The Psychologist April 2018

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psychologist april 2018

Psychologists and the media Opportunities and challenges

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psychologist april 2018

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

Psychologists and the media Opportunities and challenges

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 free apps via your iOS/Android store 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 march 2018 issue 43,934 dispatched design concept Darren Westlake www.TUink.co.uk printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper Please reuse and recyle 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.

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), 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 Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall 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

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psychologist april 2018

Careers Anne Collard-Scruby on her work in air traffic control; and we hear from Bianca Neumann-May

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Jobs in psychology

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Books Q+As; ‘My shelfie’; and more

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Culture With Adam Buxton

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Looking back World War Two’s ‘awkward lot’

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A to Z P is for…

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

http://marcelinaamelia.com

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Engaging with the media, whatever your walk of life, comes with challenges and opportunities. For us as scientists, both are perhaps thrown into sharp relief: can a need for caveat and caution ever truly coexist with a constant drive for readers, viewers, listeners?

In this month’s special feature (p.36), our stellar and varied line-up consider the issues and try to offer some practical tips. Fundamental differences emerge, such as timescale. Journalist Tom Chivers admits to being ‘like a mayfly trying to understand continental drift’. But there’s common ground too, and an increasing number of people doing a great job of straddling any divide.

One theme that emerges strongly is that ‘there are many good, kind and ethical people working in the media’, and that we owe it to our profession and to the public to have a voice across the various channels that now exist.

There are online extras around the piece, and we hope that it continues to grow into a positive and practical resource.

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Letters Pensions; leaders; obituaries; and more

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Meaning in randomness Claire Elliott considers the significance of ‘electronic voice phenomena’

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‘She’s afflicted by these memories…they flood her’ Jack Dutton investigates

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Psychologists and the media: Opportunities and challenges Contributions from Uta Frith, Claudia Hammond, Sophie Scott, Dean Burnett, Hamira Riaz, Essi Viding, Tanya Byron, Funke Baffour, Aleks Krotoski, and many more, with practical tips based on their experiences

Opinion Mohamed al-Khougali writes News Aesthetic surgery; virtual reality; refugees; research; and more

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‘They’re grasping at life… the young person doesn’t want to die’ Alexandra Tyler meets Beverley Barclay MBE

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Hidden treasures of knowledge Mohamed Gamal el-Din Abdelaal Khougali argues that Western psychology has much to gain by abandoning its largely Eurocentric view

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In my postgraduate year, we had classes on the origins and history of psychology, and on social psychology and cognitive psychology, where we were exclusively exposed to white scholars and philosophers. It was routine to discuss the plethora of white accomplishments, whether it was directly related to psychology or otherwise. The course content line-up was composed of Spinoza, Jung, Fritz Perls and the like. I remember in one class, the lecturer talked about how it was a ‘universal phenomenon’ that white blonde girls were the most popular and attractive demographic in middle school. During this time, any discussion of blackness or African-ness was intrinsically bound to colonialism or postcolonialism; sometimes when there was a slight deviation from the norm of praising white accomplishments in social settings, we might entertain and appreciate the rebellious and ideological stance of Biko, Fanon or Malcolm X. During this period, I had an acute awareness of George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia, specifically in relation to Goldstein’s ‘The Book’, which states that in order to keep the proles content, it was common practice to erase any existence of a time where the governing party did not exist, and to confine the people to their own paradigm,

lest they contrast their state of existence with another.

It is an awkward feeling to know that every black person’s history is composed entirely of either colonialism or postcolonialism. Of course, there is no one sole architect of this reality, but this misconception can easily be resolved by reading such works as Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy’s Black Genesis or Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus or Martin BernalI’s Black Athena.

I tried to locate these books in the university library, and lo and behold! the books are not available. Ironically, it is the same library that contains ancient books about the ‘science of eugenics’. Following that incident, the intensity of my awareness of the blatant Eurocentrism peaked, in an effort to jolt myself from this passive hyper-normative reality, I started exploring Golden Age Islamic philosophy, Kushite and Nubian history (as I am Sudanese), outside the university library.

The awareness of the hegemony of Eurocentrism over academia left a lingering sensation in my mind; I become helpless, but think that this monopoly perpetuates the persistence of the racial disparity in society. My four chief concerns with the unidimensional rendition of historical philosophical and scientific advances are (1) whitewashing, (2) loss of history, and intellectual

the psychologist april 2018 opinion ignorance, (3) frozen time, consequently moulding of identity, and (4) intellectual privilege. Starting from high school, there is a stringent framework that educators need to abide by, at least in the UK: GCSE, A-levels, S4 to S6, etc. The framework maintains its rigid form throughout college then university, it promotes a skewed portrayal of history that not only glorifies Eurocentrism but also marginalises other schools of thought. The history of human progress is more or less restricted to the Greek Golden Age of philosophy, the Roman Empire, Catholicism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment Age, colonialism, postcolonialism and finally globalisation, with occasional mention of some outliers such as the Golden Age of China, or Ancient Egypt.

This whitewashing of history inadvertently precipitates the loss of history and intellectual ignorance; for instance, today when we talk about the genesis of psychotherapy we often talk about Sigmund Freud or Alfred Adler.

But almost a thousand years earlier, Islamic scholars, such as Abu Zayd and al-Razi, talk about synonymous concepts under the terminological façade of al-ruhaniyat (spiritualism). In this particular example, we not only lose part of history by not revitalising it in class rooms, but we also fixate on the achievements of a single group of people and any mention of another is ignored and placed outside the mainstream: intellectual ignorance.

Thirdly, when the history of a group of people are restricted to a certain time and place, that group become frozen in that time and place. This phenomenon is particularly salient with the rendition of African history, where almost annually a film is released to depict the struggles of African slaves in the West, or where most conversation on the subject lead to the great accomplishments of Nelson Mandela and the like. Occasionally, when there is a digression from the general narrative, there will be movies about a fictional, fantastical, wealthy country in Africa, or Ancient Egypt where, apparently, the pharaohs were white. I have yet to see a film about the adventures of the great explorer Ibn Battuta, or one of the wealthiest men to have walked this earth, Mansa Musa; or come across a lecturer that acknowledges the work of Ibn Khaldun, who in his book al-Muqaddimah talks in great depth about sociology and economics, before the time of Adam Smith. Outside of Sudan, I have yet to come across a person familiar with the work of Tayib Salih or Hassan al-Turabi or Abdalla el-Tayeb, who are all great contemporary scholars in their respected fields. This narrow representation of history usually depicts the African person to a restricted archetype, that of struggle and resistance. This should not be the case, Africans cannot be categorised as a singular binary archetype.

Finally, intellectual privilege: when one demographic of people holds dominion over science, history and philosophy, they also possess the power to narrate mainstream history from their point of view; ‘who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. That demographic also has an expectation to advance knowledge, which creates an almost hereditary right to achieve greatness.

This expectation is detrimental, not only to the ‘other’ groups, but also to the group that is expected to prevail intellectually. The obvious detriment to the former groups is disenfranchisement; it would be unlikely to relate to the course content, at least ethnically. In addition, this creates a world of patronising ‘firsts’: ‘first Asian to…’, ‘first African to…’. The negative effect this has on the latter group is living up to expectation. When it is a given that almost all modern advances and history belong to a certain group, that group has an obligation to succeed their predecessors, failure to do so may result to a feeling of impotence.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Towards the end of my postgraduate year, where I just started my archaeological excavation into the vast and deep mine that is Golden Age Islamic philosophy, I was struck with awe at the beauty of the rediscovered, seemingly new, hidden treasures of knowledge, not just new to the layman, but to mainstream academia. For example, in Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy, one of the four ‘ultimate concerns’ is death… he writes in the second chapter about the aloofness towards the subject of death in the psychotherapeutic dialogue. A thousand years before, Razi [pictured] wrote in the final chapter of his book The Spiritual Physick about the effects death has on the soul or psyche: he goes on to explore this fear from a secular and theistic point of view. Razi also starts the second last chapter, ‘Of the virtuous life’, with: The life which has been followed by all the great philosophers of the past may be described in a few words: it consists in treating all men justly.

Thereafter it means acting nobly towards them, with a proper continence, compassion, universal benevolence, and an endeavour to secure the advantage of all men…

These same words reincarnate themselves more comprehensively in the work of Irvin Yalom regarding the ultimate concern of ‘meaninglessness’ in the form of clinical examples, previous points of views about the meaning and purpose of life and altruism. This is not just a unique occurrence, these jewels are found in the works of Avicenna, Abu Zayd and more. A study of the historical treatment of mental illness around the globe, and throughout different eras will, I believe, be valuable to the advancement of psychology, as will an examination of different cultural norms in the treatment of the mentally ill. If we see further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Start with Abu Zayd al-Balkhi’s Sustenance of the Soul: The Cognitive Behaviour Therapy of a Ninth Century Physician and see if you can find the hidden jewels.

Mohamed Gamal el-Din Abdelaal Khougali Yeman-born Sudanese citizen, currently residing in Edinburgh. He recently completed an MSC psychology course at Coventry University.

The Psychologist VIP Programme We are trialling a new scheme to identify and nurture new ‘voices in psychology’.

Tell us why we need psychology, and what psychology needs, and you could be part of it.

We’re always listening out for ‘Voices in Psychology’. People who can take often complex ideas and communicate them in a way that will engage and inform our large and diverse audience.

Writers with real impact. They’re the future of our science, of our Society, of our magazine.

But perhaps you need help to find that voice.

Perhaps you’ve got that certain something but you need practice, nurturing. We think we’ve made a real effort with this in recent years, providing opportunities and guidance to many first-time authors. Now we would like to begin to a develop a more formal structure to this process.

For 2018 we’ll set a question which will run until the end of the year. It’s simply this: Why do we need psychology?

And what does psychology need?

Address either one or both parts of this question, in any way you see fit. You may find it helpful to focus on one example for each aspect.

We recognise it’s a real challenge: the total word limit is just 1000, and it’s absolutely vital you write with our publication and audience in mind.

Please submit to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk and include a bit about yourself – your aspirations, and how you’re looking to engage with the communication of psychology. While we are not exclusively aiming this at students, we are mostly interested in identifying high potential amongst those starting out in their journey in psychology.

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One submission per person please, and unfortunately we cannot respond to everyone.

Around the end of 2018 we will publish a selection of the best entries online and perhaps in print too.

Then the fun begins… we will identify up to five respondents we feel might have real potential, and contact them about playing some kind of role in developing their ‘Voice in Psychology’, through the provision of advice and opportunities to write more in various contexts.

As this is a trial, we can’t be more specific at this stage. This will be about co-creating a Programme for the future. But, at the end of it, those selected should be able to add to their CV that they were a part of The Psychologist VIP Programme!

Get writing – and don’t be shy! If you’ve got a head bubbling with questions, original ideas about psychology beyond the lecture theatre, and a desire to make a difference, then that’s a good place to start. You don’t have to be the finished article to be Very Important to us!

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor Madeleine Pownall Third-year undergraduate at the University of Lincoln, Chair of the British Psychological Society Student Committee and Associate Editor for the VIP Programme

‘Surgeons are crying out for people to work with them’ Ella Rhodes speaks to Alex Clarke and Nichola Rumsey about a new special interest group in the field of aesthetic plastic surgery

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sychology is to plastic surgery what physiotherapy is to orthopaedics – you wouldn’t give someone a joint replacement without being clear you had physiotherapy lined up and someone engaged in their aftercare.’ Clinical psychologist Dr Alex Clarke and long-time colleague and collaborator Professor Emerita Nichola Rumsey OBE told us that while psychology seems perfectly well placed to improve pre- and post-operative care for patients who opt for aesthetic plastic surgery, very few psychologists are embedded in such services. They are hoping to change that.

Last year Clarke and Rumsey – who have worked together on research at the Centre for Appearance Research based at the University of the West of England for many years – were asked to sit on a working group for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. While many reports, recommendations and guidelines have been released over the years raising concerns regarding the regulation of surgeons in private practice, the Nuffield Council report also examined wider psychosocial factors behind people seeking out aesthetic procedures.

The report made recommendations at a societal and government level. A diverse range of recommendations were directed towards various official bodies, including government departments of health and education. The need for advertising bodies and social media companies to play a larger role in reducing the rise of body image anxiety was highlighted. The report also pointed to a

significant role for psychology in research on the impact of procedures on wellbeing, and potentially screening patients for problems such as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) prior to surgery.

Rumsey told me the psychological evidence we have within plastic surgery so far is scant and of relatively poor quality. She put this down to several factors: ‘Because there’s been so little research, because these procedures are carried out in the private sector, and because surgeons and patients seem to be reluctant to take part in research, we don’t have an enormous amount of evidence to help us understand what the impacts are.’

There are some suggestions in the literature that the benefits people feel after plastic surgery wear off relatively quickly. There may also be an element of people returning for multiple procedures – but in truth we know very little about the psychology behind plastic surgery, its effects and drivers. ‘The media tends to sensationalise cosmetic procedures… you hear about the success stories and also the botch jobs, but we know very little about what happens in the middle.’

There are some established risk factors for poor outcomes in plastic surgery: for example people with BDD may feel they can ‘fix’ an area of their body via surgery, but afterwards turn their negative attention to another physical feature. This is where psychologists could be key in auditing potential patients, Rumsey said: ‘Psychologists would be able to identify risk factors in surgery, such

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as eating disorders, BDD, and shades of those. They’re often talked about as a condition you either have or you don’t have, but increasingly we understand because body image dissatisfaction is so prevalent there’s lots of disordered eating that hasn’t reached the stage of an eating disorder and there’s lots of body image distortion that hasn’t reached the level of BDD. Some involvement of psychologists in screening and assessing people who might be more at risk would be very beneficial.’

Clarke told me that aesthetic surgery is often offered to people without assessing their expectations from a procedure. People tend to be ‘sold’ positive psychosocial outcomes that have no basis in reality or evidence: ‘The Nuffield report really highlights that whilst we’ve got this huge burgeoning of body-image anxiety and worry about appearance we need to start trying to understand what predicts body-image wellbeing. It also flagged that surgeons need to be able to recognise psychological issues… not to be able to treat them or become a psychologist, but to at least have the ability to recognise things like body dysmorphic disorder and a need to refer them on.’

The Centre for Appearance Research has been at the forefront of exploring aesthetic plastic surgery in more depth. Rumsey, Clarke and colleague Dr Nicole Paraskeva developed a quick pre-operative assessment aid for surgeons to use with patients to clarify their motivation to undergo the procedure, their expectations of outcome and

the psychologist april 2018 news

signs of potential risk factors such as BDD. Yet they were unable to get funding to further their investigations.

Surgeons have responded to the Nuffield report, and one professional body, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), in association with the Royal College of Surgeons, has developed training that includes a module on psychological issues and risk factors, which Clarke and Rumsey teach. It has also asked them to form a special interest group in psychology; the eventual aim, they told me, is to create a network of practitioner psychologists from health and clinical backgrounds to carry out screening and assessment of potential patients, to act as advisers for surgeons who want to better implement psychology within their practice, to develop auditing methods for patients and to carry out research in this field.

Rumsey said the first stage of setting up the group was to get an idea of how many psychologists are already working with plastic surgeons in the private sector.

BAAPS has also offered to extend its surgeon training programme to teach psychologists about surgery and the psychology of the cosmetic surgery patient. ‘The hope is that eventually psychologists and surgeons will be offered the training together with specialist sessions within it to allow for more dialogue between both groups. There’s a big role for health psychologists in audit research and screening, for clinical psychologists, and possibly counselling psychologists too, for dealing with people before and after procedures who might need additional support.’

Clarke, who previously worked with the charity Changing Faces and within the Royal Free Hospital with people who had had reconstructive surgery, said there’s even a lack of psychologists in NHS burns units and other plastic surgery centres where one may expect to find them. She said there may be a slight reluctance for clinical psychologists, who usually train in the NHS and remain there, to work within the private sector.

‘The surgeons are crying out for people to work with them to put a better process into place. We suspect there’s people out there who’d be interested but haven’t got any background, haven’t done any training or who are slightly wary of taking this on. But Nicky and I are happy to provide some central input and training so we can get it going.’

While there are so many challenges facing mental health services at present, Clarke said, some psychologists may be put off working in an area that is lower priority in the eyes of funding bodies, but psychologists remained vital. ‘There’s a lot of really treatable mental health issues in this area. There’s the very severe BDD which affects about 1 per cent of the population, but in plastic surgery and dermatology we see much, much higher levels, up to 15 per cent. Also, a

Dr Alex Clarke

Professor Emerita Nichola Rumsey OBE

lot of people have social anxiety or they come for surgery just when they’ve had a divorce or lost their jobs and it’s the worst time to be making a lifelong decision. There’s nothing to stop people bringing children in either – while you can’t get a tattoo until you’re 18 you can get cosmetic surgery… we don’t rule that out and it’s ridiculous.’

Clarke emphasised that there was a role for all practitioner psychologists within the special interest group: ‘We’d like to get people together and hammer it out. This is about establishing what we think would work, what’s pragmatic, how it happens and how we embed it in BAAPS so a BAAPS surgeon can say “I think I have an issue here” or even better “I’m setting up a private practice and need a psychology pathway – who can I talk with to put it into place so it’s there if I have issues with patients?”.’ Eventually, Clarke said, she hopes it becomes accepted among patients that having a cosmetic procedure will often require a visit to a psychologist, which may lead to an intervention prior to surgery, for example. She emphasised, however, that psychologists would not act as gatekeepers to surgery.

On the RCS professional skills masterclass, surgeons are taught about the growth in body-image anxiety and what has driven it, and how to spot patients who may not have a good outcome from surgery. ‘It’s terribly important people are able to identify body dysmorphic patients

‘Momentous’ day for campaigner A counselling psychologist turned campaigner has helped to overhaul care standards for people with congenital heart conditions in Scotland.

Dr Liza Morton, who has been advocating for higher-quality and consistent care for patients for many years, helped to oversee the production of the new National Healthcare Standards for those with congenital heart disease (CHD).

After being born with a heart condition herself and experiencing firsthand the gaps in health care for adults with CHD, Morton became a Campaign Manager for the congenital heart charity The Somerville Foundation in 2012. Since then she has worked tirelessly, in petitioning the Scottish Government, sitting on official boards and working on science–arts collaborations, to raise awareness of CHD among politicians and improve the care people can expect from birth and into adulthood.

While survival rates for CHD have improved enormously over the past few decades (in the 1940s only 20 per cent of babies with CHD reached adulthood now 90 per cent do), many adults with these conditions require lifelong monitoring but are often lost in the system owing to gaps in care.

The new National Healthcare Standards for children and adults were recently published by NHS Scotland’s commissioning body the National Services Division and reflect NHS England’s CHD guidelines.

The document sets out who should be seen, where and for what, aiming to improve care across many vital areas, such as 24-hour access to consultations with specialist cardiology services, psychological support and improved communication with local care providers. Morton sees the publication as ‘momentous’ and said she is becoming increasingly interested in the psychological effects of living with a heart condition from birth. ER 14

and people who are pretty unlikely to do well. It’s about flagging up how these people present themselves. You can read in a paper about signs and symptoms, but what do you look for when someone comes in the door and sits down and you start to have a conversation, what are the things about them that make you think “I’m not quite sure I’m going to be able to meet this person’s expectations?”,’ Clarke said.

Surgeons are also taught about managing consultations, how to help patients who are upset, identifying whether motivation for surgery comes from the patient themselves or someone else, and looking for other potential red flags. Clarke added: ‘I teach people not to jump in too soon. If you have a quiet patient who doesn’t quite seem to know what they want done, to try and explore what sits behind that, asking them things like – if your nose was different and you were more comfortable with it – what would be different about your life? Trying to get at some of the psychosocial reasons behind it.’

In these sessions Clarke also emphasises that there’s very little relationship between a person’s objective appearance and their psychosocial distress or satisfaction: ‘You often can’t quite pin down what a person doesn’t like about their appearance, or they sit down and you think “I see what the problem is here they’ve got an enormous chin”, and they’ll say “I’m really worried about my breasts”… what you perceive as an onlooker often has nothing to do with a person’s worries, so you’ve got a real challenge in thinking about your goals for surgery.

You aren’t seeing what you’re patient is seeing.’

When surgeons are explaining procedures and potential outcomes, Clarke said, they need to be very careful: ‘You can say generally breast reduction surgery has a very good outcome – or the best outcomes out of the range of procedures. People’s neck pain tends to be improved but it’s still quite scarring and you can get numbness, so it has downsides and potential risks. But in terms of the other procedures we have very little evidence and particularly little evidence on psychosocial outcomes.’

For psychologists the training would help to teach them about common aesthetic procedures, what is known about the outcomes of these, their common pitfalls and how to prepare people for surgery. ‘When I first started in this area people were very suspicious about being sent to a psychologist, but that had shifted by the time I left the Royal Free. People can’t believe there’s no psychology in a lot of services and it should definitely be there. Not everyone needs to see a psychologist, it’s a lifestyle choice for a lot of people who’ve gone into it, have thought about it, are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, are very clear about their expectations and I would suspect have a good outcome. But surgeons need to know that in their populations are a growing number of vulnerable people and we need to take better care of them.’

If you are actively involved in working with plastic surgeons, or are interested in doing so, and would like to get involved with this special interest group, please e-mail Rumsey and Clarke on secretariat@baaps.org.uk

the psychologist april 2018 news

What lies at the dark heart of psychopathy? Is it a lack or emotion and empathy, a willingness to manipulate others – or, perhaps, a failure to take responsibility for misdeeds? All of these traits, and many more, are viewed as aspects of a psychopathic personality. But there’s still a debate among experts about which of these are core, and which less important.

Now a new study of 7450 criminal offenders in the US and the Netherlands, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, has identified what the researchers believe are the psychopath’s most ‘central’ traits . But while there were striking similarities in the data from the two countries, there were also intriguing differences. This raises the question: does the meaning of the term ‘psychopath’ vary between cultures?

Researchers from the Netherlands and the US, led by Bruno Verschuere at the University of Amsterdam, analysed the offenders’ scores on the widely used Psychopathy Checklist – Revised (PC-R). The PC-R comprises 20 questions about a range of traits related to four aspects of psychopathy: affective problems (a lack of empathy, fearlessness, and shallow emotional experience); interpersonal (e.g. being detached or a pathological liar); lifestyle (e.g. being irresponsible and having poor behavioural control); and being antisocial (showing early behavioural problems, and later criminal behaviour).

Between 20 to 22 per cent of the US offenders, and 28 per cent of the offenders in the Netherlands, were clinical psychopaths, based on their PC-R scores (as judged by trained research assistants in each country who drew on ‘extensive interview and collateral file information’ for each offender). This difference between the countries was not a surprise, as the group from the Netherlands were all violent, mentally unwell

offenders, whereas one US group consisted of general offenders from state prisons in Wisconsin, and the other comprised offenders in jail or on substance treatment programmes in five other US states.

The researchers performed a ‘network analysis’ on the offenders’ PC-R scores, mainly focused on centrality – so, among clinical psychopaths, identifying which item or items were most often present.

But they also looked at relationships between items – so if pathological lying was present, for example, then identifying which other items were often, or rarely, present.

The results showed that ‘callousness/lack of empathy’ was the most central item in both of the US samples. As the researchers note, ‘this aligns with classic clinical descriptions and prototypicality studies of psychopathy’. But for the offenders from the Netherlands, while ‘callousness/lack of empathy’ was fairly central, a ‘parasitic lifestyle’ and ‘irresponsibility’ were most central.

For the US samples, the items that appeared most peripheral to psychopathy were ‘many short-term marital relations’, ‘lack of realistic long-term goals’ (in the Wisconsin offenders only) and ‘revocation of conditional release’ (this refers to failing to fulfil the terms of probation, for example).

For the offenders from the Netherlands, ‘Promiscuous sexual behaviour’ and ‘many short-term marital relations’ were also among the most peripheral items, but,

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Differences between US and Dutch psychopaths

surprisingly, so too was ‘shallow affect’, an item that was actually the second most-central for the Wisconsin group.

In a bid to address the nongeographical differences between the US and Dutch groups, the researchers extracted a subsample from the Dutch group, excluding those with indications of current or past severe psychopathology, but the results still showed that a parasitic lifestyle and irresponsibility (not callousness, as in the US groups), were the most central items for psychopaths in the Netherlands.

The results raise the possibility, the researchers suggest, that there might be cross-cultural differences in how psychopathy manifests – or at least in how the PC-R is scored by trained raters in different counties.

Further work should help clarify this.

‘Extending network analyses to different measures, samples and cultures should shed further light on the core characteristics of psychopathy,’ they write, ‘and perhaps ultimately on the unresolved question of what psychopathy is.’

Emma Young for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/y75tj7aa

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports, including: Deborah Husbands reporting from ‘Psych4Schools’ at the University of Westminster; a preview of the Cambridge Science Festival; behind the scenes of Girls on the Edge; and more 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.

Research digest An ‘unparalleled’ study of Israeli civilians during the Gaza war of 2014 has identified several early mental health symptoms – especially having a heightened startle response – that were associated with an increased risk of a person developing more post-traumatic stress-related symptoms in the ensuing weeks. It’s hoped the findings may help target early interventions toward the most vulnerable. Psychological Medicine It’s well established that in adolescence our peers affect our development, including shaping our personality and risk of delinquency. A new study has broadened this influence to include intelligence – participants’ IQ at age 15 was correlated with their best friend’s IQ years earlier, even after controlling for participants’ own earlier intelligence. Another reason to pick your friends wisely! PsyArXiv A study has demonstrated the advantages of taking a cross-diagnostic approach to mental health. Among a non-clinical sample, different symptoms had opposite associations with aspects of metacognition. Specifically, scoring higher on an ‘anxiety-depression’ symptom dimension was associated with less confidence in a dot-counting task, but better insight into one’s own accuracy, while the ‘compulsive behaviour and intrusive thought’ dimension was correlated with greater confidence but less meta-cognitive accuracy. Biological Psychiatry There is a long-running debate over how much the average psychological differences between the sexes are due to innate biological factors versus social influences. A new study has added weight to the biological side of the equation, finding multiple sex-linked structural neural differences between baby boys and girls whose brains were scanned at the age of just one month. Brain Structure and Function

By Dr Christian Jarrett. These studies were covered by him, Dr Alex Fradera and Emma Young at www.bps.org.uk/digest – where you can find much more, including a huge archive, lively debates in the comments, and the latest episode of our podcast, PsychCrunch.

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Prescribing a new list A new booklist for common mental health conditions is to be launched nationally by the Reading Well Books on Prescription programme on Tuesday 5 June at the Wellcome Trust in London and at a series of regional launches in libraries and health centres.

The first Reading Well booklist supporting common mental health conditions was produced in 2013 and has been hailed a great success with libraries and health professionals across the country. It is being updated this year ‘to ensure that library mental health and wellbeing collections continue to contain the most quality-assured, evidence-based health information possible’.

The Reading Well programme is delivered by the Reading Agency in partnership with the Society of Chief Librarians and is endorsed by the British Psychological Society among others. Its aim is to helps people understand and manage their health and wellbeing using self-help reading. Three more Reading Well booklists are currently available, on dementia, for long-term conditions, and for young people.

Find out more, including about supporting and materials how to order, at http://reading-well.org.uk/blog/new-mental-health-booklist

New research to support those with terminal illness A team at the University of Chester and the University of Edinburgh has been awarded a £34,000 grant for research into therapy for cancer patients in palliative care services.

The funding, awarded by Macmillan Cancer Support, will allow for acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) sessions to be delivered to people who have been told their cancer cannot be cured.

The intervention being developed as part of this study is called BEACHeS, standing for Brief Engagement and Acceptance Coaching in Community and Hospice Settings. Previous research led by the University of Chester has already shown that ACT may help cancer survivors to become more resilient to psychological distress, and this pilot work aims to extend that research to patients receiving palliative care.

The pilot study was due to begin in March and will run for a year. The patients who take part will have one-to-one therapy sessions with a psychologist over a six-week period, and the researchers will test whether this short intervention has improved their psychological wellbeing. The research team hope that this will lead to a larger programme of work researching the benefits of ACT for

Sue Millington (Patient Representative) and Professor Nick Hulbert-Williams people with cancer and other lifelimiting conditions.

Nick Hulbert-Williams, Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Chester, who is leading the BEACHeS Research Study said: ‘Receiving a cancer diagnosis is a huge event in anyone’s life. To then find out that the illness cannot be cured can be psychologically devastating for some people. We currently have very little knowledge about how different kinds of psychological therapy can help people at this difficult time, but I know from my own work as a coaching psychologist providing support to this group that ACT seems to bring benefit. This will be one of the first studies that begins to empirically explore the benefits of ACT for this group of patients.’ ER

the psychologist april 2018 news

5 minutes with…

Daniel Freeman Professor Daniel Freeman (University of Oxford) has worked for 15 years researching the use of virtual reality (VR) in helping people experiencing psychosis. He and his research team were the first winners of the National Institute for Health Research i4i Mental Health Challenge Award – which challenged researchers, academics and small and medium enterprises, to come up with innovative technologically-based ideas for improving patient care and outcomes in mental health. The £4 million of funding will be used to build on Freeman’s work in this area developing the VR treatment, which involves graded virtual exposure to fearful situations, a clinical trial, and the eventual roll-out of the treatment across the NHS if successful.

Why is virtual reality a useful tool in psychological treatments?

VR has extraordinary potential to help people overcome mental health problems. Difficulties interacting in the world are at the heart of mental health issues. Individuals with severe mental health problems all too often withdraw from the world because of anxiety, triggered by paranoia, voices, or a lack of self-confidence.

With virtual reality, individuals can repeatedly experience the feared situations and learn to overcome them. VR goes right to the heart of the central mechanism of change in therapy. The beauty of VR is that individuals know that a computer environment is not real but their minds and bodies behave as if it is real; hence, people will much more easily face difficult situations in VR than in real life and be able to try out new therapeutic strategies.

This learning then transfers to the real world.

How have advances in virtual reality changed the way it’s now used in psychology?

I’ve been working on VR for psychosis for over 15 years but am still struck by how the technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, thanks to investment by major companies. We can now really make therapeutic use of the technology in ways that were not possible before. One of the most innovative features

of our VR is our virtual therapist. A friendly computergenerated avatar, voiced by a real person, carefully guides the patient through the therapeutic work, helping them practise techniques to overcome their difficulties.

In effect, the treatment is automated. This makes it potentially possible to dramatically increase access to the best evidence-based psychological interventions.

But virtual reality is not a remedy in itself. It is a tool that has to be used correctly. The content of the VR matters hugely. VR is extremely powerful when the content is right. Get the content wrong and VR is ineffective and underwhelming. To separate the wheat from the chaff, it is crucial that each VR treatment is tested in a rigorous clinical trial.

Tell me about the rationale behind this project and your next steps.

My clinical research group has provided the first evidence that VR can help treat the problems of patients with psychosis. We have helped patients, using VR, to make the learning that the world is safer for them than they feared.

This work has been recognised with the Mental Health Challenge Award. This landmark award has allowed us to assemble an amazing team, bringing together patients, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, designers, computer scientists, healthcare experts, statisticians, health economists.

Our project comprises three main stages. First is the design and development of the VR treatment, building on the work we’ve done over many years. Our aim is a treatment that’s easy to use, engaging, and right for patient needs. Stage two is a large multi-centre clinical trial in NHS trusts across the country to demonstrate the benefits of the VR treatment. The third part of the project will see us develop a roadmap to roll out the treatment across the NHS. Our goal is clear – to combine the very best psychological science with cutting-edge technology. By doing so, we believe we can help many more individuals with mental health problems to lead the lives they wish to lead. ER

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Support for refugees and asylum seekers

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The guidelines explore some of the specific factors The world is currently witnessing higher levels of that psychologists should consider while working with displacement than ever before; 65.6 million people have people who have fled their home countries. The authors been forced from their home countries and among them point out that asylum seekers may assume practitioners are 22.5 million refugees more than half of whom are are familiar with the politics and the human rights under 18. New guidelines from the British Psychological record of their country of origin, which Society point to a vital role for may mean that they do not immediately psychologists in supporting refugees disclose their experiences of human and asylum seekers. rights abuses, including torture, and Produced by the society’s psychologists may need to ask about Presidential Taskforce on Refugees and Guidelines for psychologists working with this. People who have been forced to Asylum Seekers, chaired by Professor refugees and asylum seekers in the UK: Extended version leave their homes encounter multiple Bill Yule (King’s College London), the losses, of home, culture, family, their guidelines offer advice on supporting professions, language, friends and different client groups such as adults, their plans for the future. Inevitably families and children, young people many people in this situation will have and unaccompanied minors. There is experienced trauma. also guidance on working in the wider Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, community and in settings such as the a former President of the Society who workplace and nurseries, schools and set up the taskforce, an expert group colleges. The practicalities of working that included academic and practitioner with interpreters are discussed too.

February 2018 clinical, community, counselling, Yule said that asylum seekers had educational and occupational shown great fortitude in fleeing to the psychologists, said: ‘As a discipline and a profession, UK: ‘They bring many skills and experiences with them. psychology has a wealth of knowledge, experience and But they may not always be familiar with the way things talent to apply in this area to help improve the lives of are done in their new country. Many individuals and those who have fled their countries and are seeking organisations have offered to help them settle, but while safety. Psychological evidence and practice can help to many local communities show support, some others may equip individuals, organisations and communities with show a lack of interest or worse. Asylum seekers may the knowledge, skills and understanding that they need in experience a lot of stresses such as homelessness, social order to help them navigate challenging experiences in a exclusion, stereotyping and overt discrimination. The psychological impact of this realisation can be significant.’ complex world.’ ER

the psychologist april 2018 news

Fear of death and belief in the self that persists over time, with the monastic Buddhists again showing the least belief in the self.

Would the monastic Buddhists’ scepticism about the self have a bearing on their fear of death? More than the other groups, they said that they used the no-self doctrine to cope with the prospect of death, as the Buddhists scholars said they ought to do.

Yet, when the researchers surveyed their participants about their fear of death and especially Getty Images

Imagining ourselves as no longer existing is, for most of us, terrifying.

Buddhism may offer some reassurance. A central tenet of the religion is that all is impermanent and the self is actually an illusion.

If there is no self, then why fear the end of the self?

To find out if the logic of the Buddhist perspective eliminates existential fear, Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of monastic Tibetan Buddhists (monksin-training) in exile in India, as well as lay Tibetans, Tibetan Buddhists from Bhutan, Indian Hindus and American Christians and atheists.

To their astonishment, the researchers report in Cognitive Science that fear of the annihilation of the self was most intense among the monastic Buddhists, and that the monastic Buddhists were less willing than any of the other groups to sacrifice years of their own life for a stranger.

The US participants were recruited online, whereas the monastic Tibetan Buddhists and other groups were given paper surveys to complete, translated by fluent bilinguals into the appropriate language. The hundreds of monastic Tibetan Buddhists who took part were from monasteries in Byalkuppe and Mundhod in India.

The researchers also surveyed 30 Buddhist scholars about how devoted Buddhists ought to answer the different survey questions.

Two of the surveys addressed the permanence of the self. As expected, the monastic Buddhists showed the least belief in the continuity of the self – they thought they would be different in personality, beliefs, ambitions and other characteristics in the future. In contrast, the Americans, whether religious or not, showed the strongest belief in the continuity of the self (the other groups, including everyday, non-devout Tibetans, scored midway between these two extremes).

Similar patterns emerged for beliefs about the existence of a ‘core self’

their fear of self-annihilation (gauged by agreement or not with items like ‘Dying one year from now frightens me because of the loss and destruction of the self/destruction of my personality’), to the researchers’ surprise they found that this fear was most intense among the monastic Buddhists. This was opposite to how they ought to have responded according to the Buddhist scholars.

Note, the Buddhists believed just as strongly in an after-life (though not, of course, for their current ‘self’), so this could not explain their more intense fear compared with the other groups.

Next, the researchers surveyed more participants from the same groups about how much they would be willing to sacrifice years of their own life to extend the life of another person (for instance, in the most extreme version of the thought experiment, they were asked to imagine they could take a pill to extend their own life by six months or

give the pill to a stranger, similar to them, for whom the pill would add an additional five years to their life). The monastic Buddhists were the least willing to make this kind of sacrifice – in fact, over 72 per cent preferred to keep the pill for themselves in the above scenario, compared with 31.2 per cent of non-religious Americans.

Writing on Twitter, co-author Nina Strohminger at the University of Pennsylvania said that these findings were ‘probably the most bizarre and unexpected of her career’.

The researchers believe the paradox they have uncovered, between the Buddhists’ explicit beliefs and their fears, may be explicable by the fact that, despite their training and explicit claims, the monastic Buddhists still have a powerful sense of a continuous identity that stretches from the past and into the future. It is not easy to defy the illusion of the self even if you are taught to do so. This would seem to be borne out by notable Buddhist autobiographies that betray a keen experience of a continuous self. At the same time, Buddhists may succeed well in truly believing that the self ends at death (unlike other religious groups that preach that the soul is eternal), and this could account for the Buddhists’ exaggerated fear of self-annihilation at death.

One caveat to the findings highlighted by the researchers is that, although their monastic Buddhist participants meditated every day, none of them were highly experienced, long-term meditators with many years of practice.

Meditation is seen as one way to eliminate belief in a permanent self, so it will be interesting to repeat the research, not only with other Buddhist denominations, but specifically with highly experienced, expert Buddhist meditators, to see if they too would fear self-annihilation.

Dr Christian Jarrett for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ycwkymwx

‘She’s afflicted by these memories… they flood her’ What’s it like to never forget? Jack Dutton investigates ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’ People with highly superior autobiographical memory can remember vast spans of their lives, often from an early age. How rare is this condition, what are the causes, and is it a blessing or a burden?

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Rebecca Sharrock is a big fan of Harry Potter, having read the books several times and memorised them word for word. She also contributed to our Research Digest ‘Super week’ in 2013: see tinyurl.com/supersharrock

N

ot many people can remember their first birthday, but Rebecca Sharrock has no trouble recalling hers in vivid detail. Her present was a Minnie Mouse toy, coloured bright red and white with pink bows on it. She didn’t like its smile.

‘It had a distinctive comical face,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t verbalise it at that age but the toy terrified me. Its face and all the bright colours scared me, so I’d push it away and cry whenever it was shown to me.

Whenever it was in my cot I’d just throw it out.’

That day after breakfast, Sharrock recalls her mum putting her in an itchy satin dress before her birthday celebrations, which were held in her family garden in Queensland, Australia. She clearly remembers her homemade birthday cake and also, unfortunately, putting her finger in the candle.

Her birthday isn’t the only very early memory Sharrock recalls. In fact she can remember what was happening on every date since 1 January 2004, when she got her first calendar. What was she doing on 23 May 2006? ’It was a few weeks since the Tanzanian miners had been rescued. They had gone over to America and gone on Good Morning America and talked to Diane Sawyer, and it was Todd Russell and Brant Webb; they were the ones rescued. But they were actually rescued from the mine on the 9th of May, which was two weeks before. All our media was focused on them at that time, on the 23rd.’

It was a Tuesday, which was Sharrock’s least favourite day at school. ‘I had art, which I liked doing, but I didn’t like my teacher that much and the classes were an hour and half long. I had Art, History and English that day. Whenever I went to bed on a Monday night, I’d dread waking up the next day.’

It wasn’t until she was 21 – on 23 January 2011 – that Sharrock realised she had a rare condition. Her parents were watching a TV programme that had a group of six people who had been identified by the University of California, Irvine (UCI) as people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).

Reporters were talking about the participants’

the psychologist april 2018 feature

recollections and commenting on how amazing it was, which initially confused Sharrock. She saw that kind of recall as ‘normal’.

Sharrock’s parents then sent UCI an email and a fortnight later, they got a reply from the university, saying they were willing to test Sharrock to see if she had the right kind of memory for their study. She did.

Discovering HSAM People with HSAM are able to instantly able to recall an unusually large amount of their past, often from a very early age. It is a condition that has only been diagnosed with 60 people in world, but some psychologists believe it is more common than we might think.

The first identified case of HSAM was Jill Price.

In 2000 she emailed Dr James McGaugh at UCI saying she had a problem with her memory. She had been remembering every day of her life since she was 14, on Monday 24 August 1981, when she began keeping diaries (Parker et al., 2006).

Although McGaugh is mainly retired now, Dr Michael Yassa, Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UCI, is following in his footsteps and researching HSAM. Yassa and Dr Craig Stark have been working with groups studying identical twins with HSAM, as well as adult participants. Yassa believes that the condition is not as rare as the numbers imply. ‘I think frequency and the prevalence is much higher than we can appreciate by just looking at those numbers. There’s a major selection bias as you can imagine – the people that are reaching out are people that have found out that this may be something special.’

Yassa says it is likely there are many people with HSAM that see it as everyday cognition and because of this haven’t come forward. ‘If we had access to people’s biographic memories in very, very large cohort studies with thousands of people, I could probably give you a much better estimate as to how frequent it is,’ he says.

Professor Michael Anderson, senior scientist and programme leader at the Neuroscience faculty at Cambridge University, whose work specialises in memory control, says: ‘It’s only something that’s came on our radar since Jim McGaugh’s paper and the

Sharrock recalls her mum putting her in an itchy satin dress before her birthday celebrations, which were held in her family garden in Queensland, Australia.

She clearly remembers her homemade birthday cake and also, unfortunately, putting her finger in the candle.

emergence of Jill Price… as a consequence, we don’t have any real sense of what the actual frequency is.

The number 60 is the number of people who have been successfully identified and that have come out of woodwork on their own.’

Nature or nurture?

There are two main schools of thought regarding the cause of HSAM. Psychologists like McGaugh, Stark and Yassa believe individuals with the condition have different neural makeup to people with normal

memory. Yassa deems HSAM ‘a big caveat’ for the understanding of memory and anticipates new chapters in textbooks being written on it.

But there are other psychologists who believe that people with HSAM weren’t born with biological differences. Instead, they believe it is derivative of other behaviours, such as having an obsessive compulsion to remember dates. A representative of this school of thought is Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson.

Ericsson, who focuses on the psychology of expertise, conducted famous studies on memory in the 1980s, one in which he trained a man (named SF) with an average memory to report back as high as 80 digits in a row presented one digit at a time (Chase & Ericsson, 1982). Such studies suggest that people with HSAM have learnt techniques to recite vast quantities of information from when they were young by habit, rather than being born with biological differences that then lead to superior memory.

Although Michael Anderson leans to the McGaugh side, he believes that HSAM hasn’t been studied in enough detail to fully ascertain which point of view is correct. ‘People with HSAM tend to rehearse their memories a lot. Jill Price kept a meticulous collection of diaries, recording everything that happened to her every day of her life. You think that if you write things down, you’re going to think about it in detail and Key sources remember it better. Maybe she’s not extraordinary; maybe she just Chase, W.G. & Ericsson, K.A. (1982). developed ways of remembering Skill and working memory. In G.H. these things, like the examples in Bower (Ed.) The psychology of learning Ericsson’s studies.” and motivation (pp.1–58). New York: Academic Press.

However, Anderson says there Hyman, B.T., Van Hoesen, G.W., are many behavioural indications Damasio, A.R. & Barnes, C.L. (1984). that suggest that the answer is Alzheimer’s disease: Cell-specific more complicated than that. pathology isolates the hippocampal ‘What happens with Jill is that formation. Science, 225(4667), she’s afflicted by these memories.

1168–1170.

LePort, A.K., Mattfeld, A.T., DickinsonShe walks around in her daily Anson, H. et al. (2012). Behavioral and life and whenever she looks at a neuroanatomical investigation of highly tree, she gets ten memories about superior autobiographical memory a tree. She’s not surfing through (HSAM). Neurobiology of Learning and her organisational network trying Memory, 98(1), 78–92. to remember things that she’s LePort, A.K.R., Stark, S.M., McGaugh, J.L. & Stark, C.E. (2016). Highly superior intentionally memorised. They flood autobiographical memory: Quality her, and she seems to do this with and quantity of retention over time. very little effort.’

Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/ fpsyg.2015.02017 Parker, E.S., Cahill, L. & McGaugh, J.L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical remembering.

Neurocase, 12(1), 35–49.

Patihis, L., Frenda, S.J., LePort, A.K.R. et al. (2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(52), 20947–20952.

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Professor Lawrence Patihis, at the University of South Mississippi, is another person more convinced

by McGaugh’s theory. Patihis’s research has look into the relationship between HSAM and other individual differences, including emotion and sleep quantity.

‘What I think you need to develop HSAM is a healthy brain with perhaps good genetics for memory structures, an obsession or passion with remembering autobiographical events, a motivation to link dates to events and recall previous dates on a frequent basis,’ he says. ‘You also need a good imagination and to be easily absorbed into current and past events, and years and years of practice and repetition.’

Patihis believes that people who train to remember vast quantities of information will not be able to sustain it long-term without three stable personality traits: being mildly obsessive of life events and dates, being highly imaginative and being highly absorptive.

‘For others, if you keep up practising HSAM for a few weeks here and there, you will not develop memories connected to every date for a period of 20 or 30 years.

It takes stable personality tendencies to keep it going daily for decades.’

Although it’s an area of interest, Yassa doubts you can teach HSAM to individuals with normal memory.

‘You probably can get people to be much more mindful and able to remember details of everyday life, but the individuals we’ve tested are truly off the charts.

I really struggle to see that if we train someone for a year or two, how we would be able to get someone to [remember to] that extent.’

Despite having exceptional memory for life events, people with HSAM don’t have perfect memories.

Sharrock calls her photographic memory ‘terrible’, often performing poorly in some of the photographic memory tests at UCI. Although compared with her long-term memory it is not as strong, Sharrock’s shortterm memory is still quite high: in a memory test for which controls typically get around 50 per cent, she scored 90 per cent.

Some studies suggest people with HSAM are able to forget short-term memories (LePort et al., 2016) and create false memories (Patihis et al., 2013). ‘People with HSAM forget over a 24-hour period just as much as you or I would,’ says Yassa. ‘The difference is that after 24 hours have passed, they are likely to continue to remember for a good long time, whereas you or I just precipitously decline.’

Neurobasis and comorbidities Sharrock’s favourite aspect of her condition is that it gives her the chance to contribute to research. By studying people with HSAM and SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory, the opposite of

the psychologist april 2018 feature

HSAM in fiction Although highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) is a relatively little-known condition, there have been a number of instances where it has appeared in fiction, whether that’s in books, films or television shows.

One notable example is in the US TV series House, in an episode called ‘You Must Remember This’, which tells the story of a waitress with HSAM. The waitress is able to remember a woman who had come to her café before and recall precise details about her, including what colour her hair was and what dish she ordered when she previously came in. HSAM also heavily features in the aptly titled Unforgettable, a TV series about a detective who is able to remember in a way someone with HSAM can. Despite its title suggesting otherwise, Unforgettable does concede that HSAM memory isn’t flawless – it poses problems for the lead character Carrie Wells when she is not able to remember what happened on the day her sister was murdered.

There’s also an example of HSAM in film. In the 2014 movie The Dark Place the story’s protagonist, Keegan Dark,

often sees memories as screens in the air. The flashbacks are often distressing and intense. Despite its original content, the film wasn’t well received, scoring a measly 4.6 out of 10 on online movie database IMDb. A short story written over 70 years before The Dark Place portrays someone

HSAM), neuroscientists may be able to find cures for memory loss in diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

Most of a person’s memories are storied in the hippocampus region of the brain. In Alzheimer’s, damage to the hippocampus affects a person’s shortterm memory and their sense of direction (Hyman et al., 1984). Yassa says his team has found a slight enlargement in certain brain regions of people with HSAM compared with controls, including the medial temporal lobes (associated episodic memory) and caudate nucleus (associated with habit formation).

However, Yassa says that people with HSAM do not seem to be struggling in a clinical or psychiatric sense, although ‘the overwhelming majority to this point’ have expressed symptoms of obsessions and compulsions (LePort et al., 2012). ‘It’s possibly associated with the HSAM phenomenon itself; it’s possible that the HSAM is part of an obsessive compulsive syndrome, but certainly you don’t see everyone with obsessive-compulsive disorder having HSAM – that would be oversimplifying it, I think.

Although HSAM isn’t a clinical condition, I believe OCD may be a comorbidity – it tends to happen with it and quite often, but may have a distinguishable neurobasis.’

with HSAM-like characteristics. In 1942 Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote ‘Funes the Memorious’, a short story about Ireneo Funes, a boy who was able to remember anything. Although some of Funes’ symptoms weren’t typical of HSAM, such as always able to tell the correct time without looking at a clock, many of them were. Borges says Funes was able to know ‘by heart the forms of southern clouds at dawn on the 30 April 1882’ and could compare them in his memory ‘with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising’. However, the author sees Funes’ remarkable memory as something that limits him from thinking, as ‘to think is to forget differences, generalise, make abstractions’. Borges says that in Funes’ world, ‘there were only details, almost immediate in their presence’. Unlike many people with HSAM, the tale says that Funes was not born with an incredible memory: instead he acquired it after falling off his horse and receiving a serious head injury.

Anderson agrees, believing that people with HSAM process their memories in different ways to the average person. ‘What we know is that they tend to reflect on their memories a lot more; they’re much more obsessive about rethinking about and reviewing their memories.’

No one in else in Sharrock’s family has been identified with HSAM, but her mother and her sister have really strong memory for past conversations. Sharrock’s mother often brings up conversations she had with her friends over 20 years ago. Sharrock also has relatives on both sides of the family with autism. Yassa adds that more HSAM participants are coming to the UCI labs with autism than there was initially, suggesting there could be a link between the two conditions. ‘I think that could be another comorbidity but the association between either OCD or autism and HSAM still needs to be clarified quite a bit.’

A blessing or a burden?

The majority of Yassa’s participants think that having HSAM is a blessing that helps with everyday social interaction. According to Yassa, many of them are successful in people-based jobs such as media and communications.

The condition helps Sharrock memorise scripts for

public talks, so she has a backup if she gets tonguetied. HSAM also helps her write and memorise books she reads. Sharrock is a big fan of Harry Potter, having read the books several times and memorised them word for word.

Now nearly 28 and having been aware of her condition for seven years, Sharrock has been writing her own book, called My Life Is a Puzzle, which is written like an autobiography. It has been in the works for six months, and Sharrock is now writing up the 17th year of her life. ‘Every year of life I’ve had a lot of memories. And since a lot of people are really interested in how I thought as a newborn child, I’ve added to that chapter,’ she says.

As she writes, Sharrock experiences the emotions she felt at the time, meaning she finds it difficult to write about the negative memories, which she often finds hard to suppress. ‘I call them intrusive memories – when I get a memory of a bad experience and it just intrudes on what’s supposed to be happy. Whenever I relive a bad experience, these same emotions come back and I re-experience. My conscious reasoning is like an adult, but my emotions are however old I was at the time of that memory. So, if I was depressed when I was a young child, I’d relive it with it with the same emotion as I did back then. It makes me confused and anxious because my mind is still like an adult’s.’

Often the intrusive memories stop Sharrock sleeping. ‘Whenever I’m in the dark in silence, all of a sudden, all of these memories involuntarily come through in flashes and it keeps me awake. I have to go to sleep by being stimulated. I’ve got to have at least a bit of light on and noise such as the radio or television to distract my mind from those memories.’

Sharrock often finds it difficult to make plans in the future, but has got better at it by learning specific techniques that work for her. ‘It’s really hard for me, because I’m more connected to my past than my future. Whenever I plan ahead, I have to base my future on my past.’

Future research Yassa is working on several projects, including a distinct population of HSAM adults that have been tracked at UCI since 2006. The university is also working with children with HSAM and their parents.

‘We’re trying to identify the extent we can emulate their highly superior autobiographical memory in the laboratory, as opposed to just relying on their own testimonies from their past histories. We’re also trying to understand the neurobasis, certainly expanding Jack Dutton is a freelance writer jackdutton22@ gmail.com 32

Sharrock: ‘Whenever I relive a bad experience, these same emotions come back and I re-experience’

our sample size and looking at the developmental trajectories in children.’

Yassa hopes that in the next couple of years, he’ll be able to get large-scale funding to do an HSAM study on not just hundreds, but thousands of individuals. This way he can avoid selection bias by actually contacting the HSAM participants himself, allowing him and his colleagues to do a massive screening of people.

He’s also looking to create an animal model of the ability in order to closely examine differences in neurotransmitters between HSAM individuals and controls. ‘Understanding the fundamental biology of these individuals will allow us to have informed translational approaches to a lot of clinical disorders, including autism, OCD, dementing illnesses and other diseases that have to do with memory loss,’ says Yassa.

If there is a neurochemical process or a protein expression that is found to be rampant in HSAM individuals, it can give the UCI targets to manipulate with therapeutics to help treat conditions such a dementia.

Yassa adds: ‘The implications are really limitless, but the emphasis for us is to be able to understand the fundamental biology of those individuals. That will really be the first key step before we can start applying it to disease.’

the psychologist april 2018 feature

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 2018 conference programme is available to view online. Our conference programme is subject to change at any point before or during the conference itself.

‘Previous BPS Annual conferences have been a great opportunity to catch up on recent developments across the breadth of psychology. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing good examples of open science and reproducibility from Professor Brian Nosek.’

Professor Cathy Creswell, 2018 Keynote Speaker

Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf.

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

www.bps.org.uk/ac2018

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Psychologists and the media – opportunities and challenges We hear from psychologists and journalists, with practical tips based on their experiences

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the psychologist april 2018 media

‘One of us, somewhere, will spark the most unlikely interest’ Sophie Scott on the many benefits of popularising science Are scientists who do a lot of public engagement work less good scientists? This seems to have been the view of the scientific community in the past – Carl Sagan was famously blackballed by the American Academy of Sciences, despite having a strong publication record, and this was widely believed to have its roots in his enthusiastic promotion of science in popular media.

Nowadays of course, we are all encouraged to engage in many kinds of public engagement activities, not least by funding bodies and universities. But it seems that the scientific community still views the scientists who appear in the wider media as less good scientists, according to a review by the Royal Society in 2008. Interestingly, the evidence is that academics with popular publications also had higher levels of academic publications (see, for example, Peter Bentley and Svein Kyvik’s 2010 survey of academic staff and public communication). As bestselling science writer and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde has pointed out, maybe productive writers are productive in all fields, and, as I teach my students, getting better at writing benefits all writing activities.

In fact, there is also evidence that the scientific community is OK with scientists doing public engagement work, as long as the science is sound, and the person is high profile (such that this is part of their job) and not proactive in contacting the media.

In other words, it looks like we’re OK with scientists getting involved with wider communication of science as long as they look like they don’t really want to do this but are absolutely forced to. Heaven forfend that you might want to.

Obviously my view on this topic is wildly biased as I like science communication and public engagement work and I do as much of it as I feasibly can – from writing book reviews to public lectures, from Science Fairs to the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. And I do this while maintaining a strong profile of academic research. I do it because I like it, it’s extremely rewarding, because I get to introduce my

students and colleagues to the field, because it’s made me better at writing and better at giving talks, and because it has expanded and enriched my scientific research. I can think of at least four different strands of my research that have been primarily driven by contacts made through public engagement activities – for example, my work on voice and voice production has all its roots in a public lecture I did with Duncan Wisbey, a professional impressionist.

The big change came for me in 2008 when social media made it possible to engage in a lot more selfpromotion of both science and science communication – one could write a blog or make a short video on YouTube and promote it on Facebook and Twitter, and if that got picked up through the media, great, but you could still assess the impact within the social media networks. Social media is overall a mixed experience, but it’s ideal for (the much loathed) self-promotion.

And it can lead to many other opportunities – I was suggested for a TED talk at the main 2015 TED meeting by someone I only know through Twitter.

And the TED talk was used by the Royal Institution as an audition reel for the BBC when they were suggesting me for last year’s Christmas Lectures.

(Have I mentioned that I did these? I feel like I should again, just in case anyone missed it.)

When I was a kid, watching Carl Sagan give his Christmas Lectures on the planets and the Voyager spacecraft was the first time I ever thought that I wanted to be a scientist – I was absolutely hooked.

And for me, that’s the bottom line for science communication – we should encourage everyone to do it, because you never know who you are going to engage (I’m sure Carl Sagan wasn’t looking to inspire psychologists). The wider the variety of us getting involved, the greater the chance is that one of us, somewhere, will spark the most unlikely interest, maybe on someone who had no idea they wanted to know more about science. And all of science needs that.

A fork in the road Aleks Krotoski on being a broadcaster and psychologist As I was finishing my PhD, my dad offered some words of advice. He was a multi-degreed lifelong research scientist who had tried to dissuade me from going into the same profession. As I’d ignored that, this was probably his last-ditch effort. ‘Don’t tell them about your media career,’ he said. ‘It will count against you.’

Now, I thought he was being overly critical, and perhaps a little touchy too. Still, I listened to the extent that I didn’t broadcast that I’d worked in television

before returning to academia. This being the age of Google, it backfired occasionally when a colleague would, for whatever reason, search for my name. And when I was asked what I was doing after submitting my dissertation, I didn’t hide that I was going off to interview many of the same people I referenced in my thesis for a BBC 2 documentary series, but I wasn’t forthcoming with the information either. I still got the degree. But he was, in a way, right.

Sophie Scott is Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience sophie.scott@ ucl.ac.uk

I am no longer in academia. Instead, I’m in media. Out loud I use the loose term ‘journalist’, but in my head I have lofty ideas that I’m involved in communicating important social psychological science. Really, I’m a journalist. The truth is that I’m more welcome in the journalism field – with its broad, sweeping generalisation and tight turnarounds – than I am in academia – which exists to unpick those generalisations at a much slower pace.

It’s been a hard thing to admit to myself. The sticky tendrils of the academic identity that I’d reified during the intensive training of the higher degree didn’t come unstuck for years after I’d finished, despite the fact that I was making my money outside the Ivory Tower.

I was grateful to the institutions that incorporated me into their visiting programmes, but I knew they weren’t interested in my analytic chops. My media profile gave good Impact. It was a transaction both ways.

I have now been outside academia for too long to return to a department. And just as my studies changed how I wrote for the general public, I’m too far gone the other way to write a research paper. But my university background does turn up as I write the stories we tell in BBC Radio 4’s The Digital Human; my producers know that scripting sessions will last hours as I put them through viva-level enquiries about every narrative decision, every case study, and the lack of psychology theories in the story. But they also do a good job of keeping me comprehensible too.

I make my own programmes and podcasts about psychology, but find the self-directedness of the

Dr Aleks Krotoski is presenter of The Digital Human on BBC Radio 4 aleks@alekskrotoski.com

projects much more like solitary academic research.

And that comes with the same hangups. Because I am trying to explicitly communicate science, I get too close to a theory or a study to actually make it digestible by Anyone Else. I have to pass it by disinterested people to lighten the tone before I push publish. Yes, knowing too much in the media is not always a good thing. They too are a little scornful of the other side.

Although my academic credentials do make me more interesting as a writer to editors, I honestly can’t say that my journalism has made me more attractive as a researcher to academia. Although some are able to balance both worlds, for me there was a fork in the road. I took my dad’s advice. I’ve kept them separate.

‘You have to ask why you want to do it’ Funke Baffour on the importance of a wider platform

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My very first ‘live’ experience was in 2006 when I went onto the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. I had signed up to the British Psychological Society media database, where I got most of my media work, and they got a call asking me to do some IQ analysis on his radio show. Then a few weeks later I was asked to do Big Brother with Dermot O’Leary, and that was my first experience being on live TV. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed giving out information to so many people and it gave me a nice buzz.

There were a couple of situations where I was asked to do things which didn’t quite fit in with my professional identity and how I wanted to be portrayed as a clinical psychologist. On one occasion a TV programme I was on said, Dr Funke Baffour is a Chartered Psychologist ‘OK, when the music comes on I want you to do contact@drfunke.co.uk a funky dance’: I had to be quite clear in saying no; I know my name’s Funke, and I like having fun, but I was there to give my expert views and represent my profession.

The media is a cut-throat business – you can be the flavour of the month when they want information from

you, they know how to make you feel special; but once they get that information, that’s it! You have to ask why you want to do it. For me it was about having that wider platform to talk about what I do and help the public have a better understanding of mental health issues and empower them to help themselves.

I don’t think working with the media trivialises the subject. Psychology is not supposed to be behind closed doors at academic conferences, we should throw it open and invite people to understand it. Get out there and do it. Do the BPS media training (it’s an eye-opener), and join the media database. Get a mentor, someone who has been through it. Don’t just comment on anything. If you’re going on live TV do some role-play beforehand, speak slowly and make sure you have three points you’d like to get across and stick to them… never waffle!

But remember that you’ll never know everything.

Don’t feel like you need to. If you’re appearing in the media as an expert remember the media are on your side when they call you – don’t feel like they’re out to stitch you up or make you look silly.

the psychologist april 2018 media

Three cautions David Pilgrim on the compromises involved in media work It is not self-evident that taking every opportunity to put Psychology (big P) into the public domain, via the mainstream mass media, is a good thing. Every solution about an old problem, in this case hiding the discipline’s light under a bushel or in the Ivory Tower, brings new problems. Reflecting on why my heart sinks when I see it all going wrong, three points come to mind.

First, lay audiences like simplicity and the mass media (even the broadsheets and the serious parts of the BBC) pander to this by offering reductionist headlines. Medics have to suffer being asked about the cause of cancer and we have similar crosses to bear.

Whether it is putative concepts like the male brain or the psychopath in your workplace, the journalist will want to know the main ‘story’ in headline form. Not only will they not be too interested in pre-empirical considerations and conceptual controversies or doubts from ambiguous data, they may not grasp them at all. Journalists have a job to get their facts right, but psychological findings and debates are not like reporting the details of a road traffic accident or opening a village fete… a partial story may well suffice, provided that it is entertaining.

As a discipline, psychology contains traditional positivists, postmodernists defying them and critical realists (like me) in between and attacking both sides for different reasons. My sense is that the first of these is the safest place to speak from, when journalists make an approach, and this will then create a narrow conservative, ‘disinterested’, empiricist image of the discipline. That impression will be comforting for many, but it leaves some of us feeling unrepresented.

In the very first editorial of the British Journal of Psychology in 1904, Ward and Rivers set out the stall for positivism and psychology as a distinct empirical science, scorning and leaving behind philosophical

speculation. They set out the stall about ‘the facts’ produced now by this ‘distinct science’. Over a century later, we have come a long way and the discipline remains both variegated and at times fragmented, but maybe the narrow 1904 version is what is most comfortable when working with the mass media.

David Pilgrim is My second wince point, in the wake of Chair of the History any such approach from journalists, is that the and Philosophy of outcome invariably will be under their control, Psychology Section not the psychologist’s. Talk to any colleague about of the Society, and their frustrations when trying to get complexity a Professor at and contention over in good faith to journalists. the University of Even when the psychological expert is drawn on, Southampton at length, in the background as a consultant or D.Pilgrim@soton.ac.uk foregrounded as an interviewee, they will then look on as an edited product misses out caveats offered or even a major caution expressed.

My third concern is a wider ethical one about media psychologists tempted by celebrity status. The usual considerations about humility (being careful to only speak about your particular area of expertise) seem to get blown away, when the mass media discover a socially skilled and telegenic expert. This can lead to people who may have once only offered opinions about their research or form of professional practice, now being seduced into being expert about any and every matter psychological. A cultural pincer movement of celebrity-seeking and consumerism has amplified the risk of this seduction.

None of the above three cautions imply that we should avoid journalists like the plague.

They do remind us, though, that any contact with them might lead to compromises about our honesty, our complexity and even our ethical practice.

It may sometimes be worth paying the price of these compromise formations – but not always.

‘Opting out is not the answer’ Essi Viding has mixed feelings based on past experiences

Essi Viding is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London e.viding@ucl. ac.uk

Engaging with the media seems like a double-edged sword. You feel a responsibility to communicate your findings to the taxpayer who funds your work and stakeholders whose lives may be impacted by your research or your expert opinion; but you’re also terrified your contribution will come across ‘all wrong’.

In my experience, different media outlets vary widely in the extent to which they have a pre-fixed story in mind (for which they are looking for soundbites), how well they do their ‘homework’, which audience they hope to reach, how many words or how much air/screen time they can use, etc. These are all

factors that can enormously impact how you come across when you engage with the media. I have been both bitterly disappointed (and angry), as well as pleasantly surprised after engaging with the media.

There have been times when I have seriously thought about opting out of media engagement altogether, as I have worried about the risk of irresponsible and inappropriate reporting outweighing the possible ethical obligations to engage with the public. Experienced senior colleagues have, however, convinced me that opting out is not the answer. If legitimate researchers and practitioners do not engage

with the media, the floor is left for charlatans to bask in the media limelight and put forward potentially harmful views.

Despite, on balance, considering engagement with media to be important, I also regularly worry about how my contribution will be perceived by my colleagues or whether it will end up resulting in more harm than good. This worry is not entirely unfounded, as typically there is little or no control over what gets written or aired. In my experience, what someone contributes to an article/radio/TV programme and what ends up in the final product are often very different things. For example, I recently met with documentary makers on three different occasions, for several hours at a time, and spent a whole day filming with them.

This engagement resulted in a few minutes of faceto-face interview footage in a TV programme. I was reasonably pleased with what made the cut, but several important and nuanced points that are dear to me did not get aired. When I hear critical comments about colleagues’ media engagement, I often wonder whether the critics consider that (a) their colleague’s aired contribution is extremely unlikely to reflect the totality of their input, (b) their colleague is likely to have very little control over how their research/views are reported, and (c) as a rule articles and programmes are not prepared for an audience of psychology experts

and inevitably nuance will be lost in the process.

In my dealings with the media, I have found the following considerations useful: • Practise clear communication: media training is very helpful.

• Do not sensationalise: write clear and responsible press releases.

• Cultivate relationships with trusted and responsible media entities.

• Ask who else is contributing to a piece and try to get a sense of whether the journalist/director is after a particular angle, or whether they are truly looking for expert input.

Of course we now have various social media channels that offer an opportunity to engage with the public in a way that affords more control. I think that as a result we have seen some superb communication about psychology (including by the official British Psychological Society channels) that has really improved the reach of the discipline. I don’t find that this type of engagement comes naturally to me, nor can I imagine finding the time between all the work and family commitments. But I hugely admire colleagues who undertake this form of public engagement and I regularly enjoy reading and watching their contributions.

Make yourselves available A science journalist’s view from Tom Chivers

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all you have time to do is rewrite the press release, Journalism and academia work on utterly different using the sexiest line you can find in it for timescales. For me as a science journalist, that’s a the headline. fact I’ve had to get used to. I’ll phone a psychologist This is partly why psychology, and science in for a comment on a study that that’s out in Nature general, is often badly represented tomorrow, and they’ll ask if it’s OK to in the media. It’s not the only or get back to me in a week’s time, when even the main reason – the main I need to file the piece within the hour. reasons are: (1) that the incremental, I’m like a mayfly trying to understand provisional nature of science is continental drift. hard for non-scientists, such as From a selfish point of view, it reporters, editors and readers, to makes my job harder, because I have understand, and (2) that people read to frantically ring or email a dozen scaremongering and sensationalism, scientists to get a quick comment so it’s easier to get clicks out of them (often, they get back to me the than by doing careful, well-researched, following month, long after the piece caveated work, and the media is forgotten, and ask if I still need responds to incentives like anyone anything). But more importantly, else. it interferes with the public’s But it’s the problem that scientists understanding of science.

Tom Chivers is a freelancer can do the most to fix. By making I’ve been lucky with my employers, chiversthomas@gmail.com yourself available to speak to reporters so I’ve usually had time to phone those at short notice – especially when you dozen scientists. But as the media have a paper out yourself! – you can do your best to industry withers, there are fewer and fewer journalists add the caveats and on-the-other-hands that otherwise still trying to fill the same space. A science journalist get missed. It won’t fix everything, but it might be can be expected to file five stories a day. If you make a start. time to phone a scientist and they’re unavailable, then

the psychologist april 2018 media

‘I have learnt to be much kinder to myself’ Hamira Riaz on appearance issues A passionate lepidopterist, a grapheme–colour synaesthete and genius author of Lolita, there’s a lot about Vladimir Nabokov to capture and hold the interest of psychologists. For me, an interview he gave a few months before his death in 1977 sums him up. He comes across as equal parts vainglorious and selfdeprecating, playful but serious, imperious yet human.

Famously unyielding in his demands of would-be interviewers, Nabokov insisted on being provided with all questions in advance.

For many, this reduced the face-to-face encounter to a stage-managed Q&A affair, utterly devoid of surprise and spontaneity.

Nabokov’s rationale was deliciously disarming.

‘I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect – or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.’

Nabokov’s willingness to take an honest look in the mirror, to dispassionately assess how effectively he’d articulated his thoughts, to evaluate the impact of his words on others, and then to control the means by which his message is relayed to the audience – well, it’s a veritable masterclass in handling the media. Following in his footsteps, I always ask for questions ahead of an interview and I script my answers. Time allowing, I try to review final drafts to ensure written quotes are accurate. I am very camera shy so I rehearse Hamira Riaz is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the Society before filming until it feels at least a little hamira@hriazconsults.com bearable to watch back.

In the four years since being on the British Psychological Society’s media panel, I’ve been asked to contribute to numerous articles in both broadsheets and tabloids, had guest slots on local, national and racial stereotypes so I am not unwittingly fuelling international radio, and made TV appearances in unconscious biases. As a clinical psychologist, I push pre-recorded and live formats. This has propelled back on journalists to ensure that the ‘latest research me to scramble up steep learning curves at speed, on study’ is represented in a well-contextualised way. diverse subject areas far outwith my comfort zone, I won’t pretend it’s always a bed of roses, far from ranging from self-harm to self-care, from character it. Be prepared for the exhilarating highs to come and assassination to the psychology of smiling. Everything learn to push through the stomach-churning lows, and is always last-minute and you get used to doing things if you don’t like the idea of living life at amplitude, it in double time. may not be for you. My experiences have re-activated As a woman speaking in public, I have realised that the ‘unrelenting standards’ schema I thought I’d social media feedback can get very personal and often conquered years ago and provided an unending supply has nothing whatsoever to do with what I’ve actually of fuel to my inner critic. But in the process, I have said. So, I do take extra care with my appearance, grown a thicker skin, become more skilled at mediabecause if I feel good about the way I look, the barbs friendly straplines that stand out, and learnt to be don’t hurt as much. As a woman of colour, I look at much kinder to myself. All in all, I can genuinely say, everything I’m planning to say through the lens of I wouldn’t change a thing.

‘Take an active interest in your press releases’ Aimée Challenger and Luke Bratton, plus advice from Chris Chambers

Luke Bratton is at Cardiff University BrattonLA1@ cardiff.ac.uk

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• Above all, take an active interest in contributing to press releases reporting on your research. This may be the only version of your work that makes it to the public.

Getty Images

Aimée Challenger is at Cardiff University DaviesAR5@ cardiff.ac.uk

When our lab asked scientists ‘Who do you think is to blame for inaccurate science news reporting?’, the overwhelming answer was journalists. However, we also found that exaggeration in news stories was strongly related to inaccuracies in university press releases (concise lay summaries written to attract media interest). Specifically, we found that when university press releases incorrectly reported causal relationships from observational research, the odds of the news also containing the same type of inaccuracy was 20 times higher.

When press releases reported advice that was not present in the journal article, then the odds of its inclusion in the news were 6.5 times higher.

When the press release made conclusions about humans from non-human studies, the odds of inaccurate reporting in the news was 56 times higher.

Importantly, we found no difference between the number of news stories for press releases that exaggerated versus those that did not, and no difference in news uptake for press releases containing caveats regarding study design versus those that did not.

These findings are based on retrospective observational data, so inferences about whether inaccuracies in press releases directly influence news cannot be made. And our findings do not warrant a shift of blame solely towards press officers and press offices. Press releases are often written collaboratively, between press officers and scientists, and in our survey over 40 per cent of scientists admitted their most recent press release was overstated.

So what should you do, in a media environment where the pressure is on journalists to produce a greater output in a shorter amount of time, with the press release often their primary source? We suggest the following three simple points: • Be clear if your work was not performed on humans. It is unlikely that the general reader would be able to recognise findings that are not directly relevant to them. Making a statement such as ‘this area of the brain demonstrates significant plasticity’ without explicitly stating that your study was performed with mice could quite easily be mistaken for a finding immediately relevant to humans.

• For associative designs, be careful to avoid causal statements. Even though they are generally more concise and sound punchy, they make implications that could mislead readers and journalists. Readers appear to broadly distinguish between three strengths of relationship: association and moderate cause, can cause, and cause. Language synonymous to can cause and cause should avoided when reporting associative findings.

So should journalists let scientists review what they have written for accuracy before publication? Here are some thoughts on that from Chris Chambers (Cardiff University): you can read more about how he arrived at these conclusions in the online version of this piece.

• If you insist on checking a journalist’s copy before they publish, get used to never talking with the good ones. It makes you sound pedantic and untrusting, and you are only ensuring that your work is either never covered or is only covered by journos who lack confidence.

• Sometimes journalists check their copy (or sections of it) anyway to be sure they have got a particular fact correct. It happens to me maybe 5 per cent of the time. That’s fine if it’s their choice, but never impose that as a condition of engagement.

• Don’t ask to check quotes. Instead, if you have prior concerns, tell them you are recording the interview at your end for your records. If they misquote you, tell them to correct it. If they won’t, publish the transcript, tell their editor and never talk to them again.

• If you really want accurate science news, avoid exaggeration in your own press releases and anticipate likely misunderstandings by including a section ‘What this study does not show’. If you allow hype in your PR then you share culpability for misreporting.

• Accept that you’re not special to journalism and neither is science. Independence is key to journalism. Sometimes journalists will screw up and sometimes you will do it all by yourself. Get media trained, find the good journos and trust them. Basically, get over yourself.

the psychologist april 2018 media

The mini confidence crisis Catherine Loveday on overcoming worries and concerns My first experience of doing any media-related work was completely accidental. Some of our research was being filmed for The One Show and I was invited to help out in the background, but on my way to the neuroimaging session at York University I received a call from my colleague to say that he was unable to come and I would have to take the reins. It was a baptism of fire, and it’s fair to say that I still find TV work the most challenging.

Media work was never something I set out to do, nor was it something I ever imagined I’d get the opportunity to do. But I have always been deeply passionate about public engagement with science.

In my capacity as a lecturer, I relish the challenge of getting my head around a complex concept and finding a way to translate it into something that a group of students can understand and be excited by. To have been able to turn my hand to doing this on a wider scale – to connect with a broader audience – has been a real privilege.

In the last few years I have spoken at all sorts of different public events, ranging from large festivals like Latitude, through to talks for the local Age UK or WI group, and panel discussions after theatre performances. Live events provide a great chance to

connect with people, and to encounter thoughtprovoking questions. I also particularly love radio work, especially when it is live (or ‘as live’), although I’ve also come to learn that a lot of interviews are highly dependent on the presenter and producer. I’ve been very lucky to work on BBC Dr Catherine Radio 4’s All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond, Loveday is at who is highly knowledgeable and extremely skilled the University of in asking the right questions.

Westminster As much as I love the media work I do, I feel C.Loveday@ compelled to admit that most ‘performances’ are westminster.ac.uk accompanied by at least a mini confidence crisis.

Did I sound like I was rambling? Will people wonder why I have the audacity to present myself as an expert?

And most worrying of all, what if I got something wrong, or accidentally perpetuated a neuromyth?!

I worry that people will think I’m ‘courting fame’, or that they will lose respect for me and my research.

These are real concerns that haunt me continually, but I try to mitigate this by doing proper background research, and taking care not to step outside of my own area of expertise.

All in all, despite these worries, it is hugely rewarding to share my passion for science through so many different channels.

‘Upholding and promoting the same ethics standards as those that we follow in our research and practice’ John Oates chairs a British Psychological Society group on media ethics The field of ethics is in an interesting state of flux, which has quickened in recent years, particularly for professional practice and research in psychology.

There’s a growing appreciation that ethics issues permeate all aspects of our work; for research, from the generation of new research questions through to the dissemination and application of findings, and for professional practice, seeking to understand and respect the social nexus and context of clients. Another key change has been to move beyond the ‘medical Getty Images

models’ of ‘diagnoses’ and ‘patient protection’ to recognise that our involvements with humans should recognise potential implications and effects that spread beyond the individual person, into their relatives, friends and associates, groups and communities.

Whereas psychological work is by default ethically concerned to protect the identity and confidentiality of individuals, broadcast media almost without exception show identifiable persons, often revealing sensitive details. Increasingly, broadcasters seek to involve psychologists in their outputs. This can pose major challenges for psychologists, because the sorts of programme ideas that come up are often well outside our ‘comfort zone’ and may envisage the role of a psychologist as being confined to very specific aspects of productions, without recognising the breadth of ethics issues involved in initial planning, through production and editing to the social impacts of portrayals of individuals and groups, as well as the portrayal of psychology as a discipline and profession. Following

John Oates is Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Media Ethics Advisory Group j.m.oates@open. ac.uk

a formal involvement in the Thane review of licensing of children in performances and in the subsequent development of legislation and regulation in England and Scotland, the BPS Ethics Committee several years ago established the Media Ethics Advisory Group (MEAG).

The MEAG is made up of a volunteer team of psychologists with extensive experience in broadcast production, including involvement in developing treatments, script review, screening contributors, supporting contributors during production, providing on-screen comment, analysis and observations, working with chaperones and providing after-care.

Our starting point is that psychologists involved in media productions should be upholding and promoting the same ethics standards as those that we follow in our research and practice. We provide an initial review engagement with productions when they approach the BPS for suggested psychologist involvement, where there are clear ethics issues.

At any one time we will usually be working with

three or more productions. As well as working with independent production companies we have established links with the major channels, with the Producers’ Alliance for Cinema and Television, and with chaperones, and we seek to maintain alignment with Ofcom’s regulatory role. We also offer a service to BPS members who become involved in productions where they feel the need for additional support.

With extensive consultation among these various stakeholders and with the BPS Ethics Committee, we are developing a guidance document for media commissioners and producers, ‘Psychology and Media Productions’, which will spell out our ethical stance, and analyses in detail issues of safeguarding, protection, the ethical portrayal of mental health and the discipline of psychology, with clear statements of the standards that BPS members will work to when engaged in productions. We are seeing this as a new step forward in a process of mutually beneficial engagement and development of the relationship between media and psychology.

Can you be a serious psychologist and be on TV? Uta Frith has learnt not to look over her shoulder

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This is the question that kept nagging at me when I was first asked to take part in a BBC Two Horizon documentary. I have now been involved in the making of three such documentaries, and obviously I was not an expert on all of the topics chosen. For the first one, on autism, I felt I should know something about it after a lifetime of research, but, no question, others knew more about specific aspects of autism and were more in touch with what’s important in the present.

Why did I not shy away from presenting topics that I was definitely no expert in, like OCD and psychopathy? I had learned not to constantly look over my shoulder to check whether my Uta Frith is Emeritus Professor in Cognitive colleagues would laugh Development at University College London at me: I was not speaking u.frith@ucl.ac.uk to them! One of the amazing producers I worked with told me, ‘You are now speaking to a hairdresser in Luton in their own living room, and you don’t want them to switch to another channel.’ This

was all I needed to shed my anxieties.

Are you ready with a ‘No, not me, I’m no expert on this’ when asked to appear on the media? It is exceedingly rare that you are the one and only expert on exactly the question that has come up. But, who better than you for knowing who might be the experts that can complement you? For example, I was easily able to identify the people to speak to in the Horizon documentaries. Much to my delight they all agreed when asked by the BBC researchers.

Still, there remained a tricky issue: I could not mention all my collaborators nor those who actually did the work, as this is not appropriate in a popular science programme. The Luton hairdresser will not take in these names, not even your own. What is frustrating is that, on the one hand, most of us collaborate widely in their research, so much so that single-author papers are a rarity; but when it comes to public engagement we feel we are on our own.

However, the media too embrace a collaborative approach, and the idea that science is a collaborative venture is trickling through.

If we continue to refuse to appear on the media, others will step in. It happens easily in the case of psychology, because here, everyone can feel they are an expert. We need to dispel this nonsense. A good start is to bear in mind that your audience may find it hard to distinguish between the confident but naive folk psychologist, let alone the charlatan, and the teams of scientists who try to understand the incredibly complex relationships between behaviour, cognition and the brain.

the psychologist april 2018 media

Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’ Chris French on scientific literacy Over recent years, the attitude towards public engagement within universities has undergone a fairly radical transformation. It used to be the case that many academics not only showed no interest whatsoever in stepping outside of their ivory towers, they also looked askance at any colleagues who did engage in such activity. Surely such colleagues should be actually doing research, writing papers or applying for grants rather than wasting their time talking to ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’?

These days, many universities do not just tolerate their staff engaging in public engagement and media work, they actually (to a greater or lesser extent) encourage and support it. In these times of increasing competition with respect to student recruitment, such activities can be valuable simply in terms of the publicity they provide for an institution, but I would like to believe that this change in attitude goes deeper than that. There appears to be an appreciation that giving the wider public greater insight into our research and its implications is necessary to improve responsiveness, relevance and accountability.

There’s also a growing emphasis upon reaching out to non-traditional audiences. It is all very well writing occasional columns in The Guardian or taking part in events organised by the Wellcome Trust, but is ‘Brenda in the chip shop’ likely to benefit from such efforts?

There is no doubt that some areas of research are of greater interest to the general public and inherently more accessible than others. I am perhaps fortunate in this respect. My primary research area is anomalistic psychology: developing and testing non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences.

It’s a topic that fascinates a large proportion of the general public, both believers and sceptics. As a result, I am frequently invited to take part in TV and radio programmes dealing with paranormal and related claims, or to provide a sceptical perspective on such claims for newspaper and magazine articles.

Apart from being inherently interesting in their own right, some topics within anomalistic psychology have wider implications. Two of my favourite examples of such topics are sleep paralysis and false memories.

Sleep paralysis is a common experience of temporary paralysis that occurs between sleep and wakefulness.

It can sometimes be associated with a range of additional symptoms, such as a sense of presence, frightening sensory hallucinations, difficulty breathing, and intense fear. Not surprisingly, such experiences are sometimes interpreted as ghostly or demonic encounters. I am keen to reassure sufferers that, although such experiences can indeed be terrifying, sleep paralysis is best explained in scientific rather than supernatural terms.

Sleep paralysis often also appears to be a factor in explaining reports of alien contact and abduction,

Chris French is at Goldsmiths University of London C.French@gold.ac.uk

but such cases typically also, I would argue, involve false memories. Another ostensibly paranormal phenomenon that is best explained in terms of false memories is that of hypnotic past-life regression. It is worth emphasising that exactly the same techniques are used to ‘recover’ memories of alien abduction and past lives as are used to ‘recover’ allegedly repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse (including extreme memories of Satanic ritualised abuse). In the absence of any additional evidence, it seems wise to adopt a level of scepticism regarding all such memories.

So, do the ‘harder-to-reach’ sections of the general public have a more informed view of sleep paralysis and false memories as a result of my constantly banging on about these topics over the years, on the couch of This Morning or in the pages of the Sun or Daily Mail? In the absence of systematic research, we simply cannot say. But I do know that I am regularly contacted by members of the general public who, after years of worrying that their strange nocturnal experiences might be a possible indication of serious psychological problems, have found reassurance by eventually learning about the scientific explanation of sleep paralysis. And if only one person is steered away from getting involved in dangerous forms of psychotherapy that employ dubious techniques in an attempt to recover allegedly repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, that will be have been well worth the effort on my part.

‘Exposure can lead to unpleasant criticism’ Peter Kinderman on the benefits and risks of putting yourself out there

Peter Kinderman is at University of Liverpool p.kinderman@ liverpool.ac.uk

Psychology is – or should be – a discipline and profession that spans the whole range of human experience. We are experts in things that really matter to people: relationships, education and learning, health, mental health, politics, sport, crime, work, how organisations function, prejudice and intercultural understanding, and more. Our obligation is, therefore, to keep psychology always relevant to our fellow citizens and to the real world. The media, naturally, are partners in this exercise; if psychology is useful, there is little to be gained if we speak only to ourselves.

Measuring the impact of such engagement is difficult, but I am optimistic about the changes I have seen in the coverage of mental health over my career. From a culture of dismissive ‘othering’ and unquestioning assumptions of pathology, we are emerging into a world in which people are confident in discussing their mental health in a spirit of openness, and in which empathy is encouraged by a framework of understanding that appreciates how we are emotionally shaped by the events in our lives.

Psychologists and others speaking out, sharing their views and visions, are presumably shaping the views and attitudes of people with more media presence. We have also seen increasing understanding of the role of wellbeing in politics – a commitment to consider what might improve a nation’s and its citizens’ wellbeing.

As the New Economics Foundation have said, this is ‘economics as if people and the planet mattered’.

More personally, too, there are benefits and opportunities from engagement with the media.

The reach and penetrance of established broadcasters mean that partnerships can yield mass participation in research studies (such as some research that colleagues and I did with the BBC on how psychological processes mediate the impact of familial risk, social circumstances and life events on mental health) and then disseminate the findings.

There are, however, a couple of concerns to

be noted. First, in this partnership, our journalist colleagues have unrivalled impact. When we published the results of our collaboration with the BBC, the news story available on the BBC website garnered over 200,000 readers in 24 hours. The scientific paper itself was clearly available via a single mouse-click, and yet was accessed only 200 times. In other words, 99.9 per cent of people relied only on the journalist’s version of the story; only 0.1 per cent checked the account that had been through peer-review. We clearly need to have trusted partners in this endeavour.

Also, as a profile is raised, on social media or on mainstream outlets, this increased visibility brings increased opportunity (and perhaps licence) for comment. We need to be aware that exposure in the mass media can lead to unpleasant criticism. Social media, in particular, can be ‘corrosive’. Over the past few years, I’ve been described in social media as: ‘a nincompoop’, ‘a real asshole’, a ‘pompous buffoon’, a ‘puritanical classist prig’, ‘a moralistic cloistered white prude’, referred to as ‘Mussolini’ and seen my colleagues likened to the British National Party. I’d like to pretend that these things don’t matter, but of course they do. They hurt and they demoralise – which is what they are intended to do.

Nevertheless, my chosen profession is one that matters to real people in our everyday lives. We all rely on journalists to help us understand the world around us, and therefore psychologists, like everybody else have a duty to engage with the media. If we’re proud of our applied science and what it can offer (and I for one, am very proud to be a clinical psychologist) we should be enthusiastic about cooperation with journalists. It’s not too difficult; decide what your two or three bullet points are and express them in straightforward language. And, overall, there’s more to be gained than lost. Because, despite the trolls, we also get praise: ‘Thank you @peterkinderman – thoughtful, humane, holistic + praxis!’. Which is what it’s all about.

‘Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you’ Mary Aiken on receiving the Hollywood treatment

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I had no grand plan to ‘get ahead in Hollywood’. It just happened. As a cyberpsychologist, I had been invited by the Obama administration to participate in an academic research initiative focused on exploring solutions to technology-facilitated human trafficking.

We presented our findings at a White House event, which attracted some media attention. A Hollywood agent made contact with me, quickly followed by a meeting with the President of Entertainment at CBS, who commissioned the primetime show CSI: Cyber

practically in the room. I worked as a subject matter expert and producer at the CBS television and film studio in Studio City California. I was involved in everything from brainstorming scripts with the writers, to working on set with actors, visualising abstract theoretical constructs by means of CGI, participating in publicity roadshows… and yes, it was as exciting as it sounds.

I had little or no formal instruction in terms of preparing for my role at CBS, I simply had to figure

the psychologist april 2018 media

it out as I went along. I did, however, draw on my academic training.

Adaptability refers to an individual’s ability, skill, disposition, willingness, and/or motivation to change or fit different task, social or environmental features. Hirschi’s (2009) longitudinal study maintains that the growth of career adaptability over time is a predictor of the growth of life satisfaction over time. This is key for those who seek a varied career in the behavioural sciences, and strive to enjoy it.

Shortly after the show was launched I was contacted by a book agent who asked if I could write a ‘popular’ book about cyberpsychology. What exactly did she mean by popular? ‘Shorter sentences and fewer references.’ (There it is again, adaptability.) I shared the news with a psychologist colleague.

‘Oh, don’t do it,’ they cautioned, ‘many a fine academic career has been ruined by a popular book.’ I went ahead anyway, calling it The Cyber Effect. It turned out to be a joy to leave behind some of the constraints of academic writing. Children are actively engaging with technology, and parents and caregivers urgently need advice. Academics cannot sit on the fence waiting for longitudinal studies – some combination of learnings to date, informed opinion and expert consensus must prevail.

My working week continues to have lots of variety: as academic adviser to Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3); as an adjunct at University College Dublin; as PI on cutting-edge research projects; and as a subject matter expert media commentator. I travel extensively and manage incoming speaking requests through agents and my website. I have experienced everything from being interviewed live on primetime US TV shows, to participating in online chat sessions on parenting websites, to giving a talk to 3000 US Navy Cyber Midshipmen at Annapolis, USA. In forensics, Locard’s exchange principle dictates that ‘every contact leaves a trace’: this is also true when you engage with the media. Make sure you prepare well and are cognisant of the multiple audiences you need to consider when discussing a topic publicly, particularly those who are vulnerable. This month I will be in Mexico City presenting a report on voter behavioural manipulation online in advance of the July general election. As Joseph Campbell said, ‘Follow

Mary Aiken is Adjunct Associate Professor, Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin, www. maryaiken.com mary.aiken@ ucd.ie

your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.’

In summary: do the work, get the qualifications, participate in research, publish, lecture, get media training, present at conferences; and when you feel confident about your expertise and ability to communicate, engage with media. Don’t pay attention to the naysayers: science is built not only on the shoulders of giants, it is also built on individual performance, vision, perseverance, adaptability and good instincts. If you are passionate about your discipline, then go forth and disseminate – by means of both traditional and popular channels.

On becoming ‘The Brain Guy’ Dean Burnett has jumped ship In November 2017 I handed in my notice at my day job as a lecturer and tutor, because I eventually realised my writing, blogging and comedy performing (things I’d always considered hobbies or harmless pastimes) somehow provided the bulk of both my workload and income, what with book deals, media appearances, international speaker invitations, and more.

Point is, I seemed to have become, in the eyes of many but particularly the media, ‘The Brain Guy’. A normal academic existence no longer seemed feasible.

It’s a very weird situation for me. I’ve not got a single first-author credit, I’ve never been acclaimed or renowned in the field of neuroscience or psychology.

So, how come I get asked to speak for them so often?

The late great comedian Mitch Hedberg had a brilliant line in response to Hollywood types who kept asking him to do things that weren’t stand-up comedy, like act, or write scripts; ‘It’s like if you work your ass off to become a cook, and someone says to you, “OK, you’re a cook; can you farm?”’

I feel the same applies to science, especially neuroscience and psychology (or anything with similar levels of uncertainty). Researchers are often encouraged to do outreach, but the drive, focus and diligence required to achieve success in the lab doesn’t automatically result in the ability to share it Dean Burnett has now left the day job and is mostly freelance.

He remains an honorary research associate at Cardiff Psychology School. Find him on Twitter @garwboy drdeanburnett@ gmail.com

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effectively with others. So there’s a certain perverse logic in the way my numerous failures as a researcher apparently turned me into someone best placed to do communicate my subject successfully.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, my lack of research achievements has often been an advantage.

There’s no one set of results or school of thought that my credibility (such as it is) rests on, so I can afford to bring (hopefully) consistent objectivity to any science story that I’m asked to comment on. Given the completely unpredictable nature of what’s deemed ‘important’ by the media from one day to the next, this often proves useful.

I’m also not from academic stock; in the tiny Welsh former-mining valley where I grew up, further education was rarely considered as an option. I therefore spend a lot of time telling friends and family about what I do, but without the jargon they’ve no experience with. You get used to explaining what you do in everyday terms and language. It’s a useful skill to develop, perhaps not one readily obtained in the fabled Ivory Towers of academia.

Despite the eye-rolling and scepticism I got from those who felt humour and science were incompatible, I’d advise any scientist interested in outreach to try it. Schemes like University College London’s Bright Club are good and popular, but I’d advise anyone to do it ‘cold’; sign up for an open mic night where nobody knows you’re a scientist and wouldn’t care if they did. You might ‘die on your arse’, as they say, but this is good. It provides empathy, humility, a sense of how others perceive you on first impression. If you’re working with the media, your audience will be thousands of people who don’t know or care about you more than any other stranger. Experience of standing before such people and winning them over with words and ideas alone can prove invaluable.

Lastly, my own introduction to the media was something of a ‘baptism of fire’. Ridiculous newspaper spreads, ludicrously edited reality-TV documentaries, humiliating appearances on the Guardian website home page; these all quickly taught me how unpredictable and inconsistent the media can be, and that there’s nothing that can’t be interpreted or sneakily edited to provide for a predetermined conclusion.

You get good at spotting this eventually; when your ‘scientific’ contribution is simply wanted to provide a sheen of credibility to an otherwise farcical narrative.

The list of credits I do have is nothing compared to the one of things I’ve flat-out rejected.

I can’t really advise anyone else on how to pursue a career as a media psychologist. I didn’t even pursue it, this is all unexpected to me. I can only say that, if that’s what you want, give it a go. Even if it all goes ridiculously wrong, that can still prove useful in the long run. If I can convey any message, let it be that.

the psychologist april 2018 media

‘I sense a profession fearful of saying the wrong thing, so we choose to say nothing’ Tanya Byron urges us to be brave and find a public voice I started working in the media for BBC TV in 2000 I often ask the trainees to imagine that they are on with the series Little Angels, where I worked with screen for the evening news, commenting on a recent families with children with behaviour problems. tragedy in terms of mental health need and provision From there I did a number of other series on the same for those affected. I ask them to practise a 45-second theme – House of Tiny Tearaways, Bedtime Live (C4) monologue about PTSD – what it is, how it affects and others on psychology and mental health more people, what we as psychologists can do. They have to generally such as Am I Normal?, Lose Weight for Love, imagine doing it fast and with a camera stuck in their Horizon: What’s the Right Diet for You?, Child of Our face. Many then share with the group and surprise themselves at how eloquent they are, how much you Time. I generally do one series and several programme comment appearances (e.g. Newsnight) a year. I also do can say in 45 seconds and how that 45 seconds could empower someone to find support for themselves or 30 hours of clinical practice a week. a loved one. We then talk about how Looking back I cringe at the names soundbites can facilitate enquiry and of some of the series I have presented. allow viewers to empower themselves When I teach modules on ‘Working in by finding out more. the Media’ on clinical training courses Mostly I tell the trainees about the I always feel the need to justify them. many excellent, ethical, caring and wellOur brilliant trainees debate with me meaning media colleagues I have and about the commercialisation of what we continue to work with. I wish there do when it’s public facing – you’ve got were more of us. Our great profession, to grab the viewer as they trawl their so often overshadowed by the medics, hundreds of channels. You might as has a voice and a presence but is well not bother making something that noticeably absent from many broadcast sounds worthy if no one watches it. opportunities. My instinct is that we Indeed my discussions with our bright, young up-and-coming colleagues Tanya Byron is Chancellor of may struggle with our self-efficacy, worrying that we can’t allow ourselves helps me continually debate the many Edge Hill University difficult issues associated with working tanya@professortanyabyron. to be pulled into a soundbite setting for fear it will compromise our more in the media. Confidentiality, ethics, com holistic approach to mental health and contributor follow-up once cameras Twitter: @ProfTanya wellbeing. have stopped rolling… these issues cut We must make ourselves more visible. We have across all I do in the media, not just TV but also my newspaper columns, radio and other digital broadcasts. a public health responsibility that extends beyond the services, universities and other places we work in.

My sense is that there is an innate distrust of the media and how it works. Exploitation is often debated. We know important, evidence-based stuff that can be heard and in and of itself can make all the difference to In addition, trainees raise concerns about oversomeone afraid by what is going on in their head. We simplifying what we do, being pulled into soundbite utterances that leave us looking narrow and diagnostic. can educate, normalise, de-stigmatise, reassure. Via the How can a formulation be explained in a heavily edited media, our reach is vast.

Of course it is frustrating at times that the only interview? More fundamentally, how can I know that way to convey what we know is within programmes what I say isn’t chopped up, re-pasted, edited in out of formatted around narrative devices to keep the viewer context and ending up nothing like what I intended to watching and coming back every week (the ‘jeopardy convey? (Say it fast, don’t pause giving a cut moment moment’, the ‘reveal’). Without a doubt there is a to the editor, refuse to resay it as asked unless you risk that we take when we are asked to comment on agree with the summary suggested by the director.) complex issues in sometimes simplistic ways.

All these questions are astute and important. I I sense a profession that is, at times, fearful of explain the pre-production editorial red lines that are saying the wrong thing… so we choose to say nothing. in my contracts, including budgets for aftercare and follow-up, contractually agreed editorial oversight of I do at times feel anxious about my work being out there, in truth mostly in terms of what my colleagues my series, clear screening of contributors by off-screen may think; I’m sure sometimes I could do better. But as colleagues. I describe the many letter templates sent cuts are made to services and posts lost, as the funding to readers I can’t answer in my columns but to whom of clinical training is threatened and as the world I want to send advice and links for further support.

I explain how heavily lawyered all my screen and becomes more stressful and triggering to those that print media are. I also give examples of the many dire are vulnerable, we have to be brave and find our broadcast proposals sent to me and explain why I public-facing voice. We owe it to our profession and said no. we owe it to the public we serve.

‘There are many good, kind and ethical people working there’ Cynthia McVey was a reality-TV pioneer

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Since I first dipped my toe in the world of the media, with the BBC’s Castaway 2000, there have been commendable developments in the approach of broadcasters and producers in relation to the care and protection of adults Cynthia McVey and, more particularly, children who Cynthiamcvey@ participate in a range of activities rocketmail.com from documentary/reality television to competitions and drama.

I learned a lot from Castaway 2000 screening participants to form a community living on the island of Taransay for a year. My qualifications to support them during this time were questioned frequently by one member of the community, who felt that a counsellor should have been employed. ‘With Young Musician, I see all competitors individually and can visit them at This exemplified the assumption that any time if there are any concerns’ psychologists with PhDs would be academics without practical experience of understanding, supporting and comforting people. issues at any time – before, during or after filming/ There were difficult situations involving the castaways broadcasting. I was asked to do a follow-up call to and outside influences, but I am glad to say that I ensure that all of the competitors who did not progress, found virtually all of them to be interesting, bright and were feeling fine and had settled back into their usual friendly. I remain in touch with some of them 17 years life and activities. The care and protection that the after the ‘first reality programme’.

BBC required was excellent. It was similar with Young So what goes into the preparation for these Musician: I see all competitors individually and can participatory programmes? I and Dr Jacqui McKechnie visit them at any time if there are any concerns. The have developed a careful system that involves production team and crew inform me if they think psychometric tests including personality, anxiety, there is something worrying. The crew and production, depression, psychological vigour and personal the competitors and the judges all lunch together; the questions; a form regarding informed consent; and a feeling is one of support and it is clear that production telephone interview to talk over the challenges of being genuinely care about their competitors. in the media glare and to explore issues highlighted by I’ve experienced the same ethical care with other the tests. If the programme involves very vulnerable broadcasters: working with Sky on Got to Dance people or families, or if there are concerns exposed led to my involvement with children in a range of by the tests, a clinical psychologist conducts a full programmes, including children acting in adult interview, which often involves a home visit; children drama as Sky’s compliance department was keen can be screened in this way. to take great care with these child performers. And One recent programme for CBBC involved production companies have never gone against my adventure activities taking place away from home. I advice concerning the exposure of children to adult telephoned each parent and child to ensure that they material. They have accommodated my advice using a were comfortable with everything, and to check that range of techniques like computer-generated imaging, children would cope with being away from home different camera angles, cut-in pieces and sometimes and with lack of success. Parents had my telephone elimination or rewriting of the child in the scene. number so that they could contact me with any Of course, sometimes you will not do things as well as you would like. Sometimes there will be very tight timescales, which can challenge your ability to focus More online… on the care of the participants. I would advise getting a good feel for the attitude of production and broadcaster before agreeing to work with them; and get as much See thepsychologist.bps.org.uk for more contributions, detail as possible. But the media is a very interesting and references.

Have your say by commenting on the online version, emailing us and varied world. It can be frustrating and scary but on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweeting @psychmag never dull and there are many good, kind and ethical people working there. You too can do this.

the psychologist april 2018 media

‘Try not to think about what your peers will say. This isn’t aimed at them’ Claudia Hammond on the importance of knowing your audience I did my very first interview with a psychologist for a radio programme back in 1991. Since then I’ve interviewed many hundreds of them for Mind Changers on BBC Radio 4 and in my 10 years’ reporting and then 10 years’ presenting All in the Mind. Some were famous, like Albert Bandura and Henry Gleitman. Others were presenting their first paper at a conference. There is no doubt that psychologists are getting better and better at doing interviews. I’m particularly impressed with the way some PhD students explain their research these days. If we want the public to engage with psychology, then in my view it’s crucial for psychologists to agree to do interviews where they are happy that their research will be taken seriously. This is your chance to correct some of the common misperceptions about psychology and to explain to all what an important topic it is.

The key to a good interview is preparation. As well as interviewing people, I’m often on the other side of the microphone talking about my books or other topics in psychology, and even now I think about every interview in advance.

A good producer should explain things to you beforehand, but they are getting more pressed for time, so make sure you ask them these questions when they call or email you. Some of these may sound obvious, but often people don’t ask these questions until they arrive.

• Which show and channel is the interview for?

• Is it live or pre-recorded?

• How long will it take? TV takes much longer, while they find nice places to film you. To make it quicker you can look around for somewhere attractive beforehand and suggest some options (not a meeting room with a blank wall). Don’t forget to look outside too. Many universities have lovely places to film in the grounds.

• What’s the format? They might just need a quick clip for a package or it might be a one-on-one interview with you and the presenter, or maybe it’s a discussion with other people in it too.

Once you have the answers to these you can start preparing by following these steps: • Make sure you tell them your job title.

Psychologists are often misnamed as psychiatrists or psychotherapists because many people still don’t know the difference.

• Listen to or watch the programme beforehand if you possibly can. This is much easier now that so many programmes are online and it helps you to know how to pitch your answers and how much details to give. An interview on In Our Time on Radio 4 is very different from a quick clip for a news bulletin.

• If you have a choice of studios to go to, think about which would help you to perform best. Going to

• •

• • •

•

•

• •

the main studio to be with the presenter might mean a long journey, but some people feel happier doing this because they can have eye contact instead of feeling rather remote in a tiny studio on their own. Others prefer the local studio because there aren’t as many distractions.

Think beforehand about two or three main points you’d like to make, and if you don’t know what they want, ask them what they’re hoping for.

Imagine you are sitting in the pub describing your research to a friend who’s not a psychologist. How would explain it? In particular think about how to summarise the methodology. Don’t list every one of the six conditions. Find a way of just explaining the basics. The aim isn’t for someone to replicate the study. You are just trying give a flavour of how research is done.

Don’t write down verbatim answers and try to read them out. Unless you’re brilliant actor, it will sound terrible.

Try not to think about what your peers will say.

This isn’t aimed at them. The whole point is to engage the public, not your colleagues.

Remember that it’s rare that interviewers are aiming to catch you out. Most interviews are about getting across information that the audience will find interesting. Even if you are part of a heated debate, what the media want is for you to put your case as well as possible. If you know you work in a controversial field, then think in advance about the question you would most hate to be asked.

Do be prepared to talk more widely about your field. Occasionally people seem to feel they’re not allowed to mention research that someone else has done because that person should do it themselves, but they’re not on the show, you are.

To the listener you are the voice of authority on this subject at this moment and you do know loads more than most of them do about it. Don’t quote research as you might in a lecture. ‘Hammond (1995)’ means nothing in the middle of an interview. You can say what previous research has found, but miss out the names unless they are very famous. Don’t give long lists of colleagues. If we included lists of everyone who contributed to every topic that is covered on radio or TV, then the programmes would sound boring and we would have to cover fewer items. If you’re worried about your colleagues feeling left out you could try asking if you could be introduced as ‘part of a team from X’.

Sound enthusiastic about your work. If you don’t sound interested, no one else will be interested either.

And so your mum can tune in, don’t forget to check again when it will be on.

Claudia Hammond is a radio presenter and psychology graduate, and is on Twitter @claudiahammond

Beverley Barclay MBE ‘…they’re grasping at life.

The young person doesn’t want to die’ Alexandra Tyler meets Beverley Barclay MBE, Director of Clinical Services at the J’s Hospice in Essex, a community hospice caring for young adults with life-limiting conditions

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Beverley was made MBE in 2016 for services to neurology and urology departments, and you’re going nursing, and in particular her contribution to childto five or six different hospitals. So you disengage. adult transitional care. She was interviewed here For the parents it’s an absolute nightmare, because

by Alexandra Tyler, a second-year trainee clinical the young person is growing up with all the ordinary psychologist at Plymouth University, about her challenges that brings, and then they have to engage holistic and psychologically informed approach. with a whole team of professionals who often won’t Beverley Barclay was working as a nurse on a talk to the parents, saying “that young person’s an busy paediatric ward when she realised that many of adult now”.’ the children in her care were living far longer with Beverley also sees the struggles faced by diagnoses like cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular professionals in adult services, who often lack dystrophy and metabolic conditions. From a the paediatricians’ specialist knowledge. She sees developmental perspective their needs were changing. parents, who know their child’s condition inside out, ‘They weren’t dying as children but being asked the same questions living as young adults, and they repeatedly by professionals. She needed a service that was tailored also sees young people with “They weren’t dying as to their needs.’ This realisation complex medical conditions such children but living as led to Beverley setting up a new as severe cerebral palsy, who might young adults, and they hospice for young adults. ‘A big be ventilated and PEG-fed, getting part of my life then was writing needed a service that was lost in the system: ‘No one knows policy after policy after policy. I where they should be, and they fall tailored to their needs” spent a long time going out visiting into a big black hole.’ Psychological hospitals and other professionals, care often falls by the wayside, talking about what was missing and both for the young person and what we could provide. I remember the first day their family. The approach becomes less systemic and I started. It was me and a fundraiser, and I had a room, more individualistic; siblings suffer because they have a desk and a phone; I thought, “What on earth do I do been used to a very child-friendly, family-focused now?” The day we got CQC registration was probably environment, and adult services can come as a shock up there with getting married and having children.’ by comparison.

However, her patients still face huge challenges Many challenges of Beverley’s job are unique to the in transitioning from paediatrics to adult services. transition period. She finds that with the right help ‘For the young adults themselves, it’s really difficult. and support, many young people begin to relish the You’ve been cared for by the same team, paediatricians, greater independence of young adulthood. However, nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists, the consequences of not engaging fully with their care physiotherapists, throughout your journey, then – ‘not taking their medication, not doing their physio, suddenly it’s not one paediatrician any more, it’s not putting their ventilator on’ – can mean a worsening consultants within respiratory, gastrointestinal, in their condition. Beverley also has to confront the

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meaning of transition for her patients. ‘Some years ago I remember a young man with Duchenne who was really reluctant to move from child to adult services.’

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a genetic disorder characterised by progressive muscle degeneration and with Duchenne with yet another chest infection; you weakness; nowadays individuals with the condition see the subtle deterioration. I pride myself on knowing tend to live into young adulthood. ‘When we pushed if my patients are poorly when I enter the room. By the him, he said that for him moving into adult services end-of-life episode the young person and the family was one step further towards death. On the whole, trust you completely to take them through. If now I people with Duchenne don’t die as children but as got a phone call to say one of my patients was poorly, young men; there’s a lot of work to be done to enable I wouldn’t think twice about going. You only get one them to have full lives while also recognising and chance to make that end-of-life OK.’ managing their worsening condition.’

A huge part of Beverley’s work involves offering The nature of the work means that reflection, psychological support to families; a visit might supervision and a supportive professional environment sometimes be only 10 minutes with the patient and are crucial. Beverley tells me that for her it is the an hour with the family. She also has what she calls ad-hoc conversations in the office that are most ‘doorstep conversations’, when everything comes valuable in preventing unhelpful rumination. ‘You tumbling out just as she’s about to leave. After all, get back in and it’s been a difficult visit, and you just how do you admit that your marriage is breaking reflect... you think, “Did I do that well? Could I have down, that you’re not sleeping or eating, that the done it better? How did that conversation feel for me?” sexual relationship is affected – these are big things The opportunity to talk to someone and say, “I said to tell a stranger. Relationships come under enormous this, what do you think?”’ strain: ‘You’re married, you have Beverley says she has always the baby you’ve always wanted, “You get back in and it’s worked alongside counsellors and then suddenly you’re told that your psychologists, and insists that child has a life-limiting or lifebeen a difficult visit, and nursing care can’t be separated condition. Who gave you just reflect... you think, threatening from general mental health and the child the condition? Does one ‘Did I do that well? wellbeing in palliative care. ‘You partner blame the other?’ Beverley can’t care for somebody’s symptoms says that the people who concern Could I have done it but ignore how they’re feeling, her most are teenage boys, perhaps better? How did that because that’s going to be a big part sons or brothers of patients. ‘You conversation feel for me?’” see a lot of that age group get into of helping them to deal with their deterioration in their condition. trouble – schoolwork begins to be I call it “parallel planning”. On affected, truancy, stealing, trouble the one hand, it’s important that they stay well, that with the law. More so than the girls, I would say, they attend their appointments, and that there’s some because the girls tend to be talkers.’ advance planning for when they become poorly. But Beverley tells me some parents say to her, ‘Don’t the other arm is so important – working closely with talk to them about death and dying; they don’t know psychologists, physios and OTs to enable them to they’re dying.’ She thinks they generally do. ‘How can live a full life. It’s vital that they’re allowed to do all they not know? They can go onto the computer and the things their peers do, experimenting with drugs look up their conditions; they know that their peers and alcohol, friendships, relationships and sexuality, have died… but you live with this collusion. as long as their medical condition is kept as stable as An oncologist once told me that if you give a family possible. One doesn’t work without the other.’ Beverley a 1 per cent chance of a young person coming through explains how the hospice aims to be as person-centred a round of chemotherapy, they’ll take it because they’re as possible, helping its young patients to achieve grasping at life. The young person doesn’t want to die.’ dreams like attending family weddings or going to see Because of this, being honest can feel uncomfortable. their favourite football team in action.

‘I’d always, always be guided by the young person.

Working in the patient’s own home, where they feel There’s no greater privilege in the whole world than safe, means Beverley and her staff have to be careful. working with somebody who will talk to you about ‘Sometimes I think conversations are easier to have on dying. “Is it going to be painful? What will it be like? a ward than they are in the home, because you leave What will happen to my parents, my siblings?” I work them in that home with that information. They’re to ensure that a death is a good death, whether it’s at psychologically vulnerable in their own home. On the home, in a hospice or in a hospital, by supporting the other hand, one of the good things about running a young person to have some control, and by supporting small service in the community in that you have small the family. That’s as good an outcome as we can hope numbers of patients you can see regularly, and get to for, when people say, “That was better than I thought it know the family. It might be that round of chemo or was going to be… that was really sad but it was OK.” radiotherapy that hasn’t worked, or the young man You can’t ultimately change the inevitable.’

the psychologist april 2018 interview

Calling all Postdoctorates and Postgraduates...

Funding for Study Visits The Postdoctoral Study Visit grant scheme provides funding for UK based psychology Postdoctoral researchers and lecturers to undertake research study visits in the UK, Europe and internationally. These are offered alongside the Society’s Postgraduate Study Visit Scheme which provides grants to support research students who are registered for a doctoral degree in psychology at a UK university to acquire skills directly relevant to their research training above and beyond that required for the completion of the doctoral degree. All applicants must be a member of the British Psychological Society.

Six grants will be available under each Scheme, two in each of the following categories: • Up to £500 for a visit to an institution in the UK • Up to £800 for a visit to an institution in Europe • Up to £1200 for a visit to an institution elsewhere in the world The closing date for applications is 28 June 2018.

For further information, the full eligibility criteria and an application form please contact liz.beech@bps.org.uk Note: The schemes do not provide funding for conference attendance or to present conference papers.

Mining for myths Our editor Jon Sutton dips into a new series from Routledge, The Psychology of Everything

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here are 11 books in this series – for now – each little more than 100 pages long. The aim is a bold one – to ‘make you look at everything in a new way’, by debunking ‘the myths and pseudo-science surrounding some of life’s biggest questions’. With each offering written by an expert in the field, research-based knowledge is compared with popular wisdom, and a focus is the potential of psychology to enrich our understanding of humanity and modern life.

So, how to review 11 books in one go… with one magpie eye for shiny myths, and the other on whether I really do end up looking at ‘everything’ in a new way.

(1) Where better to mine for myths than The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories, by Jan-Willem van Prooijen.

It’s a rich seam: did you know that many people believe Prince was murdered for singing about chemtrails?

Deeper in, van Prooijen counters the myth that conspiracy theorists are right-wing, tinfoil hat wearing loons.

Such theories are widespread, rooted in common and functional cognitive processes, in perceived intergroup conflict, and strong ideologies of whatever political persuasion. Ingenious studies, including the author’s own, back up this social and cognitive framework.

(2) The Psychology of Performance, from Stewart Cotterill, takes a usefully broad contextual view of its subject. The section on deliberate practice and the ‘10,000 hour’ myth gave me a glimmer of hope for my guitar playing… maybe I’ll be one of the lucky people who reaches an expert level of performance without large volumes of practice…

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(3) Sex, by Meg-John Barker, is a bang-up-to-date reminder of how our views of ‘normal’ and ‘proper’ sex have been shaped by the cultural and personal assumptions of a surprisingly small number of individuals, often psychologists. An update to sociologist Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle, illustrating the sex

hierarchy perpetuated by psychology, medicine, laws, religions and mass media, was a useful visual prompt to critically engage with the topic.

(4) Do people trust the police? Do even the police trust the police? For me, this was an interesting and timely part of Ken Rotenberg’s offering, The Psychology of Trust. Turns out that the police report higher beliefs that they will refrain from emotional harm and demonstrate honesty than they think the community at large will; and these trust beliefs are associated with their own wellbeing and low stress in the workplace. (Read online chapter.)

(5) Talking of Working Life, Toon Taris includes a very wellwritten chapter on ‘The seventh day: Recovery from work’.

He counters the myth that you’ll get more done if you work more hours; studies show associations with lower levels of wellbeing and health, higher injury and accident rates, and a decreasing efficiency of production. Taris doesn’t ignore the caveats and cautions in the research, but I’m with many policy makers in deciding to ‘err on the safe side’. (Read online chapter.)

(6) Some strange people recover from work by Gardening: to me, it’s just outdoor housework. Perhaps I just haven’t got a ‘gardening personality’: or is that a myth?

The research cultivated and pruned by Harriet Gross’s green fingers prompts me to speculate that my ‘need for structure’ is out of step with my skill as a gardener, and I am destined to forever serve what Monty Don calls ‘a forced apprenticeship of drudgery… I didn’t know any of the interesting bits.’

(7) When bereaved, do we have to ‘do our grief work’, confronting the experience in order to come to terms with the loss and avoid negative impacts on our health?

Richard Gross looks at the shortcomings of this

the psychologist april 2018 books hypothesis in Grief: definitions, evidence, and whether the concept is gender- and culture-bound. In fact, it seems, people naturally ‘oscillate’ between a focus on loss and on restoration – a more practical focus on a now-changed world.

(8) In last month’s issue, we spoke to Carolyn Mair about her book on Fashion: my favourite part of which recounts research from Dr Phillipa Diedrichs to bust the myth that men are less bothered than women are about their bodies, flaws and media depictions of style and beauty.

(9) Addiction covers an area shot through with entrenched myths, and Jenny Svanberg’s approach to busting them is a book that ‘mirrors my own learning curve’ with Glasgow Addiction Service and Forth Valley Substance Misuse Service. It’s from the heart, persuasive and unafraid to pose the big questions.

Svanberg concludes that ‘addiction isn’t a weakness, or a moral disorder, but a learned adaptation to distress, isolation or dislocation, and one that each one of us might have faced’.

(10) You’ve got to be pretty brave to attempt to traverse the ever-shifting, hazardous landscape of Gender in 90 pages… Gary Wood seeks to ‘shake things up – to cast a critical eye over the gender-club rule book.’

The chapter ‘Gender stories, backwards, forwards and sideways’ uses fairytales, science fiction and re-readings of cultural history to reflect on how gender schemata can have mythical roots.

(11) If any of the topics particularly suit a slim volume, aimed at a wide audience, peppered with practical tips and humour, then it’s Dieting. Jane Ogden is on inspirational form with an evidence-based argument that there is no ‘miracle diet’: we overeat and are underactive because of what’s in our heads and the triggers in the environment.

The ‘public understanding of psychology’ is often put forward as a desirable end-point these days, but the pessimist in me points to just three stumbling blocks: what we mean by ‘public’, ‘understanding’ and ‘psychology’. So Routledge’s optimistic take is to be applauded. If we can go mining for psychology in everything, anywhere, this series is a fine view of the strata. The challenges are familiar: if portraying psychology as evidence-based is your priority, as it should be, then it can be easy to end up preaching to the converted. And I do think the books will find an audience that is already fairly scientifically literate – the mythical ‘Brenda in the chip shop’ may have needed a few more take-home messages and practical tips pulled out. Or maybe not… I picture her at a train station, picking one of these up on impulse in the shop, devouring it in one go and alighting at her destination with, as promised, a ‘psychological lens’ to view everything through.

Rights and wrongs This book is about left-handedness and it covers both its history and the contemporary research. While few people would maintain that the condition is entirely of environmental origin, very little is known about its biological basis. There is even little agreement on how left-handedness should be defined. One thing that does come through loud and clear is the discrimination that left-handed people have faced.

In Western countries it was common until recently to force left-handed children to write, eat, sew, etc. with their right hand, and the practice was brutally enforced.

Forcing children to sit on their left hand or tying it up was common. It has often had negative consequences for the children involved. For example, stammering is common among children who have been forced to use their right hand, and the author points out that the stammer of King George VI, which was portrayed in the film The King’s Speech, occurred when it happened to him. The practice has not entirely disappeared in the West, particularly among recent immigrants, and it is still common in China, India, Africa and the Islamic world. It is surprising how widespread it is.

Most cultures associate ‘right’ with good, sacred and normal and ‘left’ with evil, profane and deviant.

These views have often been reinforced by religion and, for much of the 20th century, by science. Left-handedness has been associated with a variety of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, mental retardation, ADHD, and autism.

It has also been associated with femininity, criminals, ‘primitives’ and homosexuality. The author shows that, in spite of all the effort that has gone into establishing these links, there is no evidence to support any of them. They are simply attempts to associate one kind of stigma with another. Indeed, the negative consequences of the discrimination that left-handers have faced are far more serious than any problems that it is thought to involve.

The book will be of special interest to left-handed people, particularly those who have suffered negative consequences as a result, and to members of other stigmatised groups. For the rest of us, it is an interesting case study in the seemingly limitless capacity of human beings to discriminate against those who are different from themselves.

Reviewed by Adrian C. Brock, who is an independent scholar based in Greater Manchester

On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History Howard I. Kushner Johns Hopkins University Press; Hb £20.00

My shelfie…Dr Mark Griffiths (Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Psychology Department, Nottingham Trent University) Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addictions Jim Orford One of the most influential books on my whole career is Jim Orford’s seminal book Excessive Appetites, which explored many different behavioural addictions including gambling, sex, and eating (i.e. addictions that don’t involve the ingestion of psychoactive substances). Orford’s books are always worth a read, and he writes in an engaging style that I have always admired. It was by chance that I did my PhD at the University of Exeter (1987–1990) where Orford was working at the time, and since 2005 we have published many co-authored papers together. While we can agree to disagree on some aspects of how

and why people become addicted, Jim will continue to be remembered as a pioneer in the field of behavioural addiction.

The Psychology of Gambling Michael Walker If there’s one book I’d wish I had written myself, it is this one. I did my PhD on slot machine addiction in adolescence, but this book was published shortly after I’d finished and beautifully summarises all the main theories and perspectives on gambling psychology. My PhD would have been a whole lot easier if this book had been published when I first started my research career! I got to know Michael quite well before his untimely death in December 2009 (and he was external PhD 70

examiner to some of my PhD students), and one of my enduring images of him was walking around at gambling conferences with his book clutched in his hand. Some of my colleagues found that a little strange, but if I had written a book that good I’d have it with me at such events all the time!

Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People For Change William R. Miller & Stephen Rollnick I reviewed this book for the British Journal of Clinical Psychology (BJCP) back in the early 1990s and concluded by saying that it is a book that should be read by all therapists because its content can be applied to nearly all clinical situations and not just to those individuals with addictive behaviour problems.

Motivational interviewing (MI) borrows strategies from cognitive therapy, client-centred counselling, systems theory and the social psychology of persuasion, and the underlying theme of the book is the issue of ambivalence, and how the therapist can use MI to resolve it and allow the client to build commitment and reach a decision to change. In my most recent research I’ve used the basic tenets of MI in designing personalised messages to give to gamblers while they are gambling online in real time. I’ve now come to the conclusion 25 years after writing my BJCP review that anyone interested in enabling behaviour change should apply the tenets in this book to their work.

The Myth of Addiction John B. Davies Even though this book was published back in 1992, I still tell my current students that this is a ‘must read’ book. Davies

takes a much-researched area of social psychology (attribution theory) and applies it to addiction. The basic message of the book is that people take drugs because they want to and not because they are physiologically addicted. The whole book is written in a non-technical manner and is highly readable and thought-provoking.

I often use Davies’s term ‘functional attribution’ from this book in my teaching and writings on sex addiction, and apply it to celebrities who use the excuse of ‘sex addiction’ to justify their infidelities.

Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices Anil Aggrawal Anyone that reads my blog will know that when it comes to the more bizarre side of sexual activity, my ‘go to’ book is Dr Aggrawal’s book on unusual sexual practices. Others in the sexology field often look down their noses at this book, but it is both enjoyable and informative and the kind of book that once you start reading you find hard to put down again.

A lot of academic books on sexual behaviour can be boring and/or impenetrable but this one is the polar opposite. The book also kick-started some of my own recently published research on sexual fetishes and paraphilias.

Small World David Lodge During my PhD I remember watching the 1988 adaptation of David Lodge’s novel Small World. At the time, I had never heard of David Lodge but I went out and bought the book and was totally hooked.

I then discovered that Small World was the second part of a ‘campus trilogy’ (preceded by Changing Places and followed

by Nice Work). Since then I have bought every novel Lodge has ever published and he’s my favourite fiction writer (and I’ve bought and read some of his academic books on literary criticism). I love campus novels and through Lodge have devoured other university-based novels (including Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind, and Ann Oakley’s The Men’s Room among my favourites).

the psychologist april 2018 books

Informative rather than analytical How the Child’s Mind Develops (3rd edn) David Cohen Routledge; Pb £19.99

If you are looking for an overview of key issues and ideas in developmental psychology, How the Child’s Mind Develops is a great choice. This is an immensely readable book that covers huge ground in a level of detail ideal for those with a professional or academic interest in children but without deep knowledge of cognitive development theories.

Cohen kicks off with a pithy summary of the methodological difficulties in studying developmental psychology. How can we research babies’ brains when they have no language for reporting thoughts or preferences? Personally, I would have preferred an even greater scepticism here about the pitfalls of jumping to conclusions from methodologically unstable ground.

There is a succinct, reader-friendly canter through Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and its main critiques, and a similar chapter devoted to Vygotsky’s work on language development.

The narrative ranges effortlessly across neuroscience,

philosophy and medieval thinkers to place our understanding of children’s minds into a wider historical context. There is a lovely (too brief) chapter comprising excerpts from a mother’s diary, which gives a refreshing glimpse into actual lived interactions with a real baby.

The absence of any discussion of gender is a weakness. And the final chapter on the impact of technology on children’s development is disappointingly out of date, focusing exclusively on TV rather than portable digital devices and missing current debates about children’s use of social media.

Broad rather than deep, informative rather than analytical, How the Child’s Mind Develops uses observation exercises to prompt reflection. But it is left firmly up to the reader to draw conclusions on any practical implications for children, families and practitioners.

Reviewed by Anita Cleare, who is a parenting writer, speaker and coach

‘Round the bend’ in Kriegieland This book was produced as a result of Dr Clare Makepeace’s doctoral dissertation at Birkbeck but was inspired by the author’s father, Alan Makepeace, who was himself a prisoner of war in Poland, having been captured with 10,000 others in 1940.

Captives of War documents the journey and experience of British prisoners of war in Europe during the Second World War (although the First World War is also mentioned briefly).

The experience of British POWs in the Far East, yet another very harrowing story, is not covered here.

The book takes us through the phases of capture, imprisonment, liberation and resettlement and is based on nearly 100 war diaries and sets of letters held as archive material by the National Archives, the Imperial War Museum together with other sources.

From a psychological point of view, the most illuminating chapters are those that describe how prisoners developed a ‘Kriegie’ (from the German Krieg: war) spirit and mentality as a means of survival and developing a very different sort of personality to that exhibited before imprisonment. Another chapter, ‘Going Round the Bend’, describes

vividly how many suffered marked psychological disturbance, often severe psychological disturbance, as a result of that imprisonment.

But the psychological effects of imprisonment did not end with liberation. The vast operation that was mounted to assess and assist liberated service personnel gives some indication of the scale of the problem.

The book is illustrated with diary extracts and by original drawings and cartoons backed up by numerous military reports, many from the Department of Army Psychiatry. Psychologists do feature here but are outnumbered by military psychiatrists, because at the time of the war psychologists were, in the main, involved in research and selection and, of course, the development of the discipline of clinical psychology was yet to begin.

The book is extremely well referenced but perhaps overly so with, in some cases, half a page of text being taken up by reference material. It would, in future editions, perhaps be much better to record reference material in bibliographies at the end of each chapter or, chapter by chapter, at the end of the book to provide a more accessible

experience for the reader.

The only other thing that really begin to grate in this otherwise generally excellent book was the author’s habit of repeatedly citing, quoting or otherwise referring to the title of book throughout. ‘This book’ would have been quite adequate.

All in all, though, an extremely interesting read, which I would recommend to all psychologists and others interested in the psychology of war, warfare and survival psychology.

Captives of War: British Prisoners of War in Europe in the Second World War Clare Makepeace Cambridge University Press; Hb £31.99

Reviewed by Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, who is, among many other things, Visiting Professor of Military Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University.

See also ‘Looking back’ in this issue.

More online: Find exclusive book extracts, interviews and more reviews via www.thepsychologist.org.uk, including: extracts from the Wellcome Book Prize nominated books With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix, and In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer’s

by Joseph Jebelli; and a Q+A with Dr Daniel Krawczyk about his new book Reasoning: The Neuroscience of How We Think.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress Steven Pinker Allen Lane; Hb £25.00

Anyone for a shift in consciousness? Like, now?

Steven Pinker is one of the most influential intellectuals and experimental psychologists working today. In his latest book, Enlightenment Now, he argues that human progress is an empirical hypothesis that can be measured and observed and that our progress as a species depends upon the level to which we embrace the progressive tenets of the Enlightenment. Namely, science, reason and humanism.

The heart of this argument was first posited

by Pinker with regard to violence in his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which made a compelling case that we are, despite the headlines, living in the most peaceful time ever experienced by our species. The data in Enlightenment Now, presented comprehensively across a wealth of universal issues, are equally compelling when we consider, just to name a few examples, that universal life expectancy, maternal and child mortality, child labour malnutrition, literacy, workload, the spread of democracy and wealth, all chart dramatic progress over the past hundred years.

It is difficult to argue with the figures and evidence on display here, but the key idea in Enlightenment Now worth exploring is the assertion that if we can free ourselves from the desire to believe those things that prove our loyalty to a particular coalition, we allow ourselves new beliefs based on what is empirically true. Pessimism is not necessarily the most intelligent or most moral choice, and arguments that are not data-based are, at best, fear-based complacent ignorance and, at worst, wilful propaganda.

In an effort to harness social media’s immediacy and scope, larger media outlets have resorted to generating debate, but debate to no end. What is worse is that a distrust of the media, which has been growing since the turn of the century, has reached the point where an expert is treated with suspicion but the opinion of a stranger with an egg for an avatar online will be taken as read. So, what of seemingly ethereal concepts like a newly recharged Enlightenment in a world like this? How do we untangle this mess? And, what is more, how to be enlightened in a world that isn’t? These are the questions on which Pinker is at his most lucid and vital here and why I would suggest Enlightenment Now is both timely and essential.

American scientist Arthur Kantrowitz once said that ‘as sure as pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, optimism is a selffulfilling prophecy too’, and paraphrasing American economist Paul Romer, Pinker encourages us to proceed with conditional rather than complacent optimism in order that we may continue to make real progress on the issues that affect human wellbeing across the globe. Enlightenment Now makes a compelling case that the best of all possible worlds is there for us, if, to borrow a phrase popularised during the Enlightenment, we dare to know.

Reviewed by Niall James Holohan, musician, writer and BSc in psychology undergraduate at the University of East London @nialljholohan on Twitter

A missed opportunity Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do John Bargh William Heinemann; Hb £20.00

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John Bargh is a charming and expert guide to research on the importance of our motivations, goals, habits, history and environment in affecting our everyday behaviours.

His enthusiasm for the topic, and track record for conducting experiments with just that bit more flair than most, shine through this book.

He walks us through a series of striking demonstrations of how small differences can have big effects on our behaviour. These are things such as his famous experiment reporting that students who did a word-

unscrambling task priming the concept ‘elderly’ walked slower down the corridor upon leaving the experiment, or the study showing that holding a hot drink influenced people to rate a stranger more warmly.

A core topic of the book, so called ‘social priming’ has been very staunchly criticised for being based on shifting sands of unreliable, selectively published research.

It is remiss that he doesn’t once offer a rejoinder to these criticisms. Also, Bargh’s use of the term ‘unconscious’ is over-inclusive.

It is not valid to infer, as Bargh does, from a lack of report that a participant is unconscious of a driver of their behaviour in any strong way.

Bargh can use the word ‘unconscious’ to mean ‘not often discussed’ if he wants, but it is an unfair trick on the reader, who might assume that the word carried some deeper conceptual importance.

These problems mean that ultimately this book, despite its virtues, is misleading for novices and unsatisfying for experts. A missed opportunity.

Reviewed by Tom Stafford, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield

the psychologist april 2018 books

A simple truth We spoke to Caroline Elton about her new book Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors (William Heinemann) How did you first get involved in working with medical doctors?

It happened quite by chance – a textbook example of John Krumboltz’s theory of ‘planned happenstance’. In 1998 my youngest child had just started primary school and I was wondering what to do with my career. Idly flicking through the jobs pages of The Guardian (back in the days when hundreds of jobs were advertised each day), I spotted a vacancy with the then South Thames Department of Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education. The essential requirements were somewhat random and included a PhD (which I’d recently finished) as well as teaching experience (which had been my original career).

I applied, had the toughest interview of my life and was duly appointed.

You write movingly about the psychological difficulties many doctors face. What do you hope will be the impact of your book?

I want the reader to appreciate the psychological demands of medical work – to see the pressures that doctors work under (made significantly worse by the current state of the NHS), the hideously difficult things we ask doctors to do, whilst providing minimal or no emotional support. I also want the reader to understand the length of training, the years of moving between jobs as a trainee, the insidious corrosion of sexism and racism, and how the professional culture of medicine rejects doctors who become sick or disabled. Above all, I want the show how we have lost sight of the simple truth that doctors are also human.

Thinking about the saying ‘Physician, heal thyself’, have you found doctors especially resistant to seeking psychological help?

I’m an occupational and counselling psychologist who specialises in career counselling, so the doctors come to me for help making career decisions. For example, clients might wonder whether they have chosen the right specialty (there are over 60 of them) or whether they are actually suited to being a doctor. But a high proportion of the doctors I see are also experiencing mental health difficulties – most frequently depression and anxiety. I know from what these doctors tell me and also from the literature that doctors with mental health issues can be particularly stigmatised. Unsurprisingly, this makes them resistant to seeking any form of psychological help.

Are doctors easier or more difficult to engage with than other types of client?

I often feel that I have to earn my spurs with medical clients.

Their initial assumption can be that as I am not a doctor myself, I couldn’t possibly understand their working lives. But having counselled hundreds of doctors over the last ten years, they quickly realise that I do seem to have a good sense of what their work entails. At that point there can be a marked shift,

characterised by tremendous relief that they can speak openly about the difficulties they are experiencing without fear of being judged.

What about your own inner life? What keeps you going?

I begin my book with a quote from the psychiatrist Christine Montross, who describes how working with people in distress is like walking out on a frozen lake, to somebody who has fallen through the ice; although you can reach out one hand to the person who has fallen into the ice, you also need to make sure that your other hand is anchored to the shore. The things that keep me from falling through the ice include spending time with family and friends, balancing client work with other stuff – writing and teaching, for example – walking for an hour a day, playing the piano and, of course, regular supervision.

Matt Crockett

The ‘sideways lookers’ Jon Sutton listens to The Adam Buxton Podcast, along with his new BBC Radio 4 offering You’re Doing It Wrong.

Plus a Q+A with Adam, and a selection from his conversation with Michael Lewis about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky

A

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dam Buxton – comedian, writer and actor – has been a constant presence in my headphones for more than two decades now. Years of proper laugh-out-loud moments on my commute thanks to the Adam and Joe radio shows, and latterly 66 episodes and counting of his own podcast (he describes himself as ‘guy with vague job’).

Seek out everything you can: he’s an extremely amusing man (and his dog’s even funnier). But what makes Buxton interesting for us is that he’s (increasingly?) dipping his toes into the world of psychology.

That may often be a passing mention – Milgram, Zimbardo, Gladwell, Vince Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders – but the episode with author Michael Lewis

should be required listening for any psychologist. One of Adam’s recurring themes, for which he draws upon a well of personal experience, is ‘double act dynamics’. He’s so witty, candid and intelligent on this that I keep badgering him via Twitter to write a book on it. Lewis is the perfect foil for this interest, given that his book The Undoing Project considers perhaps the greatest ever double act in psychology – Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Pretty much every word from Lewis in the podcast is utterly fascinating. Kahneman and Tversky are well known for their work on cognitive biases. They are generally considered the founding fathers of ‘behavioural economics’, which now pervades so many aspects of

the psychologist april 2018 culture life. But I’m finding myself more and more drawn to ‘the psychology of psychology’… what goes on behind the scenes, the foibles and failings of everyday folk, which scientists are in no way immune to!

The story behind the title of the book, The Undoing Project, encapsulates this. Kahneman’s nephew, an air force navigator, dies in a crash on his final day of service.

At the funeral, Kahneman watches others, and observes many ‘if only’ statements. He realises there’s a structure, that people are imagining alternative realities by undoing an event at the end and working back. This is a point in the relationship where Kahneman is becoming sensitive to Tversky’s growing fame, so he writes long letters to him and feels like the response is inadequate. Lewis found a folder, ‘The undoing project’, in Amos’s file drawers, where he was ‘intensely trying to turn Danny’s insights into a logic they can publish… he’s clearly really interested in it’. When Lewis shows Kahneman the folder, he is ‘ashen’. ‘He went, “Oh my God, he was still listening. This changes my way of thinking about what was going on”.’

So Lewis called the book The Undoing Project partly due to that, partly due to the sense that one way of describing the whole enterprise of Kahneman and Tversky is that they were undoing a very false view of human nature, by looking at behaviour from a different perspective. Until then had we, as psychologists, been doing it wrong? Another offering from Buxton, BBC Radio 4’s You’re Doing It Wrong, considers whether we’re all doing everything wrong… work, parenting, eating, etc.

In the first episode, on our chase for the ‘dream job’, he talked to guests including Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol). Buxton’s trademark humour was still very much to the fore… ‘I love to look sideways, that’s what I’m known for,’ he has said in self-mocking tones…’most people look at things straight on, don’t they? But not me – I’m the sideways looker.’ Maybe more psychologists should be ‘sideways lookers’.

I asked Adam some questions about his interest in psychology.

Are you finding yourself increasingly drawn towards psychology?

I’ve always found psychology interesting. Trying to understand how and why people think and do the things they do is like learning a magic trick. I often feel overwhelmed and baffled by other people’s behaviour and even more so by my own, so I think about what goes on in people’s heads a lot. Psychology seems to be a good way to be what Carrie Fisher called ‘a spy in the house of me’.

I guess that’s just another way of saying ‘Know Thyself’.

As I said to Michael in the podcast, the process seems to me very similar to the way comedians approach a ‘bit’ i.e. trying to identify patterns of thought and behaviour that are easily relatable then riffing on them.

My understanding is very superficial though… a lot of Jon Ronson and Malcolm Gladwell (possibly controversial figures in psychology?), and I got some interesting stuff from a book called 50 Psychology Classics that summarised the work of a number of popular psychology tomes. That’s where I heard about people like Harry

Harlow, Stanley Milgram, Abraham Maslow, Stephen Pinker, John Gottman, etc., and followed up on quite a few of them.

Do you have any tips for psychologists being interviewed for podcasts, or creating their own?

I’d love to hook up with a psychologist for my podcast (as long as they’re good talkers!) When I was little I liked the interviews Anthony Clare would do. Finding interesting people to hang your shtick on – that’s what most podcasts (including mine) try to do. If you weren’t going the celebrity guest route, some sort of self-help style approach with a solid psychological underpinning would be popular. There’s a few of these already but they’re generally a little too dopey and touchy-feely for me. Keep it accessible but scientific, i.e. case studies, acknowledgement of conflicting points of view, data, etc. and I’m in!

What’s your favourite cognitive bias, as it applies to you?

I’m very much a Peak End Rule man (is that a bias?).

It’s all about how strong your closer is. That’s why my lifelong affection for David Bowie became much more profound after he died. The way he wrapped up his life was inspiring, I thought. I hope he felt that way. If I knew I could live my last few years something like the way he did, I’d enjoy being alive a lot more. Not that I don’t enjoy it very much, but I could do with being less fearful.

What’s the most interesting aspect of ‘double act dynamics’ for you?

The fragile symbiosis. The possibility of creating something far greater than the sum of those two parts.

The hardest thing to appreciate when you’re in the double act is that although your contribution may appear the weaker/less important of the two elements, it’s vital to what you produce together. No one wants to be the straight person, but if you can get beyond your ego and protect the relationship, you’ll probably be happier and more successful in the long run, and if morons write history with you as the weak link, then fuck ’em. But like a marriage, sometimes it’s just not worth staying together, and there’s an art to knowing when to quit too.

By the way, I don’t think I’m talking about myself and Joe here as we’re still very friendly, but we’ve certainly had tense moments!

What follows is an edited selection from episode 66 of The Adam Buxton Podcast: a conversation with American writer Michael Lewis about his book The Undoing Project, which tells the story of the friendship and fascinating work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman. You can find a review of the book, and an interview with Kahneman, via our website.

Michael: [Daniel Kahneman] was sensitive and needy… needy in a way that Amos Tversky seldom had time for, but he identified clearly Kahneman’s brilliance. One of Amos’s great contributions to the world is to identify just how valuable Danny’s mind was. I think others didn’t see

Barbara Tversky

just how original what was coming out of it was. But in their relationship, there’s no question that Danny is the ‘stay-at-home wife’ and Amos is the alpha male who’s coming home with red meat every night. Everybody thought that Amos was the genius, and Amos would say, ‘It’s the strangest thing to me, because Danny is the one that’s got all the ideas!’

Amos Tversky had this mesmerising effect on people socially. They would come away from encounters with him saying they had just met the smartest man they’d ever met. I interviewed dozens of people who said Amos Tversky is the smartest person I ever met. There was a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Richard Nisbett, who after he got to know Amos designed what he said was the shortest intelligence test ever created, he called it the Tversky Test. It was the longer it takes you after you’ve met Amos to figure out that Amos is smarter than you, the stupider you are. Even Danny had that reaction to Amos.

Because he’s so mesmerising and charismatic, he gets all the credit for the work. People look at Kahneman/ Tversky and they say what is Kahneman for, even though they should have thought, ‘Wow, this work is different from anything Amos did by himself, or Danny. It’s an alchemy, something neither of them could have done alone.’

You say every double act has this tension in it. A lot of academic partnerships aren’t quite double acts because they don’t get that much attention. Double acts come under scrutiny, you’re on stage, you’re on air, wherever you are, you have a sense of being watched and evaluated.

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Every double act has a tension in it – Amos and Danny in the back yard

As long as Danny and Amos were in Israel and in a small place, I don’t think they thought of themselves as performing for an audience. But they moved to the United States, for complicated reasons… Amos didn’t want to go but Danny followed a woman there… and the moment they were on a bigger stage, and the rewards were increased, the stakes were increased… it puts the pressure onto an academic collaboration that would normally only be put on a double act, a performance act.

It exacerbates the problems already in a relationship, that Danny needs affirmation.

Adam: Was he able to articulate that to Tversky?

Michael: Not well enough. The letters have a manly reticence about them, but when the relationship starts to fracture… their relationship has the shape of a love affair.

When they meet it’s like love at first sight, and there’s this passionate ten years… they’re not having sex, but they fuck each other’s ideas… then they have this horrible falling out. Amos saved the letters from Danny, and what Danny’s articulating is more subtle than ‘I’m sick of you getting all the credit, I want some credit’. What Danny’s articulating is ‘I’m growing weary of you believing the way the world sees our relationship. The more adulation you receive, the more dismissive you’re becoming of my ideas. The more I think that you actually believe that you’re the stronger person in the relationship and that you don’t need me.’ And the fuel for the work, Danny felt, was a feeling of uncritical acceptance between the two of them. Danny was an idea factory. He just spewed stuff. Some of it was useful. All of it was probably interesting. Amos’s gift was to dig through it and see what was really valuable, and give Danny the confidence to shape it and make it ready for prime time. The minute that Danny starts to feel ‘Amos is criticising my ideas as opposed to accepting them’, he starts to clam up.

It’s very much like an improv comedy, the relationship… it only works if both sides feel the other is trying to make them look good. If both sides are accepting whatever the other person does, and building on it. Danny did say from the very beginning that this improvisational aspect only existed when they were in private. When they were in a room, just the two of them, it was fine. The minute they were at a party or in front of a class together, they became competitive with each other and it vanished. So he said actually, in writing the book, I was going to have a problem, that no one could ever have seen how we were together because we weren’t that way when other people were watching us.

the psychologist april 2018 culture

Cosmological questions Rising more than four metres high, a mix of steel, 1700 LEDs and 14 speakers, Cosmoscope is an impressive sculpture.

The culmination of a two-year interdisciplinary research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award, the creative team includes Professors of Cosmology and Chemistry, an imaging physicist, a programmer, a composer… and a counselling psychologist.

Monia Brizzi is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society in private practice in London.

She told us: ‘I have always been fascinated by the liminal position that psychology occupies between hard and soft science as well as between science and art, and by the rich possibilities for interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation. Amplification

and knowledge advancement are enabled by psychology’s distinct “combinatorial capacity”, as William James put it. Cosmoscope calls us to amplify our perspective and vantage points on the world in a way that challenges the Western tradition of subjectivity and moral allegiance to selfhood, and prioritises our basic interdependence and the plasticity of our world relations.’

The sculpture seeks to reflect cosmological or existential questions that Brizzi feels are fundamental to her efficacy in her practice as a psychologist: ‘How can we create structures able to contain, sustain and guide us in our everyday life without entrapping and stultifying us? How do we exist as unique yet fundamentally interconnected parts of the enormously complex, often unsettling and bewildering,

mysterious universe we inhabit? Over the years my clinical practice has increasingly shown me that the lack of embodied relation to the world and participation in cosmic life leads people to conditions of existential dissociation, dislocation, nihilism, anaesthesia, anhedonia, despair. This has led me to believe that the issue of how to best facilitate and engage people in cosmological questions should be a primary concern for psychologists.’

Cosmoscope was shown at Lumiere Durham 2017 and Lumiere London 2018, and was the basis of a Durham University public engagement and science outreach project that invited thousands of primary school children to build their own physical, psychological and social universes.

Bringing home World War Two’s ‘awkward lot’

I

Clare Makepeace on the use of Civil Resettlement Units and their possible lessons for today

To try to understand more about these problems, the government established an experimental rehabilitation scheme at the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) Depot in Crookham, near Aldershot.

The scheme ran from November 1943 to February 1944 and included more than 500 returned regimental stretcher bearers and almost 800 RAMC personnel.

These POWs were observed to have developed a ‘stalag mentality’, disproportionately severe in those who had been prisoners for more than 18 months. Features of this included ‘a very real but unfounded feeling that their physical or mental health had somehow been damaged’, which was related to ‘depression and guilt’ suffered whilst in captivity, and to ‘anxieties of re-adaption’.

Around this time, articles written by ex-POWs on the consequences of captivity appeared in the press.

Captain George Collie, who had escaped from a POW hospital in Paris in 1942, penned an article for The Fortnightly magazine on the ‘Rip Van Winkle’ effect.

He explained how thousands of men captured at the fall of France had ‘no conception of life in Britain A ‘normal’ problem to-day or of the changes in the outlook for the future’, The issue of the rehabilitation of POWs first came to and that ‘these blanks in the knowledge of events are a the War Office’s attention in the middle years of the serious matter for the prisoner of war’. A few months war. Distinguished soldiers from the Great War wrote later, the British Medical Journal to the War Office, recalling how published an article by Major they had never fully recovered “POWs were observed Philip Newman. Newman’s escape from the psychological effects from captivity had involved being of captivity. Their observations to have developed buried for 56 hours underneath were matched by events from the a ‘stalag mentality’, the floorboards of one of the current war. A survey by the army disproportionately severe huts in his transit camp at Rouen in May 1942 revealed the difficulty in France whilst the rest of the it was having in rehabilitating and in those who had been camp was being moved back to employing escapees and other prisoners for more than Germany in early 1942. He wrote ex-POWs recently repatriated from 18 months” of ‘release phenomena’, which he Italy in an exchange of sick and characterised as the psychological wounded POWs and protected equivalent of ‘the bends’ or personnel. Another investigation, ‘decompression sickness’. Just as the deep-sea diver’s carried out by army psychiatrists on 100 body exhibits a variety of symptoms if insufficient time ex-POWs who had returned around the start of is taken to release it from high underwater pressure, 1943, showed 30 per cent of them were exhibiting so an ex-POW, having gone through the intensity of ‘some degree of abnormality’ three to six months after captive life, would exhibit symptoms of restlessness, their release.

n February 1944 Lieutenant-Colonel Tommy Wilson, an army psychiatrist recruited from the Tavistock Clinic, submitted a nine-page report to the War Office. It focused upon the plight of tens of thousands of servicemen overseas who had, in recent times, become labelled by administrators in the British government as the ‘awkward lot’. The other term they were known by was ‘prisoners of war’.

Wilson’s report set out a series of recommendations on how to handle these men upon their return home at the end of the Second World War. The eventual result was to be far-reaching: a programme of Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs). Largely forgotten about, this programme was one of the first controlled experiments in social psychology, an early example of ‘therapeutic communities’ and is notable for its humane treatment of returning service personnel.

It is also potentially instructive for society today.

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the psychologist april 2018 looking back

A British prisoner of war, looks out for the aircraft that will take him back home to England – May 1945

Jones, E. & Wessely, S. (2010). British prisoners-of-war: From resilience to psychological vulnerability. Twentieth Century British History, 21(2), 163–183.

Newman, P.H. (1944). The Prisonerof-War Mentality: Its effect after repatriation. British Medical Journal, 1(4330) (1 January 1944), 8–10.

White, A. (2016). From the science of selection to psychologising civvy street: The Tavistock Group, 1939–1948.

Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent.

Wilson, A.T.M., Trist, E.L. & Curle, A. (1952). Transitional communities: A study of the civil resettlement of British prisoners of war. In Guy E. Swanson, Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley (Eds.) Readings in social psychology (pp.561–579). New York: Henry Holt and Co.

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Civil Resettlement Units Ex-POWs’ adjustment problems were considered by psychiatrists to be most severe during the first six months of civilian life. CRUs were residential units designed to catch men at this point. They provided a ‘half-way house to Civvy Street’; a bridge in the transition from army to civilian life.

Attendance at a CRU was purely voluntary. This was essential, given that the purpose of the units was to re-accustom ex-POWs to living as civilian members of a free society.

Considerable efforts were made to make POWs aware of the units.

©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 2977)

irritability and even dishonesty after returning home.

Collie and Newman’s assessments, like those of other ex-POWs, psychiatrists and advisers, stressed POWs were ‘normal’ men. Their psychological problems stemmed from being removed from their natural environments. Newman described it as a ‘normal response of a normal man to release from an abnormal external environment’. As Wilson put it, ex-POWs were not ‘psychiatric cases’, but experiencing problems ‘of a special type’.

The basic problems ex-POWs faced were considered to be different only in degree, rather than kind, from those facing all repatriates. POWs had been more firmly uprooted from their home society and more absolutely cut off from it than other servicemen. This was one reason why POWs received the government’s attention. There was another. During the interwar years, a perception had developed within the British public Key sources that demobilisation after the First World War had been mismanaged and brutalised ex-servicemen had WO 32/10950. A.T.M. Wilson ‘Report to been at the centre of a series of the War Office on Psychological Aspects of the Rehabilitation of Repatriated bloody riots that had swept across Prisoners of War’, February 1944. The towns and cities. By supporting National Archives, Kew. POWs in the current war, the WO 32/10950. ‘The Crookham government offered a gesture of Experimental Rehabilitation Scheme for reassurance to civilians that the Repatriated Prisoners of War’, February same would not happen again.

1944. The National Archives, Kew. Collie, G.F. (1943, June). Returned The observations from the prisoners of war: A suggested scheme current war, along those available for rehabilitation. The Fortnightly, No. from the First World War, led 153, pp.407–411.

Wilson to compile his nine-page Curle, A. (1947). Transitional report on the ‘psychological aspects communities and social re-connection: of the rehabilitation of repatriated A follow-up study of the civil resettlement of British prisoners of war. prisoners of war’. The adjutant Part I. Human Relations, 1, 42–68. general personally took the matter Curle, A. & Trist, E.L. (1947). to the Secretary of State for War. Just Transitional communities and social reover a year later, in March 1945, connection: A follow-up study of the civil approval was given for the creation resettlement of British prisoners of war. of 20 CRUs across the country.

Part II. Human Relations, 1, 240–288.

Lectures and notes were prepared for officers who went into camps at the end of the war. Pamphlets were sent to repatriates a fortnight after their leave began. Posters were produced and news coverage was carefully planned.

One of the strongest factors in an ex-POW’s decision to volunteer for a CRU was his dislike of being a long way from home. As a result, units were established close to the homes of repatriates, as determined by census figures. Where possible, large country houses were used, so the CRUs contrasted from army camps, such as the Jacobean stately home Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

Each unit accommodated 240 ex-POWs at any one time. Ex-POWs entered in groups of 60 per week so the older residents could help settle in the newcomers.

Generally, men stayed for between four and five weeks.

The units were arranged to eliminate some of the key challenges POWs faced in their reintegration back into society. There was minimal formal discipline, allowing activities to be spontaneous and democratic, and enabling ‘flexibility and personal embellishment’ amongst the attendees. The Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, supplied 100 of the 140 staff members of each unit, to re-accustom POWs to a mixed community. Meals were served in a common dining room shared by all ranks, repatriates and staff, which symbolised CRU democracy. Ex-POWs were waited upon, to avoid queuing for meals; an omnipresent and hated feature of captive life.

Repatriates could return home each weekend, and their wives and civilian friends were invited to attend

the psychologist april 2018 looking back

social gatherings that took place in the unit. The objective of CRUs was not limited to reintroducing the ex-POW into civilian life, it extended to helping families and communities reintegrate returned service personnel. In this way, the two groups were ‘treated’ together in with only 36 per cent of those who a ‘therapeutic community’.

Dr Clare Makepeace is an had elected not to attend one.

Group discussions were held Honorary Research Fellow at CRUs also had a wider objective. to encourage men to disclose their Birkbeck, University of London, Distinct from the narrow aim of feelings without embarrassment in and the author of Captives of War. ‘preventing casualties’, they sought the hope they could discuss their British Prisoners of War in Europe to acknowledge and sanction the problems more openly at home. in the Second World War (2017, positive democratic outlook a POW Men could be referred or selfCambridge University Press) had gained from his experience referred to a psychiatrist: two CRUs of captivity and sustain this in had a resident psychiatrist whilst civilian society. Psychiatrists recorded that POWs other units were paid weekly visits. Each unit had a female Civil Liaison Officer: a trained psychiatric social believed captivity had promoted positive psychological development in them. They had become more worker who dealt with domestic difficulties. Other mature, wise, considerate and self-reliant. They had specialists, from Army Education Corps instructors experienced ‘considerable democratic freedom’ in the to Dental Officers, were available for consultation, but the guidance information handed out at individual camps where, on their committee of representatives, a private had as many rights as a warrant officer, and CRUs placed great emphasis on these meetings being anyone who failed to come up to the required standard voluntary, with it being up to the repatriate to initiate could be voted out. contact.

Ex-POWs who attended a CRU along with those In all these ways, it was expected that the who had not were compared with a control group resistance POWs showed to authority figures, a means of 40 families who represented the civilian norm. by which they had sustained their morale whilst The sample was, admittedly, small but the findings under the power of their enemy, would be neutralised, are remarkable. Ex-POWs who had attended CRUs and they would reconnect with home society, accept showed ‘more adaptability and co-operativeness’ than responsibility and display the initiative necessary for was normal for their civilian neighbours. In contrast to civilian life. CRUs also offered vocational guidance adhering to conventional roles that sometimes impeded and access to the labour exchange, with the proximity cooperation between a husband and wife, these former of the unit to a man’s home allowing him to remain POWs were said to have discovered how to get the close to possible jobs. There were also workshops most out of relationships, and had broken the bonds where men learnt skills and hobbies under trained of conventional restriction. There was a ‘continuum . . supervision. . in terms of the degree of flexibility and participation The units existed for two years. They started in these relationships’ from those had been to a CRU closing in May 1946, with the final one shutting its through to the control group, to former POWs who doors in June 1947. At least 19,000 – 13 per cent of had not attended a unit.

POWs held in Europe – attended one, as well as 4500 or 9 per cent of those captured in the Far East. The RAF established four of its own resettlement centres, A lesson for today which received more than one quarter of some 13,000 CRUs are noteworthy for their innovativeness, returned airmen held captive in either Europe or unprecedented scale as well as their results. The the Far East. The Royal Navy made no comparable principles and some of the methods devised for them provision. Since the Navy had relatively few POWs, it were later adapted and applied to European civilian probably considered the cost of establishing dedicated refugees displaced by war. centres outweighed any gain.

One wonders if they might have a place in Britain today. A fifth of all veterans in the UK will suffer from conditions such as PTSD, depression, anxiety and A positive outlook alcohol disorders. CRUs illustrate one way in which An evaluation study carried out by the Army into they could be helped to smoothly re-adapt to civilian the efficacy of CRUs demonstrates their success. Fifty life. The model also suggests a wider potential benefit. repatriated POWs in one area, who had attended a With the right support, those who have gone through CRU, along with 100 who had not, were ‘intensively studied’ some months after they had been demobilised. the challenge of war might be able to teach something to the rest of us about the social relationships and 74 per cent of ex-POWs who had attended a CRU adaptability they learnt whilst under extreme duress. were deemed more settled in civilian life compared

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...is for positivity

‘Being surrounded, mostly, with rapidly-becominggrumpy-old-men in the Psychologist team, I thought I would suggest something upbeat! Each month I seek suggestions for #PsychAtoZ on Twitter – please get involved!’

There’s a downside of positivity: when deployed at the wrong time or in the wrong amount, positivity has clear downsides for preparation, prevention, relationships, and even mental health. See Kate Sweeny’s article from February 2017.

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Karla Novak

Suggested by Debbie Gordon Assistant to the Managing Editor on The Psychologist

coming soon… a special collection on the new psychology of health; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

relentlessly upbeat that, if you weren’t swept up by this spirit of positivity, you could feel like an outsider’.

Positivity in online comments can have a disproportionate effect on subsequent ratings, according to a 2013 study led by Lev Muchnik and covered on our Research Digest blog. Collaborating with a news-sharing Positivity can even be brought to bear on trauma: website, they randomly assigned either a positive see Stephen Joseph’s or negative first-rating, November 2012 article or no rating (control ‘What doesn’t kill us…’ condition), to 101,281 real comments posted over five Some psychologists, months. The first viewer of including Tim Lomas a comment rated positive writing for us in July 2016 on cross-cultural nuances by the researchers was 32 of positivity, found the first per cent more likely to add wave of positive psychology their own positive rating, as compared with the ‘daunting… It often gave the impression of being so control condition.

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