The Psychologist June 2020 by The Psychologist

the

psychologist june 2020

Psychology has a sexual harassment problemâ&#x20AC;Ś â&#x20AC;Ś and tackling it requires reckoning with the past that brought us here, argue Jacy Young and Peter Hegarty

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psychologist june 2020

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk

Psychology has a sexual harassment problem… … and tackling it requires reckoning with the past that brought us here, argue Jacy Young and Peter Hegarty

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

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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 Annie Brookman-Byrne Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Michelle Hunter, 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 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, Deborah Husbands, Peter Olusoga, Richard Stephens, Miles Thomas

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psychologist june 2020

News Covid-19 update; ethics; Member Connect; and more

Society President Hazel McLaughlin takes over at the end of June

Walk in my shoes Liam Cross gets in sync in search of solutions to intergroup conﬂict

‘You need to talk to people who are at the coalface’ Debra Malpass, BPS Director of Knowledge and Insight

Supporting parent carers Joanna Grifﬁn

Letters Brexit, suicide and more

‘We are interested in how the clock breaks down’ We meet Stephany Biello

‘Putting individuals at the centre of health care means something different’ We meet Dean Fathers

Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

Books We talk educational psychology with Paul Kirschner; and hocus pocus with Richard Wiseman

Culture Hilda; DEVS; Theroux; more

Looking back Matthew Adams revisits Pavlov’s labs from a dog’s perspective

Thank you for all your messages about our May edition. We had to adapt quickly to remote working, and we changed a lot of the content at the last minute in an attempt to strike the right tone… so your thoughts, and photos of you reading the magazine in lockdown, were much appreciated. This month, it’s more a case of aiming for ‘business as usual’. We do showcase the Society’s response to coronavirus (see p.2), and you can ﬁnd dozens of perspectives on our website. But mainly we’re content to get a ‘standard’ issue out, while we also work hard on a special July/ August edition which will look ‘towards the new normal, and beyond’. We recently hosted a webinar on that topic, which you can watch at tinyurl.com/ BPSnewnormal. Keep up with all our news/events by following us on Twitter @psychmag. Also looking to the future and a ‘compelling vision’ is Dr Hazel McLaughlin, who begins her stint as Society President soon. Meet her on p.8.

One on one …with Raffaele Presti

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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Obituaries Marcia Worrell; Aidan Moran; Reuben Conrad; Janet Carr; Keith Wesnes

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Digest Sleep; running; and more

Psychology has a sexual harassment problem… …and tackling it requires reckoning with the past that brought us here, argue Jacy L. Young and Peter Hegarty Realms of recognition Rupert Brown considers the life and legacy of Henri Tajfel ‘We cannot continue to be part of environments that perpetuate inequality’ Anne Templeton on building inclusive supervision

Society comes together while apart Ella Rhodes speaks to some of the British Psychological Society members working on its response to coronavirus

n the last issue of The Psychologist we reported on the formation of a British Psychological Society Covid-19 coordinating group [pictured meeting virtually above]. In the short space of time since, the group, bringing together psychologists and senior managers from the BPS, led by President David Murphy, has produced more than 20 sets of guidelines, advice, webinars and videos. They cover a vast array of psychological topics relevant to the current crisis, across eight workstreams (with diversity and inclusion as a consideration across all of them).

Behavioural science and disease prevention

Dr Angel Chater, a health psychologist and Reader in Health Psychology and Behaviour Change at the University of Bedfordshire, has been leading a workstream focused on behavioural science and disease prevention – bringing together psychologists from health, clinical, social, sport and exercise, policy and public health arenas. So far the group has produced guidance on behavioural science considerations relevant to public health strategies to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and offered volunteers from the health psychology workforce. This document has been shared with the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) which feeds into the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), Public Health England, local authorities and Health Education England.

Chater explained that the offer of voluntary expertise from health psychologists was being coordinated under a collective ‘hive’ called the Health Psychology Exchange which includes many members of the BPS Division of Health Psychology (DHP), managed by a small team including Chater, Dr Lucie Byrne-Davis (DHP Communications Lead) and Professor Jo Hart (DHP Past Chair). Organisations can be signposted to this by contacting the DHP with the subject title Covid-19 at communicationsdhp@bps.org.uk Over the coming months Chater’s group are looking into translational materials which may help local authorities and public health teams to use the guidance at a practice level, and are exploring potential issues in the future which may beneﬁt from behavioural science input. ‘One of our teams of volunteers have just completed a rapid review on the use of apps, both in relation to Covid-19 and other health behaviours that may be helpful to support future track and trace app development, uptake and engagement. Three of our taskforce are also members of the Psychological Government steering group, and so we are looking at further ways to support government… We will be hosting a webinar in due course to bring all of this work together.’

Staff wellbeing Leading the staff wellbeing workstream, along with BPS President David Murphy, is Dr Julie Highﬁeld –

the psychologist june 2020 news a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in Wales’ largest Critical Care Unit in Cardiff. Highfield has been working with an expert reference group of 11 people which managed to produce BPS guidance on the psychological needs of healthcare staff, aimed at leaders and managers of healthcare services, over the course of a weekend (tinyurl.com/y9n52np6). The BPS has been working with the NHS to influence the response at a national level and psychologists have been able to use this work to guide their local NHS response to the crisis. The guidance includes ten recommendations for responding to the coronavirus crisis at the organisational, management and individual levels and points to some of the potential psychological reactions to the crisis, as well as what might be needed to help people recover psychologically. ‘The guidance produced by the group was really well received’, Highfield said. ‘I’ve had many people come back to me thanking me for the timely response, and the direction from the BPS. I think there has been a surge to action, and not all thought through. The guidance provided an evidence-based way of steering these responses.’ The publication of this guidance was followed by a webinar on the same topic which was watched live by 1300 people and viewed over 12,000 times the following week alone (see tinyurl.com/y7ssk5pc).

Adaptations Consultant Lead Clinical Psychologist and chair elect of the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP) Dr Roman Raczka has been leading a group tackling adaptations to psychological practice and training in our current state of lockdown and beyond. The group has been focusing on a number of key areas including professional practice, digital approaches, remote working, apps, social media, leadership, resilience and wellbeing, supervision, reﬂective practice, community psychology approaches, training, research and longer-term adaptations to practice. Raczka, who has also been working on the DCP Covid-19 task force developing a strategy for clinical psychologists’ response to the pandemic, has previously worked on the DCP’s Digital Health Care sub-committee developing digital training standards and digital competencies for clinical psychologists. He said the BPS adaptations workstream aimed to support psychologists working across all sectors and areas of practice to adapt in facing the unprecedented challenges presented by Covid-19, while continuing to work in a way which was effective and professionally safe. The group has recently released Adaptations to Psychological Practice: interim guidance during Covid-19 pandemic, a guidance document to support psychologists in adapting their practice to meet the unique circumstances created by Covid-19. It covers professional practice, working remotely, digital approaches, redeployment and wellbeing as well as longer term adaptations to practice. The group has also produced a webinar which includes tips for practitioners carrying out therapy via video (tinyurl.com/y97al3wb).

Diversity and inclusion Layne James Whittaker has been working as the diversity and inclusion champion across all of the Society’s Covid workstreams – highlighting areas where marginalised groups should be considered given the different impact Covid-19 has had, and will have, on such groups. As well as being a psychology undergraduate student at the Open University James Whittaker is also a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter, and she has highlighted the importance of the Deaf community having good access to information presented in BSL throughout the pandemic. ‘The majority of the Deaf community are British Sign Language users as their first language, yet there have been no consistent BSL interpreters present for live announcements or daily briefings. All material that is released is not accessible in BSL. Deaf native BSL key workers may have also missed out on vital information as there has been no access via interpreters. Deaf patients, both native BSL users and those that do not use BSL but rely on lip-speakers and lip reading, will have no access once admitted to hospital if staff are unaware of how to contact the relevant companies to access BSL interpreters or lip speakers.’ James Whittaker pointed out to the bereavement and confinement and social distancing workstreams that the BAME community may be facing increased fear and worry due to the recent, and disproportionate, increase in deaths of BAME people. She also said that guidance should consider those with different first languages who may be struggling to access information at present and language interpreters who will be under increased pressure at present – helping to deliver news on loved ones who may have died or helping comfort a person who is dying. While Covid-19 has thrown up many challenges for marginalised groups, James Whittaker said it had been an amazing opportunity to help. ‘I feel really fortunate and privileged to be part of this, they are a great team.’

Effects of conﬁnement Educational psychologist Vivian Hill (UCL Institute of Education) and Alison Crawford, Glasgow City Council principal educational psychologist, have been leading a group considering the effects of conﬁnement and social isolation. They told me a key focus of their work was on the impacts of lockdown on vulnerable groups. The group has already produced guidance for schools ahead of their closure in late March, a document on resilience in teachers, and advice for older people and people with dementia. They are currently working on advice for children and young people with experience of being in care. Another key strand to their work, which will be published soon, is giving advice on transitions – for younger children moving from the family home into nursery or primary school, children going back to school and young people moving from school to college or university. Hill said she and the group were keen not to pathologise anyone who was struggling with the impact of lockdown. ‘We’ve been keen to recognise that it’s a completely adaptive response to an extraordinary,

completely unprecedented, phenomenon which nobody really had chance to think about or prepare for.’ Hill said she thought cross-divisional working, bringing together the expertise of educational, health and clinical psychologists, had been very constructive. ‘We’re all learning together, we’re all taking these initial steps forward together. The primary concern is to keep people safe and to save lives and as psychologists I think we’ve got a lot to say about supporting people’s behavioural responses – when people are uncertain their behaviour is much more unpredictable, whereas when there is a degree of certainty about next steps and the ability to plan for them then I think we see a much better public reaction.’

Bereavement and care of relatives The UK is on course to have one of the highest death rates in Europe from Covid-19, bringing with it many thousands of families experiencing unexpected deaths and grief. The nature of Covid-19 also means that families will be unable to see their loved ones at the time of their death and won’t be able to carry out normal rituals such as large funerals and wakes. Consultant Clinical Psychologist Professor Nichola Rooney has been leading a group in creating a toolkit of resources for coping with grief. One of these resources, Supporting Yourself and Others – Coping with death and grief during the Covid-19 pandemic (tinyurl. com/yadsh3g9), gives advice on the emotions and behaviours which may result from grief, ways to cope and complicated grief – which describes a situation when people are unable to ‘bounce back’ after a bereavement. There is also advice available on talking to children about coronavirus, and plans to publish advice on advance care planning, death and dying in a care home, supporting staff who have lost a colleague to Covid-19, and adapted ways to carry out bereavement rituals after a death.

Working differently

Janet Fraser, chair elect of the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology, and a group of psychologists from occupational, educational, clinical, health, counselling, sport and exercise, and health and safety practice, have been considering the ways the world of work has changed in recent weeks. The ‘working differently’ group is planning to produce guidance and podcasts covering remote working, furlough and redeployment, employee and manager wellbeing, and the transition to post-lockdown workplaces for employers, organisations, unions and employees. Fraser said people were experiencing lockdown working in both positive and negative ways. ‘On the one hand they’re avoiding the commute and have ﬂexibility while working from home. On the other hand they might be experiencing cognitive dissonance – juggling different roles such as supervising home schooling while meeting work deadlines, attending virtual meetings and experiencing uncertainty. There’s been a lot of anxiety as well as huge inequalities. We can also learn from adaptations to working practice during the lockdown

and apply the lessons to the way we organise work in the future.’

Rehabilitation President of the BPS David Murphy and Dr Dorothy Wade, a health psychologist who works in critical care (University College Hospital), have taken a focus on rehabilitation along with a group of experts. Their group includes clinical psychologist Dr Anne-Marie Doyle who also works in critical care, clinical health psychologists Dr Simon DuPont and Dr Dorothy Frizelle, academic health psychologists Professor Val Morrison and Professor Rona Moss-Morris, clinical neuropsychologists Professor Martin Bunnage and Dr Jessica Fish and Dr Hannah Murray – a research Clinical Psychologist specializing in PTSD. Outside of psychology Paul Twose, a critical physiotherapist, and critical-care occupational therapist Penelope Firshman, have also been on hand to support the group. The group has produced guidance on the psychological needs of people recovering from severe Covid-19, with support from patients and relatives from the organisation ICUSteps, and have held a webinar on the same topic. The guidance is aimed at GPs, nurses, allied health professionals and others involved in supporting patients to recover from severe Covid-19 as well as their relatives. Murphy said the work had been well-received by health professionals including the Chartered Society for Physiotherapy, and it was highlighted in the GP-magazine Pulse. Since its release Murphy has been invited to represent the BPS on an NHS England group which is developing a rehabilitation package for those recovering from Covid-19.

Community action and resilience The community action and resilience workstream is led by Dr Sally Zlotowitz, Clinical and Community Psychologist and Director of Public Health and Prevention for MACUK, and Dr Carl Harris, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and committee member of the BPS Community Psychology Section. They will be considering the ways in which psychology can inform, support and amplify community level responses to Covid-19 and recovery from the pandemic. ‘We want to recognise and honour the important role that communities and community organisations have played in looking after each other and our essential workers, whether that’s through mutual aid groups, holding local and national government to account or advocating for marginalised groups. We hope to ensure that the BPS speaks up for the importance of strengthening communities and inclusive participation processes as we try to #buildbackbetter from the impacts of this pandemic.’ To read all of the resources mentioned here, and many others, see www.bps.org.uk/responding-coronavirus For our own collection of dozens of perspectives on coronavirus, see https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ volume-33/april-2020/coronavirus-psychologicalperspectives

the psychologist june 2020 news

The British Red Cross and British Psychological Society have joined up in a move that will make the most of psychological expertise in the face of major incidents and disasters in the UK. This project will allow clinical and counselling psychologists to join a team of Psychosocial Reserve Volunteers (PRV) to assist the public after such incidents. The PRV project will allow accredited and professional psychologists to undergo specialist training with the British Red Cross so they can be called upon to provide support during and after crises, whether that is a house fire or terror attack. This support will help those directly affected by an emergency as well as people working for and with the British Red Cross. The British Red Cross is the largest voluntary organisation in the UK that responds to crises. Head of the British Red Cross’ Psychosocial and Mental Health teams, Dr Sarah Davidson, said, ‘When we think about responding to people it is holistically, we think about people’s physical and mental health, and so the Psychosocial Reserve Volunteers project allows the Red Cross to draw on the expertise of the British Psychological Society to the benefit of people’s physical and mental wellbeing’. Davidson explained she was inspired by a similar partnership between the Australian Red Cross and Psychological Society, as well the events of 2017 when the British Red Cross responded to terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire. She said, ‘Our psychosocial teams were really stretched in terms of capacity in 2017 and I think we could’ve done so much more had we had a Psychosocial Reserve Volunteer programme in place. I think in one respect it was an awareness of how much more we could do if we had the right people and secondly it was an awareness of how many volunteers wanted to be used but were not known to us’. In times of national crisis Davidson said she is often contacted by psychologists who would like to help out. ‘It’s always really appreciated, but the reality of matching up these offers of support with people who need it in that moment, especially at a time of crisis, is very complicated. The Psychosocial Reserve Volunteers programme means we will have a pool of experts who are already offering their help and can be utilised much more quickly in their local area in an emergency. It is a real bonus for us to have the British Psychological Society on board to help us get the right people.’ The CEO of the British Red Cross Mike Adamson, and CEO of the BPS Sarb Bajwa [see comment in ‘From the Chief Executive’ opposite], signed a Memorandum of Understanding to bring the PRV project into effect this spring. Adamson said the British Red Cross was proud to be partnering with the BPS to launch the PRV project in its 150th anniversary year. ‘Supporting people’s mental and social wellbeing during and after a crisis

from the chief executive I hope that all of our members and your families are keeping well during the current situation, and that reading this magazine gives everyone at least some semblance of normality for a couple of hours. Ever since the start of the crisis, we have been collating psychological perspectives on coronavirus, and making sure that everyone has access to the psychological guidance and resources that they need. The role of psychology is only going to grow as we move towards the recovery phase of this pandemic, and focus shifts to the disease’s wider impacts. Those who have suffered with severe Covid-19 will need a signiﬁcant amount of support as they recover, so I’m delighted that our coordinating group has produced both a guidance document and webinar to help people to incorporate psychology into recovery plans. It is also unfortunately the case that many people will develop mental health concerns, or see existing ones grow, because of an extended period of uncertainty. Psychologists are doing a fantastic job making sure that services are still available for people to access, even when we need to make adaptations such as the use of video technology, and we will support you through guidance and relevant professional development. We will also need to consider the impact that this pandemic will have had on the psychological wellbeing of healthcare staff. We recently signed a memorandum with the Red Cross to work on support for responders to traumatic events, and I want us to emulate this and work closely with other organisations on providing the best possible support to NHS staff and other key workers following this crisis. The next issue of The Psychologist will look towards the ‘new normal’ and beyond, and I’m looking forward to reading what perspectives our members have on this, and what they see the more medium-term future looking like. We will make sure that we’re prepared for it, and do all that we can to encourage policy makers to put good psychological practice and evidence-based psychology at the heart of the choices that are made. Stay safe, and if you think that there’s something that the BPS can do to support you during this challenging period, please let me know. Picture credit

British Red Cross memorandum

Sarb Bajwa is Chief Executive of the British Psychological Society. Contact him at Sarb.Bajwa@bps.org.uk is so important for people to be able to recover and rebuild their lives. The current coronavirus pandemic has highlighted more than ever that we need to be able to scale up our psychosocial support during a crisis, so this is a very welcome step at a critical time.’ Psychologists who would like to become a PRV should be HCPC-registered counselling or clinical psychologists who are chartered members of the BPS. Keep an eye on the British Red Cross and British Psychological Society websites for further information in due course. ER

Interactive learning on ethics The British Psychological Society is launching a new eLearning course around ethics, developed by a group of members with expertise in the ethics of practice. Joanne Hudson (a Chartered Psychologist at Swansea University and Chair of the Working Group) told us: ‘Professional ethics is fundamental to all applied psychologists and this course allows members the opportunity to revisit key ethical principles and standards that guide their work.’ The course comprises five interactive modules, taking around two hours to complete. It is designed for practitioner psychologists and for those providing psychological services in the wider workforce; from those who are newly qualified to those who have been practising for a number of years. Course content will include a module on historical and current examples of ethics in applied settings, and an overview of current ethical standards. Participants will have the opportunity to explore an ethical case study in greater detail. With each case study the course guides participants through a process of identifying ethical concerns, linking them to the BPS and HCPC Codes, and then using the Codes and a moral psychology framework to think through these concerns and conflicting principles, ending with practical decision making. There is a wide selection of cases to choose from including team working, supervision and social media, consent and confidentiality, and trading services. To complete the course, participants only need to complete one case study. However, participants will also have the opportunity to explore other case studies if they wish. Roger Paxton, Chair of the Society’s Ethics Committee, said: ‘There’s no doubt that psychologists regard ethics as important; the Society receives many questions about ethics, and we’ve responded with an Ethical Enquiries page via www.bps.org.uk/ethics. The aim of the eLearning course is to provide further support to Society members by guiding them using a systematic

approach to ethical decision making, centred on the BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct, the Health and Care Professions Council Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, and a framework for ethical reasoning from moral psychology.’ Joanne Hudson added: ‘The course makes use of case studies and vignettes that focus on different domains of psychology, so that users can engage with examples that are relevant to them, making use of interactive tasks and reflection exercises to allow users to apply the content to their own circumstances and working environments. We are pleased to be offering this course informed and written by members for members.’ Paxton said: ‘As an example, one of our cases involves a vulnerable client whose difficulties are multiple and have worsened, but who now wishes to disengage from contact with the psychologist and does not consent to relatives or other services or colleagues being contacted. Here there are major concerns about avoidance of harm, consent and several other important principles.’ Paula Prendeville, a Chartered Psychologist, reported that the writing team sought guidance from a selection of applied practitioners to ensure that the course covered key ethical concerns that arise for Society members. Mansoor Mir, a Chartered Psychologist who leads a research ethics board at the Home Office, initially wondered how the writing process would evolve having such a wide representation of members on the team: ‘As we began to collaboratively create course materials, we quickly realised that as psychologists we had a lot more in common than we initially thought. There are fundamental principles of ethical practice that apply across different settings.’ JS The course will be launched in June 2020 via www.bps. org.uk/find-cpd/e-learning. See also www.bps.org.uk/ ethics for more information on standards and guidelines.

Your new online community

The BPS has recently launched a new online community for members to connect and share ideas. Member Connect follows the launch of similar forums for student members and members of the Division of Clinical Psychology – with the new site open to all BPS members. Digital Projects Manager Linda Corrie said the community was initially intended to provide members with a place to connect and discuss changes in the BPS, but the Covid-19 outbreak shifted the focus slightly. ‘We decided it was still a good time to launch as, now more than ever,

it is a time where people want to stay connected and our new online community provides our members with a space for them to connect, discuss relevant topics, stay up-todate with the latest from the BPS and share their ideas. Hence the community is now open to members sharing and discussing a wider range of topics than originally planned.’ Member Connect will still be used for its initially-intended purpose, allowing the Society to share updates from its change programme, as well as its future plans and asking members to help

inform those plans. The Psychologist will also be using the new community to source ideas and content, and to keep in closer contact with readers. The community already has more than 1200 new members – many of whom have spoken of their gratitude for the platform. ‘We have had a really positive response from members – many saying that this is a great idea especially during these unprecedented circumstances.’ ER To join, simply log in (bps.org.uk/ communities) using your usual BPS website credentials.

what to seek out on the

psychologist website this month

Lots more on Covid-19 Find dozens of perspectives on coronavirus, and watch our webinar, at tinyurl.com/PsychmagCorona Full archive 33+ years via https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/archive

Find all this and so much more via

thepsychologist.bps.org.uk 38

‘The vision needs to be compelling’ We meet Dr Hazel McLaughlin, who takes over as British Psychological Society President at the end of June

How do you see the role of the President? For me, it’s to be a catalyst for change. My role is to enable the BPS team to deliver excellent services for members. I will work closely with the trustees and the senior leaders to focus our attention and resources on the core priorities. Building alliances and encouraging external collaboration is also core as this will enhance our broader impact nationally and internationally. The world around us is changing and we need to be thriving and not simply surviving. It is important to have a positive can-do attitude but also to be realistic and enable practical and long-lasting results that matter to members. This is not change for the sake of it, but rather it is about good governance and risk evaluation coupled with an appreciation of potential opportunities and collaborations. I have been privileged to work with the Society for many years and I am delighted to be your President for 2020-21. I am a strong advocate for psychology and continue to enable the professional development of psychologists within the Society.

Of course, working with organisations in times of change and transition has been central to your work as an occupational psychologist. What psychological factors are most important at such times? Change is not simply a rational process. The work of John Kotter and others highlights the importance of placing people and their experience of the change process at its heart. Communication is vital, especially when the change involves attitudes as well as behaviour. The vision needs to be compelling, but it cannot just be the story from the top. What matters to employees and to members is not always consistent with what is important for leaders. It is important to build engagement and communication and to listen to motivation, needs and aspirations. You cannot jump

to implementation without ﬁrst achieving buy-in from these key stakeholders. People need a sense of control and to see the added value of the change before they can commit to it. In terms of that vision: What is the Society for? That is a good question and it is important to go back to basics and to be clear on what we want to achieve. This will shape our sense of purpose and our strategy going forward. For me, the Society has two core roles, to be there for members and to be the voice of psychology externally. I always take heart at the fact that there are over 2000 volunteers who contribute to the Society and they come from all networks, psychological specialisms and from academia and practice. Psychology is exciting because there is a psychological element to every situation and this is evident in the wide range of settings in which we apply our discipline; in the NHS, in education, our criminal justice system, health, sports and in business to name a few. My experience and expertise in occupational psychology provides me with insights into organisations, strategy, and culture and this can add value to the President role, especially as we enable the change programme and as we revisit our strategy this year. It is important to have a clear sense of purpose and to have all parts of the BPS ship moving in the same direction. This means the BPS ofﬁce team and members working together to achieve the overall goals and objectives. Part of this is recognising differences and being inclusive, but ultimately it is about clarity on the vision and the way ahead. You have also mentioned talking ‘with one voice’. Psychology is so diverse, in terms of subject matter and the perspectives people bring to it. Do you think

the psychologist june 2020 new President

‘one voice’ is really possible? We have more in common than we think. It is easy to focus on differences and natural to do so but psychologists can learn from each other too. Different specialisms within psychology have a distinct focus but ultimately it is about people. They can be seen through a different lens, researched and applied in different ways. At its core psychology informs us about people, their needs and reactions in different situations. If we go to the heart of psychology, we are asking questions about the mind and the impact of our thoughts, feelings and experiences on how we react, behave and make decisions. So, respect differences but build on commonality. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The essence of diversity is to understand differences and respect and respond to them but also to seek out areas where we can inﬂuence and engage with others. I recognise that different strands of psychology have a lot to contribute and can inform and inﬂuence public policies, governments and key decision makers. You also bring expertise in working cross-culturally. How can the Society achieve positive change in that area? I enjoy travel and learning from different cultures and have had the opportunity to work with global organisations and with people from many countries. This has enhanced my perspective on the world of work and highlights both the similarities and differences. From a psychological viewpoint it is fascinating to understand what makes people tick. At the International Congress for Applied Psychology in Montreal, we debated how transferable psychology is across cultures. There are cultural differences and the research from Fons Trompenaars and others is illuminating. However, the similarities and transferable applications are also striking. In my coaching and development practice I have worked with people across Europe and from Asia, Middle East and North America. People behave and act within the context of their cultural norms but there is often variation within cultures as well as across them. It is important to be sensitive to difference whilst applying good evidencebased practice. What makes you tick? I often work with business leaders on their underlying motivators. Ultimately for me it is about making a difference. I care about people, listen to them and enable them to achieve at their very best. Outcomes matter: for me it is about positive energising solutions based on sound evaluation and decision-making. My background in occupational psychology provides expertise that is very useful in these times

of change and transition. I can take the long-term strategic perspective and collaborate with key stakeholders. I bring a different lens that enhances innovative and effective results. I am passionate about life, and this translates into my approach with psychology. I am interested in the underlying factors that shape our lives. In a work context, I apply the science of psychology; psychological theory and research combined with best practice. My work centres on change with business leaders, teams and organisations in times of change and uncertainty. This is particularly relevant now in our Covid-19 world and beyond. These are unprecedented times and there is a need for agility, resilience and a broader perspective. When we talk about diversity and inclusion, for me this is about voices being heard, people being able to speak up and opportunities being explored. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts’. Read ‘part two’ of this interview in the next issue, where Dr McLaughlin talks about the potential impact of Covid-19, before looking 10-20 years down the line for psychology and the Society.

Tim Sanders/www.timonline.info

The forgotten Brexistential crisis

Prime Minister Boris Johnson celebrated his election victory in December 2019 with the words ‘This is a turning point in the life of our nation. We got Brexit done.’ It seems that since then, Brexit has disappeared from public awareness. The media are now focusing on the next turning point in the life of our nation: the Covid-19 pandemic. However, Brexit does not seem to be completely done. The UK still has to formally leave the EU on 1 January 2021, with or without trade agreement. The EU negotiator Michel Barnier expects that a no-deal has become more likely, as he accuses the UK of not engaging seriously in the negotiations. Many EU citizens in the UK had also hoped to get security by their ‘settled status’ in the UK, but this status not been backed by any long-term Government commitment. Consequently, Brexit remains a potential source of uncertainty and stress for Europeans in the UK and for Britons in one of the 27 EU states, particularly as the deadline of leaving the EU is getting closer. Here, we preview our longer article for The Psychologist website which reviews the emotional impact of Brexit, and describes how psychologists can help individuals with Brexit-related mental health problems. Both Covid-19 and Brexit seem to have a large psychological impact on the population. Our systematic review of 19 surveys and research studies showed that between one-third and half of the population have reported a range of Brexit-related emotional concerns, such as uncertainty, anxiety, sleep problems, social concerns and a sense of powerlessness. Research also indicated that Europeans living in the UK experience an even larger emotional impact. It could be imagined that these Brexit-related mental health problems will get exacerbated by the stress caused by Covid-19. Why do people experience Brexit Blues? In line with the Power-Threat-Meaning-Framework, we could

interpret these emotions as a normal response to situational threats. Research confirms this: European citizens in the UK report uncertainty about their future status and rights, feel that they do not belong here anymore and feel unwelcome and rejected, often triggered by a negative media discourse. Up to 70 per cent of all EU citizens have experienced discrimination at work, and the number of racially motivated hate crimes has increased by 442 per cent since 2016. Furthermore, Brexit seems to trigger an existential crisis, as some individuals start to question themselves, their identity, their place in the world, and their fundamental sense of belonging, security and safety. Since 2017, the Emotional Support Service for Europeans (ESSE) has offered six counselling sessions to individuals suffering from Brexit-related mental health problems. The volunteering counsellors help clients to explore and better understand their emotional responses, make informed decisions, and explore beneficial copingstyles. ESSE has helped approximately 100 clients, 16 of whom participated in an audit. These clients described ESSE as very helpful and creating large positive changes in their life. They attributed these changes to the open ear, supportive relationship, normalisation, and help in decision-making that they received from the counsellor. Brexit gives a good example of how difficult circumstances can impact our wellbeing, and how individuals could benefit from professional help in challenging life situations. Similarly, individuals confronted with other situational threats, such as Covid-19, could experience mental health problems and may benefit from psychological support. Dr Joel Vos, Professor Emmy van Deurzen, Professor Digby Tantam Read their full article: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/brexistential-crisis

the psychologist june 2020 letters

Suicide prevention and bereavement The NHS Five Year Forward View identiﬁed reducing suicide rates as one of its primary goals, and yet 6507 people died by suicide in 2018 in the UK alone (Ofﬁce for National Statistics, 2018). One study reported that over 80 per cent of those who died by suicide visited health care professionals in the year prior to death (Ahmedani et al., 2014). Despite this opportunity to identify clients at risk, primary care providers (PCPs) rarely discuss suicidal ideation with their clients (O’Connor et al., 2013), as the time available for suicide risk assessments is limited. Are others in the community capable of identifying individuals at risk of suicide? Pharmacists have regular contact with clients who may be suicidal. In recent years, the role of pharmacists has changed. They increasingly offer both advice and consultations to the public. One study reported that pharmacists see mental health service users on average 31 times more a year than their PCPs (Moose & Branham, 2014). Many pharmacists become familiar with regular clients and, as a result, may be better placed

to identify deteriorations in mental state than PCPs. The primary barrier to pharmacists intervening is lack of conﬁdence (Watkins et al., 2017), which stems from the belief that they do not possess the appropriate skills or knowledge to assess risk of suicide (Gillette et al., 2019). Pharmacists could be trained to identify those at risk, provide support for suicidal individuals and make referrals to appropriate primary and secondary care services. Suicide prevention and mental health ﬁrst aid training could be incorporated into pharmacy degrees. Moreover, it is essential that pharmacists become more involved in the care of mental health service users. Systems could be developed to inform pharmacists of clients who are at high risk of suicide, such as those who have previously attempted suicide (World Health Organization, 2014). Pharmacists could remain particularly vigilant over such individuals and prompt appropriate discussions around the topic by suitably trained professionals. At the time of writing, the UK

As a mental health professional, my first experience of receiving the devastating news that a patient/service user (not the most humanistic of terms) had taken their life brought the very nature of the job into perspective. This job is rewarding – lives are saved every day – but the most challenging when someone cannot be saved. Naturally, you begin to question your professional ability and the limitations of your profession. You are required to process and grieve within a minute of receiving the news, because in the next minute you are delivering therapy to a service user who is having thoughts of taking their own life. It can have an overwhelming impact. When learning the details, it feels as though only you know why, what, where and how. It can be haunting. Confiding in family and friends does not always help, despite their best efforts. Through reflective practice sessions, I began to process the fact that we had a level of responsibility to the person and somehow, for whatever reason, the intervention was not enough to save them. Whilst reflective practice is helpful, that one conversation is often not enough. With an alarming increase in suicide rates, not all practitioners have the opportunity to engage in reflective practice immediately after an incident. One study showed that only 17.7 per cent of mental health professionals were offered formal support

lacks sufficient data regarding the influence of Covid-19 on suicide rates. Working in a community mental health team, I have seen a dramatic rise in mental health concerns during the outbreak. Pharmacies remain open, so pharmacists would be well placed to identify and help those at risk of suicide. Moreover, the social and economic consequences of the coronavirus will outlast the pandemic, undoubtedly resulting in additional negative ramifications on mental health. Therefore, providing pharmacists with suicide prevention training is of unequivocal importance in coping with the fallout of Covid-19. Health care providers are under increasing pressure and it is becoming ever more important that we utilise community-based services in supporting those with mental health issues. Training pharmacists would help towards the goals of the NHS Five Year Forward View. Liam Myles Assistant Psychologist Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

following service user suicide (Murphy et al., 2019). Both clinical supervision and reflective practice, in this instance, involve short intervention where professionals are encouraged to process traumas that arose in clinical practice, to reduce distress (Mendes, 2015). However, this is largely inaccessible to staff (Awenat et al., 2017). One of the most valued supports for mental health professionals following a service user’s death is informal peer support (Murphy et al., 2019). The Reflective Room is a discussion forum that keeps the conversation going, providing anonymous peer support. It is a safe space where mental health professionals can share their own experiences of losing to suicide an individual they have worked closely with. The Reflective Room encourages professionals to reflect on the long lasting impact service user suicides has both personally and professionally. Professionals can share something that others may identify with, providing the space to grieve. You can access the forum at thereflectiveroom. forumotion.com. Please be mindful not to use names or identifiable information of those who have lost their lives to suicide. Norgenta Lata Camden and Islington NHS Trust

References in the online versions

Examining gamma bias I’m concerned by the examples in Martin Seager and John Barry’s letter on ‘gamma bias’ (April 2020). Whilst in theory the gamma bias proposal may have some purpose, the examples of firemen and domestic violence perpetrators were frankly inappropriate on a number of levels. Firefighters are called firefighters because that’s the job description – there is no longer gender bias, that’s the point. The number of firefighters who are women increases each year, now that discrimination in hiring requirements and practices has reduced. On the domestic violence front, Women’s Aid noted in 2016, ‘there is a small but significant number of women who commit domestic abuse… figures from Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) VAWG report show… 92.4 percent of defendants being men and 7.6 percent women. This year, the CPS report also showed that violent crimes against women in England and Wales had reached a record-high. ‘We know that the domestic abuse women experience as victims is far more dangerous and severe than that experienced by male victims. In particular, they are much more likely to be killed – 97 percent of female domestic homicide victims in the 2014-2015 CPS VAWG report were

killed by a man. By comparison, about a third of the far smaller number of male domestic homicide victims were killed by a woman.’ Whilst the number of prosecutions of women has increased for domestic abuse crimes, the chances of women being killed by a male partner, husband, father, brother are far far higher. To blur the factual evidence with the claim that this is in someway a ‘cognitive distortion’ is disturbing. I understand that the authors are looking to balance the four quadrants of their gamma bias theory but I feel that they dismiss the impact of the ‘doing harm (perpetration)’ quadrant – particularly given the increase in domestic violence incidents during lockdown and the number of people needing refuge (note I say people, not women, albeit I’m sure that the figures would fit the national statistic trend as above). Work is required to improve the psychological health of men, as well as to reduce perpetration by men. It does nobody any favours to imply that the harm is not really there. Samantha Goffin Postgraduate Student University of Manchester

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Having read Dr Marshall’s letter (April 2020) about increased navel-gazing in The Psychologist, it was with some trepidation that I turned to the rest of the magazine, worrying that my blood pressure would be raised to dangerous levels by a plethora of leftist propaganda. You can imagine my relief at ﬁnding, contrary to what Dr Marshall wrote about the Society’s obsession with narratives, labelling and being unduly nice to people, that the articles in that issue were mainly about coronavirus, vision, pain and mirrorwriting. I suspect Dr Marshall might be experiencing some sort of unconscious bias. David Mingay The Open University

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the psychologist june 2020 letters

Holding our hands up I was intrigued by the image at the top of the article ‘The magazine is you’ (April 2020), probably because it reminded me of many situations I have been in, both professional and social, where a man is doing the talking and a woman is listening. The man in the photograph [Editor Dr Jon Sutton] does not appear to be looking at his interlocutor [Editorial Committee Chair Professor Catherine Loveday] and his raised hand suggests he is actively ‘holding the ﬂoor’ whilst talking. She, though, is looking at him with her hands demurely folded in her lap. Is this depressingly

familiar to women readers or just my personal reading of the situation? Was the conversation really maledominated? So, I decided to count the number of lines attributed to each speaker and discovered that Jon has 296 lines of speech to Catherine’s 135 lines. Is this still typical of a ‘conversation’ between peers of different genders and if so, is it cause for concern that it should be printed unquestioningly in The Psychologist? Victoria Field Writer and Poetry Therapist Canterbury

Editor’s response: I must hold my hands up to this. It was in my mind all through the actual conversation, the editing of it, and how we presented it. I was aware I had hogged the conversation. The priority was always for me to update readers on lots of developments that might have passed them by… but, given that, maybe the conversation format just wasn’t the right way to go. Separately, Catherine has conﬁrmed with you that she doesn’t feel any need to ‘demure’ in our chats! But I do agree we should have done / presented this differently. I apologise to Catherine and readers.

Understanding the BAME gap This letter is inspired by the recent call for ‘hope and help’ from Binna Kandola and David Murphy’s conversation (March 2020) regarding the new Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce. My aim is to provide avenues of thought from the perspective of an aspiring applied social psychologist and from my own and known experiences as a BAME PhD student. There have been recent attempts in research and educational policy to close the attainment gap between BAME and white students. Despite such attempts, there is still a lack of representation in higher education. In my opinion, this reduced diversity aids the stagnancy of academic culture. One factor is the few role models

for BAME students to access and so few who understand the contexts that BAME students can bring to the table. Answers to such issues have included mentorship schemes and further research looking at belonging within the individuals in BAME groups. I believe that listening to suggestions and experiences from BAME individuals as well as investigating the psychological underpinnings that maintain the gaps in education may encourage new policies and systems that could change the academic status quo for the better. Daniella Nayyar Continue reading online at https://thepsychologist.bps. org.uk/volume-33/june/understanding-bame-gap

Professor Marcia Worrell 1966-2020 It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Marcia Worrell, who died on the morning of 14 April. Marcia was a great inspiration to all who knew her. Her kindness, intelligence and devotion to justice and equality in the face of exploitation will be sorely missed by all. She was the daughter of parents who came to England from the Caribbean, and the sister of an older brother, Floyd and a younger brother, Ian, whose children (Leah and Dylan) Marcia was particularly close to. She had a large loving family across the UK, Caribbean and the United States. Starting in 1985, she completed an undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Reading. She then went on to complete a doctorate at the Open University under the supervision of Wendy Stainton

Rogers in what was then the Department of Health and Social Welfare. Alongside her PhD research on child abuse and neglect (which used qualitative methods to deal both sensitively and practically with the ethical, psychological, legal, social and political complexities of this challenging topic) she also acted as a researcher and course team member on a range of innovative courses on child protection. Her whole-hearted commitment to education was clear throughout her career, and she was a long-term accredited member of what is now the Higher Education Academy. Marcia acquired her ﬁrst permanent lectureship in 1992 at the University of Bedfordshire (formerly the University of Luton) where she helped to set up the ﬁrst British Psychological Society (BPS) accredited

qualiﬁcation at that university. During this phase she also became a core member of the Beryl Curt Collective, contributing to the landmark 1994 book Textuality and Tectonics: Troubling Social and Psychological Science (Open University Press). This was a radical group of psychologists who articulated an innovative critical approach to psychology. As part of Beryl, she drew upon her own research to show how problems that are typically theorised and tackled at the individual level are in fact related to broader ‘cultural tectonics’ which shape and give rise to the discursive practices through which issues like child abuse and neglect are made sense of and acted upon. In 2004 she moved to the University of Roehampton, where she took up the role of Programme Convenor for Psychology in 2007. During that time she also served on the BPS Research Board and chaired the Board of the Children’s Legal Centre. She was awarded a joint Roehampton Teaching Fellowship (2010-2013) in recognition of her work on learning and teaching in higher education. Marcia was an educational innovator, initiating and putting into practice students-as-partners learning approaches even before these were fully recognised as excellent practice in the HE sector. One example of this was how she personally encouraged and supported ﬁnal year UG students in organising and presenting at their very own academic conference, a concept which was subsequently taken up in other departments and institutions. Marcia was also a long-standing committee member, and Chair, of the Psychology of Women (latterly, the Psychology of Women and Equalities) Section of the British Psychological Society, leading the celebrations for the Section’s 30th anniversary. Marcia engaged in political activism in her international work including in South

Africa and, notably, in Cambodia where she was part of a development to set up the ﬁrst psychology Master’s programme in the country. Staff and graduates of the programme remember her with great fondness. Her ﬁnal role was a Professorship at the University of West London where – in addition to her formal responsibilities – she was a central part of the establishment of The London Policing Research Network which aimed to ensure that wide-reaching decisions regarding police practice are informed by up to date, relevant research. Marcia helped to initiate and drive forward a culture shift which will transform police education in the Metropolitan Police Service ensuring that the values she espoused will be ingrained in future policing in London. In acquiring this Chair, Marcia became one of the small number of black women Professors in the UK. Life was not always easy for her, but she confronted friction with the help of a wonderfully honed wicked sense of humour, and she rarely lost the glint in her eye. Amidst all this work, she never ceased to be there for her family and friends when needed. Her friends, colleagues and students will miss her unique combination of generosity, determination, and joy. All who knew her well were touched by her dynamic social presence, joyful laughter and by her unbreakable larger-than-life heart. It seems that until the end she never asked what others can do for her, but what she can do for others. There will not be another Marcia Worrell, but her example will continue to inspire generations of caring, intelligent and politically engaged psychologists and practitioners to come. Paul Stenner, Lindsay O’Dell, Rose Capdevila, Wendy Stainton Rogers, Orly Klein, Sharon Cahill, Gina Pauli, Angel Chater

Professor Aidan Moran 1956-2020

Aidan Moran BA, MA, PhD, FAPS, FPsSI, FBPsS, Reg Psychol., C. Psychol., Full Professor of Cognitive Psychology at University College Dublin (UCD), sadly passed away on 16 March 2020. A ﬁrst class honours psychology graduate from UCD at both undergraduate and Master’s level, he studied for his PhD at NUI Galway with Professor Donald Broadbent as his external examiner. He later returned to UCD as a college lecturer and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (1994) which facilitated research in the US, forging lasting collaborations with Dr Sean McCann (USOC), Dr Shane Murphy (formerly USOC), and Professor Bob Singer (University of Florida). His most notable work The Psychology of Concentration in Sport Performers: A Cognitive Analysis (1996) was conceived during this sabbatical. A meta-analysis of mental practice in 1994 was among his classic works cited 1500 times and his collective research has already generated over 7000 citations. These numbers are, however, not the measure of the man. Members of the BPS Division of Sport and

Exercise Psychology, readers of The Psychologist and many across the field of sport psychology were major beneficiaries of his insights, research and mentoring. Ironically for a scientist-practitioner who influenced the field greatly, Aidan was reluctant to assume the label sport psychologist. In his own words captured in Becoming a Sport Psychologist by PESS graduate Dr Paul McCarthy (Glasgow Caledonian University) and Professor Marc Jones (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘I don’t regard myself as a sport psychologist at all… since I don’t have any formal qualifications in sport psychology.’ Sport for Aidan was both a playground for his own pursuits in competitive tennis and a natural laboratory for the study of cognition and action. Aidan was as likely to cite William James or Roger Bartlett, as any research contemporary. As he often remarked, if you want to find a new idea, look in an old book. Acknowledging the hand of history and predecessors was a hallmark of his work. The Looking Back column featured, with his long-time friend John

the psychologist june 2020 letters

Reuben Conrad 1916-2020 Reuben Conrad, always known just as Conrad, passed away on 17 March 2020 at the age of 103. I was a young postdoc when I first met Conrad, who was already a senior figure; for reasons lost in time we shared a car journey from Oxford to a conference in the 1970s. I can’t remember which of us was driving, but I do remember that he was a shy and taciturn man. His reserve did fade away, however, when talking about education for Deaf children, the topic of the conference. Conrad’s work had been seismic in showing that the widely-used oral education approaches that were pretty much universal in the UK were failing many children, and he was passionate in his advocacy for a different approach. Not only had he demonstrated that levels of literacy of Deaf children were years behind those of their hearing peers, but he had found an explanation for this. At the time, the idea that reading involved language skills, and especially phonological processing, was still a novel concept that had barely penetrated the field of education. In addition, there was a widespread belief that sign language was just a collection of gestures, without full linguistic status. This meant that, with the best of intentions, educators thought that the optimal way to teach Deaf children was by using oral methods involving lip-reading and hearing aids. Conrad showed that oralism did not foster development of the ‘inner speech’ that was

Kremer (formerly QUB), the history of sport psychology, the history of psychology in Ireland with Mark Campbell and me as co-authors, and his own conceptually rich research on concentration, attention and mental imagery. Aidan posed difficult conceptual and theoretical questions about cognitive psychology on topics including motor cognition, attention, concentration, mental imagery, meta-cognition and the cognitive processes underlying expertise in skilled performance. Beyond his doctoral students, Aidan established a vast network of collaborators internationally including Professor Sonal Arora (Imperial College), Professor Marc Jones (MMU), Professor Craig Mahoney (UWS), Professor David Lavallee (Abertay University) and his long-time friend and co-author Dr John Kremer (QUB). In 2006, he was appointed inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology which grew to become a leading journal in the field. His door was always open to conversations on the perennial questions in the field and Professors Dan Gould, Bob Weinberg, Anders Ericsson were among those who passed through it. This provocative thinker, wonderful mentor with an abundance of kindness will not be forgotten in the history of sport psychology. Our condolences are with his wife Angela, son Kevin, his brothers Ciaran, Dermot and sister Patricia, and his extended family. Dr Tadhg MacIntyre University of Limerick

so important for reading and memory, but instead Deaf children could use ‘inner sign’. When Conrad turned 100, I wrote a piece for The Psychologist (July 2016 issue) documenting his academic contribution, and tracing the history of how he came to be involved in research on Deaf education. It is an intriguing tale, whereby a family tragedy – the death of his wife – led him to re-evaluate his life as an applied experimental psychologist. He had done important work in the 1950s and 1960s in the Cambridge MRC Applied Psychology Unit, on verbal coding in short-term memory that had inﬂuenced the development of the British postcode system, but he felt he wanted to address a more important question. Having settled on inner speech in the Deaf, he worked for a year at the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital in London, where he planned his major life’s work: a psychological study of Deaf school-leavers in the UK, which he carried out while based in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. The resulting book, The Deaf School Child, is one of my favourite psychology texts. It showcases Conrad’s clear thinking and careful approach to experimentation, and is a classic example of how experimental psychology can be applied to important everyday problems. Conrad received few accolades from the academic establishment, despite being awarded a CBE. But his legacy is his work on short-term memory, inner speech and Deafness, which will continue to have an inﬂuence long into the 21st century. Professor Dorothy Bishop University of Oxford

Dr Janet Carr 1927-2020 Dr Janet Carr died peacefully at home on 17 March 2020, a few days before her 93rd birthday. Janet graduated in psychology from Reading University in 1948 where she became close friends with Alan and Ann Clarke, whose research in intellectual disability had a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on her own career. Indeed, it was Alan Clarke who persuaded Janet to apply for the course in clinical psychology that had just started at the Maudsley Hospital. After some years combining part-time clinical work with bringing up a family, Janet joined the MRC Psychiatry research unit at the Maudsley, which was conducting a follow-up study of six-week old babies with Down Syndrome born in 1964. At that time, many families were still being advised to place these infants in institutional care. Janet explored the experiences of mothers on being told that their baby had

Down Syndrome and the huge variation in the ways this was done. This resulted in her first publication (1970), in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. Janet continued to see the families regularly until the babies were four years old when she completed her PhD. This was supervised by Jack Tizard, another pioneer in the field of intellectual disability who also became a life-long friend. Her first book, Children with Down’s Syndrome, was published in 1975. In 1971, Janet was appointed as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry and consultant psychologist at Hilda Lewis House, a new outreach service at the Bethlem Royal Hospital for children with learning disabilities and very disturbed behavior – including life-threatening self-injury. Its aim was to help children and families stay together in the community and, wherever possible, to prevent admission to long stay hospitals. It could be a very challenging place to work, as those of us who were there at the time still remember. However, Janet was almost unfailingly optimistic about the potential for change and many children were able to return home with support. Her much praised book for parents, Helping Your Handicapped Child (1980) is based on her work at that time. Janet returned to her Down Syndrome families when the children were aged 11 years and she saw them again at 21 years, after moving to St George’s hospital. Post retirement, because of increased awareness of

early dementia in Down Syndrome, Janet revisited all her cohort at 30, 35, 45, 47 and finally at 50 years. Her findings did much to enhance knowledge about Down Syndrome and, in particular, highlighted the very positive attitudes and experiences of many families. Her work also emphasised the variability of individual trajectories. Thus, while some people continued to have profound disabilities, others were able to find work and live at least partly independently. The research also documented significant improvements in services over the years. Life expectancy has risen from 12 years in 1951 to approximately 60 years currently; most young children with Down Syndrome now attend mainstream infant and junior schools and many adults live with families or in their own homes, mostly with supported living services. As well as the academic importance of her research – which resulted in numerous international publications and lectures (Janet’s final keynote lecture was at the age of 90 in Melbourne), many of the study participants viewed Janet as a lifelong friend. Indeed, many attended a celebration of the 50-year follow-up at the House of Lords, hosted by Dame Sheila Hollins, in October 2014. Over the years her dedication to people with disabilities won several awards, including from Down’s Syndrome UK, the Josephine Mills Lifetime Achievement Award, Down Syndrome International, and the OBE in 2015. Sally Carr, Glyn Murphy and Patricia Howlin

Professor Keith Wesnes 1950-2020

I first met Keith in the mid-nineties at the BPS Psychobiology Section Annual meeting in the Lake District. Back then there were three factors which made the meeting perfect for Keith – a focus on good science, an informal atmosphere and the fact that it was held in a pub. We hit it off immediately, almost certainly due the last of these. At the time he was already an established scientist, while I was taking baby steps, having just secured university funding for my first PhD student. He willingly came on board as co-supervisor for that PhD (and many more subsequently). From there, we were friends and colleagues for the next 25 years. Keith was incredibly supportive, using money from his business to contribute resources to me and my colleagues, even to the point of funding whole PhDs. He was instrumental in establishing my research at Northumbria University, and of course he paid for the party when my first lab was launched. When I was offered a job in Australia 10 years later, Keith was the first person I called for advice. For people who didn’t know him well, Keith may be remembered for the Cognitive Drug Research (CDR) battery, the first computerised test battery of its kind. The way he told it to me, Keith won a university prize during his PhD. He was testing nicotine’s effects in humans which required a work-intensive, human ‘conveyer belt’ of reaction time and pencil-and-paper

tests. He used the prize money to pay a techie friend to program these tasks onto a BBC Micro (this was the eighties), and the precursor to the CDR battery was born. People at conferences started asking more questions about his battery than about his research. Keith, being way ahead of his time, recognised the potential value of commercialising research (decades before the university sector). So he started CDR Ltd as a company. Keith probably made a lot of money from CDR, but he was hugely generous. His business model was to charge top dollar to industry while offering the CDR battery free to students and academics. I was at a couple of meetings where his business manager’s face would drop as Keith made these decisions. Beyond the entrepreneur though, Keith was a true pioneer of psychopharmacology, razor sharp with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the area. Another tribute to Keith has rightly described him as a ‘giant of psychopharmacology’. He was an absolute one-off with a huge appetite for life as well as for good food, good wine and good conversation. Like many who knew Keith, I’ll cherish fond memories of long nights out, drinking and talking into the early hours, ending with a boozy, rib crushing hug from the big man. Keith Wesnes passed away peacefully in his sleep on 14 April. He leaves behind wife Louisa, children Anna, Kay and Louis and grandson Koa. Andrew Scholey

the psychologist june 2020 letters Editor’s note: Sadly, we are currently receiving many obituaries. You can ﬁnd them collected at https://thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/obituaries – where we are able to publish longer tributes, and multiple contributions. Go there for additional obituaries: Professor Ron Davie 1929-2019 An appreciation from John Visser. Also revisit our 2018 interview with Professor Davie, at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/april/ hearing-voice-child Barry Frost 1926-2020 (Pictured, right) An appreciation of the British Psychological Society Fellow from his daughter, Meredith Gibson. Dr Mike Solomon 1967-2019 An appreciation from Liz Doherty and Sally Hodges.

A webinar In conversation: Dr Rowena Hill (Nottingham Trent University and the cross-governmental C19 Foresight group) Professor Susan Michie (Director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, and government advisor) Kathryn Scott (British Psychological Society Director of Policy) Hosted by The Psychologist Editor Dr Jon Sutton Watch now at tinyurl.com/BPSnewnormal

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Is lack of sleep a problem? Emma Young digests the research

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website

e all know that too little sleep is bad for us. Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley sleep scientist and author of the best-selling Why We Sleep, has gone so far as to declare: ‘The shorter you sleep, the shorter your life.’ However, some researchers fear that our concerns about not getting enough sleep are becoming overblown – and that, ironically, they could be making the problem worse. In this feature, we take a look at evidence that ‘too little’ sleep isn’t always the disaster that it’s held up to be.

1. You’ll be familiar with the chronotype concepts of larks (early to bed and early to rise) and owls (late to bed, and late to rise). [And for more, see p.21] Most kids start out as larks, but during adolescence, many shift to becoming owls. Waking up late is ﬁne for teenagers at the weekends, but not during the school week. Unsurprisingly, then, various studies have found that delaying the time school starts improves academic results for this age-group, and many sleep scientists and paediatricians support such a policy. It’s been assumed that this is because it allows teens to get a decent night’s sleep. But there’s some evidence that this may not be the reason. A recent study of Dutch secondary school pupils, published in Scientiﬁc Reports, found that owls did get poorer exam grades, but this was effect was largely independent of sleep duration. This suggests that even when owls get ‘enough’ sleep, they don’t do as well as larks on exams. And this, it seems, is because exams are often administered in the mornings… when owls aren’t at their cognitive peak. When owls took exams in

the afternoon, closer to that peak, they achieved similar grades as larks. This was especially true for science subjects. Of course, if the school day starts later, then exams start later – and this could be a better fit for many teens’ chronotype. What this all means, though, is that, in many cases, trying to get teens to go to bed earlier, to sleep for longer, may not make as much of a difference to their performance at school as has been claimed. 2. Anxiety, OCD, ADHD, schizophrenia, PTSD… all kinds of mental health problems are associated with sleep problems, too. It’s now recognised that the relationship is circular, with mental illness and insomnia exacerbating each other. It’s not as simple, then, as a lack of sleep causing symptoms. And certainly, there’s evidence that stress early in life can set you up for insomnia much later. One study found that children who grew up in families with high levels of conflict went on to be more likely to have insomnia as adults. This held even when any sleep problems or depression during childhood were controlled for in the analysis – so it wasn’t a case of participants who’d had trouble sleeping as kids still having these difficulties as adults. And when it comes to depression, the links between sleep and symptoms can be surprising… 3. Depriving depressed people of sleep works as an effective treatment. This was shown in series of studies starting almost 50 years ago. But it has become a standard therapy only recently. Healthy people deprived

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of sleep will generally find that their mood worsens. But for people with depression, staying awake for at least a night can do the opposite (temporarily, anyway). The impacts are rapid, and work on most patients, as a study in Denmark, for example, has found. Exactly how the treatment works is still debated, but it’s thought to shock a sluggish biological clock. 4. The evidence that sleep is important for memory is pretty overwhelming. But, recently, at least one study has challenged the idea that sleep always brings memory benefits. Given the experimental record, the researchers had expected to find that eye-witnesses who were given the chance to sleep would be better at identifying suspects the following day. But they weren’t… This was a big study: 2000 participants watched a brief video of a man stealing a laptop from an office. Twelve hours later, they were asked to identify him from a line-up. Half had slept during this time, but, contrary to expectations, they were no more accurate than the others at picking out the perpetrator. More work is needed to try to clarify why not.

6. Just how bad is insomnia anyway…? There are a lot of people out there who technically do suffer from insomnia, but who don’t believe, or realise, that they do, and these people experience no distress or anxiety, and are no more impaired in terms of daily fatigue than those who get good sleep. What’s more, a massive increase in hypertension (high blood pressure) was observed among those who regarded themselves as having insomnia, but not among the ‘non-complaining poor sleepers’. The same review found that 37 per cent of people who think they have insomnia actually sleep normally, and having an ‘insomnia identity’ was more predictive of daytime impairment than poor sleep. Other research has found, meanwhile, that worrying about not getting enough sleep can itself lead to prolonged insomnia. Headlines that make people worry that they’re not getting enough sleep could themselves, then, cause some of the problems they’re describing. Which brings me back to the start of this feature…. There’s plenty of evidence that a good quantity of regular quality sleep is important. But how we think about the way we sleep is important, too.

A 2011 study found that people were more likely to believe in ‘climate change’ than ‘global warming’. Now researchers have failed to replicate that effect, ﬁnding that people’s belief in the phenomenon doesn’t depend on the exact wording. The different results could reﬂect the fact that climate change has become more politicised over the past decade, leaving subtle matters like word choice having less of an effect. Journal of Environmental Psychology

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5. No doubt you’ve heard that a lack of sleep isn’t just bad for your mental but your physical health. Women who get less sleep are indeed more likely to develop obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, for example. But the major reason for these effects seems to be indirect: women who sleep poorly tend to make poorer food choices, going for higher-calorie, energy-dense foods. These choices are certainly related to a lack of quality sleep, but they aren’t an inevitable result of it. The same team behind this ﬁnding suspect, meanwhile, that a poor diet can cause poor sleep: ‘It’s also possible that poor diet has a negative impact on women’s sleep quality’, notes lead author Faris Zuraikat, at Columbia University. ‘Eating more could also cause gastrointestinal discomfort, for instance, making it harder to fall asleep or remain asleep.’

When you’re comforting a friend, it’s important to make sure they feel validated, according to a new study. Participants imagined having an argument with their spouse and then receiving a message of support from a friend, which either encouraged them to move past the argument (‘low person-centred’), or acknowledged and engaged with their feelings (‘high person-centred’). The high person-centred messages improved participants’ well-being, but the low person-centred messages left them feeling angry and controlled, and more likely to argue with the friend. Journal of Communication

How long-distance runners are different For many, running a marathon is seen as the ultimate amateur athletic achievement; for others, it’s just the start. Ultramarathon runners often take on courses of incredibly impressive length, running 50 or 100 kilometres at one time or over several days. Clearly this is physically demanding, and only those in seriously good shape will be able to take on such challenges – ultramarathon running involves stress on muscles and bones, blisters, dehydration, sleep deprivation and mental and physical fatigue, so it’s really not for the faint of heart. But what about the psychological traits that make someone suitable for long-distance running? What kind of person can withstand this kind of physical stress, and how? A new study in the Australian Journal of Psychology takes a look. Gregory Roebuck from Monash University and colleagues recruited 20 ultrarunners and 20 control participants aged between 18 and 70; runners were matched with non-runners by gender and age. Participants were asked about their exercise behaviours Getty Images

and running experiences before completing a number of questionnaires. These included a 25-item scale designed to measure resilience (with participants rating how much they agreed with statements such as ‘I am able to adapt when changes occur’), and two questionnaires that looked at emotion regulation – the ways a person moderates or expresses their emotion. Finally, a 155-item questionnaire looked at a range of personality traits across domains like well-being, achievement, stress reaction and aggression. Next, participants took part in an emotion regulation task, viewing 36 neutral images (e.g. a sofa or chair) and 36 negative images (e.g. a bloody medical scene). Before viewing each image, participants were asked to either respond naturally to it (a ‘look’ trial) or attempt to not have a negative reaction to it (a ‘decrease’ trial), before rating the strength of their emotional response. Heart rate and skin conductance were measured during this section of the experiment. Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners, and were more likely to indicate they used positive reappraisal when regulating their emotions – in other words, they were better able to reframe a situation with a positive angle. This may be down to the need to maintain high levels of motivation during races, attaching positive meaning to negative events in order to keep running. There was also a physiological difference between ultrarunners and non-runners in the emotion regulation task, with ultrarunners showing reduced skin conductance and heart rate even when viewing unpleasant images. However, they didn’t show any differences in their ability to decrease their response to negative images. There was one measure on which ultrarunners scored lower, however – affiliative extraversion, which measures how socially warm people are, which the team puts down to the high levels of solitude involved in long-distance running. There was no significant difference in any of the other measures. The results suggest that ultrarunners are pretty similar to the rest of us – with some important differences. While it’s clear that ultrarunners are indeed more resilient than non-runners, and use different emotion regulation strategies, the direction of those relationships is not yet clear. It could be that training for ultramarathons makes people more resilient, or, on the other hand, it could be that people with higher levels of resilience are more likely to be attracted to the pastime. It would be interesting to further explore how ultrarunners motivate themselves through many hours of pain and effort. Because even though most of us will never run 100 kilometres in one go (and may have no desire to, either), understanding how to tolerate pain, and cope with physical and mental fatigue, is a lesson we all could benefit from. EMILY REYNOLDS

the psychologist june 2020 digest

We’re not good at spotting when someone has a false memory of committing a crime Our memories are not always reliable. But sometimes they’re rich, textured and vivid – even if they didn’t happen. Now a new study has found that not only can false memories feel real to the person remembering them, but observers aren’t very good at telling whether someone’s memory is true or false either. Julia Shaw from UCL asked 124 participants to watch videos of someone recalling both a real and a false memory of events that had (supposedly) happened during their adolescence. (The videos came from earlier work in which Shaw’s team gave participants false memories). In one condition, participants saw the person recalling an emotive false memory (e.g. being attacked by an animal or being bullied) while in the other condition, the false memory related to committing a crime (e.g. an assault with a weapon). Afterwards they were told one memory was real and one false, and asked to identify the false one. In the second study, participants saw the same videos either with or without sound, or just heard the audio.

Participants were no better than chance at classifying false memories – about 57 per cent of false memories were identified in the first study, and only 44 per cent in the second. Numbers were similar across conditions: criminal false memories were identified 55 per cent of the time in study one and 44 per cent in study two. In study two, accuracy was highest when participants were given video with audio (53 per cent accuracy) and worst with just audio (32 per cent). Shaw argues that the study’s results demonstrate that false memories look real to an observer – which could have serious implications for judges, police officers, lawyers and others involved with gathering evidence and interviewing eyewitnesses. Shaw points to judges in particular, who should ‘never assume they can tell when someone has a false memory… and should consider the entire process to see if there was any risk of contamination of a defendant or witness’ memories’. EMILY REYNOLDS

Night owls may use poorer emotion regulation strategies than early birds Getty Images

Are you an evening person – an owl? Or a morning person – a lark? No end of studies have reported variations in the functioning of people who like to wake and go to bed late, versus those who are early to bed and early to rise. And now a new study, published in PLoS One, has found links between our ‘chronotype’ and the way we handle emotions, reﬂect on our thoughts and feelings, and assert ourselves. Juan Manuel Antúnez at the University of Malaga, Spain, recruited 2283 healthy Spanish men and women, aged 18-60 years, to complete a series of online questionnaires. First, their chronotype was assessed. This revealed that about 28 per cent were owls, about 23 per cent were larks, and the rest were neither. The participants also completed a questionnaire that explored their use of two different strategies for emotional regulation: ‘cognitive reappraisal’, which involves reframing a stressful situation to lessen its emotional impact, and emotion suppression, which is related to decreased well-being and psychological problems like depression. The closer a participant was to the lark extreme, the more likely they

were to use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions. Those who were closer to the owl extreme were more likely to use suppression, however. Owls also showed more maladaptive ways of thinking about their own thoughts and feelings, and reported the lowest levels of assertiveness. Because, biologically-speaking, owls only ‘wake up’ later in the day, they are out of sync with most

countries’ daily routines, and this has been linked to greater fatigue. That might drive the owls’ poorer results, Antúnez suggests, although studies that follow people over time will be required to explore this. Still, he writes, ‘[the] results emphasize evening-type as a risk factor for the development of psychological disturbances and morning-type as a protective factor against those’. EMMA YOUNG

Stephany Biello ‘We are interested in how the clock breaks down’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Professor Stephany Biello (University of Glasgow) at the annual meeting of the Psychobiology Section.

What do you find particularly exciting about circadian rhythms? Circadian rhythms are super exciting because they’re so pervasive, across organisms. So they coordinate physiological and psychological systems together in humans, but they’re also so basic that they run through all organisms. This system, of cycles repeating across a roughly 24-hour period, is a really nice model to explore the physiological basis of behaviour. And we’ve made a lot of progress, I think, in understanding the physiological basis of behaviour by looking at circadian rhythms. Almost everything you look at has an aspect that’s influenced by the timing and the synchrony of how those patterns work together. And these rhythms are both externally queued and internally generated? Yes. The various rhythms within your body need to be in synchrony with each other, for you to function optimally and to be efficient. They are influenced by external signals, and they also allow you to anticipate those changes that are happening in the environment. The light pathway is the most pervasive: we’ve developed our circadian system in response to our external environment, so that’s the driver, the primary signal. But I’m also interested in exercise and social motivational signals. For many years as the field got started, people thought light was the only thing that could influence your circadian rhythms. Now it’s almost hard to find something that doesn’t influence your circadian rhythms!

…And animals which have evolved for 200 million years in caves and have no light whatsoever still display circadian rhythms. That’s right. You don’t need an environmental cycle to have a clock. The cave salamander doesn’t experience changes in temperature, or light, but it shows robust 24-hour rhythms. Flowers can open and close on a 24-hour cycle, and if you take one bud off and put it in controlled conditions, it will continue to open and close.

A lot of your work has been with mice. What makes them a good model for gaining insights about sleep and light in humans? There are a lot of tools available. If you really want to get at the physiological basis of something, mice are great. If you want to look at the pharmacology, the molecular basis, genetics, we know so much in mice. Obviously there are going to be differences, but it gives you a place to start… when you go to the human population, you don’t feel like you’re ﬁshing. You go in with really good hypotheses, a physiological basis. And what kind of questions do you ask? Well, I got interested in circadian cycles through sleep. Sleep is something we can’t resist… it comes up every 24 hours. It’s an overwhelming urge, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, if you have to sleep you have to sleep. That’s an indication of how robust these circadian cycles are. And you’ve asked how the system changes with age? Yes. As you get older yourself, I think you get more interested in how systems change with age, so that’s something I’ve looked at more as I’ve gone on in my career. We’re interested in how the clock breaks down. This is important because sleep disruption is a risk factor in all manner of things, including obesity and depression. So what changes do we observe with age, and what is that physiological control path? Well, we can put an infrared sensor in the cages of the mice, and measure when and how they move around. We ﬁnd that in younger mice, the patterns are nicely consolidated during the night period – mice are nocturnal. If you look at the older animals, the activity bleeds out more into the light portion. Their behaviour is disrupted. With an acute pulse of light, you can reset the clock just like you can reset a watch on your wrist – particularly if that pulse is administered towards the end of the wake cycle. But older mice don’t reset to a 15-minute light pulse in the same way as younger animals. By increasing the light level, you can get the

the psychologist june 2020 interview Martyna Maz/nenart.net

response that you got to the lower dose of light in young animals. You can raise the bar a bit in the older animals, but still there’s a big difference. And of course that behavioural outcome in an ageing mouse, the outcome from the circadian clock, is very similar to what we would see in humans. You mentioned the physiological control path. We were trying to figure out where the deficit is… light was a nice one, because the signal is very defined. You

have the retina, the optic nerves, the suprachiasmatic nucleus [SCN], which sits above the optic chiasm, with direct input from the eyes. It acts like the conductor, orchestrating different systems so they’re in time with each other. With some of the other signals – social signals, some of the motivational signals – the pathways are more complex. With light, if there is an issue within the clock area itself, we could follow that pathway. We can test sensitivity of the retina, we can see

whether the light is reaching the SCN, and then show that there is some of the deficit within the SCN itself. By recording electrophysiologically from that area, we find the peak firing rate is not as strong in the older animals. And if we look at the neurochemicals which mediate such a response – in particular the glutamatergic receptors, and specifically NR2B – we get differences in the ageing mice. That research is tracing the path all the way to cells in the dish, and then all the way back to the whole animal. So the clock, or at least part of it, is broken… and you’re finding out how by using different levels of explanation. Yes. With humans you’re unlikely to solve a problem by just looking at the biology. That’s why I’m a psychologist and not a biologist. But it remains fascinating and important to study different facets of the explanation. To give just one example, if we give our ageing mice access to a wheel for a short amount of time during the day, and if they’re motivated and interested to use it – perhaps because we’ve cooled the cage – then the activity seems to reset their broken clocks. It’s similar to the effect of neuropeptide Y, which can phase shift the cycle if you inject it into the SCN. It’s not simply that old mice / people are less active, so they have less need for sleep in the night? No. Even if you have animals that have the same level of activity as younger animals, the consolidation is what’s different. There are older animals that still have higher levels of activity, and younger animals that have lower levels. But even if the younger animals have a low level of activity, you still see the consolidation; with older individuals who have higher levels, you still see the disorganisation. And with the wheel, the mice do get more sleep if they’ve done more exercise, but it’s in no way proportional. That’s not all that’s going on. As an aside, I remember we had a student in the lab, using an activity watch, and we downloaded the data and said, ‘oh, your watch isn’t working’. We gave him a new one. We gave him three watches. ‘Do you not move during the day?’ He was the most sedentary we’d looked at, but you could still see that there was consolidation, a pattern to it: a peak in the morning and evening.

I think we’ve both got teenage sons, so we’re right in the midst of changes in the circadian rhythm. My son is starting to get particularly active around half nine when everyone else is wanting to wind down… Teenagers are in a really difﬁcult position, because they have this biological delay of their circadian clock. Then they have all the psychosocial pressures around wanting to stay up at night, and they have the light from their screens… the wavelength of 450 nanometres of light that is beamed out of the phone when they pick it up is going right along the optic nerve to the SCN in the early part of their night, which will cause a

further phase delay. And then some have the cognitive things around ‘fear of missing out’ when they do decide to put their phone away and go to sleep. Most of them are using their social media to facilitate their face to face relationships, and they’re worried about not being there for their friends. So there’s a whole host of things. Those cognitive effects, you think that’s more signiﬁcant than the physiological effects of the blue light? It’s hard to say… certainly in some people, it is more. The ﬁeld has worked with industry to attack that light issue. You can download apps that change the relative wavelengths of light. You can do the experiment… if I use my phone without the 450 nanometers of light does it still impact on my sleep? Yes, it does, in a big way. But you should still use the apps, because we all have that phase delay portion of our cycle, it’s not just the young people. So even if these are neurochemical effects, the whole psychology around sleep becomes vital. Yes, even that cognitive activity and arousal is impacting on the sleep and the circadian system by acting on the clock, so it’s a chemical acting on the SCN to reset your clock. So with your son, he might cognitively override that urge to come to life, and he’ll go to bed at 9:30, and then spend an hour and a half in bed not sleeping. What that does is set up a cycle where they associate their bed will not sleeping, and that’s a big problem in developing insomnia. Throughout history people have taken all sorts of medication to help them sleep, but this is really just sedation and leads to that REM rebound the following night. Trouble sleeping is actually a leading reason, after pain, that people over 65 go to their GP. We have worked with a supported living unit in Edinburgh, using activity monitors, and found similar patterns to in our mice. So we’re now looking at the impact of light, of CBT to address beliefs around sleep, and an activity class. And you’ve also worked with Sleep Scotland to train better beliefs around sleep? Yes, there are now sleep counsellors who are trained to go into schools, but also working with families who have children with special learning needs or developmental disorders where there might be more issues with sleep. In Scotland we’ve trained more than 700, and in England and Wales over 500. There are so many areas of interest here… sleep disruption in new parents, or during the menopause, or in hospital – particularly in relation to levels of ambient light. These applied topics are really rewarding… as you go on in your career, get older, you feel like you want to make sure that you’re trying to have an impact.

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Psychology has a sexual harassment problem… … and tackling it requires reckoning with the past that brought us here, argue Jacy L. Young and Peter Hegarty A psychologist (a man) brings you (a woman undergraduate student) into the laboratory and asks you to read aloud to them a series of 12 explicit sexual words and two sexually graphic passages of text…

ow do you feel in this situation? What thoughts run through your mind? Would it surprise you if you learned later that the experiment’s topic is in no way related to sex? This scenario is not merely a thought experiment centred around the common experience of being a student in psychological research. It’s the reality of a 1959 social psychology experiment as experienced by 21 women. Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills’ study at Stanford

University lent support to the then-new theory of cognitive dissonance. In the decades that followed, the study’s particulars faded from view even as it was regularly upheld as an exemplar of a well-designed social psychology experiment. This narrative continues in textbooks through to the present day. This is just one example of the lively presence of sexual harassment within psychology over the discipline’s history. In our Feminism & Psychology article we began to trace the long history of sexual harassment in psychology. We described the various ways in which sexual harassment has been embedded

the psychologist june 2020 harassment Michelle Kondrich, michellekondrich.com

in the practices of social psychology across at least three terrains, as (1) a research technique, (2) a subject of investigation, and (3) a behaviour amongst research psychologists. But sexual harassment within psychology is not merely a footnote in history. In the wake of the #metoo movement, recent cases of sexual harassment have received widespread attention and even, in some cases, a measure of redress (Hartocollis, 2019). What the broader #metoo movement challenges us to recognise is that such cases are not isolated instances

of individual bad actors, but rather illustrative of larger structural factors that sanction, if not encourage, abuses of power. Those factors are, of course, social psychological factors, and their recognition or occlusion is also part of this history. Sexual harassment as normative Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway (1997) we use the presence of sexual harassment in three realms to triangulate on the masculinist scientiďŹ c cultures of

psychology. Such cultures can render psychologists’ harassing behaviour normative. In the case of the Aronson and Mills (1959) study, the particularly gendered nature of its legacy comes into further relief when seen in companion with other cognitive dissonance research of Key sources this era. In the early 1960s Dana Bramel, who like Aronson and Cherry, F.E. (1995). The ‘stubborn Mills was a graduate student in particulars’ of social psychology: Essays Leon Festinger’s research group, on the research process. London: brought men participants into the Routledge. laboratory and presented them Greenglass, E. (2005, March 1). with ‘photographs of handsome Interview by A. Rutherford [Video Recording]. Psychology’s Feminist men in states of undress’ (1963, Voices Oral History and Online Archive p.319) and then falsely informed Project. Toronto, ON. Retrieved from them that their accompanying www.feministvoices.com/estherphysiological responses indicated greenglass latent homosexual arousal. The Hegarty, P. (2013). Gentlemen’s participants were then provided disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the sexual politics of smart with opportunities to resolve men. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago their dissonance by projecting Press. homosexuality onto others. Unlike Kelman, H.C. (1967). Human use the acclaim accorded Aronson of human subjects: the problem of and Mills’ work, Bramel’s research deception in social psychological was quickly derided as unethical experiments. Psychological Bulletin, 67(1), 1–11. for the possible long-term harms Liu, J.H. & Hilton, D.J. (2005). How to the self-regard of the men who the past weighs on the present: Social participated in this experiment, representations of history and their and for conjuring up the spectre of role in identity politics. British Journal of latent homosexuality that can haunt Social Psychology, 44(4), 537–556. masculinity (Kelman, 1967). Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford, UK: Oxford University The stark difference in responses Press. to these two cognitive dissonance Rutherford, A., Capdevila, R., Undurti, V. projects reveals a gendered empathy, & Palmary, I. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of one which attuned concern to men international feminisms: Perspectives on participants in Bramel’s work while psychology, women, culture, and rights. failing to register any such concern New York, NY: Springer. Rutherford, A., Vaughn-Johnson, for the women in Aronson and K. & Rodkey, E. (2015, June). Does Mills’ experiment. This gendering psychology have a gender? The of disciplinary empathy is part of Psychologist, 28(6), 508–511. a longstanding broader ‘gendering’ Shapin, S. (1989). The Invisible of psychology (Rutherford et al., Technician. American Scientist, 77(6), 2015). As is now well recognised, 554–563. Retrieved from JSTOR. Wilkinson, S. & Burns, J. (1990). scientiﬁc psychology’s earliest years Women organizing within psychology: were not only dominated by men Two accounts. In E. Burman (Ed.), but explicitly structured so as to Gender and psychology. Feminists exclude women from scientiﬁc and psychological practice (pp. 140participation, particularly from the 162). Thousand Oaks, CA, US: Sage key spaces in which disciplinary Publications, Inc. Williams, J.A. (1984). Gender and power and prestige were obtained intergroup behaviour: Towards an or enacted, such as laboratories integration. British Journal of Social and professional societies. Less Psychology, 23(4), 311–316. acknowledged is how practices Young, J.L. & Hegarty, P. (in press). of exclusion have not been Reasonable men: Sexual harassment fully eliminated – consider the and norms of conduct in social psychology. Feminism & Psychology. continuing dominance of men as keynote speakers or, particularly Full list available in online/app version. in America, the not infrequent occurrence of all men panels (or

‘manels’) – even as the absolute number of women in psychology has increased immensely. The move of greater numbers of women into the profession challenged the discipline’s masculinist cultures but failed to overthrow them. Women who entered psychology in the mid-20th century faced regular sexual harassment from colleagues and superiors. These experiences are documented in a number of forms, including in the oral histories collected as part of the Psychology’s Feminist Voices (www.feministvoices.com) project and in the reflective writings of psychologists themselves. Such harassment was not simply a reaction to increasing numbers of women in spaces formerly dominated by men, but also a means of challenging the priorities women brought with them into the discipline. Psychologists active in the nascent field of the psychology of women, such as Fran Cherry and Esther Greenglass, note that harassment came from those in positions to judge their work and in ways that were dismissive of the value of work on the psychology of women (Cherry, 1995; Greenglass, 2005). Even as masculinist scientific cultures persisted, psychologists made efforts to address sexual harassment more broadly. In the late 1970s psychologists began documenting the particulars, prevalence, and differing perceptions of sexual harassment, in the process helping reify the then newly named phenomenon. This work offered the basis from which psychological expertise was brought into the courts and government policy, including through the research of Barbara Gutek and the activism of psychologist Bernice Resnick Sandler (Gutek et al., 1980; Sandler, 2007). Much of this first occurred in the United States, where ‘sexual harassment’ was coined, but proved broadly influential internationally. Henri Tajfel In the context of burgeoning attention to sexual harassment as a social issue in need of correction, harassment continued to be normative in psychology. To elucidate the masculinist scientific cultures that sanction harassment, in our Feminism & Psychology piece we offered a detailed account of the conduct of one psychologist who will be familiar to UK readers: social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel – co-originator of Social Identity Theory and a founder of the European Association for Social Psychology – figures centrally in our narrative about the history of sexual harassment in psychology because of a unique set of oral history interviews from the late 1990s. In these, Tajfel’s former students and colleagues acknowledge his tendency to direct unwanted sexual attention to the women around him. Those interviewees offered firsthand accounts of this sexual harassment that they had experienced, witnessed, or were aware of for other reasons at the time that it was happening. This case history contributed to our analysis of

the psychologist june 2020 harassment

how the masculinist scientific cultures of psychology can render sexual harassment normative. Norms of conduct in the psychology department at the University of Bristol during Tajfel’s tenure there in the 1970s and 80s sanctioned sexual harassment. Such norms were hardly unique to this department – and Tajfel’s own conduct predates this period (see Rupert Brown’s 2019 Tajfel biography, and article in this issue). Nor are these norms especially particular to social psychology as a field, as other firsthand accounts of harassment in 20th century psychology attest. All that is unique is the existence of these oral history interviews, which allowed a rich description of a masculinist scientific culture, a culture that one interviewee – Margaret Wetherell – explicitly described in these terms (quoted in Young & Hegarty, 2019). Consequences of sexual harassment Disciplinary cultures that sanction sexual harassment have real consequences on who remains an active member of those cultures. Marilyn Webb left her graduate program at the University of Chicago in 1967 after being sexually harassed by multiple professors, including a prominent moral development expert. It was only some 50 years later that Webb returned to the university and received her doctorate (Kristof, 2019). For Webb and others, escaping harassment means leaving departments, programs, and professions. In the process, their stories have been lost to the historical record. Sexual harassment does not just mean particular people (most often, though by no means exclusively, women) are pushed out of the discipline. It also assists in sidelining certain avenues of inquiry. Hostile educational, research, and professional environments exclude the perspectives of these people from disciplinary discourse. There is both an individual cost here as well as an intellectual one, and the extent of either will never be fully known. Powerful members of the discipline are those who set much of its agenda. For Tajfel, this meant foregrounding socially engaged research, particularly that on the vital topics of racial, ethnic, and nationalistic prejudice and discrimination, while dismissing related issues of gender as unimportant (Young & Hegarty, 2019; but see Williams, 1984). The centring of particular perspectives on certain topics to the exclusion of others can have profound implications for what counts as psychological knowledge. Productive work on the psychology of women, including a rich outpouring of critical qualitive feminist psychology in Britain, is all the more remarkable and historic when considered in relation

Jacy L. Young is at Quest University Canada Jacy.Young @questu.ca

to this uniquely inﬂuential school of social psychology in Britain at this time (Rutherford et al., 2011; Wilkinson & Burns, 1990).

Making sexual harassment public Toward the end of June 2019, our piece on the multifaceted, multiPeter Hegarty is sited history of sexual harassment at the University officially appeared in press. This of Surrey was followed by the 1 August p.hegarty announcement by the European @surrey.ac.uk Association of Social Psychology (EASP) that it was renaming its lifetime achievement award. Since its establishment in 1982, the Henri Tajfel medal has been the association’s highest honour, bestowed upon a host of luminaries in European social psychology, the majority of whom (10 of 12 awardees) have been men. Following documentation of his harassment, Tajfel’s name will no longer grace the award. Whatever the context, talking publicly about sexual harassment is almost always met with some measure of resistance. As moral philosopher Kate Manne (2017) has argued, discussions of harassment regularly provoke gendered empathy or ‘himpathy’, Manne’s term for the way in which sympathies in conversations about sexual harassment or assault lie with men accused of this behaviour, rather than the individuals who have been harassed or assaulted. This can be seen in recurrent concerns about a lack of ‘due process’ within such conversations, which imposes the language and standards of the legal system on decision making more broadly. This kind of framing can be seen in EASP PastPresidents Fritz Strack and Wolfgang Stroebe’s open letter in response to the EASP decision, wherein they note both that ‘These are serious and potentially libelous accusations, which should not be made without “due process”’ and express their concern that the EASP’s decision making ‘procedure violated Henri Tajfel’s fundamental rights’. Yet only Tajfel’s legacy, not Tafjel himself, can be affected by these facts coming into clearer view now. Significantly, this kind of prioritisation of the imagined repercussions to those accused of sexual harassment – even in cases where individuals, like Tajfel, are long dead – forestalls action to address norms that allow harassment in the present. For us what has been most heartening is the overwhelmingly positive reaction to our work and the willingness of psychologists to engage with the larger issues it raised. In response to the article, and a thread on Twitter one of us posted about the piece, there was sustained discussion of the necessity of changing disciplinary norms, including from established figures in social psychology: Michelle Ryan, Ilka Gleibs, Rhiannon Turner, Lexi Suppes, Celia

Kitzinger, Alexander Haslam, and Stephen Reicher. The recognition that sexual harassment is a problem to be addressed, and that aspects of the disciplinary culture must be changed in order to do so, is a vital step in making such change a reality. Commemoration and disciplinary identity Grappling with the history of sexual harassment in psychology provokes questions about how the discipline constructs its identity through acts of commemoration, and the broader effects of such decision making. Who the discipline chooses to celebrate is a political act, as choices about how to recount psychology’s past and the actors within it reflect the discipline’s values. In doing so, commemoration establishes a people’s identity through social representations of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005). This conceptualisation of the relationship between history and identity is itself informed by Social Identity Theory and ironically, in positioning women as a ‘social group’ but not a ‘people’, it too limits what can be done with regard to gender. Overly generous narratives about individual scientists reflect a disciplinary identity shaped by the fetishisation of ‘genius’ and the impunity often afforded such figures. The male-by-default genius is an entity psychology has itself been instrumental in constructing (see Christine Battersby’s 1989 book Gender and Genius; and Hegarty, 2013). Attempts to limit narratives to the science, and leave aside the conduct of the scientist, imply that all that matters is the content of the science and that this exists apart from those involved in its creation (see McNeill, 2019); that reprehensible behaviour is excusable, even forgettable, so long as one’s scientific contributions are deemed valuable by those situated within and benefiting from masculinist scientific cultures. Mythologising the singular genius, whose intellect is unrivalled, not only fosters norms that such individuals are impervious to critique but obscures the contributions of those lower status people around them upon whom their scientific achievements depend (Shapin, 1989). Conceptions of individuals as brokers of knowledge working alone leave out the broader communities instrumental in cultivating ideas and carrying out research projects – what musician Brian Eno once termed the ‘scenius’. Science is carried out by intellectual communities, each shaped by norms of conduct. Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm was not an individual achievement, nor was Social Identity Theory. This is reflected, in part, by the co-authors listed on these publications. Yet more often than not scientific achievements are, to the detriment of larger disciplinary cultures, associated with an individual scientist who is singled out and celebrated.

Moving forward For psychology, the #metoo movement arrived in the midst of the discipline’s ongoing replication crisis and its attendant conversation about ethics in the conduct of research. Common to Questionable Research Practices (P-hacking, HARK-ing, data fabrication, etc) and sexual harassment are disciplinary norms that sanction unethical conduct. Both #metoo and the replication crisis challenge us to take seriously problematic professional practices writ large. These norms are not necessarily one and the same but are mutually supporting as they sustain questionable, if not outright unethical, conduct on the part of psychologists, be it methodologically, interpersonally, or at the nexus of both. Embracing feminist ethics and making these core to the discipline offers a means of addressing some of the discipline’s most pressing dilemmas of the present. Taking unethical conduct in psychology seriously requires us to consider carefully not only its presence but the broader disciplinary milieu in which it has been fostered. Longstanding masculinist norms of practice have shaped the cultures of psychology. The recurrent presence of sexual harassment in the field has (re-)produced psychologists who sexually harass, or who overlook such conduct on the part of their colleagues, perhaps regarding it as slightly irritating but normal. But sexual harassment is not a fly that lands on your dessert. It is a bit of poison served at every meal. Reckoning with sexual harassment consequently involves interrogating not simply the actions of individuals, but the disciplinary norms that permit harassment and which seek to keep histories of sexual harassment out of public discourse. More broadly still, institutional factors also encourage ongoing harassment, including the regular use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) by British universities (Weale & Batty, 2016). This practice removes problematic individuals from particular institutions, while facilitating ongoing harassment elsewhere, as this silencing allows individuals to move unimpeded between institutions. It also ensures that these histories are being actively forgotten in our own time. For psychology, a necessary part of grappling with sexual harassment in the current moment is contending with its longer history in the discipline. Openly discussing unethical behaviour in our histories allows us to face head on the norms that support such conduct. To focus exclusively on Tajfel is to miss the point – it’s time for greater reflexivity amongst psychologists about our own role maintaining or reshaping these disciplinary cultures.

the psychologist june 2020 harassment

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Realms of recognition Rupert Brown considers the life and legacy of Henri Tajfel (1919-1982)

ust over one hundred years ago, a little boy was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Włocławek, a small town in northern Poland. That boy was named Hersz (or Heniek) Tajfel. He was later to become known as Henri Tajfel, one of the most important European social psychologists of the 20th century. Although his career was cut tragically short when he died at the age of 62, it was a glittering one in terms of his inﬂuence on social psychology, both intellectually and organisationally. However, for all his academic success, he was a complex man with some undoubted personal failings in terms of inappropriate conduct towards women. These have only recently come to light, leading some to question his legacy.

Roots Growing up as a Jew in Poland in those inter-war years was no fun. Anti-semitism was rife, both in the daily life of Jews in schools and on the streets, and in the form of anti-Jewish decrees and restrictions on the numbers of Jews permitted to enter Polish universities and professions. Probably because of this, Tajfel emigrated to France in 1936 to pursue his university studies. His original choice of degree was chemistry, not a subject that ever much interested him. As a result, he failed some exams (in the summer of 1939), causing him to remain in France to re-take them. That’s where he was when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Along with hundreds of thousands of his fellow emigrés, Tajfel was conscripted into the French army soon after. In May 1940, he was taken

the psychologist june 2020 henri tajfel

prisoner by the Germans, together with 1.8 million other French soldiers. He spent the war in various prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Austria, most probably hiding his Jewish identity (cf. his entry in Wikipedia). On his release at the end of the war, he returned to Paris to discover that nearly all his family had died in the Holocaust. For the next four years, he worked in children’s homes in France and Belgium, helping Jewish orphans rebuild their lives. Then he returned to Germany to assist in the rehabilitation of refugees and other displaced persons, under the auspices of the International Refugee Organisation. He was later to write that these experiences during and after the war provided the motivational mainspring for his entire academic career. They drove him to seek a new explanation of intergroup conflict, and convinced him of the need to incorporate a thoroughgoing analysis of intergroup relationships into social psychological theory. To Britain In 1951 Tajfel emigrated to Britain, his fifth country of residence. He undertook a psychology degree at Birkbeck College, graduating (with First Class Honours) in 1954 at the age of 35. This marked the start of his academic career. He spent two years as a research assistant to Fred Smith at Durham University where he conducted his first empirical research (on weight estimation) and where he developed his ideas for his first publication on the effects of value on perceptual judgements of magnitude (Tajfel, 1957). This paper was a theoretical integration of several experiments that had been conducted as part of the New Look movement initiated by Jerome Bruner. One intriguing discovery of this approach was that size judgements of physical stimuli (e.g. circular shapes) were affected by the association of symbolic value with those shapes (as in the case of coins) and by the social background of the perceiver (whether they were from poorer or wealthier families; Bruner & Goodman, 1947). In his paper, Tajfel showed that several disparate findings could be reconciled with the use of a single psychological principle – accentuation, either within or between ordered series of stimuli. He later tested a hypothesis he derived from this paper, showing that length estimates of lines could be reliably altered by the imposition of an arbitrary categorisation (A or B). If this categorisation was correlated with length (shorter lines A, longer lines B), then the perceived difference between the A and B categories was accentuated by about 100 per cent (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). Tajfel moved from Durham to Oxford in 1956. His position was as a ‘Tutor’ rather than a ‘Lecturer’ and was in the Delegacy for Social Work Training rather

than in Experimental Psychology. Both these facts rather rankled with him, since they meant that he occupied a rather marginal status at Oxford. Perhaps they also induced him to seek a year’s leave of absence shortly after his arrival there, to work with Bruner at Harvard. This experience was formative for Tajfel, both professionally and personally. He initiated several new lines of research and, perhaps as important, developed a close friendship with Bruner that persisted for the remainder of his life. Take off Over the next decade, Tajfel’s career took off. He won sizable research grants from both the British and American governments and published prolifically on such topics as stereotypes, the development of nationalism in children, prejudice and cognitive biases in judgements more generally. He also worked tirelessly to develop social psychology internationally, playing a leading role in setting up the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EASP), now one of the leading professional organisations of social psychologists in the world. Although he eventually succeeded in obtaining a Lectureship and subsequently a college Fellowship at Oxford, his continued exclusion from the Department of Experimental Psychology and the negligible likelihood of ever obtaining a Chair there, led him to apply for (and obtain) a Chair at Bristol University in 1967. Securing this position, one of only three other Chairs in social psychology at the time, was to prove pivotal in establishing his international reputation. The first step in that process was the publication of a paper entitled, ‘Cognitive aspects of prejudice’ (Tajfel, 1969). This was at once a coruscating critique of some then fashionable ideas about intergroup hostility – that it was due to some aggressive instinct or unconscious drive – and a powerful argument for viewing prejudice as the outgrowth of normal cognitive processes. Drawing together several of his own previous studies and those of others, Tajfel showed how negative intergroup stereotypes (or prejudice) are the end product of people’s search for meaning and coherence. This paper had a major impact, winning him the prestigious Gordon Allport prize, and is credited by some as initiating the social cognition movement in social psychology (Hamilton, 1981). The second achievement of his move to Bristol was the development of an experimental paradigm which showed that the mere fact of being categorised as a member of one group and not another was sufficient to trigger intergroup discrimination. The paradigm came to be known as the Minimal Group Paradigm (MGP) because the groups that participants were assigned to were so minimal as to be meaningless – preference for one abstract painter or another or even,

in one study, the mere toss of a coin. The fact that people were inclined to allocate more money to those they believed were in the same group as them than to people in the other group, even though recipients were always anonymous, flew in the face of explanations of intergroup prejudice at the time. These held that such discrimination was either the result of personality dynamics, or the product of frustration, or emanated from objective conflicts of interest between groups. None of these theories could explain why mere group membership was enough to cause people to favour one group over another. Although the original idea for this experiment was not Tajfel’s – it was first mooted by a Dutch social psychologist, Jaap Rabbie, some years previously – it was he who had the insight and creativity to develop it into the form that yielded those dramatic results. The MGP has achieved landmark status. Of all classic social psychological experiments published between Key sources 1950 and 1980, only Zajonc’s (1968) ‘mere exposure effect’ has Brown, R. (2019). Henri Tajfel: Explorer been cited more frequently (2578 of identity and difference. Abingdon: times, according to Web of Science) Routledge. than the first full report of the MGP Bruner, J.S. & Goodman, C. (1947). (Tajfel et al., 1971; 2088 times). Value and need as organizing factors The paradigm is still widely used in perception. Journal of Abnormal and today in a range of research contexts Social Psychology, 42, 33-44. Hamilton, D.L. (Ed.). (1981). Cognitive – cross-cultural psychology, Processes in stereotyping and intergroup cyber-psychology, developmental behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. psychology, evolutionary Otten, S. (2016). The Minimal Group psychology and social neuroscience Paradigm and its maximal impact (Otten, 2016). in research on social categorization. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11, 85-89. Tajfel, H. (1957). Value and the perceptual judgment of magnitude. Psychological Review, 64, 192-204. Tajfel, H. (1969). Cognitive aspects of prejudice. Journal of Social Issues, 25, 79-97. Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behaviour. Social Sciences Information, 13, 65-93. Tajfel, H., Billig, M.G., Bundy, R.P. & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1, 149-178. Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. In W.G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psycholgy of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33-47). California: Brooks & Cole. Tajfel, H. & Wilkes, A.L. (1963). Classification and quantitative judgement. British Journal of Psychology, 54, 101-114. Young, J.L. & Hegarty, P. (in press). Reasonable men: Sexual harassment and norms of conduct in social psychology. Feminism & Psychology. Zajonc, R.B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1-27.

Social Identity Theory The MGP was not only an extraordinary discovery in its own right, it also paved the way for what proved to be Tajfel’s most enduring intellectual contribution, Social Identity Theory (SIT). This was sketched out initially by Tajfel himself (Tajfel, 1974) but was worked up into a more formal theoretical statement with the help of his former PhD student, John Turner (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). The essence of the theory rests on three propositions. First, it holds that on many occasions in our daily lives, who we are – our social identity – is deﬁned by the groups we belong to. These may be small face-to-face groups like our family or a work-group, or they may be larger categories like social class, ethnicity or nationality. The particular social context we ﬁnd ourselves in determines which

of our many possible identities is most relevant to us in the moment. Once a specific group identity has assumed significance, the fortunes of that group become our fortunes, its misfortunes our misfortunes. Second, the theory assumes that this incorporation of the self into the group has motivational consequences. In general, we prefer to see ourselves – and hence our group(s) – in a positive light, and we will expend psychological and physical effort to achieve that. Third, the theory proposes that group evaluations are comparative in nature. We know how well we (and our group) are doing by comparing ourselves with others. If we are doing better than others (have better jobs, live in better houses), our identities are said to be positive; if not, they are negative. In either case, we will be motivated to maintain (or restore) some positive distinctiveness for our ingroup, often by displaying ingroup favouring biases in judgements and behaviour. Although SIT was originally proposed to explain intergroup conflict, the past 20 years has seen an enormous proliferation of its applications. It is now used widely in business and management, health psychology, political science and even in branches of theological studies (Brown, 2019)! At the last count, it had achieved over 13,200 citations on Web of Science. By way of comparison, Festinger’s 1957 Cognitive Dissonance Theory has amassed 12,700. Tajfel’s legacy? For all the undoubted success that Tajfel enjoyed at Bristol, his time there was not positive for everyone. Earlier in his career, he had acquired the unenviable reputation of being a sexual harasser of young women. Once at Bristol, this importuning seemed to increase in its frequency and flagrancy. Undergraduate and postgraduate students, junior colleagues and other women were all the object of uninvited and unwanted advances. On at least one occasion, he was summoned to the university’s vice-chancellor, following a complaint from a student. Another feature of this late phase of his career were his conflicts with senior colleagues in Europe. These were seldom intellectual disputes but were mostly fuelled by mutual rivalry. Most famously, he fell out with Serge Moscovici, the famous French social psychologist and, with Tajfel, one of the founders of EASP. The conflict arose from a book that Moscovici had proposed. He had wanted to publish a handbook of European social psychology but had not consulted or included Tajfel in the proposal. After a furious exchange of letters, the two men, who had known each other for 15 years, never spoke again. Despite these personal failings, Tajfel has bequeathed us a rich intellectual legacy. His PhD students (Billig, Milner, Turner, Breakwell, Ng, Brown, Caddick, van Knippenberg, Ross and Philo) and their students, in turn, have developed and expanded his ideas on the importance of groups in people’s lives in myriad ways. It is no exaggeration to say that the

the psychologist june 2020 henri tajfel

lifetime achievement award and social identity approach is now there has been much discussion on one of the liveliest and most fertile social media and elsewhere about perspectives in social psychology. the wisdom of that decision. Until quite recently, Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s I can understand the legacy seemed secure. He was consternation that has been known as the discoverer of the expressed in various quarters about minimal conditions needed to this issue, especially in light of the elicit intergroup discrimination. many legitimate concerns of the He was the architect of a #metoo movement. How can we theoretical perspective which Rupert Brown is Emeritus best channel this controversy to the provided the catalyst for several Professor of Social Psychology beneďŹ t discipline of psychology, important theoretical and applied in the School of Psychology, or of science more generally? By contributions in contemporary University of Sussex focusing on Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transgressions, psychology. And he was one r.brown@sussex.ac.uk however reprehensible they of the founders of a successful undoubtedly were, is there a professional association which risk of regarding the problems of sexism and gender has evolved into a vibrant network of research inequality as one of individual pathology rather collaboration and training for European social than an institutional (and societal) failure? Is there a psychologists. In recognition of these achievements, danger that Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very real contributions to social in 1982 EASP inaugurated a triennial Tajfel prize psychology, both intellectually and organisationally, for lifetime achievement in social psychology, and will get obscured by the clamour of outrage about his commemorative lectures and seminars were named after him by the universities of Bristol and Warsaw and sexual harassment? My own view is that it is perfectly possible and appropriate to recognise Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s many the Social Psychology Section of the BPS. achievements without condoning his unconscionable However, the recent revelations of Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history behaviour in one realm of his life. That recognition can of sexual harassment (Brown, 2019; Young & Hegarty, now take place in amongst discussion around those in press) have led some to call for a re-assessment institutional and societal contexts, and I am pleased to of Tajfelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legacy. The executive committee of EASP see that happen in this trio of articles. took the unusual step of removing his name from that

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‘We cannot continue to be part of environments that perpetuate inequality’ Anne Templeton has suggestions to build inclusive supervision environments

If we want to dismantle inequality and build a more inclusive discipline then it is time to reﬂect on the issues of sexism and power dynamics that still persist, identify ways to improve, and work collectively to progress academia.

he work of Henri Tajfel is a vital inﬂuence in my research and that of many social psychologists. My impression of Tajfel was that he had created a thriving, positive research community with his students. When reading Jacy Young and Peter Hegarty’s writing, it became evident that the positive community was reserved solely for Tajfel’s male students. I was saddened about the experiences of the female students who worked with Tajfel and the disparity in the type of supervision that the female and male students were given. It would be folly, however, to frame the narrative as though these were isolated issues with one person in the past. They are structural issues that persist in academia today. The 2018 annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s Social Psychology Section held an initial collective discussion about how to combat exploitative systems and sexism in academia. It provided a space for members to raise topics they felt were important, and we will continue the discussion at the next conference (now postponed). One focal point for creating an inclusive discipline is to improve supervision practices, through understanding and navigating power dynamics. Power dynamics in supervision is an issue I have been acutely aware of over the past few years as I have moved from the role of supervisee to supervisor. Supervision is important for encouraging students’ professional development, but it is also one of the most important factors affecting postgraduate wellbeing and burn out (Saavedra et al., 2019), and intention to continue in academia. Supervision provides a prime avenue to collectively move towards an inclusive, healthy academic environment. Below, I highlight some considerations and offer solutions for supervisors to make supervision inclusive and supportive. I have woven issues of gender, race, disability and religion throughout to emphasise that an inclusive environment must incorporate these considerations. The list is not exhaustive, and you may know (some of) them already. However, I hope that if we acknowledge existing issues then we can focus on how to build an inclusive atmosphere for our students and broader academia in the future.

the psychologist june 2020 power dynamics Michelle Kondrich, michellekondrich.com

Give appropriate credit It may sound obvious to say that credit should be given where it is deserved, but the contributions of women are often under-represented and this can have negative consequences on reviews of their papers. Women are less likely to be first authors on papers than men, but recent research suggests that they are also six times more likely than men to defer corresponding author status if they are the first author in a paper, meaning they do not handle the peer review process (Edwards et al., 2019). Deferring like this has been associated with significantly worse peer review scores and less positive editorial decisions (Fox & Paine, 2019). Moreover, in an environment where the Research Excellence Framework is increasingly a judgement of academic worth, women in psychology are particularly underrepresented in high impact journals (Odic & Wojcik, 2019). There are some simple solutions. Be aware that the contributions of women, particularly women of colour, are often under-represented in publications and author order in papers. Give careful consideration to whether you are giving appropriate credit. Where women are first authors, ensure they are the corresponding author.

Encouraging students of all genders to be first authors of their papers can help them take ownership of the paper and gain valuable experience of the publication process that will assist them in their career. Interview panels consider the authorship order of publications so having students as first authors can show their ability as independent researchers as they progress in their careers. Communicate and agree expectations The nature of power dynamics means that it can be difficult for students to raise issues if they feel their supervision needs are not being met. Universities often have structures in place to assess student evaluations of their supervision (e.g. annual reviews), but in reality the student is often speaking to a colleague of their supervisor rather than an unrelated or objective outsider. You can mitigate this by working with students to agree on expectations for supervision. Ensure that students have an active role in agreeing aspects of supervision such as frequency of meetings, development of skills and opportunities, and

timeframes for feedback. If something is not feasible (e.g. frequency of meetings) then discuss why, so that your students can make more informed choices. Aim to create space for evaluation of these expectations where students can provide input if they require adjustments. Clearly communicate your expectations of students, e.g. focusing on developing particular skills, or work required for important deadlines. Aim to be flexible when agreeing expectations of the student and attend to issues that disproportionately affect women. For example, caring responsibilities may require flexible working which means that students do not reply to emails or send work within conventional 9-5 hours. Actively creating a flexible environment where expectations are mutually agreed on is important to retain our students and will build an environment that is inclusive of work-life balance and people with caring responsibilities.

Key sources Aryan, B. & Guzman, F. (2010). Women of color and the PhD. Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 1(4), 69-77. Bagilhole, B. (1993). How to keep a good woman down. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14(3), 261-274. Edwards, H.A., Schroeder, J. & Dugdale, H.L. (2018). Gender differences in authorships are not associated with publication bias in an evolutionary journal. PLOS One, 13(8), e0201725. Ellis, E.M. (2001). The impact of race and gender on graduate school socialization, satisfaction with doctoral study, and commitment to degree completion. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 25(1), 30-45. Fox, C.W. & Paine, C.E.T. (2019). Gender differences in peer review outcomes and manuscript impact at six journals of ecology and evolution. Ecology and Evolution, 9(6), 3599-3916. Lerchenmueller, M.J., Sorenson, O. & Jena, A.B. (2019). Gender differences in how scientists present the importance of their research. British Medical Journal, 367, l6573. Odic, D. & Wojcik, E.H. (2019). The publication gender gap in psychology. American Psychologist, 75(1), 92-103. Saavedra, P., Ntontis, E. & Kyprianides, A. (2019). PhD supervisors and faculty members might help to avoid burnout as well as enhance engagement and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) among PhD students. http:// dx.doi.org/10.20919/Psych(2019).001 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group. (2017). The burden of invisible work in academia: Social inequalities and time use in ﬁve university departments. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39, 228-245.

Have an additional supervisor and/or mentor Even if supervisors do create open channels of communication, students may still have problems that they feel unable to discuss with their supervisor. Students should have a named additional person that they can approach in such instances. This is crucial for ensuring that students are not tied to just one person who holds substantial inﬂuence over their work and position. Many universities have a second supervisor policy which is helpful for research, but the second supervisor is usually tied to the primary supervisor in some way (as they are expected to have expertise in the same research area). This makes it difﬁcult for the second supervisor to attend to the students’ concerns without their position being compromised. One option is to have a designated person (or people) within the department who students can approach. The established procedure for reporting issues with supervision should be made clear to all students so that they are aware of the support their institution offers.

Provide effective feedback catered to the student’s speciﬁc needs Imagine receiving particularly blunt feedback from dreaded Reviewer 2. Now imagine that the reviewer is in charge of your research and you are directly responsible to them. Supervisor feedback acts as the main reference point for students’ understanding of their success or (perceived) shortcomings. Receiving even constructive feedback can be devastating. Supervision entails guiding students when mistakes are inevitably made and challenging students to learn and perform at their best. However, be aware that the tone intended when providing feedback may not be the tone in which the student reads the feedback. One option to ensure intentions are clear is to discuss feedback with the student in person and allow them to ask questions. An aspect which is too often overlooked is positive feedback. I do not mean adding one cursory ‘well done’, but clearly describing what the student is doing well and why. This helps them know what to aim for as they move forward and can provide a buffer to more negative aspects of the feedback. Be particularly aware of how disabilities might impact the type of feedback you give. For example, use fonts and colours that are accessible to people with dyslexia or visual impairments, or factor in additional time for students to read feedback before acting on it. Another way to make the feedback more inclusive is to ask the student what sort of feedback is most helpful for them, such as whether they prefer more verbal or written feedback. Also ask students to identify parts of their feedback they are unsure about, areas where they want more detailed feedback, and if they want more action-oriented feedback or more focus on conceptual issues. Frequently check the effectiveness of the feedback with the student to ensure that it works for them and to give them a more active role in their learning. Involve students in the community A recent study by Saavedra and colleagues (2019) demonstrated that not identifying with the community was one of the biggest predictors of PhD burn out, over and above hours spent on the PhD. Aim to encourage students to be part of the community. Tell them about events for student researchers (e.g. training events within the university, external postgraduate conferences), encourage collaborations between PhD students, and involve students in departmental events such as seminar series or social events. A great way for students to feel part of the community and meet like-minded researchers is through hosting visiting speakers or researchers. However, an aspect that is often overlooked in social events is to ensure that events are affordable for students. It may be tempting to take visiting researchers to an upmarket restaurant to impress them, but this can be ﬁnancially alienating for students

the psychologist june 2020 power dynamics

that doctoral programmes could be isolating and frustrating due to institutional racism and sexism, but formal positive mentoring improved their appraisals of the institutions and provided them with vital professional development skills that were otherwise ignored (Aryan & Guzman, 2010). Dr Anne Templeton is a One substantial caveat to this, Lecturer in Psychology at however, is that academics in the University of Edinburgh. historically disadvantaged groups a.templeton@ed.ac.uk are often inundated with additional caring and service responsibilities that do not help their career progression (Baginhole, 1993; Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, 2017). First, we need to stop Cultivate independent researchers burdening academics in these groups with solving the I passed my viva three years ago and now work as a problem, but another issue is that we need to formalise lecturer, but I am still told by men ‘we should work and give due credit to mentoring schemes and other together once you are more independent’. I have caring roles that are overlooked. been discouraged from working on great research Crucially, use your own knowledge and platform opportunities with my PhD supervisor in order to to promote the work of students and develop their establish my independence. Many of my female early skills. For example, suggest conferences that will allow career researcher colleagues have reported similar students to showcase their work, teach students how experiences, but I am yet to hear of the same thing to do an ‘elevator pitch’ of their research, familiarise being said to our male counterparts. Bearing in mind them with journals and the publication process, ask that women’s contributions are often under-valued, them to assist you in reviewing articles, involve them ensure to promote their work. Pay attention to how in book chapters or articles that you are writing to much the work of female or gender minority students help them gain experience, and include them in is promoted and ensure the contributions of students media interviews or articles for popular outlets. There are not being under-endorsed. are many aspects of academia that are not obvious Ironically, one of the best things my supervisor to people from non-academic backgrounds, such as did (and there were many good things) was gently how to give an academic talk, so discuss abilities and encourage me to become an independent researcher experience with students to ensure they are all given as I progressed through my PhD. I recommend his the same knowledge and opportunities. approach: encourage students to take ownership of their work, to be proactive about exploring ideas and learning new skills, and to be reflective of their abilities and avenues for development. Also encourage students A final note I write these recommendations with full awareness that to collaborate with others, including facilitating I am relatively new to supervising and that academics placements with another research group to develop are experiencing substantial increases to their skills and build a network of collaborators. These actions have helped me immeasurably both in instilling workloads. The recent UCU strikes have demonstrated that we regularly work far above our contracted enthusiasm for my research, but also in securing jobs hours. This system is unsustainable and particularly since my PhD and in developing my abilities as an discriminatory to people from disadvantaged groups academic. and those with caring responsibilities. Within this system, it can be difficult to find time to supervise students to the best of our abilities. I would argue, Facilitate professional development however, that we do not have time to keep things as A fundamental avenue towards creating an inclusive they are. Much of the content about power dynamics environment in academia is to engage in active in the Young and Hegarty (2019) paper could apply mentorship about professional development. to academia now. We cannot continue to be part of Interviews with doctoral students of colour suggests environments that perpetuate inequality. To make that poor relations with mentors leaves students academia a more positive, inclusive environment, behind in terms of invitations to publish and other we need to update our practice and encourage our professional development activities (Ellis, 2001). students to take those developments forward. By One option is to find groups or initiatives building inclusive supervision styles we can take within your university that can provide a supportive an important step towards addressing the structural environment for students who want to engage with inequalities in academia. them. In one example, women of colour reported who could otherwise benefit from the opportunity to meet the researcher. Another important way to build inclusive environments is to be aware of accessibility considerations, such as avoiding loud venues, ensuring access for wheelchairs or walkers, and using microphones in meetings. This also includes ensuring events are welcoming to people of all religions, for example through being alcohol-free and observing fasting times.

‘You need to talk to people who are at the coalface’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Debra Malpass, Director of Knowledge and Insight at the British Psychological Society.

‘Knowledge and insight’ is a new function for the Society. What is it that needs to change in the Society, and perhaps in psychology, in those terms? In terms of the Society, we need to create a knowledge management system… not simply a repository of policies and papers, but a way of capturing who worked on a project, what was the output, what could have been done differently… It becomes a feedback loop for continuous improvement. That involves IT systems and a cultural change too, but that’s the vision. In terms of insight, in my previous role I was responsible for setting up a horizon scanning function and having people who can draw insights from across different fields. A lot of our members work in the NHS, and there’s a lot of change in the psychological workforce arena. Adding insights from, say, an economist, could be helpful. When someone has treatment from a psychologist, what’s the contribution to the economy in terms of sick days saved? We need to show the wider societal impact psychology has, beyond the individual. So proving psychology’s worth? Yes, and I know a lot of people will say you shouldn’t have to put a price tag on these things. But the government we have at the moment, they are focused on that sort of stuff. Our members are out there, doing very high value work, and demonstrating that in terms of quality and realistic outcomes for people becomes important. We have a role in influencing policymakers by getting some hard data. In my previous role with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, we also used geospatial mapping: where were solicitors based in the country, and what kind of sectors and services did they deliver? That was mapped against multiple indices of deprivation: crime, health, inequality and so on. You can use that to identify a group of people who haven’t got access to the services they need, and then go on to influence the Department of Health and so on.

And that’s not just about ‘we’re the body representing psychologists, what you need is more psychologists’? It’s working smarter in partnership… Applied psychologists are, in my view, becoming increasingly comfortable with ‘giving psychology away’, for

example by instilling a generally psychological approach amongst non-psychological colleagues. Yes, and psychologists have got a role in training up those people and making sure that what they’re using is the most up to date, evidence-based practice. In my previous role we had hard data coming in, but we also crowdsourced insights. You can use a mixed methods approach. We can go out to members and major stakeholders, and ask ‘what’s on your radar, what are the issues that come up for you day in day out? What are the risks that are not being addressed? How can psychologists add value?’ You need to talk to people who are at the coalface. We brought that information together with an algorithm, in order to identify ‘10 priority risks’ that we then highlighted to the profession. Doing that here can be both driven by and fed into the Society’s overall strategy. How those priorities are selected is always going to be controversial, isn’t it, even when it’s voted for by members at the Society’s Senate. There can be a tension between ideologies / politics and science… on The Psychologist I’m regularly being told, ‘stick to the science’, which I think is a fascinating phrase. It assumes a kind of fixed definition of what science and what psychology is… …and privileges some forms of evidence over others perhaps. I left academia 10 years ago, and have worked in various roles using a mixed methods approach. In terms of the problem you’re trying to address – what’s the best tool to use? If we’re trying to influence the NHS about the number of psychologists required that might be quantitative data; looking at the impact of psychological therapy on the outcomes of people using those services might involve qualitative research, or a mix. It’s about bringing all that evidence together and telling a convincing story. Why did you leave academia? My PhD was working in human psychopharmacology, looking at the effects of smoking on the symptoms of people experiencing depression. When I came to the end of it, there wasn’t much research happening in the UK, so I moved to the USA and worked at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. But the US education system is very different to the UK… my son is of

the psychologist june 2020 knowledge and insight

British Arabic heritage, it was the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, and he experienced a lot of racism. We returned to the UK as I wanted to get him back in his old school. Then I’m back in the UK, no one’s doing research in this area, I’m a single mum and I need a job. I moved into the field of psycholinguistics, which I worked in for about four years and, you know, enjoyed it, and published some papers. But in trying to get more permanent roles the response was ‘we don’t know what specialism you are. You’ve got these two fields…’ I wasn’t prepared to just be on a series of shortterm contracts. I can remember going to a conference in New York, and it was paid for by the university, but I was so poor I couldn’t afford to buy food. I thought ‘This has just got to stop now’. So I started applying for research roles outside of academia. It was the best move financially, but it also allowed me to develop a whole new range of skills. But you’ve kept in touch with psychology? Yes. I worked for an exam board in the research department and as a psychometrician, and then worked at the Solicitors Regulation Authority running their research and analysis team. I kept in touch but accessing journals through paywalls was an issue. A lot of what was filtering through was around behavioural economics, actually. I do think they’ve stolen a bit of a march on psychology. If you want to win a Nobel Prize, you’ve got to call yourself a behavioural economist… Yes. And I did find there was a bit of prejudice against psychology. If people asked my background, and I’d say I’m a psychologist, there would be eye rolling from some people. Why do you think that is? Some people can have quite a narrow view of psychology, that it’s about supporting people experiencing difficulties or it’s just ‘fluffy stuff’. Now I’m with the BPS, I’m embarrassed to say that for a while I did stop calling myself a psychologist. ‘Behavioural scientist’ was better received. It’s interesting for us to think about the public perception of psychology, and how can we improve that. I think it’s all part of the perception of science, even amongst scientists. I often say about the BPS that it amazes me you can have two members who would even disagree on the role and importance of evidence. When it comes to a Knowledge and Insight function, a challenge is around communication, and when we can be certain enough around the evidence to put forward a firm steer on something. Yes, you can caveat things, but does that confuse people, and reduce their confidence in what you’re saying? I don’t think other disciplines necessarily do that. But we do need to get better at telling the stories of evidence-based research. The Behavioural Insights

Team are very good at doing that. A lot of think tanks are good at doing that, even when the evidence from think tanks might not be very robust. After a couple of months in post, have you got to the stage of identifying priority topics? One of the things that I would like to explore is machine learning. It can be used to scan lots of material, you can use natural language processing to tag documents and build a searchable taxonomy. So I would be interested in doing that, to digitise our extensive archives. It would also be useful for a wider knowledge management perspective. To help people ﬁnd the information they want to ﬁnd more effectively. From a lot of different member networks in the Society, climate change comes up as an area where we need to draw together the evidence base. There’s been work on individual behaviour change, but can we extend that to changing structures and communities and so on. I think that’s an opportunity for working together across domains in the Society. I’d like to see more collaboration across the different psychological professions and different networks. I’d also like to see practitioners and researchers working together to inform evidence-based practice and insights from practice informing research. For example, practitioners’ experiences of dealing with NHS frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic could lead to groundbreaking research insights to increase our understanding of mechanisms of coping and resilience.

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Watching cartoons as self-care tv Hilda Netﬂix

ilda is a cartoon TV series created by Luke Pearson, about a little girl who lives in a forest around the fictional town of Trollberg. Protagonist Hilda experiences small adventures that always end well. This is not probably not what you’d expect as the evening entertainment of a nearly 30-year-old. Why would somebody who pays their own bills and worries about the spiralling situation of Covid-19, watch a Netflix show that is clearly meant for children? The answer is exactly because it’s meant for children. I, and surely others too, need a little escapism right now. Watching Hilda make friends with a speaking raven or a tiny elf helps to calm my nerves and brings a little whimsy back into my daily life. The soundtrack, including indie music from Frankie Cosmos and Kishi Bashi, is beautiful and by itself enjoyable. Finally – and this is the big one for me – the scenery in which Hilda has her adventures is simply beautiful, as are the colour schemes. Watching this show reduces my stress (from the fight-or-flight response many of us

are feeling right now) and allows me to relax, recover, and enjoy some creativity. With constant news on the number of coronavirus cases, people struggling with the psychological, societal and ﬁnancial results of the virus, as well as strain of social isolation, relaxation has become rare. The show, comprising only 13 episodes, has already gathered a small but committed fan base. Its selfcare feel, with a Nordic ﬂair and introverted-romantic appeal, along with Hilda as the strong female lead are some of the reasons that I regularly end my day with a blissful 24 minutes of escapism into her happy, healthy cartoon world. As a psychologist and relaxation therapist I encourage you to give it a try. If you happen to have children, let them join in the fun too – at the very least you’ll have 24 minutes of quiet time while they’re glued to the colourful screen. Reviewed by Margaretha Madoures, co-founder and chief of social media of 2KindMinds Oy

the psychologist june 2020 culture

Compelling listening podcast Grounded with Louis Theroux BBC Radio 4

As an avid watcher of Louis Theroux’s documentaries, I was delighted to find he has a new podcast series through BBC Radio 4. Think of it as ‘When Louis Met…’ with less confrontation, and guests including Lenny Henry, Boy George and Miriam Margolyes. In the first episode, he chats with Jon Ronson, a fellow documentary maker and author – or, as Theroux says, his ‘professional doppelganger’ and rival. There are plenty of interesting anecdotes as the topics range from arguing in the lockdown, to Skyping with Robbie Williams about ghosts and conspiracy theories. Ronson shares a realisation he has had during the coronavirus lockdown; he is able to cope better in the current situation due to his anxiety. Ronson was diagnosed with adjustment disorder and believes that his experiences have prepared his mind for an eventual catastrophe. He considers ‘what if…’ thinking and explains how ‘you spend your life catastrophising in the most absurd ways’, such as thinking his son had been involved in a terrorist attack at school. So, when the pandemic started, he felt calm, focused and able to deal with it – as if he had been preparing for it his whole life. It is an honest and insightful admission by Ronson, although his experience may not be typical of everyone. According to a recent study by University College London, a large majority of people are reporting higher rates of wellbeing within the past three weeks – although there is less evidence for those with a diagnosed mental health condition. Theroux and Ronson briefly discuss ethics within their work, and whether those they encounter are ultimately happy with the result. Ronson discusses his podcast,

The Last Days of August, which investigated the suicide of young female porn star August Ames. He handled the project with care and was relieved to ﬁnd that all involved, including Ames’ family, were pleased with the outcome. However, Ronson describes the anxiety towards his moral obligations. He mentions how this can develop into scrupulosity, a dimension of obsessive-compulsive disorder which involves overly stressing about moral or religious issues. As Ronson concludes, ‘there’s a danger in worrying not enough about it and a danger in worrying too much about it’. Other intriguing ideas are introduced in the podcast, such as how leaders that behave in conspiratorial ways can lead to an increase in conspiracy theories. Theroux comments how it may be conceivable for some people to be especially predisposed to seeing patterns in data that are not there. Ronson relates this to schizotypal disorder; a plausible idea, although the delusions in this disorder can present in several different ways. This is where the podcast turns slightly stranger, with mentions of coronavirus 5G conspiracies, lizard people and Ronson’s letter of recommendation from the head of the Ku Klux Klan. Interspersed with Theroux’s characteristic narration style and some light humour, the podcast is compelling listening. Difﬁcult topics are discussed with honesty and open-mindedness. I look forward to what comes next. As Ronson says, ‘I think the complicated stuff is the most interesting stuff’. Steven Parkes is an undergraduate BSc Psychology student at the University of Derby.

Daring and unpredictable sci-fi The writer and director Alex Garland has developed his own brand of sci-fi: high concept, glossy and meta, with enough science to give his ideas heft. Ex Machina (2014) explored artificial intelligence and won Garland an Academy nomination for his screenplay. Annihilation (2018) considered what alien life might actually be like (spoiler: not bipeds who experience emotions). At one level, Garland’s new eight-part serial DEVS is about quantum mechanics. Fortunately, as with Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland’s abiding interest is what makes us human. DEVS starts with Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and her boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman) travelling from their San Francisco apartment to an out-

of-town complex not dissimilar to Googleplex. There are some differences – one is the creepy statue of a little girl which looms over the site. Another is (we hope) the reaction of corporate Amaya to an attempt at industrial espionage. The Amaya corporation is the brainchild of tech genius Forest (Nick

Offerman), a laid-back looking sort of guy, flattened by grief for his young daughter, the titular Amaya. But when Sergei goes missing on campus after his first day on the DEVS project, Lily finds herself dealing with Forest and his head of security Kenton (Zack Grenier). Things quickly escalate.

Whilst this is the start of the DEVS plot, it would be a mistake to focus too much on who is doing what to whom. This is not the DEVS mystery. The mystery is, what is the technology that Forest is developing in his super-secret, hyper-secure, shimmering golden laboratory? Once we start to realise the answer, a more fundamental question arises: what do you choose to do with such a technology? Without wanting to give away any spoilers, DEVS is about the implications of a man playing God. And if there is an all-seeing, allpowerful God, what does that mean

for free will? If everything we do has already been determined by an external agent, how can we take responsibility for our own actions? This is hardly a unique theme in science ﬁction (Westworld is currently doing the same thing). But few have been brave enough to weave this theme around theoretical discussions of the Copenhagen and Everett interpretations. DEVS is not for everyone. Some might become impatient at the uneven pace, or the style of acting, which seems to be deliberately underplayed (although I felt that for Mizuno, there was an actual

lack of acting ability). But I loved its intellectual daring, and the unpredictability of its destination. It is beautifully shot, and has a wonderful original score, supplemented by a carefully curated selection of music (medieval early music and Inuit throat-singing sit cheek-by-jowl to Patrick Cowley’s HI-NRG Menergy, Low’s Congregation and Steve Reich’s minimal composition ‘Come out’). A thoughtprovoking examination of power, grief and agency. Reviewed by Kate Johnstone, Associate Editor for Culture

Real experiences and real pain tv Noughts + Crosses BBC One

Noughts + Crosses has taken 20 years to transition from book to screen, and never has its message felt more timely; coronavirus, or no coronavirus. I did make the mistake of watching the first episode with my partner of over 30 years, however, having read Malorie Blackman’s novel when it was first published in 2001. After all, how much more relevant could the topic of Noughts + Crosses be for us – growing up during apartheid South Africa, but on opposite sides of the railway tracks? The central premise of Noughts + Crosses is a classic apartheid inversion in an altered, but contemporary Britain – following an alternative history where African people have colonised the UK (called Albion) and Europe, rather than following the whitewashed British Empire narrative, currently taught as history. The ‘Noughts’ are the subjugated white dominant British majority; the ‘Crosses’, the black African conquering elite. The opening image of London, dominated by a massive statue of an African woman bestriding the landscape, is an arresting and powerful one, and the visual and aural richness of the show is stunning – lush with African colour and sounds, with a fantastic soundtrack, evocatively covering a broad range of the continent’s wonderful music traditions. The main plot conceit – a Romeo and Juliet type forbidden (and conflictual) ‘cross race’ relationship between Callum (a ‘Nought’) and Sephy (daughter of the Home Secretary, a ‘Cross’) is the heart of the narrative engine, that feeds into the wider ongoing story around attempts by the white Liberation Militia (LM) to ‘decolonise’ their country. Noughts + Crosses is beautifully acted, to bolster its high production values, with outstanding performances particularly from Paterson Joseph as Home Secretary (and Sephy’s baba/father) and Helen Baxendale as housekeeper (and Callum’s mother). Although the race-inverted premise may feel clunky to some, it’s full of subtle and clever communicative interactions, highlighting colonialism and ‘micro-aggressions’ and misinterpretations, based on the experiential chasms

between the major characters. The plotting felt a little stilted on occasion – it’s hard to fit such a dense book into six packed episodes – but it carries a hefty punch. At the end of the first episode, I turned to my partner: ‘Interesting, wasn’t it?’ Her face, however, was contorted in pain: ‘That’s – that’s been my life for many years.’ It hit me then. This programme (and book) is based on real experiences, real pain. My partner felt ill, with what bordered on PTSD. This story is, at heart, a live and visceral one, for many people within Brexit Britain right now, with a rampaging virus that will only further the Othering of many others. Noughts + Crosses is a powerful account of what racism looks and feels like, and is highly relevant for our professions as psychologists, where we often unwittingly diminish people’s stories as ‘interesting’ or even ‘boring and tiresome’. I too, am guilty as charged. But, given my white privilege, I was at least able to watch the whole series. Given her own and separate history, my partner could not manage more than the first episode. History matters. History lives. Watch it. Reviewed by Nick Wood, clinical psychologist and writer

the psychologist june 2020 culture

Education in creativity As the Covid-19 lockdown took hold and I could not visit the adored Royal Exchange Theatre and other artistic venues in Manchester, I turned to the beloved BBC, and was not disappointed. Two programs caught my attention. ‘The Art of Raising a Child’ on Radio 4 is about a research project conducted by De Montfort University in Leicester called ‘Talent 25’. Researchers are investigating the effect of creativity on babies, and following them up every six months until they reach the ripe old age of 25. Tiny participants and their families participate in creative sessions in community centres – good in terms of ecological validity – and their responses are recorded with both qualitative and quantitative methods. There is an indication that involvement in creativity from a very early age can positively influence the way individuals interact with the world. The hope is that fostering early creativity will equip individuals with the creative skills and flexibility that is necessary in work and in life, as well as enhance wellbeing. I look forward to seeing the results of this fascinating longitudinal study. I then travelled in time and space to a small village in Ireland via the BBC documentary ‘A Carryin’ Stream’ to look at an example of creative education at a primary school in the 1930s. Director Alison Millar went back to her childhood home to find out more about a legendary teacher, R.L. Russell who had taught her Dad at primary school. Mr Russell believed in the power of poetry, visual arts and creativity. He encouraged the children to create poems and visual artefacts, such as drawings, woodprints and Lino prints. The pupils were of poor background, with safe job prospects in the local factory or farm. The teacher therefore saw education as an opportunity to enrich their lives through art and creativity. The classroom was viewed as a place to inspire children. Mr Russell gave the children freedom to create whatever they liked, anything that interested them, rather than imposing things on them. He stressed the importance of children finding their own true voice, rather than trying to capture someone else’s vision. He encouraged them to look around them carefully into ‘ordinary’ life, and bring what they saw onto the page. He gave them the confidence to feel that what they had to say mattered. As one of the contributors noted, Mr Russell was ‘trying to educate people into creativity’. There was plenty of discussion about the positive effects of this type

radio/tv The Art of Raising a Child / A Carryin’ Stream BBC

of teaching in the pupils’ lives, which, though anecdotal, was impressive. The teacher collected the pupils’ work in leatherbound volumes, to give them the confidence that their work was of value. The idea appears to be that children see themselves as published authors and artists, enhancing their confidence in their creative abilities, in turn increasing their creativity and creative potential (see Karwowski and Lebuda in the 2017 Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research). It occurred to me that The Psychologist is doing something similar. It is open to contributions from fledgling and seasoned psychologists alike, and encourages different types of writing – including articles, reviews and even poems. It is a space where, similar to Mr Russell’s classroom, people can look around them, write about things that matter to them in their own true voice, and educate themselves into creativity. Indeed, this very review is accompanied by artwork from one of our second year psychology students, Eden Dori. Reviewed by Dr Aspasia E. Paltoglou, Lecturer in Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University

Find more on our website, including Georgia Harvey on ‘In my skin’

We have all heard of Ivan Pavlov (18491936), the legendary Russian physiologist turned psychologist. He’s famous for the discovery of learning through association that revolutionised psychology, and kickstarted one of the most important and controversial schools of thought in the discipline – behaviourism. But how often do we stop to think about the lives of Pavlov’s dogs? 76

the psychologist june 2020 looking back

The kingdom of dogs

Matthew Adams revisits Pavlov’s labs from a dog’s perspective

very student of psychology learns about what is now referred to as ‘classical conditioning’, and Ivan Pavlov remains one of the most cited psychologists of all time to this day. The term a ‘Pavlovian response’ has even entered our everyday language, to refer to the prevalence of this type of learning in everyday life. Yet until recently I knew very little about Pavlov, less still about his dogs. I had never thought to question the familiar, iconic image of Pavlov. Then a couple of years ago I began to research, write and subsequently teach on the topic of humananimal relations. As a critical psychologist with an interdisciplinary bent, I came to the subject via theoretical developments in the humanities and social sciences, where animal life is increasingly in the spotlight, and growing attention paid to the lives of other species as they are entangled in our own (human) personal, social and cultural lives. This shift is sometimes referred to as the ‘animal turn’, and you can see its impact too in the emergence of interdisciplinary fields such as Human-Animal Studies and posthumanism, and in the important work of environmental philosophers like Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret. As I began to learn more about the field, I noticed that little attention had been paid to the lives of animals, or human-animal interactions, in experimental psychology, past or present. In contemporary accounts of Pavlov’s achievements, his dogs mostly appear as anonymous and interchangeable experimental objects – exemplified in those familiar textbook diagrams explaining the conditioning process, complete with generic canine images. The role of dogs as living animals in these experiments rarely features in textbooks or academic accounts, which emphasise a tale of scientific progress and experimentation. Cherkaev and Tipikina’s description is representative of the general tone: ‘hard-set laws derive from Ivan Pavlov’s studies of animals’ higher nervous activity, which allows animal behaviour to be broken down into predictable and modifiable reflexes… Pavlov’s famous experiment of the drooling

dog shows that there are two types of reflexes: innate reflexes that are evoked by the irritant itself and acquired reflexes that are evoked by subsequent associations’ (Cherkaev & Tipikina, 2018, p.29). As a psychologist influenced by the ethical and theoretical pull of posthumanism, and its challenge to anthropocentricism, this absence seemed significant – an example of a persistent blind-spot in psychology’s understanding of itself. I decided to re-examine Pavlov’s experiments through a focus on the everyday experiences of the dogs involved, taking them as legitimate historical subjects – a novel kind of ‘history from below’ (Montgomery & Kalof, 2010). I set out to find out all I could about their lives, their interactions with human co-workers, and the part they played in the laboratory setting and the wider life and times of Pavlov, assisted in particular by the remarkably detailed work of Pavlov’s biographer Daniel Todes. I soon discovered that in paying closer attention to the actual experiences of Pavlov’s dogs and their relations with humans, the received image of order and calculability slips considerably, to reveal something much more complex, messy and interesting. Over a career spanning six decades, Pavlov housed, cared for and experimented on thousands of dogs in his St Petersburg labs. They were incarcerated, starved, tortured, driven mad, vivisected and killed; but they were also named, cared for, attributed complex personalities and immortalised in countless lectures, doctoral theses and lab reports now long forgotten. Here I share just a few significant moments that throw a spotlight on Pavlov’s dogs, and in doing so invite us to consider one of the most celebrated milestones in psychology from a new perspective – more zoocentric than anthropocentric. ‘I will now shred dogs without mercy’ Pavlov’s early studies concentrated on the relationship between eating and variation in the secretion of gastric, pancreatic and salivary fluids in dogs. To ‘solve the problem’ of observing and measuring secretions accurately, Pavlov and his co-workers performed surgery on the dogs which made possible his ‘sham feeding’ system: ‘Pavlov would remove a dog’s

[o]esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail’ (Specter, 2014, p.3). All whilst the dog was still living. Many dogs were sacrificed along the way in developing such procedures. Operating techniques routinely failed, whilst new developments and the promise of success often increased Pavlov’s fervour ‘I’m trying – and will now shred dogs without mercy. You know, I have not worked so hard for a long time’ (cited in Todes, 2014, p.106). If my intention was to damn Pavlov in retrospect I would stop there perhaps, or detail some of the unquestionably barbaric experimental procedures he inflicted on his dogs throughout his career, such as the later conditioning experiments designed to induce neuroses, pursued relentlessly in the purposefully built Tower of Silence. However, in placing animal life in the spotlight, I want to take the opportunity here to complicate the story a little. A significant moment for our dogs is also pivotal in Pavlov’s career and his subsequent legend. Following up initially incidental observations, by the early 1900s Pavlov and hundreds of co-workers, human and nonhuman, embarked on the systematic and almost exclusive study of saliva drops and what were now termed ‘conditional reflexes’ via thousands of experimental trials. The measurement of salivation depended upon a surgical procedure that was relatively discreet – the insertion of one or more fistulas into a dog’s cheek or neck to divert saliva from the three salivary glands into a measuring device. This meant the dogs lived longer, and it was common practice for co-workers to be assigned a single Key sources dog for the duration of a series of studies (Pavlov rarely conducted experiments himself). Experiments Adams, M. (2020). The kingdom of dogs: Understanding Pavlov’s experiments as often lasted for eight to ten hours human–animal relationships. Theory & at a time, sometimes much longer, Psychology, 30(1), 121–141. with human and dog in close Adams, M. (2018). Towards a critical proximity. psychology of human–animal relations. As Todes noted, this set-up Social and Personality Psychology facilitated a relationship in some Compass, 12(4), 1–14. Despret, V. (2016). What would animals ways akin to ‘pet and master’; it say if we asked the right questions? resembles what we might today call University of Minnesota Press. a companion species bond. That Haraway, D.J. (2008). When species said, on the experimenter stand it meet. University of Minnesota Press. was a relationship often defined by Specter, D. (2014, 24 November). Drool: a shared tedium. The hours would Ivan Pavlov’s real quest. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/ often drag for both – experiments magazine/2014/11/24/drool were monotonous and wearisome, Todes, D.P. (2014). Ivan Pavlov: A Russian involving little more than pressing life in science. Oxford University Press. a button to trigger a stimulus, measuring saliva, proffering small Full list available in online/app version. amounts of food at strictly regulated intervals. And then waiting.

Apparently, a key challenge was staying awake – either animal falling asleep at the ‘wrong’ time was potentially ruinous for the experimental procedure. However, it also meant human and canine co-workers got to know each other to an unprecedented extent compared to Pavlov’s early career. Pavlov used this closeness to his advantage at the moment he needed it most – just as his whole theoretical ediﬁce was in danger of collapsing around him. The character of dogs As Pavlov’s career progressed, the number of experiments grew, producing increasing amounts of data. Despite the outward appearance of order, and apparent discovery of ‘hard set laws’, the reality was far messier – and all because of the dogs. Individual dogs were way more idiosyncratic and unpredictable than Pavlov publicly admitted then or is recognised today. Even the simplest and most ‘basic’ patterns in the way conditioned responses worked were subject to a great deal of variation and complexity. Different dogs responded to the same conditioned stimuli in different ways, in terms of the amount and timing of salivation; some conditioned responses were reinforced much more quickly in some dogs compared to others, and so on; just as the same dogs responded differently on different days – facts well known by Pavlov and his co-workers, but actively erased from academic publications and public pronouncements, and maintained as what Todes refers to as an ‘industrial secret’. The idea that ‘in Pavlovian conditioning the animal remains essentially passive’ (Glickstein & Berlucchi, 2008, p.117) was simply not borne out by reality. The dogs’ liveliness and unpredictability contributed to the experimental set up in ways that could barely be contained. Pavlov never tired of trying, developing a personality theory of ‘nervous types’ to try and encompass such diverse data. It is here that he depended on the close relationship between human and canine co-workers. He hoped to explain variation – why one dog responded differently to another – through reference to a dog’s character, which could be derived from observation (and of course, retrospectively, through results!). To that end, co-workers were actively encouraged to closely observe idiosyncrasies in their own dogs’ behaviour on and off the stand. Such attention became part of experimental protocol, in which Pavlov fully participated, offering his own ‘anthropomorphic’ interpretations. Following this procedure, dogs were routinely described as ‘weak or strong, compliant or independent, passive or impressionable, aloof or sociable, modest or greedy, cowardly or heroic’ (Todes, 2014, p.495); characterisations which were then invoked in interpreting varied experimental data. The ‘kingdom of dogs’ – as one visitor described Pavlov’s St Petersburg set up – was recognised then as home to a range of distinct characters, and characters

the psychologist june 2020 looking back

were identiďŹ ed via close observation and interaction with dogs, during Matthew Adams taking in war, revolution, starvation, experiments and in the shared space ďŹ&#x201A;oods, and the rise of Soviet science. is a Principal of the laboratory life more generally. I cover some of this detail in a recent Lecturer in With the beneďŹ t of hindsight we can journal article, and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working on Psychology at see that a dogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s observed character telling more of the story from a dogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the University of no doubt evolved in the context perspective. Brighton. of their relations with other dogs, It is an understatement to say human co-workers and handlers; that we rarely get to hear about Matthew.Adams@brighton.ac.uk and was situationally interpreted these aspects of Pavlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work today, in terms of the demands of the a forgetting which extends to the experiment and the data produced. majority of scholarship on Pavlov, It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Pavlov never where dogs appear only in passing as experimental succeeded in containing or quantifying the canine objects, never as subjects about which we should component. He was always playing catch-up with express care or concern. I hope I have offered a the way in which the relational conďŹ gurations of perspective here which challenges the idea of animals dogs and co-workers exceeded calculability â&#x20AC;&#x201C; his as passive, interchangeable objects, which can be initial description of two â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;nervous typesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (excitation/ seamlessly slotted into experimental designs to produce inhibition) expanded to 23, and according to Todes hard set laws. It also raises ethical questions about he continuously wrestled with doubt about the whole animal welfare that are often dormant in psychology, project on this account. and not just in accounting for its past. In an account of their critical review of Zimbardoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infamous prison studies in The Psychologist, informed Rewriting our texts by newly available archival materials, Stephen Reicher Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s much more to the story of Pavlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dogs. and colleagues conclude that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;there is no longer any Their experiences were entangled with Pavlov and his excuse for repeating a story which is so deeply ďŹ&#x201A;awed. co-workers in tumultuous and febrile times in and We need to get busy rewriting our texts and revising outside the lab. We are talking about one of the most our lecturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (2018, p.1). The same, surely, can be said signiďŹ cant periods in Russian and global history, with of Pavlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experiments and the animal life at their St Petersburg, Pavlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lifelong home, at its centre, heart.

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our feelings without dwelling on negativity… to breathe and take care of ourselves. The energy of the music makes the rest.

Raffaele Presti Support Worker at SweetTree, Homecare Services

One experience that changed me Work with children on the autism spectrum. What I learned from them and their parents was priceless and changed my approach to disability completely.

One interesting thing about my job Observing the role of biology in defining the individual self. I have always been fascinated by the relation between the brain and personality. Luckily enough, my job allows me to examine this link directly. It’s stunning to see how people may change their identity after a brain injury. Sometimes they come to a point where they need to redefine themselves, rethinking who they are and what they like. One thought about university Psychology courses should invest more in teaching practical skills and less on theory. I remember my first experience in a secure unit, dealing with people with psychosis and personality disorders. When I started, I had some knowledge about what patients would be like, but I was totally unaware of what I personally needed to do, to do my job properly. I had thought that patients would be ready to commit and change with small but decisive efforts. The reality shuttered my naivety… I had to deal with aggression, ambivalence to change, manipulation and lots of emotional distress. At the end of that experience, I found myself asking if psychology was the right choice for me and my life. I will always keep in mind those struggles and doubts. Universities should not forget that, as professionals, we deal with people, relationships and emotions. A knowledge of psychological models is vital, but personal and interpersonal skills can really make the difference in determining successful and unsuccessful treatments.

one on one

One song Maybe Tomorrow by Stereophonics. It describes the experience of feeling down brilliantly, leaving us with a glimmering sense of hope. The lyrics gently invite us to approach

One book Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain by Antonio Damasio. How does consciousness come to mind? And what does it mean to be a conscious self? As a psychologist with a passion for biology and philosophy, I found this a compelling and passionate look at the evolution of consciousness and its neural correlates, from primordial feelings and wordless images to complex emotions and rational thinking. It changed my perspective on life and neuroscience, making me more mindful of the common structures we share with other creatures inhabiting our planet. One thing psychology should do better Be more mindful of the influence of society on the psychological self. If we read and analyse Fromm, Bauman and socio-economic essays, we can really grasp how much culture and upbringing shape our thinking, desires, preferences, and more. In a society dominated by an economic paradigm where success is worshipped and even social relationships are interpreted in terms of trading and interests, what’s the role of psychology in all that? What’s our role in fighting social injustices, pressures and inequalities? I think that the spreading of the biopsychosocial model has been beneficial, and lately I have been inspired by Peter Kinderman’s A Manifesto for Mental Health. It seems to me that we are moving in the right direction but there’s a lot to be done. One inspiring thing about my job The commitment and perseverance of people undertaking psychological rehabilitation and therapy. It’s impressive to see their resilience shed light on a slow but achievable recovery.

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