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psychologist vol 28 no 11
november 2015 www.thepsychologist.org.uk
Wu-wei – doing less and wanting more The only way to succeed is not to try, argues Edward Slingerland
letters 858 news 866 interview: Cary Cooper 904 looking back: the Great War 944
prisoner suicide 886 choice and control for captive animals 892 a perceptual control revolution? 896 organisational psych of Jurassic World 906
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Wu-wei – doing less and wanting more The only way to succeed is to not try, argues Edward Slingerland
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Prisoner suicide 886 Graham Towl and Tammi Walker consider public management, punitiveness and professionalism
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Choice and control for animals in captivity Laura M. Kurtycz looks at how to counter ‘learned helplessness’
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© 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.
A perceptual control revolution? 896 Warren Mansell and Timothy A. Carey introduce a theory dating back to the 1950s that is increasingly touted as revolutionising the behavioural sciences New voices: Working in a goldfish bowl – ethics in rural practice 900 Steven MacDonald with the latest in our series
...reports
ISSN 0952-8229 Cover Chinese characters wu-wei – effortless action
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news 866 who helps the Ebola helpers?; research treasure trove; mass shootings; the term ‘stampede’; event reports; a new era for psychology?; and much more society President’s column; Branches Forum
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The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’.
Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson
Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera
Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson 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 ...debates letters the reproducibility project; academic resilience; alien abduction; psychology’s contribution; mental health terminology; and more
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...digests using brain imaging to re-evaluate famous case studies; the toll of being ‘on call’; and more, from our Research Digest (see www.bps.org.uk/digest) 876
...meets interview Cary Cooper tells Gail Kinman about his attempts to change organisational culture through the wide dissemination of psychological theory and research
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careers 930 we speak to Siobhan O’Neill, on the eve of a Society briefing paper on suicide and self-harm which she contributed to; Aleesha Begum describes her work with an autism charity; and Karen M. Zubrucky shares how a tragic event led to a career ‘chasing memories’ as a cognitive psychologist one on one with Peter Fonagy, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre
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...reviews eye on fiction 906 Andrew Clements provides an organisational psychology perspective on Jurassic World Cosmonauts at the Science Museum, Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’, Macbeth, Hangmen, BBC Horizon on whether video games are really that bad, and more 938
You may have noticed that this column has become one long, forlorn attempt to elicit sympathy from you readers for how hard my team and I work. Then I talk to academics, and they are putting in more hours than I knew there were in a week. Maybe we don’t have it so bad. But is the ‘nose to the grindstone’ approach outdated and ineffective? On p.882 Edward Slingerland draws on the early Chinese ideal of ‘wu-wei’ or effortless action in order to argue that the only way to succeed is not to try. And on p.904 Cary Cooper tells us organisations need to catch up with the research showing that working hours are not synonymous with commitment or effective performance. As often seems to be the way, Sweden is setting an example on work–life balance, with many workplaces trialling a six-hour working day for the same pay (see tinyurl.com/yesswedecan). The signs are positive, with efficiency and wellbeing on the up. So give yourselves a break – be ‘wu-wei’! Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk
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...looks back Psychology and the Great War, 1914–1918 Ben Shephard considers our discipline’s involvement, on all sides
The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Phil Banyard, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Peter Olusoga, Peter Wright
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Six years ago Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our archive, including parasites, minds and culture in a Darwininspired special
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Big picture centre-page pull-out a ‘selfie’ with a difference: words and image from Natalia Kucirkova (Open University)
NEWS
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Lost in memory In the face of Ebola, who helps the helpers? Ella Rhodes reports. Forced to work in secret using pseudonyms, shunned by families and communities, all the while risking their own lives for the thousands who had been struck down by Ebola. The national healthcare workers in Sierra Leone faced scores of barriers and intense psychological trauma during the height of the epidemic. In a country with no state-employed psychologist and only 20 mental health nurses the future could look bleak for the Sierra Leonean healthcare workers. However, a small team of psychologists from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) has recently launched a pilot service to help them. The three-phase service has already reached more than 70 per cent of those who worked tirelessly for months in the six Ebola treatment centres in the country that were funded by the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID). This pilot project is part of a wider Ebola Psychological Support Service set up by SLaM and funded by the DFID, which also offered one-to-one Skype support to NHS workers who also gave their time to help those affected by Ebola in the country. Idit Albert, consultant clinical psychologist and expert in complex trauma and PTSD, leads the service for UK aid workers. She said that when faced with the numerous psychological challenges of Ebola, SLaM, DFID and other trusts within the NHS were quick to act to implement a service to support UK workers in the country. She explained that at the time Ebola broke out, a team from the King’s Centre for Global Health had already been in the country for around 18 months. ‘A mental health nurse from the King’s team had been receiving Skype support from a psychiatrist and she wanted to ensure this type of support was available for the rest of her team in Sierra Leone.’ The mental health nurse asked her boss to contact Alison Beck, the head of psychology and psychotherapy at SLaM, to see if any of its team of psychologists and therapists were willing to help the King’s staff. Around 10 per cent of the workforce said they would be happy to volunteer their time in supporting the people fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. The King’s Global Health Team were paired up, one-on-one, with psychologists and therapists from SLaM to speak to whenever they needed. The Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies heard about the service and suggested linking it up with the Department for International Development to offer the service to NHS workers who would soon be sent out to the country. Although there are only a few NHS staff in Sierra Leone at
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the time of writing, and 20 staff on standby to be deployed to Sierra Leone in case of increase in Ebola cases, the service is still supporting NHS volunteers who have returned home. The Skype support sessions from psychologists and psychotherapists who volunteered their time varied from counselling and psycho-education through to higher-level clinical interventions. For the majority of aid workers, it involved discussing their work during deployment, processing what they saw, debriefing and also offering advice on improving personal resilience and protecting their wellbeing. Dr Albert explained that in other cases aid workers presented with anxiety, depression and PTSD-type symptoms. She added: ‘The service aimed to encourage people to think about self-care as well as giving them a place to process their experience during their deployment and supporting them in the adjustment to life in the UK. The psychologists and psychotherapists can be flexible in how they offer help.’ Despite the traumatic scenes many of the aid workers witnessed, Albert said some came out of the experience feeling stronger. She added: ‘We haven’t analysed all of our data yet but it’s encouraging to see that after this experience people’s priorities in life have shifted and many discovered they were stronger than they initially thought.’ The DFID were also keen to offer support to Sierra Leone nationals who had been working at the Ebola treatment centres. Elaine Hunter, a consultant clinical psychologist and expert in complex trauma, psychosis and cross-cultural psychology, was chosen to lead this pilot project. She visited Sierra Leone in April to assess the 2000 workers’ needs and developed a three-phase pilot project to give culturally appropriate support to treatment centre staff across the country and recruited an in-country team of 15 Sierra Leonean nationals to deliver the service. Phase one of the project proved highly popular and attracted more than 1600 people. This included group workshops with questionnaires that assessed general wellbeing, and those who had moderate to high scores were then invited to take part in the second phase. The second phase, also open to anyone who is interested in taking part, will include group self-help sessions focusing on six areas that were found to be most problematic during Dr Hunter’s initial visits to the country: stress, sleep, anxiety, low mood and grief, anger and alcohol, and relationships. National staff have been able to sign up to attend any of these problem areas and already over 3500 participants have been booked. The third phase will offer brief individual CBT-style guided
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self-help over six weeks for anyone who is still experiencing psychological problems. Hunter painted an alarming picture of the challenges that so many of the Sierra Leonean healthcare workers face, many of whom have no clinical background. She explained after Sierra Leone shut down schools and places of business to attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, many were drawn to work at treatment centres – one of the few places of paid employment in the country. ‘People who work around Ebola are really stigmatised, they often work in secret and used pseudonyms,’ Hunter told me. ‘I talked to the burial team, who were some of the most stigmatised because they’re preventing people from carrying out traditional burial practices. They were such a dignified team despite their very grim job – they had to bury up to 12 people a day. People’s relationships broke up, if found out people were pushed out of their families. They all witnessed a huge number of people dying and some of them very suddenly.’ Even experienced clinical staff, including nurses, were left in shock after witnessing the many children who were killed by the disease. She added: ‘They don’t normally see children dying; with Ebola it has a 100 per cent mortality rate for anyone under five years old. Most people knew others who were dying – family, friends and colleagues.’ While speaking to national staff, Hunter was struck by the ways in which people described their psychological problems. ‘People speak of having “problems with their imagination” following their experiences. People who experienced flashbacks, feeling like they were back on the wards again, said they were “lost in memory”. They described having anxiety symptoms as a “restless heart” and they spoke of themselves as being “sick at heart” when describing grief or depression.’ This pilot project will run until the end of December, and the Maudsley team will evaluate data from questionnaires and outcomes to assess whether the project could be expanded. The Maudsley is currently in discussion with the DFID and the organisations recruiting NHS staff for humanitarian aid missions for providing formal psychological screening and support in future. I For the thoughts of the NHS workers, see the online version of this item via http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk
A treasure trove The boxes of data – 65 of them – had lain unattended for years. Answers from a two-decade research programme carried out by an Australian academic, who died suddenly in 2007, were in danger of being lost for ever. The records potentially contain clues to how schizophrenia differs across cultures. There was just one small problem – the study had been conducted with the tribal Iban people of Malaysia, and very few people understand the language. But now the project is being rescued, following a chance meeting involving a psychologist from London’s University of Roehampton. Between 1986 and 2006 Professor Rob Barrett investigated the indicators of schizophrenia in Iban people. There are just 400,000 Iban in the world, many living a lifestyle based on farming and agricultural work in Sarawak, Malaysia. Professor Barrett lived amongst them in ‘long houses’ housing several generations, combining social anthropology, psychiatry and genetics to dig out the roots of schizophrenia. His records included firsthand accounts in the native language, and blood samples from 700 people. Professor Barrett’s theory was that some major symptoms of schizophrenia, such as those related to thinking (e.g. delusions of control and thought broadcast, insertion or withdrawal), may not be a significant indicator of schizophrenia in all cultures – including the Iban. In the Western context, thinking is a mental activity that takes place in the brain. But among the Iban, thinking is believed to come from the heart-liver region and is closely tied with emotion, desire and will. The research findings would have remained a mystery were it not for an invitation to Professor Cecilia Essau to give a seminar at the University of Adelaide last September. Explaining her personal history and Iban language fluency led to the international connection – Professor Barrett had previously worked at Adelaide. Professor Essau is the only Iban-speaking academic psychologist in the world and was the first Iban women ever to hold a PhD. She is also a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. With support from the Florey Medical Research Foundation, Essau is working for the next two months with Barrett’s former colleagues at the University of Adelaide, including Head of Psychology Professor Anna Chur-Hansen, to translate and study his findings. ‘There’s so much
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there, it’s incredible,’ she told us. ‘There are lots of videos and interviews with patients and their family members, fieldwork notes, photos, documentation of Iban shaman doing curing rites and death and bereavement rites.’ Professor Essau said: ‘This is a hugely exciting project to work on, not least because Professor Barrett’s fieldwork was carried out in towns near where my own family have lived, but also because it reaches right to the heart of the nature or nurture debate. Having the opportunity to recover the work of such an eminent scholar, interpret it into English and understand his findings, is a real contribution to science. It would have
Professor Cecilia Essau
been incredibly sad to think so much work and study over a lifetime would have been lost.’ The boxes are being kept at a section of the special collection at the Barr Smith Library. Professor Essau said there would be increased need to work with other psychologists to fully analyse the information. ‘At this point, we haven’t yet started looking at the family component of the research. The Iban family structure is very complex because we don’t have surnames like in the West. And it has been interesting to read how the patients described the way they communicated with the voices they heard: animal themes seem to be very dominant in the content of the hallucinations.’ Professor Essau invites any academic psychologists who feel their expertise may be useful to this project to contact her on c.essau@roehampton.ac.uk. ‘Professor Barrett’s is definitely work that will last for several years,’ she concluded. JS
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‘Focus your attention on the victims and their families’ October’s school shooting in Umpqua Community College Oregon was just the latest of almost 300 mass gun attacks in the US this year alone. President Obama could barely contain his emotion and frustration at the regularity of these attacks, saying: ‘Our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It does nothing to prevent this carnage being inflicted some place in America, next week or a couple of months from now.’ Noting that the US has spent trillions of dollars and passed laws to protect people from terrorism, Obama said: ‘…yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how to reduce potential gun deaths. How can that be?’ Yet there are others with a responsibility to reduce the risk of further shootings: the media. Back in 2009 (see tinyurl.com/parkdietz), forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz called on the media to avoid: showing sirens blaring in their reports, using photographs of the killer, having rolling 24 hour coverage of the event, and leading with the body count. Dietz warned that these were all factors in creating ‘anti heroes’ and prompting copycat, one-upmanship: ‘Every time we have intense saturation of coverage of a mass murder we expect to see one or two more within a week.’ The coverage of the Virginia TV journalists shot dead earlier this year during a live report suggested Dietz’s advice had not been heeded. However, following the Umpqua killings, the Sherriff of Douglas County, John Hanlin, refused to name the shooter in an official statement released on Facebook, and implored news outlets to do the same. He said: ‘Let me be very clear: I will not name the shooter. I will not give him
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credit for this horrific act of cowardice. Media will get the name confirmed in time… but you will never hear us use it. We would encourage media and the community to avoid using it, repeating it or engaging in any glorification and sensationalisation of him. He in no way deserves it. Focus your attention on the victims and their families and helping them to recover.’ Unsurprisingly though, once the killer’s name was released to the press, hugely in-depth investigations of his background were released. His internet activity, his history and interviews with his distraught father saturated the news while a photograph of the shooter holding a rifle accompanied each separate report. Research supports the suggestion that such coverage has a deadly impact. Work led by Sherry Towers (Arizona State University) and published in PLOS One earlier this year (see tinyurl.com/towersetal) found that there is a ‘temporary increase in probability’ following mass killings involving firearms, lasting on average for 13 days and leading to at least 0.30 new incidents. Shockingly the authors outline that 87 per cent of all children (aged 0 to 14) killed by firearms are children living in the US, despite the fact only 5 per cent of the world’s children live in the country. Psychologist Pam Ramsden (University of Bradford), an expert in vicarious trauma, said that in the wake of school shootings a certain percentage of the public – particularly
parents – could be prone to experiencing some symptoms of trauma after viewing coverage on the news. She said: ‘We know that when children are involved the amount of trauma is higher – especially if they have schoolaged children, because they can visualise their own children in danger at what is suppose to be a safe environment. Trauma is more likely when normal people are doing normal things – for example we all are not shocked when a soldier is killed during active duty, because we have an expectation that this will happen. We don’t have the same expectations in what we would consider “safety zones”.’ Some of the media images following the Virginia shootings, showing the precise moment the victims realised they were going to die, seemed particularly graphic. Rumsden said: ‘These pictures are traumatising as the human brain is specifically designed to catalogue visual memories… we store these and each picture we see further builds on these traumatising images. I believe it is enough to show that a terrible accident occurred, or a natural disaster, we don’t need to see floating bodies – whether they are human or animals. These graphic violent images can be damaging, and I believe that the media, in an effort to increase shock value, portrays
the very worst of the images that they can.’ As for helping schools to reduce their vulnerability to deadly shooting incidents, research by Traci Wilke and Mark Fraser from 2009 identified six strategies, including strengthening pupils’ attachment to their school, reducing social aggression, breaking down codes of silence, establishing resources for troubled and rejected students, increasing basic security measures, and bolstering communication within the school (e.g. by introducing a mass text message alert system) and between school and community agencies, allowing, for example, the rapid review of pupils whose essays and compositions may betray signs of mental distress. ‘If implemented successfully, programs based on these six strategies are likely to reduce social stratification, increase school bonding, and provide early intervention to ostracized and angry students who, if exposed to other risk factors, may have a higher likelihood of violence,’ the authors wrote. (See also the excellent piece on the race to stop the next school shooter: tinyurl.com/nrm7jep). But to turn the spotlight back on the media, is it time for outlets to take responsibility for reducing glorification and sensationalisation? There are media guidelines around the reporting of suicide (see tinyurl.com/8fvckxv) so why not homicide? Surely a first step would be to follow Sherriff Hanlin’s advice: to not name the killer, ditch his photo and focus instead on the victims and their families. ER
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‘Stampede’ – a loaded term The horrific crush near the holy city of Mecca, during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in the valley of Mina, killed 717 people and injured more than 850 others. Press coverage quickly focused on ‘panic’ and ‘stampede’, but is the ‘mindless mass’ really to blame for such tragedies? Professor Steve Reicher (St Andrews University) told us that the problem lay in crowd physics management rather than crowd psychology. ‘Claims of inevitability are using excuses for doing, and having done, nothing… descriptions like “panic” and “stampede” suggest that the problem lay in irrational crowd psychology or behaviour. Yet there is little evidence of anyone “rushing wildly”, as is the nature of a stampede. In fact, in events such as this the problem is that people can’t run anywhere.’ When crowds meet a certain density of around four people per square metre, Professor Reicher explains, any push or shove results in waves passing through the crowd. Another issue, he said, is that is people at the front fall or meet an unexpected barrier; those behind may carry on moving leading to a ‘catastrophic’ build-up of pressure. Dr Clifford Stott (University of Leeds) added: ‘While we still don’t know the full details it appears the authorities allowed crowds from different directions to converge on a single location that itself was a confined space. Much like the Hillsborough disaster this would have created fatal pressures that no-one could have escaped from.’ There is also growing evidence that two paths near the site of the accident had been closed off for ‘unknown reasons’. ‘This points to the fact that in many disasters, the problem lies in the way that certain exits are blocked off,’ Reicher said. On top of this, Reicher added, there were issues with group psychology, trust and respect of authorities. ‘We know that Islam is a house divided. Previously that was not seen to be too significant at the Hajj. Whether it was a factor in the tragedy, we don’t know yet. But what we can see is that the tragedy has affected socio-political divisions. Iran, for instance, has attacked the Saudi regime for mishandling the Hajj. Since the whole legitimacy of the Saudi regime rests on being “custodians of the two mosques” this is potentially of huge geopolitical significance.’ A large-scale survey of pilgrims at the Hajj, by Dr John Drury (University of
Sussex) and Hani Alnabulsi and published in PNAS, has shown that the effect of density on feeling safe is moderated by social identification. If a person felt part of the crowd of pilgrims they didn’t fear crowding and, in fact, felt safer in denser spaces – because they felt that they were alongside people like themselves who would support them. Reicher said: ‘This could potentially lead people into risk taking and attract them to dangerous spaces. I would stress, though, that compared to issues of crowd flow and management this is relatively minor.’ So how can the risk of such tragedies be reduced? Dr Stott says: ‘The solutions do not lie in increasing coercion and security measures, nor merely in addressing the infrastructure, but also in
facilitating awareness and communication with and among crowds.’ In this sense Reicher highlights the need to see crowd members as part of the solution to disasters and not just the problem. Studies have found that, far from panicking, and looking after oneself at the expense of others, in disasters people come together and help each other often at severe risks to themselves. ‘So we should examine the role of crowd members as ‘first responders’, as helping to deal with the aftermath of the crushing,’ Reicher concluded. In 2006, more than 360 pilgrims were killed in another incident in Mina. Back then, pilgrims were blamed before the finger was pointed at poor management as the primary problem. ‘Most crowd safety experts would say “accidents” are due to mismanagement,’ Dr Drury told us. Writing about the term ‘stampede’ on his blog (http://dontpaniccorrecting mythsaboutthecrowd.blogspot.co.uk), psychologist Dr Chris Cocking said: ‘…it is such a loaded term, and does not accurately describe what actually happens in such incidents… if we are going to improve safety at large crowd events, using outdated terms such as “stampede” when things go wrong, will only get in the way of trying to create safer crowd experiences for everyone involved.’ JS
See our website at http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/reports for much more news, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction; and reports from the launch of the new Forensic Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London; from the European Skeptics Congress; and the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s West Midlands Branch.
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Nudging us towards a better future Eloise Smart reports from Behavioural Exchange Insights 2015 Over two days in London this September, the Behavioural Insights Team hosted the inaugural Behavioural Exchange conference. Addressing an array of global social issues, the sold-out event brought together 900 of the world’s leading behavioural insights experts, policy makers and practitioners to use social norms to create policies that can affect the world for the better. Amongst the leading the speakers were esteemed Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and President of the American Economics Association Richard Thaler. Starting the conference by tackling ‘the world’s biggest challenges’ head-on was a team including David Halpern, psychology graduate and Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, discussing social issues such as poverty and inequality. Professor Iris Bohnet from the Harvard Kennedy School spoke to the impact of gender inequality at the highest levels within the workplace. To remedy this, the British government found that telling companies a positive statistic (that 94 per cent of companies had at least one woman on the board) rather than a negative one (that only 17 per cent of board members were women) led to a much better response in those companies’ promotion policies. The science and style of behaviour change communication were debated between leading psychologists Steven Pinker and Robert Cialdini, where the effectiveness of ‘reciprocity’ (that people are more likely to give something up if
SCOTTISH HIGHERS – A CORRECTION The news item on p.793 of the October issue, headed ‘A-level Psychology’, stated that total entries for Scottish Higher Psychology in 2015 were 3175, a ‘10 per cent decrease’ compared with 2014. In fact, the 2015 exam was the first year of the new revised Higher under ‘Curriculum for Excellence’, running alongside the old Higher in its final year. The old Higher had 3175 entries while the new Higher attracted 497. Old and new Highers yield the same Higher Award, and entries should therefore have been collated to give an overall entry total of 3672 – a 5.5 per cent increase.
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another party has also given something up) was highlighted in Cialdini’s example that hotel guests are more likely to reuse towels if told their hotel has already given to an environmental charity. Health and behaviour change was also given thorough and thought-provoking examinations. The ‘interactive’ session ‘You are the doctor’ allowed the audience to experience how good and bad medical decisions can cause life or death, and stress-tested the alternatives. Health experts, including Cornell University’s Brian Wansink (whose obesity research contributed to the introduction of smaller 100-calorie’ packages for reduced portion size) and the White House’s Sam Kass (who served as Executive Director of the First Lady’s ‘Let’s Move’ campaign) then discussed the epidemic of obesity and solutions to change widespread health behaviours around impulsive eating patterns. Topical sessions on finance and behaviour demonstrated the UK government’s pressing need to entice the public to actively manage their money for sustained financial health, as best exemplified in the recent pension reforms. Effective communication of the implications of poor financial management drove reformed behaviour, as observed after reminding people that taxes fund vital public services, rather than simply demanding payment without explanation. Another route was equally effective, as explained by David Halpern: ‘Findings from behavioural science show us that people are strongly influenced by what they think their fellow citizens are doing. The Behavioural Insights Team, for example, has shown that people are more likely to pay their tax when they are reminded of the truth – that most people pay their tax on time. So this survey has important implications. We underestimate how virtuous our fellow citizens are, and this really matters. If we think others are cheating, not saving enough, or not eating healthily, then we’re much more inclined to do the same ourselves. Our perception of others’ behaviours is often way out of line with reality, and this has consequences for what we ourselves do.’ Halpern’s references reflected the findings of the Ipsos Mori survey released at the event. This found that Britons underestimate how much exercise they really do, and the extent to which they save for retirement. The survey found
people think that 65 per cent of the population are not saving enough for retirement, when government studies suggest it’s actually 43 per cent; and that only 42 per cent do the recommended amount of exercise each week, when detailed physical activity surveys indicate it is 57 per cent. The survey, which was conducted in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, France and Germany, also found that people believed others’ behaviour was generally worse than their own. For example, people think that 52 per cent of their fellow citizens have pretended to be sick in the past year, but only 23 per cent of workers say they have done so themselves. On these and many other key topics that affect our everyday in big and small ways, such as crime, the environment and education, it was acknowledged that behavioural economics could seem paternalistic, and that turning theory into policy brought with it responsibility, and uncertainty. In a plenary session that was by far the highlight of the event, long-time colleague Richard Thaler interviewed Daniel Kahneman (dialling in from New York) about these issues, whose words were wise as a reminder of consequence: ‘In designing policy you have to worry about who the losers are going to be. What I believe is when you are introducing change there will be winners and losers. Losers will fight harder. Reform is more expensive than expected. Leaders don't anticipate loss aversion… they create winners and losers who they have to compensate… That would be the first piece of advice: who will the losers be and what will they be able to do to you?’ As final parting words, Kahneman’s concerns felt apt to the number of policy makers in the room: ‘I think there is an awful lot of decision making going on within firms and government and much of it is really very poor quality – it has evolved but it hasn't been designed. And designing decisions is a very large field. Seeing an organisation that produces decisions and asking: what quality controls can we apply? Getting into that is a very big challenge.’ Perhaps Thaler nailed the shortcut to the solution to this challenge by asking Kahneman how one can get buy-in for change management even if you don’t have a Nobel Prize? ‘Well, I think every consultant should have one,’ quipped Kahneman.
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Aiming to forget – human frailty or strength? What does it really mean to forget? Michael Anderson (University of Cambridge) has spent his career challenging the belief that forgetting is a human frailty and exploring the neurological mechanisms behind so-called motivated forgetting. He began his talk, at the British Academy in a joint event with the British Psychological Society, speaking of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film that follows a man’s mission to have memories of his ex-partner erased. He said that although people think forgetting is a negative thing, there are many situations where people may be motivated to actively forget. For example, one may wish to alleviate negative feelings, to protect one’s own self-image. He added: ‘More often than we realise, forgetting is what we want and need to do. Forgetting is the goal while remembering is the human frailty.’ Dr Anderson told a story of knocking a cactus from a windowsill and inhibiting himself from catching it. He said it occurred to him that if nature saw fit to give us mechanisms to prevent actions, some of those mechanisms might be able to be turned inward – for example in the case of memory retrieval. He went on to investigate this idea in the lab. Participants were trained to memorise word pairs. When faced with one of the cue words, could people actively prevent themselves retrieving the associated word? Anderson looked further into the moment where a person stops themselves from remembering. A ‘think – don’t think’ paradigm presented subjects with words either in green or red: when shown green they retrieved the associated word, when shown red they had to refrain from remembering the associated word, not allowing it to enter their consciousness. In the final phase of the test participants had to try to remember all word pairs. The words presented on ‘think’ trials were remembered well, while those on ‘don’t think’ trials were remembered more poorly. Anderson used the term ‘suppression induced forgetting’ to describe this phenomenon – constantly trying to keep something from one’s mind results in worse memory for that stimuli. But what are the neurological mechanisms behind this process? Anderson found activity in the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during motivated forgetting, an area also heavily involved in inhibiting action. Interestingly, Anderson also saw suppressed activity in the hippocampus – an area with a wellestablished role in memory. Anderson wanted to find out in these ‘don’t think’ trials whether people were simply waiting and not thinking of the associated word, or ‘slamming on the mental brakes’, as it were, to stop themselves remembering. So he asked subjects in the scanner to report on the ‘don’t think’ trials whether the associated word had crept into consciousness or hadn’t. He said when a participant experienced the word coming to mind and had to push it out he saw huge downregulation of hippocampus activity. Potentially, Anderson said, downregulating hippocampus activity does not target specific memories but has a more global effect on memory – causing people to briefly become amnesic. He described the case of one woman who suggested to him that she had experienced organic amnesia. It later emerged that she had witnessed a mass school shooting and later had to return to the same school. She found that her memory for her school years was badly affected. Anderson suggested that while suppressing memories triggered by stimuli related to the incident, this down-regulation of the hippocampus would have affected other memories that were unrelated to the trauma but that happened to the woman just before or after the incident that triggered the suppression. In his future work, Anderson and his
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team are hoping to assess whether people can be trained to suppress certain memories and whether people can be trained to down-regulate the hippocampus using neurofeedback. He concluded: ‘Forgetting is much more active than we realise. We do it on purpose more often than we realise.’ ER I Watch the lecture in full at tinyurl.com/babpsma
HCPC REVISE TRAINING GUIDANCE The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) has launched revised guidance for people with disabilities who are considering or training for a profession regulated by the HCPC. Nicole Casey, HCPC Acting Director of Policy and Standards commented: ‘Disabled people have an important contribution to make to the health and care professions we regulate. Having a health condition or disability should not be seen as a barrier to becoming a registered health and care professional. Many people who have disabilities successfully complete our approved training programmes, go on to register with us and practise as health and care professionals. We hope that this revised guidance will encourage, enable and support disabled people who are considering or training to become HCPCregistered professionals.’ I Download the guidance from tinyurl.com/ps8zges
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Not-so-smartphones – government reviews mobile policy in schools An investigation into how to train teachers to tackle poor pupil behaviour is to be expanded to cover the use of mobile phones. Former teacher and expert in behaviour in schools, Tom Bennett, will lead the government-commissioned review into how initial teacher training prepares teachers for managing behaviour in 21stcentury schools. Though many schools now use devices such as tablet computers to help children learn, teachers have reported that the growing number of youngsters bringing personal devices into class hinders teaching and leads to disruption. A recent study from LSE found banning mobile phones from classrooms could benefit students’ learning by as much as an additional week’s worth of schooling over an academic year. The report found that banning phones would most benefit low-achieving children and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
A 2013 survey suggested that the vast majority of schools have some form of mobile phone policy in place and one third of schools ban mobile phones outright, with a further fifth limiting their use in lessons. Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has already called for more schools to ban children from bringing phones into lessons – a major issue that Tom Bennett will now review. Occupational Health psychologist Gail Kinman (University of Bedfordshire) is part of a team who have organised a BPS-funded seminar series on the so-called
‘Always On’ culture. She said focusing on mobile device behaviour in schools would be useful in preparing young people for the workplace. ‘As well as the need to understand how using mobile devices at school can impair learning, it is important to help children appreciate the etiquette around using mobile phones – what is appropriate and what isn’t. Most university lecturers and employers have experiences of young people being unable to switch their phones off and who are engaged with them during important meetings and even during job interviews. The behaviours children learn in schools are reinforced and, if not challenged, will be used later.’ There is increasing evidence that a respite from mobile phones has benefits for learning as well as health and relationships. Professor Kinman said that although mobile devices are here to stay, there are ways of setting boundaries for their use. She added: ‘Parents have quite a lot
of power in this, and they are important role models for mobile phone use. They may tell children they can do something while a school says they can’t – there needs to be a negotiated and consistent view.’ Kinman suggested that schools should involve teachers, parents and children in developing the policies around mobile phone use in school. She added: ‘Parents and children need to appreciate the accumulated evidence that constantly switching attention from a phone to a teacher will impair attention at school as well as potentially create problems for them in their future education and in the workplace.’ The final seminar on the always-on culture, entitled ‘The always on culture: Implications for work life boundary management over the lifespan series’ will be held on 11 March. Further details will be available on https://alwaysonculture. wordpress.com. ER
POLICE AND UNIVERSITY TEAM UP FOR STUDENTS University of Bolton staff and students have joined forces with Greater Manchester Police on research and professional training, thanks to a memorandum of understanding. This also aims to support the provision of placement opportunities for students interested in working alongside police. This marks one of the first agreements that links up a large police force with a psychology department. Leader of the BSc in Criminological and Forensic Psychology at the university, Dr Gill Allen, said the memorandum would allow students to engage in research within applied areas around policing. She added: ‘Following the successful set up of a data-sharing agreement, which is in progress, students will be able to use existing data and collect their own data, which
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may contribute to the completion of their third-year honours projects.’ Academic staff will also be able to work with the police to undertake research, which will in turn benefit teaching across modules on the Criminological and Forensic Psychology programme. Allen added: ‘In addition to this student research, psychologists from the university will support Greater Manchester Police though delivering training sessions, research dissemination and facilitating on wellbeing events, which are increasingly important for the police force.’ Students will also be given bespoke lectures from Chief Inspector Shane O’Neill on opportunities of working in the police force as well as giving advice on important transferrable skills they will develop during
their academic studies. The memorandum of understanding will also open up new opportunities for placements for both undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in working with the police. Dr Allen said: ‘The undergraduate students were delighted to hear about this new partnership. When the information was disseminated to students in induction week, one final-year student who is keen to forge a career within the police service said, “I think it is a really fantastic opportunity for young motivated individuals like myself to get a foothold in the police force, and it will help boost relations between the community and Bolton University if the general public are aware that GMP are in partnership with us”.’ ER
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A new era for psychology? Could psychology be heading as Shadow Public Health those things without the for a new era, where the Spokesperson, Luciana has strong economy that we have subject is high on political powerfully advocated for an built over these last five years.’ agendas and guides policy appreciation of the social On the other side of the and legislation? Recent events determinants of health – for pond, Barack Obama signalled seem to signal a shifting focus physical health problems, his intention to put towards psychology and psychology at the heart of the behavioural sciences in policy by issuing an Executive the political world. Order on the use of so-called The newly elected ‘nudge’ techniques (see leader of the Labour Party, tinyurl.com/pgzgnfw). Obama Jeremy Corbyn, has said in the order that findings garnered praise for his from psychology about how appointment of a new people make decisions and act Shadow Minister for on them could be used in Mental Health Luciana policy to ‘better serve the Berger. In a statement American people’. He added announcing the members that where policies have been of his Shadow Cabinet, he guided by behavioural science pointed out it was the first they have improved outcomes time there was a majority for Americans, and he gave the of women. He added: ‘I am example of automatic delighted that we have enrolment and escalation in established a Shadow retirement plans, which have Cabinet position for mental helped people accumulate Shadow Minister for Mental health, which is a matter more in retirement savings. Health Luciana Berger I have long been interested He said that behavioural in.’ insights could support people The Independent reported where economic and social in finding better jobs, lead (see tinyurl.com/ox2rbe3) that disadvantage dramatically healthier lives and increase Berger will: ‘Directly work on affect our health, and in access to educational mental health issues and mental health, where social programmes. He made consider how they can best determinants are recommendations, among be addressed by the NHS and overwhelmingly important.’ prioritised by a Labour Psychology and mental government.’ Her position is health also featured in an entirely new creation, and Corbyn’s first Prime Berger has no counterpart in Minister’s Questions – in the current Conservative which he asked members of government. the public to submit BPS President Elect Peter questions to be put to David Kinderman said on Twitter Cameron (see Hansard report that the appointment of Berger at tinyurl.com/q56zgph). He was game changing. He added: was asked by one woman ‘It’s wonderful that mental why mental health services health now has a Shadow were ‘on their knees’ and Cabinet position – Luciana Angela Gilchrist, a clinical Berger will sit at Shadow psychologist, had one of her Cabinet meetings – rather than own questions put to the being a subsidiary Shadow Prime Minister, she asked Dr Tom Insel, Director of the Minister under the Health about the lack of beds for National Institute of Mental portfolio – which substantially mental health patients. Health raises the profile of this vital The Prime Minister issue. responded that although ‘Luciana Berger herself has more resources need to be others, that Executive been a strong advocate of good made available there should Departments and agencies mental health services and, also be a change in both the should identify areas of policy indeed, the work of the British way the NHS works and public where behavioural science Psychological Society, speaking attitudes to mental health. He could have good input, test at the launch of our report added: ‘But I say again that we and evaluate areas where it is Understanding Psychosis. And, will not be able to do any of used and recruit behavioural
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science experts to the Federal Government to help achieve this. Also in the USA Dr Tom Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, announced he would be stepping down to join Google Life Sciences, which looks into developing technologies for early detection of health issues. This potentially signals psychology and mental health issues having more input. The New York Times reported (see tinyurl.com/qzavfzr) that Insel was turning back to the psychosocial realm after focusing much of his career steering funding towards the most severe psychological problems, such as schizophrenia, and into basic biological studies. The report, by Benedict Carey, gave insight into what his first input may be: ‘One project he has thought about is detecting psychosis early, using language analytics – algorithms that show promise in picking up the semantic signature of the disorganized thinking characteristic of psychosis.’ Insel told Technology Review: ‘We are at a really interesting moment in time. Technology that already has had such a big impact, on entertainment and so many aspects of our lives, can really start to change health care. If you ask the question “What parts of health care can technology transform?” – mental health could be one of the biggest. Technology can cover much of the diagnostic process because you can use sensors and collect information about behavior in an objective way. Also, a lot of the treatments for mental health are psychosocial interventions, and those can be done through a smartphone. And most importantly, it can affect the quality of care, which is a big issue, especially for psychosocial interventions.’ ER
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Wiley Prize in Psychology Professor Peter Fonagy has been awarded the British Academy’s prestigious Wiley Prize in Psychology, awarded every two years to an outstanding international scholar for lifetime achievement in psychology. Previous winners were Professors Martin Seligman, Michael Tomasello and Anne Treisman – it has never before been awarded to a British academic. Professor Fonagy is being recognised for ground-breaking work that has had a major impact on social policy on early childcare, adoption and fostering. His research has demonstrated that having a secure attachment to a parent or caregiver helps children to develop the ability to understand their own and others’ thoughts and feelings. This capacity, which he termed ‘mentalisation’, is uniquely characteristic of humans but individual differences have been shown to influence personality development and mental health in both the short and longer term. He has shown that these abilities are passed from caregiver to child, not genetically but via the quality of childcare. This research into mentalisation has also been extended to psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality
disorder (BPD). This group, characterised by difficulties with emotion regulation and impulse control, and unstable relationships and self-image, were previously often seen as ‘untreatable’. With Anthony Bateman, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at St Anne’s Hospital, London, Professor Fonagy developed and evaluated mentalisation-based treatment (MBT), which has had a major impact on clinical practice for the treatment of patients with BPD in the UK (NICE CG 78) and internationally. It has also been used with other common mental health problems, including eating disorders and substance misuse, and in a range of clinical settings. As well as being an academic at University College London, Professor Fonagy is Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre (www.annafreud.org), a pioneering children’s mental health
Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), who has spent her career investigating the emotional and social development of the adolescent brain, has been awarded the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for her research. The award is given by the Jacobs Foundation, which promotes child and youth development, to recognise exceptional research in the field. Blakemore’s research has focused on the development of social cognition and decision making during adolescence, she has helped to overturn the previously held belief that no major neurodevelopmental changes occur after early childhood. By demonstrating that the brain develops both structurally and functionally during adolescence, her work has shown adolescence represents a period of relatively high neural plasticity, particularly in brain regions involved in executive function and social cognition. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore said: ‘It is a great honour to be awarded the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize. It is truly humbling that my lab’s research has been recognised by this prestigious award from the Jacobs Foundation. ‘I am indebted beyond words to my mentors and to all the people who have worked in my team at UCL over the past 13 years, and I am grateful to the many children and young people who have taken part in our studies and the schools that support our research. I am also grateful to the colleagues who nominated me for this award. I feel privileged to work with such inspiring and supportive people.’ The award, consisting of 1 million Swiss francs, will be presented on 4 December at an award ceremony at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
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charity. The Honourable Michael Samuel, Chair of Trustees of the Centre, said: ‘We are delighted that Peter has received this recognition. He has been an energetic and exceptionally successful academic leader of the Centre and has overseen its growth from a local mental health provider to a national centre for child mental health.’ The charity is currently leading a push for a stepchange in the way services for children and adolescents with mental health problems are delivered. The Duchess of Cambridge visited the Anna Freud Centre two weeks ago to find out more about this work. Professor Fonagy said: ‘Naturally, I feel deeply honoured to receive this award which I feel recognises my many collaborators over nearly four decades of research whose contribution I am delighted to join in celebrating.’ JS I See p.948 for a ‘One on one’ with Professor Fonagy, and read more about his work in our archive (see tinyurl.com/pj6xn4s)
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU… A CEO? The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held at Harvard University in September, celebrating research that makes people laugh and then think. Its founder, Marc Abrahams, presented prizes to winners including academics who have studied the likely descendants of Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty (the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco) and research into the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds.) Each of the Ig Nobel winners was given their prize by a real Nobel
laureates and the winning teams also received a cash prize of a ten trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. Although there was no psychology prize this year the management prize went to Gennaro Bernile and his team, who discovered that many business leaders developed a fondness for risk-taking after childhood experiences of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and wildfires (see tinyurl.com/otdx8xv). ER I Watch the ceremony at tinyurl.com/nkrhqqu. More improbability: tinyurl.com/improbres
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Using brain imaging to re-evaluate psychology’s three most famous cases It’s 50 years since the American neurologist Norman Geschwind published his hugely influential Disconnexion Syndromes in Animals and Man, in which he argued that many brain disorders and injuries could best be understood in terms of the damage incurred to the whitematter pathways connecting different areas of the brain. To mark this anniversary, an international team of researchers has used modern brainimaging techniques to reveal, in an open-access article for Cerebral Cortex, the likely damage to brain connectivity suffered by three of psychology’s most famous cases: the 19thcentury rail worker Phineas Gage, who survived an iron rod passing through his brain; Louis Victor Leborgne, the 19th-century aphasic patient studied by Paul Broca who played a key role in our understanding of language function in the brain; and the most studied amnesiac in history, Henry Molaison (known as H.M. in the literature), who died in 2008. Michel Thiebaut de Schotten and his colleagues first obtained existing information about the brains of these three cases. For Gage they used a CT scan taken of his skull by In Cerebral Cortex researchers in 2004 and mapped the signs of injury onto a simulation of his brain. Leborgne’s brain is in preservation at the Dupuytren Museum in Paris, and they used an area in the left frontal lobe). The researchers think Leborgne MRI scan of it taken in 2007. For Molaison’s brain they used an also likely suffered damage to pathways not involved in MRI scan taken while he was still alive in 1993. language, such as the left cortico-spinal tract (which could Next, the researchers created an intricately detailed map of explain the documented paralysis of his right arm and leg). the human brain’s connective pathways. They used an advanced Finally, turning to Molaison, the researchers again estimate version of a technique known as diffusion tensor imaging to plot widespread damage to connective tissues beyond the main brain the connective tissues in the brains of 129 healthy volunteers regions, including the hippocampus, that were directly removed (aged 18–79; 59 men). They combined the data from all these by surgery (Molaison became amnesic after radical healthy people’s brains to create an average roadmap of the neurosurgery to treat his epilepsy). This includes the fornix, the human brain’s connective tracts. ventral cingulum, uncinate fasciculus and anterior commissure. The final step involved applying the information on the brain Damage to that last tract, which is involved in processing smell, damage incurred by the three famous cases onto this roadmap might explain lab reports that Molaison had problems with his of the human brain’s connective pathways, to see which odour discrimination. important tracts had probably been affected. What to make of these new insights? The researchers said In the case of Gage, the researchers estimate that he they have ‘demonstrated the validity of applying an atlas based suffered widespread damage to several connective pathways approach to reappraise the effects of disconnection in 3 historic in his frontal lobes, beyond the specific damage thought to have patients’. Their research is certainly a fitting tribute to the legacy been inflicted by the passage of the iron bar. These pathways of Geschwind, showing how ‘social behaviour, language, and include the uncinate fasciculus, the frontal intralobar networks, memory depend on the coordinated activity of different regions and the fronto-striatal-thalamal-frontal network, with likely rather than single areas in the frontal or temporal lobes’. implications for his decision making and emotional functioning. However, the researchers also admitted that much caution is Mapping Leborgne’s brain lesions onto the connectivity needed: their research involved many ambitious leaps and roadmap, the researchers estimate that he suffered extensive generalisations. What is for sure is that these new insights will damage to many tracts, including almost all the dorsolateral further fuel the mythical status of these three patients. Gage, tracts of the left hemisphere, which would have had profound Leborgne and Molaison are the psychological case studies that implications for his language function (on top of the effects caused by localised damage to what is now known as Broca’s just keep giving. CJ
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The psychological toll of being off-duty but ‘on call’ In Journal of Occupational Health Psychology That increasingly common end-of-day feeling: of physically leaving the office, only for it to tag along home. Thanks largely to technology, our availability – to clients, bosses and co-workers – extends into our evenings, weekends and even holidays. Getting a clear account of what this means for us isn’t easy, as jobs that intrude more into leisure time are also distinguished by higher pace and further factors known and unknown, making it hard to pinpoint what harmful effects, if any, are specifically due to our constant availability. A new study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and led by Jan Dettmers at the University of Hamburg, takes a fresh tack on this, investigating workers who have two types of free time: on-call periods where they are free to please themselves but must remain available for potential work demands, and other periods where they are truly off-duty. For each individual participant, this set-up keeps job-role demands and responsibilities equal while varying the need to be available. The data suggest that extended work availability has a negative effect: dampening mood and also increasing markers of physiological stress. The 132 participants – mostly men in 13 organisations ranging from IT to transport – spent periods of their calendar on-call, meaning they were available out of office hours to deal with special customer requests or troubleshoot technical emergencies. For the purposes of the study, the researchers focused on a four-day oncall period (including the weekend) and a similar period without on-call responsibilities. During the study, participants completed morning mood diaries that showed them to be more tired, tense and unwell following an on-call day. The effect
remained even after controlling for the number of work calls taken the previous day – suggesting it isn’t explained purely by lengthy and draining interactions. It’s likely that the mere anticipation of interruption, and the resulting loss of control over one’s free time, eats away at the benefits of leisure, even if the interruptions turn out to be minor. In addition to the diary information, 51 participants provided physiological data in the form of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol can be used as a physiological marker of stress: specifically, the degree of its postwaking climb in concentration, which appears to be a preparation for the anticipated stresses of the day. A larger increase suggests a more stress-oriented state, and Dettmers and his team were able to analyse this from cotton balls that participants chewed on immediately after waking, and 15 minutes and 30 minutes after waking, before popping them into the freezer to await collection. The cortisol awakening response was greater the morning after an on-call day, with this effect
also persisting once the volume of the previous day’s interruptions was controlled for. We already know that use of work technology during free time makes it harder to relax and detach. Here we see further evidence that the mere prospect of workrelated interruptions during free time can exacerbate stress. In the organisations researched in this study, on-call periods were formally identified as such and represented just a fraction of the work calendar; an unspoken truth in many organisations is that on-call is the unofficial default mode. In these cases, carving out truly off-call periods that allow people to reclaim control over their experiences is long overdue. AF
Mental effort is contagious In Psychonomic Bulletin and Review If you’re about to dive into a piece of work that requires intense mental focus, you might find it helps to sit next to someone else who is concentrating hard. According to
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an ingenious new study published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, mental exertion is contagious: if a person near you is straining their synapses in mental effort, their mindset will automatically intensify your own concentration levels. Psychologists have known since at least the 1960s that the presence of other people affects our own performance in predictable ways. For example, the 1965 social facilitation theory describes how the presence of other people makes it easier to perform well-rehearsed, automatic behaviours. Yet company can also be distracting and make it more difficult to perform behaviours that require mental control. Kobe Desender at Vrije Universiteit in Belgium and his colleagues wanted to build on these findings by testing whether it makes a difference to our performance what other people present are doing – and
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specifically, if someone else is using a lot of mental effort, does that affect how much mental effort we exert ourselves? Thirty-eight participants (20 women; average age 22) performed a version of what’s known as the ‘Simon task’ in pairs. Coloured squares appeared on either the left- or right-hand side of a computer screen. When two of the four possible colours of square appeared, the person sitting to the left of the screen was required to press the 'd' keyboard key as fast as possible with their left hand. When either of the two other possible coloured squares appeared, the person on the right was required to press the 'k' key as fast as possible with their right hand. Superior performance is revealed through faster responding and fewer errors. Although the task was performed in pairs in this way, there was no need or possibility for collaboration between partners, nor was there any competition. An important thing to understand about this task is that it was easier for participants to respond to a target square (i.e. one that
was a colour that they had been instructed to respond to) when it appeared on the same side that they were sitting, and that was therefore also the same side as the hand they were using to respond – that is, when the target and response were congruent. Also, the higher the proportion of congruent trials that a participant was subjected to, the easier the task would become, because they could switch to a more automatic mode of responding. The researchers manipulated task
LINK FEAST Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s People today are apparently about 10 per cent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans. That’s according to Olga Khazan who reports on an intriguing new study for The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the1980s/407974 Confessions of a Neurotic Extravert Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman writes a deeply personal article for The Creativity Post. www.creativitypost.com/psychology/confessions_of_a_neurotic_extravert Blindsight: The Strangest Form of Consciousness Some people who have lost their vision find a ‘second sight’ taking over their eyes – an uncanny, subconscious sense that sheds light into the hidden depths of the human mind. By David Robson for BBC Future. www.bbc.com/future/story/20150925-blindsight-the-strangest-form-of-consciousness Drugs and Talk Therapy Affect the Brain in Different Ways And sometimes they offer complementary benefits, suggests a new study that Digest editor Christian Jarrett reported on for Science of Us. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/09/drugs-talk-therapy-affect-the-braindifferently.html Why Music? A whole host of programmes on the psychology of music, from BBC Radio 3 and the Wellcome Trust. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02zjcpx/members The Problem of Too Much Talent It’s true of basketball players, businesspeople, and even baboons: When too many powerful personalities are present, discord ensues. Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer report on their fascinating research for The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/hierarchy-friend-foe-too-muchtalent/401150
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difficultly individually for each person in a pair by varying their proportion of congruent versus incongruent trials. The issue of stimulus-response congruence also provided a ready indicator of a person’s concentration levels. If a person was trying really hard, their performance would be less affected by whether their target squares were congruent or not. Desender and his team were especially interested in those instances when they made the task super difficult for one participant (he or she had only 10 per cent congruent trials), but they kept the difficulty medium for the other participant (they had a 50/50 mix of congruent and incongruent trials). In this situation, the participant in the difficult version was required to use maximum mental effort to succeed. The intriguing finding is that this mental effort influenced their partner. A person playing alongside someone who was forced to concentrate really hard was themselves less influenced by their own targets’ congruency – a sure sign they too were trying harder than normal. Somehow one person’s hidden mental effort seemed to influence the other. Further analysis confirmed that this effect was not caused simply by one player mimicking the other’s response speed. Nor was it that the participants were influenced by looking at their partner’s ratio of congruent and incongruent trials and seeing that their task was more difficult. The researchers ruled out this possibility in a follow-up study in which each player had their own display, and a piece of cardboard stopped them from being able to see their partner’s squares. The researchers don’t know what led one player’s levels of mental effort to contaminate their partner, but they speculate that perhaps it had to do with body posture. Maybe the person forced to concentrate extra hard adopted a more tense body posture and this sign of mental effort automatically influenced their partner to also concentrate extra hard. However, they added that a ‘more radical hypothesis should also be considered, such as the possibility that effort exertion is influenced by a difference in scent of someone else exerting high or low effort’. CJ
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Looking for the brain basis of chimp personality In NeuroImage Some chimps are more outgoing than others. Some like trying out new foods and games while their friends stick to the tried and tested. In short, chimps have personalities, just like we do. What’s more, psychologists investigating chimp personality have found that their traits tend to coalescence into five main factors, again much like human personality. Three of these are named the same as their human equivalents: Extraversion, Openness and Agreeableness. The other two are Dominance (a bit like the opposite of the human trait of Neuroticism) and Reactivity/Undependability (opposite to the human trait Conscientiousness). The neurobiological basis of human personality is a thriving area of research, but this study published in NeuroImage by a team of psychologists and primatologists is the first to look at the brains of chimpanzees to try to find the neural correlates of personality differences in our evolutionary cousin. The chimps were residents at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. There were 50 males with an average age of 22 and 57 females with an average age of 20. Robert Latzman and his colleagues relied on colony staff to rate the chimps’ personalities using a 41-item personality questionnaire that tapped the chimp equivalent of the five main personality traits. The chimps then sedated while their brains were scanned by MRI. Evidence has linked many aspects of human personality to features of the frontal cortex, so the researchers decided to focus their investigation in that part of the chimp brain. After controlling for age and sex (older chimps were less reactive and less extravert; males tended to be more extravert and dominant), they found that the more grey matter a chimp had in the frontal cortex, the more dominant, open and extravert the chimp tended to be. The researchers said this potentially
reflects the broad role of the frontal cortex in ‘the control of emotions in the service of goaldirected behaviour’. Zooming in on a particular sub-structure in the frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; associated in humans with motivation and expectations, among other things), higher Extraversion and Openness were associated with more grey matter in this structure. The researchers also looked at asymmetries between the chimps’ brain hemispheres, where they found that more grey matter volume in the right hemisphere was associated with higher Extraversion and Dominance, contradicting human research linking approach behaviours with the left hemisphere. However, when the they looked at asymmetries in specific structures, including the ACC and the medial prefrontal cortex, they found that more grey matter in the right hemisphere was associated with more reactivity, while a left-hemisphere bias was associated with more dominance, which is more consistent with human evidence. The study makes a start at exploring the neurobiology of chimp personality, but it does have some problems, including the cross-sectional design (were the brain differences a cause or consequence of personality differences?), the exclusive focus on the frontal cortex, and the way the researchers translated each chimp's brain structure onto a common template, thus losing some of the individuality between chimps. Nonetheless, Latzman and his colleagues said their findings added further evidence to the idea that human personality has an evolutionary and biological basis, and confirmed ‘the importance of neuroscientific approaches to the study of basic dispositions (i.e. personality)…suggest[ing] that many of these associations are comparable in chimpanzees’. CJ
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DIGEST DIGESTED Full reports are available at www.bps.org.uk/digest Researchers testing the effects of the first version of the foc.us headset – a commercially available brain-stimulation device – found that it impaired users’ working memory compared with a control condition in which the device was switched off. Experimental Brain Research Most acts of aggression by toddlers, such as biting, shoving and hair pulling, are unprovoked. The finding comes from home visits to children’s houses and contradicts the idea that toddler aggression is the result of an inability to control frustration or anger. Developmental Science Self-doubting bosses prefer to delegate tasks to self-doubting staff. Myriam Bechtoldt, who conducted the research, says it is a simple matter of self-image. In the self-doubting subordinates, impostor participants see some part of themselves, and prefer to rely on someone with a similar mindset. Personality and Individual Differences Background positive music increases people’s willingness to comply with a request to do others harm. The music needs to be upbeat and familiar, but the lyrics aren’t so important. Researcher Naomi Ziv thinks the effect occurs because the music forms a social bond between the person making the request and the target of the request. Psychology of Music We usually think of entrepreneurs’ passion as driving their effort. A new study of German entrepreneurs shows it can work the other way – the more effort they invested in a task, the more passionate they felt about it later, so long as they’d chosen their own goals, believed the task was important, and that their contribution had made a difference. Academy of Management Journal The solitary inventor, buried away in garage or shed, is the classic depiction of introvert as born problem-solver. But a new study found that extraverted people performed better at the classic Tower of Hanoi task (a test of visual and spatial skills and planning) because they were more motivated than introverts by reward and excitement. Psychological Studies A twin study has found that most of the genes that are associated with face-recognition ability are different from the genes involved in general mental ability or the ability to recognise cars. The result supports the argument that face recognition is a special skill that has evolved somewhat separately from our other mental abilities. PNAS
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Wu-wei – doing less and wanting more The only way to succeed is to not try, argues Edward Slingerland
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Although modern Western society tends to emphasise the importance of willpower and striving, there are some central human goals – happiness, relaxation, charisma – that appear to come only to those who are not trying to achieve them. The importance of ‘not trying’ was recognised by early Chinese thinkers, who understood how relaxed spontaneity could lead to both personal and social success. The early Chinese ideal of effortless action is also looking increasingly plausible from the perspective of modern psychology, as we come to better understand the pervasive role of embodied, tacit knowledge in human behaviour.
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Why is ‘being in the zone’ so important for performers and athletes? Why do relaxed, spontaneous people strike us as more confident and attractive?
resources
Slingerland, E. (2014). Trying not to try: The ancient art of effortlessness and the surprising power of spontaneity. Edinburgh: Canongate. www.facebook.com/slingerland3
references
How are the challenges of sinking a crucial golf putt similar to those of impressing a blind date?
Barker, J.E., Semenov, A.D., Michaelson, L. et al. (2014). Less-structured time in children’s daily lives predicts selfdirected executive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 593. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00593 Barsalou, L. (2010). Grounded cognition: Past, present, and future. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 716–724. Baumeister, R. (1984). Choking under pressure. Journal of Personality and
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2014 study by Heejung Park and colleagues, focusing on annual surveys of 12th-graders that have been conducted since the 1970s, showed a steady increase in expressions of materialism, as well as a corresponding decrease in professed concern for others, for the first decades of the surveys. This trend began to reverse itself, however, in about 2008, with the younger members of the so-called ‘Millennial’ generation. (The Millennial generation is loosely defined as those born from the early 1980s to about 2000.) Materialism and self-concern appear to play a less central role in the lives of these young adults than in the generations that preceded them. In their discussion of this study, Emily Esfahani Smith and Jennifer Aaker (2013) connect this work to a 2011 study by the Career Advisory Board and Harris Interactive, surveying both Millennial workers and their supervisors, which showed that Millennials are much more concerned with meaning, and less concerned with money, than those responsible for hiring them. The Millennial search for meaning leads them down many paths, but one of the directions they may be turning is East. Over the past decade and a half, I’ve noticed a marked uptick in the number of students interested in my specialty, early Chinese thought. And this is not an idiosyncratic observation. The Chronicle of Higher Education has documented a sharp increase in the visibility of Chinese philosophy in the American academy (Romano, 2013), while The Atlantic describes the hundreds of Harvard
Social Psychology, 46, 610–620. Baumeister, R., Vohs, K., Aaker, J. & Garbinsky, E. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 505–516. Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: What the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to. New York: Free Press. Buckley, C. (2014, 11 October). Leader
students that every year pack the lectures of my colleague Michael Puett on early Chinese thought – the third largest enrolment in the entire university (GrossLoh, 2013). This is, of course, not the first time young Westerners have had a surge of interest in Eastern thought. There were widespread flirtations with Vedantic thought in the 19th century, as well as the counter-culture movement of the 1960s that saw in Chinese and Indian philosophy the perfect antidote for the alienated squareness of their parents’ generation. The Millennial turn toward Eastern thought strikes me as different, though. Whereas many of the devotees of Alan Watts or celebrity Indian gurus looked to Eastern thought for a confirmation of their own worldviews – assurance that Zen or Hinduism said that sex, drugs, free love and interminable guitar solos were OK – the academic bent of the Millennial generation (notably better educated than their predecessors) seems to reflect a growing desire to understand alternative ways of thought on their own terms. This is important because there are significant contrasts between, say, early Chinese thought and recent Western philosophical and religious thought – contrasts that have much to say about how we value the different components of our psychological make-up. One of the more salient is an early Chinese suspicion of the value of conscious striving. Western philosophers tend to emphasise the importance of thinking rationally about our goals and then exerting effort and self-control to achieve them. Putting this in terms of dual systems models of cognition (Evans, 2008; Kahneman, 2011), Western thought has strongly emphasised System 2 (or ‘cold’ cognition), and based their models of ethics on the exertion of cognitive control. Their influence has much to do with the focus on discipline and persistence that we see in academic psychology and education. Although there were certainly
taps into Chinese classics in seeking to cement power. New York Times. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row. DeCaro, M., Thomas, R., Albert, N. & Beilock, S. (2011). Choking under pressure: Multiple routes to skill
failure. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 140(3), 390–406. Dijksterhuis, A., Strick, M., Bos, M. & Nordgren, L. (2013, 19 January). Proposing System 3. Paper presented at the Society for Social and Personality Psychology Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA. Dijkstra, K.A., van der Pligt, J., van Kleef, G.A. & Kerstholt, J.H. (2012). Deliberation versus intuition. Journal
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thinkers in early China advocating rationality and self-control, the mainstream thinkers – the Confucians and Daoists who set the tone for the subsequent 2000 years of East Asian intellectual history – believed that true moral perfection and spiritual fulfilment required attaining a state where striving is transcended. The ideal of ‘effortless action’, or wu-wei, refers to the dynamic, unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective behaviour flows automatically and spontaneously from the self, without the need for thought or exertion (Slingerland 2003, 2014). Since none of these thinkers believe that we can reach this state without some sort of self-cultivation, we might see this model of ethics as a kind of time-delayed cognitive control, in which the fruits of cold cognition are built into our ‘hot’, embodied systems (Slingerland 2011). In our contemporary world, we can see the importance of wu-wei in many
areas of life, from sports to interpersonal role to play – we are at our most powerful relationships. As in many elite sports, and effective when we are not thinking, where levels of training and when we let our body take over. professionalism are uniformly high, the Ironically, disembodied scientific athlete’s greatest enemy is typically his or rationality has, in recent years, begun to her own mind. The difference between reveal the profound limits of abstract Olympic medal and demoralising failure thought and conscious control when it often hinges on an ability to forget the comes to our lived experience. We have years of preparation, forget the rankings very good scientific reasons for thinking and the pressure, and to simply relax into that logic and willpower – especially the moment (Beilock, 2010). While the when we’re talking about one human crucial importance of spontaneity for being relating to another, or a person athletes or other performers learning to inhabit his is widely recognised, we or her social world – are have a tendency to overlook extremely useful in an “…proper and its importance in everyday indirect way, but can’t effective behaviour life. But it is certainly the actually be trusted when flows automatically case that the insomniac there’s actually something and spontaneously trying to fall asleep, the urgent to do. In most from the self…” nervous bachelor on a blind moments, success does not date, and the job applicant come from thinking more striving to appear confident rigorously or striving harder, and relaxed all find themselves in because our minds are built for doing, not precisely the same situation as an elite thinking (Clark 1997; Thompson 2007), Olympic athlete: the only way to succeed and we can only act effectively when we is to not try. can persuade our conscious mind to get One of the reasons for our blindspot out of the way. when it comes to the pervasiveness of To those familiar with Mihalyi spontaneity, and the unique tensions Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ involved in obtaining it, is precisely (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) this might because we are heirs to the Western sound familiar. Like flow, wu-wei involves philosophical tradition that emphasises a loss of sense of self and a feeling of conscious striving and will power. effortlessness. Flow, however, is typically We are taught that we have to use conceived of in very individualistic terms, our minds to control our bodies, and portrayed as a state that requires a and that success and happiness are constant ramping up of challenge and inextricably intertwined with complexity. Many of the exemplars discipline and effort. The ideal of presented by Csikszentmihalyi’s in his wu-wei, on the other hand, presents 1990 book Flow – the world-renowned an embodied model of the self, one businesswoman who spends her life in that seems increasingly in line with perpetual motion, migrating between her our best current understanding of various residences around the world, or human cognition. Contemporary the rock climber constantly striving to cognitive science, slowly emerging find a more challenging ascent – have from a philosophical hangover a strong every-person-for-herself feel to induced by dualistic Western them. The distinctive feature of wu-wei, thought, is gradually coming to on the other hand, is a sense of a consensus that human thought immersion in a greater, shared and valued is embodied (Barsalou, 2010; Gibbs, whole. So, although wu-wei can be Confucians and Daoists believed that true moral 2006; Shapiro, 2014; Varela et al., attained in challenging situations perfection and spiritual fulfilment required 1991; Wilson, 2002), and that – while requiring skill or training, it is more attaining a state where striving is transcended abstract knowledge certainly has a commonly encountered in less
of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(5), 1156–1161. Durkheim, É. (1965). The elementary forms of the religious life (Joseph Ward Swain, Trans.). New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. (Original work published 1915) Evans, J. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278.
Gibbs, R. (2006). Embodiment and cognitive science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, A. (2013). Give and take: A revolutionary approach to success. New York: Viking. Gross-Loh, C. (2013, 8 October). Why are hundreds of Harvard students studying ancient Chinese philosophy? The Atlantic. Jackson, R., Ashford, K. & Norsworthy,
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G. (2006). Attentional focus, dispositional reinvestment, and skilled motor performance under pressure. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 28, 49–68. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Levitin, D. (2014). The organized mind: Thinking straight in the age of information overload. New York:
Dutton Penguin. Marcks, B. & Woods, D. (2005). A comparison of thought suppression to an acceptance-based technique in the management of personal intrusive thoughts. Behavioral Research and Therapy, 43, 433–445. Osnos, E. (2014). Age of ambition: Chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new China. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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adrenaline-inducing activities, like a quiet walk in a special landscape, a simple meal with family and friends, or just sitting on a beach watching the ocean roll in. Wuwei is fundamentally about belonging and meaning, not skill or challenge per se. Belonging and meaning seem to be precisely the things that the Millennials who fill my classroom on early Chinese thought seem to be looking for. Whereas my fellow university graduates in the early 1990s were hell-bent on landing jobs in business, finance or law, the recent graduates I know tend to work for nonprofits or alternative newspapers, or head abroad for a year or two of volunteer work. They also seem quite comfortable with the idea of blazing their own career path: a full 50 per cent of Millennials in the 2011 career survey reported feeling interested or very interested in being selfemployed. Cynical observers may dismiss all of this as a pragmatic response to a weak job market but, whatever the ultimate cause, these young people do seem to have embarked on a quest for rewarding, meaningful work and a sense
of community. This is reflected in a host of recent trends, from the locavore movement to apartment sharing and tool swapping. These frameworks, cobbled together from a variety of sources, are nowhere near as comprehensive or coherent as traditional religious worldviews, including the early Chinese thoughtworld in which wu-wei was originally embedded. It is also no doubt the case that some drawing upon Eastern thought are less motivated by spiritual thirst than an interest in using alternative modes of knowledge to maximally leverage their tech company’s IPO. Events such as ‘Wisdom 2.0’ (www.wisdom2summit.com), where ancient Eastern wisdom is combined with motivational speakers and frenetic business networking, strike one as more instrumental in their use of alternative religious traditions. The millennial seekers whom I know, however, strike me as entirely sincere in their quest for rewarding, meaningful work and a sense of community.
Nose to the grindstone? Modern workplaces tend to emphasise long hours and constant striving as the keys to success, whether it comes to successfully managing a team of employees or coming up with a conceptual breakthrough. In many cases, however, this ‘nose to the grindstone’ approach may be profoundly counterproductive. A growing literature in the psychology of perception has demonstrated that, when it comes to certain difficult visual tasks, simply relaxing and letting the answer ‘pop out’ works much better than actively trying (Smilek et al., 2006; Watson et al., 2010). Similarly, when one is stymied by a problem, simply changing your focus of attention is often the best way to solve it (Dijksterhuis et al., 2013). Relaxing the conscious mind allows the adaptive unconscious to take over, and frequently our tacit selves are better at solving certain types of particularly complex problems. In the field of psychotherapy, so-called ‘acceptance’ strategies, in which clients are instructed to simply allow unwanted thoughts or memories to flood over them, regularly prove to be more effective than active suppression strategies (Marcks & Woods, 2005; Wegner, 2011). The Daoist thinker Laotze at one point advises the ruler, ‘Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish’ – in other words, you don’t want to overdo it. This is equally good advice for a workplace manager or knowledge-economy worker. When faced with a difficult management decision or an intractable technical problem, the best approach may be just to walk away. Sleep in, take a walk, go weed your garden.
Park, H., Twenge, J.M. & Greenfield, P.M. (2014). The Great Recession. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5, 310–318. Pomerantz, E.M., Ng, F.F-Y., Cheung, C.S-S. & Qu, Y. (2014). Raising happy children who succeed in school. Child Development Perspectives, 8(2), 71–76. Rappaport, R.A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Romano, C. (2013, 23 September). Chinese philosophy lifts off in America. Chronicle of Higher Education. Schooler, J., Ariely, D. & Loewenstein, G. (2003). The pursuit and assessment of happiness can be self-defeating. In J. Carrillo & I. Brocas (Eds.) Psychology and economics (pp.41–70).
To my considerable surprise, interest in early Chinese thought also appears to be growing even in the unlikeliest of all places: China itself. Anyone who has experienced a modern Chinese city, with its packed Gucci outlets and golden iPhones, might be forgiven for thinking of the modern Chinese ethos as the precisely the opposite of wu-wei, a wildly individualistic and materialistic frenzy of acquisition and consumption completely unmoored from any recognisable moral or social values. It’s also true that, when I studied in Taiwan in the late 1980s, fellow students greeted my explanation that I was planning to specialise in ancient Chinese thought as if I’d expressed an interest in papyrus-making or medieval alchemy. They themselves wanted to study Western, modern things – economics, business, engineering or English – and saw my interest in ancient China as culturally flattering, but also faintly ridiculous. Returning to China as a professor in the new millennium, I find the landscape – physical and intellectual – fundamentally transformed. As the initial rush of consumerism begins to wear off, the young Chinese counterparts to the Millennials are looking for something more. Evan Osnos has recently documented the resurgence of interest in Confucius in mainland China, where many of the same revolutionaries who burned feudalistic books and sent Confucian scholars down to the countryside in the 1970s are now aggressively promoting Confucius Institutes and celebrating Confucianism as the essence of Chinese cultural soft power (Osnos, 2014). There is an undeniably cynical and sinister aspect to this trend: the new cult of Confucius allows China’s leaders to deflect concerns about human rights and rule of law, while simultaneously using Confucius as a convenient hook upon which to hang whatever form of Chinese nationalism is currently most useful for maintaining one-party rule (Buckley, 2014). But Osnos argues convincingly that there is also a
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schumpeter. (2013, 17 August). In praise of laziness. The Economist. Shapiro, L. (Ed.) (2014). The Routledge handbook of embodied cognition. New York: Routledge. Slingerland, E. (2003). Effortless action: Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China. New York: Oxford University Press. Slingerland, E. (2011). 'Of what use are
the Odes?' Cognitive science, virtue ethics, and early Confucian ethics. Philosophy East & West, 61(1), 80–109. Slingerland, E. (2014). Trying not to try: Ancient China, modern science and the power of spontaneity. New York: Crown Publishing. Smilek, D., Enns, J., Eastwood, J. & Merikle, P. (2006). Relax! Cognitive strategy influences visual search. Visual Cognition, 14, 543–564.
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Anyone who has experienced a modern Chinese city might be forgiven for thinking of the modern Chinese ethos as the precisely the opposite of wu-wei
grassroots component to this return to the classics, which are perceived as a way to fill the ‘spiritual void’ left by the abandonment of the proletariat revolution. There seems to be a need for personal and social goals that go beyond merely maintaining a 7–10 per cent annual GDP growth rate. Meaning-embedded, socially situated ideals such as wu-wei are also appealing because they reflect the important insight that we are not 1980s-style solitary, Ayn Randian heroes wresting resources out of the ground and building capital out of thin air, but rather profoundly social animals, more dependent than ever in our evolutionary history on our communities for the basics of life. Barack Obama’s observation that entrepreneurs need to recognise their dependence on publicly created resources, ranging from roads to police services, was lambasted by the Right as yet another example of wild-eyed socialism. From an academic perspective, though, it’s just a basic anthropological and economic fact. Human beings are able to function in modern, large-scale societies, not because we’re good at calculating costs and benefits or reasoning carefully, but primarily because we are emotionally bound to the people around us (Durkheim, 1915/1965; Rappaport,
Smith, E.E. & Aaker, J. (2013, 30 November). Millennial searchers. New York Times. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watson, M., Brennan, A., Kingstone, A. & Enns, J. (2010). Looking versus
1999). Implicit trust, and spontaneously embraced values, function as the glue that holds civilisations together. Moreover, recent work has suggested that the feeling of being connected to a larger, meaningful whole is a key component of psychological wellbeing and reported happiness (Baumeister et al., 2013). That said, these days we do seem to live in a society dead-set against spontaneity. We’ve got three year-olds attending drill sessions to get an edge on admission to the best preschool, and then growing into hyper-competitive high school students popping Ritalin to enhance their test results and keep up with a brutal schedule of afterschool activities. As adults, our personal and professional lives increasingly revolve around a relentless quest for greater efficiency and higher productivity, crowding out leisure time and simple unstructured pleasures. The result is that too many of us spend our days stumbling around tethered umbilically to our smartphones, immersed in an endless stream of competitive games, e-mails, texts, tweets, dings, pings and pokes, getting up too early, staying up too late, never far from the bright glow of tiny LCD screens. It doesn’t need to be this way, though,
seeing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(4), 543–549. Wegner, D. (2009). How to think, say, or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion. Science, 325, 48–50. Wegner, D. (2011). Setting free the bears: Escape from thought suppression. American Psychologist, 66(8), 671–680. Wilson, M. (2002). Six Views of Embodied Cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625–636.
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and in fact this incessant effort and striving are often profoundly counterproductive. Many of our most desired goals – happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity – are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving actually interfere with their attainment (Baumeister, 1984; Schooler et al., 2003; Wegner, 2009). This is a fact that is slowly being more appreciated. Recent studies have suggested that nonstop exam prep and a dearth of unstructured playtime is having a negative impact on children’s emotional and cognitive development (e.g. Barker et al., 2014; Pomerantz et al., 2014). In business management, there’s a growing recognition that pushing harder too often leads to producing less (Schumpeter, 2013), and that people who put themselves last, in the sense of generously helping others, actually end up ahead in the long run (Grant, 2013). And for many people the realisation is gradually dawning that creativity – the magic, elusive key to success in our new knowledge economy – cannot thrive unless given room to breathe (Levitin, 2014). Furthermore, research suggests that we are often at our most effective when can relax and allow our unconscious hot cognition to take the reins (Jackson et al., 2006; DeCaro et al., 2011; Dijkstra et al., 2012). As an early Chinese saying has it, ‘Be wu-wei [literally ‘do nothing’], and nothing will be left undone.’ In many situations, this turns out to be pretty good advice. The Millennials who pass through my classroom seem to have developed a healthy scepticism of materialism and winner-take-all individualism. They want deeper connections to their communities, and choose careers that they see as imbued with value. While they may have been driven to this by economic necessity, they also seem to have stumbled onto something important. By doing less, and wanting more – more belonging, more meaning – we might all find ourselves connecting better with our communities and families, deriving more satisfaction in our work, and sleeping better at night. Not quite the ecstatic union with the Divine envisioned by 1960s spiritual seekers, but nothing to sneeze at either. Edward Slingerland is Professor of Asian Studies and Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. edward. slingerland@gmail.com
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Prisoner suicide Graham Towl and Tammi Walker consider public management, punitiveness and professionalism
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Too many citizens are imprisoned in England and Wales, expanding markets for the commodification of forensic services. Rather than being seen by prisoners as healthcare professionals, psychologists may increasingly be viewed as ‘state psychologists’ and thus lower the likelihood of disclosure of suicidal feelings, resulting in more avoidable deaths. This article considers the issue of roles for psychologists in preventing prisoner suicide, and includes the perspectives of both the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and a Prison Governor.
Is there any psychological work in prisons more important than saving prisoner lives? Do forensic psychologists ‘deal with’ or ‘work with’ prisoners?
resources
The Harris Review into Self-Inflicted Deaths in NOMS Custody: http://iapdeathsincustody. independent.gov.uk/harris-review
references
What can we do to save more lives?
Berman, G. & Dar, A. (2013). Prison population statistics. House of Commons Briefing Paper SN04334. Correia, K.M. (2000). Suicide assessment in a prison environment: A proposed protocol. Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 27, 581–599. Francis, R. (2013). Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry. London: The Stationery Office.
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risoner suicide is of particular concern for three reasons. First, there is the loss of life, by way of a potentially avoidable death. Second, prisoners tend to come from socially and economically disadvantaged groups with high levels of need and comparatively little access to support services. Third, they are under the care of the state. Psychologists have key roles to play in contributing to reducing the rates and risk of suicide amongst prisoners. In this article we argue that if psychologists are to play a full role in addressing the unacceptably high levels of suicide in prisons, then there is a need to recognise that there may well, at times, be tensions between such clinical roles and forensic functions or work roles. Indeed, the introduction in 2003 of the first strategic framework for psychological services in prisons and probation brought these issues into sharp focus (HM Prison Service and National Probation Service, 2003). The strategy was pivotal in the development of psychological services and in particular in warmly welcoming a range of applied psychology specialisms to work in prisons and probation services. Of course, there is much overlap across the practitioner psychologist specialisms, and there can be much variation in job role within the discipline of, for example, forensic psychology. From a statutory regulator perspective the concern is chiefly that all those on the register work within the bounds of their competence. On the broader canvas of public service developments there is benefit in considering the advent of New Public
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Garland, D. (2001) The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawton, K., Rodham, K. & Evans, E. (2002). Deliberate self-harm in adolescents: Self report survey in schools in England. British Medical Journal, 325, 1207–1211. HM Prison Service and National Probation Service (2003). Driving
Management in the late 1980s and the neoliberal agenda of a new punitiveness. If we are to better understand and respond to rates of suicide in prisons there is a need to revisit the psychological maxim that all behaviour takes place in a context. With suicide the evidence seems to indicate that the context is critical. Just by way of broad illustration, the rates of suicide in prisons have been internationally and historically reported as being significantly higher than those outside prison. And in prisoner suicide assessment we know that the earlier days of imprisonment are those with the highest degree of risk, by a significant margin, for most prisoners.
New Public Management and ‘new punitiveness’ The term New Public Management (NPM) broadly refers to an ideology that the business disciplines of the private sector may be routinely transferred to deliver more effective public services. This has contributed to a marketisation of public services including prisons (and probation services). Since around the 1990s there have been impacts of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘new punitiveness’ in criminal justice (Garland, 2001; Pratt et al., 2005). The approach is perhaps most starkly reflected with the doubling of the prison population in England and Wales over the past 20 years or so (Berman & Dar, 2013; Ministry of Justice, 2013). This new punitiveness has also impacted directly upon the work of psychologists in prisons, where the prisoner may be seen as having been ‘dealt with’ rather than ‘worked with’. The shift in the work of many psychologists in prisons to focus upon reducing the risk of reoffending, rather than on areas such as seeking improvements in everyday functioning, may well have detrimentally impacted upon the relationships between psychologists and prisoners. The net result is that instead of being seen fundamentally as health and care
delivery: A strategic framework for psychological services in prisons and probation. London: Author. McGuire, J. (2001). What works in correctional intervention? Evidence and practical implications. In Bernfeld, G., Farrington, D. & Leschelid, A. (Eds.) Offender rehabilitation in practice: Implementing and evaluating effective programs. Chichester: WiIey & Sons.
Mills, J.F. & Kroner, D.G. (2000). Depression, Hopelessness and Suicide Screening Form (DHS): User guide. Unpublished manuscript. Ministry of Justice (2013). Story of the prison population: 1993– 2012 England and Wales. London: Author. Perry, A., Marandos, R., Coulton S. & Johnson, M. (2010). Screening tools assessing risk of suicide and selfharm in adult offenders: A
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Learning lessons about suicides in prison Nigel Newcomen, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Tragically, the number of suicides in prison increased sharply in 2013/14, reversing a welcome decline in recent years. My office independently investigates all deaths in custody and, in 2013/14, we investigated 64 per cent more suicides than the year before, as well as 7 per cent more deaths from natural causes (In 2013/14, we investigated 130 deaths from natural causes, 90 suicides, 4 homicides and 16 ‘other deaths’). While the increase in deaths from natural causes was largely due to an ageing prison population, explaining the increase in suicides is more difficult. Some have argued that the rise is related to austerity, which has reduced staffing and protective factors, such as time out of cell and interaction with others. While plausible, the evidence for this is limited, and suicides also increased in prisons that had not suffered cutbacks. While the increase may be hard to explain, a higher rate of suicide in custody than in the community is common to most
jurisdictions, not least because of scale of mental ill-health among prisoners (Preventing Suicide in Prisons, Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, WHO). Sometimes the cases I investigate illustrate just how difficult it is for prisons to deliver their duty of care to the most vulnerable. For example, last year a prisoner on constant watch in a healthcare unit killed himself by jumping from a height before staff could stop him. The mental ill-heath and abject despair evidenced by such cases is shocking. Despite this depressing picture, we must recognise the positive efforts of those working and living in prison. Every day prison staff and prisoner peer supporters save prisoners from harming themselves, an achievement that goes largely unreported and without which the statistics would be much worse. But more must be done. So to signpost the way forward, I recently published two thematic reviews of the lessons to be learned from investigations into suicides since 2007. The
professionals, such chiefly forensic psychologists may simply be seen as agents of the state. An example of this may be illustrated by the accredited ‘programmes’ that have been rolled out in the UK since 1996 within prisons and probation with their emphasis on procedure rather than broad psychological knowledge or process
systematic review. International Journal of Offender Therapy Comparative Criminology, 54(5), 803–828 Pratt, J., Brown, D., Brown, M. et al. (2005). The new punitiveness: Trends, theories, perspectives. London: Routledge. Shaw, J., Baker, D., Hunt, I.M. et al. (2004) Suicide by prisoners: National clinical survey. British Journal of Psychiatry,
first examined how well prisons identify and assess risk of selfharm or suicide (tinyurl.com/oyljbd8). The second examined the quality of support to prisoners identified as at risk (tinyurl.com/q2qbrv6). Both reviews provide case studies to illustrate their findings. Worryingly, I found recurring weaknesses in suicide and selfharm prevention procedures in prison (known as ACCT – Assessment Care in Custody and Teamwork). When assessing risk, prison staff often placed too much weight on how the prisoner presented, rather than known risks, such as previous self-harm. The professional judgement of staff is crucial, but known risks should not be ignored as they can be predictive of future action. Similarly, for those identified as at risk, too often the support was not good enough. In many ways, ACCT procedures are impressive, and I know of few better approaches in other jurisdictions. However, the real test is implementation, and this can be poor. The
(see McGuire, 2001). This has led to psychological therapy with prisoners being deconstructed into a manual with set procedures. It has been argued that as a result of this there is no need to understand the individual to whom these procedures are applied; they just need to understand their part in the process (Thomas-Peter, 2006). As a consequence
184, 263–267. Thomas-Peter, B. (2006). The modern context of psychology in corrections: Influences, limitations and values of ‘what works’. In G. Towl (Ed.) Psychological research in prisons. London: Wiley. Towl, G. & Forbes, D. (2002). Working with suicidal prisoners. In G. Towl, L. Snow & M. McHugh (Eds.) Suicide in prison (pp.93–101). Oxford: BPS
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reviews highlight some lessons that prisons need to learn. First, there is a need for better risk-assessment training for prison staff, which ensures that all known risk factors are considered. Second, once ACCT documents are opened, they need to be adjusted to new events affecting the prisoner, with regular multidisciplinary reviews of progress. Monitoring needs to be supportive, engage those at risk and, where possible, involve their families. Records need to be comprehensive and regularly tested for quality assurance. These are important lessons that clearly still need to be learned. Given the unacceptable rise in suicide in prison, the urgency of the situation is obvious. That is also why, in my annual report for 2013/14 (tinyurl.com/pxa8bpz), I called for a review of the implementation of ACCT, which was designed for a prison service with fewer prisoners and more staff. The review is under way – we must hope it succeeds.
of this situation, psychologists have been known to use psychometric tests without the intent of changing their intervention according to the results. They simply forward the results of the psychometric instruments to programme managers as if the data is irrelevant to their own clinical work. In this capacity, some believe, psychologists have become ‘intellectually
Blackwell. Towl, G. & Hudson, D. (1997). Risk assessment and management. In G. Towl (Ed.) Suicide and self-injury in prisons: Issues in Criminological and Legal Psychology, 28. Leicester: British Psychological Society. Walker, T. (2015). Self-injury and suicide in prisoners. In G. Towl and D. Crighton (Eds.) Forensic psychology. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
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dependent programme drones’ that run the ‘risk of never developing the competence… to derive unique psychological solutions for unique psychological problems’ (Thomas-Peter, 2006, p.32). The development of such structured groupwork interventions then had three key antecedents; NPM, new punitiveness and some initially promising empirical findings. But one unintended consequence of such an approach may well be an increased challenge in being able to engage most effectively with prisoners, for our purposes here in
working with the suicidal. Thus in view of such differences in the purposes of such interventions it presents professional challenges – for the individual and also the recipient of the service – in switching such roles.
New professionalism If as psychologists we are to have a full role in saving lives, then there is a need for change. There are some signs of such changes. As mentioned earlier, the 2003 strategic framework for psychological services included recognition of the need
The priority? To keep people alive John Podmore, Prison Governor The first dead body I ever saw was as a trainee Assistant Governor in Kent wing of Maidstone Prison in 1985. He was a young man who had died by hanging. I was summoned to the scene as the duty governor of the day. The staff that found him were too shocked to cut him down and the task was left to me. In the next 25 years I saw too many others. In a joint question and answer session with another Governor some years later we were asked what our main priority was as a Governor. My colleague replied ‘to prevent escapes’. I replied ‘to keep people alive’. I failed more often than I was comfortable with. Such deaths always had a significant impact on staff and prisoners alike. I saw sadness, regret, guilt and remorse. There was also disdain, disrespect and indifference, such is the nature of the difficult, damaged and complex environment that is a prison, but it rarely came to the fore. It is prison officers who shoulder the greatest burden in such circumstances. I saw as many officers in tears as those attempting unprotected resuscitation. People cared. There was
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compassion and a desire to learn from mistakes. To help those delivering care we developed processes to measure its effectiveness or defend its failure. There were assessments aimed at the recognition of the vulnerable. There was suicide awareness training but no mental health awareness training. The Prison and Probation Ombudsman and inquests sought answers, but they came years later peppered with ‘urgent recommendations’ that may or may not have had implications for the subsequent suicides. Reports often contained, and rightly so, findings that related to a lack of care, of people not doing their job properly, or at all. The culture of a jail and the nature of staff–prisoner relationships, however, were concepts that too often escaped the coroner and the Ombudsman. It is the prison officer who is at the heart of a prison and on whom the safety, security and decency of a jail depends. But they do not operate in isolation. They need to be led and motivated by someone who has a vision for the establishment. As individuals with limited skills
and training they need support from specialists: psychologists, probation officers, medical practitioners. The fact that so many staff across the specialisms are now working under separate contracts has had the effect of isolating prison staff rather than bringing everyone together as a team working for the overall benefit of prisoners. Psychologists in particular are perceived by many, not least prisoners themselves (see any edition of Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners) to have become preoccupied with screening tools and programmes, untroubled by evidence. Probation has all but been abandoned to the ravages of the market. How health and social care will emerge from the Lansley reforms remains to be seen. All the while the Governor tries to act as ringmaster with the danger that he or she may simply withdraw to the role of contract manager. Prisons are communities, albeit highly complex ones, and need to be treated accordingly. For them to be reduced to a series of complex commercial contracts will do little to protect the public.
for a range of applied psychology specialisms working in prisons and probation instead of the traditional more or less closed shop of forensic psychological practitioners (HM Prison Service and National Probation Service, 2003). The framework provided a strategic recognition of the need to view prisoners as citizens with a range of needs and wants, and not just to be seen in terms of what had become somewhat crassly known as ‘criminogenic factors’. There were good ethical grounds to broaden the range of practitioner psychologists with the richer range of approaches whereby all could learn from each other. In 2009, practitioner psychologists achieved statutory regulation with the then Health Professions Council (HPC). This afforded the opportunity to not only learn from the range of applied psychology specialisms but also a range of health professionals, in view of the HPC being a multi healthcare profession regulator. Thus the combination of the strategic framework and the advent of statutory regulation provided a professional context whereby there was scope for a more rounded understanding of prisoners and their needs as members of the public. It also provided a firmer foundation from which to further develop ethical policies and practices, with the potential for a greater diversity of contributions. Since the report of the public inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (Francis, 2013) there have been further opportunities for us as psychologists to reflect more upon our policies and practices. For example, one impact that we may all take away is a greater openness to being challenged or questioned about our practices from others. Such shared learning is important if we are to do our best for service users. Here we use the terms service user very broadly to include both the prisoner and wider public.
Helping suicidal prisoners We have outlined above the central importance of having an appropriate professional relationship and standing with the prisoner. Crucially, this is by no means solely a product of the skills base of the individual practitioner. As we have seen, there are wider forces at work in terms of the politics of the day. Without a basic trust it is unlikely that the prisoner will come forward and disclose their feelings. But even if they have, sometimes to another member of staff or prisoner, in working with prisoners for therapeutic
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The life of a prisoner is worth as much as the life of any other citizen
goals there is a need to have a suitable rapport, which includes the development and maintenance of a relationship of trust. When work is focused chiefly on protecting those members of the public who are not currently prisoners this makes work with prisoners to reduce the risk of suicide even more difficult than it intrinsically is. So, there is perhaps a discussion and debate to be helpfully had around which psychologists are best placed to provide such services. Additionally it may be helpful to develop policy and practice further amongst staff chiefly undertaking assessments of risk of harm to the public. One potential benefit is that such psychologists tend to have a good understanding of the concept of risk assessment and management – the logic is the same in terms of risk assessments whether the ‘risk’ being assessed is harm to self or others. The process involves the identification of those factors likely to be associated with an increased risk of suicide and those factors likely to be associated with a decreased level of risk (Towl & Forbes, 2002; Towl & Hudson, 1997; Walker, 2015). One problem that has bedevilled those seeking to produce ‘suicide risk screening tools’ in prisons is that, against a backdrop of most prisoners having factors associated with a higher lifetime risk of suicide (Hawton et al., 2002; Shaw et al., 2004; Towl & Forbes, 2002; Towl & Hudson, 1997; Walker, 2015), these are of little utility and sometimes have significant expense. A problem with the snapshot design associated with such screening is that suicidal ideation may significantly fluctuate over time, so the
chances of missing many through false negatives may be relatively high. Screening for suicide in prisoners is further compounded as the classification of individuals also uses a two-by-two table identifying those who truly are at risk (i.e. the sensitivity of the instrument), and those who truly are not at risk (i.e. the specificity of the instrument). Therefore the evaluation of any screening tool for suicide will include a trade-off between the sensitivity and specificity of the tool by manipulating the cut-off scores used to identify a case. Perry et al. (2010) highlighted that adverse effects from screening can occur from the misclassification of individuals in this way. In addition, to these considerations, Perry et al. (2010) also highlighted that there are issues with the transferability of existing scales as many are originally based on psychiatric populations and there is a lack of an apparent gold standard test in this area (Correia, 2000; Mills & Kroner, 2000). Overall, they concluded that there are concerns about the sensitivity and specificity of such instruments and that more research is needed to assess the predictive validity of such tools for offender populations in the identification of those at risk. So where does this leave us? There are a number of levels at which psychologists may be usefully able to contribute. First, at the organisational level by influencing policies and practices. Ensuring that policies are enacted and challenging colleagues of whatever discipline if this is needed. Contributing to structuring the environment whereby
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there is more likely to be trust than distrust, where prisoners feel safe to disclose is in and of itself a crucial contribution. Professionally it can be difficult to challenge those in authority, but sometimes speaking truth to power is a key role of the practitioner psychologist. This is consistent with what would be entirely expected post-Francis, and indeed from a health regulatory perspective too. Second, there needs to be a leadership contribution from Heads of Psychology Units. In particular this involves rolemodelling and ensuring that psychological staff recognise the importance of being therapeutic in all direct work with prisoners. This necessarily involves having a more rounded view of the prisoner, not just seeing the prisoner as criminal, whatever the balance of work of the individual psychologist. Third, and this is, in large part predicated upon the two above conditions being met, there is a need to make more widely available psychological work with prisoners to reduce the risk of suicide. In other words what we are suggesting is a public health–based model whereby all prisoners experience a positive environment and those groups identified at a higher risk (e.g. all prisoners in their first week of imprisonment) have targeted interventions, as do those who have been identified as being at a specific inflated risk. The field is replete with resources to inform any such assessments or interventions. The problem is not one of a lack of knowledge; we do not need any more research to make very significant progress. What is needed perhaps most of all is for it to be recognised that the life of a prisoner is worth as much as the life of any other citizen. If we accept that then there is real potential to provide the right services, to the right prisoners, in the right place at the right time. Graham Towl is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Pro Vice Chancellor, Durham University graham.towl@durham.ac.uk
Tammi Walker is a Chartered Psychologist at the University of Manchester tammi.walker@ manchester.ac.uk
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BIG PICTURE
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A ‘selfie’ with a difference Words by Natalia Kucirkova (Open University), image by Open University
Today’s generation is offered more personalised products and services than any other in human history. While the commercial world of ‘selfie’ propaganda might pull children into consumerism, personalisation can also empower children and motivate them in educational activities. New technologies such as tablets and smartphones are particularly well suited for personalising children’s learning to their unique needs and preferences. Children can insert their own photographs, texts, drawings or audio files into stories, making them more interesting and motivating. But does such personalisation actually promote children’s learning? While there is little research on the impact of digital books, there is some literature about the effects of personalisation on early language learning. In research with David Messer and Kieron Sheehy, we assessed three-year-olds’ vocabulary acquisition in relation to whether new
words appeared in personalised or nonpersonalised book sections. After a week of repeated reading of the books, children showed significantly better knowledge of the words that were in the personalised sections. In another study we looked at the speech produced by three-year-olds when they share personalised and non-personalised books with an adult. We found that children spoke more with the personalised books, but also that this talk was more selfreferential. When building personalisation features into children’s reading materials, there needs to be careful consideration to ensure that personalisation extends children’s thinking and is more than just a commercial take on an educational activity. With digital books in particular, the opportunity to personalise children’s multimodal story experiences provides great possibility for innovation – as long as it is combined with sound educational approaches.
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INTERVIEW
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‘Be brave, psychology needs you!’ Cary Cooper tells Gail Kinman about his efforts to change occupational culture through wide dissemination of psychological theory and research
ou are a world-leading expert on Y the subject of stress at work, but you didn’t originally intend to be an occupational psychologist. How did this happen? My ambition was to become a tax lawyer – I was studying economics and management at UCLA and started doing part-time social work. What I was exposed to when working in deprived areas in Los Angeles influenced my whole life. The level of poverty and misery I encountered made me seriously question my career plans, and so I got interested in behavioural science and social psychology. Who were the psychologists who originally inspired you? Marie Jahoda and Carl Rogers were my main influences. During my MBA I was involved with experiential training, known as T-groups, where people learned about themselves through problem solving, role play and personal behavioural feedback. In those days, teachers and social workers (or anybody who worked closely with other people in a management or caring role) did T-group training to discover how their behaviour was perceived by other people and help them improve their interpersonal relationships and communication skills – they were very powerful experiences! Carl Rogers came to visit us, as UCLA was a leader in T-group training, as well as the National Training Labs at Bethel, Maine. I didn’t find Carl inspirational as a person. In fact, I found him to be strangely emotionless – he didn’t reveal much about who he was. Yet it was his ‘ideas’ that inspired me and a whole generation of 1960s psychologists. After my MBA I moved to the UK to do PhD research at Leeds University with Peter Smith, who later became a Professor of Social Psychology at Sussex University. When Peter moved to Sussex, I moved with him and the Department was headed by Marie Jahoda. Even though I was only there for a year, Marie had an extremely powerful influence on me intellectually
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in my second marriage. I became much more focused on my family life – I learned how to say ‘no’ and made sure that I went home at a reasonable time. Funnily enough, I soon learned that creating time boundaries instead of working ‘all hours’ made me more, rather than less, productive. I became much more focused, and a far better academic manager, as I had to find the time to invest in my family. I still work long hours but start at 7.30 and finish at 4.30 and have strong boundaries between my work and home life. Sometimes I make compromises though. For example, I really enjoy working with the media. If a journalist calls me up at night or when I am on holiday to request an interview I will invariably do it – it only takes five minutes of my time after all. My family doesn’t always appreciate it! I do draw the line at reading e-mails during holidays though.
and personally. She was very nonhierarchical and encouraged deep intellectual debate; she would bring her staff together at lunchtimes and everybody, from PhD students like me to senior academic staff, was expected to discuss a study or a book they had read that week. I was also impressed with Marie’s social values – she did some very formative work that highlighted the You have written about the benefits of destructive psychological impact of mobile technologies in helping us work unemployment on individuals and more flexibly, but they can also allow communities. When she researched this work issues to intrude issue in the into our personal life. 1940s/50s, she spent How can organisations several months living “employers are going to manage e-mail more within the have to transform their healthily? communities that she Organisations have begun was studying. When I long-hours culture” to recognise the benefits of started researching controlling employees’ access people’s behaviour at to e-mail, not only to protect work, Marie’s strong work–life balance and employee health social conscience was very influential in but also to encourage face-to-face informing my belief that research should communication and team-building. be used to help and improve the wellbeing A couple of years ago I did a TV of individual workers, organisations and programme that involved going into an the communities they live in. IT company that provided facilities for Moving on to your own work, you social housing organisations, where the are exceptionally prolific. You have CEO had serious concerns about his published around 120 books and over employees’ use of e-mail – they never 400 research papers and have talked to each other, sent e-mails to collaborated with hundreds of people. colleagues in the same office, and wrote You are a full-time academic, the and read messages after 9pm. He realised Director of a large and thriving that this was bad for his business and bad consultancy and a former government, for their health, so he volunteered to EU and UN adviser. You also work participate in an experiment for one extensively with the media and travel working week. We stopped employees the world to give talks and lectures. from sending e-mails to anyone in their As a passionate advocate of work–life building; instead they had to have face-tobalance, how do you manage to face conversations with their colleagues maintain balance in your personal life? and deliver files by hand rather than via My family life is very important to me. attachments. They were also forbidden I have been married twice and have two from accessing their e-mails at home for children from each marriage. During my the duration of the experiment. Initially, first marriage, I really concentrated on employees thought they would be unable building my career and probably didn’t to keep this up, but they did and their give my older children as much time lives were transformed. We came back and attention that I should have done. into the organisation on the Friday night I realised this when the marriage broke and the whole working atmosphere had up, so I decided that things would change changed – people were talking to their
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colleagues, and they were talking to their kids when they got home instead of spending their evenings checking e-mails. We had originally planned to take their phones away and considered closing down the server, but in the end we didn’t have to take such drastic action, as people actually wanted to make these changes and now have a better work–life balance. Interesting! Some organisations expect their employees to be available 24/7, and there are inevitable costs for wellbeing and job performance. What can employers do? There has to be a culture change. Like computers, human beings need to be rebooted and spend time recovering from work demands. The only way to do this is by setting boundaries – as reading e-mail is addictive, people may need some initial help to accomplish this. If you go on holiday and you read a work e-mail about a problem that can’t be resolved until you are back in the office, you have ruined your holiday. You are going to worry about that problem the whole time rather than relax and forget about work. Some organisations drive their employees hard and have unreasonable expectations of their availability. Although evidence for the negative impact of long working hours on health and job performance is overwhelming, some employers fail to see this. Nonetheless many large companies are realising the advantages of allowing employees essential ‘downtime’, and are making changes and developing guidelines for e-mail usage. Liverpool City Council was the first organisation to stop employees from sending e-mails to colleagues in the same building, and many others are now following their example. A number of multi-nationals are experimenting with shutting down servers outside core business hours, and ATOS is even attempting to make the company an e-mail free organisation! An investment bank that I had worked with and that was previously notorious for burning people out, now tells their employees not to access e-mails over the weekend unless they are working on a big international deal. Of course changing behaviour has to be driven from the top and apply to everyone without exception – if senior managers send and read e-mails out of hours then more junior employees will continue to do so. The success of e-mail management initiatives in large organisations should trickle down and inspire small companies to make changes. The younger generation are not prepared
to work as hard as their parents – they want to ‘get a life’. So employers are going to have to transform their long-hours culture and realise that working hours are not synonymous with commitment or effective performance. Last year, the right to request flexible working was extended to all employees regardless of the reason. You were instrumental in making a case for this change. My Foresight project ‘Mental Capital and Wellbeing’ presented a cost and benefit analysis to the government that made a strong financial case for extending the right to request flexible working. There is strong evidence that it boosts productivity and motivation, reduces absenteeism, and helps companies retain top talent. Although both men and women need time to engage in their family lives and fulfil their responsibilities as well as do their work, very little was known about men’s experiences of working flexibly.
With Working Families and colleagues from Lancaster University, we completed a project that examined this issue, which was funded by the Lottery Fund. We looked at men who had taken up flexible working options in two large organisations – one in the public and one in the private sector. We found that men are less inclined to apply for flexible working and are more likely to be rejected if they do. Even if their employers allow them to work flexibly, they are typically seen as less committed with serious implications for their career prospects. Nonetheless, we found that men who work flexibly are generally less stressed, perform better and have better work–life balance; they are also more
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committed to their employers and have a better relationship with their colleagues. You have done a great deal to highlight the ways in which occupational psychology can improve the wellbeing of employees, which, in turn, can increase the profitability of organisations. Your work has been widely disseminated in journal articles and books and the media. Why do you think it is important for our work to reach the wider population? I still consider myself a scientist, and love doing hands-on research, but I think it is crucial to get our message out to as many people as possible. You can write an article for a top-rated journal and probably only a handful of other academics will read it – but most people watch TV, listen to the radio and read newspapers and magazines. I particularly enjoy writing books, as you can reach more people that way, and also have the space to expand and develop your ideas. A research article is around 20 pages, uses very technical language and focuses on one narrow topic, whereas a book may be read by many thousands of people and has more chance of making a difference to people’s lives and influence policy. Most research papers add a little piece to the puzzle, but they are not in themselves very significant. A book can bring together other people’s ideas and have a real impact in the world. It is unfortunate that it is only the journal articles that really count for academic promotion and the REF! What advice do you have for young researchers to get their message out there to the widest possible audience? Don’t be afraid to talk to journalists or to broadcast, or to attend non-academic, practitioner-based conferences. Think through how your work might influence policy, and engage with government and other professional bodies to change not only policy but also the practice of your discipline. Translate your research into books, monographs and other more widely read outlets so that you might influence behaviour change in the wider world. Don’t let the academic establishment force you to publish only in 4* journals – although that should be part of the academic mix; there are many other outlets that can influence policy, practice and the public more generally. Be brave, psychology needs you to take the field beyond the confines of a handful of journals.
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not acknowledge Dearing’s misgivings, and, as mentioned above, I saw signs that this restricted Dearing’s ability to challenge some of Masrani’s behaviour. When Masrani asks Dearing whether the dinosaurs are happy and the visitors enjoying themselves, Dearing relies upon metrics to respond. This is meant to be a Andrew Clements provides an organisational psychology perspective on the sign that Dearing is too focused on blockbuster film Jurassic World opinion polls and data, but her role is to manage the functioning of the attraction. It seems reasonable to me that she tries to base judgement upon evidence. Masrani informs her that the secret of a happy life s an organisational psychologist, one in beneficial ways with the financial is to accept that one is never in control – of the questions that intrigues me but I am not sure that this would be a performance of organisations (Wilderom about the Jurassic Park film series is, et al., 2012), attracting outside investment desirable attitude for someone in ‘How does that organisation manage to Dearing’s position. I would suggest that (Flynn & Staw, 2004) and the stay in business?’ Despite the preceding this reflects a lack of appreciation for the performance of workers (Cicero & Pierro, three movies suggesting that health and individual differences that may lead 2007). safety might be an ‘area for improvement,’ people to be suited for different roles. However, there are also potential as of Jurassic World the park is a Given Dearing’s attitude towards control, pitfalls for charismatic styles, such as a functional site with large numbers of planning and instances in which her focus on impression management with the visitors managing to spend time near anxiety is emphasised, she may well be risk of hubris (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999). dinosaurs without being promptly relatively high in trait levels of Some scholars have argued that the devoured. But this is a Jurassic Park conscientiousness and neuroticism. concept of charismatic leadership movie, so it’s no ‘spoiler alert’ to reveal People with neurotic promotes the notion of that chaos ensues. tendencies may be suited heroic leaders (e.g. Yukl, While I came for the dinosaur-related for roles that involve 1999). To an extent, I think “both key leaders mayhem, I found the organisational monitoring and reporting that the pitfalls are realised in in Jurassic World problems interesting in their own right. progress, while Masrani, who has a are minorities in Until Hollywood hire me to write a fifth conscientious people are somewhat rose-tinted view of management” instalment in which a team of suited towards planning his business and his own occupational psychologists address the (Fisher et al., 2001). This capabilities. Masrani gives a key challenges, I’ll settle for writing this maps well to Dearing’s role in sense of being ‘larger than review. The issues that I will focus on are the organisation, and I think it is life’, and there are indications leadership and the organisational culture. a shame that her style of working gets that his subordinates find it difficult to little recognition. Dearing is recognised challenge some of his risky behaviours, as a good manager, but this is somehow echoing evidence that followers restrict Leadership treated as distinct from her personality their emotional expression in the presence The owner of the Jurassic World by a number of key characters in the film. of charismatic leaders (Menges et al., attraction is Simon Masrani, although Of note is that both key leaders in 2015). At first Masrani appears charming, I am not certain that he constitutes the Jurassic World are minorities in and his confidence is presented as real head of the organisation (see Claire management. Ryan and Haslam (2005) humorous, but it contributes to the Dearing, discussed later). His taste for identified a phenomenon in which disaster that unfolds in Jurassic World. adventure (as with Richard Branson and companies experiencing either poor A sharp contrast is apparent between his ballooning and space flight), along performance during a financial downturn, Masrani the charismatic CEO, and the with his interest in the happiness of or fluctuating performance during a operations manager Claire Dearing. While others over profitability, put him firmly positive economy, were more likely to her anxiety is presented for comedic in the ‘charismatic leader’ category. appoint female leaders to the company effect, such as during a helicopter flight, it Interestingly, research suggests that a board. They termed this the ‘glass cliff’ to seemed quite justifiable to me given the reflect that women were more likely to be charismatic leadership style is associated context. My concern was that Masrani did
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Bass, B.M. & Steidlmeier, P. (1999). Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behaviour. Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 181–217. Bezrukova, K., Thatcher, S.M.B., Jehn, K.A. & Spell, C.S. (2012). The effects of alignments: Examining group faultlines, organizational cultures, and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(1), 77–92.
Cicero, L. & Pierro, A. (2007). Charismatic leadership and organizational outcomes. International Journal of Psychology, 42(5), 297–306. Cook, A. & Glass, C. (2014). Above the glass ceiling: When are women and racial/ethnic minorities appointed to CEO? Strategic Management Journal, 35, 1080–1089. Fisher, S.G., Hunter, T.A. & Macrosson, W.D.K. (2001). A validation study of
Belbin’s team roles. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 10(2), 121–144. Flynn, F.J. & Staw, B.M. (2004). Lend me your wallets: The effect of charismatic leadership on external support for an organization. Strategic Management Journal, 25, 309–330. Martin, J.L. (2002). Organizational culture: Mapping the terrain. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage. Martin, J. & Siehl, C. (1983). Organizational culture and counterculture: An uneasy symbiosis, Organizational Dynamics, 12(2), 52–64. Menges, J.I., Kilduff, M., Kern, S. & Bruch, H. (2015). The awestruck effect: Followers suppress emotion expression in response to charismatic but not individually considerate
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made leaders under precarious circumstances. Cook and Glass (2014) found the glass cliff effect occurred both for women and ethnic minorities, and that these leaders appointed in precarious circumstances were likely to be replaced by white males if company performance did not improve. While Masrani and Dearing are Indian and female respectively, there is no indication that they rose to their position during desperate times: as far as we know, as viewers, the attraction has been operating successfully for years. However, it is interesting that later in the film a white male becomes the organisational leader (in a somewhat murky process). Ethnicity is not presented as playing a role in this process, but perhaps in a time of crisis the park’s backers have turned toward their stereotyped view of what a leader looks like?
claims made by senior management about what the culture is, for example a culture of excellence. Yet there may also be I Efforts should be made to encourage communication multiple cultures within the within the organisation, particularly for raising safety organisation, some of which concerns. have goals counter to those of I The existence of subcultures within Jurassic World senior management (Martin & should be taken seriously by senior management. Siehl, 1983). An obvious I Senior management – particularly the CEO – should example is that departments, be challenging the secrecy involved in key operations. and other easily recognised I Greater appreciation of the complexity of managing groups within an organisation, the organisation is required – and the need for may have particular cultures – attention to detail. the culture of human resources I Senior management should be encouraged to may vary from that of the confront the CEO regarding unsafe behaviours. technical support team. There can also be division within these groups, and some cultures may cross within the organisation are recognised departmental boundaries (Martin, 2002). by anyone other than a handful of In Jurassic World the attraction is velociraptor trainers. Certainly Masrani owned by the Masrani Corporation, but does not seem to be doing much to other concerns are also present. The Organisational culture address the lack of consensus – although genetic engineering of dinosaurs is Organisational culture can be thought a lack of communication within the outsourced, and the secrecy around the of as a set of norms and values that are organisation may also be evident. process becomes a crucial plot point in widely shared by a group of people Consequently a bad situation is made the film. There is also a military-affiliated (Bezrukova et al., 2012). It is often worse (although it does culminate in a project (although the relationship assumed that organisational cultures are memorably silly climax). between the project and the Masrani homogeneous, essentially reflecting Corporation seemed a bit unclear) which is focused upon testing Typical problems brewing whether velociraptors There is individual psychology at play in can be trained, with the Jurassic World. People fail to follow safety project’s sponsor, Vic guidelines, which could have prevented Hoskins, advocating the the initial outbreak. The ‘sunk-cost use of velociraptors for fallacy’ obstructs a solution advocated military purposes. in Jurassic World’s control room – in an When the inevitable attempt to save a financial investment, disaster occurs in the organisation ends up facing a much Jurassic World, Hoskins greater threat to the organisation’s uses the opportunity to existence. But it is organisational factors become more powerful, that are the main contributor to the gaining the ability to disaster. Masrani’s leadership is overtest his ideas. confident, and neglectful of the devil in The objective of the details. The agendas of groups within Hoskins’s group is in the organisation develop in secret, stark contrast to without the knowledge of senior Masrani’s goals for management until it is too late. As a Jurassic World. Yet there result, problems that have been brewing is little sign that the in the organisation prior to the film come cultural differences to the fore at a time when sitting down for a calm mediation meeting is unlikely to help. Like many action movies involving businesses, the organisation is on objective and perceived corporate leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 26, at fault. It is nevertheless refreshing that performance. Leadership Quarterly, 627–641. the problems are to an extent typical of 23, 835–848. Ryan, M.K. & Haslam, S.A. (2005). The organisations, rather than particular to Yukl, G. (1999). An evaluation of glass cliff: Evidence that women are the evil companies with obscure business conceptual weaknesses in over-represented in precarious transformational and charismatic leadership positions. British Journal of plans found in other series.
Key implications
UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Management, 16, 81–90. Wilderom, C.P.M., van den Berg, P.T. & Wiersma, U.J. (2012). A longitudinal study of the effects of charismatic leadership and organizational culture
leadership theories. Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 285–305.
read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk
I Andrew Clements is a Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at the University of Bedfordshire andrew.clements@beds.ac.uk
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‘There are political, moral and ethical imperatives’ Ian Florance interviews Siobhan O’Neill, around her policy work on suicide and self-harm
hen I spoke to Siobhan O’Neill, she was working on a British Psychological Society briefing paper/position statement on suicide and self-harm. This sort of publication raises a number of questions including how they come about and their authors’ motivations in getting involved. ‘A group of us are looking at what we know about suicide and self-harm,
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evidence about the efficacy of different interventions and, based on this, what future directions we’d recommend.’ This is a particularly timely project for Siobhan, who is Professor of Mental Health Sciences at Ulster University. ‘Suicide rates are high in Northern Ireland; and they are rising when rates are declining in the rest of the UK. That we’re in a post-conflict situation is probably one of the causes. Twenty years ago the focus of suicide studies was young people, but rates are the same across the 20–60 age groups, and suicidal behaviour in those older age groups is an important area for us to understand.’ It was clear from Siobhan’s passion and animation that this is more than a purely intellectual or research interest for her. ‘You cannot study a subject like suicide and not think about practical implications. We need psychological models to underpin more accurate ways of talking about, understanding and addressing suicidal behaviour. Without these, critical questions such as those around assisted suicide, the responsibilities of the media in reporting the issue and the impact of therapeutic interventions for depression on suicide will be difficult to answer. Obviously, many professions and people have
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interesting perspectives on the issue – but psychologists have a genuinely unique contribution to make.’ I asked Siobhan to expand on how psychology could affect society on this critical issue in such a direct way. ‘We can contribute to policy and research – we have very specific tools in cognitive psychology to help understand the vital issue of how thought turns into action. We can work at the points of interaction of thoughts/action/death so we can affect policy as well as clinical practice. Connectedness is an important predictor of suicidal behaviour – here social psychology can inform social policy to help us reduce suicide rates in marginalised groups. In Northern Ireland it is vital to examine how behaviours are passed from one generation to the next. Mental illness, substance abuse and suicidal behaviour are being passed from people with direct experience of the Troubles to their offspring. Attachment and parenting behaviours are important here, as well as the provision of mental health services for those directly affected. ‘We also have a role in affecting how suicide is talked about, described, dramatised. Speculation and sensationalism do not help understanding, damaging those undergoing serious problems and the families of those who have died by suicide or have attempted suicide. This latter point is critical, since the families of people who die by suicide are at high risk. We need to normalise suicidal thoughts – many of us have them at some time or another – and emphasise the fact that most people recover, survive and flourish.’ Siobhan is clear that suicide is a behaviour. ‘It’s obviously associated with mental illness, but is not itself one – and for me as someone who trained as a health psychologist this is central to my understanding – seeing suicide as a behaviour means that we look at aspects such as the impact of substances on impulsivity and access to means of death including information about methods.
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How does media reporting influence the behaviour of vulnerable people? We must not shy away from public debate or from challenging the media about the language they use and the impact of perpetuating unhelpful myths. How we communicate the findings via lobbying, public relations and media work is part of the job – and a part I enjoy. ‘There are political, moral and ethical imperatives to what we do. We have responsibilities, and one of those is to change society for the better. I refuse to accept that suicide is an inevitable or acceptable outcome in any society – for example there should be outrage that the recession in Ireland has been implicated in more than extra 500 suicides [see NSRF study at tinyurl.com/noadlbr]. Raising awareness of suicide won’t prevent it – if done badly we know this awareness-raising might even cause acts of self-harm. Many interventions in this area are counter-intuitive. For instance you can’t just import contracts into suicide prevention – they work in other areas but not here. Talking about a topic isn’t enough. Predictive models are not always helpful in preventing deaths, and qualitative methods can be particularly enlightening in understanding this behaviour. There is so much to learn.’ Siobhan is very busy working with organisations looking at specific issues in groups such as Irish travellers and LGBT. She came to psychology after ‘almost studying art – and art and music are still fundamental to my life, but I finally studied psychology and then did a master’s in health psychology. I considered clinical psychology, but there’s a real difference between treating mental illness and understanding why people behave the way they do – and that’s what I was interested in. ‘This work is one of the things that gives my life meaning and purpose. I’ve had depression myself, and I think it’s important that we as professionals feel able to disclose our issues and are authentic in our advocacy of patients. Through this research I am learning all the time and hopefully improving my understanding of why people want to take their own lives. They talk about burdensomeness – the sense that they’re a burden to others and about killing themselves as being somehow a mercy killing, an end to unbearable pain. Until we take these existential understandings seriously we won’t understand suicide and be able to make the unique contribution I am sure psychology can make to this area.’ I thank Siobhan for the honesty and passion she showed in this interview.
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Working for an autism charity Aleesha Begum describes her role with Action for Autism Spectrum Disorders I have worked for a small charity, Action for Autism Spectrum Disorders (www.actionasd.org.uk), for over three years now. I originally started as a volunteer; this was a placement I organised for myself following advice from lecturers about the importance of relevant experience. Action for ASD is a charity and autism resource centre based in Burnley that provides services for children of all ages, families of individuals with autism and adults struggling to find support or make friends. There is some type of service on offer for everyone, including play sessions for children, training courses for parents and carers and adult sessions that encourage social interaction between adults with ASD. There are outdoor activities, residential trips and the annual Autism Show. My role mainly consists of maintaining a safe and positive environment for members whilst setting up and running sessions in a soft play area, games room, bouncy castle, sensory zone and more. This is a lot harder than one would expect! On each session we have children with different needs and complex sensory issues. If one child is having a meltdown, this can have a negative effect on other children who may be sensitive to loud sounds. Therefore, teamwork and communication are extremely important so that the staff can support each other in helping the
individual but also reducing the effect of the meltdown on others. The criteria for diagnosis of ASD are impairment of social communication, interaction and restricted repetitive behaviour. Having individuals with these difficulties play and interact together can often lead to misunderstandings and individuals clashing. With each day comes different challenges but also an opportunity to learn about autism, as well as which behaviour management and deescalation techniques work for each child. Funding is one of the biggest issues that the charity faces; every few months a review is required to examine whether the charity has enough funds to continue to offer the services as normal. In the past, a lack of funding has meant that we have had to start charging parents for the sessions; more recently, due to budget cuts, Lancashire County Council has had to reduce the funding we receive, meaning we are only funded by them through the school holidays. However, the staff members at Action for ASD are not giving up, and we are raising as much money as we can by holding events, raffles, a sponsored walk, etc. We also decided to raise awareness of the funding issues and the public have
kindly donated many musical instruments and arts and crafts items, allowing us to offer more activities to members during sessions. The charity has had a big effect on me personally, inspiring me to complete my final year dissertation at the University of Central Lancashire, titled ‘Predictors of parental stress experienced by parents of children with an ASD'. My role here has meant that I am fully trained on autism and related issues, such as first aid and epilepsy awareness. This has helped me to continue supporting students with ASD in educational settings, and I am currently working with special educational needs students at Bradley Nursery School, Nelson. Whilst I have changed jobs a few times throughout university and also since graduating, I have always worked at the charity during evenings and weekends as I am proud to be part of a team that makes such a positive difference for families; parents often tell me that they don’t know what they would do without our support. There’s no doubt that Action for ASD has helped me to decide on the career I want, and I hope to support individuals with ASD, along with the charity, for a very long time.
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A life ‘chasing memories’ Karen M. Zabrucky (Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University) describes how a tragic incident influenced her career as a cognitive psychologist decided to major in psychology during my sophomore year in college. I later knew I was most interested in cognition and, in particular, the areas of memory and comprehension. I initially became interested in exploring how difficult-to-understand and inconsistent information affected memory. Later, my interests expanded to include how traumatic events were understood and
I
remembered and how false memories developed. I received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology from Kent State University. Following my undergraduate education, I obtained a master’s degree and PhD in experimental psychology from The University of Toledo (emphasis in cognition), and studied applied cognitive psychology as a postdoctoral fellow at
My first false memory The group of National Guardsmen who fired rounds of live ammunition into a group of students were situated in front of Taylor Hall. On 4 May 1970 I ran into my elder brother at the Liberty Bell and we talked about events of the last days. Coming across my brother at the Liberty Bell was important, as I was looking for friends and stopped doing so when I saw him. During our conversation my brother and I heard shots and ran towards the sound of the shots and the Guard. What we had heard, of course, were the shots responsible for the killings of four of America’s children as well as the wounding of nine. My false memory of the location of the Liberty Bell allowed me to feel more distance and safety from the Guard than was true, and I always credited the distance with the fact that I could not have been near the Guard or the students fired on when events unfolded. In 2015 I realised that my memory spared me from the reality of how dangerously close I was.
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Wayne State. After being a Visiting Assistant Professor at Clemson University, I accepted a tenure track job at Georgia State University, where I have been since 1986. My freshman year at Kent State was a volatile time in American history, with frequent protests of involvement in the Vietnam War. During the spring of my freshman year, the Ohio National Guard were called in to quiet, control and ultimately disperse student protests against the war, following the increase of such activities on campus due of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Suddenly, my campus resembled a war zone more than a home away from home, full of army tanks, guardsmen with rifles, bayonets and clubs, helicopters hovering over my dorm at night and a declaration of martial law. I felt very vulnerable and very afraid. I was 18. On 4 May 1970 the unimaginable happened. The Guard fired live rounds of ammunition into a crowd of students during an anti-war rally. I knew one of the four students killed, Allison Krause. The Guard injured nine students, paralysing one permanently. Little did I realise then that the spring of my freshman year at
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Kent State, 45 years ago, would forever be a part of one of the most tragic events in the history of American higher education. There is little doubt that the shootings of college students at Kent State on May 4th 1970 qualifies as a flashbulb memory. Brown and Kulik were among the first researchers to study flashbulb memories, publishing in Cognition in 1977. They and others suggested that flashbulb memories are produced by highly shocking and consequential events, leading researchers to focus on whether flashbulb memories were privileged from forgetting over time (not so much the events per se but the contextual information available when remembering them – for example, where one was, who one was with, the emotions one felt, what one did after hearing or witnessing the event or events). As investigators continued to explore flashbulb memories, it became clear that although flashbulb memories may often be more salient than other memories, they are subject to degradation and distortions. In May of 2015 I attended the first May 4th memorial service since attending Kent State. My reasons for not attending earlier were due to the uncertainty of my ability to confront my emotions and memories of some 45 years earlier. I prepared myself by going to campus on 3 May 2015, and I walked the areas housing my dormitory, Engleman Hall, as well as the site where the National Guard fired into a crowd of students, Taylor Hall, and the large ‘Commons’ area separating the two buildings. I walked alone and took pictures of the areas I had walked in May 1970, and was flooded with emotion. As I began my walk from my dorm to Taylor Hall, I noticed I did not see the Liberty Bell, often rung to signal the start of a rally or other important events, right behind my dorm. This icon was a critically important element of my own memories of May 4th. I remembered with high confidence that the Liberty Bell was directly in back of my dorm and, importantly, at a good distance from Taylor Hall. Yet, while continuing to walk towards Taylor Hall, I eventually came across the Liberty Bell. It was situated behind Taylor, on the other side of the Commons area from my dorm. I felt angry that the university had made a decision to move the Bell closer to Taylor Hall. The next day, after talking to former students who had attended Kent in the
My second false memory After my brother and I heard the shots and ran in their direction, we stopped on the side of the building and my brother asked me not to go further, while he explored the area in front of Taylor Hall and beyond. When he came back he told me not to go further ahead – that is, in the front and other side of Taylor. When he said this I knew the situation was dire, and I also suspected I knew someone wounded or killed. Students near me were confused and in shock. Many were crying. There is a gap in my memory and the gap ends with me sitting, along with many other students, on a hill on the side of Taylor Hall where I had previously been but extending downward into the Commons area, surrounded by the National Guard. My memory all of these years was that I had no choice but to be there. I remember keeping my head down low and crying. |I do not remember talking to anyone. I did not want to look upward as I would be able to see Guard surrounding me and other
students in all directions. My false memory was that I had incorrectly assumed and remembered that the Guard had required students in the vicinity to sit down in one place and had surrounded us to maintain order. My memory included my geology professor, Dr Glenn Frank, a faculty martial, pleading with seated students to listen to the Guard and that if we did not, he feared a massacre. Again, my memory was that the Guard had corralled us to control our actions. Thus, my false memory provided a rationale that I was (once again) safe from harm. I was following the Guards’ orders and was not in danger. Only when I saw a video containing footage I had never seen, at the May 4th Visitor’s Center on 4 May 2015, was I able to piece together that the crowd formed and sat down in direct protest to orders from the Guard to disperse. I was shocked to think that I had defied the Guard’s orders, particularly following their shootings, and was engaging in a
spring of 1970, I discovered that the Liberty Bell had not been moved at all but had, in fact, always been behind Taylor Hall rather than behind my dorm. If it had been near my dorm, being near the Bell at the time of the shootings would have placed it at some distance from Taylor Hall and the shootings (see ‘My first false memory’). My experience on May 4th, 1970 was incomprehensible and traumatic and I struggled to make sense of the event (see also ‘My second false memory’). During my next year at Kent State, I took a class in which a professor explained how individuals could, indeed, make sense of seemingly incomprehensible information by manipulating crucial details, such as well-placed photographs or strategic titles.
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highly dangerous act. In the video I also saw and heard Professor Frank and another individual talk to either leaders or superiors of the Guard and found that they were given a mere five minutes to ‘convince’ students to disperse before there would be further consequences. While watching the video, I felt numb at the severity of the situation as well as by Professor Frank’s voice, begging us to disperse and pleading that he did not want to be a part of a potential massacre. The sound and desperation of his voice were heartbreaking, given the knowledge that he had five minutes to get us off the ground and away from where we were sitting… and students listened… and slowly left. Most of us went back to our dorms, as we were given a very short amount of time to leave campus before it would be closed indefinitely. As I walked back to my dorm, terrified, a Guardsman followed behind me, slapping his club hard across one hand the entire way I was ‘escorted’. It was time to go home.
The class greatly reinforced my already strong interests in understanding and remembering incomprehensible events in general and those that occurred on that day. For some, experiencing May 4th may have sparked an interest in misplaced aggression and violence but, for me, it broadened and strengthened my attempts to understand and remember incomprehensible and/or traumatic events. I became interested in the malleability and constructive nature of memory and the development of false memories. In sum, a series of converging events and interests surrounding understanding and remembering incomprehensible and traumatic events drove my career and I continue to be fascinated by and explore these topics.
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Learning in a digital context iPads in the Early Years Michael Dezuanni, Karen Dooley, Sandra Gattenhof & Linda Knight
The more alien we become, the more human we remain ‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.’ – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1911 Featuring prominently in the Science Museum ‘Cosmonauts’, that quote, from the Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry, captures the sense of escape and maturation found throughout this exploration of the Soviet space race. It’s not a psychological exhibition, nor would you expect it to be. But in amongst the hardware, art and design there are trajectories forged by fuel but truly made in the mind. ‘Cosmonauts’ is, for example, the story arc from dreams to reality; from the first dogs in space (anthropomorphically described here as ‘brave’) to men and women; from solo missions to the cooperation of the International Space Station and Mars 500 project, learning to battle with technical difficulties and not with each other. It’s also the story of how the ‘race for space’, and the individuals running it, could shape an entire nation. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was a remarkable individual who apparently stood out due to his positive nature and sense of humour, but in fact his working-class upbringing and photogenic smile were just as vital in what was a hugely symbolic and political choice. The strategy worked, with the media going ‘Ga-Ga’ over their first cosmonaut. Several triumphalist, chest-thrusting, fist-aloft statues are to be found in the exhibition, bringing to mind modern masculinities and a certain Vladimir Putin [http://digest.bps.org.uk/2014/03/male-fantasiestriumphalism-and-peace.html]. Similar statues of female astronauts are notable by their absence, but to their credit the Soviets were pioneers in equality. Valentina Tereshkova deserves a whole exhibition to herself, and I would love to have seen more about her hopes and fears on becoming the first woman in space. On the surface, this exhibition is all landing modules, control panels and cooling trousers, sophisticated modern technology that somehow looks disconcertingly primitive. Yet in reaching out to alien worlds, our Cosmonauts humanity remains core. Mission control is all about managing human Science experience, mediating everything from crucial instructions to Museum, sentimental messages from family. The ISS has been an ongoing experiment in cooperation between once-hostile nations. And if we are London to truly colonise our solar system and beyond we will need to call on psychology even more, as shown in Oleg Vukolov’s 1981 painting of the Sevastianov family found towards the end of the exhibition: the cosmonaut’s apparent readiness for a Mars mission contrasting with the lost, lonely look of those left behind. Recognising the importance of the space race for the psychology of an entire nation, the US threw huge amounts of money and expertise into it and grabbed the initiative with the moon landing. But ‘Cosmonauts’ is a reminder that it was the Russian space programme that launched us into a new era of human experience. The next era, leaving the cradle far behind as we launch on to alien outposts, will remain grounded in what makes us uniquely human. I Cosmonauts runs at the Science Museum in London until 13 March 2016, and costs £14 (concessions available). For much more on the psychology of space travel, alien contact and more, see our October ‘Out of this world’ issue at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/october-2015/out-world. Reviewed by Dr Jon Sutton who is Managing Editor of The Psychologist
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This book is very topical given the accessibility of technology for children and its growing use within different settings (e.g. schools and homes). Based on research in Australia, the authors have pulled together engaging and informative chapters transferable to wider settings that will appeal to teachers, parents, students and academics. Each chapter looks at a different method of using iPads within teaching from story making/storytelling to literacy and digital culture. Those using other tablet devices should not dismiss the book but think about the similarities and the transferability of the areas discussed. One of the central aims of using the iPads in the research discussed was ensuring they became embedded in teaching and were not just gimmicks. The book documents well how schools, teachers and children reacted to using the iPads as part of lessons, and how they were also able to help with engaging the home through the use of a school loan system. Underlying the writing is reference to theory and pedagogical approaches. The authors present an honest account of the challenges of the research, discussing how adaptations to teaching were made/needed but also reporting the opportunities it created, which would not have been as accessible or possible without the use of iPads. The book concludes with five ‘digital basics’ to help people design learning for children. Overall there are many strengths to this book, but the price tag may impact the accessibility. I Routledge; 2015; Hb £95.00 Reviewed by Dr Anna Mary Cooper, University of Salford
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Facing facts Forensic Facial Identification: Theory and Practice of Identification from Eyewitnesses, Composites and CCTV Tim Valentine & Josh P. Davis (Eds.) Although eye-witness testimony is highly prized in criminal/legal settings, anyone with a passing interest in the field will know we have a problem: we are not generally very good at remembering and identifying unfamiliar faces, and it is not that much better with familiar ones. This is partly because encoding a face is a highly imperfect and error-prone process. It is also because the techniques used to elicit witness descriptions or identify a suspect can make matters worse. This has significant implications for the lives and liberties of those involved, but it is not easily resolved. Forensic Facial Identification is part of Wiley’s book series addressing the psychology of crime, law and policing. This text is focused on contemporary forensic face research and its implications for theory, practice and implementation. It is edited by respected British psychologists Tim Valentine and Josh Davis, who draw together a good range of topics that include interviewing witnesses, problems and performance in line-ups, mug-shots and composite
face construction, identification from CCTV by humans and computer systems, craniofacial analysis (which I loved) and the implications for psychology, law and government. Each chapter is a manageable size, informative and clear. There are handy examples, legal case studies and summary conclusions. I would have liked to see a bit more colour (all monochrome figures and images), but that is a minor issue, and the text is never dry. Forensic Facial Identification is an ideal source of reference for anyone interested in the field and would be an excellent primary text on an advanced course reading list. I Wiley-Blackwell; 2015; Pb £34.00 Reviewed by Dr Andrew K. Dunn, Nottingham Trent University
Will it ever be ‘game over’ for this debate? Are Video Games Really That Bad? BBC Two (Horizon series) Are video games really that bad? Over the years I have come to see this seemingly simple question as the discipline of psychology in microcosm. People want to know the answer. There have been 30-odd years of research into it, with the brightest minds in the business using a huge range of methods. Yet, as the redundant reminders come throughout this programme, ‘human behaviour is very complicated’, and the area ‘may always divide scientific opinion’. It’s little wonder that the media choose to make up their own mind, cherry-picking from the research for their scare stories. Horizon promised to look ‘behind the hype and the headlines’, and as you would expect for a programme with first-class psychologist and blogger Dr Pete Etchells (Bath Spa University) as Programme Consultant it served up plenty of serious science. Yet I was left unsatisfied by the staple Horizon diet – foreboding warning versus by contrary evidence, the ‘which part of the brain lights up?’ bit, the feel-good and future-oriented conclusion. The starter in that three-course meal pitted the research of Professors Craig Anderson (Iowa State University) and Brad Bushman (Ohio State University) – broadly speaking, ‘You can’t zone out when you play a video game, you’re directly tied to a violent character’, and this leads to small but measurable increases in real-life aggression – against Professor Chris Ferguson (Stetson University, see also tinyurl.com/oxpkjff) and a ‘growing group of academics’ who argue that if anything the rise in gaming has led to
a decline in youth violence. Ferguson’s ‘routine activities theory’ certainly makes intuitive sense: if you take a group who are already prone to aggression and give them something else to do, it takes them away from scenarios where they are likely to engage in bullying and aggression out in the real world. The programme noted that this division in the academic community is rarely mentioned in the media, and scare stories continue to dominate. Am I being naive in hoping for one side of this debate to win out? An APA report (tinyurl.com/pl37a9u) recently supported the link between gaming and increased aggression and not criminality, so perhaps that’s the key distinction. Or perhaps the changing nature of gaming – myriad styles for all sections of society – means we need a more nuanced approach to the question, or simply to move on to richer and more positive possibilities. That’s pretty much what the programme did, with a series of contributions from academics looking deeper at the gaming–aggression link, before diving into the potential of virtual worlds. Dr Andrew Przybylski, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, used the wonderfully named ‘Bastet’ (also known as ‘bastard Tetris’) to look at the impact of frustration on aggression. Professor Rene Weber (University of California, Santa Barbara) showed that even looking inside the brain at the moment of playing a violent game is not providing us with answers. (Apparently the anterior cingulate cortex suppresses the
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amygdala’s normal response to violence, but that’s just a normal modulation of emotional response.) Then there’s a brief diversion into ‘problem gaming’, with Professor Mark Griffiths (Nottingham Trent University) warning ‘we should not confuse excess with addiction’. Also normalising the pastime were the video game journalists interviewed, with Leigh Alexander pondering: ‘Play is fundamental to who we are, and we’re just doing it through technology now.’ There seems little doubt that gaming is changing (see tinyurl.com/oq7rfv7) and in amongst the shoot-’em-ups you’ve got virtual worlds that can train surgeons (Henk ten Cate Hoedemaker’s ‘Underground’) and combat mental decline as we age (Professor Adam Gazzaley demonstrated ‘Neuroracer’). We may not be able to play our way to a better world, but gaming may at least improve visual tracking and attention shifts (see the work of Professor Daphne Bavelier http://mosaicscience.com/story/lazy-eye). In the end, no doubt my frustration is not with the programme but with the nature of psychology and even the scientific process in general. No doubt playing video games could be good for us, but can’t we get some kind of decent answer to the first question? What is ‘proof’, and if it’s never really ‘game over’ for any particular body of research is it any surprise that the media write their own ending? I Reviewed by Dr Jon Sutton who is Managing Editor of The Psychologist
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The plot thickens… Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories Rob Brotherton Former Goldsmiths lecturer Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds presents a textured and often surprising look into the fascinating world of conspiracy theories. A world so often described as dark and shady is shown to be much closer to home than we could have first imagined. From the history of conspiracy theories in ancient Rome to the archetypal narratives of good and evil that are often at the heart of modern theories, the book takes one on a journey of understanding. We come to realise that the conspiracy-minded are not so different to us after all. Brotherton also goes on, with fascinating examples of research and theories throughout, to outline the innate cognitive processes and biases that affect us all, but that also can play a role in cementing beliefs in such theories. We come away with the realisation that every one of us could benefit from the knowledge that we are useless at understanding why we believe what we do. With potential links to violent extremism (though evidence for this is patchy) and their central role in the antivaccination movement, conspiracy theories themselves are not always the work of harmless kooks. Brotherton looks into what makes a person conspiracy-minded and outlines six factors to help define what a conspiracy theory is. Looking into the narratives within conspiracy theories, Brotherton traces many back to classic stories of good overcoming evil. So many also
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include a central underdog, for example renegade scientists who claim vaccines cause autism or argue against the seriousness of HIV. These narratives, Brotherton says, resonate with us all. In perhaps the most fascinating section of the book Brotherton points to innate cognitive processes that, while helping us understand the world around us, can distort our picture of reality. From our inherent desire to see patterns in a chaotic world, to attributing non-existent intentions to actors in our worlds, it becomes clear we can all be susceptible to (albeit necessary) cognitive shortcuts that can colour our personal world view. Cognitive biases, too, are put under Brotherton’s microscope. He outlines research into the proportionality bias, where people expect big causes for big events, perhaps making official explanations for world events somehow unsatisfactory. Confirmation bias also has a probable role, making us only look to evidence that backs up our existing world view. This excellently in-depth yet accessible book would be fascinating to psychologists and the general public alike. Looking at conspiracy theories, and those who believe them, reveals much about the workings of the human mind, as Brotherton puts it: ‘Conspiracy-thinking is ubiquitous, because it’s a product, in part, of how all of our minds are working all the time.’ I Bloomsbury; 2015; Hb £16.99 Reviewed by Ella Rhodes who is staff journalist on The Psychologist
Drawn to the nectars of negativity Dismaland Banksy The West Country – home to The Wurzels, Wallace and Gromit, Glastonbury… and for a limited time only, Dismaland. Unafraid, provocative street artist ‘Banksy’ has flaunted his audacious art works globally – from the wall of the Palestinian West Bank to the Louvre in Paris, to Timbuktu and beyond – ostensibly promoting freedom of speech through potent, anti-establishment and political messages. Now, he and his international compatriots have created a new phenomenon – the Bemusement Park – a fusion of art, sculpture and fairground attractions conceptualised on negativity and set to dishearten and demoralise with underlying potent significance. The irony of this temporary, cheerless, pop-up installation is enhanced still further when one considers its previous incarnation – a lido, which by definition was brimming with fun and merriment – a wholly biophilous British seaside experience. The installation considers those thorny, often unspoken, disconcerting issues which have the power to entice the masses in a response to perceived injustice and evil. One of the stated intentions of Banksy’s rationale is to educate a new generation in the breadth of depressing world realities while shattering any residual hopes of denial or avoidance through fairytale escapism. Much like the Victorian freak shows at the end of the pier, the darkness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or movies featuring the undead, mutilation and destruction, Dismaland delivers a cacophony of all things anarchistic and nihilistic. In contrast to the mawkish bogus fantasy world of its opposite namesake, what awaits the surging crowds is a combination of the unalive, the largely inanimate and an expression of societal discontent and global self-destruction. The motivation for the stampede toward this attraction and the exhibits within appear in part inextricably linked to a necessity to be part of something fashionable and trendy. This jumping on the bandwagon and social conformity (Asch, 1955) is illustrated by the frenzied clamour for the limited online ticket availability – at times seemingly like the odds of obtaining a golden ticket to Dahl’s
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chocolate factory. This further parallels the recent zeitgeist-driven mindset resulting in the climax of Corbyn-mania with the variously welcomed or otherwise lurch or despair-filled moves to the political left of the Labour movement (see Bikhchandani, et al. 1992). The entire process and experience of the Dismaland journey is imbued with layered ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger, 1957) for the punters so they remain con-vinced (sic) they are attending of their own volition despite all the obstacles placed in their way. Whether they be in the initial procurement of online tickets, the bogus ticket availability following the weekly ‘sold out’ status, the winding cattle market queues for the ticketed and ticketless, the unaccommodating behaviour of the Mickey Mouse-eared staff, the acquisition of the ‘happy face’ programme from a burnt out ice-cream van, or the demand for the obligatory ‘I’m an imbecile’ black helium balloons – an impression of contempt is ever present. Necrophilous in theme, Dismaland unapologetically displays its wares, and the fervent public consumption is as much a voyeuristic appeal drawing us toward all things deathly as it is a celebration of rebellious creativity and the right to protest. In considering Von Hentig’s (1964) and Fromm’s (1973) work on the necrophilous personality in understanding human destructiveness and Freud’s (1930/1961) theory of ‘Thanatos’ – the death drive/instinct, it is possible to identify the psychological mechanisms in play. To the extent it is known at all, the popular interpretation of necrophilous interest is of a paraphilia, that is, a sexual acting out with corpses often by those with opportunity (e.g. morticians and murderers). However the benign sexual/non-sexual aspects permeate society and are more prevalent than is often acknowledged and understood. This refers to a broader passion toward the destruction of life and an attraction to all that is dead, decayed/ing, putrid and sickly and the purely mechanical (Fromm, 1973; Von Hentig, 1964), whether inanimate objects, body parts, internal organs or skeletal remains. Those who are drawn to such negativity, particularly in the context of necrophilous personality, psychologically retreat to a non-threatening place with safety and certainty where there can be no risk and only total control (Boon, 2016), effectively from the womb to the tomb (Cooper & Epperson, 2008). Hence such individuals can find comfort, indulgence and satiation in an involvement in and/or exposure to a breadth of
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darker interests. These may comprise music resembling ‘nothingness’ (e.g. death/doom metal), movies portraying deathly themes and detailing explicit ‘point of death’ scenarios (e.g. ABCs of Death, Hostel, Kill Bill and Perfume), fashion designs or artwork containing overt references to death or decay. Such persons often exhibit a penchant for scatological language, dark humour and in-kind accoutrements – tattoos, clothing, cars, leathered furniture, etc. – displaying their underlying disposition. The thematic content of the rusting, dilapidated attractions and art at Dismaland illuminate necrophilous content across various planes. Although somewhat disguised within a humorous ambiance, what is revealed include a large painting of a disembowelled man entitled ‘Grey’, the Grim Reaper doing the ‘dance of death’ driving a fairground dodgem car spinning to ‘Stayin’ Alive’, the demise of Cinderella observed by the predatory paparazzi, a unicorn in formaldehyde, a woman being attacked by seagulls and a toilet escaping killer whale diving into the sanctuary of a paddling pool. Further are anonymous seaside portraits devoid of human identity, merry-go-round horses turned into lasagne or intimately skeletonised, a beach ball precariously suspended in air over a sea of razor-sharp kitchen knives entitled ‘The fragility of love’ and a portrait resembling Chaplin showing the demolition of the individual via destruction, literally clawing the face and eviscerating its life blood. Further gloom and hopelessness can be reaped from the political messages and anti-capitalist/anarchistic themes. These reference variously ongoing global conflicts, terrorism, the plight of refugees migrating to Europe, environmental crises including climate change, genetic animal mutation experimentation, nuclear weapons, the control of the surveillance/police state along with a Soviet-style ‘Comrades Advice Bureau’. In toto, the craze of Dismaland provides Banksy et al.’s followers with an acceptable outlet for the thought-provoking consumption and expression of negativity, together with the warm and fuzzy comfort derived from the equal sharing of misery. I Reviewed by Lynsey Gozna who is a forensic psychologist at the University of Lincoln and the University of Nottingham and Julian Boon who is a forensic psychologist at the University of Leicester References Asch, S.E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193(5), 31–35. Bikhchandani, S., Hirshleifer, D. & Welch, I. (1992). A theory of fads, fashion, custom, and cultural change as informational cascades. Journal of Political Economy, 100, 992–1026 Boon, J.C.W. (2016). The aetiology and nature of necrophiliac offending. In E. Hickey, A. Aggrawal & L. Mellor (Eds.) Necrophilia: A global anthology. San Diego, CA: Cognella. Cooper, T.D. & Epperson, C.K. (2008). Evil: Satan, sin and psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans. and Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1930) Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Von Hentig, H. (1964). Der nekrotrope Mensch [The necrophile man]: Vom Totenglauben zur morbiden Totennähe. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke.
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Gallows humour Hangmen Royal Court Theatre Martin McDonagh has spent the last 10 years writing screenplays, notably the acerbic and foul-mouthed In Bruges (2008), and Seven Psychopaths (2012). Now he returns to where he started, with a new play, Hangmen. The action mainly takes place in 1965, on the eve of the abolition of hanging. Harry Wade (David Morrisey) has been forced to retire from a career in execution, where he was less than ably assisted by Syd (Reece Shearsmith). To Harry’s chagrin, he is now running a grubby pub in Oldham. Commanding yet pompous in his dickiebow, he is master of this significantly reduced domain, with a coterie of hangerson who are only there for the beer. Into this backwater strides Mooney (Johnny Flynn), a cocky cockney who unbelievably wants to rent a room above the pub. He’s up to something, but what? It’s a delight to watch what unfolds. The one-liners come thick and fast – Harry lecturing about why hanging is the best form of execution (‘The guillotine’s messy, and French’) and characters are swiftly developed (Mooney’s insistence that he is only ‘vaguely menacing’). But as the action becomes darker, the laughing becomes more horrified. The second act is pure Joe Orton: there’s an authentic 1960s vibe, pivotal roles for domestic props (a chair and a curtain feature heavily), and a deeply unpleasant undertone which could lead anywhere. It’s perhaps this anticipation of where we might be going that leads to the loudest laughs when the truth is revealed – an example of the evolutionary perspective on humour developed by Hurley, Dennett and Adams in their 2011 book Inside Jokes (see the special edition on laughter for this and more http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ volume-26/edition-4). If humour is your area of interest, Hangmen offers a great opportunity for some field work. For the rest of us, it’s just a brilliant night out. I Royal Court Theatre, London until October 2015, and then Wyndham’s Theatre, London from 1 December 2015 to 5 March 2016 Reviewed by Kate Johnstone who is Associate Editor (Reviews)
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Daggers of the Mind Macbeth Justin Kurzel (Director) I am in two minds about the new film version of Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel. Did I like it? I certainly enjoyed it, if that is the right term for spending 90 minutes watching scenes of battle and murder, with no shortage of blood and untrustworthiness. There is good acting, camera work (the wobbly hand of the modern cameraman is effective), and the dark and brooding scenes of moorland and mountain provide an appropriate backdrop. There is also a coherent storyline – perhaps a little too coherent – and complex trauma is well represented in both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Film-makers should alter storylines, but I am not sure that introducing a dead baby for the Macbeth family works. It gave the film an explicitness that the play doesn’t have (explicitness being a problem of modernity). The start shows the Macbeths distraught at the funeral of their young – and only – child. There is then a battle scene, with close-ups of frightened and traumatised faces, strong men and young boys, long swords and lots of hacking the enemy to pieces. So within a few minutes of the start of the film we have a good reason for (a) both Macbeths to be traumatised through the loss of their child and (b) Macbeth to be traumatised and brutalised by war. Accept the rationale for the introduction of the baby and the film works. When Macbeth meets Duncan we see the trauma of recent battle on his face. When the possibility of the succession to the throne arises we see Lady Macbeth in her usual role as originator and Macbeth as perpetrator of the death of Duncan. We see the decline of Macbeth’s mental health as he fights between doing what his wife wants and trying to control himself.
Macbeth’s trauma is evident. He is represented as strong, weak, decisive, indecisive – i.e. normal. He has flashbacks and intrusive thoughts – common symptoms of our modern disorder, PTSD. He has visions (of witches, of people he has killed), he makes murder look easy in the killing of Duncan, though that presumably derives from being brutalised. Without his wife’s influence he might have continued to be a loyal subject of Duncan, and this debate is evident throughout. I remain undecided regarding the baby. I was unconvinced by Macbeth’s village being placed on an evident wooden platform on a moor, in a place that would not sustain human life, there being no room for animals or crops (the city person’s fallacy, not realising that food is grown). I was also unconvinced by the ending (don’t worry, I won’t give it away), which is rather drawn out. Why do our film heroes always take so long to die? (Sorry, I gave it away) This Macbeth demonstrates the complexity of problems faced by traumatised people. Trauma is not about a single isolated incident. It is an interaction between things that happen to people, interactions with people, the social world generally and the culture in which we live. This is well represented in the film.
I Reviewed by Dr Nigel Hunt who is Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, University of Nottingham. He will be speaking at a British Psychological Society event on Wednesday 18 November to commemorate the centenary of C.S. Myers’ shell shock article in The Lancet. For more information and to book, see www.bps.org.uk/news/cambridge-eventmark-centenary-’shell-shock’
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It’s not you’ Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control In Your Intimate Relationship Lisa Aronson Fontes ‘Invisible chains’ tether us to family, jobs and home. This well-structured book describes how coercive control creates ‘invisible chains’ within intimate relationships. It defines coercive control via behaviours, such as degrading, micromanaging, abusing, punishing, stalking and isolating. It then uses a formulatory approach to highlight the life-long factors that might lead to the application or acceptance of coercive control. The book’s outstanding feature is its nurturing of the reader through a journey of understanding, encouraging them to consider how perhaps seemingly innocuous strands of
(an)other’s behaviour creates a rope binding them into a coerced existence. Readers’ experiences are validated through relevant sections and examples, so victims can identify that ‘it’s not me’, generally an implausible hypothesis when embroiled in an abusive relationship. The journey then extends into ending or remaining within the relationship, setting realistic targets for recovery and accepting future challenges – that is, responding within a new relationship. It is expertly inclusive, with sections for LGBT and teenagers and uses empowering jargonfree language to aid victims to
regain perspective. These strengths support its aim as a validating, informative selfhelp guide. The author’s broad clinical (and personal) experiences of coercive control within intimate relationships no doubt contribute to the readable style and the inclusion of a chapter on helping others, with pertinent questions for therapists to pose to themselves and patients. The main drawback for me was the lack of academic referencing, but this is acceptable for a self-help guide. Beyond this, however, it lacked definition. Given that it mentions US laws against coercive control and there are similar pending
UK law reforms, which have no doubt influenced the timing of this book, it could easily have incorporated some case law or more detailed case studies. These were frustratingly lacking. Having said that, I found the book a fantastic starting point in preparation for these changes and would definitely recommend it to those dealing with domestic abuse and conflict – victims, friends, therapists, police and lawyers. I Guilford Press; 2015; Pb £9.99 Reviewed by Dr Lorraine Childs who is Consultant Clinical Psychologist at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton
Tackling trauma The Therapeutic ‘Aha!’ 10 Strategies for Getting Your Clients Unstuck Courtney Armstrong could be maladaptive and blocking. The therapist’s role is to access and explore these root memories in order to bring about the favoured behaviour change. The writer proposes a method of recalling and reconsolidating traumatic memories in a simple fivestep plan. However, use of these five steps seems to belie the necessary study and experience required to safely work with traumatised individuals. The writer also offers ideas for replacing traumatic images with a compassionate image, and calls on the use of music, metaphor and mindfulness to support clients through emotional change. Information regarding these additional strategies, however useful, remained limited, though extra work sheets and ‘how to’ guides are available via an internet link provided in the book. A must-read for anyone contemplating working with trauma but equally users of the methods proposed could benefit from extensive further reading to fully grasp all detail and skills required. I Norton; 2015; Hb £18.99 Reviewed by Dr Levina Smook who is Principal Counselling Psychologist, Clinical Health Psychology, Dudley
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For more reviews, including The Secret Footballer: Access All Areas (with exclusive extract), see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/reviews contribute
At first glance the book seems lighthearted, with its title promising an easy-to-read quick reference’. However, on closer examination there is much research evidence provided, based in neuropsychology and its links to understanding how traumatised clients could struggle. The writer aims to offer strategies not only to reach the client effectively and build a secure attachment relationship, but also to move the client to a position where the trauma is resolved. We are guided through the emotional brain and its seven primary emotional systems (drawn from Panksepp & Biven, 2012), said to lie at the basis of all primary reactions, which often override conscious thinking. By learning to understand which emotional systems were in play, the therapist was said to be better able to understand the client’s motivations as related to traumatic events. The writer also encourages a sensitive and collaborative therapy style and the use of meaningful goals within therapy (akin to value-based exploration as used in acceptance and commitment therapy). Clients are said to be stuck in behaviours that at an earlier time had a protective function but at present
Sample titles just in: The Political Psyche Andrew Samuels How to Be a Researcher: A Strategic Guide for Academic Success Jonathan St B.T. Evans The Prevention of Suicide in Prison Daniel Pratt (Ed.) The Perception of People Perry R. Hinto Applied Leadership Development Al Bolea & Leanne Atwater For a full list of books 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 much more than books: if you see a film, play, exhibition, app, TV programme, radio show etc that you would like to review for us, get in touch on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or on Twitter @psychmag
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Psychology and the Great War, 1914–1918 Ben Shephard considers our discipline’s involvement, on all sides
he British psychologist Philip Vernon once described the 1900s as ‘the most exciting decade in psychology since the death of Aristotle’. That being the case, you might have expected the war that broke out in 1914 to be a very psychological one. In Britain it was not. The military scarcely knew about psychology – apart from a few oddball intellectuals like J.F.C. (‘Boney’) Fuller, who tried to make use of Gustav Le Bon’s crowd theories. Generals were not in the habit of drawing on civilian expertise, except in areas such as railway logistics, surgery or chemical warfare. As a result, most of the British academic psychologists (Myers, Rivers, McDougall and Brown) worked as psychiatrists in shell-shock hospitals. All were medically trained; Rivers had spent several years working as neurologist at Queen Square and a psychiatrist at Bethlem. In seeking to understand and treat shell-shock (a term coined by Myers) they drew mainly on psychiatrists such as Janet and Freud. Their role was important because the neurologists, supposedly the medical specialists in this field, were at first mystified and defeated by ‘shellshock’, while the asylum doctors clung to their pre-war belief that mental illness was entirely hereditary. Only at the end of the war, after he had returned from France, did Myers do some ‘proper psychology’, working on sound for the Royal Navy. Similarly, Rivers, after leaving Craiglockhart in late 1917, did some psychology with RFC
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Ash, M.G. (1995). Gestalt psychology in German culture, 1890– 1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boring, E.G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. (2nd edn). New York: Appleton-Crofts. Bourke, J. (2001). Psychology at war, 1914–1945 in G.C. Bunn et al , Psychology in Britain: Historical essays and personal reflections. Leicester:
flyers. Charles Spearman, a professional soldier by training, spent much of the war guarding a depot in the north of England, but later carried out testing work for the Admiralty. In Britain no attempt was made to apply psychology to the testing of military recruits. In Europe, however, where the discipline was much better established, psychologists played a more prominent role. In October 1914 Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first experimental
laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, was one of 93 prominent German cultural and academic figures to sign a Manifesto refuting the charges of barbarism made against the German army for its conduct in Belgium. A year later, in The Psychologies of Nations, he sought to argue that Germany’s underlying philosophy was superior to those of France and England. Many of those involved in the war, on both sides of the Atlantic, were pupils of Wundt. Indeed, the academic discipline of psychology in 1914 was itself essentially a German invention. Frederic Bartlett later recalled that the course taught at Cambridge before the war ‘was Germans, Germans all the way, and if we were going to stick to psychology then to Germany sooner or later we must all surely go’. Bartlett never went to Germany himself, but nearly everyone else did; many had fond memories of the ‘unstinted kindness and precious friendship’ of very many Germans and found it uncomfortable to be at war with
Krupp munitions factory – expertise built up by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labour Physiology in Berlin was used to minimise fatigue among munitions workers
BPS Books. Geuter, U. (1992). The professionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. Gould, S.J. (1984). The mismeasure of man. London: Pelican. McDougall, W. (1920). The group mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDougall, W. (1930). 'William
McDougall' in C. Murchison (Ed.) A history of psychology in autobiography Vol. 1. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press. Rabinbach, A. (1990). The human motor: Energy, fatigue and the origins of modernity. New York: Basic Books. Schaffer, R. (1990). America in the Great War: The rise of the war welfare state. New York: Oxford University Press. Seligman, M. & Fowler, R.D. (2011).
Comprehensive soldier fitness and the future of psychology. American Psychologist 66(1), 82–86. Shephard, B. (2001). A war of nerves: Soldiers and psychiatrists in the twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shephard, B. (2013). Headhunters: The search for a science of the mind. London: Bodley Head. Strachan, H. (1996). The morale of the
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them. Amongst the conflict-driven dreams Rivers recorded at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917 was one in which he found himself back in the Heidelberg laboratory where he had worked two decades before. But divided loyalties were most powerfully played out at Harvard, where Hugo Münsterberg, the pioneer of applied psychology and a deeply patriotic German, found himself surrounded by anglophile New Englanders. Instead of returning to Germany, Münsterberg stood his ground but the strain took its toll, and in December 1916, while lecturing at Barnard College, he collapsed, fell from the podium and died. Had Münsterberg gone back home, he would have been much in demand. The War Ministry in Berlin had no hesitation in calling in physicists, chemists – and psychologists. ‘I myself would have shaken my head in disbelief if someone had told me what sorts of things would be done in my Institute in these war years’, the Berlin psychologist Carl Stumpf declared in 1918. The military drew primarily on the industrial expertise the psychologists had acquired before the war; as early as 1915 aptitude tests developed by ‘psycho technicians’ were being used to select pilots, truck drivers, radio operators and other military specialists. At the same time, the expertise in nutrition and industrial fatigue built up by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labour Physiology in Berlin was used to minimise fatigue among munitions workers and to help German civilians adjust to the restricted and rationed diets enforced by the British blockade. By the end of the war, more than 11,000 synthetic food substitutes had been developed (Rabinbach, 1990). At the same time psychologists were set specific tasks by the military. Max Wertheimer, later a leading Gestalt-ist, devised a directional listening device to help soldiers to locate enemy artillery over long distances. It consisted of two funnels or microphones a fixed distance apart mounted on a tripod and connected to earpieces with tubes or hollow cables; but, unfortunately, did not work very well:
German Army. In H. Cecil & P.H. Liddle (Eds.) Facing Armageddon. The First World War experienced. London: Leo Cooper. Stumpf, C. (1930). 'Carl Stumpf' in C. Murchison (Ed.) A history of psychology in autobiography Vol. 1. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press. Watson, A. (2008). Enduring the Great War: Combat, morale and collapse in the
there was simply too much noise in artillery battles. Wertheimer’s old boss, Carl Stumpf, a musical scholar, had the more congenial task of organising gramophone recordings of the native dialects and songs of the prisoners of war held in camps in Germany (Ash, 1995). In addition, several German psychologists carried out investigations of combat motivation while serving in uniform. Walter Ludwig set 200 officers and wounded soldiers to write an essay on ‘what the soldier thinks in the moment of greatest danger in order to overcome the fear of death’; and concluded that religious feelings, memories of home, and ‘social emotions’ (comradeship) topped the list, with patriotism well down the field. By contrast, Paul Plaut concluded from his own experience and from questionnaires sent out by the Psychological Institute in Potsdam, that ‘one looks after oneself first’. He also emphasised the fatalism that soldiers develop (Watson, 2008). Although these surveys were not initiated by the military and their findings were largely ignored, overall the psychologists helped to make the German war effort more scientific, rational and modern; they contributed to what military historians call ‘the full rationalization of machine war’ (Strachan, 1996). But they must also take some of the blame for Germany’s failures, such as the maladministration of food rationing which caused such unrest. Above all, the psychologists were unable to prevent Germany suffering a psychological defeat, as civilian morale collapsed in 1917 and desertion and mutiny crept into the armed forces the following year. Yet, professionally, they prospered. Historians agree that the First World War was ‘a turning point for academic psychology in Germany (Ash, 1995); it ‘enabled the discipline to demonstrate to the state its practical usefulness and thus prove its claim to be separate from philosophy. Thanks to the war, new positions dedicated to established psychology were created in institutes of technology and
German and British Armies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zenderland, L. (2001). Measuring minds. Henry Goddard and the origins of American intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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commercial academies’ (Geuter, 1992). In France none of the big names took part in the war. Alfred Binet had died prematurely in 1911; his student Théodore Simon spent these years running a psychiatric hospital; ThéoduleArmand Ribot was 74 in 1914; while Piaget, Flournoy and Claparède were all Swiss nationals. As in Germany, most of those involved with the military had previously been engaged in the ‘science of work’. Thus, Jean-Marie Lahy (1872–1944), a leading French opponent of the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor which were becoming fashionable in Europe just before the war, carried out studies of the reaction time and sangfroid of machine gunners, measuring variations in their respiration and pulse rate; his colleagues devised test for aptitude for flying. Neither in Germany nor in France did psychologists attempt to test all military recruits; nor did they test for character. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it was once again those who had worked in industry who proved most useful to the military. The US Army, hastily expanding, was happy to accept the help and advice of Walter Dill Scott, a former pupil of Wundt with long experience of aptitude testing in business. Scott’s techniques for finding smart and alert salesmen were easily adapted for military use, and by the end of the war his Committee on the Classification of Personnel in the Army had a staff of 7000 specialists who had interviewed and classified more than 3,000,000 men. The Army gave Scott a medal. But it was more doubtful about the ambitious testing programme conceived by Robert M. Yerkes, the President of the American Psychological Association. Partly because his own career seemed blocked – he had been unable to get funding for the primate work he wanted to do and had been forced to supplement his income by developing mental tests for patients in a Boston psychiatric hospital – Yerkes saw in the war an opportunity to apply psychology in bold new ways. He persuaded the Surgeon-General of the Army that testing of recruits would help the military to eliminate the mentally unfit and to identify the intellectually superior. Yet, as Yerkes well knew, the technology needed for such testing did not yet exist. Before the war, American psychologists had taken up the mental tests developed in France by Binet and taken further by Stern in Germany; the concepts of ‘IQ’ and ‘mental age’ had been established. Henry Goddard had translated and used the Binet tests on “feeble-minded” children’ and on
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immigrants at Ellis Island and in 1916 his colleagues, having expended so much Lewis Terman had published the effort, naturally asserted the integrity of Stanford-Binet, which further adapted their material – though Henry Goddard the tests to America conditions. did admit that ‘we seem to be impaled on Though Yerkes’ initial idea was to the horns of a dilemma: either half the test military recruits individually, he soon population is feeble-minded; or 12 year realised that what the Army needed was mentality does not properly come within a group test that could be conducted by the limits of feeble-mindedness’. unskilled personnel. Between May and Whatever its flaws, Yerkes’ ambitious July 1917, he sat down with Terman, scheme had important consequences. Goddard and other colleagues and came Firstly, it initiated the IQ wars in the up with three tests: the Alpha for literate United States: ‘The statement that the recruits, the Beta for illiterates, and, for average mental age of Americans is only those who failed Beta, a modified Binet about fourteen is not inaccurate. It is not individual examination. It then took incorrect. It is nonsense’, thundered months to overcome opposition within the US Army and to organise the manpower and facilities needed to carry out the tests, but by the summer of 1918 the programme was under way; in the end, some 1.7 million recruits were tested. This exercise was of some practical use, in enabling the army to shed potentially vulnerable recruits, though the tests also carried out by psychiatrists were probably more effective. But the military suspected that that was not the real purpose of the testing programme – that Yerkes and his colleagues might ‘ride it as a hobby for the purpose of obtaining data for research work and the future benefit of the human race’. Such suspicions were confirmed Henry Goddard had translated and used the Binet tests on when the data came to be ‘feeble-minded’ children and on immigrants at Ellis Island analysed. Crudely put, the tests showed that the mental age of the average American was 13.8, Walter Lippmann in 1922. To which that 95 per cent of America’s black Lewis Terman retorted: ‘There is nothing population were ‘morons’ and that, about an individual as important as his contrary to expectations, Jews from IQ.’ Secondly, at a popular level, the tests southern and eastern Europe were not as gave ammunition to those who wished to intelligent as ‘old Americans’ from New restrict immigration to the United States England. (as had surely been Yerkes, Goddard and Were these findings credible? Critics Terman’s intention) and contributed to pointed out, then and afterwards, that the the climate that produced the 1924 tests themselves contained heavy cultural Immigration Act, imposing quotas on biases – that they measured education immigrants. Thirdly, they ‘put psychology and familiarity with American culture, on the map’: ‘the advertising that this not innate intelligence. Furthermore, the testing gave psychology in America programme was not carried out under reached into the remotest corner of the perfect conditions – Gould later described laboratory and swelled college classes’ it as ‘a shambles, if not a disgrace’ ... (Boring, 1950). Although historians now ‘conducted in an almost frantic rush’ and regard the Army Tests as an early chapter asserted that most of the soldiers taking in the argument over race and the tests ‘must have ended up utterly intelligence, many psychologists continue confused or scared shitless’. Yerkes and to see the World War 1 experience in a
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heroic, or at any rate a positive, light. According to Martin Seligman, psychology ‘responded to the national needs and was itself transformed’. Was it? In 1920 William McDougall remarked that the Great War was ‘supposed to have revolutionized all our ideas of human nature and of national life’, adding that his own wartime experience had not caused him to change his mind about anything, either because he was too old to learn anything new or because his views had been right in the first place. However, many of his colleagues felt that the war had revealed truths about the human mind that must now be acted upon. ‘Our conception of mind has to be completely altered,’ W.H.R. Rivers told students at Cambridge in 1919. A new world, ‘based on the operation of the unconscious mind’, was going to transform such matters as criminal law. His colleague, Charles Myers, imagined a broader kind of psychology, replacing the ‘meaningless numbers’ and ‘senseless syllables’ of brass instrument psychology with ‘the factor of feeling’; taking the discipline into such areas as mental abnormality, child development and industrial neurosis. Myers opened up the membership of the British Psychological Society to anyone interested in the subject but his efforts to create a mental health clinic in Cambridge and to transform the teaching of psychology in the University were both frustrated when the more conservative elements, alarmed by the ‘wild rise of psychoanalysis’, dug their heels in. Myers went off to London to create the National Institute for Industrial Psychology. Overall, Joanna Bourke (2001) is right that ‘social and clinical psychology received a significant boost from the First World War’. But her further assertion that there emerged out of the war ‘a new branch of the profession: military psychology’ is more debatable. Certainly wartime experience left some psychologists with a vision of a new role – helping soldiers to endure the mental effects of modern warfare, excluding the vulnerable, separating malingerers from neurotics, and developing new ‘psychological’ methods of training – but a generation would pass before the military allowed them to play that part, and then only in a piecemeal way. I Ben Shephard is a historian and writer ben.shephard@blueyonder.co.uk
vol 28 no 11
november 2015
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The ‘street children’ of Latin America
Words and sorcery Simon Oxenham and Jon Sutton consider the causes of bad writing in psychology, and its impact
Graham Pluck with a story of challenge and survival for millions
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letters 172 news 184 careers 236 reviews 244
radical behaviourism 24 mindfulness in psychology 28 mental illness – head to head debate 34 looking back: Asch’s line studies 72
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ONE ON ONE
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… with Peter Fonagy
‘I would like to abolish silo working’ One moment that changed the course of your career The moment lasted three and a half years. It was my analysis aged 17 with Anne Hurry at the then Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic (now Anna Freud Centre). She was a superb analyst, particularly for a depressed, isolated adolescent boy. She showed me how to face up to parts of myself that I was uncomfortable with, to say truths that I didn’t like and yet retain a sense of myself as worthwhile. And she was very funny to boot. One person who inspired you My dad. He spoke more languages than I could name including Sanskrit and could read the hieroglyphics in the British Museum. One thing that you would change about psychology/ psychologists I would like psychologists to abolish silo working, both in
coming soon
Peter Fonagy is Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre p.fonagy@ucl.ac.uk
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relation to other professions, but above all in relation to each other. The working of the mind is the most rewarding and important subject of study and it is an incredible privilege to be given the most exciting of subjects as a centrepiece of one’s profession. Many psychologists work very well with each other and other professions, but I have met many who do not. We should share our knowledge broadly in the interest of our clients and abandon the guilt we have built up to protect the particular patches of our universe. One era I’m very fortunate having been born at the late end of the baby boomer generation. We have had the advantage of a welfare system, subsidised education, contraception, relative peace and in many parts of the world liberalism and enlightenment. My hobby is reading history and quite honestly I can think of no other period where an ordinary person like me had it so good. One person I would have liked to have met Montaigne, a French philosopher and essayist. He
Advance decisions, morality, giving a voice in dementia, and 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. I To advertise: Reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover.
was, at least in his writing, incredibly witty and terribly clever. And he cut through numerous Gordian knots with nothing more than an incisive intellect. I particularly like his essay on empiricism. One regret Some of the more creative ideas that help progress scientific work that we have done came relatively late in my career. I spent the early years of my career a bit lost in the wilderness. It wasn’t until two PhD students focused my attention on attachment and Bowlby that I found the topic in psychology that I was really genuinely interested in.
airline pilot. I think I didn’t have the right A-levels though. One hero/heroine from psychology past or present I met John Bowlby when he was visiting professor at UCL in the 1970s. He was a remarkable man and a highly controversial figure among psychoanalysts but he stood up for empiricism and for children and for identifying the biological basis for understanding behaviour. I am not sure if I liked him as a person – he was somewhat remote and not overly friendly – but in terms of sheer scientific determination and
One book Heinrich Mann’s historical biography of Henry IV of France is one of the books that inspired me to read history for pleasure. For the last 30 years I have only read history books outside of reading I have to do professionally. One film Les Enfants du Paradis. It depicts human beings as they really are – sometimes ugly on the outside but beautiful on the inside.
Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis
One song/album I remember in Hungary listening to the Beatles song ‘Lady Madonna’ and I didn’t understand and mispronounced the words because I couldn’t speak English. And then the Sergeant Pepper album came out and I listened endlessly. That had the words on the inside cover. It was my first proper lesson in English. One thing I’m ashamed of I was one of the worst goalies ever. One alternative career path you may have chosen Is it a bit boring to say medicine? What I really would like to have been is an
sense of focus I have not seen his equal. One place I love A 16th-century farmhouse Briançon. It’s about five minutes away from one ski resort, Serre Chevalier, and 20 minutes from another, Montgenèvre. It’s owned by my sister and her husband and we go skiing there annually as a family. One thing I am proud of I am proud of the decency and humanity of my kids. One key to my success I have achieved nothing on my own. Working with teams has been the greatest pleasure and a working team being happy the greatest source of pride.
vol 28 no 11
november 2015