the
psychologist april 2021
www.thepsychologist.org.uk
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the
psychologist april 2021
contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates. CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB contact Krishan Parmar 01223 378051 krishan.parmar@cpl.co.uk march 2021 issue 60,921 dispatched cover Nick Taylor www.nicktaylorillustration.co.uk environment Printed by PCPLtd
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www.thepsychologist.org.uk
The Psychologist is the magazine 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’
The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag.
Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young
Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Alison Torn Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Emma Beard, Harriet Gross, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Deborah Husbands, Peter Olusoga, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker
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the
psychologist april 2021
62 ‘I tend to deal with unconventional clients’ We meet Lindsay Wilkinson
64 Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies
68 Books David Livingstone Smith on dehumanisation; leadership; and reviews
72 Culture Rap, gangs and trauma; dementia; and more
76 Looking back Demistifying attachment with Robbie Duschinsky
On The Psychologist we’re perhaps more aware of cycles and the passing of time than most. Over the years we’ve been driven by a monthly schedule, which has then become weekly, daily and eventually getting on for hourly in terms of output. So in this issue we’re keen on two features that consider how we think and act in cycles, and how time can be a subjective experience. We had nearly half a million users on The Psychologist website during January and February, up 50 per cent on the same period last year. Social media reach has similarly exploded. But we put as much love and attention as ever into packed and diverse print editions which feature so many of your voices. Just yesterday a reader described us as ‘a barometer of the health of the discipline/BPS and our/its direction of travel’. To continue the mixed metaphor, I would add that the team willingly shoulder that ever-interesting burden in the knowledge that your wind behind our sails keep the wheels turning, time after time.
80 One on one Kristina Xavier
Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag
56 Pathways to Psychology, Part Two: What next? We hear more from the next generation 02 Letters University metrics, alcohol and mental health, Method, and the President 08 Obituaries 10 News ‘Catch up’, mental health, 2021 event, plus we meet Rose Capdevila 20 Digest ‘Just as good’, learning styles and more
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26 Cycles Ella Rhodes considers the cyclical nature of life, both literal and metaphorical
32 In a different timeworld Steve Taylor seeks to make sense of time expansion experiences 40 Keeping it neutral: conducting research on immigrant detention Jake Hollis 44 ‘How is your parents’ relationship?’ Camilla Rosan and Patrick Myers on reducing conflict and improving outcomes for children 50 ‘I’ve become increasingly interested in cultural differences’ Lance Workman interviews Peter K. Smith
60 ‘I realised I should put more trust in myself’ Georgia Dunning on an undergraduate professional placement
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The next generation of psychologists will lose
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How does one measure the value of an academic psychologist? For a university, this is not a navel-gazing meditation; it’s a practical problem. The answer we choose has a major impact on the provision of education and training, and ultimately the next generation of psychologists. We need to get it right and we cannot just rely on narrow ‘objective’ metrics. Recently, we lost a great psychologist: Dr Scott Lilienfeld. He made real-world contributions in busting popular myths about human behaviour. He interrogated the concept of psychopathy, discussed the psychological treatments that actually harm, lambasted pseudoscience, and was sceptical of neuroscience being able to answer complex questions about human behaviour. Despite all this, he did not win enormous grants. A purely metricsbased valuation would not have captured the value he brought. This might feel like an old discussion but it is still a pressing topic. The University of Liverpool is planning to cut 47 jobs based on grant income and a citation metric. Five psychologists have been identified. Important contributions are being completely ignored: for example, teaching; collegiality; student experience; knowledge exchange. There will be huge losses to science and clinical practice if psychologists are hired, promoted, and fired based on a narrow assessment of performance. The use of a narrow set of metrics fails to capture the value that teaching and mentoring has to students.
Mentoring students benefits student experience and boosts both their academic and job opportunities. However, this takes time away from lecturers’ ability to develop their own research. Many women and BAME individuals are also involved in decolonising the curriculum in psychology. This takes time. These equality, diversity, and inclusion strategic priorities dovetail with those of the wider discipline (i.e., British Psychological Society). Recently, within the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programmes, Health Education England provided funding to improve diversity in the profession. If one fails to value these activities, this could be seen as an example of structural racism which prioritises a narrow area of excellence in higher education. Universities push staff to get big grants, but they should be doing the opposite. Psychologists should be rewarded for providing scientific knowledge while saving costs to the taxpayer (see Chris Chambers’ 2019 book The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology). Bidding for unneeded public money is wasteful and unethical. Some psychology research is cost-effective: important, impactful work can be done inexpensively. This kind of research should be recognised and incentivised. This includes psychological research which directly improves our health and wellbeing, but even basic science is important and can sometimes be done with openly available cohort data and without expensive equipment.
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Tim Sanders
the psychologist april 2021 letters
Scraps from the table?
Universities often care about how many publications are produced, but we should instead look at their impact. Impact could be measured in many ways: policy impact, impact on health interventions, and impact on ‘what works’. Instead, many universities count how many times a published paper has been cited or mentioned within another scientific publication. Different areas of psychology show greater ‘value’ when using this citation metric. However, psychology is most useful when multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are encouraged. Pursuing high citations threatens the position of psychology as an interdisciplinary science with input from a variety of expertise – e.g., methodological, social, and clinical. The profession is already dominated by certain voices, and this bias will continue if we focus on grants and citations, as University of Liverpool is doing. We need to reward psychologists who convert the tax-payers’ purse into excellent research, whether that is experimental ‘blue sky’ research or social psychology. Also, academic excellence needs to include the work of equality, diversity, and inclusion. Since women and ethnic minorities take up the decolonisation work and mentoring and coaching, the next generation of psychologists will lose. We can’t expect the field of psychology to be more inclusive if these individuals are pushed out. Dr Luna Centifanti Senior Lecturer / Senior Research Tutor DClinPsych University of Liverpool For more comment on how academic work is valued and what makes a department, see Dorothy Bishop’s blog at http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2021/03/ university-staff-cuts-under-cover-of.html and seek out Twitter threads from Richard Bentall and Tom Stafford.
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Increasingly as an early career researcher (ECR), I find that I’m being left with scraps from the table. The pandemic has only made me more aware of the precarity of ECR positions in academia. At the start of the pandemic, as a graduate teaching assistant, I was asked to pivot to online teaching. My full-time colleagues were given what they needed; I had to equip myself. To my eyes, Covid-19 has only accelerated the neoliberalisation of higher education which has seen the increased marketisation, corporatisation, and managerialisation following the economic crisis. ECRs have always faced challenges at the start of their career; balancing teaching demands with establishing a strong track record in research, even while on a short-term contract. Now it is also becoming increasingly difficult for graduates to obtain honorary academic affiliations while they seek full-time or permanent positions subsequent to a first postdoc. We can feel like a ‘non-citizen’ of the academy, no longer able to access resources, lab spaces or the software which has become vital to pivot our research from face-to-face to online or desk-based research methodologies. This is all in the context of ECRs perhaps being in a foreign country, unable to get home to their loved ones, or maybe even living alone or being part of an at-risk category group. The situation created by Covid, including shouldering increased burdens of departmental duties, provides little time to invest in maintaining our academic careers through reading, writing and critical discussions. Indeed, in Nicola Byrom’s survey of ECRs and doctoral students back in April-May 2020, over two-thirds of the respondents reported that the pandemic had made it difficult for them to discuss ideas with colleagues. Informal professional
discussions are rarely afforded any level of importance within the HEI management structure. The focus on working from home has meant that many ECRs have been isolated from their network – and at a time in their careers when networking has never been more important in terms of progressing up the career ladder. Pre-pandemic, you might bump into a colleague in the hallway after a seminar, which leads to an informal chat on theory or research, or they might email you a paper that you perhaps then discuss whilst walking to a meeting together. These discussions are short, but often vital to ECR research and opportunities for teaching collaborations, even leading to inclusion on funding bids. Yet, from a more established researcher’s perspective, such interactions with ECRs do not merit the demands on their time and attention. The pandemic has affected everyone, but contrary to the ‘we are in this together’ discourse, it has impacted differently on the various demographic groups in academia. For example, women in STEM and also parents have been disproportionately affected by the new context of the pandemic. For ECRs, many have lost the valuable space – physically, socially and philosophically – in which to work, discuss, and collaborate within and across disciplines. And, again, reflecting on intersectionality, the pressures that ECRs are shouldering are far worse for those with caring responsibilities, such as for small children or ageing parents. It’s not all bad news for ECRs in academia. Our training prepared many of us for the online pivot, and, arguably, it is ECRs who are emerging as the most resourceful and creative in the move to teaching and research within the context of Covid. Adele Pavlidis talks of individuals in precarious situations drawing upon ‘adversity capital’. This allows us to style our own versions of ‘productivity’ and ‘meaningfulness’.
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What could this look like for ECRs teaching and researching during and post-Covid? Possibly creating our own discursive spaces. For example, on place of my usual catch-up every Monday morning with a colleague as we arrived on the same bus, now we need to actually schedule in such exchanges. I have scheduled a weekly time with other ECR colleagues to discuss a recently published article. But I end with a plea to senior management in institutions, particularly those in charge of
research funding and policymaking. Please, if you already offer research development activities for your permanent research and teaching staff – such as journal clubs, book clubs, discussion groups, seminars, assistance with bid-writing, publication writing spaces and any collaborative space for research development – open these up to your wider networks, in particular your ECRs, postgraduate researchers (PGRs), and precariously placed research and teaching staff. If such
activities are not currently offered in your own research domain, then I suggest combining forces with your ECRs (and even PGRs) to informally or formally start arranging these vital collaborative virtual networking spaces. An early career researcher Name and address supplied For the full version, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ scraps-table
Alcohol use and mental health – a false economy
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Over the last ten to fifteen years, a wedge has been driven between service provision for people with mental health problems and ‘alcohol misuse’. This habit seems to reflect a binary view of the two issues. The uncoupling is the legacy of political decision-making and fails to employ a sensitivity to people’s contextual or functional use of alcohol (i.e., that subjectively it is not being misused) and the aetiological paradox that exists between psychological distress and alcohol consumption. The pair have a reciprocal and compounding relationship, yet all too often, people who disclose consumption that eclipses NHS recommendations are directed away from mental health services, to work on reducing their alcohol intake, or are referred to specialist addiction services. This leaves us in a clinical no man’s land – a costly place to be. The net costs of alcohol use for the UK economy are difficult to determine, as the effects can be indirect as well as direct, and not helped by the fact that alcohol use is knotted up in most aspects of our lives: our physical and mental health, relationships and professional lives. Various categories of alcohol use (hazardous & harmful, alcohol dependence, alcohol use disorder) are associated with premature mortality, impaired health, disability, crime, domestic violence and unemployment. Alarmingly, despite the nuanced effect that the pandemic appears to have had on people’s drinking habits, it was recently reported by the ONS (2020) that there has been a 16.4 per cent increase in alcohol-specific deaths, the highest rate since 2001. And yet there is a distinct lack of integrated or parallel services provision. With their separate philosophy and budget, mental health services frequently turn people away from support and treatments that could address the aetiology of their ‘problem’. While this issue does not reserve a special place in IAPT services per se, the work of its architect, the economist Lord Layard springs to mind. The inception of
the UK’s flagship primary mental health provision was based on Layard’s economic vision. He reasoned that a 50 per cent ‘recovery rate’ would balance the books and the services would effectively pay for themselves, in lieu of the savings made to incapacity benefits. Layard’s inspirational call for action was based on his observations that common mental health problems cause massive distress, create deprivation and involve huge economic costs. These so-called ‘reasons for action’, apparently, are not reason enough, when it comes to people with mental health problems that happen to self-medicate their distress with alcohol. This is all the more surprising, when we begin to contemplate how the financial (and human) costs rise exponentially when people present with ‘co-morbid’ mental health problems and hazardous (and harmful) alcohol use. I am heartened by my observations that alcohol recovery services seem more willing to adopt the ‘no wrong door policy’ advocated by Public Health England (2017). However, individuals’ good work is often undone when their psychological distress is left unabated when they successfully abstain from their self-medicating alcohol use, resulting in relapse. So, in the spirit of the of the Layard Report (London School of Economics, 2006) ‘therapy for all’ then, that is unless you drink. Emboldened by Orwellian fear, to me, it seems that all types of psychological distress are equal, but some types of psychological distress are more equal than others. Daren Lee in the write-up phase of a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology Read the full piece and references via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/mental-health-andalcohol-use-chicken-and-egg-problem
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the psychologist april 2021 letters
Spearman Medal is retired The Spearman Medal was instituted by the BPS in 1962 and the first medal was awarded in 1965 to Anne Treisman. Since that time, 47 Medallists have been honoured. Recently, a number of concerns have been raised, including a letter from Dr Vaughan Bell to The Psychologist (September 2020), regarding Spearman’s links with the Eugenics movement and whether renaming the Medal would be appropriate. The Research Board was therefore asked to consider whether to rename or retire the Medal. The Research Board agreed that, whilst recognising the exceptional contributions of Spearman to Psychology, we must also be mindful of the complex legacy associated with the Spearman Medal and ensure that our awards represent the best of what the Society wishes to promote: equality, diversity and inclusion. As a result, it decided to retire the Medal with immediate effect, and we will be launching a new early career award for exceptional contributions to psychological knowledge in due course. Professor Daryl O’Connor Chair, Research Board
from the president The ’cycles’ element of this month’s magazine is somewhat farsighted, as we all start to emerge from what has been one of the most challenging cycles in our lifetimes. As Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, says: ‘Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else’. We have experienced this pandemic in cycles, with individual ups and downs for people at different times. It is hard to remain resilient and focused. Yet psychology is a source of positivity with time to take stock, reflect and gain perspective. We recognise that there is validity in our emotional reactions and with the support of others, we can move on through to the next cycle. Psychologists have shared best practice, and those directly involved with healthcare have come to the fore during the pandemic with their understanding of the link between psychology and physical health outcomes. Many applied psychologists have provided excellent support to frontline NHS workers and those who have been the most affected by the pandemic. Behavioural change has been important and social psychology has provided insights into our responses. As we move through the next cycle of the pandemic, the wellbeing and mental health of the nation will be of paramount importance. Psychologists have a critical role in this arena. The BPS is liaising with policy makers and the government across the four nations to highlight the science and the evidence that can inform decision-making. Furthermore, we are working internationally through the Global Psychology Alliance and with our European colleagues in EFPA to bring rigour and science from psychology to challenges
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post-pandemic. This will include sustainability, a focus on climate change and the challenges as the nation returns to workplaces. On this latter topic, occupational psychologists can make a significant contribution as organisations and employees adapt to the next cycle in this pandemic. With international colleagues on the Global Alliance, I recently was encouraged by the presentation from Guy Kawasaki, the Chief Evangelist at the Apple Corporation. His focus was on how to energise others during change and transition. He highlighted the importance of Champions of Change who can clearly articulate the story and enable others to have a clear direction in which to move forward. His context for change was in business, looking at products and services, but the core principles can be applied for us in psychology. Some of his core tips that were on target for me: plant many seeds as you do not know which ones will be the key; localise your efforts; we need to focus on what matters. Tell stories and gain commitment to your ideas, trust your judgement, and let others test drive the solutions. Provide a safe first step for people and ignore titles and pedigrees. Invert the pyramid, listen to people, and build a collective response. Together, we can make a difference. So, what will happen in our next cycle is yet to be decided, but we can shape the outcomes. To quote Albert Einstein, ‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving’. This makes me think about the core values and purpose for psychology and about the direction, the BPS vision, and the importance of doing what really matters not only for psychology and psychologists, but for our local communities and for the nation. Dr Hazel McLaughlin is President of the British Psychological Society. Contact her at PresidentsOffice@bps.org.uk
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What do we mean by ‘catch up’?
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hat might the future hold for children in the UK after lockdown? This question is at the forefront of the minds of parents, teachers, psychologists and many others – closing the attainment gap, helping children to get back on track with their educational and social development, and supporting children and young people’s mental health are major concerns as schools reopen their doors to all students. In late February UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out his plans for ending lockdown and announced that English schools would fully reopen their doors on 8 March. At around the same time early years and primaryaged children in Scotland went back to school as part of a phased reopening and all children under seven in Wales also returned. The Covid pandemic has had a huge impact on children’s access to learning – both academic and social – and some have suggested that children should return to school during summer breaks to catch up on material they have missed. The British Psychological Society’s Division of Educational and Child Psychology, however, recently urged the government to move away from an emphasis on ‘catching up’ with education and think more
about supporting children’s wellbeing and educational needs. In a statement the division suggested a phased return to regular schooling with a quality over quantity approach to key learning, its members also suggested that if children will be attending school more there should be a focus on support through socialisation and play. Co-chair of the division Dr Dan O’Hare said that while it was understandable that parents and carers may be concerned that children had missed aspects of formal learning, the idea that children were ‘behind’ or needed to ‘catch up’ put children under more pressure to perform after a challenging time. ‘It’s important to celebrate the progress, learning and development children have made in the last year and ensure that they feel proud of what they’ve achieved so that they can build upon their strengths and continue their key learning moving forward. Together, parents, caregivers and teachers have done an amazing job of continuing children’s education outside the school environment, and its vital that this work isn’t diminished.’ O’Hare said that some children may well have had a positive experience during lockdown, but we should
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the psychologist april 2021 news not lose sight of the fact that Covid had had a huge impact on children’s everyday lives. ‘Many children may have seen their families struggling with sudden unemployment, loss of earnings or grieving the death of a loved one. Vulnerable children and families from disadvantaged communities may have spent the lockdowns wondering where their next meal is going to come from, or how they’re going to keep a roof over their heads. ‘Whatever a child or young person’s circumstances, we can’t assume that the right thing to support their recovery and wellbeing is for them is to be in lessons for longer each day. The voice of children and young people has been noticeably missing from this debate and it’s essential that they are consulted and their thoughts and feelings considered as part of the decision-making process about the return to school.’ PlayFirstUK – a group of 15 child psychologists and education specialists led by Professor Helen Dodd (University of Reading) – recently wrote to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to warn that plans for intensive ‘catch up’ activity could harm children’s mental health and wellbeing. The group suggested this could lead to increased pressure on mental health services, would result in less time to play with friends, and could have a negative effect on children’s learning in the long term. Dodd said in a statement that the group was concerned about the impact of the pandemic on children, with research showing increases in loneliness and mental health problems. ‘As part of the recovery process, children need time to reconnect and play with their friends, they need to be reminded how good it feels to be outdoors after so long inside and they need to get physically active again. ‘There is understandable concern about children’s education but the impact of mental health problems in childhood can be lifelong. This letter is really a plea from us that children’s mental health and their right to play and have fun with their friends are not forgotten in a rush to catch them up to educational targets that adults have set for them.’ It remains to be seen how well children and young people will recover from the effects of lockdowns as well as missing out on parts of their educational and social development – especially given the current struggles of CAMHS services. In her annual report on children’s mental health services in England Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield pointed out the low levels of access to mental health services, inadequate spending on such services, and the postcode lottery involved in accessing them. In a statement Longfield said that it was widely accepted that lockdown and school closures had had a detrimental effect on children’s mental health, with one NHS study from July last year estimating that one in six children in England had a probable mental health condition. ‘In the longer term, the Government’s ‘building back better’ plans must include a rocket boost in
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funding for children’s mental health, to expand services and eliminate the postcode lottery. As an absolute minimum, all schools should be provided with an NHS-funded counsellor, either in school or online. ‘We have seen how the NHS has risen to the scale of the Covid crisis for adults. We owe children, who are suffering the secondary consequences of the pandemic, a mental health service that provides the help and support they need.’ However, writing for The Psychologist, Naomi Fisher – author of Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of their Learning and a clinical psychologist – encouraged a focus on narratives of resilience. Fisher pointed to press coverage of the Covid pandemic which has often focused on fears about children not being able to catch up, parents struggling to cope and wrote that she had been contacted by many parents who felt they were failing and falling behind. While Fisher acknowledged that the pandemic will have had an impact on the younger generations’ experience of childhood, and that impact will vary from family to family, the way we talk about experiences, or the narratives we use to make sense of the world, matter. ‘Life isn’t just about what happens to you, it’s about how you make sense of what happens to you – and what explanations are offered to you to help you with that.’ The narratives of mental health post-covid suggest we are facing an enormous mental health crisis and that demand will outstrip supply. Children and young people certainly are experiencing depression, anxiety and anger thanks to Covid lockdowns but we could reconsider the way we frame these reactions, Fisher suggested. ‘When we call these emotional reactions mental health problems, we define them as a disorder, an illness or dysfunction. Does feeling anxious, depressed and angry after nearly a year of intermittent lockdown, social distancing and ongoing fear of Covid-19 mean that there’s anything actually wrong?’ In her own work Fisher focuses on encouraging narratives of resilience and reframing experiences – encouraging clients to reflect on the fact they have survived very difficult times. ‘This is hard to do. My own children are distressed by lockdown. They are bored and lonely, they frequently get angry and upset and I wish I could make it less difficult for them. But resilience isn’t about not feeling emotions or never getting angry. It’s about knowing that you can carry on even when things are tough. ‘It’s a belief in your capacity for recovery. This is what we need to give our children, and this is the narrative I think psychologists need to fight for. How we talk about things matters.’ er To read the Division of Educational and Child Psychology’s full statement on the ‘catch-up’ narrative see: https://tinyurl.com/5fe4zp53 To read Fisher’s full article see: thepsychologist.bps. org.uk/weathering-storm
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What’s up with everyone?
Dr Tom Curran
Researchers in mental health have teamed up with Aardman Animations to launch a new campaign aimed at supporting the wellbeing of 17- to 24-year-olds. The What’s Up With Everyone? campaign features a series of short animations touching on five broad issues which affect young people – perfectionism, loneliness, social media, competitiveness and independence. To create the films, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Aardman worked alongside principal investigator Paul Crawford, Director of the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health (University of Nottingham), and teams from Loughborough University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, with support from the Mental Health Foundation and the mental health charity Happy Space. The films, directed by Daniel Binns at Aardman, feature animated characters’ internal struggles and show how perspectives can be shifted slightly to improve wellbeing before issues begin impacting mental health. Crawford said in a statement that the research behind, within and about the project was fundamental to the successful creation of the films to support young people’s mental health. ‘With Covid-19 there will be no red carpet but there is a deep pride that all those involved in this project have been part of a bit of magic amidst the difficult times we are all facing. Anyone who has worked with Aardman or seen their work will know that their reach to the audience is profound, so the potential impact trajectory for the project is jaw-dropping.’ The themes for each of the videos were decided on after extensive focus groups with young people and they are featured on whatsupwitheveryone.com alongside resources for further support including helplines and charities. Each one draws on evidence-based mental health research and their impact will also be evaluated by teams of researchers. Social Psychologist Dr Tom Curan (LSE) was coinvestigator on the three-year-long project. An expert in the area of perfectionism, Curran said that working on the project had given him a deeper understanding of the struggles which young people face. ‘As someone who researches and writes about these issues academically we often look at societal expectation,
the uncertainty in the economy and precarity, and we assume young people think about those things, but they don’t. They’re more thinking about the direct social comparisons that they engage with on a day to day basis – this might be social comparison on social media, pressure from parents or social comparison at school.’ Curran said that social media, in particular, had changed the landscape for young people. ‘These days young people are not just consumers, they’re products, and they feel they have to sell themselves through social media – that has been a complete change in the way I thought about social pressures… with social media these pressures are much more severe and I think it’s something that we, as a society, really need to be aware of. ‘Young people do get a bad rap because they seem to have all these things – phones and technology and material items – that older generations didn’t have. But what we don’t recognise is that, within that, comes additional pressure to project this idealised image, this perfect, polished profile and at the same time they have none of the securities that older generations had, like a stable job or income.’ Curran said it had been a great experience to work on a project that closely involved young people as well as those from a number of different academic and creative disciplines. He will also be part of the team evaluating the impact of the videos – specifically exploring whether the videos increase young people’s willingness to seek support or their willingness to support others. er
Informing Futures toolkit
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A charity which supports young people with experience of care and custody has released a free online toolkit for those working with this population and people who commission and design services. 1625 Independent People developed ‘Informing Futures’ thanks to funding from the National Lottery Community
Fund as a legacy resource to share learning from its Future 4 Me project. The toolkit, available for free online at www.informingfutures. co.uk, includes information and resources on building psychologically informed environments, training modules, self-assessment tools and short films which have been
co-designed with young people, information on supporting positive mental health and resources for trauma-informed working. It also contains information about 1625 Independent People, the Future 4 Me project, Future 4 Me partners, and a section for funders and commissioners.
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the psychologist april 2021 news
Work experience for psychology students In a bid to increase access to work experience for psychology students Outcomes First Group has offered placements for people interested in working with children with learning disabilities and complex needs. Dr Robina Shah, Director of Clinical and Wellbeing at the organisation, said placements and work experience would be available to pre-university, undergraduate and postgraduate students. Outcomes First Group (OFG) runs residential care homes, schools, and regional fostering agencies in the four nations of the UK. Shah, also Director of Manchester University’s Doubleday Centre for Patient Experience, said she hoped to tackle some of the competitiveness
over finding work experience in psychology and related disciplines – including speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. ‘Often psychology students don’t consider the independent sector for work experience or placements and turn to the NHS or voluntary sector instead. We’d like to open a gateway for people to have up to a month of supervised work experience with OFG.’ Shah has experience of linking up young people with career opportunities through her work as Chief Ambassador of the Meet Your Future scheme started by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. She said she would like to see work experience opened up to more
people from different backgrounds, and for schemes to be better coordinated through organisations such as the British Psychological Society. Placements will be organised once lockdown restrictions are eased, but Shah said in the meantime she hoped to run events for students interested in the field to have a chance to attend virtual talks from psychologists and speech and language therapists about their work. If you would be interested in arranging a work experience placement with OFG see www.outcomesfirstgroup.co.uk. er
Dr Robina Shah
Growing influence It has been a busy time for the British Psychological Society’s policy team, who have recently been involved in a number of meetings and discussions with cabinet, and shadow cabinet, ministers. Policy Advisor Nigel Atter has been in discussions about children and young people’s mental health with Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth. Among the recommendations that Atter and colleagues have shared with ministers include a funding boost for children’s mental health, a workforce investment strategy, and a significant increase in the number of applied psychologists working in schools. Atter was joined by three BPS members in his meeting with Ashworth in which they focused on the decline in children and young people’s mental health and psychological wellbeing. Prior to that Atter met with Gavin Williamson, Secretary of State for Education, and Nadine Dorries,
Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth
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Minister of State for Mental Health, Suicide Prevention and Patient Safety, along with other stakeholders. The meeting was instigated by MP Dr Lisa Cameron who called for cross-party collaboration on Children and Young People’s Mental Health and raised issues including the long waiting times for treatment. Atter spoke on behalf of the BPS to highlight the importance of early intervention and prevention. Recent statistics show approximately 50,000 referrals to children’s mental health services in October 2020 alone, and approximately 300,000 children in contact with mental health services. He also met with Shadow Secretary of State for Education Kate Green MP and Cat Smith MP, Shadow Minister (Cabinet Office) (Young People and Voter Engagement), as part of a roundtable after a meeting with Labour MP Emma Hardy on the subject. Atter said that these meetings showed that the policy team’s impact and influence was growing, and that the BPS was prioritising building relationships and communicating its agenda on children and young people’s mental health. ‘We recently had our fourth meeting with Jon Ashworth so it’s great to be maintaining that relationship, and the fact that we are meeting with front benchers is really encouraging. These meetings also enable us to interact with the other stakeholders present too, which means we can share our message and build networking links with those organisations.’ The policy team has also written to Williamson about educational attainment, drafted parliamentary questions for Shadow Minister for Schools Wes Streeting, and are working on a response to Andrea Leadsom’s early years review.
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This year’s main BPS conference will consider the challenges that have faced the world throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and psychology’s role in helping us to face adversity. The fully online event, held 1-2 July, will be based around the theme of positive adaptations and psychological strengths. Speakers will focus on the ways we can support resilience and compassion within psychological professions, as well as its role in embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in society. A full programme and registration will be available soon on www.delegate-reg.co.uk/bpsconf2021.
News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ reports, including: ‘The same difference allows you to connect to people’: Ella Rhodes reports on a British Psychological Society webinar around issues of class. Much Psychology on offer at the Cambridge Festival (26 Mar-4 Apr).
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Black Psychology and African Spirituality: The Origins of Therapuetic Practice. Dr Y. AdeSerrano and Dr L. Gordon report from a one-day conference.
Maximum Headroom The BBC has launched a website bringing together resources to support the public’s mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. Headroom includes inspiring stories from the BBC’s documentary back catalogue on iPlayer, calming playlists, podcasts and music mixes, diet tips from BBC Food, motivational tips from BBC Sport, archive episodes of All in the Mind and creative ideas from BBC Arts. Director General, Tim Davie, said there were currently significant challenges for people and their mental health. ‘Headroom is a great resource for everyone bringing together a unique package of content to help in difficult times. Mental health is a topic that we should all be able to talk about.’ er Visit bbc.co.uk/headroom to find out more and access these resources.
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05/03/2021 14:06
‘Representation and methodology need to change’ Dr Rose Capdevila is Associate Dean of Research, Scholarship and Enterprise for the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at The Open University, and Chair of the BPS Psychology of Women & Equalities Section (POWES). For International Women’s Day, Deputy Editor Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne asks the questions.
The Section was originally founded in 1988 as The Psychology of Women Section. Tell us about the change to incorporate Equalities. The reason for the name change, the addition of ‘equalities’, was to allow for a fuller representation of our membership and to better reflect the development of research in this area. As we argued in the application for the name change, the addition of ‘equalities’ meant that
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Dr Rose Capdevila
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the section could recognise the breadth of work on/by women and/in psychology as well as more intersectional research which draws on the relationship between gender and the body, class, race, sexuality and other markers of difference. Conceptually, our focus has always been on the psychology of women as an issue of equality and social justice. The name change made this explicit and the membership voted overwhelmingly in favour of it. What do you think needs to change in the psychology curriculum to address gender issues and inequalities? That’s a huge question. Primarily, I think, we need to stop assuming that the experience of one group is the experience of all groups. We have a long history of psychologists pointing out how our discipline can fall short in terms of representation – from Mary Calkins’ ‘Community of ideas of men and women’ in 1896 to Robert Guthrie’s Even the Rat was White in 1976 to Carole Tavris’ 1992 The Mismeasure of Woman and countless others. More recently, we’ve all been reminded that psychological data are still dominated by samples from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010; Muthukrishna et al. 2020) and that this has a direct impact on the claims that can be made. To be fair, psychology has made some efforts to respond to these critiques and there has been some progress (Eagly et al, 2012)… but not nearly enough. This is because it is not simply a question of adding in a few variables or diversifying your study sample. If we want a curriculum that represents our world and our values, we need to think about how we go about producing knowledge in line with those and consider how power is playing out in the process. As feminist psychologists have been arguing for decades, we need to think more carefully about methodology. So, I would say, two things in particular need to change: representation and methodology. Currently, I am working with Dr Hannah Frith on a book that compliments current methods provision from a feminist perspective. It is part of the Feminist Companions series which draws together feminist research and theory in each area of the psychology curriculum. You can find more information about this in the POWES Newsletter.
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Tell us about the most exciting feminist and emancipatory research and theory at the moment. There is so much wonderful work going on at the moment. It’s great to see how many researchers are embedding feminist and emancipatory approaches in their work. In the last decade we’ve seen feminism go from being an ‘f-word’ to becoming part of everyday talk in popular culture. For many young people it’s become a taken for granted. What’s most exciting is how much excellent work is being done. For instance, we have four excellent keynote speakers at our annual conference (7-9 July) that all make important contributions in different ways. Chris Griffin, Professor Emerita at the University of Bath, has been a long-time member and supporter of POWES. Her work around young women has been a foundational influence for many members’ research and teaching, including my own. Bridgette Rickett’s contribution to feminist methodology along with her work on gender and class have brought something new to the way we think about these issues. Jen Slater’s work in disability studies, has taken a critical approach to the embodiment of gender, having recently completed a fascinating arts-based project exploring the toilet as a space of exclusion and belonging. Our fourth speaker, Jacy Young, a historian of psychology, has recently been challenging the norms of conduct in social psychology with a focus on sexual harassment. We’re all looking forward to their presentations.
Worrell, a member of the POWES committee and past chair who died tragically last spring. The prize is for mentorship, an activity which members have told us is one of the most important for them in POWES and at which Marcia excelled.
References Calkins, M.W. (1896). Community of ideas of men and women. Psychological Review, 3, 426-430. Eagly, A.H., Eaton, A., Rose, S.M. et al. (2012). Feminism and psychology: Analysis of a half-century of research on women and gender. American Psychologist, 67(3), 211. Henrich, J., Heine, S.J. & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. Muthukrishna, M., Bell, A.V., Henrich, J. et al. (2020). Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance. Psychological Science, 31(6), 678-701. Myers, K.R., Tham, W.Y., Yin, Y. et al. (2020). Unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists. Nature human behaviour, 4(9), 880-883. Tavris, C. (1992). The mismeasure of woman: Paradoxes and perspectives in the study of gender. American Psychological Association. Wenham, C., Smith J. & Morgan R. (2020). Covid-19 is an opportunity for gender equality within the workplace and at home. BMJ, 369, m1546.
If you could make one policy change to support women and equalities what would it be? I would suggest that psychology has shown us that change rarely works that way – as a single event that can be decontextualised from everything around it. POWES champions the values of equality and social justice in all of the work we do and to inform any engagement with policy. Most recently a group of POWES members have contributed the BPS response to the government’s consultation on Violence Against Women and Girls. There are some issues with how the policy has been conceptualised. For instance, it focuses on specific and sensationalised examples of violence which don’t engage with or capture the realities of people’s everyday experiences, as we’ve seen highlighted by the #MeToo campaign. What activities has the Section been involved in recently? We think our recommendations would improve the policy. In spite of the challenges this year has brought our Getting this right is hugely important focus has been on community and and would definitely make a big communication. We are continuing difference to the lives of women and with most of our usual activities such “POWES champions the girls but also society as a whole. as organising our annual conference, values of equality and coordinating the POWES Student social justice in all of the What are the challenges and prizes, editing our journal POWER priorities for POWES going forward? (Psychology of Women and Equalities work we do” Making sure there is a supportive Review), putting out a newsletter space for academics to work, and running our social media think and research around the accounts. We also find working with psychology of women and equalities. We all know that other organisations within and outside of the BPS really for many people, life has become much more difficult rewarding. in the last year. Research also indicates that some So, in the coming year we are running, with PsyPAG, groups have carried more of the caring burden during a workshop for postgraduates on dealing with the media, this time, for instance, women have taken on a greater we’ve organised anti-racism training for our committee share of the responsibility of home schooling (Myers et and members with Nilaari, a BAME-led voluntary al., 2020; Wenham, Smith & Morgan, 2020). How do we sector organisation, and we’ve initiated a project on the assess and mitigate the negative psychological impact history of POWES and feminist psychology in the UK of these inequities and learn from the good practice we with the History of Psychology Centre and Psychology’s can identify? The role of POWES, and now with the new Feminist Voices and with the support of the History and equality, diversity and inclusion agenda of the BPS as a Philosophy Section. At this year’s conference we will also whole, would be to facilitate and promote this work. be instituting a new prize in honour of Professor Marcia
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‘Just as good’ less than ideal Emma Young digests the latest research
Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website
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T
hough girls and boys do equally well on maths tests, the stereotype that girls aren’t as naturally able at maths – or as likely to be extremely smart – is adopted early; even six-year-olds in the US endorse it. Of course, these stereotypes harm women in an educational setting and in their professional lives, point out the authors of a new study in Developmental Psychology. So it’s important to understand what gives rise to them. Eleanor Chestnut at Stanford University and her colleagues now report that one common and well-intentioned way of attempting to convey girls’ equality with boys actually backfires: saying that girls are ‘just as good’ as boys at something leads the listener to conclude that boys are naturally better, and girls must work harder to equal them. Earlier work has shown that we use the syntax of a sentence to make inferences about the relative status of objects and social groups. Typically, we view the thing or person that is being compared to as the more typical or superior reference example. So, if you were to read ‘Molly’s cake is as good as Jessica’s’, you’d be likely to infer that Jessica’s is the exemplar that Molly is striving to equal. ‘Girls are just as good as boys at maths’ is something that family members, caregivers, teachers and public figures all say to try to promote gender equality, note the researchers. And in 2018, Chestnut and her colleague Ellen M. Markman reported that adults who hear that statement infer that boys are more skilled at maths and have more natural ability. Unfortunately, then, it seems to perpetuate the very stereotype that it seeks to counteract. In the new study, the team set out to discover whether stereotypes can not only be perpetuated but
learned, based on syntax alone. First, the team studied 288 adults, who were recruited online. These participants read sentences that incorporated nonsense words for abilities or traits. The team found that people who read that girls are ‘as good as boys’ at ‘thrupping’, say, or ‘trewting’, inferred more natural skill to the boys, and that girls had to work harder to be ‘trewtic’, and so on. When the boys were reported to be ‘as good as girls’, though, the girls were perceived to be superior – showing the influence of syntax in the participant’s judgements. When the sentence read, ‘Suppose someone tells you that boys and girls [or girls and boys] are equally good at thrupping’, and so on, neither gender was perceived to be naturally superior. The team then ran a similar study with 337 children, aged 7 to 11, who were recruited from museums in the San Francisco Bay area. This time, the researchers used puppets (who said they wanted to tell the children about boys and girls on their planet) as well as written statements. And instead of using nonsense words, the researchers referred to activities that the children would understand but which the team didn’t think they’d have a strong pre-existing gender bias about – whistling, hopping on one foot, doing handstands and snapping. When these children were told that boys [or girls] are ‘as good as’ girls [or boys] at one of these things, the children were more likely to report that the gender in the reference position, at the end of the sentence, was naturally better, and would have to work less hard to be skilled at it. Also in line with the findings from adults, when the boys and girls on the alien planet were presented as being ‘equally as good’ at an activity, the children didn’t view either gender as being naturally superior. The children’s age made no difference; they all made similar inferences. ‘We conclude that is critically important to consider how we frame equality when talking to children,’ the researchers write. The work suggests that if a child does not already hold the stereotype that boys are better than girls at maths, or more likely to be extremely smart, hearing that girls are ‘as good as boys’ in these spheres could actually teach it. Public figures, websites, statements on Twitter, and even psychological research articles readily equate girls’ abilities with boys’ or women’s with men’s, the team notes. Their work suggests that presenting girls and boys, and men and women, as being ‘equally as good’ at something is a far better strategy. ‘Until women and men are on equal syntactic footing, they will not be on equal social footing,’ they conclude.
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‘Learning styles’ myth still prevalent among educators The idea that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their specific ‘learning style’ – auditory, kinesthetic, visual or some combination of the three – is widely considered a myth. Research has variously suggested that learners don’t actually benefit from their preferred style, that teachers and pupils have different ideas about what learning styles actually work for them, and that we have very little insight into how much we’re actually learning from various methods. Despite this evidence, a large proportion of people – including the general public, educators and even those with a background in neuroscience – still believe in the myth. And a new review, from Philip M. Newton and Atharva Salvi (Swansea University) and published in Frontiers in Education, finds no signs of that changing. The team looked at articles that focused on belief in learning styles published between 2009 and April 2020. Articles with participant groups that were not made up of educators or trainee educators were excluded from analysis, as were surveys that focused not on whether learning styles actually existed but on other opinions – whether they explain differences in achievement, for example. Data from over 15,000 educators were included in the analysis. Overall, 89.1 per cent of participants believed that people learn better when instruction is matched to their learning styles. A total of 95.4 per cent of trainee educators believed in learning styles – slightly higher than the 87.8 per cent of qualified educators who showed similar beliefs. And despite more widespread debunking of the myth, both in academic publishing and the mainstream media, there was no significant decrease in belief in studies conducted more recently. This had a real impact on how teachers worked: in the seven studies that measured use or planned use
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of learning style-matched teaching, 79.7 per cent of educators said they used or intended to use matched teaching methods. Interventions designed to disavow educators of their belief in learning styles did seem to make some difference, however – in the four studies that utilised training for these purposes, belief decreased significantly, from 78.4 per cent to 37.1 per cent. The myth of learning styles, it seems, is as pervasive as ever. But why educators continue to believe in them is less clear. It may be that the belief is heavily promoted during teacher training; it could be that teachers are working with their students as their teachers worked with them; or it could be that attempts to debunk the myth have simply not been high profile enough, failing to cut through to educators. But researchers could also do with improving research into the prevalence of learning style myths, the team suggests. Many studies included in the analysis had no key indicators of the quality of survey responses, raising questions about the generalisability of findings. ‘None of the studies use a defined, representative sample, and very few include sufficient information to allow the calculation of a response rate,’ the team writes. The questionnaires used in the studies could also be clearer about exactly what it means to ‘match’ instruction to learning styles, the authors add. Future research could also look at the consequences of learning style-matched teaching – does it actually matter if the myth is perpetuated, and does it have a serious impact on how people learn? Studying how training can educate teachers on the learning style myth could also help us understand how it spreads and why it sticks – and might help students get the most out of education at the same time. Emily Reynolds
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Digest digested… Researchers have identified changes in the language of thousands of Reddit users going through breakups. These included decreases in analytic thinking and increases in the use of ‘I’ words, which began weeks before the break-up and continued for months afterwards. These changes suggest that in the period before and after a break-up, people show a disruption in their ‘normal’ thinking patterns and increased selfimmersion. PNAS We all know that when an instructor is enthusiastic, those sessions are more enjoyable – and we remember more. Now researchers
have identified why: material delivered with enthusiasm is better at capturing kids’ attention. But when another task is competing for children’s attention, it doesn’t matter how enthusiastic an instructor is – suggesting that teachers should ‘economise’ their efforts to increase their enthusiasm, only doing so when it will actually be useful. British Journal of Educational Psychology A new study has identified a ‘dark side’ to gratitude: people who feel more grateful are more willing to obey ethically-dubious instructions. Participants who were asked to think of a time when they felt grateful, or
those who were made to feel grateful towards the experimenter, agreed to add more worms to a coffee grinder, believing they were sending the creatures to their death (no worms were actually harmed in the experiment!). Emotion
With Covid-19 taking up space both in the media and in our minds, are people thinking less about climate change? Not according to a new longitudinal study, which suggests that climate change is now such a major concern that even serious threats of another nature don’t diminish fears at all. UK-based participants showed no decrease in belief in, or concern about, climate change between April 2019 and June 2020, and saw climate change as a bigger threat to the world than Covid-19. PNAS 22
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Microdosing and mental health – a placebo response The practice of ‘microdosing’ psychedelic drugs – taking a very small quantity of a psychedelic substance repeatedly over a period of time – has become popular in recent years as a way of supposedly boosting mood or improving creativity. But although results from some surveys or poorly-controlled trials have suggested that microdosing can have beneficial effects, more rigorous placebocontrolled trials have failed to find any such evidence. A new study in Scientific Reports could explain why. The team, led by Laura Kartner from Imperial College London, finds that any effects of microdosing on wellbeing may be the result of a strong placebo response. The researchers recruited 253 people who were planning on microdosing a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin, LSD, or ayahuasca. Participants first completed a survey about their expectations, indicating how confident they were that the experience would have a positive effect, for instance, and measures of wellbeing, depressive symptoms and anxiety. Then, once they began microdosing, participants completed these same measures of mood each week for four weeks.
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After participants started microdosing, their wellbeing increased and symptoms of depression and anxiety decreased. Most of these effects emerged in the first week of taking the drugs, then remained at a similar level for the rest of the four-week period. But, importantly, their expectations in the week before beginning to take the drug predicted the extent of these changes: those who had a greater expectation that microdosing would produce positive effects tended to show more positive changes in all three measures. At first glance, it might seem like the study supports the use of microdosing. But the fact that people’s expectations were tied to their response suggests that what seems like a useful therapeutic effect might actually be a placebo effect, driven by what participants want or expect to occur. That could explain why previous placebo-controlled studies have found that microdosing doesn’t produce any beneficial response beyond that of a placebo. Of course, in this case there was no placebo arm of the study, so it’s impossible to tell for sure. Matthew Warren
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Cycles Ella Rhodes considers the cyclical nature of life, both the more literal and the metaphorical
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he first moment that I truly realised the flexibility of the passing of time from one moment to the next,’ Dr Ruth Ogden (Liverpool John Moores University) tells me, ‘was the car crash. It ended my youthful sense of immortality and was the starting point for a new phase, realising that I had to look after myself. I had the same sense of the cyclical nature of life after the birth of my first child – a near instantaneous sensation that everything before this moment was “the past”, an old me and an old version of my life. Everything going forward would be different.’ Ogden’s accident sparked her academic interest in how emotion affects time perception. Events which cause emotion affect time perception, she tells me, ‘but they also mark out cycles in our life. Cycles are made of representations of time. Significant changes to our lives often help to mark out new forms of cycles.’ We are rhythmic, cyclical creatures, living in a rhythmic, cyclical world. Our lives and bodies work in these cycles; some biological, visceral and real, some invented. Our brains can trick us into believing that these cycles are largely predictable, a feeling bolstered by our inherent relationship with the natural world – the cycling of the seasons, days, weeks and months. Whether real or not, when these cycles break
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down, change, or prematurely end, the results can be startling. Life cycles That car crash led Ruth Ogden to experience the uncanny, nauseating feeling of time slowing down. And now she reminds me of a very different situation where time seems to drag: Mondays. Although time moves inexorably forward, as humans we don’t always seem to experience it this way. Many things, Ogden told me, can affect how quickly or slowly we feel time is passing. ‘We know that objectively we’ve got clock time, we know time passes constantly… it doesn’t change, a day is always the same length. But when you ask people about their experience of time – whether that’s very long periods of time like days, months and years, or tiny little bits of time like seconds and minutes – it seems to be the complete opposite of this. Depending on how we feel and what we’re doing that will determine how we feel time is passing – whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.’ One idea is that this phenomenon provides us with some sort of perceptual gain. ‘You’re seeing things in a slowed down way, your cognition is occurring in a different way and this provides you with some sort of gain for survival. One of the reasons we think that’s the case is we only see a relationship between sympathetic nervous system activity and distortions to
time for very, very negatively-arousing stimulation [lab studies use photographic stimuli of mutilated bodies, for example]. It would be totally useless if we had a time perception system that just waxed and waned all the time… but perhaps what we do need is a time perception system that in the most severe of situations, the most critical situations, adapts to give us some sort of advantage over prey or threat.’ As well as arousal, information processing can affect how quickly we feel time passes. ‘If you have variance in arousal and variance in information processing across the different days of the week, then this is going to influence your ability to judge that week in a consistent manner,’ Ogden says. ‘And we don’t schedule our weeks in a way that enables us to have a consistent experience. Monday is always very busy, a lot of information processing going on, so then when we look back at Monday we think “how can it only be Tuesday, I did so much yesterday?” If your weeks are very busy they feel long; if your weekend feels very relaxing and there’s not a lot of information processing going on, you might have this unfortunate feeling that it was very short, because you didn’t do very much.’ Ogden adds that her own research on the Covid-19 lockdown experience found that the disruption to our normal routines and cycles, but also our emotions, influenced how we experience short cycles such as the day and week. ‘Only a fifth of people experienced Illustration by Nick Taylor nicktaylorillustration.co.uk
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the passing of the days and weeks as “normal” during lockdown. Forty per cent felt like the days and weeks were passing more quickly than normal and 40 per cent experienced the opposite; the days and weeks passing more slowly than normal. The days and weeks passing more slowly than normal was associated with increasing, greater dissatisfaction with social interactions, reduced task load and increased stress.’ Cyclical vs linear Could cyclical thinking be useful in organising our lives? In a 2014 paper Professor Leona Tam (University of Technology, Sydney) and Professor Utpal Dholakia (Rice University) asked whether people could be encouraged to save more money by thinking in terms of cycles. In their first study participants were asked their opinion on ‘cyclical’ or ‘linear’ orientation methods developed by life coaches. According to the cyclical method, thinking in terms of cycles could encourage people to expect the future to be similar to the present, and to form routines and habits – if you perform an action in the current cycle you may be more likely to repeat it in the next cycle. According to the linear method, once events are in the past they are over, and completing tasks requires thinking about the future and setting goals and benchmarks. Participants in the cycle condition subsequently made slightly higher estimates of how much money they would save in the following month, compared to those in the linear condition.
The four seasons The cycle of the four seasons appears to truly, and universally, affect our emotions. A letter published in Nature Human Behaviour by Park et al. examined music streaming habits on Spotify across 2016. Their random sample of one million individual users, comprising 765 million online music plays across 51 countries, revealed some startling daily patterns. People tended to opt for relaxing music later at night with more energetic music being played throughout the day. Younger people and those in Latin America listened, on average, to more intense and emotionally arousing music throughout the day. There were also patterns in seasonal preferences throughout the year which varied depending on a user’s distance from the equator. People globally tended to listen to more emotionally arousing music in the warmer months and calmer music in the winter – apart from during the run-up to Christmas or other festivals such as Carnival on 7 February. But this variation in seasonal preferences decreases the closer someone lives to the equator. The authors write that seasonal variations in affective music choices ‘are more strongly influenced by seasonal activities that depend on temperature, weather, and indoor and outdoor daylight than by seasonal changes in the timing of sleep relative to the dawn signal that synchronizes the circadian pacemaker’. 28
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In a second study Tam and Dholakia gave students instructions on how to save money from either a linear or cyclical point of view. In the cyclical condition they were told to focus on the amount of money they would like to save now, ask themselves if they had saved enough in the previous paycheque cycle, and if they hadn’t to make up for it with the current paycheque cycle. Those in the linear condition were told to focus on their savings goals for the future rather than how much they had saved in the past. Participants in the cyclical condition made estimates of how much they would save over the next fortnight which were 70 per cent higher than those in the linear condition, and actually ended up saving 82 per cent more. From a third and final study, Tam and Dholakia concluded that thinking about savings in a cyclical way produced a mindset of lower optimism for the future and higher levels of implementation planning, compared with a linear savings approach. Change to our daily and weekly cycles, it seems, influences how fast or slow we feel these periods; and thinking cyclically can influence how we feel about and organise our lives. And changes to our biological cycles can have particularly profound impacts. When a cycle changes Around the age of 45, the menstrual cycles of people who menstruate start to change. The perimenopause describes the point at which periods become increasingly irregular until they cease entirely – known as the menopause. The perimenopause lasts four to six years, yet many feel unprepared when the time comes. This isn’t too surprising – there has been very little research on this time of life, compared with other areas of health in those who menstruate, such as pregnancy. Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Obstetrics and Gynecology Pauline Maki (University of Illinois at Chicago) tells me there are fundamental questions yet to be answered about this crucial time. ‘Most women don’t know when they are transitioning, they don’t think that their period changing is necessarily them entering the menopause. It’s so important because 100 per cent of women who live into late life will go through it. This is a universal event, and yet there’s so much about it we don’t know.’ One symptom of the perimenopause is what’s often called ‘brain fog’ – where people may become more forgetful and have problems with their cognitive processing speed. Maki said the best way to look at problems with memory and other cognitive functions is to use standardised neuropsychological tests and longitudinal study designs – testing the same individuals in the pre-menopausal stage, during the perimenopause and post-menopause. ‘When you follow the same woman using these neuropsychological tests over time, what you see is that she begins to experience a decrease in her memory even just before the onset of the peri-menopause. On average you see a decrease in memory in the early
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the psychologist april 2021 cycles
perimenopause, it worsens as women continue to the late menopausal transition, which is when she’s skipping periods. The good news is that for most women it bounces back in the post menopause. Our work is to identify for which women it might not bounce back.’ Those in the perimenopausal phase may still get pregnant and may need to take an oral contraceptive to prevent this. Maki tells me that while there have been many clinical trials of hormone therapy and their effects on cognition post-menopause, there has been little to explore this in perimenopausal individuals, and there have been no clinical trials of hormonal contraceptives and their cognitive impacts on perimenopausal people. This issue is further complicated by one of Maki’s major discoveries – that hot flushes, or flashes, may contribute to memory problems. ‘Our work suggests a linear relationship, a direct correlation, between the number of hot flashes we can measure (based on sweating on the surface of the skin) and memory problems… and there are very strong relationships between hot flashes and brain function when we do brain scans.’ Maki calls it a perfect storm… ‘we know oestrogen is good for memory, because if you remove a woman’s ovaries her memory declines. We know that hot flashes appear to be at least disruptive for sleep, and we know that poor sleep contributes to memory problems. So there are a lot of direct and indirect ways that perimenopausal hormone changes influence memory.’ There’s also, according to a recent systematic review by Maki and colleagues, ‘a window of vulnerability for women developing depressive symptoms. It’s pretty striking, the estimates are that 56 per cent of women with a history of depression will have a recurrence during the perimenopause. When we’re depressed we’re not necessarily thinking so clearly or paying attention as well and so the depressive symptoms can also complicate the cognitive changes at perimenopause.’ Maki said that while there is a temptation to ‘throw oestrogen’ at the problems experienced during the perimenopause, this can be a far too simplistic approach. Other cyclical events can contribute to depression, for example. ‘It’s not all hormonally driven, some of it is societally driven. For women who had children early in life they could be going off to university, and oftentimes relationships end at that time in a woman’s life. She’s at the most stressful time of her career, with women’s peak earnings at that point of her career and into her early 50s. She’s coming to grips with being older. There are a lot of life stressors and imagine if she’s also sleeping poorly… that’s a perfect mix for depressive symptoms.’ What if a cycle ends too soon? When a cycle that we expect to play out in this predictable way ends abruptly, without any warning, the results can be hugely traumatic. We see life itself
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The news cycle The news cycle has shifted dramatically in recent decades: thanks to Twitter and news organisations’ desire for clicks and advertising revenue, we can now follow notable events in real time through many different viewpoints. But what effect has this shift had on the human attention span? Dr Philipp Lorenz-Spreen (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) and his colleagues looked at websites, including Twitter, Reddit and Wikipedia, to longitudinally assess how long a particular topic captured and maintained collective attention. For example on Twitter the authors looked at hashtags between 2013 and 2016 and found that in 2013 hashtags stayed in Twitter’s top 50 for 17.5 hours on average, decreasing to 11.9 hours in 2016. ‘Our modelling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.’
as a cycle – parents expect to die before their children, and we have all heard comparisons between the helplessness of infants and people in their later years. As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, ‘Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ The trauma of abrupt endings can be seen in particularly stark detail in the stories of families whose loved ones have gone missing. Andy Owen, author of the 2017 book All Soldiers Run Away: Alano’s War: the Story of a British Deserter, wrote in an Aeon article that ‘Taoist thinkers emphasise the cycle of the seasons, and the wider cycles that the seasons fit into, as central to many key concepts and ways of understanding the world, challenging the linear notion of our stories’ arc that puts so much stock on the ending.’ When people go missing, Owen wrote, it’s as if their stories are cut off mid-sentence. In a fantastic Guardian article on the work Gene and Sandy Ralston have been doing for around 20 years to recover victims of drowning across North America, Professor emeritus Pauline Boss (University of Minnesota), said that the human brain could not let go until there was evidence of ‘transformation from life to death’. ‘You need to see that the person is no longer breathing… Or you need to see the bones.’ This is complex and ambiguous loss, also seen in the loss of a baby early in pregnancy, through miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy. That’s a largely understudied area. A recent study, led by Clinical Fellow and specialist registrar Dr Jessica Farren (Imperial College London), explored the impact of miscarriage before 12 weeks and ectopic pregnancy loss in 650 women. The researchers found that a month after losing a baby 29 per cent of women
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experienced post-traumatic stress; 24 per cent experienced anxiety; and 11 per cent suffered with depression. These impacts persisted: nine months later, 18 per cent were experiencing post-traumatic stress, 17 per cent were suffering moderate to severe anxiety and 6 per cent were experiencing depression.
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Trapped in a cycle Many applied psychologists spend their working lives seeking to break cycles, of a more metaphorical nature. People can become trapped in a cycle over time. Addiction, over-eating, and our emotions associated with those behaviours, can lead us to struggle to break free. And other life circumstances can be usefully thought of as a cycle, including homelessness. Dr Emma Williamson (South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) has spent the last nine years working as Principal Clinical Psychologist for the Psychology in Hostels Project in Lambeth. This work has involved the creation of psychologicallyinformed environments in accommodation for homeless people – ensuring environments are welcoming and that all staff are well-versed in psychology and the complexity of trauma. She said homelessness, and particularly chronic homelessness, could be thought of as cyclical in a number of ways. ‘I think one cycle could describe the origins and elements of homelessness. Being homeless in itself is about being unstably housed, and that cycle of different locations and the rootlessness of individuals in themselves. I also think there are cycles between trauma and homelessness in terms of the origins that feed and maintain homelessness – there’s a big focus more recently on being more aware of the trauma that perpetuates and maintains homelessness.’ Williamson tells me that there has been an increasing focus in recent years on the role of trauma in leading to homelessness, and thus exposing a person to more trauma as a result. She pointed to a cycle originally created by Rose Schmidt and colleagues to describe women’s homelessness, but said their work could be applied to any person who becomes homeless. This model pays particular attention to the poverty and social exclusion that homeless people have often experienced in their past. ‘I think we really need to recognise the impact of social exclusion, poverty and inequality in our society as a key driving force… I would say the cycle starts there. People may have lower levels of education and face economic barriers, and this can lead to poorer mental and physical health and disabilities. Higher levels of social inequality and inequity lead to greater risk of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and we know that the more ACEs individuals have the poorer their health outcomes.’ This experience of poverty and social exclusion can play a role in younger people entering the care system, and older people being unable to gain employment or becoming trapped in lower-paid work. ‘There may not always be the safety net of a reliable support for
some people to fall back on. Family breakdowns, people coping with mental and physical health issues or poverty can play a role in people struggling to find or sustain suitable accommodation, sofa surfing or sleeping rough.’ Schmidt’s model also highlights ineffective service provision as feeding into the cycle of homelessness – with services often being unable to respond to people in the right way. Some are not trauma-informed, may be fragmented, or demand much from individuals who may understandably take time to trust, have high support needs and a need for flexibility. ‘That places people at greater risk of further mental health difficulties and further trauma because of their unstable housing situation which compounds the difficulties and experiences they had early in life. That means they can withdraw from services, they might not trust or build relationships very easily because of some of their past experiences like being raised in care or being let down by the system. People might be using drugs, alcohol or medication to cope, and then people can be at more risk of finding themselves in vulnerable situations – women or men entering prostitution for example to find accommodation or staying in abusive relationships because of limited choice.’ All of these factors put people in situations where they may face further trauma, multiple disadvantage and social exclusion. ‘That’s a vicious cycle of everincreasing need and complexity that traps people in… people find relationships hard to manage, they may become more chaotic… services can have quite rigid operating practices, so people might end up disengaged if services are offered in scary unfamiliar places, or day time appointments when the person has been up all night to stay alert and safe, for example… they become further excluded and stuck in this cycle. The longer you’re homeless the more entrenched that can become.’ What tomorrow brings For some people there may be comfort and hope in the cyclical nature of life. As the great Frank Sinatra once sang, ‘There isn’t much that I have learned, through all my foolish years, except that life keeps runnin’ in cycles, first there’s laughter, then those tears… Life is like the seasons, after winter comes the spring, so I’ll keep this smile awhile, and see what tomorrow brings.’ [And see box, ‘The four seasons’.] Our brains love to find patterns in the chaos of the world. Perhaps a feeling that we live in a world of predictable cycles brings some form of order to our random and unpredictable lifespan. We know some cycles are doomed to end from the beginning, some we never expect to start. Cycles are sure to break down, end or trap us within them, with surprising effects on our lives as people and as psychologists. Why not share your examples of cycles and what they mean to you? Ella Rhodes is The Psychologist’s Journalist. Ella.Rhodes@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag
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In a different timeworld Steve Taylor seeks to make sense of time expansion experiences A few years ago, I had a car crash. I was driving in the middle lane of a motorway, when a truck pulled out from the inside lane and hit the side of our car, spinning us around, and then hitting us again…
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s soon as the truck hit us, everything seemed to go into slow motion. I heard the sound of the impact and asked my wife, ‘What was that noise?’ Time seemed suspended, as if a ‘pause’ button had been pressed. Then the car began to spin. I looked behind, and the other cars on the motorway seemed to be moving extremely slowly, almost as if they were stationary. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. Everything became clear and vivid, and I was able to take in a lot of detail. I was surprised at how calm I was. Rather than panicking, I thought
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the psychologist april 2021 time
Theories of time perception clearly and methodically about the situation. I tried The flexibility of time perception has been a topic to regain control of the car, gripping the steering of interest for psychologists ever since psychology wheel and pressing down the brake, but the car kept emerged as a field of study. In his foundational text on spinning, for what seemed at least half a minute The Principles of Psychology (1897), William James (although in reality it could not have been more than made a connection between the human experience of a few seconds). Luckily, the car spun in the direction time and intensity of perception. James puzzled over of the hard shoulder of the motorway, and we finally the fact that time seems to speed up as we get older, careered into a crash barrier, without any injuries. and suggested that this is because, Then everything seemed to switch ‘in youth, we have an absolutely back into normal time again. “Most people described new experience, subjective or This is an example of a objective, every hour of the phenomenon which I call a ‘Time their Time Expansion day… but as each passing year Expansion Experience’ (or TEE). Experiences as positive, converts some of this experience I have just published a qualitative even if they occurred into automatic routine which we study of these experiences (Taylor, hardly note at all, the days smooth 2020). Following a pilot study in accidents and themselves out in recollection to of 22 TEEs specifically linked to emergencies. Almost contentless units, and the years accidents, I collected 74 general everyone reported a grow hollow and collapse’ (James, reports of TEEs, and examined 1897/1950, p.624). James also their causes and characteristics. sense of calmness…” suggested that new experiences, I found that 40 of the 74 reports such as foreign travel, have a were linked to accidents (mostly similar time-expanding effect. As he noted, ‘rapid and car accidents). Twelve were linked to meditation or spiritual experiences, while seven were linked to sports interesting travel’ results in the same ‘multitudinous, and long-drawn-out’ time perception as childhood. and games, and another seven to psychedelic drugs. Later psychologists have concluded that time (There were a few other minor triggers, like traumatic perception is related to a number of different factors. experiences or listening to music.) Firstly, in the words of one of the UK’s leading Most people described their TEEs as positive, researchers on time perception, John Wearden, there even if they occurred in accidents and emergencies. are ‘deep connections between time perception and Almost everyone reported a sense of calmness, despite information processing’ (Loveday & Sutton, 2012, the danger they were (in most cases) facing. Most people reported a sense of alertness or even heightened p.582). Simply put, the more information our minds process, the slower time seems to pass. This doesn’t awareness. They felt that their slowed down sense of just mean the sheer volume of information, but also time gave them the opportunity to take preventative includes factors such as complexity, variation and action. They reported rapid and detailed thinking, segmentation (Ornstein, 1969; Block & Read, 1978; with more time to make plans and decisions. As one Poynter, 1983). participant who had a car accident reported, ‘My head Two other contemporary researchers, William was really clear because I seemed to have so much time Matthews and Warren Meck, have linked this to factors to think … I will always remember how much time I such as perceptual clarity and ease of informationseemed to have to think and work things out.’ Some extraction, which lead to ‘vivid representations people also reported a sense of quietness, as if noise and efficient perceptual decision-making’ (2016). from their surroundings had become muffled. Other research has looked at self-reported mood (or In many cases, the time expansion was very subjective wellbeing) and arousal. Positive affect and dramatic. Seconds seemed to turn into minutes, or high arousal are associated with a swift passage of time, time seemed to stop or disappear altogether. As one while negative affect and low arousal have the reverse participant who had a TEE during a hockey game effect. Boredom, anxiety and depression seem to slow reported, ‘The play which seemed to last for about 10 time down (Droit-Volet et al., 2011; Gil & Droit-Volet, minutes… occurred in the space of about 8 seconds.’ One person who fell off a horse reported, ‘It only lasted 2009; Wyrick & Wyrick, 1977). In duration estimation studies, fear and threat have also been associated a few seconds for me to be thrown from the horse and with a slowing down of time (Anderson et al., 2007; hit the ground; however the whole experience seemed Campbell & Bryant, 2007). to last for minutes.’
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Conversely, studies have shown a link between hedonic wellbeing and a swift passage of time. As the saying ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ suggests, tasks that are engaging and enjoyable are reported as passing more quickly (Sackett et al., 2010). Ruth Ogden (2020) found that people with a higher level of social satisfaction, less stress and a decreased task load reported a swifter passage of time during the 2020 UK Covid-19 lockdown.
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Explaining TEEs Can any of these theories explain the type of dramatic ‘time expansion experiences’ which I have investigated in my research? Perhaps TEEs related to accidents could be explained in terms of negative affect – specifically, in terms of fear, threat or pain. However, most participants in my research didn’t report feeling anxious or threatened during accidents and emergencies. On the contrary, they reported feelings of calmness, detachment and even wellbeing. As one person who was stung by a wasp in his mouth reported, ‘I couldn’t breathe and it felt like this was possibly it. I felt okay about it (despite the years prior to having somewhat of a death anxiety) and felt pretty calm.’ The fact that TEEs occur during states of high positive affect (such as meditation, psychedelic experiences and sports) is further evidence against this interpretation. Perhaps, then, TEEs can be explained in terms of information processing? Certainly, many of the participants of my research reported feelings of high alertness and heightened awareness. High alertness generates more vivid perception, which leads to the processing of more information. Along these lines, Zakay (2012) applies his ‘attentional gate’ theory to emergency situations, suggesting that accidents and emergencies bring a widening of the attentional gate. However, a possible problem here is the degree of time expansion in these experiences. Time often appears to expand by several orders of magnitude, even to the point where seconds seem like minutes. In the words of one participant who had a car accident: ‘It seemed as though this took minutes, but it all happened within a second or two.’ Significantly, similar degrees of dramatic time expansion were reported in altered states of consciousness, such as drug experiences and spiritual experiences. For example, one person who inhaled butane gas reported that ‘a few seconds was like hours’. Some participants reported a sense that time had stopped or disappeared altogether. One person who was in a deep state of meditation reported that ‘the self disappeared along with the past, the future and the passage of time. Everything just happened. There was no before or after.’ If there was an association between information processing and time perception in these experiences, then the degree of information processing would also have to increase very significantly. Imagine the sheer
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intensity and volume of perceptual stimuli that a person would have to absorb and process for their time perception to stretch a few seconds into minutes! This isn’t impossible – for example, psychedelic drugs often bring a high level of perceptual intensity and perhaps this is connected to their timeexpanding effect. However, I’m inclined to doubt this as an explanation, since the participants of my study generally didn’t describe being flooded with impressions. Many people in accidents and emergencies reported a high level of alertness, and a heightened awareness, but at the same time, their attention was focused in quite a narrow way – namely, on their immediate predicament, and how to take preventative action. So I think it is doubtful that the level of information processing that they experienced could fully account for the slowing down of time. In the moment or recollection? Another question that we need to answer is whether TEEs happen in the moment, or whether they are the result of recollection. An experiment in which people made freefall jumps (for 31 metres) before landing in a net, conducted by Stetson and colleagues (2007), points to recollection. The jumpers wore a chronometer on their wrists, and were asked to read the numbers on it during their fall. However, they were unable to see numbers on the watches, only seeing a blur. Despite this, the participants retrospectively overestimated their own falls by 36 per cent, compared with the falls of others. The authors concluded that this shows that an expanded sense of time in emergencies is based on memory rather than perception. The increased number of impressions that people take in are ‘encoded’ in memory, so that when people recollect the experiences, they have the illusion that they lasted for a long time (Steston et al., 2007). However, one issue here is that the freefall jumps were not a real emergency. Real emergencies are unexpected and involve real danger. The participants were fully aware of the nature of the activity in advance and that it did not involve real, life-threatening danger (since they had a safety net). The jumps were not dramatic or sudden – participants underwent preparations, climbed up to the tower, and waited, while watching others make the jump before them. Certainly, the participants in my research had a strong subjective sense that they were experiencing time expansion in the moment rather than as a recollection. As noted above, many participants felt that their TEEs enabled them to take preventative action in the face of danger, potential injury or death. They described carrying out complex and detailed patterns of thought and complex sequences of actions in periods of no more than a few seconds in real time. Many participants were convinced that a slowing down of time enabled them to plan and execute actions which would have been impossible under normal
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the psychologist april 2021 time
circumstances. For example, one described how time expansion allowed her ‘to react and divert a major accident’. A woman who saved her children from a fire reported, ‘I think the only reason I was able to do this was that I first experienced a great calmness and then that time seemed to stop’. It remains possible that all of this could be a recollective effect. Perhaps a state of heightened alertness allowed the participants to think and act much more quickly than normal, and they interpreted this retrospectively as a slowing down of time. However, it is also possible that they were able to react and think so quickly because time was moving very slowly to them. A survival response? Since many participants reported the sense that their TEE enabled them to take preventative action, is it possible that TEEs are a survival mechanism, a kind of adaptive trait that our ancestors developed as a way of increasing their chances of survival in dangerous situations? It would certainly have been beneficial for our early human ancestors – surrounded by wild animals and dangerous natural phenomena – to develop the ability to slow down their experience of time in emergency situations. However, one might argue that this doesn’t explain why TEEs occur in nonemergency situations, such as meditation and psychedelics. As Piovesan and colleagues point out, ‘If lengthening of subjective duration is to be adaptive, it must also be limited to circumstances of specific threat’ (2019, p.1157). (The idea that TEEs are adaptive also, incidentally, works against the notion that they are an illusory phenomenon produced by recollection. After all, it is difficult to see any survival advantage in
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remembering accidents in more detail afterwards.) One suggestion put forward by the Finnish philosopher Valtteri Arstila (2012) is that time expansion in accidents may be linked to increased levels of norepinephrine in the brain, related to the ‘fight-or-flight’ response. However, the most common theme of TEEs (in accidents and other situations) is calmness and a sense of wellbeing, which doesn’t fit with the fight-or-flight response or higher levels of epinephrine. In addition, as we have seen, TEEs don’t just occur in accidents and emergencies but also in nonemergency situations such as sports, psychedelics, meditation, and listening to music. With the exception of sport, none of these are situations in which one would expect to find high levels of norepinephrine. In fact, states of meditation (and other relaxed states – for example, listening to classical music) are usually experienced as states of stillness and inner peace, in stark contrast to a fight or flight response. Craig (2009) suggested that time perception is linked to the brain’s anterior insular cortex (AIC), explaining time dilation in relation to ‘emotional salience’. In highly emotional situations – such as accidents – there is an accumulation of what Craig calls ‘global emotional moments’ in the AIC, which produces the effect of time slowing down. However, again, this doesn’t seem to fit with the sense of calmness and detachment reported by many of my participants, and also the fact that TEEs can occur in peaceful and positive states such as in meditation or while listening to music. Altered states of consciousness In my view, perhaps the best way of understanding dramatic TEEs is in relation to altered states of
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consciousness. As noted by Marc Wittman (2018), a contemporary researcher on time perception, our experience of time is closely bound up with our sense of self consciousness, due to their sheer and our state of consciousness. shock and intensity. They can When we shift into a different state suddenly ‘jolt’ us out of normal of consciousness, due to unusual consciousness – and our normal circumstances or triggers, then we Dr Steve Taylor is a Senior sense of self – into a dramatically shift into a different ‘timeworld’ in Lecturer in Psychology at different state in which our which time expands dramatically. Leeds Beckett University, and awareness shifts significantly, This takes us back to William Chair of the Transpersonal along with our perception of time. James (1902/1985) who suggested Psychology Section of the British From this point of view, all of the that human beings’ normal state Psychological Society. TEEs in my study were linked of consciousness is ‘but one www.stevemtaylor.com to dramatically altered states of special type of consciousness, consciousness. whilst all about it, parted from In reality, there is no binary distinction between it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential normal and altered states of consciousness. There forms of consciousness entirely different’ (p.388). are gradations between them. One could possibly Our normal sense of time is associated with the see all variations in time perception as the results of psychological processes and structures of our normal changes in our state of consciousness – for example, state of consciousness. But when we shift into when time seems to drag when we’re bored or in pain, ‘entirely different’ forms of consciousness, different or to speed up when we’re absorbed in an activity. psychological processes and structures operate, So perhaps, from this point of view, it’s simply a generating a different experience of time. question of degree: the more dramatic the alteration in In other words, when we experience dramatic consciousness, the more dramatic the time distortion. variations in our time perception, such as in accidents Boredom, pain and absorption alter our state of or emergencies, it’s because we shift out of our normal consciousness to a small degree, and so cause a small state of consciousness and into a dramatically altered degree of time distortion (sometimes speeding time up, state. This would explain why some of the dramatic as in the case of absorption). Accidents, psychedelics TEEs in my research were linked to psychedelic and spiritual experiences cause a more drastic and experiences, meditative states, and spiritual dramatic alteration in consciousness, and so bring a experiences, since these are all associated with altered more dramatic time distortion. states of consciousness. This could apply to the TEEs Another way of looking at this is to suggest that of sportspeople too, since the intense absorption of factors such as information processing, arousal, competitive sport may lead to the altered state of consciousness which mood, and attention may themselves generate altered Key sources states of consciousness. Certainly, previous theories is sometimes described as being ‘in the zone’ (Murphy & White, 1995). of altered states of consciousness have suggested that shifts in consciousness occur as a result of significant An alternative way of looking Arstila, V. (2012). Time slows down during accidents. Frontiers in Psychology, psychological and physiological changes. For example, at this would be to think in 3, 196. https://www.frontiersin.org/ the transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart (1983) terms of a loss of the sense of article/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00196 suggested that states of consciousness are the result self. As Hartocollis put it, ‘Inner Murphy, M. & White, R.A. (1995). In the of the interaction of a large number of neurological time or duration is virtually zone: Transcendent experience in sports. and psychological processes – such as attention, indistinguishable from the Penguin. awareness of the self, the experience perception, cognition, emotions – and that if any one Taylor, S. (2007). Making time: Why time seems to pass at different speeds and how process is altered sufficiently (e.g. if one concentrates of the self as an enduring, unitary to control it. Icon Books. to an intense degree or experiences intense emotion) entity that is constantly becoming’ Taylor, S. (2020). When seconds turn into an overall consciousness shift may result. (1983, p.17). After all, spiritual and minutes: Time expansion experiences in So while it is clear – in my view – that there is a psychedelic experiences are often altered states of consciousness. Journal strong relationship between TEEs and altered states of interpreted in terms of a loss of self, of Humanistic Psychology. https://doi. consciousness, the exact nature of the relationship is or ego-dissolution. org/10.1177/0022167820917484 Wittman, M. (2018). Altered states difficult to determine. It may be that further research But how about accidents and of consciousness: Experiences out of will clarify this. There is no objective or standard emergencies? These aren’t normally time and self. MIT Press. https://doi. passage of time, only infinite variations which arise in thought of as altered states of org/10.7551/mitpress/11468.001.0001 relation to different psychological processes, and our consciousness, or a loss of the Zakay, D. (2012). Experiencing time in state of consciousness. My feeling is that we will only sense of self. But perhaps they daily life. The Psychologist, 25, 578-581. be able to fully understand the passage of time once can be understood in these terms. Full list available in online/app version. we fully understand consciousness – which will most Accidents and emergencies bring likely not be any time soon… about a shift into an altered state of
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the psychologist april 2021 time
Call for Nominations
Honorary General Secretary 2021-2024 Nominations are sought for the election of Members of the Society to fulfil the role of Honorary General Secretary with effect from the AGM 2021. The Honorary General Secretary is a trustee of the Society and has the overall task of ensuring that the administration of the organisation is conducted with probity and integrity. The HGS has a number of formal responsibilities within the Society including the oversight of the election/ appointment of officers to the Society and responsibility for certain actions within the Society’s complaints and Member Conduct processes. Whilst the Board of Trustees takes ultimate responsibility, it is the Honorary General Secretary who assures the operation of the organisation. Descriptions of the role and responsibilities, together with requirements and time commitments, are available on request. Please contact Kerry Wood, kerry.wood@bps.org.uk Procedure The Board of Trustees has the responsibility to ensure that there is at least one candidate for this position. Those wishing to propose candidates or to discuss this position are invited to contact the Honorary General Secretary, Dr Carole Allan (e-mail: governance@bps.org.uk) for guidance. Deadline for nominations is 30 April 2021 Nominations can be made via the link: https://www.mi-nomination.com/bps If more than one candidate is nominated, the election will be decided by a ballot of the Membership and the result announced at the AGM in July 2021. Please Note: There are proposals to reform the governance of the Society and when implemented are likely to result in the role of Honorary General Secretary being removed. If this happens before the end of the three year term of appointment, the successful candidate will continue to be a trustee on the Board of the Society until the end of their three year term.
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‘How is your parents’ relationship?’ Dr Camilla Rosan and Patrick Myers both support parents in reducing conflict and improving outcomes for children. Here they interview each other on the context of their work, their aims for the future, and the challenges in reducing inter-parental conflict.
Camilla Rosan, Head of Early Years Programme, Anna Freud Centre
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Camilla, what is the Anna Freud Centre’s interest in inter-parental conflict? The Centre has always had an interest in family wellbeing. The co-parenting relationship, including parental conflict, is a critical but often overlooked part of this. Over the last five years, our expertise in mentalisation based therapy has strengthened and we’ve focused on assessing and treating families where there’s conflict between separated parents, often around the residency of and contact with their children. The parents seen by the Contact and Residence Disputes (CRD) project frequently have a history of litigation focused on the care of their children and current or historic allegations and counterallegations against one another – usually around the abuse or neglect of their children. The children’s own experience and needs are frequently obscured by the conflict between their parents, and their emotional, psychological and relational needs are adversely impacted. Often their relationship with one parent has broken down altogether as a result of them being involved with their parents’ conflict. We receive referrals from parents directly, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, the Local Authority and directly from court. Recourses to support these families are incredibly scarce, partly because of a lack of evidence around what works and partly because the group is often considered hard to treat, with high levels of burnout among clinicians. The Anna Freud Centre has developed a model of ‘therapeutic assessment’ which we call ‘Family Ties’. The model has three main components: a) improving both parents’ capacity to mentalise their child and protect them from the parental conflict; b) gradually ‘de-sensitising’ the child to the non-resident parent, with the support and encouragement of the primary caregiver; and c) co-constructing with both parents a coherent ‘narrative’ around family events which is acceptable to them both (as well as the court, Local Authority or Children’s Guardian where involved), which they can share with the child (Asen & Morris, 2016). More recently the CRD project has turned its attention to multi-family group work (see Asen & Scholz, 2010) in conjunction with, or sometimes as a more effective alternative to, individual family work. Families stuck in entrenched patterns seem more able
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the psychologist april 2021 parental conflict
to recognise some of their difficulties when they are mirrored by families in the same predicament rather than described by professionals. They are sometimes more able to find new solutions in a context of mutual support and reduced stigma. The project has been inspired by work in the Netherlands by Justine van Lewick and her team, and their multi-family group model ‘No Kids In The Middle’ (van Lawick & Visser, 2018). The approach is well established in countries across Europe, and we are evaluating and adapting it to a UK context. The Centre has been provided funding by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Reducing Parental Conflict ‘Challenge Fund’ for a 12-month project to train and supervise frontline staff in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and Local Authority settings to deliver specialist multifamily groups, and evaluate this intervention. As well as improving outcomes for children and young people, the project aims to increase professionals’ confidence and improve access to support for families. We will also learn about the effectiveness of the intervention and facilitators and barriers to local support for a population that is often thought of as ‘treatment resistant’. The Centre is also running, developing and evaluating this group work for families where the parents are involved with private family court proceedings. We aim to continue to develop and increase the evidence around effective treatment and to disseminate best practice to increase the provision for children caught between, and made the focus of, their separated parents’ conflict. The Centre hopes to reach a stage where Local Authorities and the family courts are better informed about the treatment to recommend in these situations. We hope effective treatment will be more widely available and free at the point of access, so that these children can get the help they need as soon as they need it. What challenges have you faced in doing this work? One of the big challenges we have is to successfully engage both parents, particularly the dads. We have been really focusing on how to improve this by co-producing our services and intervention delivery with dads, as well as mums. There is no one answer on how to do this well, but we have found that some simple changes can make a big difference – such as offering support in the evening or at weekends, and in locations that feel dad friendly (community centres, libraries, even supermarkets!). If we are to disrupt parental conflict, we need to promote empowering, positive role models for fathers. Where are we with the evidence of impact on children of parental conflict? Historically, parental conflict was only really considered pernicious to children if it was openly hostile and violent. However, thanks to the impressive work of academics such as Professor Gordon Harold
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Proportion of low and middle/high income UK children not living with both parents
and others, the evidence base has made great strides in recent years to illustrate that exposure to frequent, intense and poorly resolved conflict can harm children’s developmental outcomes and impair their life chances. It is important to say that a proportion of children whose parents exhibit inter-parental conflict go on to have a normal development, however a number of recent prospective studies strongly indicate that conflict can cast a long shadow. For example, there is an increased risk of adverse child outcomes, such as anxiety, depression, aggression, hostility, antisocial behaviour and criminality as well as deficits in academic attainment (Harold, 2016). There is also increased risk of impaired physical development such as obesity (e.g. Rhee et al., 2006). However, this body of research predominantly focuses on the impact to children over four years of age. As a psychologist working in the perinatal period and with families with children under five – I have to mention the gap in the evidence base around parental conflict interventions in the early years. What we do know is that becoming a parent is a critical risk period in the relationship, with increased conflict and a decline in satisfaction compared to couples with no children (Cowan & Cowan, 2000). Based on the most recent national statistics collected on family breakdown, almost half of couples divorcing in 2015 had at least one child aged under 16 living in the family. Over a fifth of the children were under five and 64 per cent were under 11 (ONS, 2016). Also, around a fifth of children under one do not live with both biological parents, and this increases steadily with age, to over 40 per cent of 16-year-olds (DWP, 2016). These patterns are even more devastating to low income families, with over 50 per cent of low income families breaking down when they have children under five years of age (see figure above).
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Clearly the early years are a risk period for new parents, but they are also an opportunity for early intervention – so I would like to see more research exploring what interventions work for whom, right from pregnancy. How do we help parents recognise and act to change their behaviours? I think we need a system-wide change, where our society recognises the importance of reducing parental conflict as early in a child’s life as possible. I think training and empowering the workforce is an important first step in this journey. Having a curious, competent and confident workforce of practitioners such as midwives, health visitors, and teachers who know more about inter-parental conflict and how it can impact children would mean they can ask parents about it. Simply asking, ‘How are things going at home with your partner?’ can go a long way. Then, once a problem is identified, we need evidence-based interventions to signpost families to. This is exactly what the DWP Reducing Parental Conflict agenda is changing. We are starting to deliver a range of interventions in the community that can actually help these families. I am a big advocate.
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Patrick Myers, Senior Ambassador for the Reducing Parental Conflict Programme, Department for Work & Pensions
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What is the role of psychologists? I am a clinical psychologist by background. Certainly clinical psychologists, like many other practitioner psychologists are well placed to bring a systemic lens to this area of work by working with the whole system around the child, to avoid replication of splits and ensure good safeguarding of children. Psychologists are also well skilled in facilitating clinical supervision and reflective practice to work with this system to support clinicians in avoiding getting caught up with the conflict themselves. Having said this, I think there is a huge gap in clinical psychology training related to couple or co-parenting-focused ways of working, and in my experience many psychologists feel very anxious about working in these ways. I think this is inadvertently reinforced in the NHS service structures, as couples support is not explicitly supported in most services. In the last year of my clinical psychology training, we had the opportunity to invite an external trainer, and we brought the wonderful Scott Woolley over from America to train us in emotionally focused therapy, which is an incredible evidence-based intervention for working with couple distress. It is still one of the most important clinical skills in my toolbox. Another approach that I am not trained in (but would love to be) is behavioural couple therapy for depression and substance use, which again has a really fantastic evidence base, but you rarely see psychologists delivering it in the NHS. I really welcome how it has been rolled out in Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) – I just wish there was more of it. It is so important for psychologists and other practitioners to be up to date with the evidence in this area and deliver interventions based on evidence. There is emerging evidence that traditional family therapy approaches can be ineffective and, in some cases where children are caught in parental conflict, counterproductive (Warshak, 2010). My last message to all the practitioner psychologists, no matter whether you work in CAMHS, IAPT, paediatrics or dementia, is to ask the people and families you work with, ‘How are things with your partner?’ or, ‘How is your parents’ relationship?’ Patrick, how did you come to be involved in this area of work and what is your role now? I was an assistant director of children services in Dorset, which was one of 12 local authority areas that were interested in the trial work that led to the development of the full Reducing Parental Conflict programme. A relatively small amount of money was provided to each area to innovate in the relationship support space. At that time, it was reported that one in 10 children with parents living in the same household, were exposed to potentially damaging levels of conflict. The trials tested ways of engaging parents – in Dorset, investment in a post within a school cluster proved
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the psychologist april 2021 parental conflict
really valuable. However, all areas reported that there was not enough strategic leadership around reducing parental conflict, frontline practitioners were not confident in having conversations about the quality of relationships and there was also a paucity of interventions to deal with inter-parental conflict. So the findings of the trials known as Local Family Offers directly informed the development of the full programme. Working with the Early Intervention Foundation and Professor Gordon Harold and colleagues saw the publication of the research paper entitled ‘What works to enhance inter-parental relationships and improve outcomes for children?’ Originally seconded into the programme from Dorset Council and now appointed by the DWP, my role is to promote the evidence and work with national organisations to see how the evidence can influence the wider policy arena and become part of the family policy narrative. Why is the government interested in working with families to reduce parental conflict? The overall ambition is to give every child the best start in life. We all know that parents play a critical role in giving children the experiences and skills they need to succeed. However, children who are exposed to parental conflict can suffer long-term harm. It can affect their early emotional and social development, their educational attainment and later employability – limiting their chances to lead fulfilling, happy lives. That’s why we are working to reduce conflict between parents – whether they are together or separated. Sometimes separation can be the best option for a couple, but even then, continued co-operation and communication between parents is better for their children. The poor outcomes for children exposed to parental conflict can also lead to increased pressure on public services. What does the £39 million programme look like and how is it going? 149 local authority areas are engaged with the programme. For each of those, the offer of resource for strategic leadership support and practitioner training has been accepted. Practitioners receive both classroom and online training that shares the evidence base, helps with challenging conversations and offers practical tools to support action on the issue of conflict. This has now been tested and we are confident that the full breadth of practitioner training can be delivered through this mechanism. In 30 of the 149 local areas the programme is testing eight new parent interventions that focus on both parenting and the impact of conflict on children and parents. Parenting programmes that do not deal with conflict will not enable the necessary behaviour change to improve children’s lives now and later. In addition, recognising the bi-directional relationship between conflict and alcohol, nine local authority areas have shared an Innovation Fund (jointly funded by the
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Key sources Asen, E. & Scholz, M. (2010). Multi-family therapy: Concepts and techniques. Routledge. Asen, E. & Morris, E. (2020). High-conflict parenting post-separation: The making and breaking of family ties. Routledge. Cowan, C.P. & Cowan, P.A. (2000). When partners become parents: The big life change for couples. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. DWP. (2016). Social justice outcomes framework: Family stability indicator. Department for Work and Pensions. Available at tinyurl.com/y4rw7mgc Harold, G.T., Acquah, D., Sellers, R. et al. (2016). What works to enhance inter-parental relationships and improve outcomes for children. Department for Work and Pensions. Available at tinyurl.com/yxvepwzx Rhee, K.E., Lumeng, J.C., Appugliese, D.P. et al. (2006). Parenting styles and overweight status in first grade. Pediatrics, 117, 2047–2054. van Lawick, J. & Visser, M. (2018). Action oriented and experiential work in the context of highconflict divorce. Context, 157, 14. Warshak, R.A. (2010). Family bridges: Using insights from social science to reconnect parents and alienated children. Family Court Review, 48, 48–80.
Department for Health and Social Care and DWP) to work with families where the parents are dependent on alcohol. The current phase of the programme lasts until March 2021 and as you would expect there is an extensive evaluation of all the programme strands. You mentioned the Innovation Fund for Children of Alcohol Dependent Parents, can you say some more on this? The nine Innovation Fund projects are working in different ways, but the common feature is that they aim to work with the whole family and not just the parent in treatment. Like the Reducing Parental Conflict programme there is much investment in workforce development, stressing the quality of practitioner relationship with families as the route to better outcomes for those in treatment and their families. As well as seeking to increase the number of parents receiving treatment interventions, the projects are working purposefully with children individually and in groups. All nine areas have been able to create a remote model of service delivery responding to the likely increase in alcohol dependency during this time. How do you think psychologists can help, and how can they get involved with the national programme? I hope that many psychologists can see the connection between their work and the aims and objectives of the programme. The impact that parental conflict has on children’s internalising and externalising behaviour as described by Gordon Harold mean that it should be of interest to a whole range of psychologists. Make contact with your local authority and see what opportunities are in your area, from training to the ability to refer onto the interventions that have been commissioned to support families to make their lives better.
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what to seek out on the
psychologist
website this month
Cyber-racism – it doesn’t just happen to footballers Susan Cousins, Senior Advisor, Race Religion and Belief at Cardiff University, shares psychological insights following a racist online attack. ‘I’m still the kid with the nuclear explosion inside him’ Author Ewan Morrison on power, pain and a painted bomb… plus an extract from his new book. ‘Informal families like ours seemed unaccounted for’ Peter Blaney is a mature psychology student and father caring for three children of family/friends. These children are now adults – Max aged 22, Luke aged 25 and Joe aged 28 – living in their own homes, but experiencing mental health difficulties every day. Peter’s house was their sanctuary away from the destructive nature of their conditions, a home with love, support, and mental health care daily… until Covid-19. A day in the life of a Chief Clinical Information Officer Scott Galloway on a perhaps little known role which might suit psychologists… Find all this and so much more via
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PsychCrunch episode number 23, on diversity and representation in psychological research
Research Digest 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 54
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What next? Pathways y og to psychol Part two
Interviewers Laura Oxley (University of York) Hannah Evans Lucy Atkinson (University of Roehampton) Elizabeth James (Counselling Psychologist in Training, Teesside University) Tom Bichard (Chartered Counselling Psychologist)
Interviewees Eve Smyth (University of Cambridge) Hannah Paish (University of York) Daniela Marinova (University of York) Jonathan Fancett Clare Wakenshaw (Teesside University) Bairavi Selvarajah (University of York) Hakan Sahin (University of Rohehampton) Alice Wharton (Oxford Brookes University) Oyindasola Famodou (UCL) 56
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‘These things that can’t be taught; you need to experience them’
Madeleine Pownall and Ian Florance with follow-up stories from the next generation
In our first article, published in last month’s issue, nine student psychologists described how they initially got interested in the subject, and how that fed in to their school and university education. Here we move on to the next stage in their journey: do the students who we interviewed now feel prepared to join the world of work; what work experience do they have; what (if any) are their goals, and how do they want their first job and careers to shape up? We initially asked about their practical experience of psychology roles and what insights they had gained from this. Bairavi Selvarajah’s goal to move into research was aided by work in ‘a summer intern job with the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck... an ASD intervention as part of their Babylab... managing infant data, putting them into the system. I think it’s important to get hands-on experience in a research centre. Academic writing and theory are very important, but so are understanding how to work alongside other people and the natural demands of a research assistant. These are things like: how do I cope if I conduct a study and things don’t go to plan or new problems arise? These things that can’t be taught; you need to experience them.’ Like other interviewees, Hakan Sahin admitted that ‘when I started my programme, I had a naïve idea of what therapy involved. My work experiences have shown me how therapy requires separating my emotions from the clients’ ones. However… experience working with suicidal ideation and self-harm have shown me that I have the skills.’ Clare Wakenshaw emphasised points learnt during her doctorate in counselling psychology that apply whatever course someone is studying; or whether they, like Clare, have earlier experience in a related profession (Clare had been a teacher). ‘I concentrated throughout the doctorate on getting as wide a range of experience as I could: placements in a third sector organisation, a private occupational health organisation, an NHS inpatient forensic mental health and NHS health psychology team and trying to get experience with patients and clients across the whole lifespan. I’ve worked hard to get work published... I had worked with people with learning disabilities and in older adult settings... A limitation of the counselling psychology doctorate is that only therapeutic work counts as clinical experience and I worked hard to develop my experience beyond that.’
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the psychologist april 2021 careers
Bairavi Selvarajah
Across our interviews, the NHS was a major learning site for many would-be psychologists. Oyindasola Famodou, for example, recalled how she worked in oncology ‘and I think that’s where my interest in health psychology came from. You see a lot of things that are just not right and think “if I could change that I would do this, like this, I would do this this way”. Working with sickle cell patients I started to think about more than just behaviours. This helps you relate to people because you search for explanations of why they do what they do’. Any sort of work experience can help. Jonathan Fancett is currently ‘working in retail. I thought getting a psychology degree might get me on to the graduate programme of a supermarket where I was working… right now, I’m just a supervisor in a Farmfoods shop.’ For Eve Smyth, ‘tutoring psychology students, working on summer camps, a lot of educational roles’ all offered insights. ‘I did a role where I was teaching psychology in China for a few weeks, so teaching students who haven’t studied psychology before and going back to basics definitely did help.’ So, did the students think about their first graduate job and the specific skills and knowledge they would need for them?
Hakan Sahin
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‘You need such a massive passion for it’ What soon became apparent was how many of our interviewees were applying for further courses or looking to do further research. Hakan Sahin wanted ‘to do research which combines Neuroscience and Psychology and Counselling. I have an idea about developing a new therapeutic method to reduce treatment time for PTSD from years to months. I could conduct this research in a PhD or PsyD doctoral programme.’ Alice Wharton was excited to be in the process of applying for her Master’s. She described how she was having difficulties choosing between several interesting specialties from neuropsychology and research methods to applied positive psychology and coaching. She feels this short-term study will influence her later career. Bairavi Selvarajah was also planning to start a Master’s in developmental and cognitive neuroscience. ‘From there, I’d like to get a job within that field. Working as a research assistant full time for a baby lab or working with a team in a research centre.’ Eve Smyth was already committed to her Master’s and had some specific jobs in mind. ‘I would like either to be in a behavioural science consultancy firm or it would be an ultimate goal to be accepted into the Civil Service Fast Stream working on policy. But I’ll apply Clare Wakenshaw to a range of things...’ She believes first jobs should give you ‘experience in how to communicate with clients, in the world of work in a professional way. When contributing to team meetings, I can draw on things that I know from psychology to benefit a certain goal or something like that.’ But in several cases, some of the students we spoke to were coming to the end of their degree with no clear-cut idea of their graduate destination. Daniela Marinova admitted to not being too sure. ‘I’ve been offered an internship at the European Parliament in Brussels, so maybe I’ll go and do that in September... Then the other thing is moving to China and eventually starting to work as an English teacher there. A friend’s mum has got a company that’s related to pet product manufacturing, so they need people to either do advertising or some sort of data science or evaluation on how their marketing is going, because it’s quite a big company in China.’ The impact of Covid-19 on the graduate job market featured throughout the interviews too. Hannah Paish emphasised this overarching, critical point: ‘given the current situation, people aren’t hiring in the way that they would, so you’ve just got to apply for everything and see what happens. I’m looking for things that I think I’ll be able to do, not necessarily stuff that related to what I’ve studied.’ The relative lack of jobs meant that the job market for ‘psychology jobs’ was increasingly competitive, as Oyindasola Famodou explained: ‘I initially thought
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of training in clinical psychology, but the competition is just ridiculous. You need such a massive passion for it. Do I have that passion? You have to be truthful to yourself. I am very passionate about making a difference in health care and patient experience... I need to find out more about how I could fit into the NHS in real life.’ When these interviews took place, the Covid outbreak was regularly mentioned; it was reducing the number of jobs available, increasing the need for psychological help and making some of our interviewees even more concerned to get involved. Alice Wharton: ‘What I hear at the moment is that lockdown is having a huge effect on people’s mental health... it makes me think I want to help these people who are struggling.’ But there were several fundamental responses to the issue of job availability. One was that, given the need to finish a course, students hadn’t got time to research jobs. There were also financial implications. Jonathan Fancett finds himself in very specific circumstances. ‘Now, my partner is the chief earner, but at some point we’re thinking of children. And one of the things we considered was, well maybe I should complete a Master’s alongside being a stay-at-home parent.’ Others already had jobs, like Clare Wakenshaw: ‘It’s a maternity contract as a specialist psychologist in an NHS cancer health psychology service where I did my final placement. But it certainly looks like two to four of us have jobs. The majority of people in
my cohort have already secured jobs. So, it feels like actually the jobs stuff is broadly quite positive.’ ‘Not an ideal environment’ A more common response, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that there are either too few jobs, or none at all around; Eve Smyth commented ‘I think for most graduates, given the circumstances, it’s not an ideal environment in the world of work. Sometimes compared to my friends doing medicine or economics, I feel there’s less certainty about whether you’ll get a job related to your degree.’ Oyindasola Famodou pointed out that the job that usually comes up is ‘teaching assistant’. For Bairavi Selvarajah a key issue is that ‘finding relevant experience to increase your chances is hard’. Hakan Sahin and Oyindasola Famodou also raised important points about their particular situation: Hakan: ‘I don’t want to generalise too much, but I feel they (employers) can be looking for a person who is born in the UK, maybe a member of a white, middle class family and of female gender. I think a person who fits these criteria has a better chance of getting a job…. My personal experience is such attitudes exist. The discriminatory barriers can be demotivating.’ Oyindasola commented: ‘Friends of mine are struggling to get into psychology, they are what you would term BAME. Maybe we don’t have the same knowledge and opportunity. I think when we know people who have these connections that are maybe a bit more established, and they have a bit more knowledge, you’re in a better position to find opportunities.’ Daniela Marinova sounded more positive, commenting, ‘the skills that you develop with the degree, especially in terms of research and statistics, are relevant to a lot of fields. A lot of employers are looking for soft more than hard skills. I think a lot of fields are open to psychology graduates. I don’t think it’s that difficult to find a job. I think university is actually making it quite easy for us, always sending job offers and saying sign up to this and that website.’ Similarly, Hannah Paish emphasises, ‘I’ve known from the beginning that psychology is ranked quite far down the list of jobs with high employability
Alice Wharton
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Eve Smyth
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Daniela Marinova
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the psychologist april 2021 careers
Hannah Paish Oyindasola Famodou Jonathan Fancett
rates, but I think that’s because employers just don’t really understand what sort of skills psychology graduates have. If you do something like law or medicine, then people know exactly what skills you’ve got. But there are so many that you have: data analysis, project writing, and reviewing literature.’ End goals We finally asked each interviewee what their end goal was. It is easiest to give their answers. Oyindasola Famodou: I’m interested in change management as well as using research to influence health policy, specifically in the NHS. Jonathan Fancett: The two main ones are probably educational psychologist for long-term, very long-term planning or research. I don’t know enough about them to say for certain, but that’s likely at the moment. Daniela Marinova: I always saw myself as going into the clinical psychology field after university, but I think that changed throughout my experience. Life coaching resonates with my personality a bit more because it’s more future focused. Hannah Paish: I don’t see myself becoming a psychologist. I used to think I wanted to be one. My current goal is more to use the skills that I’ve gained from my degree in whatever I want to go into really. I’m looking for things to do with project management or around that area. I’m applying for a data analysis programme. What I’d quite like to do is to find a career area that I really like or a job that I really like and then work my way up to a higher position, but I haven’t really thought as far ahead as ten years. I’d like to be in a stable career. Hakan Sahin: Academically, my ambition now is to work in research projects combining neuroscience and psychotherapy, but I recognise I have to be realistic about this challenge. Drawing from both disciplines I want to help clients to the best of my ability. Bairavi Selvarajah: I want to stay in research so everything I do now, the things I’ve applied for and the
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experience I’ve had within psychology, it’s all a lead up to eventually having a career in academia within child development. In 10 to 15 years’ time, I hope I’m working as a postdoc or as part of a project in child development. Eve Smyth: I would love it if I was part of a team working on policy and doing research to determine how policy might work best in different areas, definitely psychology-related. Clare Wakenshaw: I’m really interested in cancer psychology and palliative care more broadly, particularly the overlap between end of life care and bereavement as that has been the focus of my research. In the longer term, I’m really keen to consider how I might be able to contribute to policy and practice development. Alice Wharton: I do see myself becoming a counselling psychologist, but whether that’s with five years of life experience after university or a 30-year period and then you come back to it, I don’t know. Some thoughts A key message we drew from these interviews is that whether students apply their learning practically or advance research they, as Bairavi points out, find there are some things that can’t be taught and must be experienced. On the other hand, with the right psychologically-minded attitude any job experience teaches something about psychology: but will future employers or educators recognise this fact? How experience is gained and then factored into a person’s qualification for a role or training needs further thought, as does employers’ understanding of what a psychology education offers in addition to specific knowledge. Given the lack of jobs and the consequent competition to get them, flexibility is key. Students have to have a Plan B (and C and D) if their first idea proves impossible. These two articles are not formal research findings, but contributions to what we feel is an important and hopefully ongoing conversation.
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‘Dehumanisation paves the way for the very worst things that human beings do to one another’ David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England and is a campaigner for social equality, having spoken at a G20 summit about dehumanisation. David’s latest book On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, published by Oxford University Press, is out now. Harriet Over, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of York, asked David about the book. What is dehumanisation? There isn’t a single correct concept of dehumanisation. There are various, sometimes contradictory, conceptions of what it is. What I mean by dehumanisation is the attitude of regarding other people as subhuman creatures. Other researchers understand dehumanisation differently. How did you become interested in this topic? Around 15 years ago I got interested in wartime propaganda, and found that in such propaganda enemies are often portrayed as subhuman. Looking further, I discovered that there is hardly any literature addressing this topic outside of social psychology. But I was dissatisfied with the social psychological accounts, so I decided to try to do better. This led to my first book on the subject, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others which appeared in 2011. What theory do you develop in the new book? It updates Less Than Human and offers what I think is a much more sophisticated story of how dehumanisation works. One major change is that I now hold that when people dehumanise others they regard them as both human and subhuman simultaneously, and that this has distinctive and highly disturbing psychological consequences. Another is an emphasis on the importance of the political sphere. I describe dehumanisation as a psychological response to political forces. A third is an emphasis on the intimate tie between dehumanisation and racialisation.
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How does your theory differ from other theories of dehumanisation? My conception of dehumanisation is quite different from the two leading psychological approaches. The most influential of these – developed by the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam – is that we dehumanise others by attributing fewer human traits to them. But I
don’t think that attributions of humanity boil down to the attribution of traits. I draw on research into psychological essentialism to argue that seeing others as human is an all-or-nothing affair rather than something incremental. So, whereas Haslam thinks that when we dehumanise people we regard them as less human, I think that we regard them as less than human. The other mainstream view is that to dehumanise people is to think of them as having lesser minds. But this is utterly inconsistent with the paradigmatic case of the Nazis’ dehumanisation of Jews. Nazis did not regard Jews as mentally impaired. They thought of them as diabolically intelligent. A theory of dehumanisation that doesn’t apply to Auschwitz can’t, in my opinion, be taken seriously as a theory of dehumanisation. Do you think anthropomorphism is the opposite of
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the psychologist april 2021 books dehumanisation? Although it sounds like a contradiction, I think that anthropomorphism is a component of dehumanisation. Let me explain. We are a highly social species. Because of this, we are exquisitely attuned to indications of humanness in others. Our ‘humanness detectors’ are set on a hair trigger. Anthropomorphism happens when the detector misfires, and we respond to non-human things as though they are human. Paradoxically, this automatic psychological disposition is responsible for the most dangerous, disturbing, and destructive aspects of dehumanisation. In the book, I argue that dehumanisation occurs when those in positions of power and authority get us to think of others as subhuman creatures. But at the same time, thanks to our ultrasocial nature, we can’t help seeing and responding to these others as human beings. This transforms dehumanised people into terrifying, unnatural, uncanny beings – into monstrous or demonic fusions of human and animal – in the eyes of their dehumanisers. Are all victims of discrimination dehumanised? Absolutely not. Racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination usually do not involve dehumanisation. What do you think the outstanding challenges for research in this area are? Dehumanisation does not lend itself to normal psychological research protocols. One reason for this is that because it straddles the psychological and political spheres, dehumanisation requires interdisciplinary engagement with diverse theoretical vocabularies and research methodologies. And because dehumanisation is a psychological response to political forces, it’s got to be studied out in the world rather than just in the lab – which in turn implies that the immensely complex variables that produce dehumanisation cannot be adequately controlled for. In short, researching dehumanisation is difficult. But it’s too important – too vital to human welfare – to be neglected or squeezed in to an inappropriate methodological framework. What implications (if any) do you think the study of dehumanisation has for policy makers? Dehumanisation paves the way for the very worst things that human beings do to one another. So, to prevent such things from happening, it’s important for us to resist the dehumanising impulse, both in ourselves and out there in the world. To do that effectively, we need to know how dehumanisation works. There are two aspects of this that are relevant to policy. One has to do with education. People need to understand what it is about the human mind that leads us to dehumanise others so that they can recognise and resist the impulse in themselves. The other involves political action to support and strengthen those institutions that protect the vulnerable from dehumanising propaganda.
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The function of dissociation the crisis, and rebelled against the In this ‘whistle-stop’ tour of rules. Dissociation may also explain dissociation, Sinason offers a neat why initially, many outside China and surprising insight into trauma believed it was a localised problem, and dissociation. Having expected a something for ‘the other’ to deal run of the mill outline of dissociation, with. Everyone else could the short read of only 154 turn a blind eye. pages was, in fact, relevant, The Truth about According to Sinason, informative and thoughtTrauma and dissociation allows us to provoking. Although the title Dissociation carry on with our day-to-day somewhat brackets itself Valerie Sinason lives. We can see the body into the trauma market, Confer Books; of a child refugee washed it is of a much wider range, £12.99 up on a beach because it examining how society is only one body and far reacts to trauma as much removed from our world. as the individual necessity We can read or watch reports about of dissociation. The truth, the book rape, war and murder and continue argues, is that dissociation is more to feel safe in our part of the world. utilised in general than has been The reality is that trauma can occur given credit thus far. Its selling point to any of us at any time. is its ability to explain the times we Sinason discusses two types currently find ourselves in. of victimisation: the deserving and Sinason considers the current undeserving. The undeserving are worldwide trauma of Covid-19. those who had no input in their The suggestion is that much of the trauma, for example, victims of world’s population is in a state of natural disasters. They are accorded dissociation. Humans are not good at validation and support in a different staring death in the face. Thus, the way to the ‘deserving’ – victims of increasing death toll means most car crashes or domestic abuse, have had to dissociate at least to for example, who can have a finger some degree. As the news reports pointed at them for their victimhood. growing figures do you look on while Sinason argues that the ‘deserving’ sipping your cocoa? Do you gasp are, of course, in reality equally then turn back to your daily life? undeserving. But for society to Whichever way you turn is probably function, blame is often lain on the with dissociation. As the crisis individual, to escape the belief that unfolds, making choices to follow society allows such events to occur. restrictive measures or not requires Such a belief would mean horrific dissociation – to carry on as before events could happen outside of our or turn inwards. This helps to explain own control to ourselves. why some have denied or ignored This is not a bog-standard book about dissociation. The truth about trauma and dissociation goes on a journey back to the function of dissociation. It outlines how a healthy coping mechanism protects us as individuals and societies from the effects of trauma. The truth about dissociation is that it is available to us all – both helpful and harmful, and without which many more individuals would find themselves living in a trauma state. Reviewed by April Mangion, Trainee Counselling psychologist at Middlesex university & New School of Counselling and Psychotherapy
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Journeys of discovery Purchasing this novel, I was unsure what to expect. It turned out to be a more unexpected story than I could have possibly imagined! The topic of detransitioning is controversial, emotive and largely unspoken about within media and popular culture, though Peters does so with insight, compassion and wit. We are thrust into the chaotic and turbulent world of Reese, a transgender woman on a journey of exploration. Together, the reader and Reese consider femininity, womanhood, identity, relationships and motherhood. Reese is on a relatable search for connection, acceptance and love. Romantic unfulfillment, questioning and rejection litter the plot, developing our empathy for Reese and the other main characters, Ames and Katrina. The narrative jumps around from present to past, creating a sense of dysphoria and confusion that mirrors the experiences of Ames, who was
Books online: Find more at www.thepsychologist.org.uk, including: Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind: Extract from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett The people who vote: Inside the Mind of a Voter: A New Approach to Electoral Psychology by Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison, reviewed by Dominic Jones ‘Feeling is part of the fabric of the universe’: Steve Taylor meets Michael Jawer to hear about his new book, Sensitive Soul: The Unseen Role of Emotion in Extraordinary States
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assigned male at birth, transitioned to female, and then detransitioned back to male. The chaotic narrative invites the reader into Ames’s mind, facilitating a sense of understanding of the pain and uncertainty he feels Detransition, Baby Torrey Peters One World; £14.99 about himself. We traverse this journey of discovery alongside him, as he is faced with decisions about parenthood when his partner Katrina, a cisgender woman, unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Katrina, Ames and Reese are brought together over the prospect of parenthood and come to an unusual parental agreement, challenging traditional heteronormative perspectives of childrearing. Katrina experiences challenges in understanding and
accepting Ames whilst confronting her own issues in relation to race, relationships and motherhood. Each character fights an individual battle. Each is vulnerable and loveable in their own right. While littered with humour and irony throughout, this is certainly not an easy read. It deals with important, harrowing concepts including suicide, miscarriage and the maltreatment and abuse of trans women. Peters enables the reader to engage with these issues through her captivating storytelling. Prepare to feel sad, happy, angry and any emotion in between. In covering the terrain associated with detransitioning, it’s worth noting that this book is not promoting detransitioning, it is simply a portrayal of a fictionalised lived experience of it. The provocative title of the novel does exactly what it set out to do: provoke discussion, reflection and consideration of experiences that are less understood and rarely conceptualised in fiction. This book moved me, educated me and entertained me simultaneously. As a trainee psychologist, I feel it’s important to engage with perspectives and narratives that differ from my own lived experience, and this book helped me do exactly that. Reviewed by Talia Drew, Trainee Clinical Psychologist
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the psychologist april 2021 books
‘People give their best to leaders who have their back’ Leader: Know, love and inspire your people by Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston (Crown House Publishing) is out now. Annie Brookman-Byrne asked Katy and Emmie about the book. Read the full Q&A online. In a nutshell, what makes an effective leader? Can anyone become a good leader? Effective leaders know their people, love their people and inspire their people! That’s what the latest research from neuroscience, psychology and business literature highlights as the foundation of effective leadership and we can all get better at it. Knowing your people is about learning to listen actively and ask great questions. That will allow you to understand people’s values and strengths, enabling you to bring out the best in your team. This is a real challenge in the current climate, where many leaders can’t see their staff face to face. A 2020 study by Dana Vashdi, from the University of Haifa, tested whether staff working closely together before the crisis were less depressed and lonely. The conclusion was that the more interdependent teams were before lockdown, the more resilient they seemed to be afterwards. As we begin to emerge from another winter of uncertainty and lockdowns we need resilient teams. That resilience will be built on how well we know one another. Loving your people is about compassion, service and fearlessness. We have seen many leaders get this right over the pandemic. Where leaders in the public or private sector have genuinely looked after their people they have seen productivity improve and creativity flourish. People give their best to leaders who have their back, they go the extra mile for leaders who care about them. World class sporting teams such as Liverpool FC (managed by Jurgen Klopp) and the England Football Team (led by Gareth Southgate) have shown that even in the high stakes, cut and thrust of professional sport the best leaders know and care for their people in a way that builds trust and loyalty. Inspiring your people is about co-creating a clear vision for what difference your team makes and then empowering and resourcing people to deliver it. We give our best to visions we believe in, a sense of purpose that gets us out of bed in the morning. Leaders can’t micro-manage people working from home, they need to motivate them and trust them instead. Many organisations still try to motivate
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people through performance related pay and targets, despite the fact we have known for decades that extrinsic motivators rarely work once people move beyond basic cognitive challenges. In fact ‘carrot and stick’ schemes can lead to worse performance. As leaders we should take money off the table as an issue and then give people a sense of purpose and autonomy. The pandemic has highlighted this more than ever, people want to work in teams where they feel trusted and valued and contribute to something that matters. That sense of purpose is what unleashes the creativity and agility needed to turn car manufacturers into ventilator makers, perfume designers into hand sanitiser producers, athletics gear leaders into surgical mask fabricators.
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The hidden life of a Top Boy Ron Dodzro, who identifies as a Black man, a Clinical Psychologist in training and a lover of UK rap, looks to the genre to make sense of gang-affiliated violence
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ocal gangs shaped my childhood. Growing up as a Black man in London, I experienced firsthand the violence that gang-involved young adults are at increased risk of as victims, perpetrators and witnesses. Now, as an aspiring clinical psychologist, I want the voices of young, Black men suffering with trauma to be heard. The UK rap scene
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affirms their pain, traumas and redemption, so I have scattered lyrics from prominent UK rappers throughout this piece. ‘Leaders are calling for disenfranchised youth to be listened to and understood’: Loski – Intro. People are quick to marginalise and criminalise young, Black men, but rarely comprehend the vicious cycles of trauma they are trapped in. Our souls are wounded. It is crucial that we stop this rolling on to the next generation, especially since the social, political and economic disadvantages faced by Black men leave them at greater risk of issues with their mental health. A UK study from 2013, led by Jeremy Coid, found that 90 per cent of male gang members (aged 18 to 34) had been involved in violence in the past five years with 80 per cent reporting at least three violent incidents. The media coverage shapes the narrative around ‘Black on Black’ crime, as if this is some form of racial, culturally-induced violence that doesn’t occur amongst other groups. I think past the way the stories are portrayed, to the aspects often omitted. One is the trauma experienced by young, Black men as the result of witnessing or being directly involved within violent activity. Exposure to trauma through violence is unfortunately a daily reality for many young, Black men. Research by Robert Motley and Andrae Banks from 2018 shows that 62 per cent of Black men have directly experienced a traumatic event in their lifetime, 72 per cent witnessed a traumatic event and 59 per cent have learned of a traumatic event involving a friend or family member. One way or another, many young Black men are carrying around the burden of trauma. I see their heavy shoulders. ‘Yeah, we know how to handle a threat, but I don’t know how I handle the stress, PTSD coulda had me in a mental home but I’d rather a mansion instead’: Konan in Abracadabra – Seen it all. Those with PTSD or complex PTSD may re-experience the trauma, avoid stimuli associated with the trauma, and have increased arousal. ‘So many man my age have got PTSD and I don’t think that it’s hit them, If you envision the way that we’re living, the things that we had seen, situations that we’d been in’: Dave – My 19th Birthday. [I’m pictured with Dave here... he’s on the left]. This can lead to increased irritability, outbursts of anger, difficulty managing emotions, feelings of shame or guilt and suicidal ideation. Traumatic experiences lead to altered perceptions of safety within everyday life, causing people to remain in a heightened state of threat and panic.
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the psychologist april 2021 culture
Safety, strength, self-esteem and systems We need to do better as a community to ensure their needs are being met. How are we providing a safe space for young, Black men to discuss their traumas? ‘Torn between seeing a therapist or a pastor, Think about it, Heaven or Hell, what would you rather? I’ve lost friends I still hope to see in this life after’: Chip – 0420; R.I.P Black The Ripper. How are they coping with what they’ve seen and done? ‘How can I talk about killing my opps and in the same breath say Black Lives Matter? My issues are deep rooted’: Ghetts – Mad About Bars S5: E7. What sense are they The response making of these experiences? ‘I don’t know why me and In my personal and professional life, I see young Black dem oppers started beefin, do I blame me or the Willie Lynch men struggling to acknowledge or cope with the theory?’: Headie One – Don’t Judge Me. symptomology that comes with trauma. That begins with How will professionals bridge the gap to identify and barriers to seeking help in the first place. Black men are understand the intricacies that get people entangled approximately half as likely as their White counterparts within gang life and violence? Representation is powerful: to use professional mental health services (according 6 October 2020 was the first time I to a 2011 study led by Sidney saw and was lectured by a Black male Hankerson). clinical psychologist. Young Black men may be “One way or another, Mental health services have a influenced by both internal and troubling relationship with us; we are external expectations to ‘man many young Black men undertreated in the community but up’ or to ‘get over it’. They are are carrying around the yet over-represented on psychiatric left to deal with the emotional, burden of trauma” wards. We are more likely to access psychological and physical services through coercive pathways ramifications of their traumas and less likely to access help ourselves. alone. Some have internalised Interventions need to take all this into cultural beliefs about therapy. account in establishing a sense of safety, strength and They believe that by engaging within therapeutic self-esteem. We must consider how an individual is interventions, they may be ‘snitching’ if they end up located within a nested structure of ‘systems’; influenced disclosing pertinent details about a traumatic event. by their social context and relationships with others such That’s against the ‘street code’: they must handle the as family, friends and institutions, but also the wider situation themselves. ‘I can’t trust the police force’: Headie systems surrounding young, Black men. ‘I come from One – Don’t Judge Me. where the mothers are worried, sun comes up and their sons Some will self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. ‘Just haven’t come in’: Ghetts – Proud Family. to get away I take a toke’: Stormzy – Lay Me Bare. ‘Mummy At this level we also need to be addressing the telling me I need a counsellor ‘cause I’m drinking too much narrative that surrounds this group. We are more than the and there’s smoke in my lungs’: Ramz – Think Twice About threatening, fear-inducing stereotypes forced upon us. Suicide. We need culturally-sensitive, curious psychologists who Some will isolate and withdraw into their homes, show humility. I believe we live in an unequal society with avoiding people and the streets. ‘Took a little break from racial injustice, and some young Black men have learnt to the game, started praying, man, I had to get my mind right’: adjust within this society to make life easier. Yet when they Stormzy – First Things First. do wrong, we neglect the community and psychological Some will escape their residential areas and stay approaches which could help to break the cycle. ‘Like what with other family members, with the hope of appeasing their feelings of anxiety. ‘How can this be home when I feel I have I done to deserve this life?, I got brothers in the pen that will never see again, Got my brothers dem servin’ life, And I wanna flee here?’: Headie One – Don’t Judge Me. know that you think that it serves ‘em right, But I come from Some will walk around with weapons in order to feel a place where you burn or die, Or we turn and ride, So don’t somewhat safer. ‘To be safe, I gotta pick my gun up, Just in blame us when we turn to the dirt we tried, I just pray we fly’: case cah they just might run up, They want me dead and I Stormzy – Don’t Cry For me. just can’t let up, That’s just the usual’: Abracadabra – How So think twice when you next walk past a young, Black we living. man with his hoody up. Think about the feelings and Some will be forced to remain in their environment, anxieties this stirs in you. Think about the traumas they surrounded by triggers and reminders of the trauma. may have endured. We all have a responsibility to provide They may also face possible retaliation. ‘They took an L but the nurture and support that may be lacking. made sure the next letter coming was M’: Ghetts – Window ‘I didn’t choose to be me, so why discriminate me?’: Pain. ‘Retaliation is a must when I buck my opps there’s no Headie One – Don’t Judge Me. remorse’: Dutchavelli – Bando Diaries. ‘Anxiety every time I hear the door knock I gotta be brave’: Little Torment – Stress. As a result, people who have experienced trauma may cut themselves off from friends and family, and engage in yet more risky behaviours. High levels of PTSD are linked to violent experiences, and the more violence a young person is exposed to the greater the PTSD symptoms. And so the cycle continues… can we help to break it?
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Twitter: @NDodzro For the full version of this article, including references, see thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/ hidden-lifetop-boy
05/03/2021 16:49
‘What will we do when she doesn’t recognise us?’ Mother is a candid, sensitive and very powerful documentary that centres around a care facility in Thailand for Westerners with dementia. At the heart of this documentary is the vulnerability and significance of what it means to be a mother, and an unsettling insight into what it feels like to lose one. I found it utterly heart-wrenching in places, yet incredibly heart-warming in others. Director Kristof Bilston manages to capture an authentic and raw insight into the lives of two mothers – Pomm, a Thai mother who provides high level round-the-clock loving care for patients with advanced dementia, and Maya, a 57-year-old Swiss mother with Alzheimer’s Disease, whose family are preparing to move her into the home where Pomm works. We also meet Elizabeth, who Pomm has cared for and developed a close mother-daughter type bond with. Bilston presents these stories in parallel and at first I found the shifts between them incongruous – just as I was immersing myself emotionally in one life, I was thrust into the other. But as the striking parallels and
film Mother www.motherdocumentary.com
stark differences between Pomm and Maya’s lives began to emerge, this approach became compelling and effective. Pomm is a young mother of three children: Miriam and Moses who live with Pomm’s mum, and 4-year-old Nadia who has to live with her dad. Pomm goes weeks on end without seeing them so that she can hold down two jobs in Chiang Mai, four hours away from her family home. She has no choice if she is to repay her debts and support herself financially. Throughout the film, Pomm’s love, generosity and deeply caring nature is tangible but while her client benefits enormously from this, it is heartbreaking to see her children being deprived of this part of her. Meanwhile, we see the pain experienced by Maya’s children as they are increasingly separated from her by the ravages of dementia.
‘What will we do when she doesn’t recognise us any more?’ asks her eldest daughter. Together, Maya’s family make the decision to send her to live in the care facility in Thailand where Pomm works. It is a long way away but the level of care is second to none and the cheap labour means that it is affordable for them. This is a story about two mothers whose relationships with their children is at the mercy of their own circumstances – for Pomm her poverty and for Maya her illness. There is plenty for psychologists to get their teeth into, from the obvious questions about how best to care for someone with dementia to the issues of attachment and ambiguous loss. But the film also draws attention to some fundamental and uncomfortable socio-political realities: Maya’s family’s financial savings are Pomm’s family’s emotional costs. This tender portrayal of motherhood is a difficult but essential watch. Reviewed by Catherine Loveday, Professor of Psychology at the University of Westminster
Continued resilience in the face of adversity dance Like Water balletblack.co.uk
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Ballet Black is a British ballet company, comprising of Black and Asian dancers. Set up by Cassa Pancho MBE in 2001, the company aims to provide opportunities to dancers and students of Black and Asian descent, and ultimately to diversify classical ballet in Britain. Ballet Black advocate for wider societal change and were instrumental in collaborating with professional dance shoe manufacturer, Freed of London, to create pointe shoes for Black, Brown, and Asian dancers’ skin tones instead of the typical Caucasian ‘nude’. Like Water, created and choreographed by Mthuthzeli November, a senior artist with Ballet Black, is a beautiful and moving triumph. As a white woman, I cannot begin to imagine the horrors contained with the histories that are woven throughout this nine-minute film, spectacularly performed on the shores adjacent to the white cliffs of Dover, though I can, however, appreciate the raw beauty of the story the artists seek to share. The film opens with narration from November, initially spoken in the Xhosa tongue with subtitles in English, ‘Mntana we langa (Children of the sun). Camagu (Gratitude) awusemhle mntanedlozi (you are beautiful)’ and starts off slowly with an almost ripple-like quality to
the synchronicity of the dancers’ movements. Each artist tells their tale using their body to depict experiences of slavery, fierce uprising, and ultimately emancipation. The theme of water quite literally flows throughout, with the waves of the English Channel providing the perfect backdrop. This leads the viewer to one of the final scenes displaying a single dancer on a chair gazing out to sea, with his peers having fallen on the sand behind him. ‘The spirits of the water have seen a great many things. They have seen a people, captured, abducted and sold over the centuries only to be bought and sold again... the only connection with home being the ocean herself.’ Like Water is a huge nod of recognition to the generations that have had no choice but to show continued resilience in the face of adversity. ‘A world that has conditioned us to not see the beauty of our skin, hair, culture and our people. But like water we flow, like water we change shape. We remain resilient.’ Like Water could help all acknowledge the histories and struggles that have come before us and remain to this day. Reviewed by Joh Foster, Organisational Psychologist and Change Specialist. Twitter: @TheWiseFoster
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the psychologist april 2021 culture
Super Ted’s circle of ‘we’
As the second series begins filming, Melissa Marselle revisits Ted Lasso – which some are calling perfect lockdown viewing… Although it came out in summer 2020, a friend recommended the US comedy Ted Lasso to me in January as a ‘smart, funny, feel-good show without irony, naivety or self-deprecation’. In the midst of winter and the start of Lockdown 3.0, this sounded like tonic for the soul. Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show about a good-natured American college football coach, Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis), hired to train the fictional English Premier League team AFC Richmond. Originally based on an NBC Sports advert, Ted Lasso is a classic fish-out-of-water story of a heart-on-his-sleeve American rubbing against buttoned-up English mores. The show starts with Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) assuming ownership of AFC Richmond from her cheating ex-husband, firing the current misogynist trainer and replacing him with Ted Lasso. All is not as it seems… Ted’s ignorance about football makes him an unlikely choice. His enthusiastic personality makes him the perfect dupe and our beloved underdog. To avoid relegation, Lasso must earn the respect of his players while also winning over a hostile press and fanbase. For a show about a football coach, the football remains mostly in the background, as the show focuses on the relationships Lasso forms with those around him. Ted’s secret weapon is his positivity. What he lacks in basic knowledge about football or the UK, he makes up for in positive thinking and motivation skills. This is best conveyed in his coaching philosophy: ‘I don’t care if we win or lose matches. I am here to help these players become the best version of themselves.’ By cultivating positive relationships and self-esteem, Ted helps others pursue meaningful lives. In this way, Ted Lasso embodies positive psychology – the study of psychological strengths and positive emotions. Ted is an extraordinarily positive person. He demonstrates many positive psychological character strengths, such as curiosity, creativity, open-mindedness, integrity, persistence, humility, gratitude and humour. This is especially conveyed when Ted attributes a quote to Walt Whitman during a darts competition: ‘Be curious,
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not judgmental’. Kindness is another character strength, as Ted secretly bakes homemade shortbread biscuits for Rebecca, and gives his football players personalised presents. Ted also demonstrates forgiveness to Rebecca, while she in turn clings to the negative attachment to her ex-husband. Lasso has high dispositional optimism as he expects that good things will happen. Despite never having coached football before, he is confident about his future at AFC Richmond and expects that team and player outcomes will be positive. Lasso explains that the causes of bad events, like losing games, are unstable (We’ll win next time), specific (it’s just a game) and external (Man City are a good team). Through his persistent optimism and genuine warmth, Ted leads characters and AFC Richmond towards their best selves. As such the programme is also a case study in the social identity approach to leadership, which has felt like a real paradigm shift in Psychology in recent years. For Ted, leadership is about ‘we’ not ‘I’. This is a lesson some real life Premiership football managers seem to grasp more than others: Jose Mourinho is perhaps experiencing diminishing returns with his ‘I am a special one’ approach, while just last night Leeds’ Marco Bielsa won plaudits from many fans for saying ‘I didn’t take Leeds to the Premier League. I manage in the Premier League thanks to Leeds.’ I enjoyed spending time with Ted. His positive character strengths and optimism are infectious; an antidote for all the doom and stress and negativity in the world right now. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory highlights how TV programmes can encourage people to make positive changes in their lives. Ted Lasso sparks such behavioural and social changes by showing the benefits of positive thinking and behaviour. Although just a TV show, it may even prompt the audience to become the ‘best version of themselves’.
Find much more on our website including Alina Ivan on the BBC Sounds podcast series The Happiness Half Hour, with Professor Bruce Hood; and Drusilla Joseph on Malcolm and Marie
Reviewed by Melissa Marselle, PhD, Lecturer in Psychological Well-being, De Montfort University. Twitter: @melissamarselle
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We dip into the Society member database and pick out… Kristina Xavier Clinical Psychologist & Integrative Nutrition Health Coach at Kristina Xavier Clinical Psychology & Coaching One moment that changed the course of your career As part of my training to qualify as a Clinical Psychologist I completed several internships – at a private practice, in a hospital setting and in an eating disorders day program. Each setting afforded unique learning opportunities, but ultimately, I found I enjoyed the wide range of presentations in the private practice. I was offered my first job at this private practice! One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Develop a healthy self-care routine, learn to put yourself first. One podcast During lockdown my goal has been to listen to more podcasts. I’ve enjoyed How To Fail With Elizabeth Day. She interviews actors, writers and other public figures on their failures and how they’ve dealt with them. She’s also recently published a book which is on my reading list. One thing psychologists could do better Be flexible and treat each client/patient as an individual with their own unique set of strengths and challenges. There will never be a one size fits all approach!
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One inspiration Tools and techniques from positive psychology, such as discovering unique strengths, gratitude journals and thinking about values, inspires clients to make meaningful changes in their lives. Rather than talking about ‘what’s missing’ or ‘what’s wrong’, discussing what they are proud of significantly changes the energy of our sessions.
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one on one
One song George Ezra’s Shotgun. This was our family’s soundtrack for 2020 after my 5-year-old was introduced to it by her Reception teacher. It’s such a fun song to dance around and dream of adventures to (once life returns to ‘normal’).
One musical I’ve seen Les Misérables countless times and it never fails to move me. One alternative career path I’m passionate about health and wellbeing, so if I hadn’t trained as a Clinical Psychologist I would have become a nutritionist. One hope Our way of life has been so disrupted by coronavirus. There have been so many challenges over the past year, but overall I hope that we all take something from this experience – that we re-evaluate what is really important to us. One lesson learnt I don’t believe that we can do or have it all. We need to constantly work towards finding balance, and I think we can do this by prioritising what’s important to us ‘right now in this moment’. One thing you couldn’t do without Coffee!
coming soon… a collection on living with cancer; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more... contribute… reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …April 2010, ‘Helping the homeless’ …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist psy 04_10 pOFC:Layout 1
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One proud moment Setting up my own private practice, first in Sydney, Australia and now in London. I enjoy the balance of running a small business and being a Clinical Psychologist. One book that has inspired your work as a Clinical Psychologist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is incredibly powerful in helping clients access what is really important to them (i.e. their values), and ties in so well with cognitive behavioural therapy, Schema Therapy and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. I also recently read Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open which I found fascinating and inspiring.
Helping the homeless Christian Jarrett examines psychology’s response
Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society
forum 266 news 274 careers 336 looking back 356
the nonexistent purpose of people 290 imagining harmonious relations 298 psychosocial support in the Red Cross 304 emergency response in Madrid 308
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