The Psychologist February 2019

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the psychologist

psychologist february 2019

february 2019

The new hidden persuaders Ella Rhodes www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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the

the psychologist

psychologist february 2019

february 2019

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates.

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The new hidden persuaders Ella Rhodes www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience.

For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us.

Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, tweet us on @psychmag or call /write to us at the Society’s Leicester office.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Vacancy – see p.55 Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Emma Young

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Culture Kate Johnstone, Sally Marlow Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus, Asifa Majid Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Harriet Gross, Kimberley Hill, Rowena Hill, Deborah Husbands, Peter Olusoga, Richard Stephens, Miles Thomas

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psychologist february 2019

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02 Letters

Surviving

your PhD,

Brexit and more 10 News

Migrant children,

neuromyth,

events,

awards and more 16 Digest

From the

latest journals

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22 Keep on taking the medicine?

Parastou Donyai considers medication non-adherence

28 The new hidden persuaders Ella Rhodes considers whether shadowy influencers are really pulling our strings

36 We’re only human, after all

Emily Hutchinson on

organisational safety

42 ‘It’s a pleasure to use the word gifted in a constructive way’ We meet Paul Curran

48 ‘Psychology without

compassion leaves an emptiness’

Laura Lea with a day in the

life of a service-user

involvement coordinator

52 ‘It’s a privilege to work at Great Ormond Street’ Rachel Bryant-Waugh

56 Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

60 One on one …with Simon Proudlock

64 Books Including Q&As with Robin Ince and Fiona Dunkley

72 Culture Conscious rap, Poirot and more

76 Looking back on Lucy Fildes 80 A to Z

For those who read the magazine from back-tofront, our A to Z will be no secret, and you may not make it this far to read my defence of it as we reach its end. It’s not been universally liked, and I’m the first to admit it has rather utilitarian origins. However, it did two things I feel are important: particularly in its complete form at thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/psychology-z.

First, it’s a snapshot of how psychology pervades our personal and professional lives; second, it hopefully whets your appetite for our huge Psychologist and Research Digest archives.

It’s an exercise I can imagine repeating… but not just yet.

This month, seek out all manner of interviews, alongside feature articles on medication nonadherence, organisational safety, and our journalist Ella Rhodes on ‘the new hidden persuaders’.

Also, due to unforeseen circumstances, our search for a new full-time Deputy Editor continues. If you love magazines, websites and psychology it’s a great opportunity to make a real impact. See p.55.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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‘Their prison is built of fear’

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sychologists in the USA have warned of the effects of immigration policies on the mental health of children with undocumented parents. In light of current UK immigration policy, and that to be implemented post-Brexit, they outline the role for mental health professionals and others to develop approaches which could help these children and their families.

Writing for The Psychologist online were Dr Elke Weesjes, an associate at Paula A. Madrid Psy.D & Associates who is involved in writing psychological evaluations for immigration proceedings and interviewing adults and children facing the psychological stress of immigration, and Dr Paula Madrid, a clinical and forensic psychologist who, along with her private practice, is a consultant to the Children’s Health Fund in New York.

The world has been shocked by the statistic that the number of migrant children in US government custody is at its highest ever level. Yet not many consider the chronic fear and anxiety experienced by children whose parents face deportation for being undocumented in the country.

This is no small issue: there are an estimated 4.1 million US citizens, under the age of 18, who live with at least one undocumented parent. ‘These children also live in a prison, albeit a less sensational and more insidious one.

Instead of being built of metal and concrete, their prison is built of fear.’

Over the last 10 years Weesjes and Madrid have evaluated hundreds of children whose parents, often hailing from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, are undocumented. Their lives are almost always overshadowed by fear and anxiety about their family’s future. This uncertainty often prevents children from planning for their lives, making meaningful friendships, and leads to clinical levels of distress, anxiety, attachment and trust issues. Many older children are fearful to go to college in case one or both of their parents are deported, or because submitting application or funding information could expose their parents’ immigration status. ‘Children’s overwhelming fear of deportation, along with day-to-day exposure to discrimination and the inability to participate in modern rites of passage such as attending college, places them at risk for emotional stress and social isolation. In this context, the term “perpetual outsiderhood” was coined by Suárez-Orozco and colleagues.’

Elke Weesjes completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in 2011, and in their article the authors turn their attention to the rising levels of hate crime in the UK. During her time as Home Secretary, Theresa May’s hostile environment policy intended to target illegal migrants, those who had overstayed visas, some commonwealth migrants and those who had been refused asylum.

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Ingrid Encalada, an undocumented immigrant from Peru and mother of two, holds her son Anibal Jurado, 17 months, at their home on June 6, 2017 in Thornton, Colorado. Ingrid was given a temporary stay from deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in May after she took sanctuary in a Denver church for five months to avoid deportation. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Many of these people and their families have lived in the UK for years, yet the Immigration Act which was implemented in 2016 denies individuals access to basic services such as housing, employment, banking services, driving licences and healthcare.

The authors wrote: ‘Thus, unauthorised immigrants and their documented or undocumented children are cut off from society, are unable to socially integrate, and are often forced into a life of destitution… The ultimate aim of this law is the detention and removal of unauthorised immigrants. The Home Office, however, appears as disabled by bureaucracy as its US equivalent. Asylum and immigration cases, and the appeals that usually follow, can take many years to be concluded. As a result, immigrants and their children live in fear of deportation for prolonged periods of time.’

Given the relatively recent implementation of this law the mental health consequences of the policy are only just beginning to surface. ‘By looking at the experiences of mental health professionals in a country like the United States, where the crackdown on illegal immigration has been in full force since the 1990s, strategies can be formulated on how to assist these children and their families who are impacted by these policies.’ er To read the full article see tinyurl.com/y8oahkzw

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the psychologist february 2019 news

Increased funding for SEND The government has announced an increase of £350 million in the funding available to help children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). This includes money to train more educational psychologists.

From September 2020 there will be an increase in the number of educational trainees from 160 to at least 206, to help meet the demand for the specialist services they provide. The British Psychological Society welcomed the announcement, but emphasised that the assessment and support of children with special educational needs and disabilities had been severely compromised in recent years.

In the five years between 2010 and 2015 there was a 13 per cent reduction in number of educational psychologists working in local authorities and for the first time ever, there are some local authorities without any educational psychology service. Sarb Bajwa, the Society’s Chief Executive, said: ‘We are pleased that the Secretary of State has recognised the need to train more educational psychologists, but we question whether the additional funding will be enough to achieve the government’s ambitions. A clearer workforce plan is need across education, health and social care.’

Parliamentary postgraduate posts filled

Margaret Laurie

Lois Donnelly

Two PhD students have been chosen to work with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) to produce briefing notes for parliamentarians. The joint BPS and POST scheme runs every year and gives postgraduate students the chance to write evidence-based, concise documents on a specific topic.

Margaret Laurie, who studies at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (University of Edinburgh), and Lois Donnelly, from the Centre for Violence Prevention (University of Worcester), will spend time with POST during 2019 to produce their briefings.

Whilst their topics are yet to be confirmed, Laurie’s work at the University of Edinburgh is focused on how digital technologies shape interpersonal interactions in autistic children, and her POST briefing is likely to be in a related area. Donnelly’s postgraduate work looks at the wellbeing of victims of domestic abuse as they go through Family Court proceedings – her work with POST will be on an aspect of social psychology potentially related to gendered violence.

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Neuromyths and neuroreality

Dr Christian Jarrett

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While inaccurate beliefs about the brain have been around since the days of Aristotle, they persist even in the face of modern science and brain imaging evidence.

Neuromyths, and the reasons they persist even in the face of good evidence, were up for discussion at the British Neuroscience Association’s Christmas Symposium held at King’s College London in front of a lively audience.

Given the topic of Professor Cordelia Fine’s talk – Eight/Seven things to know about sex, gender, brains and behaviour: A guide for academics, journalists, gender diversity advocates, social justice warriors, tweeters, Facebookers, and everyone else not otherwise specified – it is perhaps understandable why she felt safer delivering it via Skype more than 9,000 miles away.

A Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (University of Melbourne), and the author of Testosterone Rex, Fine advised on the questions people should ask to best distinguish between reasonable claims and ‘grade A drivel’ in research, and subsequent media coverage, on gender differences in behaviour and the brain. Fine works alongside Daphna Joel, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience (Tel Aviv University) and Gina Rippon, Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging (Aston University), in tackling myths held about the ‘female’ and ‘male’ brain and the supposed differences between them.

The first, and most fundamental, of these questions is whether a difference actually exists. Fine also implored the audience to question how large, and what kind of sex difference had apparently been found, and to ask if the study had been carried out in various environmental conditions with different human populations. If, after asking the above questions, you are certain a difference does truly exist, ask where that difference comes from and whether indirect circumstances could affect the brain, hormones and behaviour.

If a difference is considered in isolation from other factors, or if inferences about behaviour are drawn from factors such as local connectivity, structure or size we should also be wary. Finally, if evolutionary explanations are given to explain a sex difference, we should ask whether that variation could be genetically heritable and look at whether cultural influences had been considered in a study. Fine concluded that while asking questions about apparent differences in male and female brains is sometimes said to be driven by a political ideology, or thinking that equality depends on psychological sameness, ‘This isn’t political correctness, it’s scientific correctness.’

Dr Christian Jarrett, Editor of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog and author of Great Myths of the Brain, discussed why brain myths are so persistent and believed by so many. He pointed to statistics showing that even people with training in neuroscience believe neuromyths; for example that we only use 10 per cent of our brains, or that people learn better when presented with information in their preferred learning style.

Professor Cordelia Fine’s talk was delivered via Skype Jarrett suggested that these myths seem to stick because many are open to interpretation, they give an appealing ‘insight’ into humans and their potential, and often contain grains of truth. For example, it is true that many people have a preferred learning style and feel they learn better when that style is used, even though there is no evidence they actually do. The idea also gives people an excuse for why they may not be learning something easily if it is presented in the ‘wrong’ way.

Jarrett also emphasised that prior beliefs and bias may affect how we assess the validity of certain myths.

Of course, scientists themselves are not immune from the effects of this. There is also a lack of understanding that science is a process – that what was once fact can become myth. This may explain the persistent nature of some neuromyths. He pointed to the idea that adults can grow new neurons, once considered a myth… a later study suggested it might be fact, and then a more recent study has planted this idea back in the ‘myth’ category… for now at least.

Professor Helene Joffe (UCL) suggested one important neuromyth to consider is the idea that expert thinking holds the truth, while public thinking is emotionally-driven and ignorant. This assumes expert knowledge is easily knowable, unanimous and unchanging. Joffe has examined media representation, and public understanding, of neuroscientific research and where misrepresentations may emerge.

In one study she and her colleagues examined 3,630 articles published on neuroscience research between the year 2000 and 2012. The majority were related to brain optimisation and training, pathological conditions and basic functions such as memory. In a second study involving free-association interviews with 48 people on their perceptions of brain research, Joffe uncovered four themes. First, that people saw the brain as a domain of science that was interesting but not personally salient.

This distance people felt from science sometimes evoked admiration, and sometimes hostility. Second, people saw

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the psychologist february 2019 news the brain as something that goes wrong and were often drawn to reading about neuroscience after personal or family experiences of problems with the brain, such as dementia. Third, Joffe found that people saw the brain as a source of human variation, and fourth that people saw the brain as a resource that is subject to individual control. People spoke of a desire to improve their brain function, with many believing that only a small percentage of the brain is used. Joffe pointed out that while we have long had an obsession with improving our bodies, a newer emphasis is placed on ‘optimising’ the brain.

Joffe moved on to trace the journey of a single study from publication, through press release, to subsequent media coverage. While the study reported findings that male brains show more communication within brain hemispheres and women’s brains show more communication between hemispheres, the later press release mentioned a potential explanation for women’s apparent ability for multitasking compared with a single-task focus in men – something the study did not suggest. From that press release emerged 87 newspaper articles, 162 blog posts and hundreds of reader comments.

Joffe said media reports introduced discussion, based on these findings, of differences in emotion, rationality, parenting and housework. The research was presented as vindicating the legitimacy of stereotypes, celebrated for undermining political correctness and perpetuated a view that women’s inferiority was biologically ordained. ‘As the information moved away from the original source it became more infused with the values of those who assimilated it.’

Joffe’s first and second studies highlighted the focus people have on self-control and brain optimisation – a feeling that with enough work on our brains and bodies we can control our destiny. However, Joffe noted that when the reports of neuroscience findings take this view and people’s place in the world is seen as deserved, the role of environmental and other factors is obscured. er

Professor Helene Joffe

For more from the event, including talks by Professor David Nutt and pseudonymous blogger Neuroskeptic, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk.

Compelling narratives on detention Respect, dignity, choice and control are at the heart of recommendations made after an independent review of the Mental Health Act led by Professor Sir Simon Wessely. Soon after the release of the review, compiled following extensive meetings and surveys of service users, carers, the public and organisations including the British Psychological Society, the government announced the introduction of a new Mental Health Bill and accepted two of the authors’ recommendations.

Some people with mental health problems can be detained (or sectioned) and treated against their will under the Mental Health Act (1983). In 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May announced a review of the Act in the face of rising rates of detention, and an overrepresentation of people from minority ethnic backgrounds being sectioned.

The review authors made recommendations for changes to the act that would modernise services and the law, give people’s wishes more weight, help those from ethnic

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minority communities, children and young people, those in the criminal justice system, and people with autism and learning disabilities.

Writing in the review introduction Wessely said of his work leading up to the review’s publication: ‘I heard compelling narratives that for some detention left them worse, not better off. Of course, all interventions, and being detained under the Mental Health Act is an intervention, have side effects. The treatment that only does good, and never harm, doesn’t exist. But we can only help reduce these outcomes if we accept they happen. I often heard from those who told me, looking back, that they realise that compulsory treatment was necessary, even life-saving, but then went on to say “why did it need to be given in the way it was?”.

And it was that last comment which has given rise to the majority of our recommendations.’

The government has accepted two of these recommendations immediately; namely that people who are detained under the act will be able to nominate someone to help with decisions with their

care (currently they have no say on which relative can be contacted, with unknown or distant relatives sometimes being called to make these important decisions), and to give people the ability to express their preferences for their care and treatment in statutory advance choice documents. A response is awaited on other recommendations, but there is an apparent commitment to legislation.

There has been some criticism of the review, for example from the English National Hearing Voices Network, which released an alternative review of the Act including results from a survey of its members.

Calling for a ‘radical overhaul’, Akiko Hart, a member of the network’s board, said: ‘Whilst we recognise the good intentions, dedication and heart of those who contributed to this review, we cannot ignore its failure to address widespread and institutional abuse and the ongoing erosion of people’s human rights. This is not the time for timid changes or placating promises, it is a time for action and an opportunity to revision the support we offer to those in most distress’. er

Professor Sir Simon Wessely

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‘Who knows where the journey will take you’ A non-linear, messy and confused career path, dotted with failure, may very well become a successful career path.

This was the message spoken loud and clear by each of the speakers at two recent British Psychological Society Careers in Psychology events in Newcastle and London.

CEO of the Society, Sarb Bajwa, welcomed delegates in London pointing to his own background in academia and later work with membership organisations. David Murphy, the Society’s President Elect, shared his journey from a tricky time during A-levels – his physics report read ‘David’s major weakness appears to be the failure to learn and apply basic facts’ – through a Zoology and Psychology degree, to his work at Imperial College London, the University of Oxford, and more recently

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The British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference takes place in Harrogate from 1-2 May. For more details, see www.bps.org.uk/ac2019.

The overall conference theme is The Psychological Impact of Inequality. As a ‘fringe event’ in keeping with this, The Psychologist is planning an evening discussion titled ‘Ivory Towers, Political Powers’. In preparation, we’ve been on Twitter @psychmag calling for examples of psychology research that initially appears to be pure/theoretical, but it turns out to have important policy implications...where seeking understanding of brain and behaviour for its own sake ends up making the world a better place. Share your suggestions using #IvoryTowersPoliticalPowers

the Centre for Strategic Leadership at the University of Edinburgh.

Clinical Psychologist Dr Gemima Fitzgerald, who gave inspiring talks at both events, came to academia as a mature student and a single mum after leaving an abusive relationship. She worked as a cleaner throughout her undergraduate degree, during which an academic at a careers fair told her he could tell just by looking at her she was ‘not the type’ to be pursuing a career in clinical psychology.

Fitzgerald, having now worked as a clinical psychologist in many different settings for five years, has recently set up her own business and works with private patients, the NHS, hospices, elite athletes, and staff working in homelessness services. Clinical psychology doesn’t have a ‘type’, she said, and diversity in the psychology workforce is very much a good thing.

Given her own experiences it is no surprise that much of Fitzgerald’s work involves resilience-building. She said this would be vital in work, and training, as a clinical psychologist. ‘There is potentially a long road ahead – be process focused rather than destination focused, enjoy the fact that every day you’re learning something, who knows where the journey will take you. Reframing failure is so important, people often ask me how to be more confident but the way I think of confidence is it isn’t a personality trait – I think it’s about letting go of a fear of failure.’

Speaking at the Newcastle event was Counselling Psychologist in-training, Fraser Smith, who set up the YouTube channel, podcast and blog GetPsyched almost

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the psychologist february 2019 news two years ago to help make contacts and spread the word about psychology, therapy and mental health. He emphasised the power of networking, creativity and sheer determination in forging a successful career in the field and encouraged keen writers to reach out to him to author guest posts for the blog which was nominated in this year’s (2019) UK Blog Awards.

Thanks to the influence of 90s TV programmes such as Sex and the City and Ally McBeal, Occupational Psychologist and Principal Lecturer Dr Vicki Elsey (Northumbria University) hoped to be a high-flying MD by the age of 30. However, upon realising many of the people around her hated the daily grind of their work, after her degree she embarked on a Master’s course in Occupational Psychology.

After working for a Management Consultancy in the North East, developing leadership programmes, working in psychological assessment and organisational change, Elsey moved into academia at Northumbria University and completed a doctorate on the career trajectories of occupational psychologists. While Elsey had not ever predicted a move into academia she sent a message that echoed through both events – be open to opportunities which arise, even if you had not considered them before.

Work takes up a huge proportion of our time on the planet, and Elsey said it is normal to feel at the whim of chance throughout one’s career journey. ‘Make the most of the opportunities you have, career success is more about the knowledge you gain from your degree. Be prepared to adapt, network, learn about other jobs and careers and don’t be fixed in your mindset – often things which are unintended can be more enjoyable.’

In London Dr Emma Norris, a Research Associate at the Centre for Behaviour Change (University College London), gave an early-career perspective on a life in academia. She emphasised another message which ran through both events – there is no ‘correct’ career trajectory in psychology.

She explained the process of completing a PhD and gave some tips on how to find postgraduate study opportunities by contacting potential supervisors or searching for vacancies on job sites. As a postdoctoral researcher Norris spends around half her week on research and the rest on teaching, writing, administration, grant-writing, meetings and seminars. As a former chair of the Society’s Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG), Norris pointed to the importance of getting involved with organisations such as the Society, writing for publications such as The Psychologist and GetPsyched, and using social media to stay involved with discussions in the field. Finally she added: ‘love what you do on a day to day basis and that will get you through those rocky moments.’

Both events also included lively panel discussions with experts in Sport and Exercise Psychology, Infant Mental Health, Clinical and Forensic Psychology taking questions from the audience. Many enquired about gaining clinical psychology experience in the face of diminishing numbers of assistant psychology posts and the emotional difficulties of working with people struggling with their mental health. er

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Society action for early career researchers The British Psychological Society is aiming to better support psychologists, whether postdoctoral researchers, lecturers, or practitioners, in the early stages of their career. The results of a new survey into the experiences of early career researchers has resulted in a free event which will be held in March to help answer the questions many in this group have.

Early last year the BPS Research Board’s Early Career Working Group developed a survey to better ascertain what support this group needed. More than 300 people took part and it revealed that many were unaware of bursaries available to them, there was some confusion over who counts as ‘early career’

and there were many requests for more support and inclusive events and workshops. As a result of these findings BPS early career bursaries have been re-branded so as to be more easily identifiable and early career will now be defined as anyone who is up to eight years post PhD or psychology training.

A free half-day event, titled ‘Building your career after you qualify: An event for early career psychologists’, is being held by the working group on Friday 29 March at the British Psychological Society’s London Office. The event is open to all, whether a BPS member or not, and more information and registration can be found at www.bps.org.uk/earlycareerpsych.

Psychologists honoured in New Year list Three psychologists have been recognised for their work in the New Year’s Honours list. Professor Zenobia Nadirshaw from the University of West London received the MBE for services to people with learning disabilities and mental health treatment. An Honorary Life Member of the British Psychological Society, Nadirshaw is a consultant clinical psychologist with 40 years of clinical and management experience in NHS health and social care services.

Professor Ian Deary, Professor of Differential Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of its Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, received an OBE for services to the social sciences. Deary is noted for his work with people tested as schoolchildren by the Scottish Council for Research in Education in 1932 and 1947. Later follow-up work with this group has given valuable new insights into the relationship between intelligence, mortality and ageing. Professor Zenobia You can find more about his work in our archive at Nadirshaw MBE thepsychologist.bps.org.uk.

Professor Quentin Summerfield from the University of York received an OBE for services to psychology and people with hearing loss.

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist. org.uk/reports, including Stephen Reicher with his ‘Notes from an Istanbul courtroom’ – a day spent observing political trials of academics in Turkey.

For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

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Psychology research is still fixated on a tiny fraction of humans Jesse Singal digests the research on how to fix that

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Christian Jarrett Writers: Emma Young and Jesse Singal Full reports and much more on the Digest website

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F

or a long time, some psychologists have understood that their field has an issue with WEIRDness.

That is, psychology experiments disproportionately involve participants who are Western, Educated, and hail from Industrialised, Rich Democracies, which means many findings may not generalise to other populations, such as, say, rural Samoan villagers.

In a new paper in PNAS, a team of researchers led

by Mostafa Salari Rad decided to zoom in on a leading psychology journal to better understand the field’s WEIRD problem, evaluate whether things are improving, and come up with some possible changes in practice that could help spur things along.

For their paper, nicely titled, ‘Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population,’ Rad and his colleagues pulled two samples of articles published in Psychological Science: all articles published in 2014, and the last three issues from 2017. Unfortunately for the field of psychology, they found little evidence to suggest that Psychological Science, published by the US-based Association for Psychological Science, has addressed the WEIRD problem.

Looking at the participant groups in the subset of the 2014 articles in which authors included demographic information, ‘57.76 per cent were drawn from the US, 71.25 per cent were drawn from English-speaking countries (including the US and UK), and 94.15 per cent … sampled Western countries (including English-speaking countries, Europe, and Israel).’ The 2017 numbers weren’t much better.

So there’s clearly a problem. But, Rad’s team added, ‘[p]erhaps the most disturbing aspect of our analysis was the lack of information given about WEIRDness of samples, and the lack of consideration given to issues of

cultural diversity in bounding the conclusions’.

That is, the articles they examined all too often omitted information that could help other researchers note WEIRDness when it occurs, and all too often explicitly over-extrapolated findings drawn from WEIRD samples.

Summing up these problems in the 2014 sample, Rad and his colleagues said: ‘Over 72 per cent of abstracts contained no information about the population sampled, 83 per cent of studies did not report analysis of any effects of the diversity of their sample (e.g., gender effects), over 85 per cent of studies neglected to discuss the possible effects of culture and context on their findings, and 84 per cent failed to simply recommend studying the phenomena concerned in other cultures, implying that the results indicated something generalizable to humans outside specific cultural contexts.’

The authors don’t just grumble about the problem – they offer some concrete potential fixes based on their findings: • ‘Required Reporting of Sample Characteristics’ — It’s already the norm to report the gender breakdowns of experimental samples; Rad and his colleagues think that authors should be ‘required to report [other characteristics including] age, SES, ethnicity, religion, and nationality,’ when it is practical and realistic to do so.

• ‘Explicitly Tie Findings to Populations’ — Less ‘We discovered X about people’, and more ‘We discovered X about a small group of undergraduates with the following demographic characteristics in New Haven, Connecticut.’

• ‘Justify the Sampled Population’ — Authors should have to explain why they chose the population they chose – and sometimes, as Rad et al note, yes, the answer will be convenience. That’s fine, within reason:

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the psychologist february 2019 digest

A study of university students left traumatised by a relationship breakup has found that their subsequent feelings of ‘post-traumatic growth’ were illusory – using a longitudinal design, researchers were able to show that the students had not actually changed for the better even though they felt they had.

The results are consistent with the idea that post-traumatic growth is often more about positive reappraisal than real change.

(Journal of Social and Personality Relationships)

Social psychologists are overwhelmingly left-wing and some may be averse to evolutionary psychology for ideological reasons – that’s according to the authors of a survey of members of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. (Archives of Scientific Psychology)

Recommendations for editors and reviewers

The above suggestions provide a solid jumping-offpoint for solving the WEIRD problem: Any one of them could be debated, discussed, and potentially modified or implemented. The next step, then, will be to see whether journals – the most important deciders when it comes scientific standard – will take up the mantle.

At the risk of getting overly meta-psychological – discussing the psychological science of how psychological science is conducted – a great deal of human behaviour can be boiled down to the path of least resistance and to incentives. Often it’s not a deep-seated bias or a lack of concern about other groups that causes researchers to overlook non-WEIRD samples (though I’m sure both are sometimes factors), but rather it’s because college students are right there. As in, literally in the same buildings as the ones where most psych researchers work. You can just put up some flyers, and boom, you have a group you can experiment on! It’s all too tempting. And it’ll take some incentive-shifting – shifts to editors’ behaviour, or the possibility of earning badges, or whatever else – to get researchers out of their WEIRD rut.

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Another blow to neuromyths?

‘Learning styles’ – there can be few ideas that have created such a stark disconnect between the experts on the ground and the evidence published in scholarly journals.

Endorsed by the overwhelming majority of teachers, yet dismissed by most psychologists and educational neuroscientists as a ‘neuromyth’, the basis of learning styles is that people learn better when taught via their preferred learning modality, usually (but not always) described as either visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.

Past research has already established that students do not actually learn better when taught via what they believe to be their preferred learning modality. Now researchers in Greece have reported evidence of a further issue – primary school age pupils and their teachers do not agree on the pupils’ preferred learning style. This is a blow to advocates of the learning styles approach since most teachers who employ learning styles in their classrooms rely on their own

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• ‘Non-WEIRD = Novel and Important’ – ‘Journal editors should instruct reviewers to treat non-WEIRDness as a marker of the interest and importance of a paper.’

• ‘Diversity Badges’ – Some journals already award “badges” when authors pre-register or engage in other open-science best-practices. Badges for research centered on under-studied populations could be a nice little incentive-nudge.

• ‘Diversity Targets’ – It would be reasonable, argue the authors, to have at least 50 per cent of published papers analyse non-WEIRD populations.

Ideally, it would be higher, but as the numbers above show the situation at the moment is pretty dire, 50 per cent would be a major improvement.

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The problem isn’t that college students are studied sometimes, it’s that they’re studied far too often.

• ‘Discuss generalisability of the Finding’ – Similar to the point about populations above, the idea is simply that authors should explicitly discuss whether they expect a given finding will generalise beyond the experimented-upon population, and why.

• ‘Analytical Investigation of Existing Diversity’ – Even WEIRD samples often have some degree of diversity to them along certain dimensions, so here Rad and his colleagues are suggesting that authors check for the presence of diversityrelated moderators, both gender (which is already reported, usually) and other characteristics like race (which often aren’t). In other words, even if your experimental sample is mostly WEIRD, it could be informative to check whether, for example, the small handful of black participants produced different data than the rest of the group.

assessments of their students’ learning styles.

Writing in Frontiers in Education, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou and her colleagues concluded that ‘… if the identification of learning styles … is unreliable, as evidence by the findings of the present study, this should constitute an additional reason why teachers should abandon the use of learning styles in instruction.’ [Christian Jarrett]

11/01/2019 10:39

Glass half full?

One of the most ambitious replication efforts in psychology has found that only about half of 28 classic and contemporary research findings ‘worked’ in the sense of delivering the same finding in the same direction at a statistically significant level.

The Many Labs 2 project, leadauthored by Richard Klein of the of the Université Grenoble Alpes, used original materials and ‘registered reports’ (where methods and hypotheses are logged prior to data collection) to help minimise ‘boring’ reasons for replication failure (to quote co-author Brian Nosek).

While the findings – released as a preprint hosted by the Association for Psychological Science – would appear to show that the so-called replication crisis in psychology is a genuine concern, there is an upside to the results. The Many Labs 2 researchers found that variability in the observed experimental effects was more attributable to the effect

under study than to the sample or setting in which it was studied, such as: task order; lab or online data collection; and the participants being Western or from other cultures. This suggests that that psychology can be conducted in a robust way such that the findings – whether positive or negative – are not unduly influenced by the circumstances. [Jesse Singal]

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In an economic game of trust, men who scored highly on autistic traits were less influenced than other participants by how trustworthy their partners looked (based on their facial appearance), focusing instead on their partners’ actual behaviour in the game. The findings add to earlier research that found autistic boys did not use facial appearance to guide their decisions in an economic game.

(British Journal of Psychology) Getty Images

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It is better to ask a student to see if they can explain something to themselves, than for a teacher or book to always explain it to them.

(Educational Psychology Review)

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An American study of people’s beliefs about what leads people to feel loved prompted many suggestions you’d expect (making love, being hugged, receiving gifts), but there was even stronger agreement that mundane yet touching gestures make us feel loved, such as: our pets being happy to see us, a child snuggling up to us, or someone showing us compassion.

(Journal of Social and Personal Relationships)

11/01/2019 10:39

the psychologist february 2019 digest

Finding the best exercise intensity, type and duration for boosting mood

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It’s well-known that physical exercise is beneficial not just to physical health but also our mental health. Yet whereas most countries have detailed, evidence-backed guidelines on the type and intensity of exercise required for various physical health benefits, such guidelines do not yet exist for exercise and mood. This is partly due to a lack of necessary evidence. However, a new systematic review in The Journal of Psychology Interdisciplinary and Applied brings us usefully up-to-date on the current findings in this area, collating evidence from 38 relevant studies that examined the associations between exercise intensity, duration and modality and any effects on mood.

Before dipping into some of the key take-aways, an important distinction made in the review is between aerobic exercise and anaerobic. The former involves such things as walking, jogging and cycling and means exercising in such a way that your body is able to use oxygen to burn fat for energy. In contrast, anaerobic exercise – such as lifting heavy weights or sprinting – is of such vigorous intensity that your body does not have time to use oxygen to create energy and so instead it breaks down glucose in your blood or muscles.

Beginning first with the influence of exercise intensity on the mood benefits of aerobic exercise, the researchers, led by John Chan at Shenzhen University, found contradictory results from 19 relevant studies. Some favoured higher intensity, others low, while seven studies found that intensity made no difference to mood benefits.

In relation to the intensity of anaerobic exercise, however, the results were far clearer – the optimum for improving mood is moderate intensity, perhaps because low intensity is too dull while high intensity is too unpleasant.

Next, Chan’s team considered exercise duration. The main finding here was that 10 minutes often appears sufficient to achieve gains in mood (although one study found that 30 minutes was required to achieve feelings of increased vigour). Overall, there was little evidence that going beyond 30 minutes leads to any further gains in mood, which is good to know for anyone who struggles to find much time for exercise in their daily schedule.

Finally, the researchers considered studies that have compared the mood benefits of aerobic and anaerobic exercise (they noted that mindfulness-based physical exercise, such as Yoga and Thai-Chi, have also shown promise for boosting mood, but that there is too little evidence to draw any firm conclusions). The picture here was that the beneficial mood effects of aerobic exercise are less consistent than is found with anaerobic exercise, and anaerobic exercise appears especially to be more beneficial for beating stress and anxiety (the researchers suggested this may be because with many forms of anaerobic exercise, such as weight training, it is easier to see your progress, leading to more immediate, rewarding feelings of mastery; also anaerobic exercise is associated

with increases in BDNF – brain-derived neurotrophic factor – which may help foster beneficial structural and functional changes in the brain).

These headline results from several decades of research come with some hefty caveats. The studies were mostly lab based, used different ways of measuring intensity, and they recruited extremely varied volunteers.

You can easily imagine how study findings could differ a lot depending on people’s past experience with exercise, their age and health, and even their personality and interests.

This makes it difficult to extrapolate from the findings to our own lives. However, when reflecting on the optimum type of exercise for your own mood, the common sense message is probably to take into consideration your own fitness level and preferences, to find that sweet spot, such that the exercise is enough of a challenge without being unpleasant.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this review, though, is that we clearly need much more research into how different types and intensities of exercise affect our mood in real life, and how this varies according to our own characteristics. The sophistication and ubiquity of modern fitness trackers should open up exciting new opportunities for psychology research that can address these questions. [Christian Jarrett]

11/01/2019 10:39

Keep on taking the medicine?

Parastou Donyai considers strategies for understanding and tackling medication non-adherence

Imagine a patient who is 60 and recovering from breast cancer. She was treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy six months ago. Sent home with a hormonal treatment, she was told to take the tablets once a day for the next five years. Since starting the letrozole tablets, she has had night sweats, hot flushes and headaches.

Her GP, although ‘very nice’, doesn’t want to discuss her medication with her, as this is related to her cancer, which ‘the hospital treated’. She tells you she’s unlikely to continue with her medication for much longer: ‘Why spoil the last good five years of my life?’

How would you respond?

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edication is the most common intervention in health care. Community pharmacies dispensed over a thousand million prescribed items in England in 2015; an average of 20 items for every person. Scotland and Northern Ireland had a similar average, with Welsh pharmacies dispensing 26 items each. This is perhaps to be expected: medication is used to treat or manage a range of conditions, particularly in our increasingly elderly population. In addition, a number of guidelines encourage doctors to prescribe medicines to prevent illnesses; for example, lipid-lowering medication to reduce the risk of stroke or heart attacks.

Medicines for conditions affecting the mind and the nervous system (e.g. mental health) cost the most, followed by conditions affecting the endocrine (e.g. diabetes), respiratory (e.g. asthma), and cardiovascular (e.g. high blood pressure) systems. Items dispensed in England in 2015 had a net ingredient cost of £9266.6 million.

Yet people commonly fail to take their dispensed medication as instructed. What progress are psychologists making in understanding and tackling medication-taking behaviour?

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the psychologist february 2019 taking medicine

Definitions We are going to use the term medication adherence when referring to medication-taking behaviour – instead of medication compliance, which carries a negative inference of passive obedience (Sabaté, 2003).

Medication adherence is about how the patient takes their medication compared with the instructions on their prescription.

There are three stages to adherence. The first is the initiation stage – does the patient take the first dose as prescribed? Next is the implementation stage, which is ‘the extent to which a patient’s actual dosing corresponds to the prescribed dosing regimen, from initiation until the last dose is taken’. The final stage is the discontinuation stage, which is whether the patient takes the last dose as prescribed (Vrijens, et al., 2012).

Another key term is persistence, which is the length of time between the initiation stage and the discontinuation stage. A patient can be non-adherent to their medication regimen if they fail to collect and take their medication on time, if at all (described as primary non-adherence); if they don’t follow the dosing regimen during the implementation stage (secondary non-adherence); and if they discontinue the course early (non-persistence).

One other term for us to consider is concordance. It describes a medical consultation process whereby the prescriber and patient agree therapeutic decisions that incorporate both views. The term also encompasses prescriber communication and patient support in medicine taking (Horne, et al., 2005).

The extent of the problem The 2003 World Health Organization report on adherence, authored by Eduardo Sabaté, estimated that patients do not take between 30 and 50 per cent of medicines prescribed for long-term conditions as intended, and this remains an often-used statistic to depict the extent of the problem. Measuring the true prevalence of medication non-adherence in chronic conditions has been particularly difficult because no methodological gold standard exists to measure the range of non-adherent behaviours (Vermeire et al., 2002). Researchers have used a range of methods: • subjective methods (e.g. by asking the patient to report their adherence); • objective approaches (e.g. by using electronic monitoring devices to record doses accessed, or pharmacy databases to look at the frequency of dispensing); and • direct methods (e.g. biochemically measuring the amount of drug in the patient’s body, or placing a microchip inside the medication form).

None of these is a perfect instrument for quantifying non-adherence (Dodds et al., 2000). And what are suitable benchmarks anyway? The proportion of prescribed drug taken, days with correct number of doses, doses taken on time, the number of drug

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holidays (Vrijens et al., 2012); this heterogeneity in measurement means it is difficult to accurately compare adherence between different conditions.

However, we can draw on a useful US study that compared adherence and persistence across six chronic medication classes using one methodology. It found variable but uniformly suboptimal use with medication prescribed for diabetes (mean 12-month adherence rate 72 per cent), overactive bladder (35 per cent), cholesterol (61 per cent), cardiovascular disease (66 per cent), osteoporosis (60 per cent), and glaucoma (37 per cent) (Yeaw et al., 2009). Patients are also known to be non-adherent in all sorts of other chronic conditions, including HIV, arthritis, gastrointestinal disorders, cancer, pulmonary disease, mental health disorders and epilepsy (DiMatteo et al., 2002; Sabaté, 2003).

When people don’t adhere to their medication, this can reduce the clinical benefit of the medication and in turn affect the patient’s quality of life. Medication non-adherence affects health systems by increasing the burden of ill health, medicines waste, hospitalisation and emergency admission (DiMatteo et al., 2002; Simpson et al., 2006). In the long run, we’re talking life and death.

The psychology It’s tempting to view medication non-adherence as either unintentional (e.g. due to forgetfulness or carelessness) or intentional (e.g. not believing in the treatment), but this is an over-simplification. People’s beliefs can also predict unintentional non-adherence (Gadkari & McHorney, 2012).

One psychological model of medication adherence is the Necessity–Concerns Framework, which concentrates on intentional non-adherence. At its heart is the idea that patients’ commonsense beliefs about prescribed medicines can be captured and categorised according to necessity beliefs – perceptions of personal need for treatment – and concerns about a range of potential adverse consequences. If necessity beliefs outweigh concerns, then you should have intentional adherence. Rob Horne and John Weinman’s associated Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire quantifies these aspects. Other tools for screening non-adherence across chronic diseases also exist (George et al., 2006; Hahn et al., 2008; McHorney, 2009; Svarstad et al., 1999; Willey et al., 2000).

However, practitioners as a whole have not adopted any of these tools widely in practice. Non-adherence remains a complex and unresolved problem. Reasons for non-adherence are multifaceted and not easy to categorise, including: the severity of the disease and whether symptoms are present; patients’ perception of their condition and sense of vulnerability; their concerns about medication side-effects and long-term consequences; their knowledge about a medicine’s mechanism of action and their health literacy in general; the complexity of the regimen; forgetfulness;

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fear of dependence; and so on (Kardas et al., 2013; Pound et al., 2005; Vermeire et al., 2002).

Taking a broader view, the 2003 World Health Organization report described five interacting dimensions of non-adherence: healthcare system/ team; patient-related; therapy-related; conditionrelated; and social and economic. It defined patientrelated factors of adherence as the patient’s resources, knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and expectations. Patient-related barriers to adherence are then a lack of information and skills as they relate to self-management, difficulty with motivation and self-efficacy, and lack of support for behavioural changes. The report concluded that ‘patients need to be informed, motivated and skilled in the use of cognitive and behavioural self-regulation strategies if they are to cope effectively with the treatment-related demands imposed by their illness’.

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What works?

A 2014 Cochrane review led by epidemiologist Robby Nieuwlaat examined 182 randomised controlled trials of interventions. Only five of the 17 identified studies reported improvements in both adherence and clinical outcomes; three improved only adherence outcomes, one improved only clinical outcomes, and the remainder did not improve adherence or clinical outcomes. They found no study that led to large improvements Key sources and also found no obvious common study characteristics.

NICE (2009). Medicines adherence: The most robust designs generally Involving patients in decisions about involved complex interventions prescribed medicines and supporting with multiple components, where adherence. National Institute for Health healthcare professionals (e.g. and Clinical Excellence. pharmacists) gave ongoing tailored NICE Medicines and Prescribing Centre (2015). Medicines optimisation: The safe support, often delivering intense and effective use of medicines to enable education/counselling (including the best possible outcomes. National motivational interviewing or Institute for Health and Care Excellence. cognitive behavioural therapy by Nieuwlaat, R., Wilczynski, N., professionals) or daily treatment Navarro, T. et al. (2014, 20 November). support (or both), and sometimes Interventions for enhancing medication adherence (Review). Cochrane there was additional support Database of Systematic Reviews. from family or peers. However, doi:10.1002/14651858.CD000011.pub4 the reviewers could not make a Sabaté, E. (2003). Adherence to longjudgement about which intervention term therapies: Evidence for action. type was most effective because of Geneva: World Health Organization. the diversity and complexity of the Vrijens, B., De Geest, S., Hughes, D. et al. (2012). A new taxonomy for studies (e.g. the variety of settings, describing and defining adherence to participants, intervention types, medications. British Journal of Clinical medications, adherence measures Pharmacology, 73(5), 691–705. and clinical outcome).

Yeaw, J., Benner, J., Walt, J. et al. (2009).

The European ABC project Comparing adherence and persistence also reviewed RCTs but included across 6 chronic medication classes.

Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy, only studies where researchers had 15(9), 728–740. assessed adherence by electronic medication-event monitoring.

Full list available in online/app version.

This consists of an automatic, electronically compiled drug-

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dosing history for each patient (Demonceau et al., 2013). The reviewers found statistically significant increases in adherence when the intervention included feedback to patients using electronic monitoring or involved a cognitive-educational component. To elaborate, electronic monitoring was followed by a focused discussion giving feedback to the patient of their recent dosing history data, as a guided example of behavioural counselling. Cognitive-educational interventions presented information individually or in a group setting, orally, in written form and/ or audiovisually, in order to educate and motivate patients. The rationale is that patients who understand their condition and its treatment will be more informed, more empowered and more likely to adhere.

The ABC’s systematic reviewers also examined and reported on intervention components (Demonceau, et al., 2013). Such approaches seemed more effective than treatment simplification, behavioural-counselling interventions, social-psycho-affective interventions, technical reminder systems, or providing technical equipment for disease monitoring. None of these techniques demonstrated clinical significance.

Yet other research suggests a complex and conflicting picture. For example, a 2007 review led by Kripalani found the most effective interventions to be those that simplify dosing demands, as well as those involving monitoring and feedback, and multisession informational trials. Others (e.g. van Dulmen et al., 2007) have also concluded that simplifications of dosage and packaging can be effective. So, ‘more research is needed’? Perhaps. But another view is that the factors of non-adherence are so complex that no single intervention or package of interventions could ever be effective across all patients, conditions and settings. We should instead focus on a client-centred approach to adherence – let’s listen to our patients and address their concerns.

The advice In keeping with a client-centred approach, the 2009 National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guideline on medicines adherence makes recommendations for healthcare professionals who prescribe, dispense or review medicines, or who have a role in making decisions about medicines with patients, under the following broad headings: • Patient involvement in decisions about medicines (communication, increased patient involvement, understanding the patient’s knowledge, beliefs and concern about medicines, providing information); • Supporting adherence (assessing adherence, interventions to increase adherence); • Reviewing medicines; and • Communication between healthcare professionals.

Patients should be encouraged to become involved in the conversation, asking open-ended questions to uncover their concerns. Specifically, the health

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the psychologist february 2019 taking medicine

professional should explore what the patient hopes a new treatment will achieve and their views and concerns about the medication, and discuss the condition and how the medication will influence this, including the pros and cons.

They should accept that the reasonable proposal to address patient ultimately has the right to Parastou Donyai is a Professor this gap would be for closer, decide not to take the medication. at the University of Reading multidisciplinary working to Health professionals should also p.donyai@reading.ac.uk better support patients with their be aware that the patients might medication needs. want to discuss a range of issues, How do these guidelines help us respond to the such as what happens if they are non-adherent, how 60-year old female whose case was outlined at the they might reduce or stop longstanding medication, start of this article? There are a number of issues to and how to make a choice between which of different consider. It is clear that the patient is experiencing medications to take. side-effects that she considers to be detrimental to In due course, health professionals should assess her quality of life. In addition, she has been unable to the patient’s adherence to their medication by asking, discuss her concerns with her GP, who she considers in a non-judgemental way, about their medication taking, for example whether in the past week they have has no interest in her cancer treatment. These concerns missed any doses. If the patient is not adhering to their are likely to lead the patient to become ‘non-persistent’ with her medication, discontinuing medication, health professionals the course of treatment early should tailor any intervention to the individual; if side-effects are a “…another view is that the without first exploring her with a health practitioner. particular problem for the patient, factors of non-adherence concerns The initial action, then, is to have a then health professionals should are so complex that no client-centred discussion with the allow them to make an informed patient in order to further explore choice about how to deal with these single intervention or beliefs about the medication, by discussing the benefits as well as package of interventions her its benefits and also the extent of the side-effects of the medication. could ever be effective concerns she has with the sideThe dose taken may need to be effects. A practitioner psychologist adjusted, the medication switched across all patients, would need to communicate with to another drug, or a different conditions and settings” the other professionals involved strategy might be needed, such as in this patient’s care, for example changing the timing of when the the GP, in order to explain the medication is taken. patient’s beliefs, concerns and preferences, and suggest NICE published another relevant guideline, in a medication review. During a medication review the 2015, on medicines optimisation: ‘a person-centred patient may agree for her medication to be switched approach to safe and effective medicines use, to to another hormonal treatment or she may decide ensure people obtain the best possible outcomes with the GP to stop taking the medication altogether. from their medicines’. This guideline recommends The key is an approach that allows an open discussion carrying out medication reviews, as well as using and joint decision about the medication to be reached self-management plans and patient decision aids with the patient. during medicines-related consultations. Healthcare Much progress remains to be made. Future professionals completing medication reviews as part of research, for example, could examine the specific medicines optimisation are asked to take into account detail of a successful client-centred approach using the patient’s (and family members’ or carers’, where methodology such as conversation analysis. The rapid appropriate) views and understanding about their advent of technology-enabled adherence services too medicines as well as concerns, questions or problems provides considerable opportunity for innovation. they have with their medicines.

Currently, the best opportunity for providing adherence-focused conversations, however, is at the point of prescribing and dispensing medication.

Working together Therefore, there is strong justification for asking the Both of the NICE guidelines cited here are directed at British Psychological Society and the different medical, health professionals who have competent knowledge pharmacy and nursing professional representative and expertise about prescribing and medicines, such bodies to work together to improve the psychological as doctors, nurses and pharmacists. But these health know-how of the wider group of professionals in the professionals often lack the psychological know-how field. that underpins behaviour-change practices. One

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11/01/2019 11:16

The new hidden persuaders?

Ella Rhodes considers whether shadowy influencers are really pulling our strings More than 60 years on from the influential text about psychological manipulation in advertising, how has the landscape changed?

Are we being pushed and pulled in ever-more fundamental directions, or are our fears exaggerated?

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n the introduction to his bestselling 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, American journalist Vance Packard wrote about the ‘probers’, using their psychoanalytically driven ‘depth approach’ and ‘systematically feeling out our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behavior’. American psychologists at advertising agencies were, he warned, ‘probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on’.

Thus persuasion was painted as intrusive, targeted and all-powerful: ‘You can probably make them do anything for you: Sell people things they don’t need; make women who don’t know you fall in love with you.’ Packard’s approach arguably fuelled a mistrust that has lasted for decades.

But the world is now a very different place.

By 2005 more than half of households in Great Britain had access to the internet, and even since then our social, political and consumerist lives have changed beyond recognition. The technology channelling the persuasion to us is becoming more complex: it’s harder for us to understand who is seeking influence and how, or potentially even to have any awareness it could be happening.

We’re confronted with a stream of emotional appeals, conspiracy theories, social-media-proliferated propaganda and ‘fake news’. Psychologists remain at the heart of these issues. The Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal saw researchers use personality tests taken on Facebook to create ‘psychographic’ profiles of voters, with data sold on to enable targeted messages for the Brexit ‘Leave’ campaign group, and Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s presidential campaigns.

Reports of the CA data being accessed from Russia, and hundreds of social media accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency and attempting to influence UK politics, refuelled the ‘Cold War paranoia’ that was so key in Packard’s era.

We’re not talking about which brand of shampoo we buy here. Political decisions reflect our ideologies.

Can the ‘new hidden persuaders’ really be shaking our foundations, the very core beliefs we hold dear, and all without us even realising?

11/01/2019 11:31

the psychologist february 2019 hidden persuaders

Ana Louis - destroymodernart.com/index.html

A dark forest In the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, a death in a forest is shown from four entirely contradictory points of view – casting doubt on reality itself. In a recent Wired article on the ‘dawn of the posttruth era’, former head of Facebook’s targeting effort Antonio García Martínez argues that ‘everything is in a Rashomon effect, and real discourse becomes impossible’. In the new media reality ‘the universally acclaimed expert or editor has been replaced by internet-enabled rumor and hearsay arbitrated only

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by algorithms’, Martínez writes. ‘There are some dominant media outlets with a claim to primacy, just as every village has a particularly well-informed local gossip, but the capital-T Truth, so beloved by the French encyclopedists, will no longer exist across a broad spectrum of society… As with the film, we’ll all choose the version we find most appealing. As to what actually happened in that forest… or whatever the next national crisis is… we’ll never have a definitive account of it. We won’t even think that possible.’

Research published in Science by Soroush Vosoughi,

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Deb Roy and Sinan Aral layers a worrying trend on top of this: misinformation reaches more people online than the truth. ‘The top 1 per cent of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people.’ They also observed that the truth took around six times as long to reach 1500 people compared with ‘fake news’ (a data set of ‘rumour cascades’ on Twitter from 2006 to 2017).

Vosoughi told me that there have always been people trying to change our opinions through persuasion. ‘This isn’t anything new. But technology has amplified the effect. Radio and TV allowed advertisers to reach into people’s homes, and now with social media it’s become even easier for persuaders to reach people and it has become harder to trace the source of the persuasion. And then it spreads... psychologists have looked at sharing behaviour in different domains and people tend to share more surprising and interesting stories in the offline world as well. People share stories that have greater emotional valence and tend to elicit a more visceral reaction...

I believe false news has that emotional punch.’

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Friends and likes Cialdini’s remaining principles are ‘consistency’ (highlight any prior actions or beliefs that are consistent with your target behaviour); ‘reciprocity’ (encourage a feeling of obligation to give back to those who have given us or shown us something), ‘authority’ (the use of apparently credible experts in persuading us to buy, do or believe something); and ‘liking’ (deliver messages via someone a person likes). These principles are perhaps universally amplified on social media. In the past a toothpaste company may have relied on putting a dentist, complete with white coat, centre stage in its ads; now we often turn to the aggregated opinions, reviews and ‘likes’ of our peers.

Indeed, some of Stafford’s own research has shown people value their friends’ opinions on a topic as highly as a scientific view – not because they see their friends as more expert than scientists, but because they know their friends are on their side. To humans, this is vital. As is the size of the crowd: in one study Andrew Flanagin and Miriam Metzger found that when userAna Louis - destroymodernart.com/index.html

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Informational hygiene Dr Tom Stafford, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield, has a more optimistic view. He sees hope that our relationship with the digital world will grow, that we will learn ways to avoid persuasive attempts.

‘We’re in a particularly unusual time, and our culture is acting like adolescence – we haven’t developed the maturity to deal with this stuff and I think we will.

It will involve things like checking facts before passing them on. We’re going to improve our informational hygiene… part of that will be technological solutions, but part of it will be cultural change brought about by learning to deal with the abundance of information and fake information. If you’re motivated to collect information that agrees with what you believe already there’s scope like never before for doing that. But that also means people can find critical views, aggregate evidence… if you’re sincerely interested in finding out the truth, it’s now easier than ever before.’

Stafford does suggest that many of Robert Cialdini’s famous principles of persuasion (outlined in his book Influence) have the capacity to be amplified by social media. ‘One of his six principles is social proof, or consensus – if you’re in a theatre and everyone stands up and gets out you’ll leave, but if someone shouts “Fire!” and everyone stays where they are, you’ll stay where you are. What everyone else does matters, and social media amplifies that signal.’ Another principle is scarcity – Stafford says that the urgency of social media is the equivalent of ads shouting ‘Offer must end today’ or ‘While stocks last’. ‘The very latest news is only fresh for a few minutes with Twitter. It’s an interesting thought experiment – if you said to me “You can look at the Twitter feed from 14 July 2013”, there’s no way that would seem as appealing as looking at updates

from today, even though the quality of information is probably about the same. It doesn’t have the same feeling of urgency; I want to know what’s happening now.’

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the psychologist february 2019 hidden persuaders

generated reviews of a film hit a certain number, participants saw that information as credible, relied on it and believed it to be accurate. ‘As information is aggregated in high volume, it is more difficult to fake and is less susceptible to individual raters’ subjective biases. Its influence is therefore amplified.’ While participants in their study did judge the film ratings of other members of the public as less credible and accurate than the critics, people were more willing to rely on expert opinions only when there were fewer ratings from non-experts. ‘User Generated Content’, the researchers concluded, ‘can equal, or even trump, expert information.’

“I was a socialist but now I’m a capitalist”. That does happen, and that captures our imagination, but most persuasion isn’t conversion. It’s gradual and hard to see.’

Stafford argues that ‘psychology is responsible for sowing this idea of human nature over the last 50 years’, by over-emphasising certain findings – for example, that the taller presidential candidate in the USA always wins. ‘People assume Cambridge Analytica are doing some sort of voodoo… that people were happily browsing Facebook, a personality-customised ad drops into their feed and they head zombie-like towards the polls and vote for Trump or Brexit when the thought had never crossed their minds before.

Obviously, that’s not true. If you look in the political science literature and at the strategy of actual political parties, they win elections by mobilisation. It’s much easier to persuade people who are already on your side to get out to vote than to get people who are persuaded towards the other side to vote for you.’

Conversion or mobilisation?

This potential for persuasive messages to be amplified by online groups becomes all the more important given our tendency to dwell in ‘echo chambers’ – surrounding ourselves with people who hold similar worldviews and reading/liking/sharing information that chimes with our thoughts and experience. It’s The collective mentality confirmation bias on a mass scale, and there’s some There’s even scepticism over the level of influence evidence it is negatively skewed. when we head back into the world of consumer This is even built into the business models of products. Professor of Marketing Chris Hackley the tech giants, some argue. Ian Leslie, writing in (Royal Holloway University of New Statesman in 2016, says that London) tells me: ‘Advertisers like Facebook in effect charged the “It’s much easier to the idea that they can quantify Trump campaign lower rates than the Clinton campaign, because persuade people who are the results of their ad spend, so they buy one-to-one ads targeted Trump’s ads made people angrier already on your side to at individuals based on their and thus generated more clicks. ‘It get out to vote than to get browsing, liking and spending. was the logical outcome of the ad business’s core principle: the more people who are persuaded But there is no strong evidence that sales or other outcomes – for attention you win, the more you towards the other side to example attitude change, votes, get paid. Since negative emotions vote for you” service enquiries or brand value are more likely to win and hold – respond any more positively to attention than positive emotions, such ads than to old-fashioned the system has an incentive to mass media ads. The success of spread fear and loathing. Russia’s propagandistic political advertising, including fake entire propaganda campaign relies on an advertising stories, show that humans are not socially solipsistic in model that rewards paranoia and spite… The way we forming our attitudes and deciding on our behaviour – choose what to buy, like the way we choose to vote, we have a collective mentality. We seek to identify with will never be logical. Trying to make it so has created groups.’ an environment in which our basest impulses are This leads Hackley to favour a perspective relentlessly stimulated and amplified.’ drawn from ‘what you might call sociological social So far, so shadowy. But perhaps we need to shine psychology’. ‘The distinctions between different a different light on the ‘new hidden persuaders’. Tom categories of advertising and promotion are becoming Stafford suggests our commonsense understanding of blurred – for example a sponsored celebrity might persuasion, and psychological explorations of it, do appear in an ad, wear the brand in interviews, and not reveal the true mechanisms behind how we are mention it in social media, the sponsorship deal might persuaded, and potentially overstate the extent. be discussed in trade press and chat threads, and so ‘This simplistic model of persuasion would be on. If the brand relationship with the celebrity become easiest to capture by psychologists in experiments,’ widely known, every appearance of the celebrity he tells me. ‘You get people in, measure their attitude, becomes an intertextual reference to the brand. do something, then 10 minutes later measure their One promotional intervention can manifest in many attitude again. This means that our intuition, and different forms of promotional communication.’ our experiments, make persuasion hard to see in the I ask Hackley about the research on advertising way it really happens… It’s rare that you have these effectiveness. He tells me it’s a highly disputed area.

Damascene conversions and you say, for example,

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‘Ad campaigns can have many different objectives, most of which are intermediate to sales; for example, encouraging consumers to believe X or Y about the brand. So there isn’t one simple answer to what amounts to an effective campaign.’

Into plain sight So psychologists are surplus to requirements in the real world of advertising and political campaigning? Not so fast. There is research that suggests psychologically tailored adverts can bear fruit – for example a study led

by Sandra Matz found that adverts tailored to match individuals’ level of extraversion and openness led to more purchases of beauty products, a crossword app and a game.

Yet Matz believes that psychological tailoring, and other forms of targeting that attempt to match with our behaviours online, are simply an amplification of the way we have always communicated and persuaded others. ‘In face-to-face communication you probably think intuitively about the personality of the other person and wouldn’t bring up the same subjects when you talk to an extraverted or introverted friend. So we hear in the media about this new weapon of warfare, but it’s just not true… we’re imitating the way people have communicated for centuries. I think the scary part is it feels much more anonymous now.’

Matz also suggests that discomfort stems from

a dawning realisation about the types of personal data companies have been collecting for many years.

‘Persuasion probably isn’t any more effective than when companies used our data to make predictions on what messages to send or which products to advertise. But now, with personality-targeting, we’re putting a label on it… instead of “dimension 1000 in our complicated machine-learning algorithm” we’re calling it “extraversion”… people wake up and think, “Oh wait this is quite intimate and I didn’t realise the company on the other side actually knew that much about me”.’

Of course, the ‘hidden persuaders’ could be a force for good. Matz stressed a project she is working on with a bank in Central America to come up with ways to encourage lower-income people to save money, by targeting certain elements of their personality.

However, she adds, companies must be proactive in increasing public trust in these kinds of methods by increasing transparency on how their data is used.

Matz also suggested companies could allow users to engage with the predictions that platforms made about them – feeding in extra information, for example, if the personality profiles weren’t quite accurate or asking platforms to see content that goes against their datagenerated psychographic profile. ‘Rather than just feeling outrage for a month then forgetting all about these issues, I’d like to see us having a constructive conversation about them,’ she concludes. ‘We need to discuss which contexts we’d be happy to see these

Study a Psychology MSc at Coventry Applied Psychology Business and Organisational Psychology Forensic Psychology Health Psychology Mindfulness and Compassion Occupational Psychology Psychology Ranked 13th in UK Guardian University Guide 2019

www.coventry.ac.uk/pg-psychology 32

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the psychologist february 2019 hidden persuaders

methods used in.’

In the context of politics, however, Matz is more torn. ‘I think one of the biggest dangers we have at the moment is people are disengaged. Trump didn’t just get elected because Cambridge Analytica was running ads, but because 40 per cent of the population didn’t even vote. But if these same techniques were used in a more transparent way, for example in finding out the issues people care about and pushing messages to get them involved in the political process, it could hold value even in this context.’

What can we do about it?

Many psychologists are working to find ways of protecting ourselves against persuasive attempts, and awareness is key. Writing in CREST Security Review Stephan Lewandowsky, Sander van der Linden and John Cook point out that misinformation is ‘sticky’ – even when people know it to be false in the face of facts from a trusted source, they may carry on believing it regardless.

That’s where inoculation, or pre-bunking, comes in – we need to get in before persuasion sticks.

Studies by the above authors, along with Ullrich Ecker, have found making participants aware that that information they read may be inaccurate and that people still rely on facts that have since been retracted due to inaccuracies, can cause people to rely on misinformation to a lesser degree. They have also had success in making participants aware of other methods, including exposing the ‘fake expert’ persuasion strategy; at play in debates around smoking in the past, and climate change in recent years.

A simple awareness of persuasive attempts, and the methods used to manipulate us, seems vital.

Another potential strategy, put forward in a pilot study by van der Linden and Jon Roozenbeek, is to have people play a ‘fake news game’, in which participants use misinformation strategies to come up with their own fake stories from the perspective of different characters – a denier, an alarmist, a clickbait monger and conspiracy theorist. In their sample of 95 students aged between 16 and 19, the researchers found that playing the game reduced the perceived persuasiveness and reliability of fake news stories.

Interestingly, Sorough Vosoughi told me that the technology we regard with suspicion may be part of the solution. YouTube, for example, has recently introduced a feature that displays information cards from Wikipedia pages and other trusted sources when people search for certain topics, such as the moon landing, which attract conspiracy theorists and misinformation. But the key, he says, is in education.

‘You can provide all the links to true articles you want, you can do all the false news detection you want, but if the person looking at these videos doesn’t want to know the truth there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s something you can change through education. Part of the solution will come through

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teaching young children how to think more critically and, more importantly, not to take anything at face value. Research what you are told, to check if it is corroborated.’

Cold War echoes An obvious problem with researching an article about ‘the new hidden persuaders’ is that such people are, well, hidden. Rumours abound about psychologists working on persuasive methods with big tech, consumer companies and governments.

It’s a professional concern that such people may be operating with little ethical oversight. Building trust and transparency, and keeping the public engaged in these discussions, would seem vital if we are to quell the paranoia we feel in the face of new technologies.

And yet paranoia about psychologists’ shady role in persuasion is nothing new, and modern concerns have interesting echoes of the reaction to Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Charlie Williams, a postdoctoral researcher with Birkbeck’s Hidden Persuaders project – which examines the involvement of ‘psy’ clinicians in brainwashing, interrogation, psychological warfare, subliminal advertisement and therapeutic experimentation – said that while Packard’s book caught the imagination of the public as the first exposé of the role played by Freudian psychologists in advertising and PR, it also reflected wider concerns about the increasingly diverse sets of problems psychological skills were being applied to in the post-war period. ‘Psychologists were, by 1957, routinely employed by government and commercial institutions to recruit, monitor behaviour, and evaluate opinion and morale. In the 1950s, a new term “brainwashing” emerged, often used to describe the most sensationalist fears about psychologists’ purported ability to control minds, feeding into concerns about the influence of communism, the Soviet Union and the role played by new media in shaping human thought.’

While we could look back on the Cold War era as a particularly paranoid time, for understandable reasons, Williams said psychologists have been portrayed in films and literature ever since as playing questionable roles in government and big business.

‘The use of psychological expertise, particularly in the advertising industry and the military, continues to fuel speculation about uses of psychology we are not wholly aware of. What is interesting about the resurgent discussions on “hidden persuasion” is that the concerns about the specialist knowledge of the psychologist or “depth man” has been increasingly replaced by the “knowledge” generated by algorithms and AI.’ …Or perhaps that’s just what the ‘depth man’ wants us to think.

Ella Rhodes is The Psychologist’s Journalist Ella.Rhodes@bps.org.uk

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We’re only human, after all Emily Hutchinson on how organisations can improve safety by really understanding psychology

All organisations have a duty to keep their employees safe, and most organisations sink considerable amounts of money and time into minimising risk. Yet things still go wrong. Why? And can a psychological approach ensure that safety becomes truly integral to how business is done?

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the psychologist february 2019 safety Marcelina Amelia/marcelinaamelia.com

D

o you work with dangerous chemicals, extremely high or low temperatures, toxic substances, radiation, travel at speed or height, or other clear risks? If so, safety will have been a hot topic for many years now. In industries where there are inherent hazards to the public, employees and the environment there are strict regulations to ensure that organisations are prioritising health and safety. Such organisations invest significant budget and resources in implementing and developing approaches to minimising risk.

Psychological research has played an important role here, understanding how significant disasters – such as Chernobyl, Challenger, Ladbroke Grove – have occurred. Jim Reason’s work on understanding human error has been influential. It is generally accepted that taking steps to engineer fail-safe mechanisms, to design user-friendly (and tolerant) interfaces, to introduce checklists and processes to protect critical points, and to educate operators and leaders around behaviours (for example using human performance tools) are all helpful approaches.

But something is still missing. Things continue to go wrong – for example, the Smiler ride at Alton Towers in 2015; the Croydon tram disaster in 2016.

Sometimes they go wrong repeatedly – according to General Medical Council figures from 2012, one in 20 prescriptions from GPs has an error. This is despite the fact that most organisations would say that they prioritise safety and aspire to be completely accidentfree.

However, an approach that measures success on the basis of zero accidents turns mistakes (if they are admitted to) into something to control rather than something to learn from. Safety measures can become rigidly applied and have the unintended consequence of demotivating and disengaging people, as they signal a lack of trust and reduce autonomy. And safety is also frequently treated separately within organisations, as a department responsible for ensuring compliance, rather than as an integral way that business is done.

Most organisations recognise that culture is important in safety, and that our social environment influences behaviour. But there is still limited attention paid to what else might influence someone’s behaviour (and how). There is also still a tendency in event investigations (which are conducted when something

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goes wrong) to adopt a mechanistic model – to treat people as a logical, predictable and controllable part of the system. This approach limits learning and stops us pushing safety improvements to the next level.

Let me give an example. When I worked within the nuclear industry in 2003, the most common identified root cause for things going wrong was that individuals didn’t ‘self-check’ at the point of work.

The event investigations had explored all angles and concluded that the reason that a mistake was made was that someone didn’t pay attention and/or correctly process that information to realise that they needed to take a different course of action. The recommendation that followed from those investigations was, therefore, that people needed to apply self-checking – a perfectly logical conclusion but not one that prevented future, similar mistakes being made.

I conducted some research that established a couple of things. First, in these types of situations, the individuals were generally operating on ‘automatic pilot’, and hence were not in the right psychological state to apply self-checking. Second, there were a number of organisational factors that seemed to influence how likely they were to be in that psychological state of operating sub-consciously, including their supervisor’s expectations and actions regarding safety and how ‘valued’ the individual perceived their job to be. In other words, there were organisational influences that were affecting their emotional and cognitive state and hence behaviour.

The safety critical world is not the only area in which a logical and mechanistic model has dominated.

Richard Thaler, in his 2016 book Misbehaving, challenged the standard economic assumption that people operate in a rational way: ‘I believe that for the last 50 or 60 years, economists have devoted Key sources themselves to studying fictional creatures… they might as well be Edmundson, A. (2014). Building a studying unicorns.’ But if we are psychologically safe workplace. TED trying to improve performance talk. Available at tinyurl.com/y9hczuxd of any system, an approach that Kline, N. (2015). More time to think. doesn’t understand and work with London: Cassell. how people are in reality will always Murphy, L.R. (1988). Workplace interventions for stress reduction. In be deeply flawed.

C.L. Cooper & R. Payne (Eds.) Causes, coping and consequences of stress at work (pp.301–342). Chichester: Wiley.

Reason, J. (1991). Human error.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rock, D. (2009, Autumn). Managing with the brain in mind. Strategy+Business.

Issue 56. Available at tinyurl.com/ y83f4kuj West, M.A., Borrill C., Dawson, J. et al. (2002). The link between the management of employees and patient mortality in acute hospitals. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 13(8), 1299–1310.

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What we need We need a far greater focus on our core human nature – how we feel psychologically and physically. This holds the key to creating better and safer organisations. How we feel affects our perception, our ability to process information and make decisions, our relationships and our choice of behaviour, which all ultimately affect safety (and performance) outcomes.

There is certainly evidence

for this. For example, in 2002 Michael West and colleagues explored the relationship between HR practices such as the quality of the appraisal process, training and team working within NHS Trusts and patient mortality. They found strong associations between the two, with improvement in staff appraisals in particular being linked to a reduced number of patient deaths. And a 2016 Gallup meta-analysis, which examined more than 1.8 million employees in 230 organisations, across 49 industries and in 73 countries, found that business units with engagement scores in the top quartile of their employee engagement database had 70 per cent fewer safety incidents compared with bottom-quartile units.

This should be no surprise to readers of The Psychologist. We are strongly influenced by how we feel – the emotional part of our brain exerts a strong and often immediate influence on our behaviour, frequently without our conscious awareness (as regularly exploited by advertisers). And how we feel is affected by both our physical and psychological wellbeing, which can vary from day to day; and people show variation in their baseline states as well.

Psychological wellbeing can affect our physical health (if we are stressed or depressed, we get physical symptoms) as much as our physical health can affect our psychological wellbeing (if we are physically ill, it affects our ability to process information). And both of these affect behavior, which can then have safety implications. For example, sleep is a physical and a psychological need; if it’s compromised, that can significantly increase the chances of people making mistakes and having accidents, as well as having a whole host of other negative impacts (e.g. 2016 figures from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety show that missing just a couple of hours sleep doubles your risk of a car accident).

So, what should organisations do?

It is time to approach health and safety from a different angle, one that prioritises and invests in creating healthy environments that will then keep us safe.

Understanding psychological health and how we create psychological safety – the environment that helps people to be feeling and thinking at their best – will enable organisations to take learning far deeper than the current focus, which so often struggles to get beyond physical safety.

This is an approach that brings together health and safety – two words that are frequently joined in our language but often disconnected in practice (beyond health and safety professionals). Investing in what helps us to flourish physically and psychologically also helps us to be safe. Of course, there’s another welcome by-product in the form of improved business performance. This is nicely supported by 2015 research conducted by Google to understand ‘what makes our teams effective?’. Their data analysis found that psychological safety was by far the most important

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the psychologist february 2019 safety

factor in creating stand-out teams.

There’s no doubt a cultural shift difference in this area. But as well is required here. It’s preventative as this focus, there also needs to be rather than curative. We tend to investment in the maintenance of have a reactive approach to health wellbeing and in how to develop in the Western world – we seek peak performance. medical help when we are ill.

Finally, I come back to physical Skewing the investment to staying health. Most of the people that I well makes more sense, and indeed Emily Hutchinson helps work with (a lot of technical and there is more focus on this in individuals and organisations to engineering organisations) spend Eastern cultures. Murphy (1988) learn through her organisation, most of their time ‘in their heads’ talks in terms of three levels of EJH Consulting. She also holds rather than in their bodies. For stress management interventions: academic positions and is many of us, it is often only when from primary (which focuses on Associate Editor (Books) for The we are struck down with an illness preventative measures) to tertiary Psychologist. or an injury that we really pay (which is reactive). It is easiest emily@ejhconsulting.co.uk attention to how we are physically. to provide support at the tertiary And yet our physical health can level, but it is equally, if not more, strongly affect how we feel emotionally and our ability important to focus on the primary level. to perform (something of course that sportsmen and What would a focus on the psychological women are very aware of). Organisations could and environment in your organisation actually look should use general health measures, such as Britain’s like? Applied psychologists can help to create an Healthiest Workplace survey. Paying attention to sleep, environment of high trust, respect and authenticity to what we eat, and how much we exercise acknowledges improve health, safety and performance. Leadership the basic biological needs that we must meet in order behaviours and communication styles should be a to operate optimally. particular focus. We need to move beyond task-based/ This is not a particularly new idea: I was very credibility-based trust towards vulnerability-based trust involved in sleep-related research 20 years ago. But relationships, where individuals and teams feel safe at that time the focus tended to be mostly on safetyenough to risk saying what they really think and feel. critical industries and jobs where understanding how Expressing those ideas can lead to breakthroughs in to manage shiftwork to limit the negative effect of improvement and innovation. An organisation that is oriented around a ‘growth’ rather than a ‘fixed’ mindset fatigue on performance was clearly important. Now technology has changed the way that we work and live, switches the focus away from blame and towards what and this has affected our attitudes towards sleep. There can be learnt in every situation. is better understanding of the negative impact a lack David Rock’s work on the triggers for our brains’ of good sleep can have on us, physically, emotionally, threat or reward response describes five particular cognitively and behaviorally. Vicki Culpin (author of qualities that are important for organisations in The Business of Sleep) certainly feels that organisations maintaining a psychologically safe environment. should be starting to take sleep seriously as a factor Considering how Status, Certainty, Autonomy, affecting their bottom line. One that has done just that Relatedness and Fairness play out in your organisation is Aetna – in his 2017 book Why We Sleep Matthew can provide a starting point for change. Another Walker reports that staff there are paid bonuses for approach that relates strongly to this concept of getting a good night’s sleep. Simple psychological creating environments where people’s brains are not feeling under threat is set out in Nancy Kline’s Thinking human performance tools, such as using a simple reaction-time test or mindful body-scan technique to Environments. Having recently trained as a Thinking check for fatigue, can increase focus and reduce the Environment facilitator I have seen at first hand how risk of safety incidents. this technique creates meeting environments that feel quite different from the norm. The approach is based upon 10 deceptively simple principles that Taking the next step are embodied in techniques to promote a high-trust, It’s time to spread an understanding of health and respectful and creative culture. safety more widely across organisations. By investing I’ve also been working with organisations to at the psychological level, improved physical safety introduce helpful tools (such as mindfulness) that can (and health) and boosting the bottom line will be increase people’s awareness of how they are feeling welcome by-products. And if we take this approach, and how they can take control of their own wellbeing. we naturally switch focus from blame to learning, and Organisations must provide education and support and encourage conversations about mental health. The from the individual to the system, thereby dealing with Heads Together organisation, amongst others, has done the systemic factors that impact fallible human beings (rather than unicorns!). It’s time to move from health a fantastic job of raising the acceptability of discussing and safety to being healthy and safe. mental health, and there has started to be a real

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HARROGATE 2019

The British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference Harrogate International Centre, 1–2 May

Call for stewards We’re seeking a small but dedicated team of enthusiastic conference stewards.

If you have strong communication skills and are available for the duration of the conference, apply online (via conference website) before 8 February to be considered. Stewards benefit from free conference attendance (travel and accommodation are not included).

Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf.

Credit: Catherine Aldred, www.catherinealdred.co.uk Watermark Gallery, www.watermarkgallery.co.uk

www.bps.org.uk/ac2019

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what to seek out on the

psychologist

website this month

Exclusives To score or not to score Maria Loades and colleagues on dilemmas posed when using questionnaires in complex, comorbid conditions Steve Reicher’s ‘Notes from an Istanbul courtroom’

Extras Including an extract from Robin Ince’s I’m a Joke and So are You, to accompany the review and Q&A on p.64 Following last month’s main news item on the impact of immigration policies on children’s mental health, read the full article ‘An insidious prison’ by Elke Weesjes and Paula A. Madrid

Engage See https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/contribute Find out about our Deputy Editor vacancy Watch this space for our 2019 VIP Programme, an Annual Conference fringe event and more…

‘An ecological approach to resilience is essential’ Louise Roper hears from her University of Liverpool colleague Kate Bennett, about widowhood, resilience, and an upcoming gerontology conference Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism Fergus Murray – science teacher, writer and ‘autist’ – on single attention and associated cognition in autism; a theory with a family connection…

Find all this and so much more via

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Paul Curran ‘It’s a pleasure to use the term gifted in a constructive way’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets independent practitioner educational psychologist Paul Curran For an educational psychologist I think it’s interesting to start off with your own experience of school.

I’ve got happy memories really. Catholic parents sent me to Catholic school. I’m still in touch with half a dozen people from those days. I got into Leeds through clearing to do psychology, and I was one of the first people to do it. A key contributing factor was my A-level English teacher, who made us read R.D. Laing, Freud and the post-Freudians… there was no A-level Psychology at that time, but that teacher got me interested enough to find out more. And then day two at Leeds, the Head of Department said, ‘You should all join the British Psychological Society as students, particularly if you want to go on and become a psychologist.’ So I’ve still got my membership number from when I was an 18-year-old; it inspired a lifelong admiration for the BPS. Over the years I’ve done things on various committees, particularly the Division of Educational and Child Psychology.

Was that teacher fanning the flames of an interest in people that was already there?

No, I think it was new. What became clear, and is still the case, is that clinical psychology is the most popular applied area, but it was simply being a professional psychologist that appealed. I got into educational psychology almost by default.

The thing about ed psych is that you could end up teaching for 10, 15 years before you got on a master’s course. But I got offered a place on one of the few integrated courses, at Swansea. It was a nice package: you knew at the end you’d come out as a psychologist, relatively young compared to others at that time.

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What’s it like teaching in the midst of that pathway?

Are you teaching in a different way from a newly qualified teacher?

You had to do one-year primary, one-year secondary, and six weeks in a special school. But you were always a probationary teacher, never a fully qualified teacher.

And you had to go in for lectures in the evenings, so you kept feeling you’re part of that course.

Because I was an educational psychologist in training I was asked to look after what was then called

– this was a long time ago – the ‘remedial class’. All that experience got you lots of points when you were talking to staff… you knew what they were talking about. But I felt I was always a psychologist in training.

What were your first impressions of the education system?

The majority of people in it are dedicated, vocationally minded people who want to do well for the young people that they’re teaching. If it’s not for you, you tend to leave the profession. So you’d have that educational/ learning focus, but the other aspects of the application of psychology to that system weren’t that different from what occupational psychologists did with organisations, or what clinicals did in the NHS. You were still using applied psychology in a lot of different settings, whether it was individually focused, groups, teams or organisational process change.

Creating a climate that people can thrive in. So you finished your master’s, where did you go from there?

My father died suddenly, so I went back home to help my mum. He was a pharmacist, that had to be looked after. I got a job in Essex as an ed psych, in Southend.

But what I did do, the HoD at Swansea, Professor Maurice Chazan, was very big internationally, so I built a gap year into the plan. I’d got interested in two or three areas that ed psychs could be particularly effective in. One was pre-school kids. You get the right supportive programmes in place early, you can have a greater long-term beneficial effect. Another was kids with profound and multiple difficulties. Chazan knew all these professors around the States, and through that I went to about 15 different states over a seven- to eight-month period. A fantastic time!

What did you learn?

How much more money was put into research compared to here, how much better schools tended to be funded. I got to visit places like Portage in Wisconsin, where they had this little team led

by Bronfenbrenner who had devised the Portage Checklist. This unique place was in the back of beyond, but the visitors’ book showed people had

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the psychologist february 2019 interview Jon Sutton

come from Japan to visit. It was a series of checklists to do with all developmental areas, and then step-by-step targets for helping kids become more independent.

This was a home-visiting service, by teachers trained in the method. At that time it was completely unique and fascinating.

I was offered posts… the English accent goes a long way! But I knew I had to get back.

Did you come back with a different approach to children and their learning?

Perhaps to a degree. The role of ed psychs employed by local authorities is driven by legislation, and ultimately the budget to support them. You might get lucky enough to work in an innovative team of exciting

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psychologists, but more and more you are driven and paid to fulfil a statutory role…

Many educational psychologists seem to actively play down their role, saying ‘I’m not going in as the expert’… it’s quite a non-directive role of facilitating change.

I think it varies. Tom Ravenette wrote this seminal paper, ‘Never ever ever give advice’. His reasoning was that people won’t change if you tell them what to do, it has to come from them. That works in a lot of situations, but in other situations, people are asking for a very directive approach, or answers.

What if you’re working with children with profound

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difficulties? Does that population suit a more manualised, structured approach?

I think you’re right. What seems to work there is a behaviourist approach, for the parents, the teachers and the kids. When you go into a good special school you can tell it’s good by the way the teachers are organised and managing lessons and small-group activities… there’s fairly detailed record keeping, breaking things down into more and more detailed steps so that you can chart progress over time and have realistic targets on language development, independence, etc. You’re helping that person be as independent as they can become, into adulthood.

That’s the best you can do.

You also work with gifted children. Does that require a more loose, creative approach?

Giftedness is just a social construct, it doesn’t exist.

For a long time, IQ was the benchmark, but it’s more complex than that. You can have a very high IQ score, be quite accomplished in the classroom, but you might be very immature socially and emotionally. That can cause difficulties. There was a BPS conference where Howard Gardner was a keynote, and it was brilliant. All his slides were pictures, not a single word. I remember it vividly. That theory of multiple intelligences, completely independent, it still makes the most sense out of all the theories of intelligence for me. You can have a high kinaesthetic intelligence, be a great ballet dancer, but be rubbish at maths. It’s a lovely one with parents as well, to be able to say ‘OK, he’s not got a lot of interpersonal intelligence, but look at the way he plays football’.

Does it link with learning styles, a controversial area of research? People might have preferences for ways they learn, but that doesn’t necessarily map on to performance if they are taught in that modality.

It would depend who you talk to, and that’s what’s fun about psychology I guess! Steven Pfeiffer is the big cheese at the moment on giftedness and gifted assessment, and his tripartate model makes sense: high IQ as one, evidence of success, and ability to excel across a number of areas. But there’s not yet a gold standard assessment.

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Are assessments motivated differently according to whether it’s teachers or parents asking for them?

Yes, and a key question is why are you testing in the first place… Where has that referral come from?

Sometimes what might come up is that they’re worried about the kid’s behaviour, but he – usually a he – is just a bit bored. Let’s look at extension materials, if he’s finishing before the other kids. What would keep him interested? Perhaps a less experienced teacher hasn’t seen that, and then it’s all got blown up into something else. A psychologist can come in and see what hasn’t been spotted, and back it up if you need to with a few standardised tests. Let’s try a new plan for six weeks, review it, see what’s happened.

It seems a shame that the education system isn’t particularly set up to put resources into individual pupils, or if they do it often seems to be to the detriment of the rest of the class. My main sense of the school system is that it’s about getting the mass of the pupils up to a ‘good enough’ level, ‘adding the expected value’… there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of effort put into ensuring that individual children actively thrive. ‘Stretch and challenge’ takes resource.

OFSTED did try to address that, with Progress 8, so you had to show progress at their level. But I think you’re right, overall, and the way the press cover schools, there’s a huge emphasis on paperwork for teachers, which drives quite a lot of them up the wall.

When my kids went to the local secondary school, a guy at the local cricket club asked me to come and be a community governor. It was interesting to see that side of how things work in a school – how driven it is by ensuring the middle all move up a bit. But you should be able to set up a system so that everybody is getting a good deal: if they can do it in places where the taxation rate is slightly higher, in northern Europe…

A lot of areas of applied psychology seem to be looking to Scandinavia. Talking of other countries, Dubai came knocking for you?

Yes. After four or five years in Essex, I got a tutor’s job at UEL. Two days as a psychologist in Essex, three days at UEL training ed psychs. Fantastic, nothing I would rather be doing. The HoD Professor Sheila Wolfendale sadly died in post, and I thought I’d try something else, see what independent practice is like. I looked at setting something up with three friends, as associates.

This place, in Harley Street, was advertised in The Psychologist. They go through all your qualifications before giving you the licence to practise. I like this one because of the people, but the Harley Street location attracts a certain kind of international client. The basics are no different, you just don’t have to wait six months to see someone or get a report that you need.

About four years ago, a friend introduced me to the London Dubai Clinic who were looking for a psychologist. What they wanted was for me to go out there on a three-year contract, but with where my kids were in education and all the rest of it there was no way that was going to happen. We came to an arrangement that I’d come out for a week every five or six weeks.

And are you coming across issues that stem from cultural differences, or is the work similar to what you might get here?

I mainly work with the ex-pat community, because there’s such a big cultural difference sometimes. You can be in a position where you offend somebody unintentionally. A father might take exception to his child being described as ‘being on the autistic

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the psychologist february 2019 interview

spectrum’: ‘but that is my son, how can there be anything wrong with him? You are insulting me!’

But when I’ve been in schools to give introductory talks it’s a very different place… health and education, everything’s private. Ex-pats might come in for three years on big contracts, and pay very high school fees for their children, and the schools there are even more driven by excellence.

We think of that constant testing as quite a UK thing, but it can be even more so, perhaps particularly in quite a transitory culture?

Singapore’s similar, the way it’s rigidly organised… the end product is a different type of young person, I think, compared with a school that might have a bit of creative arts going on, media studies, whatever, subjects that aren’t necessarily core curriculum but give you a wider base.

So I got contacted by the Education Development Trust, based in Reading. They support schools globally, and they said, ‘We’ve come across you, we have a client, Sandooq Al Watan and the Ministry of Education UAE. They feel they have identified the 2000 most gifted kids from grades 6 to 13, and they want to narrow that down to the top 100 most gifted.’

The oil is going to run out – they feel that if they can identify those top people now, long before they’re applying for university or anything, this will be really important for the future.

I find it impressive how the UAE and Dubai look after their own people. You can never establish yourself there: everyone there who is not an Emirati is sponsored by someone, usually a sheikh, and when their contract ends they are out. All the companies have to take a percentage of employees who are local.

When you’re 21 you’re given a plot of land and money to build a villa for you and your potential family. Some people may say there are bad sides to that… but it’s like Bladerunner out there, and only a generation or so previously they were essentially desert dwelling, tribal people. The current Sheikh Maktoum, the combined Theresa May and Elizabeth II of Dubai, does seem to have this vision of the future beyond the gold rush city.

When the oil’s gone, it’s just going to go back to desert unless we’ve got top, ahead-of-the-game technology, AI… so all the sheikhs contribute money to this project.

Where does the psychology click in?

They had been told it’s going to be the ones with the highest IQs. I was talking to them about what they wanted to identify and why, and to see it as more threedimensional. We should also look at resiliency. Where are they in Belbin’s team roles? Let’s ask for parental perspectives, find out what the teachers think, get some qualitative stuff. You might want a blend of skills.

Going back to Pfeiffer, he would say that you could call ‘gifted’ some children with an IQ above 115, who have achieved great success or have high social skills.

As for where we are now… I never go there

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between April and September. It’s just too hot. We were going to start in Abu Dhabi and start with CogAT, used in the States for identifying kids for gifted programmes.

So I was proposing a more three-dimensional model. It’s a very exciting project now awaiting final confirmation of the start dates in early 2019 in four of the seven emirates of the UAE. It’s become less and less fashionable to use the term gifted. The term high potential is preferred. Where do you stand on that?

In some ways that’s a shame. I remember a father, years ago, who was very keen on getting his son to the Yehudi Menuhin School, because he was very musically talented, and he was trying to do it through the special educational needs route, that the local authority should be funding it on those grounds. That was an interesting case. Didn’t work.

I suppose I don’t like the elitist overtone to gifted, exceptionally able, etc., yet as a shorthand it can be really quite helpful. To be able to say ‘the scores would suggest that your 10-year-old absolutely has the potential to go to a good university, to follow whatever they want to do’, when they started with worries about their school performance. It’s a pleasure to use the term gifted in a constructive way.

I think of it from a parent perspective. I see no conflict between being happy whatever our children make of their lives, and supporting them in that, while also pushing them to genuinely excel. Yet actively driving your children to be the best seems to have become a little frowned upon… perhaps due to a prevailing cultural view around elitism and meritocracies.

You’ve got to enjoy it, that’s the key. You can meet people spending thousands and thousands on school fees, investing all this money to get ‘that product’, whatever that is, without thinking about the actual kid.

But thankfully, some kids still enjoy learning and achieving. As do you? Do you ever think about moving back into the state system?

I did get asked recently, but I found it no different to 10 years ago, and quite frustrating in some ways.

Nothing to do with the teachers, or the kids… it’s the bureaucratic processes, and the statements of special needs are now overtaken by health and social care plans. It’s a good idea in theory, that education health and social care all have to contribute to form one plan, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t work very smoothly.

You’ve got your own kids working their way towards the end of that education system?

That’s right. And I don’t want them to start out with a £60K debt and no deposit for a flat or house, so I am definitely working for the next five years even though I have friends who have retired now! But I’m happy about that. All sorts of interesting work and projects have come my way here in London and in Dubai.

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‘Psychology without compassion leaves an emptiness’’ Laura Lea with a day in the life of a service-user involvement coordinator

I’ve had days when I’ve been quite psychotic.

I struggle to work out which bits of my experience have actually happened. Everything feels dreamlike, and the dreams seem real. I try to implement my crisis relapse prevention plan: check out the evidence, ‘reality test’. I’m determined to hang on to my working life. I have two jobs: both involve working alongside psychologists as a coordinator of service-user and carer involvement, in the research department of a mental health trust and on the Doctoral Programme in Clinical Psychology at the Salomons Centre, Canterbury Christ Church University.

My psychotic blip keeps me off work for less than a week. When I go back, my head is hurting like a bit of me has been yanked in the wrong direction.

I need to be there though: I like to earn money and enjoy the social aspect of being at work, but I’m also fascinated by what I do and believe strongly in its value. When we – people with lived experience – are able to speak up about experiences of mental health and neurological problems, it challenges ideas.

Professionals may own the knowledge in this territory, but it is we ordinary and extraordinary people who can provide insight into the real-life experience.

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Bridging two worlds Every time I use my key card in the morning I think: ‘Most other service users can’t get in this way. Should I be here?’ I feel like I’m not quite in the right place.

I’ve got into the areas of the NHS and academia where psychologists are in their private territory. In this territory it’s unusual for people to identify as having a disability, or to acknowledge having used mental health or psychological services. I get a fairly unique view of services, research and the training of psychologists, from the inside out. I find myself in a bridging position between what often feels like two worlds: the one of the service user or research participant, and the one of the service provider or researcher.

From being on the inside I have found something out. There is really just one world. There are lots of psychologists who have their own psychological challenges, or have family members who do. We are all humans together. Yet somehow, the powerful knowledge systems in universities and mental health services work to reinforce old ideas of ‘them and us’.

My day at the university begins with emails.

Sometimes these are to researchers, asking them to meet service users to explore their research idea.

Always there are problems with psychologists’ diaries – and the service users or carers who get involved can also be busy. More than once a service user has said: ‘Do they think we sit around waiting for them

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the psychologist february 2019 a day in the life

hard-won. They are the stories of suffering, making to ring us, like we have no other life?’ But I know, because it happened to me in the past, that when faced meanings out of this and – on a good day – finding the strength to say, ‘I am a survivor.’ with psychological or neurological challenges, lives do shrink. We can literally be sitting there waiting for the phone to ring, hoping that we will somehow Not the whole story become connected to a wider world. One of the great In 2016 the service-user group and colleagues at the pleasures of my work is that people can connect and university published a piece of research that had been reconnect. Psychologists and service users and carers long in the making. It asked the question: Why exactly together. Forging something new, enabling graduate are service users and carers willing to work with and postgraduate learning and developing useful and psychologists to educate them about the experience of sensitively delivered research. living with a mental health diagnosis? The answer from Having set up some meetings, I speak to two of the our research was: Because we are interested in you, the service users I work with. They are new to the servicepsychologists, seeing us as human beings. user group. My role is to help them manage the new For me as someone who uses mental health environment; to ensure they feel supported and able services regularly, this is the most important thing. But to speak up. Faced with the power of psychological I also want a psychologist to see me as unique. Because theory, language and practice, a very human reaction I have had psychosis, there are some who will make is to feel inadequate. Making sure meetings work for assumptions about me. These assumptions can make everyone takes robust thinking and careful facilitation. it difficult to see my value as a fully rounded human.

I have to address the principles, the purpose, the I become a problem to be solved or researched. Yes, presence (i.e. people and how they are present), the research does tell us important things. There are ‘facts’ processes and intended impact of any particular piece about people with psychosis that it’s helpful for me to of work. know. I need to know, for example, that social isolation Being clear why we are meeting is the starting tends to accompany psychosis. The point… sometimes service users are psychologist practitioner needs not so sure why they are present. to have this in their mind as they We can become the ‘token’ service “These assumptions formulate. We need to understand user: only there as an example can make it difficult to that this is something to work or specimen to be examined and see my value as a fully against. demonstrated, rather than as a Being diagnosed means valued colleague who brings a rounded human. I become acquiring a label that is usually different perspective, reflecting a problem to be solved or stigmatising and carries all sorts of the richness of our own human researched.” negative implications; for instance, story. Of course, these reflections that you are dangerous. But it’s may bring challenges. They psychological knowledge that has might contradict the ideas of the prevented these labels sticking to psychologist. Even professionals are me and in some way becoming my whole story. So I’m not immune from prejudice. into the democratisation of psychological knowledge.

I spend the next hour looking at the comments It helps people take control. Facilitating conversations from a colleague about a research paper we’re between service users, carers, researchers and clinicians co-writing. It’s a piece about the proposed new mental helps that process of democratisation and humanising. health legislation, and it feels like my voice is being I tell my story to make the claim to be more than a co-opted. I feel indignant, frustrated. How is it that diagnosis and a problem. So do others. Through this psychologists earn a living from the experiences process we hang on to our humanity and step aside of those who are less well off? Why don’t we hear from the diagnostic labels that can so easily be a way to directly from the people concerned? How come we devalue us. are talked about but not so often spoken with? It But psychologists, like many academics and feels a fundamental injustice. Perhaps it was partly therapists, by and large hold their knowledge close such ethical concerns that led the UK Health & to their chests. (There are notable exceptions, like Care Professions Council in their 2018 standard of Professor Tanya Byron.) One example of this is the education and training to require the involvement of new Power Threat Meaning Framework, advocating service users and carers in the training of healthcare for formulation above diagnosis. It has had a mixed professionals. reaction from some psychologists, but what difference My frustration leads to a stormy conversation with will it make to the ‘average’ patient, who will probably one of my psychologist colleagues. I tell him: ‘Own never hear of it? There is block in the pipeline between your own stuff and don’t try to own mine. Don’t take service users (and carers) and psychologists and my words and shape them into something else… let the knowledge they hold. This is despite the valiant my voice be heard.’ Or, as it’s said in the service-user efforts of the British Psychological Society to provide movement, ‘Nothing about us without us’. These accessible and robust information about psychological stories of living with psychological challenges are

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problems, including the report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia.

Such frameworks are empowering for me, helping to make some meaning out of my experience. They acknowledge that often we can feel powerless in the face of discrimination, poverty and oppression. They ask us to think about our own relationship to power.

I seem to have doggedly refused to hand over my power and personal agency. They’re top of my agenda. How to accept that power is limited, to find it, acknowledge it and increase it. This belief informs the way I work. I ask the question, ‘How can we hear the voice of the service users and carers?’ so this can inform the work of psychologists.

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The personal and professional At 11.30, after a walk to the coffee shop, I plan a teaching session involving people with lived experience of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I begin by asking the question, ‘Do the aims of people who use services, as represented by our livedexperience colleagues, align with the outcomes that the psychology lecturer has in mind?’ I make sure that differences between people are noticed. Understanding and even celebrating difference brings richer teaching, better research and a fuller life. It really isn’t about conformity. My life hasn’t conformed. My life plan went wrong, things happened that I didn’t bargain for.

I didn’t want it to be like this. None of the service users or carers who take part in our research, or the teaching on the programme, wanted or expected their lives to be different or challenging. That doesn’t stop people judging them. The old-fashioned deficit approach, that sees people in contact with services as missing something normal and as a problem to be solved, is still to be found.

Getting busy and pounding on my keyboard helps me focus away from the impact of recently being unwell. I take time to think: How will I stay well? How much of my own lived experience should I bring to today’s work? This is not just a question for me, it’s a question that our trainee psychologists are facing too. Where exactly does the boundary between the personal and the professional lie? How much meaning and space should each of us give to our own personal struggles? In what ways should these inform the working lives of psychologists?

In the afternoon, I and a colleague present a teaching session entitled ‘What is psychosis?’. I want to share information about this unusual and altered state.

I want to demystify it. I hope to help people become better friends, colleagues, therapists and researchers who will be more understanding and responsive. I tell the students about how bright everything becomes.

I tell them that colours are stronger, that sounds are more intense, that touch, taste and smell are bigger and have more impact. I say I forget to drink or eat and that I can’t tell what time it is. I talk about the multiple connections that we all take for granted

but are unaware of that exist below the conscious thresholds of lives. How these connections surface and how scary, frightening and bewildering this is. I talk about what helps. I also unashamedly plug the research topics I am interested in (service users should have a say in research too). Speaking my story takes an emotional toll; but the nuanced and positive view of my colleagues, and being with other people who have lived experience helps keep me well.

Best and worst After the afternoon’s teaching I finish writing some words for an article and do some work on involving service users in the assessment of trainee psychologists. I spend time on the phone to a service user who is having doubts about staying with us in the involvement work. They are finding our systems too stressful, and the jump into the university too difficult to manage. I try to normalise this process, saying, ‘Just hold it lightly for the moment, things will fall into place if you stick with it.’ Then I speak to another colleague. We’re working on a research project developing a measure of the impact of involvement on mental health workers’ practice. I’m learning loads, including that factor analysis was first used on crops!

Somehow, I think to myself, there may be trouble in using it on human behaviours. Human behaviour always comes with multiple meanings… yours and mine and half a dozen other people’s.

It’s tea time and I get to sit with the clinical academic tutors, all of whom are psychologists, and hear about their worlds. I feel accepted, but my difference as someone working out of the lived experience of mental health problems is acknowledged.

Sometimes I grapple with this. I have been shaped by the best and worst aspects of psychology. I can improve from a psychotic experience within a week, because I borrow the knowledge held by social, positive and clinical psychologists. It allows me to navigate meanings about psychosis that are empowering rather than disempowering. But it’s not all roses. Some approaches to psychology have me pigeonholed as ‘abnormal’. I want to shout, ‘How dare you describe me in this way? What is normal anyway? Are you normal?

None of us are.’

But I have learnt to avoid bitterness; to grow through suffering. We all need to meet the onslaught of negative narratives, wherever they come from, with some degree of compassion. Perhaps that’s what I want to communicate most in everything I do. Psychology without compassion leaves an emptiness.

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What makes a Psychologist?

That’s the question for our 2019 ‘Voices In Psychology’ Programme, to identify and nurture new writing talent.

We’re always listening out for ‘Voices in Psychology’. People who can take often complex ideas and communicate them in a way that will engage and inform our large and diverse audience. Writers with real impact.

They’re the future of our science, of our Society, of our magazine.

But perhaps you need help to find that voice.

Perhaps you’ve got that certain something but you need practice, nurturing. We think we’ve made a real effort with this in recent years, providing opportunities and guidance to many first-time authors. And we have been developing a more formal structure to this process.

In next month’s issue, you’ll meet our successful 2018 applicants. And we’re setting a new question: What makes a Psychologist?

Interpret this in any way you see fit. The total word limit is just 1000, and it’s absolutely vital you write with our publication and audience in mind. One submission per person please, and unfortunately we cannot respond to everyone.

Deadline is 20 September.

Please submit to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk and include up to 200 words about yourself – what you’re up to, your aspirations, and how you’re looking to engage with the communication of psychology. While we are not exclusively aiming this at students, we are mostly interested in identifying high potential amongst those starting out in their journey in psychology.

We will publish a selection of the best entries, and identify the respondents we feel might have the most potential. We’ll contact them about playing a role in developing their ‘Voice in Psychology’, through the provision of advice and opportunities to write more in various contexts.

So get writing – and don’t be shy… you don’t have to be the finished article to be Very Important to us!

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor Madeleine Pownall Associate Editor for the VIP Programme

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11/01/2019 11:43

‘It’s a privilege to work at Great Ormond Street, but it brings responsibilities’ ‘I do feel hugely committed to Great Ormond Street,’ Dr Rachel Bryant-Waugh tells Ian Florance.

‘You get to meet extraordinary families and children and identify patterns of behaviour in often very complex difficulties. It’s a privilege but that comes with a responsibility to communicate what you learn to other people who might find it helpful. That’s where teaching, influencing policy and writing come in.’

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Dr Rachel Bryant-Waugh at her leaving tea party on the roof garden at GOSH

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Great Ormond Street Hospital is buzzing when I arrive in the early evening to interview Rachel Bryant-Waugh. It’s an energising place, set in one of these villagey areas in the centre of London. Rachel is leaving the Feeding and Eating Disorders Service at the hospital, with which she has been associated for almost 35 years. She has a fascinating story to tell with, I suspect, new chapters to be written.

‘In many respects I’m my father’s daughter. I’ve inherited his desire and liking for being proficient in what I do. I’m organised.’ Her father moved with the family from Surrey to the Phillips head office in Eindhoven when she was 11. ‘I was useless and cross during my first year in Holland.

I was taught in Dutch at a very progressive school, which had a very different culture from Sutton High School for Girls!

Perhaps being in a different place, negotiating a different language was what interested me in psychology in the first place. I would have said that I was “interested in the human experience”.’

Rachel wanted to go to a Dutch university – ‘I had a Dutch boyfriend apart from anything else’ – but the only way of doing that was to take dual nationality. ‘I’d describe myself as pretty defiant, so I went to live with a lovely family in Paris and studied history of art.’

But Rachel finally made it to Sussex where she went on ‘a wonderful, maverick, seminarbased four-year BSc course in Human Sciences. I found it difficult at first: there was a real sense of dislocation. In my first biochemistry lecture I had to turn to ask my neighbour what sodium was, as I only knew its name in Dutch. However, when a tutor asked, “Now what do you think?” and encouraged critical thinking I realised I was in the right place.

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the psychologist february 2019 careers

The course covered a huge range of topics from biochemistry and genetics to images of childhood, and I was so interested in many of them that there was a real danger I’d lose focus. But, to repeat, I’m like my father in my desire to master things – if I think I can do something I don’t like to deliver second best.

I was also interested in development and children.

My mother ran a nursery school and my sister is a teacher, so it runs in the family. And of course, Sussex was quite a radical, exciting place. There were lots of sit-ins. And as students we were hugely influenced

by Ivan Illich, Thomas Szasz and the whole antipsychiatry movement. I registered for a DPhil at Sussex in developmental psychology, and spent a year doing various jobs.’

Bright but... rather snooty!?

Rachel got her first job at Great Ormond Street in 1983. ‘So, I’ve worked here, on and off, for 35 years. I was initially a nursing assistant – that’s what graduate

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jobs were called back then. I remember that Bryan Lask who interviewed me wrote in his notes that I seemed “bright but... rather snooty”. I started work in the child psychiatry inpatient unit where there were a couple of children who had anorexia nervosa. This was in the 1980s. Adult bulimia was just being recognised, but there was precious little work on childhood eating disorders. I watched Bryan talk to the children and afterwards asked him why he was so rude and bossy towards them: I was questioning everything at that phase. Bryan answered, “I don’t know why.” That led to a dissertation on “Childhood onset anorexia nervosa: Presentation, course and outcome”.’

I had noticed that one of Rachel’s many interests is the children of mothers with eating disorders. Was this an early area of study? ‘In 1982/83, when I was in my first year of doing my part-time postgraduate degree and before I had decided what to focus on, I went on an introductory course at the Institute of Family Therapy in London, so I was interested in the area even then. Later I spent some time setting up the

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Southampton adult eating disorder service and worked with mothers who attended the clinics. They often feel very isolated, and there are a number of issues – bodyhatred, bottle vs. breast feeding, implications for the child if the mother is not receiving enough nutrients, among many others – which I began to be interested in.’

Rachel started a master’s in clinical psychology in 1985 and... by this stage my notes suggested that Rachel was involved in about four or five major courses and jobs. I asked her if I was getting the chronology wrong. She answered with a smile. ‘I tend to do that. So, in 1985 I got married on the Saturday and started my clinical training on the Monday while still doing my DPhil. In January 1988 I had my first child, having completed all my clinical training requirements, spent the subsequent months finalising my DPhil thesis and MSc dissertation and submitted both ready to start work back at Great Ormond Street in the June. I like things to be neat, but that was a bit excessive!’

In 1987 Rachel was on a placement at the Middlesex Hospital as well as in the early stages of her pregnancy. ‘I worked with the HIV team, and I was there when Princess Diana shook hands with an AIDS patient. It’s difficult to remember what an important act this was. It had the effect of challenging stigmas in society and was a phenomenally powerful thing for her to do. Being with so many dying young men who were battling social exclusion and prejudice had a profound effect on me. The HIV clinic was an extraordinary place to work offering compassionate care to patients who had suffered social exclusion and prejudice.’

Rachel had another experience of Princess Diana’s ability to cut through prejudice. ‘I was on the platform when she opened our conference on eating disorders, held at Kensington Town Hall, and spoke passionately about young people with eating disorders. It was widely held to be rooted in her own experience. She had made private visits to our eating disorder clinics before that.’

Still a lot to do At the end of the 1980s, Rachel and Bryan Lask set up the first UK programme dedicated to treatment of childhood eating disorders. This focus allowed them to identify a range of clinically significant eating difficulties, all with serious consequences for everyday functioning, and negative implications for health and development. These included what was then known as pervasive refusal syndrome – a refusal to eat, drink, talk or even walk – but without the anorexic’s obsession with weight. This focus on childhood onset feeding and eating disorders is one of the achievements she’s proud of – what are some of the others?

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‘Well, I suppose I’d say I was “content with” certain things I’ve done rather than “proud of” them.

Co-writing Eating Disorders: A Parent’s Guide is an example. I wrote it after having my third child by getting up at four every morning and writing for two hours. But the real reason I mention it is that it seems to have helped so many people. It’s not an academic book but tries to do exactly what it says in the title. It’s good to know that you’ve affected people’s lives for the better.

‘I think I’ve had a part in the increased recognition that children can develop eating disorders. There’s still a lot to do – children’s mental health has been marginalised, especially primary-school-aged children.

But I’m very positive about the future here.’

Rachel says she has also really enjoyed the eating disorder work group that informed the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). ‘Of course, children don’t present with precise diagnostic categories, but unless there’s some agreement about the commonest patterns, different people will interpret a presenting child’s condition in very different ways – and then you get trapped in terms of taking research forward. I was invited to join the working group by the APA [American Psychiatric Association], having previously worked on some NICE guidelines, and they were a fantastic group – insightful, compassionate, thoughtful, collegiate.

We had sufficient evidence to define a diagnostic category, but these categories are never final. They are hypothetical constructs that need constant revisiting.

They’re helpful if you see them for what they are. They shouldn’t pathologise anyone but provide patterns and underpin discussions about if, where and how far a particular individual fits. They provide a shared language for person-centred discussion.’

Rachel also mentions the additional money invested in community services for child and adolescent eating disorder services, pioneered by Norman Lamb and announced by Nick Clegg. ‘I was national clinical adviser on how the money should be spent. It’s early days yet, but when I think back to what things were like before this, it’s changed a lot – for the better’ Rachel conducts research and gives talks and lectures, but her most recent role has combined leading her multidisciplinary team as Senior Consultant Psychologist, and a significant caseload. ‘I like to be emotionally engaged in my work. I’ve always tried to foster a strong multidisciplinary team with a supportive culture. Of course, even Great Ormond Street has its challenges – specialists at the top of their profession can be difficult to work with, and NHS policies create tensions.’

What will you do after you leave, Rachel?

‘Honestly? I don’t know! But I’m not stressed about that. I’ll still work in the same field and I want to push things forward. I have my own personal shed and I do have some writing plans – to include some that are not academic…’

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the psychologist february 2019 careers

january 2019

january 2019

The Psychologist is the magazine sent out to 50,000+ members of the British Psychological Society each month, alongside a website at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk which reaches out to a large and international audience.

the

psychologist

the psychologist

Deputy Editor, The Psychologist

‘It’s an intriguing world that is opening up’, says Sarah Garfinkel

John F. Cryan on our microbial world

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

We are looking for a diligent, creative full-time team member to work with an experienced editor in order to help take us to the next level. If you are passionate about psychology and science communication, this is a rare opportunity to make a real impact.

You will build connections across psychology and beyond in order to source regular, high quality content; your attention to detail and drive will help to maintain standards and regular output; and your ideas will help to ensure the magazine continues to evolve.

Salary: £33,264. Based in Leicester.

For a job description, see www.bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs To apply, send CV and covering letter to personnel@bps.org.uk.

You should outline, in not more than 800 words, why you want the role and what you would bring to it (including an idea for a format, topic or author which you feel would engage and inform our audience).

Closing date 14 February.

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A treasure trove of psychological wisdom Mandeep Singh and Niamh Doody on ‘conscious rap’

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Kid Cudi

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ap music for many brings to mind themes such as exorbitant boasting, greed, gang-violence, sex, drug-use and money. However, as an evolving and varied entity, rap is possibly one of the most emotionally forthcoming, painfully honest and psychologically insightful genres of contemporary music.

A politically charged subgenre of rap – known as ‘conscious rap’ – has been increasingly influential in recent mainstream artists. The genesis of this subgenre lies in Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, from way back in 1982. The song’s iconic lyrics see the lyricist plead for peace of mind; ‘Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge, I’m trying not to lose my head.’ Subsequent artists – usually underground – have adapted Flash’s psychologicallyinformed approach, which has allowed for a narrative of deep self-examination, vulnerability and wisdom within digestible, musically cutting-edge forms.

A key popular proponent of such an approach has been Kid Cudi, whose raw lyrics have delved deep into his depression and suicidal thoughts. In one of his most famous works, ‘Soundtrack 2 My Life’, Cudi lays bare the isolation he feels despite being surrounded by friends and family. Cudi juxtaposes the perception of fame with the reality that

mental illnesses is universal and all too personal to him: I live in a cocoon opposite of Cancún / Where it is never sunny, the dark side of the moon / So it’s more than right, I try and shed some light on a man / Not many people of this planet understand...

These startling confessions of mental suffering are not unique. Other artists are brutally honest about their experience with therapy. Kanye West raps ‘My psychiatrist got kids that I inspire’ on ‘No More Parties in LA’ featuring Kendrick Lamar. This line is saturated with West’s bravado, while at the same time highlighting his need for psychiatric help. In contrast to West’s blasé attitude to his psychiatrist, Noname Gypsy (pictured above) has a problematic relationship with hers, whom she portrays as over-reliant on medical intervention, as the cure to lasting happiness: ‘I wanna stop seeing my psychiatrist / She said “pill pop, baby girl ‘cause I promise you, you tweaked / The empty bottled loneliness, this happiness you seek”.’

What might be the effect of such confessions? We know from personal experience how connected we feel to our favourite artists, rap or otherwise. However in rap especially, the narrative nature of the music means you can truly feel you ‘get to know’ the artist. Thus, when they speak on their issues and make explicit their willingness to seek help, might this encourage others to do the same?

Some evidence seems to suggest so. In contrast to Cudi’s intention to ‘shed some light on’ the issue of

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the psychologist february 2019 culture depression and suicide, rapper Logic used his song ‘1-800-2738255’ featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid as a way to place vulnerable individuals in direct contact with mental health services. The title of the song is the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Helpline in the United States. The lyrics are astonishingly honest – the rapper speaks on contemplating suicide and the total despair felt by those in such a state of mind. It was reported by various news sources in the US that the day the song was released the helpline received 4,573 calls, and after a performance on the MTV Video Music Awards, the helpline logged over 5,000 calls. The 450,000,000 views on YouTube alone offer a stark reminder of the power of popular culture to reach audiences beyond academia and the remit of mental health services.

Apart from projects which explicitly tackle mental health issues, there is a vast catalogue of rap which explores the psyche with a sensitivity and depth reminiscent of the most influential 20th century literature.

Simple mechanics underpin this. The sheer volume of words and linguistic command required in writing a rap verse means it’s a more literary genre than most music.

Furthermore, a need for brevity, narrative clarity, and the broad life experiences encountered on the road to becoming a successful rapper add to the richness of the artforms psychological explorations.

Kendrick Lamar’s psychodynamically charged track ‘FEAR’, from the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning album DAMN., explores the artist’s experience of fear at a different age in each of the song’s three verses.

Verse one is rapped from the perspective of his mother, angrily disciplining her 7-year-old son amidst pressures to survive financially in a deprived Los Angeles neighbourhood: ‘You know my patience running thin / I got beaucoup payments to make / County-buildings on my [back] / Trying to take my food stamps away’.

The second verse transports forward a decade to age 17 where a deflated, hopeless vocal cadence prophesises ‘I’ll probably die anonymous / I’ll probably die with promises / I’ll probably die walking back home from the candy store / I’ll probably die because these colours are standing out’. Thus we are immersed into a life we would never otherwise know, but with themes we can recognise. To ‘die with promises’ is ambiguous enough to mean dying with unlived dreams, half-formed friendships, financial debts, and more. Are ‘these colours’ that invite death shades of skin, colours of gang affiliation, or are they the blue of his mood? Such meaningful ambiguity is the hallmark of poetry as opposed to mere entertainment.

Contrary to the gold-chains, dancing women and bravado that colours hip-hops public persona, such sensitivity and depth is readily found within its mainstream.

The brutally honest third verse best exemplifies this depth, as the rapper reveals his struggles at age 27 whilst adjusting to the responsibility of his ‘saviour’ status. ‘How they look at me reflect on myself, my family, my City / What they say ‘bout me reveal if my generation would miss me / What they see from would trickle down generations in time / What they hear from me would make them highlight my simplest lines / I’m talking fear’.

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Mandeep Singh As with any honest portrayal of another’s psyche – be it fictional or not – the reader/listener will connect uniquely to the song. For one of us (Mandeep), this song spoke to my own fear of the weight of words, most potently in clinical encounters. It also made explicit the tendency to place creative vocations on a pedestal, whilst at the same time making clear the struggles of a creative leader. Hip-hop has the capacity to affect and teach us, as can a great play, a sprawling canvas or an absorbing novel. The varied psychologies and stories it contains help make it the dominant popular music format for this generation.

It is tempting to draw a conclusion espousing the utility of rap. Despite rapid progress in arts in health research, we still do not why or how art helps us. We do, however, know that we cannot imagine our lives without it. We know that we tend to consume those things we think will be valuable. And we also know that there is a disconnect between how rap is widely perceived, and the extent of value, insight and humanity contained in its catalogues. If popular culture is a mirror for the psychology of the society which produces it, then hip-hop – with its intricate verbal exploration of everything from the grandiose to the despairing – offers a rich window into ourselves. We can all benefit from peering through it.

Mandeep Singh is a medical student at King’s College London, a rap artist and researcher of the arts in healthcare. Find him @mandeepthemc and listen to his track ‘Two sides of a man’ –describing a session of psychotherapy – via www.theintima.org/twosidesofaman Niamh Doody holds a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Clinical Neurodevelopmental Sciences from King’s College London. She is hoping to pursue training in Clinical Psychology.

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TV The ABC Murders BBC1

Being Hercule Poirot

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Why has nobody ever cast John Malkovich as Hercule Poirot before? 2018 finished with the new version of The ABC Murders on BBC One we never knew we needed, penned by the screenwriter Sarah Phelps, whose credits range from EastEnders to the RSC. This is Poirot, but not as we know him.

Phelps layers darkness upon darkness. Poirot is out of favour with the public, and the police treat him with contempt. Flashbacks and a conflicted relationship with his Catholic God hint at past trauma. He lives in a London where immigrants are increasingly vilified. It is hardly surprising that Poirot is ill at ease with himself, a man who dyes his facial hair, and who lives a solitary existence, no companion-chronicler Hastings in sight.

This dispensing of the tweeness of Poirot which has become so much a part of David Suchet’s portrayals of recent years, exposes Poirot’s vanity as something more desperate, and his mannered affectations as a brittle defence, but against what, exactly? Like all the best protagonists, Malkovich’s Poirot is ambiguous: attractive and repellent at the same time, ridiculous but wise, and eliciting sympathy and annoyance in equal measure from the viewer.

We meet him in The ABC Murders – This Poirot layers darkness upon darkness

radio Tyranny of story BBC Radio 4

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a series of grisly crimes all involving a brand of tights called Twinkle Toes, and starting with Alice Ascher in Andover, followed by Betty Barnard in Bexhill... you get the picture. As the story unfolds Rupert Grint’s Inspector Crome is blinded by his dislike of the Belgian, and struggles to find ‘the code’ which links the murders, but it’s obvious to Poirot – he is the code, and all the murders have a link to him. The conflict between the younger, ambitious and chippy Crome, and the older, antagonistic detective, replaces the bonhomie we’ve seen in other characterisations, where Hastings and Poirot rub along in mutual respect and friendship.

Phelps has stayed true to much of Christie’s storytelling, but has twisted and embellished where it suits her.

The landlady of the chief suspect becomes a bitter and needy woman who pimps out her daughter to her lodgers.

The fiancé of the second victim is a vain and shallow buffoon. Poirot’s back-story is enticingly revealed little by little, episode by episode – a backstory Christie herself had always left vague. There are some lovely touches in this production: time and time again a typewriter violently crashes out letters from the killer taunting Poirot to find him; the cinematography is dark and menacing; and the 1930s costumes and architecture are a stylistic dream.

I should caution that not everyone was as enamoured with this production as I was. Agatha Christie purists can be found on platforms far and wide, furious at what they see as gratuitous tinkering, and resulting vandalism of sacred texts. For me, however, Phelps has removed something which has always been a barrier to my Poirot enjoyment. Malkovich’s Poirot is real and pantomime at the same time, and all the better for it.

Reviewed by Sally Marlow, Associate Editor for Culture

Politics and narrative The Guardian journalist John Harris presents a three-part series which examines the potency of stories, both for us as individuals, and for society.

Given Harris’s day job, it is unsurprising that the first episode focuses on politics and narrative. He speaks to Drew Westen, who wrote ‘The Political Brain’ in response to the failure of the Democrats, and the left in general, to grasp the significance of storytelling. ‘People don’t want you to get out your fact collection’, he explains. ‘Make America great again’ is not just a phrase, but a story in four words. In contrast, Clinton’s campaign went through 84 different slogans before settling on the feeble ‘Stronger,

Together’.’ Harris talks to Tali Sharot about the neuroscience of narrative, and investigates how the ‘Significant Objects’ experiment increased the value of a second-hand mallet from 33 cents to $77.

In the second episode he focuses more on the importance of person narratives, and considers why there is an onus on those accessing services (such as benefits) to provide a coherent narrative of their lives.

Interviewees in this episode include Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School.

The third episode looks at the intersections between science, art and storytelling; Harris also discusses memory and the

unconscious in relation to story with Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Overall, this is an enjoyable and informative listen which benefits from Harris’s non-academic, magpie-like approach.

Reviewed by Kate Johnstone, Associate Editor for Culture Also on BBC Radio 4 recently, and available via the BBC Sounds app, are ‘Thought Cages’ and ‘A History of Delusions’ with psychologist Professor Daniel Freeman. If you are interested in reviewing these or future programmes, please get in touch, or keep an eye on Twitter @psychmag

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the psychologist february 2019 culture

Symbolic action The title, provided by the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, represents the number of people who migrated from one country to another last year plus the total number of migrant deaths recorded since the project start date. This number is stamped on your wrist as you explore the gallery off the Turbine Hall – a stark reminder of the dehumanising nature of both many migrants’ experiences and the role of statistics used to report on the loss of human migrant life.

This unique exhibition from acclaimed activist and artist Tania Bruguera provokes an emotional and a physical reaction – an adjoining gallery contains a tearing agent which makes you cry. Bruguera describes this as ‘forced empathy’, a way to create a shared public emotional response and remind us that whilst migration may be represented as an ongoing crisis which can lend itself to apathy, we can all act and interact at a local

level in our communities to support positive change.

Two levels of action are explored in this exhibition: direct and symbolic.

Symbolic action through collectively touching the floor with others to reveal a portrait of Yousef, a young man who left Syria and found emotional and practical support through SE1 United and who now works for the NHS to support others.

Tate Neighbours, a group of local

residents/workers who were brought together for the project and to inform the future direction of the Tate, represents the direct action of the organisation by its neighbours. Their manifesto appears if you log into the Tate Wifi and it inspires you to act locally in your own community.

The discourse used to describe migration and migrants matters: ‘us’ versus ‘them’ language, the use of statistics rather than individual stories, and a focus on negative migrant stories are some of the ways which can be used to dehumanise a group of people who are no different from ourselves. At a time where the future legal policies concerning UK borders and migration are uncertain, Bruguera provides a timely reminder of the importance of taking positive local action as individuals and as Psychologists in society.

exhibition Tania Bruguera: 10,148,451 Tate Modern

Reviewed by Lucy Decker, Trainee Occupational Psychologist, Civil Service

Psychology in the Pub Creating Experiences and Hypnosis for Behavioural and Emotional Change Jim Petruzzi Wednesday 20 February 2019, 6.30pm Gulliver’s, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW Free talk - All welcome!

For more information visit www.bps.org.uk/BPSNW-pip-20Feb @BPSNorthWest

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@NWPsych

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TAN Exhib Tate M

AZ the

psychologist

Karla Novak

to

Z ...is for Zeigarnik effect

Suggested by Paul Redford, University of the West of England @paulredford ‘Can’t stop thinking about all the things you need to do? Blyuma Zeigarnik found we’re better at remembering incomplete than completed tasks – the Zeigarnik effect. How to stop? Masicampo & Baumeister (2011) show it helps to construct a specific plan to complete these tasks. Just consider them……’

Critical goals still unconquered at the end of a work day are the path to a spoiled evening, according to a 2015 study from Brandon Smit [who appears to have an unfinished surname] covered on our Research Digest. Planning where, when and how each task would be tackled allowed participants with high ‘job involvement’ to better let go after hours.

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In a 2012 study of ‘earworms’ covered on our Research Digest, Ira Hyman Jr and colleagues proposed that the playing of only a part of a song in your head leaves it

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coming soon… our ‘Voices In Psychology’ programme; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

incomplete and thereby increases the likelihood of its return against your will as an earworm. This insight suggests that one way to squash a developing earworm is to make sure, once a song starts playing in your head, that you see it all the way through (perhaps you will need to listen to the track again to ensure this is possible).

In a Research Digest special feature [tinyurl. com/y7bzzyll], David Lavallee described how the Zeigarnik effect ‘came to the rescue’ when he was moving home.

Check out tinyurl.com/ y7r6vr9s for an excellent Scientific American blog post from Maria Konnikova ‘On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik’.

A to Z The complete A to Z is collated at https:// thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/ psychology-z If you think we should repeat the exercise at some point in the future, why not join the campaign on Twitter using the hashtag NotThatBadReally

contribute… reach 50,000+ colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover

Search for more on this topic and any other via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist and www.bps.org.uk/digest

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Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk

President Professor Kate Bullen President Elect David Murphy Vice President Nicola Gale Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Professor Ray Miller Chair, Membership and Standards Board Dr Mark Forshaw Chair, Education and Public Engagement Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor Chair, Professional Practice Board Alison Clarke Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa Director of Policy Kathryn Scott Director of Corporate Services Mike Laffan

society notices

society vacancies

Presidents’ Award for Distinquished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge See p.63 Lifetime Achievement Award See p.20 CPD workshops 2019 See p.41 North West of England Branch - Psychology in the Pub: Creating experiences and hypnosis for behavioural and emotional change Manchester, 20 February 2019 See p.75 North West of England Branch - Psychology in the Pub: Psychology - the velvet glove over the government’s iron fist? Liverpool, 25 February 2019 See p.51 BPS Annual Conference Harrogate, 1–2 May 2019 See p.27 BPS conferences and events See p.35

President 2020-21 See advert p.8 Closing date 8 February 2019 Deputy Editor, The Psychologist See advert p.55 Closing date 14 February 2019

Director of Member Services Annjanette Wells (Acting) Director of Communications Rachel Dufton (Interim) The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester.

All enquiries should be addressed to the Leicester office (see inside front cover for address).

The British Psychological Society was founded in 1901, and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1965. Its object is ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied and especially to promote the efficiency and usefulness of Members of the Society by setting up a high standard of professional education and knowledge’.

Extract from The Charter

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