The Psychologist February 2018

the psychologist

the

psychologist february 2018

february 2018

The age of illusions Nicholas Wade looks at a new world that emerged in the 19th century and invigorated psychology

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

psy 0218 pOFC.indd 1

12/01/2018 12:16

the psychologist

the

psychologist february 2018

february 2018

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

CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB recruitment Kai Theriault 01223 378051 kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk display Michael Niskin 01223 378 045 michael.niskin@cpl.co.uk january 2018 55,509 dispatched design concept Darren Westlake www.TUink.co.uk cover Nicholas Wade’s ‘Purkinjě’s Sehen’: his portrait can be dimly discerned in the circles. See p.54 printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper issn 0952-8229 (print) 2398-1598 (online) © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk.

psy 0218 p1 contents.indd 1

The age of illusions Nicholas Wade looks at a new world that emerged in the 19th century and invigorated psychology

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

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

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

12/01/2018 10:46

the

psychologist february 2018

74 Culture Jane; Black Mirror; and more

80 A to Z N is for…

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

Nick Ellwood/www.nickellwood.co.uk

In the late 1990s, dating was still fairly low tech.

In my search for love, I had to place a personal in an actual physical magazine and they would send the actual physical replies to my flat. Guardian Soulmates took it up a notch: you recorded a greeting, and then phoned in nervously to listen to any messages left for you.

I received just the one.

It said: ‘Actually, you sound rather boring, I don’t think I’ll bother.’

So has the dawn of apps made the game of love even more cruel? On p.46, Hannah Potts looks at the evidence. If that leaves you hankering for a bit of kindness and compassion, Lee Rowland (p.30) and Paul Gilbert (p.36) have it covered.

For more on dating and attraction, why not revisit the very first episode of our Research Digest podcast PsychCrunch, via digest. bps.org.uk/podcast These days my perfect match would be any psychologist out there whose work could grace our cover. Reach out and make a connection, particularly if you’ve not yet featured in our pages!

02 Letters Failure; and more

08 News Events; research; honours; and more

24 Good grief Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut on the difference between healthy grief work and unhealthy rumination

30 Kindness – society’s golden chain?

Lee Rowland

36 ‘Compassion is an antidote to cruelty’ Kal Kseib meets Paul Gilbert

64 Looking back

Chris Timms on Field Marshal Montgomery

42 ‘I’m happy to be an academic and a psychologist committed to positive change’ We talk to Ashley Weinberg

46 ‘You can always press delete’

Should we keep playing the

game of love? Hannah Potts wonders.

psy 0218 p1 contents.indd 2

54 The age of illusions Nicholas Wade on a new world in the 19th century

68 Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies 70 Books

12/01/2018 10:46

A call to arms for social change

‘A

08

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 8

growing movement within mainstream psychology is more explicitly making the links between how changes at a societal level impact on people and how certain groups of people are becoming increasingly oppressed and marginalised by political and economic choices. We are realising ideas of power, privilege and context can no longer be ignored by psychology – racism, neoliberalism, alienation, materialism, and gender and structural inequalities need to be addressed head on.

This is what community psychology has been saying, and acting on, for decades.’ Dr Sally Zlotowitz, chair of the British Psychological Society’s Community Psychology Section, wholeheartedly believes the time has come for community psychology to shine.

Psychologists from many areas of the discipline are seeing the real-world results of austerity measures on public mental health – indeed the group Psychologists for Social Change, formerly Psychologists Against Austerity, published a report on these effects. Inequality is also clear to see in the UK with the Equality Trust reporting that the 1000 richest people in the UK have as much wealth as the poorest 40 per cent of households combined.

Benefits sanctions have also been highlighted by many as a major cause for concern. The British Psychological Society, along with counselling and psychotherapy organisations sent an open letter to The Independent calling for the suspension of these sanctions because of their negative impact on mental health. The letter was later raised on The Andrew Marr Show in an interview with then Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke.

Zlotowitz, one of the co-founders of Psychologists for Social Change, said interest had been growing steadily in the Community Psychology Section of the BPS as well as Psychologists for Social Change – which now has groups

across the country. ‘Community psychology and its ideas have been badly neglected by mainstream psychology, which we know is overly focused on individuals and individual minds. We still have a long way to go to ensure community psychology is taught, funded and applied to the same degree as other fields of psychology, but we need community psychology now more than ever.’

A longstanding environmental and social justice activist Zlotowitz almost embarked on a career in campaigning but later moved into cognitive neuropsychology followed by clinical psychology: ‘I found myself frustrated by the lack of connection between the big picture issues like inequality, class, ethnicity, housing, community disconnection and climate change, and psychological distress. Why were people so interested in helping people ‘cope’ with social adversity, rather than working with people to change the policies which lead to social adversity?’

For the past eight years Zlotowitz has worked at mental health charity MAC-UK which draws on community psychology interventions to work in partnership with young people affected by youth violence in their communities. ‘I think psychologists working in the health, social and/or education sectors are experiencing an ever-growing demand for services that are not offering the right solutions, they are too limiting and limited.

People are seeing increasing suffering because of social and cultural issues, like rising homelessness, ecological crises, isolation and an ever-increasing pressure to be ‘perfect’, consuming individuals.

‘One overarching concern of community psychology is the individualisation of psychological distress and the disproportionate amount of funding and research that goes into individual processes and interventions.

Expecting individuals to change ‘their mind set’ fits with

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news the current cultural and political context that keeps structural power and structural violence invisible from our everyday experience.’

Zlotowitz has recently been involved with starting the Housing and Mental Health Network to take action on an ‘unjust’ housing system. ‘We are working in partnership with housing academics and the inspirational housing activist group Focus E15 in London, who have been actively campaigning on how processes of regeneration and gentrification, post the Olympics in Stratford in their case, lead to “social cleansing”. This is when local people in council housing are “displaced” to areas many miles away from their communities, which causes a great deal of mental health distress.’

The BPS section has run three Festivals of Community Psychology since it was founded – aimed at being inclusive alternatives to conferences. ‘We have replaced Hilton Hotel venues with local community arts venues, Powerpoint and keynotes with storytelling, spoken word, film, experiential workshops, dance and participation by community members. We keep the festivals affordable and still informative. We have used local independent businesses or social enterprises set up by community groups to cater for us, like the Vietnamese women’s cooking project/social enterprise supported by psychologist Angela Byrne. We would recommend taking a more creative, participatory and accessible approach to sharing ideas and research across all fields of psychology.’

Many psychologists are keen to affect change in their local communities but some are unsure of where to start, Zlotowitz recommends informing ourselves on behalf of the marginalised in society rather than accepting more mainstream narratives. ‘I would argue all psychologists should be familiar with organisations such as the New Economics Foundation, Equality Trust, Debt Resistance UK or the Tax Justice Network – all questioning the current economic “logic” and structures and promoting the alternatives which increase equality and justice. And read about critical and community psychology ideas.

‘Then get involved to address these social determinants of wellbeing – whatever you feel most passionately about, engage with it. Join community organising groups or start your own – whether it’s refugee issues or housing insecurity, there is a group tackling it and they will welcome your skills as a psychologist with open arms. You’ll find it soon snowballs in a lovely way.

‘Think of ways you can connect your work and skills as a psychologist to these issues and find local allies and like-minded people to amplify the voices of those most affected by inequality and to change the way systems work. We have to work collectively, and I am so grateful to everyone involved with the BPS Community Psychology Section and Psychologists for Social Change. The argument can be won on the grounds of evidence and because it’s the right thing to do. Equality is the best therapy!’ er

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 9

New unit to inform mental health policy In striving to bridge the gap between evidence and policy, UCL and King’s College London are leading the establishment of the new NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit.

Commissioned by the Department of Health, the unit will bring mental health researchers, clinicians, service users and carers closer together in working to inform policy.

Hosted at UCL, the unit will be jointly led by UCL and King’s, alongside researchers from City, University of London and Middlesex University, and including third sector partner the Centre for Mental Health.

It has been funded at a cost of £5 million for five years. Director of the unit Professor Sonia Johnson said across the healthcare system what we know about what works is more than what is actually used to inform policy making, as policy makers often don’t have the latest research readily available. ‘We are putting together a responsive core team, and building up a broader network of experts who will ensure that policy makers will have access to the most comprehensive and upto-date evidence to guide their plans.

Our network of experts includes economists, big data analysts and service-user researchers, to name a few, so we will be well placed to look at mental health policy research from many different angles.’

The research unit will be focusing on prevention, access and quality of mental health care, by conducting research on the impact of existing policies and to guide future plans, as well as by providing expert advice in a timely manner. The unit will offer bespoke analyses to help guide mental health policy, drawing on existing data sets to rapidly collect evidence, and by synthesising established findings. The unit will also work with a broader network of experts in the field, and identify researchers who can be available at short notice to offer advice or to take on short-term projects.

Professor of Evidence Based Practice and Research at UCL Miranda Wolpert will be working on the new unit, bringing her expertise on child and youth mental health.

‘Across the country, a network of Policy Research Units already exist to provide the Department of Health with relevant evidence in fields such as children and young people and women’s health. However, this is the first such unit in the field of mental health and marks a significant step in the right direction as it will bring mental health researchers, clinicians, service users and carers closer together. It will provide research to inform policy makers and provide service users and carers a channel through which to ensure their views are heard and considered in the development of key mental health policy.’

People who have used mental health services, some of whom are professional researchers, will be part of the team and will contribute their perspectives on equal terms.

The unit’s research priorities will be set by the Department of Health and affiliated bodies, and the research team will be collaborating with all stakeholder groups to determine how to address them. A Service-user and Carer Involvement Coordinator is set to be recruited as well as a Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) consisting of 12 service users and carers. The aim of the LEAP will be to contribute to each substantial piece of work carried out by the unit – especially that which involves investigating service models or stakeholder experiences and views.

The team will be using the National Survivor User Network and others to develop links with service-user and carer groups across the country, to enable it to conduct broader consultations rapidly if required, or to reach specific service-user populations. Service-user and carer involvement in the PRU will be led by Professor Sarah Carr. er

12/01/2018 11:13

Winding roads to psychology careers

Our journalist Ella Rhodes

10

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 10

Psych4Graduates celebrated the vastness of our discipline, and heard stories from a multitude of careers that fall under the umbrella of psychology. The event featured professionals from an array of psychological careers, including clinical, sport, health and forensic.

As a final-year psychology student, I left feeling refreshed and excited about the career paths I could find myself on. The speakers all noted the non-linear aspect of their career, and spoke about the unforeseen twists and turns throughout their journey.

It appears that success in psychology, however that may be defined, is rooted in attitude, open-mindedness, and (often) a bit of good luck.

From a ‘solid C student’ at GCSEs to Head of Research at The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, Dr Paul Dawson attributes his career success to relationship building.

Dawson details his journey from a naive and inquisitive forensic healthcare assistant (‘I was attacked on my first day of work’) to part-time PhD student, assistant psychologist, and finally, researcher. Following his ‘itch for wider influence’, Dawson joined the Metropolitan Police as a researcher, later moving to City Hall.

His work now involves delving daily into a ‘goldmine of data’ (and, he adds, a lot of meetings). He offers both encouraging advice and words of warnings to aspiring researchers.

Good research is evidence-based, contextual, and rooted in strategy.

It is not, or rather it should not be, knee-jerk analyse-everything-andsee-what-comes-out.

Dawson explains that good research, particularly in forensic settings, must be anchored in policies and plans. As he puts it, we must ‘embed the research and embed the learning’ in order to make meaningful organisational change. Without this, we are left with disjointed and disconnected research.

This approach, coupled with a pragmatic and proportional way of managing research teams, means that not everything needs analysing.

For Dawson, that is the key to his

Alice McNamara, Elise Marriot and David Murphy of the DCP PreQual Group job. Find the bits that matter, find research allies, and stay focused, he advises. But, this comes with a health warning. Research that is highimpact and highly analytical does not always make you popular. This is particularly true if your research outputs challenge the assumptions of cultures and organisations. So, how can psychologists overcome this? Be thick-skinned and know that people conceptualise success in different ways. Dawson advises to ask yourself what success looks like (Is it publications? Meeting targets?

Hitting deadlines?) and work to this picture of success when making career decisions. Importantly, when it comes to recruiting the next generation of budding psychologists, he urges that whilst statistics and practical skills can be learned, attitude, inquisition and drive cannot.

The next speaker was The Psychologist’s own journalist Ella Rhodes, who spoke of her varied career from psychology to the newsroom and back again. After graduating from a psychology degree, she describes feeling confused and overwhelmed at the plethora of potential career paths she was faced with. Empathy rippled through the crowd of current thirdyear undergraduates. Following an enthusiastic conversation with a journalist friend, she enrolled on a postgraduate journalism course and later joined the Derby Telegraph as a qualified journalist. Starting her journalistic career with the rather

envious title of ‘beer and animal correspondent’, she describes the wide array of topics and news stories that she covered during her time as a reporter. This included features on diverse topics, including alien species, dying moth populations in Derby, folk music, and a blind cat called George (whom she promptly adopted). Journalism, in the traditional sense, involves talking to people and uncovering stories, so it comes as no surprise to learn that a degree in psychology was fitting preparation for this career.

So, after submerging herself in the camaraderie of the newsroom, what prompted the move back to psychology? The right person at the right time and a little bit of good luck, it would seem. Journalists are, according to Rhodes, jacks of all trades, who are constantly learning and evolving as both writers and people. After explaining the benefits of writing for such a wide and diverse audience, Rhodes offers some advice to aspiring writers. Ask questions, be brave, question authority, she urges.

Find a niche, start a blog, be prepared to learn and to be challenged. Her final words particularly resonated: ‘Don’t be afraid of looking stupid.’

From the newsroom to the fatigue clinic, Dr Vincent Deary of Northumbria University talks about his career in health psychology. Our life trajectory is like a theatrical play with three acts, says Deary.

It starts with a warm up, then the action happens, and some kind of

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news

Research digest resolution or conclusion usually follows. Act two is where the magic happens. It’s the dramatic, occasionally uncomfortable, challenging, interesting bit of the play. Sticking with the theatrical metaphor, it’s this messy middle bit that makes the ‘story’ entertaining, and the same can be said for our life.

However, this period of discomfort challenges the habitual nature of our routine-driven way of life; how we generally like to live. Challenge and drama forces us to reconsider our ‘way of working’, and prompts us to make adjustments. Every system has a capacity of comfortable functioning and is able to survive if only one parameter veers out of this level of comfort. When two or more parameters venture into uncomfortable territory, our capacity is passed. Or rather, it is at this stage that we ‘get through the clinical door’ and require intervention.

Deary tells a story of 'Anne', a fictional client based on an amalgamation of real clients’ experiences of entering the fatigue clinic. Anne, in her early thirties, is a single mother working in the NHS. She brands herself a ‘stoic coper’ and has been developing symptoms of chronic fatigue for several months. How can psychology help Anne?, Deary asks. Fatigue is transdiagnostic, biopsychosocial, and is best treated in a multidisciplinary and holistic way. This means finding therapies that acknowledge not only Anne’s presentation of fatigue, but also her mind, body, and overall health. As a health psychologist, Deary prefers a holistic way of working, which draws upon different disciplines. In order to ensure these different domains are working in harmony, he proposes an overriding therapeutic theme that aims to ‘make sense of narratives’. If we can understand how Anne constructs her own story, we can then attempt to make adjustments. This is all in keeping with the concept of allostasis, or adjusting to a new setpoint. The fatigue clinic is based on the concept of making sense of

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 11

change, learning to adjust, and – crucially, Deary points out – believing in people. Psychology, in its various forms, can help Anne to re-orient values, re-evaluate her sense of identity, and affirm her position back into the system.

Evidencing Deary’s three-act concept of life, Sophie Carrigill’s path to psychology has been a journey of several acts. Her journey into sport psychology was fuelled by a near-fatal car accident that left her paraplegic. Following the 2010 accident, she completed her psychology A-level and degree in sport psychology. Her story is one of resilience, coping, turbulent identity and grappling with control. Since the accident, ‘my life has been taken over by psychology’, she laughs. She describes calling on principles of psychology to see her through the trauma of the accident: mindfulness, reflection and self-development have been cornerstones of her journey.

As her acceptance for her newfound disability grew, her interest in sport was reignited. Since then, she competed in wheelchair basketball at the 2016 Rio Paralympics and now is co-captain of the GB team. She trained for Rio alongside writing her third-year dissertation, obtained a first-class degree, and is now looking to a master’s in sport psychology. It’s good news for psychology students, as she attributes her sporting success partly to her study of psychology.

‘It’s about learning about people’ she explains. Her accident prompted her to rethink her perceptions of helpseeking, grit and resilience.

Carrigill left the event with words of motivation and inspiration.

After listening to the various talks, the Pre-Qualification group of the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology discuss routes in applied psychology, and the vast showcase of exhibitors, I left with a new-found excitement for my degree. The road to psychology is rarely linear but, as the speakers proved, something will muddle through in the end.

Madeleine Pownall University of Lincoln

Imagining we are experiencing a particular body state can affect our subsequent behaviour and decisions (simulating the effects of real bodily states). For example, participants who spent a minute imagining that they felt full went on to choose smaller food portions as a reward, as compared with participants who’d imagined feeling hungry. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin A brain-imaging study by researchers in China has provided new clues as to how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or ‘shock therapy’) helps people with severe depression, for whom other less radical treatments have failed. After ECT, patients with depression showed increased volume in a brain region involved in emotional processing (the amygdala), and increased connectivity between this area and part of the temporal lobe involved in processing faces. The neural changes correlated with symptom improvement. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience The key to assertiveness may be having greater self-respect. Daniela Renger says this aspect of the self has been neglected in psychology research.

However, her new measure of selfrespect was more strongly associated with participants’ assertive responses than their self-confidence or self-esteem Self and Identity One of the first attempts to study ‘love at first sight’ has concluded that the experience isn’t really about love at all, but rather about strong feelings of initial attraction. For instance, among attendees at a speed-dating event, those who said they’d experienced love at first sight for another participant didn’t report any other feelings resembling love, but did report strong feelings of physical attraction. Personal Relationships

By Dr Christian Jarrett. These studies were covered, along with many more, by him, Dr Alex Fradera and Emma Young on our Research Digest at www.bps.org.uk/digest

12/01/2018 11:13

Creating space for mutual support One lunchtime clinical psychologist Dr Nina Browne encountered a breast cancer surgeon sitting in a tepee at the entrance to Blackpool Victoria Hospital. After chatting with a bereaved mother, this surgeon had become reacquainted with the power of doctors, their words and diagnoses, and the true pain of their patients; this experience had changed her practice.

This tepee, bedecked with fairy lights and comfy seats, was the brainchild of Sarah Mortimer, a Development Manager for the Association of Camerados,

a social movement whose motto is ‘The answer to all our problems is each other’. Browne, works for fellow social enterprise Owls, whose vision is a world where anything is possible through collaboration and where communities are listened to and looked to for solutions.

In partnership Browne had worked with Mortimer for the previous 18 months creating spaces in public environments which encourage people to connect.

For almost a year Mortimer and Browne worked to develop ‘living rooms’ in prisons, libraries and other unlikely locations, which initially consisted of sofas and a standard lamp, in an attempt to create spaces where people feel they can talk to and support each other. After some trial and error, and many positive experiences among those who used the living rooms, Mortimer came up with the idea of erecting a tepee in the main foyer of Blackpool’s Victoria Hospital for three weeks, with a simple sign outside which read: ‘This is a Public Living Room. A Place to relax, share, laugh and look out for each other. Come in, there’s no catch!’

Mortimer said: ‘I spent quite a lot of time at the tepee – but people didn’t know I worked for Camerados.

I’d sit in the Costa opposite watching people go in and out.

The way I describe it is they were subconsciously leaving their lanyards at the door, they were all interacting as humans, not as consultant and patient, there weren’t the power dynamics of the wards and waiting rooms. That was the most powerful thing.’ Browne and Mortimer have received hundreds of postcards and emails from those who used the tepee and felt it was a powerful place.

Browne said there was an enormous amount of

Understanding uncontrollable thoughts

12

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 12

Distressing conditions, including PTSD, depression and anxiety, have something in common: a difficulty in suppressing unwanted thoughts.

Negative self-judgements and re-experienced traumas directly impact on mental health and make recovery harder by intruding into the new experiences that should provide distance and a mental fresh start.

Understanding what’s involved in thought suppression may therefore be one key to helping people with these conditions. Now research in Nature Communications has uncovered an important brain process that might explain why some people struggle to control their thoughts.

The research, led by Taylor Schmitz, comes from the lab of Michael Anderson at Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Anderson first began investigating thought suppression

when the dominant position was that it’s not possible to suppress thoughts voluntarily – ‘just try to not think of a white bear for five minutes and see what happens!’ was the popular example of the time, derived from Daniel Wegner’s ironic processing theory. However, Anderson used new methods, including the so-called ‘Think/No-Think paradigm’ (more on this in a moment), to show that suppressed thoughts only rebound under certain conditions – in other words, it is sometimes possible to suppress thoughts successfully.

The new research used this Think/No-Think paradigm.

Participants first studied pairs of words. Afterwards they were shown one word from each pair and – depending on the instruction for that pair – either had to recall the other word in the pair (a ‘Think’ trial), or had to block the other word from

coming to mind (a ‘No-Think’ trial).

Later, when participants tried to remember the pairings, they did worse for pairs from No-Think trials than Think trials, on average (in fact, they did even worse recalling the No-Think pairs than other pairs that hadn’t featured at all since the initial study phase). This shows that No-Think pairings had mostly been suppressed successfully.

These effects replicate established findings for the Think/No-Think paradigm. The main purpose of the new study was to see what was happening in the brain during this process, and for this Schmitz and his colleagues used two imaging techniques: fMRI, to look at patterns of blood flow during the task, and 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy, to look at the concentration of neurotransmitters in different parts of the brain. For comparison,

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news evidence supporting the benefits of peer support and non-professional helpers: ‘Camerados are creating spaces that break down the barriers that divide us up.

Enabling every day helping in people’s communities, supporting one another as human beings, with little, if any, professional intervention. This partnership is about psychologists working with non-psychologists and us moving away from traditional mental health settings but still having huge benefits for people’s mental wellbeing.’

Also a psychology MSc student at the University of Central Lancashire, Mortimer said including formal interventions within the living rooms would minimise the message of Camerados, adding: ‘The living rooms are very informal and at the opposite end of the spectrum to services. We’re trying to bring people back to being people and not having to fix each other. What would happen if you had a conversation with someone at a coffee shop or a bus stop? There’s not someone there to report to a keyworker, there’s a safety element in that they can trust each other to have conversations. We’re trying to put out these enabling spaces where everyone is on a level and supports each other.’

Camerados is hoping to expand the tepee concept and is on the hunt for eight partner hospitals in the NHS to test out more living rooms in hospitals. The organisation has also been experimenting with social eating in bringing communities together.

While there has been a growing movement within psychology to listen to the needs of communities and work with experts by experience, Browne said, there were more ways for psychologists to go beyond

the researchers also scanned the participants’ brains during a task that involves suppressing movements, rather than thoughts (the ‘Stop Signal’ task, in which a key must be pressed as fast as possible in response to certain colour cues, but withheld for other colour cues).

During the suppression of thoughts (the No-Think trials), blood flow was reduced in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in memory. The extent of this change was related to the levels of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. Participants with a higher concentration of GABA, specifically in the hippocampus, also showed a greater decrease in blood flow in that area. Moreover, the degree of thought suppression correlated with the amount of GABA in the hippocampus (not in the brain more widely). These same patterns were not observed in the Stop Signal task. These findings strongly suggests that hippocampal

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 13

this: ‘Psychologists working with non-mental health professionals is really exciting. Working in new ways allows us to draw on the expertise and assets within communities to tackle social issues such as isolation.

We need to create more spaces and opportunities for people to connect and really be empowered. There are other great examples of this in the youth field such as MAC-UK and RedThread. There’s definitely momentum in community psychology in the last decade, but I’m really interested in how psychologists working within any field can use their skills and expertise beyond individual approaches. We also need to be thinking of this outside the realm of community psychology, this is about mainstream psychology happening outside of the clinic.’

Browne said the experience of working in this way had changed her own practice: ‘It allows me to remove myself from the expert position and challenge the system we have around help-seeking. Had that surgeon not sat in the Tepee and listened to that mother she wouldn’t have had that experience. We need others to help us.

It’s about being able to step out of our traditional practices for a moment and really listen to what people are telling us. That’s how we can build solutions together.’ er If you would like to find out more about the work of Camerados or contact Sarah Mortimer about expanding the living rooms project into your hospital please email sarah@camerados.org To find out more about the work of Owls visit www.owls. org.uk or contact enquiries@owls.org.uk. Browne has blogged about Camerados at www.owls.org.uk/blog

GABA is playing a specific role in the ability to suppress thoughts, by helping the area dial-down its activity.

What triggers the involvement of GABA during No-Think trials?

Previous work suggests that the thought suppression process involves a signal starting in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the more this frontal brain area is active, the more deactivated the hippocampus becomes. The new findings suggest that this ‘negative coupling’ depends on GABA. For people low in hippocampal GABA, this process – which appears to be a key component of thought suppression – didn’t happen.

These findings have implications for our understanding of mental health conditions, suggesting that lower concentrations of GABA could be a risk factor for some. However, the research is correlational, so this conclusion has to be taken tentatively (causality could be the other way

around, such that GABA is driven pathologically low by psychological issues). Future research could test the causal role of hippocampal GABA in uncontrolled thoughts (including in clinical samples), as well as refine our understanding of which psychological interventions will be of benefit – most likely those that don’t just harness the involvement of frontal brain areas, but also produce downstream change in the soil health of the hippocampal range.

This study is a breakthrough in bridging neurophysiology and psychology, and it looks likely that getting a grip on the role of molecular pathways in the hippocampus will be at least part of the solution to helping those for whom issues from the past still plague their present.

Dr Alex Fradera for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ ydaydv5u

12/01/2018 11:13

Soothing public minds

14

Dr Stella Chan

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 14

A clinical psychologist who has called on the public to create a collection of soothing images for use in psychotherapy and research has been awarded this year’s British Psychological Society Public Engagement and Media Award. Dr Stella Chan (University of Edinburgh), the founder of Project Soothe, has been actively bringing ‘citizen science’ and psychology into the public eye, opening conversations she never expected.

Chan explained how Project Soothe came to be. Initially inspired by her fireman and freelancephotographer father, she later had a realisation during training as a clinical psychologist that while many therapies use mental imagery, some people cannot produce such images. Finally, on a Sunday morning reading Physics World, big, impressive citizen science projects came to her mind. ‘In astronomy there’s one called Galaxy Zoo… while traditionally you’d need a lot of fast computers and a lot of scientists to identify galaxies, astronomers instead recruited amateur scientists, basically geeks in the community, who really liked looking at stars anyway, and gave them a bit of basic training.

Then these trained citizen scientists each take a bit of the data and analyse it and put it together. They’ve already published something like 50 papers on that. I thought there’s no reason we can’t do that in psychology.

I came back to the idea of creating this bank of images to help people self-soothe and bring about a sense of self-compassion.’

Chan felt it important to avoid prescribing what soothing should mean to people: ‘I thought if we go out and create these images it isn’t representative of the population. With the help of some seed funding from the university we launched phase one, designing the website and asking people to send in any images they found soothing. We were deliberately vague at the time, we wanted them to use their imaginations to think about

what soothing means – which is something we’re not clear about theoretically.’

Since setting up Project Soothe, which is now funded by the British Academy, the team has received more than 700 photos from 21 countries. Chan was amazed by the consistency of the themes seen across the images.

‘Five themes keep coming up – natural landscapes, water features, sky, trees and flowers, and animals.’

Along with her colleagues and students Chan has also carried out numerous research projects using the images.

One asked participants to view a randomly selected group of 25 of the images and measured their mood before and after. ‘We found people’s mood significantly improved from before to after. It’s a very robust effect we see, and we’ve replicated it in a smaller, more well-controlled study. We also found that whether people benefited from these images was not related to their level of depression.

Even though some people may feel low and down, it doesn’t stop them from getting the mood benefit of the images. That was very good to see.’

In a further study teenage participants in Belize were randomly allocated to either view and rate 25 of the images, or imagine soothing images. Those who saw the real images had a significantly better mood improvement than those in the mental imagery group. The team has also carried out a qualitative study asking people to define soothing and to describe the last time they felt soothed.

Here she found an interesting contradiction. ‘We found if you ask people an abstract question like what is soothing, you get a very different answer than if you ask someone to recall a memory from when they last felt soothed and describe the experience. For example, when you ask people what is soothing they don’t really talk about nature, but connectedness with nature really came up when they described their experiences of soothing.’

This recurring theme of nature in people’s

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news experiences and images of soothing led Chan to hold an exhibition of the images at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. ‘We started talking to the Royal Botanic Garden, which is an amazing place. We introduced the project to them and they were really interested, they were incredible partners. The exhibition had interactive activities including voting for the most soothing images and a survey. We estimate about 2000 people visited over a month, and 400 filled in our survey – it was very internationally rich, as many were tourists. We took data from the qualitative study about people’s narratives of soothing and commissioned a poem from the Edinburgh Makar – the city poet – he looked at the results of that study and transformed it into a poem and paired it with one of the images.’

Many people who visited the exhibition spoke openly to Chan and her colleagues about their own mental health problems. ‘When we put up the exhibition we didn’t emphasise it as a mental health project… when you’re reaching out to the public it’s more about general wellbeing of people. But nonetheless people with mental health difficulties found it really resonated with them.

That was one thing that made me realise that while it wasn’t the original design of the study, maybe some of the value of Project Soothe is that it opens up conversations.’

The exhibition was also taken to a secondary school in Edinburgh, and it may tour more schools in the area.

Some of the Project Soothe images are also set to be used in an NHS Film Library project that is working with artists to create moving images for use with patients in hospitals. Chan has also held a panel discussion about adolescent mental health, another area of expertise, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Midlothian Science Festival. ‘One wonderful thing about public engagement, and something that’s nerve-wracking for a lot of researchers, is that once you put your research in the public domain you have no control over how people use it. You really need to let go and trust that people will use it in a way they will benefit from.’

Public engagement, Chan said, requires a great deal of heart and a genuine interest in connecting with people and inspiring them. ‘In traditional research you can be logical and pragmatic and produce a good piece of research. But for public engagement the main thing is it’s not about what you do but about whether you mean to genuinely connect with people. And this connection can only happen if you want to connect. It’s not something you can learn as a skill, it doesn’t work like that… the public engage with you because they can feel your enthusiasm.

The public engagement events that I think are successful are those that show you want to come out and make a difference. It’s that enthusiasm that attracts people.’

While public engagement is traditionally done after research has already been published, Chan said she hopes to continue involving the public: ‘If you genuinely want to do that, you involve them right from the start, you consult them, you see what kind of research they want to see done and what they see as valuable. I think in the new year my goal is trying to integrate that in different stages of research, rather than at a later point.’

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 15

Over the coming year Chan said the team is hoping to dig deeper into preliminary data on the longer-term benefit of the Project Soothe images. ‘I want to step up the public engagement as well, because I want to consult the public on how they’d like to see these images being transformed into a more structured way of treatment or intervention. My work has two sides now – one is Project Soothe and the other is adolescent depression. This year we’re launching a new study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, looking at the underlying mechanisms, risks and resilience in adolescents, to see what can predict and explain why some young people get depressed and some not and why some who do get depressed recover and some don’t.’

Working alongside the Royal Botanic Garden, Chan said, had been a particular highlight. ‘Academics need to step out and work with other people… I can’t emphasise enough how good the Royal Botanic Garden has been, both their understanding of the project and their creativity around it. Particularly Dr Roger Hyam who is like a wizard, not only is he a botanic expert but somehow a DIY expert. When it’s a small-budget project you don’t have many resources… the keyboard we used in the exhibition was made by Roger from an Ikea chopping board!

It warmed my heart to do a project where I know every detail of it. In academia we sometimes get too competitive about big grants and are judged on them, but a lot of meaningful work doesn’t need a lot of money. We need to get back to that basic level of understanding that it’s not about money, it’s about what you want to achieve. It’s not about how big the grant is but how big your heart is.’

Finally, Chan said she was overjoyed to win the Public Engagement and Media Award. ‘I was jumping up and down and trying to find someone to hug! I am so grateful for the support of many colleagues including the Project Soothe team, the STRADL team, as well as funders British Academy, Wellcome Trust and the University of Edinburgh and its press office.

Traditionally you do come across academics who may be snobbish about public engagement and who think it isn’t as important or it’s an add-on. Nonetheless I did it not because I think it’ll lead to a great career – I did it because I really wanted to do it, and to see that recognised is a real boost. I’m really glad the BPS has that shared value that public engagement is an important area of our work and it’s worth encouraging people do more.’ er

To find out more about the Society’s Public Engagement and Media Award, see tinyurl.com/ y93qn7pa

12/01/2018 11:13

From openings to the power of music

Dr Gustav Kuhn

Hundreds of A-level students had their minds opened to the breadth of psychology as a discipline at the British Psychological Society’s annual Psychology4Students event held at London’s Kia Oval.

Beginning proceedings, appropriately, was Professor of Social Interaction Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough University) with how the first 10 seconds of a conversation can be really telling. Through a few recorded conversations, she showed that the absence of the usual ‘how are you’ pleasantries of early interactions can tell us much about where a conversation might be heading.

When two women opened a conversation with ‘Shellie?’…

‘Debbie?’, the audience just knew instinctively that this exchange was about to take a turn for the worse.

Stokoe is an advocate of studying real conversations and interactions, arguing that such verbal exchanges are in fact highly systematic and ripe for study. In simulated conversations people don’t tend to speak in the same way: police officers being trained in interviewing techniques sound radically different compared with officers carrying out actual interviews. In real police interviews the stakes are so much higher, and this obviously changes the content of a conversation or interview entirely. Stokoe said it was wrong to base assumptions on simulated conversations such as these.

Listening in to people phoning services such as vets, local councils and even window companies reveals the different types of conversation starters we use when building requests. If we are unsure of what services are available we may say: ‘Hello, would it be possible to…’, compared to calling a vet: ‘I need to bring the cat in.’ Stokoe and her colleagues analysed 3000 phone calls to different GP surgeries, and it emerged that a few simple conversational tweaks can make the process far less stressful and as a result improve ratings in the National GP Survey. Illustrating this was a jarring call in which a man was told point blank no appointment was available on his requested day, and then no alternative was offered. The confusion and frustration in his voice was there for all to hear. Stokoe advised that patients should always be offered an alternative time, and once the appointment is made it should be confirmed back to them. Similar principles applied to students phoning university clearing can again ensure smoother progress along the ‘conversational racetrack’.

Power and politics

16

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 16

What do Donald Trump and ISIS have in common? This was the question posed by Professor Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) in a captivating talk covering the history of leadership studies and toxic leaders. One of the main things Trump and ISIS share is their styles of leadership – both portray themselves as the embodiment of America and Islam respectively, punishing and decrying any of those against them as enemies of the entire group itself. In his final campaign advertisement Trump laid out his view of America, that ‘the people’ face an

enemy comprising external enemies and the internal establishment. Enemies of Trump are presented as enemies of the people. Reicher said that in the online ISIS magazine Dabiq, the world is also divided into two camps, Muslims and non-Muslims, which are presented as inherently incompatible. Enemies of ISIS are portrayed as playing into the hands of the West, whether they are Muslim or not. Reicher said both ISIS and Trump peddle a politics of hope: Dabiq, for example, has more photos depicting community and acceptance than it does death and destruction, albeit in a completely distorted way.

Next up, in a wonderful real-time display of a democracy, Dr Ashley Weinberg (University of Salford) opened his talk on the psychology of politicians with a referendum on which tie he should wear – a jazzy red Christmas number won by a landslide. He argued that psychology did not do enough to influence world leaders and politicians, despite having much to offer. Weinberg pointed to the enormous amounts of stress MPs deal with and a slowly growing acceptance that politicians struggle with their mental health.

Now that’s magic

Magicians have been baffling audiences since Roman times, and perhaps before, and psychologist-conjurer Dr Gustav Kuhn (Goldsmiths University of London) has drawn on the startling illusions of magic to uncover more about human perception. He said the experience of magic results in a conflict between what we think is possible and things we’ve experienced before, and psychologists are growing more interested in what mechanisms lead us to believe impossible things. After some brilliant live demonstrations Kuhn said the key to magic was in exploiting the many limitations of human awareness.

While we believe we have a full and coherent perception of the world, the truth is much stranger: our eyes have only small areas of high acuity, our peripheral vision nears black and white, we move our eyes three times per second and during these saccades become effectively blind for one tenth of every second. Kuhn said our feeling of being fully aware of the world around us is an illusion.

In eye tracking experiments scientists have revealed that where people look during a trick has little effect on what they actually see – someone may be looking directly at the solution to a trick (i.e. a magician keeping a coin hidden in her palm) but miss it entirely. Kuhn said this had implications for things like driving: while hands-free kits are legal, Kuhn said processes such as this reveal that while our mental attention is distracted we can miss things happening in front of our eyes. In an illusion Kuhn threw a ball into the air twice keeping it in his palm on the third throw – but a good proportion of the audience ‘saw’ the ball disappear in mid-air. Kuhn explained that to live in our dynamic world, where our brains take some time to process what is going on, our constant need to predict the future results in us ‘seeing’ things that aren’t really there.

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news

As humans, Kuhn said, we have a choice: we can grow enormous heads that allow for bigger brains to process all of the information in the world around us, or we can use these mental shortcuts and estimates to process the most important information. He said the reason magic works is that we are so often completely unaware of our own cognitive limitations.

Music hath charms...

It’s part of weddings, funerals, football games, films, exercise, lonely walks… we use it to calm down, get excited and cry to… it’s music. In her captivating talk, Professor Catherine Loveday (University of Westminster) explored why music has such overwhelming power for most people. She explained that music has demonstrable effects on behaviour. Very young babies in hospitals require less pain medication when they listen to music; sad music makes us spend more money in shops; music can affect eating speed, the type of wine we buy and even whether we’ll give a stranger our number. Animals also respond to music: dogs react in an excited way to rock music and calm down to classical, the milk yields of cows increase with faster music, wounds in rats take twice as long to heal when listening to aggressive music, and chickens have a particular penchant for Pink Floyd.

After showing an excellent video of a parrot dancing to ‘Gangnam Style’ (tinyurl.com/mvua9x2), Loveday explained music has measurable biological effects on humans: a study of homeless men who sang together in a choir showed reduced stress and higher immunity with each session. Opiates in the brain also play a role: if the effects of opiates are blocked people experience no pleasure when listening to music. The ‘chill’ effect, the shiver down the spine people experience when hearing particular pieces of music, is also evident in brain scans,

changes in body temperature and respiration. It’s even found in chickens.

But what is it about music that makes it so powerful?

Loveday said humans are innately sensitive to changes in pitch, timbre and rhythm in people’s voices. Our ability to socially connect with people depends so much on our ability to read the musical content of language. Memory is also key. Music helps to tie us to specific autobiographical memories, and our memories of music seem very robust – we need only hear the opening few notes of some songs to recognise them. Loveday said some of the power in some music was in challenging expectations. Just as a good joke will build a sense of what is to come and violate it, music draws on this technique too – building to unexpected changes in pitch or volume. er

Professor Stephen Reicher

New guidelines for interpreters As increasing numbers of people relocate across national borders, the diversity found within Britain demands attention to ensure that psychological services are to be accessible to everyone. The 2011 Census estimated that over 138,000 people in Britain do not speak the English language and 726,000 do not speak it well. It’s in this context that the British Psychological Society has published guidelines for psychologists working with interpreters.

Professor Rachel Tribe, School of Psychology, University of East London and Dr Kate Thompson, from the organisation Rakuba, who wrote

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 17

the guidelines, said: ‘It is important to consider forms of language support so that those not fluent in English can still access psychological services. These guidelines seek to help psychologists appreciate the complexities of working in different settings where interpreters might be needed, but also to recognise the benefits that interpreters as coworkers and team members can bring.’

Read the guidelines at www. bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/ working-interpreters-guidelinespsychologists

12/01/2018 11:13

Small talk saves lives The Samaritans’ new campaign, Small Talk Saves Lives, aims to give ordinary people the confidence to approach and chat to anyone they may think is contemplating suicide at train stations. We spoke to Dr Lisa Marzano, lead psychologist behind the campaign, who works with the Samaritans Media Advisory Team, and previously British Transport Police, on training staff in helping suicidal people.

A 2016 systematic review of rail suicides by Brian Mishara and Cécile Bardon, commissioned by Samaritans, revealed there was little information about why people choose to die by suicide on the railways and, importantly, what might reverse this decision. Marzano (Middlesex University London), along with colleagues from her own university and the University of Westminster, were selected by Samaritans and Network Rail to develop five studies to explore this question. These included an online survey, face-to-face interviews, the assessment of CCTV footage of railway suicides, an analysis of news reports and an exploration of what information is available to those searching online about suicide on the railways.

‘The interviews and survey revealed that one of the main reasons people considered the railways was this perception, or misperception, that it would be guaranteed to be lethal. But people also talked about the railways as being places that were easily accessible, quite impersonal and remote, and where they felt unlikely to be interrupted.

We also analysed CCTV footage to see if there were any patterns of behaviour prior to a suicide on the railways and we saw that people weren’t interacting with others much and in all but one case they’d all been at a train station, sometimes switching platforms or station hopping, for quite some time. It showed there were lots of opportunities for intervention.’

Around one in six staff on the railways are now trained in helping those who may be suicidal, but the chances of

18

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports, including a report from a debate on the Mental Health Act, and an HR award for Professor Gail Kinman and Dr Almuth McDowall. For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 18

a suicidal person meeting one of those staff members is less likely than their coming into contact with a fellow commuter. ‘I always contextualise this work in the wider suicide literature. For example there was a Public Health England guidance document published in 2015 on preventing suicides in public locations. Based on a review of the literature, the authors couldn’t identify any reasons against interventions that address public fears, increase whole-community awareness and preparedness to intervene, in tackling suicides in public places. The people who spoke to us about their suicide attempts said ensuring they wouldn’t be interrupted was one of the factors for carrying out an attempt, so we reversed that to suggest that if someone did intervene that might help.’

Marzano said the research and resulting campaign were relevant beyond suicides on the UK rail network: ‘I hope it helps us to open up more conversations about suicide and more opportunities around it. I hope we begin to recognise that suicidal thoughts are very common but there’s recovery from them, and there are things we can all do to help’.

Marzano is working with Network Rail and Samaritans on further themes that emerged from her research; one of which concerns the perceived lethality of rail suicides. She said while many believe such methods are sure to cause death, rates of death on the London Underground are closer to 55 per cent, with a higher average rate (around 80 per cent) on UK main railways.

‘This perception was one of the key factors that we found to be driving people to this kind of death. The numbers of people who are seriously injured in an attempted suicide by rail are high. In our surveys when people commented on why they decided against the rails they made comments about the effects on others and the train driver, but it was rare for them to say they were worried about surviving with serious injuries. We’re now considering how to deliver that message in a safe and effective way.’

The Small Talk Saves Lives campaign reached more than 10 million people in its first 15 days and was endorsed by Stephen Fry, Lord Alan Sugar, suicide researcher Professor Rory O’Connor and many others. er To find out more about the campaign see www.samaritans.org and to contact Samaritans for support call 116 123 (UK and Ireland)

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news

Is this why life speeds up?

‘Like a ball rolling down a hill, time often seems to pick up momentum, going faster and faster as we get older…,’ write the authors of a new paper in Self and Identity that aims to explain the reasons for this phenomenon. Understand it properly, and it might be possible to stop it – because as Mark Landau at the University of Kansas and his colleagues also note: ‘Perceiving life as rapidly slipping away is psychologically harmful: unpleasant, demotivating, and possibly even hostile to the sense that life is meaningful.’

The philosopher Douglas Hofstadter suggested that the acceleration of time is the result of our increasing tendency through life to package distinct experiences into bigger ‘chunks’. For example, for a child, a walk in the park can involve so many new experiences that each is remembered as a distinct individual event. For the adult accompanying that child, if nothing novel happens, all the varied sensations and impressions associated with that walk may be collapsed – or ‘chunked’ – into a single memory of ‘a walk in the park’. Since, as far as the adult is concerned, only one thing happened, that span of time will be remembered as brief, while for the child it will feel long.

To test this explanation, the researchers first asked 107 volunteers either to write about how events over the past year of their lives were similar to the events of other years (a task designed to encourage the chunking of past experiences) or to write about how events and activities could have turned out differently (the ‘no chunking’ group). The participants who’d chunked their previous year perceived it as having passed more quickly than an ‘objective’ calendar year, whereas the other group did not.

Next, the researchers asked a different group of 115 undergraduates to spend two minutes reflecting on how much

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 19

time they had spent engaged in four different activity categories (School, Job, Socialising and Other), either over the past year, or over the past day. The idea was that this would prompt them to ‘chunk’ experiences together, but over different periods.

All these participants then indicated how quickly they felt the previous year had passed, compared with the ‘average’ year. Those who’d ‘chunked’ their past year reported feeling that it had gone faster than those who’d chunked the previous day.

‘It appears that perceiving a given period as passing faster depends on whether one chunks that period,’ the researchers wrote.

The researchers also reasoned that if chunking experiences causes an erosion of life’s meaning (by stripping our memories of evocative detail), then we might use nostalgia to help compensate for this. After the two-minute reflection period, the researchers asked all the participants about how important nostalgia was to them. Those who’d chunked a whole year said nostalgia was more important than those who’d chunked the previous day, presumably because they’d lost the detail from a greater part of their lives to the chunking process.

Similar results were found with another group of 105 adults asked to chart how they’d spent their time either over the past year or past day.

Again, those who had chunked a year reported feeling that it had passed more quickly than those who had chunked a day. And they also placed

more importance on nostalgia.

‘It is worth noting’, the researchers add, that ‘the inductions used here are meant to simulate a chunking process that, we suspect, takes place spontaneously.’ We may well chunk all kinds of periods of time – from a day (into ‘commute’, ‘work’, ‘family time’, ‘eating’, for example) to a year, or even, especially as we reach middle age (when people tend to report that the passage of time really accelerates), even a decade or more. It’s easy to see how looking back over the past 10 years of your life and remembering it in just a few ‘chunks’ could make it feel as though it has passed in a flash.

On a positive note, if grouping our experiences into broader chunks is a key part of the reason that life seems to speed up as we get older, there are possible ways to counteract this.

One antidote might be mindfulness, the researchers suggest. People who try to live ‘in the moment’ may better appreciate the uniqueness of those moments once they have passed, making it less likely that they’ll be swallowed up into a ‘chunk’. Meditation and engaging with art may perhaps also help, they write, since ‘these experiences have the potential to re-sensitise us to the satisfaction of simple things and, perhaps, counteract life’s quickening pace’.

Emma Young for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ ycrdscay

12/01/2018 11:13

Honoured psychologists

Dr Marian Brooke Rogers OBE

Professor Antony Chapman OBE

Experts in emergency preparedness, psychosis, music and psychology, as well as a former British Psychological Society President were among the psychologists named on the 2018 New Year’s Honours List.

Dr Marian Brooke Rogers, Reader in Risk and Terror at King’s College London, received an OBE for services to academia and government. Rogers has been chair of the Behavioural Science Expert Group, which works alongside the Cabinet Office in preparing the classified National Risk Assessment, National Security Risk Assessment – both secret-level outputs – and the public-facing National Risk Register. These documents lay out the evidence regarding the likelihood and potential impact of natural disasters, major accidents and malicious attacks. Rogers and her colleagues have been instrumental in changing the government’s approach to communicating with the public about such low-probability, high-impact events.

Dr Rogers said: ‘The appetite for incorporating academic behavioural science evidence into policy making and planning is growing. The Blackett Review in 2011 was a turning point, this was a review of high-impact, lowprobability risks. It argued that one of the key drivers in a major crisis is to avoid collateral impacts and restore normality as quickly as possible. But it also went on to say that quite often we don’t even understand what the public think or know about these risks. Back in those days the government would have been nervous about talking about some of these risks – they were afraid of panicking people or frightening them. But now we’ve really given them the evidence and confidence to say that actually it’s irresponsible not to make the information available.

If governments do not engage with members of the public throughout the process, they’ll struggle to deliver plans and procedures.’

Over the next few years Rogers will be continuing her work with the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response. Her team’s work will focus on the behavioural impact of communications on groups considered to be more vulnerable. She will also be looking to assess the effectiveness of some of

the emergency-related campaigns we see all around us, such as the ‘See it, Say it, Sorted’ and ‘Run, Hide, Tell’ campaigns.

Former President of the British Psychological Society Professor Antony Chapman, lately Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff Metropolitan University, received an OBE for services to higher education. He joins his wife, Dr Siriol David, who was awarded an OBE in last year’s New Year’s Honours List. He said among his proudest achievements were being voted an Honorary Fellow of the BPS and receiving an honorary DSc from his alma mater, the University of Leicester. He plans to continue working with the Buttle Trust and developing UK higher education overseas through trans-national education.

Professor Elizabeth Kuipers, (King’s College London), received an OBE for services to clinical research, treatment and support to people with psychosis. Kuipers is well known for her research and clinical work focusing on developing, evaluating and improving psychological interventions for people with psychosis and their caregivers. She has also worked towards improving support for women academics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s, which received a Silver Athena Swan award in recent years.

Kuipers is currently working on, among other things, a trial investigating SlowMo therapy led by Professor Philippa Garety. This therapy incorporates an interactive app to support people experiencing delusions between therapy sessions.

An OBE was also awarded to Professor John Sloboda, Research Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, for services to psychology and music. Sloboda directs the Guildhall School’s Understanding Audiences research programme and is also Emeritus Professor at Keele University where he worked from 1974 to 2008. His work on the psychology of music is known internationally, and he has been President of the Psychology and General Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.

Registered reports reach the Society

20

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 20

The British Psychological Society and John Wiley & Sons Journal of Neuropsychology is now accepting publication of registered reports.

These allow authors to register their planned experiment, methodology and suggested statistical tests, prior to data collection: an important step in dealing with issues raised in the so-called ‘replication crisis’.

Professor Daryl O’Connor, Chair of the Society’s Research

Board said: ‘We are thrilled to be working closely with Wiley to launch registered reports in one of our flagship journals… The introduction of registered reports will increase the transparency of our science and allow peer review of research studies before the results are known. As a consequence this will help reduce the use of questionable research practices while improving the quality of our research protocols, that will

ultimately improve the robustness of our evidence base.’

Journal of Neuropsychology is the first of the journals published

by Wiley on behalf of the BPS to introduce registered reports. Wiley has a registered reports toolkit for editors of the journals it publishes to enable them to launch the new protocol rapidly, and will extend the initiative to a number of other journals through 2018.

12/01/2018 11:13

the psychologist february 2018 news He said prior to being awarded the OBE that some of his proudest moments included being elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy with dual membership of both the Psychology and Music Sections: ‘This recognised that my work, and that of music psychologists more generally, has had significant impact both within the disciplines of psychology and of music. Indeed, music psychology is probably a more common component of the contemporary music undergraduate degree than it is of the psychology undergraduate degree, and this is only right, since it is musicians, what they do, and who they affect, that are at the heart of the issues that music psychology discusses.’

Last year Sloboda was appointed President of a new international scholarly association for research into the Social Impact of Music Making. ‘My research over the next few years will focus on how musicians work to improve not only musical but social outcomes for people in such diverse environments as countries in or recovering from conflict, prisons and areas of urban deprivation.’

Clinical psychologist Lucy Marks was awarded an MBE for services to children’s mental health and primary care. She is Chief Executive Officer with Compass Wellbeing, a social enterprise that delivers NHS and local authority services, including psychology and counselling in primary care . ‘We created a values-based organisation that is connected to the community, and, as a clinical psychologist I feel I have been in a really fortunate

position to be able to use sound psychological principles to underpin how we do things.’

The organisation has won tenders to deliver both school nursing and Family Nurse Partnership (FNP). They have developed a training programme for school nurses in the early detection and management of emotional distress and mental health issues in pupils. FNP is for vulnerable teenage parents, providing regular visits from specially trained family nurses from pregnancy up until the child is two years old. These nurses can recognise the early signs of emotional distress and support younger parents in building their confidence. ‘It has been particularly rewarding to bring together the expertise we now have in psychology and counselling and nursing, I feel really fortunate to have been able to work with so many talented staff at Compass Wellbeing and we continue to develop our services at a time when there are such enormous pressures in health and social care services.’

Neuroscientist and co-founder of the artificial intelligence research group DeepMind, now owned by Google, Demis Hassabis was awarded a CBE for services to science and technology. As reported on the BBC, Hassabis said he was very proud of his team at DeepMind: ‘This is recognition of the immense contribution they have already made to the world of science and technology, and I’m excited about the potential for many more breakthroughs and societal benefit in the years ahead.’ er

Professor John Sloboda OBE

Lucy Marks MBE

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) Skills & Advanced Training 2018 British Isles DBT Training are affiliated with the Linehan Institute and Behavioral Tech LLC

DBT® Skills Essentials 22-23 March WATFORD

Register online at www.regonline.co.uk/Skills-Spring2018

This two day workshop covers the fundamentals of DBT Skills: Core Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation and Interpersonal Effectiveness.

DBT® National Intensive Training 23-27 April 2018 LEEDS A DBT team is a group of mental health professionals who meet regularly to assist each other in applying DBT in the practice setting. The training is intensive Part I and Part II are both five full days of training comprising of 10 days in total.

DBT® Problem Solving 19-20 April CHESTER

Register online at www.regonline.co.uk/ProblemSolving-2018

The DBT Advanced Class will focus on increasing strategic and conceptual skills and competence in DBT Individual therapy. This workshop will count towards DBT teaching hours from recognised DBT trainers for those therapists interested in accreditation as a DBT therapist with the Society for DBT in the UK and Ireland.

More details found on www.dbt-training.co.uk, or message info@dbt-training.co.uk or call 01978 346900

British Isles DBT Training, Croesnewydd Hall, Wrexham Technology Park, WREXHAM LL13 7YP +44 (0)1978 346900

psy 0218 p8_21 news.indd 21

info@dbt-training.co.uk

www.dbt-training.co.uk

12/01/2018 11:13

Imagine a client: male, age 46, his wife died from cancer a year ago.

She deteriorated through the illness… he can’t get certain thoughts out of his head. Why did it happen, could he have somehow prevented it, could he have supported her more during her illness? Why did she have to die so young?

He asks you, ‘Is this normal? Is this grief or am I going crazy?’

How would you respond?

And would it make any difference had his wife died, say, two months ago?

24

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 24

12/01/2018 11:17

the psychologist february 2018 grief Nick Ellwood/www.nickellwood.co.uk

Good grief What is the difference between healthy grief work and unhealthy rumination?

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut investigate.

T

he loss of a loved one is well recognised as a harrowing and stressful life event. Bereavement is something that most people experience at some time in their lives and, for a minority, mental and physical health complications do occur. Our case raises a fundamental question: How does one best cope with such a loss?

For a long time, following the work of Sigmund Freud, it was thought that one had to ‘do one’s grief work’ to come to terms with loss. One had to confront the experience of bereavement. Eric Lindemann vividly illustrated how ‘working through’ might be adaptive: This grief work has to do with the effort of reliving and working through in small quantities events which involved the now-deceased person and the survivor… Each item of this shared role has to be thought through, pained through if you want, and gradually the question is raised, how can I do that with somebody else? And gradually the collection of activities … can be torn asunder to be put to other people. (Lindemann, 1979, p.234)

Also in the 1970s, Colin Murray Parkes identified more specific features of grief work; namely: preoccupation with thoughts of the lost person; painful repetitious recollection of the loss experience; and an attempt to make sense of the loss, to fit it into one’s assumptions about the world, or to modify those assumptions if need be.

Grief work was understood, then, to be a confrontational process leading to good health outcomes. It was only toward the end of the last century that doubts were raised about the adequacy of this concept as an explanation of adaptive coping.

Paul Rosenblatt was one of the first to take a critical look at such grief theories. Shortly thereafter, Camille Wortman and Roxanne Silver even coined the phrase ‘myths of coping with loss’, drawing attention to additional shortcomings of the grief work notion.

Our own early reservations about the grief work concept are perhaps encapsulated in a meeting at an international conference on bereavement in London in 1988 with John Bowlby, renowned attachment theorist and author of the trilogy Attachment and Loss. Being asked the difference between grief work (an integral

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 25

concept in his attachment theory) and rumination, Bowlby answered, ‘I don’t know.’ If Bowlby did not know the answer, how can we be expected to? Such concerns led to our analyses of grief work across the following years. In our view, theoretical shortcomings had to do with both the concept and how it was put into practice. These included the confounding of grief work with negative affect; the lack of understanding as to why grief work is effective, or what underlying mechanisms could account for its efficacy; failure to consider potential benefits of suppression and denial; and unexplored links between grief work and continued or relinquished ties to the deceased. These problems were compounded by lack of empirical evidence: a range of studies, including our own, failed to provide unequivocal support for the idea that working through grief furthered adjustment to bereavement. Indeed, investigations in other cultures suggested that different ‘prescriptions’ for grieving (such as control over expressive grieving; suppression of memories) may also be effective.

It’s time to review developments in knowledge and report on current understanding of the difference between grief work and rumination, in order to shed light on the nature of (mal)adaptive coping with bereavement. This is not only of theoretical interest – for example, to establish which underlying regulatory processes account for ‘getting stuck’ with grief complications – it might help our 46-year-old male too.

A closer look at rumination Progress in understanding the difference between grief work and rumination came first through pioneering research conducted by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema within the framework of her response styles theory (RST). Originally, RST was proposed to explain how rumination may prolong depression. However, in due course Nolen-Hoeksema’s work also marked a new direction in research on complicated grief (CG). Previously, the focus had been on examining how denial and suppression caused ill effects in bereavement; Susan’s work changed to a focus on the ‘opposite form of coping’, namely, rumination, which was shown to be closely related to CG. She referred to ruminative coping as ‘the polar opposite of avoidance

12/01/2018 11:17

26

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 26

and denial’ (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1999, p.21). It is noteworthy, though, that Nolen-Hoeksema was looking to establish the causal role of rumination in poor Unravelling the distinction adaptation, rather than to ascertain whether it was Clues as to how to understand the difference between a confrontational or avoidant coping strategy. grief work and rumination emerged from the related The distinction of rumination from grief work fields of research on generalised anxiety disorder remained unclear. Three points make this evident.

(GAD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

First, there is conceptual similarity with grief work.

According to Thomas Borkovec and colleagues, worry Nolen-Hoeksema (2001) characterised rumination as is associated with a variety of disadvantages and persistent and repetitive, chronic and passive focus debilities, including GAD on the occurrence, causes and and – like rumination – depression. consequences of negative (grief“Persons who ruminate Yet a difference was postulated related) emotions and symptoms. with respect to underlying There is a slightly narrower focus go over and over events processes. Unlike the claims on confronting one’s own emotions related to their loss, to for rumination: ‘…worry partly and going over related problems avoid that which is simply functions as a cognitive avoidance in rumination, while grief work response to threatening stimuli… encompasses a wider range of too painful to confront, Worry distinctively involves a death-related concerns. The former namely, the reality of loss” predominance of verbal thought seems closer to ‘mulling over’ while whose function appears to be the latter encompasses ‘meaningthe cognitive avoidance of threat’ making’ (but then again, dwelling (Borkovec et al., 1998, p.573). Worry is conceptually on a negative meaning seems close to rumination). similar to rumination (the former being more futureNevertheless, the differences hardly seem enough oriented than the latter). Could it be that rumination to explain why rumination should be systematically in bereavement is actually an avoidant process too? related to poor (bereavement) outcomes, while grief Further indications came from cognitive behavioural work has been postulated as adaptive. accounts of PTSD. For example, in 1995 Anke Ehlers Furthermore, there is lack of differentiation and Regina Steil suggested that rumination may be regarding underlying mechanisms. Nolen-Hoeksema one of the major strategies of cognitive avoidance described the mechanisms through which rumination in chronic PTSD, and rumination was found in could amplify and maintain distress as follows: • Ruminating enhances effects of distressed mood on several subsequent studies to be a strong predictor of persistent PTSD. These understandings seemed in stark thinking, drawing attention to negative thoughts contrast to Nolen-Hoeksema’s view that ruminative and memories. coping was the polar opposite of avoidance.

• It may interfere with good problem-solving.

It was still a few years before similar ideas to those • It impairs instrumental behaviours by reducing in the GAD and PTSD areas entered the bereavement motivation to engage in mood-lifting activities field. A breakthrough came in 2006 when Paul Boelen • Social support may be reduced because and his colleagues linked avoidance to complicated ruminations violate social norms for coping. grief (CG). Their theory laid the foundations for a new direction of research, moving toward clarification of the Again, these appear similar to the grief work features grief work/rumination puzzle. While their and other described above, as identified by Parkes: similar researchers’ focus was on avoidance and CG, shortly mechanisms seem implicated in the preoccupation thereafter, in 2007, we brought together the ideas in a with one’s loss and self involvement while ‘doing one’s review article entitled ‘Ruminative coping as avoidance: grief work’.

A reinterpretation of its function in adjustment to Finally, importantly, both grief work and bereavement’. We argued that rumination is not an rumination were described as confrontational opposite form of coping from suppression or denial, processes. So we’re left without a definitive answer to but that it is a similar phenomenon to these processes, the question: What is the critical difference between and very different from the types of confrontation that grief work and rumination? take place in grief work.

This reasoning laid the foundations for what we later defined as the rumination as avoidance hypothesis (RAH): Persons who ruminate go over and over events related to their loss, to avoid that which is simply too painful to confront, namely, the reality of loss.

This avoidance of facing the reality of the death is the essential component of the non-adaptive, unhealthy ruminative processing. This line of argument is in accordance with an observed cognitive phenomenon

12/01/2018 11:17

the psychologist february 2018 grief

among bereaved persons struggling to come to terms with their loss: to avoid acceptance of the reality of loss, the person may engage in counterfactual thinking; that is, they may generate imagined alternatives to actual events.

‘If only I had made her stop smoking, then she’d still be alive.’ Such ruminative thoughts act as distraction from more emotionally laden topics. There are also non-ruminative avoidance (suppression, denial, etc.) processes, which can be related to poor mental health following bereavement. Nevertheless, in our view, confrontationavoidance processing, associated as it is with emotion regulation, is fundamentally important in adaptive versus maladaptive grieving.

Margaret Stroebe is in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht University; and the Department of Clinical Psychology & Experimental Psychopathology, University of Groningen M.S.Stroebe@uu.nl

Evidence for the distinction It is remarkable that, although clinical wisdom claims it as the essence of grieving and theoretical arguments were given across decades, support for the efficacy of grief work is still based on very shaky foundations: there is hardly a single study, let alone a body of evidence, showing that working through grief enhances adaptation. Future empirical studies still need to test the grief work hypothesis, for example, to show that confrontational strategies – such as facing up to the reality and pain of loss, problem-solving, engaging in constructive instrumental behaviours and activities, making plans of action to solve difficulties, perhaps even finding meaning in the loss – lead to adaptation over time. This should not be too difficult given scientific developments (e.g. in methodological and statistical techniques; use of carefully designed, laboratory and intervention efficacy studies), as shown in the rumination area.

The domain of rumination in bereavement has provided a comparatively extensive body of relevant research, moving well beyond the state of knowledge at the time of the our 2007 review article. Initially, though, the focus was mainly on the connections between ruminative thought and health consequences.

For example, the extensive work of Edward Watkins and colleagues linked ruminative thought with CG, and identified types of repetitive thought that yield more adverse versus more facilitating outcomes.

More recently, examination of underlying ruminative mechanisms has taken place. Empirical studies have begun to examine rumination as an avoidant process, also providing finer-grained analyses of maladaptive ruminative processes. We continued along such lines of research, designing a programme specifically to

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 27

examine RAH; we focus on this here, while recognising the related work of others.

To put the RAH ideas to adequate empirical test, several major steps and years of investigation were necessary. Our Henk Schut is in colleague Maarten Eisma developed the Department the project, culminating in his of Clinical 2015 PhD thesis containing several Psychology, related lines of research. The first Utrecht essential step was to develop an University assessment instrument to measure rumination in bereavement.

Only with a valid bereavementspecific instrument could we go on, for example, to distinguish high from low ruminators and test our hypothesis that the former are more avoidant of bereavement-related threats.

We produced a new bereavement-specific scale, the Utrecht Grief Rumination Scale. The UGRS included subscales covering rumination about the meaning of the loss, social relationships, injustice, feelings and counterfactual thinking. We then conducted studies to validate the instrument and examine the predictive validity of its subscales. With this measure available, we could then investigate working mechanisms underlying rumination.

In a series of investigations undertaken with the cooperation of different groups of bereaved participants, we examined the relationship between ruminative coping, psychopathology (particularly CG/ depression) and specific avoidance processes. We first conducted a longitudinal questionnaire study, followed by two laboratory investigations using implicit measures: an eye-tracking and an approach-avoidance task (AAT). Such tasks are by now quite standard measures of automatic behaviour tendencies. In the eye-tracking study, high ruminators showed conscious attentional avoidance of stimuli that represented the loss, while showing attentional preference for more benign negative stimuli. In the AAT, bereaved persons could use a joystick to pull stimuli closer or push them away. Our study showed that, when presented with personal loss stimuli, participants who ruminated more were faster in pushing these away and slower in pulling them closer, implying that more rumination was associated with stronger implicit loss avoidance.

Taken together, the evidence from these various studies supported RAH: rumination during bereavement was demonstrated to increase and prolong symptomatology and this negative

12/01/2018 11:17

Key sources

relationship, providing preliminary evidence for an association between rumination and loss-threat avoidance. Keen to demonstrate the potential applied value of our work, we then examined the impact of therapist-guided intervention for rumination, comparing two conditions: internet-delivered exposure and behavioural activation for CG and rumination, and a non-intervention control group. Findings supported the efficacy of the exposure intervention in reducing levels of CG and rumination at post-test and follow-up. Of course, we remain cautious about causal mechanisms and the impact of other variables.

For example, rumination and avoidance behaviour have both been characterised as passive coping styles, so people who have a trait-tendency to engage in passive coping may be likely to engage more in both rumination and avoidance.

Boelen, P.A., van den Hout, M.A., van den Bout, J. (2006). A cognitivebehavioral conceptualization of complicated grief. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 13, 109–128.

Borkovec, T., Ray, W. & Stöber, J. (1998). Worry: A cognitive phenomenon intimately linked to affective, physiological, and interpersonal behavior processes. Cognitive Therapy Research, 22, 561–576.

Ehlers, A. & Steil, R. (1995).

Maintenance of intrusive memories in posttraumatic stress disorder: A cognitive approach. Behavior and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 23, 217–249.

Eisma, M. (2015). Rumination following bereavement: Assessment, working mechanisms and intervention.

Ridderkerk, The Netherlands: Ridderprint BV. Lindemann, E. (1979). Beyond grief: Studies in crisis intervention. New York: Aronson.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B.E. & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 400–424.

Parkes, C.M. (1972). Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Stroebe, M.S., Boelen, P., van der Hout, M. et al. (2007). Ruminative coping as avoidance. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 257, 462–472.

Watkins, E.R. & Moulds, M.L. (2013).

Repetitive thought: Rumination in complicated grief. In M.S. Stroebe, H. Schut & J. van den Bout (Eds.) Complicated grief: Scientific foundations for health care professionals (pp.163– 175). New York: Routledge.

Wortman, C. & Silver, R. (1989). The myths of coping with loss. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57, 349–357.

28

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 28

Conclusions So, is rumination a confrontation or avoidance process? Maarten Eisma concluded that a compelling case can be made for the theory that rumination serves to avoid painful aspects of the loss and the negative emotions linked with it. Our research could be said to corroborate RAH and disconfirm the RST notion that rumination is (only) a maladaptive confrontation process.

We now believe the difference between grief work and rumination is that the former reflects a confrontational, the latter an avoidant strategy in adjustment to the loss of a loved person.

The function of grief work is to gradually face up to the fact of loss of an attachment figure, accept the reality of death, and work toward finding a place for the deceased in ongoing life. By contrast, while people confront certain aspects in their ruminations about their loss, we showed that they avoid more personally threatening aspects. We think that that is why they ruminate about the (to them) less threatening concerns.

It needs to be kept in mind that both grief work and rumination are part and parcel of normal grieving, a tandem of strategies reflecting complex emotionregulation processing that occurs during bereavement.

Yet, so far, grief work and rumination have been examined independently of each other. They could usefully be integrated in future research, for example, to explore their possibly interrelated functions in coming to terms with loss. Furthermore, it is important to remember that the functions of both grief work and rumination remain complex. For example, on the one hand, grief work may not always be adaptive; it cannot be done all the time (it is exhausting). On the other hand, only in extreme or unrelenting cases is ruminative coping associated with maladaptation (mulling things over ‘familiarises’ one with the fact of loss). So to some extent, avoidant rumination serves adaptive functions (e.g. when the reality is too hard to bear early on, or all the time).

We return once more to our 46-year-old male: What should the practitioner do, what advice can be derived from this line of research? Our results suggest that this client’s persistence of intense, relentless ruminative thought over many months is likely to be a central complicating factor in his particular case: a valid indicator of maladaptive grieving (more so than it would have been during the first few months of bereavement). So application of the types of therapeutic techniques mentioned earlier could in this case be considered appropriate and may prove effective (e.g. by integrating exposure to threatening stimuli). However, we emphasise again: at this stage of research we need to be cautious in ‘translating’ our findings into daily practice. To mention just two reasons: complications in grieving may be unrelated to maladaptive ruminative coping – one size does not fit all; and the therapy situation itself encompasses much more, it is always more complicated than straightforward application of the small number of variables considered in research.

Despite these cautions about limited application, in our view, distinguishing healthy grief work from unhealthy rumination is a critical step forward in theoretical understanding, one that, as further knowledge accumulates, should also better inform practice. Bowlby and other earlier theorists were correct to identify the necessity of grief work in coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. Now we can better draw the fine line between this adaptive process and maladaptive coping. We can further explore the RAH idea that, in cases where complications are rumination-related, a bereaved client may need to confront rather than (only) to distract from their own personal, loss-related threats.

12/01/2018 11:17

the psychologist february 2018 grief

NottiNgham 2018

The British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham 2–4 May

Moving Psychology Forward Confirmed Keynotes Professor John Antonakis, University of Lausanne Professor Brian Nosek, Centre for Open Science Professor Cathy Creswell, University of Reading Professor Stephen Reicher, University of St Andrews

Programme now available ‘The keynote speakers at the Annual Conference are often the major highlight for me! Every year the team manage to secure the very best national and international speakers!

The BPS Annual Conference also gives you an opportunity to keep up to date with the latest developments in different areas of psychology. Yes, I will be attending the conference in Nottingham. Again, I’m looking forward to the keynotes as well as catching up with colleagues from different areas of psychology that I don’t normally get a chance to see.’

Professor Daryl O’Connor, Chair Research Board

Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf.

Credit: John Wright, johnwrightart.blogspot.co.uk

www.bps.org.uk/ac2018

psy 0218 p24_29 stroebe.indd 29

12/01/2018 11:17

Elmore

Professor Paul Gilbert OBE is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and is based at the Centre for Compassion Research and Training at the University of Derby

36

psy 0218 p36_39 gilbert int[1].indd 36

12/01/2018 16:35

the psychologist february 2018 interview

Paul Gilbert ‘Compassion is an antidote to cruelty’ Kal Kseib meets Professor Paul Gilbert, founder of compassion-focused therapy

In a nutshell, what is compassion-focused therapy?

A way of helping people to develop compassion motivation for themselves and for others, and also to be open to receiving compassion. It began back in the late 80s with three basic themes; the first was, in the context of cognitive therapy, to get people to focus on the emotional tone of their coping thoughts, teaching people to generate a compassionate, caring, validating and supporting orientation to their coping thoughts.

The key is to help people recruit specific brain systems that evolved for caring and helping others, and have specific threat emotion regulation functions.

The second strand stems from Buddhist psychology, and specifically the Mahayana Tibetan tradition, which sees compassion motivation as core, with practices and exercises around developing a compassionate mind and identity.

The third strand was from evolutionary psychology, to help people realise that the human brain is tricky because of the way it evolved. A lot of our motivational systems are designed by our genes for survival and reproduction, and can do wonderful things but also some terrible things. Humans are potentially one of the cruellest and nastiest species that have ever walked on this planet. We’re quite capable of deliberately trying to create and be indifferent to the suffering of others.

Compassion really is an antidote to cruelty.

In the last 20 years of Western society we’ve been nudging people toward the competitive ‘me first’, and tribalism. It’s important to recognise that there are social contexts which can also nudge people toward the more compassionate side. CFT is really trying to introduce these notions about how we take a more compassionate orientation to ourselves, in therapy, in our schools, in our environment and the world we live in. We must study the relationship between inner motives and social contexts; it is social contexts that can bring out the best and worst in us.

What first motivated you to explore compassion?

You can see the beginnings of it in my 1989 book Human Nature and Suffering. Then in 1995, I

psy 0218 p36_39 gilbert int[1].indd 37

watched quite an extraordinary programme about the experiences of people who were taken into the Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War. They showed letters written to children, stuffed in pillowcases hoping they were still alive. I had young children at the time, and I was never the same after that. I probably cried for well over an hour. I remember thinking, ‘Well actually, the human brain is completely fucked. I mean, to have a mind where you can do that to millions of people, that is just frighteningly terrible.’ And that’s partly what got me on the road to really thinking we have to address the issue of cruelty, because we just keep doing it, century after century.

So it’s been this kind of wake-up call to the reality that humans are not necessarily a nice species unless they’re given an opportunity to bring out the compassion and courage within us, and that raises the issue of how to cultivate compassionate minds and cultures. That, for me, is the great privilege of being a psychologist, understanding the origins of human behaviour and discovering how to help the human species, to become more moral. It’s a fantastic challenge.

Can compassion be an antidote for more personal suffering too?

People can be very cruel to themselves. Self-criticism is often quite hostile and can drive people to be depressed, anxious or even suicidal. One way of helping people to be compassionate to themselves is to link internal hostility to what sits underneath it – often a fear of being rejected, of being worthless or of not being wanted. Humans don’t do very well when they feel disconnected and isolated, and compassion allows us to see that. The research shows our physiological systems, our cardiovascular and immune systems, flourish best when people feel loved, cared for and have a sense of belonging, and when they themselves are being loving and caring to self and others.

Another dimension to compassion is in understanding that some forms of cruelty are rooted in fear and threat – so the more we feel threatened by people the more unpleasant we can become to them,

12/01/2018 16:35

and therefore compassion helps people to reduce or not act on the threat. Compassion for the people you love is great, I’m all in favour of that, but if you can develop open compassion beyond those people you like, your friends or circles of preference, towards the people you don’t like, the people who are different to you, the people who are not like you, then that becomes very important. And that also takes you into the sphere of morals and ethics. How do we bring a more moral and ethical orientation to the way we relate to ourselves, societies and the planet?

How does a compassion-focused approach differ from simply saying ‘be kind’?

Commitment to compassion has two aspects – one is about turning towards suffering, and the second is about finding out how to alleviate and prevent it where possible. That’s important because people often forget the wisdom part of compassion, the desire to discover how to be helpful. For example, if I see someone fall in a river and I think to myself, ‘Ah, I must jump in and save them’, that’s good intention, but if I can’t swim it’s not very helpful. If you wanted to help people as a health professional but you weren’t prepared to study, then there’s not much behind your intention.

So having both intentionality and commitment to learn how are really important in compassion. Compassion isn’t just this nice feeling, it’s the preparedness to turn towards difficulty and the commitment to try to work it out by taking action.

Could you give an example of a protocol or intervention used in CFT? One process is called, ‘developing a compassionate self-identity’ where we help people to think about ‘If you were at your compassionate best, what qualities would you have?’. So a response might be ‘I would be friendly, I would be tolerant’. The person imagines having those qualities and then is invited to have the quality of wisdom, the wisdom being that we all just find ourselves here with a brain and a body that’s been built for us. We didn’t build it, we just have to experience it. We then teach breathing exercises designed to create parasympathetic grounding, so as you slow your breathing you sense your body getting heavier and more grounded. And we have this commitment rooted in the compassion motivation, which is the preparedness to be sensitive to suffering for yourself and others, to turn towards it rather than away from it, and the openness to learn what you need in order to alleviate and prevent it. Kindness is more a sentiment maybe, important of course, but it does not focus on suffering per se nor does it require courage. We’re just completing a study of how people distinguish them, and they do.

38

psy 0218 p36_39 gilbert int[1].indd 38

In helping someone to adopt a more compassionate stance in their lives, where might you start?

We can bring the work of compassion into any aspect of people’s lives. So imagine you’ve had an argument

with someone you care about, you could be angry with them or ruminate, thinking, ‘I’m so cross because they’re not listening to me’, or anxious, ‘What does this mean for our relationship if we’re arguing like this?’.

Learning to take a compassionate position could be about breathing and grounding, and thinking, ‘If I was at my compassionate best, if I was at my wisest, my strongest, and my most committed to try to address this in the wisest way I can, how would I actually like to be?’. Shifting someone into this perspective where intentionality is created, by using the body and also using this motivational clarity, brings the person into a different mental state in which they’re able to think about the problem. So anger itself would just be attacking, whereas your compassionate self would give you a chance to be empathic to the difficulties between the two of you. Once that mental state is created, people tend to find they actually have a lot of intuitive wisdom. But you have to click into that, you have to practise getting into that state in your head, and that’s when compassion opens up for you.

What are the biggest blocks to compassion?

In CFT we talk about ‘fears, blocks and resistances’.

‘Fears’ are things like ‘I’d like to but I don’t think I’d be any good at it’, ‘When people are kind to me, I feel like I don’t deserve it’ or ‘It’s because they want something from me’. ‘Resistances’ reflect situations where people think, ‘It’s stupid’, ‘I can’t see the point in it’, ‘Why would you want to do that?’. An example of this is in what’s going on in some countries right now, where people say, ‘Why should we worry about immigrants or refugees?’, ‘We’ve got to look after ourselves’.

‘Blocks’, on the other hand, are not necessarily caused by resistances or fears – they are because you can’t.

So with the NHS, for example, when you look closely people mostly aren’t overwhelmed by the suffering they’re dealing with, it’s that they’ve lost morale, that they’ve been downgraded, they’re working too hard, they don’t get home at night, they’re not able to give the time they want to the patients, and so on. You find that it’s not really compassion fatigue, it’s system fatigue. The research that we did on this was clear; people very rarely say, ‘I’m overwhelmed because I’m seeing so much suffering’, they say, ‘The demands on me, the bureaucracy are too much’, or ‘I always feel that I’m selling the patients short’. In many of our health services there are a huge number of these blocks to compassion. Just ask the staff and they’ll tell you.

What steps might overcome those ‘blocks’?

Really working with staff to help them understand that ‘this is not your fault’. Most people in the service want to be as caring as they can be, and it is about helping people to deal with the emotions that are generated, particularly frustration emotions, in a system that has been turned into a bit of a factory. And then the next thing is trying to help people to work together.

So if you could get people working together to form supportive relationships with each other about the

12/01/2018 16:35

the psychologist february 2018 interview

stresses at work, that’s also helpful. If you create the systems for compassion, compassion will flourish, but not as it is at the moment. I mean, it’s amazing what people are achieving given the stresses on them.

So we must work for massive political change too.

What are some of the latest innovations in CFT? From a therapeutic point of view, we’re using more acting techniques to help people practise enacting the compassionate self. Imagining and practising taking on this character of the compassionate self, even if at first it may seem very artificial. The other new focus is the importance of playfulness. How to make therapy more playful as a way of stimulating a capacity for social connectedness, because a lot of people, particularly individuals who are very shame prone, have a great sense of disconnection and of being isolated and alone.

We’re doing a lot of work on training to improve heart-rate variability.

Another area we’re looking at is different types of self-criticism. There are the self-critics who basically think they should be better than they are. They might say, ‘I’m not performing’, ‘I can do better’. It’s like the famous footballer who misses an open goal and gets angry with themselves, ruminating on their mistake.

There are also the ‘self-hating’ self-critics who don’t think they should be better, they just think they’re bad. Those individuals are more likely to come from backgrounds of abuse or hyper-competitive families.

Self-haters are complex because it’s possible they’re also carrying quite a lot of anger toward other people.

A classic example of this in anthropology is how the Aztecs used to believe that the gods controlled the famines, the wars and pretty much everything.

So what the Aztecs were doing to please the gods was sacrificing lots of people, virgins, and so on. If you do this all year, and then the famine is worse than ever, do you go to them and say, ‘Look, give us back our virgins? Where’s the rain, you cheats?’ No, you don’t, because displays of anger could get you hurt more, so you self-focus and you say, ‘What did we do to upset you?’ That’s what happens when we’re confronted with very powerful others who can hurt us. When you have a powerful other, be it a god or a parent, you have to bring them onside to make sure they care for you rather than hurt you.

What a child frightened of a parent may do is to think ‘What did I do?’, because it’s a natural safety mechanism. So they internalise this sense that ‘there’s something wrong with me’, or ‘I’ve done something bad’. Sorting out that confusion, and working through the anger towards the people that hurt you in the first place, can be quite scary for people. So when you’re working with people with very strong self-criticism, even though they could be liberated from it by seeing it in a different way, it’s sometimes too frightening for them to let it go. Whereas the self-improvers are slightly different because you can guide and show them that if they’re able to treat themselves more kindly and with more support, it’ll allow them to achieve more.

psy 0218 p36_39 gilbert int[1].indd 39

We call it ‘developing compassionate self-correction or guidance’. In 2010 we did some studies on self-criticism, looking at what happens in your brain when you’re being self-reassuring or being self-critical.

What was very interesting was that the ‘self-hating’ self-critics also showed threat responses when they were trying to be self-reassuring! So for these different types of self-criticism, the therapies may differ.

What do you think is the greatest opportunity CFT has in today’s world?

Although there are new and major challenges, despite all of the setbacks, there’s a gradual movement towards understanding how we shift the world to a more compassionate place. There is a growing desire to do that. When we begin to see compassion as having the courage to address suffering, to try to be moral, to create a world that’s better for everybody, people say, ‘Yeah, that’s quite a good thing’. And they also say, ‘But I don’t know how to do it’. That’s a scientific question, that’s a psychological question. We’re beginning to understand how genes interact with environments, we know the process of methylation by which genes get turned on and off according to the environment, we know that people will respond strongly to the social context. Indeed psychologists of the future will need to know much more about epigenetics. The [Philip] Zimbardo book The Lucifer Effect looks at this idea of how you can get good people to do bad things and vice versa. People who are brought up in abusive environments are much more vulnerable to mental health issues than people who are brought up in loving environments. If we want to create a fairer and better world, the question is how. Can we bring compassion into the way societies organise themselves, given that humans can easily become tribal, self-orientated and narcissistic? How do we create the conditions for people to become more prosocial, compassionate and altruistic? Only science is going to answer that.

And are you optimistic?

We’re beginning to understand that, yes we can have better medicines, yes we can have faster cars, yes we can shop 24 hours a day, but at the end of the day, our happiness and our ability to live peacefully with each other is going to depend on interpersonal psychology.

I think psychology is one of the most important sciences to humanity, and it’s progressing fast. After the industrial and technological revolutions, I really think we’re standing on the brink of the psychological revolution. I think people are starting to get interested in the question of how we deal with the serious inherent problems with the evolved human brain.

It’s very badly put together, an awful piece of gear full of trade-offs and glitches and feedback loops that go all over the place. Yet it’s also the root of the solutions to the problems we’ve got in the world – political, social, economic. That’s why I, with many others these days, am focused on how to build compassionate selves, relationships, communities and cultures.

Kal Kseib is a Health Psychologist Trainee at City University.

To read his other interviews for us, search ‘Kseib’ on our website

12/01/2018 16:35

Free download for iOS and Android via: App Store: tinyurl.com/psychmagios Google Play: tinyurl.com/psychmagplay Amazon: tinyurl.com/psychmagamzn 44

psy 0218 p44_45 ads.indd 44

12/01/2018 11:34

Routledge Psychology are proud sponsors of

The British Psychological Society Research Digest

Psych

podcasts We’re offering PsychCrunch listeners the chance to discover even more ground-breaking research, with free access to 25 articles of their choice from our Behavioral Sciences journals.

Find more details and register for access at:

bit.ly/psychcrunch2017

Follow us: @RoutledgePsych

Like us: Routledge Psychology

bit.ly/psychcrunch2017

50

psy 0218 p50_53 ads.indd 50

12/01/2018 11:37

‘You can always press delete’ Should we keep playing the game of love?

Hannah Potts wonders Psychological research on romantic relationships has traditionally focused on areas like attachment, emotions and intimacy.

However, in the past few years a new aspect of romantic relationships has emerged, with a surge in the popularity of dating apps.

46

psy 0218 p46_49 potts.indd 46

I

ncreasing numbers of couples now meet, and even marry, after ‘swiping right’ on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and Happn. At one time, these and similar apps were viewed with some suspicion and stigma, but such negative responses have largely dissipated. TSB Bank found that dating apps now contribute £11.7 billion to the UK economy every year (see tinyurl.com/yd6odsul) – a reflection of their prevalence in the modern-day dating scene. Dating apps are no longer the exception, they’re the norm.

While dating apps are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, they are quickly taking centre stage in the formation of romantic relationships, especially among young people. Research is therefore beginning to address the psychological element of dating apps, both in terms of interpersonal relations and individual emotions. Much of the early research has focused on motivations for using dating apps, and particularly on how frequently they are used to bolster self-esteem (Sumter et al., 2017).

But has the spiralling use of dating apps changed the dating landscape and how romantic relationships are formed? In a 2016 article, ‘Liquid love’, Hobbs and colleagues noted the emphasis on ‘strategic performances’ in people’s activity on dating apps, including deliberately constructed self-presentation.

While Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life had identified impression management as a common practice in social relations long before the advent of dating apps, there has never been more opportunity to control first impressions than there is today. On Tinder, potential dates must judge whether to swipe left or right based on just a few carefully chosen photographs and a short 500-character biography. Users are able to display a highly filtered version of themselves, if they choose to do so; information can be selective and highly crafted.

In some 2016 qualitative research, Janelle Ward interviewed 21 Tinder users of a range of ages; her findings illustrated that impression management on Tinder emerged from the desire to present an ideal (yet authentic) self in one’s profile. Perpetuating an ideal self, while maintaining the desired authenticity and refraining from outright untruths, is made easier through an online platform. It allows the user to

12/01/2018 11:36

thethe psychologist psychologist february month 2018 year dating apps

hold back information (at least at first), which would not be possible when meeting face-to-face, and to magnify or emphasise positive features. Monica Whitty interviewed a large pool of 60 internet daters in 2008, and found that half of the interviewees admitted to exaggerating their attractive qualities on their profile, although most said that they refrained from blatant untruths. With apps (as opposed to dating websites), the messaging stage that usually comes prior to meeting also provides an opportunity to cultivate false

psy 0218 p46_49 potts.indd 47

impressions; messages can be edited until they are ‘perfect’ before pressing send.

Incidentally, this practice of perfect profiling can actually perpetuate low self-esteem. Strübel and Petrie surveyed over 1300 young people, and reported that Tinder users had lower self-esteem and a more negative perception of their body image than non-users. The use of the app was found to facilitate ‘body shame’ and ‘body monitoring’. And this aim for perfection is not only applied to oneself; the vast array of choice

12/01/2018 11:36

48

of potential partners on dating apps means that an imperfect relationship is increasingly likely to be discarded in pursuit a more ‘perfect’ match. This was termed ‘relationshopping’ in a study conducted

by Rebecca Heino and colleagues, who found the ‘marketplace’ to be a salient metaphor in their in-depth interviews with 34 respondents.

While to some extent dating might always have been described in a crude sense as a ‘marketplace’, research has found that values that have traditionally been emphasised Key sources as important in mate selection include good company, honesty, consideration and affection (Buss Ansari, A. (2015). Modern romance. & Barnes, 1986). However, the London: Allen Lane.

Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid love: On the sudden accessibility of hundreds frailty of human bonds. Cambridge: Polity of potential Tinder dates involves Press. selection based solely on pictures Finkel, E.J., Eastwick, P.W., Karney, and a very short bio; this inevitably B.R. et al. (2012). Online dating: A increases the emphasis on looks critical analysis from the perspective when selecting people to chat to of psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13, 3–66. on apps like Tinder. This could Heino, R.D., Ellison, N.B. & Gibbs, J.L. decrease the chance of these (2010). Relationshopping: Investigating relationships being satisfying in the market metaphor in online the long run, since substantial dating. Journal of Social and Personal research has found that intrinsic Relationships, 27, 427–447. dimensions (such as warmth and Hobbs, M., Owen, S. & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, kindness) are a stronger predictor sex, relationships and the digital of well-functioning relationships transformation of intimacy. Journal of than extrinsic dimensions Sociology, 53, 271–284. like attractiveness and wealth Knee, C.R. (1998). Implicit theories (Rodriguez et al., 2015). This means of relationships: Assessment and that selecting a date on Tinder could prediction of romantic relationship initiation, coping, and longevity. Journal skew our initial ‘selection criteria’ of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, towards things that are less likely to 360–370. bring us long-term happiness.

Rodriguez, L.M., Hadden, B.W. & Eli Finkel and colleagues, in a Knee, C.R. (2015). Not all ideals are very extensive review of research in equal: Intrinsic and extrinsic ideals in 2012, also noted that the ‘shopping relationships. Personal Relationships, 22, 138–152. mentality’ could lead people to Strübel, J. & Petrie, T.A. (2017). Love me discard imperfect but satisfying Tinder: Body image and psychosocial relationships in favour of the functioning among men and women. search for a ‘soulmate’. Discarding Body Image, 21, 34–38. imperfect relationships has long Sumter, S.R., Vandenbosch, L. & been identified as more common in Ligtenberg, L. (2017). Love me Tinder: Untangling emerging adults’ those who hold ‘destiny beliefs’ – motivations for using the dating the idea that two partners are either application Tinder. Telematics and meant for one another or not (Knee, Informatics, 34, 67–78.

1998). However, Finkel’s group have Ward, J. (2016). What are you doing on argued that dating apps (and their Tinder? Impression management on a frequent ‘soulmate’-related claims) matchmaking mobile app. Information, Communication and Society, 20, have exacerbated the trend for 1644–1659. soulmate or destiny beliefs, which Whitty, M.T. (2008). Revealing the ‘real’ (given that most relationships me, searching for the ‘actual’ you: undergo stresses at some point) are Presentations of self on an internet likely to undermine wellbeing in dating site. Computers in Human relationships in the long-term. Their Behavior, 24, 1707–1723. analysis cites a poll from January Full list available in online/app version.

2011 indicating that 73 per cent of Americans believed in soulmates

psy 0218 p46_49 potts.indd 48

at the time of the survey, which showed an increase of 7 per cent since just six months earlier. Dating apps can discourage the belief in ‘romantic growth’ (Knee, 1998) – in other words, the belief that relationships need work and persistence to succeed and get through problems and relationship stressors.

Ghosting and game-playing It appears, then, that dating apps have changed people’s attitudes towards how best to attain (and maintain) a fulfilling and successful relationship – and arguably have actually decreased the likelihood of achieving this.

Interaction through the barrier of a screen can also change the way we treat one another throughout the dating process itself. One reason for this is that the online medium can create a sense of depersonalisation, with the person on the other side of the messages being seen as anonymous (and therefore more easily dispensable). In his book Liquid Love, Zygmunt Bauman argued that relationship security had been dissolved by the medium of online dating, even before the advent of Tinder: one of his participants openly claimed that the benefit of internet dating is that ‘you can always press delete’.

Aziz Ansari’s book Modern Romance focuses on the changing face of romance more specifically in response to modernity, mobile phones and dating apps. For this book he conducted a mass survey of 150,000 people, which revealed that it is common practice to ‘ghost’ people – in other words, to end a relationship by ceasing all communication with that person and ignoring their attempts to get in touch.

The survey showed ghosting to be the respondents’ second most popular means of letting a potential partner know they’re not interested. Using an app can further encourage this behaviour by removing any potential embarrassment that might otherwise result from cutting off contact – Ansari emphasises that before technology became involved, people were more likely to meet and date somebody who lived in close proximity. This would have resulted in some awkward encounters if one party had decided to simply stop speaking to the other. Dating apps, however, open up a far wider pool of people, most of whom we are never likely to see again should we choose to ghost them.

This means budding relationships are now less likely to be secure.

12/01/2018 11:36

the psychologist february 2018 dating apps

‘My interest in the psychological impact of dating apps was sparked by seeing substantial changes in how people my age were approaching dating. While dating apps and online dating used to be talked about with disdain, their reception dramatically changed as the stigma was dropped, and their popularity accelerated at an astonishing rate.

Romantic relationships can have a dramatic impact on our emotional state, and psychological research has understandably paid much attention to traditional aspects of relationship formation.

However, dating apps are effecting substantial changes in many people’s experiences of dating. As they become more and more prevalent, it becomes all the more important to understand how these changes can impact on us mentally – for better or worse.’

However, the existing research could already be revealing causes for concern. First, the research that discusses dating apps as a move towards ‘destiny beliefs’ suggests that dating apps encourage people to be less willing to work through any relationship problems, and therefore put relationships at higher risk of being abandoned as soon as they hit a snag. The increase ease of abandoning relationships through ‘ghosting’ also creates a more unstable environment for budding The safety barrier of the screen relationships. So far, then, dating can also lend itself to other forms apps have certainly changed the of ‘game-playing’. Research by face of romantic relationships and LendEdu showed that 44 per dating, exposing users to a wider cent of Tinder users only use the pool of people but also producing app to boost self-esteem or to more uncertainty and insecurity procrastinate, with no intention within these relationships, as well of meeting up with the person as encouraging (and enabling) they are messaging. Tyson and worse treatment of potential dates. colleagues conducted a survey last Do the potential positives of dating year of 131 people (90 men and apps outweigh these risks? In the 40 women) and found that a third long-term, arguably not. of men said that they ‘casually like These changes are likely to most profiles’ without necessarily produce a knock-on impact on even being interested – in the mental health. The decreased same survey, not even one woman stability in relationships, the claimed to do the same. While this negative treatment between study could be made more robust potential daters, and the with a more even split between increased pressure on looks women and men, the results have are all concerning, given the nonetheless caused outcry in the already acknowledged trend Hannah Potts has just media, and men’s ‘swiping activity’ towards increased depression and completed a conversion course has been interpreted by many as a anxiety in millennials: a study in Psychological Sciences at simple game to see who will ‘like’ by the American Psychological Brunel University them back. Until 2016 Tinder Association suggested that 12 1617283@brunel.ac.uk screens even offered users the per cent of millennials have been option to ‘Keep playing’ as opposed diagnosed with a clinical anxiety to sending a message to a potential disorder, and a BDA white paper found that as many match. The wording was changed last year from ‘Keep playing’ to ‘Keep swiping’, speculated to be a deliberate as 30 per cent of working millennials experience shift away from the negative reputation associated with general anxiety, although not necessarily with a diagnosis. The latter figure rises to 61 per cent among being a platform for game-playing.

American university students, according to a 2014 study by the American College Health Association.

These figures are indicative of the mental impact of Long-term increasing pressures on millennials, which come with It seems clear that dating apps have brought about an uncertain political landscape, a competitive job significant changes to the practices involved in market, and now the greater instability and pressure instigating and forming romantic relationships – but involved in the formation of romantic relationships. what is the impact of these shifts? To date, relatively Especially given these statistics, which demonstrate few studies have examined the lived experience and the emotional vulnerability of millennials compared to personal psychological effects of dating app use. Since previous generations, further psychological research dating apps also remain a relatively new phenomenon, (both qualitative and quantitative) will become crucial the long-term effects of the dating app culture on in the future, to educate us further on the long-term mental health (or on interpersonal relationships) psychological impact of placing dating apps at the cannot yet be known, either at a cultural or an centre of our romantic lives. individual level.

psy 0218 p46_49 potts.indd 49

12/01/2018 11:36

The age of illusions Nicholas Wade looks at the new world of visual illusions that emerged in the 19th century and invigorated psychology

The great Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinjě (1787–1869) maintained that visual illusions reveal visual truths. However, the illusions he was referring to were not the geometrical optical illusions described later in the century but the apparent distortions in patterns like concentric circles. Purkinjě’s portrait on the cover of this edition can be dimly discerned in the circles: his left eye is at the centre of the pattern and he is shown in threequarter profile. His face can be seen by defocusing the image, shaking the head or viewing the circles from a distance. Many images like this can be found in my books Visual Allusions and Art and Illusionists.

54

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 54

T

he 19th century was the age of visual illusions. Concern with confusions of colour, contour and motion can be traced to the ancients, but the pace quickened after 1800. Initially the illusions of interest were those visible in the natural environment, like the waterfall illusion, the apparent motion of the moon when clouds pass by or the ambiguous direction of motion in windmill sails seen from afar. In the domain of colour, practical problems of fabric dyeing resulted in formulating laws of colour contrast.

All was to change with the invention of photography and of instruments that presented paired pictures or sequences of slightly different ones. Thereafter, pictures permeated perception, transforming its study by transferring it from the natural environment to the laboratory. The nature of the transformation had two phases: in the early 19th century concern was with simulating in the laboratory what was visible in the environment – depth and motion. In the second half of the century illusions became simpler and divorced from the external world.

Geometrical optical illusions involving line drawings inducing small spatial distortions, like those in Figure 1, were the order of the day. They were then, and remain, fascinating to look at, and many variations were described often bearing the names of those who drew attention to them. Now, with the advent of computer graphics their number has expanded enormously, and a multitude is assembled in The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions (Shapiro & Todorovic, 2017). I will describe motion and spatial illusions from the early phase before introducing those given the name ‘geometrical optical illusions’.

Early 19th-century illusions What are illusions? They can be considered as errors in perception, and as such they were remarked upon before the basic perceptual processes were either described or appreciated. This was so because it was possible to compare observations of the same objects over time and to note any discrepancies between their perceptions.

The modern definition of illusions applies to differences

12/01/2018 11:41

the psychologist february 2018 age of illusions

Figure 1. Illusions of vision by Nicholas Wade. All the lines defining the words are vertical but those for VISUAL appear to be tilted in the opposite direction to those for ILLUSIONS due to the background orientations. Colour assimilation is also evident as the yellow background is physically equivalent throughout.

between the perception of figures and their physical characteristics, and they have been gauged by many means. The most venerable method has involved the comparison of percepts: when an object’s properties appear to differ under different circumstances, then an illusion is said to have occurred. The only assumption that needs to be made is that the object has not itself changed between the two events.

The 19th century witnessed an explosion of experimental ingenuity in all areas of science. The senses were at the centre of many of the dramatic departures, and the experimental advances in turn influenced theories of perception generally and

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 55

illusions in particular. For example, perplexing percepts like the apparent bending of sticks when immersed in water could be given a more mundane interpretation when the laws of refraction were specified.

Early in the century instruments were invented that not only extended the phenomena that could be investigated but also enabled their study in the laboratory rather than in the natural environment.

What is truly remarkable is that the seeds of the transformations of visual space and time were sown in the same geographical space and at around the same time: London in the 1830s.

12/01/2018 11:41

56

The major figures in this visual revolution are shown in Figure 2. The catalyst was Charles Wheatstone, who not only invented the stereoscope (in 1832) but also devised other ‘philosophical toys’ based on visual persistence. Nowadays, philosophy and toys seem strange bedfellows, but then the term was in common currency. Philosophy was associated with the study of nature, and what we now refer to as physics was called natural or experimental philosophy.

Toys were simpler and rarer at that time, and they were sources of amusement or entertainment. Philosophical toys fulfilled the dual role of instruments for scientific experiment and devices for extending awareness of the senses. Wheatstone defined them as applying the principles of science to popular amusement, which also made them more memorable. Motion illusions were examined before spatial illusions took centre stage later in the century.

Philosophical toys were applied to the perception of stereoscopic depth and to the apparent movement of a sequence of stationary pictures. The latter was based on visual persistence – the effects of a stimulus outlast its physical presence. Young used it to make the paths of rapidly vibrating strings visible. This led Paris, Roget, Faraday, Babbage and Talbot to find novel ways of exploiting persisting images. They are known for other contributions to knowledge: Roget for his Thesaurus, Faraday for his research on electromagnetism, Babbage for his computational difference engine, and Talbot for developing the Key sources negative/positive photographic process. Paris devised the Boring, E.G. (1942). Sensation and thaumatrope or wonder-turner, perception in the history of experimental which rendered two stimuli on psychology. New York: Appleton-Century. opposite sides of a disc visible Gregory, R.L. (2009). Seeing through illusions. Oxford: Oxford University simultaneously when it was Press. rotated rapidly. It was ridiculed Shapiro, A.G. & Todorović, D. (Eds.)

by Babbage and Faraday, but it (2017). The Oxford compendium of visual was phenomenally popular. Roget illusions. New York: Oxford University analysed the curved appearance of Press. spokes when passing behind vertical Vicario, G.B. (2011). Illusioni otticogeometriche: Una rassegna di problemi. railings. Faraday was attracted by Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Roget’s analysis of rotating spokes Lettere ed Arte. and by his own observation of Wade, N. (1990). Visual allusions: Pictures counter-rotating cogwheels when of perception. Hove: Erlbaum. (Reprinted visiting first a lead mill and then in 2017 by London: Routledge). the Thames Tunnel with Brunel.

Wade, N. (2016). Art and illusionists.

Heidelberg: Springer.

When viewed so that one wheel Wade, N.J. (2017). Early history of was aligned with the other ‘there illusions. In A. Shapiro & D. Todorović was immediately the distinct, (Eds.) Oxford compendium of visual though shadowy resemblance illusions (pp. 3–37). Oxford: Oxford of cogs moving slowly in one University Press. direction’. He constructed a simple Wade, N.J., Todorović, D., Phillips, D., & Lingelbach, B. (2017). Johann Joseph arrangement of cut-out sectoredOppel (1855) on geometrical-optical discs to examine the effects further illusions: A translation and commentary. and wrote: ‘The eye has the power, i-Perception, 3, 1–18. as is well known, of retaining doi:10.1177/2041669517712724 visual impressions for a sensible period of time; and in this way,

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 56

Figure 2. London visionaries by Nicholas Wade. The central figure is Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), who was both the youngest and most instrumental of the London scientists involved in the experimental investigations of space and time in the early 19th century. The others are shown in clockwise chronological sequence from Thomas Young (1773–1829) at the top to Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), John Ayrton Paris (1785–1856), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Charles Babbage (1792–1871) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877).

recurring actions, made sufficiently near to each other, are perceptibly connected, and made to appear as a continuous impression.’ Talbot devised a disc for combining colours when rotating and established a relationship between apparent brightness and intermittency – the Talbot–Plateau law.

Faraday’s work on visual motion stimulated Joseph Plateau (1801–1883) in Belgium, with his phenakistoscope or fantascope, and Simon Stampfer (1792–1864) in Austria, with his stroboscopic disc (both in 1833) to make similar instruments for presenting a series of slightly different still pictures in rapid succession – the first moving pictures.

Stroboscopic discs presented stimuli discretely, briefly, and in succession; that is, a sequence of drawings differing slightly from one another were viewed successively through slits in a rotating disc. To the astonishment of observers, a single figure appeared in motion: perceived movement was synthesised from a sequence of still pictures. These instruments could be used by just one person at a time, whereas William Horner (1789–1837) from Bristol developed a variant for group viewing: it consisted of a cylinder mounted on a vertical axis, with slits at regular intervals, and a sequence of drawings on the opposite inside surface of the cylinder. He called it a dædaleum, but it became

12/01/2018 11:41

the psychologist february 2018 age of illusions

widely used in the latter half of the 19th century under the name of zoetrope.

Another motion illusion was described in 1834 by Robert Addams (1789–1871), a peripatetic London lecturer acquainted with Wheatstone and Faraday.

The waterfall illusion is a special case of the motion aftereffect and it was described after observing the Falls of Foyers in northern Scotland: ‘Having steadfastly looked for a few seconds at a particular part of the cascade, admiring the confluence and descussation of the currents forming the liquid drapery of waters, and then suddenly directed my eyes to the left, to observe the vertical face of the sombre age-worn rocks immediately contiguous to the water-fall, I saw the rocky face as if in motion upwards, and with an apparent velocity equal to that of the descending water.’ Thereafter instruments for generating motion were enlisted to investigate the phenomenon (Figure 3); they could be moved for a precise period and then stopped whereupon the previously moving part would appear to move in the opposite direction.

Ambiguity is a fundamental feature of visual representation, and artists have exploited it for centuries. For example, Roman geometrical mosaics display most of the principles associated with Gestalt grouping. Pictorial ambiguities were made explicit by many 18th-century artists, and the vase/faces motif was introduced around the turn of the century. Many ambiguities are dependent on the lost dimension of pictures – depth. They introduce uncertainly in our vision, and this uncertainty is evidenced in the fluctuations in apparent depth that ensue. Visual ambiguities offer alternative interpretations of the depth in drawings or alternative descriptions of objects defined by equivalent contours. A good example is the Necker cube, many variants of which were produced later in the century together with illustrations of ambiguity of interpretation (Figure 4). Wheatstone appreciated the significance of Necker’s observation and made a three-dimensional wire cube that also alternated in apparent depth. Another common

Figure 3. Stimuli for investigating motion aftereffects.

Left, a 19th-century chromolithograph of the Falls of Foyers; Addams would have observed the waterfall from the platform shown. Centre, an artificial waterfall. Upper right, Plateau’s spiral and lower right, a sectored disc.

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 57

example of perceptual reversal is that of a hollow mask, and this was described by David Brewster (1781– 1868) in 1826. Brewster also observed conversions of relief with cameos and intaglios, which depended on the direction of the illuminating source. Necker corresponded with Brewster and described a perceptual alternation in a drawing of a crystal. Recognising radically different aspects of the same contours draws on more complex perceptual processes and they became popular later in the century.

Figure 4. Upper left, Necker’s drawing from 1832; lower left, Beaunis cubes from 1876; centre, Gossip, a print showing women talking with one another in postures such that their clothing defines a satanic visage; it was produced in New York in the 1890s; right, the young girl/old woman figure as presented on a German postcard from 1888.

Late 19th-century illusions The illusions that attracted the interests of many 19th-century visual scientists were those labelled ‘geometrical optical’ by Oppel in 1855 (see Wade et al, 2017). In addition to coining the term, Oppel described and displayed various illusions of orientation and size. These included line distortions due to intersecting angles as well as juxtaposed arcs, size distortions as a consequence of line intersections in triangles, rectangles and circles, as well as the influence of curved figures on size judgements. Geometrical optical illusions consist of relatively small but reliable distortions of visual space, mostly in the domains of size or orientation (Figure 5). Many novel forms were devised and depicted in the final decades of the century, and they often bear the names of those who first drew and described them.

Many attempts have been made to classify illusions in a manner that will facilitate interpreting them.

Vicario (2011) listed 26 different classifications!

Perhaps the simplest is the one proposed by Boring (1942): direction, orientation and the rest. The common factors of the classifications are: direction (orientation), size, contrast, assimilation and perspective. Some systems are concerned with the distorted dimensions (like size and orientation), others involve possible underlying processes (like assimilation and contrast, and eye movements), and yet others characterise the levels at which the illusions should be considered (like physical, physiological and psychological).

The new geometrical optical illusions were interpreted according to the visual theories of the day. However, prior to the explosion of experimental inquiries in the late 19th century a lucid classification and interpretation of illusions was provided by

12/01/2018 11:41

Figure 5. Geometrical optical illusions of size and orientation. All the horizontal lines are equal in length and parallel, as they so appear in the centre. Both these features can be manipulated visually by adding fins (left) or tilted lines (right).

58

Roget. The three classes of illusions he presented – optical, internal and mental – are similar to those that are applied in contemporary visual science of physical, physiological and psychological (Gregory, 2009). Different approaches have been made to the interpretations of illusions in Roget’s three categories.

Illusions in the first class are generally interpreted in terms of geometrical optics. Interpretations of those in the second class have had some success with regard to the burgeoning knowledge of neural processing. Most attention is now directed at those of the third class, for which there are competing theories.

Geometrical optical illusions are quintessentially phenomena of the late 19th century, when the likes of Helmholtz, Hering, Mach, Müller-Lyer, Poggendorff and Zöllner described their eponymous phenomena.

These illusions have an important place in the history of psychology, because they were among the factors that led Wundt to establish his Psychological Institute at Leipzig in 1879 – he could not envisage how illusions could be accounted for in physiological terms, and so they, along with consciousness, required a separate discipline. Wundt took as his yardstick the proximal stimulus (the retinal image) – and he could not accept that, say, two linear extents that produced equivalent retinal extents could yield perceptual inequality due to physiological processes. Thus, geometrical optical illusions are important in the context of establishing psychology as an independent discipline: there was considered to be no physiological correlate of perception.

Why should there have been this burst of illusory activity in the late 19th century? Why did outline drawings assume such a central role in the study of vision? It could have been due to the combination of two powerful strands of thinking about vision. The first stems from the 17th century, when the dioptrical properties of the eye were elucidated, thereby setting in train the idea that vision has as its starting point the static retinal image. The problem was seen as restoring the missing dimension of distance. The second strand relates to the experimental approaches to the study of perception introduced in the mid-19th century.

Wheatstone and Helmholtz argued that experimental rigour of the physical sciences should be brought to bear on the study of vision. Thus, stimulus variables should be isolated and manipulated in quite unnatural

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 58

‘The allure of visual allusions and illusions has long attracted me – not only looking at them and examining their history but also producing them.

I am drawn to testing the limits of our vision by concealing portraits in patterns as well as combining faces with motifs reflecting the work of those portrayed – I call them ‘perceptual portraits’.

The delight in discovering previously unseen images could well make them more memorable.

Perhaps this will be the case for my self-portrait above. My experimental work concerns binocular vision and motion perception. The former is alluded to in the pattern: each set of circles is centred on an eye and my right eye dominance is signified by the greater clarity of the circles surrounding that eye.’

Nicholas Wade is Emeritus Professor at Dundee University n.j.wade@dundee.ac.uk

ways in order to determine how perception is modified.

It is difficult to manipulate solid objects, but it is exceedingly easy to create novel pictures. Moreover, Wheatstone himself had shown that the perception of three-dimensional space can be synthesised from the use of two appropriate flat drawings. So pictures became the accepted stimuli for the study of vision.

Once accepted, the psychologists then rediscovered

12/01/2018 11:41

the psychologist february 2018 age of illusions

tricks that had been a part of the artist’s armoury for centuries, and they devised some novel ones too.

Illusions remain a potent source of visual stimulation – see the myriad manipulations illustrated in The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions. However, in my eyes, the 19th century remains the golden era of illusions (Figure 6). Purkinjeˇ’s promise has yet to be realised; perhaps visual truths will reveal visual illusions rather than the reverse.

psy 0218 p54_59 wade illusion.indd 59

Figure 6. Age of illusions by Nicholas Wade. Portraits of pioneers of illusions are embedded in the figures with which they are associated. The central portrait is of Johann Joseph Oppel (1815–1894) in one of his illusion figures. The other portraits are (clockwise from the top in chronological sequence): Roget; Louis Albert Necker (1786–1861); Purkinjě; Johann Christian Poggendorff (1796–1877); Plateau; Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894); Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832–1920); Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering (1834–1918); Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882); Ernst Mach (1838–1916); Franz Carl Müller-Lyer (1857–1916); and Mario Ponzo (1882–1960).

12/01/2018 11:42

A public and private persona Kirsty Graham (University of York) examines the contradictions in a new documentary about Jane Goodall

film Jane Brett Morgen (Director)

74

psy 0218 p74_77 culture.indd 74

S

ince the 1960s, when National Geographic first produced a film about her work with chimpanzees, Jane Goodall has been an inspiration to future naturalists.

Goodall has been particularly influential for young girls, by showing them that women can be field biologists too.

When I meet someone new and tell them that I study primates, the most common question is: ‘Are you going to be the next Jane Goodall?’ And I then have to think about all of the complicated thoughts that I have about Jane Goodall as a person, a primatologist and a representation.

The documentary Jane, showing Jane Goodall’s life at Gombe, Tanzania, really brought home those complicated feelings for me.

First of all, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Birute Galdikas have left a lasting impact on how the world sees primates. They captured the world’s imagination with their descriptions of great ape behaviour: Jane Goodall found that chimpanzees use sticks to fish for termites – they use tools! This was the first time tool use had been seen in a non-human species. Primatologists today stand on the shoulders of these early pioneers. The chimpanzee footage in Jane is beautiful and captures the awe of seeing chimpanzee behaviour for the first time. The film is also tragic – I cried at three separate points at the

images of sick and injured chimpanzees. But it’s seeing chimpanzees interacting with humans that brings up problems.

In the early days at Gombe, Goodall fed the chimps and came into physical contact with them. The film shows the aggression at the feeding sites and the vulnerability to human diseases, both reasons that most primatologists (including Goodall) stopped interacting with primates in that way. But those iconic photos and videos remain embedded in public imagination. The feelings of awe, compassion and fascination that they inspire have been used to effect great good in the conservation of wild apes and the welfare of captive apes. At the same time, today we have substantial and highly profitable pet trade, tourism and ‘entertainment’ industries built on getting to touch, feed and take photos with other primates. Jane Goodall, as a person, does an immense amount of work to conserve primates and combat the primate pet trade, which is why those early images are so complicated. The actions of Jane the person conflict with Jane the public representation.

My biggest issue with this documentary is that primatology is often displayed and described as ‘white researcher goes into empty African wilderness’. That’s

12/01/2018 16:42

the psychologist february 2018 culture

Behaviour change by design

psy 0218 p74_77 culture.indd 75

Reviewed by Dr Francis Quinn, Lecturer in Psychology, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen The exhibition ran until 14 January, but an accompanying book under the same title is published by GraphicDesign& (www.graphicdesignand.com). It features many of the exhibits plus additional commentary.

exhibition Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?

Wellcome Collection, London

Above: An advertisement for the Silence = Death Project, used with permission by ACT-UP, The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power.

Colour lithograph, 1987. Credit – Wellcome Library.

Left: The malaria mosquito forming the eye-sockets of a skull, representing death from malaria, 1941.

Credit: Estate of Abram Games

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

hugely problematic. In this and other documentaries about her, Goodall is portrayed as an attractive, young, white woman in an empty forest with chimpanzees.

Black bodies are used as background images or instruments for transporting people and goods, which mirrors their exploitation in the political economy of colonialism and slavery. But Tanzanians are never allowed to engage in the plot. There is an unfortunate editing choice at one point in the film where Jane is narrating about how lonely and isolated she felt without anyone around, but which has been overlaid on images of Tanzanian field staff carrying food and water.

Erasing people from the context of fieldwork is awful – it is a privilege to conduct research in another country, and that research would be impossible without the support of national government, researchers, academics, field assistants and staff. International researchers should reflect that in their work, and filmmakers could do well to represent it. When Goodall speaks at conferences, she emphasises the importance of people in her research and conservation, and the need for collaboration among everyone. So again, Jane Goodall the person conflicts with Jane Goodall the representation.

I don’t want this review to be misleading – I really enjoyed this documentary. It has a beautiful score,

by Philip Glass, and breath-taking cinematography, and tells the story of a young woman learning about chimpanzees and finally moving on to fight for their conservation and protection, both in the wild and in captivity. It also gives an interesting glimpse into Goodall’s personal life with partner Hugo and son Grub. This film is well worth the watch, and maybe with this review in mind you can consider the ways in which a 1960s representation could do with updating.

In the mid-20th century, designers believed that good design could improve our lives. At the Wellcome Collection in London, Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? explores the power of the visual image in health and healthcare.

While psychologists sometimes use images in interventions, most psychologists lack the skill with imagery of graphic designers, and many interventions rely on text or speech. The exhibits on show use visual design to change behaviour, improve communication, or gain attention. Some aim to change attitudes and persuade, perhaps aiding health (e.g. choice of the least appealing colour for plain cigarette packs) or against health (e.g. tobacco advertisements). Some improve medical and health education, using diagrams and informational design. Some improve hospital communication and experience (e.g. Communi-Card 1 and 2). Some aim to change behaviour during epidemics (e.g. the fearbased anti-AIDS campaigns of the 1980s). Some focus on medication choice, dosage, adherence and sales, and reducing errors.

Some draw attention to campaigns (e.g. the Things On Your Mind campaign run by the Samaritans).

As an academic health psychologist, I wondered whether psychologists could use graphic design more skilfully. Mention of psychology or scientific evidence was rare. Yet again and again I saw creative uses of graphic design as intervention to change behaviour, or psychological outcomes (e.g. communication, distress, knowledge, etc.). Often creative visual imagery seemed to be a delivery method for behaviour change techniques. What if applied psychology could harness graphic design as a powerful vehicle for our interventions?

What if psychologists and designers worked together to create psychologically informed, evidence-based graphic design? I think then graphic design really could save lives.

Street artist Stephen Doe paints an educational mural about Ebola in Liberia, 2014

12/01/2018 16:42

exhibition Hannah Ryggen: Woven Histories Modern Art Oxford

76

psy 0218 p74_77 culture.indd 76

Threads through troubled times Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) was a Norwegian self-taught textile artist, who took the socio-political issues of her era and wove it into her artwork. She was a pacifist living in a tumultuous time during the Second World War, and her art was a direct response to what was happening in the world.

All of her artwork considers war, love and politics from a woman’s and a mother’s perspective. This gives a deeper insight into the human condition and how war can have a profound impact on generations to come.

The art ranges from portraying a mother’s heart to the threat of nuclear weapons. Throughout my time walking through the gallery, I realised that these events aren’t in the past, they are also our present. The rhetoric between world leaders today causes the world to become more anxious about the threat of a nuclear war. How do we as ordinary people deal with this?

Ryggen’s way was to stand up and say something through her art in protest. The art may have been a form of therapy, finding a way to reconcile herself to the world she had to live in, giving her purpose in a time of helplessness as women had to say goodbye to the soldiers that went away to fight. This artwork brings attention to the damage done by war to the soldiers that come back from war with what we now know to be posttraumatic stress disorder.

Hannah Ryggen also took on key historical figures in her artwork, including Hitler and Winston Churchill. The psychology of these men is fascinating. This artwork kept bringing me back to this idea of connection: as human beings we want to relate and connect to each other, but how can we do this when the world is fragmented?

Ryggen couldn’t reconcile her world of war and destruction, so she made her own efforts through art.

We now live in a world of different wars and we are faced with different issues, but what remains is the same desire for connection. This artwork is a connection to a world that we can still relate to today.

Reviewed by Emily Mackey, an A-level student The exhibition is showing at Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford until 18 February 2018.

12/01/2018 16:42

the psychologist february 2018 culture

Two reflections on the blackest of mirrors The fourth season of standalone episodes starts, in true Black Mirror style, in the mind of Robert Daly, a shy, socially awkward chief of technology at a games company.

Daly’s real life is dull and unfulfilling, and characterised by a lack of power and presence despite his position.

This is a sharp contrast to his fantasy life, within a modified version of the game he created, where he’s the captain of a space ship that flies round the galaxy defeating evil. The twist in this dark Star Trek parody is that Daly’s crew are sentient beings, digital replicants created from the DNA of co-workers who he feels have wronged him. It’s a ‘bubble universe ruled by an asshole god’. Questions about sentient code and AI are raised throughout the episode, especially in a profound conversation where they discuss ‘dying’.

The second instalment, ‘Arkangel’, kicks off the Year of the Woman in style. Directed by Jodie Foster, it follows a mother and daughter and their developing relationship. After temporarily losing her young daughter, Maria has an experimental chip installed in the child’s head. Psychologists might be interested in the treatment of the cortisol response in the learning of fear and appropriate behaviour,

and the transferring online filtering and censorship from the digital realm to real life. The breakdown of trust between mother and daughter highlights aspects of Jung’s Electra complex.

The trademark Black Mirror head chip also features in ‘Crocodile’, one of Black Mirror’s darkest offerings to date. What if we could see the memories of others? Visually, the depiction of the memories is as many would expect if this machine were real: fragmented, hazy pictures that the insurance investigator describes as subjective. She even opens beer and plays music to help stimulate memories, which has parallels of context-dependent recall. Subtle moments, such as when the visual

Another week, another news article questioning children’s reliance on smartphones. It’s always a good time to review the new series of Black Mirror, the often unsettling sci-fi series that explores our relationship with technology.

Series 4 has six episodes, varying in their ‘sci-finess’. ‘USS Callister’ and ‘Metalhead’ are the episodes that feel most typically sci-fi, with the former set in space and the latter involving the protagonist being hunted by robo-dogs. For me, one of the strongest episodes was ‘Arkangel’, which focuses on a mother and daughter’s relationship and questions whether you would keep surveillance on your own child in a bid to keep them safe.

I also loved ‘Hang the DJ’, a romance by all accounts, focusing on a couple in a walled world using an online app to choose their perfect match. What would happen if we allowed technology to control not only how we formed relationships, but also when we ended them?

In ‘Crocodile’ we see a world where we can share our subjective experience of events to overcome issues with eyewitness testimony. Something I really enjoyed in this episode was the susceptibility of memory to change with

psy 0218 p74_77 culture.indd 77

of the memory changed according to what was said, highlight a sense of paranoia regarding the uses of these machines in everyday life.

Black Museum ends Season 4 with an anthology riddled with Easter eggs for hardcore fans. Apparently confirming the shared universe of Black Mirror theory, this episode uses props and outfits from previous episodes as the museum exhibits.

Whilst this episode is relative selfexplanatory compared with others in this season, the concepts that it raises, of life and death, will most likely stick with you long after the show has finished.

tv Black Mirror Season 4 Netflix

Reviewed by Michelle Dodd, a psychology undergraduate

additional information: ‘Others said her coat was yellow.’

Two things struck me from a psychological point of view. First, the popularity of the series does not seem to be simply down to the interesting questions posed, which, for an audience of psychologists, are likely to intrigue and infuriate in equal measure. It comes from a pervasive and ubiquitous fear we carry that relates to our level of dependence on machines, and the people behind them.

Second, when I wanted to see the reaction to the new series, I went to Twitter. Here, I found hundreds of people ranking their favourite episodes, and this got me thinking about how this awareness of others’ attitudes might shape our own, possibly before we are sure of them ourselves. Perhaps by using social media and seeing the constant barrage of others’ opinions, our attitudes are changing, just in the same way that the eyewitness in ‘Crocodile’ saw a different colour based on someone else’s feedback.

Reviewed by Sarah Wilding, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds

12/01/2018 16:42

AZ the

psychologist to

...is for Narcissism

Karla Novak

N

Suggested by Sarah Henderson, Senior Lecturer at Robert Gordon University @RGUSocScience ‘There’s raised interest and awareness of narcissism in the public domain, connected to (often erroneous) speculation about the mental capacity of public figures.

The ethics of Duty to Warn (if a professional did have legitimate and valid concerns about a public figure) vs. the so-called Goldwater Rule, stating it’s unethical for psychiatrists to comment on the capacity of individuals they have not directly examined, is an interesting issue to discuss.’

In an interview with us in November 2014, the Rt Hon. Lord Owen outlined his ideas on ‘hubris syndrome’ in politics: the primary symptom being ‘a narcissistic propensity to see their world primarily as an arena in which to exercise power and seek glory’.

80

There’s such a thing as ‘collective narcissism’, characterised by outward confidence around a group compensating for deeprooted insecurity. That’s according to a 2016 study

psy 0218 p80 atoz.indd 80

coming soon… the brains of experts; charisma; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

led by Agnieskzka Golec De Zavala and covered on our Research Digest.

In his online exclusive on ‘being envied in organisations’, W. Gerrod Parrott cited research with students showing that higher levels of narcissism were strongly associated with greater enjoyment of public recognition, but also with not caring about whether fellow classmates had negative reactions to them.

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

Narcissists use tears to their advantage, according to Ad Vingerhoets in his March 2016 interview.

Does the reverse exist: ‘the Sussicran complex’?

Mallory Wober’s letter in the October edition pondered ‘one who unduly disparages one’s self’.

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

12/01/2018 16:41

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

President Nicola Gale President Elect Professor Kate Bullen 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

society notices

society vacancies

Postdoctoral Conference Bursary Scheme See p.6 CPD workshops 2018 See p.51 BPS Annual Conference Nottingham, 2–4 May 2018 See p.29 BPS conferences and events See p.52 Psychology in the Pub (South West of England Branch) Exeter, 28 February 2018 See p.78 DCP Pre-Qualification Group Annual Conference Leeds, 16 March 2018 See p.78

Research Board Postdoctoral Representative See advert p.22 Contact Liz Beech liz.beech@bps.org.uk Closing date 22 March 2018 Standing Conference Committee Members See advert p.40 Contact Liz Beech liz.beech@bps.org.uk Closing date 16 March 2018

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).

Professional Practice Board Ordinary Members (one- and two-year terms) and Research Board Ordinary Member (twoyear term) See advert p.62 Contact Zoë Mudie zoe.mudie@bps.org.uk Closing date 30 March 2018

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

Extract from The Charter

psy 0218 p80 atoz.indd 81

12/01/2018 16:41