The Psychologist August 2015

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psychologist vol 28 no 8

august 2015 www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Making holidays work Jessica de Bloom takes a tour

letters 606 news 616 digest 626 reviews 682

qualitative psychology special feature 638 interview: ‘we’re all either Jedi or Sith’ 660 big picture centre careers 674

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Making holidays work work and organisational psychologist Jessica de Bloom takes a tour of the world of vacation research

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Breaking out of the silo mentality Rachel Shaw and Nollaig Frost argue for pluralism and mixed methods, to open a special feature on qualitative psychology

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Learning from the ‘lifeworld’ Joanna Brooks introduces a range of approaches to phenomenology in qualitative psychology

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Rhetoric and resistance Stephen Gibson uses qualitative analysis to understand Milgram’s studies – are they really ‘obedience’ experiments?

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Crossing into the digital realm 652 Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans, Christine Griffin, Yvette Morey and Helen Murphy look at the issues for researchers in online and digital research

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638 Cover Kate Thornton http://katethorntondesign. blogspot.co.uk © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained from the British Psychological Society for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk.

The publishers have endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all illustrations. If we have unwittingly infringed copyright, we will be pleased, on being satisfied as to the owner’s title, to pay an appropriate fee.

...looks back Let a thousand flowers bloom 656 Anna Madill rounds off the special feature with a look at how such methods, and the Society’s Section, have blossomed over the years

The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson

Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Matt Connolly Interviews Gail Kinman Reviews Kate Johnstone Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

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the issue ...reports news is unemployment being rebranded a psychological disorder?; APA torture investigation; harrowing stories in the Harris Review on self-inflicted deaths in custody; perspectives on psychosis and schizophrenia; and more

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society President’s column; a psychological perspective on hoarding; the Society’s Research Assistantship scheme; and more

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...debates letters 606 learning to teach more reflectively; psychology and religion; Society investments and the presidential term; the not-so-new statistics; Professor Edgar Miller; and more

...digests Phineas Gage, giggling toddlers, the monster in the mirror, and much more – including news of a live event – from www.bps.org.uk/digest

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...meets news 620 five minutes with Helen Cassaday on the use of non-human primates in research interview: ‘we’re all either Jedi or Sith’ 660 Miles Thomas meets John Amaechi OBE – psychologist, organisational consultant, high-performance executive coach and former NBA basketball player careers we hear about partnership working from Jackie Sykes and Chris Welford, and Fiona Sweeney describes her work in mental health street triage

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one on one with Victoria Clarke, Associate Professor in Sexuality Studies at the University of the West of England

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Break out your tiny violins: The Psychologist and Research Digest do not get holidays. We have considered a combined July/August issue, to ease the pressure on our small team during the summer and to allow us to do more outreach events (such as last month’s Latitude Festival appearance). We would welcome your views on that, but in the meantime we plough on with our usual monthly issue and daily web updates. No doubt many of you find juggling holidays, work and other responsibilities a challenge too: Jessica de Bloom’s piece (p.632) has some evidencebased tips for you.

Elsewhere, colour coded on this contents spread, we have a special feature on qualitative psychology.

I am particularly pleased that we are trying new ways of pulling together contributions: see Sarah Riley and colleagues (p.652) and the associated video discussion. All part of our print/online integration, along with forays into live events such as the Digest ‘heaven and hell’ do (www.bps.org.uk/digest/10): no rest for the wicked!

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

...reviews The emotion of Inside Out; The Elephant Man; Dementiaville; Scientology and the Prison of Belief; ‘Decision’ exhibition; and more

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

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3 years ago Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our archive, including a special issue on time

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Big picture centre-page pull-out left-handedness: mysteries and myths, with Carolyn J. Choudhary

NEWS

Is unemployment being rebranded a psychological disorder?

Issues around psychology and employment came to the fore during June, with a report on ‘coercive strategy’ in UK government workfare programmes, a demonstration against the placement of psychologists in job centres, and statements on the topic from the British Psychological Society.

First, an article published in Medical Humanities (see tinyurl.com/ostsfke) suggested that people claiming unemployment benefits are being coerced into undertaking psychological interventions. The research, which drew largely on personal testimonies, suggests unemployment is seen as a

personal failure and psychological deficit.

Both authors of the paper, Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn, are members of campaign group Boycott Workfare. This group works to stop ‘work-for-your-benefits’ schemes where people are made to work for free with potential sanctions on receipt of their benefits if they do not comply. Friedli and Stearn suggest psychology is being used by the government to explain unemployment (that people have the wrong attitude for work) and as a means to achieve the ‘right’ attitude for job readiness.

The report describes the role of ‘psycho-compulsion’, which it defines as the imposition of psychological explanations of unemployment and mandatory activities that are aimed at Dr David Harper (Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London) is a member changing beliefs, attitudes and disposition. of Psychologists Against Austerity (see https://psychagainstausterity.wordpress.com): Friedli and Stearn write that some ‘Professionals and service users concerned about the involvement of psychological therapists workfare contractors that run training in jobcentres are not trying to simply deny people psychological help, rather, they are programmes, such as A4e, focus on concerned about the way therapy is being introduced. The Conservative manifesto included psychological or ‘soft outcomes’ that treat a commitment to introduce de facto mandatory therapy: “People who might benefit from gaining a job as something that can be treatment should get the medical help they need so they can return to work. If they refuse achieved by having the right attitude. The a recommended treatment, we will review whether their benefits should be reduced” authors write: ‘Izzy Koksal, in her blog on (tinyurl.com/m3m3e2c, p.28). the experience of A4e training, describes ‘Compulsory healthcare is reserved within society only for extremely serious situations the impact of being surrounded by (e.g. managing epidemics or where someone poses a serious risk to themselves or others or motivational quotes, with their persistent where someone has committed a serious violent criminal offence) and where there is legal emphasis on individual responsibility for oversight. Reviewing someone’s benefits for failing to take up therapy in relation to jobunemployment and the perils of negative seeking seems an entirely disproportionate and probably counter-productive move. thinking.’

‘It is worth noting there has been little coverage of the evidence base for the government’s They also refer to a recently policies. An evaluation has been published of the pilot sites (tinyurl.com/nrkawyg). Even announced scheme in which claimants within its own assumptions the outcomes were poor and had a very high drop-out rate: of 413 will undergo interviews that will assess referred to the four pilot sites, 173 dropped out. The high drop-out rate may be one of the whether they have a ‘psychological reasons the manifesto suggested that benefits should be refused if people didn’t take up resistance’ to work, as well as profiling to opportunities for help, but there is relatively little insight into why drop-out rates were high test if they are ‘ bewildered, despondent or (see bottom of p.6) and there was no systematic research into the experiences of those determined’. The people it deems to be receiving or declining therapy. less mentally fit, the authors write, will be ‘Of the 240 left in the pilot, only 15 got jobs (a success rate of 6.25 per cent). Forcing given more intensive coaching than those therapy with such a low success rate is disproportionate. Placing the onus for unemployment viewed as optimistic – such as graduates on individual unemployed people seems to be a case of blaming the victim. Levels of or those recently made redundant. unemployment are partly due to the government’s own austerity policies and many The Department of Work and Pensions economists have criticised the government for not adopting policies focused on economic (DWP) told the BBC growth (as they have in the USA, Iceland, Germany and elsewhere).’ (tinyurl.com/q33yc7a) that Friedli and

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Stearns’ report was not based on fact but rather anecdotal evidence from blogs and social media. ‘We know that being unemployed can be a difficult time, which is why our Jobcentre staff put so much time and effort into supporting people back into work as quickly as possible. We offer support through a range of schemes so that jobseekers have the skills and experience that today’s employers need,’ they said.

The report also criticised the British Psychological Society, with the authors writing: ‘BPS has confined itself to saying that such tests must be administered by experienced users of psychometrics under supervision of a chartered psychologist.’

However, Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, BPS President, responded with concern over the issues raised (tinyurl.com/nme2fb7).

He said in a statement: ‘We are concerned at what the paper has revealed, particularly the issue of coercion to undertake psychological interventions. Friedli and Stearn suggest that unemployment is being rebranded as a psychological disorder, with an increasing range of interventions being introduced to promote a “positive” psychological outlook or leave claimants to face sanctions.’ A later statement called for ‘a dialogue with the government about applying psychological methods to public policy that emphasise best practice, trust, efficacy and appropriateness.

There must be public confidence in psychology as a person-centred science. It should not be used for financial, political or ideological ends. … Individual wellbeing, not resource rationing, must be central to policy decisions about the use of psychology in the benefits system. We have yet to be assured this is the case.’

This report follows news in the 2015 budget that online CBT would be available to 40,000 claimants of Jobseekers’ Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance, and that IAPT therapists would be located in at least 350 jobcentres by the end of the summer. At the end of June, psychologists and clients marched on Streatham Jobcentre in protest over the plans. Back in March, the DWP had announced that Streatham would be the first centre giving mental health support to help unemployed people back into work.

Several groups, including Psychologists Against Austerity, attended the demonstration. One of their members, Dr David Harper, a Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, spoke to us about his long-standing concerns over what he sees as the ‘anti-therapeutic’ approach of the UK government (see box, and search ‘austerity’ at http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk).

The Society has also released a briefing paper calling for thorough reform to Work Capability Assessments (see tinyurl.com/qguswec). This call to action highlighted a growing body of evidence that seriously ill people were being inappropriately subjected to these assessments, and said these do not effectively measure fitness for work and can produce inappropriate outcomes for claimants. It quoted the conclusion of the 2014 review by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee: ‘Simply rebranding the WCA by taking on a new provider will not solve the problems… This will be time consuming and complex, but the redesigned ESA assessment processes needs to be in place by the time a completely new contract, involving multiple providers is tendered in 2018.’

The briefing paper called for the introduction of: a reliable, valid and fully researched method of assessment to replace the Limited Capacity for Work Questionnaire and the face-to-face Work Capability Assessment; appropriate training in assessment, scoring and interpretation for assessors; specialist assessors to assess people with mental, cognitive and intellectual functioning difficulties; supervision for assessors from qualified clinicians with expertise in rehabilitation, assessment and interpretation; appropriate referral routes for those with mental, cognitive and intellectual functioning difficulties, with specialist assessment and support; and appropriate periods of reassessment for people with long-term conditions based on specialist advice to accurately reflect the prognosis. ER

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OUTSTANDING IMPACT IN SOCIETY FOR KITZINGERS Psychologist Professor Celia Kitzinger (University of York) has, alongside her sister Professor Jenny Kitzinger (University of Cardiff), been awarded an ESRC prize for ‘Outstanding Impact in Society’. The pair were recognised for their online resource supporting relatives of patients in long-term coma-like states.

In 2009 the researchers’ sister Polly Kitzinger was severely brain-injured in a car accident. ‘It was this personal experience combined with talking to other families on the hospital ward and discovering the shortage of reliable information that led us to research this area,’ Professor Jenny Kitzinger explains.

Working in partnership with Sue Ziebland from the Health Experience Research Group, Oxford University and the DIPEx charity, the pair set up a steering group composed of representatives from the brain injury charity Headway, family members, and health professionals from intensive care and neurorehabilitation. They interviewed 65 people with a family member in either a prolonged vegetative or minimally conscious state, discovering that family members were struggling with feelings of isolation, guilt and confusion as well as incorrect legal guidance, poor information and inadequate support.

The team put together an online resource of more than 250 film clips of family members talking about what it is like to have a relative in a vegetative or minimally conscious state (there are up to an estimated 64,000 people in the UK in longterm ‘comas’). ‘It explores the issues they find most challenging,’ says Professor Celia Kitzinger. The healthtalk.org online resource has provided information and support to thousands, and led to training sessions in hospitals, rehabilitation centres and care homes. The research directly informed the Royal College of Physicians’ National Clinical Guidelines on Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness and led to the inclusion of specific guidelines on the family's role in decision making and guidance for clinicians and families about the law. The findings were cited in recommendations by the House of Lords Select Committee on the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and transformed thinking on ‘coma’ by offering more nuanced representations of the vegetative/minimally conscious state through, for example, the Radio 3 programme Coma Songs (co-produced by Jenny Kitzinger), which reached 59,000 listeners.

‘We are concerned to ensure the highest-quality support for family members of people in long-term vegetative and minimally conscious states,’ Professor Celia Kitzinger told us.

‘Family members often feel tremendous grief and despair about their relative’s situation and some are also very angry at the healthcare system that has created it. Expression of these feelings tends to be viewed as evidence of pathology – “prolonged grief disorder”, “traumatic stress disorder”, et cetera – to be “treated” by psychologists or counsellors, who can unwittingly become involved in “managing difficult families” rather than helping families to address the medical, legal and social contexts which create many of the problems in the first place.’ The sisters have run many training sessions with healthcare professionals to help them to understand and engage productively with family members in counselling settings, best interests meetings, and at the bedside. JS

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‘Deeply disturbing findings’ – APA and An independent report has accused the American Psychological Association (APA) of ‘hiding its head in the sand’ over so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – commonly known as torture. The report to the special committee of the Board of Directors of the APA (tinyurl.com/q727rl7) concludes that key APA officials colluded with the US Department of Defense to implement ‘loose, high-level ethical guidelines’, and that ‘the handling of ethics complaints against prominent national security psychologists was handled in an improper fashion’.

We reported on journalist James Risen’s expose of the report in June (tinyurl.com/phrqhuj), but the full document – based on review of ‘over 50,000 documents’, and well over 200 interviews of 148 people – is uncomfortable reading that vindicates long-standing critics of the APA on this issue. The authors, led by former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, say their investigation ‘will help define the meaning of psychology’, warning that when a profession that ‘can salve our emotional traumas… allows for the potential that psychologists will intentionally inflict pain on an individual with no ability to resist, regardless of the individual’s background or motives, faith in the profession can

diminish quickly’.

This is perhaps the saddest element of the report, and one that is attracting considerable comment on social media – that the APA’s priorities were found to be ‘PR strategy and growing the profession of psychology’, rather than the welfare of the people being interrogated. The report notes ‘many emails and discussions regarding how best to position APA to maximize its influence with and build its positive relationship with the Defense Department, and many emails and discussions regarding what APA’s messaging should be in a media environment it perceived as hostile’, but ‘little evidence of analyses or discussions about the best or right ethical position to take in light of the nature of the profession and the special skill that psychologists possess regarding how our minds and emotions work – a special skill that presumably allows psychologists to be especially good at both healing and harming’.

Interestingly, the report does include examples of resistance, notably from Columbia University professor Michael Wessells (p.22), speaking of the importance of the APA taking a ‘high standard’ at a ‘moment of national panic’.

Unfortunately the make up of the APA task force, weighted in favour of military

psychologists, worked against him. This process is repeated elsewhere: when Board member Diane Halpern makes the ‘very strong recommendation’ that ‘somewhere we add data showing that torture is ineffective in obtaining good information’, an internal staff e-mail exchange quickly concludes: ‘Hopefully, Diane’s suggestion is dead in the water.’

Although the task force report prohibited the involvement of psychologists in torture, the independent review agrees with critics of the APA that it knew ‘the artificially narrow Justice Department definition of “torture” …[and] did not necessarily prohibit acts that would properly be considered torture at most other times’.

The report accepts that some of the detainees in question were hardened members of sophisticated terrorist organisations, were well trained to resist interrogations, and had knowledge that would have been relevant to efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks. But it notes that ‘this is not the first time in the history of warfare that this dynamic has occurred’ and goes on to quote an unknown military officer, e-mailed in August 2003 for recommendations about interrogation techniques because ‘the gloves are coming off regarding these detainees’. The unknown officer wrote:

Wired for communication A psychologist whose research resulted in a new approach to communication training has been awarded a WIRED Innovation Fellowship for 2015.

Elizabeth Stokoe, Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, is one of 14 Fellows to be selected by WIRED, a magazine and

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website offering news and reviews in future science, culture and technology, as part of its celebration of forwardthinking innovators who have the ‘potential to make a significant impact on the world’.

Professor Stokoe’s research uses conversation analysis to understand the organisation of communication in different interactional settings, including mediation, medicine and police interviewing. She has developed the Conversation Analytic Roleplay Method (CARM) to

provide a research-based alternative to more traditional methods for communication training. CARM uses audio and video recordings of realtime, actual encounters to identify conversational problems and roadblocks as well as effective practices for avoiding and resolving them.

Professor Stokoe said: ‘It’s amazing to find out that I’m one of the lucky recipients of this year’s WIRED Innovation Fellowship, and I’m really excited to speak about the science behind effective communication at

WIRED2015 in October in London.

‘CARM has attracted numerous accolades and substantial public interest… it presents a challenge to traditional forms of communication training, as a process of turning our ordinary life conversations into something different to look at and learn from.’ JS I Read more about Professor Stokoe and her work in our March 2013 interview http://thepsychologist.bps.org .uk/volume-26/edition3/careers

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torture

‘We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are. Those “gloves” are…based on clearly established standards of international law to which we are signatories and in part the originators. … It comes down to standards of right and wrong – something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient …

We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground.

We need to stay there.’

The report notes that the profession of psychology must also define for itself whether it is ethical and legitimate for psychologists to use their special skill to

intentionally inflict psychological or physical harm on individuals, concluding that ‘APA officials made such a decision in 2005. Their decision was to keep the limits on this behavior loose and high-level.’

The report notes (p.299) that the British Psychological Society came out with a statement in February 2005 that condemned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in interrogations, combining more general terms with examples of specific techniques.

The APA has disclosed that it parted ways with Stephen Behnke, its Ethics Director for 15 years, on 8 July. Behnke was heavily criticised in the report for his ‘remarkably expansive role, well beyond the expected duties of APA Ethics Director, the result was a highly permissive APA ethics policy based on strategy and PR, not ethics analysis’.

Behnke had been hired specifically to

pursue an ethics programme that was more ‘educative’, and the report notes that during his tenure the ‘focus shifted to “supporting” psychologists, not getting them in trouble – a strategy consistent with the ultimate mission of growing psychology’.

Chair of the Independent Review’s Special Committee and former APA President Nadine Kaslow told The Guardian (tinyurl.com/ohzykmr) that she personally thought ‘the council needs to adopt a policy to prohibit psychologists from being involved in interrogation, people being held in military custody at Gitmo [Guantánamo] and other sites’.

(Psychologists still operate at Guantánamo, as part of the detention facility’s behavioral-health unit.)

In an APA statement [http://www.apa.org/independentreview/independent-review-release.aspx] apologising for the ‘deeply disturbing’ findings and organizational failures, Kaslow added: ‘This bleak chapter in our history occurred over a period of years and will not be resolved in a matter of months. But there should be no mistaking our commitment to learn from these terrible mistakes and do everything we can to strengthen our organization for the future and demonstrate our commitment to ethics and human rights.’ JS

A Chartered Psychologist has been recognised by the Australian Psychological Society’s College of Organisational Psychologists for an innovative programme to promote effectiveness in a telecommunications company.

The programme was designed and implemented by Pauline Willis, a UK-based occupational psychologist, and Dr Josephine Palermo (General Manager, Customer and Collaboration, Telstra Corporation). Telstra is the largest telecommunications company in Australia and has

a presence in over 15 countries. Willis told The Psychologist: ‘Collaboration is widely recognised as being critical to business success, in the global economic environment where the digital economy is creating new challenges. Feedback from both Telstra staff and customers identified the potential detrimental consequences of working in silos to both customer experience and

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NICK RAWLE

Workplace prize

employee engagement. By harnessing organisational psychology, we designed a program that raised awareness

of the importance of collaboration and developed a culture of collective or shared leadership.’

The Workplace Excellence Awards celebrate exceptional achievement and innovation in the application of psychological principles in the workplace and recognise best practice in organisational psychology. JS I See www.workplaceexcellenc eawards.com.au/about-theawards

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5 minutes with…

Dr Helen Cassaday, University of Nottingham Nikos Logothetis, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, has said he will give up his research on primates ‘as quickly as possible’, citing a lack of support from colleagues and the scientific community as key factors in this decision.

In particular, he calls on organisations worldwide to file criminal charges against radical activists. You’re the lead on animal welfare for the British Psychological Society’s Research Board – do you feel psychologists who work with animals receive enough protection?

I think it’s most important to emphasise how highly protected primates are by UK and European legislation.

Under UK Home Office legislation (www.gov.uk/ research-and-testing-usinganimals), special protection begins with the octopus and non-human primates are most highly protected. Research on chimpanzees and gorillas would be illegal and the use of new world monkeys such as marmosets is highly restricted – the number of non-human primates used in research is kept as low as possible, and rats and mice are often used as alternatives. So the legislation is ‘speciesist’ based on current understanding of neurological complexity and sentience, but no rat or mouse is used either if the scientific objective could be addressed by the study of humans or the use of a computer simulation.

The remit of my BPS role doesn’t extend beyond the welfare of non-human primates but as a Home Office licence holder I’m not feeling particularly protected at present. I have spoken to researchers who say that animal models are of great importance in their field but

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that those working on these research questions using monkeys are working outside of Europe (i.e. Asia) because they feel they could not pursue their research in Europe.

Do you think the public have a good understanding of the issues around the use of animals in research?

The Openness Concordat, published early in 2014, has the objective to promote public understanding of animal work based on the increased availability of information and potential public access to animal labs.

In particular many animal protection organisations would like greater availability of images, including CCTV. However, Logothetis’ work was the subject of a broadcast on German national television in September that showed footage filmed by an undercover activist working at the institute. Logothetis has said the footage is inaccurate, presenting a rare emergency situation following surgery as typical and showing stress behaviours deliberately prompted by the undercover caregiver. So it’s possible that video footage can be misinterpreted. Data on the numbers of animals entering regulated procedures can also be interpreted in different ways and the purpose of the research may not be accurately described in press releases issued by animal protection organisations. FOI requests for example have been causing some problems – especially in US, not just for animal researchers.

Do you think primate research still has a place in UK psychology?

The UK Home Office position on this is that primates should only be used for invasive

laboratory-based studies when there is no alternative, the potential benefit of the research is clear and the highest standards of animal welfare are applied. Personally, as a beneficiary of medical research, I’d endorse this view.

However, I think the use of alternative species raises similar concerns in that, for example, the use of pigs in neuroscientific research is on the increase as an alternative to the use of non-human primates, not so much in the UK at present but in parts of Europe. Pigs too are widely viewed as intelligent emotional animals.

Not all ‘psychology’ research can or should be considered medical or

potentially medical and some is non-invasive and conducted for the purpose of better understanding the animals.

To the animals’ advantage, the more we know about the cognitive and emotional capacities of non-human primates, the stronger the justification for increased protection, also in the natural environment where poaching is a serious threat to survival.

We can meanwhile be confident that laboratory work judged to require the use of non-human primates will be done to the highest possible standards in the UK and the rest of Europe, such work is not so highly regulated in some other countries. JS I For more, including comment from a research neuroscientist, see the online version tinyurl.com/pqdg5qz

QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY HONOURS A psychology professor who has spent her career researching human face perception, person memory and social cognition has been made a Dame in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Vicki Bruce (Newcastle University), who is also a former BPS President and carried out research for the Royal Mint in designing the £1 coin, said she was overwhelmed by the award.

Professor Bruce, who previously received an OBE, was awarded her DBE for services to higher education and psychology.

She told The Psychologist: ‘When the letter arrives you are simultaneously shocked and delighted, but not allowed to tell anyone until the list appears weeks later, and sad, because Mum and Dad are no longer with us.

‘Then there’s a large dose of impostor syndrome, which I hadn’t felt for a while, but will probably stay with me until my own grave. And then when the list appears… amazing!

It's been really touching hearing from people from way back, and I hope it’s good for psychology. I’m proud for our discipline.’

An OBE was also awarded to MOD psychologist Dr Susanne McGowan for services to armed forces personnel. She said:

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US jail appointment A clinical psychologist has been appointed head of one of the USA’s largest prisons, where around a third of inmates are mentally ill. Nneka Jones Tapia has been supervising mental health strategy at the Cook County Jail in Chicago for several years.

Reuters reported the prison holds around 9000 inmates with around 25 to 35 per cent of those with a mental illness, a number that has grown in recent years (apparently due to a fall in the number of mental health services). Tapia, now the jail’s Executive Director, will be the first head of a large jail who is also a mental health professional.

She said, in an interview reported by Reuters, that most of the mentally ill inmates in Cook County are there charged with low-level and non-violent offences and that some get into jail as a means to receive treatment. She added: ‘I think I can bring a wealth of knowledge to the staff in understanding the inmates.’

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart also told Reuters that since the 1960s, the number of beds in Illinois’ state-run psychiatric hospitals has fallen to fewer than 1500 from 35,000, which is why there are so many mentally ill people incarcerated. He added: ‘When a third of your population is mentally ill, you sure as heck better have someone who understands that at the top.’

We spoke to forensic psychologist, Professor Graham Towl (University of Durham) and former Chief Psychologist at the UK Ministry of Justice for his opinion on the move. He said there were a number of psychologists in the UK who managed prisons, and added: ‘Health and care professionals who are also effective leaders are very well placed to take on prison manager roles.

‘I am surprised, stunned, delighted and very pleased to receive this amazing honour. This came completely out of the blue and I still haven’t got used to the whole thing.’

Emma Cravitz has been awarded an MBE for services to children and families particularly in London. Cravitz has worked as an educational psychologist for 20 years and has founded a nursery and three schools, all of which have a focus on inclusivity and support children with special educational needs. She said: ‘When the letter arrived I was completely shocked and needed to read it several times before I could take it in. I feel really honoured to have been given this award and still can’t quite believe it has happened.’

Most recently she co-founded Eden Primary in Muswell Hill, a faith-based free school. Cravitz said her particular aim was to ensure that all children regardless of their needs would feel completely included in the school community. In the future, Cravitz said, she would be keen to set up summer holiday residential camps for young people who have conditions on the milder end of the autistic spectrum. She explained: ‘It seems to be a real gap in provision as these young people do not meet the criteria for special needs camps yet do not have the social skills to cope with a mainstream camp.’

Dr Janet Carr has been honoured with an OBE for her work with people with Down’s syndrome and their families, which has spanned more than 50 years. Last year The Guardian reported that, at the age of 87, she had just completed the longest-running research project looking at people with the condition. The study began with 54 babies and was initially only meant to last for 10 months – as The Guardian

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Prisons have much in common with hospitals as institutions.

Both have vulnerable recipients of services, patients and prisoners respectively. The UK public sector has, in recent years, become characterised by more marketisation and the increased segmentation of services. Health professionals including psychologists have some potentially useful skills sets for undertaking such challenging roles.’ ER I To read the Reuters article on this story see tinyurl.com/ngalecu, and for an interview with Nneka Tapia see tinyurl.com/laqckxl

article pointed out this research started at a time the ‘intellectually handicapped’, as people with Down’s syndrome were then known, were ‘regarded as non-persons to be consigned to institutions’. Carr remained close to the families and her 1995 book, Down’s Syndrome: Children Growing Up, was dedicated to ‘all the young people, and their families, who have been my friends since 1963 and taught me so much’.

Professor Emeritus Roy McConkey (Ulster University) has received an OBE for services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. His career has been devoted to applied research aimed at providing a better life for children and adults with intellectual disabilities and for their carers.

He told The Psychologist he was surprised to receive the award but pleased that his work with a small section of society was worthy of national recognition. ‘I have had more than my fair share of [career] highlights. Perhaps my work in developing countries has brought the most rewards both personally and in terms of making an impact in the lives of families. I have been privileged to work alongside some real pioneers and entrepreneurs who have taught me how big differences can come from sparse resources,’ he added.

Also awarded CBEs were Professor Jonathan Paul Nicholl for services to health research, who was Chair of the Sub-Panel 2 in REF 2014; and Professor Judith Helen Cross, a neuroscientist at UCL Institute of Child Health, for services to children with epilepsy. ER

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Light and heat in psychosis debate Ella Rhodes reports on a day of discussion at the University of Bath Opening this event, organised in response to the Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia report from the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology, Professor Paul Salkovskis expressed a hope that the event would ‘generate light rather than heat during the discussion’. However, he admitted to being ‘perturbed’ by the report because he and others had not been consulted about it. The debate was needed, he urged, to consider other professions’ views and to explore recent science and theory in the area.

Professor David Clark, from the University of Oxford and the Clinical Lead behind the government’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme (which he developed along with Lord Layard), gave an overview of its successes in treating anxiety and depression. He also gave suggestions to the gathered psychologists and psychiatrists about ways a similar model may be used in helping people with psychosis and schizophrenia, outlining key principles such as a national outcome monitoring system, a national training programme in NICE-recommended CBT treatments, and ambitious and clear access targets. ‘I hope that the principles of IAPT will now be extended to people with bipolar schizophrenia and personality disorders,’ he concluded. ‘To some extent it’s up to you to ensure it happens.’

Clinicians need to ‘step up to the plate’, embrace outcome monitoring and be transparent about their data so patients could see if a certain service was likely to help. It was critically important, he said, to have a well-argued economic case; in IAPT they could tell the government it would save more money than it cost.

The results of a trial of an IAPT-type approach in helping those with psychosis and schizophrenia was outlined next by Philippa Garety (King’s College London).

Professor Garety spoke of two sites in South London and Maudsley Trust that have been the centre of data collection for a new approach for treating psychosis and schizophrenia. The project, which started in 2012 and collected data until December last year, included a trust that covers four London boroughs with ‘exceptionally high’ levels of psychosis. In this new treatment people were offered CBT to NICE recommendations, a course that lasts six to nine months with weekly or

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fortnightly one-hour sessions. People using the service showed improvement in wellbeing, distress and social functioning.

Although not everyone presented at the clinic with a current hallucination or delusion, those who did showed a reduction in such symptoms.

Finally Garety pointed to preliminary data from an economic analysis by Paul McCrone that looked into the costs to the NHS. He compared costs before and after therapy and found crisis team usage and bed costs were reduced. She concluded there was clear evidence of demand for CBT in psychosis, good completion rates and evidence of improvement on a number of measures.

Daniel Freeman (University of Oxford) spoke next, about some new work targeting the severe paranoid thoughts often seen in people who experience psychosis. He said among the psychological factors that maintain such thoughts is worry – rates of worry between people with schizophrenia and those with anxiety disorders are nearidentical. As a result of this and other

work, Freeman worked with a clinical group of 150, all of whom had persistent persecutory delusions, to target these feelings of worry. All of them had at least 50 per cent conviction in their delusions and had worry levels similar to those in general anxiety disorder. Some were given a six-week worry-intervention CBT using six booklets of exercises, while others continued their normal treatment. Worry was reduced by eight weeks and remained at the same level at the 42-week followup. The intervention also caused a reduction in delusions, which also persisted after 24 weeks.

The debate over the potential genetic basis for schizophrenia and psychosis has raged for many decades, and Robin Murray, Professor of Psychiatric Research (King’s College London) spoke about the interaction between genes, the environment, cannabis and social adversity. He began by explaining that people who experience psychosis have an overreactive dopamine system, which can be triggered by stress, and social factors can make it worse: ‘It’s dopamine that

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grabs your attention, and it’s dopamine that leads to you thinking all sorts of things around you are significant when they’re not,’ he said. Other risk factors for psychosis and schizophrenia include drug abuse, being a migrant, being abused as a child, and being in an ethnic minority.

Murray ran through some evidence showing that those who had experienced childhood abuse or had a disrupted childhood, but had not suffered psychosis, also had dopamine dysregulation problems in times of stress.

Is the answer in the genes? Murray concluded with a new study that looked into 37,000 cases of schizophrenia and found there were at least 108 regions of the genome where there are genes associated with schizophrenia. ‘Individual risk genes are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause schizophrenia… rather, they increase the risk.’

A new video that aims to normalise opinions of psychosis among the general public, and to inform them about compassionate relating treatment, was shown by Dr Charles Heriot-Maitland (King’s College London). The video (compassionforvoices.com) tells the fictional story of Stuart who experiences voices and seeks help from a therapist.

Developed with Dr Eleanor Longden and Dr Rufus May, psychologists who have both had personal experience of psychosis, it outlines three emotional systems – threat, drive and soothing – and how these can be regulated with compassion training.

Next to speak was Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group, Clive Adams (University of Nottingham). The group aims to identify all trials worldwide into schizophrenia, and reviews evidence from around the world on the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of people with psychotic illnesses. Adams spoke about managing bias when reviewing studies, the history and future of investigations, and the importance of using real-world measures in trials.

Moving on to the controversial evidence around the use of CBT in treating psychosis, Adams outlined a review by Chris Jones in Birmingham, who had written: ‘Trial-based evidence shows no clear, convincing advantages over sometimes much less sophisticated therapies on average.’ On NICE guidelines, Adams quoted Udayanga Perera and Mark Taylor, who wrote that the guidelines for using CBT seem to promote psychosocial interventions beyond the evidence and to make recommendations based on no evidence at all. Adams concluded: ‘Where does this

leave us in psychiatry, mental health, nursing? I think it leaves us in trouble.

Ever so polite but sniping at each other, and that’s wholly unedifying, privately or publicly. The hopes of people with schizophrenia are raised and dashed at the same time, how dare we do that?

Clinicians don’t know which way to turn and the researchers research. Careers blossom and fade and Rome burns while the services degrade – something’s wrong here.’

Finally, in a round table discussion Peter Kinderman (University of Liverpool), co-author of the DCP report, began by promising to involve input from more people in future, apologising to those who did not get advance notice.

However, he added that he did not expect to be consulted on every report in a relevant field. Professor Kinderman moved on to criticisms of the report’s content, saying that much of it had been from those who did not share the views of the authors, but that a report should not be criticised through misrepresenting its content. He added that although he expected to find the conference at variance with his world view, he had actually agreed with all that was presented and felt that it was compatible with the content of the report.

Next, psychiatrist and epidemiologist Dr James McCabe (King’s College London) shared his views on whether we should view psychosis as being on a continuum or in categories – a topic also included in the DCP report. Viewing psychosis on a continuum captures more information and can sometimes be helpful for those experiencing a first episode of psychosis, to know a large proportion of the normal population occasionally have psychotic symptoms.

But when scientists are confronted by masses of confusing data, categorising it can be useful. McCabe concluded with some of his current work looking to develop new ways of describing groups of people that are likely to respond to particular treatments, rather than just their symptoms.

Dr Rachel Churchill, a psychiatric epidemiologist from the University of Bristol, gave a professional and personal perspective on how systematic reviews and high-quality evidence synthesis can be of immense value. She added that groups who make decisions that result in change to health care use evidence synthesis: ‘We need to produce evidence syntheses directed at these groups to make a difference for people who experience psychosis.’ Churchill said it was also crucial to consider the organisation of care between different

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providers, the patient’s circumstances and wishes, as well as the value of public education about psychosis. Reducing stigma would make people better understand psychosis as well as making the experience of psychosis in the first instance easier to speak about.

James Coyne (University of Pennsylvania), who has voiced criticisms of the Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia report, put these in some context. He said in the 1980s while working as Director of Research at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto he witnessed what he described as the ‘horrible’ Soteria project. He explained that participants in the project had acute psychosis and were given just low doses of medication. ‘It’s important because it informs my perspective a lot of what we’re hearing about dealing with people with severe mental disorder, we’ve been there, tried it and it didn’t work… Some horrible chaos ensued, horrible exploitation of some patients by other patients, and when it finally collapsed, we tried to revive the project not to continue with this way of dealing with patients but to make sense of what had happened. We applied for NIMH funding to do followups. It was soundly rejected, the reason being all the clinical data on these patients was very experiential not categorical.’

Coyne said this experience told him there was a necessity for precision of observation as well as categorisation.

He also raised concerns that quotes in the DCP report were not from psychotic patients, adding: ‘I think studies that simply involve checklist assessments of anomalous experience really don’t add to our understanding.’ He concluded: ‘I think the UK is committed to studies that are next to worthless in looking at the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy. They’re committed to studies that make comparisons of routine care that’s not adequately quantified or standardised.

And I think, deliberately, the people who are doing CBT research avoid comparisons with minimal active treatment conditions like befriending.’

The final discussion involved several people with personal experience of psychosis/schizophrenia, and Professor Salkovskis told The Psychologist later that what he took from it, and from the day as a whole, was that there was ‘more agreement than disagreement, and a consensus to do better’. So in sum, a day with plenty of light and perhaps a thawing of relations between various parties in the debate, but heat is likely to remain around this important and controversial topic.

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Harrowing stories ‘No-one should be under any illusions, prisons and young offender institutions are grim environments: bleak and demoralising to the spirit.’ So warns a hard-hitting and affecting new report, Changing Prisons, Saving Lives: Report of the Independent Review into Self-inflicted Deaths in Custody of 18-24 Year Olds (http://iapdeathsincustody.independent.go v.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/HarrisReview-Report2.pdf), which concludes ‘an intense one year period’ for the Harris Review.

The Review panel, led by Lord Toby Harris and including forensic psychologist Professor Graham Towl, was set up by the Justice Secretary to consider self-inflicted deaths in custody amongst 18- 24-yearolds. ‘All self-inflicted deaths are a tragedy’, the Review website notes, ‘and we want to ensure those that occur whilst individuals are under the protection of the state are subject to the most thorough scrutiny.’

The report makes powerful reading, and Lord Harris writes evocatively and with obvious gratitude towards the families of the 87 young people whose cases were considered in detail. ‘Listening to the harrowing stories of families who have lost their loved one through a selfinflicted death in custody has been a humbling experience, and one that the panel and I will remember for a long time,’ Lord Harris said. ‘Whatever the events that led to them ending up in custody, those young people were also someone’s son or daughter, sister or brother, partner or even parent.’ Sir Winston Churchill’s sentiment of 1910 is pushed to the fore: ‘there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man’.

As of 31 December 2014, 101 people under 24 had died in prisons since April 2007, another 14 since the cohort whose case studies were considered in detail for the report. ‘Each of those deaths represents a failure by the State to protect the young people concerned,’ chides the report. ‘That failure is all the greater because the same criticisms have occurred time and time again. Our findings echo the criticisms and recommendations made consistently and repeatedly throughout the last fifteen years and more. Lessons have not been learned and not enough has been done to bring about substantive change. This time, following this Review, it must be different.’

The report argues that prison is a

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hugely expensive intervention with questionable benefits, concluding that the experience of living in a prison or a Young Offenders Institution is not conducive to rehabilitation. ‘Young adults do not have enough activities, such as education or work, which will enable them to live purposeful lives.

Additionally, we heard frequent examples of medical and mental health appointments being missed because there are not sufficient ‘Whatever the events that led to them ending up in custody, staff available to escort those young people were also someone’s son or daughter, the patient.’ It calls for sister or brother, partner or even parent.’ ‘an inherent shift in the philosophy of prison in this country’ recommending that the in the first place.’

Ministry of Justice publishes a new Professor Graham Towl is Pro Vice statement on the purposes of prison, Chancellor and Deputy Warden at where the primary purpose is Durham University. He is a Professor of rehabilitation, and which acknowledges Forensic Psychology and was formerly that all persons deprived of their liberty Chief Psychologist at the Ministry of shall be treated with respect for their Justice. He told us: ‘In public health terms human rights. prisoners are a vulnerable group on a Individual cases do not make easy range of measures with high needs for reading for anyone involved in the justice psychological support. I would encourage system. The inquest into the death of 16the National Offender Management year-old Joseph Scholes in Stoke Health Service to build on previous and existing Young Offenders Institution in 2002 work and employ a broader range of concluded that ‘risk was not properly applied psychologists to deliver services recognised and appropriate precautions reflecting the full range of the needs of were not taken to prevent it’. Or, as members of the public who happen to be Joseph’s note to his parents put it: ‘I tried prisoner.’ telling them and they just don’t fucking We asked Lord Harris what his main listen.’. message for psychologists was. He said: The report makes a number of ‘The need for proper mental health concrete recommendations, including support for prisoners came across loud around safer cells, the importance of and clear in the evidence we considered. family contact and liaison, and the It is important that when prisoners creation of a new specialist role focused encounter psychologists in prison that on rehabilitation. ‘Delaying action until they can feel confident that the the resource position is easier is not an psychologist is there to help them and will option,’ the report warns. ‘Unless progress prioritise their well-being and safety. A is made on the proposals that we have kind and compassionate ear may well do made, young people will continue to die much to save the lives of some of our unnecessarily in our prisons and we will most vulnerable citizens.’ JS I Read an advance publication of Graham continue to waste countless millions of Towl and Tammi Walker’s article on pounds in failing to rehabilitate those who suicide in prisons (www.thepsychologist. could be rehabilitated, in locking up those bps.org.uk/prisoner-suicide). The Society for whom a non-prison option would be will be publishing a Call to Action and more appropriate, and in failing to Briefing Paper on suicide, led by the intervene early enough to prevent people Research Board, later in the year. from entering the criminal justice system

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It’s in the eyes A project to investigate the diagnostic power of eye-movement abnormalities in psychiatric disorders has been given £1.4 million of funding by the Department of Health and Wellcome Trust. Saccade Diagnostics Ltd, a spin-out company of the University of Aberdeen, will carry out their research along with teams from Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh.

Recent research from psychologist and eye-movement expert Dr Philip Benson, and Professor David St Clair, a clinical academic psychiatrist (both from the University of Aberdeen), has shown promising results. A range of tests based on simple eye-movement recordings taken by a fast camera as a person watches pictures was effective at diagnosing a range of major psychiatric disorders (see the paper in Biological Psychiatry: tinyurl.com/oatq8ze). Ultra-rapid ‘saccades’ were analysed by computer algorithms to generate different patterns.

The researchers say their eye-movement technology performs better at distinguishing different psychiatric

disorders than any current blood, radiology or gene-based tests of which they are aware.

The new funding will allow the team to potentially replicate their findings on larger sets of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and recurrent depression.

They will also test patients with a range of other psychiatric disorders, such as borderline personality and obsessive compulsive disorders, as well as large numbers of diagnostically challenging cases and normal controls.

The company will be involved in taking the technology through product development, regulatory approval and field trials before it can be made available commercially.

Dr Benson commented: ‘Many challenges lie ahead translating our research findings into a technology that can be used clinically. I am thrilled to be playing such a key role in its development. It is rare in medicine for an individual to have the opportunity to take a discovery all the way through from bench to clinic.’ ER

Practitioner standards The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) has published revised standards of proficiency for practitioner psychologists.

The standards of proficiency are the professional standards that every registrant must meet in order to become registered, and must continue to meet in order to remain on the HCPC Register.

The standards set out what professionals should know, understand and be able to do to practise safely and effectively.

The standards of proficiency are divided into generic standards (which apply to all HCPC-regulated professions) and standards specific to each profession.

The revised profession-specific standards for practitioner psychologists are reflective of the seven areas or ‘domains’ of practice of the psychology profession, with specific standards relating to each: clinical, counselling, educational, forensic, health, occupational, and sport and exercise psychologists.

Michael Guthrie, Director of Policy and Standards, commented: ‘We are grateful to the British Psychological

Society who have made recommendations and worked closely with us to review the standards. The changes made to the profession-specific standards for practitioner psychologists will ensure that they reflect current practice. Responding to the consultation, we have particularly focused on the language and terminology used to ensure that it is both relevant and appropriate.’

Mark Forshaw, Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Membership Standards Board, said: ‘We naturally welcome updates to the HCPC standards, which are based upon a process of consultation but which also reflect the independence of the HCPC as a regulator.

The Society maintains its own definitions of Chartered Psychologist status, which we present to the world as a set of additional standards beyond benchmark threshold competence.’ JS I The standards are available from www.hcpc-uk.org/aboutregistration/ standards/standardsofproficiency. The HCPC will work with education providers to implement the new standards.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT SURVEY The Wellcome Trust, Royal Society and 13 other financial supporters of publicly funded research have come together in a consortium to review public engagement with research in higher education, research institutes and clinical settings across the UK. Research company TNS-BMRB has been commissioned by the consortium to carry out an attitudinal survey of researchers and those working in a public engagement role.

The work aims to create an evidence base around the understanding of, and participation in, public engagement with research.

The survey will build on the 2006 Royal Society Survey of factors affecting science communication, to ascertain changes in the sector since then and to provide a benchmark for future research and will include all academic disciplines. The consortium also includes organisations such as the British Academy and Research Councils UK. The results are due to be announced in the autumn. ER

PSYCHOLOGIST APPOINTED EXPERT The Health and Safety Executive has appointed a psychologist in its new committee of experts who will aim to give independent advice on workplace health. The Workplace Health Expert Committee is made up of nine members, including Chartered Psychologist Emma Donaldson-Feilder, who will give opinions on emerging issues and trends, new evidence relating to existing issues and, on the quality and relevance of the evidence base on workplace health issues.

The group will provide scientific and medical advice to the HSE’s Chief Scientific Advisor and Director of Research Professor Andrew Curran and to its board. One of its main focuses will be on chemical and physical hazards and human behavioural or organisational factors in the workplace that could lead to physiological and psychosocial ill health.

Ms Donaldson-Feilder said she was delighted to have been invited to be part of the committee: ‘I very much hope that this new committee can make a difference in ensuring work enhances, and doesn’t damage, workers’ health across the UK. I am particularly delighted to provide input as a psychologist as I believe the psychological and social aspects of work are key,’ she added.

I Read more about Emma in our August 2013 issue (at tinyurl.com/edfpsych)

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DIGEST

What the textbooks don’t tell you about psychology’s most famous case study It’s a remarkable, mythical tale with lashings of gore – no wonder it’s a favourite of psychology students the world over. I’m talking about Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railway worker who somehow survived the passing of a three-foot long tamping iron through the

In Teaching of Psychology front of his brain and out the top of his head. What happened to him next?

If you turn to many of the leading introductory psychology textbooks (American ones, at least), you’ll find the wrong answer, or a misleading account.

Richard Griggs, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida, has just analysed the content of 23 contemporary textbooks (either released or updated within the last couple of years), and he finds most of them contain distortions, omissions and inaccuracies.

It needn’t be so. Thanks to painstaking historical analysis of primary sources (by Malcolm Macmillan and Matthew Lena) – much of it published between 2000 and 2010 [for example, see ‘Looking Back’, September 2008] – and the discovery during the same time period of new photographic evidence of post-accident Gage, it is now believed that Gage made a remarkable recovery from his terrible injuries. He ultimately emigrated to Chile where he worked as a coach driver, controlling six horses at

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once and dealing politely with nonEnglish-speaking passengers. The latest simulations of his injury help explain his rehabilitation – it’s thought the iron rod passed through his left frontal lobe only, leaving his right lobe fully intact.

Yet, the textbooks mostly tell a different story. Of the 21 that cover Gage, only four mention the years he worked in Chile. Only three detail his mental recovery. Fourteen of the books tell you about the first research that attempted to identify the extent of his brain injuries, but just four of the books give you the results from the most technically advanced effort, published in 2004, that first suggested his brain damage was limited to the left frontal lobe (see video at tinyurl.com/p5dgvlz).

Only nine of the books feature either of the two photos to have emerged of Gage in recent times.

So the textbooks mostly won’t tell you about Gage’s rehabilitation, or provide you with the latest evidence on his injuries. Instead, you might hear how he never worked again and became a vagrant, or that he became a circus freak for the rest of his life, showing off the holes in his head. ‘The most egregious error’, says Griggs, ‘seems to be that Gage survived for 20 years with the tamping iron embedded in his head!’

Does any of this matter? Griggs argues strongly that it does. There are over one and half million students enrolled in introductory psychology courses in the US alone, and most of them are introduced to the subject via textbooks. We know from past work that psychology textbook coverage of other key cases and studies is also often distorted and inaccurate. Now we learn that psychology’s most famous case study is also misrepresented, potentially giving a misleading, overly simplistic impression about the effects of Gage's brain damage. ‘It is important to the psychological teaching community to identify inaccuracies in our textbooks so that they can be corrected, and we as textbook authors and teachers do not continue to “give away” false information about our discipline,’ Griggs concludes. CJ

Psychology heaven and hell Wednesday 9 December 7-10pm Senate House, London #digestblog10 For further information and booking

www.bps.org.uk/digest/10

Toddlers learn better when you make them giggle In Cognition and Emotion There is probably nothing more fun than making a baby or toddler laugh. And now there’s news that it could even help with learning – the toddler’s not the adult’s.

In the first study to look at the effects of humour on learning at such a young age, Rana Esseily and her colleagues began by showing 53 18-month-olds how to reach a toy duck with a cardboard rake (other toddlers who had spontaneously used the rake as a reaching tool were excluded).

Crucially, half the participating toddlers were given several non-humorous demonstrations of how to use the rake to reach and pull the duck nearer. In these straight demonstrations, the experimenter was smiley, but just played with the duck for a bit after getting hold of it. The other toddlers were given several humorous demonstrations. In this case, after getting hold of the duck, the experimenter suddenly threw it on the floor and smiled. Sixteen of the 37 toddlers in the jokey condition laughed at least once when shown the funny demonstrations.

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Here's a technique that helps self-critical people build confidence from a taste of success In Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Celebrating a decade of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog

Supported by

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Next, the researchers placed the rake near each toddler’s hand, to see if they would imitate the action and use the rake to reach the duck for themselves. Among the laughing toddlers, all but one (93.7 per cent) used the rake to reach the duck. In comparison, just 19 per cent of the nonlaughing toddlers in the jokey condition used the rake, and just 25 per cent of the 16 toddlers who had been given the straight (non-jokey) demonstrations.

‘Our results suggest that laughing might be a stimulant of learning even during the second year of life,’ the researchers concluded. However, they conceded that there are other possible interpretations of their findings. For example, perhaps infants who laugh at jokes are just more cognitively advanced and that’s why they showed superior learning (although if that were true, you’d also expect a similar range of ability in the control group, which wasn’t found). Or maybe it‘s not laughter per se that aids toddlers’ learning, but any kind of positive emotion. ‘Further work is clearly now required to elucidate the question of the mechanisms underlying this effect of laughter on infants’ learning,’ the researchers said. CJ

minutes to prepare and then make a Last week Kathleen finally put aside her speech to camera on the topic of transition fears about public speaking to give a to college life, a fairly easy one to tackle. presentation… and it went pretty well! But Each participant then watched themselves when you caught her at lunch today and on video, with the experimenter offering asked if she wanted future opportunities to reassuring feedback and implying that they present, you found she was as pessimistic did surprisingly well. about her ability as ever.

The same participants then engaged in This story reflects an unfortunate directed abstraction (or the control ‘how’ truth: people with low self-belief are liable query) before being thrown once more into to hold on to negative assumptions about the breach with a second speechmaking themselves despite concrete evidence of experience, this time on a tough topic, with the contrary; that is, they fail to ‘generalise no coddling feedback afterward – this was from success’. Thankfully, in a new paper, the real deal. Did the directed abstraction psychologist Peter Zunick and his colleagues describe a technique, called directed abstraction, that can help the selfcritical change their mindsets.

Direct abstraction means stopping to consider how a specific success may have more general implications – this is the abstraction part – and also ensuring this thinking is directed towards how personal qualities were key to the success. Let’s see what this means in practice.

In a first study, 86 students guessed the number of dots flashed up on screen, and were given fake but convincing positive feedback on their performance. Half the students were then asked to explain how they completed the task, which kept their thoughts on a very concrete, specific level. participants gain confidence from their early The other half were prompted to engage in success that could survive a rockier second directed abstraction by completing the round? They did, reporting more confidence sentence: “I was able to score very high for future public speaking than their peers. on the test because I am: ... ” This query is The technique seems to be appropriate not about how, but why – a more abstract for a range of settings, although obviously consideration – and also focuses on the it’s only useful to use it following an event individual’s own qualities. that can be reasonably seen as a success, Engaging in directed abstraction otherwise it could backfire. And it’s simple appeared to give a particular boost to those to use to help a friend or yourself, just by participants who’d earlier reported believing taking the time after a success to think they have low competence day to day: through what it owes to your personal afterwards, they not only had more qualities. Then confidence can follow. AF confidence in their estimation ability (than similarly self-critical control participants), The material in this section is taken from the Society’s they also believed Research Digest blog at www.bps.org.uk/digest, and is they would do better written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett and at similar tasks (like contributor Dr Alex Fradera. guessing jelly beans in a jar) that they Visit the blog for full coverage including references and faced in the future. links, additional current reports, an archive, comment, In another our brand new podcast, news of an exciting live event experiment, Zunick’s (see above), and more. research team sifted through hundreds of Subscribe to the fortnightly e-mail, friend, follow and students to find 59 more via www.bps.org.uk/digest with low faith in their public speaking skills. Each of them was given a few

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Is dyslexia associated with exceptional visual-spatial abilities?

In Current Psychology Children and adults with dyslexia have reading skills that are weak relative to their overall intelligence. That’s why it is often referred to as ‘specific learning disability’.

But what if such a profile also tended to be associated with exceptional strengths in other areas, such as visual skills? That’s certainly what some experts have proposed, for example based on the observation that people with dyslexia are overrepresented in fields that involve visual-spatial abilities, such as art and architecture.

Now a team led by Mirela Duranovic has tested 40 children aged 9–11 and diagnosed with dyslexia, on a range of tests of imagery and visual memory. The children with dyslexia performed similarly to 40 agematched, non-dyslexic controls on most

tests, including the mental rotation of shapes; copying a complex, abstract figure (the so-called Rey-Osterrieth Figure); and following the beginning of a line to the end, through a tangle of other lines.

LINK FEAST How I Overcame the Fear of Public Speaking Organisational psychologist Adam Grant shares his experience for the Quiet Revolution website. www.quietrev.com/overcome-your-fear-of-public-speaking The Data or the Hunch?

‘More and more decisions, from the music business to the sports field, are being delegated to data,’ writes Ian Leslie in a feature for Intelligent Life. ‘But where does that leave our intuition?’ http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/features/data-or-hunch Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer ‘Airplanes may not fly like birds, but they are subject to the same forces of lift and drag,’ writes Gary Marcus in the New York Times. ‘Likewise, there is no reason to think that brains are exempt from the laws of computation.’ www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/face-it-your-brain-is-acomputer.html I Once Tried to Cheat Sleep, and For a Year I Succeeded For one year, Akshat Rathi managed to keep up the Everyman Sleep Schedule: 3.5 hours at night and 3 x 20-min naps in the day. http://qz.com/430415/i-once-tried-to-cheat-sleep-and-for-a-year-i-succeeded Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us A psychologist and ethicist argue that it's better to test out what works in our best interests, rather than powerful people and corporations relying on their gut instincts. www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/please-corporations-experimenton-us.html The Hard Science of Oxytocin It's been dubbed the ‘cuddle hormone’ because of its role in love and bonding, but new findings show this is a gross oversimplification. Helen Shen reports for Nature. www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-the-hard-science-of-oxytocin-1.17813

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On memory for simple geometric shapes there was a tendency for the dyslexic children to underperform. And on one test, the children with dyslexia clearly performed worse than the controls: this was drawing the Rey-Osterrieth Figure from memory.

However, on yet another test, the dyslexic children excelled, outperforming the controls. This was the Paper Folding Test, which requires looking at a depiction of how a piece of paper is folded and where a hole is punched through it, and then judging which one of several illustrations correctly depicts how the paper will look once unfolded again.

The superior performance of the dyslexic children on the Paper Folding Test is intriguing – this test is arguably more challenging and complex than simple mental rotation tasks, and involves a larger sequence of mental steps to complete.

This new study adds to a complicated, contradictory literature on visual spatial skills in dyslexia, filled with studies that have reported no differences between dyslexic people and controls, deficits in dyslexic groups, and advantages in dyslexia.

More research is now needed to explore why the currently reported dyslexia advantage was observed: what is it about the mental processes involved in the Paper Folding Task that meant the dyslexic children performed better than controls?

Also, will the finding replicate, and will it generalise to other tasks that require the same mental processes?

‘Connecting dyslexia to talent leads us in a more optimistic direction than only associating dyslexia with a deficit,’ the researchers concluded. ‘The revelation of talent in individuals with dyslexia opens a door to more effective educational strategies and for choosing professions in which individuals with dyslexia can be successful.’ CJ

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The monster in the mirror In Journal of Health Psychology One of the participants in an upsetting series of new interviews says she once stared into the mirror for 11 hours straight.

She was looking, searching, trying to find a perspective where she felt good enough about herself to be able to go outside.

The woman in question, Louise, has body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), which is defined by psychiatrists as a disabling and distressing preoccupation with a perceived physical flaw or flaws. For their study, Joanna Silver and Jacqui Farrants at City University in London interviewed 11 such people (four men) about their relationships with mirrors – an important, but previously unexplored aspect of their condition. The participants’ reasons for mirror gazing were complex and contradictory. Jane describes mirrors as ‘f*cking bastards’ and mirror gazing as a ‘form of self-harm’. Others spoke of the practice as masochistic and addictive and imprisoning. ‘It’s just like I need to look,’ said Hannah. ‘I do feel kind of bereft if there are no mirrors.’

The participants also described what they perceived as the ugliness of the person staring back at them. ‘I look like a monster,’ said Hannah. Jenny said she is ‘truly hideous’ and ‘repulsive’. The participants questioned how other people could bear to look at them. Jane said, ‘How don’t people throw up every time they seem me?’

To catalyse the interview process, the researchers asked their participants to bring in photographs that represented their experience of BDD and mirror gazing. Chris brought a photograph of the Sponge Bob cartoon character, which he said shows the ‘hideous’ image with ‘really protruding teeth’ that he sees in the mirror. Jenny brought a photo of a Raggy Dolls reject bin and Louise shared her ‘getting ready station’ featuring stop watch and scissors for scratching the desk-top in frustration.

The researchers said their participants’ experiences could be understood in terms first described by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty: ‘…it seems that participants do not experience their body as a “lived body” but instead as an “objectified body”.’

While they cautioned that the findings of this study may not generalise to all people with BDD, the researchers said their results highlight an important aspect of the condition that is not found in standard textbook accounts. ‘Detailed accounts given by participants suggest that mirror gazing in BDD is a complex and embodied phenomenon and it is vital that health psychologists ask clients open questions about their individual experiences at the mirror,’ they concluded. CJ

DIGEST DIGESTED Full reports are available at www.bps.org.uk/digest We’re three times more likely to cheat on our last opportunity to do so, on average, according to a coin-flipping study. Researchers say the motivation is the anticipated regret of missing the last opportunity, not because of weakened willpower. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Expert philosophers are just as irrational in their thinking as the rest of us. Hundreds of them were found to be as prone as non-philosophers to so-called framing effects and order effects when faced with moral dilemmas. This was true even when they were prompted to take their time and be extra reflective. Cognition Thinking about the future can make it harder for us to recall autobiographical memories on a similar topic. This interference effect adds to other evidence that has suggested the same brain mechanisms are involved in remembering the past and imagining the future. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A survey of Harry Potter fans has found they tend to have personalities that match the characters who belong to their favourite House: Gryffindor fans were the most extraverted, Hufflepuffs more agreeable, Ravenclaws sought more ‘need for cognition’, and Slytherins reported more ‘"Dark Triad’ personality traits. Personality and Individual Differences A series of meta-analyses of over a hundred studies has found little support for the popular idea that willpower is a ‘limited resource’ that runs out with repeated use. Unlike a previous influential meta-analysis that supported that theory, the new analyses included unpublished data. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General New findings suggest that the memorability of a face is affected by its emotional expression and the congruency of that emotion with the wider context. So, for example, if you smile at a party, people are later more likely to remember your face and where they saw it. Acta Psychologica Researchers need to beware that people who volunteer for free brain scans may differ in systematic ways from those who decline. A new survey of older adults found that brain scan volunteers were more likely to be younger, male, better educated, married, employed, and mentally and physically healthier. Brain Imaging and Behaviour

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your family, right? Unfortunately, research suggests otherwise.

A longitudinal study following 96 Dutch workers in the two weeks before their vacation found that health and wellbeing decrease in the last week before departure. This decline was related to rising levels of workload and was even With the holiday season in full swing, work and organisational psychologist more pronounced in women, who Jessica de Bloom takes a tour of the world of vacation research additionally experienced a rise in home load (Nawijn et al., 2013). And more danger lurks in the transition phase ‘How long should a man’s vacation acations are considered a source of between busy working weeks and a be?’ was the title of an article in the happiness and an essential ingredient holiday period.

New York Times in 1910, in which for quality of life (Filep, 2012; Physical complaints within the first businessmen, academics and Richards, 1999). As the longest chunk of days off seem to be a widespread problem politicians discussed whether leisure time that relieves people from job with different names, such as transitory vacations for the working classes stress and leaves them free to do as they stress, environment shock or leisure were necessary and why. Today, please, holidays are viewed as a means to sickness (see also tinyurl.com/pvngj7t).

European workers enjoy a preserve and to restore full working Several studies suggest that the start of a minimum of 20 days paid annual capacity. holiday period is for many people spoiled leave (plus statutory days) and the But holidays also come at a price. In by high blood pressure, poor sleep quality, tourism industry employs more the UK, a legal minimum of 5.6 weeks of bad mood and lack of initiative, as well as than 260 million people worldwide. annual vacation adds up to roughly 840 more serious bodily symptoms such as Does that mean we have the million unproductive fever, migraine or an answers to the intriguing questions days. In addition, upset stomach (Blasche raised in a newspaper more than each British family et al., 2012; Pearce, 100 years ago? spends about two 1981; Vingerhoets & Not quite. months’ salary on Van Huijgenvoort, Our journey will pass major their holidays. Are 2002). theories and milestones of vacations worth this The etiology of these research on recovery from work, investment of time phenomena is not yet and get an overview of findings on and money? What well understood, but vacation effects. As a souvenir of benefits can many symptoms show your trip, you’ll be given some employees expect a striking resemblance to practical tips to make the most of during their time off immune reconstitution your next holiday. and after returning inflammatory syndrome, to their work? Is which originates in there anything sudden deprivation of Are vacations worth the time people can do to corticosteroids, major stress and money? increase or prolong hormones (Nehls, 2012; Van De Bloom, J. (2012). How do vacations the benefits of their Heck, & Vingerhoets, 2007). affect workers’health and well-being? vacation?

And do holidays render Imagine the reaction of your car engine if Vacation (after-) effects and the role of employers a recovered, productive you changed from fifth gear directly to vacation activities and experiences. and better-performing work force? first gear. In the same manner, a stressed (PhD), Radboud University Nijmegen, human body working on full-speed in the ‘s Hertogenbosch: BoxPress.

Zijlstra, F.R.H. & Sonnentag, S. (2006). weeks preceding a holiday has trouble Work and rest: A topic for work and Pre-vacation perils with downshifting in a flash. organizational psychology [Special The next holiday is booked. In the Let’s say you are able to smoothen the Issue]. European Journal of Work and coming weeks, you can lean back and transition period and master the start of Organizational Psychology, 15(2). dream about relaxing under a palm tree, the holiday without any complaints. drinking cocktails and quality time with Which benefits are still to come? Is a

Making holidays work

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Binnewies, C., Sonnentag, S. & Mojza, E.J. (2009). Daily performance at work: Feeling recovered in the morning as a predictor of day-level job performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30, 67–93.

Binnewies, C., Sonnentag, S. & Mojza, E.J. (2010). Recovery during the weekend and fluctuations in weekly job performance. Journal of Occupational and Organizational

Psychology, 83, 419–441.

Blasche, G.W., Arlinghaus, A. & Dorner, T.E. (2014). Leisure opportunities and fatigue in employees. Leisure Sciences, 36, 235–250.

Blasche, G.W., Weissensteiner, K. & Marktl, W. (2012). Travel-related change of residence leads to a transitory stress reaction in humans.

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(1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores.

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De Bloom, J., Geurts, S.A.E., & Kompier, M.A.J. (2012). Effects of short vacations, vacation activities and experiences on employee health and well-being. Stress and Health, 28(4), 305–318.

De Bloom, J., Geurts, S.A.E. & Kompier, M.A.J. (2013). Vacation (after-) effects on employee health and well-being, and the role of vacation activities, experiences and sleep. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14, 613–633.

De Bloom, J., Geurts, S.A.E., Taris, T.W. et al. (2010). Effects of vacation from work on health and well-being. Work & Stress, 24, 196–216.

De Bloom, J., Kompier, M., Geurts, S. et

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vacation worth the extra effort and preparation stress at work and at home?

When workaholics take a break

Holiday resort as last resort?

al. (2009). Do we recover from vacation? Journal of Occupational Health, 51, 13–25.

De Bloom, J., Radstaak, M. & Geurts, S. (2014). Vacation effects on behavior, cognition and emotions of compulsive and non-compulsive workers. Stress and Health, 30, 232–243.

De Bloom, J., Ritter, S., Kühnel, J. et al.

(2014). Vacation from work: A ‘ticket

What happens when perfectionists and workaholics – employees who are cognitively preoccupied with their work – go on a holiday?

Two studies, two possible scenarios.

Study 1: In a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2012, Paul Flaxman and his team followed a group of 77 academics before, during and after Easter holiday.

They compared selfreported changes in wellbeing between people scoring high or low on perfectionism.

Study 2: In a study on three-week summer holidays, published in Stress and Health in 2014, De Bloom, Radstaak et al. tracked wellbeing in 54 Dutch employees categorised as high or low on workaholism.

Scenario 1: The dutiful workers miss their work, feel bad or even guilty whenever they leave their office. Consequently, free time comprises a deprivation of their ‘drug’ and it may be extremely difficult for them not to work

NORDIC PHOTOS/AWL IMAGES LTD

On the positive side, two long-term epidemiological studies have suggested that you may actually lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and even premature coronary death (Eaker et al., 1992; Gump & Matthews, 2000).

One study was part of the famous, still ongoing ‘Framingham Heart Study’, a study of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Boston University that has been medically examining healthy adults annually since 1948 in order to investigate the relation between cardiac health, lifestyle, environmental factors and inheritance. They identified infrequent holidays as an important risk factor for heart diseases.

However, these two studies and a third study by a team of Japanese researchers (Tarumi et al., 1998) also found that people who go on vacation regularly tend to have a healthier lifestyle in general, for instance regarding smoking, exercising, sleep and nutrition.

This shows that in order to fully understand the potential benefits of vacations, longitudinal, individual-level studies that investigate people’s health and wellbeing before, during and after vacation are needed.

In 2009 we meta-analysed the available evidence about vacation effects on employee health and wellbeing (De Bloom, 2009). Until then, only seven studies had systematically examined these effects. They revealed small decreases in exhaustion and health complaints as well as small increases in life satisfaction after vacation that had vanished within two to four weeks after resuming work.

In order to gain more detailed information on the development of wellbeing, our research team from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands set up a series of longitudinal studies in about 250 Dutch employees (De Bloom et al., 2010, 2012, 2013). We

or at least think about their work, resembling a state of withdrawal. Accordingly, wellbeing will go down.

Scenario 2: For persons who are preoccupied with their work, a vacation may constitute one of the very rare chances to psychologically disengage from work, relieving the workers from their usually high levels of job stress. The physical distance from the office may translate into psychological distance from work and weaken the workers’ tendency to worry about their job. Accordingly, wellbeing will go up.

Results and conclusion: Both studies arrive at strikingly comparable

found that self-reported employee health and wellbeing, measured with one-item indicators via telephone interviews, increased during vacation. The magnitude

to creativity’? Tourism Management, 44, 164–171.

Derks, D. & Bakker, A.B. (2012).

Smartphone use, work–home interference, and burnout: A diary study on the role of recovery. Applied Psychology, 63, 411–440.

Derks, D., ten Brummelhuis, L.L., Zecic, D. & Bakker, A.B. (2012). Switching on and off…: Does smartphone use obstruct the possibility to engage in

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conclusions. In line with Scenario 2, perfectionists and workaholics enjoy highly comparable levels of wellbeing to the nonpreoccupied workers during the vacation period, while their wellbeing was lower before the start of the holiday. However, right after returning to work, the preoccupied workers experience a sudden drop in wellbeing. Vacationing seems to offset characteristic differences in wellbeing between workers with and without the tendency to worry about their work. Perfectionist and workaholic workers seem to gain more in terms of wellbeing by going on a trip, but they also lose more upon returning.

of this improvement was medium-sized in terms of effect sizes. Within the first week of resuming work, workers’ wellbeing lapsed to pre-vacation levels, regardless of

recovery activities? European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23, 1–11.

Eaker, E.D., Pinsky, J. & Castelli, W.P. (1992). Myocardial infarction and coronary death among women: Psychosocial predictors from a 20year follow-up of women in the Framingham Study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 135, 854–864.

Englesbe, M.J., Pelletier, S.J, Magee, J.C.

et al. (2007). Seasonal variation in surgical outcomes as measured by the American College of Surgeons’ national surgical quality improvement program. Annals of Surgery, 246, 456–465.

Filep, S. (2012). Positive psychology and tourism. In M. Uysal, R. Perdue & J. Sirgy (Eds.) Handbook of tourism and quality-of-life: The missing links (pp.31–50). Dordrecht: Springer.

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the type or length of their holiday. decrease in school performance is related Subjective vacation experiences, such as to a lack of practice and differential relaxation, pleasure in and control over availability of learning materials, meaning one’s daily activities, turned out to affect that well-off parents practise maths and wellbeing changes more than the type of reading with their kids during holidays activity people engaged in during their while poorer parents don’t. trip.

So much for schoolchildren. But These individual-level findings have how about working adults, who have recently been supported by Terry Hartig considerably shorter holidays than school and his team’s study of national level kids and different tasks awaiting them on drug consumption and vacationing. return? Fascinatingly, a study (discussed By combining data from the Swedish on National Public Radio: pharmacy corporation, tinyurl.com/l2qmt3v) has described the national health care rather similar declines in system and performance for surgeons. Jason “…holidays can governmental data on Hockenberry and Lorens Helmchen actually work vacation taking in the (2014) compared mortality rates for for employers” period between 1993 patients whose surgeon has and 2005, they laid bare operated the previous day and a significant relationship patients whose surgeon had not. They between the number of people on found a small increase in mortality rates vacation and a decline in antidepressant in the latter group. Even though the effect consumption (Hartig et al., 2013). was very small and there are possible Summing up, vacations from work alternative explanations such as seem to have positive, though short-lived scheduling the sickest patients first after effects on wellbeing. This is particularly the surgeons’ return, this study suggests so for vacationers who are able to relax, that time off work may result in skill have fun and enjoy high levels of depreciation in highly specialised autonomy during their trip. But happy professions. Please note that this study workers are not necessarily productive, was conducted in the United States, high-performing workers. So, what can where employees are entitled to a meagre bosses expect when granting their staff 10 days of annual leave. How would the time off? results look in Europe, where each worker enjoys a more lavish allowance?

Actually, several international studies A ticket to high job have reported spikes of hospital fatalities performance? due to medical errors and complications Surprisingly, systematic research on the in summer time, a phenomenon referred relation between vacationing and job to as the ‘July effect’ or, more dramatically, performance is scarce. Let’s first look at the ‘killing season’. It is speculated that the evidence generated by a team of this effect is mainly related to the influx researchers from the University of of newly qualified doctors during this Missouri-Columbia and Tennessee State time of the year and seasonal variations University, who reviewed 39 studies about in complaints (due, for example, to heat school performance after summer waves). But according to Michael holidays (Cooper et al., 1996). Compared Englesbe and his research team in their with spring achievement test scores, 2007 paper, the absence of experienced pupils performed worse after summer senior staff due to vacation schedules may holidays, especially in maths and spelling. exacerbate the problem.

This decline was even greater in pupils Does this mean employers should from lower socio-economic backgrounds. rather try to prevent their staff from The researchers hypothesise that the taking holidays? Better not!

Flaxman, P.E., Ménard, J., Bond, F.W. & Kinman, G. (2012). Academics’ experiences of a respite from work.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, 854–865.

Fredrickson, B.L. (2000). Extracting meaning from past affective experiences. Cognition and Emotion, 14, 577–606.

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psychology. American Psychologist, 56, 218–226.

Fritz, C. & Sonnentag, S. (2006).

Recovery, well-being, and performance-related outcomes: The role of workload and vacation experiences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 936–945.

Gump, B.B. & Matthews, K.A. (2000). Are vacations good for your health? The 9-year mortality experience after the

In line with the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll & Shirom, 2001), recovery researchers have speculated that long periods of free time would enable workers to restore lost resources, which they could use after starting to work again. Correspondingly, a series of diary studies in Swiss and German samples have indeed proved that workers who feel mentally and physically refreshed in the morning experience their work as effortless, are willing to help colleagues and display other forms of organisational citizenship behaviours as well as high self-rated task performance (Binnewies et al., 2009, 2010).

What might the size of such an effect be? In a CNBC interview, audit firm executive Maryella Gockel claimed that ‘for each 10 vacation hours a person took, we found on average that performance reviews were 8 per cent higher’. Findings from the few existing scientific studies on this topic seem to match this claim. Using samples of German and US workers and repeated measurements before and after the respite, Fritz and Sonnentag (2006) and Lounsbury and Hoopes (1986) found that employees rated their job performance higher after taking a holiday.

In addition, a study by Mina Westman and Dahlia Etzion (2001), involving a sample of 87 Israeli blue-collars workers before and after a factory shutdown, found that rates for short absenteeism for unclear reasons (i.e. without medical attest), decreased from 63 per cent before to 44 per cent after the company holiday.

It appears that holidays can actually work for employers.

Recover to discover According to a press release of the US Travel Association, two out of three American executives believe that vacationing improves creativity at work.

The ability to ‘think outside the box’, to produce novel, original and useful problem solutions, is vital to drive civilisations forward and adapt to change (Hennessy & Amabile, 2010).

multiple risk factor intervention trial.

Psychosomatic Medicine, 62, 608–612.

Hartig, T., Catalano, R., Ong, M. & Syme, S.L. (2013). Vacation, collective restoration, and mental health in a population. Society and Mental Health, 3, 221–236.

Hennessy, B.A. & Amabile, T.M. (2010).

Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 569–598.

Hobfoll, S.E. & Shirom, A. (2001).

Conservation of Resources Theory: Applications to stress and management in the workplace. In R.T. Golembiewski (Ed.), Handbook of organizational behavior (Vol. 2nd ed, rev. ed and exp. ed., pp. 57–80). New York: Marcel Dekker.

Hockenberry, J.M. & Helmchen, L.A. (2014). The nature of surgeon human capital depreciation. Working paper available at: tinyurl.com/kxl6l4e.

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In recent years, several studies have demonstrated that people who have lived abroad show higher Exercise at the end of your last work day levels of creativity (for an Job stress activates your body for action by releasing overview, see Leung et al., stress hormones into your blood stream. Smoothe 2008). For instance, the transition to lazy life by heading to the gym after William Maddux and your last day at the office. This will help you to Adam Galinsky (2009) mentally disengage from your work, get rid of the conducted several stress hormones and prevent physical complaints experiments in their lab during your first days off work (Vingerhoets & Van during which students Huijgenvoort, 2002). If you’re a couch potato, try had to work on creativity gradually reducing work hours during your last tasks such as the Dunker work week and take a firm walk home on your candle problem, last work day. negotiation and drawing tasks or the Remote Set an out of office reply for your work e-mail…

Associates Test. They …and make sure that it’s on until a day after your found that students who return. This way, you can sneak back into your office, had lived abroad and prioritise your work and possibly even surprise adapted to a foreign colleagues with an earlier-than-expected reply. culture solved the tasks more creatively than Detach and take control students who lacked this Leave your work phone at home, refrain from international experience. checking your e-mails and make clear arrangements But can considerably concerning your availability during your absence. shorter periods abroad Also remember: getting in touch with the office at also improve creativity? a time that suits you is much better than an To answer this unexpected call during family dinner. You determine question and to also if and when you are available for work! address the problem of reversed causality in Start slowly earlier studies (that is: it’s Resume work on Wednesdays instead of Mondays the creative students who or gradually build up working times during your go abroad rather than a first week back at the office. In any case, prevent stay abroad making them overtime after work resumption. A stress-free return more creative), we set up to work and relaxing activities during the evening a longitudinal field study after work help to preserve positive vacation effects (De Bloom, Ritter et al., and savour your ‘holiday afterglow’ (Kühnel & 2014). In this study, we Sonnentag, 2002; Strauss-Blasche et al., 2004). examined creativity with the help of an ideaCreate and cherish happy holiday memories generation task in 46 The more senses an experience engages, the more Dutch workers before and intensive and memorable it will be (Pine & Gilmore, after a three-week summer 1998). So try to mindfully attend to holiday holiday. Each generated idea was blindly rated by three trained raters independently. Not surprisingly, we found that the ideas after Hemingway. However, it also turned out the holiday were as original as before. that the range of ideas produced by each A trip to Cuba does not make you a person was more diverse after vacation,

Holiday boosters

Kühnel, J. & Sonnentag, S. (2011). How long do you benefit from vacation?

Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32, 125–143.

Leung, A.K-Y., Maddux, W.W., Galinsky, A.D. & Chiu, C-Y. (2008).

Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how.

American Psychologist, 63, 169–181.

Lounsbury, J.W. & Hoopes, L.L. (1986). A vacation from work: Changes in work

and nonwork outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 392–401.

Maddux, W.W. & Galinsky, A.D. (2009).

Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1047–1061.

Martindale, C. (1999). The biological basis of creativity. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) Handbook of creativity (pp.137–152).

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experiences: listen, watch, touch, smell, taste.

According to the peak–end rule (Fredrickson, 2000), we remember particularly well the worst, the best and the last moments of an experience.For sweet memories, end your holiday on a high note instead of spending your last day off cleaning the apartment and packing. Back at home, use a holiday photo as a screensaver on your work computer, meet your new holiday pals again and cook your favourite vacation dish for them.

Spread your annual leave Avoid ‘binge vacationing’ – taking only one long holiday per year. Vacation benefits wash out fast, irrespective of the holiday duration. Moreover, it may be risky to put all eggs in one basket and hope for the perfect holiday. By planning regular long weekends and short vacations, you can achieve a healthy work–life balance in order to feel vital all year round.

Make every day a holiday Make optimal use of shorter respites such as lunch breaks, evening hours and weekends. Integrate your personal ‘holiday happiness’ ingredients into everyday life and celebrate mini-holidays at home.

Have a swim in the morning, a nap or a picnic in the park during your lunch break. Play board games instead of watching TV for one evening per week, or join a guided tour through your home town. You’ll be surprised how much there is still to discover.

indicating higher levels of mental flexibility. This means, after returning home from a vacation, workers are

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nawijn, J., De Bloom, J. & Geurts, S. (2013). Pre-vacation time: Blessing or burden? Leisure Sciences, 35, 33–44.

Nehls, V. (2012). Der Fluch der Erholung: Immunrekonstitutionssyndrome [The curse of recovery: Immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome]. tinyurl.com/ls43895

Pearce, P.L. (1981). ‘Environment shock’: A study of tourists’ reactions to two tropical islands. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 11, 268–280.

Pine, B.J. & Gilmore, J.H. (1998).

Welcome to the experience economy.

Harvard Business Review, 76, 97–105.

Pressman, S.D., Matthews, K.A., Cohen, S. et al. (2009). Association of enjoyable leisure activities with psychological and physical well-

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slightly more likely to consider different aspects of a problem and avoid reliance on conventional ideas and routine solutions. Travel may actually broaden the mind!

It is not yet clear what the underlying mechanisms for this type of change are. A prime suspect is removal from work strain. Job stressors such as time pressure and cognitive or emotional demands deplete people’s psychophysiological resources by demanding constant attention. Stressed people are more likely to display routine, well-rehearsed behaviour patterns, because their attention and effort is focused on salient job stressors. In this situation, creative ideas are less likely to come to awareness (Fredrickson, 2001; Martindale, 1999).

This suggests that moments free of job stress are important for human functioning. But how often can we experience these moments nowadays?

Boundaries between work and private life vanish and many people can work everywhere and at any time. Laptops, tablets and smartphones ensure that we can stay connected to our work around the clock. For many people, vacationing means spending a lot of money to stare at their phone in exotic locations.

Always on, never done ‘I am on vacation. Your message is being deleted. Please resend your email after I’m back in the office.’ You may receive this reply if you e-mail Daimler employees during holiday season. They follow the trend set by another German vehiclemaker, which shuts down the e-mail servers after office hours. Are such drastic measures useful in counteracting the prevailing 24/7 work mentality? Is mental disengagement after work really at stake?

Two diary studies across several work days published by a team of researchers from the Erasmus University Rotterdam

being. Psychosomatic Medicine, 71, 725–732.

Richards, G. (1999). Vacations and the quality of life: Patterns and structures. Journal of Business Research, 44, 189–198.

Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). Selfdetermination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.

American Psychologist, 55, 68–78.

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provide some insights (Derks & Bakker, 2012; Derks et al., 2012). The authors found that intensive smartphone use during evening hours can hamper work–life balance by reducing the possibility of engaging in beneficial leisure activities that provide a sense of mental disengagement from work and help to restore working capacities.

Numerous other diary studies, many led by German professor Sabine Sonnentag, have also shown that mental disengagement from work during leisure time acts as a buffer between job demands and psychological ill-being (e.g.

Sonnentag, 2012; Sonnentag & Fritz, 2014).

While we have generally replicated the findings regarding the importance of mental detachment in our vacation studies, we did not find strong and consistent relations between engagement in work-related activities during vacation – pretty much the opposite of mental detachment – and changes in health and wellbeing. How come? Whilst around a third of vacationers worked during their holiday at some point, it appeared that working time during holidays remained limited to less than 30 minutes per day for most working vacationers. Moreover, the majority of employees had complete control over whether to engage in work-related activities as well as the type of tasks they pursued, and the starting and ending time

Sonnentag, S. (2012). Psychological detachment from work during leisure time. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 114–118.

Sonnentag, S. & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36, S76–S103.

Strauss-Blasche, G., Muhry, F., Lehofer, M. et al. (2004). Time course of wellbeing after a three-week resortbased respite from occupational and

of these tasks. Accordingly, it seems crucial whether employees have the feeling that they can freely decide which activity to pursue during free time and how much pleasure they experience while performing this activity.

This is also in line with Ryan and Deci’s (2000) selfdetermination theory and other studies that found that control over one’s free-time activities is key to recovery from work (Blasche et al., 2014; De Bloom et al., 2013; Pressman et al., 2009).

No silver bullet In conclusion, a vacation is definitely not a silver bullet that can compensate for a constant imbalance between work and private life. It may even cause some troubles, as most nations like to enjoy their holidays at the same time of the year, resulting in staffing problems for companies.

Still, there is a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that a holiday boosts health and wellbeing and positively affects work performance, at least temporarily. The challenge is to make holidays work, that is, making optimal use of leisure time. Instead of pondering where to go, how long and what to do there, focus on the things that really matter: a smooth start of the vacation period, mental disengagement from everyday worries, pleasure and autonomy during the holiday, a memorable end of the vacation period and a gradual return to work. Have a happy holiday!

domestic demands. Journal of Leisure Research, 36, 293–309.

Tarumi, K., Hagihara, A. & Morimoto, K. (1998). An investigation into the effects of vacations on the health status in male white-collar workers.

Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 3, 23–30.

Van Heck, G.L. & Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M. (2007). Leisure sickness: A biopsychological perspective.

Jessica de Bloom is in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere, Finland Jessica.de.Bloom@uta.fi

Psychological Topics, 2, 187–200.

Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M. & Van Huijgenvoort, M. (2002). Leisure sickness: A pilot study on its prevalence, phenomenology, and background. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 71, 311–317.

Westman, M. & Etzion, D. (2001). The impact of vacation and job stress on burnout and absenteeism. Psychology and Health, 16, 95–106.

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Breaking out of the silo mentality Rachel Shaw and Nollaig Frost argue for pluralism and mixed methods The return to methods focusing on language and experience following the dominance of experimental methods has in the last few decades led to debate, dialogue, and disagreement regarding the status of qualitative and quantitative methods. However, a recent focus on impact has brought an air of pragmatism to the research arena.

In what ways, then, is psychology moving from entrenched mono methods approaches that have epitomised its development until recently, to describing and discussing ways in which mixed and pluralistic research can advance and contribute to further, deeper psychological understanding?

questions resources

Weblink/book/journal article Frost, N.A & Shaw, R.L. (2015). Evolving mixed and multimethod approaches in psychology. In S. Hesse-Biber & R.B. Johnson (Eds.) The Oxford handbook of multimethod and mixed methods research inquiry. Oxford University Press

references

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How can using different methods provide different insight to human behaviour and experience?

Banister, P., Burman, E., Parker, I. et al.

(1994). Qualitative methods in psychology. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Barnes, J., Caddick, N., Clarke, N.J. et al. (2014). Methodological pluralism in qualitative research. Qualitative Methods in Psych Bulletin, 17, 35–41.

Brewer, J. & Hunter, A. (1989).

Multimethod research. Sage Library of Social Research, Vol. 175. Thousand

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silo, in which systems are unable to operate with any other systems, is perhaps best epitomised within psychology by the notion of the ‘paradigm wars’ (Oakley, 1999). These arose out of the practices that saw quantitative research methods used separately from qualitative methods. At the height of the wars, users of each type of method went so far as to criticise the other approach, arguing that theirs was the most justifiable in the advancement of the understanding of human behaviour.

With the outbreak of a ‘fragile peace’ (Bryman, 2006) some reconciliation between the users of both types of methods took place, and the rise of mixed-methods research developed rapidly in psychology. From its origins as a research paradigm that combines one quantitative method with one qualitative method – in which the qualitative method was originally most often a secondary method used to triangulate or inform larger-scale more generalisable research – mixed-methods research has now evolved to include the mixing of more than one method with others in multi-method research (e.g. Brewer & Hunter, 1989) and the prioritising of qualitatively oriented research questions in qualitatively driven mixed-methods research (e.g. Hesse-Biber, 2010; Mason, 2006).

These methods have sought to place the research question back at the centre of psychological inquiry and avoid the research emphasis being placed on method (a process termed ‘methodolatry’

by Curt, 1994). With such developments

What is the value of combining qualitative methods in applied settings, e.g. to understand more about health and wellbeing?

Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bryman, A. (2006). Integrating quantitative and qualitative research.

Qualitative Research, 6(1), 97–113.

Bryman, A. (2007). Barriers to integrating quantitative and qualitative research.

Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(1), 8–22.

questions about epistemological and ontological (in)coherence have been raised by researchers asking whether and how different views of knowledge and its acquisition can be combined. One response to these questions is found in the development of pluralistic approaches to research. Developing simultaneously in the UK and the USA (e.g. Frost et al., 2010; Johnson & Stefurak, 2014), forms of pluralism that include methodological pluralism (Frost, 2009), analytical pluralism (Barnes et al., 2014), interpretative pluralism (Coyle, 2010) and dialectical pluralism (Johnson, 2012) all adopt the view that human experience is multidimensional and multiontological, that its exploration can be better served by combining methods to address the research question in many ways, and that embracing the differences that different paradigms bring can help us better understand the complexities of human experience and interaction.

In this article we briefly consider the history of methods in psychology to consider how they led to a silo mentality.

We will consider the ways in which mixed methods and pluralistic research address some of the concerns about epistemology and ontology and show how they offer a flexible and functional disciplined approach to research into human behaviour.

What is the meaning of science?

The growth and dominance of experimental methods to understand behaviour in psychology was embraced by behaviourists such as John B. Watson as a response to perceived limitations of introspection for scientific pursuit. The science of experience and culture was left behind as psychology focused on observable and measureable behaviour.

This provided satisfying ways to place paradigms of epistemological assumptions about how valid scientific knowledge can be gathered, drawn largely from the natural sciences, at the fore of psychological research, giving it

Coyle, A. (2010). Qualitative research and anomalous experience. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 7(1), 79–83.

Curt, B.C. (1994). Textuality and tectonics.

Buckingham: Open University Press.

Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens. In N.K Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.) Handbook of qualitative research (pp.70–82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Finlay, L. & Gough, B. (Eds.) (2003).

Reflexivity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Frost, N. (2009). ‘Do you know what I mean?’: The use of a pluralistic narrative analysis approach in the interpretation of an interview.

Qualitative Research, 9(1), 9–29.

Frost, N.A. (2011). Qualitative research in psychology. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Frost, N., Nolas, S.M., Brooks-Gordon, B. et al. (2010). Pluralism in qualitative

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recognisable status and acceptance. The dominance of the scientific approach became the consensus amongst psychology researchers as the best way to understand human behaviour. A new concept of science as applied to human behaviour was developed and adopted into the mainstream. However, in time, and largely spearheaded by the advent of feminist critique of the underlying assumptions of reality (ontology) and the validity of scientific knowledge (epistemology), the beginnings of a scientific revolution took hold. The dissenting and marginalised voices began to be raised and led to the ‘turn to language’ in psychology.

The turn to language The cognitive revolution had promised a move away from behaviour towards a more meaningful examination of the human subject. Jerome Bruner (1990) and others were disgruntled with the artificial intelligence and informationprocessing models that came to dominate cognitive psychology; they were limited by their experimental methods and failed to ask the bigger questions about the nature of human experience. This prompted a shift towards the examination of discourse, our means of communication, the bedrock of our social existence (well charted in qualitative methods textbooks, e.g. Banister et al., 1994; Smith et al., 1995; Willig, 2008) .

In the US this movement was led by a cry for ‘new paradigm’ research that was inspired by humanistics and phenomenology (e.g. Giorgi, 1970; Reason & Rowan, 1981). In the UK critical psychology and discourse analysis took to the fore (e.g. Gough et al., 2013; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). The result was a call for psychological research with people (rather than subjecting them to tests and observing them) that might give voice to participants and improve their lot in the world. This emancipatory goal created a political agenda for research and represented a backlash against the

research. Qualitative research, 10(4), 441–460.

Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science. New York: Harper & Row. Gough, B., McFadden, M. & McDonald, M. (2013). Critical social psychology: An introduction (2nd edn).

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hiles, D.R. (2014). Qualitative inquiry, mixed methods and the logic of scientific inquiry. Qualitative Methods

Pluralistic method, multiple selves Katsiaficas, D., Futch, V.A., Fine, M. & Sirin, S.R. (2011). Everyday hyphens: Exploring youth identities with methodological and analytic pluralism. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8(2), 120–139.

A pluralistic narrative analysis approach was employed in a two-year study to explore the enactment of multidimensional and dynamic identities amongst three adolescent women.

Participants were selected from a wider sample of urban youth, attending different schools in New York City. Their ethnic backgrounds differed: two were recent immigrants, one from Tibet and one from China, and the third was born to native parents of black, Indian and Italian background. Each was interviewed about their social, academic and emotional engagement, given sentence completion tasks, and asked to create identity (Years 1 and 2) and learning maps (Year 1). The maps invited participants to make visible their selves across place, relations and time (Sirin et al., 2010). The pluralistic methods aimed to gather evidence that better documented social and academic engagement.

The materials were analysed within person, across time, and through the data sources, using a set of theoretically driven codes drawn from the ‘hyphenated selves’ framework, in which identity is regarded as joined, and separated, by history, socio-political context, geography, biography, longing and loss (Fine, 1994). The analytic dialogue across data was further supported by interpretative dialogues between researchers in which they used their theoretical and methodological differences as an additional resource.

The study found tensions of loss, longing and disconnect in representations of self. The texts provided descriptions of the young women’s lives, the drawings showed them as double selves, split into a happy and sad face, a relational devoted self surrounded by friends, and a worldly transnational stick figure, and a single blossoming flower. Interpretations enabled understanding of struggles against silencing and advocacy, towards bridging family obligations and language challenges outside it, and of resistance and engagement within different contexts.

The pluralistic methods enabled identification of a core dynamic of desire/struggle in the adolescents’ development of identities, within emotionally charged constructions of the self.

‘us–them’ divide that had become evident in experimental psychology; psychology was accused of ethnocentrism, and critical psychologists demanded that the power imbalance between researcher and researched be broken down, or at least recognised for what it was (Stainton Rogers, 2003).

For psychology this meant taking a critical stance towards the study of human phenomena, building awareness

in Psychology Bulletin, 17, 49–62.

Hesse-Biber, S.N. (2010). Mixed methods research. New York: Guilford Press.

Johnson, R.B. & Stefurak, T. (2014).

Dialectical pluralism. Qualitative Methods in Psychology Bulletin, 17, 63–69.

Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd edn).

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mason, J. (2006). Mixing methods in a

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of the researcher’s role in constructing the data beyond ‘experimenter effects’, prioritising the participant’s voice, and accepting the coexistence of multiple meanings attributed to the same event, state, or text (e.g. Finlay & Gough, 2003; Shaw, 2010; Smith, 2008). In brief, this meant the rejection of positivism and objectivism. Some researchers engaged with postmodernism, some with social constructionism, and others with

qualitatively driven way. Qualitative Research, 6(1), 9–25.

McLeod, J. (2005). Counselling and psychotherapy as cultural work. In L.T. Hoshmand (Ed.) Culture, psychotherapy and counselling.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Oakley, A. (1999). Paradigm wars.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2(3), 247–254.

Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse

and social psychology. London: Sage.

Reason, P. & Rowan, J. (Eds.) (1981).

Human inquiry. New York: Wiley.

Rodriguez, D. & Frost, N.A. (2015, May). A methodological reflection on the application of qualitative pluralistic research to couple relationships.

Paper presented at the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology Second Annual Conference, City University of New York.

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humanistics, existentialism and phenomenology. For all it meant a focus on language.

Muddying the waters between principle and method

any research adopting an emancipatory or collaborative inquiry approach was expected to use qualitative methods in principle; ergo any study using qualitative methods was assumed to fall within this ‘new paradigm’ of research. While for a good many years this happened to be the case, the two were not fundamentally connected, nor were they mutually dependent. Nevertheless, the useful shorthand, ‘qualitative psychology’, has gained ground and is now in popular use.

As a political movement the turn to language initiated a sea-change in the way research is conducted and participants treated. Funding bodies now expect to see how participants or service users will be involved in the development, running, evaluation and dissemination of research A more disciplined inquiry projects. Furthermore, it is a requirement Talking of paradigms and epistemology is for any study involving human too ‘heavy’ for most people, but bear with participants to be considered by an ethics us while we attempt to demonstrate how committee (in the heyday of social (a) mixing up a type of data (qualitative) psychology experiments, ethical issues with a discipline (psychology) and were often bypassed or forgotten). An (b) muddying the waters between extension to this is the current focus on principles (emancipation, giving voice) impact, which means researchers need to and methods (turn to language) has led demonstrate the impact their work will to a fundamental have and how this will misunderstanding in manifest in the everyday lives psychology, and thus of people in the real world. “researchers need to of mixed methods.

These changes in the demonstrate the Kuhn’s (1970) principles of research have impact their work theory of scientific gone beyond method and are will have” revolution, notes that far-reaching. In some ways, it is the paradigm that they are the legacy of the turn dictates all subsequent to language. research decisions. Hiles’s (2014) model The turn to language has also become of disciplined inquiry also begins with synonymous with the growth of paradigm, followed by strategy, method, qualitative methods in psychology. The analysis and critical evaluation; and it link is understandable because with the emphasises the significance of the turn to language came a focus on quality research question. The formulation of over quantity (i.e. a focus on examining the research question is of paramount the meanings of textual data instead of importance in any research project; the statistical analysis of numerical data). decisions that follow should be guided Using participants’ own words followed by that question rather than an arguably the principle of working with them and arbitrary preference for quantitative or giving them voice. However, what it has qualitative data. Indeed, as Hiles (2014) also done is to muddy the waters between argued, focusing on the distinction a shift in principles and the use of between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ (quantitative or qualitative) methods. research is a red herring; it is flawed logic.

The terms ‘qualitative methods’ and Putting such emphasis on the type of data ‘qualitative research’ came to signify more misses the point that it is the strategy that than a type of data or method; indeed, as is adopted – the logic of inquiry – that stated above, qualitative methods were impacts on research design. Also note sometimes referred to as ‘new paradigm’ that the paradigm will guide the strategy research. The implication of this is that

Ross, A. (2012). The new pluralism.

European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 14(1), 113–119.

Shaw, R.L. (2010). Embedding reflexivity within experiential qualitative psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 7(3), 233–243.

Sirin, S.R., Katsiaficas, D. & Volpe, V.V. (2010). Identity mapping. Intnl Society of the Study of Behavioral Development Bulletin, 2, 22–26.

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Smith, J.A. (Ed.) (2008). Qualitative psychology (2nd edn). London: Sage.

Smith, J.A., Harré, R. & van Langenhove, L. (1995). Rethinking methods in psychology. London: Sage.

Stainton Rogers, W. (2003). Social psychology. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Willig, C. (2008). Introducing qualitative research in psychology. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

taken; which will in turn denote which methods in the ‘toolkit’ are fit for purpose; and the data generated that will determine what method of analysis to use; and all of the above will lead to particular decisions with regard to critical evaluation. The discipline within this model of inquiry is manifest in this directional flow of decisions. Following this model, the label, ‘qualitative psychology’ becomes illogical because it prioritises the type of data gathered and its method of analysis.

Mixed methods in psychology The idea of mixed methods in psychology only became viable once qualitative methods of generating and analysing data had become more acceptable in psychology. Cynically, we could consider this as a ‘validation’ of qualitative methods by using them with quantitative methods. Combining methods within and across paradigms allowed research questions to be asked about how human beings talk and practise themselves into particular subject positions and what those positions might consist of. It soon became clear that the plurality of methods available within qualitative methodology could lead to a toolkit approach where the most appropriate methods are selected for the research question, such as is seen in the pragmatism approach. However, the significance of epistemological allegiance in psychology meant instead that researchers still opted for their preferred method, one that fitted with their worldview, and moved forward by always using that method. Consequently, some qualitative researchers in psychology became known for the method they use rather than their subject of interest.

Despite this, advocates for increasing qualitative outcome research (e.g.

McLeod, 2005) argue that the use of qualitative inquiry encourages questioning and deconstruction of takenfor-granted concepts such as ‘outcome’ and ‘change’. They suggest that instead of seeking evidence based on traditional natural scientific designs and concepts, qualitative research allows for creativity not possible in quantitative work alone (e.g. Mason, 2006) and so also allows for in-depth enhanced insight into human experience. This has led to an increased use of qualitative approaches alongside traditional quantitative approaches to bring multidimensional research strategies to research questions of lived experience and individual realities (e.g. Bryman, 2007). It has also led to the emergence of pluralistic approaches. These allow not

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only for the mixing across paradigms but also within them.

Pluralism In its simplest terms pluralism denotes diversity – of beliefs, practices, views or opinions. When applied to the conduct of research, pluralism suggests the mixing of paradigms, data, and/or analysis techniques to promote engagement with diversity, to enter into personal and methodological dialogue to promote and foster understanding of research inquiry and outcomes (Frost, 2011).

Combining analytical tools that emerge from different paradigms means that assumptions about the nature of reality and the knowledge being sought influence the type of research questions asked and the way data is interrogated.

Thus pluralism advocates mixing paradigms within and across approaches in order to reduce the likelihood of reductionism of the data or the meanings within it, to bring different vantage points to the research. The range of methods available to researchers allows for visual, verbal, technological and observational datasets to be combined with each other and/or with measured statistical data.

Data are transformed within a theoretical and intersubjective framework that results in the construction of personal and collective perspectives on lived experience and social worlds. ‘Dialectical pluralism’ (Johnson & Stefurak, 2014) actively seeks difference across positivist and interpretivist paradigms by explicitly incorporating stakeholders’ and researchers’ epistemological and social/political values to guide the research. It aims to combine important ideas from competing paradigms and multiple values into a new socially agreed upon whole (Johnson & Stefurak, 2014).

By considering how each method works alone and with other methods, pluralistic approaches set up dialogue across methods rather than putting barriers between them.

Concluding remarks Moving beyond the silo mentality of qualitative vs. quantitative methods prompts psychologists to work across difference and to work with diversity, in the recognition that human experience is not confined to one way of seeing, understanding and making sense of the world (see boxed research examples).

Mixed-methods research goes some way towards this by offering ways to design research that are both nomothetic and idiographic. Pluralistic research offers the

Balancing out nicely Muller, I., Kirby, S. & Yardley, L. (2015). The therapeutic relationship in telephone-delivered support for people undertaking rehabilitation: A mixed-methods interaction analysis. Disability and Rehabilitation, 37(12), 1060–1065.

This mixed-methods study was conducted within one arm of a trial that tested rehabilitation treatment for people with chronic dizziness. A randomised controlled trial within applied health research offers opportunities for a number of elements to come together in pursuit of a particular objective. It is especially useful to employ a number of methods when the intervention being tested is complex.

The intervention reported in this paper involved providing patients with a booklet including cognitive and behavioural strategies for balance retraining and therapeutic support by telephone. Telephone sessions conducted were recorded and transcribed for analysis. The Rota Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) was used to categorise utterances against 43 predetermined mutually exclusive communication strategies. These were then coded to form three composite categories of communication within the medical encounter: relationship building, therapist dominance, and person-centredness. The outcome measure for the therapy was working alliance based on subscales relating to goal, task, and bond (using the Working Alliance Inventory – WAI-S). Bivariate correlations were examined to establish whether there was a relationship between these variables. Person-centredness was significantly correlated with goal and bond.

The qualitative component of the study explored the content of therapy rated to have high and low person-centredness. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted and identified differences between high and low personcentred sessions in the following themes: unrelated friendly chat, therapist encouragement, therapist reassurance of no harm, therapist reacting to participant cues, therapist not reacting to participant cues, and participant concerns. Therapist sessions with high personcentredness involved more responsiveness to participant cues, more reassurance, and a friendly feel. Low person-centred sessions did not involve unrelated chat, encouragement, and therapists were likely to be unresponsive to participant verbal cues.

Here, both methods used are needed to answer the research question about effectiveness of communication strategies in developing a therapeutic relationship. Implications are drawn from both elements of the study, and it is difficult to see how these findings could have been offered without using qualitative and quantitative methods.

opportunity to gain more holistic, indepth insight by bringing a range of perspectives, each of which is valued in relation to the research question.

It is important however to recognise the tension inherent in the desire to be open and inclusive to practice and methods whilst also needing to avoid an ill-disciplined ‘anything goes’ approach.

Clear theoretical foundations that link the selected methods to the focus of the inquiry are key. Ross (2012) suggests developing a ‘pluralism of pluralisms’ within the counselling field that will minimise the risk of closing down inclusivity. Perhaps mixed methods and pluralistic researchers can do the same and consider ways of holding together multiple accounts in theoretically consistent ways.

Challenges to researchers include staying with the messiness of these approaches and resisting the urge to tidy up what is found into neat packages that present only some of what is experienced.

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This means developing confidence to present what is closer to the dynamism, chaos and untidiness of human life. Or to put it another way, to accept that ‘loose ends do not have to mean frayed ends’ (Rodriguez & Frost, 2015) when striving to break out of the research silos of psychology.

Rachel Shaw is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Aston University r.l.shaw@aston.ac.uk

Nollaig Frost is Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University London n.frost@mdx.ac.uk

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Learning from the ‘lifeworld’ Joanna Brooks introduces a range of approaches to phenomenology in qualitative psychology

references

resources

question

The term ‘phenomenology’ is perhaps not well understood by those less involved in qualitative research. It has developed and diversified to encompass a bewildering array of different traditions and methods. This article provides a whistle-stop tour of its history, key figures and applications in psychology. Leading qualitative psychologists then explain the particular ways in which they understand and draw upon the principles of phenomenology and apply these in their own work. Phenomenological psychology may be thought of as an umbrella term encompassing a variety of rich and useful approaches, and this article showcases just some of the ways in which a phenomenological stance is being used by qualitative psychologists in the UK today.

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A

How do you make use of phenomenology?

Finlay, L. (2009). Debating phenomenological research methods.

Phenomenology & Practice, 3, 6–25.

Husserl, E. (1931/ 1967). Cartesian meditations (D.Cairns, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijihoff.

Todres, L. (2007). Embodied enquiry.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ashworth, P.D. (2006). Introduction to the place of phenomenological thinking in the history of psychology. In P.D. Ashworth & M.C. Chung (Eds.) Phenomenology and psychological science. New York: Springer.

Ashworth, P.D. (2009). William James’s ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ and contemporary human science research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Health and Well-

lthough different branches of phenomenology have developed, with their own particular variations and emphases, all are usually acknowledged Dr Joanna as stemming from the Brooks work of the founding is at the father, Edmund University of Husserl (1859–1938).

Huddersfield Husserl was concerned with developing phenomenology as a rigorous alternative to methods traditionally used by the natural sciences. These existing methods were, Husserl believed, inappropriate for the examination of human experience. In contrast to notions of an objective reality, Husserl suggests that it is in fact only our experience of the world – namely, direct and subjective human experience – that is ‘knowable’. We can, Husserl argues, only really know and understand concepts when they are grounded in concrete experience.

A fundamental concept is the lifeworld, the world of lived experience inhabited by us as conscious beings, and incorporating the way in which phenomena (events, objects, emotions) appear to us in our conscious experience or everyday life. Husserl conceptualised the lifeworld as pre-reflective – that is, our focus is on what we are perceiving rather than how we are perceiving it.

Husserl’s project was to isolate ‘essences’ – invariant features and structures of phenomena – and to describe these as

being, 4, 195–206.

Ashworth, P.D. (2013). The gift relationship.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 44, 1–36.

Colaizzi, P. (1978). Psychological research as a phenomenologist views it. In R.S. Valle & M. King (Eds.) Existential phenomenological alternatives for psychology. New York: Open University Press.

Derrida, J. (1992). Given time: 1

precisely as possible. By isolating such essences from a range of experiences, Husserl argued that it might be possible to identify the qualities giving a specific experiential phenomenon its distinctiveness. Husserl believed that to do this, it was also necessary to adopt a specific attitude, to suspend – or ‘bracket’ – presuppositions and judgements so that a clear and unblinkered view of the lifeworld could emerge. This attitude is known as the epoché.

How far it is possible to fully engage with and transcend the epoché is a topic of contention for different phenomenological traditions – and it was in fact a pupil of Husserl’s, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who first developed an alternative to Husserl’s original descriptive or transcendental phenomenology. Heidegger is associated with the development of existential or hermeneutic phenomenology. For Heidegger, we are, as human beings, inseparable from the world in which we live and exist – we exist in the world, rather than next to or outside of it. If this is the case, then notions of achieving the epoché as advocated by Husserl become more problematic. Rather than focusing on how we know what we know, Heidegger was instead interested in exploring what it means to live in and among a world that is experienced by each individual in their own way.

Heidegger saw our relation to the world as being always both interpretive and relational – we are always situated in context. This means that to understand reality, we need to understand both detailed experience and the bigger picture, and thus factors such as language, temporality, history and culture become important. Neither the whole nor the individual elements can be really understood without reference to the other – this is known as the hermeneutic circle.

The extent to which the bracketing of presuppositions is possible, and the appropriate balance between description and interpretation in phenomenologically

Counterfeit money (P. Kamuf, Trans.).

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dessai, P., Sutton, L., Staley, M. & Hannon, D. (2013). A qualitative study exploring the psychosocial value of weekend camping experiences for children and adolescents with complex heart defects. Child: Care, Health and Development, 40(4), 553–561.

Giorgi, A. (2006). Concerning variations in

the application of the phenomenological method. The Humanistic Psychologist, 34(4), 305–319.

Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Giorgi, A. (Ed.) (1985). Phenomenology and psychological research. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

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informed work, continue to provoke considerable debate to this day.

Heidegger’s writings inspired many other theorists and writers and for phenomenological psychologists, the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) is often highlighted as particularly influential. Merleau-Ponty radically challenged accepted dualist notions prevalent at the time, arguing that as people are embodied beings, we cannot, when considering human experience, meaningfully detach mind from body, nor subject from object (‘There is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself’ – Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962). Much of Merleau-Ponty’s work originates from empirical psychology studies (he held a Chair in Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Sorbonne in Paris and was succeeded to this post by Jean Piaget), and the productive amalgamation of phenomenology and psychology continues today. Phenomenology has been an important source of reference for the development of qualitative psychology as it provides a philosophical rationale for focusing on the study of human experience.

However, a considerable array of different traditions and methods is covered by the umbrella term of phenomenology. We turn now to a number of leading qualitative UK psychologists to reflect on some of the thought-provoking ways they personally draw upon phenomenological principles and approaches in their work. Rosie Morrow, Alison Rodriguez and Nigel King outline Colaizzi’s (1978) descriptive approach to phenomenology – little known in psychology but widely used in other fields – using an example from a study on the experience of camping; Jonathan Smith uses two examples from his recent research into depression and chronic pain to demonstrate how his approach to experiential research (interpretative phenomenological analysis or IPA) draws on a range of

Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book (F. Kersten, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Original work published 1913) Husserl, E. (2001). Logical investigations, Vol. 1 (2nd edn) (D. Moran, Ed.).

London: Routledge.

James, W. (1950). The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover.

phenomenological thinking to capture lived experience whilst recognising research as a dynamic and necessarily interpretative process; Darren Langdridge uses an example from his research on sexualities to describe how his ‘critical narrative approach’, with its explicit focus on narrative, works with language, power and politics within a phenomenological framework; and Peter Ashworth reflects on how his use of a descriptive lifeworld approach to phenomenological psychology can reveal ‘taken-for-granted’ meanings in everyday life experience, using the example of gift giving.

This is just a glimpse of the wide variety of approaches available, but we hope that these concise exemplars give some idea of how phenomenology is being used in psychology today. escriptive phenomenology is concerned with revealing the ‘essence’ or ‘essential structure’ of any phenomenon under investigation – that is, those features that Rosie make it what it is, Morrow, rather than something Alison else. By far the best Rodriguez known descriptive and approach in Nigel King psychology is that are at the of Amedeo Giorgi University of (1985), who is widely Huddersfield credited as a pioneer in bringing phenomenological thinking into psychology. Giorgi’s method can be seen as a form of distillation, in which the analyst step by step sifts away everything that is not essential to an adequate description of the phenomenon.

It is, however, not the only descriptive phenomenological method in the social and human sciences. We focus here on a method proposed by Colaizzi (1978), which is little-known in psychology but widely used in other disciplines, such as

(Original work published 1890) Kirkham, J.A., Smith, J.A., HavsteenFranklin, D. (2015). Painting pain: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of representations of living with chronic pain. Health Psychology, 34(4), 398–406.

Langdridge, D. (2007). Phenomenological psychology: Theory, research and method. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Langdridge, D. (2009). Relating through

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the health sciences. We argue that the method has considerable potential for qualitative psychologists, especially those coming fresh to descriptive phenomenology.

Colaizzi’s (1978) distinctive sevenstep process provides a rigorous analysis, with each step staying close to the data.

The end result is a concise yet allencompassing description of the phenomenon under study, validated by the participants that created it. The method depends upon rich first-person accounts of experience; these may come from face-to-face interviews, but can also be obtained in multiple other ways: written narratives, blogs, research diaries, online interviews, and so on. The stages are as follows: 1. Familiarisation: The researcher familiarises him or herself with the data, by reading through all the participant accounts several times.

2. Identifying significant statements: The researcher identifies all statements in the accounts that are of direct relevance to the phenomenon under investigation.

3. Formulating meanings: The researcher identifies meanings relevant to the phenomenon that arise from a careful consideration of the significant statements. The researcher must reflexively ‘bracket’ his or her presuppositions to stick closely to the phenomenon as experienced (though Colaizzi recognises that complete bracketing is never possible).

4. Clustering themes: The researcher clusters the identified meanings into themes that are common across all accounts. Again bracketing of presuppositions is crucial, especially to avoid any potential influence of existing theory.

5. Developing an exhaustive description: The researcher writes a full and inclusive description of the phenomenon, incorporating all the themes produced at Step 4.

6. Producing the fundamental structure:

difference. In L. Finlay & K. Evans (Eds.) Relational centred research for psychotherapists. Chichester: WileyBlackwell.

Mair, D. (2010a). Mind the gap?

Unpublished doctoral thesis, Metanoia/Middlesex University.

Mair, D. (2010b). Fractured narratives, fractured identities. Psychology & Sexuality, 1(2), 156–169.

Mauss, M. (1990). The gift: Forms and

functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

(Original work published 1925) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945) Morrow, R. (2013). A study to explore the lived experience of camping and associated effects of escapism: A green exercise approach. Master’s

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The researcher condenses the exhaustive description down to a short, dense statement that captures just those aspects deemed to be essential to the structure of the phenomenon.

7. Seeking verification of the fundamental structure: The researcher returns the fundamental structure statement to all participants (or sometimes a subsample in larger studies) to ask whether it captures their experience.

He or she may go back and modify earlier steps in the analysis in the light of this feedback.

Morrow (2013) used Colaizzi’s method to explore the lived experience of camping, with a particular interest in its impact on relationships. While there is a substantial literature on the use of structured camping-based interventions as a form of therapeutic intervention (e.g. Desai et al., 2013), there is very little about how people experience everyday unstructured recreational camping. Four participants were recruited on the basis that they had recently embarked on an unstructured camping trip. Through using Colaizzi’s method, five themes were identified: ‘Getting away’, ‘Relationship maintenance’, ‘Tranquillity and relaxation’, ‘Appreciation of the natural environment’ and ‘Freedom and adventure/exploration’. Following the seven-step process, an exhaustive description was created, which was then condensed into a fundamental structure of the lived experience of camping: Camping provides the ideal escape for friends and couples alike. The tranquil and relaxing environment provides the ideal setting for relationship maintenance and reinforcement with friends and partners, whether there are issues to resolve or otherwise. The freedom experienced by individuals encouraged adventure and exploration, which in turn allowed them to appreciate the natural environment. (Morrow, 2013, p.49)

thesis, University of Huddersfield. tinyurl.com/pv66pmr Morrow, R., Rodriguez, Al. & King, N. (2014). Camping: A tool for relationship maintenance?

International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, 35(2), 48–55.

Polkinghorne, D.E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences.

Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy.

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While the fundamental structure is the end-point of the analytic process, the main themes from which it is derived are themselves useful to explore and present.

Thus in Morrow et al. (2014) we focused particularly on the theme of ‘Relationship maintenance’.

The final step in Colaizzi’s method, returning the results to the participants, is a controversial one, criticised by Giorgi (2006), who stated that the researcher and participant inevitably have different perspectives – the researcher from a phenomenological perspective and the participant from the ‘natural attitude’ (our everyday taken-for-granted perception of the world). This echoes a wider debate in qualitative research as to the value of ‘respondent validation’ or ‘member checking’. We would certainly agree that any notion that participants can simply rubber-stamp an analysis as ‘correct’ is untenable. Nevertheless, given the aims of descriptive phenomenology, it is not unreasonable to expect that they should be able to recognise their own experience in the fundamental structure.

Descriptive phenomenology is especially valuable in areas where there is little existing research, as was the case in the example we have given of the experience of recreational camping. For psychologists, Colaizzi’s method offers a clear and systematic approach; its thematic nature may be more familiar and accessible than the ‘distilling’ style offered

by Giorgi. nterpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was developed and articulated as a particular approach to conducting experiential research in psychology (Smith 1996). Since then it has grown enormously and is now one of the best-known and most frequently used

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Professor Jonathan Smith is at Birkbeck, University of London

(Trans. D. Savage). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1971). The model of the text.

Social Research, 38, 529–562.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J.B. Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life: A story in search of a narrator. In M. Vlades (Ed.) A Ricoeur reader. Toronto: University

approaches in qualitative psychology. IPA aims to provide an in-depth and nuanced analysis of participants’ accounts of their lived experience. For much of IPA, the experience in question is one of major significance or existential importance to the participant. Much of the early work was in health psychology, but IPA is now used to address questions in a wide range of areas both within and beyond psychology. While IPA originated in the UK, it is increasingly being used in many countries.

IPA represents an attempt to put some of the philosophical principles of phenomenology into practice in the form of a methodology that can be used for empirical research in psychology and related disciplines. It does not privilege any one phenomenological theoretical position but draws on the range of phenomenological thinking. It tries, as far as possible to go ‘back to the things themselves’ (Husserl, 1900–1901/2001), p.168), to capture personal lived experience in its own terms, as opposed to those prescribed by existing scientific or personal presumptions. However, IPA recognises this process as an interpretative process and is therefore influenced by hermeneutics and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.

IPA is meticulously idiographic, requiring the in-depth examination of each case in its own terms before moving to the next case. What comes out of this process is a detailed and nuanced analysis of convergence and divergence in participants’ accounts of experience. IPA is not in principle averse to moving to more general claims, but such a move for IPA will be a slow, painstaking one.

Following from IPA’s micro-lens is a particular concern with the value of the gem (Smith, 2011), the small extract that offers powerful illumination of the topic under investigation. IPA is described as involving a ‘double hermeneutic’, as it recognises both researcher and participant as intrinsically sense-making creatures.

Therefore ‘the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make

of Toronto Press.

Smith, J.A. (1996). Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse.

Psychology & Health, 11, 261–271.

Smith, J.A. (2011). ‘We could be diving for pearls’: The value of the gem in experiential qualitative psychology.

Qualitative Methods in Psychology Bulletin, 12, 6–15.

Smith, J.A., Flowers, P. & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative

phenomenological analysis: Theory, method, research. London: Sage.

Smith, J. A. & Osborn, M. (2003).

Interpretative phenomenological analysis. In J.A. Smith (Ed.) Qualitative psychology. London: Sage.

Smith, J.A. & Rhodes, J. (2014). Being depleted and being shaken.

Psychology and Psychotherapy [Advance online publication]. doi:10.1111/papt.12034

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sense of their world’ (Smith & Osborn 2003, p.51).

There is not a single right way of collecting data in IPA. Any method that allows a participant to give a detailed account of their personal lived experience can be used. Thus IPA has been conducted with diaries and other personal written accounts. However, by far the most common way of collecting data is through the in-depth, semi-structured interview. The popularity of the interview lies in allowing the researcher to hear the participant’s unfolding account and decide, in real-time, where and when to probe further. There is not a prescribed process of analysis. However, to help the newcomer to IPA, a guided step-by-step approach is offered – beginning with the close examination of the first case, leading to the extraction of microexperiential themes and then a careful examination of patternings across the cases in the corpus. This primarily linear process is accompanied by a parallel operation of the hermeneutic circle, whereby pieces of text are seen as parts and wholes offering mutual illumination.

Good IPA presents a stimulating and coherent analytic account evidenced with vivid quotes from participants and with some detailed interpretative commentary.

For a detailed presentation of IPA, including coverage of the theoretical underpinnings as well as practical guidelines, see Smith et al. (2009).

In a recent paper (Smith & Rhodes, 2014) we present an in-depth analysis of the experience of first-episode depression.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven patients from a mental health service in London. We interpreted the participants’ depression as involving a three-fold existential depletion in the relational, corporeal and temporal domains. Along with this diminution, participants experienced occasional intensified emotional reactions and frenzied thinking. The paper gives a detailed interpretative presentation of these features of depression illustrated with extracts from participants’ accounts.

We point to the value of examining these existential features in the early stages of therapy.

Another current paper (Kirkham et al., 2015) is concerned with understanding the experience of chronic pain. It does this through an analysis of patients’ accounts of their own visual representations of their condition.

Participants are seven women, aged between 36 and 52 years, from southern England. The pictures offer striking portrayals of the pain. In some the pain itself becomes a sinister punishing object;

in others the picture is of the self in relation to pain. The artworks also vividly capture the biographical context for the pain with representations of self before and after it had begun. Some images look ahead to a hoped-for pain-free self in the future. We discuss the valuable role pictorial representation can play in helping the expression of difficult conditions and experiences. he method of critical narrative analysis (CNA) that I have been developing was created to serve a specific purpose in my own research programme on Dr Darren sexualities, and also Langdridge to resolve some of is at the Open the epistemological University tensions that I saw with other similar methods (Langdridge, 2007). It draws heavily but not uncritically on the hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1970, 1981) and is an attempt to work with language, power and politics within an overarching phenomenological framework. It is distinct from other forms of phenomenological analysis, firstly through the explicit focus on narrative.

Whilst this is not commonly seen amongst the better-known methods of phenomenological analysis featured here, it is common to a number of phenomenologically informed narrative methods (e.g. Polkinghorne, 1988). This theoretical focus on narrative reflects a Ricoeurian (1971, 1991) stance where meaning is appropriated through the critical interrogation of the stories we tell of our lives.

The second distinctive element to this method is the inclusion of a moment of critique, engaging with two analytic moments in a hermeneutic arc. The first moment is what Ricoeur would refer to as a ‘hermeneutic of empathy’, and is that descriptive mode of understanding common to all phenomenological methods. The second moment involves the use of specific methods of interpretation – or in Ricoeur’s terms ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – to critically interrogate the social imaginary, the world of stories into which we are all immersed and that allows and limits our ability to understand and narrate our experience.

Ricoeur (1970) identifies Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as the ‘three masters of suspicion’, but here I depart somewhat from Ricoeur and argue that we need to

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turn to critical social theory for our critique rather than, if we take Freud as our example, engaging in an archaeological trawl through the unconscious for hidden meaning. For me, the key to using hermeneutics of suspicion is to draw on social theory like queer theory or post-colonial theory as ‘imaginative hermeneutics of suspicion’.

This enables us to critique the ideology of the social worlds of researcher and participant alike for how it allows and limits understanding and narrative expression.

Studies using this method are likely to be idiographic, with a focus on individual stories of particular life experiences. This need not be solely about the case study, as data from participants can be combined (see, for instance, the studies of ethnicity and sexuality conducted by David Mair, 2010a, 2010b). But the data collection method does often involve a life story interview of some kind designed to encourage the telling of a story or stories.

So, for instance, I conducted a piece of case-study research with one of my therapy clients in which we worked together to examine his life as it related to being a sexual slave (Langdridge, 2009).

Several hours later and with few interventions from me we stopped, with me having the privilege of considerable new insight into his ‘lifeworld’ through the stories he told me. I suggest a number of analytic stages for CNA, but these are open to modification: (1) a critique of the illusions of subjectivity; (2) identifying narratives, narrative tone and rhetorical function; (3) identities and identity work; (4) thematic priorities and relationships; (5) destabilising the narrative; and (6) synthesis. These stages guide the researcher around a hermeneutic circle of analysis such that there is a critical but also ethical examination of the stories being told of the life, or lives, in question.

Where the topic is notably inflected with power and politics, as we see with minority sexualities or ethnicities, and is also amenable to understanding through the stories told of personal experience, then CNA is likely to be appropriate.

Should your research interests lie elsewhere, then other methods from the phenomenological family may better suit your needs. CNA should be understood as ‘open source’, amenable to modification, to be used – or not – as you see fit. We need to avoid rigid adherence to methodological guidelines and dogmatic fights. That is not to say ‘anything goes’, not at all, but rather we should avoid the debates and politics so often associated with the marketing and branding of methodologies. Instead, we

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should focus our energy on achieving our shared research goals as phenomenologists, notably our desire to improve our understanding of the human condition. henomenological psychology does not aim at discoveries of precisely the kind experimental psychology seeks.

Experimental psychology uncovers the causal conditions Professor of human behaviour, Peter where the individual Ashworth is seen as an intrinsic is at Sheffield part of the objective Hallam system of mechanisms University of the natural world.

Phenomenological psychology, instead, aims to reveal the taken-for-granted meanings by which our experience is constituted. For example, when giving a gift (Ashworth, 2013) what are the meanings involved for the giver and the recipient? What constitutes ‘giving a gift’?

Such meanings are by no means always explicitly known but are usually lived through, and these are to be brought to light. I will use the phenomenology of gifting below as an example, mentioning four principles of analysis.

First, keep in the realm of experience by the epoché. Husserl (e.g. 1913/1983) insisted that to seriously scrutinise an experience purely as experience, an epoché is required, a setting aside of the presuppositions with which we approach it. William James (1890/1950) made a similar point specifically for psychology, showing how easily a researcher can unintentionally impose their own meanings onto research participants’ accounts or actions (for James’s psychologists’ fallacy, see Ashworth, 2009). Following Giorgi (2009), I regard it as imperative to adopt the discipline of the epoché, even though it can never be complete… in any case, the researcher has to start trying to understand by using their own categories of thought. Be this as it may, the researcher must continually, self-critically question the accuracy of their understanding to minimise the danger of the psychologist’s fallacy.

For example, in investigating giving a gift, the scholarly literature (e.g. Mauss, 1925/1990, and Derrida, 1992) almost unanimously argues that the recipient experiences an implicit obligation to reciprocate. (Gifting is thus reduced to the structure of economic exchange.)

The presupposition that the obligation to

P

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I Sociality: How does the situation reciprocate is part of the experience must, affect or depend on relations with however, be subjected to the epoché. others? When accounts of giving and What is the experience itself like? Of receiving are used to describe the course such things may reappear in the conditions of possibility of gifting in findings (gifts might indeed evoke a sense general, the lifeworldly elements self of obligation). But these are not imposed and other predominate. The giver prior to the description of the experience. assumes for themselves the right to The difficulty of the epoché has led give, and by the act of giving defines some qualitative researchers to downplay a relationship with the other. The its importance and to emphasise the role recipient may or may not accept the of interpretation. The danger of this move gift; gifting may then not be ‘fulfilled’. is that of succumbing to the psychologist’s I Embodiment: How is our body fallacy, and is only justifiable if the implicated in the lifeworld? For research plainly remains within the instance, since our projects are phenomenological realm – experience. pursued through bodily action, The second principle is to notice both illness, gender, age, etc. can have what is experienced and how it is personal reality in the thwarting of experienced. The realm of experience our activities and our uncovered in the ability to give. epoché has two I Temporality (and its thoroughly “idiographic accounts are events): How is the interdependent parts. investigated, embedded in meaning of time, In being conscious, each personal lifeworld” duration, or biography one’s mode of approach intrinsic to the situation? to the experience (the How is the past echoed and noesis) will entail some the future anticipated in giving? elements of memory, imagination, I Spatiality (and its things): Consider perception, and so on, as well as various the meaning of the staging of giving emotion-tones. At the same time what is and the form of the actual gift. experienced (the noema) is affected by, I Project: How does this event of giving and affects, the noesis. Both aspects of relate to activities to which the person intentionality (the approach of is fundamentally committed? consciousness to its object) must be I Discourse: The gift relationship is studied. The phenomenon entails both. surrounded by social conventions Third, idiography alternates with and linguistic formulas. However, essential structure. An individual’s important though it is, gifting ‘noematico-noetic’ experience of a discourse is by no means fully phenomenon is not free-floating or determinative or limpid. How the abstract, but is set in that person’s specific person speaks and enacts gifting must lifeworld. A phenomenological research be carefully analysed. report will seek the essential ‘conditions I Mood-as-atmosphere: A feeling-tone is of possibility’ of such-and-such an an essential element of any situation, experience – the features without which and in gifting the mood dynamics of the experience would not be one of this the expression of gratitude are kind. But in any particular personal extraordinarily sensitive: gratitude instance, the experience will be seals the meaning of the gift as an thoroughly linked with other aspects of affective affirmation. (Not, it is clear, the individual’s lifeworld. Research as an economic exchange.) therefore alternates between the idiographic understanding of an I have mentioned four principles of individual’s experience within the analysis. For more detail, Giorgi’s (2009) lifeworld, and the description of the approach is to be recommended. The key essential features of a specific experience. perspective is this: The material of Finally, to help grasp the idiography phenomenological psychology is precisely of an experience some features essential the intentional realm under the epoché, to any lifeworld should be noted and the taken-for-granted meanings by (Ashworth, 2006 – developing especially which our experience is constituted.

Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962). Then those Research participants’ idiographic aspects which are bound up with the accounts are investigated, embedded in conditions of possibility of gifting can be each personal lifeworld. Taking such sought. For example, consider: I Selfhood: How does the situation evidence together, a description of the implicate identity, the person’s sense features without which the experience of agency, their feeling of their own would not be of the kind under scrutiny presence and voice in the situation, is achieved. Such a description is etc? phenomenological.

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Connect…

Stories of Psychology Clinically Applied: Origins of a Profession

Wednesday 14 October 2015, 10.30am–4pm Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London The fifth annual ‘Stories of Psychology’ symposium looks forward to the 50th anniversary of the Division of Clinical Psychology in 2016 by looking back at the development of clinical psychology as a profession, a history that reaches back beyond the foundation of the DCP in 1966.

Cost: £16 (BPS members); £18 (non-members) including buffet lunch Registration is essential

For more information and to register, go to www.bps.org.uk/stories

…with The Psychologist and the Society’s free Research Digest service for more psychological news and analysis

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History of Psychology Centre (t) 0116 252 9528 (e) hopc@bps.org.uk

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PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE BOARD

Lifetime Achievement Award The Professional Practice Board invites nominations for this annual award to recognise and celebrate distinguished lifetime achievement within professional psychology Eligibility – Current or retired practitioners in any area of professional applied psychology. It is expected that nominees will have enjoyed outstanding personal success in their careers and also have reinvested in psychology through encouraging and developing others.

Nominations – should include:

A 1000-word narrative highlighting the candidate’s achievements and grounds for proposing the candidate A full CV The names and contact details of three referees (including at least one current/former work colleague of the candidate) Any other relevant supporting documents

Award – Life membership of the Society and a commemorative certificate.

Nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Professional Practice Board at the Society’s office to arrive no later than Tuesday 1 December 2015.

Further details are available from Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office (e-mail: carl.bourton@bps.org.uk).

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ARTICLE

Rhetoric and resistance Stephen Gibson uses qualitative analysis to understand Milgram’s studies – are they really ‘obedience’ experiments?

When he conducted his experiments on ‘obedience’ to authority in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram recorded the majority of his experimental sessions on audiotape. Despite the comment, extensions and critique generated over the years by Milgram’s studies, there have been surprisingly few attempts to use these recordings as the basis for secondary analysis. However, recent qualitative analysis of the archival materials points to some intriguing insights concerning the interactions that took place in the ‘obedience’ laboratory, and even suggests that we may have misunderstood the nature of the studies themselves: rather than demonstrations of people’s propensity to obey orders from an authority figure, they may in fact show just how ineffective the issuing of direct orders might be.

questions resources

Stanley Milgram Papers archive at Yale University: tinyurl.com/qavvp4v Gibson, S. (2013a). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis.

British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

references

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Do the ‘obedience’ experiments really demonstrate obedience?

Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality.

New York: Harper & Row. Asch, S.E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70, 1–70.

Augoustinos, M. & Tileagă, C. (2012).

Twenty five years of discursive

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he 10th anniversary of the Society’s Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section affords an opportunity to reflect on the place of qualitative research within the discipline. The Section has clearly been hugely successful – as soon as it came into being, its membership numbers made it the Society’s largest Section by some distance, a status it retains to this day. In drawing together scholars and practitioners from a diverse range of psychology’s subdisciplines, the Section has provided a forum for lively debate amongst individuals who may not otherwise have found themselves sharing the same conference floor. Similarly, it has been an important voice in making the case for qualitative methods at the heart of the disciplinary establishment over the last decade.

Yet there is a danger on occasions such as this that one slips somewhat unthinkingly into celebratory mode. It is not uncommon to find accounts of qualitative methods in psychology that suggest that the discipline was dominated by a restrictive experimentalism for much of its history, and that it is only in recent decades that qualitative methods have begun to be accepted as part of psychology’s methodological toolkit.

However, as Dennis Howitt points out in his splendid introductory text, the idea that, until relatively recently, ‘mainstream psychology was a quantitative monolith smothering any other perspective on what psychology should be...is a creation myth rather than a precise and historically accurate account of the dark days before qualitative psychology’ (Howitt, 2010,

What is the role of discourse and the social context in laboratory experimentation?

psychology. British Journal of Social Psychology, 51, 405–412.

Billig, M. (1996). Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burger, J.M., Girgis, Z.M. & Manning, C.C. (2011). In their own words: Explaining obedience to authority through an examination of participants’ comments. Social

p.xvii; see also Wertz, 2014, for a recent historical overview).

In my own subdiscipline of social psychology, the emergence of qualitative methods is often traced to the so-called ‘crisis’ literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led to the development of approaches such as Harré and Secord’s (1972) ethogenics and Gergen’s (1985) social constructionism.

Or sometimes it might be suggested that qualitative methods only really began to gain a foothold in the discipline with the advent of discursive and rhetorical perspectives from the late 1980s (see Augoustinos & Tileaga˘, 2012, for a recent retrospective). It is not to contest the impact of either of these developments to suggest that such accounts might stand in need of qualification as origin stories for qualitative methods in psychology.

Even a cursory glance through many of the classics of the field highlights that qualitative research had an important place within the discipline in its North American heartlands some time before the ‘crisis’. Adorno and colleagues’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950), chiefly remembered for the F-scale, featured extensive use of material from interviews conducted with participants. Asch’s (1956) ‘conformity’ experiments, remembered as a demonstration of people’s overwhelming tendency to ‘go along with the group’, involved detailed post-experiment interviews designed to explore why people had behaved in the way they did. Indeed, Asch saw his experiments as a demonstration of the way in which individuals might resist pressures to conform. Milgram’s (1974) ‘obedience’ experiments again featured extensive follow-up interviews. In addition, Milgram also included short case studies of individual participants in his most detailed account of his research, and these featured direct quotations from transcripts of the experimental sessions themselves. For each of these classic studies, there are more detailed stories to be told concerning the ways in which the nuances of their authors’ messages have

Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 460–466.

Gergen, K.J. (1985). The social constructionist movement in modern psychology. American Psychologist, 40, 266–275.

Gibson, S. (2013a). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis.

British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

Gibson, S. (2013b). ‘The last possible

resort’: A forgotten prod and the in situ standardization of Stanley Milgram’s voice-feedback condition.

History of Psychology, 16, 177–194.

Gibson. S. (2014). Discourse, defiance and rationality: ‘Knowledge work’ in the ‘obedience’ experiments. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 424–438.

Harré, R. & Secord, P.F. (1972). The explanation of social behaviour. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Haslam, S.A., Reicher, S.D. & Birney, M.E. (2014). Nothing by mere authority: Evidence that in an experimental analogue of the Milgram paradigm participants are motivated not by orders but by appeals to science. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 473–488.

Haslam, S.A., Reicher, S.D., Millard, K. & McDonald, R. (2015). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as

a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments.

British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(1), 55–83.

Howitt, D. (2010). Introduction to qualitative methods in psychology.

Harlow: Prentice Hall.

Maynard, D.W. & Schaeffer, N.C. (2000).

Toward a sociology of social scientific knowledge: Survey research and

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find to be the most fascinating aspect of the archives: the hundreds of audio recordings of the experimental sessions themselves. These have received relatively little attention from researchers seeking to understand Milgram’s experiments until very recently (see Modigliani & Rochat, 1995, for a notable exception).

Exploring a sample of these recordings has led me in two directions.

First, the experiments can be understood as occasions for rhetoric and argumentation. As participants attempt to argue their way out of the experimental situation, the experimenter seeks to provide arguments for participants to continue. Second, and relatedly, the recordings show that the level of work required by the experimenter in trying to elicit ‘obedience’ goes some way beyond what might be assumed from a straightforward reading of Milgram’s accounts of the studies.

This leads to a consideration of the ways in which we need to understand Milgram’s laboratory as a particular social context. As an example of how these two strands interrelate and overlap, it is worth briefly considering an excerpt from one of the experimental sessions, from condition 2, the voice-feedback condition, which uses the basic procedure outlined above.

First, and most strikingly, it is worth noting that this condition features a departure from the ‘standardised’ procedure used in the experiments. In three experimental sessions, Milgram’s confederate John Williams, in the role of experimenter, responds to participant attempts to bring the experiment to a close by leaving the room, apparently to go and speak to the learner in the adjoining room. This tactic was not reported in Milgram’s published descriptions of the experimental procedure. Extract 1 shows how this could be prompted by a participant using a rhetorical strategy that made their continuation in the experiment

FRED THE OYSTER

been re-packaged over the decades in confederate) issued orders that the textbook chapters and lecture theatres, teacher continue. Such conditions but for present purposes it is sufficient to produced obedience rates of between highlight the role played in each by 47.5 per cent and 65 per cent (Milgram, qualitative methods.

1974), where obedience was Clearly, then, things are not as operationalised as delivering the highest straightforward as is often assumed. voltage level on a scale rising from 15v to Nevertheless, it is arguable that the red450v in 15v increments. herring distinction between qualitative In the last five years or so there has and quantitative methods is relevant here. been a growing body of literature Psychologists may have been using examining the materials held in the qualitative methods, but they weren’t Stanley Milgram Papers archive at Yale staking a claim to be doing, say, University. Scholars have used the interpretative phenomenology or social materials to explore how Milgram piloted constructionism. When these researchers his experiments (Russell, 2011), how he were conducting their interviews, they constructed his film of the experiments were treating them as windows on the (Millard, 2014; see also The Psychologist, psychological processes underpinning the August 2011), and to challenge his behavioural phenomena they were account of the studies on ethical studying, not as situated social actions designed to manage issues of accountability, stake and interest. The issue, then, is one of epistemology and methodology.

So what happens if we adopt an approach to this classic work that is informed by more recent developments in qualitative research methodology? In my own work (Gibson, 2013a, 2013b, 2014), I have sought to develop a perspective on Milgram’s experiments informed by discursive and rhetorical psychologies (Billig, 1996; Potter & Wetherell, 1987).

As is well known, Milgram used a cover story of a memory experiment to study people’s willingness to obey orders from an authority figure. In its most well-known variants, this involved a naive participant Experimenter (E), teacher (T) and learner (L) in playing the role of ‘teacher’, Milgram’s obedience experiment delivering what appeared to be electric shocks to a ‘learner’ (in fact a confederate) as punishment for (Nicholson, 2011), methodological (Perry, incorrect answers on a memory test.

2012) and theoretical grounds (Haslam et When the teacher appeared reluctant al., 2015). In my own research, I have to continue, the ‘experimenter’ (another sought to take advantage of what I still

ethnomethodology’s asymmetric alternates. Social Studies of Science, 30, 323–370.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row. Millard, K. (2014). Revisioning obedience: Exploring the role of Milgram’s skills as a filmmaker in bringing his shocking narrative to life. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 439–455.

Miller, A.G. (2009). Reflections on ‘Replicating Milgram’ (2009).

American Psychologist, 64, 20–27.

Modigliani, A. & Rochat, F. (1995). The role of interaction sequences and the timing of resistance in shaping obedience and defiance to authority.

Journal of Social Issues, 51, 107–123.

Nicholson, I. (2011). ‘Torture at Yale’: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the ‘rehabilitation’ of

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contingent on receiving assurances that the learner was all right. As we join the experimental session, the participant is attempting to bring the experiment to a close (L = Learner; E = Experimenter; T = Teacher; numbers in parentheses indicate timed silences in seconds): Extract 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

E: It’s absolutely essential that you go on.

(2) T: Well if he says it’s all right it’s all right with me. Will you ask him if he wants to go on?

(3) E: Whether the learner likes it or not er, we must continue.

T: I wouldn’t continE: ((inaudible))T: I wouldn’t continue without asking him.

(2) E: As I explained to both er, er to him when you were there, er although the shocks may be extremely painful there is no permanent tissue damage.

T: Well I still th- I still don’t want to go on unless he says all right.

At this point, the experimenter leaves the room for just over 50 seconds, and when he returns, reassures the participant that the learner is ‘willing enough to go on’.

This leads to the participant continuing with the experiment for two further shocks, but as we re-join the session the participant has now reached the 150-volt lever on the shock generator, at which point the learner demanded to be released: Extract 2 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

L: Experimenter! Get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more. I refuse to go on, let me out!

E: Please continue.

T: Not under those conditions. Not with him hollering.

E: I just checked on him, and he er, seemed pretty willing to continue

Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’.

Theory and Psychology, 21, 737–761.

Perry, G. (2012). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. Brunswick, Australia: Scribe.

Potter, J. (2012). Re-reading Discourse and Social Psychology: Transforming social psychology. British Journal of Social Psychology, 51, 436–455.

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

so please continue.

T: No not unless I think, you see he’s hollering in there it’s just er (16) E: It’s absolutely essential that you continue.

T: Well I’m not gonna continue with the man hollering that he wants to get out of there I mean er (2) it might be essential to you but it’s not that essential for me.

(3) E: I was just in there and he seemed willing enough to continue.

T: Well, that’s what he says but you know it’s not er (14) E: ((inaudible)) T: I mean i- I’d be glad to walk in there if he says to me go on I’ll go on but I’m not going to go on with the man hollering in there to stop.

E: You have no other choice you must go on.

T: Well I don’t say that I mean I’m just not gonna go on unless he says to go on.

E: Well we’ll have to discontinue the experiment then.

It is notable that it is the participant’s attempts at arguing his way out of the experiment that occasions the experimenter’s leaving the room. At lines 4–6, 12–13 and 20–21, the participant sticks to his rhetorical strategy of refusing to continue unless he can receive assurances from the learner himself. It is also apparent that the experimenter appears much freer to improvise than is often assumed to be the case. The major procedural departure of leaving the room is followed by further attempts to rhetorically invoke the apparent visit to the learner in an attempt to convince the participant that all is well and that he should therefore continue (lines 23–25; 37–38). So, not only is the participant engaged in mobilising rhetorical strategies in an attempt to draw the experiment to a close, so the experimenter is building arguments for the continuation of the

Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987).

Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour.

London: Sage.

Reicher, S. (1997). Laying the ground for a common critical social psychology. In T. Ibáñez & L. Íñiguez (Eds.) Critical social psychology (pp.83–94). London: Sage.

Russell, N.J.C. (2011). Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments:

experiment (see Gibson, 2013a, 2013b for fuller analyses of this and related extracts).

In one sense, we shouldn’t be surprised that standardisation as conventionally understood simply wasn’t possible. There is enough work in the sociology of scientific knowledge on everything from standardised survey interviewing to particle physics that problematises the conventional stories of scientific method to be found in published reports (e.g. Maynard & Schaeffer, 2000). But what this tells us about Milgram’s experiments themselves is that the experimenter has to do far more than simply issue orders to try and convince people to keep delivering electric shocks.

So, whatever else may be going on in these experiments, it looks like the traditional assumption that participants were obeying orders from the experimenter simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, there are now sufficient lines of convergent evidence to suggest that this issue should no longer even be a matter of debate. Some scholars have identified prod 4 (‘You have no other choice, you must continue’) as particularly crucial to accounts of the experiments which see them as demonstrations of obedience (e.g. Miller, 2009). Yet analysis of the use of the prods in the experiments suggests that prod 4 is actually rather ineffective: Milgram’s participants typically didn’t continue after receiving prod 4 (Gibson, 2013a). Other recent work from contrasting theoretical perspectives (e.g. Burger et al., 2011; Haslam et al., 2014) also points in a similar direction: Insofar as psychologists have understood obedience as a form of social influence elicited in response to direct orders, this is simply not what is happening in these experiments. There are, of course, conceptual debates to be had about the nature of obedience, and further analyses to be done, but one thing seems clear at this point: we simply can’t keep referring to Milgram’s obedience experiments. To do so is to perpetuate a

Origins and early evolution. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 140–162.

Wertz, F.J. (2014). Qualitative inquiry in the history of psychology. Qualitative Psychology, 1, 4–16.

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myth that simply doesn’t stand up to production are rendered invisible by scrutiny. This raises a further spectre – techniques explicitly designed to strip that for 50 years, we have held these away apparently irrelevant context. The experiments as Milgram tapes offer exemplars par a tantalising glimpse excellence of the of what might be willingness of ordinary possible if more such people to obey direct records existed of orders, when in fact experiments-inthey show precisely the action. As Jonathan opposite: the failure of Potter (2012, p.440) direct orders as a means has argued recently, of effecting social ‘It is surely time influence. for collaboration To conclude, I’d like between an to return to the place of experimental qualitative methods in social psychologist, the discipline. None of a discursive the research described psychologist and above would have been a sociologist of possible without the science in studying recordings made by how a social The Milgram tapes offer a Stanley Milgram over psychology experiment tantalising glimpse of what 50 years ago. To what is conceived, performed, might be possible extent is it common analysed, and reported.’ practice to create such Such analyses need records of psychological not be seen as a challenge research? One of the key critiques of to the experimental method, and contrary laboratory research has been that the to the stark either/or way in which social processes involved in data methodological debate is often framed,

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they do not rule out experiments as valid tools for knowledge construction. Rather, such an engagement with the discourse and rhetoric of experimentation may well be useful in conducting more nuanced and context-sensitive experiments. After all, experiments are fundamentally discursive encounters in which one party’s attempts to exercise power in defining a situation are responded to in various ways by another party (Reicher, 1997). If we attempt to analyse what happens in experiments without exploring the use of language, we risk missing the social processes that should be at the heart of the study of social psychology.

Note: The extract from participant 0208 is reproduced by permission of Alexandra Milgram.

Stephen Gibson is in the Department of Psychology & Sport, York St John University s.gibson@yorksj.ac.uk

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research (see box). The discussion started with a question on distinctions between ‘digital methods’ and researching the ‘digital world’.

Crossing into the digital realm

Researching the digital world

Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans, Christine Griffin, Yvette Morey and Helen Murphy look at the issues for researchers in online and digital research This article reports on a discussion with a group of qualitative researchers working with digital and online research. The conversation took as its starting point the social and technological changes that make distinctions between on and off line selves increasingly irrelevant. Through this lens the group considered the distinctive contribution of qualitative research methods to investigate the complexity of the networked human experience, including the embodied and emotional elements of life online.

They also considered the new BPS internet research guidelines and future areas for research, particularly the impact of an intensified life lived out through the imagined presence of another and the blurring of public and private, work and personal lives.

questions resources

Snee, H., Hine, C., Morey, Y. et al. (in press). Digital methods for social science: An interdisciplinary guide to research innovation. Basingstoke: Palgrave. http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk

references

D

In the era of ‘big data’ what can qualitative researchers offer to digital and online research?

Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? New Media and Society 11(6), 985–1002.

Boyd, D. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.) A networked self (pp.39–58).

New York: Routledge.

Broekhuizen, F. & Evans, A. (2014). Pain, pleasure and bridal beauty. Journal of Gender Studies.

Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top?

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usting off a lecture on ‘internet research’ written only three years ago, it seemed so dated. The focus was on the interactive possibilities of Web 2.0 technology as a research tool, it conceptualised a virtual world, discrete from the ‘real’ one, and the structures and business models that enabled such technology were not considered. For this semester the lecture got a revamp.

Renamed ‘digital selves’, it considers debates over ‘Web 3.0’ and uses terminology such as ‘on- and offline selves’ to recognise the incorporation of the internet, digital devices and digital software into everyday lives. The challenge it now highlights is how to study the flow of information on interconnected platforms that gives people a sense of agency in their identity projects, while it is also structured to benefit business.

But the old lecture does not have to be discarded completely. Some content is still relevant: unprecedented access to people and their communications; the convenience of transcription-free qualitative data and cost-free questionnaire software; a continued blurring of public and private as personal data is shared on the web; and the opportunity to explore identity, social interaction and meaning making, all key issues for qualitative psychologists. In this context The Psychologist brought us together at the University of West of England as five qualitative psychologists experienced in digital research to discuss our views on the opportunities and challenges of doing online and digital

How do we explore the complexity of networked human experience?

Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media and Society, 14(7), 1164–1180.

Clerkin, E.M., Smith, A.R. & Hames, J.L. (2013). The interpersonal effects of Facebook reassurance seeking.

Journal of Affective Disorders, 151(2), 525–530.

DeWall, C.N., Buffardi, L.E., Bonser, I. & Keith Campbell, W. (2011).

Narcissism and implicit attention

The digital realm is embedded in many people’s everyday lives, both for our research participants and for us as researchers. Digital television, mobile technology with constant internet access, GPS and high-quality audio and video technologies have transformed social media platforms and practices. Apps and websites digitally link pre-internet media such as magazines, interviews are conducted with digital recorders, and reading groups held on Skype. Expanding ‘smart’ technology connects our material and embodied world to the internet, from fridges to heart-rate monitors.

Increasingly sophisticated algorithms enable extensive data mining, such that users’ identities and online practices have become commercial products (Beer, 2009; Bucher, 2012; Fuchs, 2014). All of this makes distinctions between the ‘on-’ and ‘offline’ world increasingly irrelevant.

A key challenge for researchers then is how to understand and analyse this complexity. Close collaborations across and between disciplines are required, linking psychology with computer science, sociology, cultural studies and media studies (see for example, van Dijck, 2013). There is a strong tradition of this type of close interdisciplinary collaboration in qualitative psychology.

Qualitative psychologists are well placed to offer the deep levels of analysis and the contextualisation of meaning and experience that is required when researching the digital world.

From this perspective, qualitative research offers a vital contribution to research in the era of ‘big data’. For example, sentiment analysis identifying patterns of ‘likes’ related to a particular topic or set of topics can give us a valuable understanding of how specific ‘targets’ are linked on social media. But

seeking. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(1), 57–62.

Edwards, G. (2010). Mixed-method approaches to social network analysis.

ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper NCRM/015.

Available at tinyurl.com/cdee99o Evans, A. & Riley, S. (2014). Technologies of sexiness: Sex, identity and consumer culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Evans, A. & Riley, S. (in press). The entrepreneurial practices of becoming a doll. In A.S. Elias, R. Gill and C. Scharff (Eds.) Aesthetic labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ferreday, D. (2009). Online belongings: Fantasy, affect and web communities.

Oxford: Peter Lang.

Ferreday, D. (2010). Reading disorders:

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Watch the discussion This article stemmed from a roundtable discussion which The Psychologist facilitated at the University of West of England. The participants, and authors of this article, were Sarah Riley (Reader in Psychology at Aberystwyth University), Adrienne Evans (Senior Lecturer at Coventry University), Christine Griffin (Professor of Psychology, University of Bath), Yvette Morey (Research Fellow at the University of West of England) and Helen Murphy (Principal Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of East London).

A video of the discussion accompanies this article on our website. Thanks to Adam Teighe for his work on editing the piece.

there are significant gaps in this knowledge, notably how such online practices operate in specific social, economic and cultural contexts, what such connections mean to people, and how they are embedded in everyday lives.

The gaps in our understanding of online practices are not addressed by an adherence to orthodox approaches. For example, research on Facebook has taken known psychological facets (e.g. attachment theory, addiction and personality) and framed them over/on a digital platform without considering their appropriateness or usefulness in understanding and recording online social practices (see for example, Hart et al., 2015; Suissa, 2015; Wang et al., 2015).

We argue that there is a need to think a bit deeper and harder, challenging ourselves as psychologists to consider the complexity of human practice that may be reproduced across on- and offline contexts or that may be significantly altered by being played out over multiplatform digital business products.

For example, analyses of online embodiment show complex issues to hand, which sometimes produce exaggerated sociocultural norms (e.g. in relation to breast or penis size on dating websites: Waskul et al., 2000), and at other times playfully inverting them (e.g. the normalising of ‘gender bending’ avatars: see MacCallum-Stewart, 2008).

Online suicide and the death of hope.

Journal for Cultural Research, 14(4), 409–426.

Forest, A.L. & Wood, J.V. (2012). When social networking is not working.

Psychological Science, 23(3), 295–230.

Fuchs C. (2010). Labor in informational capitalism and on the internet. The Information Society, 26, 179–196.

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media: A critical introduction. London: Sage.

Digital participation can challenge norms and allow new contradictory senses of self to emerge. Facebook’s original ‘one to many’ identity presentation challenged the everyday multiplicity of identities, whereas the diffused and fractured representations of a person produced through participation on the internet fundamentally challenged the notion of a coherent self (Gergen, 2000; van Dijck, 2013). Such complexity means that while the possibilities offered by new digital tools and platforms are considerable, care must be taken to avoid engaging in short-sighted ways that are ineffective or that neglect longstanding research issues. For example, researchers have raised concern over the rush to develop apps for a range of health and psychological needs that often fail to engage with the complexity of behaviours such as self-harm or significant life events such as pregnancy (Ferreday, 2010; Riley et al., in press). These moves are also criticised for focusing on individual responsibility while overlooking the social, cultural, commercial and political dimensions of digital technology (Lupton, 2014).

The huge amount of material that is publicly available online is seductive. It lures us into studying online texts, but we will have limited understanding if we do not also try to understand how they are embedded into people’s everyday lives, in

Gergen, (2000). The saturated self. New York: Basic Books.

Gill, R. & Pratt A. (2008). In the social factory? Theory, Culture and Society, 25(7–8), 1–30.

Gregg, M. (2010). On Friday night drinks: Workplace affects in the age of the cubicle. In M. Gregg & G.J. Seigworth (Eds.) The affect theory reader.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Griffin, C., Szmigin, I., Bengry-Howell, A.,

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

terms of psychological processes, social practices and the wider context in which people are located. In considering the wider context of digital practices, indepth qualitative research draws attention to the way the digital realm is ‘embodied’ and ‘embedded’ (Hine, 2015), providing accounts that are absent in traditional quantitative ‘big data’ approaches. A focus on context also allows us to examine the role of the underlying infrastructure on participants’ communication practices and the experience of being networked.

For example, Beer’s (2009) examination of ways in which networked data circulates and operates through the filtering of information by search algorithms highlights the importance of a focus on the affordances of the platform as well as participants’ communication practices (see also Boyd, 2010; Bucher, 2012). Other qualitative work has helped us theorise affect and how the internet creates new ways of feeling connected to others (Ferreday, 2009).

In the era of big data qualitative psychology has a major contribution to make, offering an understanding of the meanings behind the click and locating these at the interrelations of the embodied, material, subjective, affective, technological and political, so that we can explore the complexity of the networkedhuman experience. Combining the benefits of quantitative big data analysis

et al. (2013). Inhabiting the contradictions. Feminism and Psychology, 23(2), 184–206.

Hall, S. (2011). The neo-liberal revolution.

Cultural Studies 25(6), 705–728.

Hart, J., Nailling, E., Bizer, G.Y. & Collins, C.K. (2015). Attachment theory as a framework for explaining engagement with Facebook.

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Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the internet. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hodkinson, P. & Lincoln, S. (2008). Online journals as virtual bedrooms? Young, 16(1), 27–46.

Karatzogianni, A. & Kuntsman, A. (2012).

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Lupton, D. (2014). Digital sociology.

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with qualitative approaches requires a multimethod as well as an interdisciplinary approach. For example, the sophisticated statistical techniques of social network analysis that provide a snapshot of existing ties within a network can be combined with qualitative approaches (e.g. walking interviews, diaries of communicative practices, participatory mapping) that focus on the lived experience of social networks and the meanings that ties have (Edwards, 2010). This and other qualitative methods also allow the analysis of changes over time (Hine, 2015).

Our celebrations of the qualitative contribution in the era of big data are, however, somewhat tempered as we considered two forces likely to reduce the impact and value of qualitative research: a fetishisation of quantification as a fast way of mapping large-scale human behaviour and conversely, how qualitative research is ‘labour intensive in a way that big data approaches are not [and] requires spending time with people online and offline, working out how the various aspects of their lives fit together and how the Internet makes sense for them’ (see tinyurl.com/n7fdogc). Now is the time to challenge the pervasive assumption that research on ‘big data’ must only be quantitative. Qualitative research has a great deal to offer in complementing and extending existing research in this area.

Old dogs with new tricks?

It remains the case that the choice of research methods should always be dictated by the research question. We also recognise the value of a range of new research methods for studying the digital world and how it operates, not only at a technological level but also in terms of particular topics or communities who are associated with online practices. But we need to be careful not to get swallowed up in the enthusiasm for digital methods and engage in ‘digital methodolatry’, overlooking existing methods that are able to engage with complex issues for

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MacCallum-Stewart, E. (2008). Real boys carry girly epics. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2(1), 27–40.

Morey, Y., Bengry-Howell, A. Griffin, C. et al. (2014). Festivals 2.0: Consuming, producing and participating in the extended festival experience. In A. Bennett, J. Taylor & I. Woodward (Eds.) The festivalization of culture.

Farnham: Ashgate.

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the lure of the new and untested.

Digital methods often have antecedents in earlier research, such as ethnography, meaning that researchers need to perform a fine balancing act between not innovating for innovation’s sake but equally not employing traditional methods in an insensitive way.

An example of the latter is evident in ‘personality’ research on Facebook and other social networking sites that assumes core definable ‘traits’ as though these are relatively stable across and within the lived experience of the digital world (e.g.

DeWall et al., 2011; Weisbuch et al., 2009). The challenge for digital researchers, then, is finding methods that can map complexity, including: participation on interconnected social media platforms, communication across on- and offline spaces, and content that is visual, textual, embodied and material.

This is as likely to draw from visual sociology and digital ethnography as it is from qualitative textual analyses or quantitative mapping and counting techniques.

We are also interested in what online communication can do to ‘traditional’ methods, especially in terms of space and time. The ability to conduct research interviews over Skype is not just a convenience but can facilitate important shifts in communication. For example, the participant in a cross-national bridal study who started the online interview saying that wedding objects weren’t important, slowly filled the room with her wedding album, decorations, gifts, and dress, which then became digital objects through the medium of Skype (see Broekhuizen & Evans 2014). Similarly, digital technologies allow us to visualise, archive and disseminate in ways that are more difficult to do with offline pen-andpaper methods.

Ethics guidelines – up to the job?

In 2013 the British Psychological Society released a new set of guidelines called Ethics Guidelines for Internet-Mediated

Nakamura, L. (2000). Race in cyberspace.

London: Routledge.

Nakamura, L. (2011). Economies of digital production in East Asia: iPhone girls and the transnational circuits of cool. Media Fields Journal, 2, 1–10. www.mediafieldsjournal.org/ economies-of-digital Riley, S., Evans, A. & Robson, M. (in press). Postfeminism and health: Critical psychology and media

Research (tinyurl.com/bpsimr13).

Previous guidelines were based on earlier iterations of the internet and were not equipped for the messiness and complexity of notions around public and private, authorship, and ownership on the participatory web. The new guidelines are reassuring in that they acknowledge many of these issues and try to deal with them in a context-appropriate way.

Acknowledging the fact that many people still perceive their content to be private, even when it is ‘public’, the guidelines come down on the side of caution with regard to obtaining valid consent and ensuring confidentiality and anonymity.

Given how ‘sticky’ and searchable content is, it makes sense that even data collected unobtrusively from social networking or social media sites can harm unwitting participants when published and disseminated. There is also the question of balance between the benefits of gaining an understanding of a community or behaviour and driving said community and its associated content underground (Morey et al., 2014). Not only may individual participants be emotionally and reputationally harmed, but social groups and communities may be threatened by new or increased scrutiny. For example, members of selfharm and pro-ED sites continually change key terms to avoid detection by search algorithms which may result in regulation or blocking by ISPs or platform providers.

But even with the new recommendations, getting the balance right is difficult. Conducting ethical research through dialogue between participants and researchers that acknowledges inequalities and power differentials (e.g. see 2013’s New Brunswick Declaration: tinyurl.com/qy8hf74) is difficult and sometimes, impossible, in the digital research world. For example, trying to obtain valid consent to use an image that has been reblogged or re-circulated hundreds of thousands of times, is impractical if not impossible. Obtaining valid consent from big platform providers

perspectives. London: Routledge.

Rodham, K. & Gavin, J. (2010). The ethics of online research: The new challenges of new media. In F. Columbus (Ed.) Internet policies and issues (pp.205–214). New York: Nova.

Suissa, A.J. (2015). Cyber addictions: Toward a psychosocial perspective.

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media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vasalou, A. & Joinson., A.N. (2009). Me, myself and I: The role of interactional context on self-presentation through avatars. Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 510–520.

Wang, C.W., Ho, R.T.H., Chan, C.L.W. & Tse, S. (2015). Exploring personality characteristics of Chinese adolescents with internet-related

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(e.g. Facebook), which are motivated by commercial interests and increasingly moving towards becoming the gatekeepers and owners of the data they host, is a further complicating factor (Fuchs, 2010, 2014). To deal with such complexities, psychologists involved in qualitative research in online contexts have argued that research ethics committees need to include researchers with expertise in this field (Rodham & Gavin, 2010).

What are the ‘hot’ topics?

It’s clear that the internet facilitates a blurring of public and private in a way that has significant implications for psychology. Living life publicly online and through digital technology is a requirement to socially ‘exist’ for many people now (Fuchs, 2014), and this opens up new possibilities and associated new challenges. For example, platforms such as Facebook, Flicker, Tumblr, Snapchat, etc. offer the opportunity for people to creatively produce and share representations of themselves across time (Hodkinson & Lincoln, 2008). The corollary of this public sharing is that people are vulnerable to intense public critique, past transgressions remain permanently exposed, bullies can no longer be left at the school gate, and the promise of a ‘digital revolution’ that overcomes difference seems a hope from a bygone age as trolls threaten rape for having an opinion. See, for example, Laurie Penny as one of many examples of women reporting this kind of behaviour – tinyurl.com/dxvg5p3; and Nakamura’s (2000) analyses of language in cyberspace as the homogenisation of straight, white male assumptions.

Digital media has also intensified a life lived out through the imagined presence of the other and contributed to our surveillance culture. Try this as an

addictive behaviors. Addictive Behaviors, 42, 32–35.

Waskul, D., Douglass, M. & Edgley, C. (2000).

Cybersex: Outercourse and the enselfment of the body. Symbolic Interaction, 23, 375–397.

Weisbuch, M., Ivcevic, Z. & Ambady, N. (2009). On being liked on the web and in the ‘real world’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 573–576.

activity: there is an app that will track your loved one giving you their map coordinates in real time. If you didn’t know this already you may have had an affective response: perhaps shock at the personal invasion, or amusement at the thought of technologically afforded arguments between couples. What you’re responding to is surveillance. Now think about a time when it would have been handy to have got hold of someone close to you, maybe the anxiety of not knowing where they were or frustration of looking for them in a large shopping centre.

Perhaps the app now seems quite useful?

There is a need then for psychological research exploring the personal experience of being networked. For while ‘the networked self’ has been discussed by internet researchers such as Boyd (2010); psychologists’ voices have been relatively absent on this issue (with some exceptions, for instance Vasalou and

Joinson, 2009, who examine the intersections between technology, behaviour, and the self). Where psychologists have contributed is in exploring the complexity of impression management on Facebook, the possibilities and anxieties social media affords for social interaction (Clerkin et al., 2013; Forest & Wood, 2012). There is room to develop this research. For example, much of the work on the creation of youth-generated content on social media considers such content in isolation of the platforms that allow for its creation, curation and communication.

Future research needs to include analysis of the particular features or affordances of digital platforms – such as social media sites – in order to understand the ways in which they amplify and extend individual and social identities online and unobtrusively advertise through data gleaned from demographic information and taste-preference

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algorithms (Bucher, 2012). Equally our emotional connections to online-ness is an issue that will become increasingly important (Karatzogianni & Kuntsman, 2012).

We also need to place our participants’ online practices within their sociopolitical context. For us this means considering neoliberal regimes of governance that construct ideal subjectivity in terms of a ‘choiceful’ subject, who is individually responsible for their actions and social practice and who employs consumer practices to transform themselves into their ideal self in a rational and autonomous way (for recent analyses, see for example, Evans & Riley, 2014; Hall, 2011). Neoliberalism is implicated in the production of a judgemental culture, where structural inequalities, such as those around gender, class and ethnicity, are masked under the ‘you can do it if you want it hard enough’ rhetoric of individualism (Griffin et al., 2013).

Online interactions are classed, radicalised, gendered, sexualised and embodied (e.g. Nakamura 2000, 2011). We can build on this work to explore differences in ‘digital agency’, examining how the production of new technologies forms part of new forms of labour, a ‘factory without walls’, shared on a global scale and structured by gender, class and ethnicity (Evans & Riley, in press; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Gregg, 2010). New research needs to take account of both the global inequalities of the production of digital content (can we speak of the ‘digital sweat shop’?) as well as the emotional labour involved in the blurring of social and working practices, when so much of work–life practice take place through the ‘network’.

We have argued above for an analysis of identity, social interaction and meaning making contextualised within its sociocultural, technological, political and economic context. From this standpoint, digital research has little changed our research imperatives or questions. But the pace of technological change, the increasing embeddedness of the digital, and the consequent generation of an unprecedented volume and speed of potential data, mean that we are now in a position to know both more and less about ourselves than ever. What’s needed is a balanced approach that acknowledges the broad knowing that accompanies big data, while reaffirming the deeper knowing that comes with thick data. It’s this complicated messiness of people that qualitative researchers like best.

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LOOKING BACK

Let a thousand flowers bloom Anna Madill outlines how qualitative methods in psychology, and the Society’s Section, have blossomed over the years

ualitative approaches have a long history in psychology. Jean Piaget drew heavily on qualitative observational methods and interviews, and psychotherapists have maintained a qualitative strand of practice-based inquiry since the very first narrative case studies of Sigmund Freud. However, the 1960s brought a change in ‘the development of qualitative research as method, with a concern for rigour and an interest in epistemology’ (Madill & Todd, 2002, p.5).

Key to this change was the 1965 publication of Awareness of Dying by Glaser and Strauss followed two years later by their classic The Discovery of Grounded Theory. These works from sociology offered a methodologically sophisticated, qualitative approach to tackling questions of relevance to social scientists, drawing broadly on the language of science to do so. Shortly after, in 1972, Harré and Secord’s groundbreaking book The Explanation of Social Behaviour proposed ethogenics as a new approach within psychology, in many ways pre-empting the ‘turn to language’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s and providing qualitative methods with an increasingly secure foothold in psychology.

In the 1980s psychotherapy researchers began to champion rigorous qualitative methods for understanding the in situ processes of therapy (Elliott, 1983), and educational psychologists appreciated quickly their potential for

references

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Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology.

Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77–101.

Burman, E.E. & Parker, I. (1993).

Discourse analytic research. London: Routledge.

Cacioppo, J.T. (2007). Psychology is a hub science. Observer, 20(8). tinyurl.com/qxwze22 Camic, P.M., Rhodes, J.E. & Yardley, L.

studying classroom behaviour and communication (e.g. Spector, 1984).

From the mid-1980s, drawing from the wider social sciences and humanities, psychologists also began to explore the implications of social constructionist approaches for studying sexuality and gender and developed a major strand of qualitative research in these areas (see Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1995). Probably the key publication of this period was Potter and Wetherell’s 1987 text Discourse and Social Psychology with its assertion that everyday language is worthy of study in its own right. And as the 1980s closed, Parker captured the ensuing upheaval in social psychology in his charismatically entitled book The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology – and How to End it.

The 1990s saw fuller development of qualitative approaches speaking to central concerns – substantive and methodological – of psychology as a discipline. Discursive social psychology maintained its successes with Edwards and Potter (1992) continuing to develop an ethnomethodologically informed version and Burman and Parker (1993) outlining an alternative, more politically informed, vision for discourse methods in psychology. In terms of thematic methods with an interest in experience as it is lived, a key publication of this period was Henwood and Pidgeon’s (1992) presentation of grounded theory as a method of relevance to psychologists: the first major article on qualitative methods in the British Journal of Psychology.

(Eds.) (2003). Qualitative research in psychology. Washington, DC: APA Press.

Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.

Elliott, R. (1983). Fitting process research to the practicing psychotherapist.

Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 20, 47–55.

Gough, B., Hugh-Jones, S., Lawton, R. et al. (2002). Developing guidelines for the

Rigorously ‘methodological’ qualitative research continued to flourish in psychotherapy process research with adaptations of existing methods (e.g. task analysis, Greenberg & Foerster, 1996), the creation of new approaches (e.g. consensual qualitative research, Hill et al., 1997) and the application of discourse methods (Madill & Barkham, 1997) and grounded theory (Rennie, 1994). And the way in which many qualitative approaches incorporate sensitivity to the workings of ideology allowed researchers to study the politics and processes of exclusion, discrimination and disability pertinent to educational institutions (e.g. Kastberg, 1998). Similarly, research on gender and sexuality have been highly fruitful areas for the development of qualitative methods in psychology (e.g. Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996).

Recognising these developments, a highly influential series of workshops on qualitative methods was held between 1992 and 1994 at Cumberland Lodge, organised by John Richardson and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Psychological Society. The workshops resulted in the 1996 Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences, well ahead of the first qualitative methods handbook of the American Psychological Association (Camic et al., 2003) (which, itself, was influenced strongly by British academics with chapters by Karen Henwood, Nick Pidgeon, Jonathan Potter and Lucy Yardley). At this point, Richardson (1996) identified several unmet needs of qualitative researchers in psychology: suitable textbooks, skilled supervisors, and competent examiners for postgraduate research.

At the close of the 20th century, in 1999, the 18th International Human Science Research Conference, chaired by Peter Ashworth, took place at Sheffield Hallam University. At this conference I was part of a small group of qualitative psychologists wondering what it would be like to have our own Section of the

supervision of undergraduate qualitative research in psychology.

LTSN/HEA Report. Available at tinyurl.com/q5gkmzj Greenberg, L.S. & Foerster, F.S. (1996).

Task analysis exemplified. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 439–446.

Henwood, K.L. & Pidgeon, N.F. (1992).

Psychological research and psychological theorising. British

Journal of Psychology, 83, 97–111.

Hill, C.E., Thompson, B.J. & Williams, E.N. (1997). A guide to conducing consensual qualitative research. The Counselling Psychologist, 25, 517–572.

Hugh-Jones, S., Madill, A., Gibson, S. et al. (2012). A national survey of qualitative research methods teaching in UK HE psychology departments. BPS Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section

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British Psychological Society. The idea stuck with me and I stayed in touch with Zazie Todd about developing a proposal.

After presenting it at a BPS Research Board meeting, we were strongly supported, and in 2005 the Section came into being, the one required revision to change the proposed name from Qualitative Psychology to Qualitative Methods in Psychology (QMiP). Another list of needs was included in the original proposal for the Section (see tinyurl.com/opth4j8) stemming from formal and informal discussions at a Higher Education Academy–funded workshop at the University of Leeds (Gough et al., 2002): pressure on a small number of staff to fulfil increasing qualitative methods teaching requirements; poor access to research funding; poor access to publishing in quality journals; and potential for marginalisation within psychology departments. In contrast to Richardson’s list of needs, which have largely now been fulfilled, some of the list compiled from the 2002 HEA workshop are still issues for qualitative psychologists today.

As co-founder of QMiP, and former chair (2008–11), my vision for the Section was to be supportive of diversity in qualitative methods. Psychology is a hub discipline (Cacioppo, 2007) that makes meaningful connections with a wide range of other subjects such that other disciplines can be understood to be arranged around it. Although this is arguably a sign of scientific vibrancy, there is a danger that psychology could fragment as a discipline. Qualitative psychologists have always drawn heavily on other subjects and often work in very interdisciplinary ways, and there are identifiable fracture lines between different approaches to qualitative research (Madill & Gough, 2008).

This fracturing of qualitative psychology was the topic of a QMiPsponsored symposium and keynote from David Rennie – ‘Toward a MetaMethodology of Qualitative Research’ – at the BPS Annual Conference in 2007. One

report. Available at tinyurl.com/pcvbxye Kastberg, S.M. (1998). Turning fish into swans. Dissertation Abstracts International, A (Humanities and Social Sciences), Vol 59(1-A), Jul 1998, 0129, US. University Microfilms International.

King, N., Bravington, A., Brooks, J. et al.

(2013). The Pictor technique.

Qualitative Health Research, 23,

position is that qualitative methods are extremely diverse at the paradigmatic level and that it would be inappropriate to seek an overarching coherence. Against this is the argument that it is fruitful to seek an overarching theory of, or methodology for, qualitative research.

Rennie, in particular, argued strongly for the overarching paradigmatic coherence of qualitative methods, presenting his argument in a keynote at the 2010 QMiP conference which was published as his swan song in Psychological Methods (Rennie, 2012). David was a huge support to me as a developing academic, but we never saw eye-to-eye on this issue, and I am, myself, persuaded of fundamental differences across the spectrum of qualitative methods and that these differences should be celebrated (Madill & Gough, 2008).

To me, a nicely pragmatic way of getting to the bare bones of qualitative methodology can be found in the articulation of ‘thematic analysis’. Most qualitative research starts out with some kind of thematisation (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), and Braun and Clarke (2006) unpick this seemingly simply process, identifying the methodological bifurcations leading to different kinds of

Rigorously ‘methodological’ qualitative research has continued to flourish

1138–1152.

Kitzinger, C. & Wilkinson, S. (1995).

Transitions from heterosexuality to lesbianism. Developmental Psychology, 31, 95–104.

Madill, A. & Barkham, M. (1997).

Discourse analysis of a theme in one successful case of brief psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 44, 232–244.

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analysis. Not all qualitative methods will use all the steps, and some will veer off thematisation very quickly, but major types of qualitative analysis can probably be recognised, at least in their initial stages, as certain pathways through the process outlined. Accordingly, Braun and Clarkes’ atheoretical thematic procedural has been a major success for qualitative psychology.

Another huge success in contemporary qualitative psychology is that of interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, 2004): a qualitative method by and for psychologists that is a dominant approach in the discipline today. Less well known, but worth keeping an eye on, are dialogical methods based on Bakhtinian theory, particularly that adapted for the rigorous methodological standards of psychology

by Paul Sullivan (2011) – QMiP Outstanding Early Career Scholar award winner 2009.

A huge step forward in the last 10 years has been the number of mainstream psychology journals willing to publish qualitative research. For example, the qualitative methods special issue of Health Psychology in 2015 edited by Brendan Gough and Janet Deatrick is an amazing coup. There is much more work to be done to make it commonplace to find qualitative research in top psychology journals, but we are getting there.

Another big success is the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology (first issue 2004) which has published a number of extremely well-cited papers.

Qualitative research has had a much harder time getting accepted by the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology inaugurated in 2012 is, on the face of it rather bizarrely, part of Division 5: Evaluation, Measurement and Statistics. However, creating further opportunity for high-level qualitative methods publications, their flagship journal Qualitative Psychology was launched in 2014.

Qualitative methods in psychology

Madill, A. & Gough, B. (2008). Qualitative research and its place in psychological science. Psychological Methods, 13, 254–271.

Madill, A. & Todd, K.Z. (2002). Proposal to the Council of the British Psychological Society for the formation of a new Section of the Society on 'Qualitative Methods in Psychology. Available at tinyurl.com/opth4j8 Potter, J. & Hepburn, A. (2005). Qualitative

interviews in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2, 281–307.

Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987).

Discourse and social psychology.

London: Sage.

Rennie, D.L. (1994). Clients’ deference in psychotherapy. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 41, 427–437 Rennie, D.L. (2012). Qualitative research as methodical hermeneutics.

Psychological Methods, 17, 385–398.

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got a foothold in the subdiscipline of social psychology, and 10 years ago I would have considered myself to be a social psychologist. However, today, qualitative psychologists are just as likely to be working in health psychology. Who would have thought 10 years ago that it is almost a requirement to have a qualitative methodologist (although not always a qualitative psychologist) on large National Institute of Health Research–funded randomised controlled trials? It does look like qualitative health psychology has a bright future, with NIHR funding ring-fenced for the moment at least.

Some psychologists specialising in qualitative methods are situated in general social science departments, and the success of qualitative health psychology has meant that many of our colleagues are employed in interdisciplinary, health-related departments, and some are working even further afield (e.g. Victoria Tischler has recently moved to the University of the Arts, London). I think this demonstrates the wide applicability and value of qualitative methods, and psychologists as key proponents who bring additional specialist skills and knowledge. On the other hand, it has been a concern for QMiP that psychologists specialising in qualitative methods may find it difficult to secure a post in traditional psychology departments. This may be getting harder as a result of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), with psychology most recently positioned in a Unit of Assessment with psychiatry and neuroscience and, hence, towards research not associated particularly with qualitative methodology.

Qualitative methods are specified in the BPS undergraduate syllabus and in the Quality Assurance Agency subject benchmarks and there appears to be no shortage of doctorates (PhDs and doctorates in clinical psychology) drawing on qualitative methods. There was a special issue on teaching of qualitative methods in Qualitative

Richardson, J.T.E. (Ed.) (1996). Handbook of qualitative research methods for psychology and the social sciences.

Leicester: BPS Books.

Smith, J.A. (2004). Reflecting on the development of interpretative phenomenological analysis and its contribution to qualitative research in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1, 39–54.

Spector, B.S. (1984). Qualitative research.

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reworked, perhaps, for the Research in Psychology in 2008; and, methodological requirements and when the Higher Education Academy research questions of interest of the was reorganised in 2010–2012, the group discipline. My training in psychology has Teaching Qualitative Research Methods at made me value methodological rigour Undergraduate Level in Psychology had and empiricism, but sometimes this may been so successful that it was one of the stop us making the audacious leaps and few subject specialisms to be retained in trying out new ideas that scholars in the the form of a Special Interest Group. In humanities appear freer to do. Qualitative 2010 QMiP commissioned research to health psychologists are well placed to understand the extent and context of the contribute to the medical humanities, and teaching of qualitative methods in BPSthis may be a particularly useful forum accredited psychology departments for cross-fertilisation with methods and (Hugh-Jones et al., 2012). This theories developing in English. demonstrated that the qualitative Semi-structured methods being taught interviewing is still the at undergraduate level mainstay of qualitative do reflect the “…there are real psychology, but the sustained dominant methods critique of this method I think used in UK research tensions with founding has had a fruitful impact on (interviewing, focus notions of academic developing more innovative groups, discourse freedom” ways of generating data (Potter analysis, IPA, and & Hepburn, 2005). In particular, thematic analysis). there is a blossoming of visual However, a ‘culture of methods, which is particularly interesting marginalisation’ was still being given qualitative research’s usual focus on experienced by many qualitative methods words. Innovative methods include the staff. use of the Pictor technique (King et al., Qualitative psychology has come 2013) and photo-elicitation, and a huge so far that Sage is publishing a major area of development awaits qualitative retrospective edited by Brendan Gough of psychology in analysing not just what key qualitative methods papers. I wonder visual methods facilitate participants to what a retrospective in another 10 years say, but in working directly with the will include? I would like qualitative visual material itself. Digital cultures are methods papers to be commonplace in a huge area of interest for the Arts and top, mainstream psychology journals and Humanities Research Council, and, again, for there to be secure career paths in qualitative psychologists have the traditional psychology departments for methods and are likely to find innovative psychologists specialising in qualitative cross-fertilisation here with work being methods. Health sciences may offer done across the humanities. Central to qualitative psychologists a safe haven, this is exploiting the affordances of new but I hope that this will not overly technologies in data generation and narrow the range of acceptable methods analysis and understanding how this or hold qualitative research to simplified impacts subjectivity as well as the ways and sometimes inappropriate evaluation people express themselves and interact criteria. The REF is driving what is valued with others. in research and has, so far, pushed We are in a higher education psychology further away from the social environment more heavily regulated than and human sciences. This is unfortunate ever before, and there are real tensions because qualitative psychology is well with founding notions of academic placed to discover and import the most freedom. As well as providing excellence innovative theories and methods from in our teaching and research we are being the social sciences and the humanities, asked to show how our research has impact, and QMiP can play a huge role in supporting qualitative psychologists to showcase the social relevance of our Journal of Research in Science research. However, I hope that there is Teaching, 21, 459–467. still a role for research that is pursued Sullivan, P. (2011). Qualitative data analysis out of pure curiosity and an intuition using a dialogical approach. London: that there is something novel, important Sage.

Wilkinson, S. & Kitzinger, C. (1996). and interesting to be found.

Representing the other: A Feminism & Psychology reader. London: Sage.

I Anna Madill is Chair in Qualitative

Inquiry, in the School of Psychology, University of Leeds a.l.madill@leeds.ac.uk

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SGCP 5th European Coaching Psychology Conference 2015 Breaking New Ground Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December 2015 at the Holiday Inn London Bloomsbury This Conference will inspire collaborations in research evidence, professional accreditation and training routes.

It will provide a platform for setting the aspirations and agenda for both coaching and coaching psychology for the coming years.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:Tuesday 1 September 2015 There will be two days of Impressive Speakers, exciting and new Topics and a broad range of Master classes, Skills Workshops and Scientific Papers covering the following themes: Leadership, Executive and Business Coaching Positive Psychology Coaching (including resilience) Tools & Techniques in Coaching Psychology including CPD & Peer Practice Coaching Psychology Research Network, including international collaborations, international developments, new research, new researchers and new developments This event is organised by the BPS Special Group in Coaching Psychology and administered by KC Jones conference&events Ltd, 01332 224501

Please visit www.sgcp.eu for further information

Annual Conference 6-8 January 2016 TEP Day 5 January 2016 Holiday Inn London Bloomsbury Towards an inclusive psychology – do labels and diagnosis help or hinder?

The issue of labelling behaviour in the profession of Educational Psychology is controversial and contentious.

During the development of the practice of Educational Psychology, the provision of education for children with additional needs was based on a medical model of deficit, focusing on differences, and within child explanations. One hundred years on the conference aims to explore how 21st century Educational Psychology has shifted the agenda from an emphasis on illness to well-being, from problems to solutions, from deficit to potential and from within child explanations to careful consideration of the influence of context.

Submissions deadline – Monday 14 September 2015 This event is organised by the BPS Division of Educational and Child Psychology and administered by KC Jones conference&events Ltd, 01332 227774 For further information, please visit the website: www.bps.org.uk/decp2016

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663

INTERVIEW

‘We’re all Jedi or Sith’ Miles Thomas meets John Amaechi OBE – psychologist, organisational consultant, high-performance executive coach and former NBA basketball player

ell me about your time at school in T Stockport.

I hated school. I hated Stockport. The school I went to had perhaps ideas above its station, in terms of the type of school it should be – a grammar school that thought that kind of emotionally illiterate, highly didactic method of teaching was righteous, because it somehow separated the wheat from the chaff. In other words, kids who could learn that way were clever and worthy, and kids that couldn’t learn that way were stupid and unworthy.

I flirted with worthiness through extreme effort, but fundamentally it’s not how I learnt well.

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through long-term disease or illness.

My mother worked a lot in palliative care, and she also worked in a psycho-geriatric hospital. My first job at eight years old was as an occupational aide there!

Typically it started off as teas and coffees, but even then they were so understaffed it was interacting with adults who weren’t quite there. As a youngster I remember being terrified. ‘How come I’m young,

Yet you’ve been successful in an academic sense?

When I got to take the subjects I wanted to take.

I’m quite jealous when I hear of people who took psychology for A-level.

That wasn’t an option.

I had one option, in order to read psychology at university, and that was to do biology, chemistry and physics. I took subjects I hated… I got to America, and they believe in this breadth of education, so your first year you need to take French again… my second year at university, I’m taking abnormal psychology, experimental psychology, a statistics class…

they’re old, old people are supposed to be there?’ And you realise the adult is really relating to you on your own level, driven by how frightening it is…

So what is it about psychology?

I wanted to be a psychologist since I was seven. I watched my mother as a doctor, as a GP, and I realised very quickly when I went on visits with her that the vast majority of her job didn’t seem to be anything to do with medicine. It seemed to be her ability to help people be resilient

So you had an understanding of the fallibility of mind at quite a young age?

Yes. I mean, my body is wrecked, through years of doing too much with it and now not doing enough with it. But the only thing that really frightens me about my future is the idea that one day my mind will go. I work with a disability charity

and have a number of good friends in wheelchairs. So I recognise physical disability as inconvenient. But ‘losing my marbles’ would be devastating, especially if I knew it was happening.

Which psychologists have influenced you?

The professor when I was doing my MSc on marriage and family therapy in the States was Will Stillwell. He was old enough to have been a student of Carl Rogers, so he’s been around for a while.

It was the first time I’d sat down with someone and used a therapeutic method which was open and reflective and took into account the lies of humanism, which was that you don’t interject anything of yourself. It was exactly what I had imagined psychology would be when I was seven. When I was seven I thought psychology was like being a Jedi. In a way, we are all either Jedi or Sith.

Is that a bit of a primitive split?

It might be, but – and this is why I love Star Wars – the moment you realise that how people fall into being Sith is actually not as simple as ‘are they evil or are they good?’… If you read the books, a lot of Jedi are not very nice people! And there’s Sith, the Anakin Skywalker narrative of how he transitions. It’s about watching the vigilance that you have to have over yourself. I know very well that my life could be easier, more abundant in terms of cash and many other things, if I used my skills in a slightly different way. There are regularly pieces of work where I say ‘you don’t need me for this’. I have a time limit on all my coaching – we’ll do six months, then we’ll do another six months, and then I have to be sure that I am not then becoming a consistent crutch for a person. Some of my peers are on four years of coaching. If it’s mentoring, that’s a different thing. If it’s just sitting down with a glass of wine, then fine, but if it’s directive… I worry about that.

So your perspective is more about activating their resources in a longterm way.

We all have those moments when we are sitting across from somebody or a couple and we think, ‘I know exactly what the problem is with you, why don’t you just do this?’ In your head you’re screaming it.

But you have to stop, because it’s not about me, it’s not about us, it’s about them and what process will help them get to the best solution. You need to nudge people towards that ‘Eureka!’ moment of their own, that gives them not just that answer, but ‘wow, I came up with that answer!’

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You want the person to be the powerful of Notre Dame to read, I thought ‘that one, to go away and do things, not to must be what people see when they see invest too much in you. I’m suspicious me’. There’s a sense of fear of the monster, of the charismatic, the powerful but also ridicule and mockery. That’s coach… everyday. If we walk up and down this My son once told me a lovely thing… in street, you watch – people will be on their basketball there’s a backboard and a hoop, phones not paying attention, and they’ll and you shoot off the backboard into the get up close and see me and they’ll freak hoop, and it’s just a universal truth that out. Or, if you walk past, turn around and some backboards are soft, you hit them three or four steps away people will be anywhere and it’ll go in… a ‘forgiving’ pointing and laughing. backboard. My son once told me that Because of your size?

I was a forgiving backboard… whenever It’s a combination of height and size, he would throw his words and ideas at and colour. That combination to people me, they would go in the hoop. That’s as is apparently terrifying, and mockerymuch credit as you can give me – you’re worthy. the one aiming, you’re the one shooting, I’m just a forgiving backboard. But And the discrimination is overt – you sometimes you can’t control whether were refused entry to people find you a club for being ‘too charismatic, and for me big and too black’? that is not helped by the “I’m always cautious of It happens all the time. fact that I am unusual things that appeal to me The other night I was looking. The too much” in Soho, my two friends juxtaposition of that and went in first, they were what I do for a living is wearing Chuck Taylors. I’d somehow odd and come from work and was wearing a suit enticing for people. I’m fairly esoteric, so and tie. They looked at my shoes. It really if people listen to me on the radio it’s not pissed me off. I’m not blind, I can see what they’ve normally heard before, the what you’re doing, it’s blatant and it’s way I use words has an impact. These rude. But I can’t do anything about it, aren’t affectations I use for my work, it’s because as soon as I lose my temper I ‘fit how I talk to my kids and my grandkids, type’. So I’m mandated not to… it just everybody. I make points by telling cedes. I’m not allowed to lose my stories. So there’s some combination of temper… I’ve known that since I was this and the weird CV that I have that six. I can’t afford to lose control, because makes that happen a lot of the time I can accidentally hurt people just by without me wanting it to. turning around, so imagine what I can do Your Twitter feed says that ‘the most if I really intended to. It would only take unlikely of people in the most a second. improbable of circumstances can Your mum was a GP, so I suppose become extraordinary’…

What could be more unlikely that a 17from early on you had a model of the year-old who read Asimov and ate steak Hippocratic Oath, ‘do no harm’.

Yes, and the way I physically manifest slices, in six years, playing in the best on the world around me is about doing basketball league in the world, having no harm. I talk a lot with senior people never touched a ball before? It seems about their responsibility to do no harm, remarkably unlikely. For other people, and part of that is about recognising your it’s even more unlikely to them that size. If you don’t realise you’re a giant, somebody who played professional sports you do accidental damage all the time. would end up being a psychologist.

Before the age of 17 I thought I would The moment you accept the fact that you have power, you wield it differently. That have a desperately lonely life. I thought wielding tells you something about the I was a monster when I was 11 years old. person. Once you realise you’re a giant So 1981, in Stockport, in your and you still walk through the world bedroom. You described yourself as knocking people left and right, then you a ‘fat freak’. Did you have an epiphany? can say something about that character.

I don’t know if epiphany is the right You ‘came out’ in the NBA, where you word… it’s the first time I interacted with people who didn’t treat me like a monster. were the first and only Briton to have his jersey hung in the US Basketball I very much enjoy the idea of the lookingglass self concept. I looked in people’s Hall of Fame. Do you feel that part of faces, and reflected back was that I was a your role is to liberate people? monster. When I was given the Hunchback Oh no, that’s too much. I recognise the

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limits. I had meetings arranged with activists in China [when working for the BBC during the Beijing Olympics, and as a global ambassador for Amnesty International] and I cancelled them.

It would have been informative and perhaps even empowering to meet them, but I couldn’t account for their safety after I left.

I get some stick from the LGBT community because I advise people that if they’re likely to get fired from their job, who am I to tell them to come out for the betterment of society? People like Peter Tatchell are right that there’s a collective responsibility, but I lived in Utah, which has a large youth culture out on the streets because they have a religious culture which says your children must live the life, and if you don’t disown them you will be disowned by the church… so what kind of person would tell a 14-yearold to come out, you’ll feel better, you’ll be a great role model… but you’ll also be trying to find somewhere to sleep tonight.

Do your beliefs as a psychologist trump your political ones, in terms of safety, where people are at…

Rather stupidly, I had not considered that.

It would be nice if that was true. It’s somehow noble, and that of course appeals to me. But I’m always cautious of things that appeal to me too much.

Hmm, is compromise around political belief really noble?

People who are zealous, I am immediately fearful of them. As staunch as I am in some of my beliefs, I am not a zealot.

I am not interested in sacrificial lambs, that’s so medieval. There are some people out there, John Fashanu for example [whose brother Justin killed himself after homophobic bullying as a professional footballer], some people don’t seem to care how many have to come out, be pilloried, kill themselves for their particular cause. I do – the body count matters.

You adopted two children, and now they have their own children. How does it feel to be a granddad?

I’m very comfortable with it, but it’s a strange situation, to have essentially no family and yet lots of family. I live on my own, there’s no partner with me, there’s no evidence of kids in the house, yet somehow I have this massive family that’s in another country.

Is that through circumstance, or is there an element of choice in living alone?

In a work sense, interpersonally, I am Jedi

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quality! But in a social sense I’m useless, I find social interactions painful. I’m an INTJ, an extreme introvert, all social interactions are painful. I notice everything. Being introvert is not about an inability to interact, it’s about how energyexpensive it is. As I walk down the street I know everyone who is looking, everyone who is pointing, and I only have a certain amount of energy for that. So I stay in my house.

I don’t live anywhere, most of the time. I have some duties in Manchester, I’m an NHS Trustee. That’s five days a month. Then I’m in New York or Connecticut, with clients, five days a month. I have a charity in Manchester as well. I built a centre in 1999 that we opened in 2000. We have about 2500 kids a week going through our doors. I’m a little disappointed in it at the moment to be honest. I’m interested in a place that helps young people become more emotionally literate, that helps them be a bit more personally insightful. When we started we used to do MBTIs for young people, not because I think it’s the most accurate, but because any tool that’s simple enough for young people to do, that allows them to gain an understanding about how they operate and how other people operate and why they might find certain types of people irritating and others not, is a really good thing. I had to fight to get that done, and now I can’t get it done, and they just want to do a high-quality basketball centre and I don’t care about that.

What do you care about, in terms of pressing issues for psychologists?

In the community sense, there is a complete mismatch with how we look at psychological maladies and physical maladies. We’ve got hospitals, GPs and advice lines overrun with people with nothing wrong with them in a physical sense. And yet we have certain communities – men, minority groups – who just don’t access these services.

They find themselves in a justice-system response to their situation.

One of the biggest problems is that people just don’t take these issues seriously. Ridiculous people like Katie Hopkins continue to talk about depression as if it’s just a bit of sadness,

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cent of people in the House of Lords. They don’t see me as anything but a sportsperson.

That’s normal.

‘why don’t you suck it up?’ This narrative resonates with too many people. There are schoolteachers you talk to who see someone coming in, they say ‘he’s just a bit sad’ – no, sadness for six months?

Not sad.

What are your aspirations?

I’d like to be in the House of Lords, I’d like to be a cross-bench peer. I’ve already been rejected once. I really fit because I don’t care whose idea is a good idea, I care if it works. This is one of the things that I love about science, the idea that evidence counts. The rationality of it.

What works, counts. Whether I like it or not. If something I’m doing doesn’t work, I must stop doing that. Even if I’m really attached to it.

People chase their losses though.

I don’t. The moment that somebody can supply me with evidence, I’m not precious about it, it’s gone.

Is there a ruthless aspect to you?

I ruthlessly chop away people who betray me. There’s no second chance. You’re done. But not in a really proactive sense, I can’t imagine a proactive way that I’m ruthless.

It’s a defence, isn’t it?

Accidental harm, I think people do that. Even intentional harm, out of that moment of loss of control, even that… betrayal is different, and I feel very different about betrayal.

The Lords … you’re not going to give up, are you?

No. They’re wrong. I mean objectively wrong. Stack my CV up against 90 per

What should they see you as?

Who talks about themselves as what they were 10 years ago?

Who does that? Let’s talk about what I do now. I work with eight of the top 10 businesses in the world, in terms of any measure you would like to use. And I’m not cheap. They can’t all be idiots.

The annoying part is that I’m fairly sure that if I want to become a Labour or Lib Dem peer, there’s a pathway for that to happen. I just think it would be disingenuous to do that, because what I really want to do is be part of that core of backbenchers who are charged with looking at policy for unintended consequences, for rationale, for efficacy, without the lens of who comes out looking good if this policy goes through. I think this is such an important thing, especially as I lived in America and I’ve seen the Senate there… they should wear uniforms like Nascar drivers, because really they have special interests all over them. There’s no transparency with what they do. In the House of Lords, those cross-benchers are a voice of reason, rationality, and that’s a really powerful thing and I would like to be a part of that.

I think something about your story, being a big character, is ‘noisy’ for people, even for me as a psychologist.

How often do people meet ‘John’?

Rarely I would imagine. I have a lot of colleagues. There’s professional distance with that. But I have a small group of friends, and we are very much ourselves together.

I’m a spiky individual. Difficult to grab hold of. I’m not warm and fuzzy, in most people’s estimation. Professionally I am direct, firm, people recognise that I am pragmatically harsh when necessary and pragmatically warm when necessary.

But in my house, with a glass of red, I’m watching cartoons.

I John Amaechi OBE is a psychologist (and a Society member), organisational consultant and a high-performance executive coach. He is a New York Times best-selling author and former NBA basketball player. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of East London, where interviewer Miles Thomas works on the Doctorate in Education and Child Psychology.

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2015 CPD Workshops Professional development opportunities from your learned Society Expert witness: Responsibilities and business (Workshop 1)

3 September

Expert witness: Report writing (Workshop 2)

4 September

Working successfully in private practice

10 September

Understanding and working with: Hearing voices, delusions and paranoia (DCP) HERTFORD

21 September

Engaging effectively with the supervision and reflective practice process (Cross network)

23 September

Working with refugees and asylum seekers (Cross network)

28 September

Pluralism in qualitative research (Cross network)

6 October

Person-centred planning: A practical introduction for psychologists (Cross network)

6 October

Working successfully in private practice

8 October

A somatic approach to Integral Life Theory Practice (ILP) – Taking theory into practice (Cross network)

19 October

Introduction to ethics and professional practice: Ethical decision-making (DFP)

20 October

Psychological interventions for a variety of contexts: Issues of design and implementation (SGCP)

22 October

Cognitive assessment of children and young people (Day 2) (Cross network) GLASGOW

29 October

An introduction to mindfulness-based interventions for health psychologists (DHP)

30 October

CYP-IAPT and clinical psychology (DCP) MANCHESTER

30 October

Counselling skills for sport and physical exercise (DSEP)

5 November

Expert witness: Court room evidence (Workshop 3)

5 November

Expert witness: Using psychometrics (Workshop 4)

6 November

Don’t get caught out: Ethical and professional dilemmas for psychologists and psychotherapists in 2015 (Cross network)

9 November

Devising an effective performance appraisal system (DOP)

13 November

Sexualised behaviour: An integrated approach to supporting families and schools (DECP)

16 November

Working successfully in private practice

19 November

Mixed methods research for the quantitative researcher (Cross network)

27 November

Psychology: Heaven and hell

9 December

For more information on these CPD events and many more visit www.bps.org.uk/findcpd.

Follow us on Twitter: @BPSLearning #BPScpd

www.bps.org.uk/learningcentre

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REVIEWS

Far from the freak show?

In 1977, when Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man was first staged, understanding about the psychology of disfigurement was in its infancy. Research articles of the day focused on the many potential benefits of physical attractiveness, positing direct and proportionate relationships between the extent of a person’s attractiveness and the level of social success, educational or occupational achievement and self-esteem the person enjoyed.

Set in the 1890s, The Elephant Man focuses on real-life figure Joseph Carey Merrick (known as John, and played by Bradley Cooper), a young man whose appearance and physical health are severely compromised by a progressive disease, distorting his bones and resulting in multiple skin tumours. In the production of the play now showing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, the full extent of Merrick’s disfigurement is described

by Dr Treves, a young lecturer in anatomy at The London Hospital with a particular interest in the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases. Treves refers to greater-than-lifeThe Elephant Man size medical photographs of John Merrick, Theatre Royal Haymarket while before the audience, initially standing tall and strong, Cooper transforms himself into Merrick through the artful use of altered interrogate his own belief in the rationality of science as his patient posture and gait, a distorted facial appearance and impaired and friend deteriorates. diction. The metamorphosis of a physically imposing Hollywood In so far as he challenges us to better understand first star into a man twisted and bent by multiple deformities is impressions, friendships and long-term relationships, Pomerance a powerful and sensitive touch by the production, and primes might be credited with the ability to see ahead from the 1970s to the audience to remember throughout the play that underneath the present day and our own, more understanding time. However, the disfigurement is a ‘normal’ human being.

Pomerance uses Merrick primarily as a device to critique doAbandoned by his parents to a workhouse and dubbed ‘The gooding Victorian society rather than exploring an individual Elephant Man’ as the result of his skin condition, Merrick’s only possessed of inner life and character: we see too little reflection option for survival in Victorian England is to make himself a on the stigmatisation of which he must have been acutely aware, spectacle for public amusement. Exploited by a showman charging or the depression from which he reportedly suffered. customers to see ‘the freak’, his appearance becomes more Indeed, reflection and inquiry of this kind has been slow to shocking to the freak show audiences as his disease progresses, impact on society in general. Although awareness of the damaging and the showman eventually casts him loose. The abandoned effects of derogatory language and the consequences of negative Merrick is rescued by Treves and, funded by donations from stereotypes and beliefs about the origins and concomitants of a public appeal, becomes a permanent resident at The London disfigurement have increased, the personal accounts of many of Hospital. Unable to recruit nurses to care for him, Treves enlists those affected still resonate with (albeit less frequent) examples the help of a celebrated actress, weary of the stage, to visit of discrimination and stigma in multiple forms. Our attitudes may Merrick. Encouraged by Treves to ‘rehearse’ beforehand to enable have moved on from the crude caricatures of the 1890s (and to a her to withstand the shock of Merrick’s appearance, Mrs Kendall is lesser extent the 1970s too), but the ever more airbrushed beauty quick to see past his disfigurement to the man beneath, and vows ideals portrayed in the media reinforce the reality that living with not only to visit regularly herself, but also to use her social a visible difference in this social context is unlikely to become less connections to provide Merrick with a coterie of ‘friends’. As challenging in the foreseeable future. This play reminds us that, Merrick exchanges the baying mob for the gentle attentions of high while we have come a long way from the freak shows, we should society, who bring expensive gifts and showily chorus their sense be doing much more to challenge the myth that physical of identity with him, an affable temperament, imaginative appearance is the key to happiness and success in life. sensibility and keen wit emerge to lighten the play. Merrick becomes a noble savage of sorts, his trustfulness and charm a mirror reflecting the intolerance and hypocrisy of others. When I Reviewed by Professor Nichola Rumsey, Centre for Appearance Treves realises that Merrick’s condition leaves him only a few Research, University of the West of England, and Lettie Kennedy. years to live, Merrick graduates to tragic hero, prompting Treves to The play runs until 8 August: see www.trh.co.uk/whatson/3637

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Thinking deeper The Intercultural Mind: Connecting Culture, Cognition and Global Living Joseph Shaules I had expected this book to be mostly aimed at those who work and study abroad and want not just to survive their time away, but to get the most out of it. I was pleasantly surprised that this vastly oversimplifies what the author has actually achieved.

Much like culture itself, this book works on a number of levels. While it does help those who find it difficult coping with being abroad to understand why, Shaules also pulls together an overview of both the influences on the unconscious mind and how this in turn impacts on our interactions with the world.

Although it is written to be accessible to those with little knowledge of psychology, to those that have some knowledge of the subject it is a fascinating case study.

Fittingly, for a book on interculturalism, the reader is taken on an enthusiastic and intriguing journey through a surprisingly wide array of sources, weaving a picture of our understanding of our unconscious mind.

It was a great pleasure to see familiar cases, such as the oft-cited Phineas Gage, the much studied workings of perception and the use of fMRI all knitted together with the work of Kahneman, plus the author’s, and his students’, own experiences and anecdotes. It all builds to the conclusion that not just our cultural outlook, but all of our thinking is shaped and influenced in a myriad of nuanced and subtle ways that we aren’t even aware of.

This isn’t Shaules first book on the subject. He is clearly both an expert in and passionate about helping people understand the influence their own cultural viewpoint can have. Interestingly, it is written by an American living in Tokyo, which gives the book an occasional slightly American slant, providing an incidental example of interculturalism in action.

Shaules states upfront that culture itself is nebulous concept that is difficult to define, but each chapter ends with definitions of the

Finding expression Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music James Rhodes This book is the product of a child’s battle to find escape and then meaning from unimaginable hurt to the body and self. James Rhodes was regularly abused by a male school teacher from the age of six.

He is now a classical pianist, but still fighting to express his feelings – the Supreme Court recently overturned his ex-wife’s injunction to prevent him publishing (she wanted to protect their son from his father’s distress).

One broadsheet critic complained that the memoir is ‘monotonous’ and teaches us little about Rhodes’s early years and family.

Although it may be a literary ‘recitative’ – conversational and frenetic, as if he is in the consulting room – it offers a genuine illustration of the impact of trauma on the human psyche. Children who are groomed, betrayed, exploited and threatened do become disconnected from

their families, memories and experiences. Their behaviour is often a monotonous cycle of vulnerability, rejection, shame, blame and helplessness. Discord replaces the harmony and real joy in relationships.

Trauma that has no explanation overshadows every aspect of life and tempts destruction of that life. Rhodes shows us the painful truth, and we can either stay with it, or complain that we have heard it all before and demand he offers us a bit of variety. Children who have been abused need people who can stick with them and bear their repetitions.

This then, is an important memoir psychologically, as it eloquently illustrates the trajectory from sexual abuse that is never properly recognised, to dysfunctional relationships and serious

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mental health problems.

It also underlines the need for child victims to find expression (classical music in Rhodes’s case), a meaningful narrative and attuned healthy connection with others in order to be able to live with the damaged self. In common with many traumatised children, Rhodes demonstrates that he has not lost the spirit and creativity that draws his audience in and engenders hope. His memoir may not be a work of technical literary note, but it is surely an enlightening piece in terms of the lifelong psychological, social and physical cost of ‘child rape’ as Rhodes more accurately describes his experience.

I Canongate; 2015; Hb £16.99 Reviewed by Lynne Hipkin who is a Registered Clinical Psychologist in independent practice and with Kate Cairns Associates

key concepts as well as a discussion quote taken from within the preceding chapter.

With applications outside of the field of international travel and the classroom it is well worth a read to see familiar psychological studies applied to a specific subject in a lively and practical way.

I Intercultural Press; 2015; Pb £14.99 Reviewed by Louise Beaton who is an Open University psychology graduate

Heartwarming Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave Kika Markham The late Corin Redgrave, an actor and political activist, was 65 when he suffered a severe heart attack, which led to an anoxic brain injury. In this honest and moving memoir, his wife Kika Markham describes their upbringings and life together prior to his brain injury, before detailing the devastating effect the brain injury had upon Corin and the rest of the family.

Many typical symptoms of a brain injury are touched upon throughout the memoir, such as disinhibition and cognitive difficulties. Corin’s extensive memory problems are evident when he admits he has forgotten his life with Kika. A poignant theme throughout is Kika’s ongoing dilemma; wanting her husband home but being afraid of having to care for him.

The featured extracts from Corin’s journal offer an insight into the thoughts and feelings of an individual with a brain injury. In these extracts, he expresses his disorientation and confusion. It was interesting how, despite these deficits, Corin was able to return to work, showing the often seen disparities between cognitive and functional abilities.

This engaging and thought-provoking book serves to remind practitioners of the enormous strain families come under caring for their relatives. The compassion the family shows for one another in these circumstances is heartwarming. Kika aimed to give comfort to families going through similar experiences: this she does with her accessible and direct writing style.

I Oberon Books; 2014; Hb £16.99 Reviewed by Natalie Jones who is an Assistant Psychologist, St Andrew’s Healthcare

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The nature of belief

Compassionate and respectful

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief Alex Gibney (Director)

Dementiaville Channel 4

The director of this new film has a long and impressive career as a documentary-maker.

From paedophilia in the Catholic church (Mea Maxima Culpa) to the creation of Wikileaks (We Steal Secrets) and Lance Armstrong’s doping career (The Armstrong Lie), Alex Gibney has long been interested in truth, lies and self-deception. That he has made a film about Scientology should come as no surprise.

The film falls broadly into two parts, with the first half examining how L. Ron Hubbard came to develop his ideas. Just by itself, this part is fascinating, especially if (like me) you were only vaguely aware of his science fiction writing career, and completely unaware of his personal life.

Hubbard does not bear much resemblance to the character he supposedly inspired, Lancaster Dodd, in the 2012 film The Master.

Dodd is sophisticated, charismatic and selfknowing. But in the footage unearthed by Gibney, Hubbard comes across as all bluster, a compulsive story-teller who is aware, on some level, that he has lost the ability to tell his stories from his truth.

There is the sense of Hubbard desperately seeking answers to questions that psychology or psychiatry were still poorly equipped to address in the 1950s. His book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was what he came up with, and it was a best seller. The Church of Scientology followed soon after. It is interesting to see the development of auditing, a key component of Scientology and the only way in which a person can ‘go clear’. It struck me as akin to a form of counselling, with an element of the church confessional.

After Hubbard’s death in 1986, leadership fell on David Miscavige and the Scientology we are perhaps more familiar with appears: the Hollywood connections, the battles with the IRS, and an extreme resistance to anyone leaving the organisation. Less familiar accusations, including exploitation and physical abuse, are also made. Intertitles inform us repeatedly of the right to reply offered to Scientology. On occasions it is hard to know whether to laugh, cry or simply be appalled at what the ex-Scientologists interviewed say. Is it the individual or the collective that is responsible for creating the ‘prison of belief’?

I http://goingclear.squarespace.com Reviewed by Kate Johnstone who is a postgraduate student at UCL and Associate Editor (Reviews)

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One of the tragedies of dementia is just how easy it becomes to lose connections to our pasts and to our loved ones. Channel 4’s recent three-part documentary series Dementiaville shows different approaches to how individuals living with dementia and their loved ones can be supported to reforge and maintain these connections.

The first episode, ‘Poppy Lodge’, shows a residential home that takes a controversial approach to caring for residents with dementia. Called the ‘Butterfly Household Model of Care’, staff members do not correct residents’ beliefs that they are in their own pasts. Instead, they embrace and actively encourage this subjective reality.

Proponents of this approach claim that it reduces anxiety and depression. However, critics argue that it is untruthful and therefore undermines the dignity of people experiencing the later stages of dementia.

Leaving aside ethical issues, staff at Poppy Lodge can only be admired for their compassionate and respectful approach.

The genuine warmth of the relationships between staff and residents shines through in every moment shown on screen. Efforts to maintain individuals’ connections to their pasts, rather than merely attending to their physical needs in the present, are shown here to be hugely beneficial. In a society that

places little value on professional care work, it is a relief to see a care home that shows care work as challenging, rewarding and essential. It would have been enlightening, however, to show other approaches to dementia care.

Episode two looks at three families who feel they have lost their relative to dementia.

Dr David Sheard listens to their stories and discusses ways in which they can find that connection again. Communication is improved through understanding that the language of dementia is one of emotion, rather than one of facts and sequential logic. Dr Sheard encourages including and empowering family members with dementia rather than taking over from them, resulting in a more integrated family unit despite the challenges of dementia.

The final episode looks at wives whose husbands have been diagnosed with dementia, and the immense challenges they face. The episode shows the benefits of support, both from other partners of people living with dementia, and from professionals at Ivy House, a day facility that emphasises person-centred care. The couples are

A star turn Everyman National Theatre, London The new director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris, kick-starts his tenure with this retelling of the 15th-century morality play Everyman, written by the Poet Laureate, Carol Anne Duffy. With Chiwetel Ejiofor on board, nothing else about it might have mattered. Ejiofor is a genuine, A-list Hollywood star with the elusive X-factor, and Norris must have known that audiences would throng no matter what the play was like. It is to everyone’s credit, therefore, that it was decided to try out something a bit different. Not avant-garde exactly, but certainly a distance away from more conventional plays.

The plot is extremely simple, in order to clearly demonstrate the moral points.

Characters are allegorical, so there’s no interest in back stories or motivations.

In a nutshell, Ejiofor is the eponymous Everyman, and God (Kate Duchêne) has decided to send Death (Dermot Crowley) to take him away. This forces Everyman to

consider what the purpose of his existence has been, and how he will account for his life in front of God, a dowdy cleaning lady. Has he done anything which will impress her, and maybe even get her to change her mind about Death?

In contrast to the simple story, the staging is anything but: all sorts of dances, songs, music, costumes, make-up, video projections and props whizz past. Mountains of rubbish glide majestically across the stage, silver dummies float above it, and even a tent is used to eye-catching effect.

Everything is kept going by the constant inventiveness of the production, a rich seam of humour, and of course the considerable acting ability on stage. Ejiofor is magnetic: initially stunned by God’s decision, he becomes increasingly desperate as Death meanders closer and closer.

Yet ultimately, Everyman’s tale no longer

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A good giggle, but failing to gratify Decision (exhibition) Hayward Gallery, London encouraged to revisit and reconnect with key moments of their lives together. In this way, the couples make the most of their memories together, before these memories are lost to dementia.

Throughout all three episodes, the message that life does not end with dementia is displayed front and centre.

It shows that, with support, individuals with dementia and their families can live well with the condition. The series does not set out to shock, as so many media portrayals of dementia have done, but is compassionate and respectful, and interspersed with poignant moments.

All three episodes of Dementiaville focus almost entirely on the experiences of carers and relatives – it would have been interesting to hear more from the individuals with dementia themselves.

I spoke to Keith Oliver, Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust Dementia Service User Envoy, and he concluded: ‘With the exception of the title, I feel the series is a fair and accurate portrayal utilising positive strategies to support both the person with the diagnosis and their loved ones.’

I Reviewed by Lewis Slade, who is a psychology graduate, University of Kent

has the allegorical power that it must have had 500 years ago.

The prospect of being judged

by God, and found wanting, must have been sobering then.

Presumably few in the audience will think this will be the case now, but the play struggles to provide an alternative, modern-day resonance. It attempts to equate Everyman’s personal consumerism with mankind’s wanton use of the earth’s resources. There’s even a tsunami (don’t sit near the front). But this fails to stimulate the underlying fear that 15th-century audiences must have felt when contemplating their own judgment day.

Nonetheless, Everyman is worth catching for the considerable talent involved, both on stage and off.

I Reviewed by Kate Johnstone who is a postgraduate student at UCL and Associate Editor (Reviews). Everyman is playing at the National Theatre until 30 August.

Our everyday existence is arguably but a string of decisions to be taken; for the most part we are effectively unaware that with each step we make, each turn we take, each word we utter, we settle on one outcome in favour of a sometimes infinite number of alternatives. At its most elementary, however, decision making may mean simply selecting one of two options; this is the premise of Belgian scientist-turnedartist Carsten Höller’s exhibition Decision.

The exhibition of course opens with a decision. To enter the gallery space, we are asked to take note of a set of general guidelines printed on an information sheet and then to select entrance A or entrance B, being advised to proceed with caution. Given Höller’s background as a scientist, this mode of operation is hardly surprising. His art show ‘laboratory’ turns visitors into test subjects and aims to encourage interaction and reflection, and liberation from the ‘dictatorship of the predictable’.

In keeping with the binary nature of his premise, Höller forgoes the typology of a maze – which is designed to offer a multitude of choices and paths – in favour of two intertwined labyrinthtunnels, where explorers follow predetermined routes. My companion and I decide to explore alternative trajectories.

Using entrance A, I find myself in a dim, airduct-like tunnel which is pierced periodically by slivers of light filtering in through the seams of its metallic skin.

At first gingerly feeling my way forward, before long my pace up and down the narrow corridor increases.

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I have hardly started to enjoy the experience when I emerge abruptly – reunited with explorers of entrance B – into the main gallery space where we are confronted with a mobile of ‘flying mushrooms’. The space quickly fills up, as more and more subjects are ejected by the entrance tunnels; we decide to move on.

The next stop on what turns out to be a string of bite-sized experience units is the pill clock. Falling from the ceiling periodically, the pills amassing on an ever growing pile on the gallery floor can either be left untouched or imbibed. We pick up pills, surely placebos, although the lack of allergy advice repudiates the science experiment scenario, and proceed.

A perception-altering state fails to emerge, as does some form of intellectual revelation. Making our way further into the exhibition, a row of virtual-reality headsets awaits. Two separate paths through a forest– one for each eye – are mildly discombobulating, but far from challenging and fail to lead to a reconsidering of our perception of decisions taken.

Upstairs, the spiel continues and as we make our way from one exhibit to the next, the main choice we are confronted with is whether to wait our turn or decide to simply experience vicariously by watching other visitors brave the ‘flying machines’ or stumble around wearing upsidedown goggles. The goggles sit loosely on your head and the mirror inside does not cover your entire field of vision, failing to truly challenge spatial cognition,

unlike George Stratton’s 1890s experiment. As with most of the show, it’s a good giggle, but does not actually lead to ‘moments of not knowing’.

The installations do in fact awaken a desire to be surprised, but do not deliver, remaining superficial and failing to gratify, almost like an anticipated and never executed sneeze. The exhibition is marked by a vexing lack of friction, never quite achieving its intention of promoting contemplation, yet not ready to let go of conventional notions of what an art show is supposed to be and embracing its potential to simply be a playful and light-hearted experience. Before being – predictably – herded out through the gift shop, we leave the exhibition via its main attraction, the ‘Isomeric Slides’ which currently grace the gallery’s facade. Höller sees them as sculptures which you can travel through, but ultimately they are entertainment park flumes.

The slides are paradigmatic of the exhibition: good fun, but don’t expect to be truly intellectually challenged or to question perception on an existential level.

I Reviewed by Fiona Zisch who is an architectural lecturer at the University of Westminster and University of Innsbruck, and PhD by Design candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. The exhibition runs until 6 September.

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Emotions in mind Inside Out Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen (Directors) Inside Out is an animated movie, made by Pixar and Disney, that takes us into the mind of an appealing 11-year-old girl, Riley.

The mind, it turns out, is a complex place. In its Headquarters there’s a console that looks like something one might find in a television studio.

At the console sits a row of inner characters: the emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, who push the buttons and pull the levers.

These characters have become familiar to psychologists as basic emotions, the facial expressions of which were reported by Paul Ekman and colleagues to be recognisable in widely different cultures. (Surprise was apparently omitted because the director felt the ‘Fear’ character could display that too.) Dacher Keltner went to work with Ekman as a postdoc, and became an authority on how specific emotions direct social interactions. At the end of the film’s credits, thanks are given to Ekman and Keltner for guiding the film-makers on what they call ‘this emotional journey’. (Disclosure: I am a co-author with Keltner of the textbook Understanding Emotions.)

Keltner is a professor at Berkeley and, in the online magazine he started there, called Greater Good, he writes that some years ago, when their daughters were in their pre-teen years, the travails of parenting bonded him with Pete Docter, who later became one of the writers and directors of Inside Out. ‘When [children] get to their preteens and early teens,’ writes Keltner, ‘it’s like the world crashes down on them.’ This crash involves a large drop in happiness. In this film, the drop begins when Riley’s mother and father, and of course Riley herself, move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Riley loses the ice-hockey team in which she used to enjoy playing, she loses

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friends, she loses confidence, and perhaps worst of all she loses childhood.

Memories, which include autobiographical events such as scoring one’s first goal in ice hockey, are contained, it turns out, in balls about the size of grapefruit. Each ball has a colour (green for joy, red for anger, blue for sadness). They are stored in huge 20-foot-tall racks arrayed in vast halls. The racks are visited by workers with a large vacuum machine that sucks up and disposes of memories that won’t be used again, early piano lessons, names of people from history classes, and so on. There’s also the question of which memories become Core Memories: happy, or sad, or angry, or fearful, or rejecting. And, as research has shown, Core Memories based on each emotion are more likely to return to consciousness during periods when that emotion becomes predominant.

With the losses that the move to San Francisco have caused, some Core Memories that used to be joyful become sad. Joy becomes no longer the principal controller of Riley’s console. The previously equable Riley has a row with her parents, and is sent to her room. Anger, Fear, and Disgust have taken charge. Not long afterwards, Joy and Sadness are sucked out of Headquarters altogether.

Dragging Sadness along with her, Joy wanders among the racks of stored memories.

Although Sadness seems a miserable kind of being, it’s she who will be the heroine of this film. The story is a moving one; we become strongly engaged when Joy and Sadness, leave the halls of memory and topple out of the mind altogether. How can they get back? By now, at Headquarters, Anger is driving Riley to run away from home.

Still in exile, can Joy and Sadness get back to Headquarters by catching the rickety-looking Train of Thought? Or might an imaginary friend of early childhood, who also wanders in the lost regions of forgetfulness, be of any help?

There has been a tradition in the West of personifying the emotions which, until two hundred years ago, were called passions. Plato had the soul represented as a charioteer driving two horses, one that represented the noble passions and one that represented the unruly passions of appetite. In medieval times Guillaume de Lorris wrote the first part of Le Roman de la Rose, in which a courtier enters a garden and meets an aristocratic young woman whom he starts to woo.

His consciousness is represented by Hope, Sweet Thought, Reason, and so on.

She too is a cast of characters: Welcome, Status, Danger, Fear, and Shame. In the 17th century, Jean-François’s Senault’s The Use of Passions shows Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holding

in chains the passions: Feare, Despaire, Choler, Hope, and so on. In Inside Out, there’s no equivalent of Reason. It’s the emotions who work the console at Headquarters. They all seem loyal to Riley, but they vie with each other for domination.

The tradition of personifying human emotions has been a productive one. It enables us to stand a bit outside ourselves, and at the same time to look within ourselves. Inside Out is a good example of this tradition and being very 21st century it uses the latest technology of computer-animation and 3D movie-making. It’s a thoughtful film to which psychologists can take their pre-teen and teenage children, and be ready to discuss what – for goodness sake – might be going on in that mysterious and fascinating place, the mind.

I Reviewed by Keith Oatley who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto

vol 28 no 8

august 2015

reviews

A book for all Landmarks Robert Macfarlane ‘This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place.’ So begins this field guide to the literature Macfarlane loves, which doubles as a word hoard of wood, water and earth. There are thousands of terms from dozens of languages and dialects for specific aspects of landscape, nature and weather.

That specificity is key – Macfarlane writes about writing ‘so fierce in its focus that it can change the vision of its reader for good, in both senses’. And his own precision achieves just that… there are not many books I would call life-changing, but this is one.

As with any good magician, I couldn’t begin to describe how Macfarlane operates.

How does he, and each author he reveres, conjure a thicket of verbs, qualifiers and metaphors, yet simultaneously slash through sentences to reveal simple and striking images? I am so in thrall of him that the idea of ‘reviewing’ his work is laughable.

All I can do is offer a particular example of why this book should be required reading for psychologists as well as for lovers of language.

Macfarlane fantasises about the existence of a ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the

world’, a ‘glossary of enchantment for the whole earth’. This is no academic exercise: ‘once a landscape goes undescribed and therefore unregarded,’ writes Macfarlane, ‘it becomes more vulnerable to unwise use or improper action’. This is what happened on the Brindled Moor of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. In 2004 the engineering company AMEC proposed Europe’s largest wind farm, beginning a three-and-a-half-year battle over the nature and the future of the moor.

At the heart of the struggle was language: those for the development dismissed the island’s interior as ‘a wilderness’, ‘abominable’, ‘a vast, dead place’. The islanders, around 80 per cent of whom expressed opposition to the plans, realised they faced a daunting task where, in the words of islander Finlay MacLeod, ‘the necessary concepts and vocabulary are not to hand; it is therefore difficult to make a case for conservation without sounding either wet or extreme’.

So the islanders began to salvage and

create accounts – through narrative, poems, paintings, photographs, maps and more – which might restore both particularity and mystery to the moor. One of these ‘moorworks’ was made by Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod, a booklet entitled A-mach an Gleann, or ‘A known wilderness’. They mapped their moor walks, reconstructing the memory maps of ‘the people who traversed this landscape before and after the peat grew, naming features to navigate their way round’. In this way they filled the island with ‘drifts of sparkling bog-cotton, ‘scarlet damselflies’ and hundreds of words for peat alone. Amidst 10,924 letters of objection, the moor was saved.

Macfarlane quotes Tim Dee: ‘Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds and our hearts.’ That is why this is a book for all – it gives a glossary for the natural world to talk back, and for us to listen. Words, wherever or however we use them, can ‘keep us from slipping off into abstract space’.

I Hamish Hamilton; 2015; Hb £20.00 Reviewed by Dr Jon Sutton who is Managing Editor of The Psychologist

contribute

A manual for better living Science for Life Brian Clegg This is a very sensible little book, despite its being written in a style as accessible as most health journalism. Within the first few hundred words, some very prudent advice has been given. This, for example, on diet: ‘Don't eat too much – if you are putting on weight, eat less.

Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables (and don’t make them into smoothies as this ruins the valuable fibre)… It’s not strictly part of a diet, but add “don’t smoke” and “take sensible exercise” and you’ve got an instant health plan.’ Which sounds as reasonable as something that Michael Pollan may write, yet in this book the edicts are backed by evidence stronger than anecdote.

A few wise rules are reiterated. Correlation is not causation. Take journalism reports with a pinch of salt. In a kind of hybrid of an anti-Daily Mail and the debunking of headlines that @NHSchoices occasionally provides, the author reminds us that the endless task of sorting every item into the binary categories of things that cure and things that cause cancer is creating a false dichotomy. He reads the research papers that are the germ behind the headlines, including the up-to-date stories such as diet fizzy drinks causing weight gain and diabetes that

hit the tabloids at the end of 2014, and summarises the original research.

The book is not purely about diet and health – though this will be a popular section. There is also advice on the environment, psychology, knuckle-cracking, TV violence and wine critics. Short chapters drill down to the real knowns on self-esteem and the Mozart effect (the study that sales of Baby Mozart CDs are predicated upon was only done on students). One essay considers the way that we all use patterns and heuristics to navigate the world and, with a grimace-making flourish, highlights the annual cost of my workday coffee habit.

And herein lies the issue that could dismay the many authors and publishers: despite whole genres of diet books and self-help it seems that just one smallish book can summarise the whole of current knowledge on how to live well and that it can do so rather better than most.

I Icon; 2015; Hb £16.99 Reviewed by Sally-Ann S. Price FRCS who is Neurosurgery Senior Registrar, Southmead, Bristol

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For a full list of books available for review and information on reviewing for The Psychologist, see www.bps.org.uk/books Send books for potential review to The Psychologist, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester LE1 7DR ‘Reviews’ now covers so much more than books: if you have seen or heard a psychological film, play, exhibition, podcast, website, album or anything else, do get in touch on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or follow us on Twitter @psychmag for suggestions and competitions.

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ONE ON ONE

… with Victoria Clarke

‘put down your data and go out for a walk’ One place I’m lucky to live somewhere very beautiful – a small town on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. Going for an evening walk, hearing cows mooing… On my first family holiday in the Cotswolds as a teenager I fell in love with the landscape, and remember thinking ‘I want to live here’.

One book Changing the Subject by Julian Henriques and colleagues.

Read over and over, and highlighted in all the colours of the rainbow, as a student.

It fundamentally changed my view of what psychology could and should be.

One documentary I use Jennie Livingston’s fabulous documentary Paris is Burning (1990) about the drag ball culture of the black and Latino gay and trans community in New York in the 1980s to teach students about the social construction of gender and sexuality, and

coming soon

Victoria Clarke is Associate Professor in Sexuality Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol Victoria.Clarke@ uwe.ac.uk

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gender performativity, and the importance of thinking intersectionally.

One tool Mindfulness. More often an aspiration than an achievement. But an amazing tool for managing stress, focusing on what’s important, and skilful living.

One challenge for qualitative psychology Demand among students for qualitative research supervision far outstrips the number of supervisors with qualitative expertise.

One cultural recommendation The film Pride, based on the true story of a group of lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help support miners and their families during the miner’s strike in 1984–1985. It is both delightfully funny and poignant.

One nugget of advice for aspiring qualitative psychologists I love Ruben and Ruben’s (1995) characterisation of qualitative interviews as ‘on target while hanging loose’ in their book Qualitative Interviewing. That you have a general sense of where you

The school transition, academic resilience, and much more...

I Contribute: reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 I Comment: email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag.

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want to go in mind, but you’re flexible about how you get there (or indeed, ending up somewhere slightly different).

I always refer to this in teaching – it seems to help students grasp the ethos of qualitative research.

selective map of the terrain of qualitative research but presenting it as the definitive map. I’d like to see greater recognition of the diversity and complexity of qualitative research in attempts to map the terrain in the future.

One nugget of advice for supervising and teaching qualitative psychology I find that students have little or no conception of the messy ‘realities’ of qualitative research at first, and this can be hugely anxiety provoking (‘I’m doing it all wrong!’). Trying to ‘normalise’ the mess and share anxieties can help to build confidence.

One thing you like about qualitative research A sense of play, fun even, and creativity, particular when analysing (qualitative) data.

Analysing data is like having a puzzle to solve. Not in the sense that the analysis is hiding in the data waiting to be found (an assumption that is another source of irritation!), but in the sense that you need to generate

One publication you are proud of Right now I’d say my book Successful Qualitative Research (Sage), co-authored with my friend and colleague Virginia Braun. It was something of an epic undertaking to write an authored text covering all the basics of the entire qualitative research journey.

One hope for the future Greater understanding and acceptance of qualitative research. Things have changed a lot even in the relatively short period of time I have been a qualitative psychologist, not least with the establishment of the Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section of the BPS, but there is still some way to go. It would be great to see qualitative methods being taught alongside quantitative methods from day one on undergraduate psychology programmes.

One source of irritation The assumption that (good) qualitative research involves ‘code books’, inter-rater reliability scores and other measures to establish coding ‘reliability’. In other words, providing a partial and highly

a framework for your analysis that pulls together your key analytic insights in a coherent and compelling way. Ideally, with a bit of creativity injected to into it (I am rather fond of theme and paper titles that reference popular culture or play on popular sayings).

One thing that you would change about psychology A greater recognition that – as critical psychologist Ian Parker (2005) has put it – ‘what is “inside” is dependent on what is “outside”’.

One final thought Good qualitative research requires time to think and reflect. So put down your data and go out for a walk!

More answers online at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

vol 28 no 8

august 2015