The Psychologist, April 2011

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Psychology, religion and spirituality Joanna Collicutt introduces a special issue

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

letters 230 big picture centre careers 306 looking back 318

the cognitive science of religion 252 mental health, religion and culture 256 interview with Fraser Watts 268 does measuring people change them? 272

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

Welcome to The Psychologist, the 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’.

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Associate Editors Articles Vaughan Bell, Kate Cavanagh, Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Tom Stafford, Miles Thomas, Monica Whitty, Barry Winter Conferences Sarah Haywood International Nigel Foreman, Asifa Majid Interviews Nigel Hunt, Lance Workman History of Psychology Julie Perks

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letters smoking; cognitive neuroscience funding; twitter debate; and much more

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news and digest 240 chronic fatigue; search dogs; well-being; neuroscience directions; alcohol guidance; the horror in dreams; and nuggets from the Society’s Research Digest media public engagement opportunities, with Kisane Prutton

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Psychology, religion and spirituality Joanna Collicutt opens the special issue

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The cognitive science of religion Justin L. Barrett and Emily Reed Burdett on religious experience and belief

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256 Mental health, religion and culture Kate M. Loewenthal and Christopher Alan Lewis on how well-being can be affected by religious practice and cultural context Faith and psychology in historical dialogue 260 John Hall, Leslie Francis and Brendan Callaghan SJ on the roots and resurgence of interest in psychology and religion Religion, spirituality and therapeutic practice Adrian Coyle and Jenny Lochner offer some practical guidance

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Reflections on psychology and religion An interview with Fraser Watts: psychologist, theologian and priest

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272 book reviews

Methods: Does measuring people 272 change them?

David P. French and Stephen Sutton call for more understanding of reactivity 276

the globalisation of the Western mind; stories of loss and growth; the myth of autism; and more society 282 managerialism and corporatism in league tables in the President’s column; psychology and the HPC; and more

april 2011

THE ISSUE ‘Thank you to God, for making me an atheist’, quipped comedian Ricky Gervais in closing his infamous hosting of the Golden Globes. I could certainly identify with that, and as a group psychologists are famed for low levels of religious belief and affiliation. Yet huge swathes of psychology – mindfulness and positive psychology, to name just two areas – have a religious or at least spiritual feel to them.

In introducing this special issue on psychology, religion and spirituality, Joanna Collicutt points out that religion, if nothing else, is a profoundly human phenomenon, and therefore amenable to study by psychologists. And so it proves: we tackle religion from viewpoints of cognitive science, mental health, the history of faith, and therapeutic practice. We also meet a psychologist-theologian-priest who is a former President of the BPS. Elsewhere we have a fascinating piece on ‘probably the most divisive figure British Psychology has ever produced’, Hans Eysenck; Richard Bentall in ‘One on one’; and another ‘Big picture’ centrespread. In April some of you will be invited to complete an online survey to tell us what you think of new additions such as ‘Big picture’, and many other aspects of The Psychologist. Please do participate: your views really are vital in driving us forward over the coming years.

Dr Jon Sutton

306 careers and psychologist appointments we talk to Deb Viney and Paul Webley from the School of Oriental and African Studies; featured job; all the latest vacancies; and how to advertise looking back Roderick D. Buchanan on the controversial Hans Eysenck

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one on one

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…with Richard Bentall

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BIG PICTURE

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Feeling at home in a home Picture by Alex Haslam. Does your work lend itself to a striking visual image?

E-mail jon.sutton@bps.org.uk to feature in ‘Big picture’.

Moving into a care home can be an extraordinarily stressful experience. The transition often involves moving from a place which is a powerful expression of a person’s identity into an environment that has little personal meaning and where ties to others are weak: from a place in which one feels ‘at home’ into a home where one feels out of place.

Researchers at the University of Exeter – Catherine Haslam, Craig Knight and Alex Haslam – have recently investigated this process, combining insights from social psychological work into social identity with neuropsychological insights about memory and attention. In particular, they have sought to show that the transition can be made less stressful by creating new social identities for residents that centre on their relationship to the physical environment.

In an study published last year in Ageing and Society, the researchers found that empowering residents to make collective decisions about the décor of a home into which they were about to move had a positive and dramatic impact on their health and well-being.

Residents not only felt a stronger sense of shared identity with staff and fellow residents, they were less stressed and used communal spaces far more.

In a follow-up filmed as part of the BBC1’s The Science of the Young Ones, residents who made decisions about redecoration as part of design teams (pictured) used their lounges nearly four times as much as those who were not involved in such decisions, and their performance on cognitive tests was around 20 per cent better. These findings are currently being used to inform best practice in care home management.

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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DIGEST

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The loving touch Whether it’s a raised eyebrow or curl of the lip, we usually think of emotions as conveyed through facial expressions and body language. Science too has focused on these forms of emotional communication, finding that there’s a high degree of consistency across cultures. It’s only in the last few years that psychologists have looked at whether and how the emotions can be communicated purely through touch.

A 2006 study by Matthew Hertenstein demonstrated that strangers could accurately communicate the ‘universal’ emotions of anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude and sympathy, purely through touches to the forearm, but not the ‘prosocial’ emotions of surprise, happiness and sadness, nor the ‘self-focused’ emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride. Now Erin Thompson and James Hampton have added to this nascent literature by comparing the accuracy of touchbased emotional communication between strangers and between those who are romantically involved.

Thirty romantic couples (the vast majority were heterosexual) based in London took part. One partner in each romantic pair attempted to communicate 12 different emotions, one at a time, to their partner. They sat at opposite sides of a table divided by a curtained screen. The emotional ‘decoder’ slid their forearm through the curtain for the ‘encoder’ to touch, after which the ‘decoder’ attempted to identify which of the 12 emotions had been communicated. The participants were filmed throughout.

After this, the romantic couples were split up and participants paired up with a stranger to repeat the exercise (encoders and decoders kept whichever role they’d had first time around). Strangers were usually formed into same-sex pairs, to avoid the social awkwardness of touching an opposite-sex partner. This created an unfortunate confound, acknowledged by the researchers, which is that most romantic couples were opposite-sex whereas most stranger pairs were same-sex.

However, focusing only on results from same-sex pairs versus opposite-sex pairs suggested gender was not an important factor.

The key finding is that although strangers performed well for most emotions, romantic couples tended to be superior, especially for the self-focused emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride. Thompson and Hampton calculated that chance performance (i.e. merely guessing) would produce an accuracy rate of 25 per cent. Although there were 12 emotions to select from, the rationale here In the February issue of Cognition is that some are far more similar to each other than and Emotion others, so even a guesser would perform better than 1/12 accuracy. Romantic partners communicated universal emotions, prosocial and self-focused emotions with an accuracy of 53 per cent, 60 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively – in each case, far better than chance performance. In contrast, strangers achieved accuracy rates of 39 per cent, 56 per cent and 17 per cent, for universal, prosocial, and self-focused emotions respectively, with the last considered as no better than chance performance.

How did the romantic couples achieve their greater accuracy? They touched for longer, but this wasn’t correlated with accuracy. Using footage of the experiment, the researchers coded the types of touch used (a wide range of discrete touch types were identified, from trembling and scratching to slapping and squeezing), and for each emotion it was clear that strangers were using similar kinds of touch as were romantic couples. This means that there were either subtle differences in the touching used by romantic couples, which the experimenters had failed to detect, or the ‘decoders’ were interpreting the same touch cues differently when they were delivered by an intimate partner.

This topic is ripe for further investigation – for example, does the touch advantage shown by romantic couples extend to non-emotional communication? Would other long-term, but nonsexual, relationship partners such as siblings, show a similar advantage? And would romantic partners still display an advantage if they didn’t know who was doing the touching? ‘Our findings extend the literature on the communication of emotion,’ the researchers said. ‘The nature of particular relationships appears to have the ability to diminish the ambiguity of emotional expression via touch.’

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Bribing kids to eat their greens really does work In the February issue of Psychological Science Some experts have warned that bribing children to eat healthy foods can be counterproductive, undermining their intrinsic motivation and actually increasing disliking. Lucy Cooke and colleagues have found no evidence for this in their new large-scale investigation of the issue. They conclude that rewards could be an effective way for parents to improve their children’s diet. ‘…rewarding children for tasting an initially disliked food produced sustained increases in acceptance, with no negative effects on liking,’ they said.

Over 400 four- to six-yearolds tasted six vegetables, rated them for taste and then ranked them in order of liking.

Whichever was their fourthranked choice became their target vegetable. Twelve times over the next two weeks, most of these children were presented with a small sample of their target vegetable and encouraged to eat it. Some of them were encouraged with the reward of a sticker, others with the reward of verbal praise, while the remainder received no reward (a mere exposure condition). A minority of the children formed a control group and didn’t go through an intervention of any kind.

After the two-week period, all the intervention children showed equal increases in their liking of their target vegetable compared with the control children. However, when given the chance to eat as much of it

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as they wanted (knowing there was no chance of reward), the kids who had previously earned stickers chose to eat more than the kids who’d just been repeatedly exposed to the vegetable without reward.

At one- and three-month follow-up, the intervention children’s increased liking of their target vegetable was sustained regardless of the specific condition they’d been in. However, in terms of increased consumption (when given the opportunity to eat their target vegetable, knowing no reward would be forthcoming), only the sticker and verbal praise children showed sustained increases.

So, how come previous studies have claimed that bribery can undermine children’s intrinsic motivation, actually leading to increases in disliking of foods? Cooke and her colleagues think this may be because past lab studies have often targeted foods that children already rather liked.

Consistent with this explanation, it’s notable that past community studies that reported the successful use of rewards targeted unpopular vegetables just as this study did.

An important detail of the study is that verbal praise was almost as effective as tangible reward. ‘Social reward might be particularly valuable in the home,’ the researchers said, ‘because it may help parents avoid being accused of unfairness in offering incentives to a fussy child but not to the child’s siblings.’

I One programme from psychologists is Food Dudes: see www.fooddudes.co.uk and www.bps.org.uk/fooddude

‘I’ve got something to tell you…’

In the September 2010 Issue of Ethics and Behaviour Client confidentiality in psychotherapy only goes so far. If a client threatens the therapist, another person or themselves, and the threat is perceived as serious, then most jurisdictions (including the BPS ethics code) recognise this as a valid reason to breach the client’s privacy and go to the authorities. But what if the client confesses to a past violent act for which they were never prosecuted? What if they tell their therapist that they’ve previously murdered someone?

Steven Walfish and his colleagues have investigated this issue in a survey of 162 US psychological psychotherapists recruited randomly via the National Register of Health Service Providers. Astoundingly, 21 of the psychologists said that on at least one occasion they’d had a client disclose in therapy that they’d murdered someone, but never been found out (one unlucky psychologist said they’d encountered this scenario six times!).

Around two thirds of the psychologists said they’d had a client disclose having committed an act of previously unreported sexual assault, and the same proportion had had a client disclose a previously unreported act of physical assault. The majority said disclosure of past physical assault had happened on three or more occasions; one of them said it had happened more than 200 times.

From an ethical point of view these disclosures of past violent acts are trickier to resolve than threats of future violence, especially if there’s no other

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

reason to believe that the client remains a threat. Among the psychologists surveyed in the current research, the majority (63.2 per cent) said such disclosures had had a neutral effect on therapy, 18.8 percent said it was harmful to therapy and a similar proportion (17.9 per cent) viewed it as beneficial.

From a therapeutic perspective, the researchers pointed out that those therapists who viewed the disclosure negatively were at obvious risk of ‘negative countertransference’. This is a fancy way of saying that the disclosure could negatively affect the way the therapist relates to their client, especially if the therapist has themselves previously been a victim of violence.

Psychotherapists could be trained to guard against this, but Walfish and his colleagues point out that it’s not unusual for therapists to be attacked or threatened by clients and so: ‘fears of potential client violence

may not always represent an unresolved conflict on the part of the therapist.’

Somewhat worryingly, nearly one fifth of the current sample did not feel fully informed about what to do when a client makes a disclosure about past acts of violence, and nearly two thirds felt inadequately prepared for the situation by their graduate training.

Walfish and his colleagues concluded that therapists need to be prepared to hear any material in their consulting rooms, ‘regardless of how unusual or unpleasant’. They also need to be aware of their own emotional reactions to disclosures of past violence, how to maintain their own safety, as well as their legal and ethical obligations. ‘Graduate training programmes, internship and postdoctoral training settings, and continuing education courses should be encouraged to explore this often difficult topic area in greater depth.’

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 lots more reports, references and links, an archive, comment and more. Also, if you missed our tinyurl.com/sinweek special, do take a look.

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LETTERS

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Smoking in mental health – time to quit Why is it that smoking in mental health settings is still taken for granted, and that smokers with mental health problems are rarely offered comprehensive support to address their tobacco dependence?

Contrary to common perception, mental health patients’ motivation to quit can rival that of the general population, and they can give up smoking successfully when given appropriately tailored support (Banham & Gilbody, 2010; Siru et al., 2009). Given the high rates of smoking in this population and the resulting levels of smoking-related illness and premature death (Brown et al., 2000; Joukamaa et al., 2011) – with smoking being a major contributor to the immense health inequalities present in this group – one would naturally expect tobacco dependence treatment to be part of the standard care package for patients (West et al., 2000). However, even since the implementation of the smoke-free policy, there is very little evidence of comprehensive smoking cessation support for patients in NHS acute or community settings (McNally et al., 2006; Ratschen et al., 2009).

A pilot project aiming to implement a comprehensive tobacco dependence support and treatment service on

inpatient wards and in the community, funded by the Department of Health as part of a bigger programme addressing smoking-related health inequalities, is currently carried out at the University of Nottingham. At the start of the project, we found that the treatment of tobacco dependence received very little (if any) attention in the settings covered. Hardly any standard instruments or procedures were applied to ensure that addressing smoking was part of the care pathway, and essential resources, such as protected staff time and routine stocking of nicotine replacement therapy, were missing.

Additionally, common staff attitudes such as ‘they can’t quit,’ ‘smoking is all they have got’ and ‘it’s not a good time for them to stop’, combined with using cigarettes as an engagement tool, often meant that patients were not receiving comprehensive education and advice to enable them to make an informed choice about smoking.

Although it is early days, we feel the project has already made an impact. We have found that when given sufficient

information on smoking, patients often make the choice to address their smoking.

Our two smoking cessation advisers have experienced great interest in their service and successfully helped an encouraging number of patients to reduce (in a structured way with clear goals) and quit smoking in both acute and community settings. This, along with information sessions for staff (some of whom have

Ethics and sexual orientation

contribute

We are responding to Josh Schwieso’s response (February 2011) to Sylvia Kapp’s letter ‘“Treating” homosexuality is unethical’ (December 2010). Dr Schwieso’s position that the moral majority should determine what forms of sexual identity, behaviour and desire are deviant, pathological and warranting of correction is deeply disturbing.

Firstly, Dr Schwieso misquotes Ms Kapp as contrasting the broad spectrum of human sexual behaviour (including homosexuality) with that which is deviant and pathological; he misses the critical statement from Ms Kapp that homosexual

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

identity and behaviour ‘is, in itself, not problematic’. Clearly, there are behaviours, such as sexual violence, which are covered by the criminal law and occur in both heterosexual and homosexual contexts, but these are problematic because of the nature of the act rather than the sexual orientation involved. Further, Dr Schwieso conflates and confuses the terms ethical, criminal, deviant and pathological and argues that ‘what is accepted as appropriate and desirable in society is measured against ethical norms’. However, rather than advancing any ethical principles to

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

measure behaviour against, he refers instead to ‘widespread criminal and pathological behaviours that most people [our emphasis] would see as needing some form of treatment’.

Secondly, Dr Schwieso argues that evidence that a treatment is ineffective does not mean that effective treatments should not be pursued. He compares homosexual desire with ‘serious personality disorders’ which are also ‘resistant to cure’. Clearly, the wish to continue to search for an effective ‘cure’ for homosexual desire only makes sense in an internal world where such desire is

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

not permit the publication of every letter received.

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

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it taking it for granted begin to systematically challenge smoking in mental health and thus help to halt the increasing health inequalities their clients are facing?

Camilla Parker Elena Ratschen University of Nottingham References Banham, L. & Gilbody, S. (2010). Smoking cessation in severe mental illness: What works. Addiction, 105(7), 1176–1189.

Siru, R., Hulse, G.K. & Tait, R.J. (2009). Assessing motivation to quit smoking in people with mental illness: A review. Addiction, 104(5), 719–733.

Brown, S., Barraclough, B. & Inskip, H. (2000). Causes of the excess mortality of schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry, 177(3), 212–217.

Joukamaa, M., Heliovaava, M., Knekt, P. et al. (2011).

Mental disorders and cause-specific mortality.

British Journal of Psychiatry, 179, 498–502.

West, R., McNeill, A. & Raw, M. (2000). Smoking cessation guidelines for health professionals: An update. Thorax, 55(12), 987–999.

McNally, L., Oyefeso, A., Annan, J. et al. (2006). A survey of staff attitudes to smoking-related policy and intervention in psychiatric and general health care settings. Journal of Public Health, 28(3), 192–196.

Ratschen, E., Britton, J., Doody, G. & McNeill, A. (2009).

Smoke-free mental health units: Avoiding the pitfalls. General Hospital Psychiatry, 31, 131–136.

Paul A. Howard-Jones’s article (‘From bran scan to lesson plan,’ February 2011) provides an inspirational model for using neuroscience to develop teaching methods in school. However, as an educational psychologist I share the concerns expressed in the article about widely accepted ‘neuromyths’ within education and elaborated in Marc Smith’s letter (March 2011). Marc Smith wonders ‘why this kind of misinformation persists despite research to the contrary’.

I can start to answer this from my early experience as an educational psychologist. I picked up a range of neuromyths, including teaching to match learning styles and brain gym to integrate left–right hemispheric functions, from experienced educational psychologists and community paediatricians. Although not included in my training, I initially assumed them to be evidence-based, until I was asked by a teacher whether I would recommend brain gym. I tried to find some research to back up a recommendation and could find none.

It was a salutary experience.

Marc Smith also asks how we as a Society might start to address misconceptions. From my own experience, I would suggest starting with initial training From brain scan courses for to lesson plan psychologists so T that they are fully prepared to tackle the misconceptions they will soon encounter. Another place to focus is the teaching of psychology in schools. Whereas subjects taught as part of the main curriculum are carefully designed to engage students in critical thinking, psychology – in the guise of study skills or social/emotional skills – can slip things in as ‘fact’ rather than scientific claims to be interrogated.

Perhaps this is an area where the Division for Teachers and Researchers can raise awareness of issues, along with the Division for Child and Educational Psychology, and new generations of students could be equipped to critically evaluate psychological claims made in all spheres of life.

ARTICLE

TIM SANDERS

also quit successfully) on the links between mental health and smoking has fired up support from staff for our project, which has in turn had a positive impact on patients. We are really encouraged by our success so far and, supported by the mental health trust, we are working hard to make the service even more accessible and tailored to the needs of mental health clients, and to get clinicians on board.

If we continue to make an impact, then we hope the initiative may last beyond the end of this nine-month project.

Our success to date highlights the question: Given that quitting is arguably the single best thing someone can do to improve their quality of life, why are mental health patients not given the opportunity of support to achieve this? Tobacco dependence and mental health/illness are intricately interwoven and we believe that tobacco dependence treatment should be given as much consideration as treatment for mental health problems. Could and should psychologists, with their expertise in behavioural support and mental health,

Persistence of neuromyths

Paul A. Howard-Jones asks how can we use insights from neuroscience to provide more effective teaching and learning

John Waite Victoria Clarke Andy Halewood Naomi Moller Department of Psychology University of the West of England Bristol

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

questions

Counselling Psychology (of which three of us are members) state: ‘Practitioners will challenge the views of people who pathologise on the basis of such aspects as sexual orientation.’

We believe that the values and principles of respect, which are integral to our profession as psychologists, should extend to a celebration of the diverse forms of human experience, behaviour and identity and that any professional practice should be built on the goal of supporting each of us in achieving a positive identity and in being able to celebrate our differences as well as our similarities.

What sort of research is needed to translate our understanding of the brain into educational practice?

resources

seen as pathological.

Thirdly, he accuses Ms Kapp of focusing ‘only on those forms [of nonheterosexual sexuality] approved by liberal societies’. We can see no references in Ms Kapp’s letter to specific sexualities or behaviours and we are left to wonder what the forms of sexual desire or behaviour are that Dr Schwieso sees as exclusively homosexual and which cannot be characterised ‘as anything other than deviant’.

The reasons for rejecting the practice of ‘treating’ homosexual desire and identity are clearly laid out in Ms Kapp’s letter and are supported by the APA, the RCP and the BPS. The BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct (2009) states: ‘Psychologists should respect individual, cultural and role differences, including (but not exclusively) those involving… sexual orientation.’ The Professional Practice Guidelines for the BPS Division of

www.neuroeducational.net – website of the Neuroeducational Research Network, co-ordinated from the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol.

Howard-Jones, P.A. (2010). Introducing neuroeducational research: Neuroscience, education and the brain from contexts to practice. Abingdon: Routledge.

Howard-Jones, P.A. (2010). The teacher's handbook of TWIG: Minds, brains and teaching with immersive gaming.

Raleigh, USA: www.Lulu.com.

references

The idea that we should use our burgeoning understanding of the brain to improve education has a commonsense feel about it. But the past history of brain-based learning, with its unscientific and unevaluated concepts, suggests there are many pitfalls. A new type of research is needed to bridge the gap between these two very different disciplines, and psychology will be an important part of this venture.

Blackwell, L.S., Trzesniewski, K.H. & Dweck, C.S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263.

Blakemore, S.J. (2008). The social brain in adolescence. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 267–277.

Blakemore, S.J. & Frith, U. (2005). The learning brain. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cantlon J F Brannon E M Carter E J

What will be the role of psychology in such a venture?

consequent educational interventions improving language outcomes and remediating these differences in neural activity (Shaywitz et al., 2004; Simos et al., 2002; Temple et al., 2003).

Neuroscience is also shedding light in other areas of education, providing insight into the link between exercise and learning (Hillman et al., 2008), and prompting reexamination of teenage behaviour (Blakemore, 2008). Perhaps as importantly, it is established scientists that are now promoting neuroscience as having educational value (e.g. Blakemore & Frith, 2005; de Jong et al., 2009; Goswami, 2004). Indeed, neuroscientists appear increasingly willing to speculate on the possible relevance of their work to ‘realworld’ learning, albeit from a vantage point on its peripheries. Such speculation often comes under the heading of ‘educational neuroscience’ – a term that broadly encompasses any cognitive neuroscience with potential application in education.

Accordingly, its research basis might be characterised by the epistemology,

he last decade has seen something of a step change in efforts to bring cognitive neuroscience and education together in dialogue. This may partly be due to anxieties over the ‘parallel world’ of pseudo-neuroscience found in many schools. Much of this is unscientific and educationally unhelpful, and there is clearly a need for some serious ‘myth-busting’ (see box).

There may, however, be a more positive reason why discussions are breaking out between neuroscience and education. Ideas are now emerging from authentic neuroscience with relevance for education. For example, neuroscience has helped identify ‘number sense’ (a nonsymbolic representation of quantity) as an important foundation of mathematical development and associated with a specific region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus (Cantlon et al., 2006).

As we learn to count aloud, our number sense integrates with our early ability to exactly represent small numbers (1 to 4) to ‘bootstrap’ our detailed understanding of number. Such insights have prompted an educational intervention Research is needed to bridge the gap between yielding promising results laboratory and classroom (Wilson et al., 2009). Or take the field of reading: children with developmental dyslexia have shown reduced activation in typical methodology and aims of cognitive left hemisphere sites and atypical neuroscience. But, moving from engagement of right hemisphere sites, with speculation to application is not

& Pelphrey, K.A. (2006). Functional imaging of numerical processing in adults and 4-y-old children. PloS Biology, 4(5), 844–854. de Jong, T., van Gog, T., Jenks, K. et al.

(2009). Explorations in learning and the brain: On the potential of cognitive neuroscience for educational science.

New York: Springer.

Fiorillo, C.D., Tobler, P.N. & Schultz, W. (2003) Discrete coding of reward

probability and uncertainty by dopamine neurons. Science, 299, 1898–1902.

Goswami, U. (2004). Neuroscience and education. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 1–14.

Gracia-Bafalluy, M. & Noel, M.-P. (2008).

Does finger training increase young children’s numerical performance?

Cortex, 44, 368–375.

Hillman C H Erickson K I & Framer

A.F. (2008). Be smart, exercise your heart: Exercise effects on brain and cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 58–65.

Howard-Jones, P.A. (2008). Fostering creative thinking: Co-constructed insights from neuroscience and education. Bristol: ESCalate.

Available online via www.neuroeducational.net Howard-Jones P A (2010) Introducing

Rachel Ingram Wray, Lancashire

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NOTICEBOARD I I am a trainee counselling psychologist at Regent’s College.

My doctoral dissertation is examining the experiences of counselling psychologists working in English as a foreign language.

It focuses on the process of communication between the psychologists and the clients.

I wish to interview (trainee) counselling psychologists who practise in English, but for whom it is not their mother tongue.

The study has ethical approval.

The interview will take place at a convenient location for approximately one hour. If you would like to participate in this research, please contact me.

Anastasiya Golovina golovina@cantab.net, 07746 746708 I A group of researchers from a consortium of universities are researching the relationship between the science and practice of the profession. This is key to the identity of much applied psychology and central to the work of occupational psychologists. In order to help further our understanding of the way in which we work as scientist-practitioners, we are currently conducting a survey exploring the extent to which we adopt an evidence-based form of practice and the ways in which we bridge the scientistpractitioner divide. If you are a psychologist working in the field of business, industrial, work, organisational or occupational psychology we would be very grateful if you could take just a few minutes to complete it at the following link: tinyurl.com/483wcnq The results will provide valuable information about how we operate as occupational psychologists and a summary of the main findings will be made available via the Division of Occupational Psychology website.

Please also pass this request on to relevant colleagues and ask them to complete the survey for us as well.

Jan Francis-Smythe Centre for People at Work University of Worcester

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Is IAPT the only political option?

Recent concerns about the sustainability of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative, in a context of dramatically imposed fiscal savings, provides us with the opportunity to have a hard look at the rationale for psychological interventions.

We are of the view that the model enthusiastically embraced in the UK and now being adopted in Australia reflects a medical, not psychological, approach to common human unhappiness.

The prevailing design of services centres around the notion of delivering the optimal ‘dose of treatment’ to those people whose symptom scores are outside the normal range on standardised tests.

Self-referrals to services are relatively uncommon. Those who miss appointments are followed up with letters reminding them of their missed appointment and admonishing them that they may be discharged from the service. People who stop attending before the clinician thinks treatment has ended are described as treatment ‘dropouts’. Those who do not fully embrace the activities the

clinician presents to them are described as ‘non-compliant’, ‘difficult to engage’, ‘treatment resistant’ or ‘lacking insight’.

These practices exist despite the fact that recognising people’s right to selfdetermination (including their right to withdraw from the receipt of services) is one of the core ethical values of the British Psychological Society (BPS, 2009).

These observations point up a medicalised approach to conceptualisation and intervention whereby, unquestioningly, unhappy people are turned into patients (Dowrick, 2008). But supposing that not everyone with ‘presenting symptoms of anxiety or depression’ is ‘wasting their lives’ (London School of Economics, 2006): what if they are experiencing a normal and intelligible variation on experience (human suffering)? Our suffering can be endured or comforted but it is not selfevidently a ‘mental illness’ to be ‘cured’, this time by conversational rather than chemical ‘treatments’.

Moreover, an original premise of the IAPT treatment ideology was that if we are able to ‘cure’

What needs fixing?

‘mental illness’ then its ‘sufferers’ will return to work and incapacity benefits expenditure will be reduced.

What if it is the oppressive work setting that needs fixing and not the individual? This is akin to treating shellshock in the First World War, with the hope of sending people back to the violent setting of their experience.

And does the economic rationale of this medicalisation

FORUM TWITTER DEBATE This month’s question via @psychmag – If you were conducting a census to assess the psyche of the nation, what would you ask?

Who is responsible – you or ‘them’? (@KarenPine) Do you class yourself as in love with a partner? (@maddiebartlett) How many friends do you have that you consider ‘close’; how many friends do u have on SNs (fb etc) (corr'd w efficacy/well-being) (@aleksk) Do you feel you have a purpose in life? (@peterkinderman) Which 5 emotions do you feel most often? (@CraigHarper19) What do you think is your key motivation in living your life? (@celticchickadee) What are your top 3 Guilty Pleasures? (@realdaveakerman) Honestly: do you hear voices? If so, what do they say? (@bluetreehouse) Fake royal wedding invite? Tick boxes for yes/no. Invite for 'reception only' so it looks authentic. (@Jo_hockey) Join the debates by following @psychmag at www.twitter.com/psychmag

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FORUM WEB CHAT even make sense? Based on the evidence that about one in five or six people report symptoms of a common mental disorder in a 12-month period (London School of Economics, 2006) and less than half of those people access professional services for these problems, we have invested a large amount of public funds in increasing the services available. However, only a proportion of those people experiencing symptoms of a mental health disorder express a perceived need for treatment. In an Australian survey conducted in 2007 about 20 per cent of respondents reported experiencing symptoms of a mental disorder (Meadows & Burgess, 2009) and approximately 65 per cent of those people did not access any services. However, those who reported symptoms and had a perceived need for treatment and were not accessing services made up only 2 per cent of the sample.

Whether we set our target on 65 per cent or 2 per cent of those people reporting symptoms of a mental disorder has enormous implications for public spending, especially as the cut off between normal unhappiness and a professionally codified disorder is not easy to make in the general population (Wakefield & Schmitz, 2011).

Perhaps a truly biopsychosocial approach is now warranted, rather than the type of model described above with its medicalised character (Pilgrim, 2002).

A proper adoption of this would pay close attention to the individual and their interactions in the social contexts that they occupy.

We would prioritise the agency of individuals and would recognise the fundamental

importance of people being able to control what is important to them (Mansell & Carey, 2009). Moreover, we would not presume that the technological fix assumed in the IAPT approach to mental health policy is the only option for society. Unhappiness happens to us all, to varying degrees, during our lives for a large variety of reasons: being ‘treated’ for it is only one of many political and ethical scenarios.

Timothy A. Carey Centre for Remote Health and Central Australian Mental Health Service David Pilgrim University of Central Lancashire References British Psychological Society (2009).

Code of ethics and conduct.

Leicester: Author.

Dowrick, C. (2004). Beyond depression: A new approach to understanding and management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

London School of Economics (2006). The depression report: A new deal for depression and anxiety disorders.

London: LSE Mental Health Policy Group.

Mansell, W. & Carey, T.A. (2009). A century of psychology and psychotherapy: Is an understanding of ‘control’ the missing link between theory, research and practice?

Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 82, 337–353.

Meadows, G.N. & Burgess, P.M. (2009).

Perceived need for mental health care: Findings from the 2007 Australian Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 43, 624–634.

Pilgrim, D. (2002). The biopsychosocial model in Anglo-American psychiatry: Past, present and future?

Journal of Mental Health, 11, 585–594.

Wakefield, J.C. & Schmitz, M.F. (2011).

The challenge of measurement of mental disorders in community surveys. In D. Pilgrim, A. Rogers, and B. Pescosolido (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of mental health and illness. London: Sage.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Recent funding announcements made by several of the UK’s main research councils prompted Jon Simons, a psychology lecturer at Cambridge University, to post an item on his blog in February headlined ‘Is there a cognitive neuroscience funding crisis?’ His question triggered a flow of comments, some even questioning whether the field deserves the funding it gets.

Simons compared the funding available when he became a lecturer in 2007 to today’s situation in which the BBSRC, the Wellcome Trust and the ESRC have all either announced reprioritisations away from psychology or ceased specific grant schemes, especially for budding researchers.

‘It is obvious that new researchers are the most vulnerable and in need of support in developing their research careers,’ he wrote.

‘If such individuals feel that the UK funding bodies are making it simply impossible for them to do that, they will either go abroad or leave science completely. And if that happens, a cutting edge field in which the UK has been one of the world leaders within only the last few years, will face a future of rapid and inescapable decline.’

Several commenters shared Simons’ concerns. Among them was Mark Baxter, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies the neural mechanisms of learning. Until recently he was based at Oxford University but he’s relocated to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York. He warned: ‘In certain research areas (like mine) it's essentially impossible to find personnel in the UK with appropriate training, and once a base of well-trained research staff is gone, it's gone forever.’

Another commenter, Jon Roiser at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, added the British Academy’s Research Development Award to Simons’ list of newly lost opportunities for early-years researchers.

But not everyone was sympathetic. David Colquhoun, an esteemed pharmacologist at UCL, said the question that needs to be asked is whether brain-imaging experiments ‘are starving cheaper, more basic, studies of funds’. He suggested that focusing resources on cognitive neuroscience at the expense of more basic sciences is an example of ‘trying to run before one can walk.’ He also criticised a landmark paper in the field – Eleanor Maguire’s demonstration that taxi drivers have enlarged posterior hippocampi. ‘I felt … that the discussion [of the paper] failed to consider properly the many confounders that bedevil the interpretation of this sort of observational epidemiology,’ he said. ‘It does worry me slightly that cognitive people did not seem to appreciate some of these problems.’

This drew a robust response from one of cognitive neuroscience’s big beasts, Geraint Rees, based at UCL. He argued that it’s unwise to judge the quality of science based on intellectually lazy newspaper reports (Colqhoun later retorted that his criticisms were of the journal paper itself). ‘I don't think the kind of intellectual chauvinism that David espouses is very helpful,’ Rees wrote, ‘because it presupposes that one particular level of enquiry is right and that we can determine that in advance. This seems to me to be a very dangerous strategy when trying to understand a complex organ like the brain unless you are blessed with the power of God-like prescience.’

I Read and contribute to the debate at tinyurl.com/6fbka6x Christian Jarrett is staff journalist on The Psychologist.

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

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MORE NEW DEADLY SINS In the February issue, Christian Jarrett’s article on The Deadly Sins proposed six new sins for the 21st century and called on you to fill the vacant spot. Here are some more of your suggestions.

If you missed the article and the subsequent ‘sin week’ on the Research Digest blog, see tinyurl.com/sinweek.

Exaggerated self-esteem with facebook obsession. The first symptom of this is usually shown by the loud exclamation ‘Oh, didn’t you know that Bob/Bill/Sam/Kate/Emma had broken her leg/got drunk/been potty trained/been on holiday? I put it on facebook.’

The person will seem confused. As their understanding of the world is that (a) everyone is on facebook and (b) everyone wants to know what is happening in their lives.

Tracey Jones Stourbridge ‘Fraping’, otherwise known as facebook rape. The practice of obtaining another’s password and posting photographs or comments on their wall, with the intention of causing for instance, hurt, embarrassment, ridicule or amusement. Some teenagers willingly divulge their password to ‘friends’ in order to participate in the ‘game’. Since postings cannot be deleted, this could have serious consequences in an age where potential employers check on people’s facebook pages, and where defamation of character online or cyber bullying are growing issues. Unwise postings could also invite unwanted attention, resulting in child protection issues.

Teenage emulation. Adults causing teenagers to cringe by attempting to emulate their mode of dress, musical tastes, pastimes or slang, including their manipulation of the meaning of words (e.g. ‘blood’, ‘bro’, ‘wicked’, ‘shut up!’). This emulation is blindly carried out by adults with the aim of either hanging on to their youth or gaining credibility. Inevitably, this entails treating all teenagers as a socially homogeneous group. The reductionist characteristics monopolised on are predominantly those stereotypes portrayed in the media and popular culture.

Ros Napper Andover Over-expression of feelings in the media. This is often, but not always, committed by a celebrity letting the public know their response to an upsetting event, which can consume the media for days. Of equal concern/irritation is the misappropriation of the word ‘devastated’ to describe feelings more accurately described as disappointed, annoyed, etc. It would be considered devastating to lose a child but not, for example, to regain weight lost by dieting.

I blame Oprah.

Marie Stewart Preston Acquired a-manners – being too busy for common courtesies. Simple and quick acts of gratitude are declining in modern society. It is thought that these act as Skinnerian positive reinforcements for good behaviour. If, for example, another driver is courteous, you thank them and this encourages similar behaviour in the future.

Communal-agnosia – ignoring the importance of community.

There is a definite loss of community in the modern world; particularly in urban areas. Community spirit shouldn’t be underestimated as an important factor in any life. ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ schemes appear to me to be trying to readjust this deficit, but their effectiveness is, to my knowledge, unknown.

Ben Hunt Undergraduate, Bournemouth University

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High time for men?

With strange logic, Peter Branney and Brett Smith argue against the establishment of a ‘Male Gender Section’ because it would supposedly continue an entrenched idea that there are ‘simply two sexes’ (Letters, March 2011). In that case the Psychology of Women Section should be discontinued as well.

On the BPS website the Psychology of Women Section there are the following stated aims: ‘Bring together everyone with an interest in the Psychology of Women; Provide a forum for the Psychology of Women in research, teaching, and professional practice; Increase awareness and action around gender and inequality issues within the British Psychological Society, Psychology profession, and the teaching of Psychology’.

There is no reason there should not be a Section with similar aims, focusing upon men

rather than women.

Indeed, either there should be both Sections or there should be neither. If there is just one, how is this not discriminatory and sexist? It also needs to be pointed out that there are 11,508 men and 35,741 women who currently have BPS membership, very far from equal numbers. Moreover, university entry generally, but especially in psychology, is now increasingly dominated by young women, and boys lag behind girls in exam results in school. How are these facts not the result of antimale sexism, at the very least in institutionalised form within the educational system in Britain?

It seems high time there was a Psychology of Men Section, to ‘increase awareness of and action around gender and inequality issues’.

Ian Wray Sheffield

The interesting debate over the need for a Psychology of Men Section continues. Most recently, Peter Branney and Brett Smith question this need on the basis that a male section would entrench dualism with respect to constructed gender categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’. I was very happy to see such theories discussed within the pages of the psychologist as they are not widely understood and offer important insights into the fluidity of ‘gender’.

However, I felt that their argument actually strengthened the case for a Psychology of Men Section, as opposed to their view, that such a Section would reinforce dogmatic assumptions.

They suggest an online forum for the topic, but I would like to know what they would call this and whether it would be possible to avoid reference to men? I would also be interested in their opinion on the existence of a Psychology of Women Section. Like Peter Branney and Brett Smith, I am of the view that we exist in a society with entrenched and unhelpful views of gender but, without a Psychology of Men Section, how can we address issues such as the significantly higher suicide rate in men, the lower life expectancy and the higher rates of drug abuse and likelihood of imprisonment? Male terminology for such a section is not ideal, but it would offer a starting point and the space to address many issues, including those expressed by Peter Branney and Brett Smith.

Tom Grange The Northgate Clinic, Edgware Community Hospital

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Forces children: both seen and heard Lynne Hipkin expressed her interest in hearing from ‘any psychologists currently working with forces families’ (Letters, January 2011).

Contrary to the assertion that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) does not acknowledge that service children may need support, we can assure her that this is, of course, recognised by the MoD. The MoD employs clinical, occupational and other applied psychologists, whose jobs involve psychological research, professional advice, policy development, and treatment of serving personnel and their families.

For centuries, the military has understood that fighting power is influenced by the well-being of the immediate family of service personnel.

Indeed, current Army Welfare Policy states: ‘The British Army recognizes that supporting soldiers’ families contributes directly to a soldier’s operational effectiveness. The British Army is therefore committed to ensuring that all Army families are provided with additional support, both during their soldier’s deployment and in the event of a family emergency.’

The importance of the family is not simply an Army issue. Tri Service policy acknowledges the central role of the family too: ‘The critical connection between welfare and operational effectiveness affirms that the support provided for Service personnel and their family is “core” Armed Forces business.’

Furthermore, the MoD has a Director Children and Young People, whose team’s function is to provide support and promote the well-being of service children.

As the military acknowledge that family welfare is core business it is not surprising to learn that military psychologists, from different disciplines, conduct a considerable amount of work involving families. In addition, the MoD commissions work from independent psychologists and collaborates with others in the UK and overseas, consequently the MoD has access to a huge body of research in support of service families.

The psychological research underpinning MoD support for families is varied. For example each service conducts Service Families Attitude surveys (developed and analysed by psychologists)

so that the views of spouses can be heard and family policy can be evidence-based.

Recent work commissioned by the MoD, conducted by Haldane-Spearman Consortium psychologists, includes: work on the impact of separation on serving personnel, which identifies the impact on children and suggests measures that the MoD should make to improve their wellbeing; a study into the provision of welfare support to families during separation, comparing the MoD with other employers of personnel deployed overseas; and a literature review of support to parents with young families.

In addition, the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR) has conducted a number of studies, funded by the MoD, looking at communication with service families, the impact of the deployments to Iraq on service families and negotiating work–life balances in the armed forces.

Currently, KCMHR is engaged in a major study on the impact of children of having a father in the military. The study will help policy makers provide better for the needs of children of military personnel.

Military psychologists work routinely to provide advice to service personnel

who deal with support to service families during bereavement; military welfare organisations; chaplains; and teachers at schools that educate service children.

In British Forces Germany (BFG) educational psychologists and social workers work directly with children and families and work closely with BFG Health and Psychiatric services which includes clinical psychology. In the UK, MoD social workers provide support to the families of patients and work closely with all military mental health professionals, including clinical psychologists, in care planning and with the delivery of mental health services.

Finally, it should be noted that research involving service children as participants requires ethical approval and an independent MoD Research Ethics Committee scrutinises research protocols.

We trust that this reply has reassured readers of The Psychologist that the MoD does understand that ‘a serving soldier’s family is perhaps the most valuable resource in terms of his or her well-being’ and that we consider that this is ‘significantly recognised in terms of psychological research’.

G.J. Walker-Smith Head of Profession for Occupational Psychology, MoD J.G.H. Hacker Hughes Head of Profession for Clinical Psychology, MoD

Normal reporting I read with interest the letter by Alexis Makin (‘Deadly normalisation?’, March 2011). Makin responds to a ‘Media’ page I had written, on behalf of the BPS Media and Press Committee, about a seminar on improving the mental health among UK military personnel. Makin raised the idea that this ‘Media’ page, in addition to an advert for the Royal Navy that appeared in the same edition, may have inadvertently contributed to the normalisation of state violence.

I would like to pick up on Makin’s comments about the necessity of speaking out against institutions that may be seen as morally responsible for the suffering of military personnel.

Such political comments are beyond the usual scope of the media page; its job is simply to report on psychological topics that have attracted some degree of media attention or are to do with the promotion of psychology as a discipline. The goal is not to discuss political issues such as the legitimacy of foreign conflicts. This is not to say that political issues are not important, but that there are other forums in which to discuss them.

Makin’s own letter demonstrates apparently strong personal opinions against the idea of foreign conflict (e.g. referring to ‘imperial violence in Afghanistan’) and the need for psychologists to speak out against this (e.g. by following a more ‘preventative approach’).

I applaud the strength of these convictions and I believe that psychology does indeed have a role to play in politics (such as the APA’s comments about torture: tinyurl.com/4tke96q) but a ‘Media’ page reporting on an event designed to help UK service personnel is not the place.

Mark Sergeant BPS Media and Press Committee

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Psychology, religion and spirituality Joanna Collicutt opens the special issue

R

question

Why study religion?

resources

Argyle, M. (1999). Psychology and religion: An introduction. London: Routledge.

Hay, D. (2006). Something there: The biology of the human spirit. London: Darton Longman & Todd.

James, W. (1983). The varieties of religious experience. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1902)

references

In January 2002 The Psychologist published a masterly review article by the late distinguished social psychologist Michael Argyle, entitled ‘State of the art: Religion’.

Nine years later, following the events of 7 July 2005 and the rise of ‘new atheism’, religion and the related concept of spirituality have become more prominent in public consciousness. There are now more British psychologists involved in the study of religion, as researchers, teachers or practitioners. It is therefore timely that the field is reviewed, this time by several writers in this single issue of The Psychologist.

Argyle, M. (1986). The psychology of happiness. London: Methuen.

Csof, R-M., Hood, R., Keller, B. et al.

(2009). Deconversion. Goettingen: Vandenhoech & Ruprecht.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The god delusion.

London: Bantam Press.

Ecklund, E. & Scheitle, C. (2007). Religion among academic scientists. Social Problems, 54, 289–307.

Ginges, J., Hansen, I. & Norenzayan, A.

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eligion, if nothing else, is a profoundly human phenomenon, and therefore amenable to study by psychologists. In his 2002 article for The Psychologist, Michael Argyle proposed treating religious faith as an attitude – something with cognitive, behavioural and emotional components, and he strongly emphasised the social dimension of all of these. In the last five years one aspect of religious cognition – belief in God – has come under unparalleled scrutiny (Wolf, 2006). In his 2006 polemical book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins questioned why intelligent human beings persist in holding beliefs that are seemingly irrational or inconsistent with empirical evidence.

As any cognitive therapist will recognise, this is at its heart a psychological question, and Dawkins indeed draws heavily on the relatively new field of cognitive science of religion (see the article by Justin Barrett and Emily Reed Burdett on p.252) to inform his answer.

The ensuing debate continues to fascinate and divide public opinion. Psychologists have the potential to make a positive contribution to this debate by clarifying some of the basic conceptual assumptions, carrying out good empirical research, disseminating it effectively and, perhaps most of all, by ensuring that it is interpreted appropriately on all sides.

Turning to religious behaviour, it is regrettable but understandable that religious violence, including hate crimes against religious groups, has captured the attention of the press and government agencies. It was in this context that the

(2009). Religion and support for suicide attacks. Psychological Science, 20, 224–230.

Hood, R., Hill, P. & Williamson, P. (2005).

The psychology of religious fundamentalism. New York: Guilford.

James, W. (1983). The varieties of religious experience. London: Penguin.

(Original work published 1902) Jones, J. (2008). Blood that cries out from the earth: The psychology of religious

AHRC/ESRC ‘Religion and Society Programme’ was launched in 2007.

This initiative supports interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and social sciences aimed at better understanding the complexities of interaction between belief, culture and society, with a view to informing social policy in this area. In its first phase alone it was responsible for over £3 million of research funding, supporting projects in sociology, education, anthropology and geography, which examined prosocial as well as troubling aspects of religious faith. Psychology barely features among the funded projects, perhaps because psychology of religion has such a low public profile in Britain. (There is a promising psychological literature on religious fundamentalism and the separate phenomenon of religious violence, but it is largely American; see, for instance Ginges et al., 2009; Hood et al., 2005; Jones, 2008).

What of religious emotion? This seems increasingly identified with the phenomenon of ‘spirituality’. Spirituality is often contrasted with religion (e.g. Koenig et al., 2001), with the former usually thought to be more individualist than collectivist; more emotion-focused than practice-focused; more inwardly than outwardly directed; more informal than highly structured, with self-actualisation more important than sacrificial demands and duties; and more anti-authoritarian than religion is.

All the great faith traditions incorporate spiritual practises aimed at feeding the inner life, and many find this separation of spirituality from religion objectionable (Pargament, 1999). On the other hand people in Western society are developing a well-documented tendency to describe themselves as ‘spiritual-butnot-religious.’ Results of a recent crosscultural study indicate that 40 per cent of American respondents and 20 per cent of German respondents fall into this group, which includes atheists (Csof et al., 2009).

This seems to be a postmodern phenomenon involving the privatisation and individualisation of certain aspects of religion, particularly altered states of

terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Koenig, H., McCullough, M. & Larson, D. (2001). Handbook of religion and health. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pargament, K. (1999). The psychology of religion and spirituality? Yes and no.

International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 9, 3–16.

Peterson, C. (2006). The values in action

classification of character strengths.

In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. Selga Csikzentmihalyi (Eds.) A life worth living: Contributions to positive psychology (pp.29–48). New York: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, G. (2006). The church of the nonbelievers. Wired (November).

Retrieved 14 June 2010 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 14.11/atheism_pr.html

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consciousness. These are valued as means psychology and the worldwide of enabling self-transcendence and development of positive psychology. supporting personal growth.

However, I have also wondered if the focus Psychologists are no exceptions to this on spiritualities shorn of their religious social trend. As a group we are famed for roots does not pose a danger to the life of our low levels of religious beliefs and these very spiritualities. A wild rose that affiliation (Ecklund & Scheitle, 2007). Yet works in the chaos of a thorny hedgerow in recent years there has been an explosion may wilt when plucked and put in a vase of our interest in meditation techniques, on the mantelpiece. The solution then is particularly ‘mindfulness’, as a therapeutic to breed the sort of rose that will survive in resource, to the extent that it is beginning the new environment, preferably without to feel somewhat like a panacea. In 1997 thorns – to turn the rose into a userthe creation of the Consciousness and friendly commodity. This new specimen is Experiential Psychology Section of the perhaps still recognisably a rose, but much British Psychological Society established has been lost in the process. a home for the growing This is a theme that numbers of psychologists I was able to explore at interested in the ‘inner life’ more length when aspects of human delivering the inaugural spirituality.

Michael Argyle Public In 2002, at the time Lecture on Psychology Argyle was surveying the and Religion in Oxford field of psychology of in 2008. The lecture religion, the first meeting came at the end of of the European Network a one-day conference of Positive Psychology was for British psychologists taking place at Winchester, working in the areas of rapidly followed by a religion and religious special issue of The spirituality. Following Psychologist devoted to this on from a first meeting emerging area, which has in 2006, a ‘Psychology ‘Spiritual-but-not-religious’? since grown exponentially. and Religion UK’ Positive psychology has an network had been set extremely close relationship up, and it was clear that with the psychology of religion and much exciting work is taking place in the spirituality, for both are concerned with areas of research, teaching and practice, personal growth and meaning. As if to some of it showcased in the articles in this demonstrate this, Argyle himself had an special issue of The Psychologist. interest in both areas, publishing his book Nevertheless the group identified some The Psychology of Happiness in 1986, long considerable challenges: I Credibility: Psychologists who work in before the term ‘positive psychology’ was the area of religion feel that this area is coined. not always taken seriously by their Positive psychology, which is psychological colleagues. influenced by Aristotelian ethics, I Centrality: Religion is often treated as concentrates on those aspects of human a peripheral specialist area of interest that behaviour that are thought to contribute is not central to human life. to personal and community flourishing.

I Trustworthiness: Psychologists who study These are conceived of as universal religion may be suspected of having a character strengths or habits, such as hidden agenda of trying to make integrity, forgiveness, kindness and converts. gratitude (Peterson, 2006). Crucially, I Religious diversity: Despite some recent these character strengths were originally advances, much more work needs to be identified with reference to the virtues done with non-Christian faith traditions. espoused by the great faith traditions of I Identity: The majority of academic the world. Positive psychology talks of psychologists who study religion are these faith traditions with respect, but employed in university religious studies essentially understands them as womb-like of theology departments. These receptacles that have housed and nurtured psychologists have to work hard to character strengths, and may now be ready connect with ‘mainstream’ psychology. to give them up to the world. Positive I Career advancement: Obtaining funding psychology thus has a definite ‘spiritualfor psychological projects related to but-not religious’ feel. religion is extremely challenging. There As a psychologist interested in both are very few academic posts available, religion and spirituality, I have very much and choosing to do a psychology PhD welcomed the increasing recognition of the on religion is perceived as risky. importance of consciousness in British

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

I Methodological and conceptual

conservatism: Postmodern perspectives have yet to be fully exploited in the psychological study of religion.

None of these challenges was seen as insuperable. Indeed, their identification has provided a useful agenda for the further development of the psychological study of religion in Britain. As part of this, closer links with the related-butdistinct enterprises of positive psychology and consciousness studies are to be encouraged.

As might be expected in a more religious culture, the situation in the USA is rather different from that in Britain. The APA Division 36 ‘Psychology of religion’ has been established for over 30 years.

This may in part be attributable to the fact that the founding father of modern American mainstream psychology, William James, had an intellectual fascination with religion, while remaining personally agnostic. His systematic studies are described in the Gifford Lectures of 1901–02, written up as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this highly readable book James identifies with amazing prescience the questions that still exercise psychologists who study religion today: I What is the relationship between institutionalised religion and personal spirituality?

I What is the difference between functional religion and dysfunctional religion (what James calls the ‘healthy minded’ and the ‘sick soul’)?

I How can empirical psychologists avoid philosophical reductionism (what James calls ‘medical materialism’) in their study of religion?

I Is religion an area of human behaviour just like any other that can be studied with the usual methods and theories, or does it require a special approach?

I Should we be talking about universal religion or local religions or both?

As I struggle with these compelling issues in my work, my answer to the question ‘Why study religion?’ becomes clear: because it’s relevant to urgent questions facing society; because without it we have an impoverished understanding of human spirituality; but most of all, like Mount Everest, simply because it’s there.

Joanna Collicutt is at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and Heythrop College, University of London joanna.collicutt@hmc.ox.ac.uk

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The cognitive science of religion Justin L. Barrett and Emily Reed Burdett look at the psychology behind religious experience and belief

W

question

What are the current key areas of research in the field of cognitive science of religion?

resources

Atran S. (2002). In gods we trust: the evolutionary landscape of religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barrett, J.L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God? Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

Slone, D.J. (Ed.) (2006). Religion and cognition: A reader. London: Equinox.

references

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is a scientific approach to the study of religion that combines methods and theory from cognitive, developmental and evolutionary psychology with the sorts of questions that animate anthropologists and historians of religion. Specifically, CSR explores causal explanations of religious phenomena (thoughts, ideas, practices and experiences) across peoples and populations. It asks ‘How does ordinary human psychology inform and constrain religious expression?’ Four current prominent topics in CSR are introduced here: teleological reasoning about the natural world; children’s acquisition of God concepts; ‘minimal counterintuitiveness theory’; and religion and prosociality.

Barrett, J.L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God? Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

Barrett, J.L. (2007a). Is the spell really broken? Bio-psychological explanations of religion and theistic belief. Theology & Science, 5(1), 57–72.

Barrett, J.L. (2007b). Keeping science in cognitive science of religion: Needs of the field. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E. Harris et al. (Eds.) The evolution of

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hy is religion so common around the world? Why do some religious ideas and practices outcompete others? Why do religious practices take on common characteristics across cultures, and how deeply imbedded in human history and nature is religion? The cognitive science of religion (CSR) tackles questions such as these, attempting to understand the reasons for initial acquisition, recurrence, and continued transmission of religious concepts and behaviour.

Psychologists – particularly scientific psychologists – have the training and tools to address such issues, providing an empirically solid bridge to connect sociocultural theorising on one side with biological and evolutionary theorising on the other (see Barrett, 2007b; Gibson & Barrett, 2007). In recent years a number of empirical reports relevant to theories in CSR have appeared, providing a welcome move away from the area’s increasingly tenuous and speculative theorising. In this brief article, we review this research with an emphasis on experimental studies and an eye toward what is needed next.

Teleological reasoning about the natural world In a series of experiments, Deborah Kelemen and her collaborators have demonstrated that from the pre-school years children – American and British at least – have propensities to see things in the natural world as purposefully designed. Because of this ‘teleological bias’, Kelemen suggests that children may

religion: Studies, theories, and critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press.

Barrett, J.L. (2008). Coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness in religious concepts: Theoretical and methodological reflections. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20, 308–338.

Barrett, J.L., Burdett, E.R. & Porter, T.J. (2009). Counterintuitiveness in

be particularly receptive to the idea of a creator deity (Kelemen, 2004). In addition to continuing research with children, Kelemen has begun exploring whether this teleological bias persists into adulthood.

Casler and Kelemen (2007) carried out a study with American and Romanian Roma adults and American schoolchildren participants. They presented the children with realistic drawings of scenes that included unfamiliar animals, and then asked them about both the animals and the surrounding natural features. For instance, the drawing might show an animal surrounded by pointed rocks. The children would be asked why the animal had smooth skin or long necks, but also ‘Why do you think the rocks were pointy?’

There were two response options and the children were asked to select the one that ‘made the most sense’. One option was always a mechanistic/physical explanation (e.g. ‘They were pointy because little bits of stuff got piled up on top of one another for a long time’) and one was a purposeful/functional explanation (e.g.

‘They were pointy so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them’). Romanian Roma adults with little formal schooling (less than six years on average) were more than twice as likely to endorse purposeful answers than highly educated Roma adults (averaging approximately 12 years of schooling). They also more closely resembled American schoolchildren (first through fourth grades) than either highly educated Romanian adults or American adults. These results suggest that the tendency toward extending teleological reasoning from living to non-living natural things may recur across cultures, and that it is not merely outgrown but must be outeducated for it to go away.

More recently, Kelemen and Rosset (2009) provided experimental evidence that, under conditions of high cognitive demand, even science-educated adults show signs of scientifically inappropriate teleological reasoning. They presented American university science students with explanations for various natural

folktales: Finding the cognitive optimum. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3), 271–287.

Barrett, J.L., Newman, R.M. & Richert, R.A. (2003). When seeing does not lead to believing: Children’s understanding of the importance of background knowledge for interpreting visual displays. Journal of Cognition & Culture, 3(1), 91–108.

Barrett, J.L. & Nyhof, M.A. (2001).

Spreading non-natural concepts: The role of intuitive conceptual structures in memory and transmission of cultural materials. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 69–100.

Barrett, J.L., Richert, R.A. & Driesenga, A. (2001). God’s beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agent concepts. Child Development, 72(1), 50–65.

Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of

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phenomena under one of three conditions: unspeeded, moderate (5000ms of presentation), and fast (3200ms of presentation). Participants in the speeded conditions – particularly the fast condition – endorsed markedly more purposeful explanations than those in the unspeeded condition. It appears that cognitive resources are needed to override a bias toward explaining the natural world in a teleological manner.

These intriguing findings would certainly be strengthened by replications with additional stimuli sets, alternative methods, and with different cultural populations. As they stand, they suggest one possible cognitive reason for the culturally widespread existence of religious beliefs in deities that either order or create the natural world: such ideas resonate with an early developing and persistent intuition that the natural world looks purposefully designed.

Positing a designer (or designers) fits with our intuitions.

would know what was in the packet or be fooled by appearances. Three-year-olds easily attributed super-knowing to both God and human beings. Sometime

native animals, a human puppet and various supernatural agents (e.g. the Catholic God, the Sun God, the forest spirits, and the ChiiChi – spirits often invoked by parents to children who misbehave) would know what was found in the ho’ma. Similar to past studies, (Barrett et al., 2001; Knight et al., 2004) children did not use an anthropomorphic approach to reason about God, but said that God would know what was in the ho’ma. Children who did not pass the test (i.e. did not understand that humans could not know the true contents), tended to attribute super-knowledge to all agents, including natural and super-natural ones. Children who passed the false belief task, however, differentiated the various supernatural entities. Though only four to seven years old, they approximated adult perspectives of the various agents, reasoning that the Catholic God would know what was in the ho’ma, the Sun God and the forest spirits were next most likely to know, and all three of these knew better than the fallible ChiiChi, humans, and animals. These children could Children’s acquisition of differentiate various agents in this god concepts Children can reason about God non-anthropomorphically task as soon as they understood from as early as three years old Piaget (1929) proposed that, until false beliefs, but before this around age eight, children reason threshold, treated all agents like from an anthropomorphic God. viewpoint, and see God as the ‘man in the between ages four and five children Other research has called some of these sky’. This view was largely accepted until appear to stop attributing super-knowing conclusions into question. Recent studies a series of studies suggested that not only abilities to humans; children of this age suggest that instead of being biased to can children reason about God nonrealised and enjoyed the fact that attribute super-knowledge, very young anthropomorphically, but they may do so ‘Mommy can be fooled’ but persisted in children – at least at certain points in from as early three years old (Barrett et the belief that God knows the true development – instead simply adopt an al., 2001, 2003; Knight et al., 2004). contents. They distinguished Godegocentric approach: whatever the child These studies used ‘false belief tasks’ and cognition from human-cognition. knows she assumes all other agents know other methods derived from cognitive Using a similar false-belief task, Knight as well (Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007). developmental research on theory of (2008) showed Yukatek Maya children, At this point it is unclear whether the mind – how we reason about others’ aged four to eight years, a ho’ma (a drieddifferences in findings between studies mental states. For instance, children who out gourd conventionally used to hold are due to differences in study design or had been shown that a biscuit packet tortillas). Instead of the assumed tortillas, differences in the population studied. actually contained stones were asked underpants were revealed to be inside the More careful examination of different whether adult human beings and God gourd. Children were asked if various populations and religious traditions –

religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits, and ancestors. London: Random House.

Boyer, P. & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations.

Cognitive Science, 25(4), 535–564.

Casler, K. & Kelemen, D. (2007). Reasoning about artifacts at 24 months: The developing teleo-functional stance.

Cognition, 103(1), 120–130.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The god delusion.

London: Bantam Press.

Dennett, D. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon.

New York: Viking.

Gibson, N.S.J. & Barrett, J.L. (2007). On

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

psychology and evolution of religion.

In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, R. Genet et al.

(Eds.) The evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press.

Gregory, J. & Barrett, J.L. (2009).

Epistemology and counterintuitiveness: Role and relationship in epidemiology of cultural representation. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3), 289–314.

Guthrie, S.E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children ‘intuitive theists’? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15(5), 295–301.

Kelemen, D. & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults.

Cognition, 111(1), 138–143.

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perhaps especially Islam, Judaism and other traditions that lack an anthropomorphic incarnation – would be especially welcome.

Minimal counterintuitiveness theory At stake in these child development studies is just how ‘intuitive’ religious thought is. ‘Intuitive’ here relates to how readily ordinary cognitive systems can represent these ideas. If an idea is readily represented, it is more likely to be generated and more likely to be communicated, accounting for the prevalence of that idea.

The research reported above represents a growing body of work suggesting that many religious ideas are largely intuitive.

One prominent contributor to CSR, Pascal Boyer, has argued that ideas that are mostly intuitive but have just a little tweak or two are the best candidates for transmission (Boyer, 1994, 2001). An example would be a carpet that behaves in all respects like a normal carpet, except that it can fly. Such ideas combine the processing ease and efficiency of intuitive ideas with just enough novelty to command attention, and hence receive deeper processing. This has come to be known as the ‘minimal counterintuitiveness’ (MCI) theory, and has received a fair amount of empirical attention since 2001 (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001).

Though initial studies appeared to demonstrate that slightly counterintuitive ideas are remembered more readily than both wholly intuitive ones and more radically counterintuitive ones, subsequent studies provided more mixed results. One of us has suggested that these alleged ‘failures to replicate’ were the result of ambiguities in how to operationalise counterintutiveness (Barrett, 2008). To address this problem, Barrett developed a formal scheme for coding and quantifying counterintuitive concepts, and then demonstrated the utility of this scheme in analysing folktales from around the world (Barrett et al., 2009). True to Boyer’s

Knight, N. (2008). Yukatek Maya children's attributions of belief to natural and non-natural entities. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8, 235–243.

Knight, N., Sousa, P., Barrett, J.L. & Atran, S. (2004). Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: Cross-cultural evidence.

Cognitive Science, 28(1), 117–126.

Makris, N. & Pnevmatikos, D. (2007).

Children's understanding of human

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predictions, when these tales – the products of oral traditions – had counterintuitive objects in them, they were always minimally counterintuitive.

The first published experimental study using Barrett’s coding scheme did not yield simple confirming or disconfirming evidence (Gregory & Barrett, 2009): in a recall task using decontextualised MCI items (e.g. ‘a fly that is immortal’) and control items, participants under 25 years old did remember MCI items significantly better than intuitive items. But those over 25 years remembered MCI items significantly worse than intuitive items.

Taken with previous research, these results point to at least three possible explanations: I It may be that once extracted from a narrative context, MCI concepts are not readily remembered because they require more elaboration than ordinary concepts.

I The early findings that MCI ideas are more easily remembered may be entirely dependent upon their ready ability to generate meaningful thoughts, explanations, and predictions – their ‘inferential potential’ (Boyer, 2001).

I It may be that Boyer’s hypothesised transmission advantage for MCI concepts interacts with age.

Religion and prosociality Some cognitive scientists of religion suggest that once religious ideas and practices emerged in human groups, they endowed these religious folk with survival and reproductive advantages over non-religious competitors. That is, religious practices are thought to be adaptive, and this adaptiveness would have encouraged their persistence (either through genetic selection, cultural selection, or gene–culture co-evolution dynamics). A common thread of these arguments is that religious ideas and practices somehow yield communities of people that are more cooperative or prosocial than they would be otherwise.

and supernatural minds. Cognitive Development 22, 365–375.

Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Pichon, I., Boccato, G. & Saroglou, V. (2007). Nonconscious influences of religion on prosociality: A priming study. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37(5), 1032–1045.

Rochat, P., Morgan, R. & Carpenter, M. (1997). Young infants’ sensitivity to

Correlational evidence of various sorts has been produced in support of this thesis, but recently experimental evidence has appeared that offers some support for these accounts.

Using a sample of Belgian psychology students, Pichon et al. (2007) found that an act of prosocial intention was increased by subliminal priming with positivevalence religion-related words. Participants completed a lexical decision task – they had to decide whether a briefly presented string of letters was a word or not. Just before each string of words, participants were presented with one of a number of words from one of four categories: religion-related with positive valence (e.g. heaven, praise); religionrelated with neutral valence (e.g. mitre, altar); not religion-related with positive valence (e.g. freedom, smile); and not religion-related with neutral valence (e.g. shirt, banana). Subsequent to the lexical decision task, as the participants were leaving the laboratory, they were told that they could take some publicity pamphlets for a charity organisation to ‘increase sensitivity’ to the organisation’s mission.

Participants who had been primed with positive religion-related words took the most pamphlets, and significantly more than those who had been exposed to the other three classes of words (who did not differ among themselves). In this context, priming of positive religionrelated ideas was sufficient to produce prosocial behavioural change. With a similar sample and priming procedure, Saroglou et al. (2009) documented a connection between religion-related primes and a forgiving attitude to an unseen harsh critic.

Taking charity pamphlets or adopting a

movement information specifying social causality. Cognitive Development, 12, 537–561.

Saroglou, V., Corneille, O. & Cappellen, P. (2009). ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening’: Religious priming activates submissive thoughts and behaviors.

International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 19(3), 143–154.

Schloss, J.P. & Murray, M.J. (Eds.) (2009).

The believing primate: Scientific,

philosophical, and theological reflections on the origin of religion.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scholl, B. & Tremoulet, P.D. (2000).

Perceptual causality and animacy.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 299–308.

Shariff, A.F. & Norenzayan, A. (2007). God is watching you: Supernatural agent concepts increase prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game.

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forgiving attitude reflect goodwill to others but arguably, neither bears any direct cost to the self. Shariff and Norenzayan (2007), however, presented Canadian participants with the opportunity to decide how much money (out of $10 Canadian) to share with an anonymous other and how much to keep. Participants’ attention to religious ideas was activated by an explicit priming task. The task involved being presented with groups of five words in scrambled order and being asked to rearrange the order of the words and drop one to form a new sentence. In the religion-prime condition, half of the word groups

included a word related to religion (e.g. spirit, sacred). Across two controlled experiments (one with a student sample and one with a general public sample), religious participants gave significantly more money when they had been primed with religious words, as if being subtly (and perhaps unconsciously) reminded of their religiosity was sufficient to make them more generous.

These three experimental studies represent a new wave in research supporting a causal connection between religious ideas and prosocial behaviour.

Naturally, numerous follow-up studies are needed to substantiate the validity of these studies and to address related questions.

What aspects of religion (e.g. beliefs, social identification, existential security, moral teachings, ritual participation) encourage prosocial attitudes and actions? What are the limits of this prosociality? For instance, it may be that only particular types of religiousness or particular levels of

religiosity bear these prosocial marks.

It may also be that forgiveness, generosity, and so on, apply only to members of one’s own social group and not outgroup members.

Conclusion Findings and theory from CSR are sometimes used as part of an argument against the truth or justification of religious belief (Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006). We find no reason to draw such eliminativist conclusions (Barrett, 2007a; Schloss & Murray, 2009). Perhaps such evidence could even be used as part of an argument affirming a divinely implanted receptivity to the transcendent.

Whether any given religious beliefs are true or false, helpful or harmful, to be realised and successfully transmitted they must enjoy some support by human cognitive systems. Here, we are only concerned with the latest published evidence relevant to just how well supported by cognition key religious ideas are.

The literature reviewed in this article does not represent the only recently published or ongoing research relevant to CSR, but it does illustrate the growth of empirical activity in this area. Further, this research adds to our understanding of the state-of-the art in diverse ways. Research concerning teleological reasoning about the natural world affirms and extends Kelemen’s earlier argument. Not only might such a teleological bias occur across cultures, it also appears to extend into adulthood. If so, these early developing biases may continue to anchor reasoning about the world and lend support to theologies that include gods that bring about natural states of affairs. Research on children’s acquisition of god concepts complicates rather than affirms previous research. Though young children clearly do reason about gods and people differently, the claim that children are

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biased to over-ascribe super-knowledge is in need of more disambiguation. It may be that god concepts are not wholly intuitive but only ‘minimally counterintuitive’. If so, they would still be predicted to have a transmission advantage over radically counterintuitive ideas and wholly intuitive ones – or would they? More research is needed. Finally, experimental evidence is beginning to demonstrate that even subliminal priming of religion-related ideas may tilt people toward prosocial action.

Several important areas of theoretical development in CSR have received little or no new psychological empirical treatment in recent years. For instance, Stewart Guthrie’s argument that an evolved system for detecting human-like intentional agency in our environments may encourage belief in gods (Guthrie, 1993), has been under-studied. Certainly humans do possess some kind of functional system that readily detects intentional agents given scant or ambiguous inputs under some conditions (Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000).

This Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (HADD), as one of us has dubbed it (Barrett, 2004), appears to emerge already in infancy (Rochat et al., 1997).

Whether it plays an important role in generating or encouraging the belief in superhuman or supernatural beings, however, has not been satisfactorily demonstrated, let alone whether HADD plays a meaningful part in encouraging belief in the sort of cosmic deities central to many world religions.

The challenge set (Barrett, 2007b) for psychologists to contribute to CSR through empirically testing the reputed mechanisms at play has not gone unmet.

Empirical research in this area is beginning to fill the gap between theory and evidence. Nevertheless, the same need persists to solve some old and some new questions: Psychologists, CSR needs you.

Justin L. Barrett is a research fellow at Regent’s Park College, Oxford and senior researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind. justin.barrett@ anthro.ox.ac.uk Emily Reed Burdett is a doctoral student in the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Oxford University

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The controversial Hans Eysenck Roderick D. Buchanan on ‘probably the most divisive figure British psychology has ever produced’

H

ans Jürgen Eysenck – has there ever But that was not the half of it. been a psychologist like him? Born Eysenck was probably the most in Berlin in 1916 during the Great divisive figure British psychology has ever War, Eysenck was a leading figure in produced. No other psychologist aroused postwar British psychology. He developed such contrary reactions from the public a distinctive dimensional model of and from his scientific peers. While he personality based on factor-analytic introduced psychological science to the summaries, audaciously attempting to masses, he achieved much wider public anchor these dimensions in biogenetic notoriety as some kind of ‘IQ warrior’. variation. Eysenck also played a pivotal The race and IQ issue defined Eysenck in role in the emergence of clinical the public imagination. It is usually the psychology in Britain, tirelessly promoting first thing anyone outside the scientific new behavioural treatment regimes over community can recall whenever his name more traditional psychoanalytic is mentioned. Yet race and IQ was a side approaches. issue for Eysenck and Eysenck’s parents had the brouhaha he ambitions for him in the helped create a bit of “He treated science as theatre, and he wanted to a sideshow. It is not a game, and he played be a physicist. After how Eysenck would to win” graduating from secondary like to be school in 1934, he fled remembered; he tended Hitler’s Germany and to emphasise his more arrived in London the following year. substantive scientific contributions.

He enrolled in psychology at University Likewise, his scientific peers had an College, London, where he took a degree appreciation of him that went beyond the and then rapidly completed a PhD on headlines. However, as anyone interested aesthetic preferences supervised by Cyril in his legacy quickly discovers, the nature Burt. of this appreciation greatly depends on At the outset of the war, Eysenck was who you ask. He was an intellectual declared an enemy alien. Following a spell leader in personality psychology who was as a firewatcher, he landed a job at the greatly admired by a host of students and Mill Hill Emergency Hospital in 1942. influential colleagues, yet repeatedly Headed by the imposing figure of Aubrey dismissed by many critics as arrogant and Lewis, Mill Hill functioned as the self-serving, and all too fond of the relocated Maudsley Hospital. After the limelight. war the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) was Previous accounts of Eysenck’s life and established, a training and research facility work reflected this partisan landscape. affiliated with the Maudsley and Bethlem Eysenck himself supplied versions of his hospitals. The IoP Psychology Department life-story for dictionaries of biography and provided a stable institutional autobiographical collections, as well as environment where Eysenck spent the putting out two editions of a full-length rest of his career. By 1955, he had become autobiography. Provocatively titled Rebel a full professor heading a research with a Cause, they painted a picture of the programme that blended experimental fearless outsider unintimidated by methods with an individual differences established orthodoxy, as childhood perspective. Although he retired in 1983, memories gave way to lengthy accounts his research activities and writing of the various ‘battles’ he engaged in. continued unabated until his death in Moreover, the only biographical account 1997. The heavily cited author of more not written by Eysenck came from an than 80 books and over 1000 scientific acolyte of sorts, H.B. (Tony) Gibson. papers, Eysenck was also a renowned Written in 1981, Gibson’s Hans Eysenck: populariser.

The Man and His Work was necessarily

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incomplete, since Eysenck was still a couple of years away from embarking on an extraordinarily energetic retirement.

Coming to a biography of Hans Eysenck In the Australian summer of 2000/2001, I learnt of a Wellcome Trust-supported project conceived by Trudy Dehue and Maarten Derksen at the Heymans Institute of the Psychology Department at the University of Groningen. Parachuted in, I was given immense support but also great freedom. As a science history specialist from the antipodes, I liked to think I bore no scars, sported no badges of allegiance. To me, Eysenck was just another prominent figure in the annals of the history of psychology. I had mentioned him, sometimes quoted him, when writing about the history of clinical psychology, personality testing and the like. I knew little of his personal history.

Nevertheless, there were some special problems and challenges involved with taking on such a subject. Eysenck so divided his public and his peers that a privileged, singular viewpoint seemed impossible. However, I saw this divergence of opinion as utterly fascinating, positively begging explanation. And by taking it all seriously – even its most idolatrous and salacious extremes – I hoped to avoid accusations that there was something about the man I was avoiding. The legend-making PR of Eysenck’s memoirs buttressed one end of this opinion spectrum. They provided a kind of dialogical foil to compare with more sceptical accounts and the general historical record.

The public man If people can be said to have public professional life, a personal private life, and an inner intellectual life, then my focus was very much on the public professional man. Eysenck revealed only strategic elements of his personal private life, and his immediate family have maintained this stance, choosing not to preserve his personal papers. This fact alone would seemingly place an enormous barrier to any new biography, but in some respects it was quite liberating. It freed me from the obligation to follow the personal aspects of my subject’s story in circumscribed if not authorised terms, and it limited my obligations to the writing of good history.

There was still a considerable amount of archival research to be done, for much of Eysenck’s correspondence, meeting minutes, research proposals had been

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preserved, scattered in various collections around the globe and on the web. But given Eysenck covered so much ground as a scientist and public intellectual, there was more than enough in the public domain to fill several books. He was a man who virtually turned himself inside out: almost every idea, hunch or half thought got put out there, incorporated into a presentation, paper, rejoinder, letter or book.

Doing it his way

always waved away the criticism, his certainty in his own independence was not shared by many observers, nor his indifference to issues of conflict of interest and ethical oversight.

And what of the race and IQ issue?

The controversy certainly took its toll on Eysenck, more than he was prepared to admit. Drawn into it partly out of loyalty and partly as a kind of debating challenge, the controversy blended the scientific, political and the social like no other. Perhaps one would have to go back to his childhood to explain his motivations, for that is exactly what he did. During the controversy Eysenck used his experience of pre-war Berlin to bolster his anti-fascist credentials. The fairly scant records surviving from this period paint a complex but incomplete picture, but they were enough to make some of the claims he made seem a bit of a stretch. His childhood also offered an insight into his distaste for politics and his faith in the superordinate power of science. Today in the era of genome-mapping, it all has a sepia-toned quality. Some but not all of the heat has gone out of the issue as more contingent answers to the nature/nurture dichotomy are put forward. Old political certainties have likewise been muddied. With the dominance of sophisticated biogenetic techniques in the neurosciences and beyond, Eysenck’s conservative nativism – so against the grain in the 1960s and 1970s – now looks both cruder and more prescient.

In the course of getting Playing with Fire: The Controversial Career of Hans J. Eysenck to print in the UK I have learnt a lot about what Simon Singh has described as the most hostile libel laws in the world. That, however, is another story – this is Eysenck’s. Playing with Fire is an attempt to provide a full and frank account of this inveterate controversialist’s career, the man they loved to hate.

CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY, STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY

Despite the banner press and TV glare, Eysenck was actually an intensely shy, somewhat aloof figure. He did not do small talk easily, preferring to talk about work at social gatherings. He was never one for thankless committee work and organisational tasks, and he never fitted in comfortably with established associations, preferring to form his own.

But he had a competitive streak that drove his immense productivity. He treated science as a game, and he played to win. Intellectual debate was a kind of sporting joust. Thus Eysenck and controversy were a natural marriage.

Controversial issues gave him the opportunity to display his dazzling rhetorical skills, affirming a strictly adversarial model of science in the process. It was the game rather than the limelight he was addicted to.

Eysenck never compromised on the simplicity of his three dimensions as sufficient to describe the underlying structure of personality. However, his attempt to reconcile Cronbach’s two schools of experimental and correlational psychology was met with indifference bordering on hostility.

While he may have had the intellectual power and the disciplinary reach to break down such entrenched barriers, his partisan, non-conciliatorily style worked against him.

These personal proclivities also went some way in explaining why Eysenck attracted so much hostility and slander.

Those on the wrong end of his pen or tongue likened Eysenck to a prosecuting lawyer selectively marshalling facts for a preferred point of view. Moreover, he did little to the soothe the bruised egos this produced, little to clarify the doubts. And if some thought of him as a monster, then he was monster of the discipline’s own making. He dominated in an era when quick publications and statistically significant results were the order of the day. Eysenck adapted accordingly. With a postgraduate student army of researchers at his disposal during much of his heyday, he could afford to be more selective than

most, churning out empirical papers and book-length theoretical integrations at will. Replication, adjustment and revision were less rewarded, and often had to wait.

For someone seemingly so ruthless, Eysenck was also quite trusting. He gave almost unconditional loyalty, and he inspired it in return. But his loyalty was not always well placed, as he embraced causes and collaborators no one else would. Increasingly wedded to a past of heterodox positions, he painted himself into several corners. Probably the best example of this was his persistent denial of the carcinogenic effects of tobacco.

Eysenck maintained that cigarettes should

be given the benefit of the doubt, despite the mounting evidence. However, Eysenck received the millions of pounds from the American tobacco industry over several decades, only some of which was declared at the time. Litigation-driven archival stores have made it possible to investigate just how deep this relationship went. The controversial epidemiological research of Ronald Grossarth-Maticek was, Eysenck hoped, the ultimate comeback – since it suggested that psychosocial personality factors where the main culprit. Eysenck extended on and promoted this research tirelessly in the 1980s and 1990s in the face of immense scepticism. While Eysenck

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Editor’s note: For Michael Eysenck’s review of Playing with Fire, see the September 2010 issue or tinyurl.com/4c3v4cm.

I Roderick D. Buchanan is at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne r.d.buchanan@optusnet.com.au

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ONE ON ONE

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research and absolutely right in asserting that good relationships are a sine qua non for therapeutic progress.

…with Richard Bentall

One regret Mismanaged relationships with the opposite sex must be at the top of the list. I suspect the same is true for many middle-aged men. If only life was a dress-rehearsal.

Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool

One misconception about my ideological position I am usually described as belonging to the antipsychiatry camp. A couple of times I have even been compared to Laing, and I can’t work out whether to be flattered or appalled. I think of myself as a fairly hard-nosed empirical scientist and a pragmatic clinician. I’m against the standard way of thinking about mental illness (e.g the reliance on a categorical system of diagnosis and the over-emphasis of genetics) because it is bad science and harmful to patients.

coming soon

resource

One lesson from the developing world Mental health outcomes are at least as good in the developing

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world as in the industrialised West, so either they are doing something right or, at least, we are not doing anything better. Actually, one important thing that people do in the developing world is nothing. Studies in the West show that patients with psychosis who are given minimal medication but good social support do as well as those who receive conventional treatment but, of course, suffer fewer side-effects.

Unfortunately, most Western-trained clinicians find it almost impossible to do nothing.

working self-reflectively day after day, which is very difficult. I don’t count myself as a particularly talented in this way. But if there is a cornerstone of my (broadly

One alternative career Richard Bentall I nearly became a pilot. I’m Richard.Bentall@liverpool.ac.uk far too neurotic to be in charge of an airplane so the world should be grateful that CBT) approach, it is respect I changed tack. for the patient’s way of seeing the world and curiosity about One cornerstone of my own what it entails. Even the treatment approach oddest delusional system is To be a skilled therapist you the end point of the patient’s have to have a particular type honest attempt to make the of temperament and to keep best sense of the world.

‘Writing Madness Explained (2004) was a labour of love, a fantastic opportunity to try and make sense of the wide-ranging but often misunderstood evidence about the nature of mental illness.

A surprising number of service users have written to me to say that they’ve read all 500+ pages.’

One hero When I was a trainee, most discussions about Carl Rogers were along the lines of: ‘Rogers was a nice guy; now let’s talk about CBT’. But he was a pioneer of psychotherapy

Articles on traumatic imagery, teaching happiness, aesthetics, an interview with Alan Baddeley, and much more...

I Send your comments about The Psychologist to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 or to the Leicester office address I To advertise Display: ben.nelmes@redactive.co.uk, +44 (0)20 7880 6244 Jobs and www.psychapp.co.uk: giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk, +44 (0)20 7880 7556

contribute

One moment that changed the course of your career Waiting anxiously to see my psychotherapist for the first time, after becoming depressed following a messy divorce, and thinking, ‘My God, so this is what it’s like to be a patient!’

One thing that organised psychology could do better Psychology has begun to address the promotion of mental health, but this kind of work is in its infancy and, of course, involves political engagement. I like the Wilkinson and Pickett (The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Nearly Always Do Better, Penguin, 2009) concept of evidence-based social policy. We should be working hard to supply the evidence.

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Any young person wanting a research career in psychopathology should be encouraged by how little we know. We do not even know how to describe many psychiatric problems properly.

Be bold, question the assumptions found in textbooks, and keep an open mind about methodology (qualitative, quantitative, physiological – they all have their place).

One superpower The ability to deliver empathy, congruence and positive regard late on a Friday afternoon is an unrecognised superpower.

Much more online at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Think you can do better? Want to see your area of psychology represented more?

See the inside front cover for how you can contribute and reach 48,000 colleagues into the bargain, or just e-mail your suggestions to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

vol 24 no 4

april 2011

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Blogging on brain and behaviour

Awards A wards 2010 20 010

Winner!

W Wi inner! nner!

The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest service: blog, email, Twitter and Facebook ‘An amazingly useful and interesting resource’ Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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