The Psychologist January 2019

the psychologist

the

psychologist january 2019

january 2019

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

John F. Cryan on our microbial world

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

the psychologist

the

psychologist january 2019

january 2019

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk

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

John F. Cryan on our microbial world

the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates.

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Emma Young

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

the

psychologist january 2019

24 Transforming knowledge about

human behaviour

The Human Behaviour

Change Project team on a

unique collaboration between

behavioural and computer scientists 02 Letters

The Brexit

‘carnival’;

fossil fuel divestment;

offending

labels; and

much more

07 Obituaries

10 News

Suicide;

security;

obesity;

and more

18 Digest

The latest research

30 More than a gut feeling John F. Cryan on our microbial world

38 ‘It’s an intriguing world that is

opening up’

Our editor meets Sarah Garfinkel

44 One on one with Peter Dillon-Hooper, our retiring Assistant Editor

48 Careers We hear from Thea Fitch about her work at the Recovery and Wellbeing College; and from Tony Page on the role of writing in psychology.

54 Jobs in psychology

58 Books Including Alan Baddeley

62 ‘The rain turned into tiny bits of gold falling from the sky’ We talk memory with Hilde and Ylva Østby

68 Culture Including Uta and Chris Frith on ‘Modern Couples’

72 Eye on fiction Martin Milton on A Little Life

76 Looking back … on the Hawthorne Studies 80 A to Z

There’s nothing like an Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Psychobiology Section for bringing on my impostor syndrome… it can be pretty high-end stuff, and this year I bashed out a report on the train home (see tinyurl.com/ psychobio18), terrified that any grasp I had on it all was slipping. But they have always done an excellent line in keynote speakers who can engage and inform our wide audience, and this year was no exception: I hope you will join Sarah Garfinkel and John Cryan on their fantastic voyages through brain, heart and gut.

Later on in the issue there’s a bit of a memory theme, in the form of interviews with Alan Baddeley and with sisters Hilde and Ylva Østby. And Father Christmas makes a festively timed appearance in our ’Looking back’.

Also this month we shine a spotlight on a man who has been working away behind the scenes of the BPS for more than 20 years now – our Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper.

Happy retirement, Peter, you’ve earned it.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

The Brexit carnival Tim Sanders/www.timonline.info

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Recently, Prime Minister Theresa May warned that she would not ‘give in’ to those calling for a second EU referendum, saying that such a vote would be a ‘gross betrayal of our democracy’. Yet I argue, from a social psychological perspective, that what we’ve been witnessing isn’t so much an exercise in democracy as a gargantuan and protracted carnival. It’s a pageant of unruly forces that have lain dormant for many years but that have now burst forth, invading the body politic and catching everyone off guard.

Carnivals are found all round the globe. Although they come in various shapes and sizes, there are several fundamental features that they have in common. One is that carnivals only last for a limited period, during which time the official world, with its trappings of respectability and convention, gives way to an unofficial, festive world of extravagant costumes, music, laughter, feasting, drinking and revelry. While the official world is founded on respect for rank, and on restraint and responsibility, the temporary and unofficial world of the carnival is dedicated to licence, excess and abandonment. Where everyday life is serious and deferential, carnivals are playful and mocking. Their purpose is not to uphold the status quo, rather to expose and undermine it – to celebrate the forces of renewal and regeneration rather than those of orthodoxy and stability. This feature of carnivals is sometimes called ‘inversion’ or ‘reversal’, a reference to the topsy-turvy character of carnivals in which rulers are replaced by their subjects, solemnity by ribaldry, and caution by recklessness. At the end of the carnival (such as the Roman Saturnalia), the ‘Master of Ceremonies’ is often cruelly dispatched – a ritualised way of killing off the old in order to make way for the new.

While Brexit hasn’t involved carnivalesque feasting, carousing or drunkenness – unless of course we include those photo ops of politicians quaffing beer in pubs round the country – there have been unusually high levels of ridicule and derision. Like carnival fools or clowns mocking the established order, the Leavers lampooned the Remainers, who in turn did everything in their power to make the Leavers look stupid and irresponsible. The carnival humour has been typically grotesque, prone to hyperbole, and illustrative of a fantasian picture of

everything that the carnival has to offer. There are several obvious candidates for the role of ‘Lord of Misrule’.

Everyone taking part in a carnival knows that what you do and say during the celebrations doesn’t count. Your actions and utterances exist in another world, completely separate from the one to which everyone returns when the carnival is finished. And typically, when a carnival is over, everything that was associated with it is dismantled and disappears. But that hasn’t happened with Brexit.

Instead of the unofficial world of the carnival giving way to the official world of normality, it’s actually invaded the official world, and it shows every sign of continuing for many years to come.

It is also intriguing that several of the main ‘Brexit clowns’, having absented themselves from the scene in the usual carnivalesque way after the vote itself, have now returned to the tent. Their one concession to the public is arguably to have abandoned the clown car in favour of the gravitas train…

The carnival does have redeeming features. It involves everyone; equally inclusive and egalitarian. And the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out that carnivals encourage what he calls ‘misalliances’ – improbable partnerships between individuals who wouldn’t typically have anything to do with each other (think Sadiq Khan and Ruth Davidson). Perhaps there are lessons for the politics of the future here.

Similarly, political campaigners must surely learn the lessons of the carnivalesque aspects of what mobilises voters. Carnivals are unruly, energetic, inspiring and cathartic. They’re about vitality, renewal, excitement and fun. So when one side of a referendum becomes infused with the spirit of carnival, it’s bound to garner a lot more support than the prospect of things remaining unchanged.

Given the choice between a Rabelaisian world of laughter on the one hand and a humdrum world of austerity and officialdom on the other, many people inevitably choose the former. The big challenge for Britain – and even more so for the United States – is how to ‘de-clown’ politics.

Dr Peter Collett Oxford For a full version of this argument: tinyurl.com/brexitcarn

the psychologist january 2019 letters

Expressing political disapproval A long time ago, when organisations were prepared to invest more time and resources in management skills training, I co-delivered a series of senior management courses in interpersonal skills.

The courses were based on behaviour analysis research that had identified the interactive behaviours which differentiated average and superior performers in a variety of managerial situations.

The specific behavioural taxonomy which we used was that of Neil Rackham (1978) and comprised 11 categories: Proposing, Building, Supporting, Disagreeing, Defending/ Attacking, Testing Understanding, Summarising, Seeking Information, Giving Information, Bringing-in and Shutting Out. Amongst the most interesting findings of Rackham’s Huthwaite Research Group were the different effects of using two particular behaviours to express disapproval: Disagreeing and Defending/ Attacking. The former was defined

as ‘A behaviour which states a direct disagreement or which raises obstacles to another person’s concepts or opinions. NB Disagreeing is about issues’. The latter behaviour’s definition was ‘A behaviour which attacks another person, either directly [You are stupid] or by defensiveness [Don’t blame me, it’s not my fault; it’s his responsibility]. They are usually about people, not issues’. It was added ‘Defending/attacking behaviours usually involve value judgements and often contain emotional overtones’ (Rackham, 1978, pp.11–12).

The use of Defending/Attacking was criticised for (1) eliciting a similar response from others, leading to a defend/attack spiral where tempers became frayed; (2) moving the discussion away from the issues under consideration (3) reducing participant satisfaction with the meeting; (4) a reduction in Proposing and Building behaviours; (5) a longlastingly bad after-taste with the encounter (pp.40–41). In contrast,

Disagreeing about issues had no such enduring negative effects.

In a parallel study, Rackham and Carlisle (1978) discovered that ‘average’ negotiators used Defending/Attacking behaviours three times more than ‘effective’ negotiators.

In the febrile context of domestic and international relations, it strikes me that politicians needing to express disapproval would be better served by a greatly reduced use of Defending/Attacking behaviours.

Clearly, the increased availability and over-use of instantaneous means of communication is not helping the situation.

Dr Hugh McCredie Balsall Common, Coventry References Rackham, N. (1978). Interactive skills.

Sheffield: Huthwaite Research Group.

Rackham, N. & Carlisle, J. (1978). The effective negotiator. Part I: The behaviour of successful negotiators. Journal of European Industrial Training, 2(6), 6–11.

Family identity It was with great interest that I read Professor Antonia Bifulco’s sensitive article on family identity and emotional geography (November 2018), as there are parallels between her family story and my own. Of course, exploring family history can be fascinating and lead one into a new and enriched awareness of oneself, as the author describes. She is probably luckier than many others to have had so much excellent surviving material at her disposal.

However, this is not the case for most people, who have huge gaps in their family history, and this is where problems often start. When a family is troubled, and seems unable to escape their pain, they may well be carrying within them a past they no longer know of, or which was too painful to remember, and which – unknowingly – haunts them still. Many of those whose families lost numerous members in both the world wars are still affected by this past suffering. Holocaust survivors’ families, in particular, are well aware of such dynamics.

Systemic or family constellation work uncovers such legacies, entanglements and other traumata, often exhibited by destructive and seemingly inexplicable

patterns of behaviour. Revealing these can have a transforming effect on those involved, bringing peace to a previously dysfunctional and dystopic family system.

There is a growing body of literature in this field, well worth the attention of those dealing with individuals and families struggling to cope emotionally.

Edward Zawidowski MA (Oxon), BSc, MBPsS Heitersheim, Germany

Climate change – is psychology up to the challenge?

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Getty Images

The recent discussions in The Psychologist on the importance of using psychology to help in solving problems of climate change call for an honest and open debate on the nature of our discipline. The issue of climate change and that of mental health are seldom far from the headlines, and it is time to ask whether psychology is up to the daunting task of offering the powerful insights needed.

It is sometimes said by politicians that diversity is society’s strength.

Similarly, diversity is often suggested as desirable in psychology, its lack being regularly bemoaned by some; but do we all really welcome diversity? Surely psychology must by its nature be diverse, a unique subject made up of traditional scientific approaches situated alongside qualitative methods. On the one side, psychology borders sociology and on the other biology, with potentially valuable insights to each side.

Evidence mounts on the dynamic interaction between the social worlds and the biology of the brain. Yet this is hardly welcome news in all parts of our discipline, where a biology/ social dichotomy, more at home in the 1920s, is still popular.

Positive psychology seems to make little acknowledgement of positive reinforcement, even though the school’s original declaration of independence could almost have been written by B.F. Skinner.

Evolutionary psychology rarely acknowledges the role of brains in evolution, an objection brilliantly argued by the late Jaak Panksepp.

I suggest that one of the unfortunate hallmarks of psychology is to take processes and link them inextricably to schools of thought.

Rival schools then dismiss not just the other school but the importance of the associated process. A good example of this is the principle of reinforcement, as advanced by, amongst others, Skinner; himself guilty of doing this. Surely there can be little doubt as to the centrality of this process to our lives, and yet I hear it dismissed out of hand as part of the rejection of behaviourism.

Indeed, I would argue that if we wish to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change, we need to confront head-on the interaction between reinforcement and rule-governed determinants of behaviour. Sadly, as a reaction to

Letters online: Find more at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/debates Deadline for letters for the February print edition is Friday 4 January 2019 Letters received after this date will be considered for the following month and/or for publication online.

Email psychologist@bps.org.uk with the subject line ‘Letter to the editor’.

behaviourism, historically cognitive psychology formed its mirror image.

A particularly toxic confusion of process and perspective rests in the notion of social construction. There can be little doubt that a strong element of social construction lies in our use of language. In my own research area, I confront this every day. Sometimes bad-tempered arguments rage over the meaning of terms such as ‘drug’, ‘disease’ and ‘addiction’, e.g. on whether sexual addiction really exists. These rows arise because it is implicitly assumed by many that such terms have been (can be?) defined in a way divorced from the intention of the speaker. Yet the tragedy here is that those psychologists most involved in discussing the social construction of language seem intent on adopting a fortress mentality, drawing an impermeable wall around themselves, having their own exclusive journals and conferences, seemingly with the intention of keeping others out.

Time is too short.

Professor Frederick Toates Open University

the psychologist january 2019 letters

Investing ethically While we welcome the Society’s bold statement, we do ask that the Trustees, with their investment advisers, now publish the list of their present holdings, together with a timetable for moving these investments into holdings that are not implicated in climate and ecosystem destruction.

Meanwhile members might like to check if their universities, pension funds, banks, employers and other affiliations have made the step of committing to fossil fuel divestment.

Mark Burton Chorlton, Manchester Carolyn Kagan Francis Vergunst Getty Images

We were very pleased to see the Society’s new Investment Policy (see tinyurl.com/y9vfugca) which makes a strong ethical stand on the kinds of companies in which the Society should be investing its capital.

In particular, we would like to draw attention to the exclusion of companies the primary part of whose business is engagement in fossil fuel extraction, as this was something we proposed in these pages back in 2015.

The BPS joins a growing number of professional organisations and charities that have committed to ending their investment in fossil fuels, including the Royal College of General Practitioners, the American Medical Association, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and the Canadian Medical Association. It demonstrates professional leadership and a clear understanding that the extraction of fossil fuels damages not only the environment but also the health and wellbeing of us all.

By making this commitment, the BPS Trustees are adding our voice to those saying that this industry no longer has the social licence to continue quickly extracting and burning the maximum quantity of hydrocarbons, thereby undermining any chance of keeping global temperatures within the minimally safe limit of 2°C of warming.

Moreover, fossil fuel extraction (including more recent methods such as fracking) is increasingly damaging the health and wellbeing of populations living near its extraction sites and contributing to the public health crisis of air pollution, while often leading to serious human rights abuses.

The Trustees’ decision is also a sound move financially. Recent studies have shown there is nothing to gain from continuing to invest in what were once sound investments. Now we know that there is a need to leave at least four fifths of known fossil fuels unburnt, there is an increased risk of these investments ceasing to give a return (the assets being stranded).

Ditching offending labels I write to hopefully start a semantic revolution of sorts within forensic psychology. For whilst the field of offender rehabilitation has undergone considerable revolution of its own, the language used within it seems anachronistic.

To provide a brief history, in the 1970s Robert Martinson declared that ‘nothing works’ to rehabilitate those convicted of criminal offences.

However, researchers identified that a range of positive and significant decreases in recidivism were possible as long as practitioners adhered

to Risk, Need and Responsivity principles. We then started to gain a better understanding of what desistance looked like and how change happens. The focus was more on strengthening pro-social identities, instilling hope and a sense of autonomy. Tony Ward and colleagues proposed a Good Lives Model, where universal Goods are strived for, and described how, if we helped service users to realise they could reach their goals in a more pro-social way, we might discourage offending behaviour.

What we now have is a biopsychosocial model of change building on the Good Lives Model with Risk, Need and Responsivity principles. Interventions have been designed to offer service users the opportunity to strengthen biological, psychological and social resources for change. Instead of a confessional approach, forcing offenders to take responsibility for their offending, the key focus is on strengthening their ‘New Me’ by learning skills, understanding how their ‘Old Me’ is typically triggered, and ‘trying on’

pro-social strategies, like trying on a from the chief executive

different pair of shoes. The language of these interventions embodies shift in of culture: One of thethe strengths a we have NMSorganisation (New Me membership Strengths), (Becoming is its ability BNM to bring New Me),people and Kaizen (a together who share Japanese meaning a passion,word to provide them ‘continual development’). with a collective voice andSo why are weto finding it so a platform be able to hard to adapt our on general language influence a wider scale. to suit?Successful Why are we clinging on to professional labels theby past? bodies amplify voices, notofjust bringing together Let’s start with the name their own members, but also by reaching out to of the that run in prisons other like-mindedprogrammes organisations.

Ourare member nationwide: ‘Offending Behaviour networks are already undertaking some impressive partnership working, and I’m keen to build on this by forging more alliances on a strategic level.

That’s why we recently took the lead in forming an alliance of organisations on the HCPC’s proposals to significantly increase their registration fees for over 23,000 practitioner psychologists. Society members are rightly concerned about the soaring cost of registration – if the proposals go ahead, fees will have increased by almost 40 per cent since 2014.

Based on your feedback, the Society submitted a robust response to the HCPC consultation calling on them to reconsider imposing increased fees for 2019.

We also coordinated nine other professional bodies and trade unions representing other HCPCregistered professionals to write an open letter to the regulator challenging the increase. While we wait for the outcome of the consultation, we have clearly strengthened our relationships with other organisations and built a solid platform for partnership working.

In November, we published a joint statement with the Royal College of Psychiatrists in The Lancet Psychiatry, outlining a set of principles for how we should discuss often contentious mental health topics in the public domain; and last month we joined the Mental Health Policy Group calling for parity of esteem for mental health services as the NHS moves forward with its 10-year plan.

Developing strategic relationships is important, but it is only part of the drive to increase our influence. Supporting individual Society members who are leading the way in forging new partnerships is a priority for the coming year. For example, we recently committed to funding the evaluation of three pilot sites where clinical psychologists are leading the delivery of new models in primary-care settings.

Why not get in touch to discuss how we can deliver an impact that benefits our members, raises the profile of psychology and champions the work that so many of our members are engaged with?

Sarb Bajwa is Chief Executive of the British Psychological Society. Sarb.Bajwa@bps.org.uk 06

Programmes’. The focus is on the risky, unwanted, Old Me behaviour.

These are programmes for people who identify as ‘offenders’. When negative labels are attached to people, they tend to conform to the stereotypical behaviour of the label, so this goes against the aim of moving people away from criminal and antisocial identities. Instead, should we not be seen as more in the business of ‘Strengthening New Me’?

Are we not ‘New Me Enablers’?

We readily overuse ‘treatment’ and ‘dosage’, both conflations of risk culture and medical model. This language suggests that criminality is a disease to be cured. Instead, let’s use the terms ‘intervention’ and ‘exposure’. The former is appropriate, evoking ideas of intervening when someone’s ‘Old Me’ is strong to coach and strengthen ‘New Me’. The latter speaks about the degree to which a person has been exposed to their ‘New Me’ identities, which is more in keeping with the biopsychosocial

model of change. High-risk men will tend to need more exposure than moderate-risk men. The medical model has been so pervasive it is engrained in our professional identities. Some of us are ‘Treatment Managers’ who hold regular ‘treatment planning’ meetings. When referring service users we consider ‘treatment readiness’ and afterwards of ‘treatment effectiveness’.

But I don’t think that it will be too hard to learn new language, find different ways of describing tasks. Only by doing so will the culture change. I don’t have all the answers, but I do consider myself a ‘Delivery Manager’. I hold Delivery Planning meetings, think about change readiness and a programme’s effectiveness to expose a service user to credible New Me alternatives.

Who is joining me?

Ewen Scott Kaizen Delivery Manager HMP Gartree Leicestershire

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the psychologist january 2019 letters

Freda Levinson (1931–2018) Freda Levinson, who died on 31 August 2018 at the age of 87, graduated in psychology at the University of Manchester in 1952 before going on to work at Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool and the Maudsley Hospital, London, where she obtained a grant to undertake a PhD. Her studies were interrupted by surgery, and she eventually withdrew from the PhD because she was asked to undertake neuropsychological assessments on people pre- and post-frontal lobotomy, which she found abhorrent and unethical.

In 1968, she moved to Harperbury Hospital, Radlett, where she began to discuss with the Head of the Psychology Department, Dr Richard Mein, the creation of what was to become the North West Thames Regional In-Service Clinical Psychology Training Course, which accepted its first trainees in 1971 and of which she was appointed Course Director in 1972. The preliminary work in establishing a credible course, for which she negotiated funding from the then North West Thames Regional Health Authority, required an extraordinary effort within a relatively short period, and was a product of Freda’s critical thinking, determination, organisational skills and persuasiveness. Year on year she achieved an increase in the course’s funding, including negotiating the provision of a dedicated building for the course within the grounds

of Harperbury Hospital. However, in 1989 it was one of the first in-service clinical psychology courses to be put out to tender, and the clinical psychology training provision for North-West Thames was transferred to University College London in 1990. Freda’s subsequent retirement caused her great sadness, but she continued to develop and provide disability awareness training within the NHS and for other organisations.

At a reunion in 2009 for ex-trainees of the course that she directed, and staff who had collaborated with her, Freda expressed great satisfaction with the considerable achievements and reputations within the profession of her former trainees, who have been a credit to the course.

Although it cannot be said that she was always the easiest of people to work with, there can be no doubting her passion regarding clinical psychology training and disability issues, or the genuine care that she showed for the personal and professional development of her trainees.

Dimitri Sklavounos Former trainee on North West Thames Regional In-Service Clinical Psychology Training Course David Winter Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology University of Hertfordshire

Joseph Duffy (1957–2018) It was a great privilege to have known and worked with Joseph Duffy. He was a remarkable person with great warmth, joviality and a tremendous sense of humour.

Throughout his working life Joe served the educational community of Northern Ireland in various capacities. Having an interest in and a gift for languages, he began his career as a teacher of Spanish and Irish at St Colman’s College, Newry, County Armagh.

Joe was known as a very caring person in whatever role he occupied at the time. As a young man, he took a keen interest in the wellbeing of learning-disabled children and volunteered to work with them on a regular basis. This led him towards an interest in educational psychology. Having completed his MSc in Educational and Child Psychology in 1989, he worked for the South Eastern Education and Library Board, becoming a specialist senior EP working with children and young people with a range of social emotional and mental health difficulties.

The needs of the children and young people were for him always the highest priority.

In 2007 Joe joined the tutor team for the Doctorate in Educational, Child and Adolescent Psychology (DECAP) programme in Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and ultimately became Programme Director in 2016. In all of these roles Joe displayed an approachable manner and he instilled confidence in those he worked with. Ethically

strong, Joe was committed to inclusive and accessible education, and through his work he promoted the emotional wellbeing and educational attainment of at-risk children on the periphery of the educational system. Joe’s co-workers will remember him for his contribution to the field of educational psychology, particularly in the areas of inclusion, positive psychology and consultation, and also for his great skill as a tutor, encourager and developer of students. These skills were recognised when, in 2014, Joe was nominated by DECAP students to receive an award for his contribution to teaching and supervision in QUB. Joe drew great pleasure in the role of family man.

He was devoted to his wife Jacinta and his sons Niall and Conor, and together they travelled extensively. Joe had a wide circle of friends, and among his many pastimes he included music, drama, food and wine. He was a wellrounded person, always open to others and with a keen sense of the community in which he worked.

Joe met his final illness with courage, acceptance, dignity and not a little humour. Throughout his illness he maintained an outward focus, often asking about others before they had a chance to ask about him. He is, and will continue to be, missed as a treasured colleague and someone who had a positive impact on so many lives.

Patricia Davison and Harry Rafferty Queen’s University Belfast

Division of Clinical Psychology Annual Conference 2019 23–24 January, Renaissance Manchester City Centre Conference theme ‘Identity’ • Standard rates now apply, please visit website to register.

• Draft programme and keynote speakers are available to view on the website.

• Wine Reception at the Renaissance on 23 January, no booking required.

Visit our website now to register your interest and keep up to date with conference news.

www.bps.org.uk/dcp2019

#dcpconf

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UCL GREAT ORMOND STREET INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH

Postgraduate Training in Paediatric Neuropsychology Applications are now open for the professional training programme in paediatric neuropsychology starting in September 2019 delivered by University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

The Masters/PG Diploma in Applied Paediatric Neuropsychology is open to all professional psychologists and psychology graduates. The Masters/PG Diploma in Clinical Paediatric Neuropsychology is open to Clinical Psychologists and Educational Psychologists.

Programme Directors: Professor Michelle de Haan & Dr Sara Shavel-Jessop

For further information please check: www.ucl.ac.uk/ich/education/taught-programmes/paediatric-neuropsychology www.ucl.ac.uk/centre-developmental-cognitive-neuroscience www.ucl.ac.uk/ich/research/developmental-neurosciences/cognitive-neuroscience-neuropsychiatry

New initiatives for working with suicide and self-harm P

sychologists have been at the heart of creating new frameworks of competencies that aim to guide practitioners in the skills needed to work with suicidal people and those who have self-harmed. The three frameworks cover the individual and organisational competencies required for working with children and young people, adults and older adults, and those working in the community and public health, as well as outlining available interventions.

Emeritus Professor Tony Roth and Professor Steve Pilling (both University College London) had prior experience developing competency frameworks through work with the UCL’s Centre for Outcomes Research and Effectiveness (CORE). The creation of the current frameworks was driven by general concerns over the

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Researchers are looking for people to take part in a new study to better understand why autistic people may be more likely to die by suicide.

The three-year project is being led by the University of Nottingham in partnership with Coventry University and the University of Cambridge, and is the first study of its kind. It aims to find out whether autistic people have unique needs that could help guide prevention efforts.

The project involves interviewing the friends and family of people who have died by suicide, who were either diagnosed with autism, or were likely autistic but not diagnosed before they died. Friends and family are asked about the person who died, their medical history, early development,

quality and consistency of information available to practitioners who work with people who are suicidal or have self-harmed. Health Education England commissioned the work with the National Collaborating Centre for Mental health – a collaboration between the Royal College of Psychiatrists and CORE. It has been supported and endorsed by the British Psychological Society.

The NCCMH team set out by looking at the information and training that is currently available, although they found many resources these were not always of consistent quality. ‘Some of the advice that’s out there is good quality, some isn’t, and some of the training that’s available to people in the health service and public sector is first rate but some, again, falls short

social communication skills, and circumstances prior to their death.

According to UK autism research charity Autistica, autistic people are nine times more likely to die by suicide, and autistic children may be 28 times more likely to consider suicide. However, until now there has been a lack of research to determine how to effectively prevent suicide in the autistic community.

Dr Sarah Cassidy at the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology is leading the study, funded by Autistica, NIHR-CLAHRC East of England, and Coventry University, and is working with coroners to better gather evidence of autism during inquests, to make recommendations

to services and government and better prevent people with autism dying by suicide. ‘Speaking to those close to someone who died by suicide will give us important insights into why autistic people are more likely to die by suicide, and what can be done to prevent the tragic loss of even a single life. We understand this is a hugely sensitive area which is difficult to talk about, and we are truly grateful to the families who come forward so we can help prevent others experience the same tragedy and pain from losing a loved one by suicide.’

For further details and to take part e-mail the research team on suicideprevention.hls@coventry.ac.uk

the psychologist january 2019 news

See tinyurl.com/compframe for the frameworks

Communicating security At the sixth Military Psychology Conference – organised by the British Psychological Society’s Wessex Branch for the final time – disinformation, propaganda, fake news and communication were up for discussion. Experts who work within, and alongside, the police Ministry of Defence and the armed forces painted a picture of a rapidly shifting world and the challenges that presents.

Dr Helen Innes and Diyana Dobreva (Crime and Security Research Institute, Cardiff University) have been examining the ways in which misinformation proliferates on social media in the wake of terrorist attacks, with a particular focus on attacks in the UK in 2017. Often narratives fill a vacuum in the early hours post-crisis. Confusion and a lack of hard information reign. These narratives serve to cast individuals involved in catastrophe as heroes or villains, whether accurately or not.

Innes and Dobreva collected information on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that emerged shortly after terrorist attacks – this amounted to more than 30 million data points.

Individuals such as Paula Robinson, who supposedly helped 50 children to safety following the bombing of Manchester Arena, emerge quickly as heroes; these narratives persisted even after the facts of Robinson’s story were debunked by the police.

Similarly, individuals may be cast in villain roles through misinformation on social media; radical preacher Abu Izzadeen was blamed erroneously for carrying out the Westminster terrorist attack in March 2017, a narrative also incorrectly reported by the foreign media and on Channel 4 News before later correction.

The researchers also identified a significant role of far-right actors in spreading rumours and falsehoods, including Kremlin ‘sock puppet’ accounts. Interestingly, Kremlinlinked accounts were also involved in pushing left-wing, as well as rightwing viewpoints, seemingly in an attempt to destabilise narratives.

Innes and Dobreva suggested we need to be better equipped, from a

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of what you’d expect. There was a general sense that the competence frameworks should be a practitioner support tool, giving a sense of guidance about what good practice would look like.’

The NCCMH team also carried out a systematic review to find what the evidence can, and cannot, reveal. ‘With suicide and self-harm there are things which are quite challenging. For example, if you say “what’s the evidence about that would help us predict whether someone will commit suicide?” we know it’s very hard to predict, but it’s actually very helpful to know what the limits of our knowledge are because in a sense that becomes part of the framework.’

The development of the frameworks was also guided by three expert reference groups for each of the frameworks, which brought together practitioners, researchers and experts by experience. Professor of Psychiatry Nav Kapur (University of Manchester) chaired the adults’ group, Professor Jim McManus (Director of Public Health Hertfordshire County Council) chaired the group exploring skills relevant to those working in the community and public health, and former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Professor Dame Sue Bailey chaired the children and young people’s group.

One important feature of the competency framework maps is they are fully encompassed by a box labelled ‘Attitudes, values and style of interaction’.

Roth said, while he didn’t wish to point fingers, attitudes towards people who may be suicidal or self-harming can be variable, and those attitudes may impact on a person’s care. ‘Then if you look at something like risk assessment, which is a really important area but often done in a way that can be something of a tick-box exercise, you can see people following a set of procedures but not really treating individuals as individuals and having a broad framework for understanding where people are coming from.’

Roth said he had found the development of these frameworks to be an interesting journey and thanks to the input of the expert reference groups felt he was part of compiling a resource that would be genuinely useful. ‘There was a lot of expert consensus and a lot of excitement among people that this was being done because it’s making somewhat explicit what I think sits rather implicitly in services – that very often suicide and self-harm is seen as something that sits alongside what one is doing, rather than being seen as something that one can take on board in a more direct way. So, for example, when you look at people who are suicidal or self-harming there’s often a close association with depression, and there are decisions to be made around how one picks up self-harming and suicide – does one treat this as if it’s just an accompaniment to a primary disorder or as something that is important to address in its own right? Those sorts of decisions are incorporated into the framework.’ er

communications point of view, to respond in such events to prevent falsehoods and misinformation spreading too widely in the wake of chaotic and horrific events.

The importance of good communication was highlighted again by Dr Andrea Shawyer (University of Portsmouth) in her research into fire service control room operators. She and her colleagues, including Professor Rebecca Milne, are developing an evidence-based communications protocol for operators. To this end they have surveyed staff on how they handle calls and listened to 481 recorded calls. Important decisions are made on the basis of information gleaned by control room operators in extremely short calls; misinformation can also emerge from the questions asked of a witness or person involved with an incident.

With a mean call time of 66 seconds, Shawyer found operators were able to gather important information to pass on to fire crews and were good at building rapport with callers. The researchers are moving on to the final phase of the study looking at the experiences of firefighters and the information they receive, and testing their evidencebased communications protocol.

Indeed, communication has been at the heart of Milne’s research and practice for more than two decades.

She has explored the interviewing techniques used by police officers, advised the British Transport Police on the best way to interview police personnel in the aftermath of the

London Bridge terror attack in 2017, and works as adviser to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

In her keynote address she pointed to a chain of events that can lead to the police gathering incorrect information… poor questions lead to poor information, which in turn leads to poor decisions. Milne pointed to the many factors that may affect the information people give during interviews, with a particular focus on the malleability of memory and the effects of trauma, and the impact on recall of the questions that are asked.

In working with those who gather information, Milne has explored what she calls the contamination timeline – specific points at which people may unwittingly give false information after, or during, an incident. For example, at the scene of an incident

witnesses may talk with friends thus affecting their own memories, and misinformation may even arise via the questions asked by call operators in the ambulance, fire and police services. While methods such as cognitive interviews are the best way to gather accurate information these are not always used in practice, she said.

The new BPS Defence and Security Section, officially launched at the conference in Basingstoke’s Ark Conference Centre, will take over the organisation of the conference from this point on. Lancaster Security, based at Lancaster University, sponsored poster prizes and several bursaries at the conference; PhD student Colm Doody (National University of Ireland Galway) won first prize for

his Cochrane Review protocol, which will explore the effectiveness of predeployment programmes that aim to build resilience in military personnel, emergency service staff and emergency humanitarian workers.

The second place poster prize was awarded to Dr Marie Cahillane and Dr Victoria Smy (Cranfield University), who have researched the various cognitive heuristics people use when deciding on the credibility of information online. Christopher Wolper (Midwestern University, Glendale) travelled from Arizona, thanks to a bursary, to present his poster on the impact of traumatic stress on decision making.

For posters and many of the presentations from the conference see www.kc-jones.co.uk/military2018

The last question What is the optimal algorithm for discovering truth? How does a single human brain architecture create many kinds of human minds? Is technology changing the nature of moral emotions? These were just some of the fascinating answers to the final annual question from The Edge after 20 years, this year’s question – What is the last question?

More than 280 academics, journalists and thought leaders responded, with much input from psychologists and neuroscientists. Certain themes could be traced across the replies – immortality, truth, humans as algorithm and algorithm as human, and the potential collapse of civilisation in our lifetime.

Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist and Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) asked ‘Can human intuition ever be reduced to an algorithm?’. Psychologist Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley) posed the question ‘How can the few pounds of grey goo between our ears let us make utterly surprising, completely unprecedented, and remarkably true discoveries about the world around us, in every domain and at every scale, from quarks to quasars?’.

‘Why is it so hard to find the truth?’ was suggested by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (New York University Stern School of Business), and psychology

12

News online Find all our news online at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports For the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest and the new section in this issue.

See also www.bps.org.uk/news-and-blogs for the latest statements, reports, responses and more from the British Psychological Society.

graduate student Jason Wilkes (University of California, Santa Barbara) asked ‘Why are the errors that our best machine-learning algorithms make so different from the errors we humans make?’

The fascinating questions aren’t, of course, limited to the psychologists among the responses; Lorraine Justice, Dean Emerita and Professor of Industrial Design (Rochester Institute of Technology) asked ‘What might the last fully biological human’s statement be at their last supper?’. Noga Arikha, a historian and author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours suggested ‘Will it ever be possible for us to transcend our limited experience of time as linear?’. Some of us may relate to the question posed by Dylan Evans, the Founder and CEO of the risk intelligence training company Projection Point, who asked ‘Will civilization collapse before I die?’. er To read the full list of responses see edge.org

the psychologist january 2019 news

Helping policy makers understand obesity It is perhaps the health issue of our time, with around 26 per cent of adults in England classed as obese; however, approaches to prevention are often over-simplified and the condition itself so stigmatised people feel reluctant to seek support. The sixth meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on psychology brought together a panel of experts at the Houses of Parliament to raise awareness among policy makers of the psychological drivers of obesity and how to approach prevention.

On the same day the British Psychological Society (BPS) published a briefing paper on the issue calling for better psychological support for people struggling with their weight and outlining the complex social, environmental, psychological and biological causes of obesity. The authors also called for better framing of health campaigns, specifically avoiding the framing of obesity as a simple choice, weight loss services that serve everyone at an unhealthy weight, including those whose BMI is over 50, and incentives to conduct further research into tackling the stigma that prevents people accessing weight loss services.

After an introduction by APPG Chair and former clinical psychologist and SNP MP Lisa Cameron, Dr Sinead Singh shared the story of ‘Emma’ as a way to represent the true complexity of obesity. As a child, Emma built an association between food and comfort and slowly gained weight, exacerbated by personal and family trauma. As an adult, an injury at work left her unemployed and turning to food for comfort and experiencing daily stigmatising messages in the media toward obese people.

When she turned to her GP, she felt judged and criticised and following bariatric surgery received no psychological support, leading to further weight gain and eventually diabetes and hospitalisation.

Singh said it is plain to see that the causes and drivers of obesity are not straightforward, and treating the problem as simplistic and placing blame on an individual further stigmatises them and the condition. Those designing public health campaigns should be aware of the language and images they use, and Singh recommended that research into this area be better incentivised and that public health campaigns should use psychological evidence.

Health psychologist Dr Angel Chater explained the biopsychosocial model the BPS briefing paper was based on. She also outlined the usefulness of psychological expertise within public health concerns – psychologists can help understand the drivers of behaviour, how to change that behaviour and how to break the cyclical effect of low mood and guilt on motivation to change.

She explained that three factors need to be considered with a target population for behaviour change: whether they have the capability, opportunity and motivation to enact a behaviour.

Health psychologist Dr Fiona Gillison (University of Bath) gave examples of why some policies are taken up by the public willingly while others backfire. She gave

the example of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve school meals, and the parents who subsequently turned up at schools with take-aways for their children. In this case parents felt as if their choice had been taken away and that their children would be hungry and reacted accordingly.

Psychology can help us understand how to avoid this kind of reaction, how to tap into people’s intrinsic motivation and how to keep motivation going over a prolonged period. Criticisms of the National Child Measurement Programme have suggested measuring children could trigger eating disorders or cause certain children to be bullied, we can learn valuable lessons from parents’ concerns that they are more worried about their child’s wellbeing in the here and now than whether they will develop diabetes in 50 years. Children are, of course, a key concern with one in four children in reception being overweight and one in three by year six. However, Gillison emphasised that we should listen to parents about what types of intervention are acceptable to them.

Finally, Consultant Clinical Psychologist Dr Helen Moffat (NHS Grampian) gave an overview of the support available in the NHS to people with obesity. Tier three services serve people with a BMI over 40, while these services are meant to include psychologists, many don’t, and people may be offered therapy, medication and possibly low-calorie meal replacement plans. People should spend at least six months in tier three before being referred to bariatric surgery in tier four.

Psychological support and understanding when helping people with obesity is key, said Moffat, with many suffering with mental health problems and trauma. There are disproportionate levels of depression and anxiety in those who are obese, and people with learning disabilities and mental illness show levels of obesity two to three times higher than the general population. Up to half of people attending obesity services will have experienced childhood adversity and many have experienced trauma as an adult.

Moffat said that services should include behavioural interventions and that prior to surgery behavioural approaches and a psychological assessment should be offered; however, she acknowledged, coverage is often patchy. She suggested that NICE guidelines could be developed to include clear recommendations for incorporating psychology into services, funding for services to be as strong as they can be and investment into research.

To view and download a pdf of the BPS briefing paper Understanding Obesity: The Psychological Dimensions of a Public Health Crisis please see tinyurl.com/yc3692n4

Dr Sinead Singh shared the story of ‘Emma’

Five minutes with…

Dr Leah Maizey Get me out of here

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This winter saw another round of I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here, which brings together academics in themed zones to answer questions posed by schoolchildren. The British Psychological Society sponsored two zones on the themes of childhood and memory.

Across two weeks scientists were available for online chats and were voted out one by one by the students in Big Brother-style evictions – however, evicted academics can still take part in the discussion. Dr Abbie Jordan from the University of Bath was eventually crowned winner of the Childhood zone and Dr Alex Reid from the University of York won the Memory zone.

In a post about her experience Jordan said she was astounded at the range and quality of questions asked in the Childhood zone. ‘From our thoughts about the nature/ nurture debate, the relationship between social media and wellbeing to whether mermaids are real. I was blown away by the detailed questions about my work and the impact that it will have on the lives of young people and their families.’

Reid gave some examples of the brilliant questions he was asked: ‘What would happen if we cured death? What is the meaning of life?

What experiences or events have changed my life? What changes do I want to see in the world? In some instances I had to take a long walk before responding to mull things over.’

The two psychologists each won £500 to use on public engagement activities of their own. Jordan said she will use her prize to fund an exhibit on the stories children and families tell about pain at a science centre for children, and Reid said he plans to spend his winnings on equipment to help his work promoting science and psychology in local schools. er

Academics at Cardiff University are set to launch a trial of a new weightloss app called Restrain, based on cognitive control training. We spoke to Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Leah Maizey about the theory behind the app and what participants in the trial will experience.

Could you tell me how/why the Restrain project came about including the work and testing that led up to it and the theory behind it?

Lab-based studies have shown that training tasks that promote response inhibition or avoidance of specific food stimuli can reduce overeating (e.g. Lawrence et al., 2015, Appetite, 85, 91–103). It is thought that this training may boost cognitive control allowing better regulation of thoughts and actions to help avoid impulsive behaviours. While this work has shown promise, results do not always replicate and little is known about the mechanisms of how they work. The Restrain project takes these tasks out of the lab, delivering training via an app, to assess real-world benefits. The project aims to explore the suitability of cognitive control training (CCT) as a weight-loss tool by studying the success of numerous

paradigms in the largest study of its kind. We want to establish which CCT methods work best and for whom.

Although we are testing many different CCT methods, the general aim is to break down the automatic associations people have with unhealthy foods and replace them with healthy foods. In theory, this should reduce unhealthy food consumption and promote weight loss.

What will participants in the trial experience while using the app?

Participants will be randomly assigned to one of six active (or one of 10 control) CCT groups. CCT methods include response inhibition, approach-avoidance, evaluative conditioning and implementationintention-based training.

Each day participants will complete either training (a gamified version of a CCT exercise) or tasks and questionnaires designed to assess the outcomes of using the app (primarily weight and eating habits) or to assess individual differences that may influence the efficacy of training (including personality, willpower beliefs, mood and hunger). Using the app should take

Changing cybersecurity behaviour Cybersecurity has been examined from a psychological perspective in a new behaviour change briefing from the British Psychological Society. Its authors lay out the areas where psychology can contribute to challenges in the area.

Dr John McAlaney, Associate Professor Jacqui Taylor and Dr Helen Thackray (Bournemouth University), who wrote the report, suggested that psychologists can help in ensuring behaviour change is used in managing cybersecurity threats, embedding psychology in cybersecurity courses in the UK, and promoting research into developing a better understanding of why people become involved in hacking.

To read the full briefing see tinyurl.com/yb22kmoa

the psychologist january 2019 news

approximately 10 minutes per day.

As it is possible that personalised training may be more effective, participants are asked to select unhealthy foods that they would like to eat less of, and healthy foods that they would like to eat more, from a virtual supermarket.

How many participants are you hoping to recruit, when will the trial start and how long will it last?

We are hoping to recruit 48,000 participants from around the

world, promoting the app through a bespoke website that we are creating, ScienceForge, and the media. The app is due to launch at the end of January or early February.

Data will be collected for a minimum of one year.

If the trial is successful what will be the next steps for the project?

The second aim of the Restrain project is to further our understanding of the effects of CCT on brain neurophysiology

and neurochemistry, and how individual neurobiological differences themselves may influence CCT outcomes. Our investigations will focus on neural networks known to mediate reward and emotion, and those presumed to exert topdown executive control. Using a combination of imaging and stimulation techniques, we aim to establish the role of white matter microstructure and functional connectivity between cortical and subcortical structures in food-related decision making. Furthermore, the role of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters previously implicated in both response inhibition and approach-avoidance tendencies will also be explored.

To find out more about the trial and to register your interest in taking part see tinyurl.com/yb8wdpw2

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Mental Health and Psychological Wellbeing of Children and Young People – Expert Reference Group Members The Society is seeking to appoint Members to join the above Expert Reference Group (ERG) from spring 2019. This is an exciting opportunity to play an active role in delivering the Society’s campaign on mental health and psychological wellbeing in children and young people that was chosen at the BPS Senate in October.

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We are looking for members who can demonstrate relevant knowledge, skills and experience in this area. We are looking for 15 members from across the Society and every effort will be made to ensure the group has range of experience across domains, contexts of research and practice. We will also be seeking input from Experts by Experience.

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The group will support the campaign Steering Group to achieve policy change by: • • • •

Prioritising where we can make the biggest difference to policy Highlighting the best psychological evidence to share with policy makers Sharing frontline experience, expertise and best practice to influence service delivery Building external networks and partnerships with external stakeholders.

To apply, please send a Statement of Interest of no more than 500 words outlining your relevant skills and experience to Emma Smith on emma. smith@bps.org.uk Statements of Interest must be received by 21 January 2019. The first meeting of the ERG will take place in February 2019. We particularly welcome BAME and LGBT applicants who are currently under-represented in the Society.

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How to find your calling Christian Jarrett digests the research ‘Look. You can’t plan out your life. What you have to do is first discover your passion – what you really care about.’ – Barack Obama

Read reviews of the latest psychology research by Dr Christian Jarrett and Emma Young on the Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest

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I

f, like many, you are searching for your calling in life – perhaps you are still unsure whether psychology is for you, or which area of the profession aligns with what you most care about – here are five digested research findings worth taking into consideration.

There’s a difference between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive passion If you can find a career path or occupational goal that fires you up, you are more likely to succeed and find happiness through your work – that much we know from a deep research literature. But beware – since a seminal paper published in 2003 by the Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand and his colleagues, researchers have made an important distinction between having a harmonious passion and an obsessive one. If you feel that your passion or calling is out of control, and that your mood and self-esteem depend on it, then this is the obsessive variety, and such passions, while they are energising, are also associated with negative outcomes like burnout and anxiety. In contrast, if your passion feels in control, reflects qualities that you like about yourself, and complements other important activities in your life, then this is the harmonious version, which is associated with positive outcomes, such as vitality, better work performance, experiencing flow, and positive mood.

Having an unanswered calling in life is worse than having no calling at all If you already have a burning ambition or purpose, do not leave it to languish. A few years ago, researchers at the University of South Florida surveyed hundreds of people and grouped them according to whether they felt like they had no calling in life, that they had a calling they’d answered, or they had a calling but had never done anything about it. In terms of their work engagement, career commitment, life satisfaction, health and stress,

the stand-out finding was that the participants who had a calling they hadn’t answered scored the worst across all these measures. The researchers said this puts a different spin on the presumed benefits of having a calling in life. They concluded that ‘having a calling is only a benefit if it is met, but can be a detriment when it is not as compared to having no calling at all’.

Without passion, grit is ‘merely a grind’ All this talk of finding a passion, but you may also have heard that ‘grit’’ is vital for career success. As advanced most famously by psychologist Angela Duckworth, this is the idea that highly successful, gritty people have impressive persistence: ‘To be gritty’, Duckworth writes in her landmark book on the subject, ‘is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.’ It’s certainly true (many studies show) that being more conscientious – more self-disciplined and industrious – is associated with more career success. But is that all that being gritty means? Duckworth has always emphasised that it has another vital component that brings us back to passion again – alongside persistence, she says that gritty people also have an ‘ultimate concern’ (another way of describing having a passion or calling). According to a paper published earlier this year, however, the standard measure of grit has failed to assess passion (or more specifically, ‘passion attainment’) – and Jon Jachimowicz and his colleagues believe this could explain why the research on grit has been so inconsistent (leading to claims that it is an overhyped concept and simply conscientiousness repackaged). Jachimowicz’s team found that when they explicitly measured passion attainment (how much people feel they have adequate passion for their work) and combined this with a measure of perseverance (a consistency of interests and the ability to overcome setbacks), then the two together did predict superior performance among tech company employees and university students. ‘Our findings suggest that perseverance without passion attainment is mere drudgery, but perseverance with passion attainment propels individuals forward,’ they said.

the psychologist january 2019 digest

If you think passion comes from doing a job you enjoy, you’re likely to be disappointed Another issue to consider is where you think passion comes from. In a paper released as a preprint at PsyArXiv, Jon Jachimowicz and his team draw a distinction between people who believe that passion comes from doing what you enjoy (which they say is encapsulated by Oprah Winfrey’s commencement address in which she said passion ‘will bloom when we’re doing what we love’), and those who see it as arising from doing what you believe in or value in life (as reflected in the words of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón who in his own commencement address in 2011 said ‘you have to embrace with passion the things that you believe in, and that you are fighting for’). The researchers found that people believing that passion comes from pleasurable work were less likely to feel like they had found their passion (and were more likely to desire leaving their job) as compared with people who believe that passion comes from doing what you feel matters.

Perhaps this is because there is a superficiality and ephemerality to working for sheer pleasure – what fits the bill one month or year may not do so for long – whereas working towards what you care about is a timeless endeavour that is likely to stretch and sustain you indefinitely. The researchers said their results showed that ‘the extent to which individuals attain their desired level of work passion may have less to do with their actual jobs and more to do with their beliefs about how work passion is pursued’.

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Invest enough effort and you may find that your work becomes your passion It’s all very well reading about the benefits of having a passion or calling in life, but if you haven’t got one, where to find it? Duckworth says that it’s a mistake to think that in a moment of revelation one will land in your lap, or simply occur to you through quiet contemplation – rather you need to explore different activities and pursuits, and expose yourself the different challenges and needs confronting society.

If you still draw a blank, then perhaps it’s worth heeding the advice of others who say that it is not always the case that energy and determination flow from finding your passion – sometimes it can be the other way around, and if you put enough energy into your work, then passion will follow. Consider, for instance, an eight-week repeated survey of German entrepreneurs published a few years ago that found a clear pattern – their passion for their ventures increased after they had invested more effort into the ventures the week before. A follow-up study qualified this, suggesting the energising effect of investing effort only arises when the project is freely chosen and there is a sense of progress. ‘Entrepreneurs increase their passion when they make significant progress in their venture and when they invest effort out of their own free choice,’ the researchers said.

Signifying nothing?

Social priming studies that appear to show how subtle environmental cues can influence our behaviour, often without our even knowing, have generated great public interest, but unfortunately many of them are failing to replicate. Now the psychologists Jedediah Siev, Shelby Zuckerman and Joseph Siev have published a meta-analysis in Social Psychology of one of the most eye-catching of these effects, the so-called Macbeth effect – the idea that reminding people of their bad deeds makes them want to clean themselves (and to have a greater preference for cleaning-related items).

The researchers found 15 relevant studies, published and unpublished, involving over 1700

11%

participants on three continents.

Whereas the effect sizes in the original three Macbeth effect studies were moderate-to-large, Siev’s team found that in all the 11 independent replication attempts ‘there was no effect whatsoever’. The researchers said that, considered all together, ‘the evidence suggests either that unethical primes do not generate a greater preference for cleansingrelated stimuli than do ethical primes, or they generate a small one’. Reporting on the study for the Research Digest blog, writer Jesse Singal said that maybe the biggest lesson to come out of this is for science communications, where there has been a tendency to swallow snazzy research findings too uncritically.

People are ‘consistently inconsistent’ in how they reason about controversial scientific topics. In one of the first studies to consider the reasons people give for their stances on such topics, researchers found that only 11 per cent of participants consistently cited evidence; 34 per cent of their responses amounted to non-justifications (such as re-stating their belief); and 45 per cent of them said nothing could change their mind on at least one of the topics. (Thinking and Reasoning)

Why a partial loss of vision can lead to hallucinations The head of a brown lion. Multiple tiny, green, spinning Catherine wheels with red edges. Colourful fragments of artillery soldiers and figures in uniform and action.

Unfamiliar faces of well-groomed men… These are just a few of the hallucinations reported by a group of people with macular degeneration (MD), a common cause of vision loss in people aged over 40.

About 40 per cent of people with MD – who lose vision in the centre of their visual field but whose peripheral vision is generally unaffected – develop Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS), reporting hallucinations that vary from simple flashes of light and shapes to faces, animals and even complex scenes.

It has been suggested that CBS might arise as a result of over-responsiveness – ‘hyper-excitability’ – of certain visual regions of the cortex, after they are deprived of normal retinal input. But whether this really is the case – and why some people with reduced vision or blindness develop them, while others don’t – has not been clear. Now new work by a team of psychologists at the University of Queensland, Australia, led by David Painter, and published in Current Biology, offers some answers.

Painter and his team studied eight people with MD and Charles Bonnet syndrome (whose regular hallucinations include those listed at the start of this post); eight age- and gender-matched people with MD but without CBS; and eight matched controls with healthy eyes.

The researchers presented the participants with a

series of red and green flickering chequerboard patterns, to stimulate the intact peripheral region of their retinas.

Using EEG (electroencephalography) to monitor the participants’ brain activity, the researchers found a much bigger response to the flickering patterns in the early vision processing regions of the cortex in the people with MD who also have CBS, compared with both the other groups.

None of the CBS participants reported experiencing hallucinations during the study, so hyper-excitability of these visual-processing regions does not automatically trigger hallucinations, but does seem to be a feature of the brains of people who are susceptible to them.

The precise triggers for hallucinations in people with CBS vary. They include low light levels, or watching TV or riding in a car. Exactly how these triggers might interact with the over-responsiveness of the visual cortex to generate hallucinations is yet to be explored.

Unlike people with schizophrenia, individuals with CBS usually have no trouble recognising that their hallucinations are not real, and most don’t find them distressing. However, a minority do, and further research may lead to treatments, write Painter and his colleagues.

‘Based on our findings, future treatments could aim to down-regulate cortical hyperexcitability in CBS,’ they write, ‘perhaps through repeated application of noninvasive brain stimulation protocols that induce longlasting plastic changes in underlying cortical networks.’

Emma Young

Colourful language The idea that the language that you speak influences how you experience the world has a long and storied history. Previous research has shown that people whose native languages

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Already by age two, toddlers can tell the difference between a bully who rules by fear and force and a true leader who holds power based on respect. (PNAS)

have different colour categories don’t see the world in quite the same way.

Now in Psychological Science, Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman report that such linguistic differences can even determine whether someone will see a coloured shape or not.

The researchers tested the ability of Greek, German and Russian speakers to spot a light/dark blue or green triangle against a light/ dark blue or green background.

Crucially, these languages differ in how they carve up the blue colour spectrum into word categories and the researchers found this related to how the different groups performed at the visual task. For instance, the Greek and Russian speakers have a separate word for light and dark

blue (but not for light and dark green) and this was reflected in their superior ability to spot a light blue triangle against a dark blue background compared with a light green triangle against a dark green background. ‘Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive,’ the researchers said.

the psychologist january 2019 digest Getty Images

According to a new review, drawing can have a massive benefit for remembering something compared with writing it down, regardless of the quality of the drawing.

Moreover, older people and people with dementia may especially benefit from the strategy – for instance, although older adults performed worse than younger adults at remembering words they had learned by writing, there was no difference between the two age groups in their ability to remember words they had drawn.

(Current Directions in Psychological Science) National narcissism is rife according to a survey of students across 35 countries. The students were asked to estimate, from 0-100 per cent how much their home nation had contribution to world history – in sum, they estimated their countries were responsible for 1,156.4 per cent of human history. Estimates were highest in Russia (60.8 per cent) and the UK (54.6 per cent).

(Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition)

A group of psychologists at Pennsylvania State University and Harvard believe that ‘outrage’ is getting a bad rap, and that we should recognise it can galvanise collective action and help make the world a better place. (Trends in Cognitive Sciences)

Rescue pets

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For people diagnosed with what’s known as ‘treatmentresistant major depressive disorder’ the prognosis is not good – the low mood and emotional pain for these individuals has not lifted even though they are on a combination of antidepressant medications and may also have participated in psychotherapy. However, a glimmer of hope comes via a research group in Portugal who reported recently in the Journal of Psychiatric Research that adopting a pet ‘enhanced’ the effects of antidepressant medication for a significant minority of their participants with previously treatment-resistant depression.

Jorge Mota Pereira and Daniela Fonte at the Clínica Médico-Psiquiátrica da Ordem in Porto recruited 80 outpatients with severe treatment-resistant depression and invited them to adopt a pet as part of a study into the effects of pet adoption on depression. Thirty-three of them agreed to do so (20 adopted a dog or dogs, 7 a cat); another 33 who declined were allocated to form a control group.

All the participants were assessed for their depression symptoms and general functioning at baseline and then again at 4-, 8- and 12-week follow-up. Thirty individuals in each group successfully attended all the required assessments.

The main finding is that by the end of the study (at the 12-week assessment), just over a third of the petadoption group had remitted – that is, their scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale had reduced to the point that their problems were now considered only mild. By contrast, none of the control group had entered remission or in fact showed any signs of change in their symptoms at all. These improvements in the pet group actually began manifesting by week 4 follow-up, suggesting the apparent benefits of pet ownership were rapid.

Pereira and Fonte said that looking after a pet involves ‘a strong affinity and companionship that strongly contributes to mental health’ and that their results show that people with treatment-resistant depression ‘that are willing to have a pet should be encouraged to do so’.

A major weakness of the study is that it depended on participants volunteering to adopt a pet (rather than on random allocation to the pet adoption condition) – so, although pet-adopters and the controls were matched for baseline depression symptoms, there may have been other ways that they differed. For instance, perhaps there was something different about the personalities or social circumstances of the pet adopters that contributed to their willingness to adopt a pet and to their higher remission rates (raising the possibility that the pet adoption itself was not the main ‘active ingredient’ in their recovery). Future, better controlled, research may be able to tease apart these possibilities.

For now, Pereira and Fonte speculate that the therapeutic benefits of adopting a pet may arise from the responsibilities involved acting to counter the loss of motivation and pleasure associated with depression, and also from the social contact that arises through walking the pet or meeting other pet owners.

Christian Jarrett

Adopting a pet ‘enhanced’ the effects of antidepressant medication for a significant minority

HARROGATE 2019

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

The Psychological Impact of Inequality We welcome submissions relating to: • • • • •

Stigma Health Inequality Gender Inequality Educational Inequality General

Submit online up to 15 January.

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www.bps.org.uk/ac2019 22

Mental Health Support in collaboration with the British Library present:

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Transforming knowledge about human behaviour The Human Behaviour Change Project team on a unique collaboration between behavioural and computer scientists

Behaviour change is key to tackling the world’s health and environmental problems: obesity, cancer, sustainable living and countless others.

Researchers, policy makers and practitioners are crying out for evidence: what works, when, where and how.

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mountain of research evidence about behaviour change is being produced, but more than humans can synthesise and access – and it is fragmented. The Human Behaviour Change Project (HBCP: www.humanbehaviourchange.org) aims to transform our capacity to make use of this evidence.

The HBCP’s vision is to build a largely automated system that will synthesise up-to-date research evidence in real time and use it to generate new insights about effective behaviour change interventions. The user will be able to elicit answers tailored to the behaviours, populations and settings specific to their interests. This interdisciplinary, collaborative project brings together cutting-edge developments in computer science, behavioural science and information science (including system architecture) and includes academic and industry

the psychologist january 2019 behaviour change

The Human Behaviour Change Project team led by Principal Investigator Professor Susan Michie (third from left), Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change and of the Health Psychology Research Group at UCL The team also includes James Thomas, Professor of Social Research and Policy at the EPPI-Centre, UCL; John Shawe-Taylor, Professor of Computer Science at UCL; Pol Mac Aonghusa, Senior Research Manager at the IBM Research Lab in Dublin; Marie Johnston, Emeritus Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Aberdeen and a registered Health and Clinical Psychologist; Mike Kelly, Professor and Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the Institute of Public Health and a member of St John’s College at the University of Cambridge; and Robert West, Professor of Health Psychology and Director of Tobacco Studies at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre, UCL

researchers. The collaboration will enable us to interpret the literature more fully using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

We have an ambitious vision of success – when faced with a question about changing behaviour, instead of being overwhelmed by a large diverse literature, policy makers, practitioners and researchers will be able to get answers (based on real-time updated evidence) to questions such as: • Are methods that are effective in changing the dietary behaviours of young, educated populations living in Europe effective for populations that are older or less educated or living in Africa or Latin America? If so, how effective?

• Is the answer the same for different behaviours (e.g. dietary/smoking/hygiene/recycling/water conservation/clinical)?

• Does it matter how these interventions are delivered? Face-to face, via TV or smartphones, to community groups, etc?

• What are the magnitudes of effects?

• What about populations that are hard to reach and difficult to engage?

Why? And why now?

How did we arrive at this approach? Bitter experience!

Our Principal Investigator, Susan Michie, consulted for the Department of Health in England, and was asked whether the strategies shown to be effective to help people manage long-term conditions would also be effective for the ‘general population’ to prevent ill health. The question was timely as there is lots of evidence – searching Google Scholar for ‘behaviour change’ found over 50,000 results for the first three months of 2018. But, frustratingly, while there was lots of research evidence out there, the tools to assemble it efficiently and effectively just weren’t available.

Later experience with the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee of NICE (National

Institute for Health and Care Excellence) – which made recommendations for the UK’s National Health Service and public health system – revealed that the time taken from a government minister posing a question to its being answered was often very lengthy. Up to two years might be spent specifying a researchable question, commissioning systematic reviews, developing guidance, field-testing and making recommendations. At the end of the process, the evidence we could draw on was often sparse or not relevant for the intended UK populations and settings and the minister had moved on anyway.

We need to be able to find and understand what the relevant evidence has to say more quickly, mining the vast amount of accumulating evidence from public health and the behavioural and social sciences. Recent developments in behavioural and computer science mean that this is now possible.

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How? What we are doing is beyond the capacity of human effort; we need computer power to help disentangle the vast mass of research. So we will ‘share’ our understanding of behaviour change interventions with computers, which will entail translating the diverse syntax, definitions, terminologies and languages used by researchers working in the field, and developing shareable taxonomies that are machine-usable.

This involves a system for organising our knowledge – a Key sources behaviour-change intervention ontology. It’s a knowledge system that uses a controlled vocabulary to Johnston, M. (2016). A science for all define the features of interventions reasons: A comment on Ogden (2016).

– such as techniques, modes of Health Psychology Review, 10(3), 256–259.

Johnston, M., Johnston, D., Wood, delivery, target behaviour, context – C.E. et al. (2018). Communication and the relationships between those of behaviour change interventions: features. Using that vocabulary to Can they be recognised from written annotate the entities in published descriptions? Psychology & Health, 33(6), intervention evaluations, we can 713–723. train computers to do the job more Michie, S., Johnston, M., Francis, J. et al. (2008). From theory to intervention: efficiently and at scale.

Mapping theoretically derived Computers can learn to behavioural determinants to behaviour recognise and extract such change techniques. Applied Psychology: information – we are already An International Review, 57(4), 660–680. having some success in training Michie, S., Richardson, M., Johnston, computers to recognise behaviour M. et al. (2013). The behavior change technique taxonomy (v1) of 93 change techniques such as ‘selfhierarchically clustered techniques: monitoring’. But even apparently Building an international consensus simple questions like ‘How old for the reporting of behavior change were the participants?’ requires the interventions. Annals of Behavioral computer to recognise words such Medicine, 46(1), 81–95. as ‘age’ and ‘years’ and then associate Michie, S., Thomas, J., Johnston, M., et al. (2017). The Human Behaviourthe appropriate number with these Change Project: Harnessing the power words. When the computers can of artificial intelligence and machine accumulate the basic information, learning for evidence synthesis and they can then begin to predict interpretation. Implementation Science, results – effect sizes for particular 12(1), 121. combinations of behaviours,

interventions, populations and settings. And excitingly, while humans organise this evidence in different ways in different disciplines, computers lack these biases and may detect relationships and associations that we have not noticed.

Challenges – working across disciplines Developing the behaviour-change ontology raises technical, methodological and philosophical issues, and working with an interdisciplinary team to address and solve them has been central to our project.

What’s it like to work together? Our general advice on interdisciplinary working is: • Choose to work with people who are better at their discipline than you are at yours – they will push you to learn and to succeed.

• Work with people you like or at least get along with.

• Agree some practices (e.g. about frequency of meetings, and terminology) at the start.

But the first impression is how similar we are! It’s been interesting to see how much of the recent progress in artificial intelligence draws on the everyday language of psychology. Of course, this can lead to confusion if we are careless. For example, to a computer scientist a ‘learning model’ typically refers to how computers are trained to mimic aspects of human intelligence – a key step in artificial intelligence. In psychology, ‘learning models’ mean something completely different. So the ontology has proven to be an invaluable lingua franca for communication across the team. It is satisfying to see how the ontology facilitates active collaboration between all of the disciplines in the project. It allows us to share knowledge clearly and consistently, so that individual disciplines can then contribute useful results to the project.

Our collaborations with major producers and users of evidence synthesis – in particular, NICE and The Cochrane Collaboration – are important. They have a keen interest in making the discovery and synthesis of evidence more efficient and are also working on classification schemas and investigating the potential of automation. We can learn from one another’s work and avoid reinventing wheels. Ensuring compatibility, in terms of data structures and domain models, will be vital to ensure that semantic data can be shared between organisations into the future.

Shared tools and terminologies Our aim is to make knowledge easy to share. This is trickier than it sounds because in the behavioural and social sciences words for the same things are used differently in different studies. For example, if we attempt to integrate evidence from studies of ‘behavioural counselling’, we might be combining evidence from studies that involve ‘educating patients’ or, by contrast, ‘feedback, self-monitoring

the psychologist january 2019 behaviour change

and reinforcement’ while a systematic review of ‘self-monitoring’ might miss studies of ‘daily diaries’ (Michie et al., 2008). Precise labelling and definitions make it easier to combine like with like.

A key objective of the project is to enable replication through shared methods. The physical and biomedical sciences have made outstanding progress when they have adopted shared tools for structuring evidence, as in classification systems like the periodic table, or for collecting data, for example the use of shared neuro-imaging methods. There is some evidence that individuals trained in shared behaviour change techniques are more successful in recognising the content of such interventions, and might therefore be more able to replicate the content (Johnston et al., 2018).

Indeed, shared tools and terminology are essential even to know whether an idea or method is new rather than having been simply relabelled: ‘…we cannot have a paradigm shift if we do not have a paradigm.

A paradigm requires some shared methods or theories’ (Johnston, 2016). Moreover, shared explicit systems can advance thinking by pointing to gaps and indicating what is needed to fill them. As we expected, the behaviour change technique taxonomy has pointed to the lack of strong evidence for a large number of behaviour change techniques in current use.

Next steps This project will advance the field in three ways. First, it will make it possible for researchers and decision makers to identify relevant evidence quickly, without sacrificing the completeness of the research identified.

This will make it possible to conduct systematic reviews of the domains covered by the HBCP with an efficiency that has hitherto been impossible. Second, it will provide a new model for evidence discovery and synthesis that can be a template that other areas can follow. The technical and software architecture of the platform we are building will be open source and free for others to use and build upon. Third, it will advance the field of synthesis methodology itself, by providing new approaches for synthesising research that are based on machine learning rather than the more traditional meta-analysis that the field is used to. These methods will blend the precision and strength for causal claims that synthesising findings from RCTs can bring, with newer analytic methods used for ‘big data’.

This is just the beginning of what will be a long journey. Once we have established that this kind of work can be done and adds value, it can be extended to cover a wider range of research designs and domains.

We are setting up an extensible system that others will be able to contribute to and take forward; this is essential, as the scale of problem is such that no single research team will be able to solve it on its own.

We are starting with smoking cessation to help us prove the technologies and evaluate the overall impact of the approach. We plan to move on to

physical activity, alcohol consumption and dietary consumption, incorporating literature from a wider range of research designs and analysing data at the individual rather than study level. This could have significant potential impact for practitioners seeking personalised next-best action recommendations for their patients.

Extending the artificial intelligence capabilities of the system is also on our list of interesting directions.

What if we could simulate possible outcomes of a behaviour change experiment using existing data?

Artificial intelligence has transformed activities such as drug discovery, where computers use research data about molecules to streamline new-drug research by proposing candidate compounds with desired clinical effects. We are all excited by the prospect that a future version of our system to simulate the effects of policydriven behavioural interventions might lead to better value for money, better ways of enabling people to change their behaviour and better health outcomes.

OTHER PROJECTS ADVANCING THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOUR CHANGE Organising evidence about interventions effectiveness: Cochrane’s PICO project http://linkeddata.cochrane.org/pico-ontology Developing a typology of features of the proximal environment that influence behaviour: TIPPME project www.nature.com/articles/ s41562-017-0140 Evidence of the targeted behaviours and how they change; for example, how smoking changes over time and conditions: www.ucl. ac.uk/health-psychology/research/Smoking_Toolkit_Study Advancing interventions using theoretically based lab and real-life tests of hypotheses and evidence from the collaboration of behavioural and cognitive science, to gain better understanding of the processes of behaviour change, especially non-conscious processes: ‘Behaviour change by design’ programme www.behaviourchangebydesign.iph. cam.ac.uk Examining how behaviour change intervention content may be personalised in line with the more general aim of ‘precision medicine’: The Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) research network in the USA https://scienceofbehaviorchange.org As for the evaluation of behaviour change interventions, HBCP focuses on RCTs and is likely to gain from work by: • the SOBC on the psychometric properties of measures, and from the IC-SMOKE project led by de Bruin www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/27146038 • Linda Collins et al. at the Methodology Center, developing methods of optimising and evaluating intervention components, including the use of factorial and fractional-factorial research designs http://methodology.psu.edu • the Intervention Mapping project led by Kok https:// interventionmapping.com with an overview of resources at https:// effectivebehaviorchange.com

Educational Psychology Services involvement in delivering therapeutic interventions: sharing the practicalities Friday 8 February 2019 BPS London Office, 30 Tabernacle Street, EC2A 4UE This day conference is for Educational Psychologists (EPs) and Educational Psychology Services (EPSs) to share good practice in delivering therapeutic interventions. It is a joint event planned together with NAPEP. EPSs from a range of settings (Devon, Bristol, Enfield & Blackburn and Darwin) will present their experiences, including their approaches to commissioning, the practicalities of delivery and their evaluation findings. The recently produced DECP Commissioning and revised Ethical Trading documents will be available, as well as the DECP Delivering Psychological Therapies in Schools and Communities.

Learning outcomes and objectives: • To share good practice in delivering therapeutic interventions in schools and communities.

• To hear about the experiences of commissioning therapeutic interventions in a range of settings • To share evaluation findings of EPSs delivering therapeutic initiatives • To reflect on the relevance of the DECP documents on: Commissioning; Ethical Trading & Delivering Psychological Therapies in Schools and Communities DECP Member £20.83+VAT - £25.00 BPS Member £33.33+VAT - £40.00 Non-Member £41.67+VAT - £50.00 This event is organised by the BPS Division of Educational and Child Psychology and administered by KC Jones conference&events Ltd For further information and how to book, please visit the KC Jones website: https://www.kc-jones.co.uk/decpinterventions2019 If you have any queries please contact us via the event hotline on 01332 227776.

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More than a gut feeling John F. Cryan addressed the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Psychobiology Section We are living in a microbial world. The microbes were there first, and in terms of genes we are more than 99 per cent microbial. For me as a neuroscientist, it’s humbling to think that the weight of our gut microbes is about the same as our brain. In terms of cells we’re 1.3:1 microbial (next time you go to the bathroom and get rid of some of your microbes, just think: you’re becoming more human).

Remember the story of Pinocchio? The puppet has many adventures, but his creator Geppetto is rarely far away, guiding him along. This parallels the relationships that our brain has with our gut microbes: Who is really in charge?

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e personify our emotions in our gut.

We have gut feelings, gut instincts, we make gutsy moves, we are gutted, we have butterflies in our tummies. Over the last 13 years, my lab in Cork, in close collaboration with my clinical colleague Ted Dinan, has been trying to understand the overarching biology that may link these everyday phrases.

To begin that journey, I could take you right back to Hippocrates. But I’m going to start in rural Michigan in the 1840s. Here we meet a famous army surgeon, William Beaumont – an inquisitive clinician/scientist, fascinated by how digestion worked. One day he came across a Canadian fur trader, Alexis St Martin, who had received a gunshot wound to his abdomen.

Beaumont saved his life, but St Martin was left with a hole, a fistula. He was now a human guinea pig: Beaumont could actually see what was going on in the digestive tract, withdraw juices, see what affected rates of digestion. Ethics committees weren’t what they are now: St Martin was in effect his slave for many years.

Beaumont’s became the classic text in gastroenterology.

He wrote that when St Martin would, understandably, become a bit irritable or angry, it affected the rate of digestion. The emotional state was affecting the gut: we have a gut–brain axis. With the advent of brain imaging we could see the reciprocal nature of this relationship: distension of the gut will activate key brain areas involved in emotion.

Yet this is not a simple and predictable relationship.

Hans Selye, the father of stress research, said: ‘It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.’ Why, on this rollercoaster of life, will two people exposed to the same stressors respond differently? We know that genetics is important, and the growing field of epigenetics is also important. But we are also interested in how the gut microbiome could be charging these pathways, towards susceptibility or resilience. Stress doesn’t just affect a few neurons in the hippocampus.

We’re talking about a whole-body syndrome: it affects

the psychologist january 2019 our microbial world Nick Oliver www.nickoliverillustration.com

our immune system, and how the immune system talks to the brain. It affects gut barrier function, driving a pro-inflammatory phenotype. We need a holistic viewpoint on what stress is doing.

Like all disorders in medicine, we need animal models to assess mechanisms underpinning all this, so I work a lot with rodent models of stress. We have to put our hands up and acknowledge the limitations of our models; we can’t just put our rats and mice on the couch and ask them about their childhoods. But many of the core circuits underpinning these disorders have

been evolutionarily conserved, such as the fear circuits of the amygdala, the reward pathways, etc. We can use these rodents to tell us something about the human condition and to get to some of the mechanisms.

We’re particularly interested in stress at key times across the lifespan, such as in the perinatal period.

We have worked on a well-known animal model of early stress, the maternal separated rat model. This is based around clear human data showing that adverse life events in childhood are a predisposing factor for many psychiatric disorders, but also for disorders

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Germ-free mice In science, one of the easiest ways to study something is to take it out and see what happens. The concept of being germ-free has captured the imagination for a long time: Louis Pasteur wrote about it, and I have a sci-fi magazine from the 1920s featuring a germ-free man. So we have a germ-free facility in our lab: the mice are never exposed to any bacteria, they grow up with each other and in their normal cages, but in effect in a ‘bubble’.

A group in Japan showed that these animals have an exaggerated stress response, and that was more or less ignored at the time. But when we found that stress was affecting the microbiome, we thought that maybe in our germ-free animals the brain areas underlying the stress response would be out of kilter. Other groups were working on it too, and we all found the same thing: specific neurodevelopmental changes in these germ-free mice. Their brains didn’t wire properly, for example in terms of neurogenesis in the hippocampus and in the morphology of the amygdala. There were also behavioural changes relevant to anxiety in particular. Curiously, the effects were much more prominent in males.

We then found something we never would have predicted: that a lot of the genes that were operating in germ-free mice were involved in myelination. That’s the insulation that nerve cells require for appropriate conductance. We hear about it myelination mostly in the context of demyelinating disorders such as multiple sclerosis, but here what we found in the electron microscope was that there was hyper-myelination. That’s really intriguing, because it doesn’t occur that often in nature. Again, the sex-dependent effect came through: it was only evident in males. This led us once more to the world of autism, around the same time we were doing our epidemiology studies. Autism is very much comorbid with gastrointestinal symptoms. So, do our mice have behavioural problems? They are by nature very social – but not if they’re germ-free. They will usually prefer a new playmate over an existing one – again, not if they’re germ-free. These mice also had increased repetitive behaviour. That was telling us that for normal, appropriate behaviour in a mouse you need to have appropriate microbes in your gut.

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such as irritable bowel syndrome, one of the most common gastrointestinal disorders. So rat pups are separated from their mothers, and when they grow up they have a whole-body syndrome: changes in visceral pain, neurochemistry, the stress response, gut barrier function, depression-like behavioural and cognitive changes, immune changes.

My colleague Ted Dinan and I had a PhD student, Siobhain O’Mahony, and she (thankfully) did something we tell every PhD student not to do. We advise them to focus, and she did a crazy experiment with someone down the hallway, who happened to be a microbiologist. She looked at the microbiome in animals who had been stressed in early life, and found a reduction in diversity… a signature of this early life trauma that persisted in the microbes of these animals.

That could be completely epiphenomenological, but it got us thinking and set us on this path we’ve been on ever since. We subsequently validated some other models and it has been shown in human cohorts as well: mums with high perceived stress during pregnancy have offspring with a different microbiome.

People are teasing out the mechanisms.

Beginnings So how does the microbiome shape and influence behaviour across the lifespan?

For the most part we’re thought to be sterile in utero, and we get our microbes as we emerge from the birth canal – ‘frontier microbes’ from our mother. It’s like an evolutionary relay race, and we are handed the baton at birth. During pregnancy, a mum’s microbiome changes so that it is optimal for this handover at the right time. These microbes inform the developing immune system and are important for gut health.

What happens if you bypass this handover, due to C-section delivery? There are now 14 studies to show that your microbiome will be different. We were intrigued by that, because it’s well established from epidemiological studies that infants born by C-section have an increased relative risk of allergies, asthma, type 1 diabetes. But we know less about the relationship between mode of delivery and psychological outcomes.

The first step was to do a systematic review, and we found an increased relative risk of autism of 23 per cent in children born by C-section. That got a lot of headlines, mainly for the wrong reasons. There are health warnings to be associated with this type of analysis: many of these studies were old, and ‘relative risk’ gets lost in translation. We’re going from 10 in 1000 to 12 in 1000, so it’s not causing an epidemic in autism. But it got us thinking, and we found in our animal model that these animals grow up and have increased anxiety, and an elevated stress response.

So we took a cohort of healthy volunteers, stratified them by mode of delivery, and stressed them in the lab.

We saw a significant increase in stress response to an acute stressor amongst those born by C-section, and then in a later study we saw an increase in the response

the psychologist january 2019 our microbial world

brain development. We know the to examination stress. These people cognitive effects of breastfeeding on are mid-20s, C-section happened IQ and various other aspects, and a long time ago and many other it’s largely thought to be due to the things could have happened in sugars. between, but it was very interesting What about adolescence, to us. Back in epidemiology, another vulnerable time? It’s a we looked at everyone born in brain under construction. Basic Stockholm from 1970 onwards: 2.7 neuroscience is excited about million people. Again using autism John F. Cryan is Professor neuronal and glial interactions, as a read out, we again found a 20 and Chair in the Department pruning and long-term changes. per cent increase in relative risk. of Anatomy and Neuroscience, We know that a lot of psychological This looked like a huge public University College Cork, and disorders begin to emerge in this health concern, particularly with PI in APC Microbiome Ireland period. Any time you have change, C-section rates going up. In places J.Cryan@ucc.ie you have the capacity for things to like Brazil you have 70 per cent go wrong. A lot of focus is on trying C-section in certain provinces. In to understand the impact of a range of insults: alcohol, China it can be 60 per cent. In Ireland rates stress, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, drugs. We need to have doubled in 30 years. If people knew, for elective also understand what these are doing to the adolescent C-section in particular, that there might be long-term gut and gut microbes, and how they can then talk to effects… the brain. That could also play a role in the trajectory But what I learned from working with epidemiologists is that they love to show non-causality. towards these disorders.

It’s early days, and there’s little work going on with They interrogated the data, and with a sibling design human adolescents. We’ve been analysis the whole association fell showing that if we deplete microbes apart. It tells us the association is “Our studies showed in animals during the adolescent due to confounding factors; I’m trying to work out what those recently that in a group of period we see changes in anxiety, in memory, changes in factors could be, but it does seem around 180 elderly people, changes social memory. In the context of that whatever is driving C-section health outcomes – frailty alcohol we’ve been working with is perhaps also what’s driving the increased risk of autism. in particular – correlated colleagues in the NIH, looking at impact of vaporised alcohol That doesn’t mean that with the diversity of their the on the microbiome – an increase C-section is off the hook, and microbiome” in bacteria that are seen in we started looking at it in other inflammatory conditions. With disorders like ADHD, psychosis. colleagues in Lausanne we’ve been We still think that by shifting looking at dopamine receptors in the striatum, linking and disturbing the gut microbes we could be leaving that to microbial competition in an animal model of enduring effects. But C-section is a life-saving alcohol seeking. procedure, so what can we do? Is there anything we can offer to prevent or reverse this misfortune? Can we put in pre- or probiotics, or use other strategies, Ageing to prevent these effects? People are even doing vaginal Élie Metchnikoff won the Nobel Prize in 1908. All swabs, and anointing infants in that way, to try to scientists, later in their careers, start coming up with reverse it. crazy ideas, and Metchnikoff was full of them. One was around why people in some parts of rural Bulgaria lived longer. He noted that they ate a lot of fermented A brain under construction What microbes are there is one thing, but it’s what they foods, containing lactic acid bacteria. Metchnikoff are doing that’s really important. They’re little factories, has been more or less forgotten about for 70–80 years (although in Korea, you can get a yoghurt drink producing all kinds of weird and wonderful chemicals with Metchnikoff’s face on it: with that Nobel seal of that our bodies wouldn’t produce without them. One approval, it must be good for you!). of the most intriguing examples of this is in human During the ageing process, the brain goes into an breast milk. It has a higher complexity of sugars, by inflammatory state, and stress will really add fuel to about 20-fold, than any other mammalian system. that fire. Our studies showed recently that in a group These sugars cannot be broken down by the infant, but they are totally broken down by the microbes. This of around 180 elderly people, health outcomes – frailty in particular – correlated with the diversity of their is probably the best example of co-evolution… if you microbiome. We went one step further to show that it don’t have the microbes you can’t extract the good nourishment from the sugars. The chemicals that these was diversity of diet that was driving it. These findings are reinforcing Metchnikoff’s writings: that the secret sugars make include sciatic acid, which is crucial for

to healthy ageing may lie in the gut. We’ve revisited these ideas in our animal studies, and we’re now trying to delve into it to see if we could reverse the effects of ageing by changing the diversity of the microbiome by nutritional provision or even transplants.

Changing the microbiome Could we modulate the microbiome to attenuate the effects of stress? It turns out that most strains of bacteria will do diddly-squat to behaviour. It’s important to work out what the ones that do affect anxiety and other aspects of behaviour have that others don’t.

We’ve also been working on prebiotics, showing that if we pre-treat stressed mice with saccharides we’re able to restore certain bacteria, and functional behaviour. The anxiety and depressive behaviour is attenuated. So again through a dietary intervention in an animal we are able to see that the effects of chronic stress are reduced.

The question remains how, and we’re only beginning to tease that apart. We know that the immune system plays a role, but I’ll draw your attention to the short-chain fatty acids. These are

Key questions… …for a psychology of the brain–gut–microbiome axis (Allen, Dinan, Clarke and Cryan, 2017, in Social and Personality Psychology Compass) Cognitive psychology How does the composition and function of the microbiota impact upon cognitive performance?

Can the neurotransmitters produced by the gut microbiota impact upon stress and cognitive performance, and through what mechanism, if they cannot cross the blood–brain barrier?

How do visceral factors associated with the gastrointestinal tract impact upon cognitive function?

Social and cultural psychology How does the composition and function of the microbiota impact upon social behaviour?

Does social interaction impact upon the microbiota?

How does culture interact with the presentation and treatment of disorders of the brain–gut–microbiota axis?

Clinical psychology How is the composition and function of the microbiota altered under conditions of psychological disorder?

Can interventions designed to target psychological wellbeing alter the microbiota?

Can interventions that ameliorate dysregulation of the microbiota improve psychological wellbeing?

How do functional gastrointestinal disorders interact with cognition, emotion and stress?

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really important products that we wouldn’t have in our bodies without microbes. They support gut health, immune health, and we wanted to see if they support aspects of brain health and stress response. In an animal study where we bypassed the microbes and gave metabolites, we found that chronic stress-induced changes in anxiety and the animal version of cortisol were significantly attenuated when we fed these animals short-chain fatty acids.

The vagus nerve is also an important pathway for gut–brain signalling. In an animal study some years ago we collaborated with John Bienenstock’s group in McMaster University in Canada to show that all of the effects of a specific lactobacillus were absent when the vagus was severed. So this means that ‘what happens in vagus doesn’t stay in vagus’ but can affect our emotions.

What happens if you transplant a microbiome?

We found that in people with resistant major depression, there is a reduction in the diversity of the microbiome. Then we took that microbiome and transplanted it to a rat, and much to our surprise we were able to emulate many of the core symptoms of depression in the rodent. They developed anxiety, anhedonia, increased inflammation, changes in triptan levels… things you wouldn’t expect compared to controls. Again this helps us move away from correlation and towards causation.

Of course, no introduction to the microbiome is complete without mentioning faecal transplants.

They are now used in every Western gastrointestinal medicine centre, as a last resort in treating C. diff.

– it has a 90 per cent efficacy rate in what can be a deadly condition. The idea goes right back to ancient China, where Ge Hong called it ‘yellow soup’. It’s challenging our view of what medicine is. People are innovating, finding new ways to deliver it – including the ‘crapsule’.

Towards a ‘psychobiotic revolution’ The field now needs to move more and more towards humans, with targeted interventions of the microbiome to support brain health. My clinical colleague Ted Dinan has coined the word psychobiotic for such interventions. It’s early days, but we’re starting to get the data. In work with Andrew Allen, we took healthy volunteers and gave them probiotics over a month, along with cognitive testing and EEG. Remarkably, we found that when we stressed them, those that had taken the psychobiotic had an attenuated behavioural response as well a distinct EEG signature. And in another study, a fermented milk drink containing four or five different bacterial strains was able to dampen down an emotional network in the brain. It’s very gratifying to see work from animal models translate.

the psychologist january 2019 our microbial world

A role for psychologists Remember Pinocchio? It’s a story of who is in control.

Often the person who is really in control is the partner of the person who thinks they are in control. We’ve been so focused on the brain, but perhaps it is the microbiome pulling the strings.

I’m hugely enthusiastic about this area, but also wary of the ‘hype cycle’ (see box). A lot of what we do is reinventing the wheel: if you had the British Journal of Psychiatry from 1910, you would have read about the treatment of melancholia with lactic acid bacteria. We still have too many small, underpowered studies, many without good dietary information, or good psychological or psychiatric phenotyping. That’s why this is interdisciplinary work, and there’s an important role for psychologists moving forward (see box, ‘Key questions’). There’s a whole interesting area around mental health and the microbiome of the built environment; how where we live and work influences our psychological wellbeing.

It’s also worth noting that when we talk about the microbiome we’re often just talking about the bacteriome. We haven’t even scratched the surface in understanding the relationship between archae, viruses, bacteriophage, the fungi… all of these make up our microbiome. And it was the microbial evolutionary biologist Seth Bordenstein who reminded me that these microbes were there first. We’ve never existed without them. Our brains have never evolved without any microbial signals. It’s a co-evolution, which gives us a different perspective.

The 20th century was all about killing germs, saving lives. I still talk to older doctors and they can’t get the germ idea out of their heads. But we’re starting to appreciate the role that a healthy gut plays in a healthy brain: perhaps we’re now living in the psychobiotic century.

Nick Oliver www.nickoliverillustration.com

Yet when we took our best bacteria, those that had the best results and that we know were working through the important vagus pathway, and used a similar design, you could not have seen more negative data.

This highlights some of the challenges that we have in translating animal work to humans; this is common to all aspects of biopsychology.

We will continue to follow the data. It’s a journey that has taken me to weird and wonderful places that I never expected to go to. In the field in rural Tanzania, investigators have looked at the microbiome of hunter gatherers, and found that they have a very diverse microbiome. We can chart what agriculture as a process has done to the microbiome by looking at parts of rural Venezuela and Malawi, and see that we start to lose part of our microbiome. Then we look at our diets, our stress, our antibiotic exposure… we have extinguished microbes that our ancestors had. That’s a critical part of trying to understand where we are.

We need to feed our microbes in order to feed our brain.

Hope or hype?

It’s not an overstatement to say that the microbiome-to-brain concept has been a complete paradigm shift in neuroscience and biological psychiatry. I’m hugely enthusiastic about it, but I’m equally wary of where we are on the ‘hype cycle’. It’s still early days, and caution is needed in over-interpreting studies. Any field where there are more review articles than primary papers requires careful consideration.

There are many open questions…

To what extent can animal studies be translated to complex human behaviour, if at all? More interventional studies are needed with probiotic strains, prebiotics and even potentially faecal microbiota transplants. These will be important for the field to move away from correlative analysis towards causative and potentially therapeutic approaches. Most of the studies to date have been in relatively healthy cohorts. Can any of these studies translate to clinical populations?

What is a normal, healthy microbiome? There’s not an accepted definition, and inter-individual differences in microbiome composition can be vast. This makes a ‘one size fits all’ approach to targeting the microbiome challenging. It also, though, offers opportunities – the microbiome may be the conduit for effective personalised medicine approaches in the future.

Is there anything that the microbiome isn’t involved in? I’ve often been asked this by sceptical colleagues. The answer is probably no, since there has never been at time in evolutionary history where the brain existed without signals from the microbiome.

Do we have the right computational/biostatistical tools? Microbiome science is the epitome of big data. Most measures reflect relative abundance and can be made at different levels of granularity from phylum down to strain level, thus there are many ways to report alterations. Moreover, there are constraints on all of the currently used tools used to analyse such data; however, new bioinformatic pipelines and algorithms are being generated at a great pace.

Is it what’s there or what it’s doing? We must get a better understanding of what the microbiome is doing in terms of metabolites generated and interactions with the host. What are the mechanisms of communication? Despite much research this is still a very open question. The field must take advantage of recent technical advances in neuroscience to map circuits that mediate the effects of microbes from the periphery to the brainstem and from the brainstem to corticolimbic structures that underpin complex human behaviours.

2019 CPD workshops Professional development opportunities from your learned Society We are pleased to launch our popular core programme and some of our workshops for 2019.

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the psychologist january 2019 heart and mind

Sarah Garfinkel ‘It’s an intriguing world that is opening up’ Jon Sutton meets Sarah Garfinkel at the Annual Conference of the Psychobiology Section

Can you take me back to when you first became interested in how bodily signals can influence emotion and memory?

I was working with people with post-traumatic stress disorder. I was just looking at neural signals and the mechanisms underlying persistent fear memories.

But I was also taking skin conductance as a measure of fear, and that was the first time I had used physiology.

I was struck by the way that some people had very large bodily responses to fear, and others were just flat. I spoke to other researchers and they said ‘Oh, we throw out non-responders’ – they would just discard their data. But their bodies were doing something so different. That intrigued me. What might that mean for the brain?

My research was putting people in ‘dangerous’ and ‘safe’ rooms, and showing that people with PTSD couldn’t use external context to guide memory recall.

So I was thinking, is there something about their internal state which says ‘fear fear fear’. What might that look like, what might that be that keeps them constantly primed?

And you settled on the heart, which makes sense because we intuitively feel things in our heart.

It’s not just chugging away in the background like a metronome.

The beautiful thing about the heart is that it’s not regular, and I love that. It’s such an honest signal.

With neuroimaging you can analyse your data in different ways with different models, but with the heart you can just see the variability… it’s there, it’s apparent, and it’s real. A simple signal that can be so informative.

And different conditions are associated with different variability. The fact that schizophrenia has such a regularly beating heart is intriguing. But my work deals more with the heart–brain connection, and how sensitive individuals are to detecting bodily sensations. That’s interoception.

Explain that heart–brain connection. Fundamentally, your brain reacts each time your heart beats?

Isn’t that beautiful? You do get a suppression effect with most people, so when your heart is beating your brain gives you a smooth perception of the world.

Your brain edits out these signals that could potentially interfere. It’s trying to downplay events that happen in sync with your heart. If I gave you a pain stimulus when your heart is beating, you’d perceive it as less painful. There are effects on memory too… if we see stimuli on the heartbeat we are more likely to forget them. So that’s back to the inhibitory effect. That paper, ‘what the heart forgets’, showed that if a word coincides with a heartbeat you’re more likely to forget it.

The one exception to that is how fear is processed when the heart is beating. Maybe we’ll find more things, but this was a paradigm shift to find that fear is selectively enhanced with these heartbeats. And your amygdala fires more. So you have subjective effects and neural effects associated with the heightened processing of fear with each heartbeat. We think that channel may be more active in individuals prone to anxiety… It’s an intriguing world that is opening up.

So take me back to this idea of interoception…

Interoceptive accuracy is an individual difference in how good we are at perceiving internal sensations, and that’s something you can train. So when you sit here at rest, do you feel your heart beating?

And there’s a difference between how good you are at that, and how good you think you are at that?

Yes. My dad thought he couldn’t do it, but I tested him and he was almost perfect. He didn’t have insight into it. So you get these interesting dissociations.

I’m not the best at it, but I’m all right, and I have decent insight.

What are the implications of being really good at it and knowing it?

A BBC Radio 4 programme got me to work with a hostage negotiator. He claimed he was really sensitive

to other people’s emotions. Being sensitive to your own heart potentially tells you how you’re feeling, but could also give you information about how other people are feeling as well. This guy was 100 per cent perfect.

So he’s certainly sensitive at reading himself, the next question is, does his body change in response to the emotional cues of others?

40

Nick Oliver www.nickoliverillustration.com

You’d think in some ways that wouldn’t be an advantage to a hostage negotiator. Wouldn’t it get overwhelming?

My favourite quote in Middlemarch is about how overwhelming empathy can be… ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’

I think that in order to be a good hostage negotiator you need to be aware of what’s going on but also be able to regulate it so that it doesn’t overwhelm you. Use it and be in control of it.

People with autism spectrum conditions are interesting in this respect… a lot of the literature says they have deficits in empathy, but their bodies are actually very sensitive to other people’s pain.

A study by Xiaosi Gu and colleagues demonstrated that autistic individuals had a heightened skin conductance response to other people’s pain. They have often have hypersensitivity to extroceptive signals – touch, noises in the environment etc. – yet not be able to read their own bodily signals.

So their heart may be racing in response to the pain of others but they’re not able to read that in the same way.

You’ve taken this work into other conditions.

I’ve been based in psychiatry for a decade. My PhD was getting students drunk and looking at their memory, which was an awful lot of fun, and I found interesting effects, but I felt a bit of an existential crisis, I wanted to help the world. So I did a fellowship in neuroscience and psychiatry, building on the memory work. I was working with people with PTSD in the States, and then I moved to work with Hugo Critchley, who is one of the world leaders in that body–brain relationship.

I got tenure a year ago and now run my own lab in the medical school.

My aim is always to look at basic mechanisms and then look at clinical disturbance, with the potential

There’s a big overlap with anxiety there. You’re suggesting we should help people with anxiety tune into their own bodies?

To get more accurate at it. An internal focus can be a sign of anxiety, so what you actually want is bodily precision. People with anxiety might think they’re good without actually being good. Our new work shows that if you train people to have better accuracy, they have reduced anxiety.

for opening out new avenues of treatment. It’s a mechanistic approach that touches on what the general public instinctively think might be right anyway… take mindfulness, lots of people are subscribing to that but nobody is quite sure how or why it works.

Having these more controlled studies looking at bodily precision and interoception could give some idea.

Mindfulness won’t necessarily increase your accuracy in the way that training will, but the two together…

But also the ‘just noticing’ part of mindfulness could be useful: it’s good to have interoceptive precision, but then just notice and not worry if you feel a heartbeat.

How quickly could you make me better at that?

We initially gave people eight sessions. We did a baseline, a mid-point and a final assessment, and by the mid-point everyone was pretty good. We didn’t need the last four sessions! You’d probably see a significant improvement after just 40 minutes of me giving you some feedback.

You’ve worked in the area of dissociation.

We have a paper in the pipeline on individuals who were first episode psychosis, who are more likely to have dissociative symptoms – to not feel like their body is integrated in the world, and to feel like their memories didn’t really happen to them. It turns out they are people that have deficits in interoception,

the psychologist january 2019 heart and mind

specifically in the metacognitive domain. So they don’t have insight into what their body is doing, in terms of whether they know if tones that we present to them our brain feels better if we exercise, we sleep, we eat are in sync with their heart. They well. There’s such an amazing might get it correct, but not know dynamic interaction between they are correct. That metacognitive “There’s such an amazing body and brain, yet looking at and deficit in interoceptive was understanding the two hasn’t been and dynamic interaction associated with higher dissociative investigated that much. Partly that between body and symptoms. has been due to the equipment.

All specialties have been developed brain, yet looking at and in isolation and you’re limited Your journey so far has involved understanding the two by the technology. Going back a lot of neat findings and cool hasn’t been investigated not that far, people were talking titles… have there been dead ends about imaging the brain and heart along the way, or is the heart just that much” together by finding really small opening up in the way you are people! It’s relatively recently that hypothesising? we’ve been able to do things like look at blood pressure It’s never like that. There are always things in file and the brain together. Looking at these dynamic drawers! The key for me is not to be disillusioned, and relationships between peripheral bodily signatures also I like working in teams. If one thing doesn’t work, concurrently with brain is a relatively new thing, and then another thing will, and people feel ownership of I think it has the potential to open up new insights and both. I run a collaborative lab and that seems to work make therapeutic progressions we hadn’t thought of. well. Working with Hugo Critchley is a joy, and all my It’s exciting to see where it may lead. mentees and colleagues are great.

You’re finding things that are statistically significant, but how clinically significant are they as targets for interventions?

I think that we spent so long as scientists focusing on the brain… we as the general public know that

Sarah Garfinkel is Professor in Psychiatry (Neuroscience and Imaging) at the University of Sussex.

Email bsms2939@sussex.ac.uk or find her on Twitter @DrSFink. She was recently named by Nature as one of their ‘Rising stars’: see tinyurl.com/natrisingstar

Memory Based Evidence Task and Finish Group – Chair and Members The Society’s Research Board is seeking to appoint a Chair and Members to a new Task and Finish Group. The Task and Finish Group will comprise experts in memory based evidence. It is anticipated that there will be around 10-15 members. It is expected the group will start work in spring 2019. The Group will report directly to the Research Board.

The Society first published a guidance document on Memory and the Law in 2008. The remit of the Group will be to provide expert input into a new plain English psychologically informed guide to memory based evidence, for non-psychologists. The audience for this work is primarily legal professionals and others working in the Courts and with expert witnesses.

To request a Statement of Interest Form please contact Rosie Horne on rosie.horne@bps.org.uk Statements of Interest should reach the Society’s office no later than Monday 4th February 2019.

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Organised by BPS Conferences

2019

BPS conferences are committed to ensuring value for money, careful budgeting and sustainability

Conference

Date

Venue

Website

Division of Occupational Psychology

9–11 Jan

Crowne Plaza Chester

www.bps.org.uk/dop2019

Division of Clinical Psychology

23–24 Jan

Renaissance, Manchester

www.bps.org.uk/dcp2019

Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities

2–3 Apr

BPS London Office

www.bps.org.uk/fpid2019

Annual Conference

1–2 May

Harrogate International Centre

www.bps.org.uk/ac2019

Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology

4–5 Jun

Cardiff University

www.bps.org.uk/dartp2019

Division of Forensic Psychology

18–20 Jun

Crowne Plaza Liverpool

www.bps.org.uk/dfp2019

Division of Counselling Psychology

28–29 Jun

Mercure Holland House Hotel, Cardiff

www.bps.org.uk/dcop2019

Qualitative Methods in Psychology & History and Philosophy of Psychology

3–5 Jul

Cardiff Metropolitan University

www.bps.org.uk/ qmiphpp2019

Division of Health Psychology

10–11 Jul

Renaissance, Manchester

www.bps.org.uk/dhp2019

Cognitive Psychology Section & Developmental Psychology Section

4–6 Sep

Best Western Plus Stoke on Trent Moat House

www.bps.org.uk/cogdev2019

‘I’ve read every word of more than 240 consecutive issues of The Psychologist’ One on one… with Peter Dillon-Hooper, who this month retires from the BPS and his post as Assistant Editor of The Psychologist after more than 20 years of service

One long fortnight I started work for the British Psychological Society in May 1998 on a two-week contract covering a staff absence…

One alternative career I am just about to retire from it. The first half of my working life was spent in the travel business, I started with Thomas Cook in 1971 as a booking clerk (not a job title you see nowadays) and ended up organising overseas conferences and corporate events. The first Gulf War put an end to much of the business I was doing, and I found myself out of work. After a spell in the early 1990s working on building sites (which I really enjoyed and I was never fitter), I went to university, and serendipity and chance eventually led to my working for the BPS on The Psychologist.

One unexpected accomplishment When I left school I had decided that higher education was not for me, so off I went to work and earn money.

I came to regret missing out on university, but the opportunity arose again in my early forties, and I enrolled on a bachelor of laws course at Leicester University. With a family to help run, I treated it as a nine-to-five job and was delighted to gain a first class degree (one of only six awarded in a cohort of around 300).

One proud achievement at the BPS Risking hubris, may I have three? Writing the Society’s Style Guide for Authors and Editors; in my role as Manager of the History of Psychology Centre, organising the first Stories of Psychology days, now designated a BPS flagship event; and leading on the setting-up of the PsychSource website. But I can’t omit also saying that 12 times a year for the last 20 years or so I have felt proud to have been part of The Psychologist team when I have seen the result of our work land on my desk.

44

One lifelong interest I clearly remember when I was about 11 years old watching a sparrow picking up crumbs around a café table in my local park. I was struck by the subtleties of colour and pattern in its feathers. Off I went to the public

library to find out more. I remember setting up bird feeders in my garden and being rewarded with some surprising avian visitors (this was the severe winter of 1962/63). I was hooked. This youthful interest in birds, and nature in general, has never left me. And now, to my delight, one of my sons has discovered birding for himself (no doubt from seeds I sowed when he was a boy), and our occasional days out together are an utter joy.

One confession I have on my bookshelf at home The Golden Treasury of Longer Poems edited by Ernest Rhys (1944). It does not belong to me, though it has been in my keeping for over half a century. It is a school book; it bears the stamp of Harrogate Grammar School. I no longer remember how or why I came not to return it after my O-levels; perhaps they’ll want it back if they see this. I do hope not.

My English teacher, possibly still among us, might at least be pleased to learn that I have dipped into it continually throughout my larcenous possession, and that it has opened doors to my appreciating a wider landscape of poetry (acquired by legitimate means).

One book So many I could choose, but taking the desert island book approach, it would be The Natural History of Selbourne.

Actually a collection of letters by the 18th-century parsonnaturalist Gilbert White, for me it is simultaneously a practical guide to critical inquiry about one’s natural surroundings, a fine example of elegant and expressive prose, and an evocation of England. All things I’d find useful or comforting stranded far from home and alone.

One place I was considering saying Lake Lissagriffin on the Mizen Peninsula or Cape Clear Island, but really it’s West Cork, all of it… and its people. With family connections, we have been regular visitors for many years in every season.

We feel quite at home there and have considered making it our actual home. But we have more family in Britain, so West Cork will probably simply remain a regular place to go to for recharging our batteries, and for me to enjoy some excellent birding.

the psychologist january 2019 one on one Jon Sutton

One influence My wife, Gráinne. I owe much to her – she arrived at a low point in my life, and I know I wouldn’t be half the person I am without her. In many ways we are very different, but that’s what makes us a strong team.

shifted my perspective’, then I suppose I could say it’s coming to understand that ‘madness’ is largely socially constructed, that the causes of mental distress are mostly environmental, and that the ‘cure’ does not come in a box of pills.

One affliction Being unable to read anything without infelicities of spelling, punctuation and grammar leaping out at me.

This is useful for working on producing a magazine but is otherwise a potential social pitfall.

One persistent challenge As a largely self-taught classical guitar player, I have struggled with mastering the Five Preludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos for over 40 years. A kind of love-hate thing.

Two of them I can play with reasonable fluency, the others present various technical difficulties that I have not managed to overcome, and probably now never will.

But they are such delights to play when I hit a passage just right – at least, just right for me. I expect I’ll have more time to devote to playing in my retirement, so I shall soldier on with them.

One thing I’ve learnt from psychology I knew little about psychology when I started at the BPS all those years ago, but I’ve read every word (often several times over) of more than 240 consecutive issues of The Psychologist. If I take the one thing to mean ‘one thing that

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Wellbeing: Crossing Borders The work of educational psychologists in the UK Friday 22nd March 2019 The Principal Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow The day has been organised to make links between the DECP and SDEP so the two divisions can begin to share our joint knowledge of evidence-based practice. Historically there has been limited contact which is unfortunate as we share a common work focus. The day is designed to begin to remedy this. Wellbeing is topical in both England, Wales, NI and Scotland (and beyond) and it is an area to which educational psychology has much to offer and we are hoping to build on each other’s expertise. It is planned that there will be a keynote presentation from each division and a series of workshops/presentations which will be equally divided between the two divisions. The day will close with a professional dialogue which will reflect on the learning from the day, consider ways in which this can be taken forward and discuss further joint activities to maintain stronger links between the divisions.

Keynotes Dr Richard Ingram Department of Education and Social Work at the University of Dundee - ‘Emotions and Professional Practice: contributions and contradictions’ Dr Colette Soan Specialist Senior Educational and Child Psychologist: Inclusion Support, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and Bethany Williams Research Psychologist: Inclusion Support, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council - ‘The Sandwell Well-Being Charter Mark: Introduction, Evaluation and Partnership Working’ Learning outcomes and objectives: • To share evidence- based practice about well-being in schools and communities • To forge stronger links between DECP and SDEP • To plan ways forward for further joint activities between the two divisions DECP Member £20.83+VAT - £25.00 SDEP Member £20.83+VAT - £25.00 BPS Member £33.33+VAT - £40.00 Non-Member £41.67+VAT - £50.00 This event is organised by the BPS Division of Educational and Child Psychology and administered by KC Jones conference&events Ltd For further information and how to book, please visit the KC Jones website: https://www.kc-jones.co.uk/decpwellbeing2019 If you have any queries please contact us via the event hotline on 01332 227776.

Hope, control and opportunity Thea Fitch talks to Ian Florance about her move from homelessness and eating disorders to becoming a psychologist working at the Recovery and Wellbeing College ‘When we facilitate courses and workshops we always have two trainers in the room: one offers lived experience, the other is a clinician. I’ve moved from one role to, in a sense, both.’

48

An e-mail from Central and North West London Foundation Trust had introduced Thea as a senior recovery trainer and psychologist, as well as sitting on the Healthy London Partnership’s Homeless Health Program Board. It raised several questions.

Does personal experience help in working with clients, and how does someone move from ‘revolving door patient’ to clinician?

After a short rainy walk from Kings Cross I found the Recovery and Wellbeing College in Wicklow Street (temporary accommodation while their actual offices are refurbished). It can be a desolate area, but Thea gave me a warm welcome and we settled down to talk.

She turned out to be a passionate communicator on the role of trauma and mental illness in homeless people’s lives, as well as the dangers of labelling.

‘I feel lucky that I can use my life experiences in a helpful way’ What does the Recovery and Wellbeing College do?

‘It’s a trust-wide service – the third one of its kind to open in the UK. It was launched in 2012. It runs courses and workshops and is based on the idea that people with mental health difficulties should have the same opportunities as anyone else. It covers five boroughs, as diverse as Brent and Westminster, and has pockets of services in other areas.’

The college also seeks to help people build community tools, breaking down dependency on services, promoting hope and personal autonomy, and helping them escape the identity of an ill person. ‘Most of our courses and workshops are run out of colleges, universities and libraries – community buildings which are not health- or illness-related,’ Thea says. ‘People mostly self-refer, and our courses are open to anyone.

No one has to self-disclose and the services are free to people using Trust services or carers of people using Trust services, including staff working in the Trust.’

When did you start working here? ‘My occupational therapist brought me here six years ago as a student after a long period of health problems relating to my eating disorder. I saw that the staff treated students as people, not just as a label. As I’ve since learnt, the college uses an educational rather than a therapeutic model. It can be summarised with three words: hope; control; opportunity. Language is critical.

the psychologist january 2019 careers

How clinicians talk about issues give messages and make judgements; ways of speaking imply authority and power. Labelling is a problem in many areas we deal with, not least the ones I experienced and am now working in – homelessness and eating disorders. So, you can see why the attitudes and culture here were a revelation to someone who had, by that stage, accepted homelessness and anorexia as my identity. Four years ago, I applied for a peer support role in Westminster and got the job. I also got a role in training out of my lived experience.’ A little over a year ago, Thea got a role here at the Recovery and Wellbeing College as the Physical Health and Wellbeing Lead. ‘The underlying idea is you can’t have physical health without mental health, and vice versa. We talk about personal recovery in addition to clinical recovery, and help people think about changes they would like to make that would support their recovery and wellbeing. And I suppose now I cover two roles – one by virtue of my life experiences, one because of my master’s in health psychology.’ Do the two aspects get in the way of each other? ‘Far from it. I feel lucky that I can use my life experiences in a helpful way. They create an atmosphere in which trust develops more quickly and the person I’m talking to is less fearful that they’re going to be judged because I do have personal experience of at least some of the things they’re going through.’

How could I help others if I couldn’t help myself?

Something has been bugging me. What is your accent Thea? ‘I was mistaken for Irish the other day but I’m Canadian; born in Vancouver. I had a difficult childhood. “A dysfunctional family� was a term I became familiar with. My mother moved us around a lot after my parents went through a particularly messy divorce when I was very young. It was a hard time for everyone, and we all struggled to cope. Things happened that were outside of my control, that took a long time to recover from. Apart from anything else all these experiences interested me in psychology. I began to ask myself “How come these adults are making these decisions? On what basis?�.’ You sound an intelligent child. ‘I was bright but tended to hang around with kids that were less academically minded. Living in Spain I went to Spanish school for a short time, ostensibly to learn the language and the culture we were living in. I was bullied quite intensely for looking and sounding so different.’ Having lived in Spain from the age of 8 to 15 it all got too much. ‘I started telling myself repeating phrases: “I have no one�; “Life is not worth living�; “If I do not leave, I will never recover�. So, I left. I’d

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saved up enough money to get to London, hoping to speak with my father and to be able to live with him Things changed during her last admission. For in Canada. That didn’t happen. I spent a short time a variety of family reasons, she had a row with her finding places to bed down where it felt safe. In the mum and ended up being admitted to hospital with end, my father got me a place in a boarding school internal bleeding. ‘I thought, “This is it. I can’t do this in Birmingham through relations who lived there. any more.” Then one of the care coordinators came Because of that I was able to do my A-levels. My eating to me, treated me like a human being and offered me disorder was already taking hold, and I had all the some choices about how to cope with going out into traits that typify someone who develops one. I was the world again. And that was it! My recovery has been partly very self-reliant but also incredibly childlike a process of losing things – my loved grandmother had and naive, with no effective coping strategies.’ died, my grandfather who I was very close to too, my Thea stresses that she now has a good relationship marriage broke up, and I had developed very severe with her parents and, also points out ‘Having a father osteoporosis (my body finally protesting at all I had with money helped me – he’s a lawyer – and my put it through). But I discovered things too – yoga siblings are hugely important. That’s the sort of support and the college, and who I might be beyond my eating any person who is homeless or ill doesn’t often have. disorder. How I might be of some use in the world.’

In addition, Mum was a teacher and continually stressed education, which has also helped all of us.’

During a gap year living in Vancouver she Understand what homelessness means waitressed. Was that related to her eating disorder? ‘I’m What do you think Psychologist readers should know not sure it was in my case but there’s often a fascination about those diagnosed as homeless? And what can they with controlling both your own and other people’s do? eating. It’s a question of power, of control. If you can ‘First it’s important to understand what survive without eating and still seem to maintain your homelessness means. It’s not just sleeping on the street. independence, to function, you feel invincible.’ She People sleep on buses, in hospitals. They sofa-surf. also looked after her grandmother who had multiple There is a population of hidden homeless. Second, sclerosis. ‘This experience inspired me to study health the effects are stark. Homeless men die on average psychology. She had a strong religious faith and I at 47; homeless women at 43. Third, there’s a tacit realised what a powerful tool this is to help her live assumption that homelessness is a choice. But in fact, some sort of life. A lot of people I work with have faith there’s huge evidence that most people diagnosed as in something – sometimes, but not always, religion – homeless suffer traumas and mental health issues and that literally keeps them alive. before homelessness compounds It gives them hope.’ those issues. A key characteristic of Thea’s eating disorder was someone who finds him or herself “My eating disorder out of control and she stopped as homeless is a failure of trust.’ was already taking hold, looking after her grandmother. She Are there political and and I had all the traits moved back to the UK and after policy issues here? ‘Yes. I’m not a period of sofa-surfing she went particularly politically minded, that typify someone who to Southampton and did a degree though many of my colleagues are. develops one” in psychology. She then moved to The new Homelessness Reduction London with two friends and saw Act is a step forward but providing a GP ‘who got me a bed in an eating support based on labels rather than disorders clinic urgently and I stayed there for a year because of need does not help.’ and a half. I was discharged to a hostel, after which Do psychologists have a role? ‘Yes. And as we’re I was moved into a social housing flat. I still live in it.’ realising in several areas it’s the relationship that For most of the next 10 years Thea was in matters, less the particular technique or approach you hospital, either in eating disorder clinics or in an use. Kindness, hope, cooperation, the establishment acute psychiatric ward because of her self-harming. of trust are key. That’s my experience both as a person ‘To return to my earlier point about identity and who uses services and as a psychologist. Put simply, treating a person as a person, I was being told that kindness works.’

I would never recover and at best I would be a If people want to learn more? ‘Look at the London functioning anorexic.’ Every so often she would come Homeless Health Programme website and download out of hospital for three months but would soon More than a Statistic, which is the voice of people who have to return to hospital again. Remarkably, Thea are homeless in London. What comes across to anyone completed her master’s in health psychology during who reads these words is that we’re all just a few steps this period. She also worked as a counsellor, an au pair from being homeless.’ and a play coordinator and got married. But she didn’t And your final hope? ‘That support should start working as a psychologist straight after she was increasingly be given on a needs basis not because of qualified. ‘I felt a fraud. How could I help others if I a label. Diagnoses are helpful in getting support, but couldn’t help myself?’ they can be divisive.’

the psychologist january 2019 careers

We are looking for two exceptional psychologists to take on exciting volunteer roles to help the BPS to dramatically increase our impact. The successful candidates will also become members of the Board of Trustees. We actively encourage applications from members of the Society from diverse backgrounds.

Chair of the Public Policy Board

The Public Policy Board will maximise the impact of psychology on public policy so that policy makers and the public know the value of psychological evidence and the contribution of psychologists.

A mover and a shaker in policy circles, you will be well connected, a strategic thinker and politically astute. You will be able to cut through jargon and clearly articulate the Society’s recommendations whether it’s in a tweet, while briefing a journalist or when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee. You will have first-hand experience of using evidence to achieve change and will demonstrate an understanding of how to influence policy making in the four nations of the UK. Working closely with the Senior Management Team and office staff, you will help develop and implement an ambitious long-term strategy to deliver on our Senate priorities and to bring psychological evidence to the heart of government to make real and lasting policy change.

Please contact Kathryn.Scott@bps.org.uk if you would like to discuss the role.

Chair of the Education and Training Board

The Education and Training Board aims to promote excellence in psychology education and training so that students and academics have access to high-quality education and training, now and in the future.

A well respected academic, with a focus on excellence in learning and teaching, you will be well aware of the challenges faced by students, teachers and other stakeholders across the educational landscape (inc. schools and colleges and higher education).

You will be a strategic thinker that is able to work across the vast ranging education and training priorities, bringing focus for the Society, its members and wider academic community. You will be able to identify the strategic links between education, training and workforce planning, in England and across the devolved nations.

Please contact Claire.Tilley@bps.org.uk if you would like to discuss the role.

Role descriptions and person specifications are available under the ‘Voluntary Posts’ tab on bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs. Please send a 500 word statement of interest outlining your suitability for the role, along with your CV, to Emma.Smith@bps.org.uk.

The closing date for both roles is 21 January, 2019.

The British Psychological Society celebrates diversity. We are committed to equality of opportunity for all staff, volunteers and members and welcome applications from all suitably qualified individuals regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.

We particularly welcome BAME and LGBT applicants who are currently under-represented in the Society.

‘We seek to liberate people’ Ian Florance hears from Tony Page – self-employed Chartered Psychologist and author – about our ‘mistaken craving for freedom’

52

‘Writing about my Dad was a need I successfully ignored for many years,’ Tony tells me. ‘Then it came up strongly and repeatedly in supervision.

My supervisor is a psychologist friend called David Webster, and our sessions every few weeks were on a reciprocal, unpaid basis, about issues arising in our work as occupational psychologists. A personal issue kept intruding, centred on a box in the attic that I’d put away unopened a decade earlier after my father’s memorial service.’

Tony has strong views about supervision. ‘I delayed taking up supervision, although I give coaching to clients to help them reflect. I relied on journal writing as self-supervision and I was an ongoing member of a learning set. These self and group settings were more comfortable than one-on-one.’ Can you say why? ‘Because one-on-one smacks eerily of therapy, sometimes creating toxic dynamics, vulnerability and abuse. I prefer a level playing field.’

We moved on to writing. In today’s uncertain job market, many psychologists are interested in writing books for income, reputation and to contribute to debates. How did you first get published? ‘I sat down at a conference dinner next to an editor from Gower called Malcolm Stern. He asked, “Have you got a book in you?”’ After this, Gower accepted Tony’s proposal to co-write a book with his client in a big pharmaceutical company, portraying both sides of their client–consultant conversations. But, Tony’s client let him down and Gower agreed he could finish the book alone, drawing from his journal.

That first book, Diary of a Change Agent, shows a serious argument flaring up between Tony and a colleague, he says ‘because I was unstable through working too hard’. It offers the practice of journal writing as a stabiliser. ‘Journal writing often produces surprises,’ Tony tells me. ‘It is a channel to express emotion, to recover a wider perspective, a creative resource giving me answers, ideas and connections.

Good consulting – particularly relational consulting – draws from values, intuitions and a quiet inner voice, but this was not how I was trained. The writing brings me to that voice, and it’s a kind of supervision that straddles the professional/personal barrier.’

What was it like to write the first book? ‘My wife Helen says my face dropped for six months. Clearly the writing was churning me up, and I promised never to write another book… it was ten years before I did. I’ve learned to ask why I’m writing something, for whom – myself or an audience – and that there’s

nothing wrong with writing for yourself.’

Tony also discovered his category of writing is ‘auto-ethnography’ and is based on ‘participant observation’. ‘Like an anthropologist, your work gets you intimately involved with a tribe. The tribe or team lets you in and the act of writing about it changes what’s inside your skin. Then you start behaving differently towards them, and if you decide to share your insights and you do this judiciously, you are holding up a mirror, which causes the tribe to change.’

His second book, Creating Leadership: How to Change Hippos into Gazelles, first published in 2009, is a real story about bringing British Council staff successfully together across 11 different African countries through a merger. In contrast to those first two books, Tony is self-publishing the third: Secret Box: Searching for Dad in a Century of Self. ‘The world of publishing has changed,’ he says. ‘Publishers were once gatekeepers to a closed world of writer services: contracts, deadlines, advice, editing, design… they created the audience. Now technology opens everything up, but you need help and advice. I’ve had feedback from “first readers”, proof-reading, a designer for the cover and page layouts, plus invaluable help from an experienced book marketeer.’

Mysteries Tony talks – unlike most occupational psychologists I’ve interviewed – more like a clinical psychologist or even a therapist. This reflects how he became a psychologist. At school he favoured the arts, then turned to the sciences. In a scattergun way he aimed at five different degree subjects but settled for joint honours at Nottingham in maths and psychology.

‘At first, I struggled with the many mysteries of psychology, but its range had great appeal, from Freud, through mice in mazes, to education and industry. My specialist option was occupational, but my dissertation clinical, about the “spontaneous remission” of patients often occurring within two years, regardless of the type of therapy offered. The discovery of therapist bias and of “psycho-therapeutic agents in the community” – perhaps friends and family – drew me to the antipsychiatry movement, people like Laing and Szasz.’

Tony’s new book describes the influence of a father who was an organisation development consultant with big companies. His father changed as he became involved in the ‘cult-like’ activities of the human potential movement. ‘When I opened the box in

the psychologist january 2019 careers

the attic, Dad’s diaries showed me what was undiscussable at the time, which pulled him away from the family.

It’s an inescapable fact that I followed in Dad’s footsteps because I am an organisation development consultant myself.’

After graduation Tony roadied for his brother’s band Barracuda, before he took generic HR positions, then specialised in training, succession planning and graduate engineer recruitment, until he learned the skills of facilitation with management teams. ‘When the training route began to feel limiting, I re-contacted an old professor about joining the British Psychological Society. He signed my papers on condition I wrote fully about my experience, because he said, “as a profession we need to reflect”. Maybe he sowed a seed.’

His training colleagues taught him the simple practices of co-coaching, exchanging life stories and reflecting together, but ‘they tried to dissuade me from joining PA Consulting. I took that big leap anyway, and my mentor, Dr Lance Lindon, showed me how to survive in a less supportive environment.’ Tony was in the organisation development team as opposed to the assessment team, but still straddling the occupational/ clinical divisions.

Many psychologists have to face setting up in businesses, sometimes to supplement other positions.

Tony left PA after three years to restore his work–life balance soon after his son was born. What was most difficult about going out on his own? ‘Finding clients.

I started a research project, to give me a specialism to sell. I offered teambuilding, but I was asked to do other things instead.’ And any tips? ‘Be professional and reliable but flexible, don’t be afraid of taking risks.

Refer the jobs you definitely can’t do. Decide whether to grow a company and manage people or offer your skills directly.’

Freedom and getting over our ‘selves’ Following 30 years in business, Tony’s now pondering freedom. ‘We all want to be free. As psychologists we seek to liberate people: we want our friends and family, our customers and clients to be free. But I’m sensing we’re partially mistaken’. He is pointing out that the world isn’t that big any more. After working in 45 different countries he sees populations huddling together in cities and individuals making ripples, many of them unnoticed. He speaks of ‘invisible threads of

consequence’ running between us. ‘When I drop my airline seat onto your lap, you can react by dropping yours onto the passenger behind, or try to bottle it and get angry, or directly counter-react by challenging me.

We’re strangely drawn to crowds where the feedback arrives faster with more fury.’

Tony’s overseas work to develop leaders and teams with organisations in the business of cultural relations and poverty alleviation draws from contemporary psychology. ‘The 100 years since Freud spoke about narcissism has been a “century of self” featuring the bloodiest wars and the greatest liberations in the history of humanity. Psychology professors in the USA – Lewin and Milgram, for instance – demonstrated our vulnerability to dictators. Maslow and the writer Aldous Huxley called for self-expression and human growth, lifting everyone’s sights out of the sicknesses that psychotherapy and behaviourism sought to cure.

So, the human potential movement was born, but its dream was never realised. Followers – mostly middleclass men in the West – missed the simple fact that their total freedom let them spoil things for others.

Their righteous certainty broke apart families like my own. I once believed new media could teach us to co-exist peacefully again, but through highlighting inequality, and stoking mistrust, are we enabling dictators to seduce us and imperil humankind’s great advances?

‘Today’s zeitgeist also acknowledges complexity and embraces humane and diverse influences such as Chimamanda Adichie, Khalil Gibran or Nancy Kline.

Mostly we accept that lasting solutions are co-created, not imposed from above. The impetus amongst young people to go green and to clean up plastic might still fulfil Maslow’s later declaration that self-expression was always over-emphasised so we must realise our interdependency and discover a unifying sense of purpose.’

How do you think this is relevant to psychologists today? ‘We are atomised into factions that obscure the unifying purpose of our discipline, but I am optimistic.

Whether we work as practitioners in schools, hospitals or industry, or as academics doing the teaching and research in universities, we know something about creating human energy, joy and brilliance. Who better than a psychologist to remind everyone we already have the freedom that matters most – to choose how we will live alongside one another, and specifically whether to care about our impacts. Rather than overempowering individuals to “drop their airline seat onto anyone’s lap”, or supporting the delusion of their independence, psychologists can show everyone how to co-create vibrant living ecosystems that unlock our greater potentials.’

At 60, Tony has taken a change of pace: last year he and his wife went volunteering with VSO to Myanmar and Nepal. How does the world look to him today?

‘It’s smaller and better connected than ever before, with age-old injustices being challenged. Despite the shifting politics, wherever we live we’re far more privileged than we imagine.’

Jobs in Psychology Whether you are a recent graduate, or a Psychologist looking for a change in career, you can view current vacancies for a range of Psychology roles here, or view the latest roles on the new appointments site www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk The job site is still the number one online resource for psychology jobs. Fully accessible on mobile and desktop computers, the site features increased search functionality, superb ease of use and navigation. For recruiters, there are many more targeting options for you to promote your vacancies to potential candidates. All adverts placed in The Psychologist will have their adverts included on the job site.

To discuss the opportunities for advertising www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk Research Digest, please contact Kai Theriault on 01223 378051 or email kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk.

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Are you a Psychology Graduate looking to kick-start your career and gain valuable experience within healthcare that will propel you into your aspirations in the field of Psychology?

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To check the latest jobs please go to www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk 54

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Bramley Health's 2 Year Psychology Graduate Programme will provide you with the experience, knowledge and skills needed to progress your career in Psychology. Graduates will have a dedicated Trainer / Mentor to guide them through the formal learning and will also have the opportunity to spend time with members of our Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDT).

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Forensic Psychologists £34,212 - £44,936 (depending on location) England and Wales It’s not just the men, women and young people in prisons who benefit from our approach to forensic psychology. Professionals like Karen, HMPPS Forensic Psychologist, do too.

“It’s the perfect environment. I get great diversity – really interesting assessment work with a variety of personalities. You get to use lots of different tools, and work on developing your knowledge of different types of offending.’’

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Job Title: Various psychologists Employer: Elysium Healthcare Karen Howell is Head of Psychology at Chadwick Lodge Forensic Mental Health Hospital, Milton Keynes, and North Region Head of Profession for Elysium Healthcare group.

She spoke to us about the jobs the group is advertising.

Elysium was established in December 2016 and aims to be a vibrant, forward-thinking and values-led organisation. We offer a wide range of services: child and adolescent, neurological, forensic mental health, and clinical settings such as eating disorders. Some sites are psychologically led, such as a ‘full immersion’ DBT service and nationwide learning disability services. We offer a clinical specialism for every psychologist!

Elysium is fast becoming one of the country’s largest independent healthcare providers and continues to grow.

In a CQC report for Chadwick Lodge, our Psychology Service was described as ‘outstanding’: having such a good service means we invest in it and grow it.

Psychologists are at the heart of our approach – providing assessment and treatments directly to service users and ensuring our culture is more psychologically minded.

We’re committed to career development. For example, we have recruited psychology graduates as Healthcare Assistants who work alongside multidisciplinary teams. Some have gone on to work as Assistant Psychologists and then on to accredited BPS training, which we have supported via a Forensic Psychologist in Training route or offering placements to students on clinical and forensic doctorates. We’ve created various grades for qualified psychologists such as Senior, Principal, Consultant and Lead. Some psychologists feel there’s a glass ceiling in the NHS and other settings, so these offer real career progression opportunities. We look to retain experienced staff, offering benefits such as flexible working patterns, including working from home.

As a Head of Department, I focus on developing staff. Recently, team members have attended various internal and external training, including Intensive DBT, Compassion Focus, Graded Exposure for PTSD and specific assessment tools. Elysium conferences have covered these such as learning disability and sexual offenders.

I believe we have a positive, supportive, genuine values-led culture. We put service users first and are collaborative, reflective and have a strong learning ethos.

We welcome ‘can-do’ attitudes… a positive mindset.

The successful candidate will get along with teams; be reflective; be principled but also be able to cope with very complex and challenging clinical presentations. And have problem-solving skills in abundance!

If I were looking to convince someone to apply, I would say that our values and positivity speak for themselves!

We have patients’ wellbeing and progress at the heart of all we do. Those values drive how our Psychologists are invested in, supported and developed across their whole career. It is a fantastic place to work!

‘It was an exciting time to be a cognitive psychologist’ We speak to Alan Baddeley, Professor at the University of York, about his new book Working Memories: Postmen, Divers and the Cognitive Revolution (Routledge) The title of the book is a neat, and perhaps irresistible, bit of word-play… but you give us much about your early life and education as well as your working life. How much of this was garnered from your own memory and how much from other sources?

The first chapter, growing up in a working-class district of Leeds was largely from memory although I did reread Richard Hoggett’s Uses of Literacy which gives a broad account of Hunslet during the 1950s. My account was however checked by my older brother in an attempt to avoid too many confabulations.

In general I have attempted to have one or more friends check all the chapters, although they could not of course be expected to verify the more detailed aspects of my recollections.

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The chapters trace a continuous series of distinct episodes in your life. Which of these did you find easiest to write about, or gave you the most pleasure? (Assuming it wasn’t all a chore!)

The most enjoyable chapter to write was that describing my year spent in the US immediately after graduating, leaving a country that had only just abandoned food rationing to five days of feasting on the liner Queen Mary and the dramatic arrival in New York harbour. This was followed by a wonderful year in Princeton when I decided I could enjoy myself without worrying about passing exams, then a drive in a Chevrolet convertible across the US to Los Angeles before returning to austerity and job

hunting. All of this was recorded in the almost weekly letters I sent to my recently widowed mother and that she kept until I rediscovered them over 50 years later.

You have lived through some fascinating times in the development of psychology as a discipline and have met some of the great figures – what or who stands out as a highlight for you?

Two meetings with eminent psychologists spring to mind.

One was with Donald Hebb during the winter of 1956 to discuss the possibility of doing a PhD at McGill. I decided not to accept the offer, according to my letter home, because it involved working on what was then known as physiological psychology. The temperature of 20 below zero outside might possible also have played some part!

The second meeting occurred later when I had moved to the MRC Applied Psychology Unit to do a PhD on postal codes. Bartlett had retired but retained a room at the Unit and would occasionally bring around visitors.

I still remember my trepidation in describing the work I was doing on learning lists of nonsense syllables, remembering his views on such material. He happily responded in suitably benign grandfatherly way.

There seems to be a sense of inevitability when looking back on the trajectory of one’s life; but that’s not how it feels when living through it, of course. What were the real unexpected or unlooked for turning points in your career?

The most dramatic turning point in my career came in

the psychologist january 2019 books the year I returned from Princeton. Jobs were scarce and I moved from a period as a hospital porter to that of a very unsuccessful teacher in a school in a local mining community and then to a research post at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. Here I was due to work on some positive effects of alcohol funded by the Iveagh Bequest (money from Guinness!). The Burden was distinguished by the presence of a brilliant neurophysiologist, W. Grey Walter together with a rather unreliable director who announced after I had been there for a few weeks that I must depart since he had inadvertently given back the money to the trust!

I got on very well with Grey Walter who assured me that he would be able to obtain funding from the US Air Force but would need to clear this with the chairman of the board of the Institute. At about this time I received an invitation from the Applied Psychology Unit to consider a post doing research on postal codes.

This led to an interview with Broadbent and Conrad on the very day that we expected to have confirmation or otherwise of the possibility of US Air Force money.

Grey Walter said he would send a telegram and rather dramatically, it arrived during my interview with a message ‘Chairman still not back’. I had an easy decision and have in total spent 30 happy years of my career at the Unit.

MeeTwo Teenage Mental Help Handbook Suzi Godson (Ed.) MeeTwo Education; Pb £12.00

Plenty of food for thought

You seem to be still very active in your eighties… will working ever be just a memory for you?

I have been fortunate enough to be able to escape from administration and extensive teaching allowing me to focus on research. This involves collaboration with my younger colleagues who cover for my inevitable limitations. I intend to continue as long as I enjoy it at which point I may be no longer capable of remembering anything very much!

The MeeTwo Teenage Mental Help Handbook claims to be ‘the first publication of its kind’, featuring personal stories, expert overviews and a directory of resources covering all kinds of issues facing today’s teenagers. Nicely produced and lavishly illustrated, by Yumi Sakagawa and others (including teenagers themselves), it feels engaging and easy for the target audience to dip in and out of.

With the team behind the MeeTwo peer-support app, Editor and Creative Director Suzi Godson (a ‘Research Psychologist and author’) has split the book into three parts. At one end, personal stories; in the middle, an eclectic mix of support, self-help, apps, books, activities and media on numerous psychological and social issues; and then, turn the book over and starting from the other end is the ‘expert analysis’. Personally, I would have preferred to see this in amongst the personal stories, but equally I can see that the book’s organisation adds something.

More importantly, the expert input is typically good stuff from Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Sir Simon Wessely, Lord Richard Layard, Henrietta Bowden-Jones, and more.

It doesn’t get bogged down in academic speak but seems suitably cautious on areas often overtaken by hyperbole… for example, Godson herself writes: ‘When we launched MeeTwo, we were waiting for young people to blame their distress on social media. We are still waiting. …anyone who believes social media can affect young people in a negative way must, by extension, accept that it has the potential to influence them in a positive way too.’

But it’s the personal stories that are likely to strike a chord with a teenage audience. This is a time when, as Blakemore says, ‘we are developing our sense of self’.

The ‘lived experience’ of peers, in domains as varied as body hair and divorce, revision and suicide, is pretty easy to come by in our social media saturated world. But how often is it presented in honest, bite-sized chunks with plenty of extra food for thought for those hungry for more?

I’m yet to try out the app, but I’ll definitely be taking a look at it alongside the book with my teenage son. All that remains is to continue my quest for the parental equivalent… there are online resources and support groups aplenty for new parents, but far less specifically aimed at parents of teenagers. A gap that psychologists, and potentially MeeTwo, could look to fill.

For more on memory, and the ‘divers’ of Alan Baddeley’s title, see our interview with Hilde and Ylva Østby on p.62

Reviewed by Jon Sutton, Editor of The Psychologist Find a Q&A with Suzi Godson alongside the online version of this review.

Casting modesty aside, what do you think the legacy of your working life will be?

I hope the broad concept of working memory will remain. The detail has and will continue to change as it links up with neighbouring research areas and disciplines. This is particularly true of the central executive which was proposed essentially as a stop gap concept to cover the way in which attention controls behaviour. However I hope that the general concept of a broad system in which it makes sense to separate visual, verbal and executive components might survive, offering a model that is simple enough to be widely understood and used. At a slightly more detailed level, I suspect the phonological loop which is the simplest component might continue to be useful. Finally I hope that some future historian of the cognitive revolution might discover Working Memories, brush off the cobwebs and learn what it was like… it was an exciting time to be a cognitive psychologist.

A book that shaped me with Perlaine Christabel (Chrissie) Fitch From a young age I wanted to be a ‘children’s doctor’ when I grew up. I’ve always wanted to work with, and help, vulnerable, struggling children and young people. I didn’t get the grades I needed in biology to pursue this dream, and my teachers recommended that I tried psychology at AS-level.

For high school work experience, I acted as a mother’s help for a disabled toddler, and after university I worked a gap year in a Sri Lankan charity school teaching English to five- to twelve-yearolds. It was very rewarding to see that once-failing students were becoming more self-confident and passing not only class tests, but also end-of-term exams.

I became eager to train as a professional English teacher of children with a foreign first language (TESOL).

It was at this time that I came across Quirky Kids by Perri Klass and Eileen Costello. As a self-help book for parents worrying about their children who don’t quite fit in with societal norms (e.g. maybe they’re eccentric, extremely quiet or aren’t reaching milestones at the same rate as most other children), the information was easy to understand, resonated with my

Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness: Rethinking the Nature of Our Woes Richard Hallam Routledge; Pb £31.99

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experiences at the school and built on my existing psychology knowledge. The book discusses developmental disorders, learning difficulties and mental health issues, but also a range of social issues, such as bullying, sex and relationships, and substance use and misuse. It also provides various options of therapy, intervention and coping strategies that will enable parents to help their children lead fulfilling individualistic lives in the home.

I remembered AS Psychology and all I had experienced whilst volunteering… the book consolidated what I had learnt in areas such as attachment types and parenting styles, relationships, self-image, etc. I decided to complete a distance learning course in child psychology, which then led me to study an honours degree in Psychology and Child Development and become a member of the British Psychological Society (BPS).

One summer during my degree, I volunteered as a childcare practitioner and wellbeing mentor at a children’s centre. After graduating, I applied to do a master’s in Family and Child Psychology.

Following this, I obtained a one-year contract as a research assistant for a

school interventions project. I had a chance to work with shy teenage girls struggling with making and maintaining friends; I found myself dipping back into Quirky Kids.

Now self-employed, I hope to apply for the Child and Educational Psychology doctorate, and I’m sure the book will remain close to hand!

Time for a change of mind In this timely publication, Richard Hallam – a British clinical psychologist – questions the main tenets of public mental health care in the UK and beyond. He argues that the field is stuck with a medical outlook that is scientifically incoherent and unhelpful, but that persists because it suits politicians, policy makers and service managers.

All of whom are eager to demonstrate ‘measurable health outcomes’ and to cut costs.

Almost 60 years ago the dissident psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote that mental illness is a myth, and Hallam deftly distils a wide array of research and philosophical literature in support of this claim. He goes beyond Szasz, however, in acknowledging (and showing) that the experience

of chronic social and economic marginalisation can restrict human agency, grinding all too many people down into the kinds of poor physical health and despair that drive them to seek professional treatment.

While Hallam does not reject psychological therapy as a partial answer to this kind of misery, he shows that it has been consistently overrated and oversold.

Instead, he advocates a broader psychosocial approach to our ‘woes’: preferring this lay term, because it encapsulates how distress and any attempt to understand and alleviate it must take account of the sufferer’s history, of what they want out of life, and – not least – of their current circumstances. In the final chapter the author explores some

promising approaches that begin from this standpoint, having grown in most cases from an alliance of professionals, ‘mental health service users’ and grassroots organisations.

While the extent of Hallam’s scepticism about the science of his own field (as opposed to psychiatry) might not satisfy all readers, his overall thesis is nonetheless to be welcomed. If few of us these days worry about people being possessed by the devil, then this lucid and thought-provoking book shows that the time has come for a similar change of mind about the notion of mental illness.

Reviewed by Paul Moloney, Counselling Psychologist at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital

the psychologist january 2019 books

A tour of contemporary emotion research The Neuroscience of Emotion provides an overview of the history, current theories and, importantly, limitations of research in emotion. It serves as an introduction to the field primarily for research scientists in adjacent areas, as it presumes the reader has a firm grasp of scientific methods and rudimentary knowledge of neuroscience. However, for those with appropriate background and curiosity, it is extremely rewarding.

Ralph Adolphs and David Anderson are both professors of neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, with respective specialties in human and animal emotion. Both bring to the book their accomplished scientific careers, as well as extensive engagement with the general public about current issues in neuroscience.

The premise of the book is that emotions must be investigated as functional states that impact other neurological processes. This acknowledges the emotional experience of ‘feelings’ but completely separates them from neuroscientific research. The authors argue it is only by sticking to physiology and neuroscience that a research framework can emerge to create common understandings of emotion.

Through this lens, the authors present a tour

of contemporary emotion research from animals to humans. Along the way, readers are introduced to various techniques to study and measure emotions, with consistent reminders that the biological emotion state need not be conflated with the conscious experience of emotion.

Although Adolphs and Anderson do not purport to fully define or understand emotions, they strongly perpetuate the idea of discrete emotional states. By reasoning about emotions as discrete functional states, they claim to provide a framework through which emotion researchers can create common understandings. However, this imposes a practical limitation on the way researchers examine emotions and their biological manifestations, which they neglect to fully examine.

Overall, this well-timed overview on the current state of emotion research is thorough, stimulating, and engaging.

While demanding enough to scare away the casual reader, this book is a pragmatic addition to the shelf of any emotion researcher, and a must-read for all scientists interested in the field.

Reviewed by Carolyn Saund, who is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow

Timely and fascinating Rule Makers, Rule Breakers is that wonderful combination of a fascinating theory, well expounded, with plenty of examples. Michele Gelfand, who has previously only written text books, is an expert on tightness– looseness theory, which explains how culture drives social norms and influences the way we act without our even realising. While this sounds a fairly dry concept in isolation, in this book it becomes a compelling, absorbing and timely read.

With a style that draws you in and fairly rattles along, the book should appeal to both the general popular science reader as well as the psychologist.

As the product of an American writer, the book shows more of a bias towards the US, but for me this does

The Neuroscience of Emotion Ralph Adolphs & David J. Anderson Princeton University Press; Hb £35.00

not detract from the message, with Gelfand providing helpful examples of the theory in action to illustrate a lot of the points made. Additionally, she is able to draw on a network of global researchers, providing relevant and intriguing examples and research findings, some of which will already be familiar to those with an interest in psychology, but used here in different contexts, to good effect.

This use of examples is where the book is most timely, as Gelfand provides intriguing explanations for some of the questions currently causing a lot of debate: Trump’s rise in popularity and the unexpected results in the

2016 US election, and, of course, how the UK became so split over the Brexit referendum. It presents a thought-provoking new perspective on both these issues and numerous others.

The book ranges widely and covers a large amount of material, leaving a feeling that certain areas could have benefited from being expanded upon. But that could also be because it is such a fascinating book, one finds oneself wanting to know more. It is, however, a fairly short read at 376 pages with a third of the page count taken up by the index and detailed notes.

Overall, an excellent read, and I for one am very much hoping this is not the last time Michele Gelfand ventures into popular science writing.

Reviewed by Louise Beaton, who is an Open University psychology graduate

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Culture Wires Our Minds, Shapes Our Nations, and Drives Our Differences Michele J. Gelfand Robinson; Pb £13.99

Anna-Julia Granberg

Hilde and Ylva Østby ‘The rain turned into tiny bits of gold falling from the sky’ What was it like to write Adventures in Memory: The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting together as sisters?

It was both a lot of fun and a challenge. We contributed equal amounts to the book, through writing, experimenting and generating ideas. Going places and interviewing people together was really great, as was setting up experiments. As sisters, we are more honest with each other than most people, which actually helps with the writing process. Let’s just say that this adventure has given us a whole bunch of new memories together.

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Ylva, you’re a trained neuroscientist. Did you learn anything new while working on the book?

Definitely! There are so many winding roads of memory research that I wouldn’t normally go down

in my day-to-day work. And as a clinician, I mostly see clients with memory complaints, so learning more about people with superior memory abilities was an eye-opener. Also, learning from Hilde that memory was considered a divine art by 16th- and 17th-century alchemists was really fascinating. Writing this book has truly been inspiring for my research.

Hilde, you have ideas about the connection between memory and writing, drawn from your own experience as a journalist and novelist. Tell us more.

While writing this book, it dawned on me how closely related the art of storytelling and the act of remembering are – how our stories and all of the most beautiful pieces of literature are structured just like memory itself. So learning more about memory definitely taught me more about writing.

the psychologist january 2019 books

as well as those with extraordinary problems remembering. What were some of the highlights from these conversations for you?

Our conversation with Adrian Pracon, one of the survivors of the terrorist attack and mass shooting in Utøya, Norway, made a lasting impression on us. It is difficult to remain unmoved by his account of how the traumatic memories have tormented him. He took us on a trip to the island where he and so many teenagers and young people were shot down. That experience, walking through the beautiful spring scenery while he showed us where he hid and where he saw people being killed… it was such a strong contrast. How can you live with memories like that and integrate them into your life, without being crushed by them?

We also talked to several people who had lost You cover broad ground, pairing findings from memories of their childhood and youth, in part or psychology and neuroscience with insights from completely, and we were fascinated by how they coped literature, history, anthropology, architecture, with what we would consider terrible circumstances. mythology, and more. Why did you choose to Is it really possible to live a happy incorporate so many perspectives? life without all of your memories?

Memory is so much more than the a way, their story is true for all physiological processes within “Memory is so much more In of us – we forget far more than we and between neurons in the brain. than the physiological remember. We just never think of It concerns all of us and makes an all the stuff we have forgotten! impact on – and is impacted by – processes within and all aspects of culture and society. between neurons in We wanted to show through vivid What is a ‘cumulative’ memory? the brain” examples why memory matters.

Is this different from what you We were also fascinated by the call a ‘false memory’? collective memory of human A false memory is by definition civilisation – the history books and literature something that has never happened, which you that allow us to learn from our shared past. remember as if it were real. Cumulative memory, We felt that had to be reflected in the book as well. on the other hand, is a term we use to describe memories of events that have been repeated many times, like taking the bus to work or cuddling your You talk to many of the main players in terms child at bed-time. Because we don’t remember each of psychologists studying memory. Did you find separate instance the event took place, we construct a anything notable about them as a group? compilation of all those instances, so to speak. These One thing that strikes us is how versatile these compilations are similar to false memories in that they scientists are. Alan Baddeley may be known for his are not necessarily true renderings of the past, just working-memory model, but he has done so much approximations. All those times you took the bus were more – the diving experiment, a system for making the postal codes in UK more memorable, to mention a few – and the same goes for Eleanore Maguire and Edward and May-Britt Moser. While they have Diving for seahorses in February their specialised fields of memory research, they are constantly developing new ideas. And they were all On our website you can read chapter 2 of Adventures in Memory: The great fun to talk with! They are such an inspiration.

Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting (Greystone, £16.99) At the same time, we must not forget that many by kind permission of the publisher. In this extract, the sisters recreate researchers are contributing to the field through a famous Alan Baddeley study. rigorous work that may not seem groundbreaking or spectacular. But without it, science would not go Hilde Østby is a writer and editor and the author of Encyclopedia of forward. The interdisciplinary nature of memory Love and Longing, a novel about unrequited love that was published research also means that no one researcher or research to critical acclaim in Norway. She has a master’s degree in History of group can grasp the whole understanding of what Ideas from the University of Oslo. memory is. It is such a beautiful example of how the scientific community works as a whole to push Ylva Østby is a clinical neuropsychologist with a PhD from the knowledge forward.

University of Oslo who devotes her research to the study of memory.

Also, as a historian, I realised how much focusing on our individual, fallible memories can be a mistake, especially in a court of law. False memory research started in the 1970s because researcher Elizabeth Loftus wanted to examine why we so often wrongly accuse people of crimes they never committed – and do so with so much certainty. In truth, our memories are very unreliable, and she proved that through a number of spectacular experiments, including tricking people to think that they loved asparagus or hated eggs. I believe memories are supposed to be collective; together we can remember more than we can alone.

Our stories, together, connect us to each other, keeping us within a shared reality.

You also interview some fascinating characters, including people with extraordinary memories

She is also vice-president of the Norwegian Neuropsychological Society. She lives in Oslo, Norway.

unique, and likely none of those experiences were exactly like what you imagine when you think about ‘taking the bus’. But really all memories, true or false, are constructed in our minds. There isn’t as much of a difference between ‘true’ memories and false memories as we like to think.

Many of the people you interview in Adventures in Memory have gone to outrageous lengths to improve their memory. We meet taxi drivers who had to train for years to navigate London’s streets; quiz masters who diligently read their newspaper with a notepad and pen at their side; and a World Memory Champion who uses decks of cards to memorise lists of completely useless things. What drives us to these extremes?

Remembering gives us a sense of being in control and on top of things, whether it is control of performance and achievement, of our personal history, or of time itself. But for most of us, this is an illusion. Even if some of our experiences are etched into our brains as memory traces, they always come back to us transformed – perhaps even better than before, as Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time, might argue. It’s funny: we fear the loss of control that comes with forgetting, but most of us don’t even know what it is that we can no longer remember.

There’s a very provocative line in the book: ‘Forgetfulness is underrated’. Can you expand?

Remembering and forgetting are both integral parts of memory. Forgetting is our brains’ way of tidying up so that the memories that remain can stand out and shine. Forgetfulness is nature’s way of showing us that time that has passed is best reconstructed, often with flaws, rather than remembered in perfect detail. And think about it: isn’t it a relief to forget sometimes?

Good riddance to all those mundane seconds of our lives and all those bad feelings! And when it comes to the good experiences, forgetting what it was like to ride that rollercoaster the first time around makes the experience all the more exhilarating on your next visit – if rollercoasters are a good thing, that is.

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Lately, there’s been a lot of emphasis on mindfulness, on learning to live in the present moment rather than letting the mind wander. But in the book, you write that ‘mindfulness has given future thinking a bad name’. Can you explain what you mean?

Mindfulness is actually not about living in the present; that is a common misunderstanding. Instead, it involves a controlled form of mind wandering, in which one anchors the experience in the present moment. So it’s actually more correct to say that the misunderstandings around mindfulness and the hype it has created has given future thinking a bad name.

People mistake mind wandering with rumination and loss of control. But rumination is not the same as mind wandering; it’s really a form of stagnated thinking. In life, we need these free moments of mind wandering

to let our mental time machine run, process our memories, and develop a vision for our future.

Ylva, I loved the phrase – actually your sister’s, but about what you were doing – ‘As if you were a memory alchemist and transformed the day into gold!’ Tell me a bit about your approach to remembering at that stage of the book, and whether you have kept it up.

I wanted to know whether it was possible to keep more of my everyday life in my memory, but in the end, it turned out to be an exploration of the bliss of forgetting. In order to remember each day, I inserted an avatar representing the day of the month into the events of that day. So for the 7th, it was gold (because to me personally, the number seven is golden – a slight case of synaesthesia of mine), so gold nuggets would lie around in the wet snow on the pier when we watched the divers in February, and the rain turned into tiny bits of gold falling from the sky outside the coffee shop were we used to sit while writing the book.

The experiment made me really thankful for the memories I do get to keep, and perhaps more aware of the fact that the moment in the here-and-now may not be re-experienced, and that I simply do not have control over that. Also, the task turned into an obsession while it lasted, even to the extent that my mindset wouldn’t let go immediately after the 100 days were over. When it finally did, and I turned back to normal, it made me more content with what I forget. At the same time, those golden moments also remind me of the parts of my life that don’t stand out as particularly noteworthy and spectacular, just those everyday moments that is life, and I still wish I could remember more of them, too. It is a dilemma. Now, almost three years later, I can feel forgetting eating away at those memories, and I think a vast amount of it is now gone, despite my efforts. Trying to control memory is like trying to hold back the sea.

I have not kept it up. That would be insane. With my limited memory, trying to keep track of all the days of my life is a terrifying idea! But what I have kept, and what Hilde has taken away from it too, is the idea of cherishing the details of memories, even if they are not spectacular, and using them to heighten awareness of being alive and boosting happiness.

Final thoughts, Hilde?

Since research shows that depression is transforming our memories, making them more general and vague, I reckoned that happiness is in the details – you know they say ‘the devil is in the details’, but obviously that’s where happiness dwells, too! So I started focusing on the beautiful, everyday details in my life, trying to cling on to them. Actually they started using this technique in therapy, too. Whenever I feel a little bit down, I try to focus on my daughter’s beautiful eyes, or the colour on the flowers in my dining table. It really helps. Also, this is the very nature of literature, the awareness of details. So reading will also make you feel better.

the psychologist january 2019 books

Continue your Professional Development

Special Group in Coaching Psychology: CPD Programme 2019 As part of SGCP’s commitment to CPD we will be running an annual series of free Webinars and paid Masterclasses. The links to book your place are below. Places are limited. If you can’t make it, or the sessions are fully booked, we will post the recorded session in the member’s area for you to download after each event.

Webinar: ‘Working with mental health issues in coaching’ – Prof Sarah Corrie Date: Thursday 21 February 2019, 13:00–14:00 www.bps.org.uk/SGCP-Mentalhealthissuesincoaching-21Feb ‘Neuroscience and Coaching’ – Prof Patricia Riddell Date: Wednesday 10 April 2019.

Venue: BPS London Offices www.bps.org.uk/sgcpcoaching2019 Special Group in Coaching Psychology Annual Conference Date: Thursday 6– Friday 7 June 2019. Venue: London www.bps.org.uk/sgcp2019 Webinar: ‘Using psychological tools and techniques with clients’ – Dr Natalie Lancer Date: Tuesday 25 June 2019, 13:00–14:00 www.bps.org.uk/SGCP-Usingpsychologicaltools-25Jun Webinar: ‘Working with Goals in Coaching Psychology’ – Prof Anthony Grant Date: TBC September 2019 ‘Using Motivational Interviewing in coaching: a 2-day Masterclass’ – Dr Tim Anstiss Date: Thursday 10–Friday 11 October 2019 Venue: London BPS Offices www.bps.org.uk/sgcpinterviewing2019 Webinar: ‘Coaching Psychology research update’ – Dr Rebecca Jones Date: Friday 6 December 2019, 13:00–14:00 www.bps.org.uk/SGCP-CoachingPsychologyresearch-6Dec For details of how to join the Special Group in Coaching Psychology please visit: www.bps.org.uk/sgcp For any queries about any of the events please email membernetworkservices@bps.org.uk quoting ‘SGCP event’ in the subject line.

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Installation view featuring Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Tanzmaske ‘Toboggan Frau’ and ‘Toboggan Mann’ by Lavinia Schulz, 1924 © John Phillips/ Getty Images

Two heads may be better than one, but why?

Uta Frith and Chris Frith visit ‘Modern Couples’ at the Barbican

T

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he idea of the lone scientific hero has long been abandoned. Team work is essential to science and the number of authors on scientific papers has steadily increased, with single-author papers largely confined to mathematics and philosophy. We work as a couple and we believe we wouldn’t have done so well on our own.

We know quite a few other psychologist couples of whom we suspect this is also true. There is even some experimental evidence that people working together can achieve more than the same individuals working on their own. Why is it so different in the arts? Here the lone creator still flourishes.

We wondered if ‘Modern Couples’ might give us an answer; an exhibition of art from the modernist period

at the beginning of the 20th century. This was a time when people, especially artists, were breaking away from the conventional stereotypes, in particular the subservient role of women. Did the groupings that briefly flourished produce better art? But there is a problem.

There is no control group. We don’t know what would have been produced if each partner had worked in isolation. Moreover, the couples, or threesomes – they were avant-garde after all – represent many varieties of relationships, same-sex/different-sex, short-lived/longlived, passionate/platonic.

Our impression was that full collaborations were rare.

Apart from one painting shared by Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst (The Encounter, 1938), nearly all the other

the psychologist january 2019 culture pieces are attributed to single authors. Although, in some cases a joint work, for example the Barcelona chair, designed in 1929 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, became associated with just one name.

What advantages arose for individuals when working as part of a couple or a group? Lilly Reich’s influence was rediscovered in a MOMA exhibition in 1996. In other cases, one of the partners, especially if it was a woman, still waits to be taken out of obscurity.

Another advantage arose when couples were able to pool different skills and knowledge. Some of the more successful couples involved a painter and photographer (Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz) or an artist and a fashion designer (Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge).

There was evidence of mutual inspiration and imitation.

Mutual support is one obvious advantage, and it is a sad observation that when this support was lost, often through separation due to war, the effect was devastating and could result in mental breakdown.

We were particularly taken by the work of Sophie Täuber-Arp and Jean/Hans Arp. Sophie brought her training in textile design to the partnership. Likewise, in the case of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Sonia supported both herself and her husband through her wonderful textile designs and her business acumen.

Interestingly, it seemed to us that the women in these cases produced the more striking works of art, which stood out by their exquisite style and superior craftsmanship. In the past these works might well have been relegated to the applied arts, the lesser relative of pure art, but now they shine.

But where was the evidence that better work resulted from these couplings? To us it seemed very slim. One obvious exception is Virginia Woolf.

Without Vita Sackville-West, she would not have written Orlando; without Leonard Woolf, she probably would not have published anything. Overall, we were not left with an overwhelming sense of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The parts too in many cases only just make the B-list. In some cases, it is not at all obvious why these particular modern couples were included in the exhibition – unless it was the lives, rather than the art, that was of most interest.

What is our take-home for readers of this magazine? From the empirical evidence we believe that two heads are better than one. But this exhibition suggests that this is not necessarily reflected in a better product or outcome. Rather, it is found in reciprocal inspiration and confidence building.

And this is not to be sneezed at.

Modern Couples is on at the Barbican Art Gallery until 27 January. See tinyurl.com/moderncouples Reviewed by Uta and Chris Frith: see frithmind.org/ socialminds/ for more information If you are part of a long-standing professional couple or collaboration, we would like to hear from you about what makes it work/not work! Get in touch with the editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

The struggle continues medication and the contentious The movie 55 Steps opens with nature of informed consent. But a harrowing scene of a woman it’s also a film about our shared screaming as she is manhandled, humanity and how we can find forcibly injected with sedatives, friendship in unlikely places, strength and locked in seclusion on a of character, and commitment, psychiatric ward. fortitude, and persistence. It’s in the 55 Steps stars Helena Bonham portrayal of these emotional journeys Carter as Eleanor Riese and Hilary Swank as her lawyer, Colette Hughes. that Helena Bonham Carter and Hilary Swank excel, and it’s rather Written by Mark Rosin, directed wonderful that a mainstream movie

by Bille August, and released this starring A-list celebrities highlighted year, the film documents Eleanor’s this issue. ground-breaking 1987 It seems Californian court extraordinary that film case, establishing that Eleanor Riese’s fight for 55 Steps people have a right her right to exercise her Bille August (Director) to informed consent capacity to give informed over the prescription consent was fought of medication. That out in my lifetime. But there is also statement would be commonplace another extraordinary element to this in all fields of medicine... except case. Today, the UK’s Mental Health psychiatry. But until Ms Riese Act (at least as it applies in England went to court to enforce her rights, and Wales, the law is – thankfully – Californians admitted to hospital – different in Scotland) still pays no and who were capable of weighing regard to our capacity to understand up the medication’s benefits and and to make an informed decision risks – had no right to refuse, and about our care. We can still be no right to be consulted. detained and treated, against our will This wasn’t an easy victory – the and without our consent, even – and movie ends with Eleanor’s premature this is the important point for which death, killed by the medication she Eleanor and Colette were fighting had been forced to take, and the title – when we are judged able to make refers to Eleanor’s struggle to keep that decision for ourselves. I’m glad walking up the 55 steps to the court this film was made (and made so room for repeated hearings after she well), because the struggle, clearly, lost her first claim. continues.

55 Steps is a film about abusive and coercive mental health care Reviewed by Professor Peter systems, an important court case, Kinderman, University of Liverpool the adverse effects of psychiatric

play Troilus and Cressida Royal Shakespeare Company

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Gender ’balance’ – proceed with care In an interview shown during the RSC live broadcast of Troilus and Cressida on 14 November, director Gregory Doran announced that, for the first time, the play was given a ‘gender balance’. This was achieved, Doran explained, by having women play the parts of several male characters, including Ulysses and Agamemnon.

The devious, Machiavellian character of Ulysses, he explained, was not distinctively male; equally plausible as either male or female was the general Agamemnon, working hard to maintain control and order in a camp riven by envy, ambition and fear. We all caught the contemporary references.

There is nothing new, of course, in having characters of one gender played by characters of another gender.

This was routine in Shakespeare’s time, and modern versions of plays with all male or all female actors succeed because the audience grasps how easy it is to perform gender, and to buy into the performance, seeing only the female character rather than the male actor. But being played by a woman does not change the gender of the character, and so in itself does nothing to change the gender balance of a play.

Doran’s claim that there is nothing essentially male or female about the characters he transforms into women is something altogether different. It is exciting to hear someone doing psychology on the ground (as the director of a play does) insist that gender is not central to certain characters; it offers a release from the stricture that a man, or woman, is always speaking as a man, or as a woman. However, this personal release is not accessible in many contexts, and in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare portrays a distinct male and a distinct female culture,

where gender imbalance drives the tragedy. We can look at it through the lens of Carol Gilligan’s work on two different approaches to moral dilemmas, often but not always (and certainly not necessarily) a male version and a female version, one focused on preserving connection, and one focused on preserving the dignity of rights. James Gilligan’s influential 1997 analysis Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, considering its roots in distorted notions of honour, particularly manly honour, is also relevant.

Cassandra and Andromache and Hecuba speak about preserving life and honouring relationships. Without human connection, Cassandra warns Priam, everything of value will ‘fall all together’. The male characters on the other hand speak about honour, about ‘their dignities’.

When Hector’s wife Andromache, pleads with her husband to stay home on what will be the day of his death, he silences her, scoffs at her ‘offensive’ behaviour, and insists he values ‘honour’ more than life. Shutting out the women’s voices results in tragedy not only for the women – Priam, Hector’s father will ‘turn to stone’ when he hears of his son’s death, Achilles loses his beloved friend Patrochlus, and Troilus loses his Cressida who, traded to the Greeks, accepts her role as sexual pawn.

Parsing what’s gendered and what’s not in human behaviour is hugely complicated. The RSC Troilus reminds us that wherever we are doing psychology, whether in the lab, in the office or on the stage, we need to proceed with care. Forgetting gender is sometimes a release, but it still shapes our imagination.

Reviewed by Dr Terri Apter, University of Cambridge

the psychologist january 2019 culture

Young people making an exhibition of themselves Southeast London is familiar as home to two of our most well-known psychiatric hospitals, the Bethlem, and the Maudsley. However, it’s also central to the current UK arts scene, something that should not come as much of a surprise given the presence of the Camberwell School of Arts, and the proliferation of galleries and experimental spaces in the area.

I visited two small-scale projects with big ideas.

Aged 14 to 21, the Art Assassins are a diverse collective who work alongside scholars and artists in the South London Gallery. They seek to answer fundamental questions about health, identity and society at large, doing so with an imaginative hands-on approach. Over the past year they have investigated the historical ‘Peckham Experiment’.

Regarded as a ‘health utopia’, this holistic health movement took place in pre-NHS Peckham, London and aimed to promote health and wellbeing through community activities. Interestingly, the Art Assassins placed the lessons learned from the Peckham Experiment in the context of today’s age of consumer markets, where one can readily have genetic health risks identified in exchange for personal data.

The artists took their individual DNAs – extracted from saliva samples – and pooled them into a collective DNA. The result was an exclusive art piece that was on display in the autumn.

Further south, on the premises of world’s oldest psychiatric institution, is the Bethlem Museum of the Mind.

Here, one can see the wonderful artwork of young people who accessed services in the Bethlem Adolescent Unit in ‘Our Future Likes’ (with Art Assassins also amongst the contributors). Sam Curtis, artist and curator who worked with the group, explained that imagemaking and open discussions were a ‘powerful form of communication’ for adolescents who ‘are at a loss, and may feel like they have little autonomy in their environment’.

Mum, I don’t understand your emojis is a message imprinted on a white

Art Assassins are a diverse collective t-shirt displayed in the exhibition.

This is just one of the creative ways in which the exhibition captures perspectives on the impact of social media on our mental health, inviting reflection on whether the ways in which we spend our time online may be at the root of depression and anxiety.

Clearly, the wheels are turning for the use of creative approaches in

the spheres of health and wellbeing.

The Art Assassins and Our Future Likes demonstrate that when health disciplines fuse with the arts, the results can be empowering for young people.

Reviewed by Alina Ivan, a psychology postgraduate and research assistant working on the RADAR study at King’s College London

Our future likes Reviews online, and contribute: More reviews are often posted at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reviews, Writing for ‘Culture’ can be a great way to contribute to the magazine.

If you have seen or heard a TV or radio programme, a film, play, exhibition, music etc that might suit a psychologically-informed perspective, get in touch with the editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

You can also look out for opportunities to contribute by following us on Twitter @psychmag

A Little Life – but a profound story Martin Milton on what psychologists can learn from the Hanya Yanigihara novel

He woke gasping for air: … He had visions of taking an ice pick and jamming it through his ear, into his brain to stop the memories. He dreamed of slamming his head against the wall until it split and cracked and the gray meat tumbled out with a wet bloody thunk. He had fantasies of emptying a container of gasoline over himself and then striking a match, of his mind being gobbled by fire. He bought a set of x-acto blades and held three of them in his palm and made a fist around them and watched the blood drip from his hand into the sink as he screamed into the quiet apartment. (Yanigihara, 2015, p.389)

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H

anya Yanigihara’s A Little Life is an exceptional book, a harrowing story but one that all practitioners should read. She captures trauma – day in day out, for weeks, months and years at a time – and its impact on Jude, his friends and family, like nothing else I have read. At least nothing in our field.

Like a psychologist working with a client, the novelist focuses on a specific character, staying true to them as they evolve, suffer, thrive or succumb. The novelist’s advantage over the psychologist is, of course, that their focus is limited only by their imagination. In our work we may attempt something similar, prioritising the experience of this particular person, yet we often come to the edges of our possibilities. It’s not just the limits of our imagination that get in the way – other aspects of our work impinge on us too. Maybe we can’t focus on one person as we are working with a couple, family or group; or it may be due to the fact that we don’t set up services to cater to the needs of specific individuals, we prioritise developments that a range of people may use, individuals that may be subject to similar diagnoses yet may have come to these by very different experiences and manifestations of distress.

The psychologist is duty bound to think beyond the individual, which can mean we have to adopt a more global view, prioritising ‘objective’ characteristics over subjective experiences.

Psychological research is an issue too; it cannot be everything to everyone. Research often overlooks experience as experience, instead listing different manifestations of a phenomenon, or explaining the needs across individuals. Unfortunately, this has meant that we often fit the client to what we offer, rather than adapting our services to what each client may need. Too much psychology prioritises trying to explain different forms of distress and, like psychiatry, ways to ‘treat’ it. And all this affects therapy.

Instead of being able to offer the attuned engagement and knowing we so desperately want to, we can be straitjacketed, offering template interventions and explanations.

We didn’t always do this, at least not to this extent. I remember broad referral criteria, a plethora of psychotherapeutic modalities being offered within psychology and psychotherapy departments, and these being welcomed as a sign of responsiveness. But this is no longer the case.

Austerity, the closing of services, funding of research to fit the neoliberal view of people, and the constant and continuous underfunding of the psychotherapies all mean we are shackled in our attempts to work at depth and length with those that are courageous enough to approach us.

I do not mean to knock my colleagues, berate myself or discourage trainees. We try, and on many occasions, we do make valuable contributions to our clients’ efforts. Indeed, counselling psychology, my own core profession, and existential psychotherapy, my psychotherapeutic specialism, have long advocated for a stronger engagement with clients as they are, encouraging a heartfelt and attuned exploration of the client,

the psychologist january 2019 eye on fiction

their world and the events they have experienced.

It has been pleasing to see a similar focus receive sustained attention recently with the launch of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018). The better the world is understood, the more accurate a grasp we can gain of the person’s psychology.

By giving us this visceral portrayal of what distress can actually feel like, Yanigihara reminds us that our responses to the traumatised have to go beyond a reliance on scripts and manuals. We can’t expect everyone to respond in the pace we set, or even just to respond simply because X per cent of others have.

This is not to say that these aspects of our work are not without value, just that such an approach is limited, it can only ever be partial. To many, the cause of their distress is not a surprise; formulation is seldom ‘rocket science’; ‘factual’ interventions only go so far.

Jude isn’t confused as to why:

…he woke with the names of people he had sworn he would never think of again on his tongue. He replayed the night with Caleb again and again, obsessively, the memory slowing so that the seconds he was standing naked in the rain on Greene Street stretched into hours, so that his flight down the stairs took days, so that Caleb’s raping him in the shower, in the elevator, took weeks. (p.389)

Like many of our clients, Jude knows that traumatic events are traumatising, he doesn’t need someone to tell him that. A Little Life is a timely reminder that the simplistic idea of distress being primarily a personal or biological issue cannot be right. Of course, as somatic beings, we are mind and body, and trauma can affect both. But for those who struggle to imagine the impact of abuse, deceit, stigma and violence… this story brings this home.

A difficulty psychologists often have in practice is evident in the pages of this book: How do we offer something useful? How do we practitioners offer something akin to what Jude’s friends – Willem, Malcolm and JB – offered Jude, what his doctor-cumfriend Andy attempted and what Harold and Julia desperately yearned to create for him? How do we allow the person to express themselves authentically and at their own pace? Privileging hearing them and knowing them, as much as any educative, guiding approach we may also find useful?

We aim for such an engagement because our years in practice and generations of research have consistently shown that an attuned therapeutic relationship is central to effective practice (Gelso & Carter, 1995; Milton, 2017). Within such an approach, there is a chance in which the client can be seen, accepted and understood. And it’s books like this that are an invaluable aid in us getting into the person’s world, the real visceral experiences that traumatise us, the confusion we and our loved ones may feel and the terrifying experience of psychological dis-order (as opposed to disorder).

On literature more broadly Much of our CPD is reading – we review studies for this problem and that, so that we might work with familiar groups and those we have not yet encountered.

We trawl through journals that carry 5* ratings to help us enrich our knowledge and practice. But maybe this isn’t enough? Maybe we should be reading novels, listening to poets, learning to write again?

We probably all have different books that speak to us, some more profoundly than others. A Little Life is one of the best fictional accounts of trauma and the long-term effects of it. Although it is a different genre, it compares to Immaculee Ilibagiza’s 2016 Left to Tell, her terrifying memoir of experiencing and surviving the Rwandan genocide. It is one of a few books that I have read and re-read, and in that regard it is up there with van der Merwe’s Moffie (2011; see also Milton, 2014). In reading these books I have learnt more than models of trauma… something approaching the experience of it, the feelings, physicality and gut-wrenching impotence that affects so many people and those around them.

A Little Life is a novel and as such is unapologetically not a template for any particular client. Novels are humanising and empathy-stretching experiences for the therapist. Yanigihara helps with this as she changes the point of view, making us work, so at times we are required to imagine Jude’s world directly, at other times we have to picture his world through the sense-making of others. We experience Willem’s suffering in the face of conflicting needs and opposing meanings; Andy’s struggle to contain his upset at his impotence in curing Jude; Harold and Julia’s desperation as they find ‘doing the right thing’ to be so excruciatingly painful… these are all emotions that we too might feel when engaging deeply with our clients and their distress.

In this way Yanigihara offers us the experience of first-, second- and third-hand trauma, the pain, the terror and the powerlessness that radiates far and wide from the hands of those that abuse. This powerful story captures the impact of trauma, over time and as it ripples out from the individual to others in their relational networks.

I can’t help but think that in some ways fiction is far more effective in helping us understand the experience of the other. Scientific, theoretical and policy documents are all helpful and necessary adjuncts to our development as ethical and effective therapists, but good literature… there is no competition. We are transported into other worlds, they are not explained, we aren’t told about events, we are invited to inhabit them. It is these experiences that can contribute to our own abilities to work with our clients, to hear about the horror of nights spent awake, with nothing but flashbacks to the faces of perpetrators. These experiences have to be imagined to be understood. Mere explanation only goes so far.

Martin Milton is Professor of Counselling Psychology at Regents University London miltonm@ regents.ac.uk

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Walking through snow to get to work Joe MacDonagh on the Hawthorne Studies – the origins of modern organisational research

‘Management should commit itself to the continuous process of studying human situations – both individual and group – and should run its human affairs in terms of what it is continually learning about its own organisation.’

(Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939) 76

I

first came across the Hawthorne Studies as an undergraduate when my late stepfather, an engineer who had previously worked in American industry for many years, pointed out their importance in understanding people’s motivation to work. He said that the Hawthorne Studies, ground-breaking and extensive research carried out between 1924 and 1932, had highlighted how someone would walk five miles through snow to get to work if they enjoyed what they did. Fast-forward to the cold spell of March 2018, and I see a hospital head nurse say on the BBC that her colleagues had done just that. Of course, the opposite is also the case – people are more likely to resign or be absent from work if they are unhappy there. Current research, such as my own with Orla Byrne, often terms this engagement, which is linked to

the psychologist january 2019 looking back

organisational citizenship behaviour and workplace motivation.

Dr Joe Most readers’ knowledge of the MacDonagh Hawthorne Studies is likely to be is a Chartered around the supposed Hawthorne Psychologist effect. But this neglects the full and Honorary range of studies and experiments Secretary of Seeing the light carried out over an eight-year spell. the British Before the formal start of the I will argue that the Hawthorne Psychological Society’s History and Hawthorne Studies in 1927, C.E. Studies have had a profound Philosophy of Psychology Section Snow had conducted studies influence on modern workplace beginning in 1924 into the effects research, much of which now takes of workplace illumination and worker fatigue (Snow, for granted a worker-based focus on discovering the 1927). The researchers examined how levels of feelings and needs of employees. I will also show how workplace light affected worker productivity. To set the studies have been critiqued (e.g. Chiesa & Hobbs, that in context, working days were long (significantly 2008; Jarrett, 2008) and re-interpreted (Hassard, longer than the average 40-hour week we now have), 2012). And I’ll consider how many management and organisational textbooks neglect to critique the studies’ the provision of worker canteens (subsidised or otherwise) was not commonplace, and health and lack of explanation of the economic and cultural safety legislation existed in only very basic form. The context at that time, and the strong political and antiemphasis was on how costs could be reduced and how union views of many of the researchers. employees could be made to work more productively.

Whether they were happy doing so or not was not an employer concern. To be fair to the Western Electric The background Company, they did provide a workplace canteen, Historically, the Hawthorne Studies were conducted they had an educational programme for their workers at a time when the scientific management teachings of and some would say that their participation in this F.W. Taylor held great sway. These theories influenced workplace research showed their enlightened nature Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line by providing a as employers. template for the careful measurement of worker effort In the first illumination study they tested whether and productivity. Taylor’s theories also suggested that better illumination led to greater productivity – with workers should be closely guided by specially trained managers. This perhaps led to a ‘command and control’ the experimental group having raised illumination in their workplace and the control group having the mentality, where being in charge and being obeyed same level throughout. Productivity improved for both were paramount for managers and supervisors. But these decades after the First World War were reflective, groups, even in a series of experiments in which the experimental group’s lighting variously increased and with many researchers asking how we could make the decreased. The researchers sensed that this was not world a better and happier place. Many textbooks now the effect of illumination, but the fact that both groups say that the Hawthorne Studies ended up discovering were being observed. the importance of workplace groups and the social After this first study Harvard University became nature of work, setting the scene for the modern involved, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation worker-centred approach. to fund their research. In 1927, to examine further the The Hawthorne Studies took place in the effect of workers being more productive irrespective of Hawthorne Works of Western Electric Company what light condition they experienced, the researchers in Cicero, Illinois, USA – a suburb of Chicago. decided to separate six female workers and had them The Western Electric factory employed over 20,000 work in the Relay Room, by themselves and away from workers, on a scale we can now only imagine… other workers. The Relay Room experiments allowed technologisation and computerisation has reduced the women a great deal of latitude to move around and substantially the number of men and women needed to communicate with their fellow workers, which was in such factories.

The management in the Western Electric Company a change from the highly regulated work environment previously. Simultaneously, the researchers adjusted were probably only too happy to accept the offer work rates, rest periods and finishing times. Again, from Harvard University, in the form of Elton Mayo, the researchers recorded steady increases in worker to carry out this research. It promised greater worker productivity. efficiencies, through Mayo’s team testing then current The researchers believed there was another theories on worker efficiency. Mayo initiated the study important effect going on, which they believed and oversaw its progress, but most of the work on site contributed to the high worker productivity. They was conducted by the main researchers in the study – believed that the female workers felt that their work Felix Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson (Mayo, was valued as it was being observed by the researchers.

1933; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

This resulted in low absenteeism, seemingly higher

Key sources

motivation and good relationships between the women and their supervisor.

This was the so-called ‘Hawthorne effect’, which had been first identified by C.E. Snow and his team between 1924 and 1927. I say ‘so-called’ because it was first given this label by another researcher in 1950 (French, 1950), and because some dispute the findings. The main critiques of the effect say that a simpler explanation for the increase in productivity was that it was lower at the start of the week, and steadily improved as the workers moved towards the weekend. Also, some (e.g. Chiesa & Hobbs, 2008) question the replacement of two test subjects during the course of the Relay Room study, saying that this may have skewed the productivity figures. Overall, the critique goes, the effect observed was not for workers receiving more attention.

Bendix, R. (1956). Work and authority in industry. New York: Wiley.

Byrne, O. & MacDonagh, J. (2018).

What’s love got to do with it? Employee engagement amongst higher education workers. Irish Journal of Management, 36(3), 189–205.

Chiesa, M. & Hobbs, S. (2008). Making sense of social research: How useful is the Hawthorne effect? European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 67–74.

Dickson, W.J. & Roethlisberger, F.J. (1966). Counselling in an organisation: A sequel to the Hawthorne Studies. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

French, J.R.P. (1950). Field experiments: Changing group productivity. In J.G. Miller (Ed.) Experiments in social process.

A symposium on social psychology (pp.79–96). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hassard, J.S. (2012). Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric research in its social, political and historical context. Human Relations, 65, 1431–1461.

Jarrett, C. (2008). Foundations of sand?

The Psychologist, 21(9), 756–759.

Mayo, E. (1933). The human problems of an industrial civilization. London: Routledge.

O’Connor, E.S. (1999). The politics of management thought: A case study of the Harvard Business School and the Human Relations School. Academy of Management Review, 24(1), 117–131.

Roethlisberger, F.J. & Dickson, W.J. (1939). Management and the worker.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Snow, C.E. (1927, November). Research on industrial illumination: A discussion of the relation of illumination intensity to productive efficiency. The Tech Engineering News.

Taylor, F.W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & Bros.

78

The interview programme At this point the researchers believed that there might be something more at play than the power of managerial attention to increase worker productivity.

They wished to investigate the importance of worker interaction, as the Relay Room experiment had shown that workers were very positively influenced by the presence of other workers. To that point workplace studies tended to concentrate on individual worker productivity and not on the social context of work.

Thus the researchers embarked on the next stage of their research, from 1928, on an interview programme (Dickson & Roethlisberger, 1966). They conducted individual interviews with employees about their work and their lives in an attempt to discern what was important to them and what motivated them in their jobs. By modern standards the scale of the interviews, involving 21,000 workers, was extraordinary.

In the interview programme the Harvard researchers discovered that groups were a very important factor in the motivation of the Western Electric workers. If a worker was happy with their group, it had an important bearing on their work, but groups could potentially be a negative force in a worker’s life. This led them to conduct the final experiment, the Bank Wiring Observation Room Study, in which they secretly observed male workers.

Wired up Did employees in the initial studies change their behaviour, perhaps to be more socially acceptable, because they knew they were being observed? In the final study, from 1931 to 1932, in order to ensure that the 14 male workers in two work groups engaged in natural workplace behaviours, they were secretly observed wiring telephone banks. The ethicality of this, in which permission to participate was not obtained from the workers, is a discussion for another article.

The researchers quickly found that ‘informal leaders’, not necessarily appointed by management, were crucial to understanding the groups’ dynamics.

They, rather than the formal leaders, often determined the group work rate and were central to the norms and rules operated by the group. The groups often policed themselves, and management guidelines were not always observed. If a group member transgressed these informal group norms, then they might – if they did not change their behaviour – first be mildly admonished, then be subject to verbal abuse, and finally, if still not observing the norms, be hit with a tool such as a spanner.

Any of us who have worked in factories, in industrial workplaces or even in an office can see that there are many informal groups, often outside the organisational hierarchy. These groups often have identities and codes of behaviour that are observed and enforced. The Hawthorne Studies was one of the first large-scale research studies to point this out.

Still relevant today Hassard’s critique of the Hawthorne Studies points out that Elton Mayo held right-wing and anti-trade union views and wanted to find ways to structure the workplace to reduce union membership and strike action. Hassard suggests that this affected Roethlisberger and his colleagues, and that the idea that they were dispassionate Harvard researchers, merely interested in the research data, is incorrect.

He suggests that they bought into the paternalist and unitarist attitudes of Western Electric: that owners should be the only legitimate source of power; and that it was their prerogative to enhance workplace benefits, or not. Methodologically, Hassard suggests that Mayo and nearly all of the other major researchers neglected to account for the largely multi-ethnic workforce and

the psychologist january 2019 looking back

the evolving role of women in the plant. Hassard also cites Bendix’s 1956 book Work and Authority in Industry in saying that other studies had already pointed out the importance of the social nature of work. O’Connor (1999) also posits that Mayo and his colleagues used the interviews to ‘adjust the fundamentally maladjusted worker to the demands of industrial life’ – this maladjustment being, in their minds, anyone who disagreed with management, was pro-trade union or who considered strike action.

These critiques are reasonable, though they are in a small minority compared to the large number of textbooks, monographs and journal articles that refer positively to the Hawthorne effect and the Hawthorne Studies as a whole. What does strike me about the largely pro-Hawthorne articles is that many of the authors do not seem to have returned to the original texts, instead relying on secondary commentaries.

The sheer number and size of original and related texts – Roethlisberger and Dickson’s 1939 book alone is 604 pages long – may have been a deterrent. But I believe it is essential to revisit the primary research so that misconceptions do not arise and so that researchers can form their own interpretations of the foundational data. The verbatim interviews include graphic accounts, supplemented with diagrams and photographs, of the working conditions at the

Hawthorne Works. There is still a lot for future researchers to discover.

I also admire the financial endowments the researchers received, which Mayo mentions in advocating strongly for proper academic research funding (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

I think most researchers would agree with him on this, irrespective of their view of his research.

This is something to which we should aspire – adequately financed research that has the time and space to tease out the nuances involved in a linked series of work-based research questions. Though the workplace has changed a great deal in the last 80 years, I do believe that the truths about the workers in the Hawthorne Studies, and many of the commentaries about them, are timeless – pay attention to workers, truly listen to their needs and realise that if they are happy with their work and their employer then they will probably be more productive and contented human beings. If our organisation values us and if we find our work to be interesting and fulfilling, then perhaps we will walk through five miles of snow to get to it.

Early Career Conference Bursary Scheme Formerly known as the Postdoctoral Conference Bursary Scheme, this Research Board bursary scheme supports the work of UK early career psychologists.

Conference bursaries are available to support members of the Society, who are UK early career psychologists, to attend any academic conference, either in the UK or internationally, relevant to the applicant’s work. Each bursary consists of up to £250 (UK) or £500 (international) to contribute towards the costs of registration and travel to attend the full conference.

There are two rounds of the scheme each year, with submission deadlines on 1 April

and 1 October. Get your applications in now for the April deadline.

Applications are particularly welcome for this round from anyone who is planning to attend the XIV European Congress of Psychology in Moscow in July 2019.

For the full criteria and a link to the electronic application form please contact Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office carl.bourton@bps.org.uk Note: For the purposes of the bursary scheme, an early career psychologist is defined as a person who is employed at a UK HEI and is within eight years Of the completion of their doctoral degree in psychology.

AZ the

psychologist

Karla Novak

to

Y ...is for Yerkes–Dodson law

Suggested by Nick Hoyle, Open University psychology student and HCPCregistered Operating Department Practitioner @NickFromDudley ‘According to the Yerkes–Dodson law, optimal/peak performance occurs at an intermediate level of arousal. Too little or too much pressure, and performance declines. Think of the coolness of Roger Federer, who seems to know where his optimal level is. It’s an interesting model and one I plan to explore further both within sport and the workplace.’

In his 2016 British Academy/British Psychological Society lecture, Ian Robertson spoke of the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of the Yerkes– Dodson law: ‘thoughts, perceptions, actions, are beautifully represented because there’s just the right amount of background noise.’

If you’re low on the curve, stress or challenge pushes you into the sweet spot.

If you’re already there, it’s only downhill.

80

Writing in June 2015, leading neurosurgeon

coming soon… the new hidden persuaders; this A to Z finally limps to an end; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

Henry Marsh said: ‘Can one teach wisdom, empathy and judgement?

Can you force surgeons to look down? Will they just develop severe vertigo and learn nothing (just as the dancing mice in the Yerkes–Dodson experiments failed to learn if the electric shock was very strong)?’

In our May 2014 feature on ‘psychologists who rock’, Ian Deary – front man with ‘Dancing Mice (coincidentally!)’ – warned of the dangers of overarousal: ‘In the band we all notice that, when we start recording, even things that we have played flawlessly several times will suddenly go awry: the red light pushes us to the wrong part of the Yerkes–Dodson curve.’

A to Z Tweet your suggestions for any letter to @psychmag using the hashtag #PsychAtoZ or email the editor on jon.sutton@ bps.org.uk Entries so far are collated at https:// thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/ psychology-z

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

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

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

society notices

society vacancies

Division of Clinical Psychology Annual Conference Manchester, 23–24 January 2019 See p.8 BPS Annual Conference Harrogate, 1–2 May 2019 See p.22 Division of Educational & Child Psychology day conference ‘Educational Psychology Services involvement in delivering therapeutic interventions’ London, 8 February 2019 See p.28 CPD workshops 2019 See p.36 BPS conferences and events See p.43 Scottish Division of Educational Psychology/Division of Educational & Child Psychology joint day conference ‘Wellbeing: Crossing Borders: The work of educational psychologists in the UK’ Glasgow, 22 March See p.47 Special Group in Coaching Psychology CPD programme 2019 See p.65 Early Career Conference Bursary Scheme See p.79

Mental Health and Psychological Wellbeing of Children and Young People Expert Reference Group – Members See p.16 Memory Based Evidence Task and Finish Group – Chair and Members See p.41 Public Policy Board – Chair See p.51 Education and Training Board – Chair See p.51

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

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

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

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