The Psychologist January 2013

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25th anniversary vol 26 no 1

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Individual differences How modern researchers are building on the legacy of British pioneers in differential psychology

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 2 news 8 reviews 64 one on one 76

the blogging Bishop of neuroscience 42 careers: 25-year-old psychologists 54 conspiracy theories: harmless fun? 60 looking back on The Psychologist 72

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Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR tel 0116 254 9568 fax 0116 227 1314 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk www.twitter.com/bpsofficial

Welcome to The Psychologist, the monthly publication of The British Psychological

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

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

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by The British Psychological Society, unless specifically stated otherwise. Authors, illustrators and photographers may use their own material elsewhere after publication without permission. The Society asks that the following note be included in any such use: ‘First published in The Psychologist, vol. no. and date. Published by The British Psychological Society – see www.thepsychologist.org.uk.’ As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be photocopied by licensed institutional libraries for academic/teaching purposes. No permission is required. Permission is required and a reasonable fee charged for commercial use of articles by a third party: please apply in writing. The publishers have endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all illustrations. If we have unwittingly infringed copyright, we will be pleased, on being satisfied as to the owner’s title, to pay an appropriate fee.

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Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Staff journalist / Research Digest Christian Jarrett Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Occupational Digest Alex Fradera

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Mark Wetherell, Monica Whitty, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff Interviews Gail Kinman, Mark Sergeant Media Lucy Maddox Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

If you need The Psychologist in a different format, contact us with your requirements tel 0116 252 9523 or e-mail us at P4P@bps.org.uk

The Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee David Lavallee (Chair), Phil Banyard, Nik Chmiel, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Rowena Hill, Jeremy Horwood, Catherine Loveday, Peter Martin, Victoria Mason, Stephen McGlynn, Tony Wainwright, Peter Wright, and Associate Editors

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letters 2 intelligence testing; mindfulness; evaluating qualitative research; helping people into work; trauma; what has The Psychologist done for you?; and more news and digest 8 the seductive allure of the seductive allure of neuroscience; schizophrenia; event reports; nuggets from the Society’s free Research Digest service; and more SOHAN PATEL

Individual differences – the British context Gerald Matthews and K.V. Petrides open a series of articles on differential psychology On the shoulders of giants Alan Pickering, Andrew Cooper, Luke Smillie and Philip Corr on classic and contemporary research Applying neuroscience to mental disorder Philip Corr, Marcus Munafo, Roger Moore and Veena Kumari Intelligence and individual differences Ian Deary and John Maltby with a return to roots Personality and the prosocial context Claire Lawrence, Eamonn Ferguson and John Maltby

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The blogging Bishop of neuroscience Lance Workman talks to Dorothy Bishop

society 46 President’s column; Award for Promoting Equality of Opportunity; wellbeing of the military event; and more careers and appointments

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we meet some psychologists who share our birthday; Leanne Alston talks about her work with Remploy; and a new approach to ‘featured jobs’

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january 2013

THE ISSUE 2013 marks 25 years since the very first issue of The Psychologist, and a decade of our offshoot the Research Digest. I hope you will forgive us a slightly self-congratulatory focus in parts of this edition, alongside an important set of articles on individual differences.

After a pat on the back and a bit of cake, we look to the next 25 years with more tweaks to the publication.

‘Media’ and ‘Book reviews’ become a bigger, broader and hopefully better ‘Reviews’ section; there are changes to ‘Careers’ (e.g. see p.58); and opposite you will see a prominent reminder that Society members can access The Psychologist on tablet, smartphone and Kindle.

For the final word this month, I hand over to Professor David Lavallee, Chair of the Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee.

I challenged him to come up with 10 words on the Research Digest and 25 words on The Psychologist, and he said: ‘The Digest is the definitive source for psychological science evidence. The Psychologist is central to the BPS and will continue to be a valued, regular and important communication outlet for the entire membership. Happy birthday!’

Dr Jon Sutton

new voices are conspiracy theories just harmless fun? Daniel Jolley investigates in the latest of our series for budding writers

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reviews 64 new: film, apps, books, TV, radio, exhibition and more in our expanded reviews section covering psychology in all media looking back a quarter of a century of The Psychologist – Managing Editor Jon Sutton marks the anniversary with the help of his predecessors

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one on one

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…with Glynis Breakwell

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NEWS

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Psychosis – hope in a broken system A year-long investigation into standards of care in England for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or psychosis has painted a bleak picture, while also offering optimism for the future. The need for patients to be treated with compassion and kindness, and to be given hope, are the report’s leitmotifs.

The Schizophrenia Commission was established by ReThink Mental Illness in November 2011 and chaired by the psychiatrist Professor Sir Robin Murray.

Among the 14 experts who helped coordinate the investigation was BPS member Dr Alison Brabban, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead in the Early Intervention in Psychosis service in Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

‘What we found was a broken and demoralised system that does not deliver the quality of treatment that is needed

for people to recover,’ Professor Murray despite being judged a success. writes in his introduction to the report.

The Commission makes a series of ‘This is clearly unacceptable in England 42 detailed recommendations, including: in the 21st century.’ overhauling acute care units and making The Commission drew on the input more use of alternatives like recovery of 80 experts in the houses in the community; field, including more shared decision making; researchers, better access to psychological patients and carers; therapies; extending, not THE A BAND ONED ILLNE surveyed 2500 cutting, early intervention SS people online; and services; and caution in using visited services in the label of schizophrenia, at England. Among least in the early stages of their specific illness. findings: fewer than ‘In my opinion the stigma one in ten people of the label “Schizophrenic” with psychosis or negates hope in the schizophrenia who individual,’ said one of the could benefit from patients who spoke to the CBT have access to true CBT; levels of Commission. ‘I hope that the coercive treatment are up; and early Schizophrenia Commission will intervention services are being cut back recommend abolition of the diagnosis A report

by the

Schizo phreni a Comm ission

Novem ber 201 2

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THE SEDUCTIVE ALLURE OF THE SEDUCTIVE ALLURE A pair of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania have highlighted a delicious irony. Sceptical neuroscientists and journalists frequently warn about the seductive allure of brain-scan images. Yet the idea that these images are so alluring and persuasive may in fact be a myth. Martha Farah and Cayce Hook refer to this as the ‘seductive allure of “seductive allure”’.

According to Farah and Hook in an article in press with Perspectives in Psychological Science (PDF from tinyurl.com/cbg4du7), brainscan images have been described as seductive since at least the 90s. Today, it has become almost a truism that brain images are so beguiling, they paralyse our usual powers of rational scrutiny.

Virtually every cultural Convincing? commentary on neuroscience mentions this point as a matter of routine.

Consider two recent examples. In an essay for the New Yorker, Gary Marcus wrote about the rise of neuroimaging: ‘Fancy color pictures of brains in action became a fixture in media accounts of the human mind and lulled people into a false sense of comprehension.’ Earlier in September, Steven Poole writing for the New Statesman put it this

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way: ‘…the [fMRI] pictures, like religious icons, inspire uncritical devotion.’

What’s the evidence for the seductive power of brain images? It mostly hinges on two key studies. In 2008 David McCabe and Alan Castel showed in a paper in Cognition that participants found the conclusions of a study (watching TV boosts maths ability) more convincing when accompanied by an fMRI brain-scan image than by a bar chart or an EEG scan. The same year, Deena Weisberg and her colleagues published evidence in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that naive adults and neuroscience students found bad psychological explanations more satisfying when they contained gratuitous neuroscience information (their paper was titled ‘The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’). Not mentioned by Farah and Hook, but also relevant, is a study covered by our own Research Digest showing that jurors are disproportionately persuaded by brainscan evidence (see tinyurl.com/bqys6qr).

What’s the evidence against the seductive power of brain images? First off, Farah and

Hook criticise the 2008 McCabe study.

McCabe’s group claimed that the different image types were ‘informationally equivalent’, but Farah and Hook point out this isn’t true – the fMRI brain scan images are unique in providing the specific shape and location of activation in the temporal lobe, which was relevant information for judging the study.

Second, a new study published in Public Understanding of Science this year by David Gruber and Jacob Dickerson found that the presence of brain images did not affect students’ ratings of science news stories.

Finally, Farah and Hook mention research of their own and another group, as yet unpublished, involving collectively thousands of participants, which found either no effect of brain images or a minuscule effect (one of the papers has been submitted with the title ‘On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image’).

So why have so many of us been seduced by the idea that brain-scan images are powerfully seductive? Farah and Hook say the idea supports psychologists’ anxieties about brain-scan research stealing all the funding.

Perhaps above all, it just seems so plausible.

Brain-scan images really are rather pretty, and the story that they have a powerful persuasive effect is very believable.

Believable, but quite possibly wrong. Brain scans may be beautiful but the new evidence suggests they aren’t beguiling. CJ

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Well-being and encourage mental health professionals to concentrate instead on treating the symptoms of serious mental illness with compassion and without judgement.’

Above all, the Commission calls for a change in attitude: ‘People with psychosis… need to be given the hope that it is perfectly possible to live a fulfilling life after a diagnosis of schizophrenia or psychosis,’ said Murray. ‘We have no doubt that this is achievable.’

Responding to the Commission’s report, former DCP Chair Professor Peter Kinderman at the University of Liverpool said he welcomed the document but that it didn’t go far enough. ‘The Commission missed the opportunity for more thorough-going reform,’ he said.

Dr Brabban told us she was delighted

with the media coverage that the Schizophrenia Commission had attracted, thereby raising ‘awareness that psychological therapies can help people with psychosis; that service users want access to them and yet for the majority they’re not available’.

She added: ‘If this leads to genuine service change with greater investment in high-quality psychological therapies for those with psychosis, it will be a wonderful achievement. What I don’t want to happen is for mental services to expect inadequately trained staff to deliver something which they call CBT but bears no resemblance to the genuine, evidence-based approach, and which therefore doesn't help anyone and ends up giving psychological therapy a bad name.’ CJ I www.schizophreniacommission.org.uk/ the-report

From care to Cambridge A group of Cambridge graduates, led by Dr Peter McParlin, a consultant child psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society, is setting up a mentoring scheme to help looked-after young people with their academic studies. The ‘From Care to Cambridge’ project, launched in Westminster in October with the support of John Hemming MP and Lord Adonis, will provide regular face-to-face contact for pupils from care in the last few years of their school life, supporting them through A-levels and the university application process.

Dr McParlin grew up in care himself, and knows firsthand how the relationship with significant, nurturing people can help develop resilience and confidence. ‘After leaving care, I became homeless, and ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Liverpool aged 17. A chance friendship with some young university students encouraged me to return to education, initially to gain the school-leavers’ qualifications, and to aspire to go to university.’

‘The vast majority believe, wrongly, that most Cambridge and Oxford students Challenge the perception that these come from independent schools,’ McParlin universities are ‘not for me’ told us. ‘This can fuel the perception that those universities are “not for me”, and perhaps this is where a Cambridge-educated mentor can help. An increasing number of looked-after young people have demonstrated that they have the ability to undertake a degree course, and now is the time for more looked-after students to attend Britain’s best universities.’ JS I Further information about the scheme can be obtained by contacting Peter on petermcparlin@yahoo.com or 0113 232 3928

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published the first of its annual reports into the state of the nation’s well-being Life in the UK 2012 (tinyurl.com/clx2ceg). The data show that people’s life satisfaction has remained broadly stable over the last decade, despite the financial effects of the recession, including higher unemployment and a reduction in real-terms income.

The average satisfaction with family life stands at 8.2 out of 10.

Healthy life expectancy (average time spent in good health) has increased (63.5 years for men; 65.7 for women), so too our satisfaction with our own health. The data also show that our average well-being is related more strongly to average levels of household income, rather than to nationwide GDP. Reflecting on the results at a press conference, David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insight Team, told The Guardian that economic measures and subjective well-being measures do not always correlate. For instance, he said Rutland has higher average levels of life satisfaction compared with the similarly affluent Wokingham, perhaps because of environmental advantages in the former area. ‘It seems that if you can see a tree you are happier,’ he said. Community trust appears to be another factor, perhaps explaining the high levels of subjective well-being in Northern Ireland where the Troubles may have had the effect of bringing neighbours together.

The ONS has also published a ‘National well-being wheel of measures’, which allows anyone to view at a glance key statistics for different aspects of the nation’s well-being, from individual wellbeing to personal finance, health, relationships, and more (tinyurl.com/blwnh9s). CJ I The programme to measure the UK’s well-being began in 2010 (for more background, see our News pages: April and September 2011, September 2012)

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Leading the way on replication Psychology appears to be suffering a crisis psychology journals could be false. of confidence, according to the editors of It ‘appears almost certain that fallacious a new open-access special issue of results are entering the literature at Perspectives on Psychological Science worrisome rates,’ they conclude. (tinyurl.com/bwfmlox). Harold Pashler They also challenge the idea that and Eric–Jan Wagenmakers (at the conceptual replications (testing the same University of California, San Diego, effect via different methods) in and University of Amsterdam, The psychology are sufficient to weed out Netherlands) say the malaise was spurious results. They say a reliance on provoked by a series of dispiriting events conceptual replications actually amplifies through 2011 and 2012, all of them the bias problem – failed replications are documented in our news pages, typically explained as failing to match the including: large-scale frauds by Stapel original research closely enough, while and others; evidence in favour of psychic successful conceptual replications are powers; psychologists’ unwillingness to share their data; the demonstration of ways that questionable research practices can turn any result positive; a survey showing the widespread use of such practices; and the unbecoming response of an eminent US psychologist to a failed replication of one of his seminal studies.

‘Having found ourselves in the very unwelcome position of being (to some degree at least) the public face for the replicability problems of science in the early 21st century,’ the pair write, ‘psychological science has the ‘Experimental psychologists should… strive to opportunity to rise to the occasion and provide leadership explore… sources of bias in a systematic manner’ in finding better ways to overcome bias and error in science seized on as providing supporting generally.’ evidence.

A popular diagnosis is that On a more positive note, Matthew psychology’s problems stem from intense Makel (Duke University) and his academic competition, an obsession with colleagues attempted an objective analysis statistical significance, and a failure to of the rates of replication in psychology, place enough importance on replication. finding that rates have increased in recent In the first of a series of contributions years. Focusing on all the articles responding to this predicament, Pashler published since 1900 in the top 100 teamed up with his colleague Christine psychology journals (based on impact Harris to challenge the notion that the factors), Makel’s team found that 1.57 per problems in psychology have been cent mentioned the word stem ‘replic’ overblown – an argument they say they’ve (used as a marker for a replication heard from ‘prominent and accomplished attempt). Zooming in further on a researchers’. random sample of 500 of these articles, Assuming that 10 per cent of effects 68.4 per cent were actual replications. that researchers look for actually exist, Applying this adjustment to the total that psychology experiments have an sample, the researchers estimate that the average power of 80 per cent to detect overall proportion of psychology papers these real effects (which ‘likely exceeds that are replications is 1.07 per cent – any realistic assumptions’), and that all comparable to estimates made for other positive findings are published, the pair disciplines. More notable still, the estimate that around a third of proportion of replications in the period supposedly positive results reported in from 2000 to 2009 was estimated to be

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1.84 times higher than for the period 1950 to 1999.

Other findings from this analysis: 19 per cent of all replications were published in the same journal as the replicated research; over 50 per cent were published by the same research team who’d conducted the original research; lab selfreplications were more likely to be successful (in fact only three out of 167 failed!); replications overall were more often successful than not; and, contrary to popular opinion, replications were relatively well cited.

Next, Marjan Bakker (University of Amsterdam) and her colleagues likened psychological science to a game in which researchers are motivated to pursue the strategy that will bring them the most statistically significant results. They lament the fact that only 11 per cent of psychology papers in one analysis used statistical power as a rationale for choosing sample size. Instead, Bakker and her colleagues say researchers tend to favour running multiple small studies because this is the approach most likely to lead to statistically significant results.

From an analysis of 13 metaanalyses involving 281 primary studies across varied subfields of the discipline, they found that seven showed signs of this kind of publication bias.

Christopher Ferguson (Texas A&M International University) and Moritz Heene (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) challenged the idea that metaanalyses are a panacea for the problems in psychology. In particular, they say there is overconfidence in a popular method for estimating the unpublished studies in a field (Rosenthal’s fail-safe number), and that bias is introduced by researchers tending to include their own unpublished research in a meta-analysis, but not the unpublished research of other labs. ‘(T)he aversion to the null and the persistence of publication bias and denial of the same, renders a situation in which psychological theories are virtually unkillable,’ they write.

Many commentators act as though the problems afflicting psychological science are new, but Roger Giner-Sorolla at the University of Kent says the discipline went through a similar crisis 40 years ago, including anxiety about too much focus on positive results and question marks

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the unpublished findings, provided ‘overwhelming support’ for their hypothesis (namely, that aversive experiences are recalled more negatively when there is an expectation that they will have to be repeated).

Uri Simonsohn (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), the whistleblowing nemesis of psychology’s fraudsters, also criticised the approach taken by Francis. Simonsohn accuses Francis of being biased in his own cherrypicking approach to analysing other people’s findings. Francis has now identified publicly several papers as having signs of a publication bias – but which papers did he analyse and find no bias, and how many of these clean papers were there? Simonsohn also adds that Francis was wrong to say that papers showing evidence of publication bias should be ignored. ‘At its core, the “delete-all” correction confuses statistical with practical significance,’ Simonsohn writes.

Most of the remaining papers offered various solutions to the problems currently afflicting psychology. Among these, Michael Frank (Stanford University) and Rebecca Saxe (MIT) propose that undergraduate students conduct replication attempts of recent results as part of their lab work. ‘This practice kills two birds with one stone,’ the pair argue. ‘It creates a pedagogically rich, rewarding environment for the students…while at the same time ensuring the reliability of the published literature.’ Brian Nosek et al. (University of Virginia) suggest altering practices to help researchers prioritise long-term accuracy over short-term publication rates, including: checklists of standard requirements; peer review standards focused on the soundness, not the importance, of new research; and opening up access to lab data, methods, and work flow, via researcher homepages and public sites like www.openscienceframework.org.

Providing some light relief, the pseudonymous blogger Neuroskeptic outlines the nine circles of scientific hell that await sinful scientists, from the first circle of Limbo for those who merely turn a blind eye to bad practice, all the way to the ninth circle, where those who invent data are frozen in ice alongside Satan.

‘Frozen in front of their eyes’, he writes, ‘is a paper explaining very convincingly that water cannot freeze in the environmental conditions of this part of Hell. Unfortunately, the data were made up.’ CJ I We published our own special issue on the topic of replication in May 2012. See tinyurl.com/psycho0512.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

FUNDING NEWS As part of the International Partnership and Mobility Scheme offered by the British Academy and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one-year partnership grants are available to UK and Chinese scholars.

Partnerships can include a range of activities including visits, exchanges, workshops and seminars, these should form an integral part of the programme. Applicants must be of postdoctoral or equivalent status and research in the field of humanities or social sciences. Closing date: 6 February 2013.

I tinyurl.com/c2bl7ha The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School offer Graduate Research Fellowships to encourage young scholars from the social sciences and professional disciplines to pursue theoretical, empirical and/or applied research in negotiation and dispute resolution. The Fellowships allow doctoral students who are writing their dissertations to be part of the PON community for one year. PhD students currently enrolled in programmes outside the US are welcome to apply. Closing date: 15 February 2013.

I tinyurl.com/yenq5j6 The Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research invites outline proposals for primary research under the its Health Technology Assessment Programme. Topics: 12/190 Cognitive rehabilitation for people with multiple sclerosis 12/191 Sexual risk reduction interventions for patients attending sexual health clinics 12/192 Home-based health promotion interventions for vulnerable older people 12/194 Psychoeducational support for parents with personality disorders who have children with severe emotional and behavioural problems (feasibility study) 12/197 Treating bedwetting in children Closing date: 2 May 2013.

I tinyurl.com/cpmqj6f The Oak Foundation’s Learning Differences programme supports research and activities that contribute to both knowledge about and strategies available to students (in the US public school system) who struggle in school as a result of learning differences. Further details and eligibility criteria on the website.

Applications can be made at any time.

I www.oakfnd.org/node/2

info

over the authenticity of Cyril Burt’s data.

One part of the response back then was to encourage researchers to publish more papers with multiple studies. As a result, in the years 1976 to 1996, Giner-Sorolla notes that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, have increased their publication of multiple-study papers by about 50 per cent. But this isn’t the answer, Giner-Sorolla observes, as shown by the fact that Stapel published countless fraudulent papers following this multistudy format.

Oliver Klein (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and his colleagues turned their attention to reporting practices around experimenter effects in psychology. This is a pertinent issue for the replication debate because Klein et al. published a failed replication of a seminal priming paper earlier this year, finding evidence that the original results may have been due to experimenters’ expectations affecting participants’ behaviour.

Klein’s team surveyed the methods sections of hundreds of articles published in the journal Psychological Science in 2005 and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, finding that the majority failed to provide information on: the presence or not of the experimenter in the testing area; how the study was presented to participants; and on whether the participants’ understanding of the study purpose and hypotheses were examined. Klein’s group recommend that ‘rather than attempting to eliminate all potential sources of bias by automatising experiments, experimental psychologists should instead strive to explore such sources of bias in a systematic manner’.

Next, Gregory Francis at Purdue University warned that successful replications aren’t always a good sign.

While holding back from making accusations of deliberate malpractice, he targeted a study by Jeff Galak and Tom Meyvis, published in 2011, as an example of a multi-study paper containing too many successful replications to be true.

Based on the effect sizes and sample sizes in the paper, Francis says that even if the null hypothesis were wrong, one would expect by chance for some of the replications to have come up with a null result. One possible explanation, he says, is that Galak and Meyvis chose to withhold replications that hadn’t turned up significant results.

The pair hit back with their own contribution entitled ‘You could have just asked: Reply to Francis (2012)’ – in which they said they did indeed have some unpublished null results, but that a meta-analysis of all their data, including

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

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Prize-winning science blogs Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at Oxford University, was named runner-up in the inaugural UK Science Blog Prize, presented in November by the organisation Good Thinking, in association with Soho Sceptics.

Bishop’s BishopBlog presents her views on a wide range of topics, from language impairment to dyslexia, and from science communication to academic life (www.deevybee.blogspot.co.uk).

Bishop, who also writes a regular column for this publication, shared the runner-up prize with Ed Yong, author of the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog.

The top prize was shared between UCL pharmacology professor David Colquhoun for his DC’s Improbably Science blog, and Suzi Gage, a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Bristol, for her Sifting the Evidence blog. Among the other blogs shortlisted for prizes were the pseudonymous Dorothy Bishop’s BishopBlog carries her ‘ramblings on academic-related Neuroskeptic and André Tomlin’s The Mental Elf. matters’: see www.deevybee.blogspot.co.uk ‘It was great to see such a strong showing by psychologists and neuroscientists on the shortlist,’ Bishop told us. ‘Ben Goldacre [one of the judges] inspired us all cares”, and many bloggers noted that their online writing attracts by likening science bloggers to the original Royal Institution, a much larger audience than academic papers.’ CJ I See interview with Dorothy Bishop on p.42 “open, smart, accessible, nerdy, free and inclusive to anyone who

Postdoctoral Conference Bursary Scheme This Research Board bursary scheme supports the work of postdoctoral researchers and lecturers.

Conference bursaries are available to support UK psychology postdoctoral researchers and lecturers to attend any academic conference, either in the UK or internationally, relevant to the applicants work. Each bursary consists of up to £150 (UK) or £300 (international) to contribute towards the costs of registration and travel to attend the full conference.

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There are two rounds of the scheme each year, with submission deadlines on 1 April and 1 October. Get your applications in now for the April 2013 deadline.

For the full criteria and an application form please contact Carl Bourton at the Society’s office carl.bourton@bps.org.uk Note: For the purposes of the bursary scheme, a postdoctoral research/lecturer is defined as a person who is employed at a UK HEI and is within three years of the completion of their doctoral research degree (i.e.

PhD) in psychology.

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The people behind the pixels Jon Sutton reports from the inaugural Annual Conference of the Society’s Division of Neuropsychology The Division of Neuropsychology celebrated its inaugural Annual Conference on a bright November day in London, with three keynotes and three afternoon workshops covering paediatric, adult and older adult neuropsychology under the banner ‘The rise and fall of cognition across the lifespan’.

Professor Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) opened proceedings with a talk on growing up without episodic memory.

Fifteen years ago, she reported three cases of developmental amnesia. Bilateral hippocampal pathology due to neonatal injury had resulted in severe impairment in episodic memory, with relative preservation of semantic memory. As was apparent throughout the day, behind the specialist language were tragic, touching and often triumphant human stories.

‘I listened in class and understood everything, but a little later I could not remember anything,’ these children said.

Parents reported their children were always living in the present, not bothered about the past, and no thoughts of the future. Simply put, said Professor VarghaKhadem, they were ‘unable to do mental time travel’. Detailed neuropsychological and neuropathological profiles revealed the vulnerability of the hippocampus in terms of its response to hypoxic episodes.

The extent of bilateral hippocampal atrophy beyond which amnesia occurs was estimated to be a 20–30 per cent reduction in hippocampal volume on each side relative to mean control values. But again it was the patient testimony that brought the figures to life: ‘Provided the

structure is there for me, I can function very well’, Jon said. ‘It’s got its advantages.

People like to be with me, and I don’t carry grudges because I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be annoyed about.’

The next talk, from Professor Barbara Wilson OBE (Oliver Zangwill Centre, Cambridge), was entirely comprised of ‘survivor stories’: the fall and rise of cognition in the words of three people who sustained brain injury. How did their rehabilitation programmes allow them to retain some cognitive function? They had worked extremely hard, that was evident, and it was interesting to hear the dawning realisation that their brains could no longer be trusted. ‘Barbara Wilson spoke to our group’, said ‘Maggie, ‘and said these words which enabled me to think and feel quite differently about my progress – “Rehabilitation is not synonymous with recovery”. Wow! That turned a huge corner for me. I understood that I was rehabilitating, not recovering, two completely different concepts that I hadn’t realised I was mistaking.’ ‘Rehabilitation is clinically and economically effective,’ Professor Wilson said. ‘It’s expensive in the short term, but cost effective in the long term. People at all levels deserve it – the main problem is getting funding, and it’s getting worse.’

Before lunch, Professor Elizabeth Warrington (University College London) vouched for the role of single-case studies in ‘carving cognition at its seams’. Anyone familiar with Broca’s 1861 portrait of motor aphasia and Wernicke’s 1874 delineation of the sensory version will be aware of the importance of learning from

an individual patient. However, for more fine-grained analysis, clinical observation has tended to give way to quantitative measures. But we have seen, Professor Warrington argued, a renaissance of the case approach, in a more sophisticated form. The outcome of a particular study leads directly to further studies, within days rather than the years that group research might take. Professor Warrington led the audience through a succession of initials – KF, AB, JBR, VER – each set of letters hiding rich insight into the amazing fractionation within the memory domain. A patient with a better memory for abstract words than concrete? Check.

Someone who can handle ‘system’-related terms but not animate objects? Check.

There was even a patient who demonstrated better performance with a more distantly related group of words, struggling more to select countries that are nearby or associated with each other.

‘The evidence of single-case studies,’ Professor Warrington concluded, ‘takes us back to 19th-century phrenology, but with the underpinning of a developing knowledge of modular cognitive skills.’

In common with the rest of the talks though, a picture is worth a thousand words and little can bring the theory to life like seeing an earnest middle-aged man apologising frustratedly for failing to remember what a rhinoceros is. For all the seductive allure of brain scans from neuroscience, as Professor Warrington said, ‘progress must go hand in hand with analysis of function’, and it is the neuropsychologists engaging with the people behind the pixels.

ADHD, MEDICATION AND CRIME A study of 25,656 people in Sweden over four years has shown that those diagnosed with ADHD on medication committed fewer crimes than others with the diagnosis who abstained. Moreover, the same individuals who took medication engaged in about 32 per cent less criminal behaviour when they were taking medicines prescribed for ADHD compared with periods when they were drug-free. The crime reductions applied to petty crimes and more serious misdemeanours.

The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (tinyurl.com/dxsqfte) by Paul Lichtenstein at the Karolinska Institutet and a team of colleagues, including Seena Fazel from Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry.

‘Of course the potential pros and cons of each prescription have

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to be evaluated,’ Lichtenstein said. ‘What we’re saying is that this probable reduction in the risk of crime must also be taken into account. It’s said that roughly 30 to 40 per cent of long-serving criminals have ADHD. If their chances of recidivism can be reduced by 30 per cent, it would clearly affect total crime numbers in many societies.’

Clinical psychologist Dr Jo Steer, who is chartered by the BPS and the author of a book on helping children with ADHD, said this study ‘indicates a further potential benefit for those with a diagnosis of ADHD who choose to take medication’. But she added: ‘It remains important that young people and adults have a choice about their treatment options and are made aware of the possible side effects of medication alongside possible benefits.’ CJ

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Psychology4Students…

Jon Sutton reports from the Society’s student event at Nottingham Trent University in November Opening the day’s events, Society President Dr Peter Banister promised talks that would inspire the young audience to think about the relevance and excitement of real research. ‘If you’re looking to begin a lifelong relationship with psychology and the Society,’ he said, ‘this is where you can do it.’ As usual, the speakers at this consistently excellent event delivered on that promise with thought-provoking, quirky and engaging talks.

First up was a tag team from Nottingham Trent University’s Sexual Offences, Crime and Misconduct Research Unit, led by its Head Dr Belinda Winder.

Not many conferences begin with a speaker saying ‘Feel free to walk out’, but as Dr Winder said, ‘forensic psychology and sex offending is not for everyone’.

Yet many of the students were no doubt attracted to the worthwhile work, as Dr Winder and her colleagues showcased a series of rehabilitation projects. For example, Rebecca Lievesley was interviewing those serving custodial sentences of less than a year, to find out why 70 per cent reoffend within a year.

These people have an average of 55 previous offences and eight prison

sentences, so there’s a clear role for psychologists in investigating contributory factors and stopping the ‘revolving door of crime’. Stuart Teicher dispelled some myths about offender profiling – ‘it’s numbers, not the rabbit out of the hat’ – before sharing some data suggesting that the guilty take longer to respond in police interviews, and tend to interrupt the interviewer more. But the audience inevitably wanted to look beyond the numbers to what it feels like to work with sex offenders. ‘You come away quite shocked from some interviews, but from others there’s some level of sympathy and empathy,’ said Dr Winder. ‘You do need to take care of yourself because it can be quite corrosive work.’ It’s work Dr Winder clearly feels passionately about, as she firmly believes that ‘the measure of society is how it treats its least popular citizens’.

Plotting a path from John Bowlby to Brangelina, Dr Andrea Oskis (University of West London) began with Angelina Jolie being calmed by her beau, Mr Pitt.

‘It was just allowing me to breathe and hold my hand’, Jolie had said, and Dr Oskis pointed out the similarities with the protective function of adult–child

attachment earlier in life.

Attachment and emotional regulation, she said, were two sides of the same coin. Dr Oskis looked at alexithymia – having no words for emotions – and found that fear of separation, constraints on closeness and detachment from mother all equally predict alexithymia in adolescents. Focusing down on the hormonal level, Dr Oskis found that the anxious insecurely attached have a significantly flatter cortisol response in the first 45 minutes of awakening. Finally, moving from care receiver to caregiver, Dr Oskis found that a greater feeling of attachment insecurity in the mother was associated with higher levels of depression in the teenage daughter. There are clear implications for training professionals in clinical, health and social work.

Next, Professor Cathy Craig (Queen’s University Belfast) explained how she had fulfilled her ‘desire to do things a bit more

... and a student’s view 7am on a dreary wet Wednesday morning yet I am already awake, dressed and at my sixth-form college. What possible reason for such insanity? Simple. It was the day of the first-ever psychology trip, organised by yours truly.

After convincing the psychology department at my sixth-form college that it was absolutely compulsory for our education that our class attend the conference, we were off on the school minibus up to Nottingham. Despite the extremely early hour we left college, the pouring rain, sitting in traffic for an hour and the three-hour journey to Nottingham, I was looking forward to the event. What an amazing opportunity, as a future

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psychology undergraduate student, to be able to attend lectures and meet some of psychology’s leading professionals!

Some of the information was related to A-level topics that we were studying, for example Dr Andrea Oskis delivered a presentation on her research into attachment. I was able to revise what I had learnt in class but more importantly see how theories of attachment can be applied in modern-day research.

I was also introduced to new areas of psychology. A favoured lecture was the one given by Dr Peter Thompson from the University of York. His presentation was filled with optical illusions and trickeries of

the mind, grabbing the attention of the whole auditorium. I myself have a big interest in perception and cognition so made sure I got to talk to the man himself after the event.

However, my absolute highlight of the day was the exhibition area, which included a life-size copy of the Sarah Atayero sitting on BPS’ newly created Origins an illusion website, the Beuchet Chair illusion conducted by the in my opinion, the best way to University of York (see picture), enter the world of psychology and a fantastic ‘Psychology Bath’ and you are confident in the which I jumped right into! knowledge that the information My advice for students you receive is accurate and up looking to study psychology at to date. any level is to monitor the British Sarah Atayero Psychological Society’s website Newman Sixth Form for news of any local events. It is,

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biological and a bit more creative’ in studying how perception guides action.

Using examples from sport and health, Professor Craig’s talk was a fascinating exposition of J.J. Gibson’s idea that ‘we perceive to move and move to perceive’.

Sporting goods manufacturers beat a path to her door to investigate the perceptual consequences of their product design, and her use of immersive interactive virtual reality allowed her to show how rugby players process deceptive movement in a one on one. The mid-section of an onrushing opponent is the part to focus on, and experts seem to pick up on these honest signals earlier (at around 100 ms).

The All Blacks, with no colour break between shirts and shorts, appear to be cheating. But cheating is just what psychologists need to do with Parkinson’s patients. With some truly astounding videos to illustrate, Professor Craig showed how we can take advantage of the phenomenon of ‘paradoxical kinesia’, and have a painfully shuffling man break into a stride when he is given a ball to dangle in front of his feet. Psychologists can even change the stride length by projecting stripes onto the floor, or giving false audio feedback of the sound of footsteps walking on gravel.

Lunch saw students experimenting with the Beuchet Chair, a real-life perspective-based illusion that ‘shrinks’ its occupant (see left and below left).

The chair was brought along by the next speaker, Dr Peter Thompson from the University of York. Dr Thompson rode out any post-prandial dip with a ‘greatest hits’ tour of amazing visual illusions. My favourite is Ted Adelson’s checkerboard (see tinyurl.com/ypux5), which my other half simply refuses to accept. We also learned why snow goes on looking white under moonlight, why supermarket meat counters use slightly pink lighting, and why James Corden looks thinner upside down.

‘Challenging the visual system with some stimuli reveals a great deal about how our vision works’, Dr Thompson concluded, but I was struck by just how much we don’t know. As the speaker concluded, ‘We don’t know why, but who’s to say some bright young postgrad won’t be the person to find out?’

Closing the day was Dr Katie Slocombe (also University of York), reprising her talk on the evolution of language and chimpanzee communication from last year’s event in Watford (see tinyurl.com/c6v27kf and tinyurl.com/cl5djcu). It’s always good to end the day with some ‘pant hoots’ and ‘rough grunts’, and with a fine repertoire of functionally referential alarm calls (different for ‘Snake!’ and ‘Eagle!’) and sounds for high-preference food, this was an intriguing glimpse into a hidden world of primate language. ‘Liberius’ provided the first evidence for any referential communication in a great ape species, suggesting that this aspect of language evolved at least 30 million years ago. Dr Slocombe’s account of her studies in the forests of Uganda was a great way to end the day by showing students how ‘exciting, physical, tiring, amazing and frustrating’ psychology research can be.

LOOKING FOR MEDIA? Our ‘Media’ section is no more, but from this month our new ‘Reviews’ section (see p.64) will take over many of the functions that ‘Media’ served. We will be covering psychology in any form of media: TV, radio, newspapers, books, films, theatre, exhibitions, music, apps, etc., etc. To contribute, please e-mail the Editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or the Associate Editor for ‘Reviews’, Lucy Maddox, on maddox.lucy@gmail.com. We are grateful to those who have contributed to ‘Media’ over the years, many of whom will continue to help out with ‘Reviews’.

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The Board of Trustees at the American Psychiatric Association has approved the proposed changes to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The new code, criticised by the British Psychological Society, will publish in May. See www.dsm5.org and we’ll bring you more detail next month.

ZZZZZZ… A new sleep laboratory has opened at the University of Lincoln, headed up by Chartered Psychologist Simon Durrant. Among the facilities are a polysomnography system that allows simultaneous recordings of brain activity and other physiological measures while a participant sleeps. The lab’s projects include research on memory consolidation and deliberate forgetting during sleep (the latter is funded by the British Psychological Society’s Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme: tinyurl.com/c3foy9p).

HOW LONELY? UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced new plans in November to start measuring rates of loneliness among the elderly. ‘We need a measure of loneliness to shine a light on this problem and to know what we are dealing with,’ Hunt said. ‘Once we have this solid evidence, local communities will have new tools to come up with the right, targeted solutions to the problem.’

FUNDING CONCERNS A report into the provision of services for children with complex needs commissioned by the Scottish Government (see tinyurl.com/bubtake) has highlighted ongoing concerns about the loss of central funding for postgraduate training in educational psychology. ‘Long waiting lists and waiting times to access educational psychologists are already a cause for concern,’ the Doran Review states, ‘and there is increasing anxiety that matters will deteriorate further.’

IN UTERO YAWNING New research led by Chartered Psychologist Nadja Reissland at Durham University has used 4D ultrasound scans to detect yawning in unborn fetuses. Whether mouth openings by fetuses are really yawns is a controversial issue, but the scanning technology used by Reissland’s team allowed them to use longer mouth opening versus closing as a sign of a true yawn. Yawning behaviour was found to decline from 28 weeks gestation onwards. CJ I tinyurl.com/ca7oeag

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DIGEST

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The unscientific thinking that forever lingers in the mind Young children are inclined to see purpose in the natural world. Ask them why we have rivers, and they’ll likely tell you that we have rivers so that boats can travel on them (an example of a ‘teleological explanation’). Cute, but maybe not that surprising. Well, consider this – a new study with 80 physical scientists finds that they too have a latent tendency to endorse similar teleological explanations for why nature is the way it is. Oh yes, they label those explanations as false most of the time, but put them under time pressure, and their child-like, quasi-religious beliefs shine through.

Deborah Kelemen and her colleagues presented 80 scientists (including physicists, chemists and geographers) with 100 one-sentence statements and their task was to say if each one was true or false. Among the items were teleological statements about nature, such as ‘Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe’. Crucially, half the scientists had to answer under time pressure – just over three seconds for each statement – while the others had as long as they liked. There were also control groups of college students and the general public.

Overall, the scientists endorsed fewer of the teleological statements than the control groups (22 per cent vs. 50 per cent approx). No surprise there, given that mainstream science rejects the idea that inanimate objects have purpose, or that there is purposeful design in the natural world. But look at what happened under time pressure. When they were rushed, the scientists endorsed 29 per cent of teleological statements compared with 15 per cent endorsed by the un-rushed scientists. This is consistent with the idea that a tendency to endorse teleological beliefs lingers in the scientists’ minds.

This unscientific thinking is usually suppressed, but time pressure undermines that conscious suppression.

In the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General The scientists’ greater inclination to endorse teleological explanation under time pressure wasn’t a non-specific effect of being rushed. Time pressure barely affected their judgements about other erroneous statements (i.e. simple false facts). Moreover, scientists who admitted having religious beliefs, or beliefs about Mother Nature being one big organism, were more prone than most to endorsing teleological explanation under time pressure, thus suggesting their latent unscientific thinking fed into their belief systems.

‘A broad teleological tendency therefore appears to be a robust, resilient, and developmentally enduring feature of the human mind,’ the researchers concluded, ‘that arises early in life and gets masked rather than replaced, even in those whose scientific expertise and explicit metaphysical commitments seem most likely to counteract it.’

In a follow-up study, humanities academics showed the same tendency to endorse more teleological statements under time pressure. Intriguingly, their levels of endorsement were lower than college students but no greater than the physical scientists. This suggests that further education of any kind leads to a greater masking of teleological belief, but only up to a point.

‘The [scientists’] specialised scientific training and substantial knowledge base does no more to ameliorate their unwarranted teleological ideas than an extended humanities education,’ the researchers said.

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Rapping – does it scan?

In Scientific Reports In seeking to understand the brain processes underlying creative performance, researchers have already scanned opera singers and actors. Now they’ve invited rappers to undergo the same treatment. Siyuan Liu and her colleagues were specifically interested in the difference between freestyle rap, which requires the spontaneous generation of rhyming lyrics, and rehearsed rapping.

Twelve male professional rappers had their brains scanned while they engaged in freestyle rap and while they performed raps they’d learned earlier. Rappers usually like to gesticulate energetically as they perform, but this would have distorted the brain images so they had to keep still. No worry – ‘... debriefing indicated that participants’ performance was not affected by the motion restraints,’ the researchers said.

The main finding was that freestyle rapping versus rehearsed rapping was associated with increased activation in medial (inner) areas at the front of the brain, especially on the left-hand side, and concomitant reductions in activity in dorsolateral frontal areas, especially on the righthand side. These patterns of activation were anti-correlated – the greater the increases in leftmedial areas, the more the reductions on the right lateral areas. Liu and her team think this reflects a kind of disinhibition, whereby supervisory attentional systems allowed creative areas of the

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Applicants’ voluntary experience is valued by recruiters In the September issue of the International Journal of Selection and Assessment brain to have free rein. The researchers said this fitted the possibility that the creative process of freestyle rap is experienced as largely occurring outside of conscious awareness. ‘This is not inconsistent with the experience of many artists who describe the creative process as seemingly guided by an outside agency,’ they added.

Freestyle rapping also exercised language areas more powerfully than rehearsed rapping, likely indicative of the need to find appropriate rhyming words. The researchers also looked for other connectivity patterns by seeing how activity levels correlated across the brain. The medial frontal areas engaged by freestyle rap appeared to be connected to activity in prefrontal motor regions, the left amygdala and on to the right inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobes – what the researchers called a network integrating ‘motivation, language, emotion and motor function’ and which they proposed could reflect the psychological state of ‘flow’.

Critics will likely wince at the excesses of reverse inference in this study – making assumptions about the role played by different brain areas during rapping based on the activity of those regions in other studies.

‘We speculate that the neural mechanisms illustrated here could be generalised to explain the cognitive processes of other spontaneous artistic forms,’ the researchers concluded.

Job applicants with experience in voluntary roles may be tempted to report this to their prospective employers. But how favourably do recruiters regard these sorts of experience?

Christa Wilkin and Catherine Connelly investigated this in a group of professional recruiters, providing them with CVs constructed to differ systematically in the types of experience reported. They suspected that other things being equal, work experience may be favoured more when it comes with a wage, as duration in a paid role implies you have met performance and behavioural standards, whereas voluntary positions tend to lack appraisals and focus more on participation (hours of involvement) than evaluating outcomes. Wilkin and Connelly also predicted that voluntary work would be subject to the same ‘relevance’ criteria as paid: if it didn’t obviously supply skills, knowledge and experience that were pertinent to the targeted job, it wouldn’t make them more attractive to the recruiter.

The 135 participants each evaluated eight CVs with a target job in mind, rating each one in terms of how qualified they seemed for the role. The work experience for four CVs was either entirely voluntary or entirely paid, and either clearly relevant or irrelevant. The other four CVs all had a mix of voluntary and paid work in various combinations (e.g. relevant voluntary and irrelevant paid work). In addition, each recruiter recorded how involved

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they had personally been in voluntary work, to test the hypothesis that first-hand experience may lead them to attribute more value to this kind of work.

Comparison of voluntary and paid-work CVs showed that the recruiters had no significant preference for paid experience, but did favour relevant experience over irrelevant, regardless of type of employment. A recruiter’s background of voluntary work had no influence on their ratings of applicants with voluntary experience. Finally, CVs with a mix of experience were rated more favourably than either pure voluntary or pure paid work. Wilkin and Connelly had predicted this, based on the idea that voluntary work can ‘roundout’ a career history by showing evidence of traits that may not be illuminated in paid opportunities to date, such as altruism, cooperation, and a work ethic. It provides evidence

that a candidate may be a welcome presence, which is especially attractive when coupled with evidence that the candidate can also produce results in an appraised environment.

This study paints an optimistic picture for candidates with volunteering backgrounds.

Recruiters tend not to automatically deprecate these types of experience: they simply care about how the experience is relevant to the application.

Moreover, introducing volunteering work as a complement to paid experience can enhance prospects, this appears to be true even when the volunteering is lessrelevant, as long as the paid work is relevant, despite the explicit positions of recruiters that this evidence is unlikely to sway their evaluation.

I Taken from the Occupational Digest, written by Dr Alex Fradera: www.occdigest.org.uk.

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest Follow the Digest editor at www.twitter.com/researchdigest

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INTERVIEW

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The blogging Bishop of neuroscience Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford) talks to Lance Workman about tweeting, blogging and childhood disorders

oday you are well known for your T research on specific language impairments (SLI) in children – did you set out to specialise in this area?

Like most of my career, it wasn’t planned at all. I was always interested in neuropsychology and had been fired up by hearing Hans-Lukas Teuber give a series of guest lectures when I was an undergraduate in experimental psychology at Oxford University. When I completed my undergraduate degree I was quite uncertain what to do next.

I applied for a doctoral studentship in the field of animal behaviour, which I didn’t get, but I was successful in getting a place at the Institute of Psychiatry in London to do clinical psychology, which in those days was a two-year MPhil. In neither my undergraduate degree nor on the clinical course did I do very much with children.

After London, I had a great opportunity to return to Oxford to work with Freda Newcombe at the Neuropsychology Unit in the Radcliffe Infirmary. I was fascinated by aphasia and really wanted to do a doctorate in adult neuropsychology, but Freda steered me towards developmental disorders, and once I had seen a few language-impaired children I was hooked.

It was a great opportunity because virtually nothing was known about children’s language impairments at that time, and so I could pretty much make a fresh start.

You approach SLI from a number of different angles from linguistics, neurophysiology, genetics and neuropsychology. Do you find you have to be jack-of-all trades here?

It’s both a curse and a blessing of working in this field that it encompasses such a wide range of disciplines. It is virtually impossible to master everything you need to know in psychology, even without branching out into other subject areas.

So I am continuously working right at the edge of my competence and in grave danger of making mistakes. And I’ve found that some of those areas are ones

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where it’s all too easy to think you understand something and find you have got it fundamentally wrong. I’ve benefited from good colleagues in genetics who have helped enormously by checking what I write and explaining things to me when I misunderstand.

Linguistics I find a lot harder – I am fascinated by language, but it’s not always easy to get yourself into the mindset of some of the more hardcore practitioners.

I still remember the first article I ever read

by Chomsky, which made no sense to me at all: he seemed to be arguing that you first worked out the grammatical structure of your utterance before deciding what you wanted to say. The more I read of his writings, the more I feel he’s actually held back our understanding of child language learning, because he makes some fundamental assumptions that are misguided. Thankfully, there are now many linguists who reject his approach and whose ideas I find more congenial.

I’m more at home with neurophysiology – I have a geeky side and have always liked programming, so the more complex forms of data analysis don’t put me off. But I’ve now reached an age where I think I can’t learn any more new skills – it’s hard enough keeping up with the areas I have tried to master!

The real upside of being a jack-of-alltrades is that it does allow you to see links between different areas. While I had expected that psychological insights on language impairments might lead to more sophisticated genetic analysis, I hadn’t anticipated that the genetic analysis would alter how I thought about psychology. Yet in practice, I found that having a genetically informed perspective really sharpened up how I thought about causal processes.

I realise I am fortunate in being able to devote time to mastering new skills: I am enormously grateful to the Wellcome Trust for funding me on a Fellowship that gives me time to do full-time research, as without this I’d have had to pursue a far more limited range of research.

One quite specific area that you are interested in is somewhat controversial ‘auditory processing disorder’.

Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a concept developed by the audiology profession, based on observations that adults with an acquired brain lesion can be impaired at distinguishing between sounds, even though they can detect them. It’s sometimes described as an auditory analogue of colour blindness.

A rather wide range of symptoms has been described, ranging from problems in detecting speech in noise, problems integrating information from the two ears, or impaired ability to discriminate sound qualities such as pitch, intensity or duration.

The controversial bit comes from the extension of this idea to children. The assumption is that the same brain regions that cause problems when lesioned in adults might fail to develop normally and so lead to problems with processing sounds. These in turn could affect a child’s ability to learn to talk or read. The problem is that children can fail auditory tests for all kinds of reasons, and the traditional APD approach ignored many of these. For instance, if you give a child a test of discriminating speech in noise, they may do poorly because they have limited language skills. Most audiologists seem to work with a limited bottom-up view of auditory function and so don’t appreciate the possible role of top-down higher cognitive influences on test results.

Matters are complicated further by the fact that in the USA and Australia, APD is big business, with private practitioners charging large sums to assess and diagnose children, and offering intervention packages that have little if any empirical support. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I continue to investigate the role of auditory processing in children’s language and literacy problems, but I think this explanation has been over-hyped and that the diagnosis seldom helps in getting the child appropriate intervention.

You are also interested in the relationship between handedness and developmental disorders – why should there be a link between the two?

The idea goes back many years, at least to the 1930s when Samuel Orton postulated that confused laterality was associated with dyslexia and language problems.

There has been a mountain of research since that time, most of it negative, but the idea won’t go away. I guess the basic idea is that laterality evolved because it was an efficient mode of cerebral division

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of labour, and that people who are less lateralised are therefore likely to have less optimal brain organisation. My own view is that handedness is not going to tell us very much – it is far too indirect an index of cerebral lateralisation. Unfortunately, it is a very easy measure to throw into a study, and I think there’s a massive file drawer problem, with people just reporting studies where handedness shows up as significant.

I’m more optimistic, though, that there may be something in the idea of a link between language lateralisation and dyslexia or language impairment. The research evidence from brain imaging remains rather inconsistent, but we’ve now had two studies from our group using functional transcranial Doppler to assess blood flow to the two sides of the brain while doing verbal tasks, one with dyslexia and one with SLI. In both, we found reduced lateralisation for language.

It’s early days, but it’s made me think we should do more before abandoning the idea. However, we do also have people in our studies who have weak or reversed language lateralisation and who are doing just fine, with no evidence of any cognitive impairments.

Would you say that things have progressed rapidly in our understanding of the genetic and neurological factors involved in SLI in recent years?

Yes, but things are turning out much more complicated than anyone anticipated. I think we all started out thinking, for instance, that we might find a gene for language impairment.

Everyone got very excited when a three-generational family was found in whom a severe speech and language impairment showed perfect co-segregation with a mutation in the FoxP2 gene. However, it soon became clear that this family was highly unusual, and the vast majority of people with SLI don’t seem to have any genetic mutations.

Most people now seem to think that both SLI and dyslexia are complex multifactorial disorders, which means that the overall level of impairment is determined by the combined influence of many small genetic and environmental risk factors. And to make matters worse, there’s also likely to be a great deal of heterogeneity. It may help that we can now get high-resolution images of the brain in living children – something that could hardly have been dreamed of when I started out in the field in the 1970s.

And genetic methods are moving ahead at breathtaking speed. But these new

technologies bring their own problems with them – in both genetics and neuroscience we are finding that it is possible to have too much information.

Yes I can imagine there can be overload! Moving on to perhaps a simpler form of information, you are a keen blogger [see p.12] and tweeter.

What appeals to you about that?

With blogging I get a chance to say what I think, and to interact with a much broader spectrum of people. I blog about a range of stuff – much of it is me letting off steam about issues that wind me up, but I also try to write pieces that explain the science to a more general readership.

I also like the fact that I can wake up in the morning with an idea, write 800 words or so, post them on my blog, and get comments from other people the same day. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the extent to which my blogging has

generated serious academic debate – e.g. about methods used in brain-imaging – as well as more light-hearted interactions.

Twitter is another surprise – I had, like many people, thought it was used only for trivia, but in fact if you follow the right people, you can be kept up to date with latest developments in a field far more efficiently than by any other means.

It can also be enormous fun, having an intelligent, like-minded group of gossipy people continually to hand.

It’s almost as if there are two Dorothy Bishops – the serious academic and the perhaps less serious blogger, tweeter and writer of humorous crime fiction.

The novel-writing, tweeting and blogging all began in the space of a few months in

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2010, and I did feel as if a side of me that had been long suppressed was at last released. I had never intended to write a novel, but I started in the middle of a snowy spell when I was just back from Australia and far too cold and jetlagged to do any serious work. To my surprise, I found I just loved composing a story, and it was enormously satisfying to be able to write without worrying about the need to be concise or accurate. If I got stuck with the plot development, I could just change a character completely. It’s all me, I guess, but the non-academic activities have definitely liberated a longsuppressed Dorothy Bishop.

In relation to blogging and tweeting – you had a bit of a disagreement with Susan Greenfield recently about the causes of autism.

I was in two minds whether I should say anything, but I am glad I did. The problem was that Susan was implying very strongly that internet use might be responsible for the rise in autism, and this was just nonsense, because the first signs of autism are typically evident by two years of age. It’s possible that toddlers these days are using iPads, but that wasn’t true for the period she was talking about. And I had done some work on the ‘autism epidemic’ which was consistent with the view that at least part of the increase was due to changing diagnostic criteria. But the main reason I felt I had to speak out was because I knew just how hard it is for parents of children with autism to make sense of their child’s condition. I’m sure Susan meant well and thought she was just making a novel suggestion that could provide a way forward, but the net result would be just to add to the mountain of autism theories, and to do so in a way that could potentially just increase parental guilt. Overall, I think if you are in the public eye as an expert neuroscientist, you need to be very careful when talking about serious conditions that affect real people.

And finally, I get the impression you’re not keen on jargon – is this just an irritation or do you think it has an adverse effect on academia?

My heroes are people who write in clear, simple prose. One of my favourite books is Joseph Williams on Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace and I re-read sections of it regularly in an attempt to improve my writing. It’s not just management-speak I dislike, but any kind of obfuscation or wordiness. And yes, it has an adverse effect by interfering with clear thought!

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REVIEWS

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At a stroke

Returning to the cuckoo’s nest

Psychological Management of Stroke Nadina Lincoln, Ian Kneebone, James Mcniven & Reg Morris

Guilty Except for Insanity – Maddening journeys through an asylum A documentary film by Jan Haaken

I selected this book to review as I work in a stroke service and was interested to see what the book could contribute to my practice. I was heartened to find that the first chapter contained comments from people who had experienced strokes and references to further books providing personal accounts of stroke. For me, this was important to help connect the reader with the felt experience of stroke.

The book included an excellent chapter on stroke services and well-researched sections exploring neurological, cognitive, emotional and social issues relating to stroke. The authors discussed a number of psychological interventions for post-stroke difficulties and focused in detail on cognitive and behavioural approaches.

One of the real highlights was the chapter on cognitive behaviour therapy for fear of falling. Further exploration of the potential applicability of other psychological and sociological models would have been interesting, although this may reflect the greater infancy of the research base for other approaches within stroke.

Overall I found this a timely text that would be an excellent resource for anyone working in stroke services.

The film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, stemming from novelist Ken Kesey’s time as an orderly in a mental health facility, has become a staple of sixth-form and undergraduate psychology classes. Praised for its realism, it was shot on location at Oregon State Hospital and even featured former Superintendent Dr Dean Brooks as Dr Spivey. Speaking in Guilty Except for Insanity, Dr Brooks declares with some glee, ‘Everything that you see in the movie never, ever happened. But it’s all true!’

This documentary, made by clinical psychologist and film maker Professor Jan Haaken (see interview, July 2011), tells a different side of the story. The film unfolds as five interwoven stories of patients who enter the hospital through the insanity plea, how their lives spin out of control and the consequences of their encounters with the criminal justice system. It’s a compelling watch, with sections prefaced by clips from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and beguiling music written and performed by patients, staff and allies in the mental health system.

Haaken largely allows the patients’ stories to speak for themselves, but she clearly thinks her subjects are paying a terrible price for their deliverance from criminal responsibility.

Perhaps if more psychological support had been available to these people, they wouldn’t be caught in a system where ‘the search for care is as maddening as are the terms of confinement’. As Haaken says, ‘When people fall apart in America there is not much to catch them’. Forensic psychologist Dr Joel Gregor concurs: ‘The best way to get mental health treatment for a lot of people in this state who don’t have families that are watching out for them or people who can pay for their care is unfortunately to get arrested.’

There is no doubt that the crimes involved

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are horrific: the childhood friend of one patient tells her ‘I remember the recording of your 911 call, when you told them you had shot your son, and then turned around and yelled at him because he was bleeding on the carpet’. Yet it’s testament to the skill of Haaken as a film maker that it remains easy to identify with the patients and their accounts.

However, at times I found myself questioning whether my imagined reactions to the situation held any relevance. According to Brandy Adams, the restraints used on her ‘feel like you’re getting a great big hug’; ‘the razor wire provides some comfort and stability’.

Haaken asked her what she was nervous about.

‘Leaving. Institutionalisation is a wonderful thing.’

The DVD sleeve describes ‘patients and staff caught in an insane system – one that reflects larger national trends toward incarceration of individuals suffering mental health crises’. But personally I’m not sure the system came across as ‘insane’: it seemed to be one with a lot of thoughtful professionals making difficult decisions about risk while treating patients with humanity and with innovative methods. ‘Whether people drown, or ride the rough currents of history, depends on what is there to hold them, and the kinds of boats available to keep them afloat’, Haaken concludes. But I could have done with more of her own views on the ship’s seaworthiness, and the film has also left me curious as to how the UK system compares.

I Reviewed by Jon Sutton The film is available for educational use from www.guiltyexcept.com.

For your chance of winning a copy, tweet us on @psychmag with your views on our new ‘Reviews’ section.

I Wiley Blackwell; 2012; Pb £39.99 Reviewed by Liane Hubbins who is a clinical psychologist

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Straightforward self-help tool Panic Attacks: 10 Steps to Conquer myCBT Ltd keeping and overcoming avoidance and safety behaviours associated with panic. Whilst there is evidence that self-help tools based on the principles of CBT can be engaging and helpful for some people in overcoming panic, there doesn’t yet appear to be any evidence for the effectiveness of this specific app.

I Panic Attacks is available from iTunes for iPhone or iPad, £2.99 Reviewed by Kate Cavanagh, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of Sussex

A useful resource When to Use What Research Design W. Paul Vogt, Dianne C. Gardner & Lynne, M. Haeffele The selection of a research design that is appropriate to answer a particular question is a central aspect of research, but one that is often tempered by preferences and familiarity. When to Use What Research Design provides a hugely useful resource to navigate through the initial stages of research design, applicable to students and seasoned researchers alike.

The text is divided into three main sections concerned with design, sampling, and ethics respectively, and within each a chapter dedicated to each of six methodologies – surveys, interviews, experiments, observations, archival research and combined research.

The layout of the book allows the reader to easily select those chapters that are most relevant to their interests, and is facilitated by signposting of additional resources to support the reader. The book is well written and accessible, posing questions throughout to guide the reader through the research process.

A useful resource for any researcher.

Social Identity in Question: Construction, Subjectivity and Critique Parisa Dashtipour In this book Parisa Dashtipour reads research from the social identity framework (i.e. social identity theory, selfcategorisation theory, minimal group studies and group processes) through the work of Lacan and Lacanian scholars.

Readers of this book need not be already familiar with the work of Lacan, as Parisa does an excellent job of explaining Lacanian concepts with examples.

She writes that discursive and experimental research does not account for how social categories influence its members. The arguments through the book lead to a convincing justification for why a psychoanalytic approach to social identity processes is needed. Indeed, she points out that many social identity

contribute

This app from myCBT was developed by Sue KempWheeler (Consultant Clinical Psychologist, and lecturer in psychology at the University of Reading). The app delivers a straightforward self-help tool for panic and agoraphobia based on the principles of CBT. It offers clear information about panic attacks and how to over come them, including guidance on strengthening healthy selftalk and healthy imagery in relation to anxiety, ‘instant help’ audio files, and editable interactive tools for diary

Navigating identity and selfhood

concepts are in fact rooted within psychoanalysis. This inevitably has implications for consideration of the underpinning concepts of the experimental social identity framework, making it then necessary to question certain concepts in psychology that are taken to be ‘fact’, such as individuals as being unitary, rational and transparent.

Overall, the book makes for a sophisticated and first-class account of the social identity framework and should be considered of interest by students and scholars in psychology.

I Routledge; 2012; Pb £19.99 Reviewed by Alexander John Bridger who is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield

As you may have noticed, ‘Book reviews’ have changed. We are now interested in covering psychology in any form of media: books, yes, but also film, app, play, TV, radio, newspaper, music, exhibition… you name it, we would like to hear your suggestions for what to cover. Please e-mail the Associate Editor, Lucy Maddox, on maddox.lucy@gmail.com.

We still need book reviewers. Sample titles just in: The Psychology of Coaching and Mentoring Passmore et al. (Eds.) Bullying Interventions in Schools Ken Rigby Development Through Adulthood Oliver Robinson For a full list of books available for review and information on reviewing for The Psychologist, see www.bps.org.uk/books Send books for potential review to The Psychologist, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester LE1 7DR

I Guilford Press; 2012; Pb £26.99 Reviewed by Kareena McAloney who is at the University of York

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Make time for quality radio All in the Mind: The Digital Human BBC Radio 4 I have to admit BBC Radio 4 doesn’t play a big part in my life.

While some people seem to manage to listen to the Today programme while getting their kids ready for school, I’m more likely to be subjected to Pokémon or Phineas and Ferb.

Once at work, the online temptation of the written word leads me to bypass the iPlayer.

But my new year’s resolution has to be to listen to more, and in particular to never miss an episode of All in the Mind or the Digital Human.

I’ve written about both in The Psychologist before, and I make no apologies for doing so again. They are simply fantastic.

The presenters, Claudia Hammond and Aleks Krotoski, are engaging and well-informed – both with a background in psychology. Both are instrumental in shaping the series, ably supported by first class producers.

I think what impresses me the most is how both programmes deal with caveats and nuances. In print, even in the ‘quality’ newspapers, there is often a tendency to hyperbole.

Radio, or these series at least, seem far less susceptible to this. For example, in the episode of All in the Mind I have just listened to, Hammond tackled polygraph testing for sex offenders (as we did in ‘News’, September 2012). First, she talked to Dr Jane Wood, a forensic psychologist from the University of Kent and one of the authors of the Midlands polygraph pilot evaluation, describes the results which so impressed the Ministry of Justice that they are planning, subject to parliamentary time and approval, to roll out compulsory testing within 12 months in England and Wales.

Convicted sex offenders who'd served their sentence and were out on licence in the community

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were more likely to admit to risky behaviour if they were to be given a polygraph test. It was in the pre-test discussion that offenders seemed to reveal the most: as Hammond said, perhaps it’s the fear of the test as much as the test itself.

Hammond also spoke to Dr Sharon LeaI, from the International Centre for Forensic Research in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, who criticised the lack of evidence around polygraph use, and Don Grubin, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Newcastle University, who said the polygraph can play an important role in the management of dangerous sex offenders.

The Digital Human is similarly thorough.

For every bit of ‘brave new world’ boggling of the mind, there’s a cautious and evidence-based step back. The programme raises profound and surprising implications of technology without ever getting carried away. Krotoski talks to a wide variety of characters but always takes a scientifically informed approach.

I’m also amazed by how much these programmes can pack into half an hour. That All in the Mind episode also featured Ellie Ratcliffe, an environmental psychology postgraduate at University of Surrey, on the benefits of birdsong, and contributions from Nichola Rumsey and Diana Harcourt from the Centre for Appearance Research in Bristol (see ‘Big picture’, December). As a discipline, I think psychology is lucky to have these programmes, and with so much effort clearly going into making each perfectly produced package it’s the least I can do to make half an hour to listen to them.

Expert advice for expert witnesses Psychopathy and the Law: A Practitioner’s Guide Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm and Jan-Olof Nyholm (Eds.) Psychopathy is a concept that is often used in the criminal justice system and that can have important implications for sentencing decisions; however, it is not listed as a specific disorder in either the DSM-IV or ICD-10. This unusual situation presents unique difficulties for professionals involved in the legal aspects of the assessment of psychopathy.

Those working in the fields of both law and forensic mental health have a professional and moral duty to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the many complex issues involved in this area. This book is a collection of writings by many of the leading practitioners in the fields of forensic psychology and psychiatry.

It provides clear, practical information for the assessment of psychopathy and a good overview of current research and the legal implications of empirical findings. In addition, there are chapters on specific areas such as psychopathy in women and in adolescents.

This book is essential reading for anyone who is involved in providing or utilising expert witness evidence in cases pertaining to individuals with psychopathic traits.

I Wiley-Blackwell; 2012; Pb £32.99 Reviewed by Evelyn Gibson who is a Chartered Psychologist

There’s more coming up Drugs live: the Ecstasy trial Channel 4 This year, a television company funded a scientific research study for the first time. Channel 4 funded an experiment on the condition they could film part of it for a documentary: Drugs Live: the Ecstasy Trial. University College London and Imperial College collaborated with the television team in this novel way, which may provide a template for future science-media collaborations.

‘When Channel 4 first approached us we thought being live was a dreadful idea’, said Val Curran, Professor of Psychopharmacology at University College London.

Professor Curran devised the study along with Professor David

Nutt, of Imperial College.

Professor Curran was very aware of the ethical dilemmas that the programme could pose.

The programme filmed a study where people were being given either a placebo or a controlled dose of MDMA. Potentially participants would be consenting to being filmed in a drug-altered state. In the end the people taking part in filming were those who were used to television recording them or had some experience of working in or handling the media: Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, was one participant. Deputy Editor of New Scientist, Graham Lawton, was another.

I Reviewed by Jon Sutton

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Question your assumptions

In the picture

Motivate – Tool for motivating using psychology Wise Leader Group

jove.com Journal of Visualised Experiments

In the words of its developer, Society member Terry Sexton: ‘The “Motivation” app applies Dr David McClelland’s theory of motivation. In our consultancy work we spend a lot of time helping managers to understand how people have different motivation drivers. We find most managers start their career with the unconscious assumption that other people are motivated in the same way they are.

We use McClelland’s work as it is a simple way to help managers recognise the different drivers in other people to enable them to “flex” their own approach. Essentially, we have now put the insights we give managers, on development programmes, in an App form.

This overcomes the fact that we all forget most of what we learn

In the current climate of financial difficulties in higher education, it was no small gesture that Channel 4 funded the study. It meant the difference between the research happening or not.

‘Having the first 16 participants go through in the usual way was great and then subsequent people who volunteered were media-savvy people who were filmed’, said Professor Curran. ‘It was quite an adventure’, she continued. ‘Some people thought it was a sensationalist thing to do but we wanted to get across the science of drug research. It was a compromise. We had to talk in soundbites, sometimes at the expense of details about the science.’ Professor Curran acknowledged the tensions: ‘It was a two way thing, a process of trust between the scientists and

on course very soon after we walk out of the room. Managers can now keep the insights with them in their pocket.’

It’s a simple app, just a few questions where you select which of the three statements are most and least like the person you are trying to motivate. A profile is created, with recommendations for how to motivate that person. As Sexton says, it has value as a simple reminder that questions your assumptions.

I discovered that what I am doing is spot on, so that’s £1.49 well spent.

I Motivate, Influence, and Team Build apps, all from the Wise Leader Group, are available from iTunes for iPhone or iPad, priced £1.49 or £1.99 Reviewed by Jon Sutton

the television folk. We wanted to keep the science rigorous and they wanted to make the TV programmes exciting. We learnt how to communicate and understand their viewpoint, and vice versa.’

In the end Professor Curran thought the compromise worked out well enough.

‘I hope people saw that we did

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

If a picture speaks a thousand words, jove.com is the journal with an almost unlimited word count.

Based on the idea that science progresses through the replication of experimental studies, and that the ‘written word and static picturebased traditional print journals are no longer sufficient to accurately transmit the intricacies of modern research’, it publishes video journal articles of research experiments. For the more neuroscience-oriented psychologists among us it provides a useful addition to the research arena, and a great opportunity for budding neuroscientists to see research firsthand.

I Reviewed by Paul Redford, UWE Bristol

The big question Do you know what I’m thinking?

University of Manchester ‘Can you tell what I’m thinking?’

As psychologists, it’s a question we’ve all been asked. Now a group of psychologists from University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences have given their answers.

You can watch Deborah Talmi, Penny Lewis, Luke Jones, Warren Mansell, Ellen Poliakoff and Daniela Montaldi at http://t.co/FmRIXFIY. Poliakoff

try to achieve a balance. We would have liked more science in the programme but 2.3 million people – many between 18 and 25 – watched the first episode… we wouldn’t get 2.3 million 18-25 year olds reading our scientific papers.’ As Professor Curran recognised, the programme was a hot topic: ‘Twitter went crazy’.

The issue of the controlled use of MDMA as an adjunct to therapy hit the mainstream press as well. Professor Curran’s interests lie in the clinical applications of the use of some of the drugs which are usually seen as ‘recreational’, and MDMA has been highlighted as potentially useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘I’m interested in the psychological mechanisms by which MDMA might impact on psychological therapies, for example via enhancing the

makes an interesting point: ‘People can be quite uncomfortable with the idea that you can read their mind, and it makes me think that I shouldn’t mention psychology when I meet people. Whether saying “cognitive neuroscience” is any better is an open question.’

I Reviewed by Jon Sutton, Managing Editor

therapeutic alliance’, said Professor Curran. ‘If we can find things that work synergistically with psychological treatments then that’s a good thing.’

Professor Curran notes the evidence-base is as yet not substantial enough to draw firm conclusions about the role for MDMA in therapy, but is hopeful about this avenue of research: ‘I don’t think that the evidence is there yet but it’s important that people at least have a look. Let’s explore possibilities.’

As for collaborating in this type of way with television, Professor Curran seemed cautiously optimistic. ‘Having done the programme once we’ve learned a lot. There’s probably more coming.’ Watch this space.

I Reviewed by Lucy Maddox, a Clinical Psychologist in the NHS and Associate Editor for ‘Reviews’

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‘Flying along by the seat of our pants’ The Mind Reader: Unlocking my Voice BBC One Panorama Professor Adrian Owen, University of Western Ontario, Canada, reviewed his own involvement in the BBC One Panorama special, which followed a group of severely brain injured patients and revealed the revolutionary efforts made by Professor Owen and his team to help them communicate with their families and the outside world. For more information on the research, see Professor Owen’s article in the June 2010 issue (tinyurl.com/owen0610).

The programme generated a lot of interest from around the world, both from the media and from families of patients, and without exception it was positive.

I was impressed with how the BBC managed to weave together the stories of the five patients with the science behind our investigations. They had a very tough job to do and it took the best part of two years to do it. I suppose me moving from Cambridge to London Ontario mid way through didn’t help them, but they were very keen to

‘follow the science’ and came out twice to spend a week or so following my team and I as we went from patient to patient.

In the end I was very happy with how our studies were portrayed. It pretty much is just like it appeared in the programme… flying along by the seat of our pants most of the time, often making difficult decisions depending on whether a patient is responsive or not and how responsive they are.

The families were fantastic. Given all they have to put up with it was very generous of them to give up their time and help make the programme. I hope it raises awareness about these patients and how little is being done to mitigate their challenging circumstances.

I also hope it shows the public how science really works day to day and how their precious research funds get spent!

Oh brother – plenty to learn A Friend’s and Relative’s Guide to Supporting the Family with Autism: How Can I Help?

Ann Palmer The first thing I noticed about Ann Palmer’s most recent book on autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) was its ease of accessibility.

The book is written in a very friendly, engaging and honest manner, drawing on Palmer’s personal experiences as well as those of other parents of children with ASD. There is just enough background information on prevalence, research and theories without being jargon-heavy, but with signposting to further reading and resources should one be interested

Practitioner Doctorate (PsychD) in Psychotherapeutic & Counselling Psychology The first of its kind to be accredited by the British Psychological Society, this professional doctorate offers full-time training over three years. Completion of the Doctorate also confers eligibilitty to apply for Chartered Psychologist status with the BPS and registration as a Counselling Psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council.

Trainees are exposed to the main theoretical traditions with a focus on psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioural theories, and will apply them under supervision in 3 one-year-long practice placements. These can be within NHS, student counselling, voluntary and other settings identified and monitored by the course team. We have a strong research tradition and an outstanding trainee publication record. Only 15-16 trainees are accepted to ensure a high staff/trainee ratio. Entry requirements: Graduate Basis for Conditional Membership from the BPS; normally at least an upper 2nd class degree in psychology; sufficient personal maturitty and robustness to cope with the course demands.

Closing date for September entry: 8 February 2013.

For more information or to find out how to apply please visit:

www.surrey.ac.uk/psychologist

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developing their understanding of the disorder.

The narrative is very normalising, whilst acknowledging the diversity of experiences people will have, and the individuality of each child with autism.

The book will be a valuable resource for relatives, friends and parents, with clear and achievable guidance for each party.

Although not aimed at professionals, the book may aid understanding and empathy.

As a sibling of a, now adult, girl with Asperger’s syndrome, I would have welcomed this resource during my family’s adjustment to life with ASD. Even now, there is plenty that I can learn from this book, both as a professional and a brother.

I Jessica Kingsley; 2012; Pb £12.99 Reviewed by Nicolas Burden who is an assistant psychologist – Recovery/Service Development

Music from the dark side of the mind I’m going slightly mad In common with Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra on the first track of this compilation, ‘I’m nuts about screwy music’.

When it comes to wearing mental abnormality on their sleeve, today’s pop stars can’t come close to some of the protagonists in these stories of suicide, psychopathy and spasms stretching from 1935 to 1962.

Highlights include Betty Hutton, rising to fame during World War II against a background of her deserting father’s suicide and mother’s alcoholism. Her theatrical ‘Blow a fuse (It’s oh so quiet)’ was overhauled in 1995 by everyone’s favourite eccentric chanteuse Björk, but it’s well worth watching the original on YouTube. So is Beatrice Kay’s spectacularly unhinged ‘Hooray hooray, I’m going’ away’.

Buddy Knox’s ‘I think I’m gonna kill myself’ is rather more jolly than the title would suggest, and Little Willie John’s ‘Spasms’ is an interesting attempt to reconjure in more manic fashion the magic of lovestruck ‘Fever’. Woody Leafer’s ‘There are drums in my typewriter’ is genuinely unnerving.

Not the most politically correct compilation you’ll come across, but an intriguing historical and cultural artefact for those who prefer to confront the dark side of the mind head on.

Exhibition Death: A self-portrait Wellcome Collection The Wellcome Collection’s major winter exhibition is all about the iconography of death.

Designed around five themed rooms, there are 300 objects on show from the private collection of Richard Harris, a former antique-print dealer based in Chicago.

My favourite artefact is ‘Curious snake exploring a skull’, by Izumi Sukeyuki from around 1900. This ‘okimono’ expresses the Buddhist vision of the ongoing existence of the soul, which is believed to undergo perpetual transformation into new states of being. The skull is inhabited by the snake, which is believed to be reborn every time it sheds its skin.

The exhibition runs until 24 February at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London. A website supporting the exhibition, with images, interviews and more, can be found at http://tinyurl.com/welldeath.

I Reviewed by Jon Sutton

I Available from www.chromedreams.co.uk Reviewed by Jon Sutton

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A quarter of a century of The Psychologist Current Managing Editor Jon Sutton marks the anniversary with the help of his predecessors

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quarter of a century ago, in January 1988, The Psychologist emerged from the chrysalis of the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, the twocolour format perhaps failing to do justice to the beautiful butterfly adorning that very first cover. 300 issues later, here we are, with the opportunity to look back at what the Managing Editor at the time, Elizabeth Mapstone, describes as ‘an exciting, but at times painful, period in BPS history’. How did The Psychologist take flight, what chaos can ensue from a single flap of its wings, and do further transformations lie ahead? I talked to some of the former editors to find out.

‘It’s like The Sun’

‘It was a period of metamorphosis,’ says Dame Glynis Breakwell, now Vice Chancellor at the University of Bath but from May 1988 serving a stint as Honorary

Editor with Graham Davey. ‘Perhaps that is why I would choose the cover of the August 1988 issue as my favourite. For me, it seems to depict a moth turning into a book – though I guess it is meant to symbolise completely the opposite, and involve a butterfly somewhere along the line.’ The theme of metamorphosis was so prominent, it appears, that it justified two similar covers in one year!

Mary Boyle, who was an Honorary Editor with Ray Bull for six years up to and including the The Psychologist’s inception, describes the drivers for development. ‘It’s fair to say the Bulletin was held in some affection by readers – there was certainly a very high level of engagement with it. But by the mid-1980s it was clear that change was needed.

Other professions were updating their publications with graphics, colour, more varied covers and a wider range of content, leaving the Bulletin looking

One from each year, part one We have selected just one piece from each year of The Psychologist’s history, to represent the quality and diversity of the publication. Why not visit the archive (currently stretching back to 1998) at www.thepsychologist.org.uk to find your own favourites?

Interview with B.F. Skinner – John Masterson (April 1988) Noam Chomsky: American dissident – Interview by Celia Kitzinger (May 1989) Special issue: Sexism, ageism and racism in psychology – (September 1990) Special issue: Animal experimentation – (May 1991) Torture and the torturer – Lindsey Williams (July 1992) The psychology of women – Paula Nicolson (March 1993) Robbie, Fitz and me: A venture into television – Ian Stephen (January 1994) How Eurocentric psychology damages Africa – J. Owusu-Bempah and Dennis Howitt (October 1995) Is the spirit willing? A pentalogue on parapsychology – Andrew Colman, Susan Blackmore, Robert Morris, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French (August 1996) Towards a psychology of experience – Jane Henry, John Pickering, Richard Stevens, Elizabeth Valentine and Max Velmans (March 1997) Pictures at an exhibition: The science of the face – Andy Young and Vicki Bruce (March 1998) Understanding assets and deficits in autism – Francesca Happé (November 1999) Head to head: how should ADHD be treated? – Steve Baldwin and Paul Cooper (December 2000)

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decidedly staid. There was acknowledgement that the BPS needed to be more outward-looking in promoting psychology and in strengthening relationships with the media, policy makers and parliamentarians, including making them more aware of how psychological theory and research could inform policy. And internal communication was important too: the Bulletin was no longer up to the task of reflecting the diverse concerns and interests of psychologists. The (new) Psychologist was seen as playing a crucial role in keeping people in touch with what was going on, academically, professionally and in research across the discipline in the face of a growing number of specialisms, specialist journals, etc.’

Elizabeth Mapstone had been handed ‘day-to-day responsibility for the new magazine, and the special task of developing the news and features sections’, according to her welcome message in the first issue. ‘I was extraordinarily naive in those early days,’ she tells me, ‘and blissfully unaware that the changes I had been hired to implement were, let us say, controversial.

I simply supposed that everyone in the Society wanted what I was told at interview was the goal: a house magazine that could communicate across those barriers that criss-cross the many subjects of our discipline, academic and applied, becoming a publication which could eventually appear on the book-stands.’

Dame Glynis remembers Mapstone as ‘driving change impatiently, moving us from thinking about The Psychologist as a pseudo-academic journal to thinking about it as a current affairs magazine for the broad professional psychology community. The Economist for the psychologist.’

But tensions were bubbling under the surface. ‘There was a preoccupation with protecting the supposed integrity of academic articles and the Honorary Editors’ authority over them,’ reports Mary Boyle. ‘The word “ringfencing” was never far from our lips.’ Elizabeth Mapstone confirms that ‘only the Honorary Editors were allowed to choose and/or comment on such articles, which continued to sport the long lists of references I was attempting to reduce in the “feature articles” of “more accessible style”. Not surprisingly, readers did not always understand the distinction. Nor was this quite enough, at first, to allay fears. “Can’t be doing with that,” said one Society stalwart. “It’s like The Sun.”’ However, Boyle remembers the first issue was ‘very well received; whatever fears people had proved groundless’. As

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well as the usual articles, there was a ‘Who’s who in the BPS’, with a two-page profile of the then President, plus features on the use of video in trials of alleged child abuse; ‘The Leading Edge’, described as ‘Influential psychologists make their choice of the “best” in recent research’ and several pieces on ‘Psychology in the Media’.

The new format also allowed regular parts of the Bulletin – conference reports, Society news, etc.

– to be reported at greater length. ‘Even after 25 years,’ says Boyle, ‘it’s still quite an interesting read.

The design and layout wasn’t great, particularly the cover layout, but we were all on a very steep learning curve. Elizabeth Mapstone as Managing Editor and Stephen White in the Leicester office were invaluable here as they were to the whole process of setting up and producing The Psychologist.’

Elizabeth Mapstone confirms ‘the headache-inducing need to acquire desktop publishing skills in five minutes flat. Everyone worked extremely hard, but it would be true to say that during the early days, in Leicester technical knowhow and experience were in short supply.

Each issue in that first year was a small miracle.’

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Challenging the orthodoxy ‘There were moments of real concern as an editor – especially as a very junior and inexperienced editor,’ says Dame Glynis.

‘We wanted to reflect the debates of the day and in doing so it is inevitable that you rouse criticism and antagonism.

Sometimes our selection of articles was considered very, very poor. Our readership let us know in no uncertain terms. On the whole it seems to me now to have been not just inevitable but mainly healthy and worthwhile disagreement. It is good to see that the current editorial team at The Psychologist continue to be willing to allow challenge to orthodoxy.’

‘I think The Psychologist is much more confident now,’ says Mary Boyle. ‘At the beginning we were so braced for criticism of dumbing down the BPS House Journal, we were rather preoccupied with maintaining status – I wouldn’t be

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Covers have always been a source of controversy for The Psychologist. ‘While many praised our first,’ says Elizabeth Mapstone, ‘I was astonished to find the May cover, featuring a self-portrait by a child survivor of abuse, was severely criticised. Les Prince produced many memorable early designs, but towards the end of my stint, covers were to be designed by professionals. Not that this entirely eliminated angst: on their very first assignment (March 1993), they elected to change the approved photo, sparking widespread condemnation because the cover girl was too beautiful!’

In terms of my own editorship, I can confirm that nothing has provoked the fury of the membership as much as covers! Sometimes this is understandable: in 2005, a feedback session at the Society’s Annual Conference in Manchester concluded that The Psychologist was ‘puerile nonsense which has gone downhill in your time as editor’, at least in part due to an April cover which makes me shudder with embarrassment to this day. Our January 2008 effort wasn’t too popular in some quarters either!

All I can say in our defence is that psychological concepts are not always the easiest to illustrate, and that I hope the covers have improved over the years, with many more hits than misses. During my time alone we have sported a Banksy, mirror art, and myriad other styles and topics. Why not have a look at the archive at www.thepsychologist.org.uk and pick your own favourite?

surprised if the professor count of the contributors/reviewers was a little over the top. Thankfully, over the years this changed.’ Dame Glynis concurs: ‘I can see now that in format and choice of content we were hardly as radical as we thought we were being at the time.’

That may be so, but nevertheless over the years The Psychologist has tackled debates surrounding race and intelligence, torture, recovered memories, sexualities, drug treatment for ADHD, recreational use of Ecstasy, diagnosis, the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies agenda, and many more. The Psychologist puts its head above the parapet month after month, in a highly visible and accountable manner that is perhaps rare in the Society. The stated aim of the publication remains to provide ‘a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society’. Often this controversy involves the Society itself, and The Psychologist’s determination to serve as the mouthpiece of the membership rather than as a limp ‘house organ’ has been the source of considerable conflict.

Towards a new model According to Mary Boyle, a definite high of her time was the formation of the Editorial

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

(later Policy) Subcommittee. ‘The original name was always a misnomer, meant at the time to reflect that the subcommittee supported the editors. It was a very engaged and supportive committee which didn’t shirk from spirited and direct discussion of at times contentious issues.’

I would echo that to this day: The Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee plays a vital role as a representative body of Society members driving the publications and overseeing my performance as editor.

‘The Editorial Subcommittee was seen as so important,’ remembers Mary Boyle, ‘due to considerable preoccupation with editorial independence and real concern about where control of the content would lie. An appointment like Jon Sutton’s – a BPS employee based in Leicester as the sole editor – would have been unthinkable then; Maryon Tysoe’s was the bridging editorship between the old and new models.’

Tysoe followed Hugh Foot, who had served as an Honorary Editor from May 1992 to May 1997. She picks up the story: ‘I was the first person to be responsible for editing the publication as a whole, and in my second year, the post of Editor was moved from one paid day a week to two. I believe this upgrade of the role was very important in paving the way for the significant expansion in resources

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that came in later years (for instance, for the Editor to be full-time, and for a staff journalist – oh, what I would have given!).’

According to Mary Boyle, ‘one (rather blunt) way of looking at the development of The Psychologist over the last 25 years is that it reflects the BPS’s gradual and, I have to say, hard fought for recognition that if it wants a high-quality and effective house publication it will have to pay for it.’

Growth I ask Maryon Tysoe about the highs and lows of her own time as editor.

‘The coming-on-stream of new initiatives was always exciting – an expanded “Research in brief”, as the section on the latest research was called then, new series (‘State of the art’, ‘Why I study…’, ‘Personal space’), A Guide to Writing for The Psychologist to help contributors, and so on. Just one example of contributors’ impressive work came in the November 1997 issue: 10 psychologists, at about three An early splash of colour, from March 1998 weeks’ notice, writing short, insightful analyses – drawing on theory and research from their own areas – of the by a creative committee, by an evercentral purpose, to be the place where all complex reactions to the death of Princess expanding and generous membership and psychologists can communicate with and Diana. But sometimes there were very by a thriving and fascinating discipline. interest both each other and the outside specific moments: these tended to be hitI ask my predecessors whether they world.’ you-in-the-eyes visuals, such as our first have noticed that evolution. Mary Boyle I think that last point is increasingly splashes of internal colour in just the says that ‘obvious changes are the the key: communication with the outside centre pages. I remember too my thrill at increased size; more international world. At the Psychologist and Digest the sight of the first issue in a completely authorship; a wider range of content and Policy Committee meetings we are fond new, engaging (we all hoped) and creative development of features; use of of the ‘village’ metaphor: The Psychologist contemporary design (January 1999). It colour; much greater use of illustrations helps all members of the village seemed a tangible sign of our attempts to and links to the web. It also seems communicate, but we might also build on my predecessors’ achievements “younger” and I don’t showcase what and to keep moving forward.’ think that’s just psychology has done for because I’m getting those outside the village, ‘“it has an ever more vital older; there is more and invite guests in. The role to play in helping us The noughties involvement now from Psychologist is no longer feel a collective identity as My own first issue at the helm was in younger members of simply ‘by members, for psychologists” May 2000, after a chance conversation at the Society. But I’m members’: even though it a Society conference eventually led to me struck by the is a membership leaping from the ivory tower for the continuities and that publication with a opportunity to become the first editor the original rationale – communication reasonably controlled circulation, based solely in the Leicester office. ‘50 across members and external technology and social media give us an issues max’, said my arrogant 25-year-old communication – still very much informs opportunity to seek more influence in the self, ‘revolutionise it and leave in a blaze of the content. The role hasn’t changed ‘global village’. glory’. Now, almost 13 years on, it’s nearly much; what’s changed is the variety of That philosophy has informed some impossible for me to look back on ways the role is met.’ of the new formats in recent years and something I am still totally immersed in, Maryon Tysoe also notes changes and those planned for 2013. There has also and to convey the love I feel for The continuities. ‘There is more of everything, been an attempt to diversify, to mix the Psychologist (and not forgetting our operating to excellent effect: staff, professional and personal in new formats Research Digest, which turns 10 this year). readership, number of pages (including taking hold since the major redesign of Churning out issues month after month, absorption of the Appointments 2008, such as ‘One on one’ and ‘Big year after year, is hard; ensuring the Memorandum), amount of colour, news picture’. ‘New voices’ is our attempt to publications constantly evolve is trickier and new series. Very significantly, there’s encourage emerging talent in science still. Thankfully I have been supported by a strong web presence, which you writing, and ‘Looking back’ reflected an my small but perfectly formed team (we initiated and is so vital now. But it seems overdue recognition of the fascinating operate with three full-time equivalents), to me to have stayed the same in its tales lurking in psychology’s past. There is

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much still to do, but I hope we are heading towards a publication that is as diverse and delightful as the discipline it represents.

One from each year, part two Find these articles and hundreds more in the archive at www.thepsychologist.org.uk.

Back to the future Whatever became of the distinguished academic who likened The Psychologist to The Sun? ‘They later offered to contribute a feature article, and became a strong supporter of the developing Psychologist,’ recalls Elizabeth Mapstone. ‘As the shock of the new wore off, dissenters became fewer. Looking back, it seems astonishing that the early days of what has become a properly professional publication should have provoked such anxiety.’

Personally, I’m not so surprised. As Hugh Foot said in 1993, ‘As creatures of habit we didn’t like change: change by its very nature breeds suspicions about slipping standards.’ But I sense that anxiety to this day. I wonder if it reflects the fact that, as Maryon Tysoe comments, ‘The Psychologist is still the only physical entity we get for our membership money… it has an ever more vital role to play in helping us to feel a collective identity as psychologists, no matter what our precise work, and to show the public the great value of psychology and how it can benefit them.’ Perhaps this is increasingly so in a fragmenting discipline under pressure to demonstrate its worth.

Or maybe that’s rather selfaggrandising, and our biggest challenge remains getting thousands of members to actually get the magazine out of the wrapper each month! I certainly recognise that for all the evolution of the last 25 years, the pace of change in the next 25 is likely to be greater. We have made strides in electronic publishing, with our hugely successful offshoot Research Digest blog (see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog) and making The Psychologist available on tablet, smartphone and e-reader via our website. But we still need to develop our online offerings, while never neglecting the importance of what lands on your doormat each month.

For the final word, I will hand over to Dame Glynis once more: ‘For me, The Psychologist remains a vital channel into the Society and its activities. It keeps me updated in an easy-to-digest way. It seems to have evolved and matured, it is no longer uncertain about the job it has to do… Long may it serve the Society – and evolve with it.’

I Dr Jon Sutton is Managing Editor of The Psychologist. jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

Weird and wonderful: 100 odd-sounding papers from the world of psychology – Neil Martin (September 2001) Sorted: Ecstasy facts and fiction – Jon Cole, Harry Sumnall and Charles Grob, plus peer commentaries (September 2002) ECT: A shocking treatment – Lucy Johnstone (May 2003) Locked in: Have psychologists got the key? – Andrea Kübler (March 2004) The anarchic hand – Sergio Della Sala (October 2005) Freud’s influence: personal and professional perspectives (September 2006) The social brain of a teenager – Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (October 2007) Questioning the banality of evil – S. Alexander Haslam and Steve Reicher (January 2008) Social cognitive theory goes global – Albert Bandura (June 2009) The supreme infant – Alison Gopnik (March 2010) Stanley Milgram: The man, his passions and motivations – Alexandra Milgram (September 2011) Opinion special: Replication, replication, replication (May 2012)

25 years of psychology Just as The Psychologist has experienced change and development, so has the discipline itself.

We asked some of those who contributed to that very first issue for their 25 words on how psychology has changed in the last 25 years.

John Morton: Psychology fell in love with genes and neurons and drugs and happily abolished the mind. Then consciousness re-emerged! Can it be reduced to epiphenomenalia? Watch!

Clive Fletcher: Occupational psychology has grown hugely and is increasingly influential in organisations, but less often part of, or valued by, the narrowly neuroscience-dominated psychology departments.

Chris Brewin: In their treatments clinical psychologists sought less to ‘correct’ clients’ ‘faulty thinking’ and exploited Blogging on techniques requiring acceptance, increased mindfulness, or changing brain and unwanted images through fantasy. behaviour Cary Cooper: Psychology has moved from The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest service: rats, to brains, to people, a tsunamiblog, email, Twitter and Facebook like effort to deal with a range of ‘An amazingly useful and interesting resource’ Ben Goldacre, The Guardian relevant behavioural issues of our www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog time.

John Findlay: Psychology has greatly Also celebrating an anniversary – 10 years matured both as a science and a social of the ‘user-friendly’ Research Digest science and has also enhanced its key role in developing cross-connections between both disciplines.

Graham Davies: The promise of an applicable cognitive psychology menaced by the REF with its emphasis on ‘fundamental’ research and the New Reductionism symbolised by fMRI studies.

Douglas Forbes: Psychology has become much more accessible through the wonders of IT, user-friendly Research Digests, etc. Happily, its findings now frequently impinge upon educated adult awareness.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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