The Psychologist February 2015

the

psychologist vol 28 no 2

february 2015 www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The surprising world of synaesthesia Jack Dutton investigates

letters 78 news 90 careers 148 looking back 166

how relationships help us to age well 110 does our unconscious rule? 114 interview: Robin Dunbar 126 viewpoints: ‘let down by psychology’ 128

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

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The surprising world of synaesthesia 106 Jack Dutton meets those with the condition and the researchers who study them. Might it have benefits, and could it even be taught?

tinyurl.com/thepsychomag @psychmag Advertising Reach 50,000 psychologists at very reasonable rates.

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How relationships help us to age well 110 Laura Soulsby and Kate Bennett consider a rich evidence base 106

The unheard victims 118 Michelle Lowe and Bob Balfour look at service provision for male sexual abuse survivors New voices: Together against bullying 124 Suzy Clarkson with the latest in our series for budding writers

January 2015 issue 52,198 dispatched Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use or recycle.

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ISSN 0952-8229

110 Cover Moonlight sonata, visualised, by Andy Fillebrown (from tinyurl.com/moonsyn) © 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 from the British Psychological Society 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.

Does our unconscious rule?

114 Magda Osman refocuses our view on the evidence

news 90 psychologists are honoured; fMRI guide for journalists; curbing exaggerated reporting; no torture without psychologists?; event reports; and more society 132 President’s column; Society awards; exploring the ‘always-on culture’; and more

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, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff Interviews Gail Kinman, Mark Sergeant Reviews Emma Norris Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

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the issue ...debates letters sex offending: don’t forget the victims; where are all the BAME psychologists?; student satisfaction; legal highs; mental illness debate continues; and more

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...digests empathy for patients; student research participants; being a worrier; and more, in the latest from our free Research Digest (see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog) 100

...meets interview 126 ‘we are not islands, there is such a thing as society’: Robin Dunbar talks to Lance Workman about his attempts to see the big picture and find the big number viewpoints 128 ‘I felt let down by psychology’: we meet a brain injury survivor, researchers and a practitioner careers 148 we talk to Andy Cornes about his work with deaf people; and Rachel Mulholland writes about the highs and lows of being a lecturer; plus latest vacancies one on one with Migel Jayasinghe

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...reviews working memory and ageing; disobedient objects exhibition; Birdman; X + Y; The Small Big; mental health in the workplace; and much more 160

Synaesthesia, the topic of this month’s cover feature, can be thought of as a ‘union of the senses’.

Now I am the first to admit that it may be a tad self-aggrandising to describe what we are trying to do with The Psychologist and the Research Digest as a union of the senses, but I have an editorial to write so please bear with me…

Over the years we have developed the print version of The Psychologist to hopefully offer a more rewarding visual experience, and on our relaunched website at www.thepsychologist.bps.org.uk we have audio and video (stopping just short of smell-o-vision). Over on the hugely popular Research Digest blog (www.bps.org.uk/digest), our first ever podcast is imminent.

But more than that, we are trying to provide a union of ideas… a place where all corners of our wonderfully varied discipline can come together, and reach out beyond boundaries too (see p.128 for a good example).

If what we do is not to your taste, you can change that – see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/contribute and get in touch. Am I making sense?

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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...looks back Experiencing death to improve life 166 Jelena Martinovic on near-death experiences and psychology in the 1960s and 70s

The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Phil Banyard, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Tony Wainwright, Peter Wright

Two years ago Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our now complete archive, including Robert Sternberg on his scientific and personal quest for true love

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Big picture centre-page pull-out inside the heart and mind of a city: the work of psychologist Colin Ellard

NEWS

Psychologists honoured Three psychologists have been included in the New Year Honours list. They were recognised for their work in higher education, helping people with intellectual disabilities and services to music education. They told us about their plans for the future.

Professor Paul Webley, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, was awarded a CBE for services to higher education. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Psychology and former President of the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology. His research has examined the contribution that psychology can make to our understanding of problems that have traditionally been seen as the concern solely of economics.

Professor Webley said it was a great honour to be recognised, that research and teaching were the foundation of society Professor Paul and he could not Webley, CBE imagine a more fulfilling profession. He added: ‘Through my work at SOAS especially I am glad to have been able to support powerful scholarship and to ensure that specialist knowledge and understanding remains

her work was also featured accessible to generations in Nature. of students around the Professor Burns said she world.’ felt particularly honoured He told The as she knew many others Psychologist that his had contributed to the hard plans for the future were work that had gone into the to continue his efforts to achievements that had been ensure that SOAS was recognised. She added that pre-eminent and to work it was a very emotional hard to combat the moment to see 120 athletes eurocentrism of many with intellectual disabilities disciplines, including walk into the stadium at the psychology.

London Paralympics Professor Jan Burns, opening ceremony and know head of the School of that they would be viewed by Psychology, Politics and Professor Jan Burns, others with and without Sociology at Canterbury MBE disabilities for what they Christ Church excelled at, rather than their disabilities.

University, was awarded an MBE for ‘To be a part of making that happen by services to people with an intellectual using my expertise as a psychologist has disability. Her research interests include been truly inspiring and really brought gender and sexuality, the quality of life home to me how psychology can be for people with intellectual disabilities applied to impact in such a variety of and professional issues associated with settings. Our work continues, and we clinical psychology. As head of eligibility are looking at how to increase the at INAS (the international federation for number of athletes with intellectual para-athletes with an intellectual disabilities competing on the disability), Professor Burns played a key international stage, compete again in role in the re-establishment of events for the Rio Games, and gain entry into the people with intellectual disabilities at Winter Paralympics,’ she added. the London 2012 Paralympics (see Susan Hallam, Professor of Education tinyurl.com/ly9ob5v). and Music Psychology at the Institute of She received a BPS Public Education, University of London, Engagement Grant to enable her received an MBE for services to music to develop web-based and physical education. Professor Hallam is a member resources that explain why people with of the editorial boards of the journal learning disabilities have been included Psychology of Music and the Journal of in the Paralympics and how the systems the Institute for Educational Research. of general eligibility and sport-specific Her research interests include classification work for this group, and

For the benefit of the poor John Oates, BPS member and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education & Language Studies at The Open University, has been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary for his tireless efforts for the benefit of poor and disadvantaged children, particularly in Roma communities.

John’s efforts on his main project, Sure Start (Biztos Kezdet), were recognised by the President of Hungary, who wrote: ‘The President of Hungary awards John Oates with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary for playing a central role in developing the programme in Hungary, as well as for his efforts to further improve

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the educational programme for children living in the Roma community.’

Through his connections with Sure Start and early years policy in England, John facilitated the adoption, translation and adaptation of the English materials, methods and structures for the Biztos Kezdet gyerekhaz, the children’s centres, of which there are now more than 100 across the poorest parts of Hungary. He continued to play a key role in developing the programme, organising study visits to England for practitioners and planners of Biztos Kezdet, to meet with experts in early intervention and to spend time in English Sure Start Children’s Centres, and

leading study workshops and training in Hungary for mentors, trainers and practitioners. His documentary films have been shown widely in Hungary and England, influencing the public and policy makers to think more deeply about the difficulties faced by those in poverty.

Professor Oates told us: ‘My research and scholarship in child development has shown me how important it is to make use of our new knowledge about the effects of poverty and other risk factors and how they can be overcome. I am glad I have had the opportunities to put this knowledge into practice to help children in England and in Hungary.’

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disaffection from school, learning and understanding, ability grouping, music psychology and music education (see tinyurl.com/lt65qvg).

Professor Hallam said: ‘Although I have now retired from full-time work I am continuing with my research. During January a report entitled “The impact of actively making music on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people: A research synthesis” is due to be published Professor Susan which I hope will Hallam, MBE provide those engaged in music education with a review which they can use to advocate for the continuation of music education in these times of ongoing austerity. I am also continuing my research on learning in music with a particular focus on musical practice and motivation.’

Among others honoured were Dr Anna van der Gaag, Chair of the Health and Care Professions Council, who received a CBE for services to health and care, and Dr Hilary Cass, President of the Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health, who received an OBE for services to child health. ER

CORRECTION In the November issue, our item ‘Students and their struggles with stats’ failed to identify Professor Andy Field (University of Sussex) as the author of the report in question: Skills in Mathematics and Statistics in Psychology and Tackling Transitions.

This omission, combined with the seeking of comment from Dr John Reidy, gave the impression that the report was by Dr Reidy.

We apologise to all concerned.

To read the full Higher Education Academy report, please see www.heacademy.ac.uk/node/9841

PAUL BOX. REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

news

After Winterbourne A clinical psychologist has supported recommendations made by a report into the treatment of people with learning disabilities and autism, released in the wake of the Winterbourne View scandal. The NHS England report suggests using £30 million in fines from banks to help move people with such difficulties into the community.

Following the revelation of abuse at the Winterbourne House unit, a pledge was made to enable people with learning disabilities and/or autism who were inappropriately placed in hospital to move to community-based support. This was not met by the target date of June 2014, so a report was commissioned, written by a team led by the chief executive of the charity leaders’ organisation ACEVO Sir Stephen Bubb.

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Among many other recommendations the report suggests drawing up a charter of rights for people with learning disabilities and/or autism.

WI VI E NTE R F O W – TB OU R R C HA I M E N E Tran NG E of se sformin g

th disa rvices biliti fo e co es a r peop mmissi nd/o le w onin it g r au tism h learn ing

A rep Stee ort by the ring Grou Trans p, ch formi aired ng Ca

by Sir re an Step d Comm hen Bubb ission – 20 ing 14

Dr Julian Morris, a consultant clinical psychologist speaking on behalf of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology, said their Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities supported the recommendations of the report and continued to

stress the importance of the provision of evidencebased psychological therapies for all people with a learning disability and/or autism. He added: ‘This is a key component in ensuring that there are appropriate community-based services to both support the timely discharge of people currently in inpatient settings and prevent the need for admission in the first place. For people who engage in behaviours that challenge services, this means the provision of approaches that reduce the need for restrictive interventions, such as Positive Behavioural Support, which are outlined in the Department of Health’s “Positive and Safe” initiative.’ ER I To read the full report

by NHS England visit tinyurl.com/n63rgvs

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news

Research quality on the up The results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework were published in December (see www.ref.ac.uk), showing that the quality of submitted research outputs has improved significantly since the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. Thirty per cent of all submissions were ‘world leading’ (4*), and 46 per cent ‘internationally excellent’ (3*).

Research in all units of assessment (UoAs) has led to a range of social, economic and cultural impacts. These include diverse impacts on the economy, society, culture, public policy and services, health, the environment and quality of life both within the UK and internationally.

The research ratings will determine the allocation of the £2bn public funding made available to universities each year.

Madeleine Atkins, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, told BBC News that the exercise showed that ‘UK universities are in the top rank of an internationally competitive research community’.

A substantially higher proportion of early career researchers and staff with individual circumstances (such as maternity leave or part time working) were submitted than in the 2008.

Provisional analysis of average quality profiles for the UoAs to which psychology submissions have been returned reveals the percentage of research in each that is ‘world leading’ or

TOP JOURNAL ARTICLES BY ALTERNATIVE METRICS A controversial study by social networking site Facebook, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the most shared academic research last year. Statistics, released by Altmetric, revealed it ranked first out of 24,752 articles from 2014.

In 2012 the site manipulated more than 600,000 users’ news feeds over a week to assess whether being shown fewer positive or negative stories from friends would affect the emotions of individuals (see tinyurl.com/l8e48ye). The research caused a massive stir upon its release with many users saying they felt their privacy had been invaded. Interestingly, the article was most shared on Twitter, with more than 3700 tweets mentioning the research and only 371 mentions on Facebook itself, although the statistics were limited to public mentions of the research – private wall posts were not counted.

Second place on the Altmetric Top 100 list went to a paper in the Journal of Ethology titled ‘Variation in melanism and female preference in proximate but ecologically distinct environments’. This seemingly unassuming paper became infamous due to an author’s comment that had been left in the text, which read: ‘Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?’ This perhaps calls into question the utility of this form of ranking: what we are looking at here is not quality or influence, but a raw measure of notoriety.

Third place went to a study published in Nature suggesting that artificial sweeteners could induce glucose intolerance, and fourth was a breakthrough in stem-cell research also published in Nature. In fifth place was an Ig Nobel Prize award winner published in Frontiers in Zoology, which revealed that defecating dogs were sensitive to variations in the Earth’s magnetic field. ER

‘internationally excellent’: UoA 4 (Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience) – 38 per cent 4* and 40 per cent 3* UoA 3 (Allied Health Professions) – 31 per cent 4* and 50 per cent 3* UoA 19 (Business and Management Studies) – 26 per cent 4* and 43 per cent 3* UoA 22 (Social Work and Social Policy) – 27 per cent 4* and 42 per cent 3* UoA 23 (Sociology) – 27 per cent 4* and 45 per cent 3* UoA 25 (Education) – 30 per cent 4* and 36 per cent 3* UoA 28 (Modern Language and Linguistics) – 30 per cent 4* and 42 per cent 3* UoA 36 (Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management) – 29 per cent 4* and 38 per cent 3* The UoA reports, which will allow further assessment of the submissions from Psychology, were due to be released in January.

fMRI guide for journalists Cambridge University cognitive neuroscientist Dr Jon Simons has created an fMRI guide for journalists to use in reporting results from imaging papers. The guide, he said on his blog, aims to provide enough information to allow journalists to read and report on such papers with an appropriate amount of informed scepticism.

Among the pointers Simons outlines are the problems with reverse inference, where a paper links activity in one region with a single mental function. Many brain regions are involved in many psychological processes and it is rare that one-to-one mapping between activity in a brain region and a single mental state is possible. Simons also points out that if a ‘Region of Interest’ approach has been used, the particular regions studied should be selected independently of the analysis and based on the results of previous studies or a different scan in the same experiment.

Simons said the impetus for the guide came from a number of science writers, such as Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer, who mentioned that journalists might find it useful if some brief guidance existed on how to approach writing about brain imaging research. He added: ‘The blobs on brains that result from methods such as fMRI look attractive, but the science that underlies them is complex and technically challenging. We wanted to write a guide that might be helpful for those who may not consider themselves fMRI experts, but want to report fMRI journal articles accurately in the media.

‘Hopefully the pointers we provide about common problems to look out for will also be useful to press officers and scientists themselves in helping to craft press releases that reliably describe fMRI findings, resisting hype and mentioning appropriate limitations and caveats. Aiming for accuracy at all stages of the reporting process is, I believe, important for improving the public understanding of science.’ ER I For the full guide visit tinyurl.com/k7he237

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Curbing exaggerated reporting A new paper has revealed that many of the exaggerations and distortions contained in mainstream media reports of scientific findings often come from university press releases themselves, rather than directly from science journalists. The article, published in the BMJ, looked at 462 press releases from 20 leading universities in the UK alongside the original peer-reviewed research papers and resulting news stories.

The authors, led by Professor Petroc Sumner (Cardiff University), used the following outcome measures; whether any of the stories, press releases or papers advised readers to change their behaviour, contained causal statements drawn from correlational research, and inference to humans from animal research beyond that stated in the associated academic papers.

Among the press releases they found 40 per cent contained exaggerated advice, 33 per cent contained exaggerated causal claims and 36 per cent contained exaggerated inference to humans from animal research.

When the press releases contained this exaggeration, it was reflected in the news stories 58 per cent, 81 per cent and 86 per cent respectively; while if the press releases contained no exaggeration, 17 per cent 18 per cent and 10 per cent of the news stories added in each of the three exaggerations respectively. This research sparked much debate with many specialist science news journalists pointing out that reporters are responsible for fact-checking even if press releases do contain exaggerated claims.

Ed Yong, a science writer who has a blog with National Geographic, said on Twitter: ‘Blame is not a zero-sum game.

If exaggerations or inaccuracies end up in science/health reporting, then the journalist should always take 100% of the blame, even if the errors originated with

scientists or press releases. Errors can arise anywhere, they are meant to end with us.’

Science journalist and research fellow Ben Goldacre wrote an accompanying article about the prevention of bad reporting on health research. He discussed the quantitative research already done on the misrepresentation of medical research in mainstream media. He pointed to the HealthNewsReview website in the United States, which gives an ongoing critical appraisal media coverage of treatments and tests. He said: ‘A published summary of its first 500 appraisals found that most news articles failed to satisfactorily discuss the quality of the evidence or to quantify the absolute magnitude of benefits and harms… In terms of story selection, evidence suggests that the media are more inclined to report exceptional causes of death; that bad news generates more coverage than good news and that observational studies are more likely to be covered than trials (perhaps because observational research more often reflects the kinds of lifestyle choices that patients can make themselves).’

Goldacre suggests that press releases should have named authors, including both the press officers involved and the academics from the original paper, adding: ‘This would create professional reputational consequences for misrepresenting scientific findings in a press release, which would parallel the risks around misrepresenting science in an academic paper.’

He also suggests that in terms of transparency, press releases are often more impactful than the research paper itself, but are often only sent privately to journalists and are rarely linked from academic papers. He said that releases should be treated as a part of the scientific publication, being linked to the paper,

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referenced from the academic paper that is being promoted, and presented in full view of peers.

He makes the final point that feedback in these cases would require a simple extension of current norms in academia.

He said: ‘Researchers who exaggerate in an academic paper are publicly corrected – and held to account – in commentaries and letters to the publishing journal, through the process of post-publication peer review. This could be extended. Press releases are a key part of the publication of the science: journals should reflect this and publish commentary and letters about misrepresentations in the press release, just as they publish commentary on the academic paper itself. Collectively this would produce an information trail and accountability among peers and the public.’

The authors point out in their discussion that the result of their research shouldn’t be seen to be shifting blame from journalists onto non-journalists working in higher education press offices.

They point out that most press releases are written collaboratively by scientists and press officers and therefore much of the responsibility for exaggeration should lie with scientific authors in these cases.

They continue: ‘At the other end of the chain, journalists have a continuing responsibility to cross check their sources even if their working conditions make that increasingly difficult. The blame – if it can be meaningfully apportioned – lies mainly with the increasing culture of university competition and self promotion, interacting with the increasing pressures on journalists to do more with less time.’

The authors conclude that the academic community can make a large difference to the quality of health-related news stories and that appropriate claims are a good starting point. ER

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Enlightening and practical Ella Rhodes reports from the Fourth International Congress of Coaching Psychology, 11–12 December 2014, London The Fourth International Congress of Coaching Psychology, organised by the BPS Special Group in Coaching Psychology, drew in an enthusiastic audience from 23 different countries to scores of inspirational talks and practical workshops. The diverse range of topics across 10 streams and two days comprehensively covered many areas of the discipline, including sports coaching, psychometric testing and even the taboo.

One highlight from the first day of the conference, in the ‘taboo’ stream, was Dr Henry Ford, speaking about his work teaching mindfulness to executives in the City. Ford has worked for 25 years coaching and mentoring on Wall Street and in the City, within investment and commercial banking and private equity.

He spoke about his practice of yoga and vegetarianism, an unusual and taboo lifestyle choice in the executive world.

Ford said that following the credit crunch he was given the chance to formalise his coaching and bring the benefits of mindfulness to people in London. He outlined some of the research into the benefits of mindfulness and the biology and neuroscience behind the human stress response. The problems his City clients suffer are mainly issues with work–life balance and stress, and Ford gave some examples of the kinds of techniques he teaches: as well as ‘mindful minutes’ he asks clients to sit in front of their e-mail and scan the names in their inboxes, being aware of the physical effect that each name has on them.

Whistleblower Helen Stratton appeared in a moving conversation with Neil Tomalin, discussing the difficulties employees face when confronted with situations that go against their personal values. Dr Stratton worked at Bristol Royal Infirmary counselling parents of babies and children who faced heart surgery. She found out that the death rates of these young patients were higher at Bristol than elsewhere in the UK. She and her colleague, anaesthetist Dr Stephen Bolsin, compiled an audit of success rates, which eventually led to one of the biggest surgical scandals in the history of the NHS. Subsequently James Wisheart, the surgeon at the centre of the scandal, was struck off along with hospital manager Dr John Roylance.

When asked why some people do not speak out, Stratton replied: ‘My father was

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a barrister, and we were brought up arguing that black was white.’ When asked what she had learned she said that she was aware that people could not leave their jobs because of every ethical dilemma they face: however, she could not ignore her own values.

Margaret Heffernan, an entrepreneur, chief executive, producer and author, gave the first keynote speech of the congress, about wilful blindness. She began by mentioning the scandal at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and the Rotherham Child Abuse revelations that came out earlier in the year, alongside various other failures by large industry and groups. She said: ‘With all of these institutional failures, what has really struck me is the problems that beset these organisations are not taking place in private but they’re happening in large, public places.’ Heffernan said the idea of wilful blindness came to her when she was writing a radio play about the collapse of Enron, and she realised that many problems within companies are being actively ignored until it is too late.

She added: ‘What’s really interested me is that it’s not just about private denial but about organisational blindness.’

Heffernan then asked what physical things could explain why we miss pitfalls or wrongdoing in organisations. She outlined the case of Warren Briggs, who worked at a refinery in BP. He was working one day in 2005 for the 30th day in a row, on 12-hour shifts, in a control room in front of 24 screens. On this occasion an alarm began sounding but Mr Briggs was unable to stop it and consequently there was an explosion that killed 15 people, injuring 100. Heffernan said the site where Mr Briggs worked was known to be dangerous, with a high mortality rate, Mr Briggs himself was hugely sleep-deprived, and with more to focus on than human attention can handle. Heffernan concluded her talk by saying that in a crisis many businesses ‘double down’ and reinforce their existing biases (such as top executives being white British), therefore maintaining the status quo… they would do well to be more open to questions and creative conflict.

Day two of the congress saw several interesting talks on the international picture of coaching. Speaking about the emergence of the discipline in Japan was Dr Etsuyo Nishigaki (Kansai Medical

University). She said in 1999 motor manufacturer Nissan began to reform the company by introducing coaching as a management technique. In the present day there are now 40 coaching training schools in Japan, with many dealing with communication skills as their main concern.

Nishigaki’s research has looked into the reality of coaches in the country; with colleagues she surveyed 478 Japanese and Chinese coaches and found that, of these, 20 per cent had never had any formal coach training. Evidence-based coaching had not yet been fully introduced in Japan, with many coaching textbooks and works coming in from other countries (the first Japanese-language coaching psychology book was due to be published next year). Nishigaki concluded with cultural issues surrounding coaching in the country, such as an emphasis on seniority: there may be issues with a young person coaching an older client.

Director of the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre John Rust, gave the second, thought-provoking keynote speech of the congress, on the psychometric testing of digital footprints using social media. Professor Rust began by outlining the history of testing and the pitfalls of each type of test. For example, the introduction of examinations led to discrimination, IQ or mental tests led to scientific racism, and the use of social networks has the downfall of mirroring Big Brother.

Rust went on to outline some of the work done with social media data. He said that our online digital footprint can be used to track human behaviour, in the likes we make on Facebook, the links we click on and even the words in our status updates and tweets. Psychologists now have many millions of data points to use.

Rust outlined the use of data from a Facebook app that went viral in 2007, a personality test that collected data from six million people over two years. One of his own studies looked into 700,000 people who had carried out these tests and found a correlation between personality traits and likes on Facebook.

Rust said they were looking at whether a personality could be predicted from these likes and found that some traits could be predicted with 95 per cent accuracy.

He also showed some more recent work looking at whether the words used

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in Facebook status updates could predict introversion and extraversion, and said there was a great degree of similarity between people with those shared personality traits. Rust said that this sort of data is not only useful in marketing but can also help predict whether people are at risk of depression or dangerous behaviours such as terrorism or cyber crime. He said that much of this information could be useful in the context of coaching, both aiding people to overcome addictive behaviours, identifying those at risk of mental health problems, as well as helping people to manage their own online presence and digital footprint.

As well as the many enlightening

talks taking place at this year’s congress, there were also practical workshops held to give coaches new ideas for their own practices. Among them was Almuth McDowell (City University London and Birkbeck University of London) who presented her methods using a feed forward interview with a microintervention to increase psychological capital. In this approach clients are asked to tell the coach a positive story from their life in much detail, focusing on the event, the people involved and the feelings associated with it and then combining these positive feelings with future plans to build on their psychological capital – increasing selfefficacy, optimism, hope and resiliency.

Dr McDowall said following the use of this positive story it is then possible to use a micro-intervention, where a client is asked to think about a goal they wish to achieve and visualise it. Subsequently they are asked to physically draw different pathways to achieving this goal, noting down any obstacles they may encounter along the way.

I The Special Group in Coaching Psychology has a number of upcoming workshops next year with discounted rates for group members; these include Dr Sue Roffey’s positive psychology and authentic well-being on 30 March, and essential neurolinguistic skills for coaching psychologists with Dr Rene Bosman on 27 May

A SYNAESTHETIC DINING EXPERIENCE For people who do not have synaesthesia it is difficult to imagine a world where sound has colour, colour has flavour, or numbers are unique personalities you know well. But this month sees the launch of a series of educational and multisensory dining events organised with the help of psychologists and experts in the field.

Synaesthesia by Kitchen Theory is an event that will incorporate sensory audiovisual aids and the collaboration of knowledge from academia with an experimental seven-course modernist meal cooked by Michelin restaurant experienced chefs. Each event caters for 14 and offers an insight into the world of synaesthesia. Kitchen Theory has worked with Professor Charles Spence and his team at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, as well as Sean Day (President of the American Synesthesia Association) and Richard E. Cytowic, neurologist and author of Wednesday is Indigo Blue, to understand the condition.

Jozef Youssef, Founder and Chef Patron, gave us an example of the approach. ‘We knew we wanted an amuse bouche which highlights our individual associations between colour and flavour, both universal and cultural. Ours consists of four bite-size elements each of which will represent one of the four most

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recognised and familiar tastes; sweet, sour, salty, bitter. Each element will be coloured differently to correlate with that taste’s associated colour, based on research by the Crossmodal Lab. A video, featuring Professor Spence, will introduce diners to the topic of the senses and synaesthesia, and the guests will be asked to arrange the four elements in front of them according to what they perceive as being sweet, sour, salty, bitter, based only on sight.

Then it’s time to put their perceptions to the test – for some this will be a straightforward experience, some may find a few elements surprising, for others perhaps incongruent.’

The dinners will be hosted at Maida Hill Place in London, Thursday to Saturday every fortnight from 12 February. The sevencourse dinner costs £56 per head or £32 for a three-course lunch with an amuse bouche. Kitchen Theory’s 2015 residency will also include cooking classes, talks and private events. For further information, go to tinyurl.com/nuzb2d5.

I For more on synaesthesia, see Digest p.101 and Jack Dutton’s article on p.106. For more on the work of Professor Charles Spence and the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, see https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/down-culinary-rabbit-hole

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INPA Italian Network of PsychologistsÂ’ Associations

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Psychology4Graduates 2014 Ella Rhodes went to hear about career opportunities at this BPS event in London More than 600 psychology graduates and students gathered at Kensington Town Hall in December to hear from academics and psychologists about the massive range of career options available to them. The event included several presentations and panel discussions from people who have pursued varied careers, from forensic psychology to becoming psychological well-being practitioners.

First to give a presentation on her career path was Dr Estelle Moore, a forensic psychologist who works at Broadmoor Hospital. She said that enthusiasm was enormously important and gave a list of people who had inspired her along her career path, including Peter Fonagy, Claudia Herbert and James Blair. Moore also said that working alongside psychiatrists, both at Broadmoor and the Bethlem Royal, had taught her many important things.

She also highlighted several of the points that help in becoming a forensic psychologist: ‘Psychology in forensic terms will always be about sharing and collaborating with nurse therapists and occupational therapy teams. It helps if you understand people over a long period of time, understand their psychosocial environment. You should also be challenging stigma all the time and including people in their own recovery.’

Counselling psychologist Kevin Wright was next to speak about his career.

Dr Wright said he started off as a social worker and as a result became interested in family therapy. After completing a master’s in psychotherapy, he began his career working for businesses in London and now works screening patients who are waiting for psychological therapy as well as in private practice. Ingrid Collins, an educational psychologist who now has her own private practice, said she first trained as a teacher but went on to have an extensive career in educational psychology, Collins concluded: ‘Educational psychology is an area of the profession you can always find something

new, intriguing and relevant to learn about.’

Dr Carolyn Mair was next to speak briefly about her fascinating career path, which now sees her leading the only course in the world that looks into the role of psychology in fashion (see our ‘Big Picture’, September 2013). Mair’s first role was as a graphic designer and she came to psychology in her late 30s, completing a degree in psychology and computing at Bournemouth and later an MSc at Portsmouth. Her new course at the London School of Fashion looks at how

psychology impacts the fashion industry and the people who buy into the industry.

Moira Lafferty, University of Chester, was the last speaker before lunch, telling the gathered audience about her work as a sports psychologist. Dr Lafferty gave the graduates some sound advice: ‘If you don’t know what you want to do, keep your options open. One of the best bits of advice I was given was to never turn an opportunity down. If you’re engaging in psychology and have a go, you never have to do that thing again but you’ll learn from it.’

Following the lunch break clinical psychologist Dr Abigael San gave a presentation about the role of clinical psychologists and her own career. She said that before graduation from her

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psychology degree she had already gained much experience in a clinical setting, which would be a useful thing for the gathered students and graduates to consider. Dr David Dean, a neuropsychologist, then explained his work with patients who have suffered brain injury or stroke. He said: ‘I can’t imagine how devastating it must be to have a head injury, psychology is vital in helping people to rebuild their lives using some therapies such as mindfulness and CBT.’ Dean said he started off with a psychology degree and had two years’ work experience working with older adults and in a psychiatric day unit then underwent his clinical psychology training.

Health and education psychologist Dr Sheena Ashford said after studying psychology and economics at university she realised both had very different models of human behaviour and that the economics view of humans was too simplistic. She said her interest in well-being and education drew her initially into research for 10 years, then into educational psychology. Philip Wilson, an occupational psychologist working for the Civil Service, explained that much of occupational psychology work is around development and assessment using psychometric tests. He said that when compared with educational or clinical psychology, occupational psychology could offer a slightly more varied career path.

Finally Tafara Kunorubwe spoke about his role as a psychological wellbeing practitioner (PWP), providing lowintensity interventions based on CBT as part of the government’s IAPT programme. Kunorubwe began his career with an interest in mental health nursing and substance misuse. He said: ‘As a PWP you can still have specialist interests, such as using CBT for insomnia or CBT for carers of people with dementia.’ He also said there was a lot of further training and development available for people working as PWPs.

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No torture without psychologists?

Two psychologists played a central role in the brutal torture of people captured after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, holding a multimillion dollar contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. Details emerged in December in the 500-page Senate Intelligence Committee report into the use of so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques on detainees.

In the report, the psychologists are referred to by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, but multiple media outlets have identified them as Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

As well as developing techniques for interrogations, the pair were also involved with carrying them out, using techniques including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and painful stress positions.

In 2005 Mitchell and Jessen formed a company, Mitchell and Jessen Associates, for the sole purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly after, the agency outsourced almost all aspects of the programme. In 2006, the report said, the value of the CIA’s base contract with this company was more than $180 million, and the psychologists received $81 million prior to the contract’s end in 2009.

Helplessly ineffective It is also revealed in the report that neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any particular knowledge of al-Qa’ida and counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic specialism. Despite this, Mitchell and Jessen ‘carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the

effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees held in foreign government custody’.

Their interrogation techniques were based on Martin Seligman’s theory of learned helplessness. Seligman is reportedly ‘grieved and horrified’ that his work was cited to justify the abusive interrogations. ‘My impression is that they misread the theory,’ said Dr Charles A. Morgan III, a psychiatrist at the University of New Haven who has met Mitchell and Jessen. Speaking to the New York Times, he added: ‘They’re not really scientists.’

Psychologist Dr Vaughan Bell, writing on the Mind Hacks blog, said the use of the theory in developing interrogation techniques was inherently flawed: ‘Mitchell and Jessen wanted to induce this [learned helplessness] state in detainees, thinking that it would make them more likely to co-operate. This, to be frank, is just bizarre. The theory predicts the opposite would happen and this is, rather grimly, exactly what occurred.’ Detainee Abu Zubaydah, the report notes, became ‘completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth’ after repeated waterboarding. Ramzi bin alShibh started to exhibit ‘visions, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm’.

Laurence Alison, Director of the Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology at the University of Liverpool, told The Conversation that the use of building rapport, non-judgemental acceptance and empathy were far more useful in gleaning intelligence in interrogations. Speaking of his own research, he added: ‘Interrogators who resisted the (perhaps natural) urge to

SENATE REPORT AND FURTHER READING Senate Intelligence Committee report tinyurl.com/p2nkf98 British Psychological Society statement tinyurl.com/lfmtwgv American Psychological Association statement tinyurl.com/lue6wbk New York Times coverage tinyurl.com/pu4whbf tinyurl.com/lm4xypt NBC News

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tinyurl.com/oucdghm Seligman comments tinyurl.com/lm4xypt Mind Hacks tinyurl.com/pz4c443 The Conversation tinyurl.com/mgbnnrc Martin Robbins in The Guardian tinyurl.com/oy2ebe4 Steven Reisner in Slate tinyurl.com/mphczpf A history of war and

psychology tinyurl.com/mxfthh2 That CIA methods were pointless is no shock tinyurl.com/md283xm More on learned helplessness tinyurl.com/owohphr James Mitchell responds tinyurl.com/popjlkx tinyurl.com/qghj9fx tinyurl.com/k8rf57k tinyurl.com/n2t7ves

try and change or challenge the detainee’s behaviours and beliefs engaged more with their suspects and got more information from them.’

The committee’s report concludes that the torture used did not extract any lifesaving intelligence. In many cases, it says, detainees gave no information or fabricated information. In another galling revelation the report states that CIA officers repeatedly raised concerns over the effectiveness of the methods being used.

In order to justify the torture, the CIA often gave out misleading information, citing counterterrorism success as justification for the use of torture. However, in its review the committee found that in some cases there was no relationship between the success of a counterterrorism operation and information gained from torture.

In The Guardian Martin Robbins called for the psychologists involved to be ‘banished from the scientific community’.

He outlined the history of torture and why, in popular culture, a belief that torture works is often perpetuated. He wrote: ‘Only 22% of people in a YouGov poll last April were completely opposed to the use of torture, and support generally trended upwards through the Bush years and beyond. The philosophical argument against torture was lost sometime in the Old Testament, and there’s no sign of things turning around any time soon.’

Indeed, a recent study covered by our Research Digest blog (see tinyurl.com/pcee3gz) suggested that people often endorse the use of torture on the basis of retribution, rather than as a cool utilitarian judgement aimed at extracting information.

Sickening and morally reprehensible The American Psychological Association released a statement in response to the report, referring to the torture techniques used by the CIA as ‘sickening and morally reprehensible’. It also pointed out that neither Mitchell nor Jessen were members of the APA, and confirmed it is looking into allegations made by New York Times reporter and author James Risen that the APA colluded with the Bush administration to support enhanced interrogation techniques.

This is a central point for critics of the APA: writing for Slate, psychologist Steven Reisner detailed why he believed ‘there would have been no torture without the

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news

FUNDING NEWS The Economic and Social Research Council provides studentships for 600 new postgraduate students every year who are studying at one of 21 Doctoral Training Centres across the country.

Applicants must have qualifications or experience equivalent to a first or upper second class degree from a UK academic research organisation. For the full award you should have been ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK for the previous three years; for the fees only award you would have been ‘ordinarily resident’ in an EU member state, also for three years. Applications should be made directly to the DTC at which you wish to study.

I tinyurl.com/muzkrkt

‘…major national organizations of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses determined that their ethical obligations prohibited their members from participating in these interrogations’

proponents for the involvement of psychologists in interrogations are trying to limit the damage done to the profession by emphasising the role that these two psychologists played – but it wasn’t just two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen were like patient zero of a virus that infected the entire interrogation system.’

The Experimental Psychology Society invites applications for its Grindley Grants for Conference Attendance.

Grants are for a maximum of £500 and finance travel to any academic conference relevant to the applicant’s work that falls within the domain of EPS interests. Preference will be given to attendance at meetings of the EPS. Applicants should be registered for a postgraduate research degree or postdoctoral workers who are within two years of having received their doctorate.

Applications from non-EPS members must be sponsored by a member.

I tinyurl.com/kpxs3qw

Response The report has drawn responses from James Mitchell himself, who told Reuters the report was ‘a bunch of hooey’ and a ‘partisan pile of bull----’, adding: ‘If they were truly interested in getting the truth out, they would release me from [the nondisclosure agreement].’ ‘I’m in a box – I’m caught in some Kafka novel,’ he told another source. Mitchell also told the Associated Press: ‘What I would love the American people to know is that the way the Senate Democrats on that committee described the credentials and background of the two psychologists is just factually, demonstrably incorrect.’ He added: ‘It’s a lot more humane, even if you are going to subject them to harsh techniques, to question them while they are still alive, than it is to kill them and their children and their neighbours with a drone.’

The British Psychological Society also released a statement, noting the Senate’s conclusion that the interrogation methods used were ‘excessive and brutal’. The Society took the opportunity to ‘condemn and repudiate these practices; to reiterate our long-standing and principled stance in these matters; to repeat the overriding ethical responsibility of all psychologists and other healthcare professionals to protect and defend fundamental human rights; and furthermore to note the extensive psychological research concluding that torture and coercive interrogation is ineffective, especially in comparison to rapport-based approaches’. ER

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Leverhulme Trust invites applications for its Early Career Fellowships. The scheme enables early-career researchers to undertake a significant piece of work. Applicants must have a track record of research, but should not have held an established academic appointment. Fellowships are normally tenable for three years on a full-time basis and will cover fellows’ total salary up to a maximum of £24,000 per year. Fellowships can be held at universities or other institutions of higher education in the UK. The closing date for applications is 5 March 2015.

I tinyurl.com/qg7snv3

info

psychologists’. According to Reisner, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the presence of psychologists and physicians, monitoring the state and condition of the prisoner being tortured, afforded protection for the CIA leadership and the Bush administration from liability and potential prosecution for the torture. Later, the OLC applied the same rules to the Defense Department’s ‘enhanced interrogation program’. But Reisner argues that ‘for psychologists to be able to do the Bush administration’s bidding and oversee the torture of detainees, they required not only indemnification for legal liability (Mitchell and Jessen were promised a $5 million legal defense fund by the CIA), but they also required indemnification from another source’. He continues: ‘…major national organizations of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses determined that their ethical obligations prohibited their members from participating in these interrogations, so what was the American Psychological Association doing?’

Reisner answers his own question in the form of allegations made in James Risen’s book Pay Any Price, that ‘senior staff members of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychologists, colluded with national security psychologists from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House to adapt APA ethics policy to suit the needs of the psychologist-interrogators’.

Others argue that psychologists were so central to the torture that the buck can’t stop with Mitchell and Jessen. Dan Aalbers, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Sierra Nevada College, told us: ‘The very presence of a psychologist at black site meant that any interrogation was ipso facto not torture.

Every psychologist at GITMO and the black sites was therefore complicit in acts of torture – even those who only did good.

And we don’t know of any psychologist who only did good. This is important because

For BPS awards and grant schemes, see www.bps.org.uk/awards&grants Funding bodies should e-mail news to Emma Smith on emma.smith@bps.org.uk for possible inclusion

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BIG PICTURE

Psychologist Colin Ellard is applying traditional and technological approaches to the study of urban spaces and those who inhabit them.

‘If we want to know how to make a better city, the place to start is at ground level, using observation and measurement, and applying what is known of the human sciences to those measurements to build a psychologically grounded view of the relationship between the physical design of a city and what happens there.’ So says experimental psychologist Colin Ellard (University of Waterloo, Canada). Ellard told The Guardian Cities website (see tinyurl.com/ellardcity) how he is going beyond simple observations of overt behaviour, to look inside the bodies and minds of city dwellers.

‘We can measure their gaze, their beating hearts, the state of their autonomic nervous systems as they react to arousing and stressful events, their brainwaves,’ Ellard says. ‘With apps on our phones, we can record our location and movements, but also our moods, interests, and our patterns of thought.’

But a truly scientific approach to the city is a challenge. We can't tear down and rearrange city blocks to compare alternative urban realities. So in the research laboratory for immersive virtual environments (Relive) at the University of Waterloo, Ellard and his team have turned to simulation methods to help build such a science. Participants are placed into highly immersive

simulations of city spaces, using sophisticated head-mounted displays, precise motion tracking, and a raft of sensors. ‘One of our environments is based on Shibuya, a hectic and seemingly chaotic part of Tokyo with its famous scramble crossing’, Ellard says. ‘We have found that journeys through systematic spaces are stereotyped and efficient and accompanied by low levels of arousal and attention; journeys through more chaotic spaces are longer, filled with more hesitations, arousal and effortful attention. Such findings give us a set of powerful methods by which to predict the psychological effects of an urban design before anything is built.’

Sometimes, though, there is no substitute for experimentation at street level. But what excites Ellard is the opportunity to then take those ‘realworld’ findings back into the simulations to pinpoint exactly what aspect of the environment is having the effect. He concludes: ‘As we move into an exciting new era of city design in which engaged citizens have never been more interested in how to make cities better, and in which they can be provided with good tools to contribute to the efforts to do so, this marriage of simulations and real-world observations leaves us poised to move into high gear.’

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Inside the heart and mind of a city

DIGEST

Biological explanations lead to less empathy for patients The idea that mental illness is related to brain abnormalities or other biological factors is popular among some patients; they say it demystifies their experiences and lends legitimacy to their symptoms. However, studies show that biological explanations can increase mental health stigma, encouraging the public perception that people with mental illness are essentially different, and that their problems are permanent. Now Matthew Lebowitz and Woo-young Ahn have published new evidence that suggests biological explanations of mental illness reduce the empathy that mental health professionals feel towards patients.

Over two hundred psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers were presented with vignettes of patients with conditions such as social phobia, depression or schizophrenia. Crucially, some of these vignettes were accompanied by purely biological explanations focused on factors like genes and brain chemistry, while other vignettes were accompanied by psychosocial explanations, such as a history of bullying or bereavement. Next, the mental health professionals reported their feelings by scoring how far a range of adjectives – such as ‘sympathetic’, ‘troubled’ and ‘warm’ – fitted their current state.

Vignettes accompanied by biological explanation provoked lower feelings of empathy from the clinicians, and this was true regardless of their specific profession. Both biological and psychosocial explanations triggered similar levels of distress, so the reduced empathy associated with biological explanation was not simply due to psychosocial explanations being more upsetting. The mental health professionals rated the biological explanations less clinically useful; biological explanation also prompted them to have less faith in psychotherapy and more confidence in drug treatments.

Similar results were found in a follow-up study in which clinicians and social workers were presented with vignettes and explanations that reflected a combination of psychosocial and biological factors, but with one approach more dominant than the other. The idea was that this would better reflect real life. In this In Proceedings of the National Academy of case, explanations dominated by biological factors Sciences prompted lower empathy from clinicians.

Lebowitz and Ahn suggest biological explanations provoke reduced empathy because they have a dehumanising effect (implying patients are ‘systems of interacting mechanisms’) and give the impression that problems are permanent. With biological approaches to mental illness gaining prominence in psychology and psychiatry these are potentially worrying results. A silver lining is that both medically trained and non-medical clinicians and social workers in the study saw biological explanations as less clinically useful than psychosocial explanations.

A weakness of the research is the lack of a baseline no-explanation control condition – this means we can’t know for sure if psychosocial explanations increased empathy or if biological explanations reduced it. Also, as the researchers admitted, the vignettes and explanations were greatly simplified. Nonetheless, the findings may still give reason for concern. Lebowitz and Ahn suggest reductions in empathy may be avoided if clinicians understand that ‘even when biology plays an important etiological role, it is constantly interacting with other factors, and biological “abnormalities” do not create strict distinctions between members of society with and without mental disorders.’ CJ

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One in ten student research participants don’t make an effort In The Clinical Neuropsychologist It’s near the end of your university semester, you’re tired and now you’ve got to sit through 90 minutes of monotonous psychology tests to fulfil the requirements for your course. This is a familiar situation for psychology undergraduates, many of whom form the sample pools for thousands of psychology studies.

Concerns have been raised before that psychology findings are being skewed by the (lack of) effort students put into their performance as research participants. Last year, for example, researchers found that students who volunteer near the end of term perform worse on psychology tests than those who volunteer earlier.

Now Jonathan DeRight and Randall Jorgensen at Syracuse University have investigated student effort in 90 minutes of computerised neuropsychology tests designed to measure attention, memory, verbal ability and more. The session, which took place either during a morning or afternoon late in the

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After this training regime, people saw letters of the alphabet as being alive with colour In Scientific Reports

spring semester, involved the students taking the same broad battery of tests twice, with a short gap in between. The students received course credits for their time.

To test whether the students were making a proper effort, the researchers embedded several measures – for example, performing worse than chance on a multiple-choice style verbal memory challenge was taken as a sign of low effort; so was performing more slowly on an easier version of a mental control task than on the more difficult version.

Among the 77 healthy student participants who took part (average age 19; 36 women), the researchers identified 12 per cent who failed at least one of the embedded measures of effort during the first battery of neuropsychology tests; 11 per cent also failed one or more measures during the second battery. The vast majority of those who showed low effort had participated in the morning. In fact, focusing only on the morning participants, one in four displayed low effort.

Unsurprisingly, low effort also went hand in hand with poorer performance on the neuropsychology tests, especially one of the longest and most dull cognitive tests

(the ‘continuous performance task’), and especially during the second battery. A consistent exception was a particularly complex version of a test of mental self-control (the Stroop task) – perhaps because the challenge of the task provoked more concentration, even from students who were mostly not trying hard.

The estimate from this study of the fraction of student research participants not making an effort are consistent with some prior studies, but not others (the latter research found less evidence of poor effort).

Clearly more research is needed. DeRight and Jorgensen concluded that ‘healthy nonclinical samples cannot necessarily be assumed to have put forth adequate effort or valid responding’. They added: ‘Assessing for effort in this population is imperative, especially when the study is designed to provide meaningful results to be used in clinical practice.’ This last, important point is a reference to the fact that results from students are often used to establish estimates of ‘normal’ performance on neuropsychology tests, for comparison when investigating patients with brain damage or other problems. CJ

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A training regime at the University of Sussex has successfully conditioned 14 people with no prior experience of synaesthesia – crossing of the senses (see also p.95 and p.106) – to experience coloured phenomena when seeing letters.

The regime took place over nine weeks, a half-hour session every workday together with extra homework. Again and again, the trainees were encouraged to treat the letter ‘r’ as red, or ‘e’ as green, with a similar process repeated on 13 letters in all. This was tested every session using tasks such as viewing a sequence of letters and selecting all the associated colours, or completing a timed reading task where letters were omitted and replaced with squares of the relevant colours (see picture right).

Tasks became progressively harder, and the group were financially incentivised to outperform their previous scores. No previous intervention has been as extensive as this one, as Daniel Bor and colleagues were seeking to go beyond learned colour-letter associations to try and produce a genuine subjective experience of synesthesia.

After the training, the group became better at those ‘Stroop’ test trials where the trained colour of a presented letter matched the ink colour it was written in, and the task was to name the ink colour as fast as possible. This suggests that the training had gone deep enough to help them make rapid, nonreflective decisions.

The majority of participants also reported gaining a subjective experience of synaesthesia. By their own accounts, nine definitely experienced a coloured effect when seeing trained letters, which was mostly characterised as seeing the colour ‘in front of my mind’s eye’ (only two participants definitely didn’t have this experience). Naturally occurring synaesthetic effects

can be stronger than this, with colours seen floating on the surface of the letter or number, but the reported experiences are nonetheless impressive.

In addition, participants got smarter, scoring an equivalent of 12 IQ points higher on a standard intelligence test administered pre- and posttraining. We should make no firm conclusions from this, as the causal mechanism may be other aspects of the training process not directly related to synesthesia, such as the heavy load on working memory. Even so, achieving a 12-point increase

in a normal- to high-functioning group is not something routinely delivered by psychology interventions.

Three months later, did the synaesthesia stick? Not so much. The effect on the Stroop task was maintained, suggesting learned associations were going strong, but participants reported a weakening or total dissipation of the coloured experience itself.

Nevertheless, this work questions whether synaesthesia is limited to a rare and genetically distinct group, and shows how learning and experience are likely to play an important part too. We already know that young synaesthetes experience a strengthening of their colour linkings during early school years. Perhaps early pairings – seen on coloured alphabet jigsaws or fridge magnets – provide the associations that some people develop into an ever-present feature of their world. AF

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A child’s popularity is related to where the teacher seats them in the classroom In the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Teacher training doesn’t usually include a module on how to arrange the seating of pupils.

Perhaps it should – a new study by psychologists finds that where children are placed in the classroom is associated with how well-liked they are by their classmates.

Yvonne van den Berg and Antonius Cillessen studied 34 classrooms at 27 elementary schools in the Netherlands. The 336 participating pupils had an average age of 11, and 47 per cent of them were boys. In all classrooms, it was the school policy that the teachers dictated who sat where; seating arrangements were in groups or rows, or a mixture. Every pupil was asked to say how much they liked each of their classmates, and to rate their classmates’ popularity. They gave these ratings twice: four to six weeks

into the first semester (August/September time), and then again at the beginning of the school’s second semester during the following spring.

A key finding was that children who were seated in the first semester near the boundaries of their classroom tended to be less liked by their peers at that time, and also six months later, as compared with children sitting nearer the centre of the class. Another related result was that children tended to rate those located nearer to them as more likeable and more popular (this helps explain the first result – children seated centrally tend to have more classmates closer to them). Meanwhile, children who were only (re)positioned at the boundaries of the class in the second semester did not receive lower likeability ratings at that

time, presumably because their reputation had already been established by then.

Why should seating position have these associations with children’s perceptions of their peers? The researchers think two psychological mechanisms are pertinent. Social psychology research on race relations and prejudice finds that the more we interact with other people, the more positive our views of them tend to be. School pupils naturally interact and socialise more with the children located near to them, and so this interaction could encourage more positive perceptions.

There is also a psychological phenomenon known as the ‘mere exposure effect’, which describes how familiarity with something or someone breeds more positive feelings towards them.

Van den Berg and Cillessen also conducted a second study with 158 more schoolchildren, in which they asked them to rate each other’s popularity, and also to say where they would position themselves and their classmates if they could choose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, children said they’d like to sit nearer to their peers who were more liked and more popular. The researchers said this provided an insight into what’s known as the ‘cycle of popularity’ – wellliked and popular children typically attract more social interactions with others, this then reinforces the popular perception that others have of them via the mechanisms mentioned earlier.

There are plenty of unknowns in this research.

For example, we don’t know the reasoning behind the teachers’

Is being a worrier a sign of intelligence?

In Personality and Individual Differences We usually see worry as a bad thing. It feels unpleasant, like a snake coiling in the pit of your stomach. And worriers are often considered weak links in a team – negative influences who lack confidence. But of course, anxiety has a useful function. It’s about anticipating and preparing for threats, and learning from past mistakes.

Increasingly, psychologists are recognising the strengths of anxious people. For example, there’s research showing that people more prone to anxiety are quicker to detect threats and better at lie detection. Now Alexander Penney and his colleagues have conducted a survey of over 100 students and they report that a tendency to worry goes hand in hand with higher intelligence.

Participants completed various measures, including one to distinguish trait anxiety from in-the-moment state anxiety. The key finding was that after controlling for the influence of test anxiety and current mood, the students who reported a general habit of worrying more (e.g. they agreed with statements like ‘I am always worrying The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett and contributor Dr Alex Fradera. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

Subscribe to the fortnightly e-mail, friend, follow and more via www.bps.org.uk/digest

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about something’) and/or ruminating more (e.g. they said they tended to think about their sadness, or think ‘What am doing to deserve this?’) also tended to score higher on the test of verbal intelligence, taken from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

To take one specific statistical example, verbal intelligence correlated positively with worry proneness with a statistically significant value of 0.19 (after controlling for test anxiety and mood).

Together with the measures of rumination, mood and test anxiety, verbal intelligence explained an estimated 46 per cent of the variance in worry.

Another result from the survey, not so promising for worriers, was that a tendency to dwell on past social events was negatively correlated with non-verbal intelligence (that is, those students who dwelt more on past events scored lower on non-verbal IQ).

Seeking to explain these two different and seemingly contradictory correlations, the researchers surmised that: ‘[M]ore verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry. Individuals with high non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters.’

Of course we must be careful not to over-interpret these preliminary results – it was a small, non-clinical sample after all, so it’s not clear how the findings would generalise to people with more extreme anxiety. However it’s notable that a small 2012 study found a correlation between worry and intelligence in a sample diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. Penney and his colleagues concluded that ‘a worrying and ruminating mind is a more verbally intelligent mind; a socially ruminative mind, however, might be less able to process non-verbal information’. CJ

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DIGEST DIGESTED decisions of where they chose to place their pupils in their class.

Perhaps they placed more popular pupils more centrally?

In fact, there are reasons to think this unlikely – past research has found teacher and pupil ratings of pupils’ social relationships are only weakly related.

Despite the unknowns, the van den Berg and Cillessen said their results provided evidence for what’s been termed the ‘invisible hand of the teacher’ – the understudied ways that teacher decisions influence the

ecology of the classroom.

‘Classroom seating arrangements may be hugely influential in children’s exposure to and interactions with other peers and, thus, in determining children’s social relationships with one another,’ the researchers concluded. They also highlighted that this new research builds on another recent study they conducted, which found that placing children closer to each other in the classroom improved pupils’ liking of each other and reduced problem behaviours in class. CJ

LINK FEAST Why We Love the Pain of Spicy Food The fascinating psychology of why humans enjoy painfully spicy food.

‘For some reason apparently unrelated to survival, humans condition themselves to make an aversion gratifying,’ writes John McQuaid. tinyurl.com/mk3r35m Can Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Really Change Our Brains?

Claudia Hammond takes readers on an interactive tour of CBT, including research that found brain changes associated with the therapy. tinyurl.com/qj2ox5q All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes Over at the Brain Watch blog, Digest editor Christian Jarrett examines the mistaken idea that people learn better when they are taught via their preferred style. tinyurl.com/k47weeb 9 Things I Wish People Understood About Anxiety Kady Morrison, writing at Vox, was diagnosed with anxiety disorder five years ago. tinyurl.com/nsx6rwz Journalists’ Guide to fMRI Papers What does fMRI really measure, plus many more questions answered by cognitive neuroscientist Jon Simons and friends. tinyurl.com/k7he237 Serial: Your Memory Can Play Tricks On You – Here’s How ‘... at times we cannot even trust our own memory, let alone that of others,’ writes Catherine Loveday at The Conversation. tinyurl.com/lbyhnm7

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Full reports are available at www.bps.org.uk/digest When bosses break the rules, it’s not only their own reputation that suffers. Presented with hypothetical scenarios, participants assumed bad bosses’ companies were dishonest, and that their junior staff were too. The effect also applied in science and medical contexts. Social Psychological and Personality Science In-depth interviews with 10 British first-time fathers suggested that feelings of separation and helplessness are common. The men said that with their biased focus on the mother and pregnancy, antenatal classes were fuelling these feelings. The researchers called for classes to be tailored towards fathers’ needs.

Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology A lost ability to enjoy pleasures in life – anhedonia – may be an important, previously unrecognised part of the withdrawal process after stopping smoking. Among over a thousand people on a cessation programme, those who experienced more quitting-related anhedonia were more likely to relapse. Journal of Abnormal Psychology Drawing key concepts alongside more passive studying may help people better learn new scientific knowledge. Looking at relevant pictures drawn by someone else did not have the same benefit.

Contemporary Educational Psychology There are fears that playing violent video games increases bad behaviour in the real world. However a new study found that such games can increase players’ real-world feelings of guilt and concerns about fairness, thus showing the potential of the medium as a form of civic development.

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking Rapport-building interrogation is more effective than torture. That’s according to interviews with 34 interrogators and 30 international detainees most of whom had been held on suspicion of terrorism.

Confessions were four times more likely when interrogators struck a neutral and respectful stance, according to the participants’ recollections. Applied Cognitive Psychology Men and women are affected differently by superstitious beliefs.

Female students suffered a drop in confidence when allocated an unlucky seat. Their male peers weren’t bothered by unlucky seats, but they enjoyed a confidence boost when given a lucky seat. Journal of Economic Psychology

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to explain why he was experiencing those feelings.

Although there were other instances of synaesthesia recorded later in the 19th century, academic interest waned with the rise of behaviourism in the 1930s. The theory of behaviourism postulates that all behaviour is explained by conditioning or Jack Dutton meets those with the condition and the researchers who study them. experiences in one’s immediate Might it have benefits, and could it even be taught? environment. Researchers began to focus more on external influences, as it was widely assumed that internal feelings and thoughts were not measurable.

Synaesthesia wasn’t more widely and Lady Gaga all claim to have it. recognised as a condition until the 1980s. s a boy growing up in London, Authors and artists including Nabokov American neurologist Richard E. Cytowic James Wannerton would travel and Van Gogh are also said to have attended a dinner party where he saw by the underground to school. experienced forms of synaesthesia. someone cooking a chicken sauce. The He could taste his way along the route.

But it’s not just famous musicians and chef tasted the sauce and said that it ‘Piccadilly Circus tasted of the peanuts artists who experience synaesthesia. One tasted ‘wrong’ and that it ‘needed more and goo you get inside a Picnic bar. example is JB, a teenager from New York points’ on it. Cytowic questioned the chef Bond Street tasted of a tangy aerosol spray. who has synaesthesia and eidetic memory. and found out that the chef experienced I liked Tottenham Court Road; it tasted of When JB was three years of age, he was shapes on his hand whenever he tasted breakfast. The word “Tottenham” tasted able to recall the script of the movie Shrek food. Cytowic was intrigued by this, and of sausage, the “Court” tasted of egg and word for word. JB’s mother started researching the “Road” tasted of toast,’ he tells me. tells me she didn’t realise he the phenomenon James experiences a rare type of had synaesthesia until he we now know as synaesthesia, a condition in which “I’d listen to music and reported seeing numbers in synaesthesia. sensory input from one cognitive stream be hypnotised by the blue. Is JB’s profound At about the gives rise to sensory input from another colours I’d see” memory merely incidental, same time in the unstimulated cognitive stream (Cytowic, or is it potentially linked to UK, psychologist 1989). The word comes from the Greek his synaesthesia? And, if that Professor Simon for ‘joint sensation’ – as opposed to the is the case, could having Baron-Cohen came more familiar term anaesthesia, which is decent memory be one of the advantages across an interview of a painter called Greek for ‘no sensation’. Synaesthesia is of the condition? Are there other benefits Elizabeth Pulford. Pulford (EP) said she involuntary, the different associations and to having synaesthesia? Before answering experienced words and music in colour senses generally remain stable over time, these questions, we must offer some and asked whether anyone was interested and associations are often unique to the context into how this fascinating in studying her. Baron-Cohen got in individual. It is thought to affect at least phenomenon was first recognised as a touch and went on to write several papers 4.4 per cent of the general population psychological condition. on EP (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1987), (Simner et al., 2006). identifying a synaesthesia that was both There are over 60 known types of genuine and stable. In 1995 Baron-Cohen synaesthesia. James’s lexical-gustatory and his colleagues then proved that form leads words to be experienced as A brief history synaesthesia was a real neurological strong tastes. One of the most common The first scientific reports on synaesthesia condition using fMRI scans on six types is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, emerged in 1812 (Jewanski et al., 2009). synaesthetes and six non-synaesthetes which is when letters and numbers are German physician Georg Sachs described (controls). The scans showed brain tinged with colour. Letters can represent his own feelings of synaesthesia in a activity in the part of the brain associated different tones of colour, as can whole dissertation on his and his sister’s albinism. with vision when sound occurred, even words. Chromaesthesia is another Two pages of the thesis described some of when the participants were blindfolded. common form, and involves the his feelings of synaesthesia; he claimed to This only occurred in the brains of the association of sound with colour – experience coloured words, sequences and synaesthetes, and not the controls musicians Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige music. Regrettably, Sachs did not attempt

The surprising world of synaesthesia

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Colizoli, O., Murre, J.M.J. & Rouw, R. (2014). Training synesthetic lettercolor associations by reading in color.

Journal of Visualized Experiments, 84, e50893. doi:10.3791/50893 Cytowic, R.E. (1989). Synaesthesia: A union

of the senses. Berlin: Springer.

Cytowic R.E., Eagleman D.M. & Nabokov D. (2009). Wednesday is indigo blue: Discovering the brain of synesthesia.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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documented case of synaesthesia, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812'.

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences,18(3), 293–303 Kay, C.L., Carmichael, D.A., Ruffell, H.E. & Simner, J. (2014). Colour fluctuations in grapheme-colour synaesthesia: The effect of clinical and non-clinical mood changes.

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doi:10.1111/bjop.12102 Paulesu, E., Harrison, J.E., Baron-Cohen, S. et al. (1995). The physiology of coloured hearing: A PET activation study of colour-word synaesthesia.

Brain, 118, 661–676, Rothen, N. & Meier, B. (2014). Acquiring synaesthesia: Insights from training studies. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 109.

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(Paulesu et al., 1995). These findings encouraged other members of the scientific community, particularly neuroscientists, to focus their research on synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia and touch As fascinating a condition as it is, synaesthesia can be a hindrance to the individual.

Carolyn Hart, who works as a massage therapist at Twitter’s main headquarters in San Francisco, has a rare type known as mirror-touch synaesthesia. Someone with mirror-touch synaesthesia involuntarily feels the same sensation another person feels.

Carolyn tells me about her experiences: ‘My earliest memory of it was when I was James Wannerton can taste his way along the London Underground about three years old. We had a dog that broke her leg in there was no visible bleeding, but front of me. I remember that at the the 20-year history of the business. Her when she saw that the man’s leg was at moment I saw that fracture I felt pain. synaesthesia has allowed her to perceive an impossible angle, it triggered her It’s been with me as long as I remember.’ sense in ways many of her peers cannot. synaesthesia. She experienced a shooting, Carolyn’s pain is experienced It also helps her memorise her electrical pain, from the back of her hips instantaneously, before she has time to appointments with clients. ‘In my head, all the way down to the front of her legs think. It doesn’t matter how she feels I can pull up my entire calendar for and through the back of her arms. about the person or animal in pain – months into the future. I don’t need to Although Carolyn’s synaesthesia can she has to see the image or object before write down my appointments. They are sometimes be a problem, it also can be of she feels a tactile sense. ‘Sometimes, when colour-coded in three-dimensional space,’ great help – especially with her job. ‘When I am engrossed in a movie or watching an she says. Although synaesthesia can make I touch people, I tend to feel it in my own athletic event, I will involuntarily move some mundane tasks difficult, what if we body where I’m working on them. It’s very my body in ways I see the people on the were to focus on the potential benefits pleasant; it’s almost like I’m massaging screen moving. I don’t watch a lot of and use them to enhance day-to-day life? myself. It’s not quite as intense as my sense action movies because they are too of pain,’ she says. ‘My fatigue while I’m synaesthetically stimulating for me. Often working gets mitigated by the fact I feel I’ll really tense my muscles because I feel Synaesthesia and memory really good physically when I’m massaging. like I’m running along with the actor who In the same way as JB’s, Carolyn’s There’s a pleasurable component to my is running from the bad guy.’ remarkable memory is unlikely to be work that is beyond simple job Carolyn tells me she saw an article incidental. One of the leading experts in satisfaction. I find my work interesting; in Time magazine recently about the synaesthesia and memory is Dr Nicolas I enjoy the personal interaction.’ downing of the MH17 plane. ‘There Rothen, who is based at the University Carolyn’s mirror-touch synaesthesia was an image of a person strapped to an of Sussex (where he has worked with allows her to easily palpate her patient’s airline seat in the middle of a wheat field Professor Jamie Ward, who wrote a ‘State injuries and knots. She recently left a job where the body landed. The body was of the art’ piece on synaesthesia for this she was at for eight years where she was intact and there was no bleeding, cut, publication in 2003: see the most requested massage therapist in or rupture’. At first, Hart didn’t react, as tinyurl.com/jamieward). Rothen has written papers on a wide range of different topics around synaesthesia, including how it is linked to artistry and to higher cognitive functions.

(2006). Synaesthesia: The Ward, J., Thompson-Lake, D., Ely, R. & In his review paper, Rothen has had prevalence of atypical cross-modal Kaminski, F. (2008). Synaesthesia, to study the parts of the brain associated experiences. Perception, 35(8), creativity and art: What is the link? with vision. The ‘Two Streams’ hypothesis 1024–1033.

British Journal of Psychology, 99, proposes that the visual system is made Stroop, J.R. (1935). Studies of 127–141. interference in serial verbal Witthoft N. & Winawer J. (2013). up of the dorsal pathway and the ventral reactions. Journal of Experimental Learning, memory, and synesthesia. pathway. The dorsal pathway is involved Psychology, 18, 643–662.

Psychological Science, 24, 258–265. in guidance, actions and where objects Ward, J. (2013). State of the art: are in space while the ventral stream is Synaesthesia. The Psychologist, associated with object recognition 16(4), 196–199.

(Goodale & Milner, 1992).

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Nicolas discusses some of the trends he has found in his experiments. ‘As a group, synaesthetes tend to perform better on memory tasks than nonsynaesthetes. More so on tasks involving colour, abstract patterns or words, but not as much on things like spatial location,’ he says. ‘For example, in graphemecolour synaesthesia, there is an increased sensitivity in the ventral-visual pathway.’

That leads to a performance advantage in certain types of memory tasks. ‘That’s the reason why synaesthetes often have an advantage in tasks involving high spatial frequency information, such as words, colour and abstract patterns but not for spatial information, location and sound – those are functions that are mainly located in the dorsal path.’

enhance how well people learn to read and compose music.

Daniel has recently got into modern dance music. ‘With classical music I experience many different colours, but as house music is more repetitive, I often see one solid colour appear throughout the tracks. There’s one track I like at the moment by Koan Sound, which starts as an intense yellow and by the end of the song turns into a cascade of blue. The harp sound coming in at the end makes it a dark blue.

‘Part of my listening experience is seeing what colours the musical notes

evoke. It’s positive, as I get really into it and it’s part of my performance,’ he says.

‘When I’m composing, in my head I can imagine what colours I would see if I was to play it. Composing is months of work condensed into four minutes of playing time. While I’m writing I imagine the colours I see – and when I finally hear it I am amazed.’

Teaching synaesthesia It is clear that McBride’s synaesthetic associations help him with his music, but where do his associations come from?

In music Some of the memory benefits of synaesthesia can be transferred into creative disciplines. Daniel McBride is a second-year student at the Royal College of Music in London and experiences synaesthesia. After starting piano lessons aged 16, he learned very quickly, and within only seven months, he was performing professionally. ‘I’d never write down any of the songs I’d play. I could memorise everything from the colours and patterns I’d see when playing them,’ he says.

‘Being at college introduced me to a lot of music, some of which used nontraditional triads. Sometimes I’d listen to music and be hypnotised by the colours I’d see,’ he says. In college Daniel is often given music projects to work on – it’s the style in which he plays them that is influenced by his synaesthesia. ‘I clearly see a change in colour when I hear one note and hear it rise slowly in pitch.

Because of that, I really like listening to Middle Eastern music. That stimulates me the most.’

Studies that have looked into synaesthesia and creativity have found promising results. For example, one study took a sample of 82 synaesthetes and got them to answer creativity questionnaires and say how much time they engaged in art. There was a significant tendency for synaesthetes to spend more time engaging in creative disciplines, relative to nonsynaesthetes. Different degrees of creativity were also linked to the type of synaesthesia experienced (Ward et al.

2008). For example, people who had chromaesthesia were more likely to play musical instruments than other synaesthetes. These findings imply that if scientists are able to figure out a way to teach people chromaesthesia, it may

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Barbara Ryan mixing ‘Taste of November’ synaesthetic cocktails to accompany an installation at the Gooden Gallery, London 2010

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A study by Witthoft and Winawer (2013) may help answer this question. They tested 11 colour-grapheme synaesthetes and found they had surprisingly similar colourgrapheme pairings (graphemes are the smallest unit of a written word that has meaning). But, with synaesthesia being thought to be predominantly a hereditary condition, why was this the case? The researchers pointed to a surprising answer: the colours they saw matched those of a well-known set of Fisher-Price magnets, which 10 of the 11 participants recalled owning when they were younger. This suggested that environmental associations learnt in childhood had a strong effect on synaesthetic symptoms.

If synaesthesia is partly determined by your perceptual environment, could it be possible to teach certain aspects of the condition? In her lab at the University of East London, research fellow Dr Clare Jonas trains non-synaesthetes for a week to help them associate letters with colours.

She does this by continuously exposing a person to a letter associated with a particular colour. After training them, she gives them word lists containing achromatic (colourless) words, words with colours congruent to the colours they learned, and words with colours incongruent with the colours they learned.

Jonas often finds that the nonsynaesthetes start to behave in a way synaesthetes do – they are often more likely to remember congruent and achromatic words, but find it difficult to remember incongruent words, relative to non-synaesthetes who hadn’t been trained.

These outcomes suggest that certain aspects of synaesthesia could be taught.

Nicolas Rothen’s work also supports this theory – he reviewed all of the research in the area and found that some aspects of synaesthesia were transferrable to nonsynaesthetes (Rothen & Meier, 2014).

However, a lot of the effects depended on the intensity and duration of the training and the intrinsic motivation of the participant to take part in the experiment.

If aspects of synaesthesia can be taught, does this mean there is potential to augment memory in non-synaesthetes by teaching them synaesthesia? ‘At the moment we know that synaethesia has benefits for memory in young adults, but we don’t know whether it has a protective effect on memory as we get older,’ Jonas says. ‘Memory declining later in synaesthetes would be an obvious prediction. If that is the case, synaethesia training could be used to either protect or improve the memory of older people.’

Jonas’s method of teaching synaesthesia isn’t the only method that might work.

Olympia Colizoli, an Assistant Professor in

Brain and Cognition at the University synaesthesia and memory. ‘I actually think of Amsterdam, adopts a more passive that synaesthetic techniques could be used approach when training her nonto help with disorders like dyslexia. I think synaesthetes. She has them read books synaesthetic techniques can be used as with repeating differently coloured letters a learning aid in some cases. A friend of to prime them into future synaesthetic mine is dyslexic and has trouble with associations. In one of her experiments, certain letters, so I asked him what letters she coloured the letters a, e, s and t in the he had problems with. I then asked him book, but left the other letters in black. what kind of associations he had with After training, she those letters. Initially, flashed letters of the he didn’t think he had alphabet quickly and any, but I told him to “…some believe that asked participants to take his time and think identify the letter’s about it. I then synaesthetic matching colour. In the formatted the text so interventions can help test Cozoli purposely that the letters he had treat mental health showed some of the trouble with were now disorders” coloured letters in a in colour, and straight different colour to what away he could read it in they were in the book. a way he couldn’t before.

She found that it took people who had They became recognisable. Recognition been trained (or taught aspects of is a lot quicker with synaesthesia, as you synaesthesia) longer to identify those have more than one mode of stimulation colours than those who hadn’t been taught coming in.’

– they experienced interference in reaction Synaesthesia doesn’t just have time known as the Stroop effect (Stroop, potential benefits for memory and 1935). This would have occurred because creativity – some believe that synaesthetic of the involuntary associations noninterventions can help treat mental health synaesthetes formed after being trained. disorders. Ian Jordan, from Ayr, Scotland, The results showed that this method of describes himself as ‘an optician with training is successful, at least in the short a difference’. He employs synaesthetic term (Colizoli et al., 2014). methods to try to reduce the effects of Other, more recent research suggests different multisensory disorders, such that taught synaesthesia can have longas autism, dyslexia and ADHD. ‘We use lasting effects. A paper published by and monitor synaesthesia in a lot of Rothen and his colleagues found that noninterventions,’ he says. ‘Sensory synaesthetes were able to learn processing disorders are often synaesthetic characteristics that remained synonymous with synaesthesia. We present when they left the lab. Results think that tinnitus in some ways is such as these, along with other those of a synaesthetic condition. If you change other training studies, imply that the visual input significantly, you can synaesthesia isn’t just a hereditary tune the sound out in the hearing for condition, but is shaped by exposure to around 60 per cent of people. It’s a certain environmental factors during our synaesthetic effect that probably hasn’t early development. Other research been recognised as one.’ supports the environmental theory too, ‘Professionals need to be more aware finding that coloured synaesthetic of synaesthesia,’ Ian tells me. ‘They need associations can be blunted by negative to be trained to understand and work moods (Kay et al., 2014). with it. Many opticians haven’t even heard of it. We need to have opticians, occupational psychologists and therapists Implications for treating working together as a minimum.’

Nicolas Rothen gives his predictions disorders for the future. ‘In the last decade, people Researcher and installation artist were concerned about showing that Barbara Ryan has gone a step further by synaesthesia was a real phenomenon, formulating ideas to help synaesthetes with but now, people are looking into what neurodegenerative disorders cope better. the effects of synaesthesia are on higher A grapheme-colour synaesthete herself, cognitive functions. What are the she tells me: ‘I worked with a person who advantages and disadvantages of could no longer use a telephone – she synaesthesia? Is it linked to conditions had to wait for everyone to phone her. like schizophrenia or autism?’ Clearly, Although she was losing the ability to read we still have a lot to learn. language, replacing people’s names with colours or characters helped her remember what names matched with what numbers.’

I Jack Dutton is a freelance writer Ryan believes that a lot can be done with jackdutton22@gmail.com

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ARTICLE

How relationships help us to age well Laura Soulsby and Kate Bennett consider a rich evidence base Research has shown that social relationships are important for successful ageing. But what is meant by ‘social relationships’, what happens to such relationships as people grow older, and what is it about them that is important for healthy and happy ageing?

One major life course event that may influence an older adult’s social relationships is the death of a spouse – a high probability event, especially for women. But in turn, what role do social relationships play in positively affecting wellbeing in widowhood?

questions

Bennett, K.M. & Soulsby, L.K. (2012).

Wellbeing in bereavement and widowhood. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 20(4), 321–337.

Mental health and social relationships: www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/ESRC_Evide nce_Briefing_Mental_health_social_r el_tcm8-26243.pdf

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How do our relationships change as we grow older?

How does widowhood affect social relationships, and how might this influence health?

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Ajrouch, K.J., Blandon, A.Y. & Antonucci, T.C. (2005). Social networks among men and women. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 60, S311–S317.

Baltes, P.B. & Baltes, M.M. (1990).

Psychological perspectives on successful aging. In P.B. Baltes & M.M. Baltes (Eds.) Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral

eclining fertility rates and increased life expectancy have led to a demographic shift towards an ageing population. In the UK, the proportion of people aged 65 and over is projected to increase from 17 per cent in 2010 to 24 per cent in 2051 (Office for National Statistics, 2012). As our population ages, the concept of successful ageing becomes increasingly important and there is an academic and political emphasis on promoting positive states of health in later life.

Some propose that ageing ‘successfully’ involves the maintenance of physical and cognitive function, the absence of disease, and a sustained involvement in productive activities (Rowe & Kahn, 1997). Another, perhaps less restrictive, view of successful ageing is the ability to effectively adapt to and compensate for functional losses (Baltes & Baltes, 1990). Researchers have attempted to understand what exactly determines successful ageing (e.g. Depp & Jeste, 2006) and, while older adults’ health is influenced by a wide range of factors, both social networks and social engagement have been highlighted as being fundamental (Phelan et al., 2004).

Social relationships in later life Social relationships have been defined and measured in a variety of ways but are most often understood in terms of social networks, social support and social participation (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010).

Broadly, social networks are the structural character of social relationships such as

sciences (pp.1–34). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bennett, K.M. (2007). ‘No sissy stuff’: Towards a theory of masculinity and emotional expression in older widowed men. Journal of Aging Studies, 21, 347–356.

Bennett, K.M. (2010a). ‘You can’t spend years with someone and just cast them aside’: Augmented identity in older British widows. Journal of Women & Aging, 22, 204–217.

the number of contacts we have or how often we spend time with those people.

Social support is a transactional process and our relationships provide a platform for the exchange of emotional and practical support. Finally, social engagement relates to the frequency and quality of formal (e.g. religious participation, meeting attendance and volunteer obligations) and informal (e.g. telephone contact and socialising with friends) activities with members of our social network.

Research shows that there is an age-related reduction in overall social network size and levels of social engagement. Increasing age may be associated with smaller social networks which are contacted less frequently (Ajrouch et al., 2005), and this seems to be particularly true for older men (Cornwell et al., 2008). More specifically, high numbers of non-kin relationships have been found to be less common among older adults and, instead, older adults’ social networks are mainly made up of family members (Pahl & Pevalin, 2005). On the other hand, older adults may have higher-quality relationships within that smaller social network and be more involved in their community compared with younger adults (Carstensen, 1992). Research shows that older adults typically have greater contact with neighbours and are more likely to volunteer and attend religious services, though this is dependent on physical health (Cornwell et al., 2008).

Family, and particularly spouses and adult children, are a central source of support to older adults (Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Marital status has not been identified as an independent predictor in studies focused on successful ageing (e.g. Depp & Jeste, 2006), but, on the whole, research demonstrates that marriage has a protective effect on physical (Waite & Gallagher, 2000) and psychological well-being (Schwarzbach et al., 2014). Moreover, social networks and levels of social engagement, which themselves are associated with health,

Bennett, K.M. (2010b). How to achieve resilience as an older widower: Turning points or gradual change?

Ageing and Society, 30, 369–382.

Bennett, K.M. & Soulsby, L.K. (2012).

Wellbeing in bereavement and widowhood. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 20(4), 321–337.

Brannon, R. (1976). The male sex role – and what it's done for us lately. In R. Brannon & D. Davids (Eds.) The forty-

nine percent majority (pp.1–40).

Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Cable, N., Bartley, M., Chandola, T. & Sacker, A. (2013). Friends are equally important to men and women, but family matters more for men's wellbeing. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 67, 166–171.

Carr, D., Ness, R.M. & Wortman, C.B. (2006). Spousal bereavement in late life. New York: Springer.

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vary by marital status. Marriage is often regarded as a fundamental basis for support and integrates people into wider social networks (Waite & Gallagher, 2000). However, it has also been suggested that couples’ networks shrink to a more family-centred network over time and, in considering friendship choice across the life course, Pahl and Pevalin (2005) found that the recently married were more likely to move from nominating a non-relative as their closest friend to having a family member as their closest friend. At the same time, marriage has a protective effect on health and evidence demonstrates that older nevermarried adults have poorer physical health and increased risk of mortality (Waite & Gallagher, 2000). It is likely

Marriage has a protective effect on health

that this is a consequence of the lack of support provided by a spouse and perhaps the absence of the associated social network.

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Psychology and Aging, 7, 331–338.

Cornwell, B., Laumann, E.O. & Schumm, L.P. (2008). The social connectedness of older adults. American Sociological Review, 73, 185–203.

Cumming, E. & Henry, W. (1961). Growing old. New York: Basic Books.

Depp, C.A. & Jeste, D.V. (2006) Definitions and predictors of

Turning to social networks, Fiori et al. (2006) found five distinct network typologies among older Americans that differentially affect health: non family restricted, characterised by low likelihood of being married and very few or no children; non friends, characterised by very low frequency of contact with friends; family, where people had high levels of contact with family members; friends, where people had frequent levels of contact with friends; and diverse, where contact was fairly even across friends and family. Older adults who were embedded in diverse networks that included relationships with friends had higher levels of morale compared with those who were in family-based networks.

Moreover, size matters! Cable et al.

(2013) found that friendship network size was longitudinally related to psychological health, even after previous psychological health was taken into account.

So evidence suggests that, generally, the more varied your social network, the happier and healthier you will be. This tells us that intimate friends are very important for older adults, especially in the absence of strong family relationships. Often, family relationships can have a negative impact on health, but this is less typical of friendships. Friendships are the relationships we choose and, thus, may allow greater feelings of autonomy and facilitate integration into broader social networks and the wider community.

Despite this, the number of friends decreases with age (Ajrouch et al., 2005). Why should this be case? A simple explanation may be that the network is reduced as people out-survive their

successful ageing. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 14, 6–20.

Fiori, K.L., Antonucci, T.C. & Cortina, K.S. (2006). Social network typologies and mental health among older adults.

Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 61, 25–32.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B. & Layton, J.B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk. PLoS Medicine, 7(7),

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friends. Several other theories have also been proposed to explain this pattern.

First, Cumming and Henry’s (1961) early theoretical perspective, social disengagement, suggested that older adults actively withdraw from their network and reduce their number of friends, perhaps as a result of declining physical health or loss of roles through retirement, for example. Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1992) offers an alternative view: as we age, we become more selective and strengthen emotional ties, dissolving peripheral relationships and creating a smaller number of high-quality relationships.

This occurs as the salience of emotional exchanges increases with age while informational functions of relationships become less important. Kahn and Antonucci’s (1980) social convoy model describes patterns of changing social relationships as people age. It holds that the personal (e.g. age, gender) and situational factors (e.g. roles, values, culture), and how these change over time, influence quantity and quality of social relationships. The model suggests that our ‘convoy’ of relationships changes as we age, and it highlights the increasing importance of emotional quality, rather than only the quantity of social contacts in older age.

Social relationships and health How do our relationships help us to age well? It is difficult to unpick the relative effects of social network, social support and social engagement since the terms are often used interchangeably (Schwarzbach et al., 2014). However, despite the lack of clarity in definitions, there is a wealth of literature suggesting that how many people we have around us, the support that we give and receive, and how often we see them impacts on our physical and psychological health. Social relationships provide a platform for the exchange of support and opportunities for social interaction, and research demonstrates their independent influence on mortality,

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Ingersoll-Dayton, B., Morgan, D. & Antonucci, T. (1997). The effects of positive and negative social exchanges on aging adults. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 52, 190–199.

Kahn, R.L. & Antonucci, T.C. (1980).

Convoys over the life course: Attachment, roles, and social

support. In P.B. Baltes & O.G. Brim (Eds.) Life-span development and behavior (pp.254–283). New York: Academic Press.

Office for National Statistics (2012).

Pension trends. Chapter 2: Population change. Retrieved 15 January 2014 from tinyurl.com/nqhqcax Pahl, R. & Pevalin, D.J. (2005). Between family and friends: A longitudinal study of friendship choice. British

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heart attack survival, cognitive decline, depression and anxiety (Umberson & Montez, 2010). Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010) conducted a meta-analysis across 147 independent studies focusing on the association between social relationships and mortality and found that people with adequate social relationships (including both functional and structural aspects) have a 50 per cent lower mortality risk compared with those who report poor social relationships.

Focusing on psychological health, support, relationship quality and presence of confidants emerge as significant predictors of depression in older adults (Schwarzbach et al., 2014). These effects of social relationships on health may also vary by gender, though the interactions are more complex (Cable et al., 2013).

Clearly, our relationships have some protective effect on both our physical and psychological well-being and the supportive resources promote successful ageing, where ‘success’ is tied to health.

Two general theoretical processes through which social relationships may influence health have been proposed (see Figure 1). First, social support may have a moderating effect on health, that is, it is mainly effective when high stress is encountered, buffering the negative effects of stressors on heath. This may work in either of two ways. First, people may not recognise a situation as stressful if they have high levels of support, or alternatively, the levels of support may modify the response after the initial appraisal. Rosengren et al. (2004) found that the association between an accumulation of critical life changes and subsequent heart attack was moderated by the quality of social support in middleaged men. The alternative view is that social support directly benefits psychological well-being and health, regardless of the degree of stress. Either those with high levels of support may feel a sense of belonging accompanied by high self-esteem (Fiori et al., 2006) or, instead, social relationships may encourage or model healthier behaviours, such as

Journal of Sociology, 56, 433–450.

Phelan, E.A., Anderson, L.A., La Croix, A.Z. & Larson, E.B. (2004). Older adults’ views of ‘successful aging’.

Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 52, 211–216.

Piferi, R.L. & Lawler, K.A. (2006). Social support and ambulatory blood pressure. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 62, 328–336.

Reinhardt, J.P., Boerner, K. & Horowitz,

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eating breakfast and even wearing a seatbelt (Waite & Gallagher, 2000).

Social relationships also offer an opportunity to provide support to others, which can be beneficial to older adults’ well-being, perhaps as a result of the increased feelings of independence and usefulness it allows (Thomas, 2010). Piferi and Lawler (2006) found that giving support was related to lower blood pressure and arterial pressure. Moreover, those participants who reported giving support were also more likely to report receiving support, greater feelings of self-efficacy, higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression and distress. It is worth noting that there is a fine balance between providing too little or too much support to others, since providing too much can also lower well-being (Thomas, 2010).

It seems that if we are embedded in a varied network of social relationships where there are opportunities to give and receive support and engage in social activities, we’ll be happy and healthy.

Is that the full story? Whilst giving and receiving support from family and friends has a beneficial effect on our health as we age, there is also an argument that the receipt of excessive support, particularly from adult children, may in fact reduce psychological well-being and feelings of competence (Reinhardt et al., 2006).

According to Thomas (2010), the negative psychological impact of receiving support may be a consequence of identity disruption. For example, an older man must now rely on his daughter to take him to complete his weekly shop, when the norm throughout his life had been for him to provide support to her. This reduces his feelings of competence and, moreover, alters his role as ‘father’.

Relationship quality is also important, and may have a greater impact on wellbeing than structural characteristics of our social networks (Fiori et al., 2006).

Reduced well-being may occur when relationships are strained, and there is evidence that these negative social interactions are more strongly associated

A. (2006). Good to have but not to use: Differential impact of perceived and received support on well-being.

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 23, 117–129.

Rosengren, A., Hawken, S., Ounpuu, S., et al. (2004). Association of psychosocial risk factors with risk of acute myocardial infarction in 11119 cases and 13648 controls from 52 countries (the INTERHEART study).

with psychological well-being than are positive social interactions, especially for those who are more stressed to start with (Ingersoll-Dayton et al., 1997).

Reciprocity, the bi-directional giving and receiving of support, also appears to be important for receiving the health benefits of social relationships. Non-reciprocity is associated with poorer self-rated health, trouble sleeping, and higher risks of depressive symptoms (e.g. von dem Knesebeck & Siegrist, 2003).

Widowhood in later life As we have demonstrated, social relationships and their supportive resources are important for health and help to facilitate successful ageing. The social convoy model (Kahn & Antonucci, 1980) demonstrates that events such as marriage, divorce, retirement and bereavement can affect composition of the social network, the availability of support and levels of social engagement. In our own research, we have explored the impact of spousal bereavement. How does widowhood shape older adults’ social relationships and how might this influence successful ageing?

The social support inherent in a marriage offers physical and psychological health benefits, but spousal bereavement removes a primary source of support – the spouse. The widowed report lower levels of psychological health compared with their married counterparts and report higher levels of mood and anxiety disorders (e.g. Schwarzbach et al., 2014), and older widowed adults may be more likely to experience loneliness, compared with younger bereaved spouses (Carr et al., 2006). Research demonstrates that psychological reactions to spousal bereavement are acute and the negative impact typically resolves over time (Wilcox et al., 2003). Spousal bereavement also has a negative impact on physical health, including increased number of health problems, changes in weight, smoking behaviour and inactivity (e.g. Wilcox et al., 2003).

The Lancet, 364, 953–962.

Rowe, J. & Kahn, R. (1997). Successful ageing. The Gerontologist, 37, 433–440.

Schwarzbach, M., Luppa, M., Forstmeier, S. et al. (2014). Social relations and depression in late life: A systematic review. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 29, 1–21.

Stroebe, M., Schut, H. & Stroebe, W. (2007). Health outcomes of bereavement. The Lancet, 370, 8–14.

Thomas, P.A. (2010). Is it better to give or to receive? Social support and the well-being of older adults. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 65, 351–357.

Umberson, D. & Montez, J.K. (2010).

Social relationships and health.

Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51, S54–S66. von dem Knesebeck, O. & Siegrist, J.

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2010a), interviewed 66 older British widows using a grounded theory approach.

One of the important themes to emerge from this study was changes in identity. In the interviews women spoke 1b. Social Support 1a. Social Support about the way as mediator as moderator their identities had changed as a consequence of Figure 1: Social support and the effects of stress on psychological their widowhood. well-being (Bennett & Soulsby, 2012) The women reported an augmented identity. That is, We hear anecdotal accounts of people women described not having an identity dying from ‘broken hearts’ after the death as a widow alone, but having an identity of their spouse, and research as a widow whilst retaining their identity demonstrates that widowed adults do as a wife. A sample quote was ‘You can’t have a higher mortality risk compared spend years with someone and just cast with married people, especially in the them aside’. Looking at identity in 60 immediate period following bereavement widowers from the same study, Bennett (Stroebe et al., 2007). Moreover, spousal found that men were more likely to bereavement typically has a negative discuss these issues with implicit impact on access to social support and reference to hegemonic masculinity, that causes significant changes in the wider is, the culturally bound expectations of social network (Pahl & Pevalin, 2005). how men should behave. Brannon’s The bereaved must learn to socialise as (1976) four masculine roles provided a single person, and may face the loss of a useful framework to think about relationships with other married couples widow(er)hood and masculinity (Bennett, as well as losing links with their shared 2007). These roles are ‘the sturdy oak’, friends. The social network then evolves ‘the big wheel’, ‘no sissy stuff’ and ‘give over time, with the duration of ’em hell’. The first three were common widowhood positively related to the likelihood of forming new friendships and amongst the widowers. Men demonstrated how they took care of their for some, new romantic relationships families, how they took control, and how (Wilcox et al., 2003). they overcame their emotions following Why should widowhood cause the deaths of their wives. They might say changes in social relationships? One ‘I really kept these things – perhaps explanation is that older widowed adults wrongly – pretty well to myself, and it experience a change in identity following was only when I started going to the loss of their spouse, which influences counselling…’, or ‘You’ve got to make who they want to spend time with, and a move, make that first step back on the how. As part of a large-scale qualitative road to normality’. study of bereavement, one of us (Bennett, There is sufficient research to conclude that the death of a husband or wife has a significant negative impact on health. It is, therefore, important to (2003). Reported nonreciprocity of social consider factors that promote better exchange and depressive symptoms. health. Stroebe et al. (2007) considered Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 55, why people are affected by bereavement 209–214. in different ways. Situational risk factors Waite, L.J. & Gallagher, M. (2000). The case for marriage. New York: Doubleday. (e.g. cause and circumstances of death, Wilcox, S., Evenson, K.R., Aragaki, A., et al. pre-bereavement caregiving), (2003). The effects of widowhood on interpersonal risk factors (e.g. material physical and mental health, health resources, social support) and personal behaviors, and health outcomes. Health risk factors (e.g. age, gender, personality) Psychology, 22, 513–522. were all found to predict adjustment after

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bereavement (see also Bennett & Soulsby, 2012). Access to adequate support following the death of a spouse may protect against the negative consequences of bereavement (e.g. Carr et al., 2006).

A clearer understanding of why a supportive social network can promote well-being, and why a dense support network offers better adjustment over time, may help us to promote ‘resilience’ in relation to older adults. In our research with widowers we identified three groups of resilient widowers (Bennett, 2010b).

The first group demonstrated resilience in bereavement, with stable levels of psychological well-being over time. In the second group, the men experienced lowered levels of well-being when their wife died but, over time, were able to return to the same level of well-being as before their loss. The men in the third group achieved resilience through a turning point. The narratives revealed that these men drew on combinations of factors to cope following spousal bereavement, including psychological resources, societal factors and, important to this paper, their social relationships.

Conclusions As people live longer, there is an increasing interest in understanding and promoting health in later life. We hold that social relationships play a key role in maintaining older adults’ health, likely through the opportunities they provide for support exchanges, social engagement and sense of worth. This is recognised by older adults themselves, who endorse social relationships and social activities as being important for ageing well (Phelan et al., 2004). A clearer understanding of the meaning of social relationships to older adults and the ways in which we maintain our social network as we age is vital to promoting successful ageing and promoting health in later life.

Laura Soulsby is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Liverpool L.K.Soulsby @liverpool.ac.uk

Kate Bennett is a Reader in Psychology at the University of Liverpool K.M.Bennett@ liverpool.ac.uk

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INTERVIEW

‘We are not islands, there is such a thing as society’ Robin Dunbar talks to Lance Workman about his attempts to see the big picture and find the big number

ou started out studying the social behaviour of the gelada baboon.

Y Do you think it’s a natural step from primatology to asking questions about humans?

I think the short answer is yes – almost everybody who has worked on primates has ended up also dabbling in humans.

Some famously so – look at people like Robert Hinde and John Crook, they both shifted their attention from monkeys to humans. In monkeys we seem to be seeing humans in a miniature cartoon version. So it’s a very easy step to move from that to the bigger story.

You’ve been in biology, anthropology and psychology departments. In terms of academic discipline how would you describe yourself?

This has always been a great source of trial and trauma. Actually, technically, my roots are in philosophy. I started by doing joint philosophy and psychology at Oxford. In those days you couldn’t do philosophy on its own – so I chose psychology, which I knew nothing about.

I’m not even sure I could spell it back then! I was very much a dyed-in-the-wool humanities person. But psychology turned me into a scientist – taught me statistics and the scientific method. So I ended up in psychology departments for my undergraduate degree, my PhD and my first postdoc position. That has always been core to what I do and explains why, unlike other people in behavioural ecology, I have always had this core cognitive dimension and why I became interested in the brain and in evolution.

You mention behavioural ecology.

Over the last 30–40 years we seen a plethora of evolutionary-based fields of the behavioural sciences developing… sociobiology, behavioural ecology, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary economics. Are these discrete disciplines, or are they tapping into different aspects of the same area?

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In a sense they are discrete disciplines because each one focuses on a particular corner of what it is to be human.

Evolutionary politics is another big area where people focus on political structures.

Or in evolutionary economics people focus on the economic behaviour. What the evolutionary bit is doing is to provide a unifying framework. If you look at psychology it is probably the most fractionated discipline you can imagine.

You have all of these different areas such as developmental, cognitive, neuroscience, educational, and so on, none of whom ever seem to speak to each other. They all have their little corner that they sit in.

My pitch is really that the evolutionary component does no more than provide a unifying framework that allows these subdisciplines to talk to each other. This is what happened for biology. The evolutionary framework allows, say, ecologists to talk to physiologists. They still do their ecology and their physiology, but now they have an interactive framework that provides an interface for communication. I think that would be hugely beneficial for psychology.

I couldn’t do what I do without that framework because it allows me to slip from doing what is jobbing social psychology at one end, through neuroscience and neuroimaging, through to standard cognitive psychology and then dabble in personality and developmental psychology. We simply couldn’t do that without the overarching framework of evolutionary theory. It’s a story that spreads across them.

My impression is that biological and cognitive psychologists are more sympathetic to the evolutionary approach than the social psychologists.

Is that a problem for you?

No, not really. Well, maybe they just don’t talk to me! I was struck by this some years ago… doing talks in psychology departments, someone commented that I tend to try to build this big picture to integrate these different components and

show where they sit. But that is very unfashionable in psychology. Psychology talks tend to act like ‘here’s my little area and I’m going to go into it in finer and finer detail’ – all the time losing the big picture. So there is a kind of cultural dissonance as they are not used to thinking in these big picture terms.

I’ve seen this with linguists as well.

I once had an excoriating review in Nature where a linguist wrote ‘how can you possibly write a book about the evolution of language without mentioning grammar – not even as a footnote?’ The answer is really: quite easily. He’s now one of my big buddies. Once I’d met him and he saw where I was going he was fine. In all disciplines you tend to see something coming out of the blue as either agreeing entirely with you or, if it doesn’t fit in exactly with your point of view, entirely against you and then you start to think it must be rubbish. But evolutionary theory allows you to step to the layer above and see the bigger picture.

Some social scientists are very critical of evolutionary psychology – they would rather it just went away. Why? Evolutionary psychology is really split into two groups of people who don’t entirely see eye–to-eye. You’ve got the behavioural ecology end where I sit, which is interested in individual differences. Most of us came out of zoology or anthropology via behavioural ecology. Then you have the classic Santa Barbara school, most of whom came out of psychology. They tend naturally to develop a modular view and tend to concentrate on human universals. I think they began to worry about being criticised as being seen as racist or sexist or any of the many other ‘–ists’ such as biologist or geneticist! Their attempt to duck that criticism was to say ‘no, no, we aren’t trying to say some humans are better than others, we are just dealing with human universals’. So this stopped them being seen as on the wrong side in the nature/nurture debate. This means that they have gone down a channel that they didn’t really want to go down – and maybe led to a polarising of evolutionary psychology against mainstream psychology which is much more on the nurture side of the equation.

It’s interesting because sociologists of science see a clear split amongst psychologists where people who would naturally have fallen on the nature side of the nature/nurture divide became the embattled minority within psychology over the last 30 to 40 years. Many of them saw evolutionary psychology as a bulwark against these awful nurturists. So

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I went to a talk you gave a few years ago about how many people we really know and I went home and checked my Christmas card list. It was about 50, but given that each card went on average to a family of three it came out pretty close to your magic number of 150 people – ‘Dunbar’s number’.

Dunbar’s number is simply the limit on the number of people you can have a meaningful relationship with. The definition we use is the people you would try to see or contact to catch up with at least once a year to keep the relationship going. The kind of people who, if you saw them in the transit lounge at Hong Kong airport at 3am, you would immediately go up and say hello because you know where they stand and you know where you stand. The relationship has a history. You have to invest time in relationships in order for them to work – but there is also a cognitive limit. You can only really know 100–200 people and on average it works out at around 150.

Then there’s an inner core of about five that you have really intimate relationships with. You found that if you bring a new person into the core, like a new romantic partner, you then jettison at least one old one. It’s interesting because my mother was just saying that she’s hardly seen my nephew since he got a new girlfriend.

Well, relationships are time-costly – even family ones. Most of these are established very early on. I think there is something odd about kinship which is deeply ground into the genetics of the cognitive system – and we can show this with our data. Kin are always on a different plane to friends, come what may. There is something that kicks in as soon as you mention that someone is kin. This is based on very early relationships where, in effect, you become imprinted on them.

But friendships are very unstable over time. There are some exceptions – the friends you make around about university years seem to be in a slightly different category because you can pick them up decades later more-or-less where you left off. But that is just a handful. Probably because you made friends over drinks – and alcohol leads to endorphins being released. The rest of your friendships do deteriorate over time very rapidly. In two

that stem from your scientific interests or is it a separate sphere for you?

I guess it’s a bit of both. As I say, I did start life as a philosopher. Then I became a psychologist and then finally a biologist; and I think it’s hard to be a biologist and to be religious. Some people do, but I find that puzzling. In the end, it is your biological contribution to future generations in terms of fitness that drives evolutionary processes (and hence the decisions organisms make). The social cohesion of things that I’m now working on is a major component of that – like all monkeys and apes, sociality is the key to our evolutionary success. Religion plays a role in facilitating this, because its rituals seem to be especially good at kicking off the endorphin response. But there’s a moral and philosophical position that you have to have in order to create a cohesive society – Mrs Thatcher notwithstanding, we are not all islands, there is such a thing as society. The principles that we hold dear – moral, social and political – are all important in creating bonded societies. So you have to have these mechanisms which you might think of as pseudo-religious.

JOHN FRENCH

they leapt on the evolutionary psychology bandwagon and restarted the nature/nurture debate in a way that probably hasn’t been very helpful to either party, because to a biologist it really doesn’t make any sense.

I think this made evolutionary psychologists become more pseudogeneticist than they really needed to be.

I’ve always backed off from that because my background in behavioural ecology means that there is an assumption that animals do things to boost their fitness, but this doesn’t assume that animal behaviour is genetically determined. The whole point of having a big brain is so you can adapt your behaviour and fine tune it to fit in with the circumstances.

All the genetics of the system does is to provide you with the end goal.

What happens on a day-to-day basis probably fits in more with what the environmentalists have to say. I really think evolutionary theory should unify these disparate fields, but you have to see it in the right way, otherwise you end up polarising things. Once that happens in science it takes for ever to break out.

years a friend can drift from being at the inner core to the outer core of your relationships.

That’s interesting about drink – does alcohol tap into something primeval?

Endorphins seem to be essential in the psychopharmacological underpinning of close relationships, and we trigger their social release by touch, laughter and all those kinds of things that we do in social interactions. Seemingly, alcohol is a very good releaser of endorphins. Maybe because it’s a poison – endorphins are released in response to any sort of physiological or psychological stress on the body. But you also have to realise that as a student if you don’t go drinking with people, how are you going to spend a lot of time with people so that they can become close friends? So people who don’t drink at university might be at a disadvantage.

You are supporter of humanism – does

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I get the impression that you are busier than ever these days, especially when it comes to giving public talks.

Yes, I’m afraid so! The problem is that it’s all getting more and more exciting.

Some areas of science are very difficult to put over to the public, but my area happens to be very easy. It’s an area where you can talk about quite sophisticated data, because even a lay person gets it. If it’s about physiology or physics then they look at you blankly, but if it’s about human relationship, it is so easy to get across. And I enjoy doing it because it can be fun.

But there is a very serious side of this too. It’s very easy for politicians to target science when looking for ways of making major savings because most science doesn’t show its benefits until decades later. And it’s very easy to throw a lot of science out for philosophical or religious reasons – such as in creationism in America –it’s an obvious target. Get rid of it because we don’t need it, and we can save a lot of money at the same time. So I think it’s very important that the scientific community gets out and stomps the boards and shows the public, who pay for all of this, what they are getting for their money and why they should be interested in it. It is a major component of our culture now and is at least as important as art and literature. So hopefully I’m doing my bit for the community!

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VIEWPOINTS

‘I felt let down by psychology’ We hear from a brain injury survivor, researchers and a practitioner

celebrated my 21st birthday during April 2010. I completed my undergraduate degree in psychology in May 2010 and I started my first job with a Youth Advocacy Program in June 2010. However, all of these positive and important events were overshadowed by 18 July 2010 – the day I was involved in a road traffic accident and suffered severe traumatic brain injury.

Unconscious, I was rushed to a hospital where the extent of my injuries became apparent. Brain scans revealed a fractured skull, haemorrhaging and cerebral oedema. I was transferred to another hospital in Dublin. Ten days later,

I

references

The brain injury surrvivor – Niamh Lowe

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Bhalerao, S.U., Geurtjens, C., Thomas, G.R. et al. (2013). Understanding the neuropsychiatric consequences associated with significant traumatic brain injury. Brain Injury. doi:10.3109/02699052.2013.793396 Bowen, C., Yeates, G. & Palmer, S. (2010).

A relational approach to rehabilitation.

London: Karnac.

Cicerone, K.D., Langenbahn, D.M., Braden, C. et al. (2011). Evidence-

I awoke from an induced coma unable to talk, move, swallow, create short memories or remember long-term memories.

I spent the next three months in another hospital. Each of the individual services – speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, nursing care and medical care – were excellent and helped me enormously while providing guidance, encouragement and support. However, during my recovery journey, I felt let down by psychology.

During these three months, I met a number of different psychologists, and I have no recollection of these individuals enquiring about my emotional state.

I longed for one the psychologists to ask me ‘How are you?’; ‘How are you coping?’; ‘Would you like to talk?’ The psychologists produced a range of memory, attention and executive function neuropsychological tests without telling me the names of the tests or why it was important for me to complete the assessment. I performed these tests obediently while feeling immense frustration and confusion inside.

The results of the tests were never revealed to me. Strangely, the implications of my injury were never highlighted and coping strategies were not discussed. Instead, I spent hours performing these monotonous and challenging neuropsychological tests, while trying to deal with the emotional impact of the car accident and my brain injury alone.

I remember one incident in the hospital with the psychologist using the Behavioural Assessment of the

based cognitive rehabilitation: Updated review of the literature from 2003 through 2008. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 92, 4, 519–530.

Coetzer, R. (2013). Behavioural neuroanatomy. In G. Newby et al.

(Eds.) Practical neuropsychological rehabilitation in acquired brain injury.

London: Karnac.

Gracey, F., Evans, J.J. & Malley, D. (2009).

Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS). I was pushed in my wheelchair to the testing room and brought inside by the psychologist. The test apparatus was set up on the table. She was nice and polite, but did not explain the purpose of the test, and she did not enquire how I felt about participating in this assessment. When she finished reading the instructions out of the booklet, I remember holding back tears while she started the stopwatch.

I completed the assessment, someone wheeled me upstairs to my bedroom, and I cried.

Over the next two years I made huge physical advances. However, I had become increasingly emotionally unstable, desperate and expressed strong suicidal ideation. My mother was extremely worried and reached out to local support services for help and guidance in relation to my psychological state. The request for psychological help resulted in a home visit from an assistant psychologist. The assistant psychologist, however, did not appear to have been briefed about my mental state before she arrived. She never enquired about my emotional health and instead explained that I would be performing a six-hour attention test over three days.

One month after the assessment the assistant psychologist returned with the results from the assessment. My mood had deteriorated further, but the subject of my mental health was again not mentioned.

A copy of the clinical report was offered.

It used technical language, medical terms and psychological definitions. When we were asked if we had any questions my mother replied: ‘Niamh’s mood tends to be up and down, and in the last few months, it has been very down.’ I reacted very badly to this betrayal of personal information.

I told my mother to ‘shut up’ and she began to cry, and then I did the same.

The assistant psychologist left shortly after saying: ‘If there are no more questions, I’ll be heading, but if you think of any, don’t hesitate to call.’

My three years of rehabilitation ended with me experiencing an emotional

Capturing process and outcome in complex rehabilitation interventions.

Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. doi:10.1080/09602010903027763 Gracey, F., Malley, D., Wagner, A.P. & Clare, I. (2014). Characterising neuropsychological rehabilitation service users for service design.

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al. (2008). Maintaining group memberships: Social identity continuity predicts wellbeing after stroke. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 18(5–6), 671–691.

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Schools-based interventions for reducing stigmatization of acquired brain injury. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 29(2), 194–205.

Jackson, H.F. & Hague, G. (2013). Social

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viewpoints

The health professional In practice, how can we integrate neuropsychological and social psychological principles to promote a holistic approach to client care?

The ultimate goal of rehabilitation following ABI is centred around community integration (Martelli et al., 2012). Whether problems arise at the end of intervention will generally depend on whether there has been a thorough assessment of the person’s strengths, needs and goals, understood within the everyday contexts and material conditions of their life. While standardised neuropsychological testing is a crucial part of neuropsychological assessment, equating testing with assessment is not likely to be helpful. Post-acute outcomes are invariably social, yet social aspects of cognition are rarely explicitly assessed during formal neuropsychological evaluations (Jackson & Hague, 2013).

There are however, some helpful signs that this may be changing, as assessment tools that are oriented towards more real-world problems are being continually developed and refined (e.g. Multiple Errands Test: Shallice & Burgess, 1991). Further, the move towards examining social aspects related to the self as vehicles of rehabilitation is to be welcomed (Gracey et al., 2014; Haslam et al., 2008).

For some people with ABI there can of course be problems with social inference, and misunderstandings with staff can occur (McDonald et al., 2014). Clients and family will often look to clinical neuropsychology services to create a narrative about what has happened to them and what may happen in the future, and then for services to do something about these issues. Occasionally, however, services may get caught up on the thorny problem of assessment and helping the person to understand the ‘brain injury problem’.

The idea that the multitude of neurons, neural connectivity and experiences may make up a self who develops comfort from being understood by another person can occasionally become lost in the need to provide answers to such tricky neuropsychological questions.

Reductions in social disability, and improvements in social participation, mental health and quality of life, are increasingly valued as more than just the distal outcomes of rehabilitation (Cicerone et al., 2011). Some common aspects of depression in particular can be understood to result from a loss of social connectedness and changes in social identity. Interventions that foster such (re)connectedness have been used in ABI, from the individually based, such as metaphoric identity mapping (Ylvisaker et al., 2008), dyadic interventions aiding social communication (Togher et al., 2012), through group-based interventions that promote social decision making, to broader community anti-stigma interventions delivered by people with ABI (Irwin & Fortune, 2014).

It is almost old hat to state that the biological, psychological and the social are interrelated in these complex disabilities, and that

consequences and social solutions.

In G. Newby et al. (Eds.) Practical rehabilitation in acquired brain injury.

London: Karnac Books.

Kitwood, T. (1997). Dementia reconsidered: The person comes first. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Kolb, B. & Whishaw, I.Q. (2009).

Fundamentals of human neuropsychology. New York: Worth.

Main, C.J., Richards, H.L. & Fortune, D.G.

(2000). Why put new wine in old bottles: The need for a biopsychosocial approach to the assessment, treatment, and understanding of unexplained and explained symptoms in medicine.

Journal of Psychosomatic Research. doi:10.1016/S0022-3999(00)00081-7 Martelli, M.F., Zasler, N.D. & Tiernan, P. (2012). NeuroRehabilitation, 31, 3–18.

McDonald, S., Honan, C., Kelly M. et al.

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each component must be given its due in neurorehabilitation in order to promote an environment in which people with ABI may prosper. Indeed some recent research (e.g. Miller et al., 2013) supports the conceptualisation of this interrelatedness in terms of ‘enriched environments’ Professor Dónal Fortune, Senior (comprising opportunities Clinical Neuropsychologist, Health to engage in a combination Service Executive South, Republic of of group cognitive, physical Ireland and social rehabilitation).

Results demonstrate positive neural outcomes for clients (e.g. diminished hippocampal atrophy at 28-months follow-up).

So there are a number of substantial challenges of working within the current system, among them the complex needs of people with ABI and their families, the need for additional training, development of a viable translational social neuropsychology research and development agenda, and issues relating to commissioning and resource allocation. In order to meet the needs of people with ABI, I would advocate: I A more reflexive knowledge and training base for staff. The dynamic nature of the organisation, function and response to experience in the social world needs to be as prominent as the neural element in neurorehabilitation theory and practice.

I Addressing the ever-present variability in facilities and care pathways (particularly in more rural areas), which may result in bottlenecks with delayed or inappropriate referrals. In addition, the fragmentation of services in rehabilitation, and competition between them, may not always be to the betterment of clients’ experiences.

I Moving ABI services from within general intellectual disability services. Growing evidence on the economic efficiency of postacute neurorehabilitation (Oddy & da Silva Ramos, 2013) has been slow to translate for commissioners of services, and the current positioning may mean that complex needs are not appropriately addressed.

I More research from those in neurorehabilitation. It is compelling that the authors of the most recent meta-analysis of psychological interventions for depression following ABI found it ‘amazing’ (p.1394) that the number of published studies available was so small, despite the high prevalence of depression following ABI (Stalder-Lüthy et al., 2013).

(2014). Disorders of social cognition and social behaviour following severe TBI. In S. McDonald et al. (Eds.) Social and communication disorders following traumatic brain injury (2nd edn). Hove: Psychology Press.

Miller L.S., Colella B., Mikulis D. et al.

(2013). Environmental enrichment may protect against hippocampal atrophy in the chronic stages of traumatic brain injury. Frontiers in

Human Neuroscience, 7, 506.

Oddy, M. & da Silva Ramos, S. (2013).

Cost effective ways of facilitating home based rehabilitation and support. NeuroRehabilitation, 32, 781–790.

Shallice, T. & Burgess, P.W. (1991).

Deficits in strategy application following frontal lobe damage in man. Brain, 114, 727–741.

Stalder-Lüthy, F., Messerli-Bürgy, N.,

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breakdown and suffering severe depression with no personal feeling of hope about recovery or the future. I was referred to a psychiatric hospital where I remained an inpatient for two months. It was here that I met a psychologist who sat opposite me,

and enquired sensitively and genuinely ‘How are you?’ This simple question produced the suppressed emotions of the last three years.

A person is not a sum of their parts, a person is greater than their brain

functioning. In my personal experience, many of the psychologists I met failed to create a personal connection with me, and instead focused almost exclusively on assessing my brain function through neuropsychological tests.

The researchers To mark Brain Awareness Week 2014, we joined with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) Ireland to run an awareness campaign about head injury. We wished to create a forum where lay experiences of brain injury could be shared and heard, with particular respect given to the lived experience of ABI. Indisputably, the defining part of the day was when Niamh Lowe – a survivor of brain injury and psychology graduate – addressed the audience.

Much of what Niamh had to say exemplified in a very human way the importance of psychologists taking time to think about the impact of their work practices on those they are seeking to support. Niamh’s narrative appeared to exemplify the argument that we have previously outlined (Walsh et al., 2012): that advances in neuropsychological knowledge are leading to higher-quality classification and rehabilitation technology in ABI, but often this orientation to particular deficits and the injury is interfering with a more holistic understanding of the equally important social processes that can both contribute to and detract from rehabilitation.

Neuropsychology includes a spread of intellectual traditions, but it is the cognitive approach that most often features in neuropsychological assessment (Bowen et al., 2010). Neuropsychological instruments offer considerable practical utility to rehabilitation clinicians. For example, people often experience serious cognitive deficits following closed head injuries in the absence of apparent cerebral damage on their neuroimaging. In such cases standardised neuropsychological testing can constitute the only available route for

Hofer, H. et al. (2013). Effect of psychological interventions on depressive symptoms in long-term rehabilitation after an acquired brain injury. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 94(7), 1386–1397.

Togher, L., Power, E., Rietdijk, R. et al.

(2012). An exploration of participant experience of a communication training program for people with traumatic brain injury and their

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documenting the extent and nature of cognitive disturbance impacting a person (Kolb & Whishaw, 2009).

Neuropsychological testing is, however, often predicated on an individualistic model of the person that regards all behaviour as explicable in terms of brain function.

This individualistic model can give rise to constructions of individuals as ‘information processors’ (Yeates et al., 2007). The cognitive, information Dr Elaine L. Kinsella, R. Stephen Walsh and Professor Orla processing aspect of each T. Muldoon, University of Limerick person is critical to their well-being; yet, viewing the ‘brain injury’ may trump other concerns person only through this lens may lead to about an individual’s mental health. Indeed, oversights about other social factors that this may well be why mental health issues influence each person.

Depersonalisation in healthcare settings are so frequently left undiagnosed in this population. A theme in Niamh’s story is the is likely to be particularly significant for absence of her sense of feeling valued and vulnerable clients such as those with ABI – listened to by the psychologists that she particularly when the label of ‘brain injury’ encountered – key determinants of patient may result in the client not being given the trust and satisfaction (Walker et al., 1998). right to take an active role in their Perhaps this was amplified for her as she rehabilitative journey. According to was a psychology graduate herself – she Kitwood (1997), depersonalisation may expected more. On the other hand, the role lead to disempowerment (failing to allow of families in supporting psychological the individual to use the abilities they health, is also evident. Shared social retain or failing to assist them to complete relations and the personalised care offered actions they have initiated), infantilisation (treating and talking to people as if they are by families is an important health resource (Walsh et al., in press), which is too often children), labelling (as the main basis for and too routinely undervalued. interaction and explaining behaviour) and The challenge for psychology is to stigmatisation (treating the person as if avoid the pitfalls of the traditional medical they are a diseased object). The label of

communication partners. Disability and Rehabilitation, 34(18), 1562–1574.

Walker, J., Brooksby, A., McInerney, J. & Taylor, A. (1998). Patient perceptions of hospital care: Building confidence, faith, and trust. Journal of Nursing Management, 6, 193–200.

Walsh, R.S., Fortune, D.G., Gallagher, S. & Muldoon, O.T. (2012). Acquired brain injury: Combining social psychological and

neuropsychological perspectives.

Health Psychology Review. doi:10.1080/17437199.2012.733914 Walsh, R.S., Muldoon, O.T., Gallagher, S. & Fortune, D.G. (in press). Affiliative and self as doer identities: Relationships between social identity, social support, and emotional status amongst survivors of acquired brain injury (ABI). Neuropsychological Rehabilitation.

Yeates, K.O., Bigler, E.D., Dennis, M. et al.

(2007). Social outcomes in childhood brain disorder. Psychological Bulletin. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.3.535 Ylvisaker, M., McPherson, K., Kayes, N. & Pellett, E. (2008). Metaphoric identity mapping: Facilitating goal setting and engagement in rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury.

Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 18, 713–741.

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model, where the person is defined by their problem rather than being treated in a holistic way. Comorbidity associated with ABI is well-documented and the likelihood of developing depression in the wake of such a catastrophic injury is very high (Bhalerao et al., 2013). After brain injury, emotional difficulties can be the product of biological, psychological and social factors (Coetzer, 2013). Thus, biomedical models are insufficient to account for the complex disabilities often associated with chronic conditions (Main et al., 2000). In particular, Gracey et al. (2009) suggested that improved awareness might be connected to an increase in negative emotions as individuals cognitively engage with what has happened to them. The team tasked with Niamh’s care were likely to be aware of the complexity of factors influencing Niamh’s health outcomes.

However, the concern about re-establishing cognitive function may have blocked a more holistic approach to Niamh’s rehabilitation.

The specialisation within the system is of course one potential cause of this problem. A second troubling cause is the increased deployment of staff who are illprepared to deal with individual and

familial catastrophes due to limited training, experience or supervision. The over-use of assistant psychologists, particularly their use as low-paid and unpaid labour to stitch together services that are under stress, is a serious concern for the discipline. As a profession, we need to manage and govern the use of assistant psychologists carefully. In the medium and long term, the (mis)use of graduates with limited training in lieu of clinical professionals damages clients, the profession and the discipline.

Niamh’s experiences within the services are, of course, a consequence of the current system. As psychology has grown and diversified, the level of specialisation has resulted in the splitting of services. There is no doubt that this specialisation results in higher-quality care and therapies that are more appropriately tailored to the clinical problem at hand. Neuropsychology has made great progress in terms of both assessment and interventions. The psychological impact of ABI and subsequent rehabilitation represents key interests for researchers at the Centre for Social Issues Research, University of Limerick. An enduring concern in our research is the apparent lack of integration

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of the social psychological perspectives within clinical neuropsychology (see Walsh et al., 2012). Consistent with our aim of producing meaningful research that informs policy and praxis, we have built partnerships with local and national organisations, such as ABI Ireland.

We hope that an empowered patient perspective, alongside the integration of the neuropsychological and social psychological perspective – particularly one that pays due attention to systems and structures that affect care and recovery in clinical contexts – can go some way to providing the holistic service we aspire to and that clients deserve.

Seeking more viewpoints In this series we hear the viewpoints of those who have conducted published psychological research, those who have taken part in it and those who may put those findings into practice; or those who have come into contact with practitioner services.

Contact the Associate Editor, Dr Catherine Loveday, on C.Loveday@wmin.ac.uk

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LOOKING BACK

Experiencing death to improve life Jelena Martinovic on near-death experiences and psychology in the 1960s and 70s

he history of the near-death experience (NDE) is most commonly associated with the work of Raymond Moody and his 1975 book Life after Life; with parapsychology and spiritually oriented practitioners; with successfully reanimated cardiac arrest patients (Van Lommel et al., 2001); and, more recently, with the neurosciences (Blanke & Dieguez, 2008). But another tradition of research preceded all this, in which psychologists and psychiatrists played a major role.

This alternative history started in thanatology, palliative care and psychotraumatology. It investigated the NDE in its various manifestations – anticipation of death by incurable patients, experiences in extreme danger by survivors of accidents, attempted suicides. I will demonstrate this neglected chapter by presenting one particular body of work: the research conducted by the American psychiatrist Russell Noyes, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

A respected psychosomaticist, specialist of anxiety disorders and author of more than 250 scholarly published articles, Noyes dedicated his research during the 1960s and 70s to the experience of dying and near-death. He interpreted the NDE in psychological terms, defining it as a protective mechanism. His work is a window on the motivations of a psychiatrist for engaging in the study of NDE, the clinical and therapeutic implications of his results, and

references

T

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Aldrich, K. (1963). The dying patient’s grief. Journal of the American Medical Association, 184, 329–331.

Blanke, O. & Dieguez, S. (2008). Leaving body and life behind: Out-of-body and near-neath experience. In S. Laureys & S. Tononi (Eds.) The neurology of consciousness (pp.303–325). New York: Elsevier.

Cappon, D. (1959). The dying patient.

Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 23, 466–489.

both healthcare practices and attitudes towards the dying patient during that period of history.

The popularisation of death Let’s all die, Let’s practice a little, Let’s play dead for a couple of hours Let’s everybody weave elegant everlasting cerements Build fantastic tombs Carve lifelong coffins And devise great ways to die let’s!

(Corso 1960, p.40).

Gregory Corso’s pieces of advice, taken from his collection of poems The Happy Birthday of Death, reflects the popularisation of death that captured the American public sphere in the 1960s.

Numerous scientific and popular books dealing with death, dying and fears of dying were published: among them, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying (1969), Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’ Awareness of Dying (1965) and Herman Feifel’s collected essays and studies Meaning of Death (1959).

One of the main concerns for these authors was contemporary manners of dying, especially those occurring in hospitals. In the late 1960s, early in his career, Noyes joined this discussion enthusiastically by publishing articles such as ‘The taboo of suicide’, ‘The dying patient’, ‘The art of dying’, or ‘The care and the management of the dying’ (Noyes

Chodoff, P. (1960). A psychiatric approach to the dying patient. CA: Bulletin Cancer Progress, 10, 29–32.

Corso, G. (1960). The happy birthday of death. New York: New Directions.

Eissler, K. (1955). Dying patient and the psychiatrist. New York: International Universities Press.

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. London: Routledge.

Moody, R. (1975). Life after Life. Covington,

1967, 1968b, 1971a, 1971b). His argument was that progress in biomedicine (oncology, transplantation of organs, gerontology) caused a ‘taboo of death’. To undo this taboo, the practitioners looked to publish extensively on what it is to die.

Psychological and psychiatric skills were in high demand in the domain of the care of the dying and incurably ill.

Psychiatrists started to systematically describe emotional reactions of terminally ill patients suffering from cancer and incurable illnesses, emphasising the importance of psychotherapeutic supervision in the care of these patients (Cappon, 1959; Chodoff, 1960; Eissler, 1955; Weisman 1972). Noyes referred to empirical findings on survivors of catastrophes and concepts of grief, such as the ‘anticipatory grief reaction’ (Aldrich, 1963), in order to emphasise the condition of a dying patient. In his perspective, dying patients had similar emotional distress as survivors or persons who had lost a beloved one, because they had to accept that reality and relationships as they experienced them no longer existed (Noyes, 1968a).

Along with many other health practitioners Noyes believed that emotional distress experienced by incurably ill patients may also lead to benefits, if the process of anticipating death is approached as a learning experience. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s fivestages model of dying is one of the most famous and controversial examples of an instruction on how to die in a psychological manner; by evolving from denial toward acceptance (Kübler-Ross, 1969). Psychedelic researchers formulated similar arguments. At the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore for example, multi-professional teams administered LSD in several sessions to terminally ill patients suffering from cancer in order to provoke a ‘peak experience’ and a better appreciation for life (Pahnke et al., 1970) [see also our ‘Hallucinogens’ special issue, September 2014].

GA: Mockingbird Books.

Munk, W. (1977). Euthanasia. Or, Medical treatment in the aid of an easy death.

Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins.

(Original work published 1877) Noyes, R. (1967). The dying patient.

Diseases of the Nervous System, 28, 790–797.

Noyes, R. (1968a). Grief. Journal of the Iowa Medical Society, 59, 317–323.

Noyes, R. (1968b). The taboo of suicide.

Psychiatry, 31, 173–183.

Noyes, R. (1971a). The art of dying.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 14, 432–446.

Noyes, R. (1971b). The care and the management of the dying. Archives of Internal Medicine, 128, 299–303.

Noyes, R. (1972). The experience of dying.

Psychiatry, 35, 174–184.

Noyes, R. & Kletti, R. (1972). The experience of dying from falls. Omega,

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Eager to find out what happens at the very edge of death, Noyes turned his interest away from narratives of incurably ill patients toward those of survivors.

From 1970 on, Noyes started to collect narratives on near-death states from literature, poetry and first-hand accounts.

Among them was Michel de Montaigne’s essays on death: in particular the passage where the French philosopher recounts his own near-death experience, which occurred after a riding accident and left him so impressed that he was less fearful of death afterwards. Another example includes a narrative from a survivor of a nearly drowned admiral cited in William Munk’s Euthanasia.

Or, Medical Treatment in Aid of an Easy Death (1877/1977).

The survivor describes that when all exertion had ceased, ‘a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquility superseded the previous tumultuous sensations’ (Munk, 1977, p.12).

Noyes’ historical researches eventually led him to an 1892 compilation of near-death experiences in the Yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club. Albert Heim (1849–1937), a famous Swiss geologist and alpinist, had written a description of his spectacular 20-metre fall following a failed attempt to catch his hat: I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance... Everything was beautiful and without grief, without anxiety, and without pain... I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love...

(Noyes & Kletti, 1972, p.50)

In the original article entitled ‘Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz’ (Notes on Fatal Falls), Heim compared his sensations and perceptions with the accounts of more than 20 other survivors, mostly alpinists from the Alpine Club. He

2, 45–52.

Noyes, R. & Kletti, R. (1976).

Depersonalization in the face of lifethreatening danger: A description.

Psychiatry, 39, 19–27.

Pahnke, W., Kurland, A., Sanford, U. et al.

(1977). The experimental use of psychedelic (LSD) therapy. Journal of the American Medical Association, 212, 1856–1863.

Pfister, O. (1930). Schockdenken und

concluded that 95 per cent of the persons having faced death did not feel any pain, but rather sensations of well-being.

Inspired by this reading, Noyes and his former colleague, the psychologist Roy Kletti, translated the article into English and published it in 1972 in a journal of thanatology, Omega. From this was developed a three-stage model of the experience of dying evolving from denial to acceptance: (1) resistance, (2) (panoramic) review, (3) transcendence (Noyes, 1972).

From 1970 to 1977 Noyes replicated Heim’s approach by contacting members of the American Alpine Club. Noyes also investigated skydivers and contacted several institutes of Public Health to find records of people who had nearly drowned. In all, Noyes assembled 250 folders of correspondences from around the world. From these he developed questionnaires to measure perceptions, sensations and emotions of the survivors during their experiences in extreme danger. However, the most important question for Noyes was whether NDE – although described in psychopathological terms – could be a protective mechanism capable of preventing the subject from a traumatic experience.

Depersonalisation in danger From 1975 to 1977 Noyes compared sensations of selected survivors of car accidents with testimonies of psychiatric patients suffering from various disorders.

After analysing the questionnaires, Noyes argued that the experience of near-death corresponded to a ‘transient syndrome of depersonalisation’. Noyes postulated that

Schockphantasien bei höchster Lebensgefahr. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 16, 340–455.

Van Lommel, P., Van Wees, R., Meyers, V. & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in the Netherlands. Lancet, 358, 2039–2245.

Weisman, A. (1972). On death and denying: Psychiatric study of terminality. New York: Behavioral Publications.

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in situations of extreme danger an individual’s personality would split into a ‘participating self’ and an ‘observing self’ (Noyes & Kletti, 1976). In this state the individual would experience opposite sensations of rapid thought processing and heightened perception, combined with a feeling of distance from reality.

This simultaneous hyperactivity and detachment enabled the individual to make corrective movements, while falling or nearly drowning, but also to revive images of a joyful past (panoramic memory) to enable acceptance of life’s end. This conception of near death was partly inspired by the Swiss psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister’s theory of ‘shock phantasies’ (Schockphantasien), which suggested that in a moment of extreme danger a person protects herself with a ‘real’ and an ‘autistic’ element (Pfister, 1930).

Noyes’ empirical findings and methods were widely copied to measure death attitudes and NDE from the 1980s on, but his interpretation of NDE fell out of step with developments. With the newly defined PTSD a survivor of a lifethreatening danger was associated with traumatic rather than transformative experiences. On the other hand, parapsychologists have dominated the debate on NDE since the 1980s, explaining experiences close to death as extrasensory perceptions, rather than (just) meaningful experiences capable of altering fears related to death.

Nevertheless, Noyes’ research shows that it was not controversial for an ‘orthodox’ psychiatrist to study neardeath during the 60s and 70s. This changed after 1980: as psychiatry became more specialised and ‘new age’ approaches proliferated in parallel, it became polemic to study NDE. Noyes’ research sheds light on how death was thought to be prepared in the 60s and 70s: individuals should train themselves to experience their own death, at least simulate it, in order to reduce their fears. Narratives of survivors proved to be an excellent illustration of the simple but urgent argument: dying is a fear- and pain-free experience. Noyes’ findings, which complete the longstanding tradition of ars moriendi, may still be of interest today, namely when it comes to know whether it is necessary to prepare one’s own death, and if yes, how.

I Dr Jelena Martinovic is a research associate at the Institut d’histoire de la médecine (IUHMSP), University of Lausanne jelena.martinovic@chuv.ch

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Research. Digested.

Free.

www.bps.org.uk/digest ‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want?

I only wish I’d found this years ago!’

Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry ‘The selection of papers suits my eclectic mind perfectly, and the quality and clarity of the synopses is uniformly excellent.’

Professor Guy Claxton, University of Bristol

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