimination to ensure that happens? Given that these institutions are driven by a democratic process, if an authoritarian conservative candidate puts themselves forward for President of the BPS or the APA, they’re not likely to get voted in. No, they’re not. But there are ideas popular on the left, like we have to do this bean counting, that we have to use forceful methods to assure that we have one of this and three of that and seven of that, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying we need affirmative action, where we have to end up with proportional representation. I’m saying we need systemic safeguards to ensure that we never have orthodoxy. And that’s something we can all do. Yes, that’s right. So if you’re editing a journal and you have a whole set of reviewers, make darn sure that you have a few that are right of centre. When you get a paper about anything on race and gender, if it shows that there’s discrimination et cetera, many reviewers will wave it in. I mean, I’m exaggerating. But they’ll be less critical. Make sure you have at least one conservative, or even a moderate, somebody who has not drunk the KoolAid. The crucial thing for every science is institutionalised disconfirmation. That’s something we can build in. That’s not discrimination, it’s not affirmative action, that’s making sure systems work. Do you take this kind of thing into your personal life? My wife says I’m always thinking and talking about it. But I’ve always been that way. My obsession with viewpoint diversity has gotten much stronger in the last year because of the craziness on American campuses. The mood on campus is really frightening. Students are afraid of speaking up because they’re afraid of a small group of illiberal students and now professors are afraid of speaking up. So the situation on American campuses is now really dire.
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
There I go again – here I am off on a rant! So yes, I do think about it all the time. Do you think whichever way the US election goes, all the problems that you’re talking about in terms of psychology as a discipline are likely to be exacerbated? Well if Trump were to win, everybody on the left, and many on the centre, and some on the right, would be in open revolt, and it would seem virtuous to subvert him, and the government, and I wouldn’t say they’re wrong. Trump is an authoritarian, he would be a terrifying president, so if Trump were to win, polarisation would go through the roof. Do you think he will win? I don't think so. He may not be Machiavellian enough to win. He’s such a narcissist that he keeps saying and doing things that alienate ever more voters. He doesn’t seem to be thinking strategically, at least after winning the primary. So unless Clinton really messes it up, I expect her to win. I read a very interesting comment on the news this morning, I think it was a Colorado senator, and he said that he wanted to meet him to see what he was really like in person, to see if it was just a schtick. What he found is that he is who he appears to be. He’s an intense narcissist with possible hypomania, according to a few clinical psychologists I have spoken to. He is who he is. All he had to do to win was say a few things, like, ‘If you’re Mexican, you came here legally, you’re a citizen, more power to you, that’s the American Dream, I want to be your president. I don’t believe in illegal immigration, but look, we’re a nation of immigrants’. That’s all he had to say. A few things like that. And he would have won. I think he will win. I’ve got money on it. I’ve got money on him losing. Finally, if you had to choose a headline for this piece that would include a pun based on your name, what would it be? Given that my name is pronounced ‘height’ not ‘hate’… That completely changes it. I’ve got about a dozen options I need to throw away now. Please don’t talk about ‘Haidt speech’. I was on the Colbert show and that was his opening thing. They had it on the screen below, that was about ‘Haidt speech’, and I told him my name was pronounced ‘height’ and he went, ‘Oh. Oh no!’
851
REVIEWS
Disappearance and nothingness imagining being one of two or three young men in bunkbeds Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison is a participatory, living in that cell as recently as 2013 when Reading closed, one multi-modal art experience inside HM Prison Reading, centred visitor commented ‘You’d go mad’. on the theme of imprisonment. Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis, Throughout the exhibition I was struck by themes of a letter to his male lover, whilst imprisoned at Reading and it is disappearance, anonymity and nothingness. The work of Robert this that provides a focus of the exhibition. Gober suggested an experience of imprisonment as having hit The visitor is reminded that when HMP Reading opened in rock bottom, of not being visible to other people, a sense that 1844 sexual acts between men were illegal, and some of the art inside there was a part of the self still living but also dying. explores rights and sexuality. A sexually explicit work by Nan Perhaps these are experiences that Goldin engages with the notion of we as psychologists should attend to sexuality and beauty as power in explicitly with our clients. relationships, making parallels with A series of letters of separation Wilde’s relationship with his lover. from loved ones, inspired by real or In addition to changes over time in imagined confinement and authored conceptualisations of criminal by contemporary writers, were behaviour, the exhibition also draws scattered on rigid plastic and metal attention to the influence of politics dining benches screwed in to the on imprisonment, as reflected in floors of cells. Letters were framed work by Rita Donagh and Richard by etchings and daubings of graffiti, Hamilton and themed around the evidence of the life of occupants of Troubles of Northern Ireland. each cell over the years. Joe An installation by Steve Dunthorne’s letter, written using just McQueen seemed to me to be a nod one vowel, evokes a sense of the to the popular references to the determination of the writer to achieve ‘luxury’ of prison life; over a whitea goal within the constraints of painted metal bunkbed was draped available resources. Extrapolating this a gold-plated mosquito net, experience to people who are confined reminiscent of photos of luxury offers an appreciation of the depths to holiday resorts in which mosquito which someone must reach to embark nets are placed artistically over on a committed process of recovery or wooden four-poster beds. Listening rehabilitation, to produce something to the conversations of other wonderful against the odds. In visitors, any previous views of articulating a sense of empathy for the ‘prison as luxury’ had been intended recipient of the letter, a loved abandoned. People were interested one who experiences distress as a in what prison was like and seemed consequence of his imprisonment, the to be on their best behaviour, role of fantasy in escaping the reality probably intimidated by the severity of imprisonment is explicit. . of the physical environment and For me, one of the most interesting wanting to avoid any possibility of Inside: Artists and Writers in parts of the exhibition was a photo ending up there themselves. Reading Prison gallery of some of the people who left The exhibition offered a space HMP Reading Reading Prison during Victorian times where people could talk and share who were ‘most likely to commit experiences about the physical further crimes’. This was strongly and psychological effects of reminiscent of Lombroso’s theory of imprisonment. For example, atavism and criminality and was a I heard a group ask one of their clear exposition of Victorian theory party whether the beds (the regular, in action, but also progress made since then in psychological narrow single metal beds, not the Steve McQueen bed) were the thinking about crime, behaviour and risk. same when they were in prison. In another conversation, a sense I expect that the opportunity to visit a prison (which is of incredulity was expressed about the mid-19th century regime conceptualised as art in this exhibition) was as much of a draw of almost complete separation of inmates so that they did not to some people as the art or Oscar Wilde was to others. The learn criminal behaviours or adopt antisocial ideas from others. exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore aspects of This conversation reflected the broader narrative of the design of human experience and psychological strength as they interact Reading Prison (and, no doubt, others in the Victorian era) that with the environment. overcrowding was a hotbed for learning criminal behaviour. Therefore, prison dormitories were designed out and single occupancy cells were introduced. A visitor could begin to imagine I Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison is showing until 30 the psychological distress experienced by prisoners whose only October (www.artangel.org.uk/project/inside) (and very limited) contact was with staff. This typical experience Reviewed by Emily Glorney who is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic of Victorian imprisonment in Reading was visibly contrasted with Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a member those more recent. Standing in a single-occupancy cell and of the BPS Division of Forensic Psychology Committee
870
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
reviews
Thinking of children Cognitive Development in Museum Settings: Relating Research and Practice David M. Sobel & Jennifer L. Jipson (Eds.) Academic research so often informs other researchers and practitioners within a field, but when there is a crossover between disciplines, real-life discoveries and progress can be made. Psychology professors Sobel and Jipson have made an extensive study of research projects within museum settings, showing more often than not that it is the contrasting partnerships that are the most fruitful. This book summarises diverse projects in several museums, mainly in North America, pairing child development researchers within exhibition departments designed for families and children. Although models vary considerably throughout institutions, Sobel and Jipson typically found through interview that researchers and museum professionals gained insight from each other, and developed practice and results that could
not have existed otherwise. The key is genuine and respectful relationships. For example, some researchers were surprised that interactive exhibits were set up almost by intuition as to what would appeal to youngsters, without reference to best practice gleaned from research findings. Through discussion and sharing of expertise, collaborating practitioners found ways to apply more effective methodologies to their approach and displays. Other benefits to practitioners included paring analysis and findings to their own anecdotal and local experiences, thus deepening understanding of children’s behaviour within museums. Researchers found being able to observe behaviour in a more natural family setting away from laboratory conditions gave them both quality and quantity of data. The steady stream of visitors provided high
numbers of subjects, and they could trial situations and experimental conditions rapidly,
educationalists do not. Collaboration proved particularly fruitful in the area of communication, with museum professionals adept at translating text and ideas in creative ways to engage audiences both in exhibits and in research projects. This readable book is valuable to psychologists, teachers and those interested in the cognitive development of children and how it can be researched. It’s a thorough examination of different possibilities and models of collaborations between any diverse fields, sharing research and practice, and gaining from the perspective and paradigm shifts that offers.
basically having the freedom to try things out spontaneously. In any field of practice there are assumptions and omissions. Practitioners working directly with children have expertise that
I Routledge; 2016; Pb £34.99 Reviewed by Eleanor MacFarlane who is an artist, writer and MSc psychology conversion student at the University of Hertfordshire
A science for the human condition Wiley Handbook of Contextual Behavioral Science Robert D. Zettle, Steven C. Hayes, Dermot Barnes-Holmes & Anthony Biglan (Eds.) Early on in this book you are asked – reflexive of the approach – to ‘doubt everything and hold it lightly – even doubt itself’. No place for unquestioning acolytes here! Across 554 pages the 30plus years development, research and application of contextual behavioural science (CBS) is set out with its stated goal of the prediction and influence of behaviour with precision, scope and depth. CBS’s initial development came from the application of behaviour analysis to the complexities found in clinical psychology, specifically understanding verbal behaviour. This led to the development of a contextualist account of language, relational frame theory (RFT), that established new forms of behavioural regulation not accounted for by other approaches (e.g. classically conditioned stimuli could be
altered by these relational frames). These developments were so distinct – and not readily accepted by other wings of behavioural psychology – that CBS was established as a separate approach within the field. Clinical applications are covered, with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) being the most well known. Alongside the research supporting effectiveness the differences in the underpinning principles emphasised the fundamental differences to the cognitive therapies to which ACT will be compared. The scope of thinking is impressive with a section of the book devoted to applying
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
contextual approaches to areas including economics, organisations, and public health. So this is not a light, breezy book, but rather one that reflects the scientific rigour of its authors as it brings a large body of research together. I valued the clarity of the philosophical position, coherence of argument and accompanying research. I came away with a clear understanding of what the position was. My reservations revolve around the realms of complexity and chaos that the natural sciences are starting to address, and maybe a concern that if doubt is lost these areas could be neglected. So, while holding that other worldviews and understanding exist, this handbook offers a thorough grounding in CBS as a way of progressing the science of human behaviour and a fine example of applied science. I Wiley; 2016; Hb £120.00 Reviewed by Matthew Selman who is with Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust
871
reviews
Valuable tool for the advanced statistician Applied Multivariate Statistics for the Social Sciences (6th ed) Keenan A. Pituch & James P. Stevens This is definitely not a book for beginners, more suited to those at postgraduate level or beyond. As stated by the authors, readers should have some experience in statistics to fully appreciate the content. An unusual touch for a statistics guide is the focus on two different software packages, SPSS and SAS, removing the need for separate books for many researchers and students. This edition contains many updates from previous versions, along with extensively revised and new chapters, including multivariate multilevel modelling and structural equation modelling. Applied Multivariate Statistics for the Social Sciences has a free companion website, where data used in the examples found throughout the chapters can be found, along with SPSS and SAS syntax. Unlike with many popular applied statistics guides and manuals, Pituch and Stevens have included exercises for the reader, with detailed answers on the website. These are all excellent additions, making the book a valuable interactive learning tool and reference guide. Each chapter covers a different statistical concept or method, following a logical and easy-to-follow layout with plenty of examples. The reader is provided with the procedures and syntax for each covered task in both SPSS and SAS, along with examples of outputs. There are no alternative step-by-step instructions provided to run tests without syntax. This would be beneficial in some cases where syntax is not always necessary and may overcomplicate things for some readers, for instance running a three group MANOVA or factorial ANOVA. That being said, this book is aimed at the more advanced statistician who will be required to use and understand syntax for many of the more complex methodologies discussed. Pituch and Stevens provide resources for complex statistical analyses which in many cases cannot be found without using a specific specialist text for a particular type of method. Each chapter contains concise summary lists and analysis summaries, giving the reader easy to access information and overviews. This results in a highly detailed but easy-to-navigate book. I Routledge; 2016; Pb £62.99 Reviewed by Stacey A. Bedwell who is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Nottingham Trent University
872
Shining a light on mental illness and its treatment Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond Wellcome Collection The Wellcome is hosting a major exhibition on mental health, using the famous Bethlem Royal Hospital as its inspiration and starting point. Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond examines how historic perceptions of madness, distress and mental illness, and the treatment of these, have shaped our contemporary notions of mental health. I visited the exhibition with Dr Helen Fisher, Senior Lecturer and MQ Fellow at King’s College London. It challenges from the moment you enter the first room, where there is a large-scale installation, Asylum (see above), by artist Eva Kot’átková. Restraint, protection, and the tension between these, loom large. Actors’ heads and limbs poke up through a large central table to stare unblinkingly at miniature walls, or loll listlessly, amongst a gagged monkey, billowing white heavy cloth, a tiny bed with restraints, découpage, string. For me there was something intangible in this room that provoked in me a sense of not being finished, or complete, and I found the room eerie, even anxiety-provoking, but quite, quite brilliant. Moving through into the main body of the exhibition, more artists’ works mingle with artefacts to shine a light on the two themes of mental illness and its treatment. Madness is defined by law not medicine in the Vagrancy Acts of 1714 and 1744, and the transition to a more therapeutic approach is documented through references to art, and to buildings used to house those deemed to need it. Dr Fisher pointed out to me an iconic image of Pinel freeing inmates from
their chains at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, with the wry legend '….in reality the process of reform was more gradual'. I bet it was. There was however an early encouraging sign of what we now refer to as Patient and Public Involvement, in the shape of architectural plans drawn up by the patient James Tilly Matthews in 1810–1811, for a therapeutic building and community for the treatment of mental health. Passing through the decades, Dr Fisher and I were struck by how little some things change. Consider the observation from a parliamentary investigation led by the Quaker philanthropist Edward Wakefield in the late 18th century against today’s context of funding for mental health treatment: 'a hospital regime that was underfunded and understaffed'. Thankfully there has been huge improvement on his further conclusion, that things 'had sunk into cruelty and neglect'. Into the 1900s, and the architecture of the exhibition changes to reflect the way architecture changed to reflect notions of treatment in the 20th century. Everything has cleaner lines, is sharper, is whiter, although if you look up above you will see angled metal spikes reminiscent of those on top of prison walls. Here were two of the most paradoxically beautiful of all the exhibits in my mind, Jane Fradgeley’s Within and Cocoon. These are photographs of clothing worn by inmates: heavy, restraining, prison-like, but also somehow comforting and implying protection, with an overall ghostliness and sense of lives gone by.
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
reviews
In 1930 the Mental Treatment Act replaced asylums with 'mental hospitals', and Bethlem Royal Hospital itself moved to Monks Orchard, where it was housed not in a giant building, but in a villa system. This seems progressive, until we’re shown an alternative model of the family care system in Geel in the 1930s [see The Psychologist September 2015], where families welcomed those with mental illness into their homes and provided care and sanctuary. We see how art begins to be used as therapy. However, we are also reminded of electric shock treatment, and the starkness of the wards. Those restraints that were so affecting in Kot’átková’s installation might have a slightly different shape, or be made from different materials, but they are still there. The anti-psychiatry movement also makes an appearance too, reminding us that controversy has always surrounded ideas of mental health and its treatment. The exhibition ends with two artworks. Erica Scourti’s Empathy Deck contains a card tower, where each card depicts an empathetic message. The project is more than what you see though, and visitors are encouraged to follow @empathydeck on Twitter, and receive a daily personalised message. I signed up and receive my daily message. It hasn’t changed my life, but it has made me smile occasionally. Finally there is Madlove: A Designer Asylum, a utopian design for a mental health hospital, created by a consortium of artists and designers, alongside hundreds of patients and service users. It evokes those early drawings by James Tilly Matthews and reinforces the message that those best placed to design treatment environments might just be the people who use them. Madlove represents a truly creative partnership and echoes the spirit of this exhibition, for which a group of organisations came together. It feels like a collaboration shaped the essence of Bedlam, and if at times the exhibition can be somewhat bitty, that’s a small price to pay. The Maudsley Charity provided support, working in partnership with the curators at Wellcome (Mike Jay and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz); the Adamson Collection; and Bethlem Museum of the Mind (short-listed for Museum of the Year 2016 and reviewed previously in The Psychologist). This partnership has given rise to a programme of accompanying events over the next three months, all on the themes of mental health and its treatment. I Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond is at the Wellcome Collection until 15 January 2017. Reviewed by Dr Sally Marlow who is Public Engagement Fellow, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London
To do or not to do Motivation and Cognitive Control Todd S. Braver (Ed.) Whether an organism acts or not in a particular situation entails a complex interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In Motivation and Cognition, the authors look at the neuropsychology of the affective factors that drive behaviour. The book, edited by Todd S. Braver, is delineated into three parts. The first examines the relationship between rewards and cognitive processes. The papers aim to understand how rewards shape our attentional and visual processing capabilities. While we are aware that rewards serve as extrinsic reinforcers for volitional behaviour, they can also bias attention at a more automatic and possibly subliminal level.
The second section deals with the affective factors that underpin selfregulation. The relationship between rewards and positive affect and conflicts and negative affect are examined. The third part takes a developmental perspective on cognitive motivation and includes a discussion on the neuropsychology of the teenage brain. It relates mechanisms of brain maturation to concomitant changes in an individual’s ability to self-regulate behaviour. The book serves as a compendium of studies that examine the interplay between cognitive and motivational factors. While the book includes
interdisciplinary studies, it has a strong neuroscience slant and does not cover sociocultural aspects that also play an important role in people’s motivational stances. It is a great resource for scholars who are studying the neuropsychology of motivation. However, by not including the social and cultural forces that shape motivation and cognition, the book is not as comprehensive in scope as it could be. I Routledge; 2016; Pb £39.99 Reviewed by Aruna Sankaranarayanan who is Director, PRAYATNA, a centre for children with learning difficulties in India
More colour on my canvas of understanding Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self Allan N. Schore Having myself worked with and approached issues of emotional crisis with clients in the acute care pathway of the National Health Service, I found Dr Schore’s writing on the neurobiological basis of affect regulation illuminating. Schore effortlessly weaves together the threads of neurobiology, psychoanalysis and socio-environmental factors contributing to the fabric that is affect regulation. From short, sharp background and overview chapters to ideas of integration of neurobiological aspects with that of psychology, separating ideas according to the relevant development stages from early infancy to late infancy, Schore is adept at fleshing out how neurobiology and psychoanalysis together can lead to a better understanding of how clinical presentations develop. This provides an illuminating background on which interventions can be set. The introduction and thoroughness in explanation, such as on the idea of early imprinting influencing maturation of the neurobiological system and the role of maternal stimulation of the neuro-mechanisms that ultimately forms the blueprint of affect regulation, set the necessary scene that is at once an apt reflection of the sheer complexity of our brains. I was particularly struck by the chapters concerning morality, shame and the developmental psychopathology of personality disorders as these concepts were discussed in neurobiological terms of the limbic system, the interaction of this with attachment, and the necessity for maturation of the frontolimbic system that is experience-dependent. This was like throwing another colour of paint on my pre-existing psychological canvas of understanding, an unexpected yet welcome pot of colour, I might add. Refreshingly, this book does not read like a dichotomous debate on the nature–nurture scenario. It moves beyond that through descriptive and enriching text. The transactions between our neuro-networks, our behaviours, our past, and our parental backgrounds which are ongoing throughout life become apparent throughout and effortlessly bring together both concepts of psychoanalysis and neurobiology in a timely way. I would highly recommend this book, which to me has provided a useful language to think with when trying to understand the current emotional world of the client. I Routledge; 2016; Pb £54.99. Reviewed by Candy Wong, Senior Mental Health Practitioner, Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, and Counselling Psychologist in Training, UEL
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
873
reviews
A fresh approach to adolescence The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms Mary T. Brady Adolescents often feel very alone, with everything crumbling about them while at the same time they feel unable to describe their pain. The lack of containment often results in dissociated psychic states. In desperation they turn to and against their bodies to express unbearable emotions. Parents can seem forlorn, incapacitated or uninterested in what lies behind physically extreme statements like cutting and starving; clinicians can feel challenged when presented with their patient’s fresh cut or
recent episode of binge drinking. The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms by the psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Mary T. Brady examines the affective experiences of psychic isolation as an important and painful element of adolescent development. Brady has published widely on adolescence and bodily symptoms. In this book she uses Bion’s conceptualisation of containment and the balance of psychotic versus integrative parts of the personality to
examine the emergence of concrete bodily symptoms in adolescence. She raises important therapeutic questions about the holding environment, safety, parental neglectfulness and the use of supportive treatments. Anyone working with adolescents will find her discussion of the topics raised in this book to be of value. Throughout, Brady offers ways of understanding and empathically engaging with
adolescents. Her years of experience in treating adolescents guides us into understanding our adolescent patient’s anguish. In writing this book she has made a wonderful contribution to the psychoanalytic literature of treating adolescents; it has given us much to contemplate. I Routledge; 2016; Pb £27.99 Reviewed by Dr Giovanni Timmermans who is a clinical psychologist working in healthcare in the Netherlands
A reminder of risk and reward Deepwater Horizon Peter Berg (Director) Deepwater Horizon is based on the events of the catastrophic blowout that occurred on the drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The resulting explosions and fire killed 11 men, injured many others and caused major environmental damage. The film version, directed by Peter Berg, is a powerful and absorbing portrayal of the crew in the hours leading up to the accident, crediting a New York Times article as its source material. In disaster movies based on real-life events, you know from the start that this is not going to end entirely well. But the dramatic potential is maximised by the underlying tensions in the story, the quality of the acting and realistic special effects. Mark Wahlberg, in the lead, plays Mike Williams, an engineer on the rig, and creates a strong, heroic character. The predictable family scene at the start (with wife, Kate Hudson) is enhanced by a memorable ‘show and tell’ by his daughter who rather chillingly illustrates the ever-present dangers beneath the ocean. Offshore drilling is highly technical and by necessity, the account has been truncated and simplified. Nevertheless, the film production manages to convey through punchy dialogue, shots of control panels and subsea structures, what the crew are doing as they run the final tests to ensure that the well is safe. Of course, it isn’t safe – the high-pressure hydrocarbons are not going to be controlled and the story tells us why this happened with vivid footage illustrating the horrors of a blowout for the crew trapped on the exploding rig. The most interesting psychological dimension of the film and a key focus of the subsequent accident enquiries, is the interaction between the BP ‘company men’ on the rig and the Transocean drill crew. In his classic ‘bad guy’ role, John Malkovitch plays BP well site
MORE REVIEWS ONLINE See www.thepsychologist.org.uk for this month’s web-only reviews, including a Horizon special on the science of laughter, and Nick Cave’s One More Time with Feeling.
874
leader Donald Vidrine, who wants to push on and get the well completed. In counterpoint, Kurt Russell, convincingly, takes the role of Jimmy Harrell, the Transocean manager in charge of the rig who is concerned that appropriate safety measures are not being maintained. There can be tensions in any workplace between operator companies and their contractors. But this is brought into sharp relief as Vidrine starts to exert pressure and tries to outsmart the drillers by his technical explanation for the anomalous test results. (In fact, the film has some small but not insignificant differences at this point from the investigation reports, where it is reckoned that it was one of the Transocean crew who introduced the new explanation. As key members of the drill crew were killed, aspects of this element of the accident remain uncertain). Decision making for an offshore well does not only take place on the rig and little attention is given the role of the onshore managers, particularly those in BP, who made decisions that influenced well safety. But the screenplay sensibly does not attempt to make this into a documentary. The film is a vivid demonstration of how pressures for profit can imbalance fragile safety mechanisms. Exploration for oil and gas is a risky business, and the final tribute to the 11 men who died is a salutary reminder of the true costs of getting that balance wrong. I Rhona Flin who is Professor of Industrial Psychology, Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University. Read her analysis of the incident in our archive at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume23/edition-8/news-digest-and-media
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
Education and training: Shape the future of psychology Your skills and experience We’re looking for members of the Society from academic and/or practitioner backgrounds with expertise in: ■ ■
Running or delivering accredited programmes; and/or Supervising or managing trainee or qualified psychologists working in a range of practice environments.
Previous experience of participation in quality assurance or governance processes is desirable, but if you have other experience that you think is relevant, please let us know.
Our approach and ethos Our approach is known as accreditation through partnership: We work collaboratively with the providers whose programmes we accredit, and we see our reviewers as key partners in that process.
Benefits of involvement Our reviewers tell us that their involvement in accreditation through partnership gives them valuable insight into different approaches to training the psychologists of the future, and offers them the opportunity to network with and learn alongside a diverse range of professional colleagues. Their involvement in our work provides opportunities to explore alternative approaches to common challenges, and to stay up-to-date with current education, training and practice in a range of areas. There is also the opportunity to get involved in project groups in relation to special areas of interest.
What sort of work is involved? Our reviewers work as part of the Society’s Undergraduate Education Committee or Postgraduate Training Committees, with responsibility for accrediting programmes and enhancing quality. We ask our reviewers to engage in both paper-based programme reviews and in one or two-day partnership visits to universities across the UK. The nature and number of reviews and visits will vary year on year, but we will work closely with you to ensure that you are able to balance any work you undertake on our behalf with your other commitments. Each Committee holds three face-to-face meetings during the year to provide an opportunity for discussion of key policy and practice issues, and to facilitate peer support and training. We reimburse travel and subsistence expenses for any meetings or visits you attend as part of this role.
How to apply If you would like to be considered for appointment as a reviewer, please contact Lauren Ison (Lauren.Ison@bps.org.uk or call 0116 252 9563) for an application form and information pack, indicating the Committee that most closely reflects your experience. We will select and appoint members on the basis of the skills and experience demonstrated in their application, and will seek wherever possible to achieve a balance of expertise across the reviewer community as a whole.
Deadline for applications – 30 November 2016
876
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
LOOKING BACK
The medieval mind Scholars are finding that medieval science – in various fields – is more sophisticated than previously thought. Corinne Saunders and Charles Fernyhough show that psychology is no exception
rom a 21st-century perspective, looking to our medieval ancestors for help in understanding the mind would seem to be a backward step. Those were the days, we think, of supernatural forces intervening in human affairs, and with views of medicine, biology and psychology that strike the modern reader as primitive and unsatisfyingly prescientific. A progressive view of human knowledge that sees it as inexorably proceeding towards greater understanding would suggest that we have little to learn from a psychology dating from the days before science. Yet ideas about the mind in the medieval period, itself a huge span of time (from the late classical period to the 15th century) that saw many shifts in thought, were much more sophisticated than that caricature would allow. Here, we set out some prominent medieval models of mind and their implications for understanding memory, imagination, emotion and the relations between mind and body. Why should we look back to medieval ideas about the mind? One reason is that the Middle Ages saw considerable
references
F
880
Bergen, B. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books. Carruthers, M. (1998). The craft of thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaucer, G. (2008). The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales. In L. Benson
engagement with questions of mind, body and affect, and the development of sophisticated thinking about psychology – at least among the educated élite, many of them clerics, who read and wrote the texts that have been passed down to us. Another reason is that medieval texts open onto a psychology that was not dominated, as many recent discourses are, by essentially Cartesian notions of mind–body dualism. Before Descartes, mind and body were seen to interlink
(Ed.) The riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Damasio, A. (2008). Descartes’ Error. London: Random House. Dudai, Y. & Carruthers, M. (2005). The Janus face of Mnemosyne. Nature, 434, 567. Earp, B.D., Wudarczyk, O.A., Sandberg, A.
in ways that have a remarkably modern flavour. Understanding medieval psychology, though, is fraught with problems. Interpreting any texts or images from so long ago requires a shift of belief systems, in order to appreciate the ontology and background of assumptions with which medieval thinkers operated. Social and cultural contexts were very different. Western medieval writing assumed a Christian thought world, and writing was frequently seen as the domain of men. Psychology was most of all the realm of theologians, who were interested in questions of desire, will, intention, sin and virtue. We cannot look for a straightforward cross-section of medieval thought: much writing is by religious men, and personal testimonies and accounts of experience are inevitably filtered through assumptions concerning gender, class and religious belief – as well as genre. But hazards are also opportunities: medieval piety foregrounded affective experience, meditation and prayer, and the need to shun distractions in order to stay focused on those tasks. We can also look to imaginative fiction, which offers especially valuable insights into cultural attitudes and experience, of both men and women, and which suggests how ideas of mind, body and affect carried over into secular culture.
Sensory and emotional charge We aim to show how medieval writers approached the mind, highlighting some areas in which their ideas are particularly relevant to, and even prescient for, today’s scientific psychology. Just as modern psychology can be understood as a development of and challenge to Cartesian ideas about the separation of mind from body, so medieval writers about the mind were working from the starting point of a particular intellectual landscape. Hippocrates’ theory of the four humours, developed by Galen in the second century CE, underpinned the
& Savulescu, J. (2013). If I could just stop loving you: Anti-love biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical breakup. American Journal of Bioethics, 13(11), 3–17. Fernyhough, C. (2012). Pieces of light: The new science of memory. London: Profile Books. Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., Vann, S.D. & Maguire, E.A. (2007). Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot
imagine new experiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(5), 1726–1731. Huizinga, J. (1924). The waning of the Middle Ages. London: Edward Arnold. Kemp, S. (1990). Medieval psychology. New York: Greenwood Press. Marazziti, D., Akiskal, H.S., Rossi, A. & Cassano, G.B. (1999). Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love. Psychological Medicine,
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
looking back
notion of a mind–body continuum, for humours shaped both mind and body. The distinction between mind and body was complex and more fluid than in postCartesian thought, complicated by ideas of the soul, by different views on where in the body faculties were situated, and by the integration of thought and affect. The term ‘mind’ originated with the concept of memory, but quickly came to overlap with notions of the soul, and took on at least some aspects of current definitions of mind. Aristotle had situated the rational or intellective quality within the soul, and had located the heart as the centre of the senses and cognitive faculties; Galen by contrast associated these with the brain. Neo-Platonic theories situated the immortal and rational part of the soul in the head, and the appetites and emotions in the trunk of the body. In the fourth century, St Augustine saw the will as a faculty of the (superior) soul and associated emotions with the (lower) body, but also saw emotions as having both cognitive and bodily aspects (Kemp, 1990). Something like a recognisable scientific psychology came into focus towards the end of the 13th century, following the 12th-century rediscovery of Aristotle and the translation of many Arabic medical texts into Latin. Thinkers of this period such as Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon developed complex theories of mind. Observations of the effects of head injuries had confirmed Galen’s view that the rational aspects of the psyche were located in the brain (although popular notions persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond of the heart as the site of understanding and feeling). What we would now call cognition was understood as a two-part process, with physiological mechanisms in the brain mirrored by processes within the rational soul/mind, and with neither reducible to the other. The brain was instrumental in transforming the ‘vital spirit’ (one element of a three-part system of spirits deriving from Arabic philosophy) into the ‘animal
29(3), 741–745. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. Saunders, C. (2005). ‘The thoughtful maladie’. In Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton (Eds.) Madness and creativity in literature and culture (pp.67–87). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Skoda, H. (2013). Medieval violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
spirit’, which controlled sensation, movement, imagination, cognition and memory. The main work was done by the cerebral ventricles, which housed the ‘inner senses’, responsible for integrating data from the external senses and constructing thoughts from their component concepts or ‘forms’ (imagines or phantasmata). Perception worked by the reception of sensory impressions in the anterior part of the brain (the sensus communis or ‘common sense’) and their temporary storage in the imaginatio (an early version of working memory). Those impressions were then passed on for creative shaping in the middle part of the brain, the imaginativa (later termed ‘phantasy’), where another area known as the estimativa could get to work with its making of memory-based and affectivelycoloured judgements. Finally, in the back part of the brain, the cellula memorialis was the storehouse of memory. The phantasmata that resulted from this multi-stage process were no mere abstract concepts: they dripped with sensory qualities and emotional charge. The mind–brain complex was an integrated, dynamic system, with the creative power of the imaginativa having the potential to sway and deceive the rational processes of the estimativa. The delicate balance of the four bodily humours (black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm, associated respectively with the melancholy, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments) could affect the dynamic interplay of the cerebral faculties, with an excess of black or yellow bile, for example, affecting the image-production systems of the front of the brain, resulting in anomalous perceptions and melancholy or mania. The faculty of memory had a special status in medieval thinking about the mind. The historian of ideas Mary Carruthers has argued that the medieval conception of memoria embodied something much richer than modern notions of memory as a passive store of information. For thinkers of the Middle Ages, remembering was an active, reconstructive process involving the recombination of different forms of information into new cognitive representations. In its generation of alternative non-real scenarios, this model of remembering presaged modern approaches that see memory as a process of imagination as much as information storage. For the clerics who wrote many of the texts that have come down to us, memoria was a ‘a universal thinking machine’ (Carruthers, 1998), a technology for meditation and the means for creating new thoughts about God. In Carruthers’
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
analysis, a memory representation formed a complectio, incorporating emotional and motivational elements as well as cognitive, prefiguring modern ideas about memories as inherently emotionally coloured. Medieval scholars’ emphasis on the spatial nature of memory reconstruction, as evidenced by their enthusiasm for mnemonic techniques such as the method of loci, also prefigures the cognitive neuroscience of scene construction (Hassabis et al., 2007), with its emphasis on the spatial rather than temporal properties of memory representations (Fernyhough, 2012). As the example of memory demonstrates, soul, mind, intellect, thought, emotion, affect, senses and body were all intimately connected in medieval writings; emotions both shaped the understanding and were visibly written on the body. From a medieval perspective, the mind was inevitably embodied – a view that contrasts strikingly with mind–body dualism and Descartes’ influential concept of emotions (‘passions’) as felt exclusively in the mind (‘soul’), even though they might have physical causes (Saunders, 2005). This theory of emotions as private mental events underpinned subsequent philosophical explorations, and the late19th-century psychologist William James was radical in his suggestion that emotions were perceptions of bodily processes. Yet his ideas, like MerleauPonty’s (e.g. 1962) theories of embodiment and the more recent development of theories of embodied cognition (Bergen, 2012; Clark, 1997), chime closely with medieval understanding. In adopting such ideas, contemporary neuroscience, philosophy and psychology have moved over the last several decades to a position surprisingly consonant with that of the medieval thinkers. Antonio Damasio, for example, looks back to James in privileging the body, replacing the Cartesian mind–body split with the notion of a dynamic continuum between brain and body. Emotion enables cognition, Damasio suggests, playing a key role in rational/intellective processes: the cognitive is always emotional; the emotional always cognitive (Damasio, 2008). This seemingly radical new idea of the embodied mind, however, was prefigured a millennium ago, and underpinned thought and writing for many centuries following. Medieval literary texts are rooted in these notions, and writers shape powerful fictions that exemplify the interdependence of mind and body, cognition and affect, within a world
881
looking back
coloured by a profound awareness of a multi-faceted supernatural, which included not only God and the devil, but also a spirit world of angels, demons and ghosts. Such ideas are clearly at play in the ‘psychomachia’ tradition, a genre in which aspects of individual psychology are personified and brought into dramatic contact. In the late-14th-century poem Piers Plowman the hero Will meets and debates with figures who personify both affective and cognitive forces – Anima (Soul), Imaginatyf and Conscience – as well as external forces such as Holy Church and Scripture. The psyche is envisaged and exteriorised as made up of voices in contention and conflict, within a larger frame of competing forces.
Love-sickness and more The single most influential literary topos of the period is the idea of love-sickness,
which combines the idea of mental and bodily illness, and draws expressly on the notion of love as a supernatural, invasive force, creating psychical disorder. Geoffrey Chaucer’s great tragic narrative of love Troilus and Criseyde (1380s) exploits the convention of love-sickness, which originates in classical writing: the inner journey of love is throughout written on the body (Chaucer, 2008). Love comes from ‘out there’: it is an invasive, physical force, a wound with which the God of Love punishes Troilus for his laughter at the foolishness of lovers. On first seeing Criseyde, Troilus is, ‘Right with hire look thorugh-shoten and thorugh-darted’ (I, 325): the image plays on the neo-Platonic convention of the eyes as the way to the heart, which is caused to ‘sprede and rise’ (I, 278), wounding and quickening Troilus’ affections. He manifests the typical symptoms of the malady of love: weeping,
sighing, swooning, melancholy and physical decline. Love is depicted as inevitable, but also as a kind of deathwish. In the later books of the poem, when Troilus is separated from and betrayed by Criseyde, he is literally unmade by love, his melancholy characterised by swoons, nightmares, withdrawal and abstinence, until finally he wastes away to a shadowy figure of his former self: unrecognisable, pale, wan, walking with a crutch and complaining of grievous pain around his heart. Yet, in the course of the poem, affect has been shown also to have powerful cognitive elements. Troilus is a lyric poet, and the narrative is interspersed with his songs, in which love opens onto a vision of cosmic harmony; it inspires too his own moral excellence. Chaucer also explores the recombinative power of memory, and particularly in the later books imagining is, literally, image-making: Troilus, re-
Medieval thinking and the origins of Hallowe’en As a term like the ‘Dark Ages’ colourfully demonstrates, the medieval period is often associated with ignorance and superstition. Yet while its frameworks for belief were indeed very different, its thought world was complex and sophisticated. Much of what we now term ‘superstition’ – for example the colourful beliefs surrounding Hallowe’en – has its origins in serious religious rituals, but has often been overlaid with notions of the ‘pagan’ and more recent borrowings. Post-Reformation ideas placed religion and magic in opposition, whereas medieval Christian belief included concepts of the supernatural: a spirit world comprising not only God and the devil, but also spirits, ghosts and fairies, and magic. Separating religion from magic resulted in what had been acceptable religious rituals, such as the veneration of relics, becoming superstition, and in the demonisation of the supernatural. It is no coincidence that the figure of the witch (whose roots go back to classical times) took hold during the early modern period, and that witch-hunting with all its attendant suspicions was only seen in Britain after the Middle Ages. Hallowe’en finds its origins in rituals surrounding All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Hallows’ Day (now generally referred to as All Saints’ Day), which is followed the next day by All Souls’ Day, the religious festival honouring the souls of the dead. Hallowe’en may use some of the rituals that marked the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, and is thought, like other feasts, to have been established in order to Christianise a popular pagan festival. It may, however, simply be the case that both pagan (including Roman and Celtic) and Christian religion developed similar rituals to honour the dead at the time in which autumn was moving into winter, and death marked the natural world. This night was also believed to be the night on which spirits walked: revenants from the dead. All Hallows’ Eve was associated across Europe with visions or pageants of the danse macabre, a dance of skeletal figures, returning spirits reminding spectators of their own mortality. After the Reformation, the spirits of the dead were demonised – seen as witches and demons. Ghosts and suchlike are still associated with Hallowe’en, as are black cats, sometimes viewed as witches’ ‘familiars’ (their intermediaries with the devil). Jack-o’-lanterns seem to have originated in ancient Irish practice, while trick-or-treating finds its origins in medieval pageantry rituals of ‘mumming’ and ‘souling’, collecting ‘soul cakes’ in return for prayers for the dead. Some of these practices were borrowed back, slightly altered, from traditions that grew up in North America, such as the use of pumpkins. The vibrancy and remaking of Hallowe’en rituals across the centuries speaks in part to the appeal of folk tradition, to our engagement with both religious belief and superstition, but also to a deep-seated need to honour and remember the dead – and to turn fears of mortality into feasting and festivity.
882
vol 29 no 11
november 2016
looking back
reading Criseyde’s letters, ‘refigures’ ‘hire shap, hire wommanhede, / Withinne his herte’ (V, 473–74). He has the ‘proces’, the course of events, ‘lik a storie’ in his memory (V, 583–85). And his grief also leads him to philosophical debate. The poem powerfully depicts the obsessive workings of the mind that has suffered anguish and grief, the endless refiguring of the past, and the processes of inner dialogue. Chaucer is deeply engaged with both the physical and cognitive qualities of emotion, its shaping of body and mind. In his Knight’s Tale Chaucer graphically describes the bodily illness caused by love, but he also situates Arcite’s malady as an illness of the brain, ‘Engendered of humour malencolik / Biforen in his celle fantastik’ (1375–76). Chaucer draws on medical ideas about the influence of affect on the brain, available to him, for instance, through the work of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, translated into English by John of Trevisa. Trevisa describes how the passions of the soul engender the melancholy humour, which works on the ‘celle fantastik’, the front ventricle of the brain or ‘phantasia’, containing the sensus communis and imaginatio (temporary memory), which in turn control imagination and judgement in the middle ventricle. In a state of melancholy, the subject loses the ability to judge and reason; here, this becomes mania, as the imagination cannot perceive new images but sees only the beloved – affect and cognition are interdependent. Arcite’s mind obsessively bodies forth images of his lady. Such ideas play out differently but with equal force in religious writing. The mysticism of the later Middle Ages, in particular, stressed the individual humanity of Christ and the power of affect and sensory experience to move the individual to spiritual understanding and vision. The extraordinary voices and unusual perceptions of two celebrated English religious writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, further open out the intertwined notions of mind, body and affect in the medieval world.
Sophisticated and complex What we can learn from these ideas and examples that can inform our work as psychologists now? As we have suggested, medieval writings have important implications for current thinking about the relation between brain and mind. The ideas on melancholia and mania that influenced Chaucer, for example, are reminiscent of contemporary views of rumination in depression along
with neurobiological accounts of mood to (particularly physical) violence (Skoda, disorders as resulting from 2013). Differing worldviews and spiritual neurotransmitter imbalances. This has beliefs would doubtless also have affected included research linking serotonin levels individuals’ reactions to such experiences. to obsessive rumination resulting from The prominence in medieval writing of falling in love (Marazziti et al., 1999), and magical and marvellous protective objects discussion about possible chemical ‘cures’ certainly suggests their powerful play on for love-sickness (Earp et al., 2013). the imagination – and the universal hope But while modern approaches to the for health and happiness. Christianity science of love slip easily into the trap of offered a different kind of hope, for divine reductionism, medieval accounts show us protection and eternal life. But ways of avoiding the automatic Christianity also offered resources for identification of the psychological with accepting suffering, which could be the neural. Medieval thinkers resisted understood as punishment for sin but reducing the soul/mind to the brain while could also be embraced as a means of at the same time refining the soul. It is avoiding dualism. St possible too that the Thomas Aquinas, for distinctly modern-looking example, writing in understanding of the “Medieval thinkers the 13th century, relations between cognition resisted reducing the conceived of the and emotion might have soul/mind to the brain” human as a had a protective effect. The compound of body trauma of violence or death is and soul/mind. As we of course a central aspect of have seen, such ideas illuminate modern extreme emotional experience, whether notions of the embodied mind. Though this is secular or spiritual: Christ’s passion we may replace ideas of soul with those is affective precisely because of the of mind, medieval notions of the relation extreme violence he suffers and the between the non-material faculties of the horror of this for the onlooker. The soul and brain/bodily processes are continuum between body and mind powerfully suggestive: they bring to mind meant that physical affects of mental co-dependence but not identity. While trauma were an expected aspect of inevitably not representing developed extreme emotion. Unusual experiences models and theories, these writings offer such as auditory and visual hallucinations sophisticated and complex ways of were readily seen as such affects – while understanding the relation between brain the demonic and the divine, and the spirit and mind in the era of neuroscience. world between, were also accepted as Much medieval literature is made possible causes of such experience. Not strange to us by the period’s limited pathologising such experience may have knowledge of anatomy and the made it easier to live with. unfamiliarity with scientific method. Yet there are examples of extraordinary Much more to mine insight, for example in the writing on In a planned follow-up to this essay, the reconstructive nature of memory and we will turn our attention to medieval imagination (Dudai & Carruthers, 2005). preconceptions about mental control, There may be implications for clinical intrusions, and anomalous experiences practice too. To adopt Johan Huizinga’s such as hallucinations. In this area in (1924) phrase, ‘the violent tenor of life’ particular, medieval ideas about the mind in Britain in the Middle Ages meant that are guiding modern scholars towards many people would have had experience non-reductive understandings of mental of trauma. Primitive medicine and phenomena that can do justice to the technology rendered illness and famine richness and variety of human common, and life expectancy was not experience. high. The plague or Black Death recurred for over a hundred years and in 1348–49 I Corinne Saunders is Professor in the killed as much as a third of the Department of English Studies, Durham population. Political unrest and warfare University, and Co-Director of the Centre were constant realities: the deposition of for Medical Humanities Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, the c.j.saunders@durham.ac.uk ‘Hundred Years War’ with France that lasted through the realms of five kings, I Charles Fernyhough is Professor in campaigns against Scotland and Ireland, the Department of Psychology, Durham and the Crusades. University, and PI on the Hearing the Voice There are reasons to think that project (http://hearingthevoice.org) medieval minds may, as a result, have c.p.fernyhough@durham.ac.uk been less easily traumatised by exposure
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
883