The Psychologist May 2020

the psychologist

the

psychologist may 2020

may 2020

‘Babies really enjoy being babies’ Caspar Addyman interviewed

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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the psychologist

the

psychologist may 2020

may 2020

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

CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB contact Kai Theriault 01223 378051 kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk april 2020 issue 45,537 dispatched cover Caspar Addyman by Tina Vedrine www.thevedrines.com environment Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper.

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‘Babies really enjoy being babies’ Caspar Addyman interviewed

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young

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

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the

psychologist

Eliza Southwood/www.elizasouthwood.com

may 2020

24 Learning in unexpected places

Elian Fink and Jenny Gibson on

the importance of play in childhood

02 News and views COVID-19 special, and more

12 Digest

Matt

Warren on

a pandemic

research response 18 ‘Science is

a world

without walls’

Zoe

Sanderson

meets

EAWOP

President

Frederik Anseel

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28 A golden age of play for adults Dave Neale on a growing yet under-explored area

52 Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

32 ‘Babies really enjoy being babies’

Caspar Addyman talks laughter

56 Books Online peer engagement in adolescence; leadership reputation; plus reviews

60 A road to art therapy in six works Sue Holttum brings lived experience and applied psychology to art therapy

64 Culture On Being, and more

68 Looking back Jack Chalkley on Monte Shapiro and ‘the lost clinicians’

72 One on one Edward Ong

38 Compassion: the essential orientation

Tim Anstiss, Jonathan

Passmore and Paul Gilbert 44 A hero by any other name

Robert MacRory-Crowley and

Kevin O’Malley on heroism science 48 ‘Psychologists must

consistently argue for

human beings’

Alison Clarke, Society

Board chair

Whenever you write an editorial, you’re unsure of the world your words will land in when they hit the doormats in two to three weeks’ time. But never has that been more true than now… as I compose this, I have no idea how coronavirus will have continued to spread, infecting so many aspects of our daily lives. I can’t even be sure we will be able to get this issue to you (in hard copy, anyway).

At the moment we continue to work remotely.

We have been blown away by the contributions of psychologists to the frontline response, to evidence-based perspectives for our website, and to attempts to ‘stay together apart’ by maintaining important social identities in times of distancing. We thought that the best approach to this edition, in uncertain and changing times, might be to reflect those contributions before moving on to the sunnier uplands of play, laughing babies, compassion, heroism, art and more.

We’re reaching out from afar, and thank all of you reaching back and out.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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‘We had to bring people together’ As cases of COVID-19 escalate exponentially, the British Psychological Society and psychologists from across the globe are working to combat the pandemic and manage its implications for everyday life.

Ella Rhodes spoke to some of those psychologists, as well as BPS President David Murphy about the Society’s response.

‘L

Many more psychologists are working to contribute to the COVID-19 response in various ways, along with providing evidence-based perspectives for The Psychologist and other outlets.

See www.bps.org.uk/responding-coronavirus and tinyurl.com/PsychmagCorona We have also collated our coverage into a free bonus edition in our iOS/Android app, available in your store.

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ike many around coronavirus, the penny dropped for me later than it should have done. When it did, I realised normal business as usual had to stop and we had to bring people together.’ So says David Murphy, the British Psychological Society’s President at the helm of its response as Chair of the COVID-19 Coordinating Group, along with Deputy Chair Professor Daryl O’Connor, Chair of the Society’s Research Board.

David told me that his approach to responding to the crisis had been informed by a book he had come across some years ago, and by coping with a previous personal and professional tragedy. The book, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare Just Show Up,

by Patricia Ryan Madson, former head of drama at Stanford University, encourages readers to apply some of the key principles of improv to coping with daily life, such as acceptance of what you are given to work with, embracing average, giving and accepting support and expecting to make mistakes. David told me that had was forced to put these ideas into practice after his friend, mentor, and Joint Director colleague at Oxford University, Professor Paul Kennedy, passed away at work – suddenly and unexpectedly in September 2016.

David said that, although the experience was extremely traumatic for staff and trainees, it also taught him some valuable lessons – to accept help from wherever you find it, to be open and honest was about the emotional and practical challenges rather than trying to ‘keep up appearances’. ‘I’ve been drawing on these same lessons in coping with the COVID crisis’, he explained. ‘In a Board of Trustees meeting I put forward the idea of setting up a BPS-wide coordinating group. From the idea being approved to the first meeting was a matter of days, and we’ve got an amazing group of people who have come together. The first subgroup was up and running two days later and it published a really excellent guidance document three days after that!’

The coordinating group began by prioritising areas that were time sensitive, and in which the Society can have an impact, including disease prevention, staff wellbeing, the effects of confinement especially on vulnerable groups, the psychological care of patients and relatives and adapting psychology services.

The first guidance released was a set of recommendations for leaders and managers of healthcare services which emphasised

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the psychologist may 2020 news and views

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Support the workers The professional community has an important role to play, not only in supporting frontline workers and patients but the general public too. Our research group at the University of Manchester (with significant input from Salford Royal Hospital, the University of Liverpool, Kings College London and a range of other organisations around the world) has been producing useful and impactful applied work in relation to COVID-19.

Colleagues and I have spent years studying human behaviour, performance and health under conditions of stress – in particular, people living in isolated, confined, and extreme and high-risk settings. We wrote about this research for the October 2019 issue of The Psychologist. We had no idea that within six months that very same research could be applied to helping vast numbers of people stay healthy (and hopefully thrive) in isolated and confined conditions in their own homes. Early on in the imposed ‘lockdown’, we identified lessons from our research for an article on The

Psychologist website on coping with life in isolated and confined environments (read it via tinyurl.com/PsychmagCorona).

From numerous quantitative studies and in-depth interviews with astronauts, submariners, Antarctic scientists and others, we identified a range of practical strategies that could be used to deal with the unusual psychological and interpersonal demands on people.

Based on the prior work, we were quickly tasked by those involved in the COVID-19 rapid response in the NHS to produce an up-to-date, evidence-based curriculum for staff providing support to frontline workers. Users in the NHS needed this information quickly, noting that they had a two-week period to get people prepared for a surge in cases by which point staff would have limited time to focus on learning and development.

We mobilised an expert working group, including world-leading academics, practitioners and designers. Guided by the needs of our NHS colleagues, we rapidly produced and peer reviewed one-

a need for visible leadership, for physical safety needs to be met, and to normalise psychological responses in an unprecedented situation.

The BPS and eight other professional bodies have also published guidance for psychological professionals during the crisis. It covers five areas – keeping psychological services and therapies open, maintaining training programmes for psychological professions, remote delivery of therapy and interventions, taking a psychological approach to prevention, care and treatment, and supporting NHS staff, organisations and teams.

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page briefing notes on key issues that had been identified as important for frontline workers. We were also receptive to input from others collating potential useful preexisting resources.

All of the material developed and pulled together is available at www. supporttheworkers.org. As would be expected, some of the content on Support The Workers focuses on trauma and mental health, but we also see a broader application and the potential for behavioural and psychological science to contribute to other areas, such as promoting safety-related behaviour and high performing teams.

Our team’s role in the response to this pandemic is small, but one that we hope makes a difference and contributes to supporting those affected by the crisis. To all of the psychologists who are working tirelessly alongside frontline workers and in the community, thank you so much.

Dr Nathan Smith Research Fellow, University of Manchester

How are psychologists responding?

Dr Julie Highfield, who led the COVID-19 coordinating group’s staff wellbeing subgroup, is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in Wales’ largest Critical Care Unit in Cardiff.

Since the outbreak reached the UK, Highfield has been involved in supporting her team through a period of rapid planning and change, and helping them to stay calm and communicate effectively. ‘My support with C-19 patients is just starting, and I am trying to work out how to support the staff with video links to patients who are less sedated… We are working out how we might provide

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family support over telephone links.’

Highfield has been invited, by her Health Board, to become part of a group considering the wellbeing of wider staff groups. ‘It’s hard to slow down all this knee-jerk reaction, but I truly think that systems need psychologically informed action, not psychological intervention, now. Upping access to counselling and psychotherapies is probably not the most prudent use of resources, it’s better that they support managers and systems to “contain” distress, just as much as we are trying to contain the virus. We have to be very careful of encouraging emotional processing of trauma when right now people are not in safe spaces to do this – let’s think

about principles of psychological first aid instead.’

Trauma clinician, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, and clinical academic (UCL) Dr Jo Billings and colleagues Dr Michael Bloomfield, a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Traumatic Stress Clinic and academic at UCL, and Senior Lecturer and trauma researcher Dr Tayla Greene, have formed a COVID-19 trauma response working group.

Billings said the group knew they were in a unique position, as trauma specialists, to collate academic and clinical evidence and best practice guidelines to share advice with colleagues in acute hospital trusts and throughout the NHS to help support the psychological needs of staff.

‘Be prepared for a period of psychological adjustment’ Getty Images

Public uncertainty around COVID-19, the ongoing lockdown, and the possibility of further restrictions, could make things worse and possibly intolerable for those already living with anxiety-based obsessive-type conditions. Furthermore, the period of social isolation – coupled with the need for increased hygiene practices – could lead others to develop new obsessive-type behaviours. Planning to support people in this situation should begin now.

At present, the official advice to people is avoidance through social distancing, isolation where possible, hand washing, and more recently the washing of groceries. Some people may display excessive hand washing as it could be the only ‘active’ protective behaviour that people can control fully themselves, providing some sanctuary and comfort. It is not unheard of for some individuals to set alarms and reminders to wash on a regular basis e.g. every 30 minutes, even if they have not done anything to compromise their cleanliness in the interim. There are various memes and social media posts that encourage the instruction of correct washing to be accompanied by music or lyrics of the user’s choice, and as such, this ‘gamification’ of washing and strict routines may further encourage excessive behaviour. It could become a habit-forming psychological ritual, and possibly even a superstitious token for good luck.

When individuals are fearful and isolated, they may panic and lose the ability to remain in control. A recent Lancet rapid review of 24 articles concerning the impacts of quarantine showed most studies reported negative psychological effects, including confusion, anger and traumatic stress.

UK charities including Childline, OCD UK, AgeUK and Mind have all reported a surge in people contacting them for reassurance and support due to heightened anxiety about both the pandemic and the first week of isolation. On 6 March, the World Health Organization acknowledged that the COVID-19 response generated stress, and advised people to avoid watching, reading or listening to news that causes feelings of anxiety or distress.

TV news, then, has a responsibility to get the balance of reporting right. With on-screen graphs of steeply increasing infection rates, alarming international mortality comparisons,

coverage that represents news as ‘emergency’ bulletins, and a lack of any experts who can provide definite answers and reassurance, viewers would be advised to take a routine ‘time-out’. It is very tempting for journalists to publish the ‘worst-case’ statistics and ignore the more comforting projections: this happened with reporting of the swine flu epidemic in 2009. Thankfully, there are many qualified and sensible doctors and experts on social media who are making great efforts to communicate details about the situation in non-alarmist and accessible ways. They are worth looking up.

Looking at reliable sources such as Public Health England, Public Health Wales or NHS Scotland will also be beneficial and less alarming in tone and nature.

It is evident to see there will be a huge psychological impact upon a vast number of people when emerging from social isolation that will not be remedied overnight once any ‘all-clear’ is given. We should prepare for a period of psychological adjustment, both personal and professional.

Professor Craig Jackson Birmingham City University

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the psychologist may 2020 news and views Billings said they intended to support NHS colleagues by providing a trauma-informed response to the pandemic. Some of the group’s members are also feeding information to NHS England to align responses at local and national levels. ‘So far we have sought to gather best practice evidence and expert guidance and collate these resources on our website (traumagroup.org) making them available to everyone. One of our initial tasks from our local acute hospital trust was to produce a one-page document with practical advice for front line staff about coping with stress. To develop this we drew on current research, resources being developed by different clinical groups across the UK and expert opinion from colleagues in the working group.’ The group is currently compiling guidelines on early interventions to psychological trauma and compiling best practice evidence – summarising this in a document for planners and managers on how to support staff.

Health Psychologist, consultant and coach Dr Roseanna Brady has adapted some of her coaching work for medical consultants. ‘Given the pressures they are and will be under, finding flexible effective ways to support them is vital. This involves re-contracting with them individually and very likely on an ongoing basis as their needs change. The idea of SMS messaging targeting self-care was well received, so I am using that as well as telephone or video one-to-one sessions. The SMS messages are consistent with NHS approaches during this time and I am keeping up to date with the evidence and guidance. The telephone or video sessions are tailored to each individual as before.’

A number of psychologists have been working with the government in its response including Health Psychologist and Professor Susan Michie (UCL) who has been working as a member of the government’s COVID-19 Behavioural Science Advisory Group. As well as working to translate the behavioural science evidence base for policymakers, Michie and her colleagues have also written a number of articles for the BMJ Opinion on behavioural strategies to reduce the transmission of the virus, and the ways communities can be involved in managing the pandemic.

Professor Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) and colleagues have been working to advise government on the potential for public disorder in the face of challenges thrown up by COVID-19 as part of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.

The group wrote that large-scale rioting would be unusual in this type of emergency, while acts of altruism would be much more likely. The group made some suggestions to reduce any risk of public disorder, including that government should give clear and transparent reasons for its strategies, set clear expectations for how the response would develop and promote a sense of collectivism and community.

Both Michie and Reicher have written on this work for our website.

Changing roles

Highfield said she was a firm believer in creating systems which sustain wellbeing rather than ‘dancing around the

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Getting the message right We have known for some time that simply telling people about a health risk is often not enough to motivate people to take preventive action. This is particularly true of COVID-19, a virus which scientists are desperately trying to know more about. Informing us that we should be practicing good hand hygiene and social distancing behaviours by staying two metres apart from each other, is sound advice and is specific and achievable.

But we also need to know why this is important and how we can do this effectively over a sustained period of time. We need to know these measures are important for ourselves and protecting those most at risk around us.

Public health messages, particularly those in the media, which aim to arouse fear, often do little to motivate action. Instead there is a danger that such messages cause unnecessary anxiety and stress. For example, the recent Cancer Research UK obesity campaign was accused of ‘fatshaming’, being highly stigmatising, discriminating, and ultimately ineffective in reducing risk behaviour. Whilst good intentions were obvious, an opportunity to deliver an effective health message, with a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ was potentially missed.

Communicating sometimes complex information (such as statistics and large numbers) involving risk and uncertainty is challenging. We have systematic biases in the way we process information. These are sometimes referred to as emotional biases, or emotional reactions to health information, which may act as a barrier to people’s understanding.

This consequently diverts our attention away from the content of the message and leads us to focus on how the message makes us feel, rather than what we should do. We make fewer systematic decisions, which may limit our motivation to take preventive action. From the outside, it could be suggested the current lockdown was in some way triggered by images of people flocking to the beach, and crowds of people visiting the nearest country park, after being ‘encouraged’ to stay at home, rather than being ‘told’.

We know a huge amount about the dangers of poor communication of health messages; and particularly what happens when this goes wrong.

One of the seminal health communication papers explained the massive health and financial repercussions of the contraceptive pill scare of 1995, which was caused through a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of unpublished scientific data.

We may be in this for the long haul. But we have a responsibility to maintain a level of calm, and take the necessary steps to protect ourselves and others around us. Ignore the fear messages, and let the experts guide you through the statistics, the forecasting, and the steps you can take to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Dr Chris Keyworth University of Manchester

edges with resources’. ‘I draw from models such as the Job Demands Resources models, work from Michael West, Amy Edmondson’s work on Psychological Safety, and the recent Tavistock Model for organisations. As for COVID, well I am lucky to have a bright trainee who is digesting the limited literature on staff working in highly infections diseases, including work from people’s experiences of other outbreaks (MERS, SARS etc).’

Billings said her working group, being formed of clinical academics and specialist trauma clinicians, understood the demands of responding to clinical need as

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it evolves. ‘We are therefore working together to collate, disseminate and produce key communications to support our colleagues in the NHS as they deal with the physical and psychological demands of responding to Covid 19.’

Over the coming weeks Highfield said she imagined there would be a period of settling into the ‘new normal’ as she supports managers who are unable to think straight in the chaos, and coordinates low-level staff and family support. Beyond this, Highfield said she would be working to support teams to process their experiences and help to rebuild for a different future. ‘I do believe there will be some positives out of this – we are already learning some of the red tape is not needed and some processes are archaic, and I believe there will be posttraumatic growth.’

Billings said the UCL group would continue to collate evidence and best practice throughout the crisis to share with colleagues. ‘We anticipate that the psychological response to supporting staff will be phase-based, with initial focus on supporting staff with practical needs and self-care, and subsequently, as the crisis dissipates, will involve developing pathways for screening and treating staff with ongoing psychological distress.’

Brady said she will adapt her practice depending on the research and guidance which is disseminated and the feedback she receives from those she works with. ‘I will also be looking at how to provide online support to groups of healthcare professionals and find ways to do this without compromising confidentiality.’

‘We’re all facing the same issues’

A tweet Murphy sent out – a ‘mind map’ of the areas in which psychology could make a contribution to managing the pandemic – drew a huge response from psychologists and medical professionals from across the world. ‘It was a handwritten, scrawly thing… I think if I’d done a perfect thing with everything looking pristine, the response would have been much less. I’ve had comments from people all over the world. If I’d known that was going to happen I wouldn’t have posted it on a Saturday night – I didn’t sleep that night! I was replying to comments from the UK, then America, then there was a little pause and then there were things from Australia, I spoke to someone in Pakistan at about 4am, then there was someone in Armenia. On Sunday I got into a conversation with a Spanish doctor who was describing the experiences they’re having and how it’s affecting the staff.’

One of the contacts David made through the responses to his tweet was Dr Theresa Jones, a clinical psychologist and BPS member, based in Kenya, who had been involved in responding to a number of humanitarian crises including the Ebola outbreak in Africa. ‘A few days later she was taking part in the first meeting of the BPS Covid Coordinating Group! I’m so grateful to people for sharing. We’re all very much facing the same issues.’

from the chief executive Firstly, I want to send my best wishes to everyone at what is an extremely unsettling time for all of us.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented new challenges to everyone, and at the BPS we’ve been working to find out what it means for us and doing all that we can to support our members to respond to the crisis.

Sadly, we’ve had to cancel all our face-to-face events until at least the end of May, as well as BPS Conference 2020.

We will not be holding physical events until we are sure that it is safe to do so.

But the good news is that we do have some virtual events and CPD courses running. Being able to stay connected with each other is more important now than ever and if we can’t meet face-toface to network and collaborate, we can still do this online. That’s why I’m pleased to let you know that we’ve just launched Member Connect, our first all-member online community.

We’ve been planning our community

for several months now so while we didn’t intend for Member Connect to be used to connect psychologists during a global pandemic, there couldn’t be a more important time for you to have a platform to keep in touch and discuss psychology’s response to COVID-19.

We’ll also be keeping you right up to date with everything that’s happening on our transformation journey – sharing our plans for the future and giving you the opportunity to help shape our plans.

I am so proud of how quickly the whole organisation has reacted to the coronavirus pandemic, from the members who have produced vital resources for their peers to the BPS staff who have quickly adapted to remote working.

We were also able to form a coordinating group in double-quick time.

Our President David Murphy is chairing this, and it will be coordinating the Society’s response to the pandemic.

Psychologists have so much to offer in this situation, both in helping to react

to the initial crisis and as we set off on the long road back to normality. The BPS will be here at every step to support you in this vital work.

Please take care and continue to look after each other. If you think that there’s anything that the BPS could be doing in the current situation, get in touch and let me know.

Sarb Bajwa is Chief Executive of the British Psychological Society.

Contact him at Sarb.Bajwa@bps.org.uk

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the psychologist may 2020 news and views

The two psychologies of coronavirus

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Tim Sanders/www.timonline.info

There are two psychologies of relevance to the coronavirus pandemic, and which one we choose to guide policy and practice will play a big part in determining how we get through these difficult days and how we come out from them.

The first psychology sees people as fragile rationalists.

Our understanding of the world is distorted by multiple biases.

We find it hard to handle complex information, to deal with risk and uncertainty. We lack the will to deal with pressure and are liable to fold under threat. And all these tendencies are exacerbated when we come together in groups. Our reason atrophies, our emotions escalate and spread like an infection.

We lose control. We act irrationally. We panic.

According to this viewpoint, which developed with the rise of industrialisation and urbanisation and the formation of a mass society, people are the problem in a crisis. At best, they cannot look after themselves. At worst, they exacerbate the original problem through their dysfunctional responses: they strip the shops bare, they demand scarce medical resources that they don’t need, they refuse to abide by measures that are good for them, they squabble and they riot.

The implication of this view is a profound paternalism.

Since people are so child-like in a crisis, they need Government to look after them. This paternalism is embedded deep in some of the language of crisis management where the ‘first responders’ in an emergency refer to ‘blue light’ agencies such as the police, ambulance or fire services. It implies that government must communicate sparingly and simply lest people are overwhelmed by what they are told. And it even suggests that the measures used to mitigate against a crisis may have to be adjusted to deal with human frailties.

We have seen all these tendencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. But perhaps the last was the most controversial, when strict distancing measures were delayed apparently on the premise that people would soon be ‘fatigued’ and stop observing them. In this way, psychological considerations were put at odds with what medical science demanded, and failure to comply with these demands was explained in terms of psychological considerations.

The second psychology views people in much more constructive terms – constructive in the sense that we don’t distort information but rather create meaning and understanding with the tools available to us, and also constructive in the sense that we are well able to cope with our world, even in crisis. Moreover, in both senses we are more constructive when we come together in groups. We are better able to make sense of our world and better able to cope with the challenges we face in the world when acting with each other as members of a common group than when acting against each other as separate individuals.

The way in which collectivity creates resilience is particularly clear in crises. It is when people think of themselves as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ that they are most likely to accept measures that optimise the overall fight against coronavirus even if they personally are disadvantaged. And it as ‘we’ that people are coming together in innumerable mutual

aid groups – in streets, towns, as a nation – to give a level of support that the state could never provide. As so often in disasters, the real ‘first responders’ are the people themselves, way before any emergency services can arrive on the scene and the role of the state must be to scaffold, not substitute for that self-help.

This is all very well, you might say, but what then of all the evidence of panic buying, of the madness of those still congregating after lockdown. Certainly, some people may have acted selfishly and against the common good. However recent (unpublished) data suggests that stockpilers are a tiny percentage of the population and the real reason for shortages is the fragile ‘just in time’ supply chains of modern supermarkets. Equally, a large part of the problem of assembly has to do with people being forced to work by employers and having limited options of how to get there.

The main reason for non-compliance is less to do with dysfunctional psychologies than dysfunctional systems and dysfunctional practices. In effect, people are principally failing to comply with distancing measures due to lack of opportunity not lack of reason or willpower, and the response should be to provide more opportunities rather than deride the public.

In sum, then, we have a clear choice: on the one hand, a psychology which is at odds with the medical advice, which is counterposed to systemic interventions and which both disrespects and dismisses those who are best able to respond to this crisis; on the other hand, a psychology focussed on how best to implement the medical advice, which advocates for systemic change that makes optimal behaviours possible, and which harnesses the power of the group to face up to COVID-19.

Never has the contrast between the two psychologies been so stark, the different implications of each so clear, or the consequences of our choice so critical for humanity.

Professor Stephen Reicher University of St Andrews Professor John Drury University of Sussex Professor Clifford Stott Keele University See online version for references / links.

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Cook wins Spearman Medal The winner of the British Psychological Society’s 2020 Spearman Medal, Dr Richard Cook, was described by his nominator as a ‘leading international figure in social cognition and social perception research’. Cook (Birkbeck, University of London) has explored some fascinating areas of perception including mirror neurons and imitation, social perception, alexithymia and prosopagnosia.

Cook, who finished his PhD in 2012, has published almost 60 journal articles, more than 30 of those as senior author, with two of his most-cited papers including a theory of the origins and function of mirror neurons and the role

Dr Robin Cook

of alexithymia in the emotional symptoms of autism. Among many other topics Cook has explored face perception and social perception in neurotypical people, people with autism and prosopagnosia, including findings that inverted and upright faces use similar types of perceptual processing and that faces grab the attention of autistic people as much as neurotypical people. He has also led the development of new processes to identify prosopagnosia.

In 2013 Cook was named one of the ESRC’s Future Research Leaders; in 2014 he was awarded the Wiley Prize in Psychology by the British Academy; the Association of Psychological Science named him a Rising Star in 2015; and he was awarded a €1.5m grant in 2017 by the European Research Council to investigate the visual perception of social interactions. Among his many contributions to the literature Cook said his work in developmental prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognise faces, had led to some surprises. ‘I think 20 or 25 years ago people thought developmental prosopagnosia was just incredibly rare, maybe one case in 10,000, but the more work we do the more we realise if you’ve got a class of 100 people there’s a very good chance that somebody in that class will have face recognition problems that really interfere with their daily lives.’

Cook said, as well as seeing his first PhD student pass her doctorate, some of the highlights of his career so far have involved those people with prosopagnosia who have heard him

talk on the subject. ‘People seem really grateful for the research we’re doing and for trying to unravel some of the causes of this condition, and problems that come with it that really affect their lives. I think sometimes as academic psychologists we get a bit preoccupied with really theoretical questions so it’s always lovely when you actually meet people who have been really affected by what you’re studying and who are really grateful to find out more about it.’

In the coming years Cook said there was a specific puzzle he was particularly keen to help solve.

‘I’m really interested in the visual perception of the social world. One of the big questions I’m occupied with at the moment is how you understand social interactions. Since the 60s people have been studying how we process individuals, how you process individual faces, individual bodies, individual actions, but we don’t really know how you integrate that information together for the purposes of analysing social interactions.

Given how important it is for social learning and navigating the social environment it’s remarkable how little we know about that – I’d really like to find out more about that in the future.’

The Spearman Medal is awarded every year for outstanding published work in psychology which is completed within eight years of finishing a PhD. Nominations for the 2021 award will open this September, to find out more see: tinyurl.com/ vfqal2l

First national attachment survey

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Researchers are appealing for those working with children aged from birth to 13-years-old to complete the first ever national survey on attachment interventions. Led by Professor Pasco Fearon and Professor Peter Fonagy (UCL) the survey aims to reach teams and individual practitioners to

uncover the current UK practice of people working with children at risk of attachment problems, and/or their caregivers.

The researchers hope the survey results will reveal the current availability of support for these children and their families, should

assist in setting priorities for clinical practice and strengthen the evidence base of attachment interventions. If you work therapeutically, and face-toface, with children with attachment problems and/or their caregivers you can complete the 20-minute survey via tinyurl.com/attachmatter.

02/04/2020 17:27

the psychologist may 2020 news and views

#StayTogetherApart On Twitter via @psychmag we have been seeking to encourage ways of maintaining important social identities in times of physical distancing. As our own team adapts to new ways of working and tries to keep the issues coming, we have been very grateful for all your engagement.

In particular, we were blown away by this incredible collage by Dr Emma Norris from the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, made from back issues of The Psychologist.

If you’ve come up with any creative uses for copies of the magazine during isolation – a ‘found poem’, papier mache model, toilet paper substitute – we’d love to hear about it.

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02/04/2020 17:28

We need more people to provide professional training for our members.

They need access to good quality training sessions to maintain and enhance their skills and knowledge.

Webinars: These are interactive online presentations, usually around one hour.

You can share delivery with other presenters, and respond to audience questions. The webinars allow participants to access CPD regardless of their location.

Workshops: Typically a full day these faceto-face sessions are held at our London or Leicester office, with a maximum of 36 attendees. Presenters are paid a fee and expenses.

Deadline: Tuesday 27 May 2020.

W E W EL COME P R OP O SA L S ON A L L A R E A S OF P SYCHOL OGY Read our guidelines for submissions and submit your proposal online now

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Let us know if your proposal is related to our campaign priority

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02/04/2020 17:36

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COVID-19 – the research response Matthew Warren hears about rapid studies

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website

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he world is currently in an unprecedented state of upheaval and uncertainty. As countries fight to minimise the spread of COVID-19, everyone is adjusting to the ‘new normal’, remaining at home and practising social distancing. And the same is true of the psychologists whose work we report on every day on the Research Digest blog: labs have been shut and experiments have suddenly been put on hold in the wake of the pandemic.

But many psychologists have also begun launching new research to understand how the present crisis is affecting us, and to inform our response to it. In March I talked to some of these researchers to find out more about their work.

Monitoring our mental health

It’s clear that the new routines that we are following are going to be necessary for quite some time. A new study led by social epidemiologist Daisy Fancourt is asking how people are responding to these changes in lifestyle.

We already know that our mental health can be affected by isolation, says Fancourt, and there’s never been a situation where so many people have been required to remain physically separated from others.

‘We’ve not really had something like this in living history’, she says.

To that end, the team is examining the trajectories of people’s mental health during the pandemic – and investigating what kinds of activities can help protect against the negative effects of isolation. Participants – UK residents over 18 – first sign-up online via covid19study.org and fill in an initial, 10-minute survey.

Then, once a week, they automatically get sent a followup questionnaire asking about their experiences of COVID-19, how they’ve been spending their time, and their physical and mental health.

By tracking a large number of participants over time, the team hopes to figure out what people can do at home to protect their mental health. They are releasing the findings regularly to the public and to the government and health authorities. And they’re in it for the long haul, says

Fancourt. ‘As long as this pandemic is going on, and we’re having these isolation measures, we want to make sure that there is a way that we’re tracking the experiences of people.’

Fancourt emphasises that it is crucial that people stay home – doing so will save lives. And there are activities known to be good for our mental health that we can already be doing, she adds: practising music and arts, for instance, or volunteering and providing support for others in the community.

Amy Orben from the University of Cambridge is part of another team planning a large, year-long study tracking the responses of adolescents and adults during the pandemic. The researchers, who are currently in discussion with funders, plan on tracking participants’ mood and mental health through the use of an app, which will send questions to their phones on a regular basis.

Importantly, this app will also record behavioural data: what other apps people are using, for instance, and how long they are spending on their phones, as well as their movement and sleep patterns.

As in Fancourt’s study, the researchers hope the work will untangle how people’s activities relate to their mental health. They also plan on looking at how any events and announcements related to the pandemic affect participants’ responses. Orben says the team is keen to rapidly share data with the research community so that it can be analysed as quickly as possible.

For Orben, whose research focuses on the psychological effects of media use [listen to episode 19 of our Research Digest podcast PsychCrunch], one of the key questions will be how technology is being utilised in a time where face-to-face interaction is extremely limited.

‘I think it will allow us to move away from just thinking about time spent online and on screens to having more nuanced conversations about… what activities on screens are people actually engaging in’, she says. ‘Which ones of those are beneficial and help mitigate the effects of social isolation, and which ones might actually exacerbate stress?’

02/04/2020 17:41

the psychologist may 2020 digest

Exploring messaging and behaviour

Some researchers have already conducted preliminary research and published the results – as preprints, at least. Many of these studies have attempted to examine the value of different forms of public health messaging, or determine how people are behaving during the pandemic.

Take a recent preprint which surveyed more than 1000 Americans across two days in March. The team, led by Jim Everett at the University of Kent and Molly Crocket at Yale University, looked at how moral messages could promote public health behaviours. Participants read a Facebook post urging people to stay at home, which was either accompanied by a ‘deontological’ argument, telling people it was their duty to protect their community; a ‘utilitarian’ argument, asking people to think of the negative consequences of not making these sacrifices now; an appeal to virtue, reminding people that staying home is what a good person would do; or no moral argument. They then indicated how likely they would be to adopt public health-related behaviours like washing their hands after getting home, or avoiding public gatherings.

Participants were more likely to indicate they would share the deontological message – the one that appealed to their sense of duty – than a post with no moral argument or a virtue-based one. And there was some evidence that the deontological argument might increase people’s intentions to engage in health-related behaviours: participants reported a stronger intention to wash their hands after reading this message compared to the virtue-based one, for instance, although this effect did not reach statistical significance.

The study suggests that messages focused on citizens’ duties and responsibilities to others may be particularly useful. But the work is preliminary and there are important caveats: it only looks at people’s intentions rather than actual behaviour, and the effects are small and are not always significant. ‘What we’re very much not suggesting is that framing these judgments in more “deontological” ways is unequivocally going to have huge impacts on behaviour’, acknowledges Everett. But still, the findings are consistent with past work, he says, adding that even interventions that produce small changes could, together, have an impact in the pandemic. The team is now working with other groups to see whether similar effects are found outside of the United States.

Researchers have also looked at how differences in personalities influence how likely we are to accept constraints to our quality of life (like social isolation) in order to protect ourselves or others from the virus. Ingo Zettler and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen have posted a preprint based on a survey of 799 Danish citizens who completed personality questionnaires.

Participants who scored higher on the so-called ‘Dark Factor’ – which relates to people’s willingness to pursue their own interests at the expense of others – were less likely to accept these constraints. In contrast, those who scored higher on the trait of emotionality, who tend to be more anxious and empathetic, were more likely to follow them. The results suggest that some kinds of people may not be as responsive to messages from health authorities,

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says Zettler – although he points out that authorities have good reasons to keep messages clear and consistent, and that from a practical perspective it would be difficult to adapt messaging to particular personalities.

Other rapid studies have included research into Americans’ perceptions of risk and behaviours early on in the pandemic, how empathy relates to social distancing, and the ‘optimism bias’ when people consider the chance they will contract or pass on the virus. Again, it’s important to point out that most of this research consists of preprints which have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Proceeding quickly…

These studies represent just a snapshot of the work psychologists are conducting in the midst of the current crisis. J Nathan Matias from Cornell University and Alex Leavitt from Facebook Research have set up the COVID-19 Social Science Research Tracker, in which researchers can record details of projects they are working on. As of the beginning of April, there are more than 160 projects listed, on everything from the spread of conspiracy theories to the effects of remote teaching on education.

The aim of the list is to help researchers who are planning studies find ways of working together and determine where they should be channelling their efforts, says Matias. The tracker will also ensure people are aware of new results as they become available.

Other networks are also getting involved in the response. The Psychological Science Accelerator, a network of labs which collaborate on large-scale studies, recently put out a call for ‘rapid and impactful studies’ to understand the psychological side of the pandemic.

The group has decided to go ahead with three of the proposals, including a study that will examine the behavioural benefits of framing public health information in terms of gains (e.g. lives saved) rather than losses (e.g. deaths). Several journals have also joined an initiative calling for submissions of Registered Reports on research related to COVID-19.

… but with caution

While researchers conduct rapid research and stick preprints online, there’s another key effort that scientists can get involved in, says Matias: peer-review. ‘As we move quickly to organise the production of new knowledge, we absolutely need people who can take the time to look through those preprints… and get us to the point of verified knowledge in time for it to be useful’, he says.

Orben echoes these concerns: ‘Just because things are urgent doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be scrutinised.’ That scrutiny itself will need to become more instantaneous, she adds. Many journals, including the British Journal of Social Psychology and the British Journal of Health Psychology are already promising expedited peer review of papers related to the pandemic.

Other psychologists have warned that the pressure to conduct and publish research at a breakneck speed is leading the community to accept flawed work that would not pass scrutiny were it not for the crisis. ‘I do feel that our concern about the extremely unusual and serious

02/04/2020 17:41

situation we’re in leads us to overlook the potential costs of conducting and consuming research in emergency mode. Let’s not let our guard down before we’ve considered the consequences’, wrote Anne Scheel in a blog post for The 100% CI in late March. And researchers have also stressed that this rapid response needs to be informed by past work, whether that consists of studies into outbreaks specifically, or just well-grounded psychological science more generally. ‘The first rule of preventing harm is learning from what’s been done before’, tweeted Vaughan Bell recently. ‘If it’s urgent, the urgency is to do it right.’

And although many researchers are able to conduct psychological research in the midst of a pandemic, Matias emphasises that not everyone is in a position to do so.

‘A lot of people have been impacted themselves in ways that make it difficult to continue research. And that’s okay’, he says.

For those who do have the time or means to do so, however, it can be rewarding. ‘It’s easy to feel quite helpless at the moment’, says Everett. ‘I’m really glad I’m doing it – it makes me feel like I am perhaps able to contribute in some small part.’

See online version for hyperlinks.

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Our eating habits are influenced by norms on social media, according to a recent study. Researchers found that the more people believed Facebook users were eating fruit and veg, the more they ate themselves. Participants’ consumption of unhealthy snacks, on the other hand, was only influenced by how much they believed users should eat junk food. The findings point to possible ways to nudge people into more healthy behaviours. Appetite

Digest digested An analysis of millions of pages of text scraped from the internet has found that gender prejudice is more common in languages with grammatical genders. In these languages, positive terms like lucky or pleasure tended to be more often associated with male gender words like man or his than female gender words like woman or hers. Genderless languages didn’t show these skewed associations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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A new theory proposes that emotions are represented in the brain in a similar way to visual information. A small, spherical part of cortex appears to encode three key aspects of emotion – intensity, polarity and complexity – using three overlapping gradients, similar to the way

certain visual information is mapped in visual cortex.

The team have dubbed the process ‘emotionotopy’.

Nature Communications Men’s tendency to tend to overestimate women’s sexual interest may not have an evolutionary basis, as past work has claimed. In a dating experiment, researchers found that overestimation of a potential partner’s sexual interest could partly be explained by participants projecting their own interest onto their date. This tendency was more common in men, but the team suggest that this is more likely to be a cognitive bias than an evolutionary adaptation for boosting reproductive success.

Psychological Science

02/04/2020 17:44

the psychologist may 2020 digest Getty Images

A series of studies involving thousands of participants has shown that we judge who should be in power based on our beliefs about who God is. People who saw God as white and male tended to prefer white men for leadership positions, for instance, while even in made-up scenarios about alien planets, people made inferences about who should be in charge based on the characteristics of the aliens’ deity.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Selfiesteem Larissa Terán and colleagues at the University of Arizona asked 278 teenage girls, aged 14 to 17, how frequently they share selfies, and how often they edit their pictures using various different tools (e.g. smoothing skin or making themselves look thinner).They also asked participants how much effort and time they spent choosing photos of themselves to post online, and how concerned they were about the reception these posts receive.

Getty Images

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Participants also completed a questionnaire on self-objectification (a phenomenon in which people view themselves as objects rather than human beings), and answered questions on anxieties about their appearance and how they would evaluate their own looks.

Those who spent more time editing, thinking and worrying about selfies were more likely to see themselves as objects than those who did not. This self-objectification, in turn, was linked to greater anxiety and body shame amongst participants, and worse evaluation of their own looks. But sharing selfies more frequently was not associated with greater self-objectification or body shame.

Whether editing selfies actually causes concerns about appearance, however, is not so clear. It’s possible that those who already have negative body image are more likely to edit pictures in the first place: their selfesteem is already wavering or low, so they feel the need to edit out hated flaws. Still, the results suggest that the context in which selfies are taken and shared may be more important than anything inherent to the act itself.

Emily Reynolds

Getty Images

There’s been a lot of back and forth in both the academic literature and the media about the psychological effects of taking and sharing selfies.

Some research suggests that taking pictures of yourself can dent your self-esteem, while other studies have found that selfies can be a source of empowerment. Now a new study suggests that taking selfies may not itself be damaging: instead, it’s editing images that really hurts our self-esteem.

02/04/2020 17:46

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02/04/2020 17:52

As you will know, we have had to cancel or postpone all face-to-face BPS events until further notice due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you had already booked onto an event and we’re not able to reschedule, you will receive a refund.

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Keep your eyes on our website for the latest updates on webinars and our new portfolio of events. We hope our online training will prove useful to you or a colleague, and most importantly hope that you stay well at this time.

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02/04/2020 17:53

Frederik Anseel ‘Science is a world without walls’ Zoe Sanderson (University of Bristol) meets Professor Frederik Anseel, current President of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, who will hold their biennial conference in Glasgow in 2021.

Frederik Anseel has recently moved from London, where he was Vice Dean Research at King’s Business School at King’s College London, to become Associate Dean of Research at UNSW Business School in Sydney, Australia. He is the current President of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP). Zoe Sanderson caught up with him to discuss how psychology is changing across Europe, the academic-practitioner divide, and what we can expect when the next EAWOP conference comes to Glasgow in 2021.

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You’ve worked in several European countries, recently including the UK, and have a unique vantage point on work and organizational psychology across the continent through your involvement in EAWOP. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in panEuropean cooperation in psychology in recent years?

I often get asked ‘what is the European perspective?’ on a particular topic… the answer always is ‘there is none!’ because all the different European countries have their own unique perspectives on psychology.

For example, psychology in the Netherlands is very closely related to the UK and US traditions, but French psychology includes many more critical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, and in Germany there is a strong cognitive tradition and a focus on measurement.

Organizations like EAWOP bring this diversity together so we can learn from each other, especially at the conference.

Having said that, in recent years I’ve noticed more convergence between psychological traditions.

I remember when I attended my first EAWOP conference in Lisbon in 2003, my submission was rejected. I wanted to present a study on feedbackseeking behaviour from my dissertation. At that time, feedback-seeking behaviour had existed in the US literature for 20 years and was fashionable, but the committee judged that there wasn’t enough evidence on this subject to warrant a presentation at the conference. This shows the wide differences in

perspectives and knowledge that existed then across Europe, and between Europe and the rest of the world.

When I went to the conference, I remember at times it felt very exotic because there were all sorts of research perspectives and questions, some of which you don’t see any more.

In academia we have all been pushed into the same mould of how to do research and publishing. Visitors from the US and Canada tend to comment that the quality of the EAWOP conference is increasing, which is code for ‘we recognise this paradigm more so we feel like it is higher quality research’. We are internalising the US model across Europe in psychology, asking more similar kinds of research questions. There are some benefits to this, of course. Sharing knowledge and building on each other’s expertise is easier when we have common frames of reference, rather than many narrow research traditions that speak their own languages, sometimes literally. On the other hand, this represents a loss of perspectives and some valuable research traditions.

Do you notice any resistance to this tendency towards homogenisation and the spread of US norms in European psychology?

One of the mission statements of EAWOP is to build psychological capacity across Europe in different people and countries. Some people think we need to be more restrictive in who we allow to present at the EAWOP conferences, saying ‘why don’t you raise the bar and only allow star researchers to present their work?’. We don’t want that! Developing psychology in Europe involves focusing on young people and including people from all countries. We accept PhD students and encourage them to present their first studies to gain experience. I find that very important, even if it creates some variety in quality; we’ve all had to learn some time.

How would you characterise the distinctiveness of UK psychology within Europe?

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the psychologist may 2020 interview

something. My main encouragement to academics is to get out of the building they work in. Work and organizational psychologists have to physically go into organizations in order to understand the problems, for example.

Talk to people. We need to develop shared understandings of problems with the people who eventually will use our research, and only then can we ever expect to have an impact, by which I mean changing things in reality.

I started doing this very early in my career because I get bored of sitting at my desk.

I spent time with friends in industry, and this shaped my research questions. Although I’ve never really experienced the academia-practice gap, I can see that the incentives for academic progress are misaligned with this kind of practical impact. Academics need to let go of the need to produce large quantities of papers. I would be happy with people having only 10 publications over their entire careers, as long as those are meaningful publications that have engaged with a real problem in the real world and changed something. Research should add value to society.

UK psychology has an amazing intellectual tradition of extraordinary quality, scope, and breadth. You lead the world. This rich research tradition is a strength, but also a weakness. Elsewhere in Europe, we don’t have to deal so much with the weight of tradition you do in the UK. When you have psychologists who have been doing research in a certain way since the sixties, sometimes it’s hard to get new ideas off the ground.

Take the open science and replicability revolution that is happening in psychology right now, for example.

Globally, it’s being led by the Netherlands. They are a very small country, but they’re probably the most progressive and uncompromising ones in the whole debate. Now many UK departments are following them, but tradition may be slowing you down.

We often talk about the challenges of bridging the academic-practitioner divide, although of course many psychologists belong to both these groups at various times. You’ve moved fluidly between academia and practice throughout your career. What are the main conditions for successfully navigating between these worlds?

Most academics think about impact wrongly. I’m frustrated by the current approach of valorisation, in which academics research questions that fill a gap in the literature, publish their findings, and then try to throw a finished product towards end users. If their website or blog is read by enough people, it counts as success. This is not impact. Impact is changing something with your research.

This approach to impact requires that research questions are driven by the people who need

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What are the challenges of this kind of approach in your experience?

In Belgium and the Netherlands, academia is very close to business, society, and government. It is highly esteemed. Companies listen to academics and respect the value of research. Professors write in mainstream publications. In London, I found that the distance between universities and society was much bigger. In the UK, you have the best researchers in the world, so it amazes me how far removed they are from public debate, and how little value is attached to their views by society.

How is the UK’s changing role in Europe likely to affect psychology?

Brexit wasn’t the main reason EAWOP chose to have our next conference in Glasgow, but we felt strongly that we didn’t want to allow barriers to be built between the UK and Europe in psychology: science is a world without walls. We don’t want to lose the UK, so if the UK does not come to us, we will come to the UK. We will not let go of you!

As European funding pulls away from the UK due to Brexit, there is a risk that our research and practice collaborations are disrupted, so we need to be more proactive, resisting the idea that only money determines co-operation. We chose to have the conference in Glasgow because we want to reach out to UK colleagues and say ‘even if there is no European money, we will make partnerships work, because we all benefit from that’. We all face similar challenges and there’s strength in standing together.

Let’s talk more about the EAWOP conference that will be hosted by the BPS in Glasgow in May 2021.

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What are your hopes for that event?

I would love to see an injection of practitioner perspectives and ideas. I want all the practitioners who normally go to the Division of Occupational Psychology conference to come to the EAWOP conference, shake us up, and change us! We will have 1000 to 1200 of the best academics in work and organizational psychology in Europe together for three days, so this is a unique opportunity to influence research for years to come. If practitioners come to the conference, they can set the research agenda, and in four years’ time, hopefully we’ll have answers to the research questions they’re asking.

What might tempt psychologists who don’t specialise in work and organizations to come to this event?

Work and Organizational Psychology is an applied discipline. We’ve taken basic theories, insights and methods from cognitive, clinical and social psychology, built on them and refined them to better understand people’s careers and the role of work in their lives.

I think psychologists working in the more fundamental subdisciplines in psychology might be amazed to see how far we’ve come with their theories at explaining and predicting behaviour in the ‘real world’ so to speak. Maybe the time has come for these applied developments to come back and inform more basic theories. Come and check us out if you don’t believe me!

What are you looking forward to most about the conference?

The experience of the conference as President is a very stressful one. I don’t sleep a lot. I get excited if people from all sorts of traditions seem to be mingling and enjoying themselves. And when people come to me and say ‘I’ve just been to a great session, this is the best talk I’ve heard in the last five years’, this makes my conference! Often a buzz develops around certain sessions, and it’s very difficult to predict what they will be. Last year a session on computational modelling was the talk of the town. When the standing-room only session was finished, the audience was so excited that the session just went on for another hour in the hallway. Computational modelling: who would have thought? It’s always a surprise!

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In a recent publication you described the push and pull factors that you see shaping academic work and organizational psychology, such as the opportunities of data abundance and digitalisation, but also low reproducibility rates, alarming levels of mental illness among academics, and critiques about relevance.

Many of these concerns relate equally strongly to other fields of academic psychology. What should be the priorities for how we respond to these challenges and opportunities?

We must get rid of our learned helplessness. I see so many pieces about crises, about how academia is heading in the wrong direction, as if we are passive

victims of some distant dictator. We are academia.

We can do what we want, as long as we do it collectively. For example, how will we deal with the publisher abuse model? If we collectively take possession of this issue, we’re very powerful!

For instance, in the Netherlands, a couple of universities have resisted by making everything publicly available. This is very strong. Psychology departments are strong in universities because we have lots of students. If psychology departments collectively say no to certain funding or publication models, we can change those things. Every time somebody is appointed as the editor of the journal, or a Dean in a department, they need to take a stand. I get frustrated when I see nostalgic reports about how academia used to be better. Academia is us. Change it!

Your term as EAWOP President ends in 2021.

What are you hoping will be the legacies of your leadership?

First, I hope we make progress in bringing academics and practitioners together. Second, I want us to be open to new approaches and innovations, such as the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology movement of academics and practitioners who are working to change this field together. The leadership of organizations like EAWOP must listen and give space for grassroots movements like these to grow, but also need to keep our distance so they can thrive.

Thirdly, we want to preserve the mission of EAWOP to develop capacity in work and organizational psychology across Europe, so we must not become elitist and we must work hard to include all countries.

You’ve been away from Europe and a resident of Australia for around three months. What do you miss most?

When I was in London on almost a daily basis we would have visitors from all over the world. People deliberately stop in London on their way around the world and can quickly go from there to many places in the UK. It’s academic heaven! On any given day, you can attend a seminar by a world leading scholar in your domain. Australia is more isolated, so it’s harder to get people to come. It’s a privileged position for the whole world to land on your doorstep to come and talk to you. That’s something I miss.

I don’t miss the daily crowded commutes on the tube, however!

And are the wines as good in Australia?

No. I’ve been researching this carefully for several months now and I haven’t yet found an Australian red that can match my favourite Italian ones. Please don’t tell my new colleagues.

See also https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/work-worldstage where Zoe Sanderson (University of Bristol) hears from Dr Roxane Gervais and Dr Jon Cox about plans for the EAWOP Conference in Glasgow, May 2021.

02/04/2020 17:59

the psychologist may 2020 interview

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02/04/2020 17:59

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02/04/2020 18:06

Learning in unexpected places Elian Fink and Jenny Gibson on the importance of play in early childhood

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past 20 years. Nevertheless, strong evidence for a causal inverse link between play opportunities and mental health difficulties has not yet been established.

Of course the lack of evidence does not mean we can conclude that play is irrelevant to children’s health and wellbeing. There are credible hypotheses linking play to children’s social development and, in turn, there is ample evidence supporting the importance of strong social relationships for mitigating risk of mental health difficulties in children and young people. In a now classic 12-year longitudinal study, Bagwell and colleagues (1998) found that having successful peer relationships in primary school was associated with greater adult adjustment and wellbeing, while children without a meaningful peer relationship were more likely to experience poor mental health in adulthood.

Play and mental health Our research aims to understand the significance There are important reasons why the role of play of play as a context to build and learn about social in the social development of school-aged children relationships from infancy through is gaining the attention of to early childhood, in order to researchers. There have been support those children who may be reports of a ‘mental health crisis’ “…many young children, struggling with peer relationships. among children and young especially those in people, and some commentators childcare settings, have explicitly linked this to Sharing play declining opportunities for play experience sustained Picture a caregiver and infant and for autonomy (Gray, 2011). interactions with other playing together. They are likely However, empirical research is children, which then face-to-face… baby babbles and needed to test these claims. Recent data from England suggest a provides the opportunity to coos, and caregiver responds. small but steady increase in the play and form meaningful This early turn-taking with caregivers, hinging on shared prevalence of all types of mental relationships with others” positive emotion, is the earliest health difficulties in children form of social play. As children aged 5-15 years, and this increase develop new cognitive and social is slightly greater for emotional skills, their play becomes increasingly sophisticated. difficulties such as depression and anxiety (Sadler et By three years of age most children are able to make al., 2018). Meanwhile, it is very difficult indeed to up fantasy worlds, take on pretend identities and, find data supporting the idea of a decline in children’s crucially, share this with a play partner. This shift independent, free play opportunities – although towards more sophisticated play is accompanied there is a wealth of anecdotal reports. A rare piece of by a change in children’s preferred play partners – evidence documenting a decline in play opportunities from adult caregivers to siblings and peers, implying is Baines and Blatchford’s (2019) study of school that children become less reliant on adult support breaktimes, showing a decline in free time over the hildren are learning all the time.

Our team at the University of Cambridge – Social Play, Social Lives – is researching the things children learn when adults may not be expecting it. Unstructured play with friends and classmates is a key focus of this research, as it is thought to be an important context for developing and refining children’s social and communication skills.

Surprisingly, very little research has conclusively linked informal peer play opportunities to children’s social development.

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02/04/2020 18:14

the psychologist may 2020 play Eliza Southwood/www.elizasouthwood.com

When you picture children learning, do you see rows of chairs in a classroom, children poring over worksheets, flash cards on the wall, ‘carpet time’ with a story told by the teacher? These are not the only situations where learning takes place…

during play and more interested in sharing play with age-mates who have similar interests (Dunn, 1994).

The sharing of play, and in particular pretend play, is considered a form of intimacy between play partners.

Those young children who don’t yet have the skills to directly communicate aspects of self in conversation can use themes of pretend play with others to convey something about their own preoccupations and concerns (Dunn & Hughes, 2001; Parker & Gottman, 1989). Play is therefore an important context in which children can form relationships with others. Unlike the parent-child relationship, young children form new relationships with other adults, siblings and peers based on multiple sustained play interactions, rather than repeated and sensitive caregiving interactions (Howes, 1996). As a result, many young children, especially those in childcare settings, experience sustained interactions with other children, which then

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provides the opportunity to play and form meaningful relationships with others.

By the age of three years, children form preferences within their peer group – even when they’ve had equal opportunity to interact with the whole group (Ross & Lollis, 1989). Importantly these early child friendships are stable, with preschool children tending to be friends with the same play partner for over two years (half their life!). These early friendships importantly create a social context in which skilful and complex play interactions can occur. Even well-acquainted toddlers are able to engage in pretend play together before 24 months of age (Howes & Matheson, 1992; Howes et al., 1992).

The complexity of play with friends increases with development. Non-friends spend considerably more time negotiating whether play will or will not occur, in comparison with friends (who get on and play

02/04/2020 18:14

together quickly). When conflict arises within play, as it inevitably does, friends are more effective at negotiating and resolving this conflict than non-friends, allowing friends to get back to play more quickly (Laursen & Hartup, 1989).

By the time young children start school – a time in which they must enter a new social environment with unknown peers and limited adult intervention in social interactions – the play skills they have learnt in their toddler and preschool friendships allows them to successfully engage in play with new acquaintances. This provides opportunities to form lasting friendships with new classmates.

Seeking causal links Together with the Social Play, Social Lives team we have conducted a large study of over 240 children.

We have followed these children from the transition to school in Reception (at age four) through to Year 2 (age six) to better understand how play may facilitate social and emotional development in the early years

Key sources

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Bagwell, C.L., Newcomb, A.F. & Bukowski, W.M. (1998). Preadolescent friendship and peer rejection as predictors of adult adjustment. Child Development, 69(1), 140-153.

Baines, E. & Blatchford, P. (2019). School break and lunch times and young people’s social lives: A follow-up national study. http://www.breaktime.org.uk Dunn, J. (1994). Changing minds and changing relationships. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children’s early understanding of mind: Origins and development (pp. 297-310).

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dunn, J. & Hughes, C. (2001). ‘I got some swords and you’re dead!’: Violent fantasy, antisocial behavior, friendship, and moral sensibility in young children. Child Development, 72(2), 491-505.

Gibson, J.L., Fink, E., Torres, P.E. et al. (2019). Making sense of social pretense: The effect of the dyad, sex and language ability in a large observational study of children’s behaviors in a social pretend play context. Social Development, online advance publication.

Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of Play, 3(4), 443-463.

Howes, C. (1996). The earliest friendships. In W.M. Bukowski et al. (Eds.) The company they keep: Friendship in childhood and adolescence (pp. 66-86). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Howes, C. & Matheson, C.C. (1992). Sequences in the development of competent play with peers: Social and social pretend play. Developmental Psychology, 28(5), 961.

Howes, C., Unger, O. & Matheson, C.C. (1992). The collaborative construction of pretend: Social pretend play functions. SUNY Press.

Laursen, B. & Hartup, W.W. (1989). The dynamics of preschool children’s conflicts. MerrillPalmer Quarterly, 35(3), 281-297.

Parker, J. & Gottman, J. (1989). Social and emotional development in a relational context: Friendship interaction from early childhood to adolescence. In T.J. Berndt & G.W. Ladd (Eds.) Peer Relationships in Child Development (pp. 95-131). Wiley.

Ross, H.S. & Lollis, S.P. (1989). A social relations analysis of toddler peer relationships.

Child Development, 60(5), 1082-1091.

Sadler, K., Vizard, T., Ford, T. et al. (2018). Mental health of children and young people in England, 2017. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/32622/1/MHCYP%202017%20Summary.pdf

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Elian Fink and Jenny Gibson are researchers in the Play in Education Development and Learning (PEDAL) Hub at the University of Cambridge.

Ef364@cam. ac.uk

of primary school (Gibson et al., 2019). Importantly, this study will allow us to empirically examine how the quantity and quality of children’s social play with peers may influence wellbeing and psychosocial health both concurrently and longitudinally.

Observations of children’s social play with classmates at ages five, six and seven, as well as detailed measures of children’s relationships with peers in the classroom and their social competencies, make this study uniquely positioned to answer causal questions of influence between play and social development.

First findings from this project (Gibson et al., 2019) showed that while there were predictable associations between children’s language skills and their ability to engage in pretend play with a peer, these associations were very small relative to the enormous influence a child’s play-partner had on the degree to which they engaged in pretend play. The importance of the social context for children’s play, while intuitive, is often overlooked when exploring child-child play, and may explain why a conclusive link between play and children’s social skills has so far eluded researchers.

Understanding the degree and direction of influence between social competence and play isn’t just a theoretical exercise. It has broad implications for interventions to support those children who may be struggling socially during the transition to formal school. If these causal relationships suggest that play facilitates social competencies, then a focus on providing children with opportunities to play with different peers to hone their play skills would be appropriate. If, however, social skills appear to support later more sophisticated and meaningful play interaction with peers, then additional support to develop social skills would be a fruitful approach to support these children.

Finally, within Social Play, Social Lives, we have also approached the question of the importance of play from a novel perspective, asking whether it is children’s own perceptions of themselves as playful, as well as peer perceptions of classmates’ playfulness, that are important when understanding the role of play for social development. For example, it may be that some children who struggle to initiate and maintain positive relationships with their peers have a mismatch between their own self-perceived playfulness in peer interactions and their peers’ perceptions of their playfulness. By combining different perspectives of play with a rigorous longitudinal approach, we hope that our research will make a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the importance of play in young children’s lives.

02/04/2020 18:14

the psychologist may 2020 play

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02/04/2020 18:14

Krishna Kulkarni

Play for adults is thriving. Adults are playing more often and in more diverse ways than at any time in recent history – perhaps than in all history. But what is it doing for us?

Dave Neale (pictured) is an Affiliate of the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at the University of Cambridge, and the designer of two board games aimed at adults: the escape-room game Unlock! Heroic Adventures and the forthcoming Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars. www.dneale.com Dan28@cam.ac.uk Twitter: @davenealewriter

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02/04/2020 18:19

the psychologist may 2020 play

A golden age of play for adults Dave Neale on a growing yet under-explored area

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ver the past decade, the video game industry has grown considerably, with the medium now reaching a third of the world’s population. Moreover, the primary consumer demographics for video and board games has shifted from children and teenagers to people in their twenties, thirties and forties (Patterson et al., 2019).

Along with this shift, we have seen the rise of other play experiences for adults, including ‘megagames’ (games played over a whole day and with up to 300 players); growing interest in roleplaying; record attendance numbers at game conventions worldwide; and the commercial success of ‘escape rooms’, where teams of adults solve puzzles to escape a locked room within a time limit (there are now over 2000 such rooms in the USA when just five years ago there were none). And, based on rapid industry growth and an exponential increase in the number of new releases, it has been claimed that we are in a golden age for board games. I would go further: we are in a golden age of play for adults.

This is striking because it is at odds with the dominant view in Western culture (and, indeed, many cultures) that play is largely confined to childhood.

The natural world appears to reflect this idea, with play behaviour prevalent in the juveniles of many species, but disappearing almost completely by adulthood.

One explanation for the prevalence of play in juveniles is that it is a motivating and engaging context for exploring the world, where failure is permitted and mistakes are learning opportunities. Consequently, reduction in play behaviour across development makes sense in evolutionary terms. The juvenile period is about adaptation and learning, and this learning leads to adult behaviour that is more fixed – optimised for reproductive success. Individuals who haven’t learned the most adaptive behaviours for their environment by the time they reach adulthood will be at a significant disadvantage compared to those who have.

To some extent, humans follow this model.

However, if we look more closely, we see that humans continue to play into adulthood more than most species. In fact, play in adulthood is embedded in many, and possibly all, of our cultures and throughout

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our history. This raises the fascinating question of what play in adulthood – apparently maladaptive in other species – is doing for humans. Given the recent rise of play experiences for adults, now is the perfect time to be asking this question.

Definitions First, we should be clear on what we mean by play in adulthood. There are three key attributes common to most definitions of play: play is enjoyable; voluntary; and done for its own sake (Neale et al., 2018). The fact it is done for its own sake is why, for example, someone kicking a ball around a field can be considered to be playing, while a professional footballer is not (because they are engaging with the game to earn a living, not for its own sake). Play is only play if an individual voluntarily engages with it as a desired activity in and of itself.

With this in mind, there appear to be two main ways adults play: • Adults frequently engage in playful interactions, rather than discrete episodes of play. Children, by contrast, frequently engage in episodes of play – perhaps even daily.

• When adults do engage in episodes of play, those episodes tend to be more circumscribed, more structured, and often have more defined rulesets than children’s play. Examples include games, roleplaying, escape rooms, and murder mystery parties.

The first of these ways is grounded in the concept of ‘playfulness’, which is the proclivity to reframe everyday situations as something more entertaining, stimulating or enjoyable – in other words, to turn those situations into play. This includes joking, teasing, and bringing a light-hearted, imaginative perspective into an interaction. Recent efforts to create and validate questionnaires to assess adult playfulness have seen some success (Proyer et al., 2019).

The second type of play, through circumscribed, structured episodes, has a long history spanning continents and cultures. Games based on swimming and archery are depicted in cave paintings that are at least 7000 years old; archaeological evidence suggests board games may have been present 8000 years

02/04/2020 18:19

and there’s a proliferation of games for training in various professional domains today, including medicine and business management.

Games increase adults’ engagement, and this can lead to enhanced learning (Hamari et al., 2016). Beyond games, play in general has workplace benefits, with evidence that the introduction of play episodes can reduce negative The apes who never grow up and stress, increase Play and playfulness are clearly “Couples who score higher emotions group cohesion, and improve more central to adult lives than on play questionnaires, work quality, commitment and is commonly supposed, but why are humans different to and those who say play is overall performance (Guitard et al., Play may be of benefit in other animals in this regard? an essential part of their 2005). the workplace through stimulating One potential answer is that as relationship, report higher creative thinking, encouraging a species our strength is in our capacity to learn and adapt across relationship satisfaction” exploration, relieving stress, and fostering positive social interaction. the lifespan, evolving culturally as However, introducing play into well as biologically. Our lifelong the workplace needs to be done predilection for play may be part of with care to be effective. For example, games need to what underpins this capacity – an idea consistent with be designed to engage and motivate players, and to the theories of Lev Vygostky and Johan Huizinga, who accurately reflect workplace objectives. Otherwise, it is both saw deep links between play and human culture. possible for employees to use games as escapism, or for A key feature differentiating humans from our games to lead to learning outcomes that are not workclosest relatives is the persistence of our child-like relevant, or even detrimental to work. Play can easily qualities; humans demonstrate neoteny, the retention become a distraction, or trivialise serious issues, if it of juvenile traits into adulthood. While chimpanzees’ is not introduced in the right way (which may be the faces change dramatically from thinking behind the traditional play-work dichotomy). infancy to adulthood, with the Key sources forehead receding and the brow protruding, human faces do not, Transforming the familiar and as adults we look more similar Brown, S. & Vaughan, C. (2010). Play: The potential for play to be maladaptive is also clear to a baby chimpanzee than an adult How it shapes the brain, opens the in the debate around video games and mental health. chimpanzee. Our evolutionary imagination, and invigorates the soul.

There is evidence that when engaged with obsessively, trajectory selected for the retention Avery.

Guitard, P., Ferland, F. & Dutil, E. (2005). video games could have negative psychological effects, of our juvenile traits, potentially Toward a better understanding of with the caveat that excessive game-playing may because some of those traits – playfulness in adults. OTJR: Occupation, represent an escape from problems, rather than the including curiosity, behavioural Participation & Health, 25(1), 9–22. plasticity, and a predilection for play Iizuka, A., Suzuki, H., Ogawa, S. – drove our success as a species. We et al. (2019). Can cognitive leisure are the apes who never grow up. activity prevent cognitive decline in older adults? A systematic review Another possible explanation of intervention studies. Geriatrics & for the presence of play in our adult Gerontology International, 19, 469–482. lives is that it has psychological Proyer, R.T., Brauer, K. & Wolf, A. (2019). and emotional benefits similar to Assessing other-directed, lighthearted, those proposed for childhood play intellectual, and whimsical playfulness (Whitebread et al., 2017). There is in adults: Development and initial validation of the OLIW-S using selfindeed now a small body of research and peer-ratings. European Journal indicating play-related benefits in of Psychological Assessment, online relation to various aspects of adult advance publication. life, including our work. Because Van Vleet, M. & Feeney, B.C. (2015). Play work is often conceived as the behavior and playfulness in adulthood. opposite of play, the idea of play Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(11), 630–643. being beneficial to work may appear Whitebread, D., Neale, D., Jensen, H. et as something of an oxymoron. Yet al. (2017). The role of play in children’s companies such as Google, whose development: A review of the evidence. offices include staff play areas, are The LEGO Foundation, Billund, leading the way in making play part Denmark. of working life. Games have been Full list available in online/app version. used for educating and training adults since the early 19th century, ago (Rollefson, 1992). Adult humans were playing games before they invented the wheel and before they invented writing. Games stand with oral storytelling and the visual arts as one of the earliest examples of humanity’s creative pursuits.

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Eliza Southwood/www.elizasouthwood.com

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02/04/2020 18:20

the psychologist may 2020 play

The perfect time to play There is much more to be said about how, when and why we play as adults, and this has been a necessarily brief overview of a diverse and expansive topic. Our species’ proclivity for play in adulthood has roots in our evolutionary history, and in various forms, has been a part of human cultures for thousands of years. As adults we play more often than is commonly supposed, and engaging in play and playful interactions may have psychological benefits for our work, mental health, and relationships.

Despite this potential importance, play in adulthood remains under-explored by psychologists.

In the modern world, where careers, relationships, and identities are more varied and change more frequently than they have in the past, and companies need to adapt rapidly to technological and societal change, play could be more important than ever as a tool to learn and adapt throughout our lives. This shift in societal norms might explain why we have entered a golden age of play for adults. It also means that now is the perfect time to explore play in our practice, research, and, perhaps most importantly, our private lives.

Play for adults is thriving. When we play, we thrive too.

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Eliza Southwood/www.elizasouthwood.com

cause of them (Barlett et al., 2008). However, there is a flip side to this, as studies have found that, when not used to excess, video games can have positive effects on wellbeing. They may help alleviate anxiety and depression, and – along with board games and puzzles – have been linked to better cognitive health in the elderly (Iizuka et al., 2019; O’Shea et al., 2019; Russoniello et al., 2019). The variety, novelty and engagement that play promotes may lead to the adaptive retention of cognitive functioning in later life.

This indicates how some psychological benefits may arise from play’s association with novelty. Through exploration, experimentation, and the ability to see things in a different light (for example, through a humorous or fantastical lens) play can transform the familiar into something new and exciting. And this brings us to a third area where research has identified a link to play in adulthood: romantic relationships.

A challenge to the maintenance of a romantic relationship is the gradual decrease in novelty, as each partner becomes more and more familiar with the other (Brown & Vaughan, 2010). In the early stages, romance is often playful, as couples engage in banter, teasing, in-jokes, rough-and-tumble play, and create pet names for each other. Maintaining this playfulness could be a factor in determining whether a relationship succeeds. Couples who score higher on play questionnaires, and those who say play is an essential part of their relationship, report higher relationship satisfaction. More broadly, play’s ability to introduce novelty, to foster positive emotions and social bonding, and to defuse stressful situations, could all be of benefit in personal relationships (Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015).

Psychology and game design My entry to board game design was through creating Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars, a mysterysolving game where players explore Victorian London to solve crimes.

That was some years ago, and, as a psychologist, seeing how players engage with games, mysteries, and each other, has been a fascinating experience.

Developing a game involves a lot of playtesting – giving it to a group, watching them play, and asking yourself some questions: ‘Is it engaging?’, ‘What kind of experience are they having?’, ‘Is it appropriately challenging?’ Even apparently superficial changes can affect player experience – for example, players respond differently to drawing cards than rolling dice (even if the odds of success are the same) and may use a playing piece differently depending on how it looks and feels.

One way to view engaging gameplay is as a combination of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow with group dynamics. Games can create a collective flow state, where players are immersed in the game world. A concept from play theory that is partly analogous to this is that of the magic circle, the bounded play-experience that has its own rules, logic and character. Game design is partly about maintaining this circle – this collective flow – through a combination of visuals, player-interaction, and interesting challenges.

For this to work, the challenges must be pitched at an appropriate level. Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), often applied when considering the developmental benefits of play, is applicable to the practice of game design. A game where players operate in their ZPD is likely to be engaging, stimulating, and an opportunity for learning and development – even if only in terms of becoming a better player.

In these ways, and many others, the intersection of psychology and game design can generate useful insights for people from both sides of the disciplinary divide. After all, 90 per cent of board game design is about observing and curating people’s experiences, thoughts and social interactions – it’s hard to get closer to the essence of psychology than that.

02/04/2020 18:21

Tina Vedrine www.thevedrines.com

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02/04/2020 18:24

the psychologist may 2020 the laughing baby

Caspar Addyman ‘Babies really enjoy being babies’ Annie Brookman-Byrne asked Caspar Addyman about his new book, The laughing baby: The extraordinary science behind what makes babies happy.

Why baby laughter?

This isn’t entirely a book about baby laughter… it’s about the experience of a baby. One thing I noticed in my research is that babies really enjoy being babies.

The main goal of The laughing baby is to go through the first two years of life and ask, why is it fun?

Why are they enjoying being a baby? And laughter, obviously, is the best possible marker of having a good time and being happy. So it becomes about laughter as a result of that.

In the book you said you were convinced that baby smiles are real. Can you explain that?

I did a survey of parents all over the world asking them: When was the first time your baby smiled?

When was the first time they socially smiled? When did they first laugh? What are the different things that make them laugh? And one of the things you hear over and over again, in all sorts of different places is that the earliest smiles are not real smiles – they’re trapped wind. And I completely reject that on the basis of the data. The parents said the first smile comes very early. It’s around six weeks or so, just the time when people say it would be this trapped wind. But this is coming from the parents, who better than anyone else know the nuances of what their own baby is doing.

And actually, I did get at least one parent who was a professional baby researcher, who knows how to spot a real, full Duchenne smile where all of the muscles in the face light up.

So did the idea that it’s trapped wind come from people just expecting babies aren’t capable yet?

The first smiles are not social smiles, which is a bit of a surprise to people. If you think about laughter and smiles as having this evolutionary mechanism to communicate, you’d think that the first smile would be in a social situation. And they’re not, they’re smiles of satisfaction and happiness, because they’re still too young to be making that social connection. I think

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because these early smiles aren’t directly to a person, people dismiss them. But actually, you also smile when you’re happy. And that’s what those babies are doing.

Is anyone else looking at baby laughter, or are you the only one?

There are a lot of people looking at babies’ sense of humour. Elena Hoicka at the University of Bristol looks at babies’ understanding of joke-like behaviour.

And there is a group in Paris, led by Rana Esseily, who’ve looked at whether laughter indicates an understanding of something – so the little laugh of eureka-like moments. They’ve done nice studies showing that babies laugh when they grasp a new task and can understand it and do it themselves.

There aren’t so many people looking at it from the point of view of positive affect. Way back in the 1970s Mary Rothbart did include laughter in the Infant Temperament Questionnaire as a measure of having a calm or excitable baby. But it was used as a marker of something, rather than a thing in itself.

Do you have a favourite anecdote about a baby laughing?

That’s a good question... I need to develop one.

Over the years I’ve had lots of videos sent to me and one of the more surprising ones certainly taught me something. There was this phenomenon, a YouTube video of a baby laughing at tearing paper. Dad was tearing up a bill and an eight-month-old baby found it very funny. So lots of people started trying that with their own baby. And indeed, it is something that lots of babies find really funny. The first instinct of psychologists was to say it’s a deeply cognitive thing, that they like the fact that this solid object is broken apart. Then one parent sent me a video of their six-week-old baby laughing at somebody tearing up paper – at which point all of the cognitive explanations had to be thrown out. Something in this

Caspar Addyman, Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of the Goldsmiths InfantLab C.Addyman@ gold.ac.uk.

02/04/2020 18:25

is universally appealing to babies. But at this point, I still don’t know what that is.

Why did you decide to write the book?

I was initially going to do it with my sister, who is a writer and had just had her second baby. And my brother is a stand-up comedian. We thought, he can make the baby laugh, and we’ll write about all the different things that make baby laugh over these two years. She ended up just being too busy. So I thought, right, do I still do this?

One of the things that’s really nice about working with babies is that in every study you have to explain clearly to the parents why you’re doing it. In a lot of studies with your undergraduate population or with adults, you whizz through the introduction and the informed consent, but with parents who are giving informed consent on behalf of the babies, you really want them to understand what the research is about.

It’s hard to explain science in an accessible way but we got lots of opportunities because with every single parent there was a chance to slightly improve. At the end of 10 years of explaining baby science to lots of parents, I want to explain it to more parents. A lot of the parenting books aren’t doing that, they’re doing something completely different. And it felt like so much cool stuff that we discover in baby science is fun to talk about.

And following the same thread of talking to parents…

If you could give one piece of advice to a new parent, what would it be?

In the book there are three bits of advice, two of which come from elsewhere but are worth repeating. The first one comes from Benjamin Spock and from John Bowlby – you know more than you think you do. Trust your own instincts and be confident. The second one comes from Mary Ainsworth, who says never miss an opportunity to hold a baby. You have a different relationship with a baby once you’re in physical contact, and that changes how much you tune into them.

My bit of advice is to take baby seriously. When you’re interacting with a baby, pause and wait for them to lead the interaction – what do they care about?

Rather than trying to push things onto them, wait to see what they’re interested in and let them lead the interactions. Direct interaction with a baby is the really valuable thing for them.

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What would you like to know about babies that we don’t yet know, or maybe could never know?

‘What’s it like to be a baby?’ is the classic thing that all infancy researchers are fascinated by and everybody else ignores. You either think that it’s just waiting for adult abilities to turn up or that babies are just completely confused about everything all the time.

And actually, the starting point is not the adult in waiting, it really is teaching yourself the world from scratch.

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The closest you ever get to something like that is the culture shock of going to the other side of the world, into a place where you don’t speak the language and the cultures are different. It’s a bewildering and terrifying experience, exhausting… that is everyday experience for a baby, but without a previous culture to compare it to. I kind of want aliens to arrive so that we get to do that… but even then, it’s still the whole world that you’re experiencing.

At the beginning of the book, you acknowledge Imogen Heap. Could explain what that’s about?

Unbound are a publisher where you get people to support the book before it’s actually finished, to promise to buy a copy, like crowdfunding. And when we were doing that I’d been working with Imogen on The Happy Song with babies. We gave Imogen lots of advice on how to create something that would appeal to babies and then she produced this amazing song that really did take off. It was in the Spotify children’s chart and had millions of views on YouTube. And so very generously, she gave quite a large donation towards making the book happen.

So what’s in the book?

The book goes roughly chronologically through the first two years of life and a little bit of time in the womb before that. Across all of those periods, we’re looking at all of the skills that babies are learning, asking how it happens and why it happens the way that it does. The key thread throughout is that they can’t do it on their own – they need the parents and their peers, people around them. They need the whole of human society to support them in a way, and that is a consequence of us being an incredibly social mammal.

Laughter is first and foremost a way of connecting with other people. It gets to the heart of what it is to be social. You meet a stranger for the first time, it’s one of the first things you share with them. But when do babies first have positive emotions? Can they feel things in the womb? What are the earliest ways that they interact with you?

The book then looks at the first few months out of the womb at the simple, pleasurable things that babies do – eating and sleeping. The first way you really interact with babies is through touch and through holding them. It often gets overlooked that as a baby you need to inhabit your body and learn about your body. Quite simply skin-to-skin contact from very early on is a way to regulate the connection between the body and the world. We undervalue that from an adult point of view but it’s completely crucial to a baby.

I then look at the things you might normally think of in a book about baby cognitive development. What do babies achieve by playing with toys? Play is their work. But what drives their endless curiosity and their delight in discovering all these new things every single day?

Once you’ve mastered your body and your

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the psychologist may 2020 the laughing baby

‘The payoff comes from all the connections…’ connection to the physical world, and you’ve got this delight in the world, you now have to start connecting with other people. Language and music – parents singing to baby – is really an important way to communicate and connect with babies. Babies are using language to learn concepts. You can’t ever point to a yes or no and yet a baby at 18 months is already starting to understand.

The very last bit of the book finishes on how, approaching two years old, babies are finally in a position to be independent. They start to form friendships of their own, to interact as equals with other children. And then that really launches them into the full human world.

Given all that you know about babies, if you could put into place one policy, what would it be?

In this country, greater parental leave in the first year.

Parental leave for mothers and fathers to spend time with their baby. Or failing that, funding for high quality childcare because human interactions are important from the very beginning. The best ones are with your parents, but the second-best ones are where someone has got time to interact with you.

How did you find the book writing process?

It was really painful to write the book. It was deceptively difficult. I guess there were two really difficult things about it. One was just finding the time and motivation to write something 100,000 words long.

That’s extended over several years in the gaps between my real job.

And then the second one was to organise things conceptually and in an engaging way. I didn’t want it to be a list. It has to be a story. But it isn’t just a chronological story, there are different things to focus on at different points. It was quite tricky to work out which bits fitted where and what to leave out.

Would you recommend writing a book?

It’s awful, it’s exhausting because it takes a long time, and you’ve got to keep motivated all the way through… But once it’s done, and various people have told me this, the payoff comes from all the interesting connections that you get afterwards. Readers are enthusiastic people and they’ll come up to you and share stories, share possibilities for collaboration as a result. Everyone I know who’s written a popular book of some kind has not regretted the honeymoon period afterward.

Read the rest of the conversation around Caspar’s book writing process in the online version.

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8 practical steps for building compassion

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1. Learn about what compassion is, what it isn’t, and its benefits to yourself and others.

2. Practice self-compassion. Recognise the inevitability of suffering, notice your own, and treat yourself with the same kindness, care and understanding you might treat another.

3. Listen with more empathy. Imagine things from the other person’s perspective and communicate this attempt at understanding.

4. Spend time during your day – perhaps during any mindfulness practice, or when travelling or working – silently wishing other people well, wishing them happiness and freedom from suffering.

5. In seated practice, cultivate feelings of compassion for things which are easy, for example, people you love, close friends

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and relatives, loved pets, etc. Then extend this ‘circle of compassion’ towards mere acquaintances and strangers. And then, perhaps, to people you actively dislike.

6. Increase your acts of kindness to others.

Help people to do things that they cannot or might struggle to do for themselves. Try to be helpful, rather than harmful.

7. Try and shift from a self-focus to a systemsfocus, recognising yourself as part of a much larger connected biological system in which cooperation commonly results in better outcomes.

8. Continuously hone your skills and abilities around noticing, approaching, alleviating and preventing suffering in yourself and others – such as non-judgement, empathy, distress tolerance, courage and technical helping skills.

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the psychologist may 2020 compassion

Compassion: the essential orientation Tim Anstiss, Jonathan Passmore and Paul Gilbert

W

e humans engage in a wide range of behaviours, driven by many different motives.

Unfortunately, many aspects of modern society tap into and stimulate our threat sensitive, competitive, self-focused and tribal impulses (Gilbert, 2018). You don’t have to look very far to see this – just look at recent political campaigns in the UK and the US. ‘Compassionate motivation’ on the other hand – endorsed by most religions for centuries – can help to counter the destructive effects of our more basic urges, and help redress many of the world’s current problems (Ricard, 2015). But for humanity to fully unlock the power of compassion, we must first gain clarity about its nature. Where does it come from, and can we deliberately cultivate compassion?

What is compassion?

There are several definitions of compassion, arising from different models and approaches. A dictionary definition might be ‘sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others’. But we can finesse this a little, in a way that emphasises the importance of compassion for our future (Gilbert & Choden, 2013).

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One scientific model views compassion as having evolved from the mammalian caregiving system which enabled parents to be sensitive to the distress and needs of their infant and work out how to best meet those needs and alleviate distress – for instance by protecting, feeding, comforting or rescuing. This new behavioural repertoire is underpinned and enabled by a range of neurophysiological and physiological adaptations, meaning that we are wired for advanced caring.

Human compassion, though, differs from mammalian caring in important ways. About two million years ago our ancestors started to evolve new cognitive competencies including new types of selfawareness, ways to use language and reason, ways to think systemically and think in time (working out the impact of our behaviour on self and others years ahead), and a form of conscious awareness facilitating processes such as mindfulness (Gilbert, 2019b; Marsh, 2019).

These competencies radically changed the way motives can be enacted and elaborated. For instance, our competitive motivation manifests itself in international sport, the fashion industry and aspects of our capitalist economic system, with its incentives to accumulate sometimes vast wealth, power and status (resulting in the massive inequalities in wealth we see around us). Meanwhile our caring motivation has morphed us into ‘super-carers’ – e.g. highly trained healthcare professionals, fire and rescue teams and

02/04/2020 18:51

international relief agencies. We campaign for social justice and for the improved wellbeing – not just those close to us but also of strangers, people on the other side of the planet, generations yet to be born and other species. We deliberately care for gardens, parks, oceans, rivers and rainforests.

Yet whilst we may be super-carers, we are also super-cruel and callous. These same evolved competencies massively increase our capacity for harm, cruelty and viciousness. Just witness the Roman games, crucifixion as a punishment, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, and slavery, both ancient and modern. We are indeed a species of extremes (Marsh, 2018). What we need, to thrive in the future, is a better understanding of the contextual and personal conditions that bring out the best and worst in us (Sapolsky, 2017).

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An evolved motivational system Our motives – for avoiding harm, acquiring resources, securing status, developing friendships, joining groups, finding sexual partners, caring for children – are all underpinned by stimulus-response algorithms of the type: if A occurs, is felt or noticed … then do B. For example: if threat … then activate sympathetic nervous system and run or hide; if sexual opportunity … then activate sexual arousal, approach and engage; if hungry … then go search for food.

Once we understand compassion is an evolved motivational system growing from mammalian caring, we can infer that the neurologically supported stimulus-response algorithm which enables it is something like: if signal of distress … then engage and act to alleviate (the basic mammalian mother-infant caring algorithm). This has informed the widespread, evolutionary based definition of compassion as: ‘a sensitivity to suffering of self and others, with a Key sources commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it’ (Gilbert, 2017).

Anstiss, T. & Gilbert, P. (2014).

Note the inclusion of prevention Compassionate Mind Coaching. In J. in this definition, and the Passmore (ed.) Mastery in Coaching. importance of courage for engaging London: Kogan Page. and acting. Gilbert (2009) has Gilbert, P. (2019a). Explorations into outlined six trainable competencies the nature and function of compassion. for the engagement aspects of Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 108114. compassion and six for the action Passmore, J. (2019). Leading with focused aspects (see Figure 1). compassion. IESE Business School Whilst the engagement related Insights, 152, 56-63. competencies – being sensitive to Seppälä, E.M., Simon-Thomas, E., signals of distress, being moved Brown, S.L. et al. (2017). The Oxford by them (sympathy), being able to Handbook of Compassion Science. New York: Oxford University Press. tolerate our personal distress when Trzeciak, S. & Mazzarelli, A. (2019). engaging with suffering, having Compassionomics: The revolutionary empathic understanding of the scientific evidence that caring makes a nature and causes of that distress, difference. New York: Studer Group. and being non-judgemental – are necessary for compassion, they are Full list available in online/app version. not sufficient. Indeed, it has even

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Figure 1. The motivation and competencies of compassion Adapted by P. Gilbert from P. Gilbert (2009) The Compassionate Mind. With kind permission Little Brown.

been suggested that engagement with distress alone may lead to burn-out (Ricard, 2015). So the six action focused competencies are just as necessary: paying attention to how to best be helpful, imagining helpful scenarios, reasoning about causes and solutions and problem-solving, behaving helpfully and sometimes courageously, and being sensitive to emotions and body states in oneself and others.

Not a simple emotion This ‘motivational / competency’ perspective helps us see that compassion is not a simple emotion.

Compassion can be associated with a wide range of feelings depending on the context in which it unfolds.

For instance, a firefighter arriving at a burning building might experience fear, manifest courage, feel a strong empathic connection to their team and experience strong positive feelings of achievement and satisfaction after the incident is over; an undercover journalist working to expose corporate wrongdoing may experience anger at the injustice of the wrongdoing alongside anxiety and paranoia about being discovered.

This model also helps us see through the misconception that compassion is soft or weak – like pity, or just some kind of tenderness. We sometimes find this belief acts as a barrier to compassionate mind training or self-compassion exercises, so we might encourage people to get a picture of our rescue services in their mind, or historical figures such as Nelson Mandela or Emmeline Pankhurst who they might associate with compassion. Do they consider such people weak?

Compassion is also sometimes confused with kindness in people’s minds, but kind acts – such as remembering someone’s birthday or doing someone a favour – are often associated with happiness and tend not to require courage for engagement with suffering, whilst compassion always does (Gilbert et al., 2019). Whereas we are often told that ‘kindness costs nothing’, the engagement aspect means that compassion might… this could explain the classic

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the psychologist may 2020 compassion

‘Good Samaritan’ study (Darley & Batson, 1973), in which the researchers got up to 90 per cent of students on their way to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan to ignore a man slumped in an alleyway, simply by manipulating their sense of ‘hurriness’. A competing motive (desire for achievement or threat of task failure) reduced compassionate responding.

Can compassion be increased?

Something which separates humans from other animals is our ability to intentionally choose to improve our skills and functioning. And just as we can choose to get in better physical shape, so too we can choose to deliberately improve our psychological skills and physiologies via mental training [see ‘8 practical steps’ on first page].

Until recently compassion training was mainly derived from such contemplative traditions as Jainism and Buddhism, but the last 20 years has seen rapid growth in the scientific study of compassion focused interventions and practices and their impact on wellbeing, prosocial behaviour and neurophysiological systems (Goleman & Davidson, 2017). Whilst mainly offered within personal growth and therapy settings, evidence-based approaches to the cultivation of compassion are also being adopted by coaching practitioners to help clients thrive and flourish (Passmore, 2019; Passmore & Oades, 2015; Anstiss & Gilbert, 2014).

Evidence from multiple teams shows that guided, intentional practice of compassion focused activities and exercises have significant impact on a range of psychological and physiological systems including the frontal cortex, amygdala sensitivity, heart rate variability and immune functioning. Studies also show that compassionate brain training alters activity levels in neural structures enabling and underpinning compassionate responding.

But does compassionate mind training actually increase behaviour intended to benefit another? Several studies using a range of assessment measures (selfreport, economic games and real-world experiments) show that it can.

For example, Leiberg and colleagues found in a 2011 study that helping behaviour in a pro-social game increased in participants who received short term compassion training compared to the active control group. Crucially, how long a person had spent practising their compassion correlated with changes in the amount of help offered to strangers. Weng et al.

(2013) found compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside the training context, and that post-training prosocial behaviour was associated with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotional regulation. And a 2018 study led by Anne Bockler investigated three distinct mental trainings in a large scale nine-month intervention study, and found that only training in care and compassion boosted

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What good is compassion?

The giving and receiving of compassion has major beneficial impacts on human physiology, including on the immune and cardiovascular systems, neurophysiological pathways and even epigenetic profiles (for reviews see Seppälä et al., 2017). Acting in a compassionate way also brings forth positive emotions in the person acting compassionately. For instance, two of us recently developed and tested a small compassionate mind training experience inside virtual reality for people with cancer. The positive feedback from patients testing the prototype system was one of the highlights of one of our professional careers.

Then there’s self-compassion. Research shows that people who are more compassionate towards themselves tend to experience better psychological health, reduced anxiety, rumination and perfectionism, lower levels of fear of failure and depression, less struggle with unwanted thoughts and a greater willingness to accept negative emotions. They may also be better able to cope with adversity including academic failure, divorce, childhood maltreatment and chronic pain, and be more likely to look after themselves by making dietary changes, reducing smoking, becoming more active and seeking appropriate medical care.

And there’s more. People scoring high in self-compassion may have lower cortisol levels, increased heart-rate variability, and perhaps also experience more wellbeing, optimism, wisdom, curiosity, exploration, personal initiative, emotional intelligence, good relationship functioning and lower levels of self-harm and suicidal thoughts (see Seppälä et al., 2017 and Cleare et al., 2018, for reviews).

altruistically motivated behaviour. The researchers concluded that human pro-sociality, altruistic motivation and behaviour are malleable and can be altered through simple, short and non-costly daily mental practices that can be easily implemented in everyday life.

In education settings, a meta-analysis of 213 school-based social and emotional learning programmes involving over 250,000 kindergarten through to high school students (Durlak et al., 2011) found an 11 per cent improvement in social emotion skills, attitudes and behaviours compared to controls, whilst a meta-analysis of 45 studies involving close to 500,000 students (Goldberg et al., 2018) demonstrated small but significant improvements in social, emotional and behavioural adjustment including positive social behaviour.

In a must read for health professionals, Compassionomics: The revolutionary scientific evidence that care makes a difference, Anthony Trzeciak and Stephen Mazzarelli reviewed hundreds of studies to show that compassion delivers huge benefits for patients experiencing a wide range of conditions; that clinicians can be trained to manifest increased compassion in their work; and that such increases can lead to improved patient and healthcare system outcomes.

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of employees (Anstiss 2017; Dutton So what? & Worline, 2017). Compassionate Niko Tinbergen (1963) outlined Tim Anstiss is a Faculty member, approaches are also being four questions which must be Centre for Coaching, Henley extended to cities (Ruez & Parekh, answered to fully understand a Business School and Founder at 2019) and political life (www. product of evolution – including The Academy for Health Coaching compassioninpolitics.com) where a psychological trait. What is its Drtim@appliedwellbeing.com the focus is on creating helpful not function? What is its physical harmful political and economic mechanism? What is its history Jonathan Passmore is a Fellow systems. over generations? And how does of the Society, a D.Occ.Psych, But one question remains it unfold over the lifetime of an a professor of coaching and unanswered. Can the human race individual? behavioural change, and Director cultivate compassion at sufficient Over the last 20 years we have of the Centre for Coaching, Henley scale and pace – at both individual made great progress in answering Business School and collective levels – to change each of these questions for the j.passmore@henley.ac.uk the unfolding course of humanity? evolved motivation of compassion.

We are embedded in a fast-changing We’ve also found evidence that it Paul Gilbert FBPsS, PhD, OBE is world full of uncertainty and threat, can be developed in individuals via Professor of Clinical Psychology at technology advance, environmental training and therapy; and that this the University of Derby challenge, political tribalism and results in improved wellbeing and Founder of The Compassionate extremism. Discovering how to fastincreased pro-social responding.

Mind Foundation track the conditions for compassion Attempts are underway p.gilbert@derby.ac.uk is surely one of our species’ greatest to cultivate compassion in challenges, and one of the most schools (Maratos et al., 2019, urgent tasks for psychology. compassionschools.org). In workplaces, organisations are beginning to explore See also our online collection at https:// the compassionate concept of being helpful not thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/compassion-and-empathy harmful, both in activities in the world and treatment Getty Images

Too much compassion?

Can an individual suffer from being too compassionate? It certainly needs to be handled with wisdom. Acting to alleviate suffering in others can expose the compassionate person to risk of harm – for instance, attempting to rescue someone from a burning car, or stepping in to protect someone from racial harassment.

Some people may experience ‘compassion fatigue’, a significant reduction in feelings of empathy and care for others. Whether or not this syndrome is distinct from that of burnout is contested (Sinclair et al., 2017), and may be the result of similar causes (such as excessive work pressure combined with unsupportive environments and reduced self-care behaviour) and not excessive compassion per se. Indeed, some studies suggest that increasing self-compassion may be helpful in cases of burnout and compassion fatigue, including amongst psychologists (Eriksson, 2018).

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UCL GREAT ORMOND STREET INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH

Postgraduate Training in Paediatric Neuropsychology Applications are now open for the professional training programme in paediatric neuropsychology starting in September 2020 delivered by University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

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

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

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

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A hero by any other name…

Robert MacRory-Crowley and Kevin O’Malley on ‘heroism science’

From Hercules slaying the Nemean Lion, Joan of Arc rousing France or Nelson Mandela fighting apartheid, heroes have captured imaginations and animated movements for millennia.

But what makes a hero and how do we recognise them? The emerging field of ‘heroism science’ is on a quest to find out.

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cross cultures and generations, heroic stories have persisted.

A hero’s struggles can call to action or prompt introspection; they can protect against the vicissitudes of life or inspire the building of a space where those threats are not present. We repeat them to ourselves, we reflect, we share such stories from the fireside to the website. Yet critics, philosophers and scholars still struggle to agree on the most basic of questions: what is a hero?

The growing field of ‘heroism science’ (Allison & Goethals, 2017; Efthimiou & Alison, 2018) is looking to provide answers.

From the known to the unknown, and back Until recently, the study of heroes was predominantly the domain of literature and sociological research, with one of the most influential descriptions of the (mythical) hero coming from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell likened the emergence of heroes to a journey from the world of the known into the realm of the unknown.

The prospective hero undertakes a task or set of tasks that are ostensibly beyond their capacity, and undergoes a form of learning and personal growth which culminates in a return to the known world as a changed person; wiser, stronger and more thoughtful than before.

Consider Jason and the Argonauts and their voyage for the Golden Fleece: Jason answers the call to adventure by accepting his uncle Pelias’ challenge to retrieve the Fleece. He constructs the Argo and travels to Colchis, overcoming anthropomorphised clashing rocks, the harpies, sirens and direct intervention by the gods themselves, before returning home triumphantly to defeat Pelias the usurper. This storyform closely matches Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’; it’s a useful outline for myths, legends and epic poems.

Campbell identifies necessary prerequisites for heroic

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the psychologist may 2020 heroism Getty Images

classification, e.g. struggle (internal and external), personal growth and perseverance.

However, these challenges alone neither make a hero nor capture the personal meaning of heroism for many. The ubiquity of heroes, alongside the myriad colloquial meanings associated with the term, makes moving off the pages of a book and actually operationalising heroism a significant challenge for those interested in researching it. The hero’s journey might account for fictional heroes and even antiheroes, like Batman or The Punisher, yet it does

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not sufficiently capture the more complex and mature themes within some narratives. Similarly, it doesn’t account for the ‘spur of the moment’ hero – one who takes quick (and possibly uncharacteristic) action to save a drowning swimmer or who risks their life pushing a stranger out of the way of a speeding car.

In an attempt to delineate factual, as opposed to fictional, heroes further, several authors and commentators have approached heroes as a distinct category of social actors (Campbell, 1949; McEvoy & Erickson, 1981; Pearson, 1986). Klapp (1954)

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differentiates between heroes, villains and fools from a sociological perspective by creating a typology theory based on actors’ social function. He defines heroes as ‘personages, real or imaginary, who are admired because they stand out from others by supposed unusual merits or attainments. Within this perspective, heroes are moral exemplars earning their elevated status through incredible feats and serving as the apotheosis of a given society’s social norms and values.

This provides a useful typology of heroes (as ‘Clever’, ‘Questing’, ‘Avenging’ etc.) as well as offering insight into their social functions. It also begins to address the role of subjectivity in how people recognise heroes; the perennial ‘One person’s terrorist…’. However, it focuses heavily on personal skill and neglects the overlap and contrast between different heroes that do not fall readily into distinct categories. Klapp acknowledges mythical figures are the best examples of the various types he suggests, yet the famous Odysseus could be classified as the ‘Clever’, ‘Quest’, ‘Avenger’ or ‘Culture’ hero depending on what point of the Odyssey you chose to focus on.

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Heroic leaders Approaching the problem from a different angle, a sizable body of empirical work unpacks the complexity of heroism by distinguishing heroes from other prosocial actors (Franco et al., 2011; Kinsella et al., 2015a, 2015b) and exploring different forms of heroic behaviour/heroism (e.g. Eagly & Becker, 2005) to Getty Images

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Sacrifice and risk Similarly, empirical approaches to heroism have struggled to capture the concept’s range and breadth.

Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame, initially defined a hero as a person who ‘knowingly and voluntarily, acts for the good of one or more people at significant risk to the self, without being motivated by reward’ (Zimbardo, 2007). In later work (Franco et al., 2011), he and colleagues expanded this definition to four categories based on levels of sacrifice and Key sources risk. Firstly, there are people saving others from physical peril with no Allison, S.T., Goethals, G.R. & Kramer, duty to do so. Think of innocent R.M. (2017). Handbook of heroism and bystanders wrestling guns away heroic leadership. New York: Routledge. from robbers or strangers diving Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a in front of bullets intended for thousand faces. New York: New World another. Secondly, we have those Library.

Eagly, A.H. & Becker, S.W. (2005). who protect others from physical Comparing the heroism of women and peril when they have a duty to men. The American Psychologist, 60(4), do so: the warrior distracting the 343-344. enemy so their friends can escape, Franco, Z.E., Blau, K. & Zimbardo, P.G. the police officer wounded while (2011). Heroism: A conceptual analysis protecting their partner or the and differentiation between heroic action and altruism. Review of General firefighter rescuing victims from Psychology, 15(2), 99-113. burning wreckage. Moving away Kinsella, E.L., Ritchie, T.D. & Igou, E.R. from physical peril, the researchers (2015). Zeroing in on heroes: A prototype acknowledge social heroes; those analysis of hero features. Journal of who earn their heroism via sacrifice Personality and Social Psychology, 108(1), as opposed to risk (although the 114-127.

McEvoy, A. & Erickson, E.L. (1981) two may overlap). Social heroes Heroes and Villains: A Conceptual are defined by their opposition as Strategy for Assessing Their Influence, opposed to implied duty. There are Sociological Focus, 14(2), 111-122. heroes that defy social systems, for instance Martin Luther King, Malala Full list available in online/app version.

Yousesai or Emmeline Pankhurst,

and heroes that defy social reality, such as Albert Einstein redefining physics, Amelia Earhart attempting to cross the Atlantic or Serena Williams dominating tennis with 23 Grand Slams.

Akin to the previous theories, these hero types illustrate elements of heroism – facing danger, protecting others and persevering – but the taxonomy cannot grasp the personal and malleable nature of heroism. Where do we put the people who have not completed monumental tasks nor undertaken great physical risks? Are the study participants that named their parents, coaches or teachers as ‘heroes’ wrong?

While this classification provides broad groups to fit possible heroes into, it still cannot capture the personal, ‘Little H’, nature of heroism (Farley, 2012).

Two of the authors, Zimbardo and Franco, suggest in another piece that heroic behaviour is often banal and anyone is capable of it, yet their taxonomy struggles to include these individuals (Franco & Zimbardo, 2006).

Greek vase depicting Odysseus and the sirens

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the psychologist may 2020 heroism

identify commonalities (Franco et al., 2011; Allison & Goethals, 2011). Importantly, across domains, heroes differ significantly from other prominent social groups. For example, Kinsella and colleagues demonstrated that driven perspective, and we would heroes are perceived differently argue that the prototype method from social actors such as role Robert MacRory-Crowley accounts for viewpoints at personal models and leaders. Heroes is a PhD candidate in the and group levels, while retaining were perceived as substantially Department of Psychology at the the objectivity and controlled more altruistic, compassionate, University of Limerick approach we’ll need to advance this courageous, selfless, protective Robert.Crowley@ul.ie field. and morally integrous, as well as more likely to save others and sacrifice themselves. Similarly, Heroes – an untapped tool?

North et al. (2005) found that A strong and stable theoretical individuals distinguish between foundation means researchers can heroes and celebrities in terms of begin examining heroes’ functions, emotional responses and moral utilities and applications within character. Heroes elicited stronger everyday life. Organisations emotional connections and were such as the Heroic Imagination viewed as moral exemplars more Kevin O’Malley is at the Project (HIP) are already trying than celebrities. Finally, Allison University of Limerick, where to apply such research to inspire and Goethals (2013) suggested he is an IRC funded research and prepare people for heroic ‘heroic leadership’ as the peak form council PhD candidate action. HIP focuses on training of leadership, distinguishable from heroic responses to encourage other forms by the magnitude and people to be kinder, more prosocial and more effective moral character of a leader’s influence. Heroic leaders in challenging situations. In this case, the 26 hero stand above and apart from other leaders by impacting features could be used to guide heroic development by our world in ways previously unimagined. providing a basis for translating heroic behaviour into accessible terms – identifying how and why actions are heroic and laying a roadmap for personal growth.

The heroic prototype Similarly, research on behavioural interventions While this body of work has led to promising insights, indicates that using heroes could improve intervention helping to demarcate heroism from related constructs, efficacy (Ylvisaker et al., 2008). Using the features the true nature of heroism remains elusive. Much of to frame behaviour change and identify inspirational the research focuses on differences, showing us what individuals could lead to improved retention rates heroes are not, as opposed to zeroing in on what and behavioural outcomes. Heroes are universal, they are. To tap into the core of heroism, categorical so heroism research has a worldwide appeal with definitions and typologies remain too restrictive to widespread applications for day-to-day living. As a encapsulate lay theories, whereas equivocal literary source of encouragement and motivation for many, conceptualisations do not provide the precision heroes are an untapped tool. The potential for required for scientific research. imaginative projects is immeasurable – from specifying A possible solution to these issues is the prototype the precise nature of heroism, including any gendered approach adopted by Kinsella et al. (2015). Prototype aspects, to delving into the perceptual differences approaches categorise constructs by their most between ‘big’ and ‘little’ heroism. representative examples and features (Rosch, 1978), If you enjoyed what you’ve read and are interested preserving rigour through clear coherent detail and in advancing heroism research further, you’re in luck! providing coverage by revealing richness rather than The Third Biennial Heroism Science Conference will concealing it (Smith & Medin, 1981; Gregg et al., take place at the beautiful – and yes, we are biased – 2008). This approach provides central and peripheral campus of the University of Limerick, Ireland in 2021. features to describe heroism, where identification with more features indicates a more prototypical example of The title and theme of the conference is ‘Exceptional Leadership and Heroism: Enriching Communities and heroic behaviour.

Enhancing Lives’. We look forward to seeing you there, Using this approach, over the course of several so heroism research can continue to inspire while studies, Kinsella et al. (2015) identified 26 hero building towards a greater understanding of ourselves, features, with central aspects including bravery, moral our motivations and the narratives we use to explain integrity, protection and self-sacrifice, similar to features we encountered above. However, this is a data- our world.

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02/04/2020 19:09

‘Psychologists must consistently argue for human beings’ Ian Florance interviews Alison Clarke who, among many other roles, is Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Practice Board

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Alison is working within the British Psychological Society to set up accreditation of coaching psychology courses and recognition for coaches.

She is an enthusiastic promoter of the Society (‘Getting more involved was one of the best things I ever did’); a very clear thinker about what psychology is and should be; and she’s a coaching psychologist and Chair of the Practice Board. Her readiness to question the status quo reflects her unconventional route into psychology.

I started by asking Alison Clarke why members should be interested in the Society’s Practice Board.

‘Well, apart from anything else it’s responsible for the Practice Guidelines, one of the two cornerstone documents of the Society alongside the Code of Ethics and Conduct. Any practitioner member of the Society, whatever division they’re in, has to know, understand and work to these.’ This links in to one of Alison’s concerns. The Board’s purpose is ‘to promote excellence in psychological practice so that everyone can access evidence-based psychological interventions to enhance their lives, organisations, communities and wider society’.

‘So’, says Alison, ‘the Board is tasked with developing a strategy which crosses divisions. The Society has been criticised for becoming a collection of divisional silos and the Board must overcome that. That’s why we’ve been changing its terms of reference and way of working. We’re trying to be less driven by divisional competition and more by members’ broader concerns.

The present Practice Board is built round collaborative, enthusiastic volunteers who want to develop psychology and psychologists’ lives.’

Can you give a concrete example of the sorts of areas you could address? ‘Psychologists working in the NHS spring to mind. Budget pressures and the widespread influence of a reductionist medical model on public expectations, among other factors, are constraining psychologists working in the NHS. GPs who refer clients to psychologists often have no training in psychology and may reinforce the biomedical view, clouding what the real issues for that patient may be. How can you solve a problem before you identify it accurately? From the start it is a disempowering experience for the patient. This is all happening at a time when the media are full of talk about a mental health crisis in society, in which the problem is often sited within the person rather than in many societal structures and policies which increasingly pressurise individuals. Whatever your take on the details of this analysis you’d probably see why many psychologists want a different way of working, and that must be a concern of the Practice Board.

But, as I say, that’s just one example.’

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‘It’s not about watering down standards…’

I was told you were doing work on coaching and coaching psychology, an area you’re very involved in outside your work in the Society. ‘The work of coaches and coaching psychologists overlap. There are several international accreditation bodies for coaches but it’s an unregulated activity with huge variations in quality standards. At the moment the Society has a special group rather than a division for coaching psychology.

This allows people without a psychology degree to join as associate members but without voting rights.

We want to replace this with a division for coaching psychology, which can create a career pathway for coaching psychologists up to chartered status that the public recognise as a quality assurance mark. We’re building draft standards with entry, intermediate and chartered levels. Coaches without previously held psychology qualifications should be able to become full members once they’ve attended accredited courses and know and act on the two documents I mentioned earlier – the Practice Guidelines and the Code of Ethics. CPD and supervision will be critical here.

We’ve a long way to go in all this but the ultimate vision is that the Society should be the barometer for UK coaching standards because we believe that the best coaching stands on a sound foundation of psychological knowledge. It’s not about watering down standards but about improving access and extending the Society’s influence and the diversity of its approaches. We see this as a pretty critical initiative which could influence the Society’s future vision and strategy more widely.’

‘I introduce myself as a heretic’ How did Alison get to where she is now? ‘My paternal grandfather built the engines in the Titanic class of vessels in the Belfast shipyards. It was the heart of loyalist East Belfast. I believe that my tendency to challenge received opinion reflects a reaction to the pressure to conform I experienced as a child.

I introduce myself as a heretic, and the price of being a heretic is that you tend to get thrown out. Some of those early experiences have influenced me throughout my life. Several come to mind. My Mum and Dad missed by seconds getting blown up in a no warning City Centre bombing. Then, I was a scholarship pupil at what some others considered a rather posh school.

The police had to protect us as we waited at the bus

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stop to go home. And, in turn the army had to protect them, so you had this extraordinary situation of kids protected by police protected by the army because of our school uniform. Events like that, driven by division, have affected how I approach things. Living in a society with two sides, both of whom were sure they were right and were intent on proving their rightness, I refused to take sides.’

How did Alison get interested in psychology?

‘My Aunt gave birth to a baby girl with Down’s Syndrome when I was 11. I became her godmother.

It may sound naïve but it started me thinking “I want to do good… and particularly for people with intellectual disabilities”.’ Alison studied a degree in psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, which she enjoyed hugely. She feels the biggest single influence on her was studying the history and philosophy of science; ‘my first formal encounter with other heretics’.

Alison describes a rather troubled period in which a gap opened up between her parents and herself and ‘I struggled to work out what I was going to do or be.

But I married young and we shared a desire to travel.

My husband got a job at the European Commission.

When we separated, I stayed in Brussels and reinvented myself. Before Brussels I’d worked in the sales force for Proctor and Gamble but it wasn’t the environment for me. In Brussels I joined Management Centre Europe, the European arm of the American Management Association. Having said at my interview that I could touch type I had to master that skill in a weekend, then joined them as a conference organiser. This enabled me to network with many heads of European industry who were speakers at our conferences.’

Alison’s career covers a huge number of roles from business process engineering with large corporates (‘the problem was always how management worked with workers, not about systems’) to becoming chair of the economic committee of the Northern Ireland Group in Brussels. She also trained in careers counselling. I asked her to pick out some highlights of her career that still influence her.

‘Between finals and starting work my neighbour – a teacher – was looking for help to take groups of underprivileged children away for holidays. I got involved, did some cooking. I remember a fishing trip to Ardglass with children who’d never seen cows before. I loved the children and was inspired by what we could achieve with them in only five days. That work taught me that you have to love what you work with – a lesson I’ve used in much of my business/ leadership consulting. You have to care about what you are setting out to achieve and that includes the people you are working with.’

‘I really started coaching in work for the International Fund for Ireland which brought groups of young people from both communities to a foreign country for professional development.

It was exhilarating to see young people growing and achieving their goals.’

‘Another experience was one of failure. During the

banking crisis, the business I was involved in took a hammering and was no longer tenable. I learnt a lot, not least about facing a genuine personal crisis and about coaching distressed colleagues and, in some ways, this led directly to my getting more involved in the Society and my work with the Practice Board.’

Now Alison runs her own executive coaching business, with a sideline in transforming fear of flying.

Her website at www.alisonclarkecoach.com gives a vivid picture of the areas coaching affects and also details of Alison’s skills and experiences.

Creating a 21st century model of psychology Alison plainly questions the status quo and is wary of doing things the accepted ways. She brings wide experience of both coaching and business to her role in the Society. She’s a graduate in psychology: why did she never think of specialising in, say, occupational psychology? ‘That area was too bound up for me with a reductionist view of people, particularly in its use of psychometrics which I believe, in their present form, are a redundant way of looking at human beings. I’m a George Kelly girl, persuaded by the value of personal construct theory. I would like to have the opportunity to become a Chartered Coaching Psychologist with the qualifications and experience I have – and I know a lot of other people would like this too.’

Do you think psychologists should have more experience in relevant areas when they are training or even before?

‘I think you have to go back further and ask basic questions. What is psychology? What is its most useful focus? What is it to be human? This might seem naïve but I think we face a major and exciting task: taking the hybrid model of 20th century psychology and creating a new and better model for this century: one which has the well-being of human beings at the heart of it: psychologists must consistently argue for human beings.’

You’ve used words such as reductionist to describe some approaches to psychology. ‘I think it’s clear that many coaching psychologists are suspicious of scientifically reductionist approaches to the human being. I’m no different. But I’m absolutely committed to the idea that practice must be based on evidence of what is demonstrably workable.’

This article can only give a sample of the topics we covered over four hours – though they did include music of all kinds and a shared love of the Archers!

But it’s going to be interesting to see how Alison’s work bears fruit. As she comments: ‘From my first consulting project I realised that the barrier to performance was fear. Addressing fear addresses underperformance.

I sometimes think we as a profession are fearful of change: if we address that, we will serve our clients better.’

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

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HCPC registered Forensic Psychologist

Lecturer in Forensic Psychology (Professional Practice) Royal Holloway, University of London Permanent, Full- or Part-time, ÂŁ43,660-ÂŁ51,687 (inc. London Allowance) Are you a Forensic Psychologist looking for an opportunity to expand your career into academia? Are you interested in transferring your scientist-practitioner skills to the development of aspiring forensic psychologists? We seek applicants with the broad range of skills needed to teach and lead effectively within our existing programmes, including our BPS Accredited MSc Forensic Psychology. The post includes time allocation for professional practice, and is available on a full- or part-time basis.

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Closing date: 30th April 2020

Interviews: 13th May 2020

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Forensic Psychologists £34,212 - £51,753 (depending on location) England and Wales “You have to see the person behind the behaviour and understand what’s happened to them rather than focusing on what’s wrong with them.”

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Clinical Psychologist - Older Adults Government of Jersey Jersey £60,587 - £66,590 per year Closing date: 7th April 2020

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Stalking Intervention Programme, Ravenswood House, Fareham

Senior Psychologist Salary: Band 8a £44,606 - £50,819 pa We are looking for a highly specialist psychologist to be part of a unique and highly innovative service, working with stalking perpetrators and those who manage them, across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

The Hampshire Stalking Intervention Service is one of only two commissioned health services in the UK working specifically with stalking perpetrators.

This role is a rare chance to be part of this specialist service, providing unique opportunities to develop your skills and your career. You will require previous experience of working within forensic mental health services, inpatient or the community.

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Training and awareness raising is a large part of the work we do. Working with stalking perpetrators is a new and exciting area of mental health care and undertaking audit, research and contributing to the evidence base, is an integral part of our service.

For more information contact Dr Kirsty Butcher, Principal Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead on 023 8231 0957, email: kirsty.butcher@southernhealth.nhs.uk To apply visit www.jobs.nhs.uk, quoting the job reference number: 348-SS-195A Closing Date: 01 May 2020 Interview Date: 12 May 2020

Job Title: Highly Specialist Psychologist (Hampshire Stalking Intervention Service) Employer: Dovehouse Psychology Services ‘It’s such an exciting programme’, says Dr Kirsty Butcher, Principal Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead at the Hampshire Stalking Intervention Service. ‘We can be really innovative, combining clinical work and emerging research to make a difference.’

‘The programme was originally one of three Home Office funded pilot projects in the UK, working specifically with stalking perpetrators. The Hampshire Service is now funded by NHS England until end of March 2021.’

‘We work with Hampshire Constabulary, Hampshire Probation Service, and Aurora New Dawn, a victim advocacy organisation, to identify stalking perpetrators and respond effectively to them. We provide a mental health perspective to the work the police undertake with these perpetrators, including their investigations. We offer expert consultancy to health and criminal justice agencies working with stalking perpetrators in areas such as risk assessment and psychological formulation. If a stalking perpetrator has mental health needs, we work collaboratively with their health teams, promoting psychologically informed understanding and management of the stalking behaviour.

In a small number of instances we work directly with the offender.’

You’re offering specialist training for this very specific role. What would a successful candidate bring to the team?

‘They can be a forensic or clinical psychologist but ideally would have experience working with personality disordered offenders, as there appears to be a high prevalence of personality disorders among stalking perpetrators; experience of working with those with learning difficulties and on the autistic spectrum would also be beneficial.

As there will be some direct work, the person must be experienced in a specialised psychological therapy. They will also have good communication skills to be effective in a multi-disciplinary context. We’re a small team and meet regularly but have to work independently. There’s a reasonable amount of travel involved since we cover Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.’

You’re obviously very enthusiastic about the programme. ‘It’s the best job. You can be innovative, make a difference and there are opportunities to contribute to an evidence base, which at present, is still in its infancy.

Stalking can take many forms and is motivated by different drivers. This work therefore requires the ability to use psychological formulation to understand the number of fascinating psychological processes that contribute towards it. An empathic approach to stalking behaviour (which is rooted in relational and attachment issues) is imperative.

We work at an individual and service level, aiming to influence responses and policies across agencies and hope that our ground-breaking work will, in time, affect national initiatives. It’s a very exciting service to be involved in.’

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www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk If you are looking for a change in career or just getting started, the BPS job site has the latest vacancies in all areas of psychology throughout the UK and overseas.

Register on the site today to be notified of new jobs in your area.

If you need to advertise your vacancies, please contact Kai Theriault t: 01223 378051 e: kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk

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02/04/2020 19:17

What friendships really look like these days Nejra Van Zalk and Claire P. Monks preview their book Online Peer Engagement in Adolescence, published by Routledge this month

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ast year, Elian Fink and Claire Hughes published an insightful commentary in these pages on the importance of children’s friendships. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no mention of digital or online friendships.

Young people walk around with powerful computers in their pockets or on their wrists, and these new mediums have been changing the friendship landscape for the past 20 years. We are all almost continuously connected these days, with online and offline social spheres fused as one.

Research has simply not kept up with these developments.

A few years ago Routledge contacted us, interested in an academic volume on the theme of online peer engagement. Their aim, we were told, was to provide a definitive tome reflecting what friendships ‘really look like these days’. Instead of the fearmongering or largely one-sided emphasis on how all children and young people were becoming socially inept individuals glued to social media on their smartphones, this would be both sides of the story. We jumped at the opportunity to put the book together with the help of prominent researchers in this field.

The vast majority of young people today have grown up using digital technologies as the main mechanism facilitating social communication, and peer engagement as the older generations know it has forever changed.

Smartphones became available during the 1990s, and the 2004 launch of Facebook was followed by an explosion in large social platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and more. The use of technology-mediated communication (TMC), which includes various modes of communication through texts, social networking technologies and online games, is now a large part of young people’s lives practically everywhere. Having

conducted research on the development of child and adolescent friendships, we were acutely aware that research into the impact on friendship development has lagged behind.

For instance, children’s and young people’s friendship networks can be online-exclusive, offlineexclusive, and conjoint or overlapping. Yet very few studies have attempted to distinguish between these, nor track their stability or change over time. Overlapping social networks, where young people spend time with their current friends both online and offline, but also networks wholly comprising online-only friends, are especially poorly understood. The exponential growth of technological innovation has meant that the majority of traditional boundaries that typically constituted friendships (often constrained by the school you attend or the neighbourhood you live in) have by and large dissolved, not just for children but also for adults. That’s likely to continue: if an ‘Online Peer Engagement’ book were to be written a decade from now, it would likely be called simply ‘Peer Engagement’.

This isn’t just a Western-centric issue. A 2019 Pew Research Center Report indicated that smartphone use is increasing rapidly in emerging economies, and particularly sharply among younger people. For example, in Indonesia, 66 per cent of young people (18-34 years old) owned a smartphone in 2018, compared with 39 per cent in 2015. The comparative increase in the 50+ group was from 2 to 13 per cent. Much has been written in the media and elsewhere about the damage such a technological boom could be having for youth, often without clear empirical evidence. The use of TMC as another way to interact with offline friends, chat or play games, or keep

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the psychologist may 2020 books in touch during challenging life transitions, is typically unacknowledged in much research. Friendship quality remains mainly attributed to face-to-face friendship networks with no digital facilitation.

For a more accurate examination of the impact of TMC, research should aim to explore how young people use various platforms interchangeably to communicate.

Research also needs to consider how digital engagement is measured. There has been a reliance on crosssectional surveys asking individuals to self-report how much time they spend online or on a particular app.

However, research from David Ellis and others has shown that we are not particularly accurate at judging how much time we spend on or how often we access our smartphones. Technology can help to a degree, providing more objective measures of which apps people are using and when, but they do not necessarily tell us about the nature of people’s engagement. We’re going to need multiple methods of data collection (including a focus on longitudinal studies) to get to grips with the nuances of online engagement. There are rapid and promising developments in the ways in which technology can aid research, but it is vital that these are considered within the framework of ethical protection for participants.

The contributions from our book do indicate that there are some risks for adolescents in engaging in online communication with peers, including exposure to cyberbullying and aggression, as well as the potential for compulsive internet use. There are also newer forms of interaction which are facilitated through TMC, including ‘sexting’, which may bring possible risks when images are shared beyond the intended recipient. But the chapters also consider increased social capital and the development of new relationships. Young people are using TMC to further enhance their relationships with peers, communicating with friends outside of school time as well as increasing their feelings of closeness within dating relationships. The authors have also highlighted important potential positive future uses for digital technologies, using these to identify and support young people who may be at risk.

It is clear that online communication is here to stay, and it is therefore vital that research and education go hand-in-hand to ensure that young people are educated in how to stay safe online whilst enjoying the benefits of digital communication. Ongoing developments in technology are providing researchers with new tools to examine the how and why of TMC in more depth.

We are excited about what the future has to hold.

As a research community, it’s time to provide evidencebased approaches to support young people’s development in a digital age.

Taking organisational safety to the next level

Dr Nejra Van Zalk is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, based at Imperial College London.

Dr Claire Monks is at the University of Greenwich.

Online Peer Engagement in Adolescence: Positive and Negative Aspects of Online Social Interaction is available from 24 April.

Find a reflection from Emily on her own work in organisational safety, plus a review of Being human in safety-critical organisations: How people create safety, what stops them and what to do about it by Dik Gregory and Paul Shanahan in the online version.

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Rosa Carrillo has focused on the way that relationships impact on safety for many years. In her new book, she discusses why relationships matter, how conversations form them, and how leaders can change them.

Although this book is specifically about safety, it also includes the concepts of inclusivity and psychological safety (as they are key to relationships), and the lessons equally apply to improving wellbeing and performance outcomes.

Rosa lists eight core beliefs that leaders need to hold about people in order to build good relationships in their organisations (and to build trust), for example, that people will speak up if it is in their interest to do so. These beliefs influence emotions, which then influence decisions and behaviour. Through these beliefs she introduces a number of important concepts which provide an understanding and explanation for what ‘really’ happens within organisations. One concept that I found particularly interesting was ‘drift’ – that we will naturally look for ways to short-cut, improve, or change things as we become familiar with them, and how this can be both helpful (it helps us to be adaptive) and dangerous (it can lead to work arounds). As this is an inevitable natural tendency, Rosa suggests that we reframe it as positive rather than negative, and look at the opportunities it presents for learning.

Rosa writes beautifully and combines her extensive practical experience with her knowledge base to communicate her ideas. She gives practical advice and suggestions towards the end of the book around how to build relationships which engender trust with some guidance on exercises.

This book is specifically aimed at managers and leaders – anyone with responsibility for people who work within a safety critical environment. There is more recognition recently of the importance of culture at a team level in terms of the influence on the individuals – and there is an opportunity here for every team leader to create a better environment for safety within their team.

The relationship factor in safety leadership: Achieving success through employee engagement Rosa Antonia Carrillo Routledge

Reviewed by Emily Hutchinson Associate Editor Books and Director EJH Consulting Ltd.

02/04/2020 19:22

The structure of racism White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism Robin DiAngelo Beacon Press

Against the backdrop of social movements like Black Lives Matter and various global political upheavals, issues of race are more prevalent in the public’s awareness than ever before. While we have laws protecting against discrimination and consciousness of racism is growing, Robin DiAngelo powerfully argues that for further progress to be made, it is the responsibility of white people to look inwards to identify how they maintain the status quo.

This book is written through the author’s lived experience as a diversity trainer and addresses objections that she received from white people again and again.

Things like ‘I was taught to treat everyone the same’, ‘my parents were not racist, and they taught me not to be racist’, ‘race has nothing to do with it’ and ‘I was the minority at my school so I experienced racism’. While her experiences come from a USA context, these objections will probably be familiar to people in other countries, whether you have made them or been on the receiving end of them. She herself is white and compellingly reflects on her own learning and mistakes along the way.

She writes her book against the backdrop that ‘racism is a structure, not an event’; while someone can act in a prejudiced way and discriminate against someone on a personal level, it becomes ‘racism’ once it is backed by the power of institutions. She defines White Supremacy, something that might be commonly associated with overtly racist groups, as a construct that describes a social, political, and economic system of domination in

society at large. It is not just those ‘bad people’ who are racist; DiAngelo argues that in the system we are raised in, it is inevitable that we will all be. Yes, that means you too. Even if you are progressive, educated and believe in racial equality and justice. DiAngelo makes the point that the sooner white people realise they have this prejudice, the sooner the necessary reflection can begin. This is a continual, lifelong process.

If you are white, you might have just felt tempted to withdraw on reading the above. You may have had thoughts like ‘that doesn’t apply to me’, or ‘that is such a generalisation!’ or felt a strong emotion such as anger, guilt, offense or denial. This, argues DiAngelo, is a result of White Fragility, which diverts the challenge to the worldview of ourselves as ‘good moral people – and therefore not racist’; this acts to bring you back to a more comfortable place where race ‘doesn’t matter’.

White people are not often challenged on race, and so can be quick to feel stressed when it is mentioned.

You might have even felt uncomfortable by my specifying ‘white people’ throughout this piece.

This book is a well written and engaging read.

If you are white, it will be challenging and uncomfortable, because it will open your eyes to all kinds of dynamics that you had probably never noticed before. It is an essential read: get a copy as soon as you can.

Reviewed by Corinne Gurvitz Counselling Psychologist

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the psychologist may 2020 books

A twist in a traumatic tale The mere mention of a plot twist is taken as a challenge to work out as early as possible for those like me. I often think being in the field of psychology is a real fun spoiler where plot twists are concerned, with many being discoverable early on.

I was therefore excited to see what Little White Lies Little White Lies had in store considering Philippa East the author’s credentials. Philippa East Harper Collins is a clinical psychologist and therapist, so my expectations were high. My only disappointment was in not getting the twist before the reveal. East’s debut novel beat me.

The novel begins with 15-year-old Abigail returning home after being abducted at the age of eight. The story is told through the voices of Abigail, Anne (mum), Jess (cousin), and Lillian (Abigail’s aunt, Anne’s sister, and mum to Jess). Each narrative reveals an uncomfortable gap in the desire of each of the women. Anne walks on eggshells trying to integrate her daughter back into family life. Avoiding any talk of what Abigail may have gone through, she relies on the authoritative advice of her sister for guidance. Meanwhile, Jess slides effortlessly back into a relationship with Abigail, desperate for their childhood connection to pick up exactly where it left off, which on the surface appears to work. Abigail voices a rather different story. She is confused as to the circumstances surrounding her abduction and how the abductor knew so much about her. She appears aggrieved during the court hearing that the abductor is perceived as the sole person at fault. Abigail keeps a contained display while finding her place back within the family and a way through the trial. Eventually, she can no longer hold back, initiating an opening up of all the little white lies.

The characters in this novel are deep. It is easy to identify with each of them; they are consistent and believable. The twist comes towards the end of the book, at a point of immersion that made me almost forget I was on the lookout for one. After the unfolding of Abigail’s settling back into the fold, and the family’s growing confidence at her reintegration, the family is shaken at the revelation of the abductor’s identity, the return of Abigail’s birth father, and the lies told by more than one of them. With these events comes an acceptance that the family will never be able to return to their pre-abduction state.

Little White Lies subtly reminds us that one person’s trauma can affect a whole family. A traumatic experience will often come to the emotional surface when least expected or wanted. It is not all doom and gloom though.

East’s ending provides a hopeful insight – although the truth can hurt, relationships can survive, albeit in a different way. It is a tale about mistakes, honesty and acceptance with a well-hidden plot twist.

Reviewed by April Mangion Trainee counselling psychologist Middlesex University and New School of Counselling and Psychotherapy

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9 fundamental reputation winners How Leadership Reputations are Won and Lost, by Dr Richard G. Ford, is out now on Libri Publishing.

You can read more at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/howleadership-reputations-are-won-and-lost Here’s a brief extract from that piece: ‘There are two ways to look at a person’s reputation: from the outside-in perspective, which is outcome-focused or resultsfocused and refers to the impact or evidence-based consequences of our behaviour which can be perceived by colleagues; and the inside-out perspective, which is focused on behavioural intentions, refers to our motivations and how we aspire to behave and which may often be only known to ourselves.

The ‘Fundamental Five’ outside-in reputation winners refers to the key observable outcomes and evidence that successful high potential leaders need to demonstrate if they are going to win a good reputation.

1. Culture building: The ability to create an environment in which people can give of their best.

2. Strategic thinking: The ability to set vision, direction and initiate change.

3. Delivering excellence: The ability to execute given tasks and maintain excellent operational standards.

4. Team leadership: The ability to deliver high performance through others.

5. Organisational influence: The ability to influence others at all levels and across all functions for optimum impact The ‘Fundamental Four’ inside-out reputation winners refers to the key differentiating internal attributes that successful leaders need to demonstrate if they are going to win a good reputation.

1. Self-awareness: The ability to be realistic in self-assessing strengths and weaknesses, and be driven by the need to selfimprove and search for marginal gains.

2. Likeability: The ability to connect with a wide range of people at different levels and in different roles in such a way that colleagues feel good by the nature of the work interaction and the work relationship.

3. Wise judgement: The ability to reflect and think broadly and deeply about problems with an open, curious mind and broad perspective.

4. Perceptiveness: The ability to be interested, insightful and intuitive and wanting to explore how and why other people behave, think and feel in the way they do.

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A road to art therapy in six works Sue Holttum on bringing lived experience and applied psychology to art therapy Road to hell Things did not start well. At primary school I was described as a ‘slow coach’ and bedevilled by mistakes in my written work (only labelled as dyslexia many years later). However, I did well in the 11+ exam and got into the local grammar school. There, my reports every year exhorted me to take part more in class, but my diligence in studying made me a ‘good all-rounder’.

It has been my lifelong quest to understand how things work, and my research path began in pure science. Initially, I thought that it would lead to outer space. But after a brilliant summer research assistant job at the then Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, and sailing through my first year at university, I experienced ‘a mental breakdown’. I discovered that psychology was about more than just perceptual illusions.

My artwork Road to Hell was, in retrospect, an inkling that trouble lay ahead.

Self portrait From an early age I’d been into painting and drawing.

I often became absorbed in these activities; they were a form of escape, as was reading, especially science fiction novels. Sometimes I made images of myself when I experienced confusing feelings (e.g. Self-Portrait), and I looked at the images as if I could discover what they said to me.

I am not sure what they said in words, but there was something that was different from just looking in a mirror; something pinned down that would still be there the next day.

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the psychologist may 2020 art therapy

In pieces Perhaps I was trying to understand the disparity between an apparently calm exterior and what I felt inside. When I experienced serious mental distress, my drawing and painting took on new meaning, as I tried to deal with the inner maelstrom.

This is not inconsistent with the testimonies of the service users England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) drew upon, and quoted in the 2009 guidelines on treatments for psychosis and ‘schizophrenia’. Several people said that creative activities had been helpful to them. This seems to have led, alongside evidence from the few small controlled trials that had been done at the time, to a

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recommendation that all people with these diagnoses be offered arts therapies.

My mental health needs were initially to understand where my emotional pain came from, and then to find a pathway forward, be it winding, bumpy and crumbling in places, and sometimes needing sections to be built before they could be traversed safely. I have experienced a lot of psychological therapy, much of it psychodynamic but also CBT and third-wave CBT. Yet therapists were often interested when I showed them artworks. I remember one psychotherapist saying that she felt moved by a cartoon strip I drew of my life (unprompted).

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OK, yes I’m angry In the ‘patient’ role, one can often feel at the mercy of decisions made by doctors and nurses. Initially I thought that a diagnosis of severe depression and prescriptions of medication would be helpful.

However, psychiatric labels can harm as well as help, and various medications can become props that are difficult to cast aside (I am still on one). Over the years I have had more hours of talking therapy than I can count.

That is not to say that none of the talking was helpful. Apart from one early period of therapy from which I came out worse than when it started, I feel I have benefited from being able to bare my damaged soul and to experience compassion from a string of therapists over the years.

A stay of several months in a therapeutic community was also helpful early on, especially in

terms of experiencing the power of mutual support, both practical and emotional. I think this power was sometimes undermined by the need of doctors and nurses to exert their own authority. Whilst not intended to be harmful, this was not always therapeutic. Then again, they had some very troubled charges to care for, who they recognised often needed to acknowledge suppressed anger or sometimes control it better, and throughout my stay there the hospital was under threat of closure. Perhaps that’s why I’ve developed a research interest in the conditions that help mental health professionals to contribute most helpfully to their clients. Their surrounding systems and supports are so important.

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the psychologist may 2020 art therapy

Retrospective depiction of my younger self My lived experience suggests that psychological therapies never quite work in the way that the theories say they do. Understanding how therapy ‘really works’ seems a never-ending and fascinating quest. It has drawn me, amongst other work, to Ray Pawson’s writing, and to the work of psychologists Tony Roth and Peter Fonagy. For more than 20 years now, I have been based in a clinical psychology programme, teaching research methods and supervising clinical psychology doctorate research and PhDs. One of the areas I often supervise is concerned with psychological therapy processes and practices.

This brings me to art therapy. I only met art therapists in the last 10 years and have worked closely with the British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT) in the past five years doing research in relation to art therapy for people with a psychosis-related diagnosis.

I have assisted the BAAT in its development of new guidelines on art therapy for people with these diagnoses, available via www.baat.org. We have studied the most recent research evidence, and we have also listened to both experienced art therapists and service users, and incorporated their reflections and service users’ artworks. We have reported what service users say art therapists should not do, as well as what they find helpful. We want the guidelines to support research as well as assisting people to understand art therapy.

In order to understand art therapy better, six years ago I attended the BAAT foundation week in London,

entailing lectures and art-based workshops run by art therapists. Meeting new people scared me, as always, prompting Retrospective depiction of my younger self.

I often echo in my head others’ exhortations to ignore my fear or play it down. Sometimes it seems more important to me that I depict and acknowledge it.

Tickled I still make art, and it has a range of feeling tones and subjects. Through my work with art therapists, I have learned to approach other people’s artworks with curiosity and respect rather than as objects to be scrutinised and analysed. The most valuable interpretations are those of their makers when they look back at them. The artworks we have included in the guidelines, sometimes along with the artists’ statements about their work, add a special dimension to the document.

My experience of working with both psychologists and art therapists is that they often walk a line between overrationalising and over-mystifying what they do in their work with clients, and I see potential for greater collaboration and mutual benefit between psychologists and art therapists working in mental health. There’s so much to learn, and we can be creative about it. Writing stream-of-consciousness reflective diaries and allowing someone to interview you helps in articulating unexamined and sometimes deeply-held passions that may influence your work. If you’ve never tried it, perhaps doing a squiggly line on paper and then filling it in with what you see could also help. Random ink or paint splodges can work as your own Rorschach test (with your own system for interpreting them). However, as one of my participants in a research study once said, reflection can be valuable but not if you are only ever reflecting with others who have perceptions and experiences that are too similar to your own.

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So let’s listen to the users of mental health services. In what are termed audio image recordings (AIRs), people who have attended art therapy talk about their experience of it, as a voiceover to pictures of two to three artworks they made at different stages of therapy. Find these AIRs via www.baat.org.

I’ve sought to do something similar here with the written word. Let’s listen to what people are saying with the help of their art.

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Chris Daniels

How do we want to live?

Podcast On Being Kirsta Tippett

Freya McCaie listens in to On Being

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n Being is a podcast that asks the ‘animating questions at the centre of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?’ The podcast features interviews by journalist and former diplomat Krista Tippett (pictured above) with psychologists, including Ellen Langer, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt, as well as philosophers, writers, musicians, activists, spiritual leaders and even an acoustic biologist.

Interviews open with the question, ‘what was the spiritual background of your upbringing?’ In interviews with scientists this question illuminates the relationship between the researcher and their research, exploring how personal histories inform and even drive research and in turn the research alters the researcher. Consequently, we hear how psychologist Alison Gopnik was drawn to studying babies and children as the eldest of six siblings, and how psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk discovered that Rolfing helped him address trauma. While some listeners may feel frustrated at the lack of detailed research findings, the focus on the nexus of person and research is captivating.

The episode, ‘The soul in depression’, offers a frank and personal unpicking of depression – Tippett and all interviewees are ‘survivor(s) of depression’.

Andrew Solomon (author of Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression) articulates the relationship between taking medication and identity, saying, ‘medications have returned me to myself’. What is interesting here is not the conclusion – it will be different for everyone –but the discussion itself. I have worked in the mental health field and found clients express concern and interest about what medication means for selfhood, while professionals remain mute. Later, psychologist and poet Anita Barrows

focuses on the language of depression, describing the word as ‘one of the most inadequate words in our vocabulary’. Indeed, something On Being does well (albeit self-consciously) is articulate – and so offer to listeners language to talk about – the difficult or nebulous.

For example, the psychologist Ellen Langer offers the refreshing phrase, ‘noticing new things’ to describe mindfulness.

Listening to On Being is rejuvenating. Tippett is a skilled interviewer who balances structured interview questions with impromptu offerings. Though at times On Being can feel repetitive – and at worst, Tippett seems to nudge guests’ responses into a pre-determined schema – usually, the structure and focus she brings is balanced by the heterogeneity of the guests. Thus, the content varies widely from episode to episode, as each interviewee examines the existential questions of being through the unique lens of their discipline and personal histories.

In our fast-paced world it is grounding and perspectivegiving to slow down and explore questions that humans have been asking throughout history. As David Whyte, a poet interviewed by Tippett, writes: ‘Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.’ An hour with On Being is such a thing that can bring us – and the question of what it means to be us – alive again.

On Being can be found at https://onbeing.org Reviewed by Freya Tsuda McCaie, who has an MA in Education (Psychology) from UCL and a postgraduate diploma in psychology from the University of Derby.

02/04/2020 19:34

the psychologist may 2020 culture

Messy narratives of childhood theatre In Loco Parentis Connaught Theatre, Worthing

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Much questionable cleaning up goes on during the latest psychologically punishing piece from Vincent Dance Theatre, which focuses this time on young people and the care system. At various points, the dancers bring on brooms, and sweep away at the piles of paperwork that keep collecting on the stage. Sponges and a wet rag are used to erase marks from a chalkboard backdrop, the sponge snaking its way through a child’s rudimentary timeline, the wet rag whipping violently at a line drawing of ‘home’. All the while, a doll baby – the eerily still centre of the frenetic performance – lies discarded on the floor.

Informed by real-life testimony, this intergenerational dance-theatre piece is the latest in a series, from the socially engaged Brighton company, about the impact of the adult world on young lives. The last, The Art of Attachment [which I reviewed for The Psychologist in 2018], was a collaboration with women in recovery from substance misuse, some of whom had been separated from their children. In Loco Parentis wants to shift the focus on to the stories of the children themselves. An 11-year-old girl, Tia, and a 13-yearold boy, Kye, dance alongside adult performers Robert Clark, Aurora Lubos and Janusz Orlik.

In fact, many of the real voices we

hear (on interview tapes that artistic director Charlotte Vincent was editing right up to this preview performance) are those of adults: clinicians, social workers, foster carers and adopters. You suspect Vincent’s deep attachment to her ongoing research material plays some part in this, and the piece feels overlong and less structurally coherent than its predecessor.

But this strong adult presence and inconsistently sustained child voice also makes sense thematically.

Early developmental trauma disrupts continuity of being. Disorganised attachment manifests in fragmented narrative. For many of these children, their story is precisely that they have no coherent story to tell.

This is expressed in the questions Tia’s character repeats into a microphone, the stilted attempts of two caseworkers to tell why she is ‘here’ and no longer ‘there’, and the child interviewee who explains – apparently unaware of the awful irony – that there are elements of his own early history that are not yet ‘age appropriate’ for him to hear.

A painful ambiguity is whether the adults are helping or hindering.

Are they aiding the children in rebuilding their narratives or further impinging? Clearing up the mess, or messing them up more? This comes through in the post-show Q&A, as Vincent explains the direction of some current research towards supporting birth mothers to keep their children despite the risks, in order to avoid the child, ‘spending a lifetime trying to heal the primary wound’. There is a disconcerting slipperiness, too, to the way in which the performers shift between roles and age states. Adults come and go, come and go, while the man putting the boy through a series of violent lifts in one sequence is himself childlike and vulnerable in the next.

In Loco Parentis doesn’t forget that abuse is often

cyclical. The boy who has been engaged in this violent duet later greets empty space with his fists aloft. Lubos’ brilliant early solo captures the cruel predicament of the birth mother, maternal instinct battling with her own trauma history in every twitching muscle. Nor does the piece entirely foreclose hope: at one point the girl retrieves the baby doll from the floor and tenderly begins to clean it.

But I am left with mixed feelings about the climactic scene, depicting the point of no return in the children’s journey in to care. We see an exuberant family gathering descend into alcohol and cocainefuelled violence in gratuitous slow motion. The baby lies forgotten as dance music pounds, bottles smash, powder flies, and grimaces of anger or hysterical abandon twist into expressions of horror.

For me, it’s a moment when the virtuosity of the choreography and the dancers has an uncomfortable distancing effect. It feels stagey and a little judgey. But in the post-show discussion, a caseworker praises the verisimilitude of the scene: ‘We hear these stories’, she says. For her, the slick slow motion perfectly captures the experiences of birth families she has sat with in case conferences – the effect of seeing, ‘a piece of your life written up in notes and exchanged in emails…’

I wonder, though, why the company chose not to include a counterpoint – to put to movement, for instance, the moving testimony of the adoptive parent who describes, in such dance-like terms, how she responds to her new daughter’s rigid triggered states by ‘becom[ing] like water…’

‘I just keep going’, concludes her voice. What In Loco Parentis certainly conveys, with its arduous carousel of disordered and disrupted interactions, is the visceral emotional labour involved in surviving – and creating – home.

Reviewed by Isobel Todd, Psychodynamic Counsellor and arts journalist based in Brighton

02/04/2020 19:34

Maternal power and its demise opera broadcast Agrippina Metropolian Opera

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Mothers are often attributed the ultimate power to either forge or wreck a child’s emotional wellbeing.

Even the rich literature on mother love draws on this embedded assumption of maternal power, and therefore lies uncomfortably close to mother-blame.

The mother who doesn’t ‘let go’, who plans her child’s life, who uses attachment to prolong her power, is seen as toxic as the mother who neglects or abuses her child.

Combine the ambiguity of maternal power with cultural unease about woman wielding political power, and it is clear why Agrippina – mother of the sadistic and dissolute Emperor Nero – gets such a bad rap.

Agrippina, who lived from 15 to 59 AD, was framed even within her lifetime as power hungry, manipulative and murderous. Her brother Caligula accused her of plotting to overthrow him as emperor, and rumours of an incestuous relationship were the first of many ‘she slept her way to the top’ themes. Roman historian Tacitus charges Agrippina with using sexual allure to form alliances with men whom she would then persuade to destroy any rival. She is best known for persuading Emperor Claudius to adopt her son so that he could succeed him on the throne, and it is this story that fascinated two supreme dramatists of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

For these two dramatists – the playwright Racine and the composer Handel – Agrippina’s maternal power was the catalyst to her triumph. Racine’s 1669 play Britannicus portrays Agrippina as a possessive mother whose refusal to ‘let go’ of her son weakens his character.

As she ousts the Emperor’s biological son (Britannicus) as his father’s heir, she sets Nero on the path to psychopathic tyrant.

Handel’s 1709 opera Agrippina, with librettist Vincenzo Grimani, gives a comic overhaul to the dark material.

Librettist Grimani was himself a political operator, with his support for the Habsburgs gaining him the office of Cardinal. Grimani’s text ridicules the machinations of his political opponents, but Handel’s brilliant, bracing score brings us the inward life of the characters so fully and poignantly that their crude stereotypes disappear.

Agrippina is ferocious, but also proud, intelligent and vulnerable.

The production itself does not always follow the music’s nuance. In Act 1, as Agrippina conveys her plans to Nero, Handel reveals her as regal, steely and certain. Producer David McVicar, however, frames her maternal power as sexual teasing. She seduces rather than instructs the spoiled, cokehead of a teen to do her bidding. In other ways, however, Agrippina’s use of sexuality is strikingly true. McVicar shows (through DiDonato’s compelling acting) that Agrippina is not driven by lust. In fact, the touch of men clearly repels her. Sex, or even flirtation, is endured as a means to her ends. Poppea (sung by Brenda Rae, who has a voice like liquid silk) experiences a similar distaste, but initially she is more prey than predator of men. Then, taking her cue from Agrippina, she learns the older woman’s tactics and uses these against her. They inhabit a world in which every woman is for herself, alone, rooting only for the man who is most likely to secure her ambitions.

This production was first performed in Brussels in 2000 and has undergone many revisions, particularly in the portrayal of Agrippina. Reviews of the 2000 performances describe Agrippina as stalking the stage with aggressive shoulder pads, a power suit that suggested Margaret Thatcher or Hilary Clinton. Here

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the psychologist may 2020 culture she is Instagram glamorous, elegant and poised, in spite of her constant drinking. Poppea, who also moderates her sorrows with alcohol (and chocolate) is an appealing young woman set on resisting humiliation and control.

She bears more relation to Figaro/Beaumarchais’ Suzanna – clever, robust, and unmoved by the appeal of power – than to the ruthless, conniving Poppea of history (or of Monteverdi’s 1643 opera L’incoronazione di Poppea) who eventually marries Nero herself.

The production’s modern dress suggests not so much a tale of our times as a drama that might have been played out had the Roman Empire never declined.

Wiped from the opera’s overt story are the women’s first arranged marriages (Agrippina at 13 and Poppea at 14), the difficulty, when they are widowed, of protecting their fatherless sons, and the question as to how to live well in a culture where women are easy prey. And while there is no hint of Poppea’s backstory in the Handel opera, Agrippina’s Act 2 aria, Pensieri, voi me tormentate, (How my thoughts torment me) reveal the desperation and fear behind her ambition. Only if her son is emperor will she be safe, her dignity secured. Her vision is so unyielding that, in hearing DiDonato sing, there is no room to reflect on the irony that it is her son who will kill her when he does become emperor.

Does Agrippina’s maternal possessiveness destroy both her and her son? Is it psychologically appropriate that, in a story about a mother who refuses to ‘let go’ of her son, the son then kills her?

Certainly Racine’s drama is not sympathetic to Agrippina. She is the monster’s facilitator whose moral weakness seems tied to her control. But within the play there is another story, showing that the problem is not maternal power as much as its demise. Agrippina asks the primary parental question: What does my son need to thrive in his world? She believes that he needs the best teachers, and she surrounds him with these. She believes he needs a good woman, one who will curb his indolence and selfishness. She works hard to secure this. But her son’s weaknesses overpower her strength. He rejects his teachers’ advice. He pursues women he can torment and humiliate. And then he rejects his mother. It is this rejection that destroys him. Had he remained under her influence, both he and Rome would have been OK. More recent assessments of Agrippina point out that she was the only Empress of the Roman Empire and was an intelligent, benevolent ruler. Her effective control over Nero can be measured by the rapid decline of his rule after her death. These accounts are fully consistent with Handel’s Agrippina. It would be good to see a production that served the score’s positive depiction of her capability and pragmatism. In the meantime, we still have Handel’s music giving voice to a mother’s mixed bag of angels and demons – protectiveness, dedication, and strength, alongside her sometimes misguided efforts to secure ‘what’s best’ for her son. But then Handel’s opera also shows, in Juno’s final blessing of the coronation of Nero, that even the Gods do not always get things right.

Reviewed by Terri Apter, University of Cambridge

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Enduring sisterly love to understand why Connie was Sister relationships, in my anxious about Ursula speaking experience, are not straightforward. with Jack. We learn more about And so it is for Connie (Lucy Ellinson) each sister’s personality and and Ursula (Helena Lymbery), whose motivations as episodes from the pained and uneasy interactions as past fill in missing pieces of the adults at the start of the play tell of a puzzle. difficult past. Connie and The sisterly bond her partner Adrian (Silas theatre eventually endures, Carson) are in the throes Run Sister Run despite the complicated of a bitter and violent Studio Theatre, past. Though surely if we argument when Ursula Sheffield were to continue the time appears at their house, travel, we’d see just as unannounced. Nine-yearturbulent a relationship old Jack (Lucas Button) is in future decades – 50 years of delighted to meet his aunty Ursula, ups and downs can’t be forgotten. though Connie is not keen on their The play led me to reflect on my communicating, sending Jack to bed. relationships with my own sisters Ursula is sent away as Connie uses – the good times and the bad make-up to hide her bruises before times that influence how we an all-important dinner with Adrian’s are together now. Like Connie boss. and Ursula, I can think of We are taken back in time specific points in our shared to past chapters of their lives, in history that will no doubt shape decade intervals, slowly discovering our bonds for decades to come. how and why things ended up as It was almost comforting to see they did. The further back we go, what the pair went through, the closer Connie and Ursula are. managing to come back together At their youngest, they seem to in spite of it all. be the best of friends, older sister The focus on a relationship Connie promising to always hold between two sisters, and a Ursula’s hand. As they get older, the complicated relationship at that, relationship gets rockier, with Ursula was refreshing. I often find myself partying, taking drugs, and causing thinking ‘no sibling relationship is havoc in Connie’s flat. Substance use turns out to be just one factor leading like that!’ when the depiction on display is of close friends with just to the widening distance between the occasional bickering. In reality Connie and Ursula. There are some sibling relationships really surprises along the way as we come are like that, but typically they are highly charged – featuring both great warmth and great conflict, with the emotional intensity of the relationship affecting each other’s development and wellbeing. Run Sister Run felt like a portrayal of a genuine, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, sister relationship.

Reviewed by Annie Brookman-Byrne, Deputy Editor

Reviews online: Find more reviews at hepsychologist.org.uk/reviews, including Chrissie Fitch watches Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff); Jeremy Swinson on JoJo Rabbit; Ruth Borgfjord watches Feel Good; and Kevin Cheng on films with the theme of outbreak and pandemic…

02/04/2020 19:35

Psychological assessment and ‘the lost clinicians’ Jack Chalkley revisits what Monte Shapiro offers clinicians who doubt whether their assessments capture what is personal and vital in their patients’ distress

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t is just over 40 years since Monte Shapiro retired from the Institute of Psychiatry where, until three years earlier, he had been the head of the psychology service to the Maudsley Hospital and the clinical training course.

He made contributions both to research and to practice, but the heart of his work was directed at understanding the individually distinctive experiences of patients.

This preoccupation endeared him to practitioners as well as patients, and it shaped his views on routine clinical assessment. He would suggest to his trainees that while clinical researchers might tend to study single psychological ‘constructs’ (disorders, traits, drives, attributes and so on), clinical practitioners needed to be interested in all the distressing phenomena of a psychological kind that each patient brought. While he didn’t use the word himself, I will refer to these phenomena as ‘content’ here.

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Documenting concerns in a person’s own words Much at odds with prevailing practice at the time, Shapiro developed a systematic method for capturing such content. This, ‘for want of a better name’ (Shapiro, 1961, p.151), he called the Personal Questionnaire (PQ). The name stuck. There have been a few similar procedures. Bilsbury and Richman (2002) comprehensively reviewed their theory and practice in a distinguished but little-known monograph. Shapiro’s method, though, might well be the most familiar, at least in the UK, and it was the one I was drawn to throughout my career.

Rather than talk about ‘administering the PQ’, the collaboration between practitioner and patient makes it preferable to talk about ‘constructing a personal questionnaire’. The questionnaire is constructed from the purposeful conversation that precedes it. Here is an example of such a set of items for a young woman with a small child living with her parents: Difficulty stopping washing my face once I’ve started Feeling ashamed of myself after washing it Feeling of anxiety if I don’t wash my face

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the psychologist may 2020 looking back Tendency to snap at my family after I’ve been washing Sense of myself as just existing Concern that there is nothing I know how to do okay Uncertainty about how to deal with my mum and dad when they interfere Sense of not knowing how I feel about anything Feeling of being dirty when I fetch my daughter from the nursery Concern that other parents know that I’m less together than I appear

and subjective, representative rather than exhaustive of a personally distressing state of affairs. At the time Shapiro did most of his work with personal questionnaires – the sixties and seventies – it was quite radical to press on with something that, while systematic, was also quite conversational in the way these lists of concerns were created. It was radical too, in the sense that it was far from a typical view of what was objective and desirable – far at least from what systematically assembled assessment data usually looked like then.

However, now there seems to be something much What makes this kind of assessment of someone’s more immediate and appealing for practitioners about distress so striking? The material is not just personal such material. Beyond the argument for accuracy and in the words chosen but contextual in the way it takes relevance, there are the ethical considerations that hold of a person’s situation in life, and not simply remind the clinician that it is perhaps the client’s or their state of mind. What is produced is a set of items patient’s distress that is central and its value has much to do with rather than the one or more what those items contribute both “…it was far from a typical diagnostic conditions that seem individually and collectively, which will vary from person to person but view of what was objective best to fit. This focus on distress is evident in Shapiro’s writings (see, include some of the following: and desirable” for example, Shapiro, 1975a). But • the identification of a number one finds the same emphasis in of fairly discrete areas of distress a recent psychological textbook • a set of problems indicative of (Cromby et al., 2013); and it was expressed again in some sort of disorder, or condition Peter Kinderman’s address as President of the British • a number of issues that are the result of a disorder Psychological Society in 2017. rather than part of a disorder (material illustrative Yet personal questionnaires have never caught of a person’s predicament) on. Nor procedures like them. If they had a heyday, • the better understanding of particular concerns by it was in the 1970s. Today, there is recognition that the way other concerns shed light on them distress is central to matters, but there seems to be no • items that provide options, choices of ways in, a urgency at large to find a way to capture the content of means of planning and prioritising, or hints that it directly and systematically. Why have the ideas on point a way forward which personal questionnaires and similar procedures • a safeguard against what might otherwise be were based failed to take hold? Has it been due to overlooked circumstantial factors? Bill Yule in Clinical Psychology • a sense of a person’s position in relation to how in Britain: Historical Perspectives (CPIB) (Hall et al., they see their difficulties and what brought them 2015) suggested that Shapiro’s writing failed to make about, and occasionally their readiness to work an impact. ‘He kept up a steady flow of thoughtful with you papers on the role of the clinical psychologist, but the • material that needs explaining or understanding in published corpus of his work is relatively sparse and a psychological formulation does not do justice to his thinking’ (CPIB, p.133).

• the experience for a patient of being carefully This is true of his writings on personal questionnaires, listened to and perhaps better understood than where we have only a brief preliminary article and a hitherto. faded typescript to turn to for practical instruction (Shapiro, 1961; Shapiro 1975b). Elsewhere in CPIB the suggestion is made that there came a moment A road not taken when the research interests of the profession as a You might view personal questionnaires and whole turned from assessment to treatment. The similarly descriptive, phenomenological procedures inference might be that here were ideas deserving to be as a continuation of what counselling and clinical researched that for one reason or another – reasons not psychologists usually do anyway in their routine to do with the inherent merit of the ideas – failed to be clinical work. We ask a new patient why they have communicated effectively or explored sufficiently, and come to see us, or what the person’s problem is. We so never came to fruition. note the answer and possibly write it down in the person’s own words. In principle, we have only to repeat the question a number of times in a ‘Are there other reasons why you have come?’ or a ‘What else is a To measure or not to measure?

Might something else be involved? Years ago, Alvan problem?’ kind of way to create a set. There is an irony Feinstein (1967) made a distinction, rather like of the so-near-yet-so-far sort to reflect on later here.

Shapiro’s, between practitioners and researchers. He The material generated this way is experiential

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contrasted ‘clinicians’ and ‘psychosocial scientists’. He saw the psychosocial scientists as happy to do what Lord Kelvin told them to do and just get on with it and measure, but he saw the clinicians as lost. When it came to assessment, either they measured what they judged could be measured rather than what ought to be measured; or, despite knowing that there were times when they ought not to be measuring, they measured nonetheless; or, believing their activities to be too human and too complex for science, they failed to measure at all.

Today’s scientist practitioners seem in principle better able to reconcile the roles of psychosocial scientist and clinician. But they remain under great pressure to measure, especially if by ‘measure’ one includes not just formal assessment on psychiatric and the better known psychological constructs. One needs also to consider the looser assessment procedures and criteria involved in such tasks as establishing how far someone is suffering a severe mental health disorder or a person’s degree of suitability for a particular psychotherapy. These too imply metrics, even if crude ones.

This pressure might be one way of understanding the usual outcome of the debate about whether to prioritise person-based idiographic or populationbased nomothetic assessment. The two compete for the limited time available for assessment. Given the conflicting demands – and idiographic assessment is indeed much slower than nomothetic – the case for routinely using personal questionnaires suffers. The specificity and sensitivity on offer may seem a luxury (Green, 2016). There hasn’t up to now been sufficient reason to overturn the historic judgment of Beutler and Crago (1983) on the inclusion of personalised outcome measures Key sources in routine evaluation: that they are justifiable only ‘from an idealistic perspective’ (p.483).

Bilsbury, C.D. & Richman, A. (2002).

There is an impression to be A staging approach to measuring patient-centred subjective outcomes. had here of idiographic procedures Acta Psychiatrica Scadinavica, 106 like personal questionnaires as (Supplementum 414). essentially supplementary in the Chalkley, J. (2015). The Content of sense of filling in and adding on, Psychological Distress. London: Macmillan. providing greater specificity and Feinstein, A.R. (1967). Clinical Judgment. sensitivity, and thereby refining Huntington, New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company. what has gone before in terms Goodenough, F.L. (1949). Mental Testing: of measurement. If one has only Its History, Principles and Applications. this impression, one falls short of New York: Rinehart & Company. understanding what was potentially Green, D. (2016). Making the case for on offer to Feinstein’s lost clinicians using personalized outcome measures who struggled in their measuring to track progress in psychotherapy.

European Journal of Psychotherapy and to find the path to securing a hold Counselling, 18, 39-57. on their patients’ experiences Shapiro, M.B. (1961). A method of and meanings. To hold only this measuring changes specific to the impression is to misunderstand individual psychiatric patient. British Jnl the true nature of personal of Medical Psychology, 34, 151-155. questionnaires. At heart, personal Full list available in online/app version questionnaires are not measurement procedures; they are sampling ones.

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Sampling is needed where the wish is to address content rather than engage with psychological constructs. The issue surfaced as long as 70 years ago in a substantial book by Florence Goodenough on mental testing, published in the year of the Boulder Conference on the future of clinical psychology (Goodenough, 1949). It was ‘an elementary fact’, she said, that sampling involved considerations of ‘time and circumstance’ (p.101). Psychological constructs needed to transcend such considerations.

She makes no mention of content; and yet, when she later described ‘the well-nigh infinite variety of the problems the clinical psychologist is called upon to solve’, or when she said ‘the clinical psychologist cannot choose his problem; it is thrust upon him’ (p.469), she understands the difficulty psychologists face in dealing with material that is highly personal and contextualised, and utterly steeped in ‘time and circumstance’. She laments the fact, acknowledges the issue, but declines to address it.

Assessing content then and now Shapiro does address it. What he did that was so bold and radical was to tackle time and circumstance head on and ask of practitioners that they be test constructors every time they met a new patient. He encouraged practitioners to plunge in and explore the content of the patient’s concerns in their own words; and do it systematically. In contrast to Goodenough, and those who were to follow her in the search for ‘better’ psychological constructs, he was seeking to find direct expression of what the patient was finding difficult rather than proceeding via reconstructions of it in professional language.

This keenness to be personal, contextual, and to employ ordinary language suggests more a wish to describe than to explain; or, to put it another way, the emphasis of his new procedure was on determining what was to be explained or understood rather than on the explaining or understanding of it. In modern vocabulary that might be better expressed as emphasis on what is to be formulated rather than on the formulating of it. I sense Shapiro would have agreed with Clare Crellin’s (1988) observation that it makes little sense to formulate without first listening to the patient’s account of their difficulties. To take no account of these is ‘neither logical or scientific’ and therefore to be avoided unless one’s view of formulation is purely a ‘technological’ one (p.26).

Assuming though that formulations are not done in a formulaic, purely technological fashion, they have in common with personal questionnaires a recognisably bottom-up quality. Both present material that practitioner and patient need to make sense of. However, in Shapiro’s time things were much more top-down. This can be seen in his writing.

Notwithstanding all that might be said about the radical nature of his procedure, reading Shapiro’s original article, one sees how he operated within

02/04/2020 19:38

the psychologist may 2020 looking back

the diagnostic framework and have to speak of ‘self-report’ as an supporting phenomenology of aspect of something more important Jack Chalkley psychiatry. Rather than speak or fundamental; instead, we are is a former broadly of a person’s concerns able to talk directly in terms of NHS clinical or difficulties, he chose to speak a patient’s ‘personal experience’. psychologist who of ‘symptoms’ (Shapiro, 1961).

This way of expressing things is worked in Bath, Fourteen years later, he is still softer and less entangled in the Bristol and Torbay careful to describe the content of the jargon of assessment theory, even in adult mental personal questionnaire interview as if the distinctions of assessment health and recovery services over covering ‘quite familiar psychiatric theory remain key. It is important some 30 years. ground’ (Shapiro, 1975b, p.8). to think about the content validity J.uzdrow@gmail.com And it isn’t surprising, given of constructs, but also important to Shapiro’s other interests, that think about content in its own right. the role proposed for personal questionnaires in Where does this leave Feinstein’s lost clinicians? his final paper is not their potential use in routine The case outlined to them is for taking on Shapiro and clinical assessment but in reinvigorating research into beginning new psychological assessments by sampling, psychiatric depression (Shapiro, 1989). putting any measuring aside for later. It is for defying The response of clinical psychologists to Shapiro Lord Kelvin and reversing Beutler and Crago. The at the time also reflected something of the age. irony is that actually many of us probably do first ask The fine work undertaken by Patrick Phillips and what brings the patient to see us. (But then probably David Mulhall in the 1970s looked at the scaling, hesitate and change course.) The argument here is scoring and administration of ‘the PQ’ not at what for persistence in identifying a person’s concerns it was that should be being scored, scaled and systematically, confident in the quality of the material administered in ‘personal questionnaires’. Their that will be generated. It requires a conceptual step research was eminently practical and psychometric to distinguish content from constructs; and there is rather than exploratory and investigative. But now, in a further practical one involved in starting to focus this more bottom-up, patient-centred era, questions professional attention on interview coverage and what about what goes into a personal questionnaire seem to sample in approaching the matter of psychological much more central and immediate. We no longer content (Chalkley, 2015).

London

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02/04/2020 19:38

We dip into the Society member database and pick out…

Dr Edward Ong Associate Lecturer at Coventry University One thing psychology could do better I wish there were more psychologists, researchers or academics who are interested in cross-cultural research. We need more diversity to help our discipline to grow and there is so much that we don’t know. We need to learn from different groups of people, to share and reflect on what we know, to learn from other cultures as well as to help promote mental health in developing countries.

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One proud moment Every year, I get to see different groups of psychology students in the university. I get to see my students grow to be psychologists – competent, knowledgeable, inspired and passionate with what they can do and what they plan to do once they have graduated. I’ve learned so much from them as an academic and I hope I’ve done the same for them.

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Back when I was an undergraduate psychology student in Malaysia, psychology was at its infancy stage, so there were limited work experiences if you aspired to be a practitioner psychologist. However, I persevered, working as a research assistant for different psychological projects. I gained clinical experiences and volunteered in different social events and non-profit organisations, which helped me to widen my perspective, knowledge and skills. Try to get different kinds of experiences from different fields of psychology wherever you are, wherever you can. Every little step will get you where you want eventually. Be passionate, brave and do not give up.

One interesting thing about my job I get to work with different groups of psychologists and academics from different parts of Asia, who all work in a similar area to promote psychology and to promote better safeguarding for vulnerable children from abuses and violence.

coming soon… harassment in psychology; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more... contribute… reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …May 2018, The new psychology of health …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist the

psychologist may 2018

may 2018

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One book that inspired me Damaged by Cathy Glass. This book was the first that inspired me to work in the area of child abuse and neglect. Cathy is a foster carer who cared for a little girl who was sexually abused and had already been through numerous foster families because she was violent and aggressive. Cathy talks about her struggles as a foster carer, the slow process of social welfare and the patience needed to help the child open up and talk about her dark past.

That truly inspired me and I appreciate the work that foster carers and social workers do to help these children.

One motto A few years back I came across an inspiring speaker named Brene Brown. I have followed her work and one of her many quotes that still sticks with me today is this: ‘Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.’ This quote became my motto that I try to live with every day.

the psychologist

One moment that changed the course of my career I was involved in research related to refugee children’s mental health, screening for depression and PTSD. My experience was incredibly profound, as I saw for myself how fragile and vulnerable children could be from their traumatising life experiences as a result of maltreatment. In aiding those who have been hurt, the listeners too are exposed to the pain suffered. I was both shocked and emotionally pained as I listened to the children whose stories I recorded, but with them, I grew more resilient, and found the strength to assist them in getting help.

one on one

Unlocking the social cure A special feature on the new psychology of health

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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Society Trustees

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

www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are President David Murphy President Elect Dr Hazel McLaughlin Vice President Vacant Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Dr Juliet Foster Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Membership Board Vacant Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor Trustees Dr Chris Lynch, Professor Clifford Stott, Dr Ester Cohen-Tovee, Christina Buxton, Dr Adam Jowett Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa

society notices Due to COVID-19 pandemic the British Psychological Society has made the difficult decision to cancel/ postpone events.

Please see www.bps.org.uk/events for more details.

For more on the Society’s response to coronavirus, see www.bps.org.uk/responding-coronavirus

Change Programme Director Diane Ashby Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton Director of Finance and Resources Harnish Hadani Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership and Professional Development Karen Beamish Director of Policy Kathryn Scott Head of Legal and Governance Christine Attfield

For The Psychologist’s collection of coverage and links, see tinyurl.com/PsychmagCorona

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The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester (St Andrews House, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester, LE1 7DR).

02/04/2020 19:41

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