The Psychologist, June 2009

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Social cognitive theory goes global Albert Bandura on abating global problems by psychosocial means

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

forum 466 conference 480 careers 536 looking back 558

using virtual worlds in psychology 490 siblings – friends or foes? 494 giftedness and the brain 498 ‘return to work’ revisited 502

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The British Psychological Society Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR Tel 0116 254 9568 Fax 0116 227 1314

Welcome to The Psychologist the official 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’.

It is supported by a website, www.thepsychologist.org.uk, where you can view this month’s issue, search the archive, listen, debate and seek information, contribute, subscribe, advertise, and more.

Society website www.bps.org.uk The Psychologist e-mail psychologist@bps.org.uk General Society e-mail mail@bps.org.uk Advertising Reach 45,000 psychologists at very reasonable rates.

For rates and deadlines, e-mail psyadvert@bps.org.uk or tel 0116 252 9552 For job advertising, in print or online at www.psychapp.co.uk, e-mail psychapp@bps.org.uk tel 0116 252 9550 May 2009 issue 47,835 dispatched Printed by Warners Midlands plc, Bourne, on 100 per cent recycled paper Please re-use or recycle See the online archive at www.thepsychologist.org.uk ISSN 0952-8229 © Copyright for all published material is held

by The British Psychological Society, unless specifically stated otherwise. Authors, illustrators and photographers may use their own material elsewhere after publication without permission. The Society asks that the following note be included in any such use: ‘First published in The Psychologist, vol. no. and date. Published by The British Psychological Society – see www.thepsychologist.org.uk.’ As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be photocopied by licensed institutional libraries for academic/teaching purposes. No permission is required.

Permission is required and a reasonable fee charged for commercial use of articles by a third party. Please apply to the Society in writing. The publishers have endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all illustrations in this publication. If we have unwittingly infringed copyright, we will be pleased, on being satisfied as to the owner’s title, to pay an appropriate fee.

Your publication needs you!

You can shape the content in all parts of the publication – we rely on your submissions.

In return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience.

‘It's important for psychologists to develop ways of writing that really communicate: not just journal intricacy and not just glossy-magazine chat. The Psychologist offers a fine opportunity for this development. The editors are excellent, in their work with authors and in their production of this wonderful publication.’

Keith Oatley, University of Toronto

What are we looking for?

Topics which will inform our wide audience, written in a style which will engage them. We aim to publish quality, accessible overviews of research and practice (but not ‘journal style’ reports of unpublished studies), along with a wide range of more personal formats. There are options to suit all areas and authors – contact the editor to discuss, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or via the Leicester office.

We are also keen to receive news, letters, conference reports, pieces about careers, methods, teaching and learning, the history of psychology and more. Again, contact the editor.

How do I go about writing my piece?

You may find it helps to contact the editor for advice on the approach you should take and

Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Staff journalist Christian Jarrett Advertising Sarah Stainton Kirsty Wright Editorial Assistants Debbie James

Associate Editors Articles Vaughan Bell, Kate Cavanagh, Elizabeth Gilchrist, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Amina Memon, Tom Stafford, Miles Thomas, Pete Walpole, Monica Whitty, Barry Winter

how long the piece should be. You can also see www.thepsychologist.org.uk for guidance, and examples of different formats in the archive of past issues.

To allow anonymous review, authors’ names and full contact details should not appear on the typescript, but should be presented on a separate page.

Send your work as an attachment to psychologist@bps.org.uk, or post three copies to The Psychologist at the Society’s office.

What happens next?

After an initial assessment of suitability by the editor, our feature articles are blind peerreviewed to ensure scientific quality. The editor reserves the right to edit all copy accepted for publication. However, this is a collaborative process with the author, aiming for the best possible end product in terms of layout and accessibility.

An author or the editor may feel that an article is suitable for web-only presentation due to considerations of time, length or breadth of interest.

For full details of the policy and procedures of The Psychologist, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk. If you feel these policies and procedures have not been followed, contact the editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or the Chair of the Psychologist Policy Committee, Dr Paul Redford, on paul2.redford@uwe.ac.uk

Conferences Simon Bignell, Sandie Cleland International Nigel Foreman, Asifa Majid Interviews Nigel Hunt, Lance Workman History of Psychology Julie Perks

The Psychologist Policy Committee Paul Redford (Chair), Nik Chmiel, Olivia Craig, Jeremy Horwood, Alexa Ispas, James Jackson, David Lavallee, Fenella Quinn, Sheelagh Strawbridge, Henck van Bilsen, Peter Wright, and Associate Editors

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forum 466 speaking up for IAPT; the lap dancing debate; answering the climate change sceptics; statutory regulation and choices for the individual; guest columns on the economy and science communication; and more news, media and conference reports 472 ‘treating’ homosexuality; self-screening; psychologists and torture; genetic links to autism; expertise and the RAE; and lots of media coverage and reports from the Society’s Annual Conference in Brighton

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Get a second life Christian Jarrett on the benefits (and dangers) of using virtual worlds in your psychological research, therapy and teaching

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Siblings – friends or foes?

Alison Pike, Tina Kretschmer and Judith F. Dunn on what the research says about achieving a harmonious household

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Giftedness and the brain Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic look at the neural mechanisms behind talent

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‘Return to work’ revisited William J. Fear argues that people on incapacity benefit need a psychosocial intervention rooted in self-efficacy

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THE ISSUE Psychology has some strong theories, but often lacks the means to apply them on a large scale.

Equally, social policy is often missing the input from theory that would help it to be truly effective. Enter Albert Bandura. On p.504, the man whose books are cited more than any other psychologist, living or dead, describes how he and his colleagues took social cognitive theory to mind-boggling numbers (e.g. 125 million in India), and racked up numerous impressive results that are making a real difference to populations that need help.

Another such population is the mentally ill in the UK, and the IAPT programme is attempting to improve their lot. We devoted more than 11 pages to a fairly critical view of IAPT last month, so it is only fair that we draw particular attention to the considered reply from David Clark and numerous others on p.466.

Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor)

NITA WINTER PHOTOGRAPHY

book reviews 510 the neurorevolution; the fundamentals of psychology; working with race, ethnicity and culture in mental health; bad science; and more society 516 President’s column; the Society’s Award for Promoting Equality of Opportunity; and more 536 careers an interview with Gesthimani (Manya) Merodoulaki about the role and practice of counselling psychology; becoming a forensic psychologist; all the latest jobs, and how to advertise looking back the life and influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart, by Gustav Jahoda

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one on one …with Dorothy Rowe

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Social cognitive theory goes global Albert Bandura on abating urgent global problems by psychosocial means 504

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FORUM

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Speaking up for IAPT

contribute

The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative and its place in the development of the full range of psychological therapies have been caricatured by John Marzillier and John Hall’s two ‘Opinion’ pieces (May 2009).

Readers who wish to understand the initiative, rather than their caricature of it, are referred to www.iapt.nhs.uk where they will find the Implementation Plan, the Commissioning Toolkit (including a description of the service framework), the curricula for training therapists, the Outcomes Toolkit, Commissioning for the Whole Community, Supervision Guidance, a Supervision Competencies Framework, the Equality and Diversity Toolkit, an Equality Impact Assessment, the LSE’s evaluation of the two demonstration sites, plus other useful documents. Sadly, these are not referenced and are hardly mentioned by Marzillier and Hall.

In the short space available for a letter, it is impossible to itemise all the misleading statements in Marzillier and Hall’s seven pages of opinion. However, it is important to mention that many of the ‘Alternative Ways of Working’ advocated by them are already part of IAPT. These include: I training in, and respect for, the role of the therapeutic relationship (see the curriculum for high-intensity therapists); I a broad-based, person-centred assessment that goes well beyond simply establishing a diagnosis (see Commissioning Toolkit, chapter 5); I a decision tree that recognises that assessment and formulation can lead to either no-treatment, sign-posting to social and community support, psychological intervention, or help by another profession (see LSE Evaluation of Two Demonstration Sites); I provision of a range of evidence-based therapies (see the Statement of Intent, plus the forthcoming details of a training programme in interpersonal psychotherapy and support for the

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These pages are central to The Psychologist’s role as a forum for discussion and debate, and we welcome your contributions.

I

I

importance of counselling); recognition of diversity (all IAPT services carefully monitor access by ethnic minorities and have been opened up to self-referral because this has been shown to be particularly helpful for equitable access; see Outcomes Toolkit, Equality Impact Assessment, the BME Positive Practice Guide, and the LSE Evaluation); and recognition that poverty and other social factors substantially contribute to depression and anxiety (hence the inclusion of employment advisers, debt counselling, and other social assistance in the IAPT services: see Implementation Plan and Commissioning Toolkit).

We should also mention that Marzillier and Hall’s purported critique of the assumptions behind the Layard Report contains a number of errors. For example, IAPT low-intensity treatment is not defined as ‘four sessions’ but rather is characterised by a particular type of intervention (for example, guided self-help) that is typically delivered for 4–8 sessions but with flexibility to go beyond that. Similarly, it is not correct to say that CBT has been shown to be most effective for people who are only mildly or moderately anxious or depressed. On the contrary, many of the trials in anxiety disorders that find CBT superior to a psychological control condition (e.g.

Clark et al., 1994, 2006) explicitly excluded cases that were mild or of short duration. The same applies to Hollon, DeRubeis and colleagues’ recent trials of CBT versus medication in severe depression (DeRubeis et al., 2005; Hollon et al., 2005). Moreover, it is not correct to

Send e-mails marked ‘Letter for publication’ to psychologist@bps.org.uk; or write to the Leicester office.

say that ‘levels of uncompleted treatment in both research and practice settings’ were not taken into account. The Layard Report uses ‘intention-to-treat’ rather than ‘completer’ analyses, and the IAPT programme itself has taken steps to assure that data is available for incomplete interventions by developing a new session-by-session outcome monitoring system. This means that even when patients drop out of therapy there is still data on their progress. This system is operating well, and the data from the demonstration sites has already shown its advantage over more traditional, less frequent, outcome monitoring, where missing data leads to overestimation of the value of a service (see LSE Evaluation). Marzillier and Hall’s critique also seriously misrepresents the NICE guidelines on which much of the IAPT programme is based, for example to state that NICE ‘privileges randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and minimises the value of meta-analytic studies’ is simply not correct; NICE recommendations are predominantly based on meta-analyses of high-quality evidence.

The IAPT programme has already made a substantial contribution to improving the mental health of those suffering from a range of common mental disorders. Everyone involved in developing the IAPT programme believes that it is simply the beginning – not the whole story. Of course, changes will be made in the light of experience and the rigorous approach to outcome monitoring adopted by IAPT should facilitate that process. The efforts of applied psychologists (and the pages of The Psychologist) would be, we suggest, better focused on debating such developments rather than on misinformation. Such an approach will best serve the interest both

Letters over 500 words are less likely to be published. The editor reserves the right to edit or publish extracts from letters. Letters to the editor are not normally acknowledged, and space does

not permit the publication of every letter received.

However, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk to contribute to our discussion forum (members only).

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IAPT – more pertinent questions of those suffering from anxiety disorders and depression and of the many psychologists involved in developing and providing IAPT services.

David M. Clark,1 Peter Fonagy2,3, Graham Turpin4,5, Steve Pilling6,7, Malcolm Adams5,8, Miriam Burke9, John Cape9,10, Tim Cate5,11, Anke Ehlers12, Philippa Garety10, Rod Holland10,11, Judy Liebowitz9, Kay MacDonald9, Tony Roth2,7, and Roz Shafran8 1 IAPT National Clinical Advisor. 2Author of What Works for Whom?. 3Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, UCL. 4IAPT National Education and Training Advisor.

5 Ex-Chair of DCP. 6Director, CORE, UCL. 7 Author of DH Competencies Framework for Psychological Therapies and Supervision.

8 IAPT Training Provider. 9IAPT Service Lead.

10 Head of Psychology, NHS Mental Health Trust. 11IAPT Regional Clinical Advisor. 12CoChair of NICE PTSD Guideline.

References Clark, D.M., Ehlers, A., Hackmann et al. (2006).

Cognitive therapy and exposure plus applied relaxation in social phobia: A randomised controlled trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74, 568–578.

Clark, D.M., Salkovskis, P.M., Hackmann et al. (1994).

A comparison of cognitive therapy, applied relaxation and imipramine in the treatment of panic disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry, 164, 759–769.

Hollon, S.D., DeRubeis, R.J., Shelton, R.C. et al. (2005).

Prevention of relapse following cognitive therapy vs medications in moderate to severe depression.

Archives of General Psychiatry, 62(4), 417–422.

DeRubeis, R.J., Hollon, S.D., Amsterdam, J.D. et al.

(2005). Cognitive therapy vs medications in the treatment of moderate to severe depression.

Archives of General Psychiatry, 62(4), 409–416.

CORRECTION Last month’s article by John Marziller and John Hall was missing a reference: Mollon, P. (2009). The NICE guidelines are misleading, unscientific, and potentially impede good psychological care and help.

Psychodynamic Practice, 15(1), 9–24.

It is useful to see deeper consideration of the Layard proposals and the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative (Marzillier and Hall, May 2009).

The simplistic generalisations offered by Layard have clearly been very attractive to politicians committed to making sure they provide the ‘best’ without getting into the annoying intricacies of what that might actually mean. However, it is important to recognise that many of the limitations of IAPT have grown out of the policy structure in which health services currently operate. At present, NHS treatment developments primarily come from a central push to raise quality through the application of evidence, as recognised in the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines. These guidelines undeniably have many benefits, but there is a danger that the result is a rigid emphasis on particular treatment models rather than on addressing differing individual needs.

The central question posed by Layard – how to help people on incapacity benefit – is an important one. It is also

a subject that (as Marzillier and Hall point out), requires a response of far greater complexity than IAPT has thus far been able to offer. From community work to a mix of therapies there is clearly ongoing research and practice in many relevant areas. NICE, for all its strengths, does not necessarily offer a system capable of capturing this range, nor of providing strategies to deal with thorny social issues. Given this, perhaps the primary lessons of Layard are twofold. Firstly, as IAPT eloquently demonstrates, the NICE guidelines can lead to unhelpfully limited answers to complex problems. Secondly, in the face of such problems, a central challenge for psychologists at the present time is to think about how to develop systems that will foster more innovative, creative and above all appropriately sophisticated solutions.

Paul Gilbert (‘Moving beyond cognitive behavioural therapy’, May 2009) poses the pertinent question as to whether we should be working with individuals at all or with communities. Intuitively, the latter would make more sense to me. And yet, in my experience, many clinical psychologists are working only or mainly with individual clients, irrespective of their predominant approach (e.g. CBT, psychodynamic, CAT, EMDR, IPT).

Although clinical psychology places central importance on social relationships (as Gilbert reminds us), in their day-today clinical practice, many clinical psychologists seem to focus exclusively on dyadic relationships. When working with adults, individual therapy tends to be prioritised over family, group or community work. Alas, the new IAPT movement, with its focus on one-to-one CBT sessions, is no exception.

Considering that the developmental process occurs within a socioeconomic/political milieu, which inevitably permeates the psychology of the individual, therapies that focus on the individual and treat her/him separately from her/his social contexts, seem naively reductivist. However, this kind of thinking, which conceptualises individuals in some way as separate from

their social contexts, is dominant in Western societies. It privileges the individual over the group and values rationality, autonomy and, by implication, choice.

Choice is commonly predicated on a construction of the individual, who engages in rational decision making, and considers and compares the costs and benefits of his/her actions. Considering the privileged position of both individualism and rationality in Western societies, it is perhaps not surprising that CBT has emerged as a dominant model of psychotherapy. Yet choice is also premised on our values (and beliefs, which, at times, can be irrational). The decision to offer more individual therapy (in this case CBT) at the expense of group and community work seems more like a value-based rather than an evidence-based choice (which ironically is also predicated on values). Whether such approach will be cost-effective and alleviate human misery remains debatable.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

John McGowan Year 1 Director and Academic Director of the Clinical Psychology Training Scheme Canterbury Christchurch University

Susanne Iqbal Fulbourn Hospital Cambridge

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Being adult about humour The recent debate about gender and teaching (Forum, April and May 2009) has been instructive in revealing how hard it is to have an intelligent and mature debate about these issues.

On the one hand, the raising of legitimate concerns is viewed by Sallie Baxendale as an ‘attack’ (Forum, May 2009). On the other hand, the headlines chosen by The Psychologist suggest a difficulty in addressing these issues without resorting to ill-advised humour. For example, ‘Not

amused’ is the headline accompanying Mary Boyle and Pippa Dell’s letter (Forum, April 2009) about Andy Field’s article (‘Can humour make students love statistics?’, March 2009) – presumably implying some reference to Queen Victoria’s oft-quoted ‘We are not amused’ [Editor’s note: I can assure you this was not intended]. It is ironic that Boyle and Dell anticipated this reaction in the first line of their letter when they noted that women could be seen as prudish or humourless when

raising such concerns. This compounds the problem noted

by Boyle and Dell in the choice of heading for the box in Field’s article: ‘Bringing lap dancers to the lecture theatre’.

Interestingly, in the original article, Andy Field discussed the possible effect of gender stereotypes on how students might perceive the use of humour by tutors.

Moreover, in the conclusion to his article he suggests avoiding sexual themes in teaching. It is a shame, then, that the lap dancing study was given such

prominence in his article. It is also a shame that, in his response (Forum, May 2009), he argues that Boyle and Dell’s focus on gender obscures the need to create a good teaching environment. Surely these aren’t incompatible objectives?

Andy Field notes that the intended target of his humour was the idea of the researchers obtaining grant funding for their study. However, one presumes that students would probably also laugh at the introduction of the topic of lap dancing, whether that was

Climate change – answering the sceptics We are heartened by the many positive responses received to our article ‘Climate change – psychology’s contribution’ (February 2009). However the letter by Stephen Murgatroyd (April 2009) argues that (a) we show uncritical, unscientific thinking to draw the conclusion that the anthropogenic causes of global warming are undisputed within the scientific community, (b) that there is a large body of scientists (over 650 according to Murgatroyd) who have ‘signed up’ to being sceptical about the dominant climate change thesis, and (c) that a properly scientific approach should seek to ‘go beyond media reporting of this issue (especially in the UK)’.

Of course, we can fully agree that media reporting is the last thing one should base a scientific opinion on. While psychologists by training, all three of us have spent proportions of our time working on environmental issues with natural scientists and engineers. As the interview with Patrick Devine-Wright (February 2009) clearly illustrates, the challenges of climate change do not respect traditional disciplinary boundaries.

One of us (Pidgeon) held a Chair at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, home to some of the UK and the world’s best climate science as well as the UK Research Councils’ Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Our paper therefore draws upon a collective and ongoing interaction with leading climate scientists,

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learning from and debating the issues with them, as well as our reading of the contemporary peer-reviewed scientific literature on the topic. We would argue that it is engagement with the latter that marks out a genuinely critical scientific approach.

While there is always room for doubt with any proposition, scientific or otherwise, the IPCC framework assessments are clear and authoritative in their synthesis of the now extensive peerreviewed evidence about climate change and the anthropogenic contribution to this.

The most recent IPCC in 2007 involved 2500 expert reviewers, 800 contributing authors, and 450 lead authors from more than 130 countries who confirmed, in the words of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Chair of the IPCC, that ‘Today, the time for doubt has passed. The IPCC has unequivocally affirmed the warming of our climate system, and linked it directly to human activity.’

Regarding the 650 ‘climate sceptics’, we presume this refers to the recent US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works publication, a minority committee report that presents a series of quotes from individuals with little context, conventional scientific evidence,

or supporting peer reviewed references.

This report should of course be interpreted against the highly partisan nature of contemporary climate politics in the USA (see Dunlap & McCright, 2008).

We reiterate our judgement that climate change is serious, real and a threat that we all need to face up to. Shortly after the publication of our article in The Psychologist over 2500 academics, from both the natural and social sciences, met at a major climate conference in Copenhagen. A recurrent theme was that behaviour and behavioural sciences were urgently needed in the fight against climate change, and that if anything the current interpretations of the established science underestimate the risks that we all face.

We do firmly believe that our article and its conclusions will withstand the march of time, while those of any remaining climate sceptics by contrast will not.

Nick Pidgeon Alexa Spence Cardiff University David Uzzell University of Surrey Reference Dunlap, R.E. & McCright, A.M. (2008). A widening gap: Republican and Democratic views on climate change. Environment, V50(5), 26–35.

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intended or not. Humour can be quite tricky for this reason.

Indeed, advertisers are increasingly using humour to undermine potential criticisms of sexist imagery (Gill, 2009).

Given the fact that sexual discrimination still exists in many areas of life (e.g. consider the small percentage of heterosexual rape cases reported by women and successfully prosecuted) perhaps psychologists should try to use material that subverts stereotypes rather than inadvertently reinforcing them. A more socially relevant and engaged approach to teaching might also be of more

interest to students. Moreover, surely, one of the lessons of the last 30 years of stand-up comedy is that it is possible to be funny without reinforcing gender stereotypes? Perhaps readers of The Psychologist could suggest humorous examples of research that does just that.

Andy Field reports (Forum, May 2009) that he received many messages of support for his article ‘Can humour make students love statistics?’

(March 2009); the article included a box on the use of an evolutionary psychology study of men’s responses to lap dancers in Field’s statistics teaching. But we also received many messages of support for our criticism of this section (Forum, April 2009).

Contrary to Field’s assertion, we certainly would not argue that ‘as a man, he is incapable of understanding the power dynamics’ in this particular issue. We did, however, point out that his account in The Psychologist showed no awareness of them.

But perhaps our argument could have been spelled out more clearly. If psychologists are to incorporate popular culture in their teaching, and Field is surely right that they should, we need openly to acknowledge that some aspects of popular culture are strongly contested. The lapdancing industry is a particularly good example; it is contested partly because of its attempts to make heterosexual men’s purchase of sexual services a ‘normal’ part of mainstream culture and local communities. It is in topics like these that humour is likely to function, in complex

social and psychological ways, to avoid or deflect discussion of more serious and threatening issues (and we don’t mean methodological ones) or to allow discussion only in a disguised form.

Perhaps some of the student contributions that Field described as ‘entertaining’ were of this sort. Given this, it is particularly important to ask who has the power publicly to define a topic as involving humour and to recognise that the experience of presenting such topics, and the reception they receive, is very likely to be influenced not only by the group membership (age, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, etc) of the lecturer and their audience but by the relation of this membership to the topic under discussion.

Finally, and again contrary to Field’s assertion, we agree with him that The Psychologist should publish articles that encourage reflection and debate about good teaching practice. It was the lack of reflection in Field’s original piece on issues we see as crucial in teaching that led us to write in the first place.

Dave Harper School of Psychology University of East London Reference Gill, R. (2009). Supersexualise me!

Advertising and the midriffs. In F. Attwood & R. Cere (Eds.) Mainstreaming sex: The sexualisation of culture. London: IB Tauris.

Mary Boyle Pippa Dell School of Psychology University of East London

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

FORUM THE REAL WORLD Although it did not receive extensive coverage in the UK, earlier this year a new book by George Akerlof and his colleague Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits, found its way on to the New York Times top-200 book list. The title is a reference to an observation by Keynes that the behaviour which led America into, and out of, the Great Depression was the product of social factors (attitudes, beliefs and norms) rather than ‘raw’ economics. Picking up on this point, the subtitle of Akerlof and Shiller’s book is How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism.

Had it been penned by social psychologists, this subtitle might have been seen as provocative hyperbole. What is significant, though, is that Akerlof is not a psychologist, but a Nobel Prize-winning economist, famed for his work on the capacity for differences in the information available to buyers and sellers to interfere with efficient trading (the so-called ‘lemons’ problem).

In Animal Spirits, Akerlof and Shiller expand upon Keynes’s original insight and clarify its relevance for the world today. In particular, they focus on the importance of five key psychological elements for a range of range of contemporary economic concerns – from cycles in the real-estate market and global recession, to job insecurity and poverty. What is interesting too, is that these five elements are not narrowly abstracted from one particular branch of psychology. Instead, the authors draw broadly and boldly upon a full range of previous research and theory. Thus at the more cognitive end of their analysis they discuss the way in which wage negotiations and expectations are driven by the nominal value of money rather than its true purchasing power (the so-called ‘money illusion’). At the more discursive end, they focus on the importance of stories as a key driver of large-scale economic processes. It is impossible to explain the more dramatic movements of markets, the authors contend, without reference to the socially shared narratives that people draw upon to make sense of the economic world around them.

Akerlof and Shiller’s book is a fascinating and compelling read.

It offers an accessible treatment of a range of economic issues that are the topic of everyday news stories, but which (strangely) always seem to be just beyond the bounds of one’s comprehension. For psychologists, though, it reminds us that the authority of our work does not derive from its scientific isolationism but from its capacity to be woven into larger tapestries. These tapestries know little of the petty prejudices that contaminate the review process, of the fetishisation of psychological method, or of the impeccable trivia that consume so many journal pages. They also remind us that, unless we overcome these impediments ourselves, it will be left for scientists in other disciplines to show us the importance and power of our own.

Steve Reicher is at the University of St Andrews. Alex Haslam is at the University of Exeter. Share your views on this and other ‘real world’ psychological issues – e-mail psychologist@bps.org.uk.

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FORUM WEB CHAT

The Society’s campaigns to prevent registration by the Health Professions Council (HPC) and to protect the title ‘psychologist’ have been ineffective. The HPC is expected to open its register on 1 July. The HPC has already over-ruled the Society’s advice about the level of language proficiency required for registration as a practitioner psychologist. It may next overrule the basic rules about training and qualifications on which chartering has been based.

So this is a good time to start unpacking what HPC registration will mean for individual psychologists. From the beginning of July, HPC will control two generic and umbrella titles and seven adjectival titles but not any other titles, including ‘psychologist’. It will determine what constitutes competence to practise in those seven domains of the profession through approving programmes of education and training and will only register psychologists competent in one or more of those domains.

The intended relationship between the HPC and

practitioners who are legitimately not registered is not clear. For example, neuropsychologists are a special case. Those not eligible for one of the protected titles will still be able to call themselves ‘neuropsychologists’ precisely because it is not protected.

Chartered psychologists with no adjectival title are another special case. The Minister, speaking at the House of Commons committee, said: ‘If the BPS is unable to allow those people to use the titles associated with full membership in its divisions, it is difficult to give them automatic right to do so without further consideration by the HPC.’ So, for three years, they will have the option of applying for one of the seven protected title via the HPC’s grandparenting procedures. Does that mean they are obliged to seek HPC registration? What happens if they do not? The Society has expressed the view that disbarring these psychologists from professional practice except by registering under one of the protected titles is a ‘restraint of trade’. Could they,

TIM SANDERS

Are scientists too critical of their media-friendly colleagues? Physicist and TV presenter Kathy Sykes certainly thinks so. Writing in New Scientist magazine, she accused scientists of wishing for more mainstream science coverage while simultaneously taking pot shots at those researchers, journalists and film-makers who attempt to engage (tinyurl.com/ctunky).

‘While healthy debate can improve science communication,’ she wrote. ‘I think we should all shut up a bit, and stop the more rabid criticism altogether.’

She went on to defend programmes like Horizon, which have been accused of dumbing down, and she also sprang to the defence of New Scientist itself, which came in for a storm of criticism recently after carrying the cover headline ‘Darwin was wrong’. Horizon attracts viewers who usually wouldn’t watch science, she argued, and readers enticed by the New Scientist magazine cover would have discovered scientists agreeing that Darwin was right on the fundamentals. To those who are troubled by the way others communicate, Sykes had a simple message: ‘…why not spend less time ranting and get out there and communicate in ways you do like.’

Not everyone welcomed Sykes’ intervention. The Lay Scientist blog, for example, argued that presenters like David Attenborough and programmes like Coast show that science can be communicated in an entertaining and accurate fashion without dumbing down (see http://layscience.net/node/535). The Lay Scientist was particularly incensed by Sykes’ defence of the ‘Darwin was wrong’ cover. ‘So it’s okay that the headline cover was basically a lie, because the article said something completely different,’ he wrote. ‘This has to be one of the most hare-brained justifications for this practice that I’ve ever seen.’

On a related note, there was also chat on the web recently about a possible ‘crisis in media psychotherapy’, to quote The Guardian’s Lost in Showbiz blog (tinyurl.com/cuc2lw). There, columnist Marina Hyde linked the recent tribulations of spin-doctor cum psychotherapist Derek Draper (embroiled in the Damian McBride e-mail scandal) with the woes of celebrity psychiatrist Raj Persaud (found guilty of plagiarising) and the demise of This Morning counsellor Beechy Colclough (accused of inappropriate conduct with clients).

Responding on her blog (www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/?p=830), psychologist Petra Boynton argued that the problem of maverick media psychologists has been around for years, and that the blame lies as much with journalists as it does with the psychological professions. Boynton said journalists tend to seek an expert, any expert, who will provide the quote they want, rather than actually listening to the expert advice and comment of those with the appropriate qualifications. ‘Sadly what we’re seeing with the cases of Derek Draper and Raj Persaud are not a few psychs-gone-bad as The Guardian seems to believe,’ Boynton wrote. ‘What we’re seeing is the ongoing effect of our media to encourage “experts” to act in increasingly unethical and inappropriate ways and rewarding that behaviour as it has suited the agenda of countless magazines, newspapers and television programmes.’

Generally speaking, perhaps Boynton is right. But as regards the specific cases at hand – Draper, Persaud and Colclough – it’s surely worth clarifying that it wasn’t their work as ‘media psychologists’ that landed them in trouble. Draper came unstuck via his political work, not his magazine column; Persaud’s plagiarism was in journals, not his radio shows; while Colclough’s misdemeanours were in practice, not on TV.

Statutory regulation – where next…?

Christian Jarrett is staff journalist on The Psychologist.

Share your views by e-mailing psychologist@bps.org.uk.

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like neuropsychologists, continue practising under a non-protected title of their choice?

How many employers will feel confident that the HPC is the right body to regulate the training and conduct of their staff and will impose HPC registration as a condition of employment? How much of the work of professional psychologists will, by legislation, require a ‘registered psychologist’ as opposed to a ‘psychologist’?

And how many psychologists will decide that HPC registration offers them no personal benefit and they can practise without it? For example, will chartered psychologists without adjectival titles work to fit the Procrustean bed of the seven protected titles in order to gain registration or will the HPC act as an environmental pressure for evolution outside itself? Counselling psychology, health psychology, and sport and exercise psychology have all evolved during my professional lifetime, only seeking and achieving formal recognition within the Society after the evolutionary process, not before it.

Bearing in mind the Society’s remit ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’ but the ineffectiveness of its registration campaigns, we, its members, need a significant change in its culture and two urgent actions. Firstly, we need assertive promotion of psychological services provided by psychologists.

We must provide leadership concerning the roles and responsibilities that can be undertaken by newly qualified professional psychologists, and we need to be able to advise those who are entering the professional psychology training about the career pathways open to them.

Secondly, as a consequence of the title ‘psychologist’ not being protected, we need reliable guidance concerning the legitimate practice of

psychology and provision of psychological services outside the seven domains. How can the profession ensure that psychologists’ creativity is not inadvertently stifled by the statutory roles and functions of the HPC? Bernard Kat Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

When statutory regulation was first up for consultation, I remember the huge effort and collaboration that occurred.

I really valued the fact that psychologists of all varieties came together in great numbers to argue the problems inherent in the HPC project. Unfortunately it appears we gave up when we realised that the government ‘consultations’ were by and large cosmetic, thanking us for our input but leaving the framework pretty much unaffected by the key concerns we voiced.

Although as a discipline our membership of the HPC may be a foregone conclusion, there are still issues for individual members to ponder. What do we think of the project? Does it seem ethical? If it does, we will be grandparented onto the register no problem, but what about those concerned about the project?

While client protection is cited as the main grounds for regulation, this argument has never been shown to be a valid one. Some argue that this position is in effect a fearbased fallacy that has been drawn on to pressure certain responses from us (a bit like ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the run up to the Iraq war).

It is based on the ever-growing premise of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ that seems to pervade British political life.

There is also a ‘safety first’ feeling to it all, a culture that has embedded itself in many contexts and has already interfered with good practice.

Ticking boxes and monitoring all activities has come to be an acceptable part of practice, yet it is based on the illusory belief that we can control

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everything. The frameworks as they stand demonise the unknown and expect it to be eradicated. Is this not a delusional belief to foist upon our clients?

The regulation framework also risks ironing out the rich diversity within our field so that we conform to a limited view of what constitutes ‘best practice’ rather than develop our own unique style of work and the ability to tailor this to the needs of individuals. While attractive, the act of applying a predetermined set of principles to a particular client overrides their individuality and the assessment of what will work for them. ‘Best practice’ has overwhelmingly becoming a macro-economic label rather than an ethical or therapeutic one.

As ethically minded individuals, how do we discuss the issues so that we can act on our conscience?

How do we come together to discuss this before we simply allow ourselves to be sucked up into a system that may well offer limited and dubious benefits but potentially cause profound damage to therapeutic psychology, facilitating defensive practice primarily concerned with protecting the practitioner from complaint. What do individual practitioners do in relation to concerns such as these? I for one am certainly unclear on our professional body’s degree of support for those who might want to take a stance of ethical noncompliance. Will ‘the BPS’ work with insurance companies so that they recognise that it would be inappropriate for them to write statements such as ‘protection as long as practising from manual A, B or C with clients diagnosed with X, Y and Z’ into our insurance cover? While our professional body’s immediate future may be clear, I suspect that many individuals are left feeling very unclear.

Martin Milton Department of Psychology University of Surrey

NOTICEBOARD I Are you looking for part-time voluntary work to gain experience relevant to progressing your career in clinical or health psychology? I can offer a variety of work (research and clinical) for interested and enthusiastic graduate psychologists at MEND (www.mendcentral.org), an organisation specialising in the management of child obesity with links to the Institute of Child Health, UCL. Please send me a recent CV and letter of interest.

Paul Chadwick paul.chadwick@mendcentral.org I I am a member of the BPS and part of an international group of artists looking to artistically record interpretations of human emotion from differing cultural perspectives. (see www.artreview.com/group/ humanemotionproject2009). If you have an interest in showing the works, please contact me.

Bill Millett bill.millett@virgin.net I For my final-year clinical psychology doctorate thesis, I am undertaking research that explores the experiences of clinical psychologists in relation to strains and ruptures in the therapeutic relationship. Please contact me if you are a clinical psychologist trained within the UK, currently working in the adult mental health NHS clinical practice at least part time, two years post qualification, London area.

Reetta Leinonen University of East London u0731075@uel.ac.uk I The founder of scientific psychology in the Netherlands, Gerardus Heymans (1857–1930), participated in 1892 at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, in London, with a paper about his research related to Weber’s law (and Fechner’s law). I cannot trace or reconstruct the calculations he performed on the raw data. Does anyone know of an archive where written material related to the 1892 congress is kept?

Kars Dekker Groningen, The Netherlands karsdekker@hotmail.com

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Therapists still attempting to ‘treat’ homosexuality A Wellcome Trust-funded survey has shown that a minority of mental health professionals are still attempting to provide ‘treatment’ for homosexuality, despite negligible evidence that this is ever effective and ample evidence that to do so can cause harm (BMC Psychiatry: text at tinyurl.com/cvj4c8).

Michael King, professor of psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, and colleagues, received completed surveys from 1328 mental health professionals, including psychologists, counsellors and psychiatrists. The results were mixed. Only 4 per cent of those surveyed said they would attempt to change a client’s sexuality, and yet 17 per cent said they had previously helped at least one client reduce or change their homosexual feelings. Moreover, there was no evidence that these instances had become rarer between the 1970s and the present day. Such attempts were more likely amongst male and older therapists, and members of the British Psychological Society and United

Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy rather than members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (the Society has made a statement concerning this and the media coverage, at www.bps.org.uk/ihrp).

Among those therapists who reported having offered ‘treatment’ for sexual

orientation, justifications given included: client distress; the client’s right to choose the aim of their treatments; a history of sexual abuse; and a belief that the client is confused about their sexuality. There appeared to be little awareness of the harm that such attempted interventions can cause.

‘Treatments to change sexual orientation do not appear to have become completely a thing of the past,’ the researchers concluded. ‘Guidelines on appropriate approaches to clients who are confused or upset about same-sex desires could be useful.’ Professor King said: ‘The best approach is to help people adjust to their situation, to value them as people and show them that there is nothing whatever pathological about their sexual orientation.’

Publication of the findings coincided with the launch of a website that features oral histories from people who have undertaken such therapy, as well as from professionals who have devised and provided it (see tinyurl.com/qnunjn). CJ

New psychology award The British Academy has joined forces with publishers Wiley-Blackwell to create a new prize for an outstanding contribution to psychology.

The Academy’s new annual Wiley Prize in Psychology, worth £5000, will recognise excellence in research in

psychology – alternately rewarding lifetime achievement by an outstanding international scholar and promising early career work by a UK-based psychologist.

The first award, for 2009, will be awarded to one of the leading pioneers of modern

RESEARCH DIGEST The Society’s popular and influential Research Digest service is now on Twitter and Facebook! To keep up with the latest psychology radio shows, podcasts, lectures, public exhibitions and other events, see http://twitter.com/researchdigest. To follow on Facebook, see tinyurl.com/digestonfacebook.

The Research Digest blog (see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog) now sits at number 27 in the top science blogs as compiled by Wikio, based on the number and weight of incoming links (see www.wikio.com/blogs/top/sciences).

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psychology – Professor Martin Seligman, currently Albert A. Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the university’s Positive Psychology Center.

Professor Seligman is a worldrenowned expert on depression and happiness. He will receive the prize in September at the British Academy’s annual ceremony, and he will also give the 2009 British Academy/British Psychology Society’s Annual Lecture.

The President of the British Academy, Baroness O’Neill, said: ‘I am delighted to be able to announce this important new collaboration. It is vitally important that we celebrate major scholarly achievements

in fields such as psychology, which has such a profound impact on all our lives. And no one demonstrates that better than Martin Seligman.’ Philip Carpenter, Managing Director, Social Science and Humanities publishing at Wiley-Blackwell, said: ‘We offer our warmest congratulations to Martin Seligman, whose influence on modern psychology has been immense.’ Martin Seligman commented: ‘I am grateful for this splendid honour.’

The 2010 Wiley Prize will be awarded to a UK-based psychologist whose early career (defined as within five years of receipt of doctorate) shows outstanding promise.

Nominations are invited via tinyurl.com/rdepmb. JS

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BILL PASSED

Increasing self-screening A simple intervention can boost breast self-examination tenfold, psychologists have shown (American Journal of

Health Promotion: tinyurl.com/dgl67w). Between 1998 and 2001 Nangel Lindberg and colleagues at

Kaiser Permanente in California followed 600 women, some of whom received the training intervention whilst the others received dietary advice only.

The breast self-examination training involved a 45-minute session, including a video and practice on a silicon dummy, plus follow-up phone calls one and two months after the session. A year later 59 per cent of the women who had received the training were still performing effective monthly selfexaminations, compared with just 12 per cent of the control group. Most previous studies have failed to find effective ways to encourage selfexamination. ‘Many women avoid breast self-exams because they are worried about doing them correctly; however, our study showed that with a relatively simple intervention, women can learn the proper technique, and once they feel confident they will continue to do their exams,’ Lindberg said. Breast

On 5 May the House of Lords debated the legislation needed to bring practitioner psychologists under statutory control by the Health Professions Council. It was agreed (for the Hansard Report see tinyurl.com/s60debate). The legislation has already been debated and agreed in the House of Commons and by the relevant committee in the Scottish Parliament. This means that the HPC will be the statutory regulator for practitioner psychologists from 1 July 2009.

I See www.bps.org.uk/statreg for updates, and for an interview with Marc Searle, Chief Executive of the Health Professions Council, see tinyurl.com/c3exhh

cancer is the most common form of cancer in women and some evidence suggests that early detection, via regular self-examination and mammograms, can increase survival rates. The researchers said their intervention could be adapted to other forms of self-checking, for example for testicular cancer. CJ

Psychologists and torture A newly declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee into the treatment of detainees in American custody, combined with the declassification of four CIA memos, has turned attention once again to the role played by psychologists in interrogation practices during the Bush era. The documents make it clear that psychologists, along with other health professionals, were closely involved in the design and application of interrogation practices, including waterboarding (simulated drowning) and stress positions.

In response, American Psychological Association President James Bray reiterated his organisation’s policy towards interrogation, which includes prohibiting members from working in detention settings where international law is

violated, and the explicit condemnation of named interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding. Bray named two CIAemployed psychologists identified by the media as having been involved in designing interrogation techniques – James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen – but said they cannot be punished by the APA because they are not members. ‘It is also my fervent hope that the American people – and the world – will not judge all psychologists by the few who were involved in this sorry chapter in our history,’ Bray concluded, ‘but by the tens of thousands of psychologists who spend their professional lives working for the public good.’

Meanwhile, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), an independent organisation based in Washington, has

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called on the Obama administration to launch an ‘independent, nonpartisan commission to fully investigate US torture and prisoner abuse under the Bush Administration’, and for the commission to include a special focus on the role played by psychologists in interrogation.

In their statement, PsySR encourages all psychologists to sign an online petition (see tinyurl.com/akcqxu), organised by Physicians for Human Rights, which calls for just such a commission. ‘Foremost, as a profession we must confront the mindsets and networks – of power, privilege, and influence – by which our own core healing principles were abandoned for purposes that evoke our outrage, our bewilderment, and our shame,’ said PsySR’s president-elect Roy Eidelson. CJ

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FUNDING BOOST The Scottish Minister for Public Health has announced significant investment in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Acknowledging the ‘long-standing underfunding’ prevalent in CAMHS services, Shona Robison revealed £1m investment this year, increasing to £3.5m in 2011/12, to be spent on increasing the specialist workforce.

This should translate to an increase of 80 psychologists by 2012, along with a parallel growth in the number of psychiatrists. There are currently 36 training places for clinical psychologists in Scotland, of which roughly a third work in CAMHS. This will be increased by 10, with the additional places ring-fenced for CAMHS.

FUNDING CUT As part of the April Budget, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills has been asked to make additional savings of £400 million in 2010/11, almost 2 per cent of its budget for that year. The Budget states that the savings will have to be made through a renewed efficiency drive, reduced expenditure through lower than anticipated inflation rates, and the ‘strategic reprioritisation and re-phasing of programmes’. DIUS will also aim for ‘greater contestability’, with universities bidding against each other more for programmes and services.

GAMBLING AWARD Professor Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University, has won the US National Council on Problem Gambling Research Award in recognition of his outstanding research contribution in the problem gambling field.

He will collect his award at their Annual Conference in Indianapolis this month.

THE SOLOIST The National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI) – a US-based charity – has produced a website (www.nami.org/soloist) to coincide with the American release of the film The Soloist, which tells the real-life story of Nathaniel Ayers, a gifted street musician diagnosed with schizophrenia. The website uses the film as a springboard from which to help educate visitors about schizophrenia, and includes a video segment of Dr Ken Duckworth, NAMI’s medical director, answering questions about the illness. ‘The movie will help people look beyond stereotypes and create better understanding of the challenge for treatment and recovery,’ said NAMI executive director Mike Fitzpatrick.

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Genetic links to autism Three new studies published simultaneously at the end of April have provided the strongest evidence to date for the genetic basis of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). The two studies in Nature (tinyurl.com/pzem2v; tinyurl.com/of4hrp) and another published in Molecular Psychiatry (http://tinyurl.com/omwgd5) involved thousands of children with ASD and thousands of controls. All three papers identified new common genetic variations that seem to be associated with an increased risk of developing ASD. In other words, these are genetic variants which are often seen in the normal population but seem to be disproportionately more prevalent among children with ASD. Nearly all the implicated genes are known to either influence communication between neurons or influence the growth pattern of neurons during brain

development. The team leader on the Molecular Psychiatry paper, Professor Tony Monaco of the University of Oxford, said: ‘This does seem to fit with what we know from brain scans – that people with autism may show different or reduced connectivity between different parts of the brain. This new knowledge allows us to focus our studies on developing new treatments and intervention therapies for the future.’ Although he welcomed the new findings, psychologist and autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge said genes were just one part of the puzzle. He told New Scientist: ‘The challenge for future research will be to establish which aspects of autism they [the genes] can explain, how many of these genes are necessary and sufficient to cause autism, and how they may interact with environmental factors.’ CJ

FROM THE RESEARCH DIGEST…

Witnessing rudeness Seeing one person be rude to another can stunt a person’s creativity, impair their mental performance and make them less likely to be civil themselves. Christine Porath and Amir Erez, who made this finding, say it has profound implications for the workplace, where rudeness has been described by some as a modern epidemic.

Across three studies in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (tinyurl.com/qlmw3o), Porath and Erez recruited students to take part in what they were led to believe was an investigation into personality and task performance. Porath and Erez contrived situations in their lab so that the participants witnessed either a researcher be rude to a student for turning up late, or one student be rude to another student for taking so long over a consent form.

Witnessing an act of rudeness, whether committed by a researcher or student, led the participants to solve fewer anagrams, come up with fewer uses for a brick (and to come up with more aggressive uses!), made them less likely to offer to participate in another study, and lowered their mood.

A third study showed that the harmful effects of witnessing rudeness were greater when students were enrolled in a collaborative group task, compared with when they were enrolled in a competitive group task where they had something to gain from the rudeness victim’s ordeal. Although the harmful effects were lower in the competitive scenario, they were still present.

Porath and Erez said this is the first study to investigate the direct effects of merely witnessing rudeness, and that future research should explore the underlying mechanisms. ‘The conclusion that rudeness may not be contained within the instigator–target dyad and that it affects performance is theoretically and practically significant because it implies that the organisational functioning and climate could be affected by isolated rude incidents,’ the researchers said.

This item originally appeared in the Society’s free Research Digest.

For more and to sign up, see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog

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Cognitive training in schizophrenia Less apparent than the hallucinations and delusions are the cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia. And yet it is often these impairments in learning and memory that can be the most debilitating.

Now two new studies suggest intensive computer training in basic sensory and learning tasks can lead to sustained improvements in global cognitive functioning among patients with schizophrenia, leading ultimately to improved quality of life.

Sophia Vinogradov at the University of California and colleagues had 29 patients with schizophrenia undertake 50 hours of computer-based training for 10 weeks.

Twenty-six control patients spent the same amount of time, and received the same amount of supervision, playing computer games.

The computerised training focused on improving the patients’ basic auditory skills and learning. Example tasks included distinguishing between easily confusable syllables, and recalling conversations. ‘The basic notion is that

by improving the speed and accuracy of information processing in the auditory system, higher-order functions such as verbal encoding and verbal memory retrieval have more reliable signals on which to operate,’ the researchers explained.

A key facet of the training was that it exploited the fact that procedural learning appears to be intact in schizophrenia. The training was therefore deliberately sustained and rewarding, with difficulty continually adjusted so that patients achieved an approximately 85 per cent correct response rate.

Crucially, the patients who received the training showed improvements not just in their auditory skills but on global measures of cognition, as compared with the control patients (in press at American Journal of Psychiatry). A sister study followed up 32 of these patients for six months – 10 from the control condition and 22 from the training condition.

Twelve of the training patients received a further 50 hours training, which

broadened out to include visual and cognitive control exercises (Schizophrenia Bulletin: tinyurl.com/pzsf4m).

The exciting finding at six months was that improvements in cognition appeared to be sustained, and that these improvements were associated with gains in quality of life. Cognitive improvements were broadest among those patients who received the more sustained and comprehensive training package.

The researchers said their results provided ‘tantalising early evidence’ for the effectiveness of computerised, neuroplasticity-based cognitive training.

However, significant hurdles remain. For example, few prior studies have involved such extensive training, which makes it hard to tell whether the outcomes were due to the content of the intervention or its intensity. That same intensity also places a question mark over the practicality of this intervention in real-life settings – a caveat compounded by the fact the patients in these studies were all clinically stable. CJ

New research centre targets child abuse Psychology professor preventative Antonia Bifulco at Royal advice for Holloway, University of parents and London, has become coschools to director of a newly reduce risks to launched research centre children from dedicated to helping internet prevent crimes against abuse.’ children. The Centre for Other Abuse and Trauma Studies research (www.cats-rp.org.uk), projects which launched at the end include of March, aims to ‘further evaluating the understanding, social learning treatment and policy interventions implications of abuse and in previously Professor Bifulco (left) and Professor trauma and its abused young Davidson at the launch at the Reform Club consequences’. people in The Centre’s other residential care, behaviour of men who seek to director is Professor Julia and interviewing child victims Davidson, a criminologist from groom children and young of sexual abuse about their people online. Professor Kingston University. This experience in police Davidson said: ‘We hope the month the Centre will begin a investigations. The Centre also 30-month Europe-wide results of this very innovative undertakes workshops and investigation into the study will be used to inform training for CPD for

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psychologists and social workers.

Last month the Centre held a ‘Route Mapping’ event at the House of Lords on the current crisis in child protection services, attended by around twenty academics and experts from different children’s service agencies.

Professor Bifulco said: ‘Our aim was to highlight some practical ways forward to influence policy and practice in this very difficult area following from recent cases such as the death of Baby P. Psychologists can play a central role in working with children and families around abuse issues, and psychology research is fundamental in understanding the consequences for abuse on disorder across the lifespan.’ CJ

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Special school links FOSSE WAY SCHOOL

In a move that it’s hoped will bring advantages to all involved, the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol has formalised its relationship with the nearby Fosse Way School for students with special educational needs. Together, the Psychology Department, the National Autistic Society, members of the local community and the school now form the Fosse Way School Trust.

Dr Chris Jarrold, a reader in the department, helped set up this arrangement and is now one of four Trust directors. Another lecturer, Dr Liz Pellicano, has become one of the school’s 15 governors.

‘We’ve had a long-standing relationship with Fosse Way School for the last ten years or more,’ Jarrold told The Psychologist. ‘We’ve worked with children there who have autism or Down syndrome and others who don’t have a particular diagnosis. We’ve also previously given talks at the school about our work.

Now the school has decided to formalise its relationship with us – to get us more involved, not in the day-to-day running or management of the school, but in the direction of it.’

‘We are also looking to do joint research projects with the school to see if we can tailor our research more around things the school will find useful – carry out more educationally minded research,’

Jarrold said. The Psychology Department also hopes to support the school in writing grant proposals for funding from educational trusts and charitable bodies.

Fosse Way School is located in Norton-Radstock, has 145 pupils with a range of learning difficulties, and has

consistently been rated as outstanding by Ofsted. Jarrold said the new Trust was the latest example of the school’s forwardlooking approach. ‘This is a chance for us to give something back to a school that’s been very supportive of us in the past,’ he added. CJ

Gobet’s opening gambit on the RAE Inspired by their recent investigation into chess expertise, a team of psychologists has written to the Times Higher Education Supplement voicing concerns about assessment procedures used as part of the recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) – a UK-wide review that influences how much funding universities receive.

Professor Fernand Gobet at Brunel University, Dr Merim Bilali´c at Tübingen University, and Dr Peter McLeod at Oxford University, specifically challenged the assumption that panels of experts in a given subject area are equipped to review accurately

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research from an area outside their particular specialisation.

The finding that chess experts’ performance declines when solving problems outside their specialisation ‘sheds some worrying light on this assumption’, Gobet’s group wrote.

The study with chess players involved asking an expert in one particular opening style to remember and solve chess situations both related and unrelated to their favourite opening style. The results showed that operating outside one’s specific area of expertise diminished performance by about one standard deviation or ‘class

level’, relative to completing the same feats within one’s area of expertise. So, for example, a ‘grandmaster’ would perform to the typical, lesser standard of ‘international master’ when operating outside his or her favoured domain (Cognitive Science: tinyurl.com/rxvxnv).

The idea of extrapolating from these findings to the RAE came from Professor Gobet, who was in charge of the psychology RAE ‘return’ at Brunel. He’d noticed how reviewers often wildly disagreed about the quality of submitted papers, even when they all came from the same domain of specialisation.

Gobet explained to The Psychologist how the problem of expertise transfer would apply to the RAE: ‘Say one panel member is a world expert in research into problem solving, a subfield of cognitive psychology, and that she has mostly used standard behavioural experiments in her research. She would be the equivalent of a top chess grandmaster specialising in the French defence, to use one kind of player we had in our paper. Now she has to evaluate papers say in clinical psychology. That would be the equivalent of finding a good move in a Sicilian position.

So our claim is that, while she

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The Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust (BIRT) is set to open its first centre in Scotland within the next few months. There’s currently a shortage of brain rehabilitation services in Scotland but it’s hoped the new 25-bed hospital, located in Glasgow, will help plug that gap. The new centre will cater for patients with severe cognitive, physical or emotional problems following acquired brain injury, providing intensive neurobehavioural assessment and rehabilitation. It will be led by psychologists and follow a behavioural model of rehabilitation rather than the medical model. Mike McPeake of the Disabilities Trust is leading the project on behalf of BIRT. He said: ‘We have been very keen to establish a presence in Scotland for some time and from our discussions with colleagues in the field of brain injury in Scotland we knew that there was likely to be a significant demand for any such service.’ CJ

Autism and talent An issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences entitled ‘Autism and talent’, organised and edited by Francesca Happé and Uta Frith, follows a joint British Academy and Royal Society Discussion Meeting on the same subject where contributors from psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, history and sociology explored aspects ranging from the history, origin and prevalence of exceptional talent to its basis in the brain, from cognitive theories to the representation of talent and autism in biography and fiction.

Some of the challenging questions addressed in this special issue include: Are great artists fundamentally different from the rest of us? Is there a price to pay for exceptional ability in one domain?

What is the role of practice? And, finally, could we all become savants (see also our report at www.bps.org.uk/nov08news)? JS I All articles are available online at tinyurl.com/pquuv2

would be the equivalent of a grandmaster in evaluating papers in her field of problem solving, she would be the equivalent of an international master when evaluating papers in clinical psychology. Still an expert, but now very far from the top experts.’

Gobet said that in all likelihood the situation would actually be worse in the RAE than in chess because the gap between domains of psychology is greater than between different opening styles in chess. ‘The cognitive psychologist using behavioural experiments in problem solving research would have a very hard time to evaluate

papers on perception using brain imaging – although both domains belong to cognitive psychology,’ he explained.

So how could the next research assessment (the socalled Research Excellence Framework) be improved?

‘That’s the tough question,’ Gobet said. ‘Using information about citations or other type of bibliometric information is clearly a step forward, but there are issues as well with this. Given the huge cost of the RAE, one should consider the option of doing away with it entirely, and using other ways of allocating money. But here, I’m well beyond my domain of specialisation.’ CJ

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RESEARCH FUNDING NEWS The National Ataxia Foundation has three awards available to support new and innovative studies into ataxia; the Young Investigator Award (closing date 1 August); Research Grants (closing date 15 July); and Research Fellowships (closing date 15 August 2009). Note: the deadline dates given are for pre-submission application enquiries.

I www.ataxia.org/research/ataxia-research-grants.aspx The Nuffield Foundation Social Science Small Grants Scheme provide grants of normally up to £7500 to cover research expenses.

Priority is given to applications from new researchers and pilot or preliminary projects that advance social well-being. Applications can be made at any time.

I tinyurl.com/3d3v2x The following funding opportunities are available for cancer-related research: I Cancer Research UK offers Project Grants to support educational and behavioural research into cancer prevention, screening and early diagnosis. Closing date for applications 10 July 2009. tinyurl.com/qhhmfv I Dimbleby Cancer Care provides grants for research into the care needs of cancer patients, their carers and families, including support needs and psychosocial care. Closing date 20 November 2009. www.dimblebycancercare.org/research.php The Alcohol Education and Research Council (AERC) provides grants for research that improves the evidence base on alcohol-related matters and that also seek to develop the skills of people or the capacity of organisations. The research funded is broad-ranging and includes research into the effects and use of alcohol by parents, offenders and students. For further details see their website. The closing date for applications to the Research Grants and Development Grant schemes is 5 September 2009.

I www.aerc.org.uk/grants.html Under its 7th Framework Programme the EU is offering Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development. The Fellowships support advanced training and transnational mobility that will provide the means to significantly advance a researcher’s career as part of a long-term professional development plan. The closing date for applications is 18 August 2009.

I tinyurl.com/cfs6y5 The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP) offers two schemes to support early-career social psychologists. The Postgraduate and Postdoctorate Travel Grants provide support for short visits to conduct research, complete ongoing projects or undertake training elsewhere in the world. The Postdoctoral ‘Seed Corn’ Research Grants provide support for preliminary research undertaken by new researchers in the immediate postdoctoral period. Applicants for both schemes must be members of the EAESP. The next closing date for applications is 30 June 2009. There are four application deadlines each year.

I tinyurl.com/panxbrl

info

First for Scotland

For more, see www.bps.org.uk/funds Funding bodies should e-mail news to Elizabeth Beech on elibee@bps.org.uk for possible inclusion

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bed?’ using the comments in the press were massively research as its outweighed by the positive level of starting point. interest and lively debate that this Disappointingly, in research received. this piece as in some The Society press released 32 of the comment pieces that research papers presented at the Annual followed, the study’s Conference, and many of these stories Joanna Colburn reports on a successful Annual findings were were covered by the local media of the Conference for the Society’s Media Centre somewhat twisted to; university where the research was ‘women really do carried out. ‘Punch and Judy politics’ prefer a sense of humour (Peter Bull, University of York) was apers presented at this year’s Annual to good looks’. Katy Guest in The covered by the Northern Echo, for Conference reached a far larger Independent picked up on this simplified example. Brighton newspaper The Argus audience than the 578 delegates who take on the research in her comment also ran stories on each day. came along. Indeed, anyone who picked piece, writing ‘Funny guys are fun!

On Friday, research by Charis Hunter up a newspaper, read a news website or Congratulations and thanks to the and Dr Lance Workman (Bath Spa tuned into the radio from 1–3 April may University of the Blindingly Obvious’.

University) was used as some light relief. have come across one of the stories sent The main story of the conference ‘Dog owners matched to their pets’ was out into the world by the Society’s Press was arguably research by Liz Wright (De covered by tabloids and broadsheets Committee, media centre and Montfort University) and Professor Tony alike and spread quickly online. researchers willing to engage with Cassidy (University of Ulster), who Web coverage of our press releases journalists and broadcast their findings found that people who grow up with at meant that research presented at this beyond Brighton’s Holiday Inn. least one sister are year’s conference will have Fighting for space amongst the generally more reached a very diverse headlines and stories generated by the balanced and audience including many G20 summit, our psychology stories happier as adults. young people. For example, held their own. The first day saw a range The simplicity of the Dr Simon Goodson’s of our press releases covered in national message and wide research was featured on and regional newspapers: Becky Heaver relevance made this several gaming websites. of Sussex University on pupil size and a massive story We were joined in the recognition memory; Cardiff University’s across all media on conference press office by Dr Michael Lewis finding (in support of Thursday 2 April, journalists from the Daily the theory that our expressions feed with a 7:30am live Telegraph, Daily Mail, New back and impact on our emotions) that interview on BBC Scientist and Times, who botox could have positive effects on Worldwide just the took the opportunity to anxiety and irritability; Dr Simon first of 13 interviews Fighting for space – interview researchers, write that’s the way to do it!

Goodson of Huddersfield University, for the researchers. up longer articles for their finding that console driving games leave From a public publications and report on you feeling more agitated and aggressive engagement additional research. This resulted than violent shoot ‘em ups; Emma perspective this piece of research was in a steady stream of coverage in these Wightman (University of Northumbria) the most successful of the conference. It media throughout the week and the on how red wine extract polyphenol quickly became the ‘most shared’ article additional story ‘Foods rich in cocoa resveratrol could improve mental on BBC news online, featuring on the may improve performance on performance on demanding tasks; homepage and on the ‘Have your say’ challenging mental tasks like arithmetic’ and Kristofor Mccarty (University of pages. At one point it attracted 22 pages (Crystal Haskell, University of Northumbria) on how heterosexual of comments, with hundreds of people Northumbria) ran in both the Daily women rate funny men as more sharing their experiences of brothers, Telegraph and the Daily Mail. intelligent than those whose jokes sisters, family life and their views on the Articles in specialist press, magazines weren’t as amusing . research findings. The story retained its and periodicals are still coming through.

Kristofor Mccarty’s story had staying popularity with columnists Melanie The amount and content of the news power and coverage continued into the McDonagh (The Times) and Tom Utley coverage we received this year reflects weekend, going global when he was (Daily Mail) discussing the research’s both the quality of the research at this interviewed by NBC North America and significance to them personally. Both year’s conference and the media’s hunger Ireland’s Today FM. On Friday 3 April mocked the findings and welcomed for accessible science stories with a the Daily Mail printed the double-page its positive bearing on them in equal human interest angle that psychological feature ‘Can you laugh a woman into measure. However, any negative research uniquely provides.

Right on target

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This is the page of the Society’s Press Committee, which aims to promote and discuss psychology in the media.

If you would like to comment on a recent newspaper article, TV or radio programme involving psychology, if you have tips for

others based on experiences, or if you know of a forthcoming programme or broadcast, please contact the ‘Media’ page

coordinating editor, Fiona Jones (Chair of the Society’s Press Committee), on f.a.jones@leeds.ac.uk

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CONFERENCE

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When it comes to the crunch In this timely symposium Stephen Lea (University of Essex) and Peter Cooper (CEO, CRAM International) discussed the potential contribution of psychology to our understanding of the current economic crisis. To begin with, what are the psychological factors that led us into this mess in the first place? Stephen Lea argued that it is crucial to appreciate the relationship between psychology and economics, and the fact that our financial decisions are not the result of rational choices. Rather, our decisions are

influenced by a variety of factors known to psychologists, particularly the use of heuristics. In understanding the mass psychology of the housing crisis, Lea outlined three disastrous heuristics that contributed to our predicament. First, there was the feeling, particularly in the US and the UK, that home ownership is always better than renting; an idea that ownership somehow equals happiness.

This created a push towards people taking out mortgages that they should perhaps have avoided. Second, as house prices increased during the housing boom, homeowners fell prey to the illusion that they were becoming wealthier; in actual fact, having your house’s price increase does not make you any wealthier if all other house prices are rising at the same time.

Nevertheless, the illusion of wealth led people to take out This year’s Annual Conference in Brighton took place in the sunshine loans against their amongst gathering economic gloom property without

considering the consequences. The third disastrous heuristic was the rule of thumb that ‘if you can afford the repayments, you can afford the loan’; when people made decisions about whether to take out a loan, they only considered the immediate affordability of repayments, without taking into account the fact that interest rates can change, and income can suddenly drop. Lea termed these three heuristics the ‘MMM’: Materialism, Money Illusion and Myopia, and argued that it was this potent mix of flawed thinking that ultimately led us to the recession. So how can we make things better? Lea argued that we have to encourage the people that can afford it to go out and spend. This will require building the confidence of those unaffected by the recession to the point where they feel safe enough to spend their money.

Peter Cooper discussed the impact of the economic crisis on mental health.

Ongoing qualitative and quantitative research monitoring responses to the recession suggests that the reverse switch from massive prosperity to financial uncertainty leaves people showing symptoms that include depression, anxiety, anger, instability, disturbed sleep, unhealthy eating and physical stress. For those worst hit, the loss of employment can be psychologically devastating, bringing with it the additional loss of freedom, self-respect and meaning to life.

Cooper spoke of a ‘crisis ripple’ emanating from those who have been

DISTINGUISHING TRUTHFUL FROM INVENTED ACCOUNTS Two schemes for analysing the veracity of eye-witness accounts, both of them based on the ‘reality monitoring’ (RM) approach, have demonstrated comparable levels of accuracy in distinguishing invented from truthful accounts.

The RM approach draws on the idea that memories for real events will show consistently different characteristics from memories of imagined events, such as greater perceptual detail.

Amina Memon of the University of Aberdeen and her

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colleagues staged an event in which a engineer was seen to damage a laptop – half the participants witnessed this happen, while the others were merely told about it and asked to pretend that they had really been there. All the participants were subsequently questioned using a face-face ‘Cognitive Interview’, and their answers were transcribed and coded using the criteria of either Aldert Vrij and colleagues or Kevin Colwell and colleagues.

Both schemes distinguished

truthful from invented accounts.

For example, coding using the Colwell approach revealed more external, contextual and internal (e.g. meta-memories, such as ‘I thought I would never find the room’) detail in truthful accounts.

The Vrij scheme found that auditory and temporal detail was greater in the truthful accounts, with a further trend towards more mention of cognitive operations (e.g. ‘she was wearing a coat so it must have been cold’).

Overall, the Vrij scheme demonstrated accuracy at 80 per

cent compared with 72 per cent for the Colwell scheme. However, Memon cautioned that there were some notable differences from real life – here, liars gave plenty of detail whereas in real life they usually tend to keep detail to a minimum. These differences emerge at least in part because it is so difficult to recreate in research the kinds of pressure and motivations that lead people to lie in real life. Regarding the forensic potential of these coding schemes, Memon concluded, ‘We’re not there yet.’ CJ

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directly affected (for example, through unemployment) to those who have been partially affected and those for whom there is more of an ‘atmospheric’ impact; perhaps the majority, who are influenced by the general mood of the country and media. Cooper argued that psychologists have an important part to play in helping people prepare and deal with the

consequences of the recession.

Psychologists will be on the front line of providing counselling and therapy for those affected, and it may be that the most effective way to do this is in collaboration with bodies such as the Citizens Advice.

Looking to the future, Cooper discussed the yearning for change that many people report; there is a general feeling that a

cause of the recession was the emphasis on economic well-being over psychological well-being. He argued that psychologists should be pushing for a role in deciding future policies and approaches to the economy; otherwise we run the danger of recovering our financial health, but remaining psychologically and physically sicker. SC

More than 30 years of magic moments she is still teaching today because of that magic moment ‘when a pupil’s puzzled gaze gives way to a smile of recognition’.

Coombs now feels that students are subject to an overwhelming array of resources, from YouTube, Google Scholar and Wikipedia to online libraries and resource centres. Although the students themselves haven’t changed – they are

still young, exploratory people – there is a juxtaposition of the old learning and the new technology. Equipping students with the skills to deal with all the information is vital, and a new initiative is under way to provide tutorial support in good research skills. Students are being grounded in the skills required to promote independent thought, avoid plagiarism and use the wealth

of information available to their advantage.

Coombs noted how becoming a member of the Association for the Teaching of Psychology has allowed her to share good practice, including via the BPS, Science Learning Centre, Higher Education Academy and the European Federation of Psychology Teachers’ Associations, which in turn is passed on to her students. VB STEPHEN WILSON (PA ARCHIVE PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES)

Based on a teaching career spanning more than 30 years, Dorothy Coombs (Prior Pursglove Sixth Form College) is well placed to make recommendations for good practice. In this lecture on receiving the British Psychological Society’s Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Psychology, she did just that via an account of changes in a career she has clearly loved.

Since the 1980s, A-level classes have tripled in size with specifications, exams and technology all changing constantly. Whilst recognising that expectations of students are varied, and without overstressing equally vast expectations and demands of teachers, Coombs simply expects her students to learn to think rather than perform. Education is increasingly important in a competitive market, and it is important students learn the skills to differentiate themselves.

One of the biggest barriers to thinking may be student fear; commonly expressed as a fear of being selected to give an answer.

Coombs combats this by stressing that her students can give her any answer, and she tries to circumnavigate a fixation on finding the correct answer by supplying the answer herself and then asking for suggestions as to the question. A sympathetic and understanding teaching approach is apparent, and Coombs freely admits that

SEGREGATION AND VIOLENCE Interest in the effects of religious segregation in Northern Ireland is of continual interest, rising to the forefront in recent months as religious and political events make headlines. With segregation occurring across educational, residential and occupational settings, Kareena McAloney’s (Queen’s University Belfast) studies of religious segregation and community violence were timely.

The first time many adolescents have sustained and meaningful contact outside their segregated environment is at university.

Looking at measures of group identity and self-esteem, McAloney revealed some interesting effects of intergroup contact. The more students perceived they were the majority religion, the higher their self-esteem, identification with their group and outgroup rejection.

Interestingly, Protestant students also had a higher perceived percentage of Catholic friends after contact in the university environment. However, Catholic students and those who lived on campus and were immersed in the integrated environment had poorer psychological well-being, which suggests support for a ‘rejection-identification’ model.

In 2004 one in four of Northern Ireland’s youth had experience of sectarian abuse. Unsurprisingly, data suggest that this exposure to violence may be having a detrimental effect on adolescent health and well-being. This seems to be externalised in various ways, such as substance misuse, behavioural problems and depression. There is also a tradition of families telling stories about the violence, which may be continuing the cycle. It is therefore important to clarify whether this is also one of the ways young people are dealing with these experiences. VB

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IN BRIEF Vicarious PTSD There’s already a literature showing that emergency workers can suffer PTSD-like symptoms after their exposure to the suffering of others. Could similar symptoms be provoked among the public by the scenes of suffering and devastation that are routinely broadcast on rolling TV news? Pam Ramsden’s (University of Bolton) newly validated measure of vicarious PTSD revealed 20 per cent of 89 participants had signs of the condition following their exposure to news coverage of 9/11, the London 7/7 bombings and/or the stabbing of Abigail Witchalls. Participants who’d suffered traumatic events in their own lives had been excluded. Across the various events, those participants who had watched more coverage tended to exhibit more signs of distress.

‘Vicarious PTSD is not recognised as much as it should be,’ Ramsden said. CJ Mindfulness and mental control An internet survey has generated preliminary evidence for the way regular meditation can change people’s thinking habits for the better. Rebecca Semmens-Wheeler at the University of Sussex recruited 65 nonmeditators, 25 infrequent meditators and 55 frequent meditators (three or more times per week), and found that the frequent meditators displayed less thought control and thought suppression than the nonmeditators, alongside increased mindfulness and behavioural self-control. SemmensWheeler said her findings suggest meditation helps improve people’s self-control because it increases their mindfulness, thus reducing their tendency to attempt to control their own thoughts – a habit that is known to backfire, and which is associated with many psychiatric conditions. CJ The acid test Maternal nutrition during pregnancy affects fetal brain development and has been linked with psychopathology in the offspring. These findings have led to pregnant mothers being encouraged to focus on nutrition in the early stages of pregnancy, in particular taking folic acid supplements. Now in a prospective cohort study, Wolff Schlotz (University of Southampton) has found support for this practice. Maternal folate status and intake during early pregnancy was associated with hyperactivity and peer problems in their offspring at age 7–9 years, with the association mediated by fetal head growth.

These results suggest that lower folate status during early pregnancy may impair fetal brain development, predisposing to behavioural difficulties in childhood. VB

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Attention and the senses Most of you will know about the famous Stroop effect, in which interference from a colour name slows down our recognition of the ink colour. In the first of three presentations on attention, memory and perception, Oscar Kjell of the University of Westminster described some intriguing results arising from two multisensory versions of this classic task.

One task required participants to name the ink colour of a word while ignoring distraction in the form of the sight or sound of colour word names.

The other required participants to identify the high or low pitch of a voice, while ignoring the sight or sound of the words ‘high’ or ‘low’.

For the ink colour task, both written colour names and spoken colour names affected performance. By contrast, for the pitch identification task, only the spoken word affected performance; the written word did not. Kjell said this suggests that when it comes to controlling the influence of semantic information, the auditory

system is more efficient at filtering out irrelevant information than the visual system.

In the second presentation, Sam Culpeck of the University of Sussex described research that’s built on earlier findings showing that attention can be cued by gaze direction. Past research has used static photographs, but in real life, of course, gaze is always moving. In an attempt to create a more ecologically valid paradigm, Culpeck and her colleagues used static photos with moving eyes. They demonstrated that a moving shift in gaze direction has a more powerful cueing effect (for both button press and eye movement responses) than fixed gaze direction.

A final experiment compared the cueing influence of a shifting gaze against the cueing power of arrows, with moving arrow-heads. The findings here suggested there really is something special about eyes and faces – the shifting gaze condition, but not the shifting arrows

An ebbing tide There’s a prevailing view that mindfulness training is harmful for people with psychosis. But this is based on a narrow evidence base made up of just a few case studies. That’s according to Professor Paul Chadwick (Royal South Hants Hospital & University of Southampton), this year’s recipient of the Society’s Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology Award. He and his colleagues set out to develop a mindfulness intervention that would be acceptable to people with psychosis. Sessions were limited at 10 minutes as compared with the usual half an hour; they were guided so that silence lasted no more than 30–60 seconds at a time; and comments from the guide

were tailored so as to be relevant (e.g. ‘If you hear a voice, just let it pass’).

Two outcome studies – one involving 11 patients who undertook six or seven weekly sessions of 90 minutes each, the other involving 22 patients who undertook two sessions per week, plus home practice with a CD – both demonstrated significant pre–post improvement.

The sessions were delivered in groups and generally involved a period of practice, followed by a reflective session in which participants considered how they currently react to their symptoms, how it feels to relate mindfully to those symptoms, and finally what this says about themselves and their psychosis. For many, the idea of letting go of their

usual coping methods can be terrifying, leading to fears that the symptoms might come back stronger.

One approach of the training sessions, therefore, has been to ask participants to view the practice as a form of experiment – to test their beliefs about what will happen against what really happens.

These ideas were made vivid when Professor Chadwick played a DVD testimony of a patient with psychosis who has found mindfulness training beneficial. ‘It’s like an ebbing tide without me fixing on any one thing,’ she said of the mindfulness approach. ‘In and out.

Whether this is a voice or other sensations. It stops the voices becoming the sole focus.’ CJ

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PAUL DOYLE (PHOTOFUSION)

which we’re condition, showed slower at a significant comparing ‘magnitude effect’. numbers That is, response times when eye that are gaze was congruent nearer each with target location other in were significantly magnitude. reduced compared And there’s with when gaze and also the target location were SNARC incongruent, effect whereas this (spatialcontrast was not numerical significant for the association arrows condition. of response Last up, Julie codes), Castronovo which (University of suggests Leeds) turned our there’s a attention to number link processing by blind between people. She began spatial by reminding us of Do blind people use numbers more? For magnitude and some well-known example when faced with stairs, blind people space, akin to a effects in the field may learn to count the number of steps number line. of numerical Castronovo processing. For said two example, there’s the size effect, in which auditory tasks, in which congenitally or we’re slower when comparing larger early blind participants had to compare numbers. There’s the distance effect, in the magnitude of heard numbers against

either 5 or 55, showed that these kinds of distance and size effects also occur in blind people. In other words, blind people and sighted people appear to represent numbers in a similar way despite the fact that blind people have not experienced numbers in the visual domain. This challenges the assumption made by some psychologists that the spatial representation of numbers is somehow linked to the visual experience of numerosity.

Another study compared the ability of early blind and sighted participants to generate a certain number of key presses without the chance to count them, and to estimate how many tones they had heard.

Both groups showed evidence of Weber’s law, becoming less accurate with higher numbers. Furthermore, the blind participants outperformed the sighted participants. This suggests that the experience of blind people with numbers may actually be advantageous compared with the experience of sighted people.

One reason for this could be that blind people use numbers even more than sighted people do. For example, when faced with stairs, blind people may learn to count how many steps there are until they reach the top. CJ

Understanding heteronormativity Gay men in the UK are at disproportionately high risk of contracting a sexually transmitted illness. By some estimates, just 2.8 per cent of men had sex with another man in the last five years, and yet 45 per cent of new cases of gonorrhoea in Scotland and 80 per cent of new cases of syphilis were among the gay male population. In 2007, 41 per cent of new cases of HIV in the UK were among gay men.

These were just some of the striking statistics outlined

by Paul Flowers of Glasgow Caledonian University as part of a seminar on heteronormativity and health.

But Flowers argued that this

increased risk cannot be explained away by traditional health behaviour factors, such as gay men’s attitudes or beliefs about risks.

Rather, the increased risk, he believes, is linked to the fact that gay sex tends to be disassortative, with initial contact made via the internet, gay bars, clubs and saunas, whereas heterosexual sex is more assortative.

Disassortative mating involves people from diverse locations and communities coming together, whereas assortative mating is seen when people from within the same communities get together. The former increases exposure to sexually transmitted diseases,

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Flowers explained, even with an equal number of sexual contacts. Moreover, he argued, this pattern of mixing among gay men is driven at least in part by heteronormativity – the need for gay men to migrate to limited places and spaces to find suitable partners.

‘Understanding some of these issues shifts culpability for pathological burden to those who are homophobic rather than placing it on the vulnerable,’ Flowers said.

Although he cautioned that there is also ‘a need to examine aspects of our [gay] communities too – for example, the prevalence of sexual consumerism.’

Also in this seminar, Lyndsey Moon argued that lesbian, gay and bisexual training for therapists remains inadequate; Ian Rivers shared data showing that ‘same-sexattracted’ students experience more loneliness and harbour more hostility than their ‘opposite-sex-attracted’ peers; and the film Homoworld was shown. This short training film, co-produced by clinical psychologist Catherine Butler, turns heteronormativity on its head, portraying a fantasy world in which a heterosexual couple struggles to cope with a world dominated by homosexuality. Free copies are available via the University of East London. CJ

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Plants and the brain Talk of plant extracts and aromatherapy orally to men and women in a doubleperformance. By contrast the higher may conjure in your mind images of blind trial. Using neutral, positive and 993mg dose actually had some deleterious witches and pseudoscience but this scary video clips, Bradley showed that effects. Before we get too excited it’s worth symposium showed how psychologists lavender was mildly beneficial in reducing noting that the lower dose would actually are conducting serious experiments to anxiety in women, and aided their require consumption of about five elucidate the important psychological recovery to a relaxed state. By contrast, chocolate bars! The lower 500mg dose of effects of various plant phytochemicals. lavender appeared to have the opposite resveratrol also improved cognitive Such an endeavour is particularly urgent, David Kennedy (Northumbria University) explained, as synthetic drugs are failing in a number of areas.

Just recently the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence withdrew its endorsement of a synthetic cholinergic-based treatment for Alzheimer’s disease on the basis of a lack of efficacy and too many sideeffects.

Kennedy went on to describe a number of metabolites in plants that act on the human cholinergic system, some of which may provide a viable alternative to synthetic compounds.

These include alkaloid poisons from plants like deadly nightshade and henbane, but also safer ‘terpenoid’ alternatives such as from lemon balm and sage. Several promising studies have shown that these extracts can lead to improved memory and mood.

‘Plants offer a huge range of potentially effective secondary metabolites, especially among the terpenoids and phenolics, rather than the poisonous alkaloids,’ Kennedy said.

Perhaps one of the better known Lemon balm may help improve memory and mood plants used medicinally is St John’s wort, which is widely taken as an antidepressant. Sarah Canning at the effect on men. It’s possible that the plant performance but came with the University of Leeds described her interacts with hormones in women, thus undesirable side-effect of increased mental randomly controlled trial of St John’s explaining the differential effect across fatigue. wort as a treatment for premenstrual sexes. Bradley concluded that there was Last up, Ed Okello (Newcastle symptoms. Thirty-four women were a need now for a longer-term study.

University) presented a wide-ranging assessed over 10 menstrual cycles with the Two sources of plant polyphenols overview of research findings on the use of daily symptom reports. Behavioural that are often in the health column of effects of plant based products as symptoms such as insomnia, and physical newspapers for obvious reasons are red treatments for dementia. His survey took symptoms were improved by taking St wine and chocolate, with research in numerous plants, including ginkgo John’s wort compared with placebo, but suggesting they may have beneficial biloba, club moss, sage, lemon balm, the plant had no effect on psychological antioxidant and vasodilatory properties. green tea and curcumin, to name but symptoms such as low mood. Canning Crystal Haskell (Northumbria University) a few. Okello said the search for plantspeculated that the plant may have presented the results of two randomly derived treatments is now a £100 million exerted its effects via the serotonergic controlled trials she’s conducted looking business in the UK and that the largest system. at the acute cognitive and subjective clinical trials under way for Alzheimer’s What about lavender? A problem effects of resveratrol (found in red wine) disease treatments all involve plant testing the psychological effects of and cocoa flavanol. extracts. Four decades of conventional lavender is that participants soon guess Using tests such as the serial three neurobiological research had led to few the purpose of research once they detect subtractions task (participants have to effective prescription drugs for dementia, its soothing scent. Belinda Bradley at the keep subtracting three from a target Okello said, whereas plant based University of Central Lancashire solved number) Haskell showed that a lower treatments are increasingly demonstrating this problem in her test of the plant’s 520mg dose of cocoa flavanol led to efficacy and safety, with their mechanisms anxyiolitic effects by administering it reduced fatigue and improved cognitive of action gradually being elucidated. CJ

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Having a crack at psychology Opening this invited keynote, critical health psychologist Kerry Chamberlain (Massey University, Auckland) stated his intention to ‘have a crack at psychology’, which he considers has been ‘too good at ducking away from critiques’.

Taking aim in particular at the ‘globalised, Americanised, anglicised version of psychology’, Chamberlain said that just about everything we study is complex – we can’t have simple theories. More than 60 years ago, Henry Murray and Clyde Kluckhohn said that ‘Every man is in certain respects (a) like all other men, (b) like some other men, (c) like no other man’.

Chamberlain feels that psychology has never found a solution to this, and the psychological sciences have inevitably struggled to find a unifying agenda. He sees the rise of qualitative methods as a good thing, as such research forces a return to epistemological considerations and a recognition that knowledge is a function of how we find it out. But Chamberlain also worries that we are ‘just a science of fads and fashions’, concentrating our resources in the wrong areas. He pointed to the area of paired associate learning as one where thousands of studies were conducted which perhaps said ‘more about publication strategies and careers than a quest for knowledge’.

There is also the question of who psychology does its research with. Jeffrey Arnett has talked of the ‘neglected 95 per cent’, and Chamberlain feels that no other science proceeds with such a narrow base.

We ‘atomise’ constructs, start researching the components rather than the big picture: ‘theoretical discourse is replaced by statistical discourse’, and the ‘pathology of flow charting’. The result is a huge number of ‘facts’ that are largely just correlational associations.

Chamberlain says that psychologists need to make friends with their data.

‘Perhaps there is no such thing as a “health behaviour”,’ he says, but (as Frances Mielewczyk and Carla Willig have said) exploring the differences between ‘having sex’, ‘making love’ and ‘fucking’ may help us understand why condom use may be compatible with one but not another of these practices.

So can the turn to qualitative research save us, Chamberlain asked. It’s still a minority enterprise, he warned, and it’s difficult to get the mainstream involved in debates. ‘It can’t breach the inertia’, he said, and unfortunately ‘the flight from theory is still evident in qualitative research’. Many publications code and categorise the data, asking what’s in the data and how it fits together, but they often fail to progress to the ‘what do I make of this?’ stage. Chamberlain feels that current practices are serving to trivialise much of our research, and we need to ‘raise the bar so that people are making a contribution with their research. ‘We need to reinstate the centrality of the phenomenon. We should be training critical, reflexive and innovative researchers. It’s time for a change.’ JS

Sisters are doing it for their siblings Growing up with a sister may be good for our psychological health, regardless of whether we are male or female. Liz Wright (De Montfort University) and Tony Cassidy (University of Ulster) studied whether siblings have a protective effect in times of crisis; in particular they looked at whether siblings modulate psychological distress arising from parental divorce. Data collected with a questionnaire survey revealed that female siblings had a protective positive effect across a number of measures. For example, levels of achievement motivation were higher for people with sisters than people with brothers. Conversely, psychological distress was higher for people with brothers than it was for those with sisters. This pattern held for both men and women. Wright speculated that this protective effect of having a sister is because female siblings promote an expressive atmosphere within families, and this may provide a natural support system during times of crisis. SC

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VISIBLE DIFFERENCE Alyson Bessell (University of the West of England) presented results from a trial of a computerised psychosocial intervention for people with a ‘visible difference’ or disfigurement. Outcomes were measured post-treatment and at three- and six-month follow-up.

Those receiving the intervention, whether by computer or face-to-face, showed reduced anxiety and depression, and a reduction in appearance concerns, relative to the no-treatment control. There was no difference between the face-to-face and computer groups, and reports of acceptability and usefulness were high in both groups.

Bessell said future research will test whether the computer intervention works just as well when it is completed remotely in people’s homes, rather than at the clinic or university. There are also plans to improve the graphics and add e-mail and chat facilities. CJ

PEDAGAMING From the University of Bristol, Paul Howard-Jones introduced us to ‘pedagaming’, which seeks to exploit research on the addictive quality of games so as to make learning more rewarding and effective. In a recent study, Howard-Jones and his colleagues devised a quiz-style game in which participants selected a box, were told how many points that box contained, before being given the question they’d need to answer to win those points. Questions answered incorrectly would appear again later following feedback of the correct answer. The researchers found they were able to predict the likelihood of a participant answering a question correctly second time round, based on their estimation of the state of that participant’s dopamine system (dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in reward) when the same question was first encountered. Dopamine release was estimated based on ‘positive prediction error’ – the mismatch between expected and received reward.

It’s early days but Howard-Jones said that pedagaming could prove a fruitful research avenue. CJ

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In search of the optimal self Humans are not naturally passive beings: we actively meet ongoing challenges to create an optimal self. Selfdetermination theory (SDT) identifies three basic needs that allow our optimal selves to flourish, the absence of which can increase vulnerability and lead to passivity and a lack of motivation. Dr Richard Ryan (University of Rochester) described these basic needs as a tenet of SDT in a keynote talk.

According to Ryan and SDT, autonomy, competence and relatedness are innate and universal needs: crucial for well-being, even if not necessarily consciously valued or pursued. When a person acts with autonomy, they are not necessarily ‘in control’ or independent of external influences: the key to being truly autonomous lies in internalising external influences and assimilating them with one’s own values.

Competence leads to feelings of self-efficacy, and relatedness creates a sense of belonging.

In contrast, day-to-day events, such as deadlines, controlling

Dr Richard Ryan spoke about self-determination theory in his keynote lecture

rewards, competitive pressure and surveillance, are the antipathy of all three needs and therefore least beneficial for optimum mental health.

Ryan discussed the degree to which external motivation appears as a continuum rather than a separate concept and as representing variations of autonomy. In support of this,

GENETICS OF LEADERSHIP STYLE Differences in leadership style can be traced to a gene that’s involved in dopamine metabolism and social cognition. That’s according to a study conducted by Carl Senior (Aston University) and colleagues as part of an emerging field of organisational cognitive neuroscience. One hundred and fifteen students completed leadership questionnaires and supplied cheek swabs for genetic analysis. Students with two copies of the methionine allele of the COMT gene (catechol-O-methyltransferase), which is associated with less effective dopamine metabolism at the synapse, scored significantly lower on transformational leadership, and higher on transactional leadership, than students with two copies of the more effective valine allele. Transformational leadership is associated with charisma and the ability to develop followers to their full potential. By contrast, transactional leaders control their followers via punishment and reward. ‘The fact that there was a genetic difference between transformational and transactional leadership is very exciting and the next stage of this work is to examine specific leaders and CEOs who are actually working at the moment,’ Senior told The Psychologist. CJ

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he and his colleagues have found that the experience of autonomy is not moderated by cultural membership and is positively related to wellbeing. Identification reflects a conscious valuing of a regulation and the action then becomes personally important.

These values can then be made congruent with other values already held, and action becomes autonomous.

Autonomous behaviour appears to have no downside with research showing positive correlations between quality of life, mental health and intrinsic motivation. Even in moderation, behaviour supportive of autonomy creates effects apparent across domains and across cultures.

Strong relations exist between patient autonomy and taking of oral medication, between provision of autonomous support and smoking cessation and possibly prosocial behaviour; if you help for autonomous reasons the recipient receives more benefits than if helping under duress or by external controls.

Autonomy support from

teachers helps create a preference for challenge, greater persistence and creativity and an orientation towards mastery behaviours, which results in a curiosity for learning and intrinsic motivation.

Behaviour driven by such inherent satisfaction, rather than external rewards, leads to greater well-being and functioning. Intrinsic motivation is important from an early age: small children play because it’s fun, but in doing so they also gain social and cognitive benefits. If this behaviour is controlled or contingent on external rewards, the learning experience is not internalised and the volition to undertake a task can be undermined.

Strategy and goal choice, positive feedback, empathy and an absence of external pressure all facilitate internal motivation and are all provided by meeting the three basic psychological needs of self-determination theory.

Balancing the meeting of these three basic needs and pressures of everyday life with its varied and constant external demands is not plain sailing, yet Ryan creates a compelling picture that should serve to strengthen our resolve to nurture autonomy and allow our optimal self to thrive. VB

An Introduction to Clinical Psychology

A one day training event for people interested in pursuing a career in Clinical Psychology Sat 11 July or 7 Nov 2009 BPS Offices, London For details please contact enquiries@ privateclinicalpsychology.co.uk

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Approaching adversity How is it that some children face challenging situations yet emerge as well-rounded, balanced adults whilst similar others battle mental health problems? Resilience, seen as a dynamic buffer against adversity, may provide the answer. But what strategies mediate the relationship between adversity and resilience?

Research by Sophie Leontopoulou (University of Ioannina) hypothesised that coping strategies and emotion regulation will be differentially linked to various types of attachment, which in turn will mediate resilience and adaptive outcomes. In an exploratory study Leontopoulou found a relationship between avoidant coping, emotion suppression and lowered well-being.

Approach coping strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, were linked to less avoidant attachment and less emotional suppression, and were therefore more effective in promoting resilience and protecting against maladaption. Both avoidance and approach coping strategies linked with attachment to mediate the relationship between adversity and well-being. Results also showed that emotion regulation was a significant predictor of mental health problems. Although not a straightforward causal relationship, there is an interesting pattern of mediators that combine in promoting resilience.

Following on from this talk, Kay Mathieson (University of Sussex), looked at the interplay between temperament, emotion

understanding and peer play and the factors that may form the starting point for adaptive coping strategies in nurseryage children. Importantly, Mathieson wanted to utilise the special knowledge that parents have about their offspring alongside the practitioner’s view, and she

found an unexpected convergence of views around a child’s prosocial behaviours.

Effortful control such as selfregulation and delayed gratification showed a positive association with prosocial and interactive play characteristics, and social competence positively correlated with emotion recognition. Children in high-quality care settings were more likely to identify emotions, perhaps indicating that better-quality care provision perhaps modelled emotion understanding more effectively. The next step is to build upon the importance of parental interaction in day care and look at how this knowledge can be combined with practitioners to inform interaction with children to

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

best promote adaptive prosocial behaviours.

Continuing the theme of a relationship between emotion and social abilities, Joanne Emery (Cambridge Assessment) presented data linking emotional intelligence (EI) and attainment at GCSE level. Many schools in UK are involved in a government initiative to teach EI, not only to improve interactions and behaviour but also attainment. Looking at a sample of almost 2000 GCSE students, Emery found that total trait EI scores were a strong predictor of GCSE attainment.

However, not all children showed the same EI achievement effects in all exam results.

EI acted as the strongest predictor where prior attainment was lowest, indicating that EI perhaps acts as a buffer against previous disappointment. Selfmotivation and low impulsivity were the strongest trait predictors across the range of exam results.

Questions arise about causal direction, and whether EI can be improved in school. VB

KEEPING AN EYE ON THE TRUTH Rates of malingering (in other words, feigning deficits that are not there) are thought to lie between 20 and 25 per cent for patients who seek financial compensation. However, detecting malingering for cognitive deficits is extremely difficult. Becky Heaver (University of Sussex) reported promising evidence that pupil size may provide a useful tool in detecting people who fake amnesia. She reported a study in which participants took part in an ‘old/new’ recognition memory task. During a test phase, participants were presented with items and asked to indicate whether these items had been presented previously or not.

It has been reported that pupil size changes during recognition memory tasks as a function of whether items are old or new, with pupil sizes greater for old items. Heaver investigated the effect of asking participants to deliberately give wrong answers during the recognition phase, a situation akin to somebody trying to feign amnesia. She found that behaviour was changed for the recognition task; however, pupil size was not under voluntary control. Pupil size changes to old and new items remained constant regardless of the actual responses provided by participants. In other words, our pupils cannot lie; this finding has the potential to help identify individuals who have a better memory function than they claim. SC

YOUR REPORTERS, AND WEB EXTRA These reports were brought to you by Victoria Bonnett, Sandie Cleland, Christian Jarrett and Jon Sutton. Numerous extras can be found in the html version at www.thepsychologist.org.uk, and much more from the conference will appear over the coming months in the form of source material for articles. The 2010 Annual Conference will be held in Stratford-upon-Avon on 14–16 April.

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Get a second life Christian Jarrett on the benefits (and dangers) of using virtual worlds in your psychological research, therapy and teaching

his is not the only reality. Millions of people also exist online in virtual worlds, where they can fly, teleport, socialise and spend time inside a digital body of their own design. Psychologists are studying these worlds, to find out how people behave there, and to uncover whether a person’s online escapades affect their real-world selves. Others are moving into digital realms to teach and work with clients. The researchers and clinicians in this field all make the same argument – this is no passing fad, but rather the most exciting opportunity facing the profession for a generation.

Second Life (SL: www.secondlife.com) and other similar online virtual worlds are accessed by desktop computer and involve users assuming the role of a digital version of themselves known as an avatar. With this avatar they can then navigate the 3D digital world and meet and chat with other avatars online in real time, either using text or speech. SL now has over 16 million registered users.

Other online worlds, such as World of Warcraft or Everquest, allow similar freedom to explore and socialise, but unlike SL, they also have game objectives.

Early psychological research in this field has focused on establishing who these users are – no mean feat given privacy issues – and whether their online behaviour follows the social psychological laws uncovered in the real world.

Ditch any stereotypes – the evidence to date suggests these are not worlds populated solely by teenage, male video-

reading

T

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Anthony, K. & Goss, S. (2009). Guidelines for online counselling and psychotherapy (3rd edn). Lutterworth: BACP. Block, J. (2008). Out of this world.

Standpoint magazine: www.standpointmag.co.uk/out-ofthis-world-August Eastwick, P.W. & Gardner, W.L. (2009). Is it a game? Evidence for social influence in the virtual world. Social

gamers. For example, Dmitri Williams and colleagues published a study last year showing that 7000 players of Everquest 2 were aged 31 years on average, and while the majority were male, 19 per cent were female. Moreover, it was the older players and the female players who tended to play for longer hours.

Virtual research Studies in SL suggest that the way people interact online closely mirrors real-world social behaviour. For example, they may be interacting vicariously behind the mask of their chosen avatar, but a study

by Nick Yee and colleagues at Stanford University found that two characters of the same gender in SL tended to keep a greater distance between each other than two characters of the opposite gender. Moreover, the closer two characters were, the less likely they were to be directly facing each other – reflecting a realworld phenomenon, in which people tend

Influence, 4, 18–32.

Friedman, D., Steed, A. & Slater, M. (2007). Spatial social behavior in second life. In C. Pelachaud (Ed.) Intelligent virtual agents 2007 (pp.252–263). Springer-Verlag.

Gorini, A., Gaggioli, A. & Riva, G. (2007).

Virtual worlds, real healing [Letter to the editor]. Science 318(5856), 1549.

Gorini, A., Gaggioli, A., Vigna, C. & Riva, G. (2008). A Second Life for e-health:

to make less eye-contact the closer together they are. ‘Social interactions in online virtual environments…are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world,’ Yee’s team wrote.

A similar finding was made by Doron Friedman and colleagues at the University of London. When they programmed an ownerless ‘robot’ avatar to automatically wander up to people in SL, the response most people had was to back away from the digital stranger as if protecting their personal space.

Aleks Krotoski, a PhD student at Surrey University and technology columnist at The Guardian, studies social groups in SL to see how people’s friendships affect their attitudes. She’s found that group influence also works in SL in much the same way as in the real world. ‘In one study I looked at attitudes towards sexual activity in Second Life – a hot topic!’ Krotoski says. ‘I found that the density of groups had a very strong relationship with the uniformity of individual attitudes about sex in this virtual world. This is similar to what you’d find in the real world.’

Prospects for the use of 3-D virtual worlds in clinical psychology. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 10, e21.

Nardi, B. & Harris, J. (2006). Strangers and friends: Collaborative play in World of Warcraft. Proceedings of the 2006 anniversary conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work.

Slater, M., Antley, M., Davison, A., Swapp, D. et al. (2006). A virtual reprise of the

Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PLOS ONE, 1, e39.

Williams, D., Yee, N. & Caplan, S.E. (2008). Who plays, how much, and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 13, 993–1018.

Yee, N. & Bailenson, J.N. (2007). The Proteus effect: Self transformations in virtual reality. Human

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Other research has shown that little is lost in translation when proven tools of social influence from real life are put to use in virtual worlds. Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner of Northwestern University, Illinois, assumed online characters in the world of There.com and approached other avatars to ask if they would mind participating in a photoshoot on the beach. They found that both the foot-in-the-door effect (asking a smaller favour first) and the door-in-theface effect (asking a larger favour first) led to more cooperation just as it does in the real world. Disconcertingly, but adding further to the idea that virtual worlds emulate the real world, the pair also found evidence of racism, with participants less likely to cooperate when the researchers assumed the role of a dark skinned avatar (see box, ‘The dangers of virtual worlds’).

The fact that people behave in virtual worlds in a way that reflects real life is exciting news for psychologists because it opens up the medium as a way of conducting large-scale social studies, with relevance to the real world – projects that might otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to conduct. ‘By conducting a study in an existing virtual world, you have sample sizes that aren’t possible in a lab study,’ says Yee. ‘So for example, in our study of interpersonal spaces in Second Life, we gathered eye gaze and distance measures from hundreds of avatars with precise measurements.’

Krotoski agrees: ‘You can literally track everything,’ she says. ‘Where people are, which direction they’re facing, who they’re talking to – anything that’s happened in these spaces happens on a computer somewhere and that data is recorded.’ Another advantage for social studies concerns commitment. ‘You get very strongly committed groups of people,’ Krotoski explains, ‘which is an advantage if you want to understand the processes that exist in small, tightly knit groups. This also means it is an ecologically valid environment – these are

Communication Research, 33, 271–290.

Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., Urbanek, M. et al.

(2007). The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 10, 115-121.

The dangers of virtual worlds Back in the real world, UK-based psychology and psychotherapy are only just preparing for the introduction of statutory regulation, so it’s no surprise to discover that virtual therapy is currently completely unregulated. Indeed, in an anonymous digital world, it’s easier than ever for anyone to pass themselves off as a virtual therapist. As people plug into these virtual worlds in ever increasing numbers, there’s a pressing need for policies and guidelines on virtual world therapy to catch up with the technology.

Other experts have concerns about the addictive quality of virtual worlds. ‘We need to pay more attention to the risks and benefits of playing these games and spending too much time in virtual worlds,’ says psychiatrist Jerald Block, who has written several high-profile articles about so-called ‘pathological computer use’.

Critics of the notion of addictive computer use argue that there is nearly always another primary cause of the person’s distress and that the addictive use is merely a secondary symptom. Block retorts, however, that while comorbidity is at nearly 100 per cent, the range of other conditions that computer addicts suffer from is so varied, ‘it argues against a one-toone relationship that someone is using their PC simply to compensate for this other disorder’.

In the case of virtual worlds, Block is particularly concerned that too much time and devotion to their avatar can loosen a person’s grip on reality, leaving them in a psychotic-like state. ‘The real and the virtual become equated as equally valuable. These people see themselves in either universe as equally real.’ Defenders of virtual worlds answer that the social contact that’s made online is real. Indeed, games like World of Warcraft positively encourage large-scale social cooperation, with many missions requiring that people form large-scale guilds of up to 200 people to achieve success.

people who are invested and engaged in his colleagues, for example, have shown their online communities. Doing research that participants placed into taller avatars there is like going to a real-life negotiate more aggressively in a laundromat and watching how people subsequent real-life bargaining task; behave.’ and that those placed in more attractive Another avenue researchers are avatars subsequently disclose more pursuing in virtual worlds concerns information to a virtual stranger, and whether people’s online appearance and select more attractive partners in a later behaviour affects their real-life self. In an dating task. as yet unpublished study, Jeff Hancock at ‘We’ve referred to the impact of avatar Cornell University and Jeremy Bailenson appearance on behaviour as the Proteus at Stanford University recently Effect after asked 90 people to spend time in the Greek god SL playing the part of either a tall who was able “Doing research there is or short avatar. ‘What we’re to change like going to a real-life interested in is how use of these forms at will,’ laundromat and watching avatars affects the way people Yee says. how people behave” self-conceptualise,’ Hancock ‘These explains. ‘This is the idea that findings I look at the way I behave to suggest that understand who I am. We’re finding a certain amount of social engineering people are also using the information could be performed in virtual worlds they see about themselves online in just by changing what avatars we give to virtual worlds to understand themselves people. For example, perhaps we can in the real world. We’re predicting that make a virtual community friendlier just people playing the role of tall avatars will by changing the avatar selection range.’ subsequently rate themselves as more The Proteus Effect raises some tantalising attractive and dominant in the real world possibilities for therapeutic interventions.

– something we’re going to track over the ‘For example,’ Yee ponders, ‘perhaps a six weeks of the study with therapist could work with an individual questionnaires.’ with low self-esteem by modifying their Consistent with Hancock’s predictions, avatar’s appearance and practising proother researchers have shown how social and confident behaviour.’ people’s avatars in immersive virtual reality (VR) affect their subsequent realVirtual therapy world behaviour (see box, ‘Using It’s early days, but psychological therapists immersive virtual reality’). Nick Yee and

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and counsellors are already using virtual worlds to work with clients. I went to meet one such digital pioneer – SL counsellor Jack Leisen. As we arrive by teleportation module at his office, floating 600 metres above the ground, Leisen (real name John Wilson) tells me that his online clients seek help for a range of issues, including those that have arisen in their digital lives. ‘I think people are often surprised at how quickly relationships can become meaningful in a virtual world,’ he says. Other clients simply view SL as a convenient way to see a therapist, rather than travelling. ‘They still have that experience of mentally moving to another space,’ Leisen explains. Still others see virtual counselling as a way of getting ready for face-to-face contact. ‘For some people it’s an introduction,’ Leisen says. ‘It’s the first time they’ve told their story and it’s pretty harrowing.

Afterwards they might decide that’s all they need, or they might recognise that they need to take things further face-to-face.’

Kate Anthony, a psychotherapist and co-founder of the Online Therapy Institute (www.onlinetherapyinstitute.com), says that technological advances are putting power and choice into the hands of clients – they can choose how they want to work, whether by text, e-mail or in a virtual world. And if they want a different therapist they can find one at a click of the mouse. ‘The main difference from face-to-face therapy’, Anthony says, ‘is the lack of a physical presence. This cuts through all the white noise – the biases that a physical presence creates.

It allows the client to be much less inhibited, so it’s a much faster way of working. Also, with a client being able to create their own avatar, you can examine how people like to present themselves to people virtually, providing lots of material for examining how the client views themselves.’

Leisen/Wilson, who is trained in person-centred and solution-focused counselling, says that the lack of visual feedback from a client’s real world facial emotional expressions, tone of voice and body language means that he needs to be explicit in asking how his clients are.

However, he stresses that it is still possible to build up a meaningful therapeutic relationship: ‘It’s been the case that for a long time people have been deeply moved by the written word, and so it is with the way people express themselves in what they type online – their words can tell you a huge amount.’

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One key issue on which experts are currently divided concerns the extent to which virtual world therapy can ever be a complete substitute for face-to-face therapy. ‘I’m convinced that, in general, the “real” cannot be totally replaced with the “virtual”,’ says Alessandra Gorini at the Applied Technology for NeuroPsychology Lab in Milan, where she conducts clinical research in virtual worlds under the supervision of Professor Giuseppe Riva. ‘One of the most important things is the creation of a good therapeutic relationship between patients and their therapist, and unfortunately I cannot imagine a good and effective therapeutic relationship that was originally established between two avatars. That’s why we suggest using

world abilities and strengths notwithstanding, the appeal is obvious of a digital world that allows people to cast aside the chains of their real life disabilities and assume an identity of their own choosing.

Psychologist Simon Bignell at the University of Derby has been investigating online communication patterns among people with autism and Asperger’s for whom virtual world communities are proving to be especially popular (e.g. http://braintalk.blogs. com/brigadoon). Intriguingly, he’s found little or no differences between the way people with autism communicate with each other online in SL and the way ‘neurotypical’ people communicate.

‘This is bizarre, really,’ he says, ‘because you’d expect to replicate the deficiencies in their social communication skills from the real world. But I think the virtual world is levelling the playing field – a lot of people use text rather than the speech function, so this may be allowing people with autism and Asperger’s to slow down the flow of information. It makes communication a bit like a flow of text messages: you have to be succinct, to the point and unambiguous, which suits people with a condition like autism.’

Virtual teaching

the virtual online sessions only if the therapist and the patient already know each other.’

Anthony, who co-authored the guidelines on online therapy published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, disagrees. ‘I think the time will come when technology is the mainstay of the profession and most people will use it in some shape or form.

You could argue that Second Life is already face-to-face counselling – you’ve got two physical representations, and as they get more realistic and technology gets more sophisticated, the fact that you’re not in the same room won’t get noticed.’

Another striking feature in the evolution of virtual worlds has been the growth in online communities for people with conditions like cerebral palsy and autism, who would ordinarily find it difficult to seek each other out for support and companionship. Their real-

A related line of work that Bignell (avatar name Milton Broome) is involved in concerns using virtual worlds for teaching.

The most immediate advantage to virtual teaching is obvious – people, wherever they are located in the real world, can congregate in the same virtual space to hear a lecture or engage in a tutorial.

Bignell and his colleagues have gone further, asking what kind of virtual environments are optimal for teaching and how the creative possibilities of online worlds can be most effectively exploited to enhance teaching.

To this end, Bignell invited students to a series of virtual lectures, each time changing the environment according to their earlier feedback. He and his coworkers reached the point where 500 square metres of virtual space had been stripped back with all distractions removed. ‘We came to the conclusion that actually very little is needed in a virtual classroom,’ he says. ‘The basic requirements are the space that people can be in, perhaps a platform to stand on, the students, the teacher and the content.’

The students found it to be an odd experience at first, Bignell says, but eventually their attitudes started to change and most of them experienced

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a sense of total immersion, rather like being absorbed in a captivating movie.

Other psychologists are using virtual technology in a different way – creating their own virtual spaces Other advantages to using and making them truly immersive, using headsets or vast floor-to-ceiling screens. ‘You can think of virtual worlds for teaching immersion as being defined by whether you can just turn your head away from the virtual reality (VR) include the fact that there is or not,’ says Mel Slater (ICREA-University of Barcelona and UCL). ‘If the answer’s Yes, then that’s not a playful element, so it can be immersive VR. The other aspect is the extent to which your whole body is engaged. To look around you, easier to capture students’ do you turn your head or simply use your fingers on a keyboard?’ interest. The freedom of the Slater was the lead author of a study that attracted huge interest in 2006 when he and his colleagues worlds also allow lecturers to attempted to replicate Stanley Milgram's classic obedience research using immersive VR. The create virtual lab spaces and researchers found that as participants increased the voltage of the punishment they were inflicting upon resources that might be out the virtual ‘learner’, they showed all the physiological hallmarks of stress, even though they ‘knew’ the of reach in the real world. person they were punishing was not real.

Looking ahead, Bignell is to This finding reflects a more general observation from immersive VR research indicating that people lead a new six-month project tend to respond in VR as they would in the real world. ‘The best example is a hole in the ground,’ says called Preview-Psych, which Slater. ‘People’s immediate reaction is to jump back from a deep precipice in a virtual environment, and aims to translate to they show all the signs of anxiety as if it were real. The next phase is a cognitive evaluation – they might psychology a series of say to themselves “I know it isn’t there”, calm down and actually step on the hole. Other people never get problem-based learning to that stage. The perceptual information telling them that there’s a precipice is too powerful.’ methods that were designed Alessandra Gorini and her colleagues Giuseppe Riva and Andrea Gaggioli in Milan run an immersive at Coventry University for the VR lab with the specific purpose of testing therapeutic applications using a free open-source software virtual teaching of health and (www.neurovr.org). They recently showed that immersive VR could be used to help obese patients reduce nursing. their response to stress, thus helping prevent one of the main triggers for their overeating. They are now One aspect of this planning a VR trial with people who have generalised anxiety disorder. ‘We’re using biofeedback involves setting up so-called combined with VR, to teach patients to control their anxiety,’ says Gorini. ‘intelligent avatars’, which Immersive VR really comes into its own when helping people overcome their phobias, such as of look like other avatars but are spiders or flying. Compared with real-life exposure, virtual reality allows therapists to take complete actually automated. ‘By control of the intensity and quality of clients’ exposures to frightening stimuli. Such exposures can be programming these avatars to ceased immediately, if necessary, and particular situations can be over-practised at will. ‘Take the fear approach students online, we of flying,’ says Gorini. ‘Using virtual reality therapy during a single one-hour session, a patient scared by can use this technology to landings can practice several of them without wasting time and money with other aspects of air travel.’ steer conversations along a certain track,’ Bignell says.

‘You can get the robot avatar to introduce information on a terms of methods and techniques, topic, schizophrenia for instance, and emphasises the commitment that is that we’ve had for many years. We can then allow the student to reflect on that involved. ‘You need to recognise that simulate communities, we can simulate content in conversation. What’s more, the people will be disconcerted if somebody environments, we can simulate intelligent avatar can play any role you comes in and says “Hi, I want to analyse psychological processes in a safe and want, whether it be the manager of a you”. And you need to be aware that anonymous way, all the while having healthcare centre or a virtual therapist.’ you’re stepping into a community. complete experimental control. I think I always advise ensuring that you give we’re going to see a massive expansion something back, and making sure people Take the plunge in the use of these worlds.’ realise they’re not being observed as if While some experts have raised concerns For psychologists who’ve been they’re bio-molecules in a Petri dish.’ about the possible risks of virtual worlds, convinced and can’t wait to get started, ‘It helps to establish yourself,’ she there can be no doubt that developments Nick Yee cautions that the field requires says, ‘not as a shining example of the in the field are offering psychologists a a skills set that is seldom taught in community, but take a month to wander multitude of new and exciting psychological curriculums; social round, make sure you know the ins and opportunities. Alessandra Gorini is psychologists especially will not be used the outs of the communities you want to particularly optimistic: ‘The number of to having so many participants, and the study and that you familiarise yourself scientific publications on virtual reality large data sets mean everything is with the virtual etiquette. Fail to do that for clinical applications has increased significant, so you have to use tools other and you’ll either get shunned or you’ll incredibly in the last few years,’ she says, than classic p-value based statistics to impact the community in a way that will adding that it’s great news that this year’s understand what's going on. ‘For ruin it for other people and possibly International CyberTherapy and example,’ Yee says, ‘in our Second Life destroy it completely.’

CyberPsychology Conference is to be held study, we created a tool that took If you remain undaunted, Bignell says in Italy (www.e-therapy.info). ‘This is behavioural “snaphots” of 80 participants the first place to start is to download the important’, she says, ‘because it over six weeks at five-second intervals. So free SL software from the internet. ‘Get demonstrates the great impact that virtual while virtual worlds are a powerful yourself an avatar, customise it and then realities are having, not only in the United platform to study interesting just take the plunge.’

States, but also in Europe.’ psychological questions, there’s also a lot Simon Bignell, too, can barely contain of start-up effort required.’ his excitement at the prospects offered by Aleks Krotoski agrees, pointing to the I Dr Christian Jarrett is The Psychologist’s virtual worlds. ‘I think for psychology, need for technical nous, and a powerful staff journalist. chrber@bps.org.uk this is the most exciting breakthrough, in computer with fast broadband. She also

Using immersive virtual reality

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Siblings – friends or foes?

Alison Pike, Tina Kretschmer and Judith F. Dunn on what the research says about achieving a harmonious household

The vast majority of us have at least one brother or sister, yet sibling relationships have received scant attention in the UK. While many parents claim to have a second child as a ‘companion’ for their first child, the reality is that many brothers and sisters spend much of their time locked in conflict. At the extreme, it is in fact the case that children are more likely to become the victims of abuse by a sibling than by any other family member.

On the flip side, many brothers and sisters are, at least at times, the best of friends.

This article describes a study designed to uncover features of families as well as individual children that foster warm, intimate relationships between siblings versus hostile, conflict-ridden brother–sister interactions.

question resources

Pike, A., Coldwell, J. & Dunn, J. (2006).

Family relationships in middle childhood. York: York Publishing Services/Joseph Rowntree Foundation. www.sussexfrl.org

references

F

To what degree do you think that parents should be held responsible for sibling relationships?

Ablow, J.C. & Measelle, J.R. (1993).

The Berkeley Puppet Interview: Interviewing and coding systems manuals. University of Oregon: Department of Psychology.

Atzaba-Poria, N. & Pike, A. (2008).

Determinants of parental differential treatment: Parental and contextual factors during middle childhood. Child Development, 79, 217–232.

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or most of us, our relationships with brothers and sisters are the longest lasting of our lives. Siblings come before friendships or romantic relationships, and usually outlive our parents. The theme of sibling rivalry might be the most prevalent in biblical and epic writings, and also in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex.

However, although rivalry is one salient characteristic of most sibling relationships, there are many others.

Sibling relationships are usually characterised by both positive and negative interactions, and provide a safe training ground for interactions outside the home.

Conflicts, quarrels and aggression are more prevalent among some sibling pairs; others are high in intimacy, emotional and social support; yet others involve an ambivalent combination of the two (Brody, 1998; Dunn, 2002).

Whatever the relationship, it is often highly charged; exchanges between siblings are marked by both greater warmth and greater conflict than exchanges with either parents or friends (Dunn et al., 1996). Siblings also spend a considerable amount of time with each other, more so than with their parents (Larson & Richards, 1994), and know each other well. The intimate knowledge that siblings have of one another as well as the emotional intensity of the relationship means that siblings have the potential to significantly impact on one another’s development and well-being.

Until about three decades ago, the importance of siblings in terms of

Brody, G.H. (1998). Sibling relationship quality: Its causes and consequences. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 1–24.

Buhrmester, D. & Furman, W. (1990).

Perceptions of sibling relationships during middle childhood and adolescence. Child Development, 61, 1387–1398.

Coldwell, J., Pike, A. & Dunn, J. (2006).

Household chaos – Links with

individual children’s psychological development was neglected by researchers, despite the fact that in both the UK and the US around 80 per cent of children still grow up with at least one brother or sister.

Given that some brothers and sisters get on well and others badly, it’s not surprising that psychologists are often asked by our hairdressers/taxi drivers/party guests: ‘My kids fight all the time, what can I do about it?’ or ‘What’s the ideal spacing between children so they get along?’ So for practical as well as theoretical reasons, we, along with other sibling researchers, have focused on what factors predict which brothers and sisters will get along well, and which badly.

Structural factors such as age spacing and gender composition of siblings have been examined in the US by Buhrmester and Furman (1990) and found to affect the quality of relationships between brothers and sisters in childhood and adolescence.

Sibling pairs in which children were less than four years apart in age, for example, were more intimate, but also more competitive. In addition, the interactions of same-sex sibling pairs in childhood often involve more aggression and dominance than interactions of oppositesex sibling pairs, although this does not preclude warmth and closeness.

Interestingly, all children in Buhrmester and Furman’s study reported greater intimacy and companionship with sisters than with brothers, regardless of gender composition or age difference.

Brothers’ and sisters’ temperaments are also important factors that impact on how well they get along with one another.

Brody (1998) summarised that especially active and emotionally intense children experience elevated levels of conflict in relationships with their siblings. Other relationships within the family are also associated with sibling relationship quality.

Studies have compared the quality of children’s sibling relationships and patterns of other familial relationships and found impressive overlap. In other words, children and adolescents who report positive relationships with their parents

parenting and child behaviour.

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47, 1116–1122.

Coldwell, J., Pike, A. & Dunn, J. (2008).

Maternal differential treatment and child adjustment: A multi-informant approach. Social Development, 17, 596–612.

Dunn, J. (2002). Sibling relationships. In P.K. Smith & C.H. Hart (Eds.) Blackwell handbook of childhood

social development (pp.223–237).

Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Dunn, J., Creps, C. & Brown, J. (1996).

Children’s family relationships between two and five: Developmental changes and individual differences. Social Development, 5, 230–250.

Dunn, J., Kendrick, C. & MacNamee, R. (1982). The reaction of first-born children to the birth of a sibling:

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also describe their relationships with their siblings as good (see Brody, 1998, for a review). This pattern fits well into the theoretical concepts of attachment and social learning, according to which children’s social development is largely determined by their relationships to their parents or other primary caregivers.

However, all this research used samples from the US. There has been little if any psychological research of sibling relationships in the UK since Judy Dunn and colleagues’ intensive study of a small group of Cambridge families in the early 1980s (e.g. Dunn et al., 1982). In addition, previous research on young children’s sibling relationships has relied on parental reports of sibling relationship quality. We began the Sisters and Brothers Study with the aim of describing sibling relationships among typical brothers and sisters aged four to eight years old, living in southern England. A book and several journal articles stemming from the project have been published, and form the basis of this article (see Atzaba-Poria & Pike, 2008; Coldwell et al., 2006, 2008; Kretschmer & Pike, 2008; Pike et al., 2005, 2006).

The Sisters and Brothers Study We asked the children themselves about their relationship with their brother or sister, via a puppet interview (Ablow & Measelle, 1993). During the interview, two identical puppets made opposing statements about their sibling (e.g. ‘I like my brother’, ‘I don’t like my brother’) and then asked the child about their sibling (e.g. ‘How about your brother?’). The researcher’s face was covered by the puppets, to encourage the child to interact directly with ‘Iggy’ and ‘Ziggy’.

Children often simply repeated the item back to the puppets, or repeated the item providing some explanation: Iggy: I don’t let my sister play in my room.

Ziggy: I do let my sister play in my room. How about you?

David: I have to let her play in my

Mothers’ reports. Annual Progress in Child Psychiatry and Child Development, 143–165.

Hetherington, E., Henderson, S.H., Reiss, D. et al. (1999). Adolescent siblings in stepfamilies: Family functioning and adolescent adjustment.

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 64(4), 222.

Kretschmer, T. & Pike, A. (2008). Young

room because we share the room but I don’t let her play on my bed.

Iggy: I do get cross when my sister plays with my toys.

Ziggy: I don’t get cross when my sister plays with my toys. How about you?

Andrew: I do get cross when my sister plays with my toys cos I’ve got them up in a high place and she knocks them down.

Sometimes children amplified statements made by the puppets:

sibling relationships from demographic factors. First, we found no differences in sibling relationship quality between children living with single mothers and children from two-parent families. Such findings run counter to the stereotypical view, and further challenge definitions of families that focus on structural components. This implies that families are best conceptualised by their constituent relationships, rather than household membership.

The next demographic factor considered was the gender constellation of

Iggy: My brother hates me.

Ziggy: My brother doesn’t hate me. How about your brother?

Jess: My brother doesn’t hate me, I think he loves me actually.

At other times children qualified the statements: Iggy: My brother and I argue.

Ziggy: My brother and I don’t argue. How about you and your brother?

Sophie: Me and my brother squabble over little things, not really big things.

Gaining meaningful information from very young children does pose significant challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. We were thus extremely pleased with the success of the puppet interviews.

This child-friendly method yielded quantifiable information that ‘agreed’ with reports from the parents to a similar degree as has been reported for older adolescents (e.g. Hetherington et al., 1999). We think it was equally important, however, that the children’s reports did not simply duplicate the reports provided by the parents. The moderate levels of agreement indicate that there is also a great deal of distinctiveness to children’s perceptions.

Next, we moved on to look at whether it was possible to predict the quality of

children’s sibling relationship quality: Distal and proximal correlates. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50, 581–589.

Larson, R.W. & Richards, M.H. (1994).

Family emotions: Do young adolescents and their parents experience the same states? Journal of Research on Adolescence, 4, 567–583.

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Exchanges between siblings are marked by both greater warmth and greater conflict than exchanges with either parents or friends

the sibling pairs. Thus, we compared boy–boy, boy–girl, girl–boy, and girl–girl sibling pairs in terms of their sibling relationship quality. According to parent reports there were no significant differences according to the gender of the sibling pairs. When looking at the children’s reports via the puppet interviews, however, a difference did emerge from the older siblings’ perspective.

Specifically, older sisters with younger sisters reported the most warmth, and older brothers with younger sisters reported the lowest levels of warmth.

The final demographic factor considered was the age gap between siblings. This ranged in magnitude from zero (there were two set of fraternal twins

Minuchin, P. (2002). Looking toward the horizon: Present and future in the study of family systems. In J.P. McHale & W.S. Grolnick (Eds.) Retrospect and prospect in the psychological study of families. (pp.259-278). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pike, A., Coldwell, J. & Dunn, J. (2005).

Sibling relationships in early/middle childhood: Children’s perspectives

and links with individual adjustment.

Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 523–532.

Pike, A., Coldwell, J. & Dunn, J. (2006).

Family relationships in middle childhood. York: York Publishing Services/Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

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in our sample) to 52 months. A modest but consistent pattern emerged, indicating that a smaller age gap enhances sibling relationships. However, we found that once older sibling age was accounted for, age gap no longer predicted sibling relationship quality. In other words, regardless of the age gap between siblings, those sibling pairs containing an older sibling of seven or eight enjoyed less positive sibling relationships than did those pairs containing an older sibling of five or six.

It is worth highlighting that the ‘significant’ links with demographic factors were all quite small in magnitude. Our findings thus confirm previous research indicating that these structural factors do not play a key role in family life.

Next, we turned to the individual children’s characteristics. The four aspects of child temperament assessed were emotionality (specifically a tendency to display negative emotions such as anger, fear, or upset), activity, sociability and shyness. As expected, highly emotional children were involved in less positive and more negative sibling relationships.

Only one additional association reached significance, that between the older siblings’ sociability and sibling relationship positivity (as reported by the parents).

More sociable older siblings were involved in more positive sibling relationships.

Finally, we looked to contextual factors that we hypothesised would work as protective or risk factors for how well brothers and sisters get on with one another. Four distinct aspects of the family context were examined: household organisation, marital satisfaction (in the case of two-parent families), socioeconomic status, and household crowding.

We expected that less stressful family circumstances would be supportive of better-quality sibling relationships. Thus, we hypothesised that families living in more organised homes (specifically homes with regular routines and low levels of background noise), where parents were more satisfied with their marriages, of higher socio-economic status, and lower levels of crowding would also contain siblings with high-quality relationships.

Household organisation emerged as an most important contextual factors for sibling harmony. More organised families fostered more positive and less negative sibling relationships. Among the twoparent families, three of the four correlations with marital satisfaction also yielded significant findings. That is, betterquality parental relationships appear to ‘spill-over’ into more positive relationships between their children, suggesting that children may learn positive relationship

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skills from their parents, or that happily married parents are better able to structure their children’s environment and respond in a manner conducive to more amicable relations between their children.

It was equally important to find that no significant links emerged with socio-economic status, or household crowding. This mirrored the earlier demographic findings – these more objective, structural aspects of families wane in importance when compared to more subjective, detailed aspects of the everyday lives of families.

Links that emerged between contextual factors and the sibling relationship highlighted the fact that sibling relationships do not occur in a vacuum, but are inextricably tied up with their surroundings. In particular, we were struck by the links with the marital relationship as well as household organisation. Unlike parenting, these factors do not directly relate to the children involved, yet these associations were moderate in magnitude.

These findings remind us that children are not immune from tension between parents, and that a more chaotic home environment can put a strain on all family members, perhaps facilitating sibling conflict. A holistic approach to family functioning is thus warranted (Minuchin, 2002). The family system is also permeable to contextual factors within and outside the family.

We are forced to conclude that there is no easy answer as to why some siblings get along well while others become locked in conflict. However, we can say that enhancing sibling relationships has very little to do with family structure, age spacing, or even the sex constellation of sibling pairs. Instead, our findings indicate that children’s individual characters and the family environment are important factors in determining whether brothers and sisters become friends or foes.

different cultures has the potential to increase the generalisability of current findings or to uncover cultural variations reflecting differing family processes. In addition, further research using selected samples will illuminate the family dynamics that emerge in the case of physically or mentally ill children.

Recent advances in statistics are also beginning to have a profound effect on sibling research. Traditional analytic techniques made it difficult to contemplate incorporating information from more than two children per family. Multilevel modelling has the flexibility to use information from sibships of varying sizes, and to identify those factors that affect differences between families, as well as those that lead to differentiation within families. We are thus entering an era when we will be able to better understand the development of singleton children, children with one brother or sister, and those with multiple sibling relationships.

I Alison Pike

is in the Psychology Department, University of Sussex alisonp@sussex.ac.uk I Tina Kretschmer

Future directions The sample of our own study included working- and middle-class families; however, the population from which the sample was drawn is primarily Caucasian.

Given Britain’s ethnic and cultural diversity, future research including ethnic minority groups and families across

is in the Psychology Department, University of Sussex T.Kretschmer@sussex.ac.uk I Judith Dunn

is Professor of Psychology in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, London judy.dunn@iop.kcl.ac.uk

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hear some of the UK's top psychologists talk about what makes us tick!

Edinburgh Lectures Tuesday 17 November 2009 Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh Dr Adrian North, Heriot Watt University Dr Monica Whitty, Nottingham Trent University Paul Gardner, St Andrews University Dr Carol Ireland, Merseycare NHS Trust

www.bps.org.uk/edinburgh2009

London Lectures Tuesday 8 December 2009 Kensington Town Hall Professor Richard Carson, Queen’s University Belfast Professor Mark Griffiths, Nottingham Trent University Dr Pam Heaton, Goldsmith’s University of London Dr Brett Smith, University of Exeter Dr Catriona Morrison, University of Leeds

www.bps.org.uk/london2009

For further information, E-mail: edinburghlectures@bps.org.uk or londonlectures@bps.org.uk Tel: 0116 252 9555 Fax: 0116 255 7123

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Giftedness and the brain Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic look towards the neural mechanics behind talent

In the study of neural activity underlying task performance, neuroscientists have discovered that different neural states arise in low and high performers on the same cognitive tasks. What then sets the high performer apart?

This article discusses the various neural mechanisms advanced to account for differences between gifted and non-gifted performers. Is there a gender association? Do ‘talents’ have access to more neural resources?

Or do they just use their resources more efficiently? And what is the role of practice and motivation in achieving expertise?

iftedness or genius in children and adolescents is an intriguing phenomenon seeking scientific explanation. What makes a child stand out from their peers as talented? What pushes their performance into the uppermost part of the normal ‘bell curve’ distribution of different levels of performance, whether it is music, maths, sport or some other domain? Or consider general intelligence: reaching the 97th percentile (IQ > 130) is as unlikely as mental retardation (IQ < 70). Although an empirical definition and ‘diagnosis’ of talent does not necessarily imply or refer to later academic or professional achievement, the question of what drives such ability is still of interest on a personal and professional level. What can modern methods tell us?

Cognitive neuroscience and performance

question

How is the triad of talent – higher capability, less effort in standard tasks, and high motivation – represented on the brain level?

resources

Howe, M.J.A., Davidson, J.W. & Sloboda, J.A. (1998). Innate talents: Reality or myth? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 399-442.

Pfeiffer, S.I. (Ed.) (2008). The handbook of giftedness in children: Psychoeducational theory, research and best practices. Berlin: Springer.

Centre for Gifted Education Policy: www.apa.org/ed/cgep.html

references

G

Alexander, J.E., O’Boyle, M.W. & Benbow, C.P. (1996). Developmentally advanced EEG alpha power in gifted male and female adolescents.

International Journal of Psychophysiology, 23, 25–31.

Benbow, C.P. (1988). Sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability in intellectually talented preadolescents, their nature, effects, and possible causes. Behavioral Brain

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While other scientific approaches seek psychological (e.g. working memory capacity), psychosocial (e.g. parents’ income), biological (e.g. gender), or genetic (e.g. specific polymorphisms) explanations of giftedness, neuroscientists look for structural and functional brainrelated factors covarying with performance. Classical neuropsychology explored (and continues to explore) the cerebral causes of the loss of function in neurological patients; modern brain research seeks to understand the intact cognitive function. Non-invasive methods (e.g. EEG, MRI) allow the observation of brain structures and processes in healthy

Science, 11, 169–232.

Duckworth, A.L. & Seligman, M.E. (2005).

Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16, 939–944.

Elbert, T., Pantev, C., Wienbruch, C. et al.

(1995). Increased cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players. Science, 270, 305–307.

people as they perform cognitive tasks.

However, there is a potential problem here. If the task is too hard or too easy for the person, how do we know they actually perform the cognitive process under examination while their brains are scanned? In the majority of current neuroimaging studies, the inevitable variations in individual performance are widely ignored. All subjects work on the same task, irrespective of their variant performance levels.

However, recent studies show that identical cognitive tasks do not induce identical neuronal states in high and low performers. For example, Rypma et al.

(2006) considered the variation of performance on an easy cognitive task (symbol–digit comparison task, from the Wechsler intelligence scales) in a normal sample of subjects. They split the sample, on the basis of median response times. While the fastreacting subjects showed posterior (i.e. parietal) brain activation during the task, the slowerreacting subjects showed Cause or effect? anterior (i.e. frontal) activation during the identical task; this finding is termed the ‘anterior–posterior pattern’.

This study raises doubts that cognitive states can be defined by tasks without reference to the individual performance levels. Interindividual variation of performance levels cannot be ignored when neuroscientists search for correlates of talent: it actually represents the research objective. Nevertheless, most of the presently available neurocognitive research on talent adheres to the principle (or

Ericsson, K.A. & Charness, N. (1994).

Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition. American Psychologist, 49, 725–747.

Geschwind, N. & Galaburda, A.M. (1985a). Cerebral lateralization.

Biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology: I. A hypothesis and a program for research. Archives of Neurology, 42, 428–459.

Geschwind, N. & Galaburda, A.M.

(1985b). Cerebral lateralization.

Biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology: II. A hypothesis and a program for research. Archives of Neurology, 42, 521–552.

Geschwind, N. & Galaburda, A.M. (1985c). Cerebral lateralization.

Biological mechanisms, associations, and pathology: III. A hypothesis and a program for research. Archives of Neurology, 42, 634–654.

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perhaps illusion?) that a task can produce a consistent neurocognitive state, regardless of differences in performance.

The ‘neural resource’ account Neuroscientists assume that cognitive functions are realised by neuronal activity.

Consequently, complex skills should require additional neuronal resources.

The Geschwind–Galaburda model (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985a-c) represents the classical ‘neuronal resource’ account of giftedness. It was based on the empirical observation that giftedness was associated to some degree with the male gender, atypical handedness, less expressed functional asymmetry of the hemispheres as measured by visualhemifield stimulation and dichotic listening tests, and higher prevalence of

Grabner, R.H., Neubauer, A.C. & Stern, E. (2006). Superior performance and neural efficiency: The impact of intelligence and expertise. Brain Research Bulletin, 69, 422–439.

Haier, R.J., Siegel, B.V. Jr, MacLachlan, A. et al. (1992). Regional glucose metabolic changes after learning a complex visuospatial/motor task: A positron emission tomographic study.

Brain Research, 570, 134–143.

allergies and myopia. From this pattern, the authors concluded that the right hemisphere was more active in talents (i.e. that talented people show less lefthemispheric dominance and more pronounced interhemispheric exchange).

Geschwind and Galaburda speculated that in talents fetal exposure to higher levels of the male sex hormone testosterone might have favoured the relative growth of the right hemisphere and the corpus callosum.

Parts of the model were confirmed in several studies.

For example, using fMRI, O’Boyle et al. (2005) reported increased right hemisphere contributions to maths-related tasks in mathematical talents.

Alexander et al. (1996) revealed increased activity of the right hemisphere in talents during rest by EEG analysis.

However, recent research has challenged the evidence for the almost classical dogma of a higher proportion of male talents. While Benbow (1988) had reported a gender ratio of 15:1 for male mathematical talents, Hyde et al. (2008) recently showed that no gender effects on maths skills could be revealed in any grade and on any level of performance (provided that the maths test was mandatory for all pupils, both girls and boys).

Research with musical experts provides evidence for the ‘neuronal resource’ account of exceptional skills; however, it also underlines the general role of years of practice. Since psychophysiological research is correlational and quasiexperimental, it remains unclear whether neurophysiological correlates of musical expertise are a cause or an effect of such training. Evidence is mixed, for example: I In a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, the neural response (so called

Hyde, J., Lindberg, S.M., Linn, M.C. et al.

(2008). Gender similarities characterize math performance.

Science, 321, 494–495.

Jaušovec, N. (1996). Differences in EEG alpha activity related to giftedness.

Intelligence, 23, 159–173.

Larson, G.E., Haier, R.J., LaCasse, L. & Hazen, K. (1995). Evaluation of a ‘mental effort’ hypothesis for correlations between cortical

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I

I

I

mismatch negativity) to occasional changes in melodic contour or interval was 25 per cent higher in musicians than in non-musicians when they were listening to notes from musical scales, whereas no remarkable group differences occurred during pure ‘nonmusical’ note stimulation (Pantev et al., 2003).

Musicians showed higher grey matter (i.e. neuronal cell somata) density in the left inferior frontal lobe, or Broca’s area (Sluming et al., 2007). This area is crucial for language production but is also involved in sight-reading of musical notes in professional musicians, as shown by the same group (Sluming et al., 2002). Grey matter density in Broca’s area was positively correlated with years of musical practice, indicating that the increase may have been an effect rather than a cause.

In violin playing, the left-hand fingers create musical notes by stopping the strings on the fingerboard. This requires perfect motor control of each finger, whereas the right hand just holds the bow. Elbert et al. (1995) showed that the regional volume of the primary motor areas were larger for the fingers of the left hand in violinists compared to the same areas for the right hand; the effect was smallest for the thumbs. However, the effect emerged only when the person had started playing the violin before the age of seven. This indicates that neuroplasticity works more effectively during childhood and could explain why learning may become more difficult thereafter.

Musicians with perfect pitch – the ability to name a note and to evaluate whether it is tuned precisely without reference to adjacent notes – have a more expressed left–right asymmetry in the volume of the planum temporale (superior temporal lobe) than musicians without perfect pitch but with the same amount of practice (Schlaug et al., 1995). A relatively

metabolism and intelligence.

Intelligence, 21, 267–278.

Lee, K.H., Choi, Y.Y., Gray, J.R. et al.

(2006). Neural correlates of superior intelligence: Stronger recruitment of posterior parietal cortex.

NeuroImage, 29, 578–586.

Miller, E. (1994). Intelligence and brain myelination: A hypothesis. Personality and Individual Differences, 17, 803–832.

Neubauer, A.C., Grabner, R.H., Fink, A. & Neuper, C. (2005). Intelligence and neural efficiency: Further evidence of the influence of task content and sex on the brain–IQ relationship. Brain Research Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 217–225.

O’Boyle, M.W., Cunnington, R., Silk, T.J. et al. (2005). Mathematically gifted male adolescents activate a unique brain network during mental

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larger left planum temporale might represent a morphological disposition for a specific music-related, potentially inborn, skill that appears to be independent of formal training.

Although this finding seems to reveal a congenital difference, and thus a neurophysiological correlate of musical talent, it cannot be excluded that early experience and implicit practice contributed to the morphological differences.

that efficiency might depend on stronger ‘myelination’, the electrically insulating sheath that allows action potentials to ‘leap’ along the axon by saltatory transmission.

differences between high and low performers (e.g. Rypma et al., 2006; see above). Frontal activation is related to a more controlled (i.e. more effortful and energy-consuming) cognitive activity (i.e. working memory), which mainly occurs at the system’s capability limits. Posterior Convergence of both models activation is related to a more automatic In terms of general intelligence Shaw et perceptual processing below the capability al. (2006) revealed that the limits. developmental dynamics, but not specific It’s here that we run into that issue developmental stages, differ between again: that differences in brain activation high-IQ talents and nontalents. The study are often related to task difficulty (Haier et provided evidence for both accounts of al., 1992; Larson et al., 1995), which partly The ‘neural efficiency’ account talent: the cortex of highly intelligent depends on subjective capability. When While the ‘neural resource’ account aims children is thinner before the age of eight working on easy tasks, talented to point out the high capability of talents, years (indicating neural efficiency) but participants show less metabolic activation the ‘neural efficiency’ account addresses then grows faster and is finally thicker than nontalented participants, providing differences between the talents and than that of their average-intelligent peers the evidence for the ‘neural efficiency’ nontalents while working on identical in adolescence (indicating neural account. However, applying a more tasks. Obviously, a skilled cognitive difficult task system is more efficient – it achieves revealed more goals with fewer resources (time, activation in subjective effort) than an unskilled talented system. But how does cognitive individuals, efficiency translate to the neuronal supporting level? the ‘neuronal Neurocognitive efficiency has resource’ primarily been probed by task-related account. In Lee EEG recordings and advanced et al.’s (2006) methods of EEG data analysis. For study, example, Jaušovec (1996) reported increasing task that talented individuals showed difficulty increased alpha-EEG power, indicating yielded stronger less cognitive effort than in a normal activation in cohort while working on an identical posterior parts task. (Interestingly, the study also of the frontoshowed that the talented individuals parietal brain showed more mental activity when not network in working on a task.) Further evidence highly for increased neural efficiency in intelligent talents was provided by several studies teenagers than from Neubauer (e.g. Neubauer et al., in age-matched Professional mastership requires at least 10,000 hours training 2005; Grabner et al., 2006). In these peers of average studies less mental effort in talents was intelligence. resources). The correlation between indicated by less event-related Conversely, our own (as yet unpublished) developmental dynamics and intelligence desynchronisation of the alpha-EEG in studies on mental arithmetic and mental talents as compared to nontalents during primarily appeared in the prefrontal 3D-rotation in adolescents revealed higher identical tasks. cortex. frontal activation in mathematically Another explanation for higher Several neuroimaging studies on talent nontalented participants than in their neurocognitive efficiency in talents is (or high performance levels) reveal an talented counterparts. It’s a mixed picture! offered by Miller (1994), who suggested anterior–posterior pattern of activation Taken together, the neuroimaging

rotation. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 583–587.

Pantev, C., Ross, B., Fujioka, T. et al.

(2003). Music and learning-induced cortical plasticity. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 999, 438–450.

Rypma, B., Berger, J.S., Prabhakaran, V. et al. (2006). Neural correlates of cognitive efficiency. NeuroImage, 33, 969–979.

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Schlaug, G., Jäncke, L., Huang, Y. & Steinmetz, H. (1995). In vivo evidence of structural brain asymmetry in musicians. Science, 267, 699–701.

Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J. et al.

(2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature, 440, 676–679.

Sluming, V., Barrick, T., Howard, M. et al.

(2002). Voxel-based morphometry reveals increased gray matter

density in Broca’s area in male symphony orchestra musicians.

NeuroImage, 17, 1613–1622.

Sluming, V., Brooks, J., Howard, M. et al.

(2007). Broca’s area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 3799–3806.

Snyder, A.W., Bahramali, H., Hawker, T. & Mitchell, D.J. (2006). Savant-like numerosity skills revealed in normal

people by magnetic pulses.

Perception, 35, 837–845.

Yerkes, R.M. & Dodson, J.D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, 459–482.

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findings suggest that talented people are more efficient in their particular domain because they can recruit more neuronal resources for automatic processing prior to frontal activation. Alternatively, their working memory (or frontal brain system) might be more efficient as well (cf. Shaw et al., 2006). Frontal activation as revealed in neuroimaging studies may be regarded as a general indicator of reaching individual capability limits. In this way, it could allow us to make a distinction between high and low performers.

Talent and motivation Comprehensive explanations of giftedness need to explain not only higher performance, but also the high motivation to practise. It is now generally accepted that professional mastership requires dedicated high-quality training of at least 10,000 hours (i.e. nearly two hours per day of practice from the age of 3 to 17 years; Ericsson & Charness, 1994).

Notably, it has been shown that for high academic achievement, it is not necessary to have an IQ much above the average.

Duckworth and Seligman (2005) reported that the individual differences in

achievement among the students with the same IQs were explained by motivation, self-discipline and practice.

The neuroscientific findings on talent remind us of the classical law of Yerkes and Dodson (1908) that states that optimal performance is achieved at (individual) medium levels of arousal. Our speculation is that the onset of frontal activation, as revealed by neuroimaging studies, may serve as an indicator of the critical transition from optimal medium arousal to stress, (i.e. mental overload). An implication of this assumption is the notion that frontal activation does not specifically contribute to solving a task, but instead indicates unspecific and potentially disturbing neurocognitive activity at capacity limits (cf. Snyder et al., 2006).

So what are the lessons of this for the real world? Talented and nontalented individuals are often exposed to the same tasks irrespective of their different capability (e.g. in school classes). Perhaps in such tasks the former achieve good results with very little or medium effort, which reinforces positive attitudes and practising. In contrast, the latter experience stress, or even fail, despite making a strong effort, which reinforces negative attitudes. A possible lesson from psychological and neuroscientific talent research might be the idea that higher motivation – and, consequently, more practice and higher achievement – result from an individualised task selection, ensuring success at an individual’s medium levels of arousal and effort, prior to the onset of frontal activation.

I Christian Hoppe

is in the Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn Medical Centre, Bonn christian.hoppe@ukb.unibonn.de

I Jelena Stojanovic

is in the Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn Medical Centre, Bonn

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read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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OPINION

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‘Return to work’ revisited William J. Fear argues that people on incapacity benefit need a psychosocial intervention rooted in self-efficacy

eing out of work can have harmful effects on both physical and mental health, and nobody wants to hear that they are too ill to work. Yet the number of people on incapacity benefit (IB) has more than trebled since the 1970s to 2.7 million (DWP, 2002), without a corresponding decrease in the nation’s health.

This wider focus is bringing together (among others) the once disparate and vague constructs, and sectors, of ‘stress’, ‘health and well-being at work’, ‘the happy and productive worker’, ‘sickness absence management’, ‘occupational health’, ‘return-to-work (RtW)’, and ‘welfare-towork’. At the same time there is a growing recognition that the health-related elements of these sectors have been largely dominated by a clinical or medical model, and this has not proved effective.

This development is particularly important in relation to the UK government’s ‘Pathways to Work’ policy, which aims to support people in receipt of IB to find and retain competitive employment (see DWP, 2002); that is, people claiming welfare support on grounds of long-term ill health, including and especially psychological distress.

There appears to be little or no reason why most people in receipt of IB could not work (see Waddell & Burton, 2006, for a review). Waddell and Aylward (2005) found that in the IB population 65–75 per cent of people have only a limited or inconsistent pathological basis for incapacity. Furthermore, 90 per cent of

references

B

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Audy, J.R. (1970). Man-made maladies and medicine. California Medicine, 113, 48–53.

Baily, R., Hales, J., Hayllar, O. & Wood, M. (2007). Pathways to work: Customer experiences and outcomes – 2007 survey. London: Department for Work and Pensions.

Ballard, J. (2006). The health and work debate. Occupational Health at Work, 3(3), 10–12.

new claimants initially expect to return to work in due course (Green et al., 2000).

It is now widely acknowledged that an improvement in health alone is not sufficient to bring about an occupational outcome – a ‘return to work’. However, we are becoming increasingly sure that, generally speaking, an occupational outcome tends to bring about an improvement in health (e.g. see Ballard, 2006). By an occupational outcome, I mean a return to competitive employment: working in the labour market for at least the minimum wage for 16 hours or more per week and for a continuous period of 13 weeks or more. This is an important distinction as it is now widely accepted that other forms of work, such as voluntary work, do not, overall, bring about the same health-related benefits as competitive employment. This may especially be the case when mental health and well-being is taken into account (e.g. see King & Lloyd, 2007).

A recent review of vocational rehabilitation (VR) found that while health care has a key role, treatment by itself has little impact on work outcomes.

This was especially the case for mental health: ‘Sickness absence and long-term incapacity associated with mental health problems are unlikely to be improved simply by providing more healthcare...’

(Waddell et al., 2008; p.23). And a recent (draft) review by NICE found that ‘there was a lack of evidence of a sufficient quality to demonstrate the effectiveness of [healthcare] interventions that help

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioural change. Psychological Review, 84, 191–215.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Bartley, M., Sacker, A., Schoon, I. et al.

(2005). Work, non-work, job satisfaction and psychological health. London: Health Development Agency.

people receiving incapacity benefit (or similar benefits) return to employment (paid and unpaid)’ (NICE, 2008, p.7).

Indeed, the VR community has been critical of its own role. King and Lloyd (2007, p.149) noted that ‘there is now a substantial amount of evidence that rehabilitation practitioners do not focus clearly on working with clients to achieve vocational outcomes’.

The current emerging paradigm for RtW, especially in relation to common health problems, including mental health problems, is a psychosocial one. (For an excellent practical resource see King et al., 2007.) An argument has been made for a ‘biopsychosocial’ paradigm.

Unfortunately this biopsychosocial model has remained a largely clinical model that lacks full and appropriate consideration of psychological, psychosocial, and organisational factors.

I’m not suggesting that we should ignore peoples’ health conditions when assisting them to return to work, especially in the case of personal injury.

Indeed, for someone whose health impacts on their functional ability then, in the short term, addressing that element of their health in relation to function may well bring about a resolution of the problem. However, this cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, this paradigm can arguably do more harm than good when iatrogenic effects occur.

An iatrogenic effect is described as an unwanted effect that is inadvertently introduced by a healthcare professional, or their treatment (see Gatchel, 2004).

One example is when advised to rest to relieve pain, a person may continue to rest for longer than necessary. This can change the person’s behaviour and/or beliefs in response to their condition and alter their routine. The consequences of this can be extreme debilitation (for further examples and discussion see Audy, 1970; Kouyanou et al., 1997; Lucire, 1986; Spillane, 2008).

Iatrogenic effects can also be created when clusters of symptoms that commonly occur in the normal population are

Booth, D. & James, R. (2008). A literature review of self-efficacy and effective jobsearch. Journal of Occupational Psychology Employment and Disability, 10(1), 27–42.

Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) (2002). Pathways to work: Helping people into employment. London: The Stationery Office.

Dixon, J., Mitchell, M. & Dickens, S. (2007). Pathways to work: Extension to

existing customers (Matched case study). London: Department for Work and Pensions.

Gatchel, R.J. (2004). Psychosocial factors that can influence the selfassessment of function. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 14, 197–206.

Green, H., Smith, A., Lilly, R. et al. (2000).

First effects of ONE. Department of Social Security Research Report No.

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opinion

126. London: The Stationery Office.

James, R. (2007). Job–capability match, adviser skills and the five self-efficacy barriers to employment. Journal of Occupational Psychology, Employment and Disability, 9(1), 3–12.

King, R. & Lloyd, C. (2007). Vocational rehabilitation. In R. King, C. Lloyd & T. Meehan (Eds.) Handbook of psychosocial rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell.

that while there was an objective set of long-standing variables that predict whether and when an IB claimant will return to work, the two strongest predictors were the person’s perception of their own health and their ‘distance from work’ or time out of competitive employment. In addition, perception of health, not actual health, was found to be one of the biggest barriers to sustained employment (see Baily et al., 2007, and Dixon et al., 2007).

of circumstances will greatly impact on their perceived (by self and others) ability to function.

With regard to RtW in its own right, Roger James and David Booth have demonstrated that self-efficacy is one of the most important facilitators/barriers to successful job outcomes. There are strong indications that self-efficacy is important in terms of maintaining good mental health at work (see Bartley et al., 2005; Booth & James, 2008; James, 2007).

There is a bigger argument here about the persons’ beliefs in relation to their symptoms, their ability to manage them in their everyday life, and especially their ability to manage their symptoms in relation to return to work and to stay in work. Both the individual and the ‘system’ within which they work need to be addressed.

If only one side is addressed then we have a ‘clean fish, dirty pond’ scenario where the individual is supported to manage their health and well-being, but then enters a work environment that is harmful to their health and wellbeing, and is ‘powerless’ to address the situation. Note that a harmful environment is not necessarily a physically harmful environment: it is one where there is a perceived uncontrollable threat. The only way to address that, other than changing the environment, is to improve self-efficacy.

The massive social experiment that was incapacity benefit cannot be addressed by ‘fixing broken individuals’ and in particular cannot be addressed by interventions based on the ‘cult of the individual’. It needs to be addressed now, as worklessness is becoming one of the biggest causes of inequality and social morbidity not only in the UK but worldwide. Psychology as a discipline, and especially as a discipline with an expert understanding of both psychosocial factors and the world of work, has much to contribute.

JESS HURD (REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK)

labelled as ‘conditions’ that require treatment. This can result in ‘iatrogenic epidemics’ of medical/clinical conditions that previously would not have been debilitating.

As a simple way of thinking about this, many people, probably around 30 per cent of the normal population, experience ‘common health problems’ – combinations of stiffness, soreness, widespread and enduring pain, lower back pain, fatigue, headaches, an inability to concentrate, stomach upsets, mobility difficulties, sleeplessness, the triad of ‘depression-anxiety-stress’, and so on.

While most people continue their normal lives regardless, a small percentage of people are debilitated by these clusters of symptoms and may cease work as a consequence (or take extended time off work with worsening symptoms).

The importance of psychosocial factors is paramount in relation to ‘Pathways to Work’ as in the majority of cases of IB claims (perhaps as many as 75 per cent by government statistics: DWP, 2002) there is no debilitating condition that does not occur in the rest of the working population. This is not to say that people in receipt of IB are not experiencing distress and lack of functional ability, and in some cases this is severe. What it does mean is that for many people the level of distress is in part a function, and in part a consequence, of the person’s behaviour rather than their health per se: cognitive, emotional and social behaviour, including perception and expectation, are considered behavioural mechanisms for this article.

(For an example of the relevance of illness perception, see Pietrie & Weinman, 2006). In many cases, there is a set of entrenched beliefs about the severity and impact of the symptoms.

These beliefs are held not only by the individual but also by members of their communities, including line managers, GPs, family, friends, and others.

We see the importance of this in the work of Baily et al. (2007). They showed

Arguably the most extensive theoretical framework we have to address this combination of psychosocial factors, and for developing practical interventions for behavioural change, is social cognitive theory (SCT) and in particular the work of Albert Bandura on self-efficacy (see, for example, Bandura, 1977, 1997). The importance of perceived self-efficacy in relation to IB claimants, and especially in relation to iatrogenic effects and iatrogenic epidemics, is clear when we consider that skills or abilities alone do not predict performance but that ‘what you believe you can do with what you have under a variety of circumstances’ has the greatest impact on performance (Bandura, 1997, p.37). It follows that what a person believes they cannot do due to the perceived (by self and others) severity of their symptoms under a variety

King, R., Lloyd, C. & Meehan, T. (Eds.) (2007). Handbook of psychosocial rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kouyanou, K., Pither, C. & Wessely, S. (1997). Iatrogenic factors and chronic pain. Psychosomatics, 59, 597–604.

Lucire Y. (1986): Neurosis in the workplace. Medical Journal of Australia, 145, 323–326.

NICE (2008). Managing long-term sickness

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

I William J. Fear is with A4e (Wales) Ltd williamjames@live.co.uk

absence and incapacity for work: Draft guidance. London: NICE. Pietrie, K., & Weinman, J. (2006). Why illness perceptions matter. Clinical Medicine, 6, 536–539.

Spillane, R. (2008). Medicalising work behaviour: The case of repetition strain injury. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, 46, 1, 85–98.

Waddell G., & Aylward M., (2005). The scientific and conceptual basis of

incapacity benefits. London: The Stationery Office.

Waddell G. & Burton K. (2006). Is work good for your health and well-being?

London: The Stationery Office.

Waddell, G., Burton, K. & Kendall, N. (2008). Vocational rehabilitation: What works, for whom, and when?

Vocational Rehabilitation Task Group, Industrial Injuries Advisory Council.

London: The Stationery Office.

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the benefits of family planning; educational opportunities for daughters; the injustice of forced marriage; the risks of early childbearing; and HIV prevention.

A special theme centred on the devastating consequences of the widespread practice of genital mutilation.

Most people in the country favoured this Albert Bandura spoke to a packed audience at Friends House on 22 April about brutal practice. We found that our how he is abating urgent global problems by psychosocial means programme reversed this social norm.

This kind of pernicious gender inequality is a frequent target for our plots. In too many societies, women are marginalised, devalued, disallowed oaring population growth tops the With my lifetime of work in aspiration, denied their liberty and list of global problems. Even with modelling and self-efficacy, we had a good dignity. The fastest way for societies to the present population of 6.7 billion theory, and Miguel Sabido, at Televisia in enhance their human capital is to educate we have outgrown the earth’s carrying Mexico, provided a creative translational their women. A drama for India, with an capacity, but we are heading toward a and implementation model. But we audience of about 125 million, illustrates population of 9 to 10 billion by midlacked the expertise and resources to some of the psychosocial principles century. We are destroying ecological disseminate it widely. We needed a social behind our attempts to do this. A mother systems that have evolved over aeons, and diffusion model, of how to promote challenges restrictive cultural norms for that keep our planet cool and habitable. adoption of psychosocial programmes her daughter Taru, and promotes her Burgeoning population growth also in diverse cultural milieus. Enter Bill education. Taru raised the academic fuels civil strife. Around 80 per cent of Ryerson and David Poindexter at the aspirations and pursuits of teenage the violent conflicts are in countries with Population Media Center, who work listeners, who had little access to large youth populations that are worldwide using entertainment-education education. The episodes include uneducated, unemployed, living in for social positive models poverty and under autocratic, corrupt change. They (exhibiting rulers. Such youth are easily recruited for recognised the beneficial “Failure to violent activities. effectiveness of lifestyles), address the How are we responding to the crisis? this approach, negative models psychosocial With token gestures. We are like the guy and became our (exhibiting determinants of who jumps off a tall building, and as he worldwide detrimental ones), human behaviour passes the 30th floor he thinks, ‘So far, dissemination and transitional is often the so good!’ system. Many models (changing weakest link in Diverse social forces stifle applications of from detrimental social policy acknowledgement of this problem. this creative to beneficial styles Religious doctrines, contentious format – in of behaviour). initiatives” immigration issues, draconian population Africa, Asia and This contrast control measures that violate human Latin America – modelling I Albert Bandura is Professor of Psychology rights, powerful lobbyists… all have have promoted highlights the at Stanford University rendered population stabilisation a taboo personal and personal and bandura@psych.stanford.edu subject. Population growth has been society-wide social effects of lobotomised from the formula for changes that are different lifestyles. ecological destruction. But our battered bettering people’s lives.

Viewers are enabled, and inspired, by planet is in deep trouble unless we break The serial dramas we have produced seeing others change their lives for the the stranglehold. Billions more consumers with Population Media Center encourage better. will overwhelm any benefits from green, evidence-based, positive behaviour Of course, efforts at social change clean technologies. We have only 40–50 change among massive TV and radio challenge power relations and entrenched years to clean up our act, to prevent the audiences. These dramatic productions societal practices. Success does not come irreversible collapse of entire ecological are not just fanciful stories. The plotlines easily. Social change requires development systems. portray people’s everyday lives, and the of resilience to adversity. There are several We need to fight not only time, but impediments they face. They help people ways in which modelling is used to build social practices that disengage moral to see a better life, and provide the resilience. The plotlines model sanctions from environmentally strategies and incentives that enable prototypical problems and effective ways destructive activities. How can we do people to take the steps to realise their of overcoming them. They also model this, at a truly global level? First, we need hopes. Hundreds of episodes, over several how to manage setbacks and recover from a theoretical model: one that specifies the years, allow viewers to form emotional failed attempts. They show people how to determinants of psychosocial change, bonds to the models, who evolve in their enlist social support for personal change, and the mechanisms through which they thinking and behaviour at a believable and epilogues and other guides provide work. This knowledge provides the pace. Multiple, intersecting plotlines can the essential environmental support, guiding principles. Next, we need a address different aspects of people’s lives, linking to self-help groups and other translational model. This converts at both the individual and social level. community resources. Seeing similar theoretical principles into an innovative Take the example of a serial we used others succeed through perseverance operational practice. in the Sudan. Here, the plotlines included strengthens staying power.

Social cognitive theory goes global

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There are moments when I feel that Taru is directly talking to me. Usually at night. She is telling me, ‘Usha, you can follow your dreams.’ I feel she is like my elder sister… and giving me encouragement.

Our model of social change doesn’t just operate on this direct pathway, promoting changes by informing, enabling, motivating and guiding viewers to improve their lives. In addition, the socially mediated pathway links people to social networks and community settings.

These places provide continued personalised guidance, natural incentives and social support for personal change.

Failure to address the psychosocial determinants of human behaviour is often the weakest link in social policy initiatives. Simply providing ready access to resources does not mean that people will take advantage of them. One of our dramas promoted a national literacy programme in Mexico. The government had launched a national self-study programme. People who were skilled at reading were urged to organise small selfstudy groups to teach others how to read.

It was a good idea, but there were few takers. Our survey identified three impediments to participation: a critical period barrier (believing that reading is learnable only when one is young); a low self-efficacy barrier (believing that they lacked the ability to master such a complex skill); and a self-unworthiness barrier (feeling that an educated person wouldn’t be interested in devoting time to them).

In our drama, a popular star played the role of the literate person. She persuades characters representing different segments of the population to join the self-study group (diversity builds perceived similarity). They voice their self-doubts, and the instructor corrects their misbeliefs and persuades them that

Cultural sensitivity Our TV and radio serials are not foisted on nations by outsiders. They are created by invitation, from nations seeking help. The Population Media Center works in partnership with the media personnel in the host countries, to create a serial drama tailored to their culture.

Extensive cultural and value analyses are conducted before programmes are developed and implemented. This formative phase identifies problems of major concern. These interviews provide the culturally relevant information for developing realistic characters and engrossing, functional plot lines. This ‘value grid’ is vital, because if you present in abstract, you are fuelling controversy.

People will inevitably dump emotional baggage into the abstraction.

I am occasionally asked ‘Who has the authority to say what should be modelled as “good”?’ But the dramatisations are grounded in the internationally endorsed values, codified in United Nations covenants and resolutions. The values embody respect for human dignity; equity of opportunities; and support of human aspirations. These countries have signed up to these, but don’t follow the practices. Does laissez-faire morality have no limits? Is it alright for despotic regimes to prohibit education for women, and spray girls with acid on the way to school? What is the moral dilemma in creating a culturally sensitive model for improving people’s lives?

Also, we cannot afford to be casual or cavalier about the demographics involved here.

Take the figures from Tanzania [see main article]. They need help.

they have the ability to succeed.

We modelled how to manage setbacks.

The day after one epilogue, by an admired movie star, 25,000 people showed up to enrol in the self-study programme. Viewers were more informed than non-viewers about the literacy programme, and had more positive attitudes about helping each other to learn. Enrolment was 90,000 in the year before the televised series, and about one million during the year of the series.

In the year following the series, another 400,000 people enrolled, suggesting a second-order influence: as people develop competencies that improve their lives, they serve as models, inspirations and even tutors for others.

Tanzania provided a unique opportunity for an experimental comparison of the effectiveness of dramas. In Tanzania the fertility rate is 5.6 children per woman. The current population of 36 million is projected to soar to 60 million in 25 years, and 88 million in 50 years. No economic development can cope with this. Our radio drama was broadcast in one large region of the country, with the remainder serving as a control.

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POPULATION MEDIA CENTER

We also use vicarious motivators. Unless people see the modelled lifestyles as improving their welfare, they have little incentive to adopt them. The benefits of the favourable practices and the costs of the detrimental ones are vividly portrayed.

To change deeply held beliefs and social practices also requires strong emotional bonding. We have found plenty of evidence of that. In India, 400,000 viewers sent letters supporting, advising, or criticising the various models in the drama.

One wrote:

The programme raised people’s belief in their efficacy to control their family size. Before, many believed that their deity ordained the number of children they will have, or their husbands decreed it. The broadcast area had a substantial increase in the number of new families adopting contraceptive methods, compared with the control region.

Adoption of contraceptive methods also increased when the programme was later broadcast in the control region.

There was also a graded exposure effect: the greater the exposure to the dramatic series, the more the marital partners discussed the need to control family size, and the higher the adoption of family planning methods. A similar programme aired in Mexico, and contraceptive sales increased by 23 per cent in that year (compared with between 4 and 7 per cent in the two previous years).

Another major issue in Tanzania is the spread of the AIDS virus. We devote an enormous amount of effort and money to treating the ravages of AIDS, but pitifully few resources to preventing the disease. In Tanzania AIDS is transmitted heterosexually, by long-distance truckers,

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in truck stop hubs, with hundreds of prostitutes. About 60 per cent of them are infected, along with a third of the truck drivers. Our programme quickly debunked false beliefs: that mosquitoes transmit the virus, that sex with young girls is safe, and that having sexual intercourse with a virgin cures AIDS. Again, contrast modelling was used. There was a large increase in condom use in the broadcast area after the programme, and viewers also reported reductions in the number of sexual partners and the sharing of razors and needles. In Ethiopia, our serial drama was distributed as an audio cassette to truckers and sex-workers, who lined up eagerly each week for the new episode.

A storyline in the Kenyan drama illustrates how we tailor to particular cultural values. It revolved around the inheritance of land – in Kenya, only sons can inherit property – and the impoverishing effect of large families.

Following the drama, contraceptive use increased by 58 per cent, as did preference for smaller families. The more people watched the programme, the more they talked to their spouse about family planning and the higher the rate of adoption of contraceptive methods.

Could such large effects really be down to our drama? Charles Westoff, a demographer at Princeton, conducted the assessment. He applied multiple controls for ethnicity, religion, education, rural-urban residence, life-cycle status and number of wives. The serial drama remained as a major contributor to Kenya’s declining birthrate, and reduction in the rate of population growth.

And so the impacts mount up. In India, we addressed equal educational opportunities and career options for women; gender bias in child rearing; the detrimental effect of the dowry system; community development; and much more. The young woman in our drama

became adored nationally. Her death in childbirth produced an outpouring of 170,000 letters, concerning the tragedy of forced child marriages. The programme sparked serious public discussions about the broadcast themes. But it went beyond talk, to collective community action. One village sent a letter to the broadcast centre, signed by its inhabitants, stating that they will work to eradicate the practice of dowry and child marriages, and support education of daughters.

School enrolment of girls rose from 10 per cent to 38 per cent.

We are using a variety of other means, for bettering people’s lives and promoting environmentally sustainable lifestyles.

The popular, prime-time telenovelas on TV Globo, in Rio de Janeiro, dubbed into different languages, reach about 900 million people worldwide. Our Media Center helps in creating social themes, that can be easily incorporated into the telenovelas.

To reach teenagers, the Media Center created radio mini-dramas written, produced, and hosted by youth. They enjoy high popularity. Each programme begins with a street poll of adolescents for the relevant topic. It is then explored in a brief mini-drama This is an edited version of Professor Albert Bandura’s that helps teenagers to make talk for the British Psychological Society’s London and informed choices for healthier, Home Counties Branch at Friends House, London, on and safer lives. The episodes, 22 April 2009. A DVD of the event, plus an extended on issues such as drug abuse, interview with Professor Bandura, is available: teenage sexuality and enquiries to amandarose58@hotmail.com. pregnancy, are followed by For Professor Bandura’s publications and much listener call-ins. Invited guests more information, see: provide further guidance, and http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Bandura referrals on where to go for www.populationmedia.org information and help.

Each year, we also hold a

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summit in Hollywood for writers and producers in the entertainment industry. We explain how social cognitive theory uses the power of enabling storytelling for human betterment. We also present awards for dramas that include plotlines which help viewers to manage difficult problems. Recent awardees include Boston Legal, for dramatising a lawsuit against the government for neglecting medical care of veterans injured in the Iraq war; the leading Hispanic network, TV Mundo, for dramatising the causes and prevention of diabetes; and Sesame Street, for having Waldo model physical activity, and healthy eating. We also give awards to political cartoonists who have managed to distil complex issues into memorable images that can have a powerful impact on public opinion.

Finally, we have addressed the environmental costs of unbridled consumption. Most people don’t have the foggiest idea of how their consumption practices affect the environment. If they are to adopt environmentally sustainable practices, they need to understand the ecological costs of their consumption practices. They need to be enabled, and motivated, to turn enlightened concern into constructive behaviour. With this in mind, a creative team including Alexandra Paul and Michael Tobias produced a video, ‘The Cost of Cool’, for distribution to schools. It focuses on the buying habits of teenagers, tracking the ecological costs of the manufacture, distribution, sale and disposal of everyday items. It has sobering impact on teenagers. As one of them put it, ‘I’ll never look at a T-shirt, in the same way’.

Global problems instil a sense of paralysis in people. They feel that there is little they can do to reduce such problems. The mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’ is an effort to localise the global.

Our global applications increase the scale and scope of social cognitive theory in promoting personal and social changes.

They illustrate how a collective effort, combining the expertise of different players, can have a worldwide impact on seemingly insurmountable problems.

As a society, we enjoy the benefits left by those before us who collectively worked for social changes that improved our lives. Our own collective efficacy will determine whether we pass on a habitable planet to our grandchildren and future generations.

So, as you bring our knowledge, and your personal influence to bear, on saving our battered planet: May the efficacy force be with you!

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Write for The Psychologist: We publish a wide range of material: all that matters is that you have an engaging and informative message that you want to communicate to 48,000 psychologists from across the discipline. The editorial team is there to support you through the process: just email the editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

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BOOK REVIEWS

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No neurorevolution Lone Frank’s thesis is that we are at the dawn of a ‘neurorevolution’, where discoveries in brain sciences will turn upside-down our understanding of topics like economics, happiness, advertising and even morality. This neurorevolution will affect the very core of our beliefs about what it means to be human, argues Frank. But she is no mere armchair pundit. In nine chapters she tours the world, meeting researchers who can introduce her, and thus us, to blossoming fields of inquiry.

Frank travels to Canada to have her brain magnetically stimulated in an attempt to see God (it sort of works), has her brain scanned in California (where an expert in mirror neurons tells her she has a cute corpus callosum) and shops in Oxford for a package deal on an fMRI ‘neuromarketing’ study of brand effectiveness (a bargain at £55,000?).

Frank argues that ‘by exposing human nature, neuroscience makes us able to transcend and rise above it’. Just as Freudian concepts have altered the language of society, so now we are at the dawn of a ‘neurosociety’, with a new conception of human nature informed by neuroscience. Through Mindfield: How Brain biology, we will realise our freedom Science Is Changing Our from biology (‘We have no fixed World essence of identity’).

Lone Frank Frank’s prose is clear and direct.

There is enough of her humour and personal story throughout to keep the reader engaged, but never so much as to obscure the story she is telling about neuroscience. This is an excellent outsider’s introduction to some very interesting and important research areas, but I believe Frank has over-egged the neuropudding.

There will be no neurorevolution. I believe books like this are the high-water mark of neurohype; we should now expect a backlash. The topics these neuroscientists are addressing are truly deep and complex; knots that no brain scan can cut. The humanities have accumulated a wealth of genuine wisdom and experience that will not be overturned by neuroscience.

Yes, neuroscience has an important contribution to make, but our conceptions of ourselves – as moral agents, in law, in striving for happiness – are not so impoverished that they can be overturned by a coloured graphic of a scanned brain. Much of Frank’s revolution is old-fashioned experimental psychology, and it is here that hard work in understanding the mechanisms of thoughts, feelings and motivations will yield immediately tangible insights. Without good psychology, brain scans just take knowledge away from the human level and into an esoteric neuroanatomical world. Answering why we feel the way we do, make the choices we make and want the things we want requires a lot more than just locating where these mental objects might arise in the brain. Neuroscience needs to partner with, not overthrow, psychology and the broad church of the humanities.

I Oneworld; 2009; Pb £9.99 Reviewed by Tom Stafford who is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Sheffield

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Travelling can be murder…

Straits and Narrow Grace McClurg In this novel Rachel, a newly qualified forensic psychologist, embarks on a three-month tour of South-East Asia with her seemingly incompatible boyfriend. After meeting another potential suitor, she finds herself with a murder on her hands and a boyfriend about to hang. This leads the heroine to some serious introspection: If she can’t tell which of the two men in her life is a cold-blooded killer, should she be embarking on a career working with the criminal mind?

Many of us are attracted to the study of psychology because of a fascination with the narratives of others. Here, McClurg puts her thousands of hours of forensic clinical experience into the telling of a romantic holiday murdermystery with a seriously dark underbelly, yet told with engaging, quirky humour.

The psychology jokes are particularly enjoyable.

This unusual concept of chick-lit meets Irvin Yalom via Agatha Christie makes for an intriguing holiday read.

I Monsoon Books; 2008; Pb £10.99 Reviewed by Jacqui Marson who is a chartered counselling psychologist in London

Clear and authoritative Fundamentals of Psychology Michael W. Eysenck Eysenck is one of the best known psychologists in Europe and perhaps the best known A-level psychology writer, and this book has seemed a long time coming for fans of his clear, authoritative style. This introductory reference text is well laid out with a variety of photographs and cartoons ensuring that the book is accessible to the intended audience – those new to academic psychology, specifically those at undergraduate level.

Eysenck is known for his use of examples and personal experience, and this text does not disappoint. This work utilises both some of the most quoted research in psychology, including Bandura’s Bobo doll, but also educates the reader with recent research including work on template theory.

Personally, I find it frustrating that Eysenck uses American spellings despite being British, however this book serves its purpose well; providing those new to psychology with a concise, informative text on theories and research, a succinct glossary and three chapters on research methods covering everything from measures of dispersion through to how to write a psychology report. As if we expected anything less.

I Psychology Press; 2009; Pb £27.50 Reviewed by Kelly Bristow who is an A-level psychology lecturer at The Henley College, Oxfordshire

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book reviews

Working with Ethnicity, Race and Culture in Mental Health: A Handbook for Practitioners Hari Sewell Every practitioner working in multicultural mental health services in the UK should find this book indispensable as it uncovers the importance of preconceived biases when working with service users from black and minority ethnic groups. Though the writing style is didactic and prescriptive, the recommendations are based on grounded research findings that emphasise changes that need to take place. Both from personal and managerial standpoints, the author forces the reader not to turn a blind eye to individual and institutional racism.

Sewell engages his audience in self-awareness by using examples based on mundane practice. The chapters are terse but accurate, and therefore can be seen as a summative piece of the current state of knowledge in relation to the multi-ethnic service-user groups in mental health. But if the reader is looking for an international perspective or policy analysis this is not the book to start with.

The main strength of this read is that it is reflective of the current British patient cohort and as a result provides up-todate practical knowledge to delivering and achieving to race equality.

Rational thinking for an irrational society Bad Science Ben Goldacre If you too grimace at those scare-mongering psycho-babble headlines or ads for ‘intelligence’-enhancing games, then this is the book you’ll want all your less sceptical friends (and everyone else) to read.

Known for his Guardian column, Goldacre critically appraises numerous dubious scientific ‘facts’ from several disciplines, including psychology.

Goldacre considers why people don’t seek out evidence and take what is presented as fact, and explores the role of the media in perpetuating this. He questions, for example, why British schoolchildren are taught, via the Brain Gym programme, that rubbing ‘the brain buttons’ on their chests improves brain performance.

Goldacre discusses the placebo effect, the need for controlled experiments, statistics and ethics.

Goldacre is passionate, engaging and humourous, yet educational also. This is a book for every reader, from the psychology student needing to learn more critical tools, to the astute cynic who wonders why people believe such quackery to begin with.

I Fourth Estate; 2008; Pb £12.99 Reviewed by Fidelma Butler who is an occupational psychologist in training

I Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 2009; Pb £18.99 Reviewed by Huda Shalhoub who is in the Department of Psychology, Brunel University

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Concise and relevant The Visual World in Memory James R. Brockmole (Ed.) This book offers a collection of chapters authored by the leaders of the field in current visual memory research. From memory for real-world scenes

by Andrew Hollingworth, to expectancies, emotion and memory reports for visual events, by Deborah Davis and Elizabeth Loftus, this book encompasses a breadth of research whilst offering detailed analyses of current research directions and findings of each distinctive research strand. For this reason, the book would appeal not only to academics in search of current detailed analyses and discussions, but also to students requiring a breadth of information.

Edited by James Brockmole, this book examines the way in which we remember what we have previously seen, with a particular focus on how specific advances in technology, such as eyetracking, virtual reality and

just in

Up to date and practical

neuroimaging, have changed the face of visual memory research in recent years. It begins with an in-depth discussion of the nature of visual and spatial working memory, moving on to visual memory for features, faces and scenes, followed by considerations of the role of memory in real-world tasks, and concluding with a chapter concerned with recent neuroimaging advances in visual mental imagery.

What makes this book particularly interesting is the way in which it brings together the many strands of visual memory research in a concise and relevant manner. This book manages to present the most up to date research available in one single resource, something which has unfortunately been lacking in the visual cognition literature to date.

I Psychology Press; 2009; Hb £39.95 Reviewed by Helen Henshaw who is a PhD student at the University of Leicester

Sample titles just in: Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists Michelle Faubert Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness Emmy van Deurzen Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You Sam Gosling Everyday Emotional and Psychological Problems and How to Overcome Them Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman Children’s Reading and Spelling: Beyond the First Steps Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant For a full list of books available for review and information on reviewing for The Psychologist, see www.bps.org.uk/books Send books for potential review to The Psychologist, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester LE1 7DR

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CAREERS

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Beyond technique in psychological therapy Ian Florance talks to Gesthimani (Manya) Merodoulaki about her views on the role and practice of counselling psychology

How did you come to be a psychologist?

I was born in Crete and educated there until I was 18. My family had told me stories about British allies in World War Two. ‘British’ and ‘excellent’ have long been two associated words so I wanted to come to England and learn English.

I won a scholarship when I was 15 and came to Cambridge University for a language summer school. It was wet

and cold and I hated the place. Then the sun came out, we sat on the lawns playing guitars, and I knew I’d be back.

I decided to spend a year here when I was 18, polishing my English language skills before going back to Crete to teach children. Instead I started a modular degree in English literature at Richmond College, London.

I had achieved top grades for psychology at high school, so in the first semester I took an introduction to psychology, and subsequently changed to a social science degree. The modular course permitted choice, and I was taught by Ernesto Spinelli.

He introduced me to the existential/phenomenological approach, which became a very different way of experiencing life. Had I been Alexander, he would have been my Aristotle!

I consider my undergraduate years among the richest experiences in my life.

Did you take to psychology straight away?

I failed introduction to psychology the first time! I retook it and my final mark was a straight A. I wasn’t going to succumb to failure!

jobs online

What were your aims at the time?

I’d always wanted to work with

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HMP Dovegate – Chartered Psychologist Rehab UK Brain Injury Services – Clinical Psychologist Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust – Assistant Psychologist Devon PCT – Clinical Child Psychologist Private Advertiser – LSA (Assistant Psychologist)

children. After my first degree, I took the Diploma in Psychology of Education and Human Rights at London University’s Institute of Education, followed by an MA in Psychology of Education. After that I started working in the NHS as an assistant occupational therapist in adult mental health day services in London.

Was this a good experience?

Mixed. I was desperate to work with disadvantaged people, to open up opportunities through their experience of an interaction based on respect. Some people may see this as naive but it’s a continuing motive for many practising psychologists. My counselling studies had already planted the seed of experiential learning and therapists’ ways of being alongside doing. The interpersonal relationship continues to be an important feature in my client work, training and personal life.

The first hospital I worked in was a converted Victorian workhouse in one of the poorest and most ethnically mixed areas in Britain. It was run down, psychiatry-ruled, and conveyed neglect and disrespect to clients and workers.

I was very interested in mental health issues, but I thought I couldn’t stay in the NHS. Nineteen years later, I found I was wrong. There is something compelling about providing a service seemingly at no charge, having a sense of autonomy in practising, and being able to predict a reasonable income at the end of the month.

That job gave me good knowledge of, skills in and respect for psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches. I also got involved in running groups on areas such as relaxation, anxiety management, work-finding skills, and general support.

I learned a lot from how my co-therapists practised.

Alongside full-time NHS work, I

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Print ads are available from just £315+VAT. The next deadline for job advertising is 10 June (for the July issue).

For more information, see p.536. To book, e-mail Kirsty Wright on psychapp@bps.org.uk or call +44 116 252 9550.

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taught counselling skills one or two evenings a week. At weekends, I worked with children with learning and emotional difficulties in a private school, and individually with an adolescent with learning difficulties who had experienced abuse. This was the early 1990s, when I was training as a counselling psychologist at Roehampton University. At the time, there was no Division, only a special interest group in counselling psychology.

Getting chartered took a lot of ingenuity, time and mental space.

My first job as a chartered psychologist involved adult mental health roles in Teesside. I worked in a community mental health team attached to a GP surgery and had a specific role in reducing the central psychology service’s waiting list. In the late 1990s I moved to Derbyshire near my then partner.

I worked in adult mental health services there.

You seem to have moved around a lot!

It made me realise something important: psychology services are configured differently in different places, often shaped by the leader’s implementation of the latest government ‘good idea’. One of the services I worked in was impressive, filled with clever, committed people delivering high-quality services; another was chaotic, and interfered with opportunities for professional growth.

We seem to be a profession very influenced by individual people and particular schools of thought.

Movement also shaped a continuing theme in my thought. From the mid1990s, evidence-based practice was being introduced and became a dominant ideology, repressing approaches that were deemed not proven. I’m all for evidencebased practice, but I’m concerned about the all-pervasiveness of quantitative research and what I perceive as poor critiques of its outcomes.

At that time, counselling psychologists plugged holes in services that did not attract clinical psychologists.

I hope this is changing to a more accurate appraisal of the breadth and depth of skills and knowledge that counselling psychologists contribute, especially in therapeutic and team-work. When I left my early post, elements of it were regraded to consultant level – yet, as a newly qualified counselling psychologist, I had coped with all the demands of the job.

My goal to achieve a consultant grade took me to Lincolnshire. Then I moved to Rampton Hospital, in the role of Head of the Counselling Service for Staff, managing two other therapists. My

FEATURED JOB Job Title: Lecturer in Medical Education (Admissions) Employer: Undergraduate Community Medical Education, University of Dundee he job title doesn’t immediately indicate the technical and groundbreaking content of this job. But Dr Jon Dowell, Director of Undergraduate Community Medical Education and Admissions Convenor, gives a flavour of its importance.

‘We’re on a roll,’ he says, ‘but we need to keep on refining things. I’m looking for someone who is going to stay here, build our reputation, work on a long-scale research programme as well as build their own academic career. In that sense we’re focusing on the long term.’

What exactly does the job entail? ‘I joined two years ago as the clinical academic responsible for admissions. I’m actually an academic GP. I was disappointed that we were relying on UCAS form information and interviews to select students for admission to medical degrees. I wanted to improve the way admissions were handled here, and provide something of a benchmark for other UK institutions. I asked for academic support when I joined and that’s where this post came from.’

What progress has there been? ‘We’ve streamlined and analysed the information we get from the UCAS forms, but we’ve gone about as far as we can with that. We’re also looking at how we can best assimilate the information from the UK Clinical Aptitude Tests. However, last year we introduced the Multiple Mini Interview, which involves ten ‘stations’, seven minutes each, at which questions are asked on different topics. We’re happy with the trial, but we now need to develop it and assess its validity in detail. We’ve already had visits from other organisations to see what we’re doing.’

What will the successful candidate contribute? ‘They’ll manage the research effort into how well the admission system is working. They must be comfortable with and expert in psychometrics and human measurement. There are specialist statisticians around, but this person must plan the effort, get involved in analysis, draw out the implications, write them up and implement them. It’s going to take five to ten years to establish the validity of what we’re doing. The person will be an active member of the admissions team and we’re looking for them to develop the system creatively. So, to give an example, how might we assess “integrity” during the mini interviews? We’d want this person to take the issue and come up with a workable new solution. They will need to look at best admissions practice internationally and introduce new ideas here. The job also involves a small lecturing component: increasing the psychological input into the behavioural science programme.’

Although the advertisement suggests preferred psychological specialism, Dr Dowell stresses that he’s open to other specialisms. ‘The successful candidate, obviously, will be comfortable with various statistical techniques and the management of large amounts of numerical data. But we have helpful links within the medical school, the Centre for Medical Education and a variety of other research groups who can help. There is also good administrative support in place. The successful candidate needs good interpersonal skills to get support and must want to promote what we’re doing. We have a lot of good will and we need to build on that.’

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You can find this job on p.556, and with many others on www.psychapp.co.uk.

manager was a non-psychologist and, again, there was a real difference in the way he guided and supported me.

I enjoyed lots of leadership and management training. The organisation respected its staff and service users.

Can we return to your earlier comments about your strong reaction to imposed approaches?

I’m very concerned with power issues in social contexts, language and discourse, and particularly in therapeutic

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relationships. I believe that open debate is one of the best ways to advance science and civilisation. People can find creative ways to overcome oppression, and I would like to think that my approach to psychology facilitates such creativity and promotes tolerance of otherness. I’ve long had an interest in human rights and in equal opportunities, hence my focus. The person-centred approach seems the only one that pays more than lip service to power issues. And yet, that approach seems underused where it is much

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needed, such as in mental health services. predominance of cognitive behaviour It contrasts with ways of doing therapy. CBT fits well the medical model psychology which view individuals as which prevails in the NHS, and the NHS requiring correction in their ways of is a major funder of psychology services. thinking or their hormone levels.

It can seem that unless we speak and Encountering feminist ideas in think in medical terms, the profession Richmond felt like someone flicking on may become marginalised. We often react a light-switch. Later to such a threat by on, I coordinated and adopting the language taught the Women and and spirit of the “Counselling psychology is not Psychology course in dominant discourse. a miniature or a paraphrase Roehampton. I have Returning to the idea of other specialities” also been a member of of tolerance, I am the Society’s Standing concerned about Committee for the portraying happiness as the Promotion of Equal Opportunities for correct way of being and feeling. People a few years. Growing up during the are much richer emotionally, and it may dictatorship in Greece has influenced me be our role to enable people and wider in these areas. society to be more accepting of this I’ve been exposed to a variety of richness. approaches to therapy during my career.

I question compliance to the CBT I have serious concerns about the model. Clinical governance includes a

degree of mindful autonomy and I’m not certain we use that enough.

Psychologists are versatile scientistpractitioners. We need room for debate, for a wider variety of approaches, and a pinch of pragmatism. We need to continue questioning our findings and searching for more understanding and knowledge.

Are there other concerns you have about psychology as a profession?

How do we obtain our knowledge? There are significant limits to what we can learn from nomothetic approaches, studying large groups of people to draw conclusions about the total. Our world is hugely diverse, so idiographic approaches are equally, if not more, suitable for psychological inquiry, understanding and knowledge. Sometimes I think that we try to explain psychological phenomena

The reality of work as a forensic psychologist Carol A. Ireland looks beyond the TV and media portrayals at a difficult but rewarding career

he profession of forensic psychology continues to evolve and develop. Without doubt this is a reflection of the importance of psychology as a whole. It also highlights the particular wide-ranging benefits forensic psychology brings to society, not only when working with the perpetrators of offending, but when engaging with forensic organisations, victims, the public and government. A range of other applied psychologies work with offenders: clinical, occupational, health and counselling psychologists. This piece will focus on the work of chartered forensic psychologists.

One of forensic psychology’s continuing challenges is to explain what it really does as a branch of applied psychology, as opposed to the more ‘glamourised’ media and journalistic portrayals. Forensic psychology is an engaging profession and one which forensic psychologists can be passionate about. Yet the need

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to ensure an accurate image of forensic psychology must inform this. Programmes such as Cracker starring Robbie Coltrane, or more recently Wire in the Blood starring Robson Green (which portrays a clinical psychologist working in the forensic arena), are popular and entertaining but far removed from actual forensic psychology work. Not only are forensic psychologists passionate about their work but it seems there is a fervent interest in our profession from the general public, which is supplied largely through the filter of the media.

Programmes such as Cracker focus on what the producers feel are the more intriguing and exhilarating elements of the role. They are often somewhat distant from real life applied psychology.

There are a large number of forensic psychologists who may shudder at being referred to as Cracker in any context, and prefer the scientist-practitioner role to be our defining feature.

It is therefore both crucial and timely to clarify what forensic psychologists can and do contribute in their work, including how they qualify, and the range of roles that a forensic psychologist undertakes.

knowledge. Finally, stage 2 requires a minimum of 320 days spent equally across four areas: conducting interventions, assessments and evaluations with clients; applied research; supporting and advising other professionals; and training. All of these activities are coordinated by a chartered forensic psychologist. This Qualifying leads to the completion of eight Qualifying to become a pieces of work, two within each chartered forensic psychologist of the four areas, taking a is by no means a stress-free minimum of two years to and uncomplicated process, but complete this is a (although profession more for which “The work is far more realistically standards they’ll take are of vital diverse than is depicted closer to three importance. in the media” years). These The initial pieces of work are steps are to then submitted and get an examined by the British undergraduate psychology Psychological Society’s Board degree and/or the equivalent of Assessors. Successful GBR recognition. This is submission leads to followed by the completion of qualification as a forensic stage 1, which is usually an psychologist. Practitioner accredited postgraduate doctorates in forensic qualification in forensic psychology are coming online psychology (usually a one year (not to be confused with PhDs), full-time, two years part-time which merge stage 1 and stage master’s degree), providing 2 under one academic academic and theoretical

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before achieving sufficient understanding of what they are. That feels like the wrong way around.

Finally, different domains could learn more from each other. For instance, we could all benefit from knowing more about the work of developmental psychologists, as well as those working with adults across the lifespan. In adult mental health we often discover the late effects of a difficult childhood, and we could invest more in examining timelines and work on promoting lifelong healthy development.

What are you up to at the moment?

I wanted to learn more about new ways of researching, of psychometric testing, about applying psychology to people in different circumstances and services. So, I started clinical psychology training in 2006, but the training remains

programme. Currently the ‘apprentice’ model (stage 1 – university assessed and BPS accredited; stage 2 – field work assessed by the BPS) remains the most accessible and commonly used one.

Work environments Forensic psychologists work in varied environments: NHS hospitals, private hospitals, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), the Scottish and Irish prison system and private prisons, the police, universities and private practice.

The work of forensic psychologists is far more diverse than is depicted in the media. We are not, for example, advocates for those on trial; nor are we support workers for those undergoing prosecution.

There are other professions within whose remit this falls.

Whilst forensic psychologists will clearly have engagement with the perpetrators of offences, they may also, or alternatively be involved in working with victims, conducting applied research, designing and delivering training, contributing to policy and organisational consultancy.

It’s a varied career – I can only give a few examples here.

incomplete. In the past year, I’ve been re-examining whether this path will deliver the outcomes I wish to reach while retaining what I value most about being a psychologist.

I am pleased to be working for a notfor-profit organisation now: I’m employed part-time by Relate Institute as their Clinical Supervision Programme Leader.

In private practice, I provide clinical supervision (and contribute to the Division of Counselling Psychology as an assessor). I have been interested in clinical supervision since my earliest days of practice. I have read and written about it and provided it. Holding a training and education role also suits my constant thirst for learning.

What do you think about counselling psychology now?

I value its independence and integrity,

Forensic psychologists often work with or in relation to suspected or convicted offenders: assisting in investigations and court decisions; assessment of their treatment areas; the design, delivery and evaluation of treatment interventions such as sex offender therapy, and interventions targeting propensities for violence, emotional regulation, adaptive thinking, and the development of healthy beliefs that support an offence-free lifestyle.

A particular area of specialisation is assisting an organisation or court in the completion of assessments that explore the risk presented by the individual to the general public, as well as in family cases involving children. Work with victims includes supporting their recovery, apprehension of offenders and informing local police and government policy on victim support issues.

Forensic psychologists also engage in a variety of forms of qualitative and quantitative applied research, such as the exploration of individual factors related to offending, therapy evaluations and protective factors around offending.

A number of forensic psychologists are involved in the

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though it is undervalued. We draw on a wide variety of approaches, use our experience of interaction within sessions to inform our work. While respecting evidence-based models, I believe that we retain a healthy doubting/inquiring approach to what constitutes evidence.

Having established its identity, counselling psychology now seems to me to have reached a crossroads: should it remain autonomous or pair up with another member network of the British Psychological Society? We need to consider carefully the costs and benefits of such options – and beyond questions of employability. Our philosophical roots make our field very distinct. We need to ensure we safeguard distinctive aspects of our professional identity. Counselling psychology is not a miniature or paraphrase of other specialities; it is an entity with its own identity.

development, implementation and evaluation of training initiatives. The remit of such training can be varied, and based on the needs of both staff and other clients. It may include: staff development of awareness and the application of knowledge and skills for working with offenders, such as interpersonal skills and motivational approaches; organisational issues such as awareness and management of bullying, management of selfharm and the utilisation of diagnostic tools, such as psychopathy assessments.

The consultancy role is varied and wide-ranging. It can include working with management on the assessment, initiation and evaluation of change within an organisation, leading on or supporting policy development, the alleviation of stress, consulting on critical incidents within an organisation, consulting and advising on government projects, as well as assisting in the auditing of government initiatives, in agencies such as Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons.

Not to be taken lightly This is not a career that should be considered lightly. It can take

a long time to reach the requirements, and it involves continual development. More importantly, the views and decisions made by a forensic psychologist can have substantial implications for clients, particularly offenders: their expertise can be crucial in decisions made regarding their incarceration and/or restrictions on their freedom.

It is also not a career for those seeking a ‘9 to 5’ job or whose sole focus is to make individuals ‘better’. Rather, the focus of some psychological interventions with forensic clients is on managing risk rather than its complete removal. Decreasing risk can increase a client’s chances of returning to the community and may enhance their quality of life.

But these improvements need to be balanced with ensuring the public is kept safe. This can be one of the hardest lessons learned by those new to the profession. You either accept the reality of how difficult the work can be or become disillusioned with it and seek a career elsewhere. Personally, I find forensic psychology intensely rewarding, and I feel fortunate to have found myself within a profession that I find both engaging and valuable.

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The metaphysical mechanics of the mind Gustav Jahoda on the German philosopher and psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart, and his view of the mind as a starry sky of Newtonian forces

ntil the Second World War historians of psychology everywhere had high praise for Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), describing him as ‘a great thinker’ and his ideas as ‘epoch-making’. Since then his star has been eclipsed, especially in anglophone as contrasted with Germanspeaking countries. Yet such neglect is undeserved, since Herbart set the agenda for 19th-century psychology and its educational applications.

For example, his texts on psychology (Herbart, 1891a) and education (Herbart, 1901) were widely used in America.

Herbart was born in the north-German city of Oldenburg and went to university in Jena, where the philosopher Fichte kindled his interest in psychology. He then took up a post as tutor to the children of a Swiss family, an experience that led to his interest in pedagogy.

His first academic post was at Göttingen, and in 1809 he was offered and accepted Immanuel Kant’s chair at Königsberg.

Unlike Kant, Herbart believed that there can be a psychological science along the lines of Newtonian

references

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Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture.

New York: Mentor Books.

Herbart, J.F. (1890). Über einige Beziehungen zwischen Psychologie und Staatswissenschaft [On some relations between psychology and political science]. In K. Kehrbach (Ed.) Collected works: Vol.5. Langensalza: Beyer. (Original work published 1821) Herbart, J.F. (1891a). A textbook in psychology. New York: Appleton.

physics: ‘The lawfulness of the human mind [Geist] is exactly the same as that of the starry sky’ (Herbart, 1816/1891a, p.373). His model for psychology was therefore physics, which later in the 19th century came to be replaced by biology.

For Herbart, the underlying unity of all mental activity was a function of the soul.

One might suppose that by beginning with the soul he would have landed

Herbart, J.F. (1891b). Lehrbuch zur Psychologie [Textbook of psychology].

In K. Kehrbach (Ed.) Collected works: Vol.4. Langensalza: Beyer. (Original work published 1816) Herbart, J.F. (1891c). Lehrbuch zur Psychologie [Textbook of psychology] (2nd edn). In K. Kehrbach (Ed.) Collected works: Vol.4. Langensalza: Beyer. (Original work published 1834) Herbart, J.F. (1892) Psychologie als

himself in trouble. Yet he managed to avoid that by declaring that the soul itself is unknown and unknowable, except through its indirect manifestations.

Science is only concerned with the latter, so that the mystery of the soul is irrelevant. On the other hand, when it came to indirect manifestations of the soul, Herbart used the term Vorstellung, which resists simple translation. For him it appeared to mean a thought or idea, or an imagined object, and he also applied it to emotional states.

Herbart rejected the ‘faculty psychology’ that was particularly prevalent from the mid-18th to the mid 19th century. This postulated that the mind consisted of separate innate capacities of ‘faculties’, such as memory, perception, learning or the will.

Phrenologists believed that each faculty had a corresponding ‘bump’ on the skull.

For Herbart the task of psychology was that of explaining how simple Vorstellungen like ‘sweet, small, red, or heavy’ could give rise in combination to complex modes of thought.

Herbart conceived Vorstellungen as embodying Newtonian-type ‘forces’, with motions capable of being represented by sets of equations which lay at the heart of his mathematical psychology. Accordingly he viewed them as existing in two modes, mechanics and statics. Mechanics referred to the forces being capable of producing motions of several different types, the simplest being that Vorstellungen can rise above the threshold of consciousness or sink below it over periods of time.

Additionally, different Vorstellungen tend to interact in various ways. Thus they might combine and thereby become strengthened, or they may be in opposition and as a result some become impeded [gehemmt] for a time; or they may be pushed altogether below the threshold of consciousness. Statics refers to a state of temporary equilibrium when different Vorstellungen either inhibit each other or combine.

In sum, Vorstellungen were seen by Herbart as active forces, a cluster of

Wissensschaft neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik. [Psychology as a science newly founded on experience, metaphysics and mathematics]. In K. Kehrbach (Ed.) Collective works: Vol.6. Langensalza: Beyer. (Original work published 1825) Herbart, J.F. (1901). Outlines of educational doctrine. New York: Macmillan.

Jones, E. (1953). The life and work of

Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books.

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

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rieger, S. (2001). Johann Friedrich Herbart’s mathematische Differenzierung des Menschen. In A. Hoeschen & L. Schneider (Eds.) Herbart’s Kultursystem (pp.185–201).

Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann.

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dominant ones constituting an The quasi-mechanical systems of ‘apperceptive mass’ open to congruent forces were initially regarded by Herbart Vorstellungen, but presenting obstacles to as self-contained within any given others. If a new and related Vorstellung is individual, which had two significant apperceived, it can be anchored and its consequences. Since direct access to the meaning thereby rendered more fully processes was not feasible, it meant for accessible. This theory of ‘apperception’ him as it had for Kant that experiment formed the cornerstone of Herbart’s was not possible in psychology. Secondly, educational psychology. the method he advocated was that of The concept of ‘apperception’ had first ‘controlled introspection’, a paradigm he been put forward by Leibniz; but Herbart created and which remained central for used the ideas of Pestalozzi, which most of his century. Herbart also took departed radically from the over from Locke then prevailing mechanical and his followers system of education and the view that there “Herbart touched upon sought to make use of the are no innate many topics that still child’s innate powers of ideas, so that preoccupy us” observation and natural cognitive interests. Herbart began with Vorstellungen must the perceptual processes of the come ultimately from infant, which gradually build up a set of the external world, in other words from relationships between physical and other experience, and be incorporated by objects. These Vorstellungen gradually individuals. become what he termed an ‘apperceptive While Herbart had always been clear mass’, the sum total of relevant past about the importance of humans being experiences, to which members of society, he did not at first the new percept is assimilated. He was regard that as relevant for psychology. In therefore a constructionist somewhat in the first (1816) edition of his Textbook of the style of Piaget.

Psychology he maintained that only the The implications for teaching individual is of concern to psychology. methods may be illustrated with regard It is the business of ‘practical philosophy’, to geography. The traditional method had he suggested, to deal with large or small been to get children to copy maps, which, groups of people. But already at that time Herbart argued, conveys only a confused he had regarded the then prevailing picture. Instead he proposed the psychology as unduly narrow. He following: suggested extending observations to But, to the extent of their greater or people of different ages, educational lesser importance, particular points, levels, occupations, nations and earlier cities, foothills, sources and estuaries times in so far as relevant information (but not the changeable boundaries of was available. In addition he mentioned countries and provinces) should be children, the mentally ill, and even clarified in their mutual relationship animals. The emphasis was still on so that they become present in the individuals, albeit on their differences. child’s imagination. In this way the By the second edition he had adopted child should be able to scan mentally a radically different stance: ‘Psychology a whole region of the world rapidly will remain one-sided’, he wrote, ‘as long and confidently. (cited in Rieger, 2001, as it considers man standing alone’ p.192) (Herbart, 1834/1891b, p.424).

Accordingly, he elaborated what might be Herbart’s concern for education was not called a psychology of society viewed just theoretical: he founded a pedagogical more or less as the psychology of seminar, and with the help of his English individuals writ large, somewhat in the wife set up a school in his house; they manner later adopted by Ruth Benedict also adopted a mentally handicapped (1934). child.

The first indication of a similarity It may be noted that Herbart’s between mind and society, he noted, is system of Vorstellungen bears a marked the fact that it is language which holds resemblance to the psychoanalytic one, society together. Although Herbart did and that is not a coincidence: from his not follow Wilhelm von Humboldt in high-school days onwards Freud had considering the relationship between been exposed to Herbartian ideas; language and thought, he did point out moreover, he even adopted some of that verbal communication transmits Herbart’s terminology such as Verdrängung ideas and feelings from one individual in the sense of ‘repression’ or Hemmung in to another. He went on to develop an that of inhibition (Jones, 1953, vol.1; analogy between individual and collective Ricoeur, 1970). psychology:

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Hence it is clear that the whole web of societal life not only consists of the threads woven by individuals, but that it must also cohere in the same way as individuals bring together their own ideas, attitudes and decisions; for that collective life is made up of individuals, and outside their minds it simply does not exist… When in society people contradict one another in their opinions, this repeats on a larger scale what we can observe in ourselves in the play of our own thoughts… We see…a two-fold fundamental similarity between society and the individual human mind; namely inhibition of conflicting elements, and binding of that which is not inhibited. (Herbart, 1821/1890, p.29)

The shifts, divisions, and conflicts manifest in public opinion, he claimed, parallel those of Vorstellungen in the individual mind. Herbart also anticipated Wilhelm Dilthey in stating that we are creatures of history, a discipline that should complement psychology. Herbart himself attempted a kind of reconstruction of the stages the development of humanity, beginning with small isolated bands for whom any stranger was an enemy. Then he proposed what we would call ‘intra-group processes’ in the course of which inequalities of status emerged.

It will be evident even from this brief sketch that Herbart touched upon many topics that still preoccupy us, even aspects of cross-cultural issues: he asked ‘How many of us concerned with psychology have been to New Zealand?

How many of us have had occasion to observe the savages in their home setting?’ (Herbart, 1825/1892, p.16).

Admittedly his was not a coherent account, rather such short passages dealing with issues that concern us today are scattered throughout his writings.

Nonetheless he worked a rich seam of ideas that became extremely influential and remained so throughout the 19th century. The first version of Völkerpsychologie by Lazarus and Steinthal was inspired by him, and that in turn inspired Wundt’s better-known one.

It is therefore readily understandable that in German-speaking countries Herbart is regarded among other things as the founder of social psychology. He was an important transitional figure, bridging metaphysical and empirical psychology.

I Gustav Jahoda is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Strathclyde g.jahoda@strath.ac.uk

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serves to obscure the way in which poverty, deprivation, inequality between the sexes, classes and ethnic groups, and cultural institutions like marriage create the conditions where depression and anxiety flourish, and protects the government of the day from having to deal with these issues.

…with Dorothy Rowe One inspiration The philosopher Bertrand Russell showed me that it was possible to write about complex matters in everyday English, and without having to resort to jargon.

One alternative career path I wanted to be a journalist, but in the 1950s women were expected to write only for the women’s pages.

One book that you think all psychologists should read Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World.

One moment that changed the course of your career In 1977 Don Bannister read the manuscript of my first book The Experience of Depression, liked it, and recommended it to John Wiley and Sons for publication.

One cultural recommendation Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Published in 1907, this is not only one of the great books of literature but the best study of the parent/child relationship I have ever read.

One big Dorothy Rowe dorothy@dorothyrowe.com.au question How brain activity becomes meaning, and meaning becomes brain the terms used. Hypotheses activity. Psychologists should need to be drawn from address this rather than being observation and not from the seduced by the new needs and fantasies of the phrenology based on MRI. researcher.

Rowe, D. (2008). What should I believe? London: Routledge.

‘Download a chapter and listen to a podcast at www.routledgementalhealth.com/dorothy-rowe’

Articles on gender and language, paranoia, the Delphi method, student writer competition winners, and much more...

I Send your comments about The Psychologist to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 or to the Leicester office address I To advertise in The Psychologist: psyadvert@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9552 I For jobs in the Appointments section: psychapp@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9550

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One hope for the future That all psychologists will remember something what many seem to have forgotten: that psychology is a science.

Even though the subject matter is not always suitable for experimentation, that is no reason for abandoning scientific principles and operational definitions of all

One hero As Sheldon Kopp said, if you have a hero, look again. You have diminished yourself.

I admire the work of Richard Gregory and of Colwyn Trevarthan.

coming soon

One challenge you think psychology faces Improving Access to Psychological Therapies and cognitive behaviour therapy do not attempt to deal with the real issues. Their use of the language of medicine only

One thing that you would change about psychology End the division between individual and social psychology and develop a way of talking about individuals in society and the influence of one on the other.

resource

One great thing that psychology could have achieved but has not Psychologists have shown that we learn more efficiently by

being rewarded than by being punished, but they have not entered the political arena to persuade parliament to change the law in the UK so that children can enjoy the same legal protection from physical assault that adults enjoy. Is there a connection between the ‘reasonable punishment’ which the law allows parents to inflict on their children and the fact that each week one or two children die at the hands of an adult, usually a parent or step-parent?

contribute

Clinical psychologist and writer

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Behaviour is determined not by what happens to us but how we interpret it. Since no two people ever have exactly the same past experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way.

Think you can do better? Want to see your area of psychology represented more?

See the inside front cover for how you can contribute and reach 45,000 colleagues into the bargain, or just e-mail your suggestions to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

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june 2009