The Psychologist April 2014

the

psychologist vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Charting ‘the mind and body economic’ The Midlands Psychology Group introduce a special feature on the theme of ‘austerity’

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 214 news 222 careers 276 reviews 286

personality – at the heart of health 256 interview with Christina Salmivalli 258 looking back: PsyBorgs on the loose! 292 one on one: with Stephen J. Ceci 296

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

the psychologist... ...features Charting ‘the mind and body economic’ The Midlands Psychology Group introduce a special feature dedicated to the theme of ‘austerity’

232

Austerity in the university Ian Parker on increasing pressure and emotional labour at work for academics in times of crisis

236

Inequality and the next generation Gary Thomas explains how the gradient of difference can impact upon identity in the classroom

240

244

March 2014 issue 49,173 dispatched

Neoliberal austerity and unemployment David Fryer and Rose Stambe examine critical psychological issues

Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use or recycle.

The impact of austerity on a British council estate Carl Harris takes an ‘ecological model of systems’ approach

The Psychologist www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.psychapp.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Advertising Reach 50,000 psychologists at very reasonable rates.

Display Ben Nelmes 020 7880 6244 ben.nelmes@redactive.co.uk Recruitment (in print and online at www.psychapp.co.uk) Giorgio Romano 020 7880 7556 giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk

232

250

ISSN 0952-8229

New voices: Personality – at the heart of health 256 Páraic Ó Súilleabháin on cardiovascular adaptation and health in the latest in our series for budding writers. See www.bps.org.uk/newvoices

Cover Detail from ‘Begging for change'

by Meek.

Photograph by Jake Smallman

© Copyright for all published material is held

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

256

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson

Staff journalist / Research Digest Vacancies (p.283) Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Occupational Digest Alex Fradera

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

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

the

psychologist vol 27 no 4

april 2014

the issue ...reports news 222 a new gameplan for psychological science; young female power; cognitive therapy; confidence intervals; vampire symposium; and more society 262 President’s Column; BPS Scotland; Health and Care Professions Council; and more

...debates letters the ‘stressed sex’ debate continues; call for formation of a Royal College of Psychologists; Putin – the naked truth; dementia; and more

214

...digests the ‘youth bias’, the eccentricity/art relationship, and our farewell to Christian, in the latest from our free Research Digest (see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog) 228

...meets interview against bullying: Christina Salmivalli (University of Turku, Finland) talks to our Editor Jon Sutton about her new approach to an age-old issue

258

careers 276 we talk to Richard Bidder about his work for occupational psychology consultancy Catalyst; and Christopher Hunt tells us about volunteering in Sri Lanka one on one 296 with Stephen J. Ceci, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cornell University

...reviews

This month we return to the issue of ‘austerity’, following last September’s ‘opinion special’. It remains one of the main political, social and psychological topics of our time, and we have five contributions covering the conditions in which people are learning, living and working. So far, argue the Midlands Psychology Group, psychologists have done little to challenge the dubious scientific assumptions upon which ‘austerity programmes’ rest. In fact, have they sought to profit from them, ‘through the mass promotion of therapies and techniques claimed to counteract the mental and emotional damage wrought by an ever more corrosive world’?

Also in this issue (p.229), we bid a fond farewell to Dr Christian Jarrett, our journalist and Editor of the Society’s Research Digest. For more than a decade, Christian has delivered quality to huge audiences, and the Digest is regularly described as a ‘genuine game changer’ in how psychology is reported, taught and perceived. Quite some legacy: I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from him.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor

the usual mix of books and other media reviews, including The Silence of Animals, trauma and creativity online guide, Psychology, Mental Health and Distress, building a virtual brain, and True Detective 286

...looks back PsyBorgs on the loose!

292 Christopher D. Green and his team are taking the history of psychology into the digital realm, producing surprising insights The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Chair (vacant), Phil Banyard, Nik Chmiel, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Rowena Hill, Jeremy Horwood, Catherine Loveday, Peter Martin, Victoria Mason, Stephen McGlynn, Tony Wainwright, Peter Wright, and Associate Editors

One year ago Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our archive, including our special issue on humour, comedy and laughter (April 2013) the

psychologist

vol 26 no 4

april 2013

Have you heard the one about… … the psychology of humour, comedy and laughter?

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

big picture centre careers 292 new voices 308 looking back 310

this is improbable 260 laughter 264 interview – Wiseman meets Herring 270 opinion: no laughing matter 272

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Big picture centre-page pull-out crudely erased adults: A.R. Hopwood’s false memory archive

LETTERS

Sex as a clinical variable

contribute

Seager et al. (‘The hidden mental pain of men’, Letters, March 2014) are correct to highlight the imbalance in arguments about gender and mental health. Logically some diagnosed mental disorders are only possible because of biological sex (e.g. the diagnoses of puerperal psychosis and postnatal depression) but most of the differences claimed are a function of methodology, proven gender differences in help seeking and professional decision making about risk.

The arguments about methodological artefacts were evident in the 1980s when the rallying feminist text The Female Malady was largely being read uncritically (Showalter, 1987; cf. Busfield, 1988). Showalter argued that in the Victorian era women were differentially oppressed by patriarchal psychiatry, setting a gendered trend. But the prevalence of female asylum inmates was higher because women lived longer than men; once that was taken into account then gender differences disappeared.

Today both depression and dementia in older people are gendered for the same reason, if prevalence not incidence is measured.

This prevalence/incidence argument remains pertinent

today. Women seek help more than men in primary care so are diagnosed more with ‘common mental disorders’, which means that women are medicated more than men in open community samples.

For example, today 1 in 10 American women take antidepressants (twice the consumption of men). In the UK, women and men are admitted to acute care at about the same rate but men are twice as likely to be present in them. This is because women are discharged quicker, maybe because of gendered family responsibilities and greater risk being attributed to men by professionals (Pilgrim, 2012).

As for the coercive wing of the mental health industry, not only are men overrepresented in secure facilities but women have been completely removed from most high-secure facilities after successful feminist campaigns. This begs an interesting question: if high security is considered to be too inhumane for women, then why is it legitimate for men to remain in such a brutal environment? If psychiatric oppression is indeed gendered then it would seem that now men, not women, have more to

THE PSYCHOLOGIST NEEDS YOU! Letters These pages are central to The Psychologist’s role as a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and we welcome your contributions.

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

Letters over 500 words are less likely to be published.

The editor reserves the right to edit or publish extracts from letters. Letters to the editor are not normally acknowledged, and space does not permit the publication of every letter received.

214

complain about, if coercion is our defining focus. And if we only study women and not men in community samples, then we will generate evidence unevenly (Brown & Harris, 1978). The latter was intended to be a study of social class and depression not women and depression but for methodological convenience only female respondents were then used.

Single social variables as predictors of mental health status are problematic, but if we do focus on them then social class and age are much better predictors than gender, with race hovering ambiguously in the hierarchy of determinants. The reason that single-variable determinants and their implied ideological special pleading are problematic is that in open systems a multiplicity of generative mechanisms intersect and lead to variegated outcomes (including clinical silence).

Even just two variables studied in interaction inflect the evidence. For example, overall women seek help in primary care more than men, but in the US ethnic minority women (like white men) under utilise that service (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2005).

If we are to look seriously at the social patterning of

diagnosis and service utilisation, then intersectional reasoning is required. Also, within-group differences in these intersections might be accounted for by variables little used in traditional epidemiological research, even its socially informed wing. In particular, traumatised groups (from childhood abuse, school bullying, war zones, intimate violence and regimes of torture) are significantly overrepresented in clinical samples, including those with a diagnosis of psychosis (Varese et al., 2012).

‘Traumatised victims’ as a single social variable is a more robust predictor, than gender,

…and much more 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.

‘Reach the largest, most diverse audience of psychologists in the UK (as well as many others around the world); work with a wonderfully supportive editorial team; submit thought pieces, reviews, interviews, analytic work, and a whole lot more. Start writing for The Psychologist now before you think of something else infinitely less important to do!’

Robert Sternberg, Oklahoma State University 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

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

TIM SANDERS

letters

of mental health status, if we opt to use it as such. Intersectionality and intragroup differences accounted for by trauma should be our guides hereafter to researching the social patterning of mental health problems. But if gender is still considered to be important for mental health researchers, then the above arguments supporting the cautions of Seager et al. warrant due consideration.

David Pilgrim Professor of Health and Social Policy University of Liverpool References Brown, G.W. & Harris, T.O. (1978). The social origins of depression. London: Tavistock.

Busfield, J. (1988). Mental illness as a social product or social construct: A contradiction in feminists’ arguments? Sociology of Health and Illness, 10, 521–542.

Pilgrim, D. (2012). Final lessons from the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales: The limits of legalism-plussafeguards. Journal of Social Policy, 41, 61–81.

Rogers, A. & Pilgrim, D. (2005). A sociology of mental health and illness (4th edn).

Buckingham: Open University Press.

Showalter, E. (1987). The female malady. London: Virago.

Varese, F., Smeets, F., Drukker, M. et al. (2012).

Childhood adversities increase the risk of psychosis: A meta-analysis of patientcontrol, prospective- and cross-sectional cohort studies. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 38(4), 661–671.

As a headline in The Psychologist once put it: ‘Studying sex differences – not for the fainthearted!’ (June 2012, p.418). We knew this when we set out on a journey, described in our book The Stressed Sex, to answer what we consider two very important questions: Who is more likely to develop mental health problems – men or women? And if there are differences between the sexes, what are the causes? Although on a controversial topic the reception for the book over the past year has been very positive. Until, that is, the letter by Seager and colleagues (March 2014).

These six psychologists list evidence of particular mental health problems where men have greater difficulties than women, add a dose of anecdotal evidence, and conclude that men and women must have equal rates of mental health problems. This is exactly the type of selective approach we sought to avoid in The Stressed Sex. It is simply not in dispute that men have problems too. In our article (‘The stressed sex?’, February 2014) we write that there is a ‘worryingly high rate of psychological problems across the population as a whole: that is, for both men and women’. Our point is that, when you consider mental health problems together, women outnumber men.

In other words, this is not a debate about specific disorders but rates of mental disorder in toto. (Incidentally, in the book we show that this applies even when a nondiagnostic approach is taken.)

Take for example the study Seager and co. cite concerning a national epidemiological survey (Martin et al., 2013).

Here, in a new analysis, gender differences

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

in levels of depression are (unsurprisingly) reduced when problems such as anger and substance abuse are included in the diagnosis. But to understand overall rates of mental health problems one must look to the data on all problems, not just a selection. When this is done the findings from the same survey are clear: rates are higher for women than men (Kessler et al., 2005).

The question of whether men are simply unwilling to report mental health problems is often raised in discussion of these issues, and it’s one we explicitly address in The Stressed Sex. We believe it probably plays a role, but there are many compelling reasons to believe that the difference in overall rate of psychological illness is genuine.

Moreover, epidemiological surveys seek to minimise such reporting problems.

In the end, of course, self-report is the only way to find out whether someone has a problem – and it’s possible that women are also underreporting: the research simply hasn’t been done for either gender.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the study

by Pierce and Kirkpatrick (1992) did not simply find that men underreported their fear; it also discovered that rates of fear were higher among women, even after male bravado had been taken into account.

For Seager and co. to dismiss a discussion of possible gender differences by evoking the spectre of the ‘hysterical female’ displays a worryingly limited view of the causes of mental health problems. Clearly, the number of people of both sexes affected by these conditions is too high. But if they think the gender inequalities in society have no consequences for women’s mental health, or that these consequences should be ignored or hidden away, then we must disagree.

Daniel Freeman Professor of Clinical Psychology University of Oxford Jason Freeman Psychology writer and editor References Freeman, D. & Freeman, J. (2013). The stressed sex: Uncovering the truth about men, women, and mental health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kessler, R., Chiu, W., Demler, O. & Walters, E. (2005).

Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSMIV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62, 617–627.

Martin, L., Neighbors, H. & Griffith, D. (2013). The experience of symptoms of depression in men vs women. JAMA Psychiatry, 70(10), 1100–1106.

Pierce, K. & Kirkpatrick, D. (1992). Do men lie on fear surveys? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 30, 415–418.

215

letters

Call for formation of a Royal College of The British Psychological Society has been at the centre of our profession for more than a hundred years, providing a focus for our work and an invaluable channel for communicating with each other. But at a time of regulatory upheaval within our profession we believe the BPS risks losing influence and becoming marginalised, which is why we are asking you to support our plan to reform the Society so it can meet the challenges of the 21st century. To achieve our aim, we want to establish a Royal College of Psychologists.

This is not a radical step: the BPS is already ‘Royal’. The Queen granted a Royal Charter to the BPS in 1965, but in the intervening years we doubt whether it has taken full advantage of the opportunities presented by the award. Our belief is that the profile of our entire profession will be enhanced in the eyes

HEIGHT OF DIFFICULTY I refer to your article in the February issue, ‘Improving aircraft safety’. The aircraft sensitive altimeter – in RAF parlance – the Mk 14 was the original instrument with three straight pointers that had the potential to be misread. The shortcomings were recognised and the instrument was modified after many years with different pointers to overcome the problem. Your Figure 1 shows one of the modified instruments with a changed 1000 feet pointer.

In the original three-pointer instrument (pictured above), the figures on the dial represent; for the longest pointer units of 100 feet, the intermediate pointer units of 1000 feet and the shortest pointer units of 10,000 feet. The problem arose when flying at about 11,500 feet the short pointer was hidden behind the intermediate pointer so the pilot of a rapidly descending aircraft, in cloud, at night with minimal lighting could not be sure if his altitude was 11,500 feet or was just 1,500 feet. I know – it happened to me one dark and stormy night. Though I would have been descending at about 3000 feet per minute and passing through 12,000 feet, I hauled back on the controls, levelled off and then did a double take that I was at a safe altitude and was not about to get my feet wet in the North Sea. Kenneth Foster Luncarty, Perth

216

of the public, government and business by establishing and using the title of Royal College of Psychologists. It will also bring the BPS into line with many other organisations that already proclaim their equivalent status, such as the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

We feel this enhanced title will galvanise the organisation, arrest the slump in recruitment, provide a strong reason for existing members to remain in the organisation and attract new members. The latest data from the BPS shows that after more than 70 years of growth, the total number of members has been stagnating at around 49,000 since 2011. Furthermore the number of student members has been falling. Without a steady stream of new recruits, overall membership levels could soon slip into decline, which could be difficult to correct and would bring about financial strain.

To understand better the mood, we sampled opinions of colleagues and have found a marked degree of dissatisfaction regarding the BPS. In an online survey of 456 psychologists (including 374 BPS members) we found that most believe the BPS neither provided value for money nor met their professional needs.

Some respondents questioned the continuing relevance of the BPS, after the statutory regulation of psychologists was entrusted to the Health and Care Professions Council in 2009: ‘My practising licence is issued by the HCPC, and I allowed my membership of the BPS to lapse three years ago’, said one respondent. Another wrote: ‘I maintain my membership of the BPS because it’s what I’ve always done, and I don’t know if I have to, to maintain my HCPC registration…in the last few years, the BPS has been positively destructive to the profession of psychology’.

Other respondents told us they felt the BPS was lacking effectiveness as an advocate for the profession. ‘It’s poor at making a stand, representing the profession, and making any sort of decision’, said one psychologist. While another commented: ‘I don’t believe the BPS can meet the professional representation needs of psychologists with its current configuration.’

By contrast, our respondents were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the formation of a Royal College of Psychologists, 90.4 per cent supporting the idea. Among the main reasons given in support were that a College would act ‘as a unified voice’ to safeguard the professional integrity of all psychologists, as well being an active advocate for how psychologists and their work are perceived. It would also act as ‘the definitive authority’ in the eyes of the public, both at home and abroad.

The great majority of respondents (84 per cent) also believed a Royal College would play a valuable role in protecting the needs of psychologists. So we in the Campaign also wish to protect the title ‘psychologist’. We want to establish the right of all psychologists to be equitably registered, and to lobby the government towards these goals.

How do we hope to achieve Royal College status?

The principal aim of our campaign has been to gain enough support to petition the BPS to work towards the status of a Royal College, by mandating a decision to create a College of Psychologists. Once that has been achieved we would seek to secure Royal patronage. Our Campaign has already recruited 1000 psychologist supporters (a number which equals over 2 per cent of the BPS membership) and a number of highly

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

letters

Psychologists eminent psychologists have become patrons. So we have already achieved well over the number needed to require the BPS to act, although we would still like many more members to back our campaign (please visit our website www.rcpsychol.com).

There is also a historical precedent for what we are proposing. At its inception in 1901, our organisation was called the Psychological Society, but within five years, the founders felt compelled to change the name to the British Psychological Society as a protective measure in response to a rival group of non-academics who had set up their own version of the Psychological Society. By the same token, we wish to establish a Royal College of Psychologists to protect and enhance the professional standing of the membership, be they academics, practitioners or teachers. We believe this move is in accord with both the intentions and actions of the Society’s founders.

Dr Maxwell J. Benjamin, Professor Robert Bor, Dr Joel Dawson, Madeleine Devon, Dr Clare Eldred, Peter Farnbank, Professor Emeritus Peter Farrell, Dr Alex Linley, Professor A. Malik, Dr Denise McCartan, Dr Mathew McCauley, Karen Moore, Garret O’Moore, Annabel Poate-Joyner, Dr Seema Qurashi, Dr A. Michael Rennie, Professor Peter Saville, Martin Shankleman, Clive Sims, Dita Stanis-Traken, Dr James Thompson, Dr Mark J. Turner, Professor Barbara A. Wilson, Hatice Yildiran

Editor’s note: A full response from the Society will be published in the May issue of The Psychologist.

Media ethics advice It is encouraging to read in Sian Williams’s article (‘Voices of the vulnerable’, March 2014) of the care and thoughtfulness that she brings to her journalistic and broadcasting work. She highlights the dilemmas that psychologists face when we engage with public media, when anonymity for the ‘participant’ is rarely possible, and the consequences of media exposure are often hard to predict.

Because the issues that Sian raises are basically around ethics, the Society has put effort into supporting psychologists, especially those new to working with public media, by offering guidance, support and training, from an ethics perspective as well as the basic practicalities, to protect the rights and wellbeing of others participating in productions where psychologists are involved.

There is a set of guidance notes accessible to members via tinyurl.com/p4qpppq, and

practical advice on interviews is offered.

We also have a support service, via the Media Ethics Advisory Group, for situations when members need help with negotiating ethically sound ways of working with media producers. The Group also engages with broadcasters, advising on ethics protocols for programmes in the early pre-production phases, and on issues that may arise during production. The questions that Sian helpfully offers in the journalists’ checklist in her article are among those that we recommend psychologists ask of media producers, but we have also seen it as increasingly important for psychologists to clarify the ethical need for involvement in the editorial process, since so much can change in terms of the messages conveyed when recorded materials are edited and framed.

John Oates Chair, BPS Media Ethics Advisory Group

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

FORUM THE REAL WORLD With the Black Sea region, or rather Crimea, Ukraine and Russia, currently dominating the news, I (Stephen) am reminded of 1987, my first conference of the European Association of Social Psychology held in the Black Sea city of Varna. I was sitting reading by a swimming pool and wondering why so many people were giving me dirty looks and a very wide berth. Then I realised. The book I was holding was titled Male Fantasies. The front cover sported a lurid picture of a naked man on a stallion with swastikas in the background. I hastily put it away.

But, far from being salacious or disreputable, Male Fantasies actually presents an important analysis by the German literary scholar Klaus Theweleit of the German Freikorps — the ultrareactionary nationalist paramilitaries who paved the way tor the rise of Nazism. It analyses the toxic combination of damaged national pride and wounded masculinity that arose from the post–World War I settlement imposed on Germany at Versailles.

As the paramilitaries asserted their power, they benefited from the inability of a weak state to contain the violence. Many dreamt of national redemption centred on the expression of masculine power.

In 1934 American sociologist Theodore Abel ran an essay competition asking Nazi Party members to explain why they had joined. One theme ran throughout, carved in stone on a monument in the hometown of one member: ‘We eagerly await the coming of the man whose strong hand may restore order’.

In his 2013 book Fascist Voices Christopher Duggan shows that many Italians, like Germans, felt cheated and weak after 1918.

Mussolini embodied their redemption: the strong man who would create a third Rome. He loved to be pictured, stripped to the waist, performing manual tasks. His torso and his jutting jaw became metonyms for the idealised nation.

Indirectly, this takes us back to the Black Sea, to Crimea and to Russia – or at least to Vladimir Putin who is central to the current drama there. What are his motives? What might he do next? And why does he have such political freedom?

In part at least, Theweleit’s book provides important answers.

After the collapse of Communism in the 1990s the West was seen to impose its interests and its values on Russia. As a result the country was seen to be humiliated and diminished, losing its stature in the world and its identity. At the same time, the slapstick administration of Boris Yeltsin was seen to accelerate this decline. This constituted the perfect storm – the combination of conditions that energise potential patriarchs and that render patriarchy more attractive.

Tapping into this dynamic, it is clear that Putin knowingly affirms his embrace of the Russian ‘family’ by challenging his critics through the brute assertion of aggressive, homophobic, patriarchal force.

That much, at least, he shares in common with other redemptive ultra-nationalists in history. We have to hope that he hasn’t also adopted their belief in war as a redemptive tool to reforge the national character.

But perhaps the most important implication of all this is not for our understanding of the autocrats themselves – whether in Germany or in Russia. It is for our understanding of ourselves. When will we understand that a sense of the superiority of our economic, political and moral values, and our imposition of these values on those who have been defeated, will only empower those who negate all that we believe in. When will we realise that the triumphalism of the West is a harbinger of our profoundest problems?

Steve Reicher is at the University of St Andrews. Alex Haslam is at the University of Queensland. Share your views on this and other ‘real world’ psychological issues – e-mail psychologist@bps.org.uk.

An archive of columns can be found at www.bbcprisonstudy.org.

217

letters

Dementia – work being done I write in response to Sandie Hobley’ s letter (‘Dementia – work to be done’, February 2014).

There exists a phenomenal amount of psychological research, knowledge and development about what needs to be done effectively across all areas of dementia care. There is enormous potential for further work and the active, internationally renowned, cited work of members of the Faculty of the Psychology of Older People (FPOP) and its colleagues demonstrates this – please see www.psige.org.uk for an overview. We, as a Faculty, as individual psychologists, as advocates for the care of older people and

as part of the broader ‘dementia’ network welcome all opportunities and suggestions to increase this work, be that through greater research funding, opportunities for graduates, policy change or greater recognition of need.

The ‘some sort of subsection’ mentioned must refer to FPOP, and it is truly disappointing that our profile is apparently so low amongst some BPS members. We take heed as regards the absence of our work within The Psychologist and within the BPS more broadly, but in terms of making an effort to raise psychology’s profile in dementia services – I can assure you that as FPOP

HAPPY STAFF AND HAPPY PATIENTS I have just finished reading the excellent article on the Francis Report by Narinder Kapur (January 2014). I especially liked the author’s idea that there have been two revolutions in psychology in the last 40 years, the ‘splendiferous revolution’ of cognitive neuropsychology and the ‘silent revolution’ that has resulted in the better assessment and management of human behaviour. I would like to add another ‘midrange’ revolution that has been gathering pace – the methodological revolution evidenced in the increasing output of qualitative research that has already enriched the discipline enormously.

I felt a little sad and perhaps frustrated because, like the inquiry report, Professor Kapur has missed a very important and valuable factor that psychology could bring to the whole debate and to the report’s implementation, which is the introduction of organisational appreciation, compassion and support for staff. It is rather ironic that the report makes a big meal out of the lack of compassion from staff to patients and only indirectly addresses the poverty of compassion employees experience from frustrating, pressurising, punitive systems and procedures in a public organisation that is increasingly becoming a capitalist institution.

There is some evidence that ‘happy patients’ are those of services that contain ‘happy staff’ (www.nhshealthandwellbeing.org/FinalReport.html).

G. Manya Merodoulaki Chartered Psychologist Chesterfield

218

(previously PSIGE) this has been our focus, along with raising psychology’s profile in all aspects of older adult services, for the past 30+ years. This is an ‘old’ and very active subsection of the Division of Clinical Psychology. With a fee of only £30 per annum, Hobley may like to consider joining.

Dementia is at the forefront of people’s minds currently – the problem and finance saturated storyline is concerning but we recognise the need to push for greater psychological understanding. Over the past four years FPOP has created a dedicated dementia work stream to draw together and lead on psychological developments. Please follow the link tinyurl.com/q3dwfcn to see the latest publications and plans on interventions around diagnosis and therapy and how the best alternative to antipsychotic medication is good psychological care.

We agree that it is disappointing that psychology and its potential to offer so much for people with dementia and carers has held a low profile with governments, but just recently we have met with Health Education England to consider needs for training and policy change; we have contributed to guidance on commissioning older people’s services – see tinyurl.com/qgpu8f4. Scotland (http://tinyurl.com/q89kpjh), Wales (http://dsdc.bangor.ac.uk) and Northern Ireland (tinyurl.com/nthz84p) are also active in their contributions.

Our academic clinical psychologist colleagues are adding significantly to knowledge in this area and have contributed to recent developments in the UK government research agenda. Clinical psychologists are leading studies funded through the NIHR HTA dementia-focused call and ESRC/NIHR dementia large grants call (e.g. at Bangor, UCL and Worcester) As a community of older adult psychologists we would welcome the opportunity to work with well-trained, well-resourced graduates to improve wellbeing for people with dementia. Part of the puzzle is how to encourage graduates to this specialty – this is not simply an issue of economic opportunity, supply and demand because working with older people with dementia is challenging, exhausting, complicated but an ultimately rewarding and privileged role.

Becci Dow Chair, Faculty of the Psychology of Older People (FPOP)

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

letters

Misdiagnosing the unexplained Richard Brown’s article (‘Explaining the unexplained’, December 2013) relates some current thinking about medically unexplained conditions (MUS); however, there are areas that were not explored in sufficient depth.

This is important as they underpin Brown’s stance towards MUS especially those involving contested conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis and fibromyalgia, where patients’ experiences can collide with medical and psychological opinion.

Brown’s assertion that misdiagnosis is rare requires challenge. As the Chair of a UK-based myalgic encephalomyelitis self-help group with 260 members in the North West of England, I have been made aware of at least 18 different misdiagnoses in 12 different patients recently.

I wonder how many more

patients are misdiagnosed with treatable, identifiable pathology. Furthermore, there appears to be a pattern of circular thinking around the concept of ‘rarity’. If a condition is perceived as rare the patient is presumed that they can’t or probably don’t have it, so they are not checked for it, thus the patient is not diagnosed with it, so the condition remains understood to be rare and remains underdiagnosed. And so it goes on. This raises the issue of who gets to decide which patients receive the screening for the so-called rare disorders? The power to act does not reside with the patient, who is essentially powerless. On occasion this can be overcome, if they have sufficient support, by determination and a deep well of financial resources.

I suspect it can be tempting for a medical practitioner when they run

out of coherent ideas and fail to find evidence to rectify patients’ symptoms with medical diagnosis to push the responsibility back towards the patient by psychologising their symptoms (Goudsmit, 2002). This process probably helps to preserve medical authority and control; protecting professionals in the short term from uncomfortable emotions.

Patients can be given the impression, consciously or otherwise, that their symptoms and suffering are not of worth; that they are derived from within themselves via a selfgenerated, autopoietic mechanism (Deary et al., 2007), which they have the power to overcome. This selfblaming and shaming approach can silence patients discouraging them from further medical interaction and, I would suggest also, additional emotional and

social support. Together it is clear that this can have tragic consequences for patients and their families.

I would urge anyone working with patients to take time to reflect on the impact of undermining the validity of patients’ experiences via psychologisation and to explore more meaningful aspects of patients’ distress, which may in the longer term reap greater benefit.

Joan Crawford Chair – Chester MESH Trainee counselling psychologist References Deary, V., Chalder, T & Sharpe, M. (2007). The cognitive behavioural model of medically unexplained symptoms. Clinical Psychology Review, 27, 781–797.

Goudsmit, E.M. (2002). The psychologisation of illness. In J. Brostoff & S.J. Challacombe (Eds.) Food allergy and intolerance (pp.685–693). London: W.B. Saunders & Co.

Mum’s not the word I am left with two impressions. (1) Female and wisdom that those of us less fertile, or I really do despair about the state of with no interest in having children, lack. psychologists’ opinions about human knowledge, and ability to put forward Quite frankly, I don’t understand why the behaviour are not valid unless they are an evidence-based argument, in those BBC felt the need to seek out mothers. Apparently, being reproductively who go on to classify themselves as psychologists to interview as, apparently, successful blesses you with knowledge ‘psychologists’, and the perception of the opinion of anyone with psychologists by the media and children would have been equally general public. In my periodic relevant. (2) The impression that viewing of BBC Breakfast News psychologists are conveying to the since November, I have seen five general population is one of psychologists interviewed about a ignorance and subjective opinion. variety of topics. Four of them were Apparently, an undergraduate women and, in all four cases, the degree in psychology trains news presenters felt the need to students in the ability to merely point out that the women were also sound more confident in peddling mothers. The male psychologist, common sense and Geoffrey Beattie, on at the same misperceptions common in the time as one of the female general population. Otherwise, psychologists who was introduced why is there any need for the as ‘also a mother’, had no such media to interview a psychologist statement. when they can ask Joe Bloggs But what concerns me too is down the street what his opinion when the psychologist, as I have is? Or, of course, Jane Bloggs, but also seen, does not give her only if she has children… opinions based on psychological research, rather based on her Dr Jo Saunders personal experiences as a mother.

University of Strathclyde Apparently, being reproductively successful blesses you From this, albeit small, sample, with knowledge and wisdom…

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

219

letters

obituary

Professor Elizabeth Newson OBE (1929–2014) Professor Elizabeth Newson died peacefully at a nursing home in Oxford on 6 February at the age of 84. Together with her late husband John, Liz was a pioneering developmental psychologist.

They were a great husband and wife team, and their famous, groundbreaking research in the 1950s into child-rearing practices in Nottingham influenced many subsequent longitudinal studies.

Liz and John went on to found the Child Development Research Unit in the 1960s in the University of Nottingham, offering a postgraduate qualification recognised as initial training for both clinical and educational psychologists. A generation of psychology students subsequently benefited immeasurably from their humane and rigorous teaching.

They advocated an approach to casework with individual children and their families that was years ahead of the prevailing orthodoxies. They engendered a deep sense of respect and responsibility for clinical involvement. A tenet of their approach was that parents are ‘the experts’, having the deepest knowledge of their child, and that children, too, have a voice and an opinion that should be listened to. Liz ran a clinic in the unit pioneering the use of a one-way vision screen and video recordings. She practised what she preached, spending many hours listening to parents’ concerns and working on their behalf years after an initial assessment. I remember Liz being frequently called away to talk with empathy and compassion to a concerned parent or to argue with a local authority about the needs of a child. Her own personal experiences led to an interest in autistic spectrum disorders. She was a founder member of the East

Midlands Autistic Society (NORSACA), and helped set up Sutherland House School for children with ASD. On her retirement from the university, Liz focused on developing the university-based clinic she had pioneered, as an Early Years Diagnostic Centre attached to Sutherland House. This subsequently became the Elizabeth Newson Centre. Her tireless work for autistic children and their sometimes beleaguered families was recognised when she was awarded an OBE in 1999.

Not only was she an exemplary practitioner, but she and John were brave and trailblazing academics. I was thrilled to be accepted on their MA course in 1973 because Liz, John and some other Nottingham colleagues, were leading a movement back to humanistic psychology and away from the domination of behaviourism. They argued that processes within the ‘black box’ of mind were legitimate areas for empirical study. They were among the first to detail the emotional relationship between child and primary caregiver and use the now widely recognised term ‘intersubjectivity’. Liz was the first to describe pathological demand avoidance syndrome and its mechanisms and effects.

Above all, Liz made caring for others a moral imperative.

A fierce seeker after truth, but with profoundly compassionate ethical values. At her funeral everyone had a story about her kindness. She was a much-loved mother and grandmother and a generous friend to many students. She is survived by her children Roger, Carey and Joanna and by her beloved grandchildren.

Lorna Selfe Leominster

obituary

Martin Lynes (1938–2013) My late husband was Chief Educational Psychologist for Kent and Medway. After his death in November, I contacted his excolleagues and they came together to share the following recollections, Martin was a valued and supportive colleague and friend to members of the Kent Educational Psychology Service and beyond. He was a creative and inspirational Chief Educational Psychologist, and was the first to develop and introduce a career structure for the Kent service, enabling greater teamwork and mutual support, as well as opportunities for progression.

He led by example and when introducing appraisal, he volunteered to be appraised by two of his senior colleagues, to begin the process in a sensitive way. Through his leadership, the EPS made a strong contribution to in-service training, for psychologists and others. He enjoyed casework with schools and families and he developed particular expertise in supporting children with speech and language difficulties, including those on the autistic spectrum.

Martin facilitated the introduction of Synectics to the whole service and the tools and techniques for creative problem solving and effective meetings remain part of his legacy. He showed vision by encouraging three of his newly appointed Area Senior Psychologists to embark on the first steps in Synectics, which led to their training as trainers and a range of developments.

To newly trained psychologists, Martin offered wisdom, realism and pastoral encouragement, allowing each to develop particular interests and contributions. His pastoral visits to such

220

places as Thanet were marked by necessary calls to local ‘stamp’ shops. With his passion for postal history and a discerning eye, he frequently discovered real gems.

Martin had a quick, dry sense of humour. He had the facility to say something with a serious face which made you stop and think, only to have him grin mischievously and share a joke with you. However, he was also adept at encouraging individuals, and was always available when deeper issues needed to be discussed.

He had the ability to give clear and direct leadership whilst maintaining close personal contact with team members.

After the day programme for our annual conference was over, some of us remember going to a late-night disco in Folkestone, listening to the Beatles and then returning squashed together in a car, only to find ourselves locked out! We had to wake up the warden and Martin helpfully negotiated our way back in to the residence hall, alongside joining in the fun.

Martin was the quintessential ‘gentleman player’ within what became an increasing managerial culture, at odds with such principles and commitment. Indeed when moving on from his latter role as lead professional of the service, he was inspired by Vincent Nolan of Synectics to develop his passion for postal history into a noteworthy personal career. This enabled him to share his knowledge and enthusiasm at an international level.

Martin is much missed but his legacy remains with the many he has influenced and loyally supported.

Wendy Lynes Maidstone

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy

CPD Workshops Their Dark Materials With Dr Gwen Adshead 9th May 2014 – BPS London

Accredited, Accr edited, dit d, externall extern externally t y awarded aw warded diploma.

Fullyy integrated cognitiv Full cognitive-behavioural e-beha approach hypnosis, haavioural v approach to hypnosis, based on experimental and clinical rresearch. esearch.

Three compact Three ct 7-da 7-day ay modules.

CBT for Insomnia With Prof Kevin Morgan Dr Maureen Tomeny 10th May 2014 – Guildhall Winchester

starts: 26th April 2014,, London* Diploma starts: Next Diploma star starts: ts: 5th July 2014,, London

Teaching Clients Emotion Tolerance Skills

*Discount foor BPS members

With Dr Maggie Stanton & Christine Dunkley 16th May 2014 – St Patrick’s College Dublin

CPD Cour Courses/Workshops ses/W es/W Workshops Smoking Cessation Masterclass Masterc class cla (2 day w workshop) orkshop)

Teaching Clients to use Mindfulness Skills

19th-20th July 2014,, London

With Dr Maggie Stanton & Christine Dunkley 6th June 2014 – Uffculme Centre Birmingham

26th Apr il to 2nd May 2014, London 5th July to 11th July 2014,, London

Radical Openness 101 & Skills

13th September to 19th September 2014, London

With Prof Tom Lynch 19th & 20th June 2014 – London University TTeaching eaching e Evidence-Based Hypnother Hypnotherapy raapy based on on CBT CBTfo for or over over 10 years years

www.ukhypnosis.com www.ukhypnosis.com .com

For details and for our full range of workshops :stantonltd.co.uk or grayrock.co.uk

Te Tel:l: 0207 112 9040

A postgraduate psychology awar award d fr from om Coventry Universit University could give your car career eer in applied psychology the edge: Full or part-time campus based lear learning: ning:

Part-time blended (online) lear learning: ning:

MSc Fore Forensic ensic Psychology* Psycholo MSc Health Psychology* MSc Psychology** MSc Applied Psychology MSc Psychology of Health MSc Business Psychology

MSc Occupational Psychology* Forensic MSc For ensic Psychology and Crime* PGCert in Reading Development

A range of short courses ar are e also available. Please visit our website * These courses ar are e accredited accredited by the British Psychological Society as fulďŹ lling stage 1 towar towards ds specialist Charter Chartered ed Psychologist status. ** The MSc Psychology is a conversion course (for those with a UG degr degree ee in a subject other than Psychology) conferring eligibility for GBC (fr (from om the BPS) for those obtaining a mean mark of 60% or above.

To T o gain a gr greater eater insight contact the Faculty of Health missions Of fďŹ ce: ďŹ and Life Sciences Admissions OfďŹ ce: Tel: hlsgen@coventry.ac.uk T el: e +44 (0)24 7679 5959, 595 email: hlsgen@coventry .ac.uk

No.1 Mode Univer rn in the sity UK

Source : Guard ian Unive rsity Gui de

2014

www www.coventry.ac.uk/psychology-pg-pt .coventry.ac.uk/psychology-pg-pt PG centr centre e details: UK Students and Part-time EU Students Telephone: T e elephone: 024776543 02477654321 Postgraduate@coventry.ac.uk Email: Postgraduate@coventry .ac.uk

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

221

NEWS

A new game plan for psychological science Science is imperfect: pick any branch and you will find skeletons in the closet, including dubious ethics, the ‘file drawer’ effect or outright research fraud.

In recent years, following a number of high-profile scandals, a growing number of psychological scientists have set out to put their own house in order. The profession has sought to raise research practices and publication standards to a new level of reliability, and in March the Association for Psychological Science fleshed out the details of these new initiatives for a stronger science.

Writing in the APS Observer, leading experts described efforts to promote open research practices, enhance methodology reporting and provide incentives for study replications.

Kicking off, Brian Nosek (Center for Open Science and University of Virginia) admitted that his lab has a problem: ‘We do research, time goes by, and some research materials and data get lost.’

Nosek blames disorganisation, overconfidence in memory (‘I know what var0001 and var0002 mean, so why waste time writing the meanings down?’) or the complexity of managing information in collaborations. So how can this problem be solved? Based on the psychological literature, Nosek says behaviour is more likely to change if the solutions provide immediate rewards, integrate easily with existing behaviour and are easy to do. Hence the Open Science Framework (OSF) – a free, open-source web application that helps individuals and research teams organise, archive, document and share their research materials and data. It can be used for private collaboration, but using the OSF also enables researchers to improve the reproducibility of their work. ‘With our scripts, code, and data made public, other researchers can reproduce our analyses and findings, or reanalyze our data for their own purposes’, Nosek writes. Simple ‘nudges’, some payoff for making these practices routine, are integrated into the OSF itself, including a novel citation type – forks. ‘If other researchers want to use some of my public work, they can fork my public projects into their workspace.

Their new project will always link back to my original work. They can revise a measure, reanalyze the data, or extend

222

the work in some other way. The fork count is therefore a functional citation – others are using and extending my research outputs.’

Next, Daniel Simons (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Alex Holcombe (University of Sydney) tackled reproducibility: central to science, but sorely lacking in many psychology journals because publishing incentives tend to favour novelty over reliability. The Registered Replication Report (RRR), a new type of article introduced last year by Perspectives on Psychological Science, is ‘designed to help stabilise the foundations of our science by providing more definitive estimates of the reliability of important findings in the psychology literature’. The final report comprises multiple direct replications of a single finding, all using the same vetted protocol and materials. The design is preregistered, and all results are published regardless of the outcome. ‘In effect,’ write the authors, ‘the RRR is a planned meta-analysis, but one that is free from several problems that plague conventional meta-analyses, such as publication bias, variation in measures, and differences in procedure. RRRs are designed and carried out by multiple researchers with different vested interests, to reduce the influence of experimenter bias.’

A team led by Jon Grahe, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, also focus on replication. The Collaboration Replications and Education Project aims to facilitate student research training while at the same time solidifying psychological research findings. Over the coming years, the authors say they ‘hope to facilitate the research training of psychology students by encouraging replication projects and collecting data about the success (or failures) of the individual projects for use in metaanalyses and other research. In so doing, we now invite researchers and teachers to submit research findings that they feel are of crucial importance to the field, which they can do at www.tinyurl.com/mhyu87n. We hope replications will become a habit of psychology education and research.’

Geoff Cumming, Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, writes in praise of confidence intervals: ‘beautiful pictures of uncertainty’. Arguing that there is ‘life beyond .05’, Cumming calls on psychologists to ‘embrace the new statistics’ and go beyond null hypothesis significance testing. Noting that ‘almost all empirical research is guided by p values – which are in fact tricky conditional probabilities that few understand correctly’, Cumming admits ‘it’s discouraging to report that the average improvement in response time was 34 ms, 95% CI [7, 61], which means the true improvement could plausibly be anywhere between 7 ms and 61 ms.

But the CI gives accurate information about uncertainty, and we need to come to terms with that – it’s way more informative than a mere claim of a statistically significant improvement.’

Applauding the ‘bold policies of [the journal] Psychological Science to improve

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

news

PROMOTING WOMEN IN SCIENCE Staff at Birkbeck, University of London, are championing the role of female academics in scientific subjects as part of a five-country European project. The new initiative involves testing a blueprint designed to raise the status of women in scientific and technological organisations. There is a particular focus on encouraging women during the early stages of their careers.

The total project is worth more than €3 million and also involves institutions in Italy, France, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Birkbeck will receive €400,000 from the European Union for its participation in the Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) grant.

As part of the four-year applied research project, actions taken at Birkbeck will include systematic observation of potentially discriminating formal/informal behaviours and recommendations for action; promoting the inclusion of women scientists in external collaborative arrangements; and the creation of structural opportunities for the commercialisation of women’s work in research and innovation.

research practices and embrace the new statistics’, Cumming ends with a note of optimism. ‘We need better textbooks, better statistics courses, much better software, and more examples of good practice. But these are coming.’

Finally, Matthias Mehl (Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona) outlines the need for ‘an observational ecological momentary assessment method’. With James Pennebaker, he has developed the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) as such an assessment tool. ‘The basic idea behind the EAR is simple,’ Mehl writes: ‘to obtain a sense of who people are and what they do by listening in on sound bites of their moment-to-moment social lives. Technically, the EAR is an audio recorder that periodically samples brief snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their lives.

Conceptually, it is an unobtrusive observation method that yields acoustic logs of people’s daily experiences as they

naturally unfold.’ Now the iEar, in app form, is being used in a number of ‘largescale, interdisciplinary collaborative projects that use the EAR method to assess everyday person–environment interactions naturalistically and objectively’; for example, in studying how couples use their daily conversations with each other to cope with cancer.

In the introduction, E. David Klonsky, director of the Personality, Emotion, and Behaviour Lab at the University of British Columbia, is quoted as saying ‘Show me five studies in our field’s top psychological science journal, and I’ll show you four with conclusions that can’t be trusted.’ With innovative methodological, statistical and publication methods being pushed ever more to the fore, we can only hope those odds turn in the discipline’s favour sooner rather than later. JS I See tinyurl.com/psygameplan; and for our own special issue on replication, see tinyurl.com/psycho0512

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

YOUNG FEMALE POWER Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (above), from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, has appeared in the ‘Young Female Power List’ produced by The Times. The list features 30 women under the age of 45, Professor Blakemore was recognised for her research on the workings of the teenage mind, and for her TED talk, which has had more than a million viewings.

223

news

Cognitive therapy – should it be more than an add-on?

A ‘pioneering’ study on cognitive therapy as an alternative to antipsychotic drugs, published in The Lancet in February, has received a cautious welcome from experts.

The randomised control trial, led

by Professor Anthony Morrison from the University of Manchester’s School of Psychological Sciences, aimed to establish whether cognitive therapy was effective in reducing psychiatric symptoms in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders who had chosen not to take antipsychotic drugs. The researchers demonstrated that, compared to treatment as usual, cognitive therapy is associated with important treatment signals, including a reduction in psychotic experiences (such as hearing voices and paranoia) and an improvement in day-to-day social functioning.

While acknowledging that ‘a larger, definitive trial is needed’, the researchers concluded that cognitive therapy ‘seems to be a safe and acceptable alternative for people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders who have chosen not to take antipsychotic drugs. Evidencebased treatments should be available to these individuals.’

Dr Michael Bloomfield, MRC Clinical Research Fellow and Honorary Specialty Registrar in Psychiatry at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, commented: ‘We must be careful in interpreting the results of this study as it is a relatively small study and did not include a placebo treatment. This means that more research is needed into talking treatments for schizophrenia. As schizophrenia tends to be long-term illness,

we also need to answer questions like “How long should therapy go on for?”.’

Professor Shitij Kapur, Professor of Schizophrenia, Imaging and Therapeutics, and Head of School at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, said: ‘This is an important trial that shows that CBT works – and works for a very difficultto-treat population – the patients who do not take drugs. This is important as clinicians can often get nihilistic about patients who are “non-compliant”. What the paper tells us is that we can engage psychotic patients who do not take antipsychotics and deliver clinical benefits.’

The study was described as ‘pioneering’

by Professor Daniel Freeman, MRC Senior

TREASURE AWARD Professor Janet Treasure from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London has been awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Academy for Eating Disorders.

Professor Treasure has worked as part of clinical and research teams at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Psychiatry for over 30 years. Much of her research has focused on the causes of eating disorders and the translation of these findings into new treatments. These include the first ever self-care manual for bulimia. The manual uses CBT techniques and has now been adapted to be delivered online. Professor Treasure was also instrumental in developing psychological therapies for adults with anorexia, targeting personality traits and thinking styles.

224

Clinical Fellow, University of Oxford. ‘Over recent years there have been great strides made in understanding the psychological causes of delusions and hallucinations; clinical trials like this one show how the knowledge is being used to develop effective treatments. The note of caution is that although patients certainly can benefit from cognitive therapy, there is plenty of room to make these treatments even better.’

Meanwhile, a new study in the journal Psychiatry Research led by psychologist Professor John Read (University of Liverpool) has suggested that thoughts of suicide, sexual difficulties and emotional numbness as a result of antidepressant use may be more widespread than previously thought. In a survey of 1829 people who had been prescribed antidepressants, the researchers found large numbers of people – over half in some cases – reporting psychological problems due to their medication. Professor Read said: ‘The medicalisation of sadness and distress has reached bizarre levels. One in ten people in some countries are now prescribed antidepressants each year. While the biological side-effects of antidepressants, such as weight gain and nausea, are well documented, the psychological and interpersonal effects have been largely ignored or denied. They appear to be alarmingly common.’ JS

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

news

Celebrating diversity in science and… Wikipedia By some estimates, a mere 10 per cent of the editors on Wikipedia are female. As a consequence, much of the content on Wikipedia is created by males, which can contribute to a lower quality of articles about women. On 4 March, a Wikipedia 'Edit-a-thon' was hosted at the Royal Society in London to address this problem.

In advance of International Women's Day, which took place on 8 March, the event gathered about 40 women, armed with laptops, and taught them to use Wikipedia.

Our mission was to improve the quality and quantity of articles on female scientists, by creating articles, expanding information, and adding citations.

The event begun with a talk by John Byrne, Royal Society Wikimedian-inresidence, former treasurer and trustee of Wikimedia UK, and 2012 ‘UK Wikimedian of the Year’. After a brief introduction, he explained good editing practice and showed us the basics of the text editing language used on Wikipedia.

Then everyone got started, aided by

roaming expert Wikipedia volunteers.

I chose to create an article on a psychologist: Dr Sarah Boysen, a primatologist at the Ohio State University.

Despite being named as one of the top 50 female scientists by Discover Magazine, she was completely faceless on Wikipedia until that night. Other attendees chose their articles based on personal inspiration or general need. By the end of the night, 20 articles had been created or expanded – see tinyurl.com/ooeyjse.

During the session, we provided our Wikipedia usernames for long-term tracking of editing activities. While the edit-a-thon was primarily introductory in nature, the goal of such events is to retain these contributors, thereby improving the status of female editors on Wikipedia.

Whatever people think about Wikipedia, its popularity is undeniable. Thanks to a few hours of work, we had improved the profile of women on Wikipedia and thus improved the profile of women in science.

Julie Lee (psychology student, University of Bristol)

No confidence in confidence intervals In statistics, confidence intervals (CIs) have frequently been proposed as a superior alternative to null hypothesis significance testing, and their use is strongly encouraged in the APA’s Publication Manual. But how do researchers actually interpret CIs? In a study in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review led by Rink Hoekstra, psychology researchers and students

were asked to assess the truth value of six particular statements involving different interpretations of a CI. Although all six statements were false, both researchers and students endorsed, on average, more than three statements, indicating a gross misunderstanding of CIs. Self-declared experience with statistics was not related to researchers’ performance, and, even more surprisingly,

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

researchers hardly outperformed the students.

‘Our findings suggest that many researchers do not know the correct interpretation of a CI,’ the authors concluded.

‘The misunderstandings surrounding p-values and CIs are particularly unfortunate because they constitute the main tools by which psychologists draw conclusions from data.’ JS

‘A SILVER TSUNAMI’ Loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity, according to a study reported by psychologist John Cacioppo (University of Chicago) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in his hometown.

On tracking more than 2000 people aged 50 and over, the researchers found that the loneliest were nearly twice as likely to die during the six-year study than the least lonely. Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14 per cent greater risk of dying: around twice the impact seen with obesity.

Cacioppo referred to a ‘silver tsunami’ as baby boomers reached retirement age.

‘People have to think about how to protect themselves from depression, low subjective well-being and early mortality.’

IMPROVING INTENSIVE CARE More than half of patients leaving intensive care will suffer long-term psychological damage, according to research by University College Hospital in London. Dr David Howell told the BBC that the accumulation of sedatives designed for short-term use ‘obviously has an effect’. Chartered Psychologist Dorothy Wade said that this summer, UCH will pilot a new approach which they hope will be trialled in 24 hospitals across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Wade said: ‘We’re training nurses in some simple psychological techniques which we know can reduce stress, fear, and reduce the likelihood of hallucinations coming back to the patients as flashbacks.’ The clinical environment of intensive care will also be addressed, with patients consulted.

I For more, see ‘Intensive care – easing the trauma’, December 2001, via www.thepsychologist.org.uk

OPEN SCIENCE The Royal Society has announced the launch of Royal Society Open Science, a new openaccess journal publishing original research across the entire range of science.

The journal promises objective peer review (publishing all articles that are scientifically sound, leaving any judgement of importance or potential impact to the reader). The editorial team will consist entirely of practising scientists, drawing upon the expertise of the Royal Society’s Fellowship. Articles which may usually be difficult to publish elsewhere, for example, those that include negative findings, will be welcomed.

225

news

Seriously staked Deborah Bowden reports from a ‘vampire symposium’ Modern vampire fiction, such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, has created a vampire frenzy, although the literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, followed by iconic novels such as Polidori’s The Vampyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Vampire fiction is largely rooted in the ‘vampire craze’ in Western Europe in the 1700s, which featured the exhumations of purported vampires Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole in Serbia.

But what is the science and psychology behind the vampire myth, and how have vampires impacted Western culture?

In March, a symposium called ‘Seriously Staked’ was held at Goldsmiths College, London, to address such questions. The day was cohosted by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) and Goldsmiths’ Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit (APRU). Subject experts and academics gave presentations to an audience of around 200 academics, fans of vampire fiction and culture, and other interested members of the public.

Professor Chris French, Head of the APRU, said in his opening remarks that he had

always enjoyed vampire films, but had not until recently considered vampirism to be a topic of relevance to anomalistic psychology.

However, he has come to believe that studying historical accounts of, and belief in, vampires can help us to understand the human psyche, as with the study of other kinds of anomalistic phenomena.

Deborah Hyde, editor of The Skeptic magazine, gave an extremely entertaining talk titled ‘Myths and monsters: Vampires in history’, presenting witness testimonies describing the corpses of suspected folkloric vampires, which did not look as the populace of the time thought normal corpses should. Such suspects were usually reported as being bloated and ruddy, purplish or dark, which was often attributed to the drinking of blood. Other characteristics included growth of hair and nails, lack of odour and failure to decompose.

Science can now explain many of these attributes.

Suspected vampires were often buried face down, causing blood flow to their faces, explaining their colour.

A person’s skin and gums also lose fluids and contract after death, exposing the roots of

IS TRAUMA STRESS RESEARCH GLOBAL? Only 12 per cent of traumatic stress studies published in 2012 were conducted in low-to-middle-income countries (LMIC), where a full 83 per cent of the world's population lives and where risk of experiencing a ‘traumatic event’ is often the greatest. That’s according to a new bibliometric analysis, led by Dr Eva Alisic (Head of the Trauma Recovery Lab at Monash University in Australia) and published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology. Less than 5 per cent of all author teams involved collaborations between highincome countries and LMIC researchers, and LMIC researchers appeared to publish empirical studies in lower-impact journals.

226

hair and nails, which can give the illusion of growth. The reported lack of odour and failure to decompose is likely to have been due to top-down processing, whereby those inspecting the corpses may have observed these characteristics because they were expecting to. This is supported by conflicting witness testimonies, where some witnesses reported decayed bodies, while others did not.

Folkloric vampirism was also associated with contagion, with outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis and the bubonic plague being attributed to vampires. Using vampirism as a scapegoat for deaths from unknown illnesses may have provided people with a sense of agency, helping to allay tension and perceived helplessness. Similarly, Dr Kathryn Harkup spoke about scientific theories for the origin of vampire myths relating to illnesses. She outlined the scientific evidence concerning whether rabies and porphyria,

which cause sensitivity to sunlight and other symptoms associated with vampirism, may be responsible for vampires.

Hyde’s talk featured a quiz, where audience members were awarded ‘gummy vampire teeth’ for correctly answering trivia questions such as ‘Are folklore vampires attractive?’.

Unlike the Eric Northmans and Edward Cullens of modern vampire fiction, folkloric vampires were grotesque and pestilence-ridden. The transformation over the past century of the unappealing folkoric monsters into beautiful and enviable playboys was the topic of a presentation

by Jessica Monteith-Chachuat.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Anna Rice novels were instrumental in the evolution of vampires into romantic, dangerously attractive aristocrats, but what is the appeal of such creatures?

Twilight’s Bella Swan is so irresistibly drawn to Edward Cullen that she begs him to turn her so that they will be

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

THE KOBAL COLLECTION/HAMMER

news

FUNDING NEWS The Richard Benjamin Trust has funding for early career postdoctoral researchers to pursue work in occupational, organisational or social psychology. Research proposals should have a clear benefit to the public, organisations, communities or families.

Ten grants are available each year up to a maximum of £10,000. The closing date for applications is 17 April 2014.

I tinyurl.com/nqkgumj MQ: Transforming Mental Health supports research across all the sciences, from basic bench research to clinical studies, to the social sciences. The Fellows Programme is open to early career researchers from all disciplines related to mental health research.

Research can be based in the laboratory, clinic or field, and may involve experimental, theoretical or social science approaches. It must be relevant to the causes, treatment or prevention of mental illness. Early career researchers must have a PhD, MD or equivalent and have recently established their own independent research career or be about to become independent. The fellowships provide up to £75,000 for three years. Full details of what the funding can be used for and eligibility are on the website. There is a two-stage application process, with a closing date for letters of intent of 24 April 2014.

I tinyurl.com/ncg3el3

and contemporary culture.

The final talks were delivered by Skype, where Brent R. Myers discussed how vampires were only known to drink blood after the 18th century, but 700 years ago were believed to be sexually insatiable undead men that feasted sexually on women. Lastly, John Michaelson, wearing a demon mask, spoke of his personal experiences of searching for real vampires in London.

The evening presentations were followed by ‘Seriously Social’, where the audience and speakers chatted over drinks and free peanuts (no blood).

All in all, the event organisers did a fantastic job in putting on a day that was both entertaining and thoughtprovoking, rigorously answering most of the questions they set out to.

I Deborah Bowden has a PhD in psychology from Goldsmiths College, with research interests in anomalistic psychology and complementary medicine

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme (EME) is inviting proposals for translational research into interventions to reduce the occurrence of self-harm or suicidal behaviours. Research should focus on people at high risk, and explore cognitive, personality and behavioural mechanisms of self-harm. The closing date for application is 1pm on 3 June 2014.

I tinyurl.com/nracu6g A new Wellcome Trust and Education Endowment Foundation scheme aims to develop education interventions that are grounded in neuroscience research. Proposals should focus on raising pupil attainment in UK schools, especially that of disadvantaged pupils.

Collaborative research between educational researcher, teachers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and psychologists is encouraged.

Successful proposals will build on existing evidence about teaching and learning and explain how these can be made for effective by using evidence from neuroscience. The deadline for submission of the Initial Application Form is 6 May 2014. A small number of the most promising proposals will then be taken forward to the next application stage.

I tinyurl.com/oz27cys

info

eternally young and beautiful together. She cannot redefine herself away from him, and does not go to university, nor gets a job, which may appeal to those desiring a Paris Hilton lifestyle. ‘Virginal’ blondes Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse, however, retain independence and girlpower in their vampire relationships, while being liberated from their purity and innocence.

The other presentations were less relevant to psychology, but interesting without exception. Scott Wood spoke of the undead of England and elsewhere, while Dr Maria Mellins discussed the influence of the media on the London vampire community.

John Fraser spoke about the men who invented vampires, followed by Dr Stacey Abbot on the role of science in vampire cinema. Jonathan Ferguson described the tools of the vampire hunter, and Dr Hannah Gilbert spoke about vampires in folklore, fiction

The MRC has a highlight notice to support the development of validated and reliable psychometric instruments to assess the quality of life of carers of people with cognitive impairment conditions, specifically dementia, in the home environment. The psychometrics to be developed should capture the health and qualityof-life implications on a carer’s life. They also need to be appropriate for use with younger and older people and be sensitive to cultural differences. Applications are considered at Methodology Research Programme Panel meetings. Next deadline: 4pm on 3 June 2014.

I tinyurl.com/pbnzyug

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

227

DIGEST

When was the most important public event of your lifetime?

The idea that young people might find the world a stranger, more exciting place than older people makes intuitive sense. They’ve had less time to grow familiar with life. What’s irrational is to believe that more significant public events happen when people are young. Of course they’re just as likely to happen at any time of life. Nonetheless, a new study suggests that thanks to a phenomenon known as the ‘youth bias’ many of us do believe that more major public events happen during a person’s youth, than at any other time.

Jonathan Koppel and Dorthe Bernsten began by asking 200 US participants recruited online to imagine a typical infant of their own culture and gender. The participants then read the following text: ‘…throughout this person’s life, many important public events will take place, both nationally and internationally, such as wars, the deaths of public figures, and sporting events. How old do you think this person is likely to be when the event that they consider to be the most important public event of their lifetime takes place?’

The question was phrased deliberately to tap people’s beliefs about the subjective sense of when the most important public event is likely to occur in a lifetime.

There was an overwhelming bias for the participants to mention ages in the second and third decades of life (from 11 to 30 years). Splitting the participants into an older (aged 33 to 81) and younger group (aged 18 to 31), both groups showed this bias, although the younger group specifically mentioned an age in the range 16 to 20 more often, while the older group more often mentioned an age in the range 6 to 10.

Next, the researchers recruited 198 more participants online and this time they tweaked the wording of their question. The participants were again asked to imagine an infant of their own gender and culture. Then they read this text: ‘… how old do you think this person is likely to be when the most important public event of their lifetime takes place?’

This time the question was phrased deliberately to tap participants’ beliefs about the objective distribution of major public events across a lifetime, regardless of the In the Quarterly Journal of Experimental subjective impact of events on a person. Again there was Psychology evidence of a youth bias. The participants far more often mentioned ages within the range 11 to 30. This was true for the whole sample, and when the sample was split into younger and older groups.

The researchers explained there is no rational reason to suppose that major public events will more often occur in a person’s youth. ‘These findings represent the discovery of a heretofore unnoted cognitive bias, the youth bias,’ they said. ‘The youth bias holds that the most notable experiences of one’s life, whether private or public, occur in young adulthood.’

The researchers mentioned people’s perceptions about the timing of private and public events because prior studies by them and others have shown that people's narratives about their personal lives also show a bias towards perceiving more important personal events – such as marriages – as occurring more often earlier in life.

The notion of a youth bias in people’s perceptions about the timing of major public and private events also chimes with research on a memory phenomenon known as ‘the reminiscence bump’.

This is our tendency to recall more events from our teens and twenties than any other stage of our lives. In fact, Koppel and Bernsten speculated that perhaps the youth bias ‘structures recall,’ heightening access to our memories from our youth. They added that their discovery of a youth bias ‘opens up new vistas’ for research, including studies to find out whether the bias exists in other cultures outside of the USA, and whether it applies to other domains, such as people’s beliefs about when in a lifetime a person is most likely to meet the best friend they’ll ever have.

228

Eccentricity and appreciation of art In the European Journal of Social Psychology Van Gogh sliced off his own ear. Truman Capote insisted he could only think in a supine position while sipping coffee and puffing on a cigarette.

Michael Jackson hung out with a chimp, and posed for photographers while sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. Lady Gaga attended an awards ceremony wearing a dress made from meat. There’s a stereotype that creative people are eccentric and it’s easy to find examples like these to support the point.

A new study shows that because of this widely held stereotype, people infer that work produced by an eccentric person is better and more valuable than that produced by a conventional character.

Eccentricity is taken as a sign of artistic skill, except when the work in question is conventional and/or the display of eccentricity is judged to be fake.

Wijnand van Tilberg and Eric Igou tested these ideas across five studies. In the first, 38 students rated a painting by Van Gogh more positively if they were first told about the earcutting incident. In two other studies, dozens more students rated paintings by a fictional Icelandic artist more positively and estimated it to be more valuable if they were told he had an eccentric personality, or if they saw a photograph showing him looking eccentric, unshaven with half-long hair (as opposed to seeing a photo showing him

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

digest

Farewell, Christian

looking conventional, with short hair and neat clothing).

The fourth and fifth studies highlighted some caveats. Students rated the unconventional art of Joseph Beuys (‘The Pack’) more positively if they were told that Beuys was eccentric in that he had a habit of carrying roadside stones on his head. However, the same yarn about Andrea del Verrocchio did not lead to higher ratings for his conventional art (‘Lady of Flowers’). Similarly, seeing a photo of Lady Gaga crouching in an usual outfit (tight, all black, with shiny mask) led student participants to rate her as more highly skilled compared to seeing her seated in a conventional black dress; unless, that is, the students were told that Gaga’s eccentricity is fake and no more than a marketing ploy. In other words, eccentricity of the artist

leads to more positive ratings of their work, unless that work is conventional, and/or the artist's unusual behaviour is seen as contrived.

‘To the best of our knowledge,’ the researchers said, ‘this is the first detailed empirical research that establishes a link from creator eccentricity to appreciation of creative works.’ Their results build on prior research that’s shown thinking about unusual people boosts a person's creative output. The findings also fit with a prior study of ‘stereotype confirmation’, in which listeners rated a rap more positively if they were told it was by a black artist.

‘The perception of creative endeavours, typically considered as (usefully) original, deviant, and novel, is deeply embedded in conformist processes,’ van Tilberg and Igou said.

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

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

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Dr Christian Jarrett, our Research Digest editor and journalist on The Psychologist, left the Society on 19 March.

You can read his goodbye, and the comments of appreciative readers, on the Digest blog at tinyurl.com/cjleaves.

We asked Professor Catriona Morrison, Chair of the Society’s Psychology Education Board, for her views on Christian’s legacy. She said: ‘The Research Digest came along at just the right time.

Back in September 2003, the means of disseminating knowledge were changing rapidly.

Science blogging was beginning to get a foothold, and social media such as Facebook was just around the corner. Twitter was still nearly three years off! Christian was adept at surfing this digital wave, and the resultant influence of the Digest is evidenced by the impressive levels of engagement by a very wide range of professional psychologists and nonpsychologists. It has opened the Society up to a much broader readership, consequently raising the profile of the Society not just in the UK but worldwide.’

Professor Graham Powell was Chair of the then Psychologist Policy Committee when the Digest was proposed.

He told us: ‘Committees rarely get excited, but when feedback on the new venture started to come through, I nearly fell of my seat and most committee members woke up. The original aim was in part to feed the rising appetite for psychology to be found in schools, the A-level students cramming into our public

lecture events. The reality was that it was not just the youngsters who were hooked, but a large percentage of our expert membership! We had completely underestimated the power of good science writing to engage everyone. It was a pleasure for our hard-pressed members to have someone source, discuss, present a diverse range of evidencebased studies; it broadened our horizons, showed us what to be proud of in our science.

Christian does not just summarise, he critiques, separates the sense from nonsense, building on his own background of PhD in psychology and postdoctoral work in Manchester.

In checking out his website recently I was yet again bowled over by the sheer breadth of his writing and sourcing.

I would therefore like to thank Christian for educating us and entertaining us for all these years, but above all for fulfilling so uniquely well the Society’s mission of diffusing a knowledge of psychology pure and applied, to all.’

Christian leaves the Digest in fine fettle: 32,000 subscribers to the free, fortnightly e-mail; 37,000 followers on Twitter @researchdigest; and an average of around 280,000 page views per month at www.researchdigest.org.uk/ blog. He will be a tough act to follow, but we are excited to push on into a new era for both the Research Digest and The Psychologist via the appointment of two full-time replacements: see ad on p.283.

And Christian: thank you.

229

Psychology at Hull The Department of Psychology in Hull (founded 1928) is one of the oldest and most firmly established in the United Kingdom, and enjoys strong links with the Hull-York Medical School and the Department of Clinical Psychology.

We are currently inviting applications for our taught and research Masters programmes.

Taught Masters We offer three taught MSc courses, all of which include a placement opportunity and a research dissertation. These are useful for students pursuing a career in applied psychology.

MSc Clinical Applications of Psychology This course allows graduates to develop knowledge and experience relevant to becoming a mental health practitioner. It offers a useful intermediary step for those interested in doctoral training in clinical psychology or another career in mental health.

MSc Health Psychology (BPS accreditation pending) This programme offers the graduate a deeper understanding of the psychological principles underlying people’s attitudes, behaviour and thinking about health and wellbeing. The course provides Stage 1 for registration as a Chartered Health Psychologist. A non-accredited programme is also available as MSc Psychology and Health, for people who do not have a BPS-accredited undergraduate degree.

Research Masters We also offer two research-led Masters programmes, enabling graduates to develop more advanced research skills that are used in academia, industry, the NHS and elsewhere in the Health and Social Care sectors.

MRes This course provides training in the numerous methods of data collection and analysis used by professional psychologists in a variety of professional settings, as well as offering skills transferable to other disciplines.

MSc (Research) This programme allows graduates to expand upon their research interests and develop the skills suited to more advanced academic study.

Graduates will conduct original research that addresses a current issue in psychological science and neuroscience.

Further details about the Department, studentships, staff research interests and how to apply can be found at: www.hull.ac.uk/psychology, or email the postgraduate admissions secretary Laura Purdon at l.j.purdon@hull.ac.uk.

230

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Psychology in the Pub

Accredited EMDR Trainings delivered by Dr Michael Paterson OBE selected and trained by EMDR founder, Francine Shapiro PhD

PART 1 Trainings start Belfast 8-10 May 2014 Manchester 25-27 September 2014

Bath

In-house trainings - details on request Other training levels through the year

The modern office – a psychological bear trap?

Wednesday 2 April 2014 Dr Craig Knight

www.emdrmasterclass.com info@emdrmasterclass.com

Exeter

028 9066 1110

Leaving a criminal lifestyle Wednesday 23 April 2014 Dr Jo Day

Plymouth Changing our behaviour Thursday 17 April 2014 Professor Charles Abraham

Truro Experiential group work and dementia Friday 11 April 2014 Maire Mill

For more information or to notify us that you will be attending visit www.bps.org.uk/southwest-events

Further your career in psychology Our internationally recognised researchers and guest lecturers have experience of applying psychology in public and private enterprise. Their teaching combined with our advanced IT and library services, will ensure your career is heading in the right direction.

MSc Occupational Psychology This one-year full-time course fulfils British Psychological Society (BPS) stage one requirements and includes Test User (Occupational, Ability) and Test User (Occupational, Personality) training - worth £2,600, exploring topics including: selection, recruitment, stress management, career theory, occupational counselling and training and development.

Professional Doctorate Counselling Psychology A modern programme with a proud history.

Our three-year full-time BPS & HCPC accredited programme offers comprehensive training as a

Counselling Psychologist. Recently re-developed, our programme meets the needs of the professional sphere, and ensures graduates possess a highly desirable skill-set on completion. Core training is an integrative psychotherapeutic one, and in addition to helping source placements, we include: BPS accredited psychometrics, trauma-focused CBT, EMDR Level 1, critical psychopathology and psychopharmacology.

PhD in Psychology Contact our dedicated researchers about your research idea, or explore a topic from our current portfolio.

For current fee information visit: www.wlv.ac.uk/fees

Tel: 01902 322 667 Email: psychologyenquiries@wlv.ac.uk Visit: www.wlv.ac.uk/psychology

The University of Opportunity

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

231

ARTICLE

Charting ‘the mind and body economic’ The Midlands Psychology Group introduce a special issue dedicated to the theme of ‘austerity’ Richard Branson and the Barclay Brothers both own their own island. …

International motor shows unveil more exclusive and luxury models by Porsche, Bugatti and Rolls Royce at previously unheard of prices. … For a swimsuit for that special occasion, you’d need £15 million in spare cash to buy one ‘dripping in diamonds’ designed by Gideon Oberson.

(Lansley, 2006 p.x; and see Freeland, 2012)

Neoliberal ‘austerity’ programmes – favoured by many governments across the globe since the ‘Great Recession’ of 2007 – add up to a toxic regime for the mind and body of the ordinary citizen. So far, psychologists have done little to challenge the dubious scientific assumptions upon which these programmes rest. If anything, they have sought to profit from them: chiefly through the mass promotion of therapies and techniques claimed to counteract the mental and emotional damage wrought by an ever more corrosive world.

But there are other ways of doing psychology; and the articles in this special issue point the way towards a far more socially aware (and arguably more scientific) version of the discipline.

question resources

Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress: www.midpsy.org Moloney, P. (2013). The therapy industry: The irresistible rise of the talking cure, and why it doesn’t work. London: Pluto.

Smail, D. (2004). Power, interest and psychology. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

references

O

Can the theories and techniques used by psychologists ever be free of either political significance or of political influences?

Abrams, F. (2002). Below the breadline: Living on the minimum wage. London: Profile Books.

Basham, P. (2010). Are nudging and shoving good for public health?

London: Democracy Institute.

Butterworth, P., Leach, L.S., Strazdins, L. et al. (2011). The psychosocial quality of work determines whether employment has benefits for mental health: Results from a longitudinal

232

n both sides of the Atlantic, the super-rich are gaining and flaunting fortunes on a scale last seen in the days of the British Empire. Meanwhile, social inequality of all kinds has been on the rise. At the close of the first decade of the new century, in the United States, one in seven households lacked secure supplies of food, and, astonishingly, nearly one in four of all American children lived in them (National AntiHunger Organizations, 2009); More than a quarter of all British children continue to live below the official poverty line (Child Poverty Action Group, 2013), and the figure is higher – 37 per cent – in the capital city (CPAG, 2012). As real wages for the majority have declined (Office for National Statistics, 2013) and social mobility in the UK has all but come to a stop (Dorling & Thomas, 2011), many of the poor are working, but in conditions that are more likely to drain than build their mental and physical reserves (Butterworth et al., 2011; Davis, 2012; and see Abrams, 2002). The share of the working population employed as

national household panel survey.

Occupational and Environmental Medicine. doi:10.1136/oem.2010.059030 Child Poverty Action Group (2012).

Between a rock and a hard place: The early impact of welfare reforms on London. London: CPAG. Child Poverty Action Group (2013). Child poverty facts and figures. Retrieved 10 August 2013 from www.cpag.org.uk/

domestic servants is the same as in the 1860s (Elliot & Atkinson, 2007); and chronic household debt is nearing an alltime high (Lanchester, 2010; Watt, 2013).

For the last six years, the Western world has been in the grip of the longest and most serious economic slump since the 1930s. If individual health and economic climate are closely linked, as many would argue, then our political leaders and policy makers have responded to the Great Recession by placing all of us in what amounts, in effect, to a vast clinical trial; but one that is neither supported by firm scientific evidence, nor subject to the normal rules of informed consent. As the epidemiologists David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu point out in their new book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, in the one arm of this vast ‘experiment’, millions of people in America and Europe, including the citizens of the UK, have been subjected to ‘austerity’. Presented as a strategy to tackle debts and deficits caused by an underregulated financial sector, it consists largely of amputation: swingeing cuts in government funding for public services, for healthcare coverage, assistance to the jobless and for housing support.

It represents too an attack upon the wages and pensions of public sector workers. For those of middling and lower income – and especially for the poor, the sick and the disabled – austerity also means increased financial hardship and the spectre of homelessness. In Europe, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank have pressured governments in Spain, Greece and Italy to dispense this bitter medicine, traditionally imposed upon developing countries in search of economic aid (Stuckler & Basu, 2013).

In the US the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act initiated by President Obama – intended to provide some government assistance to the most needy – was short-lived; ‘politicians are now cutting public health programmes, including those that boost economic growth and prevent hardship during recessions’ (Stuckler & Basu, 2013 p.142).

child-poverty-facts-and-figures Coote, A. & Lyall, S. (2013, 11 April).

Strivers v skivers: Real life’s not like that at all. The Guardian.

Davis, J. & Tallis, R. (2013). SOS NHS: How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it. London: Oneworld.

Davis, R. (2012, 17 December). How food banks became mainstream: The new reality of the working poor. New Statesman.

Dorling, D. (2013). Unequal health: The scandal of our times. Bristol: Policy Press.

Dorling, D. & Thomas, B. (2011).

Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change. Bristol: The Policy Press.

Elliot, L. & Atkinson, D. (2007). Fantasy Island. London: Constable Robinson.

Epstein, W. (2013). Empowerment as ceremony. New York: Transaction.

Epstein, W. (2010). Democracy without

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

institutionalisation of insecurity: both for instance; and in some cases edging personal and communal. In the USA for closer toward premature death, whether example, suicide rates were already rising by self-neglect, or by deliberate choice. slightly before the start of the recession, In Greece, for example, a modern-day which then made a bad situation worse. casualty of extreme austerity, rates of selfIn the three years from 2007 to 2010, destruction soared in the wake of the American suicide deaths accelerated by erosion of pension rights and jobs, and an additional 4750 over the existing trend. likewise for cases of HIV and malaria A similar pattern was observed in the UK, infection, as the national government shut where self-inflicted mortalities rose by down the necessary environmental health more than 1000 cases between 2007 and monitoring and prevention programmes.

2010, shadowing the continued rise in Stuckler and Basu note that austerity British unemployment programmes in fact (Stuckler & Basu, 2013). have a long history None of this should throughout the last “austerity programmes be a surprise. The century, most of it carry huge costs in human epidemiologists Richard dismal. From the health and well-being” Wilkinson and Kate rejection of Roosevelt’s Pickett have shown that, New Deal by certain for industrialised countries, American states in the the size of the gap between rich and poor 1930s, to the (Washington-inspired) faithfully predicts the extent of mortality, economic ‘shock therapy’ applied to Russia ill health and interpersonal strife, and and Eastern Europe during especially for those with the least means the 1990s (which opened (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2012). In Britain up the former socialist and many other countries that have economy to privatisation embraced austerity, the poor are being and plunder) and onward, blamed for their own predicament. The to the IMF programmes in UK has not been as socially divided since the Asian crisis of the same the 1930s, but those who cannot work decade… austerity because of illness or disability have begun programmes carry huge to face vilification and hatred from the costs in human health and media, and from their fellow citizens, to well-being and seldom a degree that would have been unthinkable deliver the promised just a few years before (Coote & Lyall, widespread benefits in 2013). Public attitude surveys in the UK wealth and productivity indicate a growing indifference, if not (and see Harvey, 2005). contempt, toward the jobless and the In Russia, the country in indigent. To add insult to injury, this is which the collapse of happening at the time when sickness and economic and social safety disability benefit entitlements and legal nets was most drastic, male protections for the weakest are being life expectancy dropped systematically cut away. Much of the moral a full seven years, from 64 justification for this retrenchment is based to 57. This was the most The super-rich are gaining and flaunting fortunes upon a rhetoric that pits ‘scroungers’ catastrophic decline in mortality against ‘strivers’, or the deserving against for any industrialised country the undeserving poor, as the Victorians not embroiled in famine or war, during of us healthy and indeed sane. In the end, would have said (Lister, 2004; Mooney the last 50 years. Indeed, Stuckler and Basu we would argue, such policies make it & Hancock, 2010; Wiggan, 2012). show that in the current crisis, climbing more likely that some of us will become Trends like these are anticipated in the rates of poor physical health, infectious sick or sink into despair; perhaps trying research of social psychologists like Melvin diseases and of self-destruction are the to ease our worries through recourse to Lerner, who have shown that it is true indices of what amounts to an official chronic smoking or bingeing on alcohol, In Britain, the Coalition government has continued the transformation of the NHS, once viewed as the world’s most equitable and efficient of healthcare systems, into an increasingly dysfunctional, market-based programme (Davis & Tallis, 2013; Pollock, 2010).

Clearly, the economic choices made by governments are more than matters of growth rates and of budgetary deficits; the work of Stuckler and Basu, at Oxford and Stanford Universities, respectively, and of their many colleagues across the world, shows that these choices are also about life and death (see, for example, Dorling, 2013; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2012). While governmental policies are not the toxins that directly cause illness, they nonetheless do serious harm because they threaten the medical, physical and economic resources, the daily routines and the places and affiliations that, together, help to keep all

JESS HURD/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

decency: Good citizenship and the war on poverty. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Freeland, C. (2012). The plutocrats: The rise of the new global super-rich and the fall of everyone else. London: Allen-Lane.

Friedli, L. & Stearn, R. (2013, 10 December). Whistle while you work (for nothing): Positive affect as coercive strategy - the case of

workfare [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://centreformedicalhumanities.org/ whistle-while-you-work-for-nothingpositive-affect-as-coercive-strategythe-case-of-workfare Harvey, D. (2005). Neoliberalism: A short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jones, C. & Novak, T. (1991). Poverty, welfare and the disciplinary state.

London: Routledge.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Judt, T. & Snyder, T. (2012). Thinking the twentieth century. London: William Heinemann.

Lanchester, J. (2010). Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay. London: Allen Lane.

Lansley, S. (2006). Rich Britain: The rise and rise of the new super-wealthy.

London: Politico’s.

Lerner, M. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New

York: Olenum Press.

Lister, R. (2004). Poverty. Oxford: Polity.

Midlands Psychology Group (2007).

Questioning the science and politics of happiness. The Psychologist, 20(7), 422–425.

Moloney, P. (2013). The therapy industry: The irresistible rise of the talking cure, and why it doesn’t work. London: Pluto.

Mooney, G. & Hancock, L. (2010, Winter).

233

disturbingly easy to bring about conditions in which the victims of mistreatment are blamed for their own persecution and suffering, attributed to their supposed lack of morals and of internal resolve. Lerner argues that for the more comfortable onlooker, it is sometimes easier to believe that the world is really a fair place (in which everyone ultimately gets their just deserts) than to acknowledge the evils that it systematically inflicts (Lerner, 1980).

The associated quasi-religious belief in the power of the individual to overcome their own problems is embedded deeply in Anglo-American culture, and within much of psychotherapy itself (Epstein, 2010, 2013), has long been used by the powerful as a justification for disciplining the poor (Jones & Novak, 1991).

Nowhere is this ruthless attitude more evident than in the current governmental assault upon the principle of universal entitlement to state benefits: hastily being displaced by a system that places conditions on the receipt of such support, that forces people into low-paying and unsatisfying work, and that is designed to reduce and deny payments to those who are already struggling to get by. The new fitness-to-work tests and a so-called tax on ‘spare bedrooms’ for people living in social housing share the common feature of individualising the entitlement to benefits, but do nothing to address the widespread social inequalities that cause indolence and poverty in the first place (Wiggan, 2012).

This line of thinking complements the introduction of the psychological ‘technologies’ of parenting training, antiobesity initiatives and of central government endorsement of the use of ‘behavioural nudging’ toward healthier lifestyles – in theory designed for the general population, but in practice aimed mainly at the poor (Basham, 2010; Moloney, 2013; Throop, 2009).

Returning to Stuckler and Bisu’s metaphor of the cross-continental clinical trial, what then of the alternative therapy, which they term ‘stimulus’? For this treatment, citizens in some places have insisted that their leaders invest

Poverty porn and the broken society. Variant, pp.14–17.

National Anti-Hunger Organizations (2009). NAHO roadmap to end childhood hunger in America by 2015.

Retrieved 28 December 2012 from tinyurl.com/p3nl8yr Office for National Statistics (2013). Real wages fall back to 2003 levels.

Retrieved 18 August 2013 from tinyurl.com/onuaanx

234

in a contrary path: designed to strengthen public health and social safety net programmes.

Sweden underwent a massive economic crash in the early 1990s but suffered no comparable rise in suicide or alcoholrelated deaths. In the early 21st century, Iceland struck the worst bank crisis ever, but, in response to demands from ordinary voters, its government eventually rejected the IMF’s calls for radical austerity, and instead increased its social security spending between 2007 and 2009, with the result that the general health of The new fitness-to-work tests and a so-called tax on ‘spare Icelanders bedrooms’ for people living in social housing share the common improved during feature of individualising the entitlement to benefits the crisis, while the small government and free markets will economy of the country grew by 3 per cent always and everywhere achieve better (Stuckler & Basu, 2013). Similar gains in results than the state. As many historians public health are evident in other countries and economists have shown, there is little that have rejected austerity during the evidence for this neoliberal orthodoxy, period of the current recession, including either (Harvey, 2005; Judt & Snyder, Canada, Norway and Japan (Harvey, 2005; 2012). But it does serve the interests of Stuckler & Basu, 2013). politicians and of their allies and sponsors, If the scientific evidence shows that who seek to gain from the attack upon the the real danger to public health is not state and from the privatisation of health recession per se, but austerity; then it is and social welfare services (Davis & Tallis, worth asking why so many governments 2013; Perelman, 2006). eschew the idea of stimulus. One answer If rates of psychological distress and is that ‘austerity’ persists, not because it suicide have been rising in consequence, is based upon good clinical evidence, or then how have our political leaders even upon common sense, but because responded? They have dismissed these it reinforces an official myth: that in trends as ‘short-term fluctuations’, and everything from health care to education,

Perelman, M. (2006). Railroading Economics: Creating the myth of the free market. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Pollock, A.M. (2010). NHS plc: The privatization of our healthcare (2nd edn). London: Verso.

Stuckler, D. & Basu, S. (2013). The body economic: Why austerity kills.

London: Allen Lane.

Tallis, R. & Davis, J. (2013). NHS SOS:

How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it. London: Oneworld.

Watt, N. (2013, 20 November). Soaring UK personal debt wreaking havoc with mental health, report warns.

The Guardian.

Throop, E. (2009). Psychotherapy, American culture, and social policy: Immoral individualism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wiggan J. (2012). Telling stories of 21st century welfare: The UK Coalition government and the neo-liberal discourse of worklessness and dependency. Critical Social Policy, 32, 383–405.

Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2012). The spirit level (2nd edn). London: Penguin.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

TIMM SONNENSCHEIN/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

austerity

austerity

THE ART ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/DAGLI ORTI

more and more developmental syndromes they have offered us ‘improved access to in such students and the supposed psychological therapy’ and lectured us treatments for them. Rather, about ‘happiness’, and how to attain it. educationalists, families and communities They have implemented measures of need to nurture a better understanding of national well-being that are of questionable how inequality leads to so many children validity and that downplay the reality of being viewed, wrongly, as dysfunctional widespread personal distress, especially and unable to learn, and of finding ways amongst the least privileged sectors of of helping the school system to accept society (Friedli & Stearn, 2013; Midlands their difference, and to build upon their Psychology Group, 2007). For the strengths. The discussion poses deep psychology professions, the resulting questions about the nature and purposes growth in therapeutic services has been of the education system, about who has largely welcomed. What has been sorely the power to define normality and lacking is a thoughtful and critical deviance, and to what ends. appraisal of this situation, and of what it Traditionally of course, school has implies for the work of psychologists and usually been seen as a preparation for for the theories that they use. The articles work and as a kind of inoculation against in this issue of The Psychologist are the possible state of unemployment in intended to open the door to just such an adulthood – the theme of the next article, analysis, and to further debate.

by Professor David Fryer and his PhD Because all kinds of official psychology claim academic roots, then a good starting point is the tertiary education system, which has suffered more than its share of cuts and realignments, first under New Labour, in the name of ‘business values’, and then under the ConDem coalition’s austerity programme. Professor Ian Parker’s article explores how the teaching and researching of social psychology is being affected and where this is likely to lead us. Parker argues that when education is increasingly regarded as a commodity, there is at least more room for the students’ voices to be heard, if only as consumers. However, psychologists – overburdened with administrative work, in competition for limited resources, and under growing pressure to achieve ‘productivity’ as defined by managers – are retreating defensively into their own narrow specialist niches. The danger is that critical and feminist voices in academic psychology will continue to be ignored, and that the discipline will Toad Bosses (1920) by George Grosz be pushed even more toward its customary focus upon the individual, as the supposed student at the University of Queensland, locus and cure of all personal and social Rose Stambe. While acknowledging that problems. the cuts represent untold misery and ill These themes are echoed in Professor being, they focus sharply upon how the Gary Thomas’s searching examination of concepts of ‘unemployment’ and its some of the key assumptions and values antonym have been understood (and that underpin the British school system. deployed), by health researchers and Drawing upon the income inequalities governments alike. Professor Fryer and Ms hypothesis of Wilkinson and Pickett, Stambe find deep irony in how the fear of Thomas, an educational psychologist at ‘unemployment’ has come to serve as an the University of Birmingham, asks what unacknowledged instrument of social and austerity implies for the welfare and political control. Best of all, when the performance of those students who absence of work is widely seen as harmful: struggle the most. These are the students since it can then be used, in the name of who have traditionally been viewed by ‘job creation’, to erode social security safety he education structure as the bearers of nets and workplace conditions to the developmental disorders like ADHD, and benefit of employers, and to justify more of who have too often been seen as failures. the same neoliberal social and economic He argues that the key is not to identify

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

policies that are so toxic for ordinary people, whether they are in work, or out of it. The authors point out that these same policies have also been used to justify the creation of work for a swathe of wellmeaning middle-class professionals, intent upon reforming the poor and the deviant.

When it comes to their efforts to help the victims of austerity around the world – rather than rushing to provide individualised therapy or the motivational skills supposedly needed to secure jobs that do not exist – psychologists should be asking questions about their own complicity, in what is in effect a war being waged by the powerful against those with the least means.

These topics – of the political role of the practitioner and whose interests they serve – are key ones for community psychology; and in the final article Dr Carl Harris considers how this discipline can help the citizen to achieve some of these aims. He discusses his involvement as a clinical and community psychologist with the residents of a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, which had received funding for local initiatives from the New Deal for Communities Regeneration Initiative. Dr Harris describes his work with the Family Well-being Project, in which he and other health and social care professionals allied themselves with a group of residents to chart those aspects of life on the estate that they believed most important to their well-being, and to use this knowledge to improve the delivery and planning of housing, health, policing and other public services and amenities.

Carl draws upon the experiences of these local residents to show how the current and planned reductions in public services are likely to harm this community, and many others like it, in the UK. The analyses presented here suggest that psychologists – drawing upon their scientific and clinical knowledge and experience – are in a good position to chart ‘the mind and body economic’: to show how our day-to-day emotional wellbeing can all too often reflect the fiscal policies that govern our lives. More fundamentally, these analyses challenge the single underlying premise upon which so many of the recent austerity programmes rest; namely, that people are impoverished because of their psychological deficits – their lifestyles, their worklessness, family breakdown, bad parenting, drink and drug addiction, irresponsible debt, criminality and lack of motivation or positive thinking – when, in truth, they are poor because they lack money.

I Midlands Psychology Group www.midpsy.org

235

ARTICLE

understand better how ‘austerity’ works its way into the interpersonal and psychological levels of behaviour and experience.

Austerity in the university Ian Parker on increasing pressure and emotional labour at work for academics in times of crisis The current economic crisis comes at a time of deregulation of public services and privatisation of the education sector. The dominant ‘neoliberal’ response to the crisis that seeks to place responsibility on individuals resonates with some forms of psychology but is contested by other more social, critical and feminist approaches.

These alternative approaches are now focusing on the increasing pressures placed on university staff, in particular on lecturers faced with the National Student Survey. This article argues such methodologies intensify competitive behaviour and place pressure on women managers in particular to put in the ‘emotional labour’ required to implement increased workload in a neoliberal economy.

questions resources

McGettigan, A. (2013). The great university gamble: Money, markets and the future of higher education. London: Pluto Books.

Hey, V. (2011). Affective asymmetries: Academics, austerity and the mis/recognition of emotion.

Contemporary Social Science, 6(2), 207–222.

references

Ashcraft, K. (2006). Feministbureaucratic control and other adversarial allies. Communication Monographs, 73(1), 55–86.

Brook, P. (2009). The alienated heart: Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’ thesis and the anticapitalist politics of alienation. Capital & Class, 33(7), 7–31.

Burman, E. (2009). Beyond ‘emotional literacy’ in feminist and educational research. British Educational

236

What role does gender play in responses to management demands?

One way of conceptualising the increased attention in research on the individual set against others in the market place is to be found in analyses of contemporary ‘neoliberalism’. This economic doctrine, piloted by the Chicago School in Chile after the military coup in 1973 (Harvey,

ow do you view the individual?

As a relational being, for which competitiveness is a painful aspect of capitalist society? Or as the naturally acquisitive and aggressive ‘human animal’?

Psychologists are divided on this question, but these intradisciplinary debates often find expression in theories of gender, where femininity and masculinity are either seen as socially constructed or as hardwired. What is sometimes assumed to be underlying femininity changes over time, and as emotional labour becomes more important to capitalism, stereotypically feminine qualities are utilised by companies and government agencies to a greater degree to build rapport with customers. This turns femininity itself into a commodity, and does women themselves little favour as they are turned against each other to compete to sell themselves as embodying this valuable resource.

Times of economic crisis and an austerity agenda put a renewed emphasis on competition and more pressure on women, and today the ‘neoliberal’ governmental and managerial responses to the crisis resonate with and reinforce the most extreme versions of individualism.

Studies of the consequences of competition between universities and the burden placed on female academics and managers, however, The process of ‘marketisation’ of higher education has indicate that a more relational socialbeen driven by the rapid increases in student fees and constructionist approach may help us the introduction of a student loans system

H

Why do academics suffer increasing stress in times of austerity?

Neoliberalism in higher education

Research Journal, 35(1), 137–155.

Chafer, S. (2013). A refreshing outlook.

The Psychologist, 26(9), 646–647.

Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In R. Flood & R. Gill (Eds.) Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp.228–244). London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Hey, V. (2011). Affective asymmetries: Academics, austerity and the mis/recognition of emotion.

Contemporary Social Science, 6(2), 207–222.

Hochschild, A. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules and social structure.

American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575.

Hochschild, A.R. (1983). The managed

heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Leadbeater, C. (2000). Living on thin air: The new economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Lorenz, C. (2012). If you're so smart, why are you under surveillance?

Universities, neoliberalism, and new public management. Critical Inquiry, 38(3), 599–629.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

JESS HURD/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

reprisals, if we do not ‘adjust’ by austerity (Chafer, 2013); psychology ‘sharing the pain, taking the hit’. needs to be situated in the context of (p.209) management strategies that make the lives of women more difficult when they are subjected to the logic of the marketplace.

These studies, and other critical social Deregulation of the university sector, research into the logic of marketisation introduced by the previous government applied to the university sector (Lorenz, and accelerated by the present one, has 2012), draw attention to two important necessarily entailed as part of its politicalmechanisms that work against relational economic logic the introduction of an and social responses to the economic internal market crisis and in favour of competitive into universities and aggressive managerial and the entry of responses. One is the role of “women managers private providers dubious methodologies to evaluate are put in the front line encouraged and teaching, which encourage as often reluctant rewarded to managers to marginalise research agents of this process” compete on equal in their attempt to conform to terms with public what these methodologies demand higher education of them. The other is the role of gender (Lynch, 2006). in management, as ‘emotional labour’ is The impact of the demand for work put to work in order to increase workload intensification is already being felt by and marginalise those who will not or individual lecturers and researchers, with cannot play the game. reports of stress, breakdown and staff leaving the university sector, in some cases with no other employment to go to. This National student survey impact has been referred to by some The National Student Survey (NSS) has, feminist researchers who have conducted since 2005, been conducted by a private qualitative interview studies as ‘the hidden market research company (Ipsos MORI) injuries of the neoliberal university’ (Gill, for the Higher Education Funding 2010). Other researchers have shown how Council for England (HEFCE). The the demand that university staff conceal government now intends to give the the personal effects of pressure from results of the survey more weight in management and maintain a happy decisions about the future of courses, and appearance to reassure the students is to encourage prospective students to operates as a form of ‘emotional labour’, use the data to make their own decisions which they define as ‘the effort which is about which courses to take. This is in required to display that which are line with the neoliberal agenda in perceived to be the expected emotions’ education, and it places impossible (Ogbonna & Harris, 2004, p.1189). burdens on staff. One of the Hey (2011) notes that under these consequences is that because research conditions there is a ‘punitive psychois not directly visible to the student, social logic’ which can be ‘routinely and teaching and learning resources are given expansively stimulated by threat and priority in order to enhance the ‘student inducement’ (p.209), and she continues experience’ and to position the student as with this indictment of current conditions: a ‘customer’ (McGettigan, 2013).

It is not only qualitative and critical …the political and moral economy of researchers who have serious misgivings UK austerity discourse is being about the NSS methodology. It makes a deliberately formed through appeals mockery of academic standards to tell to particular emotional identifications students (and their parents who are now shaping an ‘us’. There are, behind this often having to pay for the courses) that inducement, economic and social they should base their ‘experience’ and ‘satisfaction’ on a distorted evidence base (Sabri, 2011). The NSS, for example, among UK university lecturers: An Science, 23(11), 1306–1313. employs an attitude rating scale exploratory study. Organization Sabri, D. (2011). What's wrong with ‘the which gives a partial account and Studies, 25(7), 1185–1203. student experience’? Discourse: which amplifies the effect of Parker, I. (2007). Revolution in Studies in the Cultural Politics of aggrieved responses from those psychology: Alienation to Education, 32(5), 657–667. emancipation. London: Pluto Books.

Stevenson, J. & Clegg, S. (2010). who are dissatisfied with lower Rink, F., Ryan, M. & Stoker, J. (2012).

Possible selves: Students marks. A low response rate Influence in times of crisis: How orientating themselves towards the exaggerates this skewed message social and financial resources affect future through extracurricular even more (and this has often men’s and women’s evaluations of activity. British Educational been a factor in the fate of lowglass-cliff positions. Psychological Research Journal, 37(2), 1–16. rated courses). There is then

2007), is in some respects a return to classical liberal political economy of the 19th century. However, its attempt to remove what is viewed as restrictive state interference in the free market is undermined by its need to ensure security of private property ownership and, in the public sector, the ability of management to enforce discipline. It is understandable that neoliberalism as a latest form of capitalist governance should have been challenged by ‘critical’ psychologists and feminist researchers (Gill, 2010; Parker, 2007).

The background context and key fault-lines for the unrelenting pressure on academics in times of austerity lies in the process of ‘marketisation’ of higher education, driven by the rapid increases in student fees and the introduction of a student loans system (McGettigan, 2013). Here we see the invidious effects of a neoliberal agenda at work inside teaching and research institutions, and the specific impact on women. Even experimental research reports chime with the argument that women who do break through the ‘glass ceiling’ are then faced with a precarious existence on what has been referred to as a ‘glass cliff’ (e.g. Rink et al., 2012). In higher education ‘the executive positions are overwhelmingly occupied by men, whilst middle management is more the domain of women’, and this power structure ‘splits the male decision-makers from the tier of people who implement them’ (Hey, 2011, p.216). The emotional as well as intellectual labour of women is harnessed to the task of maintaining the efficiency of the institutions and of attempting to ensure that discontent among those who suffer most is soothed.

Women teachers and researchers suffer under these conditions as relationships are undermined and competition intensified, and women managers are put in the front line as often reluctant agents of this process (Hey, 2011).

This is another crucial dimension of the argument that psychology has been increasingly ‘feminised’ and that this needs to be addressed in feminist approaches to

Lynch, K. (2006). Neo-liberalism and marketisation: The implications for higher education. European Educational Research Journal, 5(1), 1–17.

McGettigan, A. (2013). The great university gamble: Money, markets and the future of higher education.

London: Pluto Books.

Ogbonna, E. & Harris, L.C. (2004). Work intensification and emotional labour

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

237

austerity

pressure to inflate grades across the sector.

The NSS is being used to devalue the work of teachers and researchers in higher education, with claims in some newspaper headlines that 10 per cent of students are ‘dissatisfied’ with their degree. Given the spread of marks across a normal distribution in most departments, this is hardly surprising. The survey is also being used to put the pressure on courses that have failed to please students within the terms now set by HEFCE, and to warrant course closures. The genuine complaints that lecturers deal with from students in course committees (which are also partially reflected in the NSS results) actually concern deteriorating conditions of buildings and lack of support staff, while other aspects of student life are also obscured (Stevenson & Clegg, 2010).

These are problems in education now that call for a collective response, but this departs from the agenda that is being implemented in the NSS, an agenda that makes it increasingly difficult to find other ways of giving voice to those affected by austerity in higher education.

Gendered middle-management The drive for higher NSS scores also puts middle-managers, such as heads of department, in a difficult position, for they are forced to be obedient to a methodology that they know to be unsound and to coerce staff who are also sceptical about the process to conform to it. Such bad, and at times plainly dishonest, management practice does not bode well for a good research atmosphere in the university. It is difficult to impose such measures by force alone, and this is where the role of ‘emotional labour’ comes into play. Along with the expectation that staff and students be ‘emotionally literate’ and so merely learn to speak as they are expected to process those in power, this expectation also represents a ‘feminisation’ of the workplace in the turn to emotion which is both a betrayal of and cruel parody of feminist arguments (Burman, 2009).

Studies of ‘emotional labour’ have shown how the ability of women to show commitment to a product and to the customer in the service sector and public sector can reap dividends (Hochschild, 1983). The stereotypical caring and intuitive qualities of women are utilised in ‘emotional labour’ through which, in higher education, staff are expected to enthuse about their work and to conceal any organisational shortcomings, for that would be to show disloyalty as well as unhappiness (Hochschild, 1979).

The increase in importance of

238

emotional labour also means that a quite traditional distribution of power in management is kept in place. The hopes of women who rise to a junior managerial position, hopes that they will break through the glass ceiling and really be able to participate in higher-level decision making, are frustrated.

In the meantime there is pressure on them and difficult choices to be made about where their loyalties lie while they are waiting for promotion, pressure to The hopes of women that they will break through the glass exercise their power on ceiling and really be able to participate in higher-level those subordinate to decision making are frustrated them. While ‘emotional labour’ can be satisfying, it intensifies by higher management. They are made to levels of alienation at work (Brook, 2009). implement neoliberal policies that increase This situation, combined with the pressure on all their staff. Their ‘emotional traditionally gendered management labour’ as a middle manager is harnessed structure of higher education, raises the to intensify academic and administrative spectre of a particular form of bureaucratic workloads, and lower-level female staff are control that employs feminist rhetoric induced to engage in a higher degree of (Ashcraft, 2006), and then of reaction to emotional labour to satisfy student this control by men who attempt to assert demand to comply with what will produce their own masculinity which they feel to higher NSS assessment scores. be under threat, or are positioned as doing A former adviser to the last Labour this if they question their managers. The administration that pioneered so many of dangerous prospect here is that the recent neoliberal ‘reforms’ in UK higher stereotypical gender roles are reinforced, education put the aim of government like and the contribution of social, critical and this: ‘Universities should become not just feminist psychologists who have tried to centres of teaching and research but hubs show that such roles are socially for innovation networks in local constructed are marginalised. Austerity economies, helping spin off companies for thus breeds a regressive approach to universities, for example’. He continued psychology with respect to gender in with this phrase: ‘Universities should be particular and with respect to our human the open-cast mines of the knowledge nature in general. economy’ (Leadbeater, 2000, p.114). It is against this background that we need to appreciate the importance of strong management as an inevitable complement Conclusions of neoliberal conceptions of individual The critical perspectives on the impact of freedom in the market place. austerity described here draw attention to Austerity thus pits us all against each the malign effects of neoliberal responses other, it undermines genuine scholarship, to the economic crisis, which ratchet up and it leads to increased stress. It also leads competition between academics and to bad old psychology, which good critical researchers in different university research in the discipline now has the departments and present this state of responsibility to explore and challenge. affairs as normal and natural. In the process a particular version of ‘psychology’ is reinforced, and, as in other times of social pressure, it is women who Ian Parker pay the highest price. is Professor of In some ways the situation today is Management at the worse for women, as feminist researchers University of Leicester have pointed out, for their stereotypical ip101@leicester.ac.uk nurturing qualities are, with the ‘feminisation’ of the workplace, exploited

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Your Training Planner for April July 2014 April 2014 29 April Socratic Questioning Workshop 30 Apr 01 May Essential Supervision Skills (2 days)*

London London

Fully Booked: later date available Fully Booked: later date available

May 2014 02 May 06 08 May 09 May 13 15 May 16 May 20 22 May 23 May

Case Formulations CBT: Introductory Course (3 days) CBT: Personal Awareness & Ethical Behaviour CBT: Introductory Course (3 days) Motivational Interviewing & Beyond CBT: Introductory Course (3 days) Essential Toolkit for Running Groups

London London London Birmingham Birmingham Manchester Manchester

09 10 June

Solution Focused Brief Therapy (2 days)

London

19 June 20 June 27 June

Working with Depression Working with Generalised Anxiety Disorder Behavioural Experiments

London London London

Only 3 places left. Book now.

Fully Booked: later date available

Not to be repeated in 2014 Available Available Available Not to be repeated in 2014

June 2014 NB! NEW DATES added by popular demand. Book soon!

Not to be repeated in 2014 Not to be repeated in 2014 Available

July 2014 01 03 July 08 July 09 July 10 July 11 July

CBT: Introductory Course (3 days) London New Approaches to Grief and Loss Work London Personal Confidence & Assertiveness at Work London Skills for Dealing with Difficult People at Work London Socratic Questioning Workshop London

Available NB! Updated for 2014. Book soon.

NB! Back by popular demand.

NB! Back by popular demand.

Fully Booked: later date available

Special Note: if your organisation is interested in commissioning SDS training in-house, please, contact us with your requirements ASAP. The dates for 2014 are booking up quickly. Please e-mail info@skillsdevelopment.co.uk The Skills Development Service Ltd is a national training organisation delivering high-quality training in health, social services, education and counselling for over 20 years. We have provided training throughout the UK to over a 100,000 delegates since we started. Our courses are available as open courses and as in-house training.

SDS tutors are chosen for their professional qualifications, practical knowledge, experience and their reputation as outstanding trainers.

Our training is informed, evidence-based, very practically focused and always delivered in an engaging way which leads to excellent evaluation and delegate feedback. We use a wide range of learning techniques as our aim is to provide you with the highest possible standard of training and enable you to make immediate use of your learning.

* BPS Learning Centre confirmed that

Essential Supervision Skills course from SDS Ltd meets the standards required to confer eligibility to the British Psychological Society s Register of Applied Psychology Practice Supervisors (RAPPS).

www.skillsdevelopment.co.uk read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

239

ARTICLE

Inequality and the next generation Gary Thomas explains how the gradient of difference can impact upon identity in the classroom

questions

Inequality is bad – for individuals and for societies. And the worse off you are, the worse are the effects of inequality. These are now established facts of social science.

Yet recent events and austerityled policy have resulted in inequality becoming more, not less, exaggerated. Psychologists need to find new ways of understanding the consequences of inequality and to discover ways of engaging with institutions to attenuate its effects.

B

Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age.

As psychologists, do our ways of thinking distract us – or, worse, discourage us – from looking at wider features of the environments people inhabit?

references

resources

If there is evidence to show that psychological harm can come from inequality, shouldn’t we be doing our best to reduce markers of inequality and difference in schools?

240

Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Allen Lane. See also www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/spiri t-level-why-equality-better-everyone www.davidsmail.info

Chiu, M.M. & Khoo, L. (2005). Effects of resources, inequality, and privilege bias on achievement: Country, school, and student level analyses.

American Educational Research Journal, 42, 575–603.

Chudgar, A. & Luschei, T.F. (2009).

National income, income inequality, and the importance of schools: A hierarchical cross-national comparison. American Educational

efore he was elected President, Barack Obama noted in The Audacity of Hope (2006, p.192):

Obama was writing before the post-2007 recession took hold, exaggerating the inequalities even more. The social significance of the scale of these differences has, in recent years, begun to be appreciated. It is clear now that many of the troubles – psychological and physical – that we once took to be dispositional or located in some maladaptive relationship can be located in inequality. For us as psychologists, the danger is, to paraphrase David Smail (1996), that we may become so submerged in our subject and its diagnostic intricacies that we lose sight of the inexorable realities of the external world.

More than a decade ago, in looking at relative poverty and inequality, Keating and Hertzman (1999, p.3) summarised a range of epidemiological research to identify a phenomenon they called the ‘gradient effect’. By this they meant the extent to which social differences exist between members of a population. They put it this way: ‘Particularly striking is the discovery of a strong association between the health

Research Journal, 46(3), 626–658.

Cohen, A.K. (1955). Delinquent boys. New York: Free Press.

Cohen, G., Steele, C.M. & Ross, L.D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1302–1318.

Dickens, W.T. & Flynn, J.R. (2001).

Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ

of a population and the size of the social distance between members of the population… this gradient effect [obtains] not only for physical and mental health but also for a wide range of other developmental outcomes, from behavioural adjustment, to literacy, to mathematics achievement.’ Keating and Hertzman discussed the significance of this effect, with the important point being that the greater the gradient amongst members (i.e. the difference existing between members of a population) the greater will be the unease, mistrust and discontent existing among those members.

Around the same time, Willms (1999a, 1999b) reported important findings about the significance of gradient for education.

He examined associations between parent education and child literacy in different OECD countries – including Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, the USA and Poland – and in different US states. He found that where parents themselves were highly educated (measured by number of years in education), literacy levels of their offspring differed least, so children with highly educated parents performed equally well in each country. But for less educated parents, advantage went to the Swedes and Dutch, with Americans and Poles performing worst.

After reviewing more studies about school effects, Willms suggested why this might be so – why the children of less educated parents do better in Sweden than in the US. One of his central conclusions was about gradient: ‘…when students are segregated… [those] from disadvantaged backgrounds do worse’ (Willms, 1999b, p.85). He notes that such segregation may come from many and varied directions: from special programmes for ‘gifted’ children to phenomena such as charter or magnet schools.

Chiu and Khoo (2005) confirmed the importance of the gradient effect and its significance in education on a range of measures of achievement: students’ achievement is worse in countries with larger distribution inequalities, and students in countries with greater

paradox resolved. Psychological Review, 108, 346–369.

Ericsson, K.A. & Delaney, P.F. (1999).

Long-term working memory as an alternative to capacity models of working memory in everyday skilled performance. In A. Miyake & P. Shah (Eds.) Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp.257–297), Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Gould, S.J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton.

Howe, M.J.A. (1990). The origins of exceptional abilities. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Keating, D.P. & Hertzman, C. (1999).

Modernity’s paradox. In D.P. Keating & C. Hertzman (Eds.) Developmental health and the wealth of nations: Social, biological and educational

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

‘privileged student bias’ have lower overall achievement. Countries distributing funding more equally (such as Finland and South Korea) perform best on a range of achievement outcomes. Chudgar and Luschei (2009, p.626) also confirm the phenomenon, noting that schools are ‘a significant source of variation in student performance, especially in poor and unequal countries’. Serious concern should therefore be felt about recent increases in inequality gradients. In the USA, where funding per student can vary widely (Rothstein, 2000), the gradient effect became very much more pronounced in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of 21st (Sennett, 2006).

The sequelae of steep gradients The significant ingredient in notions of gradient lies in inequality. It is about the differences that exist between high and low, and their magnitude and visibility, it is not about absolute levels of income or capital. It is these differences that impact on a whole range of outcomes, and it is interesting to speculate on the mechanism

of their operation in education. One plausible hypothesis is that damage is done to individuals’ sense of worth and identity where they see themselves, through major differences between themselves and their peers, conspicuously excluded from the expectations, the activities, the resources and the worlds of those peers. In such circumstances people are likely to abdicate, to withdraw or to resist, as a range of research about ‘deviance’ has indicated (see Cohen, 1955; Cohen et al., 1999; Matza, 1964). Where it is clear because of the steepness of the gradient that any kind of equivalence of achievement is impossible, people will create their own identities, even if the process involves resistance, discomfort or ‘deviance’.

The absence of the acknowledgement of the sequelae of steep social gradient can be seen with the persistence of segregation and inequality in education. Minow (2010, p.153), for example, in reviewing a range of research, observes that ‘schools too often are already settings for renewed racial segregation through academic tracking, special education assignments, and

students’ own divisions in lunch tables and cliques’. And, after a major review of inequality Marmot (2010, p.19) concludes: ‘Inequalities in educational outcomes are as persistent as those for health and are subject to a similar social gradient. Despite many decades of policies aimed at equalising educational opportunities, the attainment gap remains.’

As Willms has noted, it is important to recognise the significance of gradient effects in our educational and social planning. He draws attention to attempts that have been made in some areas for school restructuring to move away from segregative measures to initiatives for curricular restructuring, parental participation and site-based governance.

He also suggests that the beneficial influences operating in low-gradient places may be in the way parents are encouraged to relate to the school in governance and as volunteers. Likewise, Marmot (2010) points to the significance of education in the early years with closer links between schools, families and the local community with more and better extended services.

More could be done in training teaching and non-teaching staff to work across home–school boundaries.

Reason for hope

Students’ achievement is worse in countries with larger distribution inequalities – and countries distributing funding more equally perform best on a range of achievement outcomes

dynamics. New York: Guilford Press.

Marmot, M. (2004). Status syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy.

London: Bloomsbury.

Marmot, M. (2010). Fair society, healthy lives: The Marmot Review. London: UCL. Available at tinyurl.com/cffvo7o Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift.

New York: John Wiley & Sons.

McClelland, D.C. (1973). Testing for

competence rather than for ‘intelligence’. American Psychologist, 28, 1–14.

McClelland, D.C., Baldwin, A.L., Bronfenbrenner, U. & Strodtbeck, F.L. (1958). Talent and society.

Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.

Minow, M. (2010). In Brown's wake: Legacies of America's educational landmark. New York: Oxford University Press.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The consequences of steep gradients are now incontestable: scrutiny of international comparisons provided

by OECD (2010) for the period from 2000 to 2009 shows remarkably consistent findings relating to the gradient effect, with the countries with the shallowest gradients performing, broadly speaking, at the top of international tables of educational outcomes. In societies with greater inequality there is lower achievement at school and there are more casualties of the school system. As Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) put it, following their seminal review of the societal consequences of inequality, ‘more equal societies almost always do better’.

Obama, B. (2006). The audacity of hope.

Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

OECD (2010). PISA 2009 at a glance. Paris: OECD Publishing. doi.org/10.1787/9789264095298-en Rothstein, R. (2000). Equalizing educational resources on behalf of disadvantaged children. In R.D. Kahlenberg (Ed.) A notion at risk: Preserving public education as an engine for social mobility (pp.31–92).

New York: Century Foundation.

Sahlberg, P. (2007). Education policies for raising student learning: The Finnish approach. Journal of Educational Policy 22(2), 147–171.

Sapolsky, R. (1999). The physiology and pathophysiology of unhappiness. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener & N. Schwarz (Eds.) Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology.

New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

241

austerity

One should not be pessimistic about this effect in policy terms, though, for there is evidence from the work of people such as Sen (1999) that support at the local level in guiding the ways that institutions work can have spectacular success in reducing inequality and its consequences.

I have stressed that when one thinks of the gradient effect, one is considering the effect of comparison that arises out of the conspicuousness of differences in capital. But comparisons rest not merely in monetary capital; they rest in the constructs we devise precisely to enable comparison. In schools this happens through comparisons of what is taken to be ability. Comparisons on the basis of ability have forever been at the root of segregation and it is these comparisons that transmute to the alienation that is sapping of status, identity and selfbelief.

It is these – identity, belonging and self-belief – that appear to me to have currency far beyond the ambit of ability.

One might suggest that the alienation and exclusion experienced by students are constructed largely out of comparison – out of the comparison of each student herself or himself with others, and the institutional endorsement of such comparison by teachers and other professionals. The point to be made is that it is not so much absolute standards of ability that are important for assessing learning ‘disability,’ as perceptions concerning relative status.

It is relative status rather than ability – or its obverse in disability of multifarious kinds – that is important in generating failure. But relative status has competed

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sennett, R. (2006). The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Smail, D. (1996). The experience of school – empowerment or oppression. In G. Alred & M. Fleming (Eds.) Priorities in education. Durham: Fieldhouse Press.

Thomas, G. (2013). A review of thinking

242

poorly as an explanatory concept against ability and disability. Ability has always shown great resilience as a framing concept despite the force of empirical evidence and rational argument to contradict it (see, for example, Dickens & Flynn, 2001; Ericsson & Delaney, 1999; Gould, 1981; Howe, 1990; McClelland, 1973; McClelland et al., 1958; Wahlstein, 1997).

Although we have known this work for some time, assessment and comparison still provide, using an ever-increasing array of tests, a process for enabling and legitimising the hierarchisation and judgement of students. Perceptions of ‘difficulty’ or ‘disability’ are thus constructed around and within discourses

[referring to Sapolsky, 1999] supporting the importance of these five characteristics – control, predictability, degree of support, threat to status, and presence of outlets – that modulate the impact of a psychologically threatening stimulus’ (2004, p.114).

The latter, the psychologically threatening stimulus, is conspicuously found in the judgemental environment, with its contrasts and comparisons, created in much of today’s education. The message of work on relative judgement implies that this environment needs continual challenge – respect, identity and control need to be given back to those inhabiting the institutions that are created for them.

Attenuate – don’t amplify

of comparison – around normality and abnormality, success and failure, the functional and the dysfunctional (see also Thomas, 2013) If the separation of one child from another is, then, down to comparison – rather than ability pure-and-simple – how do hierarchies and status actually affect identity in such a way that learning and even health are substantially affected?

Marmot (2004) puts the mechanism down to the complex set of relations that exist among inequality, hierarchy, cooperation and control over one’s own life. He suggests: ‘There is a large body of literature

and research about inclusive education policy, with suggestions for a new kind of inclusive thinking.

British Educational Research Journal, 39(3), 473–490.

Wahlstein, D. (1997). The malleability of intelligence is not constrained by heritability. In B. Devlin, S.E. Fienberg, D.P. Resnick & K. Roeder (Eds.) Intelligence, genes and success: Scientists respond to the bell curve.

The magnified inequalities created by the worst global downturn since the 1930s encourage a re-examination of the models, ideas and theories through which we construct notions about difficulty, disadvantage, disability and deviance.

Even before the recession epidemiologists were telling us of the major consequences flowing from the magnitude of income difference, and I have discussed in this article how the dynamics of that relationship work for young people in schools as well as for everyone else. But the epidemiologists’ revelations promote a realisation that the enervating mechanisms which operate to create ill health, anomie or depression operate not just through differences in income, but through other differences also – differences that institutions such as schools can, unless we are very careful, amplify rather than attenuate.

New York: Copernicus.

Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Allen Lane.

Willms, J.D. (1999a). Inequalities in literacy skills among youth in Canada and the United States (International Adult Literacy Survey No 6). Ottawa: Human Resources Development Canada and National Literacy

Gary Thomas is at the School of Education, University of Birmingham g.thomas.3@bham.ac.uk

Secretariat.

Willms, J.D. (1999b). Quality and inequality in children’s literacy. In D. Keating & C. Hertzman (Eds.) Developmental health and the wealth of nations. New York: Guilford Press.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Civil Liability Insurance for Psychologists Exclusive rates for BPS members Civil Liability insurance could help protect you should someone take legal action against you as a result of your business activities. Towergate has over 15 years’ experience in arranging civil liability insurance to professionals like you and has developed specialist cover to help keep you protected.

To take out cover today call us on:

01438 739687 or visit us at www.towergateinsurance.co.uk/professionalliability or e-mail us at: PRsales@towergate.co.uk Towergate and Towergate Insurance is a trading name of Towergate Underwriting Group Limited.

Registered Office: Towergate House, Eclipse Park, Sittingbourne Road, Maidstone, Kent ME14 3EN. Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

ACT Made Simple With Russ Harris

MASTER PRACTITIONER EATING DISORDERS & OBESITY A comprehensive, experiential 3 course programme whose modules may be taken individually. We offer a substantial discount when all 3 courses are booked together.

The modules of this programme are: Excellence in Practitioner Skills for Eating Disorders An 8 day diploma course teaching integrative theory & effective practical skills for the treatment of binge eating, bulimia & anorexia.

Autumn 2014: 2-5 October & 23-26 October, London

12 & 13 June 2014 Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regents Park Road, London NW1 7AY The workshop will cover case conceptualisation in both clinical and nonclinical populations: how to conceptualise any client problem in terms of the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model, from clinical disorders such as depression, anxiety, addiction to non-clinical issues such as work stress, performance anxiety, fear of failure and low self-confidence. It also covers working with mandated or coerced clients; getting unstuck (for both clients and therapists); ‘selling ACT’ to your clients; getting to values when your client says ‘I don’t know’; overcoming resistance and motivating the unmotivated; anger and resentment; compassion and forgiveness.

Early bird rate: £199 (ends 20th April) | Late rate: £239

Essential Obesity: Psychological Approaches 3 days drawing from counselling, clinical and health psychology approaches to change the lives of overweight adults.

Summer 2014: 5-7 June 2014 London

Nutritional Interventions for Eating Disorders 3 days teaching practical and effective treatment of nutrition-related aspects of eating disorders.

27-29 November 2014 London

View a prospectus for each course online at:

www.eating-disorders.org.uk

(select Training )

For more details go to: www.contextualconsulting.co.uk To register email: contextualconsulting@eyas.co.uk The Trainer: Russ Harris a medical practitioner, psychotherapist and one of the foremost ACT trainers in the world.

His workshops are highly acclaimed and he is renowned for his ability to make complex ideas simple, clear and accessible.He is the author of very popular self help book, ‘The Happiness Trap’, and also ‘ACT Made Simple’, ‘Getting Unstuck in ACT’, and ’The Confidence Gap’.

Or call 0845 838 2040 for further info.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

243

ARTICLE

Neoliberal austerity and unemployment David Fryer and Rose Stambe examine critical psychological issues

questions

Neoliberal fiscal austerity policies decrease public expenditure through cuts to central and local government budgets, welfare services and benefits and privatisation of public resources resulting in job losses. This article interrogates the empirical, theoretical, methodological and ideological relationships between neoliberalism, unemployment and the discipline of psychology, arguing that neoliberalism constitutes rather than causes unemployment.

If we reject the claims both that unemployment causes psychological outcomes and that psychological states cause unemployment, how else can we make sense of the unemployed subjectivity and what are the wider implications for the discipline of psychology?

resources

McCormack, C. (2009). The wee yellow butterfly. Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing.

Biehl, J., Good, B.J. & Kleinman, A. (Eds.) (2007). Subjectivity: Ethnographic investigations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

references

Is it possible to engage with fiscal austerity and its bedfellows – unemployment, poverty, inequality and neoliberalism – as a psychologist without simultaneously engaging in politics?

Bambra, C. (2013). All in it together? In C Wood (Ed.) Health in austerity.

London: Demos. Available at tinyurl.com/kj4a8tu Baxandall, P. (2002). Explaining differences in the political meaning of unemployment across time and space. Journal of Socio-Economics, 31(5), 469–502.

Beveridge Report (1942). Social insurance and allied services. Report by Sir

244

I am really sorry to bother you again.

God. But I am bursting to tell you all the stuff that has been going on behind your back since I first wrote to you back in 1988. Oh God do you still remember? Remember me telling you of the war that was going on against the poor and unemployed in our working class communities? Do you remember me telling you, God, how the people in my community were being killed and terrorised but that there were no soldiers to be seen, no tanks, no bombs being dropped? (‘The war against the poor in Britain’, Cathy McCormack’s Blogs to God, 7 May 2013: tinyurl.com/qbyl7dt)

‘…following Stuckler and Basu (2013) it is not economic downturns per se that matter but the austerity and welfare “reform” that may follow: that “austerity kills” and – as I argue here – that it particularly “kills” those in lower socioeconomic positions.’

The scale of contemporary unemployment consequent upon neoliberal austerity programmes is colossal. According to labour market statistics released in June 2013 by the UK Office for National Statistics, 2.51 million people were unemployed in the UK (tinyurl.com/neu9l47). This represents five unemployed people competing for every vacancy.

Official statistics like these, which have persisted now for years, do not, of course, prevent the British Prime Minister – evangelist of neoliberal government asking in a speech delivered in June 2012 ‘Why has it become acceptable for many people to choose a life on benefits?’

Talking of what he termed ‘Working Age Welfare’, Mr Cameron opined: ‘we have been encouraging working-age people to have children and not work’.

But the best laugh God, is our Prime Minister, David Cameron whose government has launched a worse propaganda hate campaign against the poor, unemployed and single parents than Maggie Thatcher did. (‘The war against the poor in Britain’)

ass unemployment is perhaps the most obvious and shocking contemporary manifestation of the consequences of neoliberal austerity programmes. Even advocates of austerity make no bones about this. For example, Unemployment is also high across the Chief Economist Europe, with the and Deputy SecretaryEuropean Commission General of the reporting unemployment “Want, disease, ignorance, Organization for rates of around 13 per squalor and idleness are Economic Cooperation cent in April 2013, up being generated by and Development over 1.5 million in a year ‘austerity’ programmes” (OECD), Pier Carlo (tinyurl.com/2672ohz).

Padoan, freely admitted Youth unemployment in the OECD Yearbook tends to be even higher, close 2013 that ‘[a]usterity programmes to to 25 per cent. In Greece this figure was restore order to public finances can add to more than 60 per cent in February 2013, the woes of already struggling economies, against an overall unemployment rate of leading to more job losses and social 27 per cent. In May 2013 the hardship’. Opponents of austerity (e.g.

International Monetary Fund (IMF: see Bambra, 2013), put it more strongly: tinyurl.com/kcnxnku) admitted that the

M

William Beveridge presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty. London: HMSO Brady, M. (2011). Researching governmentalities through ethnography: The case of Australian welfare reforms and programs for single parents. Critical Policy Studies, 5(3), 265–283.

Classen, T.J. & Dunn, R.A. (2012). The effect of job loss and unemployment

duration on suicide risk in the United States. Health Economics, 21(3), 338–350.

Dean, M. (1995). Governing the unemployed self in an active society.

Economics and Society, 24(4), 559–583.

Denman, J. & McDonald, P. (1996).

Unemployment statistics from 1881 to the present day. Labour Market Trends, January, 5–18. The

Government Statistical Service.

Eisenberg, P. & Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1938).

The psychological effects of unemployment. Psychological Bulletin, 35, 358–390.

Foucault, M. (2008). Lecture 14 Feb 1979.

The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978– 1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fryer, D. (1985). The positive functions of unemployment. Radical Community

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

to 202 million in 2013 and 205 million in 2014. Moreover, these shocking figures severely underestimate the number of unemployed people, considering as they do only people of an age to be employed, without employment, available for employment, wanting employment and having actively sought employment in the previous four weeks. Those who do not engage in active job search, the socalled ‘discouraged’, do not count. This is an operationalisation that constructs a very particular way of understanding ‘unemployment’, as a taken-for-granted category rather than historically and culturally contingent.

Others have explored how the ‘problem of unemployment’ Cathy McCormack, whose ‘Blogs to God’ give her views influenced how on ‘The war against the poor in Britain’: see unemployment was made tinyurl.com/qbyl7dt and quotes through this article intelligible (Walters, 2000) and politically volatile (Baxandall, 2002). ‘notable failures’ of its insistence upon It is vital to reflect on the absence ‘strong and sustained fiscal consolidation of the ‘discouraged’ in the ILO definition, and deep structural reforms’ in Greece because decades of psychological research included ‘a much deeper than expected have demonstrated beyond reasonable recession with exceptionally high doubt that people who become unemployment’ (pp.1–2). ‘unemployed’ are disproportionately On a world scale the International likely to be positioned by researchers Labour Organization (ILO) calculated that as depressed, anxious, demoralised, global unemployment was 197 million in discouraged, low in self-esteem and 2012, with a further 39 million people socially isolated (Fryer, 2012; Wanberg, having ‘dropped out of the labour market 2012). Becoming ‘unemployed’ can lead as job prospects proved unattainable’ to psychological reconstitution which leads (tinyurl.com/ozlnsl5, p.2). This increased

Medicine, 21, 3–10.

Fryer, D. (1986a). Being unemployed: A review of the literature on the psychological experience of unemployment. In C.L. Cooper & I. Robertson (Eds.) International Review of Industrial and Organisational Psychology. Chichester: Wiley.

Fryer, D. (1986b). Employment deprivation and personal agency during unemployment: A critical

discussion of Jahoda’s explanation of the psychological effects of unemployment. Social Behaviour, 1, 3–23.

Fryer, D. (1999). For better and for worse: Interventions and mental health consequences of unemployment.

International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 72(Suppl.), 34–37.

Fryer, D. (2012). Critical differences: The

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

you to lose your status as ‘unemployed’; that is, to be disappeared from the ‘unemployment’ figures in countries such as the UK using the ILO operationalisation of ‘unemployment’ (Fryer, 2013).

The costs of unemployment The accumulating evidence about the psychological costs of ‘unemployment’ is now vast. Maynard and Feldman (2011), for example, reported that their search of relevant databases (PsycINFO, SocIndex, etc.) had revealed 31,839 peer-reviewed works with ‘unemployment’ in the abstract published in the previous 50 years, and there was already a huge literature by then (Eisenberg & Lazarsfeld, 1938; Österreichischen Wirtschaftspsychologischen Forschungsstelle, 1933; Pilgrim Trust, 1938; Taylor, 1909). This large and diverse body of research has been conducted in a wide variety of geographical settings, across a range of historical periods, from diverse funding bases and political assumptions, and at a number of ‘levels’ (individual unemployed people, unemployed families, cohorts of school-leavers, whole redundant workforces, populations of states or whole countries, etc.); it has been characterised by researchers’ use of varied methods and research designs (psychiatric assessment, qualitative interviewing, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys using validated reliable measures, epidemiology, action research) (Fryer, 1986a; but see Fryer, 2013). Meta-reviews have pooled data from a variety of studies (e.g. McKeeRyan et al., 2005; Paul & Moser, 2009).

There has been, effectively, unanimity that ‘unemployment’ is not only associated with but causes individual misery and mental health problems including anxiety, depression, negative self-esteem, dissatisfaction with life, social dislocation, community dysfunction and population morbidity (Classen & Dunn, 2012; Jefferies et al., 2011; Kiely & Butterworth, 2013; Kim et al., 2012).

development of a community critical psychological perspective on the psychological costs of unemployment. In T. Kieselbach & S. Mannila (Eds.) Unemployment, precarious work and health: Research and policy issues (pp.473–489).

Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Fryer D. (2013). Unemployment. In T. Teo (Ed.) Encyclopaedia of critical

psychology: Springer Reference (www.springerreference.com). doi:10.1007/SpringerReference_3049 73 2013-01-26 18:30:43 UTC Also to be published in a print version as: Fryer, D. (in press).

Unemployment. In T. Teo (Ed.) Encyclopedia of critical psychology.

New York: Springer.

Fryer, D. & McCormack, C. (2012). The war without bullets: Socio-structural

245

austerity

Researchers in the 1930s carried out unemployment research in the context of mass unemployment and hunger marches to determine whether mass unemployment would lead to revolution or apathy: the answer given was the latter. Researchers in the 1970s, 1980s and since have been more concerned with the question of whether those with poorer mental health were more likely to become and remain unemployed (individual drift), or whether healthy people who became unemployed became less mentally healthy (social causation). Epidemiological and crosssectional studies, whilst suggestive, were deemed inconclusive. Meta-review studies and large-scale longitudinal studies using measures of accepted reliability and validity were taken to answer the question in favour of social causation.

If the association between unemployment and poorer mental health is well-established, this brings us to the question of why the lives of so many unemployed people are plagued by misery, morbidity and, according to some research, mortality. The most influential such explanation is that of Marie Jahoda (1982), who argued that although the intended function of employment was to earn a living, employment also had unintended functions (an imposed time structure, engagement in regular social contact, participation in a collective purpose, receipt of a social identity and required regular activity) the deprivation of which – by unemployment – was responsible for the psychological consequences of unemployment.

What is psychologically bad about unemployment, according to this account, is that it constitutes a deprivation of benevolent psychologically structuring features of employment. However, many privileged, secure, wealthy and privileged people in the hugely unequal societies of the OECD manage ‘psychologically’, relatively at least, very well indeed without having the ‘psychological benefits’ of employment imposed upon them. Of course there is also another literature documenting that the employment of

violence from a critical standpoint.

Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 3(1). Available at tinyurl.com/nl3zftv Fryer, D. & McCormack, C. (Eds.). (2013).

Psychology and poverty reduction.

Australian Community Psychologist Special Section, 25(1). Available at www.groups.psychology.org.au/ccom/ publications/ Gans, H.J. (1972). The positive functions

246

many people is psychologically and physically destructive, so this cannot be the whole story. Indeed, we have long offered a thorough critique of Jahoda’s account (see Fryer, 1986b).

We previously offered an alternative meta-approach in terms of the restriction of agency through unemployment by poverty and powerlessness, especially over the future (e.g. Fryer, 1986b). These days we are exploring the ways people, when unemployed, are subjectively and materially (re)constituted so that they come to embody – and perform themselves to reproduce – a socially and historically produced and psychologically destructive, unemployed identity. Whilst some variation from person to person in the experience of unemployment is The new Labour government in 1945 committed to social provision reported – widely of income, education, housing, employment and health care explained by researchers market, the degree of support for people, in terms of the moderation of the distribution of wealth, dominant social relationship between unemployment values, etc. from the 1930s to the 21st and mental health by age, length of century and from country to country. We unemployment, employment commitment, regard the consistency of the results of poverty, gender, etc. – strikingly, the broad subjectification of unemployed people as psychological impact of unemployment is saying more about the functions served by widely reported as not only unemployment for the neoliberal status psychologically destructive but also oddly quo than it does about replication of effects consistent in the nature and detail of that of unemployment (Fryer, 2013; see also destruction across time, space and culture.

McDonald & Marston, 2005; Schram, This consistency is particularly notable 2000). when we consider the huge variation in As if the experience of unemployment the nature of employment, the labour

of poverty. American Journal of Sociology, 78(2), 275–289.

Hunter, D.J. (2013). Safe in our hands?

Austerity and the health system. In C Wood (Ed.) Health in austerity.

London: Demos. Available at tinyurl.com/kj4a8tu Jahoda, M. (1982). Employment and unemployment: A social-psychological analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jefferies, B.J., Nazareth, I., Marston, L. et al. (2011). Associations between unemployment and major depressive disorder: Evidence from an international, prospective study (the predict cohort). Social Science & Medicine, 73(11), 1672–1634.

Karren, R. & Sherman, K. (2012). Layoffs and unemployment discrimination: A new stigma. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 27(8), 848–863.

Kiely, K.M. & Butterworth, P. (2013).

Social disadvantage and individual vulnerability: A longitudinal investigation of welfare receipt and mental health in Australia. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 47(7), 654–666.

Kim, I.H., Muntaner, C., Vahid, S.F. et al.

(2012). Welfare states, flexible employment and health: A critical review. Health Policy, 104(2), 99–127.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

were not bad enough, the OECD Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary-General suggests that the cure for the ills of austerity, is further austerity (OECD, 2013, para.10).

Is unemployment inevitable?

It might be supposed that although unemployment has dreadful consequences for many people, unemployment itself is inevitable.

That is not the case, but since mass unemployment is intentionally produced, or at least maintained, by neoliberal administrations, mass unemployment could be said to be an inevitable consequence of neoliberal economic policies: there is a well-used acronym (NAIRU: Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) which refers to the level of unemployment (4-6 per cent) required to prevent inflation. When unemployment goes far below the NAIRU or stays there for long, the stock exchange tends to get the jitters.

Does history suggest that mass unemployment in times of austerity is inevitable? In the time of World War II, and for a good while afterwards, there was a grim belt-tightening for individuals. But around that time there were also many collective gains: the Beveridge Report (1942) recommended tackling the ‘five giants’: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The Labour Party won the 1945 election and committed to social provision of income, education, housing, employment and health care. The National Health Service was founded in 1948 and the rate of unemployment, which had averaged 22.1 per cent in 1932, averaged 3.7 per cent in 1947 and was not to rise above that until 1971 (Denman & McDonald, 1996).

In 2014 people are tightening their belts, but this time the wider manifestations of austerity are very different. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness are being generated by ‘austerity’ programmes that dismantle social services where they still exist and

Maynard, D.C. & Feldman, D.C. (Eds.) (2011). Underemployment: Psychological, economic, and social challenges. New York: Springer.

McDonald, C. & Marston, G. (2005).

Workfare as welfare: Governing unemployment in the advanced liberal state. Critical Social Policy, 25, 374–401.

McKee-Ryan, F., Song, Z., Wanberg, C.R. & Kinicki, A.J. (2005). Psychological

disable collective resistance whilst increasing inequality, threatening mental and physical health, undermining education, extending poverty and widening and deepening unemployment.

In the UK the Coalition programme is more than an immediate response to a large current account deficit. As noted

by Taylor-Gooby and Stoker (2011, cited in Hunter, 2013, p.12), ‘it involves a restructuring of welfare benefits and public services that takes the country in a new direction, rolling back the state to a level of intervention below that in the United States – something which is unprecedented… The policies include substantial privatisation and a shift of responsibility from state to individual.’ …at least under Thatcher we always had some kind of food on the table.

But God, my neighbour can only find part-time work as a cleaner. It nearly broke my heart when she chapped on my door the other day and asked to borrow 12p to make up the money to buy her son a pot noddle for his supper! (‘The war against the poor in Britain’)

Not negative for everyone Although unemployment is a bad thing for many working people, unemployment is – it turns out – a good thing for many other interest groups. Drawing inspiration from Gans’ (1972) classic The Positive Functions of Poverty, we have drawn attention to ‘the positive functions of unemployment’ for some interest groups (Fryer, 1985). Thus, unemployment: I provides a pool of potential workers unable to be unwilling to do the most boring, dirty, dead end, menial, underpaid, temporary, insecure, stressful jobs; I provides consumers of substandard products and services which would otherwise be ‘wasted’; I provides competition for jobs from desperate job seekers allowing employers to drive down wages and working conditions;

and physical well-being during unemployment: A meta-analytic study.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 53–70. Österreichischen Wirtschaftspsychologischen Forschungsstelle (1933).

Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit. Mit einem Anhang: Zur Geschichte der Soziographie..

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

I

I

I

acts as an incomes policy ensuring lower wages, allowing bigger dividends and more investment; creates jobs for middle-class professionals, ‘worthy causes’ for middle-class philanthropists and rallying issues for political groups; positions some people as deviants who can be used to legitimate dominant norms of hard work.

In this way, unemployment functions as an instrument of personal, social, political and economic control to the extent that it is widely understood that unemployment is psychologically destructive (Fryer & McCormack, 2012, 2013). Given that psychological unemployment research is a core way in which that understanding is accomplished, we are led to the conclusion that psychological unemployment research is central to the dominance of neoliberalism in how we can live our everyday (un)employed lives.

Psychology’s role in social violence Rejecting the view that neoliberalism is laissez-faire in all respects, Foucault (1979/2008, p.145) stated: ‘…neo liberal governmental intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system. But what is important is to see what the point of application of these governmental interventions is now… Government must not intervene on effects of the market.

Nor must neo-liberalism, or neo-liberal government, correct the destructive effects of the market on society…

Government must not form a counterpoint or a screen, as it were, between society and economic processes.

It has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth.’

We interpret this intervention ‘on society in its fabric and depth’ to include the re-subjectification of the unemployed subject as ‘unemployed’, a socially and historically produced identity. Our contention is that a network of

Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel.

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2013). OECD Year Book 2013: Better policies for better lives. OECD Publishing. Available at tinyurl.com/oxby67r Paul, K.I. & Moser, K. (2009).

Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analysis. Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 74, 264–282.

Pilgrim Trust (1938). Men without work.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Proudfoot, J., Guest, D., Carson, J. et al.

(1997). Effect of cognitive-behavioural training on job-finding among longterm unemployed people. Lancet, 350(9071), 96–100.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

247

austerity

PHILIP WOLMUTH/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

interconnected socially constituted social elements – including discourses of unemployment and mental health, whose primary function is to control inflation, reduce wage costs, discipline those in work, etc. – also simultaneously constructs a category of ‘the unemployed’ necessary to make the neoliberal labour market work in the interests of employers and shareholders.

This network also visits diverse forms of social violence upon and into the members of that category and (re)constitutes the subjectivity of ‘the unemployed’ in such ways as to (re)produce the compliant human means of production required by the employers, shareholders and government within the contemporary version of the neoliberal labour market.

We can see this very clearly A Jobseekers Allowance claimant on a compulsory four-week unpaid work placement in a in the logic of ‘workfare’, which private care home in Rochdale, part of a Mandatory Work Activity welfare-to-work programme (but demands that an unemployed see tinyurl.com/n8hxwrp regarding the lawfulness of such programmes) person not only proves they are vacancies, they of course do nothing more necessary, structures. Nor is it to do with actively seeking work but are also actively the frustration of the agentic potential of than reorder the queue of unemployed working on themselves through ‘selfthe individual unemployed person. people looking for employment. They are examination, counselling, self-help Instead, it is a set of connected also individualistic and victim blaming groups… improve one’s job readiness, selfmanifestations of material, social and and deflect attention from the neoliberal esteem, motivational levels’ (Dean, 1995, subjective violence necessary to make the economic and policy constitution of p.575). Psychologically oriented neoliberal labour market work in the unemployment (Fryer, 1999). interventions to promote an active labour interests of employers and shareholders.

Psychology, in providing the psymarket have included recommendations complex resources for such that unemployed people receive cognitive So God, you better start to get a grip (re)subjectification (Rose, 1999), behaviour therapy (Karren & Sherman, because the war against the poor has contributes to the normalisation of this 2012; Proudfoot et al., 1997; Wanberg et intensified under my new Coalition shift of responsibility onto the individual, al., 2011). The JOBS Project Government who now regard the sick, which then prohibits or limits possible (tinyurl.com/qj8qbzx) ‘involves the disabled and even the terminally ill as self-intelligibilities; ones which may lie design and evaluation of a preventive easy targets. Aye God, Maggie’s wains outside a neoliberal subjectivity (Brady, intervention aimed at providing jobhave all grown up. They are the ones 2011), including potentialities for seeking skills to promote reemployment in Government now, so no surprise resistance. The apparent relationship and to combat feelings of anxiety, there God, that they are determined between ‘unemployment’ and ‘mental helplessness, and depression among the to finish off what their hero started. health’ is, from our critical standpoint, unemployed’. Whilst such projects reduce (‘The war against the poor in Britain’) revealed as not to do with ‘natural’ and unemployment in the target intervention inevitable psychobiological consequences groups, in a situation where the number of depriving an unemployed person of of unemployed people is vastly greater employment-related, psychologically than the number of employment I David Fryer is Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, Senior Research Fellow at the Schram, S. F. (2000). In the clinic: The Cambridge: Cambridge University Queensland University of Technology medicalization of welfare. Social Text, Press. and Honorary Associate Professor at 18(1), 81–107.

Wanberg, C.R. (2012). The individual the University of Queensland Stuckler, D. & Basu, S. (2013). The body experience of unemployment. Annual d.fryer@uq.edu.au economic: Why austerity kills. London: Review of Psychology, 63(1), 369–396.

Allen Lane.

Taylor, F.I. (1909). A bibliography of unemployment and the unemployed.

London: P.S. King and Son. Walters, W. (2000). Unemployment and government: Genealogies of the social.

248

Wanberg, C.R., Zhu, J., Kanfer, R. & Zhang, Z. (2011). After the pink slip: Applying dynamic motivation frameworks to the job search experience. Academy of Management Journal, 55(2), 261–284.

I Rose Stambe is a Research Higher Degree candidate at the University of Queensland r.stambe@uq.edu.au

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Division of Forensic Psychology 23rd Annual Conference Glasgow Caledonian University 25–27 June 2014

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN Early bird rates available until 8 May 2014.

All rates will increase by £15 after this date.

PROGRAMME – The draft programme is now available to view online (www.bps.org.uk/dfp2014).

Keynote Speakers: G Dr Jo Clarke, University of York G Dr Lawrence Jones, Rampton Hospital & Nottingham University G Professor Alison Liebling, Cambridge University G Dr John Livesley, University of British Columbia, Canada Invited Symposiums from: Dr Nikki Graham-Kevan, University of Central Lancashire Dr Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, University of Birmingham

G G

Crime Writers: Denise Mina Chris Brookmyre

G G

Website: www.bps.org.uk/dfp2014 Email: dfpconf@bps.org.uk Telephone: 00 44 (0) 116 2529555

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

249

ARTICLE

I

The impact of austerity on a British council estate

I

Carl Harris takes an ‘ecological model of systems’ approach

questions

What impact has ‘austerity’, the cuts in public spending by the UK Coalition government since the 2010 general election, had upon a council estate community in Birmingham?

This question will be considered in the context of the American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of systems, originally created to help psychologists understand the many interwoven factors that influence child development.

T

With which disciplines could psychology collaborate in order to further explore the psychosocial impacts of austerity?

How can psychology play a role in promoting action to reduce social inequalities?

What are the barriers to psychology becoming more active in the area of social justice?

resources references

Does the belief ‘We are psychologists, we don’t get involved in politics’ show that psychologists don’t understand how science works (i.e. it has a value base), or that we are unaware of our own vested interest in the status quo?

Community Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society: http://cps.bps.org.uk Community Psychology: www.compsy.org.uk

Albee, G.W. (1988, October). Prevention is the answer. OPENMIND (Journal of the British Association for Mental Health).

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Furness, D. & Gough, B. (2009). From feast to famine: Reforming the NHS for an age of austerity. London: Social Market Foundation.

250

he social determinants of health – which include social class, poverty, unemployment and poor housing – have been well documented (Marmot, 2010). Social inequality is correlated with life expectancy and physical health as well as with a range of psychologically relevant issues, including: mental health problems, drug abuse, interpersonal violence, and reduced educational attainment and child well-being (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009).

Given this, we would expect ‘austerity’ measures to have an impact on individuals and communities. But what is the best way for us as psychologists to understand how such policies might shape the mental and physical health of the individuals and communities that are subject to them?

In this article, I will be using American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), originally created to help psychologists understand the many interwoven factors that influence child development.

Bronfenbrenner’s model emphasises the role of context and is useful to the community psychologist first, because his efforts to relate human flourishing to the surrounding world mean that his approach can be applied to adults as well as to children; and second, because his model views each person not as an isolated unit, but as one element in a set of nested social and cultural systems, with the largest often having the biggest influence: I Micro level: of which the individual has regular direct experience (e.g. home, school, work group, club)

Gillies, V. (2005). Raising the ‘meritocracy’: Parenting and the individualization of social class.

Sociology, 39(5), 835–853.

Harkness, S., Gregg, P. & MacMillan, L. (2012). Poverty: The role of institutions, behaviours and culture. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Harris, C. (2005). The Family Well-being Project. In C. Newnes & N. Radcliffe (Eds.) Making and breaking children’s

I

Meso level: consisting of two or more of a person’s micro-level systems and the links between them (e.g. home–school, hospital–patient’s family, mother’s family–father’s family after separation) Exo level: influences on the person and the person’s micro- and meso-level systems but of which the person has no direct experience (e.g. a school governing body, a parent’s place of work, the local authority’s housing department) Macro level: on a larger scale determining the prevailing ideology and social structure within which the individual person and his/her micro-, meso- and exo-level systems operate (e.g. current rate of unemployment, other conditions of the labour market, gender roles in society, government policy of austerity).

This outlook maps directly on to the community psychologist’s traditional concern with social power as the key to well-being and distress (Orford, 2008; Smail, 2006).

This article is also informed by my own work on the estate over a 13-year period, initially as a psychologist with the Family Well-being Project (Harris, 2005).

Examples of the implications of austerity will come from multi-agency meetings in the neighbourhood over the last six months of 2013. Bronfenbrenner’s approach allows us to track movements of resources within and between the different nested systems, and to consider the psychological effects of these changes on those involved.

The macro-level: Government policy and globalisation Neoliberalism can be summarised as the promotion of free markets and of the idea of individual responsibility for health and wealth (or poverty) as the best way of managing society’s resources (Harvey, 2005). These free markets are, in fact, unfairly skewed in favour of the rich and powerful (Usdin, 2007).

lives. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

HM Treasury (2010). Spending Review 2010. www.official-documents.gov.uk Hobfoll, S.E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44, 513–524.

Latkin, C & Curry, A. (2003). Stressful

neighbourhoods and depression: A prospective study of the impact of neighbourhood disorder. Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, 44, 34–44.

Markovitz, F., Bellair, P., Liska, A. & Jianhong, L. (2001) Extending social disorganisation theory: Modelling the relationships between cohesion, disorder, and fear. Criminology, 39(2), 293–319.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

At a global level neoliberalism has manifested itself in transnational trade agreements and policy making in a number of countries around the world.

This is particularly the case in countries where there have been financial crises.

It is not easy to characterise fully the impact of neoliberalism locally. Residents have experienced the influence of this development through the ‘right to buy’ scheme which removed so much housing from public ownership. They will also have experience of being customers of privatised utility companies and of ‘zerohours’ employment contracts Within this neoliberal ideology, public funding becomes a potential source of shareholder revenue. Corporations likely to profit from marketisation have been working with national governments to promote its benefits. Think tanks present, on behalf of their clients, the benefits of neoliberalism. See for instance Furness and Gough (2009): promoting the creation of a ‘thriving provider market’, introducing charges for health care for the

wealthiest. This is a politically astute way of further opening up health provision to private corporations. It also reinforces the principle of charging for healthcare. The parameters within which health care is charged for could then be altered later.

Dissenting voices are increasingly marginalised. Reed (2012), however, supported by Action for Children, the Children’s Society and the NSPCC, uses the government’s own data to conclude that the number of vulnerable families with children will grow (largely as the result of changes to the benefit and tax systems) and that the measures put in place to mitigate the impact of the recession (such as the Pupil Premium and the Troubled Families Programme) are insufficient to offset its financial effects.

These financial effects are exacerbated by the disproportionately high use such families make of services provided by local authorities, which are being reduced through the austerity programme.

Councils had their government grant cut by 26 per cent over the four years up to

Signs of neighbourhood disorder can significantly affect family well-being

Marmot, M. (2010). Fair society, healthy lives: Strategic review of health inequalities in England post-2010.

London: Department of Health.

Moloney, P. (2013). The therapy industry: The irresistible rise of the talking cure, and why it doesn’t work. London: Pluto.

O’Connor, T., Heron, J., Goulding, J. et al.

(2003). Maternal antenatal anxiety and behavioural/emotional problems

in children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44(7), 1025–1036.

Orford, J. (2008). Community psychology.

Chichester: Wiley.

Reed, H. (2012). In the eye of the storm: Britain’s forgotten children and families: A research report for Action for Children. London: The Children’s Society and NSPCC. Scally, G. (2013). A grotesque parody of

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

2014 (HM Treasury, 2010) compared to reductions in central government budgets of 8 per cent.

As well as being affected by the financial aspect of austerity, benefitclaimant families have also been affected by the associated political strategy. This strategy involves Coalition ministers, MPs and many journalists presenting such claimants as undeserving. These families are being subjected to a negative, global judgement by a socially significant authority, while also having few options to improve their circumstances (Harkness et al., 2012). Michael Marmot was recently moved to call these cuts in services and benefits ‘a grotesque parody of fairness’ (reported by Scally, 2013).

The exo-level: Local government and agencies The estate on which I worked was a New Deal for Communities (NDC) community regeneration programme, receiving £50 million from central government between 2000 and 2010. The local NDC delivery team supported the development of a local network of agencies at a monthly meeting called ‘Local Stakeholders’. The workers were from a range of organisations, including frontline staff of public sector agencies, such as health visitors, police, learning mentors and the housing department. Senior managers also attended when required and when available. A number of non-statutory organisations were represented, for instance Befriend – a charity that supported both newly arrived and established residents in building relationships in the neighbourhood.

When the NDC funding ended, the local agencies continued to meet.

These meetings are currently chaired by a neighbourhood coordinator from the city council.

This forum has allowed workers to make connections with each other, to recognise how they are affected by and address issues that are ‘cross-cutting’, such as poor housing and domestic violence.

fairness. British Medical Journal, 347(7932), 17.

Smail, D. (2006). Power, interest and psychology. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Taylor, S.E., Repetti, R.L. & Seeman, T. (1997). Health psychology: What is an unhealthy environment and how does it get under the skin? Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 411–447.

Usdin, S. (2007). The no-nonsense guide to

world health. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications.

Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Allen Lane.

251

austerity

For example, the forum had previously responded collectively to proposals for reduced local family support provision and to plans to carry out a significant housing regeneration scheme. At a meeting in June 2013 attended by 20 public service professionals from the statutory and third sectors, while attendees maintained their focus on sharing information and managing the scarce resources within the neighbourhood, there was clear evidence of the impact of the cuts on those within the meeting.

A local day centre for older people is to be closed down. The regular users of the centre have been told that they will receive a phone call to tell them whether they will be able to access ‘alternative provision’ and if so where this will be.

There is little social work support available to help people make the transition. Any such transition is likely to involve a number of demands, for example: leaving trusted relationships and establishing new ones; finding and then arranging transport to a new venue; possibly renegotiating a care package to take account of changing circumstances; setting new priorities when the new arrangements may involve reduced support; and possible feelings of guilt when friends do not get offered alternative provision.

Staff at the meeting commented, ‘These are people’s lives you are talking about here – people [the council] aren’t interested – that’s what hurts me.’ The workers were clearly affected by their empathy for their client group as well as feeling let down by the decision makers in their organisation. They were sharing in the loss of their clients but they were also experiencing a loss of trust in their organisation, putting them at risk of burnout (Hobfoll, 1989). Their sense of fairness had been undermined: ‘we are not all in this together’, after all.

This is likely to erode the quality of their work because it will reduce their ability to empathise with their clients, and just at the time when many of these workers will also have to be defensively protecting their workplace niche and may be preoccupied with searching for new, and more stable, employment.

Many local families have children with special educational needs.

They will be invited to become more involved in the planning of their children’s care and even hold part of the allocated budget through the Children

252

and Families Bill (2014). For these families to make a successful transition to what has previously been part of their exo system and participate as ‘consumers’, they may well require the ‘support in kind’ of local authority staff – notably educational psychologists. This service has been reduced over the last financial year and now operates as a ‘traded service’ within the local authority.

The meso-level: The estate The estate in which the meeting took place was built between the 1950s and 1970s. The area is characterised by high levels of unemployment and high population turnover (up to 25 per cent per year according to local authority data), poor housing and residents who are often living isolated lives. Local workers refer to ‘low-level mental health’ problems that affect a significant proportion of the population. Thirty-three per cent of households in the area are lone parents with dependent children (2011 census).

The proportion of pupils achieving five or more A*–C grade passes, including English and Maths, at GCSE or equivalent in the 2011–2012 year was 17 per cent, compared with a national average of 59 per cent.

Public health initiatives in the area have suffered from poor recruitment and low achievement of desired outcomes (e.g. smoking cessation). Why have these initiatives largely failed? The workers find that there are multiple barriers to individuals making changes in their lifestyles. These hurdles include: social isolation, material deprivation and

personal histories of abuse. Indeed, these programmes have seldom matched the requirements of disempowered residents, concerned with the need to feel safe (both inside and outside of their homes) and

with managing day-to-day; all of which leaves them with relatively little time, money or energy to think about longer-term issues, like health and well-being.

Residents have told us that the poorly maintained physical environment affects them and their families in various ways. They describe how their children’s expectations are affected by the rubbish they see littering the streets: ‘It gets into children’s heads’. Signs of neighbourhood disorder (e.g. broken windows, burnt-out cars, graffiti) had been highlighted by residents on the estate as signs of social disorganisation, significantly affecting family well-being, as far back as 2004.

Residents describe the shame they feel when people see where they live.

With austerity we are likely to see increased levels of social displacement as families have to move to avoid the financial consequences of austerity policies. NDC’s own data shows that increased mobility has a negative effect on service delivery and on outcomes – especially educational outcomes.

Increased mobility tends to lead to decreased social cohesion – residents feel they don’t know their neighbours.

Markowitz et al. (2001) find that community cohesion reduces disorder and that disorder reduces community cohesion, a relationship that is partly mediated by fear.

This displacement and mobility, combined with the reduction in local services, will further fray the social networks on the estate that are already under strain, reducing the ability and willingness of the remaining residents to informally monitor the area for criminal and antisocial activity. As the social and physical environment deteriorates, people may feel more insecure.

They could experience chronically elevated levels of arousal causing depression and anxiety (Latkin & Curry, 2003; Taylor et al., 1997).

Among pregnant women this can adversely influence fetal development with lifelong consequences for intellectual attainment and emotional and behavioural adjustment (O’Connor, 2003) – passing on disadvantage to the next generation.

Indeed, the reduction in the number of social networks and agencies upon the

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

austerity

estate will also shrink the opportunities for young people and families to connect with schools and health and welfare agencies, and to see them as trustworthy allies rather than as agents of control (Gillies, 2005). As these groups become even more marginalised from mainstream activities, they will simply accept, or not even notice, the reduction in social mobility that will accompany these changes, but which may nevertheless have a significant adverse long-term effect upon their life course.

The micro-level: Households and families The ‘bedroom tax’ means that people with one spare bedroom will lose 14 per cent of their housing benefit, while those with two spare bedrooms will lose 25 per cent.

For our Birmingham estate, according to the local authority’s figures, there were 51 households in the local ward who would be affected by these changes, 20 of whom are included in the Troubled Families intervention.

Troubled Families, where children are not in school, parents are not in work and there is youth crime and/or antisocial behaviour, are then affected by another decline in their resources. Their attention will become focused on the more immediate challenges of day-to-day living and conserving the resources they still retain (Hobfoll, 1989): eking out their shrunken household budgets and struggling to find ways to pay their bills, keeping their children occupied and entertained (when there is no money to go on holiday or to afford trips to the cinema, for instance), dealing with welfare bureaucracies and officials, and negotiating the exchange of vital support and favours with family, friends and neighbours.

This will leave fewer resources to dedicate to the requirements to get their children to fully benefit from (or regularly attend) school.

There will be corresponding adjustments in the distribution of resources within the family microsystem. Children are more likely to have to fend for themselves, as well as to provide care and support to other family members.

In our meeting we heard how 60 per cent of our local ‘underoccupants’ are in highrise blocks. The local community development team had handed out 20 discretionary payment application forms to single men who had been using their spare bedroom for contact with their children. If their income is reduced, or they are forced to move to a smaller property, they and their children are likely to have reduced contact.

The psychological impact of this measure is worsened by there being no smaller properties available for those affected to move into. As well as losing their homes these residents will be further disempowered by a sense of lack of control over their predicament. Their option is often to move into private rented accommodation with different, less secure, terms of tenancy: usually at greater expense to the taxpayer.

Any positives?

In response to editorial queries, I sent a draft of this article to more than 100 individuals or organisations to see whether they believed there had been any positive consequences of austerity.

One city council neighbourhood manager who responded said: Very broadly speaking, for all the negatives from the changes to services and budget reductions, it is probably worth considering that there are one or two unintended, but potentially positive consequences from the service de-construction taking place. I am starting to see a lot more innovation and new partnerships developing, as well as old, antiquated and irrelevant practices and modes of delivery being challenged and changed. Long-term this can only be positive, though there are short-term and medium-term effects.

seen no benefits from austerity. One from a local public spaces charity described how the winding-up of a local youth charity had ended their collaboration.

They believed that this will now mean that they can no longer provide a natural play area for local children and that children’s well-being in the area will suffer.

Conclusions Bronfenbrenner’s nested-systems model provides a useful framework for tracking the effects of austerity on a specific community. It helps us describe how this set of policies will, in many cases, disrupt the multiple contexts within which people develop. As residents internalise the experience of marginalisation, the consequences for their academic achievement, mental health, physical health and indeed life expectancy (to take just some of the more obvious indicators) are likely to be serious. Austerity will increase inequality within our society as a whole, to the detriment of the health and well-being of us all but especially the poorest, and the most vulnerable.

As psychologists, we are in a position to understand how the effects of austerity will become embedded in the life experiences of children and families with inevitable consequences for their wellbeing. While we may see therapeutic interventions as the means to addressing some of the psychological outcomes of these issues, this approach can never be an adequate response (Albee, 1988: Moloney, 2013). It also means that we risk compounding disadvantage by labelling, pathologising, and thereby further marginalising, many who are having to manage in a situation created by social injustice.

The question remains of how psychologists will respond to these challenges. Will we look outside psychology for frameworks to use to describe and analyse contexts, e.g. urban studies, criminology, or create our own frameworks using existing psychological methodologies in different ways? Will we continue to focus on a strategy of treating an ‘epidemic’ one case at a time, or will we argue for change at a higher level?

Carl Harris is Consultant Clinical Psychologist at Birmingham Children’s Hospital carl.harris@bch.nhs.uk

One response from a GP said that he had

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

253

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy T Training raining h FAP FA AP and RFT Extended with Including assessment of your learning through regular supervision

1. ACT Experiential Introduction with Martin Wilks & Henry Whitfield 26-27 April + 10-1 10-11 1 May 2014 2. ACT Intermediate level skills training with David Gillanders & Henry Whitfield 7-8 June + 5-6 July 2014 3. Supervision to start after Intermediate level of ACT is completed with Joe Oliver - Fortnightly for a year 4. Supercharging CBT/ACT with FAP FAP 29-30th November 2014 with with Jonathan W. W. Kanter MBCT Experiential Intro with Martin Wilks Wilks 13-14 Sep+11-12 Sep+11-12 Oct Mindfulness Training Trraining Ltd. To T o book call 0800 849 6723 w.pr .presentmind.org g or visit www www.presentmind.org

RODNEY STREET LIVERPOOL Occasional and Sessional Rooms Monday Friday 9am to 9pm Saturday and Sunday 9am to 5.30pm

When every day is a bad day: A phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of burnout in practising counselling psychologists.

Would you consider taking part in my doctoral research project?* I am looking for qualified counselling psychologists who have experienced burnout in the early stages of their career.

Participation involves an hour long interview exploring your experience of burnout.

For further information, contact me, Isabelle Dolis, on u1124609@uel.ac.uk or call 07779558391.

FLEXIBLE, COST EFFECTIVE CONSULTING ROOM SOLUTIONS PERSONALISED TELEPHONE ANSWERING HIGH SPEED WIRELESS INTERNET

TELEPHONE: 0151 706 7902 Email: info@eightyeightrodneystreet.co.uk www.eightyeightrodneystreet.co.uk/bps

*UEL ethical clearance granted. Participant confidentiality and data anonymity ensured.

Postgraduate Psychology at UCLan At UCLan, you will receive an excellent BPS-accredited academic study based in a first-class research environment.

You will be taught by and work with distinguished practitioners and leading researchers in the field.

Among the 40 state-of-the-art laboratories, research facilities include the Health Psychology Suite, the Cognitive Psychology Complex, the Brain Imaging Lab, Sport Psychology Labs and the Child Observation Suite. Completing one of our accredited postgraduate Psychology programmes will provide you with stage 1 of the training to become a Chartered Psychologist.

01772 892400 www.uclan.ac.uk/psychology

Innovative thinking for the real world

254

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

'RFWRUDWH LQ &RXQVHOOLQJ 3V\FKRORJ\ DQG 3V\FKRWKHUDS\ E\ 3URIHVVLRQDO 6WXGLHV '&3V\FK

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

)RU IXUWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ SOHDVH FRQWDFW &DWK\ 6LPHRQ ,QWHJUDWLYH 'HSDUWPHQW $FDGHPLF &R RUGLQDWRU RQ RU DW FDWK\ VLPHRQ#PHWDQRLD DF XN 0HWDQRLD ,QVWLWXWH 1RUWK &RPPRQ 5RDG (DOLQJ /RQGRQ : 4% ZZZ PHWDQRLD DF XN

5HJLVWHUHG &KDULW\

Apply Now for April and September

EXPECT TO ACHIEVE

DCPsych in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy by Professional Studies Joint course with Middlesex University

Professional Certificate in Existential Supervision & Group Leadership

MSc Clinical Applications of Psychology

Online MSc in Psychotherapy Studies

Newman University’s highly popular MSc course develops your expertise and knowledge in the key aspects of psychology relevant to clinical practice and is designed for those intending to apply for Doctoral training programmes in clinical psychology.

Validated by Middlesex University To apply please contact: Tel: 0845 557 7752/0207 6240 471 Email: admissions@nspc.org.uk

New School of Psychotherapy & Counselling 254-256 Belsize Road London NW6 4BT

www.nspc.org.uk

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Delivered part-time and online, with occasional weekend workshops, this course will also improve your understanding of professional issues, ethics and diversity, considering the current and developing structure of clinical psychology in the UK. For more information please visit: www.newman.ac.uk/clinical Dr Stuart Ross T: +44 (0) 121 476 1181 ext. 2450 E: info.psychology@newman.ac.uk

255

NEW VOICES

Personality – at the heart of health Páraic Ó Súilleabháin on cardiovascular adaptation and health in the latest in our series for budding writers. See www.bps.org.uk/newvoices for more information.

norms. It also ignited my interest in how ake up, Páraic, wake up, it’s people interacted with and perceived their time for mass.’ My eyes slowly surroundings. I remember finding it opened. It was eight o’clock fascinating that various people would on a bright rural Connemara Sunday report a dramatic improvement in their morning in 1991; I was seven. ‘Mom, health following their trip. An opposite I learned in school that God has our lives outcome would certainly have been more planned out, is this true do you think?’.

My mother replied, ‘Of course, son, he has likely, given the huge numbers attending.

Following a number of years of our entire lives planned out.’ With the employment and a growing frustration at feeling that I had all my ducks in a row not being able to satisfy my fascination I replied, ‘Well then he knows already, with human thought and behaviour, I’m not going to mass today.’

I decided to return to education to study Needless to say, I found myself at mass psychology. During my undergraduate in great haste. As a Catholic child in rural study, I began to develop a keen interest in Ireland, questioning societal norms wasn’t the interactions between biological, health something that was encouraged. In and personality psychologies. As part of my particular, religious interactions were frequently subconsciously viewed as a form undergraduate study, I was required to complete a final-year piece of experimental of holy X-Factor – ‘Jesus Idol’ perhaps – research, examining the impact of where the most outrageous genuflecting personality and stress on was the social currency cardiovascular reactivity. of the day.

I found it both riveting When the yearly “personality traits are and consuming. pilgrimage was being Over a number of organised, I remember relatively accurate decades the reactivity wondering why so predictors of both positive hypothesis has played many critically ill and negative health a central role regarding people were travelling outcomes” the link between health to Lourdes, when they and stress. The reactivity had a perfectly good hypothesis states that hospital nearby. I was cardiovascular reactivity to stressors, if informed that many individuals had been exaggerated or prolonged, can promote miraculously cured of their life-threatening the development of cardiovascular disease illnesses while on religious pilgrimage (Obrist, 1981; Phillips & Hughes, 2011). there. To my disappointment, evidence of This model is thought of as an alla growing limb was not forthcoming, but this was the earliest stage of my fascination encompassing mechanism within cardiovascular stress research, with a regarding the questioning of apparent

references

‘W

256

Denollet, J. & Brutsaert, D.L. (1998).

Personality, disease severity, and the risk of long-term cardiac events in patients with a decreased ejection fraction after myocardial infarction.

Circulation, 97, 167–173.

Denollet, J., Vaes, J. & Brutsaert, D.L. (2000). Inadequate response to treatment in coronary heart disease: Adverse effects of type D personality and younger age on 5-year prognosis

and quality of life. Circulation, 102, 630–635.

Ferguson, E. (2013). Personality is of central concern to understand health: Towards a theoretical model for health psychology. Health Psychology Review, 7, 32–70.

Ferguson, E. & Bibby, P.A. (2012).

Openness to experience and allcause mortality: A meta-analysis and r equivalent from risk ratios and odds

considerable body of evidence to support its relationship to health associations (Phillips & Hughes, 2011): a norm, if you like, to be questioned.

While the aforementioned reactivity hypothesis dominates the literature, research suggests that cardiovascular stress responses are susceptible to adaptation, or change over time (Hughes et al., 2011).

Cardiovascular reactivity alone is not representative of an individual’s daily responses to stress. For example, research conducted by Frankish and Linden (1991) suggests that an individual’s cardiovascular responses to stressors are relatively stable across varying contexts. Similarly to the reactivity hypothesis, research suggests that adaptation is also a biopsychosocial phenomenon (Hughes et al., 2011). Therefore, it is reliant on cognitive appraisals, coping mechanisms and autonomic response systems (Lovallo, 2005). As highlighted

by Hughes et al. (2011), styles of appraisal and coping have a tendency to be somewhat stable within individuals, but also differ significantly between them (Hewitt & Flett, 1996).

All this suggests that personality is of central concern to understanding health within this context. Research demonstrates that personality traits are relatively accurate predictors of both positive and negative health outcomes (Ferguson, 2013). One such piece of research found that neuroticism played a significant role in variances observed in cardiovascular adaptation measures to repeated stress (Hughes et al., 2011).

Findings reported within this study add to previous research suggesting healthful correlates of short-term stress, and the relevance of adaptation to prolonged stress. Therefore, failure to habituate – for cardiovascular responses to decrease in the face of repeated stress – has been considered a reflection of an inability to adapt, a marker for negative health associations (McEwen, 1998; Schmaus et al., 2008; Turner et al., 2005). It is intriguing to consider the

ratios. British Journal of Health Psychology, 17, 85–102.

Frankish, J. & Linden, W. (1991). Is response adaptation a threat to the high-low reactor distinction among female college students? Health Psychology, 10, 224–227.

Hewitt, P.L. & Flett, G.L. (1996).

Personality traits and coping process.

In M. Zeidner & N.S. Endler (Eds.) Handbook of coping: Theory, research,

applications (pp.410–433). New York: Wiley.

Hughes, B.M., Howard, S., James, J.E. & Higgins, N.M. (2011). Individual differences in adaptation of cardiovascular responses to stress.

Biological Psychology, 86, 129–136.

Jonassaint, C.R., Boyle, S.H., Williams, R.B. et al. (2007). Facets of openness predict mortality in patients with cardiac disease. Psychosomatic

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

new voices

infections, to healthcare utilisation and doctor–patient interaction. Some personality traits are suggested as possibly being protective with respect to mortality, while others reported as potentially possessing a similar negative clinical outcome to poor exercise tolerance, smoking and older age (Denollet & Brutsaert, 1998; Denollet et al., 2000). This current area of research is one which possesses a plethora of substantial avenues. My own doctoral study is centred on cardiovascular adaptation, and in particular the impact of personality variables on an individual’s evaluation of recurring stress and execution of psychophysiological responses. I will also be developing further experimental methodologies related to eliciting stress responses within the laboratory.

In my study I will be going beyond the more popular personality dimensions such as neuroticism.

Whereas its impact is fairly well established, openness to experience appears to not be examined as strenuously. A limited number of publications have investigated this dimension with respect to stress reactivity, with fewer examining stress adaptation. Some research has indicated the potential significant impact of openness to experience on health; for example, facets of openness as being associated with patient longevity, independently of other risk factors (Jonassaint et al., 2007). This research found that those who scored higher on the openness scale displayed a 15 per cent decrease in cardiac risk of death. Recent research, a metaanalysis conducted by Ferguson and Bibby (2012) found that openness to experience was a protective factor with respect to all-cause mortality. This research provides a valuable insight into the potential impact of this As a Catholic child in rural Ireland, I remember personality dimension.

A further investigation on patterns wondering why so many critically ill people were travelling to Lourdes, when they had a of adaptation to recurring stress would perfectly good hospital nearby provide a valuable insight and is the potential benefits of short-term stress to immune function, with the potential of one’s personality influencing if or when an individual adapts to lengthy periods of stress.

The personality–health relationship, then, is a complex one. It impacts upon a wide spectrum of indices from coronary heart disease and susceptibility to

Medicine, 69(4), 319–322.

Lovallo, W.R. (2005). Cardiovascular reactivity: Mechanisms and pathways to cardiovascular disease.

International Journal of Psychophysiology, 58, 119–132.

McEwen, B.S. (1998). Stress, adaptation and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 840, 33–44.

Obrist, P. (1981). Cardiovascular

psychophysiology: A perspective. New York: Plenum Press.

Phillips, A.C. & Hughes, B.M. (2011).

Cardiovascular reactivity at a crossroads: Where are we now?

Biological Psychology, 86, 95–97.

Sagan, C. (1996). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark.

New York: Random House.

Schmaus, B.J., Laubmeier, K.K., Boquiren, V.M. et al. (2008). Gender

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

specific focus of my current research.

My thoughts are that the findings may be quite revealing, especially with respect to uncovering potential underlying mechanisms as to why openness to experience may be a substantial factor regarding if and when an individual adapts to stress.

Research suggests that personality is heavily influenced by genetics, with one’s environment also playing a significant role (Yamagata et al., 2006). An individual’s perception and reaction to stress is potentially open to being manipulated, through various moderating and mediating factors. Should this be accomplished within my current research, it could ultimately provide an avenue to further our understanding of our own mortality.

It is worth bearing in mind that research has found that personality is a good predictor of mortality, in some cases better than obesity, alcohol consumption, and socio-economic status (Ferguson, 2013).

Similarly to other research conducted relating to vaccinations and cancer screening attendance, my own work has the potential to significantly impact a wide range of both research and public avenues.

While I sit here attempting to write this piece, I notice a quote I have posted on my partition wall. I will certainly keep it at the forefront of my mind throughout my doctoral journey: At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. (Sagan, 1996)

and stress: Differential psychophysiological reactivity to stress re-exposure in the laboratory.

International Journal of Psychophysiology, 69, 101–106.

Segerstrom, S.C. & O’Connor, D.B. (2012).

Stress, health and illness: Four challenges for the future. Psychology and Health, 27(2), 128–140.

Turner, S.M., Beidel, D.C. & RobertsonNay, R. (2005). Offspring of anxious

Páraic Ó Súilleabháin is a PhD candidate, at the National University of Ireland, Galway p.osuilleabhain1@hotmail.com

parents: Reactivity, habituation, and anxiety-proneness. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 1263–1279.

Yamagata, S., Suzuki, A., Ando, J. et al.

(2006). Is the genetic structure of human personality universal? A cross-cultural twin study from North America, Europe, and Asia. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 987–998.

257

INTERVIEW

KiVa – against bullying Christina Salmivalli (University of Turku, Finland) talks to Jon Sutton about her new approach to an age-old issue

here are many ways to define, measure and tackle bullying. What’s T different about yours?

There are three main components to the KiVa programme. What we call ‘universal actions’, such as student lessons about peer relations, aiming to influence the bystanders who often provide social rewards for the bullies who are seeking status and power. In a group, you often do things that you privately think are wrong, so in the lessons before we even go to bullying we talk about group pressure and how it influences you. It’s about making salient our private actions, and making people see that we have the power to stop it.

Then there’s an online learning environment and games related to the topics of the student lessons, so when you have gone through three lessons in the classroom you can play level one of the game. In the game you’re also asked to reflect and report your own behaviour.

Finally we have ‘indicated actions’, which means when there is a case of bullying there is a KiVa team who have clear guidelines on how to address bullying problems.

many interventions that have said ‘we don’t even need to talk about bullying, let’s just improve the school climate’, but actually there is no evidence that such changes would be enough to reduce bullying. But there is evidence of the contrary effect, that if we reduce bullying then the atmosphere gets nicer. So to tackle bullying we need to talk about bullying, but not just in a negative way… everyone has the right to a nice, safe school environment, we are all responsible for that together.

And it works? www.kivaprogram.net One PhD student of mine Contact: kiva@kivaprogram.net calculated that during the first year of People have said that anti-bullying implementation of the programme we interventions need to stem from the were able to save about 12,000 victimised school themselves, to be effective. students and about 8000 bullies.

You haven’t necessarily found that to be the case?

Impressive! KiVa actually means ‘nice’ in Finnish, as well as being an acronym I don’t think so. The KiVa programme is more systematic and structured than for ‘against bullying’ in Finnish! So as many others. It’s not only that we provide much as it’s an anti-bullying policy it’s materials for schools and say ‘you can use a ‘pro-nice’ policy? them if you have some problems’, it’s Yes, although I would say there have been

258

really supposed to become an ongoing part of the normal school life. In Finland at first we thought teachers don’t like it if you tell them that in September you should do this and in October this, and so on, but actually this was well received.

I think it’s a reality that schools are already struggling with little resources, and I know that for us it took a lot of time and effort to develop the programme, and years of research. So just as someone has developed materials to teach mathematics or some other curriculum subject, I think it makes sense that this happens somewhere else, and also that the programmes and practices don’t have to be different from school to school – there can be a national strategy.

By having that economy of scale of its being a national programme, does it become cheaper to implement?

Because when I hear you talking about it, I think ‘that sounds expensive, that sounds difficult to keep going’!

Actually per student it’s not expensive at all. In Finland we have certain systems how we are trying to support schools in implementing the programme, like newsletters that we send them four times a year, KiVa conference days where staff from the schools gather annually… that’s a very nice event and certainly something that motivates them by seeing that there are other people that are enthusiastic about this.

And it’s nice for you to see the impact, so you get that continued involvement.

You’re ensuring that the anti-bullying policy isn’t just a yellowing piece of paper stuck to a classroom wall.

That’s the big challenge for us now in Finland. The government supported the schools so that every school that started implementing the programme during the first three years that it was rolled out, they got all the materials for free and all the pre-implementation training for free, but now some of those schools are not implementing it. So we are all the time trying to find ways to support them and motivate them, and tell them about the findings.

There’s still so much we don’t know about effectiveness, for example whether it works better with younger or older children, whether it stops people taking up bullying or becoming a victim or tackles existing bullying.

It seems that KiVa, at least during the first year when we started it and did the randomised control trial, we had much stronger effects in primary school. The same was true during the broad roll-out,

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

interview

but now it’s starting to change. But I think that often when there are cases of bullying in the secondary school they can be really strongly embedded in the social system, something that has lasted a long time. But I guess there are also reasons related to the way secondary schools are organised and how teachers perceive their role – they are subject specialists so they might find it more difficult to talk about these things with the kids.

cannot send it anonymously, each child has their own personal ID.

Bullying research in psychology has been around for about 30 years now, do you think it has delivered? When I left the area, what was frustrating me was that at every conference I went to people were still talking about definitions and extent, rather than actually doing much about it.

And they still are, that’s true. It is sometimes frustrating, but I think that When I was researching in the area now I see very nice possibilities in good for my own PhD (which was very much evaluation studies, in longitudinal studies inspired by your approach), people where you are actually implementing always used to say ‘you’re never going programmes in some schools and not in to stamp out bullying’. Perhaps in others… we must those older children it’s going be going in that to be very hard, but if you keep direction now, it getting to successive “everyone has the right can’t be any more generations of younger to a nice, safe school that we just make children it might never develop environment” an intervention to that extent. study and look at Yes, I think it would be a bit pre-test post-test. I think unrealistic to think we could stop that will help us to understand much bullying completely with any kind of more, going back to the mechanisms, prevention programme. It’s just part of how the effects unfold and in what human nature, we can never stop timeframe. But so far people haven’t really aggression. But I think we can reduce it had such data – it’s a big effort to collect a lot, and hopefully even if there are cases and it’s also very expensive, so we were of bullying that emerge, hopefully they lucky in Finland that we had support will not last that long. If we have better from the government. ways to intervene, or more responsible peers who are witnessing bullying, they Rolling it out to other countries is are going to do something sooner. These interesting. Presumably you’d like to are all the things we can influence. see loads of countries take up your approach, to avoid the danger of lots Technology has had a pretty bad press of different intervention studies in in terms of facilitating bullying, but do different countries, when we’d get you think in some ways it could be one more and better data with a big push of the keys to tackling it? of one approach?

I think so. I think that all this discussion Well, of course, part of me would like to about cyberbullying… of course it can be say everyone should start using the KiVa horrible, but I think it’s much more programme, but it’s not realistic. The horrible what’s going on in the schoolyard main thing is that before people start big everyday. Cyberbullying is now a very hot dissemination I would like them to collect topic, but if we discuss it too much even very good and deep data, to understand the educators might start to think that how the programmes work. That’s helpful bullying is now in cyberspace, it doesn’t for everyone then in developing their happen in school. It can make it easier to approaches. close your eyes to the bullying that is happening in front of you.

So it’s about that evidence base, Technology is motivating and fun which has been surprisingly lacking for children, so why not use it in the over a long period. prevention work? And also in reporting.

Exactly. And even just the designs in When we started out with KiVa, we saw bullying intervention studies have been that there were many children who were so varied. If you read them and you look repeatedly bullied, even in KiVa schools, at the findings and the effects and you and they never ended up with the KiVa look at the methods and the design, you team – they were still suffering in silence. must admit that we can’t really say So we were thinking of how we could whether the effects were caused by the make reporting easier, and that’s when we intervention or not. added this component, that you can send a message to a mailbox to report if you And maybe often the interventions are bullied or if you see somebody else is have stemmed from a personal suffering. It has been used a lot. You

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

approach to bullying rather than the evidence base. In terms of that personal approach, I always used to get asked ‘which were you then, a bully or a victim?’ Do you get that?

Well, many people are assuming that was my problem. That doesn’t apply, no. Of course now that I’ve been doing this work I’ve thought more back to the school days and I’ve remembered some cases. But I also remember we were in secondary school and there was this girl who was bullied mainly by other girls, a very prototypical victim, the only child of older parents, very withdrawn and shy…

I remember we were a group of girls and we went to a teacher who had been our teacher in primary school, we were telling her that this girl was treated badly. But even though we did that, with the intention to help that girl, I still think that when we were back in our secondary school class we were also part of the problem.

So it’s the social context, and it’s so ambivalent.

Exactly. In a way you feel bad and you would like to do something for the person, but… … you don’t want to be bottom of the pile. So that’s where the group processes and bystanders come in.

Do Finnish schools differ from those in the UK when it comes to the ethos and climate around bullying?

I have no idea! There are always these stereotypes that in the UK there are these old boarding school systems and still something stemming from that…

Not so much in my experience, but then I suppose like most researchers in the field I had quite a biased view, based on the more enlightened schools that let me in! There were plenty that just said flat out ‘we don’t have any bullying here’.

Yes. Now we have this trial in Wales, done in collaboration between PhD Nick Axford from the Social Research Unit in Dartington, and Professor Judy Hutchings from the Centre for Evidence-Based Early Intervention in the University of Bangor, Wales. With funding from the big innovation grant they started a randomised controlled trial in the fall of 2013. It will be so exciting to see the results from this trial, as well as from others that are ongoing in the US (Delaware), Estonia, Italy, and the Netherlands. There is even a small pilot going on in Japan school! In the near future we can talk about the effects of KiVa across countries and cultures.

259

Book Award To recognise excellent published work in psychology, nominations are sought for the Society Book Award.

Nominations can be made in the following categories G Academic monograph G Practitioner text G Pre-tertiary text G Popular science Nominated books must have been published after 1 January 2011. Five copies of the book should be sent with the nomination. For a copy of the full criteria please contact Carl Bourton at the Society’s office carl.bourton@bps.org.uk. The closing date for nominations is 19 May 2014.

TEN HARLEY STREET OCCASIONAL AND SESSIONAL CONSULTING ROOMS ______________ Monday to Friday 9am to 9pm Saturday and Sunday 9am to 5.30pm FLEXIBLE, COST EFFECTIVE CONSULTING ROOM SOLUTIONS SERVICED SUITES AVALABLE FULLY AIR CONDITIONED HIGH SPEED WIRELESS INTERNET PERSONALISED TELEPHONE ANSWERING FULL SECRETARIAL SUPPORT VOICEMAIL

______________ TELEPHONE: 020 7467 8301 EMAIL: info@tenharleystreet.co.uk www.tenharleystreet.co.uk 10 Harley Street, London W1G 9PF

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE BOARD

Lifetime Achievement Award The Professional Practice Board invites nominations for this annual award to recognise and celebrate distinguished lifetime achievement within professional psychology Eligibility – Current or retired practitioners in any area of professional applied psychology. It is expected that nominees will have enjoyed outstanding personal success in their careers and also have reinvested in psychology through encouraging and developing others.

Nominations – should include: G G G G

A 1000-word narrative highlighting the candidate’s achievements and grounds for proposing the candidate A full CV The names and contact details of three referees (including at least one current/former work colleague of the candidate) Any other relevant supporting documents

Award – Life membership of the Society and a commemorative certificate.

Nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Professional Practice Board at the Society’s office to arrive no later than 1 September 2014.

Further details are available from Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office (e-mail: carl.bourton@bps.org.uk).

260

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Study with one of the UK’s leading therapeutic training institutions Regent’s School of Psychotherapy & Psychology will develop your professional skills, helping you to think independently, build theoretical knowledge, and ethically provide psychotherapy and counselling in a variety of settings. › › › › › › ›

Certificate in Counselling & Psychotherapy MA Psychotherapy & Counselling Advanced Diploma Existential Psychotherapy Advanced Diploma Integrative Psychotherapy MPhil/PhD DPsych in Existential Phenomenological Counselling Psychology* Certificate in Clinical Supervision

Contact us to arrange a personal consultation T 020 7487 7505

E exrel@regents.ac.uk

W regents.ac.uk/rspp

RSPP is an organisational and accrediting member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and our programmes lead to professional membership of the UKCP. They also contribute towards individual accreditation with the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) and are designed to meet the requirements of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC). * This award is currently validated by The Open University

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

261

SOCIETY

President’s column Richard Mallows

President Dr Richard Mallows

Contact Richard Mallows via the Society’s Leicester office, or e-mail: presidentmallows@bps.org.uk

President Elect Professor Dorothy Miell Vice President Dr Peter Banister Honorary General Secretary Professor Pam Maras Honorary Treasurer Professor Ray Miller Chair, Membership Standards Board Dr Mark Forshaw Chair, Psychology Education Board Professor Catriona Morrison Chair, Research Board Professor Judi Ellis Chair, Professional Practice Board David Murphy The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester. All enquiries should be addressed to the Leicester office (see inside front cover for address).

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

Extract from The Charter

262

second consultation. Hopefully, psychologists in y March copy of The Psychologist arrived reaching their decisions will avoid confirmation this morning. I was tempted to read it bias and the variety of pitfalls they have already and guiltily put off writing my April well elaborated. Another important decision column. Is this a positive move after reading and relates to our relationship with the European enjoying Anna Abramowski’s article, ‘Is it time Federation of Psychologists’ Associations. David for “active” procrastination?’ I have eleven Lloyd George advises us months as President because not be afraid to take of a change in hand-over a big step when it is time, so there is now little indicated, since you can’t time for me to carry on the cross a chasm in two changes I inherited and have small steps. Closer to instigated. home we need to In the last two columns consider in greater depth I have considered expectations our unique relationship and dialogue, both of which with the Psychological have been a major feature of Society of Ireland. We my recent life. I now turn my have a Memorandum of attention to decision making.

Cooperation but we need Many of you, like me, will be to decide how this might faced with an overwhelming be further developed into amount of incoming a Memorandum of information. Fortunately, Understanding. the BPS has clear structures, Now, we are on our processes and procedures so own doorstep. We all the President is extremely benefit from the hard well supported. At times work done by our office I am called upon at the personnel and member presentation stage, after You can’t cross a chasm in two volunteers. We are planning others have done the small steps internal reviews of the BPS, necessary careful filtering and when the employees will be negotiation in order to make asked to provide critical information to the a prudent decision. At other times, I feel decision makers of the organisation. At the same responsible for making the best decision I can time we plan an audit of the trustees. As based upon informed reasoned judgements.

Honorary Treasurer I was involved with annual When workloads are heavy there is always the audits of the Society finances. The audit of the temptation to go for the ‘administrative’ model, trustees will be concerned with skill sets and that is, deciding on the first acceptable solution. fitness for purpose.

However, given the short time in post, if the This time last year I was wondering what President is to make a positive contribution, it I might write in my first column. I considered is imperative that the optimal solution is sought. a range of possibilities in terms of values, style A recent BBC Horizon programme purported and content. Some material is predictable such to tell us how we really make decisions [see as the column aimed at students in the autumn. p.289]. There was much wasted time in this Other content is unpredictable such as meeting documentary, but it did reveal the potential for a government minister or opening the Mind murky waters when behavioural economics is Maps exhibition at the Science Museum. I hope mixed with psychology. The recent part my writing has shed some light upon the life of privatisation of the Behavioural Insights Team, the President, and that you have found them or more commonly the ‘nudge’ unit, might ring interesting. This is my penultimate column, so alarm bells for those of us concerned with I only have one more opportunity to write in knowing the value compared with the price of this space. Any feedback or a suggestion a everything. member might wish me to include would be There are big decisions to be made by the most welcome, and could find a way into my Society not least of which is the Strategic Plan, final column. currently with the Member Networks for a

M

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

society

In love with psychology Sue Northrop and Adam Mahoney report from BPS Scotland’s Scientific Meeting and AGM If you can’t spend Valentine’s Day with the whose life view had changed for the better spoke of valuing relationships, a keen person you love then the next best thing sense of the value of life and love. must be to spend it in the company of This is not about happiness, said people who share your passion for Professor Joseph, but about psychological psychology. That is at least one logical explanation for why over 50 psychologists well-being, autonomy, mastery, personal growth, positive relationships, selffrom across Scotland spent 14 February acceptance together in a chilly and snow and having a swept Edinburgh at the Society’s purpose in life.

Scottish Branch AGM and Growth arises Scientific Meeting. from a struggle This year we were at for meaning not prestigious Surgeons’ Hall in from trauma Edinburgh, a venerable and Professor Joseph magnificent building, oozing emphasised; it is centuries of medical history. In about cognitive attendance were plenty of equally processing and eminent and keen psychologists, active, reflective and as the new Chair, Dr Sue rumination and Northrop, was proud to note active emotiona greater number of eminent focused coping. women than our surgeon Therefore being colleagues (judging from the able to measure portraits that adorned the walls) post-traumatic seem to have! growth can have The short and functional Professor Joseph important AGM recognised and thanked the implications for contributions that outgoing chair both practice and research (Joseph et al., Dr Zoë Chouliara had made to the 2012).

Scottish Branch and welcomed Dr Our second speaker was Mary Northrop in taking up this role. This was McMurran, Professor of Personality followed by the main business of the day Disorder Research, also from Nottingham – the Scientific Meeting. This year we University. were addressed by two very Professor eminent psychologists from McMurran’s two ostensibly different presentation was psychological backgrounds – on enhancing counselling and forensic treatment psychology. engagement and Stephen Joseph, Professor completion for in Psychology, Health and people with Social Care at Nottingham personality University, spoke about postdisorders. Professor traumatic growth and outlined McMurran’s the inherent resilience that research found most people bring to adverse a wide variation life events [see ‘What doesn’t in the completion kill us…’, November 2012]. In rates for different one of his research studies he services – some spoke to survivors of the 1987 services had nonHerald of Free Enterprise Professor McMurran completion rates of disaster, and three years after up to 80 per cent the event 46 per cent said that whereas others were as low as 15 per cent. their life view had since changed for the Non-completion of treatment is worse, but 43 per cent said it had changed problematic for a wide range of reasons. for the better (Joseph, 2011). His research Professor McMurran’s research has has demonstrated that positive growth demonstrated that short- and long-term was found in changes across a range of clinical outcomes for non-completers are areas including self-perception, life worse. Non-completion has also perspective and relationships. People

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

considerable financial implications; costs of up to £144k over a 10-year period postdischarge to NHS and criminal justice services (Sampson et al., 2013).

However, Professor McMurran’s presentation also highlighted factors that can enhance completion rates; for example, preparing clients for treatment and training staff to engage with clients properly. This includes clients being welcomed, collaboratively structuring their expectations and goals pre-therapy and developing a positive therapeutic alliance. Professor McMurran emphasised the importance of getting the ‘basics’ right in enhancing engagement and by helping clients see how treatment can help them achieve what they want in life (Wood & McMurran, 2013).

Professors Joseph and McMurran may seem to have come from different psychological worlds, but what came across was a focus on how we work alongside people, helping them transform their lives even when the odds are stacked against them. This is very much in tune with the policy and practice culture in Scotland where we are focusing on transforming public services to work with (or co-produce) outcomes with clients, patients, users or communities. To help people construct their own meaning and develop the ability to achieve their own goals. The role of psychology in enhancing the quality and experience of our lives shone through the day.

As the winter snow swirled round the buildings, a lot of very happy psychologists left Edinburgh with the warm glow of satisfaction of a good day spent in the company of peers across the disciplines. It was a really great day to be a psychologist!

I A copy of the presentation slides can be found at http://Scottish.bps.org.uk References Joseph, S. (2011). What doesn't kill us: A guide to overcoming adversity and moving forward. London: Piatkus.

Joseph, S., Maltby, J., Wood, A.M. et al. (2012). The Psychological Well-Being Post-Traumatic Changes Questionnaire (PWB-PTCQ): Reliability and validity.

Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. 4(4), 420–428.

Sampson, C., James, M., Huband, N. et al. (2013). Cost implications of treatment non-completion in personality disorder. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 23, 321–335.

Wood, K. & McMurran, M. (2013). A treatment goal checklist for people with personality disorder.

Personality and Mental Health, 7, 298–306.

263

society

Health and Care Professions Council – perspectives of a new council member through the Society or a separate umbrella The Heath and Care Professions Council body it was easy to lose sight of the prize (HCPC) is responsible for the statutory of statutory regulation. Inevitably there regulation of 16 health and social care were, and probably still are, a range of professions including practitioner views around how we should or should psychologists. The purpose of the HCPC not proceed with such powers. is to safeguard the health and well-being The HCPC Council is made up of six of persons using or needing the services registrant members and six lay members. of registrants (Health and Social Work Professions Order 2001). In turn the work This smaller council with an equal number of lay and registrant members is of the HCPC is overseen by the in keeping with what has been happening Professional Standards Authority (PSA) for Health and Social Care. The regulatory in regulation more widely. Because all 16 registrant groups do not enjoy function of the HCPC is in essence the ‘representation’ on the Council this means same as that of other regulatory bodies, that there is a shift in the role of such as the General Medical Council registrants from a tendency to advocacy or (GMC). representation of a particular profession to Within the HCPC, practitioner a broader consideration of public benefit psychologists are the seventh largest group of registrants accounting for around along with lay colleagues. This must surely be a healthy 20,000 of the 321,735 total sign given our number of registrants. The primary purpose. largest single group of Arguably the registrants are social workers inclusion of with around 86,000 registered. multidisciplinary HCPC processes and regulation brings standards are captured in four with it a greater key documents: Standards of range of balances and Education and Training, checks in terms of Standards of Conduct, our professional Performance and Ethics, practices.

Your Guide to Continuing It may be helpful Professional Development, to illustrate the and Registration and ethical importance Standards of Practice. This last of such balances and document, of the four, is checks within the discipline-specific, thus in the disciplines of practitioner psychological domain they Professor Graham Towl psychologists. In the would be for practitioner strategic framework for psychological psychologists. services in prisons and probation services In keeping with other professions (2003) for the first time, the need for the included on the register we reregister full range of applied psychologists every two years. The cost of registration is kept relatively low compared with other working in prisons and probation was acknowledged in an explicit official policy professions. Registration currently costs statement. There had been a traditional £80 per annum which compares reliance very largely upon forensic favourably with sector norms for psychologists in such organisations. The regulation. For example, nurses pay £120 wider recruitment of health, counselling, per annum and medics pay £440 per educational and clinical psychologists annum. The regulatory bodies are not served not only to improve services but supported by ongoing central government also was recognition of the need to see the funding and thus need to cover all costs offender as an individual with complex and activities with the use of registrant needs and not simply an ‘offender’. The fees. professional lenses of each of these In the Society we argued and practitioner psychologist disciplines are advocated the need for statutory in many ways diverse. It is this diversity regulation for many years. At the time that is such a strength, in improving our of the debate around whether or not the services. Of course, the diversity was not regulatory power should be exercised

264

only a matter of discipline but agency too. Indeed, this paralleled broader changes in healthcare provision in prisons at the beginning of the 21st century with a move from HM Prison Service staff providing such services to a range of staff from within the NHS. These benefits can be all the more powerful when we consider the full range of health and social care disciplines and agencies.

In terms of improving the quality of regulation, diversity serves to dilute particular professional (self) interests, sometimes this is simply a matter of perception but is nonetheless powerful.

The increase in the proportion of lay members on regulatory bodies again serves to provide a balance and check to the power of professions. This move to greater transparency and openness of decision making sits well as a base to ethical policy and practice.

Building upon the ethical advantages associated with diversity, we may look at the broader educational benefits. We can learn much from each other both across and within professional groups. This is perhaps especially so when we have to engage in some of the more difficult and challenging aspects of professional practice. One major challenge for health and social care professionals is to try to ensure that those most in need of our services receive them. This is a genuinely difficult policy and practice issue for a range of reasons. Thus, at a fundamental level our areas of commonality of purpose and function are pervasive. But each profession can bring different knowledge and competencies to the task of addressing some of the most challenging issues to face us in health and social care.

Some of our prospective clients or patients who are most in need can, even when identified, be some of the more challenging to engage with us in the services we offer.

We clearly still have much to learn and do, and I very much look forward to meeting with colleagues from a range of health and social care professions and sharing expertise on how we can continue to improve regulation with a firm focus upon the outcome of ensuring that the (whole) public are the beneficiaries of what we do.

Professor Graham Towl Registrant Council Member of HCPC

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

society

Scaffolding: Integrating social and cognitive perspectives on children’s learning at home A series of three seminars sponsored by the Society will explore the extent to which sociocultural theories of learning, in particular theories of instructional scaffolding, can be applied to parent–child tutoring interactions with specific reference to parents’ support for children’s homework.

The seminars will be hosted at Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Sussex between May 2014 and June 2015. Seminars are free to attend, but places will be limited so you are advised to register early.

The first seminar takes place in Canterbury on Thursday 15 May 2014 and will be led by an address from Professor David Wood.

I Further details and registration: http://scaffoldingseminars.co.uk

Society vacancies Professional Practice Board

Chair to lead review of ‘Generic Professional Practice Guidance’

STRATEGIC PLAN – HAVE YOUR SAY As you may be aware, the Board of Trustees has been developing a new strategic plan to guide the Society’s work for 2015–2020.

Following an initial consultation in 2013 with individual members, Member Networks and Society staff, we are now inviting further feedback on the draft plan.

For more information sign in to the website and visit www.bps.org.uk/strategicplan2015-2020 where you will find a summary of submissions from the first-stage consultation; the draft plan; and details about how to take part in the second-stage consultation. The submissions to this second consultation will be used to inform discussions of the final draft.

The deadline for submitting your comments is noon on Friday 16 May. If you would like to request a hard copy of these documents please e-mail: strategic.plan@bps.org.uk

See advert p.273 Contact Matthew Smith-Lilley matthew.smith-lilley@bps.org.uk Closing date 28 April 2014 Dementia Advisory Group

Chair See advert p.273 Contact Carl Bourton carkl.bourton@bps.org.uk Closing date 30 April 2014 Research Digest

Editor (full-time staff role) See advert p.283 Contact Personnel personnel@bps.org.uk Closing date 31 March 2014 The Psychologist

Journalist (full-time staff role) See advert p.283 Contact Personnel personnel@bps.org.uk

SOCIETY NOTICES Psychology in the Pub See p.231 Division of Forensic Psychology annual conference, Glasgow, 25–27 June See p.249 BPS Annual Conference, Birmingham, 7–9 May See p.i Book Award – call for nominations See p.260 Professional Practice Board Lifetime Achievement Award – call for nominations See p.260 BPS conferences and events See p.266 Learning Centre – call for 2015 workshops See p.268 Learning Centre 2014 CPD workshops See p.269 Professional Practice Board Practitioner of the Year Award – call for nominations See p.270 Professional Practice Board Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in Practice – call for nominations See p.270 A lasting contribution – remembering the Society in your will See p.274 Psychotherapy Section annual training conference, London, 8 July See p.294

Closing date 31 March 2014

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

265

Organised by BPS Conferences

2015

2014

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

CONFERENCE

DATE

VENUE

WEBSITE

Northern Ireland Branch (NIBPS)

3–5 April

La Mon County Hotel, Castlereagh, Belfast www.kc-jones.co.uk

Student Conference

7 May

ICC, Birmingham

www.bps.org.uk/ac2014

Annual Conference

7–9 May

ICC, Birmingham

www.bps.org.uk/ac2014

1st Trainee Conference

8 May

ICC, Birmingham

www.bps.org.uk/trainees

2nd Supervisors Conference

9 May

ICC, Birmingham

www.bps.org.uk/supervisors

Division of Forensic Psychology

25–27 June

Glasgow Caledonian University

www.bps.org.uk/dfp2014

Psychology of Women Section

9–11 July

Cumberland Lodge, Windsor

www.bps.org.uk/pows2014

Division of Counselling Psychology

11–12 July

etc.venues, Victoria

www.bps.org.uk/dcop2014

Developmental Section

3–5 September

Hotel Casa 400, Amsterdam

www.bps.org.uk/dev2014

Social Psychology Section

9–11 September

Canterbury Christ Church University

www.bps.org.uk/social2014

Division of Health Psychology

10–12 September

Park Inn,York

www.bps.org.uk/dhp2014

CYPF

30 Sept–1 Oct

University Arms Hotel, Cambridge

www.bps.org.uk/cyp2014

Division of Clinical Psychology

3_5 December

Radisson Blu Hotel, Glasgow

www.bps.org.uk/dcp2014

Division of Occupational Psychology

7–9 January

Hilton Glasgow

www.bps.org.uk/dop2015

International Academy for Professional Development Centre for Stress Management

Centre for Coaching

promoting the cognitive behavioural approach for over 25 years

promoting the cognitive behavioural approach

Two-day & Three-day Courses

Diplomas† Advanced Certificates*

Stress Management Occupational/Organisational Stress Management Cognitive Behavioural Therapy & Training Problem Focused Counselling, Coaching & Training

10-11 Jun; 23-24 Sept; 8-9 Dec 29-30 Apr 20-21 May; 8-9 Jul; 12-13 Aug; 7-8 Oct; 1-2 Dec 20-21 Aug; 19-20 Nov

Assertion and Communication Skills Training Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) Advanced Cognitive Behavioural Skills Trauma and PTSD

3-4 Sept 22-23 Jul (Edinburgh) 1-3 Apr; 30 Jul-1 Aug; 3-5 Nov 29-30 May

Relaxation Skills Training

14-15 Aug

Certificate Courses* Coaching (15 Credits, Level 5)† 7-11 Apr; 2-6 Jun; 4-8 Aug; 15-19 Sept; 27-31 Oct; 24-28 Nov Psychological Coaching (15 Credits, Level 6)† 23-27 Jun; 13-17 Oct Coaching Psychology (20 Credits, Level 7)† 23-27 Jun; 13-17 Oct Stress Management and Performance Coaching (Level 5, 30 Credits) (6-days)† modular Stress Management and Health Coaching (6-days)

modular

Two-day Courses

Other Courses (modular)

Stress Management Assertion and Communication Skills Training

Certificate in REBT (5-days)|Certificate in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (5-days) Certificate in Stress Management (6 days)|Advanced Certificate in CBT & REBT (10 days) Advanced Certificate in CBT & Stress Management (11-days)

Coaching (40 Credits, Level 6) Psychological Coaching/Coaching Psychology (50 Credits, Level 7)

modular

Performance Coaching Problem Focused Counselling, Coaching & Training

10-11 Jun; 23-24 Sept; 8-9 Dec 3-4 Sept 12-13 May; 15-16 Jul; 1-2 Oct 19-20 Nov

Distance Learning Courses

Coaching/ Coaching Psychology Supervision

Life Coaching: A cognitive behavioural approach Stress Management

† Courses accredited by Middlesex University * Courses recognised by the Association for Coaching

15-16 Apr; 9-10 Sept

Email: admin@managingstress.com Website: www.managingstress.com

Email: admin@centreforcoaching.com Website: www.centreforcoaching.com

Our courses are British Psychological Society Learning Centre Approved and are held at the BPS London, Borehamwood and Edinburgh or in-house. We have trained 1000s of practitioners on our recognised modular courses since the 1980s. The Founder Director of the Centres and Academy is Prof Stephen Palmer PhD. Our experienced trainers have authored books and/or articles in their particular fields. They include Chartered Psychologists: Prof Stephen Palmer, Dr Siobhain O’Riordan, Nick Edgerton & Kasia Szymanska.

156 Westcombe Hill, London SE3 7DH. Tel: 0845 680 2065. Reservations: 0845 680 2075. Part of the International Academy for Professional Development Ltd. Website: www.iafpd.com

266

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

LONDON S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Faculty of Brain Sciences Division of Psychiatry

MSc in Clinical Mental Health Sciences 2014-2015 We are very pleased to announce this new programme focusing on clinical practice in mental health. The course caters for psychology graduates and for clinicians wishing to undertake a broad-based, highly flexible higher degree with options to enhance clinical practice, management skills and research knowledge. A cluster of experts of international standing makes the Division of Psychiatry at UCL a unique place to study clinical mental health.

Students will develop an in-depth understanding of current evidence regarding mental health problems and approaches to treating them. We will offer students a very engaging and practical double clinical module which should very much enrich understanding of mental health problems, how people experience them and how they are treated. Practical research skills are also a major focus.

A wide range of options from across UCL ranging from neuroscience to global health, allows students to fit their individual programme closely to their needs and interests. This is an excellent opportunity to join one of the world’s leading universities, and our core team of international experts in clinical mental health and its clinical practise.

Programme Director Professor Sonia Johnson

Closing date 1st of June 2014

TO APPLY AND FOR FURTHER DETAILS VISIT

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychiatry/prospectivestudents/clinicalmentalhealthsciences or contact: Mrs Chris Coup, Course Administrator on 02076799039 or at c.coup@ucl.ac.uk

LONDON S GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Faculty of Brain Sciences Division of Psychiatry

MSc in Mental Health Sciences Research 2014-2015 The UCL Division of Psychiatry is very pleased to announce this new course offering a stimulating and practical training in mental health research, in one of the world’s very best universities. This programme will equip students with the research skills needed to undertake doctoral-level research.

Students will be taught by our world-leader academics, working across the spectrum of mental health, from biological to psychosocial approaches.

Students will produce an original piece of research, and will enhance their knowledge of cutting-edge research in mental health.

We offer highly participatory teaching, focusing on acquiring the practical skills required to undertake high quality research.

Students will have the opportunity to be involved in the work of internationally significant research groups.

A wide range of optional modules from across UCL provides access to other renowned departments in the fields of neuroscience and epidemiology, helping students to tailor the programme to their needs and interests. This is an excellent opportunity to join our strong and vibrant research Division, and to prepare for a career in mental health research.

Programme Director Professor Sonia Johnson

Closing date 1st of September 2014

TO APPLY AND FOR FURTHER DETAILS VISIT

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychiatry/prospectivestudents/researchmentalhealthsciences or contact: Mrs Chris Coup, Course Administrator on 02076799039 or at c.coup@ucl.ac.uk

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

267

The British Psychological Society Promoting excellence in psychology

2015 Learning and Professional Development Programme Call for workshops We are looking for people to run workshops for the 2015 Learning and Professional Development programme. Workshops proposals are sought in the following areas: Academic, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology Clinical Psychology Coaching Psychology Cognitive Psychology Community Psychology Counselling Psychology Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Psychology Developmental Psychology Educational and Child Psychology Forensic Psychology Health Psychology Mathematical, Statistical and Computing Psychology Occupational Psychology Neuropsychology Psychology of Women Psychotherapy Psychology

Qualitative Methods in Psychology Sexuality Psychology Social Psychology Sport and Exercise Psychology Transpersonal Psychology The Society’s annual Learning and Professional Development workshop programme is organised by the Learning Centre in conjunction with our member networks. If you are interested in offering workshops or training events please complete a proposal form and email it with accompanying documentation to learningcentre@bps.org.uk by 17:00 1 June 2014.

Further information on the submission process and relevant forms can be found on our website: www.bps.org.uk/cpd.

Follow us on Twitter: @BPSLearning #BPScpd

www.bps.org.uk/learningcentre

268

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

2014 CPD Workshops Professional development opportunities from your learned Society Advanced Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (DHP / DFP / QMiP)

31 March

Supervision skills training: Workshop 4 – Ongoing development – Supervision of supervision

2 April

Researching your psychology teaching practice: an action research approach (DARTP)

4 April

What's the story? Using metaphor and stories in therapy, counselling and coaching (DCP / SGCP)

9 April

Exploring terrorism and extremist behaviour (DCP / DFP)

17 April

Developing mental strength: Applying positive psychology in sport (DSEP)

25 April

Understanding childhood feeding disorders – Causes, diagnosis and interventions (DCP / DECP / Developmental)

28 April

Planning and implementing psychological treatment for eating disorders (DCoP / DHP / PoWS / Psychotherapy)

29 April

What do meditation and mindfulness have to offer to the 21st Century practitioner? (Transpersonal)

2 May

Running groups in schools-based on CBT principles (DCP / DECP)

12 May

Leadership and commissioning and current drivers in service development (DCP)

14 May

Supporting maternal health and well-being in the perinatal period (DCP)

15 May

The creative spark: Fanning the innovative flame in everyone (DOP) (Bristol)

16 May

Solution Focused Therapy with children, families and schools (DCoP)

21 May

Complex Trauma, structural dissocation and the body (DCP)

21 May

Essential knowledge of psychometric measures and nueropsychology for practitioner psychologists (DCoP)

28–29 May

Leading culture change (DOP)

5 June

Supervision skills training Workshop 2 – Enhancing supervision skills

6 June

Ethical Trading: Guidelines and issues for EP Services offering traded services (DECP)

10 June

Expert witness: Report writing (Level 2)

12 June

Sharing best practice of diagnosing and assessing adults with Neuro-Diversity in the workplace (this includes Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD and more) (DOP)

16 June

Understanding qualitative methods (DFP / QMiP)

20 June

Vocational rehabilitation: What is it and what role can health psychologists play? (DHP)

25 June

Working sucessfully in private practice

26 June

Making better use of a psychological resilience paradigm in health and well-being services (DCP / Transpersonal)

30 June

Expert witness: Presenting evidence in court (Level 3)

4 July

Using formulation in teams (DCP)

4 July

Supervision skills training Workshop 3 – Models of supervision

4 July

Effective joint working with children and young people (DCP / DECP)

10 July

For more information on these CPD events and many more visit www.bps.org.uk/findcpd.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

269

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Summer/Autumn Training Schedule Co-sponsored by Behavioral Tech LLC, Seattle, WA

DBT - Skills Essentials Workshop 10-11 July 2014 This two day workshop provides a brief, introductory overview of DBT followed by an in-depth look at the four skills used within the skills training component of DBT. It combines the active practice of DBT skills with instruction on the everyday practicalities of teaching DBT skills in different treatment settings.

Register online at www.regonline.co.uk/Skills-Ireland2014

DBT Taster Workshop 27 October 2014 What is DBT? This one day workshop aims to give participants an overview of the structure of the treatment, along with demonstrations of some of the techniques used in its implementation. This workshop has been specially developed in collaboration between British Isles DBT Training and Behavioral Tech LLC. Register online at www.regonline.co.uk/Taster-Autumn2014

DBT Problem Solving Workshop 6-7 November 2014 This workshop, developed by Drs Heard & Swales and closely linked to their new book soon to be published by Guildford Press focuses on identifying and solving the most common problems therapists encounter both in accurately conceptualising and practically conducting comprehensive and effective behavioural and solution analyses in DBT. Register online at www.regonline.co.uk/ProblemSolving-2014 British Isles DBT Training, Croesnewydd Hall, Wrexham Technology Park, WREXHAM LL13 7YP 0800 056 8328

info@dbt-training.co.uk

Practitioner of the Year Award The Professional Practice Board invites nominations for this annual award to recognise, promote and reward good practice.

Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in Practice The Professional Practice Board invites nominations

Award – Commemorative certificate.

Award – Life membership of the Society and a commemorative certificate.

Eligibility – Practitioners who are Chartered Psychologists.

It is expected that nominees will either have introduced new services or demonstrated best practice in the preceding twelve months that address the criteria

Eligibility – Current practitioners in any area of professional applied psychology who are making an unusually significant contribution to professional practice.

Nominations – should include: G A 1000-word narrative highlighting achievements and grounds for proposing the candidate G Full CV G Names and addresses of three referees (including at least one work colleague of the candidate) G Any other relevant supporting documents

G

Nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Professional Practice Board at the Society’s office to arrive no later than 1 September 2014.

Further details are available from Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office (e-mail: carl.bourton@bps.org.uk)

270

www.dbt-training.co.uk

Nominations – should include: A 1000-word narrative highlighting the candidate’s achievements and grounds for proposing the candidate G Full CV G Names and addresses of three referees (including at least one work colleague of the candidate) G Any other relevant supporting documents Nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Professional Practice Board at the Society’s office to arrive no later than 1 September 2014.

Further details are available from Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office (e-mail: carl.bourton@bps.org.uk)

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Chair of Dementia Advisory Group Chair to lead review of ‘Generic Professional Practice Guidance’ The Society’s Professional Practice Board (PPB) is seeking to appoint a Chair to lead the scheduled review of the Society’s Generic Professional Practice Guidance. The Chair will lead the review group whose membership will be drawn from across the Society’s member networks. It is anticipated that this work will take no longer than 12 months to complete.

For further details on the guidance, the position of Chair or to request a Statement of Interest form please contact Matthew Smith-Lilley, Policy Advisor (Professional Practice) via matthew.smith-lilley@bps.org.uk Statements of Interest should reach the Society’s office no later than 28 April 2014

The Society’s Research Board (RB) and Professional Practice Board (PPB) are seeking to appoint a Chair for their new Dementia Advisory Group.

Working closely with the Society’s Policy Advisor’s for Practice, Research and Legislation and reporting to both RB and PPB, the successful candidate will lead a cross-disciplinary group in advising the Society on its Dementia work.

The work of the group may include the development of Society publications, drafting responses to national consultations and working with the Policy Advisor’s to identify emerging issues in Dementia and Dementia care.

The group will initially operate for 12 months with a view to extending the life of the group by a further 12 months. The appointment of a Chair is for no more than 24 months in this first instance.

For further details on this position or to request a Statement of Interest form please contact Carl Bourton, Carl.bourton@bps.org.uk Statements of Interest should reach the Society’s office no later than 30 April 2014

4:J PU *YLH[P]L >YP[PUN MVY ;OLYHWL\[PJ 7\YWVZLZ

MSc Forensic Psychology at Winchester

0HWDQRLD ,QVWLWXWH D OHDGLQJ &RXQVHOOLQJ DQG 3V\FKRWKHUDS\ 2UJDQLVDWLRQ RIIHUV WKLV H[FLWLQJ FRXUVH • 9DOLGDWHG E\ 0LGGOHVH[ 8QLYHUVLW\ • \HDU 3* &HUWLÀFDWH DQG \HDU 3* 'LSORPD

• ZHHNHQGV SHU \HDU • 1RZ UHFUXLWLQJ IRU RXU %ULVWRO DQG /RQGRQ FDPSXVHV FRXUVH FRPPHQFLQJ 2FWREHU &UHDWLYH ZULWLQJ RIIHUV DQ LQQRYDWLYH LQWHUYHQWLRQ WR HQJDJH ZLWK D ZLGH UDQJH RI KHDOWK DQG FRPPXQLW\ QHHGV DV ZHOO DV D EURDG VSHFWUXP RI WKH SUREOHPV RI OLYLQJ SUHVHQWHG E\ WKRVH VHHNLQJ FRDFKLQJ PHQWRULQJ FRXQVHOOLQJ RU SHUVRQDO JXLGDQFH

For more information and to apply

7KLV XQLTXH SURJUDPPH SUHSDUHV SDUWLFLSDQWV WR ZRUN DW WKLV JURZLQJ HGJH 3DUWLFLSDQWV ZLOO GHYHORS DQG HQKDQFH WKHLU DELOLW\ WR ZRUN LQ WKLV ÀHOG YLD SHUVRQDO FUHDWLYH DQG UHà HFWLYH ZULWLQJ JURXSZRUN DQG UHVHDUFK DQG LQTXLU\ SURMHFWV 7XWRUHG E\ ÀYH SXEOLVKHG ZULWHUV ZLWK H[WHQVLYH H[SHULHQFH RI XVLQJ WKHUDSHXWLF ZULWLQJ LQ KHDOWK DQG FRPPXQLW\ VHWWLQJV 7KLV FRXUVH RIIHUV H[FHOOHQW VXSSRUW LQ SHUVRQDO DQG SURIHVVLRQDO JURZWK )RU PRUH LQIRUPDWLRQ JR WR

ZZZ PHWDQRLD DF XN PVFFZWS RU FRQWDFW WKH $FDGHPLF &RRUGLQDWRU 0DQG\ .HUVH\ DW 0HWDQRLD ,QVWLWXWH RQ GLUHFW

RU HPDLO PDQG\ NHUVH\#PHWDQRLD DF XN

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

273

Piaget, Rawlings, Spearman, and Myers all left something to Psychology ‌

What will you leave?

A lasting contribution The British Psychological Society is the representative body for psychology and psychologists in the UK. Formed in 1901, it now has approximately 45,000 members.

By its Royal Charter, the Society is charged with national responsibility for the development, promotion and application of pure and applied psychology for the public good, and with promoting the efficiency and usefulness of Society members by maintaining a high standard of professional education and knowledge.

With your help the Society works to: â– To encourage the development of psychology as a scientific discipline and an applied profession; â– To raise standards of training and practice in the application of psychology; â– To raise public awareness of psychology and increase the influence of psychological practice in society.

By including us in your will you can help ensure the future of your discipline in the years to come by continuing to support the Society.

For more information on how to leave a legacy please contact Russell Hobbs, Finance Director at russell.hobbs@bps.org.uk or call him on 0116 252 9540.

www ww w..theATP P..org .or

RICHMAN EMDR-TRAINING

.

274

Fully accredited EMDR trainings for Psychologists

The ATP is the professional association for UK psychology teachers & college lecturers Psychology teachers from all sectors, and all those with an interest in pre-tertia tertiary psychology, are welcome as ATP members. We offer outstanding CPD events, including our Annual Conference and one-day regional events. Members receive our magazine ATP Tooday three times a year.

Focusing on good practice in teaching and learning, we are the key source of support for psychology teachers in the newlyUK. Many members are experienced teachers, and newly qualified

their school / college, and trainee psychology teachers partic t ularly value our support.

I th f f ti l h t i l d

EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) and EMDR-Europe Association (EMDR-E) accredited trainings conducted by Alexandra (Sandi) Richman, Chartered Psychologist. Learn how to integrate this evidence-based therapy into your existing clinical skills.

Richman EMDR Training offer small interactive EMDR trainings (max 20 participants), incorporating the complete ‘standard’ EMDR training accredited and approved by EMDRIA/EMDR-Europe plus an Intermediate workshop between Part I and Part 3 training. After Part I participants are able to practice EMDR and Part 2 revises the protocol and offers supervision of case material. Part 3 training teaches EMDR with more complex cases and offers further case consultation.

EMDR 2014 Trainings are as follows: (London unless otherwise indicated) Part 1 (now 3 full days) 21-23 May (Leicester), 28-30 May, 19-21 June (Glasgow), 10-12 September, 16-18 October (Leicester), 29-31 October Intermediate (Part 2) 3 April, 1 May, 18 June (Glasgow), 17 July, 17 September, 15 October (Leicester), 12 November (Glasgow) Part 3 (now 3 full days)

The ATPS is the Scottish branch of the ATP ATP & ATPS are members of the European Feederation of

Associations

9-11 April, 7-9 May (Leicester), 30 July-1 August, 13-15 November (Glasgow) For more information contact Mary Cullinane, Training Co-ordinator.

Tel: 020 7372 3572 Email: mary@alexandrarichman.com

www.emdr-training.com

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

YOU RECEIVE A COMPLAINT FROM A CLIENT. YOU COUNT ON YOUR BROKER TO HELP. BUT CAN YOU TRUST YOUR INSURANCE POLICY TO PROTECT YOU? WHO ARE WE? Howden are professional liability specialists and our team has been arranging insurance for Professional Associations and their members for many years.

HOW CAN WE HELP YOU WITH YOUR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE? Our civil liability policy is designed to protect you in the event of a civil claim being made against you, or a complaint being made about you to your professional body or other regulator. We are here to help throughout the duration of your policy, not just when you arrange it and renew it – so give us a call.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST? FOR MEMBERS OF THE BPS WHO PRACTICE PSYCHOLOGY (INCLUDING TRAINING AND SUPERVISION):

LIMIT OF INDEMNITY

QUALIFIED £ 1.5m £ 3m

£ 5m

TRAINEES £ 1.5m £ 3m

£ 5m

29.50

35.00

57.00

3.14 6.28 Insurance Premium Tax * 1.65 LOOKING FOR A BETTER DEAL3.77ON YOUR 15.50 15.50 15.50 Administration Fee 15.50 PROFESSIONAL LIABILITY INSURANCE? £72.95 £84.06 £128.47 Total Amount Payable £46.65

1.98

3.30

15.50

15.50

£ 52.48

£ 75.80

Premium (Including Legal Helpline)

54.31

64.79

106.69

Whatever limit you choose, the public liability element of the cover is always £10,000,000 * Insurance Premium Tax (IPT) is at the current rate of 6% (There is no IPT on the Legal Helpline element of the premium) CONDITIONS You are an individual sole practitioner (or a limited company/partnership where the owner/partner consults, with a turnover of less than £100,000) practising from a UK base and appropriately qualified to practise (or on an approved training course leading to a recognised relevant qualification). You have not had previous insurance declined, not had any liability claims made against you and are not aware of any circumstances which may give rise to a claim against you. In some cases exclusions may apply, please see the full policy wording. Prices correct at time of publication.

Call us Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5.30pm to arrange cover or just for some friendly insurance advice.

Tel: 0845 371 1433* Email: enquiries@howdenpro.com www.howdenpro.com

Howden Insurance Brokers Limited, a subsidiary of Howden Broking Group Limited, part of the Hyperion Insurance Group, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority: Firm reference number 312584. Registered in England and Wales under company registration number 203500. Registered office 16 Eastcheap, London EC3M 1BD, United Kingdom.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

PICOM09.13

*Calls are charged at your local call rate.

275

CAREERS

From the trading floor to the training room Ian Florance talks to Richard Bidder, Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society

met Richard Bidder in the offices of Catalyst Consulting in the Strand, London. I first interviewed him around four years ago when he worked in John Mahoney-Phillips’ Human Capital Performance and Metrics team at UBS bank. At the time Richard was the team’s global assessment specialist, dealing with 65,000 staff members and maybe a million applicants a year. He was hugely enthusiastic about Fast Forward, an intensive piece of job analysis exploring what made a truly excellent (‘not just a good’) customer adviser.

Richard got back in touch a short while ago to tell me he’s now working for

jobs online

I

www.psychapp.co.uk is now open to all.

Advertisers can now reach beyond the prime audience of Society members that they reach in print, to include the many other suitably qualified individuals online.

Society members have the added benefit of being able to sign up for suitable e-mail and RSS alerts, and we are looking to add more

276

a specialist consultancy addressing human issues in financial markets. Follow-up studies are critical in the social sciences so I thought I’d apply the technique to our ‘Careers’ pages and see what happened in the next episode of his life. So, I ask, how did your Fast Forward project develop?

Cyprus may have been the wrong holiday destination ‘It was a fascinating experience. I travelled round the world looking at what it was that made the best financial advisers.

People skills – client care and embedding relationships – are critical. This led to a performance model which was applied globally. Of course there are cultural differences about how that model is applied in different countries – whether cold calling is acceptable, the use of business cards, details like that.’

Psychologists who work with technical experts from other disciplines often experience difficulties being taken seriously. ‘Yes, it was a struggle to get buy-in from busy and target-driven financial managers. For instance, structured interviews are an increasingly effective way of making recruitment decisions, but managers are sometimes reluctant to relinquish their “gut feelings” and use detailed, focused questioning, even in the

face of very robust evidence and arguments. Any psychologist working in a specialist area must learn how to use different sorts of language, frame arguments, know when to stand their ground. These are core general skills that training should give psychologists.’

You were obviously enjoying your work; why did you move? ‘I was made redundant. That’s part of working life nowadays. Some people get made redundant three, four or more times during their career, and it affects different people in different ways. I banked the positives of what I’d done so far and went on holiday with my family. The finance sector was contracting in the UK – hence my new freer status! – and we went to Cyprus, which was in the middle of an even worse banking crisis. Maybe not the best place to get away from it all! Anyway, the first couple of weeks were problematic, but I‘m a family man and that focuses the mind wonderfully.

‘I felt I had three options. I’d worked for four banks already so the obvious thing to do was join another one; I could have moved into another sector; or I had the chance to joining Catalyst, which meant a move into consultancy.’

Upping the speed, agility and intensity It’s almost a classic career change for an occupational psychologist to move in one direction or another between an employed position and a consultancy job.

Indeed many other types of psychologists also run employed and self-employed career strands in parallel. What does Richard see as the difference between the two sorts of working? ‘Well, Catalyst employs around 50 people, so you feel you can really make a difference.

Everything you do has the potential to affect your business in a profound way.

Having worked in banking for so long I had to let the bank go and think of myself as a consultant. This meant upping speed, agility and intensity. I was used to committees and annual budgets, of being

member-only benefits as the site develops over the coming years. Please let the Managing Editor know what features you would appreciate, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

Please help us to spread the word. Recruiters can post online from just £750, and at no extra cost when placing an ad in print.

For more information, see p.280.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

careers

the expert who proposed initiatives because they were technically good.

Now my success impacts directly on the company as a whole. I have to build much longer-term relationships with clients, to think about how one project links to another. You really have to work to understand the culture and guts of a client’s business, something you take for granted as an employee. In a sense I’ve had to move into more strategic thinking.’

What about the culture of Catalyst – is it different from what you were used to? ‘There is far more sharing of ideas within Catalyst. We’re all experts in different areas, and everybody mucks in to come up with a solution that fits a client. There’s also less hierarchy to cope with. And you notice problems more quickly – if there’s an issue in the business, whether it’s in your own area or not, you hear about it quickly and you have to be part of the response team reacting to it and solving it quickly.

Fundamentally you have to collaborate if you’re a smallish business. If you don’t, you won’t survive.’

I asked Richard what sorts of issues Catalyst is addressing. ‘I’m doing a lot of work in the technology field. I’m currently designing career paths and running training for high-performing technologists in both London and Hong

Kong. Core to their development is the need to broaden their skill-sets as well as keeping up to speed with rapid changes in technologies. Catalyst are good at diversity and inclusion. The issue of women in the finance sector, particularly the lack of women at executive director level, is one we’re particularly concerned with.’

I was interested in reading on Richard’s website CV that he is an England and Wales Cricket Board Level II coach. Many of the techniques and concepts of sports psychology and coaching increasingly influence the use of psychology in business. Has this influenced Richard’s work? ‘Yes. I’ve been a cricket player for 28 years. I became a coach and helped set up a cricket youth club in 2000. We now have three junior teams. I loved coaching cricket, though I’ve given it up now – and it gave me my light bulb moment. I got so fascinated with the human issues of coaching that it may have started me on the road to working in HR then studying psychology.

Sports experience and thinking can help with developing teams. I do think you can go too far with sports metaphors though. Some don’t apply beyond a very superficial level and, lest we forget, not everyone is interested in sport!’

When we talked before, Richard had

stressed that his earlier experience on the trading floor helped him hugely in his HR and occupational psychology roles.

‘I’m absolutely convinced of that. In my view, if you want to be an occupational psychologist you should get some experience of working at other jobs in different types of organisation. The experience complements your theory.’

Given his earlier comments about the difficulty of winning other experts over, does he present himself as a psychologist in his work? ‘I’m hugely proud of being a psychologist and that’s what it says under “Profession” in my passport.

I work with students at the University of East London. At any one time I might be working on 20 projects which meet my CPD needs and I use The Psychologist and online media to keep up to date with developments. But I’d like to do more.’

Outside the heavens have opened and people are sheltering from the monsoonstrength rain in shop and office entrances.

As I stand there waiting for a chance to run across the road it strikes me again that generalisable work skills – from communication to learning – are as important for psychologists as subject knowledge and clinical mastery. Careers and jobs never stop changing nowadays, and these skills help established and fledgling psychologists adapt.

Science Director – Financial Solutions London Competitive salary

Matchmaking Specialist London £30,000 - £35,000

Associate Professorship As (or Professorship) of Experimental Psychology

Clinical Psychologist Various locations £35-45K plus benefits

South East £43,745 - £58,739 p.a.

To check the latest jobs please go to

seek and advertise at www.psychapp.co.uk

www.psychapp.co.uk

277

careers

A wish and a fear – mental health in Sri Lanka Christopher Hunt with insights and observations from his time as a volunteer this course was largely based on philosophy and religion (DeZoysa & Ismail, 2002). If psychological interventions are to be considered as a more widely used option in Sri Lanka then perhaps awareness of the available Working as a volunteer methods could be raised.

Whilst visiting, I worked with a group of The reliance upon medication volunteers to conduct therapeutic activity seemed to extend to patients, as well sessions for patients with a variety of as practitioners. I was able to attend mental health conditions. Although we a clinical outreach trip with a local ran these sessions within a range of psychiatrist, during which we visited an centres, the wards of the National elderly home to assess the Institute of Mental mental functioning of the Health particularly residents on an individual stood out to me. I “Working in a foreign basis. Many of the residents was intrigued to see country has taught me a had been prescribed how reliant upon great deal of things” medication by previous drug therapy the doctors, and were reluctant practitioners seemed to reduce their dosage. The to be; doctors psychiatrist suggested that he was informed me that the vast majority of personally keen to reduce the reliance patients were under sedation and that this on drug therapy in favour of more was the most common method of psychological methods, such as cognitive treatment for mental health conditions in behavioural therapy. He went on to say Sri Lanka, if treatment was to be provided that making this transition from at all. Furthermore, electroconvulsive physiological to psychological therapies therapy was commonplace: doctors would be incredibly difficult due to the estimated that lack of education about psychology and approximately the stigma associated with mental health 40 procedures in Sri Lanka. took place per As volunteers, we hoped to encourage day. the use of psychological therapy both When I within and outside of the National questioned the Institute of Mental Health. In the use of occupational therapy wards, patients were psychological able to express themselves during therapies it organised painting sessions, alongside became clear sewing and bead making. Products made just how by the patients were then sold by the reliant upon hospital and proceeds went to further the physiological development of the wards. I found this treatments process to be very positive, and our aim these as volunteers was to extend these sessions institutions to wards where activities were otherwise were. limited. Even so, it seemed that the main Psychological difficulty in achieving this active methods engagement with the community was appeared to related to negative attitudes towards be mostly mental illness. neglected. I was informed that there are currently no On the stigma of mental health Paintings by patients at the National Institute of Mental Health practising Mental health stigma is problematic in the psychologists in the country and only Lankan National Institute of Mental sense that it becomes difficult to see past a few psychiatrists (approximately 60 Health. I have witnessed conditions far the label of a mental illness. As such, any psychiatrists to a population of 20 million different than in the United Kingdom negative views associated with the label people). Back in 2002 one Sri Lankan and have memories that will last me are often reflected onto the person with university offered psychology as an a lifetime. Despite the many difficult the diagnosis. Evidence for this can be accredited undergraduate degree, though circumstances that I encountered, I have traced back to Rosenhan’s (1973) will never forget the man with the flute, nor will I forget underestimating him.

In July 2013 I sat on the edge of a bed in a Sri Lankan special needs centre, equipped with an armoury of paper, crayons and jigsaws. A disabled gentleman lay next to me and, in my naivety, I asked if he would like to draw some pictures. The man proceeded to create a full sketch of an aeroplane, complete with technical labels and terminology. He went on to tell me about his past; how he used to be a pilot before an accident had removed the use of his legs. Afterwards, he pulled a flute from the nearby cabinet and played a melody that demonstrated both grace and skill.

I sat on that bed feeling bewildered and bemused. How could I have gotten things so wrong?

Working in a foreign country has taught me a great deal of things, including the value of culture, personality and self-esteem. For a month I had been volunteering in special needs centres, child development centres and the Sri

I

278

great respect for the Sri Lankan culture and felt incredibly welcome during my stay.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

careers

family harmony explains why many mentally ill patients find themselves relying on psychiatric institutions and special needs centres, with no one else to turn to.

Family attitudes seemed to be ingrained within the Sri Lankan culture, and there appears to be a hierarchical structure with male dominant family figures. For example, research has demonstrated that wives who believed that they should obey their husbands and prevent the interventions of outsiders A thought-provoking wall-hanging in the National Institute were actually less likely to of Mental Health experience intimate partner violence and have more peaceful experiments, during which mentally sane family relationships (Jayatilleke et al., patients claimed to experience symptoms 2010). It is because of these ingrained of schizophrenia in order to be admitted attitudes and reliance on family harmony into psychiatric institutions. Once that breaking the stigma of mental health admitted, the patients were refused in Sri Lanka will no doubt be difficult to discharge despite their apparent lack of achieve. symptomatology and natural behaviour Despite the obstacles in breaking within the hospital. To quote Rosenhan mental health stigma, the strong emphasis on labelling a person with schizophrenia, on family relationships in Sri Lanka is ‘the tag profoundly colours others’ something that I believe would be useful perceptions of him and his behaviour’.’ in a clinical setting. Family therapy is an The negative stigma of mental health option that I think would greatly benefit is not restricted to Sri Lanka, being the Sri Lankan community, if not for the equally prevalent in Western cultures. current negativity towards mental illness.

For example, recent studies suggest that If more family members were to become over 70 per cent of the British population directly involved with therapy procedures consider people with schizophrenia to be then patients with mental illnesses may a ‘danger to others’, and 60 per cent of demonstrate better chances of coping and Britain believe that people with recovery. Wickrama and Kaspar (2007) depression are ‘hard to talk to’ (West found that a strong attachment to parents et al., 2010). Similarly, Fernando et al. increased the resilience of Sri Lankan (2009) found that 70 per cent of their adolescents in the wake of the 2004 Sri Lankan sample believed patients tsunami, with a positive child–mother with schizophrenia, depression and relationship reducing the symptoms of drug/alcohol addiction to be depression and post-traumatic stress ‘unpredictable’, and these negative views disorder. seemed to be endorsed by doctors and During the volunteering programme, students. A large majority of the I attended educational sessions based on population seem to have misconceived the currently used psychological therapy views where mental illness is concerned, methods in Sri Lanka: meditation and and these perceptions need to be drama therapy. The former was primarily addressed on a worldwide scale. focused on the Buddhist faith that is highly prevalent in Sri Lanka, and Differences in culture and involved spiritual healing and relaxation.

The latter therapy aims to help clients to practice explore their feelings and express them Regarding family in Sri Lanka, the culture through movement and sound, based on is such that a positive family relationship the principle of catharsis. Having plays an important role in gaining respect personally experienced the nature of the from the community. If there is a conflict therapy – albeit only briefly – I could within the family, then the family begin to understand how useful drama considers themselves to be shamed. therapy would be in relaxation as well as Coupled with the stigma of mental improving speech, communication and health, this emphasis on maintaining

seek and advertise at www.psychapp.co.uk

motor skills. Furthermore, the therapy is easily adapted according to the client and the culture. The sessions I became involved with were aimed at increasing rapport with the therapist and were very philosophical and metaphysical, appealing to the largely religious community of Sri Lanka. Further insight into the practice of drama therapy can be found within Ranasinha’s (2013) book, which inspires the theory and practice of drama therapy in Sri Lanka.

A look to the future My time spent in Sri Lanka was as pleasant as it was insightful. The people, the scenery and the welcoming and immersive culture will remain with me throughout my personal and academic development. I was fortunate enough to see the treatment of mental health from an Eastern perspective, and it was clear to me that views of mental health are changing in Sri Lanka as much as they are here in the UK. Tackling the stigma of mental health is a gradual process, but many of the professionals that I had contact with seemed optimistic about the future of Sri Lankan psychology. With time, we may see a reduction in the use of drug-based therapies and an increase in psychological interventions.

I Christopher Hunt is an undergraduate student at the University of Birmingham chris_hunt94@hotmail.co.uk

References DeZoysa, P. & Ismail, C. (2002). Psychology in an Asian country: A report from Sri Lanka.

International Journal of Psychology, 37(2), 110–111.

Fernando, S.M., Deane, F.P. & McLeod, H.J. (2009). Sri Lankan doctors’ and medical undergraduates’ attitudes towards mental illness. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 45(7), 733–739.

Jayatilleke, A., Poudel, K.C., Sakisaka, K. et al.

(2010). Wives’ attitudes towards gender roles and their experiences of intimate partner violence by husbands in central province, Sri Lanka. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26, 414–432.

Ranasinha, R. (2013). Dramatherapy in Sri Lanka. Colombo: Author.

Rosenhan, D.L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250–258.

West, K., Holmes, E.A. & Hewstone, M. (2010).

Rethinking ‘mental health stigma.’

European Journal of Public Health, 20, 131–132.

Wickrama, K.A.S. & Kaspar, V. (2007). Family context of mental health risk in tsunamiexposed adolescents: Findings from a pilot study in Sri Lanka. Social Science & Medicine, 64, 713–723.

279

Advertising with

The British Psychological Society Reach 48,000 readers as part of the publication for psychologists - a large, prime, well-qualified audience. Advertising is also now available on the Society’s award-winning Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog. There are also other online options, including the ‘featured job’ at www.psychapp.co.uk.

All recruiters in the print edition of The Psychologist get their vacancy posted online at www.psychapp.co.uk at no extra cost. Members can then search by job type and geographical area, and then view full details online or via RSS feeds and e-mail alerts.

Job advertising is also available online-only at any time, from just £750 Advertising contact: Giorgio Romano Senior Sales Executive +44 20 7880 7556 giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk Please contact us for ad sizes, and then send your ad by email to aysha.miah@redactive.co.uk

Thinking about a better work/life balance?

NEW ZEALAND CALLING! Larry Beck, Director of Christchurch based Align International Recruitment Limited, will be in London 19-21 May 2014 to meet with Clinical Psychologists about living and working in beautiful New Zealand. Most vacancies suit clinical psychologists who can commit to a minimum of two years. You may stay longer if you wish.

All meetings are one-on-one and last about one hour. We can answer all of your questions regarding how to receive your NZ psychologist registration, cost of living and how the job process works. An Immigration New Zealand Officer will be available to answer any visa questions which you may have. All meetings are free of charge to you. Email larry@alignrecruitment.com today to schedule your meeting!

alignrecruitment.com Align International Recruitment Ltd. Matching people with their future

DISPLAY ADVERT DEADLINE

APPOINTMENT SECTION DEADLINE

PUBLISHING DATE

May

31 Mar

7 Apr

24 Apr

Jun

7 May

14 May

29 May

Jul

4 Jun

11 Jun

26 Jun

DISPLAY RATE

APPOINTMENT SECTION (WITH FREE ONLINE AD)

Full page

£1495

£3000

Half (horizontal/vertical)

£795

£1800

Quarter (h/v)

£495

£1200

Eighth (h/v)

£295

£650

Sixteenth page

£150

£500

Outside back cover 40% extra: Inside back cover 25% extra.

Blackheath Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre and Neurodisability Service is a modern centre with excellent facilities and an established reputation in the delivery of specialised rehabilitation to adults with acquired brain injury and neurodisability.

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST BLACKHEATH BRAIN INJURY REHABILITATION CENTRE EQUIVALENT BAND 7 – FULL-TIME £35,880 We are looking for an enthusiastic Clinical Psychologist to join our service, providing in-patient rehabilitation designed to meet the needs of clients with acquired brain injury or other forms of neurodisability.

The successful applicant will be joining a neuropsychology department that includes another clinical psychologist, a consultant clinical neuropsychologist and two assistant psychologists. They will be involved in a range of (neuro) psychological assessments and interventions as well as playing a key role within our broader multidisciplinary team.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic and developing service offering tertiary, specialist neurorehabilitation at a regional and national level. The department also has active research links with Goldsmiths (University of London).

Applications from individuals with experience working in neurorehabilitation or with related skills (such as cognitive assessment and behavioural management) are preferred.

to advertise please contact: Giorgio Romano, 020 7880 7556, giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk 280

For an informal discussion or to arrange a visit regarding this position, please contact Dr. Seb Potter (Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist) on 020 8694 5442.

All successful candidates will be required to apply for a disclosure from the Disclosure & Barring Service at an Enhanced Level.

Closing Date: 14th April 2014 Should your application be unsuccessful you will not hear from us.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

We are a regional charity offering specialist services to people with Autism and their families.

Our Clinical and Therapeutic Service is expanding to meet the needs of a growing organisation.

We are recruiting to three psychology posts based in Colchester. You will join an MDT of psychologists, SaLTs, OTs, teachers, support staff, PBS champions and communication champions.

Post 1

Clinical Psychologist (Essex, Adult Services) Salary dependent on experience, Hours negotiable in the region of 0.6wte Following successful appointment of a Consultant Psychologist for our Essex Services we are looking for a suitably experienced Clinical Psychologist with understanding of the autistic spectrum. This is a permanent, post. You will play a key role in our MDT and contribute to our work with Adult Services. There will be scope to develop your own specialism as the role develops.

Post 2

Clinical Psychologist (Essex, Children’s Services) Salary dependent on experience, Hours negotiable in the region of 0.4wte A new post with our Children’s services which will be fixed term in the first instance but with the possibility to grow into a substantive, permanent position. Based at Doucecroft School, with our MDT, the initial focus will be on assessing a small number of students, with scope to develop your own specialism as the role evolves.

We are open to the possibility of one person taking both posts to create a full time position. We are keen to appoint someone with experience in this area but are also happy to hear from final year trainees who can demonstrate the relevant knowledge and skills. We place high importance on a team focus, regular supervision and CPD. Successful candidates will be HCPC registered.

Assistant Psychologist (Essex, Adult Services) Salary £17,700, Full Time, 12 months fixed term We are also looking to appoint a new Assistant Psychologist to work with our team.

You will work closely with our qualified psychologists and other MDT members to support the work of the team. We have links with a number of doctoral courses and previous Assistants have gone on to successful careers in their chosen fields.

Closing date: Monday 28th April.

For application pack please see our website www.autism-anglia.org.uk For an informal chat please contact: Dr Amelia Eleftheriades (Head of Clinical and Therapeutic Services) on 01206 577678 or 01362 853753. Please state on your form which post(s) you are applying for and how many hours you want to work

Job Title: Senior Clinical Psychologist Employer: Enable Ireland ‘We definitely need a qualified clinical psychologist to work with children and their families,’ says Ann Ardiff of Enable Ireland.

Enable Ireland was founded in 1948 as Cerebral Palsy, Ireland and has grown hugely, particularly recently. ‘Our ethos and values are very important. We’re a not-for-profit, voluntary organisation which provides services nationally, across 14 counties. We genuinely partner with people with disabilities and their families.’

This is a full-time, permanent post ‘focused on children aged birth to six years. Assessment is one of the cores of the job, but supporting families, diagnostics, intervention and developing services in the area are all part of the role. Experience with children on the autistic spectrum is critical.’

The psychologist will work as part of a interdisciplinary team with a range of other professionals. Partnership and team orientation is important. Obviously there is peer support from other psychologists in the organisation.’

I asked Ann what she liked about working in the organisation.

‘It’s friendly and focused on really worthwhile outcomes, and it genuinely addresses the individuals we work with – the psychologist’s work will focus on the child as a whole, not on a particular disability. And they’ll balance real professionalism with genuine empathy.’

The organisation is very supportive of its employees and encourages and supports ongoing training and development.

seek and advertise at www.psychapp.co.uk

Enable Ireland is a leading voluntary organisation providing services to people with disabilities and their families. It provides services in Ireland in the North East/Dublin South area in partnership with the HSE. Applications are invited for the following permanent and full time post:

Senior Clinical Psychologist, Cavan/Monaghan This is an exciting and challenging opportunity to join a well established team providing services to young children (0 - 6 years) with a disability, autism and/or developmental delay, and to their families.

Essential criteria includes: • Qualification in clinical psychology • Working with young children with a range of disabilities including physical, intellectual, sensory disabilities and autism • Knowledge and experience of diagnostics of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Developmental Co-ordination Disorder and specific Speech and Language Disorder • Working in partnership with families.

• Working as part of a team.

Applications must be submitted on official Application Forms.

For Job Description, Person Specification, Application Form, contact: Ann Ardiff, Enable Ireland, North East Service, Tel: +353-46-9029845, Email: aardiff@enableireland.ie , Website: www.enableireland.ie Closing Date: 16th April 2014 Interview Date: by end of April A panel may be formed from this competition from which any future vacancies in the Region may be filled. Enable Ireland is an Equal Opportunities Employer.

281

School of Law and Criminology Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology (Chartered Forensic Psychologist) Salary is in the range £48,534 to £55,899 per annum inclusive of London Allowance Full time Applications are invited for a permanent post at Senior Lecturer level in the School of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway University of London. This post is part of a strategic initiative to strengthen and expand the Department’s teaching portfolio to include the development and accreditation of a new MSc in Forensic Psychology (delivered jointly with the Department of Psychology) to complement our new and existing undergraduate programmes in Criminology & Psychology, Criminology & Sociology, and Law. We invite applications from Chartered Forensic Psychologists that demonstrate a well-established teaching and research profile together with leadership in undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes.

This is a full time and permanent post, available from August 1st or as soon as possible thereafter. This post is based in Egham, Surrey where the College is situated in a beautiful, leafy campus near to Windsor Great Park and within commuting distance from London.

We offer a dynamic and supportive environment, in an internationally recognised and multidisciplinary department.

The Department has a strong research culture and good links with Criminal Justice agencies, prisons and the NHS, as well as government and charitable organisations. Academics in the Department work closely with colleagues in the Department of Psychology: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/psychology/home.aspx Successful applicants should possess an excellent teaching record, with previous experience of contributing to a BPS Accredited Masters programme in Forensic Psychology.

You must be a Chartered Forensic Psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Forensic Psychology, possess the broad range of skills needed to teach effectively and should be able to contribute to and develop the Department’s teaching portfolio at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, including the supervision of doctoral students, and to contribute to a vibrant and multidisciplinary research community. Information about our existing teaching and research in the areas of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Forensic/Criminological Psychology can be found at http://www.rhul.ac.uk/criminologyandsociology/home.aspx

Job Titles: Editor, Research Digest; Journalist, The Psychologist Employer: The British Psychological Society The Editor of the Society’s Research Digest and Journalist for The Psychologist, Dr Christian Jarrett, has moved on after more than a decade of exemplary service (see also p.229). As one era ends another begins, and we are excited to be recruiting two full-time replacements to these posts.

These are genuinely exciting opportunities for those with a passion for psychology.

Writing his farewell post (see tinyurl.com/goodbyecj), Christian recalls walking with his wife on Saturday afternoons along the canal between Slaithwaite and Marsden, in West Yorkshire.

‘We’d buy The Guardian, find a cosy cafe, and I’d flick through the jobs section with tea and a scone. Nearing the end of my PhD, I was in a quandary over what I’d do next. I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life studying eye movements, discovering more and more about less and less. But can you really earn a living out of a fascination with psychology and a love for writing, as I hoped to do?’

Indeed you can. I had come up with the idea of a new ‘e-research digest’ (as Christian says, ‘the ad put the quaint “e” in inverted commas just like that, in reference to the Digest being an e-mail newsletter’). We recruited Christian, and he now tells how his ‘dream job quickly became a passion’. Eleven years on, he has digested well over 1500 journal articles, written hundreds of news items and numerous features. Both the blog and Christian’s features have won awards, consistently received praise from diverse audiences, and reached huge audiences (last month the blog received over 300,000 page views. psychologist We’ve now got over 32,000 subscribers to the e-mail, and over 38,000 followers on Twitter @researchdigest).

There’s no doubt Christian is a tough act to follow, but the expansion of both roles to fulltime shows the Society is very keen to build on this success and to continue to expand and modernise our offerings. These roles are absolutely central to the Society’s Royal Charter objective of a ‘dissemination of psychology pure and applied’, and exciting times are ahead.

So if you love nothing more than immersing yourself in psychological research and practice, and communicating it to a large and diverse audience in an engaging and informative way, then we could be just right for each other. But you will need to be quick off the mark: the closing date for both roles is 31 March.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor the

vol 26 no 8

august 2013

The psychology of stuff and things

Informal enquiries regarding this post can be directed to Head of Department, Dr Rosie Meek on r.meek@rhul.ac.uk or tel: 01784 276482.

To view further details of this post and to apply please visit https://jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk The RHUL Recruitment Team can be contacted with queries by email at: recruitment@rhul.ac.uk or via telephone on: +44 (0)1784 41 4241.

Please quote the reference: X0314/7615 Closing date: Midnight 11th April 2014.

Interviews are expected to be held 29 - 30th April 2014.

The College is committed to equality and diversity, and encourages applications from all sections of the community.

282

Christian Jarrett on our lifelong relationship with objects

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

vol 27 no 4

letters 542 news 552 careers 596 looking back 612

social support following stroke 566 the voices others cannot hear 570 managing to make a difference 576 why are effect sizes still neglected? 580

april 2014

Editor – Research Digest (ref:ERD)

Journalist, The Psychologist (ref:JTP)

Full-time permanent. Salary in the range £25k–£33k p.a, depending on experience.

Full-time permanent. Salary in the range £25k–£33k p.a, depending on experience.

For more than a decade, we have digested the latest academic journal articles in psychology to engage and inform a large, diverse and international audience. The Research Digest now receives an average of 230,000 page views per month in blog form, has 32,000 email subscribers and 37,000 Twitter followers.

We want to build the success of this awardwinning blog and the work of the previous editor, in order to develop the Digest into a new era. The post is expanding to full-time in order to look ambitiously to the future: this is an exciting role with considerable potential.

Your key responsibilities will be to research newly published, peer-reviewed studies in psychology; write accurate, clear and engaging ‘digests’ of these journal articles; commission and edit freelance contributions; and present the final material via various online and social media channels.

The ideal candidate will combine a background in psychology with a passion for communicating specialist information in an easily accessible way.

You will join our Psychologist Team, reporting to the Managing Editor, Dr Jon Sutton. You will work out of the Society’s offices, although there may be the potential for remote working.

We are recruiting a journalist for our monthly publication, The Psychologist.

The Psychologist has a readership of 48,000 in print and more online, along with 24,000 followers on Twitter. It is regularly cited in the national press, and its journalist-written news and features are cornerstones of its topicality and distinctiveness.

We want to build on this success and look ambitiously to the future, in order to take The Psychologist into a new era. This is an exciting new role which the right candidate will have considerable potential to shape.

Your key responsibilities will be to propose, source, research and write quality, timely copy for The Psychologist ‘News’, ‘Society’ and feature articles; and present the final material in print and via various online and social media channels.

The ideal candidate will combine a background in psychology with a qualification or experience in journalism.

You will join our Psychologist Team, reporting to the Managing Editor, Dr Jon Sutton. You will work out of the Society’s offices, although there may be the potential for some remote working.

Some out of hours work and travel (with occasional overnight stays) may be required.

For further details see www.bps.org.uk/jobs/society-office-staff-vacancies/society-office-staff-vacancies To apply for either of the vacancies above, please send a CV and covering letter linking your skills to our specific needs and quoting the job reference you are applying for, and how you found out about the vacancy, to: Personnel, The British Psychological Society, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester, LE1 7DR. Email: personnel@bps.org.uk The closing date for applications is noon on 31 March 2014.

Interviews will be held on 1 or 2 May 2014 at our Leicester office.

seek and advertise at www.psychapp.co.uk

283

HM Prison & Young Offenders Institute Grampian Mental Health & Substance Misuse

Principal Applied Psychologist Band 8b £45,707 - £56,504 per annum Full-time 37.5 hours per week NHS Grampian is the first Health Service in Scotland to offer psychological input in a prison to address mental health and substance misuse problems. It therefore wishes to appoint a Principal Applied Psychologist with experience in mental health to provide highly specialist psychological services to HMP Grampian developing and supporting the delivery of a range of psychological services to offenders with mental health and/or substance misuse problems.

The post will be based in the prison and the postholder will be a member of an enthusiastic multi-disciplinary team providing specialist mental health and substance misuse services for the adult male and female prison population. The role will be supported by a part time Consultant Applied Psychologist with specialist clinical and forensic competencies although the post will require an ability to work quite autonomously within the prisonbased mental health team.

This role provides an exciting opportunity for a psychologist to deliver evidence-based highly specialist interventions to a population with complex needs and challenges. It also provides ample opportunity for the individual to work at a strategic level to develop interventions and training packages and to support and supervise non psychologists in the delivery of low intensity interventions.

For further information, please contact Dr George Deans, Consultant Clinical Psychologist/NHS Grampian Professional Advisor for Applied Psychology: george.deans@nhs.net. Tel 01224 557219 / 557390.

To apply please visit www.nhsgrampian.org/jobs and search for Ref No RP7601. Closing date 16 April 2014.

For all other vacancies visit www.nhsgrampian.org/jobs

seek and advertise at www.psychapp.co.uk

In a recent survey of job advertisers, 80% said they had received a good response and 70% said they had filled a vacancy as a result of their ad. to advertise please contact: Giorgio Romano, 020 7880 7556, giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk

285

REVIEWS

At peace with thoughts In Britain, John Gray has become a well-known public intellectual, in no small part due to the massive success of his 2002 book Straw Dogs. This book saw him emphasise the similarities between humans and animals (he refers to ‘human animals’ rather than merely ‘humans’), a theme he takes up again in The Silence of Animals. For psychological purposes, arguably the most relevant area of debate is that pertaining to the book’s title, of exploring the kinds of silence pursued by human and non-human animals.

Whereas non-human animals run away from noise in their environment that they perceive as dangerous, human animals seek silence for ‘an escape from inner commotion’ (p.162). However, Gray thinks we human animals are not very good at doing this, for even the monastic flight into the desert or monastery will lead one into ‘dialogue’ with God, one’s past, or projections of the future.

Unlike other animals, humans construct narratives about their lives. Seeking meaning from these narratives, and the ‘myths’ that underpin them (such as of progress or redemption), humans cannot help but use language in this way. Gradually, human animals have come to realise the error of retreating into silence, preferring instead to keep oneself so unsustainably busy that there is no time for reflection. Instead of inward retreat or The Silence of remaining busy, Gray thinks one should turn Animals: On outwards to nature, to hear ‘something beyond Progress and words’ (p.165). To this end, Gray cites the Other Modern example of J.A. Baker (1926–1987), author Myths of The Peregrine. Baker spent a considerable John Gray amount of time following peregrine falcons, and whilst he neither aimed to, nor achieved, a release from language, he was nonetheless able to still his mind temporarily for the time he was out with the falcons.

To anyone familiar with the third wave of behavioural therapies, Gray’s line of argument may be familiar. His assertion that ‘to overcome language by means of language is obviously impossible’ (p.165) is reminiscent of the shift from the second generation of behavioural psychotherapies to the third generation, or ‘third wave’, as it has been termed by Steven Hayes. Rather than aiming for direct cognitive restructuring, some third-wave therapies have introduced silence and contemplation, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). Gray would question whether MBSR would lead to inner chatter and conflict, rather than to peace. Other third-wave therapies, such as acceptance and commitment therapy, seem not to try to want to replace language through cognitive restructuring, but are arguably replacing one myth (progress) with another (‘accepting one’s fate’, as Nietzsche would put it), for Gray would argue that we are always using myths to construct narratives. In other words, Gray’s book functions as a thought-provoking challenge to third-wave therapies, making one question their aims and methods. Nevertheless, Gray’s own solution, of an outward focus on peaceful nature, is romantic, but impractical; at some point the modern world demands we turn back from nature not only to society, but also to our own thoughts.

I Allen Lane; 2013; Hb £18.99 Reviewed by Matthew Edward Harris who is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Staffordshire University and Claire Harris who is an assistant psychologist at Green Lane Hospital, Devizes

286

For the course reading list Psychology, Mental Health and Distress John Cromby, David Harper & Paula Reavey Yet another psychopathology textbook you may think, with reams of chapters about different therapies and disorders, but, oh no, this book’s whole aim is the exact opposite, and in part achieves what it sets out to do. In a bit of a two-finger salute to the medical establishment this book questions concepts in depth, such as diagnosis, the notion of normality and cultural identity, in a refreshing and certainly novel way.

At times the various authors appear to go a bit far, arguments appearing slightly unbalanced, instead coming across as a bit of an ideological and political rant. For example, as a way of deconstructing the labelling issue of diagnosis they instead use the term distress, however this appears to hold a number of negative connotations, a number of my patients certainly have some positive and life-enhancing experiences as a result of their illness, which they would probably not be too happy to have labelled as ‘distress’.

Distinct chapters on culture and service-user experience are an inspirational change to the standard psychopathology literature, everything from politics to early childhood attachment being considered in relation to mental health, this certainly leaving me pondering on some of my current clients. As a clinician and an academic, I was left (in a good way) reflecting on elements of my practice in relation to diagnosis, formulation and treatment, all of which are detailed in their own chapters, but the anti-psychiatry message at times felt a bit strong and idealistic.

The easy read and engaging style, the vast range of references and up-to-date material mean this book would be a great addition to course reading lists. I still need convincing about its usefulness in clinical practice, but maybe the fact alone that I’m left reflecting on my view on related issues is exactly what the authors set out to achieve in the first place.

I Palgrave Macmillan; 2013; Pb £38.99 Reviewed by Dr Claire Thompson who is a Chartered Psychologist and Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

reviews

Building a virtual brain Exchanges at the Frontier BBC World Service podcast super computer which performs a million trillion calculations per second. Such a machine doesn’t yet exist, but Markram’s ambition is to have it built within the next decade. He shies away from the term ‘modelling’, preferring the concept of ‘algorithmic or principle-based reconstruction’ of the brain.

‘We have to be able to get to the principles, to reconstruct the hypotheses of the brain, check it against the biology, and keep doing that until finally we’ve understood the principles and we have an accurate copy.’

An easy guide to narrative therapy Narrative CBT John Rhodes The popularity of narrative approaches both in psychology and medicine has hugely increased in recent years.

Physicians are used to talking about narrative medicine, qualitative researchers about content analysis, and psychologists about narrative therapy.

In the psychological field narrative approaches recur within very different frameworks: cognitivism, constructivism, psychoanalysis, and so on. Narrative CBT has already become part of the third wave of cognitive therapies, by recognising that problems and changes are embedded in the personal stories of one’s own life. In this book, John Rhodes offers us the distinctive features of narrative therapy in the form of an accessible guide.

Narrative CBT exhibits the pros and cons of every easy guide. It creates an easy-tounderstand overview of practical features and techniques, avoiding extensive theoretical and methodological backgrounds that can motivate the choice of one solution over another. The author himself explicitly recognises these limits

and clarifies his aim to explore how narrative ideas and practices can be combined with CBT. Narrative CBT is an introductory guide that may help CBT practitioners to embody the basic assumption of the third wave: perhaps it’s better to change the meaning of an event, rather than the event itself.

I Routledge; 2014; Pb £14.99 Reviewed by Simone Cheli who is in the Psycho-oncology Unit, Department of Oncology, Florence, Italy

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

And Markram’s end goal is an actual, visual representation: ‘We have to get close up, we have to go inside, we have to travel inside to be able to image the virtual brain across all its levels.’

This idea of levels is where the whole thing gets a bit too vague for my liking. As Markram acknowledges, scientists get trained to study the brain at a particular level. ‘The only way we can think of it is to build a digital model that contains all the levels.’ But can this virtual representation in any way represent ‘the genetic level, the protein level, the cellular level, the systems level, the wholebrain level, the behavioural level, the psychophysical level, the psychology level’? Markram wants his virtual brain, in a virtual body, to run around and make a decision... ‘the moment it makes a decision – e.g. there is some cheese behind the door – we will be able to trace back the entire causal chain of events that led to that behaviour.

This is just not possible with any technology or any approach available today.’ I suspect that even in tomorrow's world, a billion euros could be a drop in the ocean in making it possible in any meaningful way.

But what do I know. By the end of the 50 minutes, Markram’s soothing voice had

contribute

Professor Henry Markram has received the biggest personal grant in the history of science.

But even with a billion euros from the European Union to play with, Markram has his work cut out. He has taken on the task of building a biologically accurate model of the human brain: ‘almost certainly the most sophisticated thing in the known universe’, according to podcast host A.C. Grayling.

Modelling a thinking, remembering, learning, decision-making, virtual version of the human brain requires a

reassured me that he was well aware of the vast, interdisciplinary nature of the challenge his scientists face.

‘It’s beautiful, the brain’, he enthused. A neurone is ‘like a galaxy’, then later on Markram says it’s like the universe itself.

Either way, Markram plays the role of starsailor rather well, so much so that it seems smallminded to chide him for spending huge sums of money which could, in other ways, make a real difference to those suffering from the very disorders he seeks to explain.

‘We need to put a spotlight on the human brain,’ he says. ‘This is not something where we should say “let's wait until we've understood the snail”… This is the one thing that guarantees society in the future.’

I suspect space agencies advance a similar argument, so why not properly fund an exploration of the universe within? Markram's own son has autism, and Markram sees people with such conditions as ‘scouts of evolution’. Perhaps in 10, 20, 100 years time we will come to view this project in a similar way.

I Podcast: www.bbc.co.uk/ podcasts/series/ideas Reviewed by Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist

Sample titles just in: The Social Science of Cinema James C. Kaufman & Dean Keith Simonton (Eds.) The Handbook of Solitude Robert J. Coplan & Julie C. Bowker (Eds.) The Skeleton Cupboard: Every Life Has a Story Tanya Byron In Touch With the Future Alberto Gallace & Charles Spence For a full list of books available for review and information on reviewing for The Psychologist, see www.bps.org.uk/books.

Send books for potential review to The Psychologist, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester LE1 7DR And remember: ‘Reviews’ now covers much more than books, so if you have other ideas please e-mail jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or follow @psychmag on Twitter for opportunities.

287

reviews

A creative introduction Did the trauma of World War One lead to great creativity?

BBC iWonder Did the trauma of World War One lead to great creativity?

That was the question addressed in an 'iWonder' online guide from the BBC, combining short video clips, slideshows and text presented by politician and academic Baroness Shirley Williams and Chartered Psychologist Dr Victoria Tischler (University of Nottingham).

Dr Tischler visited the Maudsley Hospital in London, built in 1915 to treat soliders suffering from shellshock.

Patients were encouraged to take up creative pastimes to aid their recovery, and Dr Tischler described how this can help people to process traumatic experiences and deal with negative emotions. The result can be a positive identity shift, from patient to artist.

Baroness Williams spoke about her mother's book Testament of Youth, about her experience of serving as a nurse in World War One. 'Whilst acute trauma can hinder creativity,' she said, 'there is evidence that such experiences can increase the imaginative capacity. A 2012 study found that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder were better able to develop imaginative and complex imagery compared to those veterans who has not suffered from it.'

As Baroness Williams concluded, the results of creative processes have a wider impact on society, challenging stigma, educating us all. This online guide is, in itself, a creative way to introduce a wide audience to concepts such as post-traumatic growth, and as such could be very suitable for teachers during this commemorative year.

I www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zptgq6f Reviewed by Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist

288

Nothing about us without us CBT for Children and Adolescents with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders Angela Scarpa, Susan Williams White & Tony Attwood (Eds.) This book contains thought-provoking work by various authors on different CBT-based psychosocial approaches to treating young people with high-functioning autism (HFASD) – those diagnosed with ASD but with no intellectual impairment. Some chapters look at working with common problems, such as anxiety, that are comorbid with HFASD, whilst others look at working with difficulties, like social skills deficits, directly associated with HFASD. It is argued that CBT is an appropriate model for this work because young people with HFASD have a tendency to logical thinking that can be used to evaluate the biases and assumptions that affect their feelings and behaviours.

The thorough summaries of relevant research in each chapter show that evidence supporting the different approaches is very limited. In particular, the book contains many useful ideas about how to adapt therapy to the needs of young people with HFASD, which could be of relevance to all therapists working with this client group, but there has been little work done

on which of these are effective. There could have been more emphasis on these adaptations, such as structuring sessions, offering multiple-choice answers, teaching about emotions, using special interests, and not relying on words but using textual and visual aids.

It would have been nice to know what the young people being treated thought of these approaches – the voice of the young person with HFASD is missing from the book. This reflects the underlying assumption that the therapist and the parents know what is best for the young person, which raises ethical issues that merit much greater consideration. It is only in Isabelle Hénault’s excellent chapter on relationships and sexuality that the rights of the young person with HFASD are raised – the right, in this case, to experience sexual curiosity and interest. And that lack elsewhere is a pity.

I Guilford Press; 2013; Hb £30.99 Reviewed by Chris Baines who is a schools counselling coordinator and trainee counselling psychologist

Do you need to go on a digital diet?

Menthal Android app, free from Google Play Menthal is an Android app designed to show users how much time they are spending on their smartphones. It was developed by Professor Alexander Markowetz and his team of computer programmers at the University of Bonn, with Markowetz commenting: ‘If you would like to go on a digital diet, we will provide you with the scales.’

Menthal provides feedback on your mobile phone usage, with the developers claiming this allows the user to ‘maintain a sustainable digital lifestyle’. Running in the background, it records every time you unlock your phone, start an app, receive a call, etc. The data is sent to the developers once a day (using just 100 kilobytes of data per

day). There they extract the most interesting indicators, such as the total time you spent with your phone or the number of times you used a particular app. ‘You can then browse this aggregated information’, say the developers, ‘and interpret it in the context of your lifestyle.’

Menthal has been applied to excessive smartphone use,

but alternatively it could be conceptualised as a ‘digital diary’. Perhaps it could benefit adults suffering with shortterm memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease, as the app allows users to recall personal time spent using technology.

However, we would have liked to see more personalisation and social features: essential components for enhanced positive and engaged user experiences.

I Reviewed by Derek Laffan, Niall Byrne and Seán Doyle who are at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

reviews

Beyond conscious horizons The Power of the Placebo How You Really Make Decisions BBC Two If a map of the human mind were to be drawn in the style of a 17th-century naval cartographer, there would have to be a sizeable region labelled ‘Here be dragons’.

The idea of unconscious influences on thought and behaviour was most famously developed into a theoretical framework by Freud. More recent investigations of the unconscious have ditched his largely unfalsifiable speculations about id, ego and superego, in favour of a focus on the physical and cognitive outcomes of unconscious processes.

In ‘The power of the placebo’ Horizon showed how positive medical outcomes often result from interventions that have no active ingredient, but that somehow fool the mind.

In one instance, patients experienced pain relief when accidentally given the wrong treatment for their damaged backs. The ‘right’ treatment turned out to be a placebo.

Likewise, fake acupuncture, where patients only think their skin is being punctured, is as effective as the real thing, and more so when the doctor behaves in a caring manner.

Placebo medicine can lead to measurable physical changes. Fake oxygen to treat altitude sickness reduces levels of the PGE2 neurotransmitter, even though blood oxygen levels do not change. Placebo treatment for Parkinson’s disease leads to increased levels of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that regulates movement.

Placebos can even work when patients know they are receiving placebo treatment.

Another Horizon programme, ‘How you really make decisions’, introduced the idea that conscious thought may, in large part, serve to rationalise decisions that have already been taken at an unconscious level. Intuitive thinking is often associated with irrationality and over 150 cognitive biases have been identified by researchers.

The phenomenon of loss aversion appears to underlie irrational behaviour in cab drivers, city traders and rhesus monkeys. The animal research suggests that loss aversion may have evolved 35 million years ago, although no one

addressed the question of why something so apparently irrational would have been favoured by natural selection.

We were also provided with a demonstration of inattentional blindness, in which focusing your attention on one thing can lead you to miss important information elsewhere. My own interest in the subject matter almost, but not quite, blinded me to one rather striking observation: both shows were heavily dominated by men. The placebo programme, narrated in an annoyingly breathless fashion by Steven Berkoff, featured some nine scientists, all male. In the decisions programme, also with a male narrator, I counted seven scientists, just one of whom was female and who (in the tradition of Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall) worked with animals. One wonders what unconscious influence this gender disparity might have on the potential scientists of tomorrow.

I Reviewed by Dr David Hardman who is at London Metropolitan University

HIGHGATE CONSULTING ROOMS

A pleasure to read Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives Cristian Tileaga ˇ In a time when a wide variety of political actions are making headlines worldwide this wellwritten and informative book provides a new way of understanding the psychological factors involved in politics. The focus on European political psychology provides an interesting counterpoint to many of the other introductory texts, which tend to describe North American approaches to the subject.

The book presents a view of what it terms ‘interpretive political psychology’ that aims to go beyond simply describing modern culture to provide a deeper understanding of the way in which society functions over time. A wide variety of topics are looked at through this lens, including political communication, extremism and political identity.

The most striking thing

about this book is the way in which complex topics are clearly and succinctly presented whilst still managing to emphasise the theoretical and methodological diversity of the field. Throughout all the chapters runs the author’s vision of a political

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

psychology that moves beyond the individualistic paradigms that are the norm in much of the current work on political values and behaviour. He effortlessly incorporates significant research in many areas of social psychology in a way that makes this book a pleasure to read.

Of particular interest is the author’s understanding of both individual and collective human action and the way in which these impact on politics and society.

Although this is an introductory textbook, there is a detailed bibliography that will enable those who are interested to further explore the ideas that are presented.

I Cambridge University Press; 2013; £60.00 Reviewed by Evelyn Gibson who is with West London Mental Health Trust

* Purpose-built for psychotherapy * Architect designed and elegantly furnished * Sound-proofed * Air-conditioned group room * Entryphone system to all rooms * Waiting areas * Support staff * Sessions to suit individual requirements Contact Sally for further details: West Hill House, 6 Swains Lane, London N6 6QS Tel no: 020 7482 4212 E-mail: info@westhill-house.biz Web: www.consulting-rooms.co.uk

289

reviews

JIM BRIDGES – HOME BOX OFFICE

Self-indulgent watching True Detective HBO

The new HBO series True Detective, showing in the UK on Sky Atlantic, is not a bundle of laughs. Anyone watching it for Woody Harrelson, expecting it to be like Cheers purely because he’s in it (hello, my wife), is likely to be disappointed. The protagonists trudge through bleak backwood US settlements which look like they've been dropped out of the sky, solving grisly murders, all to a masterfully curated but gravelly soundtrack. But from an audience of psychologists, it may at least raise a knowing smile.

I have so far only caught up with episode one, but was struck by the psychological content in the script. ‘We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self’, says Rust Cohle. ‘A secretion of sensory experience and feeling.

Programmed with total

assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, nobody is anybody.’ Psychologist Professor Bruce Hood, and his latest book The Self Illusion, sprang to mind. Indeed, over on Discover Magazine blog (see

tinyurl.com/obtb2xf), Kyle Hill was making the same connection, citing Hood’s work and concluding: ‘Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective could go down in TV history as the world’s biggest

A sturdy foothold Psychopaths: An Introduction Herschel Prins Writing from over half a century of experience within the field, Prins offers a ‘toe in the bath’ introduction to psychopathy.

Spanning five concise yet informative chapters, past literature, law and cultural examples are recruited to highlight the diversity of psychopathic research.

Whilst this text is aimed at students in criminology, psychology and law, others with wider learning interests may welcome its accessible nature.

Although earlier stages highlight the steep progression of psychopathic literature, it is the latter chapters, which will grasp the interest of the reader.

Questions are asked of how the British criminal justice systems are tasked with the difficulty of juggling containment, treatment

290

and rehabilitation, whilst assessing wider complexities in understanding psychopathic disorder. This is staged in the context of a social climate whereby the public places higher importance on punitive, compared to rehabilitative measures for the ‘mad or bad’.

Though interested readers may be left wanting to know more about some of the topics proposed, Prins provides further reading to key texts when appropriate and offers open discussion questions at the close of each chapter.

An informative read which is sure to offer a sturdy foothold to any student in the field.

I Waterside Press; 2013; Pb £16.50 Reviewed by Dean Fido who is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University

bummer – a pessimist walking into extinction. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Knowing that the mind is not separate from the brain, that our senses can be fooled, that our sense of self can break down if we simply pay attention to the here and now, Rust Cohle is right – we are a multitude of unconscious processes cobbled together in a locked room and labelled “You”.’

The psychological analyses continued over on Psychology Today, with clinical psychiatrist Dale Archer writing on the identities and ‘broken boundaries’ of Cohle and his partner Martin Hart (heart and soul, anyone?).

Cohle sees human consciousness as ‘a tragic step in evolution… Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.’

He believes ‘we became too self-aware’, but for a series like this I’m not sure that’s possible… I for one am looking forward to watching the rest of this series in an annoyingly selfaware fashion, unravelling its mysteries and pondering what it all means for our view of self.

I Reviewed by Jon Sutton, Managing Editor of The Psychologist

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

New! Student Textbooks, Professional Handbooks and Reference Titles With you at every stage of your working life – Wiley-Blackwell

978-1-118-29487-1 • Cloth £199.00 • 259.00

978-1-118-77535-6 • Cloth £199.00 • 259.00

978-1-118-45399-5 • Cloth £199.00 • 259.00

978-1-118-71390-7 • Cloth £55.00 • 71.90

978-1-118-50917-3 • Paper £34.99 • 44.90

978-1-118-51008-7 • Paper £50.00 • 65.90

978-1-118-46835-7 • Paper £34.99 • 44.90

978-1-118-48361-9 • Paper £24.99 • 32.90

978-1-118-46945-3 • Paper £34.99 • 44.90

978-1-118-46924-8 • Paper £32.99 • 42.90

978-0-470-71069-2 • Paper £32.99 • 42.90

978-1-118-78881-3 • Paper £29.99 • 38.90

Follow us

@wbpsychology

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

www.wiley.com/go/psychology

291

LOOKING BACK

PsyBorgs on the loose!

Christopher D. Green and his team are taking the history of psychology into the digital realm, producing surprising insights

illiam James published more than 300 books and articles over the course of his career (Perry, 1920).

I would venture to guess that not one living person has read all of them.

Wilhelm Wundt published nearly as many items (Titchener & Geissler, 1908–1914, 1922), and probably many more printed pages (consider just the 10-volume Völkerpsychologie). I would speculate that more than half of his work goes unread today. And those are just two of the most significant and prolific figures in the history of psychology. Consider that in just the first 10 years of the existence of Psychological Review, that journal published nearly 400 articles. Who has read all of that in the past, say, 50 years?

Or even a quarter of it?

What this highlights is the fact that historians are faced with an impossible task: to read, comprehend, interpret and ultimately know the material from the time and place of their research topic.

Nearly always, however, there is far too much material for any one person to absorb and understand. As a result, historians do a great deal of culling. This work was significant or influential, or relevant to what I am doing; that work was trivial, redundant or peripheral. This kind of filtering is necessary, but only because of our cognitive limitations as humans. It is not a requirement of scholarship in principle. An omniscient being would not need to identify ‘less important’ works so that they could then be ignored; it could draw on any portion

references

W

292

Gold, M.K. (Ed.) (2012). Debates in the digital humanities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees.

London & New York: Verso.

Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. London: Verso.

Perry, R.B. (1920) Annotated bibliography of the writings of William James. New York: Longmans.

Spengler, O. (1991). The decline of the

of the entire archive at any time, no matter how large or small. That is not to say that some works are not, in fact, more important or relevant than others. Of course they are, but everything in the complete archive plays some role in the story of a significant individual, institution or event. In reality, there is no cut-off point below which an item should go unnoticed. We do it just to make things manageable.

The problem becomes particularly acute when one aims to tell the story of a very large historical unit: a nation, a century or an entire academic discipline.

Tens of thousands of documents may be involved and there is no possibility of giving every one its due. We often identify a small number of key documents – the ‘canon’ – and frame our story around their production, and the reactions to them.

The result can easily be a superficial historical account, which is very common in ‘popular histories’. They may be engaging, but in trying to capture the grand sweep of things one can be led to gloss over a wealth of stubborn little details that all too often turn out to undermine whatever snappy and memorable characterisation of events one is trying to peddle; for example, no, Dr Spengler (1918–1923/1991), cultures are not really very much at all like organisms in their ‘rise’ and ‘fall’. Partly in an effort to avoid such traps, many scholarly historians in recent decades have turned to ‘micro-histories’: accounts of very short periods of time, tightly delimited in

West (A. Helps & H. Werner, Eds.; C.F. Atkinson, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. (Original work published in German, 1918–1923) Titchener, E.B. & Geissler, L.R. (1908–1914, 1922). A bibliography of the scientific writings of Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psychology, 19, 541–556; 20, 570; 21, 603–604; 22, 586–587; 23, 533; 24, 586; 25, 599; 33, 260–262.

location and the number of characters involved. Many people outside of the circle of professional historians, however, find this kind of history dull and even trivial.

Things would be very different if there were a way to capture the totality of an entire archive at once without drowning in the details. We need to learn to ‘swim’ in the wealth of available information.

This is precisely what the modern era of ‘Big Data’ is all about. Although we tend to hear about Big Data in the context of spying scandals and the like, roughly the same principles apply to any large electronic database. If we can organise the data according to principles that are relevant to our interests, then we can display it graphically in a way that makes key elements of its structure visually salient. This general approach to humanistic research has become increasingly popular in recent years (see Gold, 2012). Several American universities have developed institutes and programmes dedicated to ‘Digital Humanities’. Even Google has created a public tool called the ‘Ngram Viewer’, which enables anyone to search and graph the historical frequency of particular terms or phrases in the vast collection of Google Books (see, for example, my blog post on mesmerism at tinyurl.com/nrraw8d).

The insights revealed by a digital examination of documents are, of course, not the same as those revealed by the ‘close reading’ of the traditional historian.

It is, in a certain sense, ‘superficial’ because one does not access directly the ‘deep’ meanings of the text. But the tradeoff is that it becomes practicable to include information about a vastly wider array of texts than one would have been able to consider otherwise. The Stanford historian of literature Franco Moretti (2005, 2013) calls this ‘distant reading’ in which one rises far enough above the ‘trees’ that one is now able to glean the overall shape of the ‘wood’. Unlike superficial popular history, however, in digital history all the detail remains in place. Each and every item is always present, though it might be just one bit among thousands, and one can always ‘zoom in’ for a closer look if that is what the research demands.

My colleagues at the York Digital History of Psychology Laboratory – we jokingly call ourselves ‘The PsyBorgs’ – have spent the past couple of years poring over a number of large computerised databases, borrowed and purpose-built, both to confirm things that were already known about psychology’s past (to assess the validity of the methods) and to

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

Emotion

1/).! ! !

1/).! ! !

$1*03! ! ! $1*03! ! !

0*.%,! ! !

0*.%,! ! !

1/.2! ! !

1/.2!

2! ! ! !

&6&7! ! !

&6&7! ! ! !

$1*03! ! !

$1*03! ! !

/ //% ! ! ! /% ! ! !

"12)"! ! !

"12)"! ! !

&..! ! !

&..! ! !

",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! ! !

$1*03! ! ! $1*03! ! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33! ! !

Functionalism

3".,&! ! !

3".,&! ! !

&6&7! ! ! &6&7!

7 ! !

*&1$&! ! !

*&1$&! ! !

7,".! ! !

7,".! ! !

Reaction time, Reflex, Habit, Attention, Testing

*##&.! ! ! *##&.! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"-&2! ! !

*&1$&! ! !

*&1$&! ! !

*&1$&! ! ! *&1$&! ! !

/8"+*! ! !

/8"+*! ! !

/4()! ! !

/4()! ! ! !

&11*$! ! ! &11*$! ! !

1".8! ! !

1".8! ! !

1*''*! ! !

1*''*! * ! !

.(&,,! ! !

.(&,,! ! ! "%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! !

Color Vision

"12)"! ! !

"12)"! ! !

"7 ! ! !

"7 ! ! !

"%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! !

1*''*! ! !

1*''*! ! !

*.&3! ! ! *.&3! ! !

/,/-/! ! ! /,/-/! ! !

42) 42) ! ! ! !

1*''*! ! !

1*''*! ! !

/,,7! ! !

/,,7! ! !

&6&7! ! ! &6& &7! ! !

$1*03! ! ! $1*03! ! !

77,*&! ! ! ,*&! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! !

.(&,,! ! !

.(&,,! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! !

&"1#/! ! !

&"1#/! ! !

*.(&1! ! ! *.(&1! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! !

"11".! ! !

"11".! ! !

Psychological Metatheory ",%6*! ! !

",%6 ! ! ! ",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! !

"-0#&! ! !

"-0#&! ! ! ",%6*! ! !

",%6**! ! ! /7$&! ! ! /7$&! ! !

1"6''/! ! !

3".,&! ! !

3".,&! ! ! 1"6'/! ! !

",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! !

"%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! !

4,,&1! ! !

4,,&11! ! ! !

*&2/6! ! !

*&2/6! ! !

&11*$! ! !

&11*$! ! !

1&.$)! ! !

1&.$)! ! !

4.23&! ! !

4.23&! ! ! )/1.%! ! !

)/1.%! ! ! *,,&1! ! !

*,,& , 1! ! !

/ /,'&! ! !

,'&! ! !

"33&,! ! !

"33&,! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"% %% % ! ! !

)/1&7! ! !

)/1&7! ! !

&11 $$! ! ! !

&11*$! ! !

*38 ! ! ! *38 ! ! !

&"1#/! ! ! &"1#/! ! !

"31*$! ! !

"31*$! ! !

3".,&! ! ! "-&2! ! !

3".,&! ! ! /,'&! ! ! /,'&! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"31*$! ! !

"31*$! ! ! *.&3! ! ! *.&3! ! !

3"11! ! !

3"11! ! !

&6& &7! ! ! &6&7! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0! ! !

17".! ! !

17" ".! ! ! *&1$&! ! ! *&1$&! ! !

1417!

1417!

"33&,! ! !

"33&,! ! ! /.1/&! ! !

/.1/&! & ! !

"-&1/! ! !

"-&1/! ! !

$1*03! ! ! $1*03! ! !

**3-&1! ! !

3-&1! ! ! ,,*2! ! !

,,*2! ! !

"231/! ! !

"231/! ! !

",3/.! ! ! ",3/.! ! ! "%% ! ! ! "$ /4! ! ! "%% ! ! ! "$ /4! ! !

"2331/! ! ! /4()! ! !

"231/! ! ! /4()! ! !

*,%&! ! !

*,%&! ! !

&,"#"! ! ! &,"#"! ! !

"6.&7! ! !

"6.&77! ! ! !

*()"-! ! ! *()"- !

"$)&! ! ! "$)&! ! !

1#".! ! !

1#".! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! ! !

",+*.! !

",+*.! !

" "11&.! ! !

11&.! ! !

*()"-! ! ! *()"-! ! !

&"2)/! ! !

&"2)/! ! !

",%6*! ! !

",%6**! ! ! ! ! !

"33&,! ! !

"33&,! ! ! !

"33&,! !

"33& 3 ,! !

"6.&7! ! !

"6.&7! ! !

/,3/.! ! !

/,3/.! ! !

1".8! ! !

1".8! ! !

&"1#/! ! ! &"1#/! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33! ! !

" "11&.! ! !

11&.! ! !

",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! !

APA Pres. Addresses Character of psychology Relation to other disciplines 4.23&! ! !

4.23&! ! !

.(&,,! ! !

.(&,,! ! ! !

/,/-/! ! ! /,/-/! ! !

*.&3! ! !

*.&3! ! !

"33&,! ! !

"3333& &,,,! ! ! !

"%% ! ! ! "%% ! ! !

//%6/! ! ! / /%6/! / ! !

4-.&1! ! !

4-.&1! ! !

3&*.! ! !

3&*.! ! !

4%% ! ! !

4%% ! ! !

&6#/,! ! !

&6#/,! ! !

",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! ! & &111*$! ! ! &11*$! ! !

*--/.! ! ! *--/. ! !

/,/-/! ! ! /,/-/! ! !

) )*3&)! ! !

*3&)! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"-&2 &2! ! !

4,,&1! ! !

4,,& &11!

1! ! ! ! !

/6*2/! ! ! /6*2/! ! !

1#".! ! !

1#".! ! ! !

1-231! ! !

1-231! ! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"333! ! !

2),&7! ! !

2),&7! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! !

.(&,,! ! !

.(&,,! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"%% ! ! !

"%% ! ! !

/%*2! ! !

/% 2 !

"..&1! ! !

"..&1! ! !

/7$&! ! ! /7$&! ! !

/7$&! ! ! /7$&! ! !

Depth, Distance, Orientation in Space

,/7%! ! !

,/7% %! ! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0! ! !

,/7%! ! ! ,/7%! ! !

"+&1! ! !

"+&1! ! ! /7$&! ! !

/7$&! ! !

1-/.%! ! !

1-/.%! ! !

,/7%! ! !

,/7%! ! !

&6&7! ! !

&6&7! ! !

",%6*! ! !

",%6**! ! !

",%6*! ! ! ",%6*! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33! ! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33!

3 ! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0! ! !

1-/.%! ! !

1-/.%! ! !

",%6*! ! !

",%6*! ! !

"11&.! ! ! " 11&.! ! !

3&32/! ! !

3&32/! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0! ! !

72,/0 ! !

1-231! ! !

1-231! ! !

"5*&2! ! !

"5*&2! ! !

/7$&! ! !

/7$&! ! ! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33!

3 ! ! !

",%6*! ! !

",%6* 6*! ! !

1#". ! !

1#".! ! !

",%6&! ! ! ",%6&! ! ! !

",%6*! ! !

",%6*! ! !

"$ /4! ! ! "$ /4! ! !

4%% ! ! !

4%% ! ! !

31"33! ! !

31"33!

3 ! !

72,/0! ! !

72 /0! ! !

"-&2! ! !

"-&2! ! !

31/.(! ! !

31/.( ! &"%! ! !

&"% ! !

"$ /.! ! !

"$ /.! ! !

-*3)! ! !

-*3)! ! !

4%% ! ! !

4%% ! ! !

31/.(! ! !

3 3311/.(! ! !

4,,&1! ! !

4,,&1! ! ! ! ! ! /23*! ! ! /23*! ! !

",+*.! ! ! ",+*.! ! !

,/22/! ! ! ,/22/! ! ! !

&..&%! ! ! &..&%! ! !

/7$&! ! ! /7$&! ! !

"."! ! !

"."! !

* +0"! ! ! *1 *1+0"! ! !

3".,&! ! !

3".,&! ! !

/7$&! ! ! /7$ $&! ! !

Philosophical Psychology

&11*$! ! ! &11*$! ! !

3&32/! ! !

3&32/! ! !

Consciousness, epistemology, self, etc.

"6+*.! ! !

"6+*.! ! !

Memory, Cognition

",+*.! ! ! ",+*.! ! !

Networks of ‘research communities’ derived from Psychological Review 1894–1898 (the complete and full-scale image is available at tinyurl.com/oqua53q)

uncover new aspects of the discipline’s development. For instance, Ingo Feinerer (Vienna University of Technology), Jeremy Burman (a York doctoral student) and I have been converting decades-long runs of articles in the early volumes of American Journal of Psychology and Psychological Review into a series of networks. In each one, the nodes represent particular articles, and the links between them represent how similar the vocabularies used in any two articles are (short link = high similarity). The results are networks in which lexically similar articles cluster together spatially into distinct ‘research communities’.

Examining one of these networks, one can directly see information about how many such communities there were, their relative sizes, how close the communities were to each other in ‘lexical space’, and how densely interconnected the articles were within each community (i.e. how elaborate and mandatory was the subdisciplinary ‘dialect’ that each had developed?).

For example, the figure above shows a network of all of the full articles published in Psychological Review from its launch in 1894 up to 1898. One of the more interesting findings here is that the largest

and most densely interconnected research communities pertain to philosophical psychology (e.g. consciousness, mind–body problem, the self) and to psychological metatheory (e.g. Is psychology a science? If so, what kind?

What are its relationships to neighbouring disciplines?). They are represented by the green and blue clusters, respectively at the far left of the image. This runs contrary to the great emphasis that is placed on the development of laboratories and ‘schools’ in traditional historical writing about this period in American psychology.

Another interesting finding was that the ‘Notes’ written by G. Stanley Hall in early volumes of the American Journal of Psychology (in essence, Hall’s reviews of psychological literature published elsewhere) served to draw together a number of autonomous research groups under the common banner of ‘psychology’, effectively creating the discipline out of research communities that were already present on the American scene. How did we draw so ‘deep’ a conclusion from a simple network of shared words? The network revealed a hub-and-spoke configuration in which the ‘Notes’ were the hub, and each of the distinct research communities were

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

strongly connected with this hub, but they were not very strongly connected to each other. That is to say, Hall cleverly wrote his ‘Notes’ to share some substantive vocabulary with each of his constituent groups even though, at first, they did not share very much with each other. A PhD student of ours, Daniel Lahham, has been working on a similar project in which the journals of interest are early 20th-century comparative psychology and behaviourism periodicals.

The York PsyBorgs are also experimenting with a number of other digital approaches to the history of psychology. The lab’s co-director, Michael Pettit, is pursuing a number of projects that involve geographical maps. For example, when the popular press writes about the research of an academic psychologist, where does the bulk of the resulting correspondence from the public come from (i.e. where in the country does psychology have the greatest public ‘uptake’) and why? In another project, Pettit, David Schmit (St. Catherine University, St. Paul, Minnesota), and Eric Oosenbrug (a York doctoral student) are investigating mesmerism, popular in the US prior to the Civil War but not equal everywhere. Using newspaper

293

looking back

advertisements they can discover where itinerant mesmerists plied their trade most successfully. In addition, one of our MA students, Shayna Fox Lee, is mapping both the biographical origins and the ultimate occupational fates of the dozens of women who attended graduate programmes in social science around the turn of the 20th century. Similarly, one of our doctoral students, Jacy Young, is geographically tracking the public lectures of G. Stanley Hall, who travelled far and wide to spread his message of ‘Child Study’.

Jacy Young and Jeremy Burman are collaborating to develop a computer program to automatically extract all of the proper names that are mentioned from a series of long texts, such as books. Once the names of the deceased are excluded, the resulting list is a set of candidates whose archival collections might contain letters of the texts’ author. This is especially useful in the case of important historical figures who did not leave behind major archival collections of their own. In addition, Burman is using the descriptions used in the American Psychological Association’s PsycINFO

database to track very broad topic trends in psychology across nearly 2,000,000 articles published over the past 50 years.

Arlie Belliveau, also a doctoral student, is using ‘bubble charts’ to track the membership numbers of the many divisions (now over 50) of the American Psychological Association over the past 60-some years. Although it is well known that divisional membership in the APA has been dropping for the past decade or so, the fates of all divisions have not been the same. Much is revealed in the membership dynamics of individual divisions.

Many of these projects are still in progress. My aim here has been to sketch a just few examples of the wide range of novel historical research projects that can be pursued when one begins to think of digital databases as research resources, and starts thinking of statistical visualisations as a way of slicing into those databases to reveal their inner structures. Although some enthusiasts for this new approach have predicted that digital history will soon begin to replace the conventional qualitative study of the past (Moretti, 2005, 2013), we are not so

inclined to speculating about that. In our experience, the qualitative informs the quantitative and vice versa. Sometimes a visualisation raises a new question that we need to pursue via qualitative means (e.g. why were a disproportionate number of women involved in vision research at the beginning of the 20th century?). At other times a matter that is murky in the textual literature can be clarified by looking at the ‘right’ visualisation of it (e.g., the nearly forgotten figure Hiram Stanley, librarian at Lake Forest College in Illinois, was involved in a wide range of distinct research communities in the 1890s).

We invite queries and comments on our work, and are eager to consult and collaborate with others who have similar interests. To keep in touch with our progress, check out our website (http://psyborgs.lab.yorku.ca) or follow our blog (http://ahp.yorku.ca).

I Christopher D. Green is at the Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Canada christo@yorku.ca

The 50th Psychotherapy Section Annual Training Conference Keynote Speakers Profs. Emmy van Deurzen & Digby Tantam – ‘Wellbeing and health in a time of austerity’ Dr Elliot Cohen – ‘The Lotus and the Butterfly: Transformation and Transcendence in Psychotherapy’ Dr Ho Law & Naomi Mwasambili – ‘Stories of hopes – a narrative practice in wider communities’

294

Overcoming the risk of stress and depression in the era of austerity Tuesday 8 July 2014 University of East London, Stratford Campus Call for submissions open!

For further information and booking:

www.kc-jones.co.uk/50th All other queries, please e-mail MemberNetworkServices@bps.org.uk with ‘Psychotherapy Training Conference July 2014’ in the subject line.

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

ONE ON ONE

important research and policy questions [see box below].

…with Stephen J. Ceci The H.L. Carr Chaired Professor of Developmental Psychology, Cornell University

experiment. To say that my senior colleagues were not enamoured with this study is an understatement. As a result of the fallout, I ended up taking a post at a better university – ironically, one that awarded me with early promotion, in Stephen J. Ceci part, because of this stevececi@cornell.edu study. When I look back at the 35 years I One thing that you would have spent as an academic, change about psychology this early decision to change Our field is no longer what jobs looms most important.

I consider to be rationally It set up a cascade of largely One moment that changed organised. There has been positive events that I believe the course of your career enormous blurring of would not have occurred if As a new PhD I had taken an disciplinary lines; the most I had remained at my former academic job at a Midwestern interesting literature on topics university. Life is often a state university in the US. such as the influence of early matter of chance encounters, Along with a slightly more stress on brain development is random stochastic processes, experienced colleague, being done by economists, and who you happen to sit I undertook what was at the sociologists, neuroscientists next to. time a very controversial and psychologists. Psychology needs to think more expansively, broadening our ‘At Cornell I co-teach a course called “Six Pretty Good Books” with training to include three colleagues from sociology, politics and economics. (We’ve been econometric models, funded to develop this into a MOOC in the coming months.) We sociological theory, etc. We provide a comparative analysis of books such as Pinker’s Better risk becoming less influential Angels, Gladwell’s David and Goliath, Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness: if we stick to traditional lines. the authors Skype with our students. It broadens our perspective…

coming soon

we ignore the other social sciences at our peril, as they are making very important contributions to the same topics we are addressing, such as the influence of poverty on cognition, the structure and impact of social networks, antecedents of violence, etc.’

296

One challenge you think psychology faces Our insularity prevents us from answering some very

Articles on prejudice and stigma; video game violence; non-clinical paranoia; living with food allergy; psychologists who rock; and much more...

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

contribute

resource

One inspiration I was in graduate school in the US when I began reading the work of a British psychologist named Michael Howe. We struck up a correspondence and I ended up doing my doctoral research at Exeter under his guidance. Mike taught me a lesson not only in psychological science but also in humanity. He and his family were just what a struggling postgraduate student needed. I’ll forever be grateful to them, and to the British system and its generosity toward me.

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists If you are repelled by the constant pressures of being a postgraduate, then get out now. Try something else. This is not the career for you; it only gets more intense – prepping lectures, grading, doing research, preparing grant applications, etc. Few individuals can withstand the continual dissatisfaction of doing something undesirable; it is no indictment if this is not for you.

One proud moment I’ve been very fortunate and have been the recipient of many awards and honours, probably the most significant being the lifetime career awards of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the APA. Being on the dais in Los Angeles to receive the James McKeen Cattell Award in 2005 stands out.

One problem that psychology should deal with We really need to get serious about the way we generalise from our samples to the relevant population. I am as guilty as the rest. I have depended on samples of convenience (university students or children attending local schools) who are demonstrably unrepresentative of the populations to which I would like to generalise the findings. The public has a right to know if claims they read in the media truly generalise to the target population. And our habit of stopping with randomised assignment should be the beginning, not the end.

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

See the inside front cover for how you can contribute and reach 50,000 colleagues into the bargain, or just e-mail your suggestions to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

vol 27 no 4

april 2014

New frrom o Hogrreeffe

• • •

p g Develop awarene ness of leadership style Improve leadersship effectiveness Embed learning g with wi Hogrefe’s Coach on the he Desktop D

p

“Anyone “Any o with the resp re ponsibility ty of appointing sales leaders rs will acknowledg dge what a dif iff ffi ficcult and cri ritical task this is. A good d salesman is not necesssari rily ly a good leader, r, but how can n we w help lp people develop the skills th hat will make them potential leaders rs of the fu future? S-LJII is usef u efu ful both fo for selection and for for the t development of salespeoplee who w are re intere rested in becoming thee sales leaders rs of the fu futture.” e Chris Wells, EMEA Salees Manager, Ashland Specialty Ing gredients.

For more information call us on 01865 402 900 or emaill marketing@hogrefe.co.uk

New! Weernerr Tschan Professional Sexual Misconduct n Institutions Causes and Consequences, Prevention and Intervention 2014, x vi + 216 pp.

SBN 978-0-88937-444-7 £ 27.90 Also available as E-book!

See sample pages at www.hogrefe.com “This is a veery informative ve book on a deeply important subject.

It is essential for the proffessional functioning of all indiviidualls in a fiduciary relationship with patients, clients, and students.”

Michael F. Myers, MD, fo ormer Clinical Prof. of Psychiatr y, Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver

“The most up-to-date and comprehensivee of any book on the topic…Should be on eveeryone’s bookshelf.”

Gar y Schoener, Clinical Psychologist and Direc tor of Consulting & Training at Walk-In Counseling Ctr, Minneapolis, MN

Can a seexual miscco onduct at wo ork be prrevented, or ‘tr treeated’?

Essen s tial reading e about a notoriously difficult prroblem o Proffeessional sexual misconduct (PSM) is a problem that is notoriously difficult to address and that can be a minefield fo or all concerned – for o victims, fo or the in institutions where it takes place, and also because outstanding and supposedly responsible members of society may be accused of abuse.

Here, Werner Tschan, s one of the world’s leading experts in dealing with PSM, outlines an up-to-date approach to PSM and proffession e al disruptive behaviors. He describes practical ways to prevent PSM, as well as efffeective treatmentss fo or victims and to rehabilitate off-feenders or those accused. Using examples from real-liffe cases from around the world, he also discusses how PSM is a societal problem and what we can do to stop it. Recent headline cases involving a variety of organizations – medical, media, church, schools, sport, industry – show that institutions can be ideal environments fo or PSM, and so great emphasis is placed in this volume on preventive measures that we can and must take at an institutional level.

With clear, jargon-free writing this book is essential reading fo or all proffessionals e interested in preventing and dealing with PSM, as well as of interest to victims and their families.

For book order inquiries:

Hogrefe c//o Marston Book Services Lttd 160 Eastern Ave., Milton Park Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4SB Teel: 01235 465577 · Fax: 01235 465592 E-mail: direct.orders@marston.co.uk Web: www.hogreffee.com

For psychometric testing enquiries:

Hogrefe Ltd. 4610 Kingsgate · Oxford Business Park South Oxford OX4 2SU Tel: 01865 402900 · Fax: 01865 402888 E-mail: customersupport@hogrefe.co.uk Web: www.hogrefe.co.uk

Annual Conference 2014 Book today – pre-booking closes on 22 April

If you enjoyed reading Sian Williams’ article in last month’s Psychologist - come and see her speak at the Gala Dinner

Testimonials from Annual Conference 2013 ‘The Annual Conference is the place that the Society becomes real for its members’ ‘As a frequent attendee of psychological conferences at home and abroad, I always find the BPS Annual Conference to be amongst the most intellectually stimulating, clinically informative, and socially delightful’ ‘Everything from the talks, to the social events, have instilled a desire for me to go on into the area of research. A truly inspiring experience’

Registration fees available from (late rates): Concession £52 Full member £128 Gala Dinner 8 May Crowne Plaza, Birmingham £35

‘An opportunity to hear about new ideas and research in psychology and engage in stimulating discussion with peers – all within a friendly and supportive atmosphere’

7-9 May 2014 International Convention Centre, Birmingham

www.bps.org.uk/ac2014 ‘big picture’ pull-out www.thepsychologist.org.uk

i

BIG PICTURE

Crudely erased adults Image from A.R Hopwood’s False Memory Archive.

Send your ideas for ‘Big picture’ to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

Based upon scientific research that demonstrates how susceptible we are to false memories, A.R. Hopwood’s False Memory Archive exhibition features artworks and an everexpanding collection of vivid personal accounts of things that never really happened. Including a display of manipulated

photographs of UFO sightings and a collaboration with a fictional security guard (pictured here in ‘Crudely Erased Adults, 1/6’), Hopwood’s work evocatively reflects the way we creatively reconstruct our sense of the past, while providing insight into the often humorous, obscure and uncomfortable things people have

www.thepsychologist.org.uk FALSE MEMORY ARCHIVE: CRUDELY ERASED ADULTS, 1/6, A.R. HOPWOOD, 2012

misremembered.

Hopwood has collaborated with psychologists to revisit key experiments, reflecting on the history and consequences of this provocative field of memory research including with Professor Elizabeth Loftus (University of California, Irvine) and Professor Christopher

French (Goldsmiths College).

The works collectively explore where the truth lies in a ‘false’ recollection, while questioning how a blend of fact and fiction can be used to challenge assumptions about memory.

Other works include an LP of silences from a memory experiment, Jackie Kennedy’s

Chanel suit re-made and a ‘remote’ past life regression reading by a psychic called Crystal. Touring venues include The Mead Gallery in Coventry, The Exchange in Penzance, the Freud Museum London, and the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery (including a presentation by Professor Sergio

Della Sala on 19 April). A.R. Hopwood’s False Memory Archive is supported by grants from the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and Creative Scotland.

You can view more about the project and submit a false or ‘non-believed’ memory here: www.falsememoryarchive.com.

BPS Textbooks in Psychology No other series bears the BPS seal of approval Refreshingly written to consider more than Northern American research, this series is the ďŹ rst to give a truly international perspective. Every title fully complies with the BPS syllabus in the topic.

Each book is supported by a companion website, featuring additional resource materials for both instructors and students.

Special discounts available for BPS members*

* For further information go to

www.wiley.com/go/bps iv

vol 27 no 4

april 2014