The Psychologist May 2022 by The Psychologist

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psychologist may 2022

Cupboard love Unwrapping the comfort in food Andrea Oskis

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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psychologist may 2022

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

Cupboard love Unwrapping the comfort in food Andrea Oskis

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

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The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

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issn 0952-8229 (print) 2398-1598 (online) © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless speciﬁcally stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@ bps.org.uk.

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, or tweet us on @psychmag.

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

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Peter Olusoga, Blanca Poveda, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Vacant Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Dawn Branley-Bell, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Deborah Husbands, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker

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psychologist may 2022

The damages of Brexit in Northern Ireland Catriona Shelly and Orla Muldoon with a social psychological analysis

Cupboard love: Unwrapping the comfort in food Andrea Oskis explores the intrinsic connection between food and feelings

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Letters Anger; the DunningKruger Effect; and more News Climate; students; BPS and Ukraine; Joanna Wilde; and more Digest Journal editors; conspiracy; and more

Beyond the battle of the dinner table Sally Wiggins Young with some evidence-based advice for family mealtimes

‘We have seen principles of CBT trickle down into the mainstream’ Jo Daniels talks to Ella Rhodes

‘Living for today’ with a progressive condition Ayad Marhoon on adapting to life with multiple sclerosis

Football adopting the Olympic model We hear from Bradley Busch

Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

Books ‘The end of trauma’ with George Bonnano; neuroscience for organisational communication; the grieving brain with Mary-Frances O’Connor; and reviews

Culture Elaine Kasket talks grief with Bjørn Johnson and Jane Harris; Travis Langley on The Batman; plus reviews

Looking back Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater on what the forgotten story of Laura Bridgman tells us about the astonishing ﬂexibility of human communication

The last time I wrote as Deputy Editor on this page was for our January 2021 issue on veganism, which caused quite a stir. As I write my last ever editorial for The Psychologist, that issue remains the one I am most proud of. It ticked all the boxes to meet our aims stated opposite – providing communication, discussion and controversy, while diffusing knowledge of psychology. This month, we bring you another issue partially focused on food. There’s Andrea Oskis on the comfort in food, and Sally Wiggins Young gives a new perspective on talk at mealtimes. To anyone who says they don’t like vegan food, I now optimistically say, ‘you’re not enjoying it now, that’s ﬁne, maybe it’ll taste better another time’. Before I sign off I’d like to thank the amazing team I’ve worked with for the last three years, and our associate editors and committee. Thank you and keep up the good work. And readers, please contribute! As I transition back to being a reader, I look forward to seeing the communication, discussion and controversy continue.

One on one …with Jane Iles

Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne Deputy Editor @psychmag

the psychologist may 2022 letters

Overconfident defenders of the Dunning-Kruger effect Our recent Psychologist article on the Dunning-Kruger effect (March issue) was not entirely endorsed by David Dunning in his reply (April issue). We have noted elsewhere that the right-of-reply format tends to produce protracted and personalised debates that drift away from the data (Chambers, McIntosh & Della Sala, 2021), so we will try to be brief and constructive here. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the common finding that poor performers overestimate their abilities more than good performers do. Dunning’s ‘dual-burden’ account of the effect is that poor performers lack the metacognitive insight to be aware of their incompetence. The main target of our article was not the work of Dunning and collaborators, much of which we admire, but the divisive meme that popular discourse has made of it: that stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid. Dunning’s first discontent is that we argued ‘that the effect has no real existence but is a mere statistical

Thanks to @NoRockAllGem on Twitter for sending us this wonderful artwork based on our March editorial, which recounted the ‘but I wore the juice’ opening of the original Dunning-Kruger paper. If you ever feel inspired to creativity by any of our content, please share with us on Twitter @psychmag

artefact’. We actually argued that the effect is strong, but so-much shaped by statistical artefacts that it provides no real evidence for the dual-burden account. The difference depends on whether the Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as the classic pattern of overestimation in low performers, or as the dual-burden account of this pattern. It is hard to know which Dunning prefers, because he seems to switch between definitions in his reply. He initially identifies the effect with his theoretical account, chastising us for ‘conflating the idea behind the Dunning-Kruger effect with its concrete measurement’; but he subsequently identifies the effect with the pattern itself, insisting that the effect is real because ‘the pattern of self-misjudgements remains regardless of what may be producing it’. We are at least consistent, and consistent with wider usage, in identifying the Dunning-Kruger effect with the pattern of self-misjudgements (see e.g. Britannica and Wikipedia). We maintain that this pattern is driven by statistical artefacts, and not by metacognitive differences between good and poor performers. One major artefact is regression to the mean, which will be most extreme if researchers double-dip the data, by using the same measure of performance to index ability and to benchmark self-estimation. The contribution of double-dipping to the classic pattern is confirmed by the fact that the pattern is attenuated when doubledipping is avoided, or adjustments are made for variability in the measurement of performance (Ehrlinger et al., 2008; Feld et al., 2017; Kruger & Dunning, 2002; McIntosh et al, 2018). Dunning notes that the pattern is not eliminated by such steps, so double-dipping cannot be the whole story. We agree, but this only underlines our point about the pervasiveness of regression to the mean, which occurs between any two measures that are less than perfectly correlated. Our example of height and weight was chosen advisedly, to show that imperfect correlations always imply regressive relationships, even when precise measurement is possible (with no double-dipping). The regressive relationship between ability and self-estimates tells us only that self-estimates are imperfectly related to ability; it does not tell us why, nor imply any special lack of insight amongst the poorest performers. So, we agree with Dunning that, in order to find out whether poor performers are metacognitively different from good performers, we need other research strategies; but some of the studies he cites have shortcomings that make their conclusions mere tautologies. For instance, to find that the people least able to distinguish fake news from real news are the most likely to share fake news stories (Lyons et al., 2021) is more-or-less to measure the same thing twice, like showing that the slowest runners are the least likely to do well in running races. To find that the people who endorse autism myths have the least knowledge of autism (Motta

the psychologist may 2022 letters et al., 2018) is actually to measure the same thing twice, if the test of knowledge includes some of those myths. Studies in this general area seem particularly prone to such logical circularities, which undermine their claims scientifically, but are rarely trumpeted in the media fanfare that follows. More promising is the study by Jansen et al. (2021), which was based upon tasks from Kruger and Dunning’s (1999) original paper. This large-scale online study did not assess metacognition directly, but compared models of the data that either did or did not include the assumption that poor performers had less metacognitive insight than good performers. This assumption allowed for a slightly better fit to the data. Dunning takes this to vindicate the dual-burden account, but the proposed metacognitive differences accounted for only a small fraction of the classic pattern at the extreme ends of the ability range. When Jansen et al. plotted their data by ability quartiles, the differences between models with and without metacognitive differences were invisible. Far from vindicating metacognitive differences as a substantive source of the Dunning-Kruger effect, these data are consistent with the view that the signature pattern is overwhelmingly driven by statistical regression. Some incompetent people may seem grossly overconfident, but this is mostly a statistical truism, not a metacognitive counterpart of incompetence; and there are also poor performers who humbly admit their limitations, and high performers hubristic in their arrogance. Indeed, people in general are rather bad at estimating themselves using simple rating scales. But self-knowledge is a multifaceted topic, and we agree with Dunning that there may be cases in which genuine overconfidence can be traced to psychological causes, for instance if a person is using the wrong rule (e.g. for calculating compound interest), thinking it to be the right one (Williams et al., 2013). We also expect that, if metacognition is measured

by appropriate methods, the poorest performers may often be the least able to distinguish their successes and failures, though this would not mean that they are overconfident or deluded. Such studies would take us beyond the reductive meme of the Dunning-Kruger effect, to a more nuanced examination of the complex topic of self-estimation. Robert D. McIntosh Sergio Della Sala Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, University of Edinburgh References Chambers, C., McIntosh R.D. & Della Sala, S. (2021). Is ‘right-ofreply’ right for science? Cortex, 142, A1. Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M. et al. (2008). Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (lack of) self-insight among the incompetent. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105(1), 98-121. Feld, J., Sauermann, J. & de Grip, A. (2017). Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 68, 18-24. Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (2002). Unskilled and unaware—But why? A reply to Krueger and Mueller. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(2), 189-192. Lyons, B.A., Montgomery, J.M., Guess, A.M. et al. (2021). Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility. Proceedings of the National Academic of Science, 118(23), e2019527118. McIntosh, R.D., Fowler, E.A., Lyu, T. & Della Sala, S. (2019). Wise up: Clarifying the role of metacognition in the Dunning-Kruger effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(11), 1882. Motta, M., Callaghan, T. & Sylvester, S. (2018). Knowing less but presuming more: Dunning-Kruger effects and the endorsement of anti-vaccine policy attitudes. Social Science & Medicine, 211(C), 274281. Williams, E.F., Dunning, D. & Kruger, J. (2013). The hobgoblin of consistency: Algorithmic judgment strategies underlie inflated self-assessments of performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(6), 976–994.

Letters on Ukraine Find more online, including: An evolving collection of perspectives from those impacted by the war. ‘Visible subalternism’ and Ukraine Bruno de Oliveira writes.

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The ‘dream forest’ of Lublin Dr Lorraine Haye with reﬂections on working at an evacuation centre for Ukrainian refugees. Undoing the cycle of violence Stephen Blumenthal with thoughts on leaders.

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‘Opportunity and hope around meaningful change’

sychologists have emphasised the importance of ecoemotions, a connection with nature and systemic approaches aimed at tackling the climate emergency. The House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, chaired by the Baroness Parminter, has been exploring ways to use behaviour change in relation to the environment, as well as policy measures to support these changes. In written evidence the Centre for Behaviour Change (CBC), based at University College London, said in designing behaviour change interventions it was important to consider what may make them less likely to work – for example, failing to consider the reasons for people’s behaviour, believing that simply providing information was enough to change behaviour, or assuming that people always act rationally. They wrote that interventions should be developed with the engagement and representation of the people targeted. Implementation should be considered at the outset of intervention design, and theory and frameworks used to understand the current behaviour. The CBC suggested that the Behaviour Change Wheel framework would be the best model to use as it was ‘comprehensive, coherent, linked to a model of behaviour and useable without specialist training’. Tackling climate change using behaviour change, they said, would require large-scale change of numerous behaviours which would involve complex systems of actors.

Leader of the Nature Connectedness Research Group, Professor Miles Richardson (University of Derby), emphasised the importance of our feeling of connection with the natural world when taking action to protect it. In his written evidence he pointed to the 2020 UK Covid lockdowns, which increased the public’s connection with nature and their levels of pro-nature behaviours. Senior Lecturer and Clinical Psychologist Dr Elizabeth Marks (University of Bath), Dr Panu Pihkala (Adjunct Professor of Environmental Theology, University of Helsinki), Caroline Hickman (University of Bath), and Elouise Mayall (University of East Anglia), submitted written evidence and highlighted the importance of eco-emotions. They pointed to a recent study of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries, including the UK, which explored their feelings about climate change. Many felt powerless, anxious, sad and afraid at the thought of climate change. Respondents also shared their beliefs about the current state of the climate with many agreeing that people had failed to take care of the planet, that the future was frightening, and humanity doomed. Marks and her colleagues wrote that approaches to encourage behaviour change should demonstrate how those changes could make a difference. ‘By offering individuals both opportunity and hope around meaningful change, they are more likely to experience emotional satisfaction and social acceptance of pro-environmental behaviours.’

the psychologist may 2022 news

BPS urges action on workforce, rising living costs and online safety The British Psychological Society has highlighted a number of issues – from psychological workforce resourcing, to the cost of living crisis, and cybersafety – which it says must be addressed to protect mental health in the UK. On the second anniversary of the UK’s lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic on 23 March, the Society demanded urgent action by the UK government on the mental health workforce and funding – with a particular focus on early intervention. This was in response to an analysis that revealed demand for children and young people’s mental health services had jumped by 45 per cent in the two years of the pandemic. There were 397,147 open referrals to children and young people’s mental health services at the end of December 2021, compared with 261,939 at the end of December 2019, according to a study by the BPS of NHS Digital data. ‘We know that early intervention is critical to improving outcomes for children, young people and their families,’ said Dr Helen Griffiths, chair of the BPS’ Division of Clinical Psychology’s Faculty for Children, Young People, and their Families. ‘These figures lay bare the toll the pandemic has taken on our children and young people’s mental health, with the pressures of missed education and reduced opportunities to socialise with friends and others, both of which play a significant part in development and wellbeing.’ She added: ‘Given that near three-quarters of mental health problems begin to emerge before the age of 25, the focus now must be to build on initiatives such as early intervention hubs and mental health support teams, as well as investing in specialist services.’ The BPS also reiterated its calls to add 10 minutes more play into the school day.

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Associate Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations Professor Wouter Poortinga (Cardiff University) shared his insights with the committee at an oral evidence session. He pointed out that a high level of concern about climate change did not automatically lead to behaviour change and said when people make decisions about their behaviour they consider multiple factors alongside the environment. When asked about what the public expect from government in terms of supporting change for the sake of the climate, Poortinga shared some of his research into perceptions of climate change and coronavirus. He found that while the public felt a joint responsibility with governments to tackle coronavirus, in terms of climate change the public saw the responsibility as lying with governments and felt their own actions would be less effective. ‘If individuals do not see the Government taking the lead, or taking their part, in dealing with those crises, individuals are also less willing to play their own part in trying to deal with the issue.’ Poortinga ended with some suggestions for government in terms of communications and behaviour change policy for climate and environmental issues. He said there was no silver bullet for behaviour change interventions. ‘You need to combine multiple measures that includes education, that includes communication, that includes infrastructure investments, that includes taxation or ﬁscal measures and regulation as well… trust is incredibly important. You would want to have the trust of the public in order to get to net zero.’ Director of the University of Cambridge Behaviour and Health Research Unit, Professor Dame Theresa Marteau also appeared at an oral evidence session with the committee. She explained that there were two broad approaches to behaviour change – those targeting individuals and those targeting environments and systems. ‘We need both but the emphasis to date… has been too much on targeting individuals and not enough on targeting those systems or environments that shape our behaviour. While information… about the impact of our behaviour on carbon emissions can be important in raising our awareness, its impact on our behaviour is at best minimal, and we need to retain that as a core observation. That is no reason not to give information, but it is not going to shift behaviour.’ One of Marteau’s main recommendations to the committee was for government to develop a science strategy and delivery body for changing behaviour to reach net zero, to be led by the Committee on Climate Change. She said this strategy would need to be both evidence-led and far more ambitious, in scale and speed, than other previous interventions by government – and have evaluation built in. She also made a plea to the committee to ensure it was properly resourced. ‘It needs to engage the whole of civil society, as well as business, and policymakers at local, national and international levels… The task is huge, but the prize is also huge.’ ER

In a separate briefing paper, ‘From poverty to flourishing: Covid perspective’, produced on behalf of the Division of Occupational Psychology by Dr Ritsa-Ventouratos and Dr Andrew Clements, the authors acknowledge ‘that all scientists and leaders are being faced with the biggest challenges of recent times’. ‘At a societal level there is a need to be mindful about reinvesting in good quality and active labour markets, to move with caution on a road that is unfamiliar to all citizens, whilst ensuring that we do all we can to flourish and sustain a healthy nation state,’ the paper concludes. ‘Organisations, too, must invest in the wellbeing of employees. As a fundamental condition, we recommend that such changes always involve fairness and justice at the community, organisational and governmental level.’ The ‘glaring absence’ of measures to address the rising cost of living in the Chancellor’s Spring Statement in March, was also highlighted by the Society. It warned that many vulnerable people and families, including children, could be pushed into poverty. ‘The mental health impacts of this are severe – we know that the stress of raising a family in poverty can have huge ramifications on parents’ and children’s mental health, and that poverty is one of the major risk-factors for the development of mental and physical health problems,’ warned Sarb

Bajwa, the BPS’ CEO. Meanwhile, the Society has warned that the UK’s draft Online Safety Bill leaves online users, particularly children, vulnerable to harm. Though amendments have been made to the Bill, it has not extended the duty of responsibility to protect users from content that is deemed ‘legal but harmful’ to all platforms, said the BPS. Instead only Category One companies – the largest online platforms including

the most popular social media sites – are compelled to address content deemed ‘harmful to adults that falls below the threshold of a criminal offence’. The government has said it will clarify what counts as ‘legal but harmful’ content in secondary legislation. The BPS noted that the government’s failure to place ‘a clear and statutory requirement on platforms to co-operate on crossplatform risks means children

will still be vulnerable to harm, for example if child grooming moves across platforms to encrypted messaging and live streaming sites’. ‘It’s encouraging to see the Online Safety Bill progressing, however it is concerning that a number of points raised by the BPS (see tinyurl.com/bpsonlinesafe) that would have strengthened it have not been heeded,’ said Dr Linda Kaye, chair of the BPS’ Cyberpsychology Section. SB

Student ambassadors raise awareness The new BPS student ambassadors have had a busy year so far, working to promote the society among their fellow students and beyond. A pilot for the volunteer scheme was launched earlier this year to build better links between the BPS, psychology students and universities in the UK. Northern Ireland Branch ambassadors Sarah, Japheth and Emma met with the chair of the branch Dr Karen Hagan to discuss future events. Sarah has also written articles to be published in the Open

University student magazine about the BPS and British Science Week, while Japheth has been speaking to staff at Ulster University to promote the student ambassador programme, and to raise awareness about the society among psychology students. In the North East of England Branch, Nicole has been working with staff members at Shefﬁeld Hallam University to promote BPS membership to undergraduate and master’s students. Nicole and Evelyn are also in discussions to present

Homes for Ukrainian psychologists The BPS is working with the National Psychological Association of Ukraine (NPA) to explore ways to match members to Ukrainian psychologists and/or their families, seeking refuge from the current war. Under the UK government’s ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme, which opened on the 14 March, named UK residents can offer named Ukrainians a place to stay. They must be able to offer refugees their own room for at least six months. The Society is also sharing resources and training with the NPA, particularly best practice in crisis and trauma, and psychological ﬁrst aid.

Soothing ‘needle phobia’ in kids Teddies and stickers – as well as age-appropriate information – may help health professionals reduce anxiety in children undergoing vaccination. These examples are from the Society’s new guidance to support all children who want a Covid-19 vaccination to have one, and to support routine procedures including blood tests. Some 50-60 per cent of children, compared with 10 per cent of adults, have worries around needles. Four documents, produced by the BPS’s Division of Clinical Psychology’s Public Health and Prevention Sub-committee in collaboration with other organisations, aim to prepare everyone involved (health professionals, parents and carers and children) when a 5-18-year-old has a health procedure that involves using a needle. See tinyurl.com/needleguidance

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‘We are not enabling people to make informed choices about their health and wellbeing’ Ella Rhodes hears from Lawrence Howells ahead of his British Psychological Society webinar.

to sixth forms and colleges about BPS membership and accredited Psychology courses. BPS Partnership and Careers Liaison Lead Natalie Billing said the student ambassador pilot has already been a valuable initiative. ‘Our selected Volunteer Student Ambassadors are making plenty of worthwhile contacts with their fellow psychology students and their university staff, to explain the beneﬁt and value of BPS membership, alongside signposting key careersrelated queries to the most suitable place. We have already seen our ambitious volunteers present to their university cohorts, set up a variety of events and activities across campus, and develop their own content to promote the BPS!’ Billing said the ambassadors’ work has raised universities’ awareness of both BPS activities and the way in which the society can support students. ‘The structure we envisaged for this pilot uses our branches to help support the student ambassadors within their region. For the ﬁve branches currently involved, we are working closely with their representatives and have received some brilliant feedback in terms of the resourcefulness of the volunteers themselves, but also through the networking developments between stakeholders involved. We are monitoring the progress of this pilot, with the hope of rolling out a UK-wide programme of volunteer student ambassadors come September of this year – watch this space!’ ER

the psychologist may 2022 news

‘I have continued to dance to the beat of my own drum’ Ella Rhodes hears from Dr Joanna Wilde around her election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. You have worked for more than 30 years in organisational change, promoting health and wellbeing in organisations, influencing national policy including as a member of the Health and Safety Executive’s Workplace Health Expert Committee. Could you tell me about that work, and proud moments of your career? I have focused on psychology’s contribution to the design of healthy environments as a multi-disciplinary practitioner and advisor, drawing on knowledge and insights from social science and design disciplines in response to complex questions from organisations and latterly policy makers. I have drawn attention to the role of power, workplace inequality, organisational justice, the systemic factors that contribute to dysfunctional psychosocial environments and the importance of design-led intervention. I am particularly proud of raising awareness about the psychological consequences of the growing epidemic of bad work, associated with working poverty and health inequality, which has gained increased salience during the pandemic. I am also proud that I have continued to dance to the beat of my own drum throughout my career, despite repeated requests/pressure from employers to take on more general director or VP roles that would have been much more lucratively paid. How did it feel to be elected as a fellow – particularly as a practitioner psychologist? I have long been concerned about psychology giving scant attention to ‘translational’ knowledge work, so it is deeply important to me to have that recognised. As a profession, we do not influence as we should. We have an increasing need for psychological know-how to be able to work with the complex, interconnecting challenges we face – but I am concerned we are not in a position to meet this need. The lack of esteem for ‘practice’ means that gaining strategic know-how is not included in the development of psychologists and, I believe, it has also left the knowledge our researchers produce vulnerable to oversight or misuse – potentially used by other disciplines to justify overly simplistic and inaccurate individualistic explanations of what are more often systemic and structural issues. A recent example is the unhelpful touting of the idea of behavioural fatigue in the context of essential pandemic protections. The recognition through a Fellowship hints at a ‘strategic know how’ pathway for our profession to work our way out of the silos we have trapped ourselves in. It also gives me a sense of personal vindication that my choice to practice after gaining my doctorate has allowed me both to demonstrate the benefits that accrue from

applying psychological understanding to work and health and also to make a distinctive and recognised contribution to knowledge. How do you think psychology’s contribution to workplace health will develop in the future? Our understanding of psychological factors such as group processes, decision-making, behaviour change and mental health will be recognised as increasingly relevant to matters of work and health. I therefore believe that the demand for psychologically informed input will increase – but I am concerned the profession is not geared up to meet this demand. While the research infrastructure in place in psychology is equipped to respond to increasingly complex research questions relevant to work and health, our infrastructure for ‘translation’ is close to nonexistent. As policy and practice questions become more complex there is a risk that other professions will be better placed to respond, contributing to oversight or to harmful mis-application of our research. This gap in translational capacity is an issue I am directly facing as I am coming off the professional register this month – 30 years’ psychology practice in difficult and damaging workplaces is enough for anyone – and am turning my attention to consolidation. I have been struck by the difficulty I have had in identifying psychologists with strategic know-how, which I consider to be the essential underpinning for effective knowledge translation in complex policy contexts. I also can’t see the infrastructure in our profession that would enable us to develop a ‘pipeline’ of psychologists with such capacity. As I moved into senior corporate roles, I managed this gap through maintaining informal links with various academic departments to support my development. These informal connections enabled two-way ‘knowledge pipelines’ that enhanced both my practice/intervention design and my colleagues research question formation and impact statements. However, the capacity for such informal connections into academia is now increasingly limited for those of us whose expertise is in practice, compromised by the growth of paywalled knowledge and increasing use of in academia of precarious employment practices. By contrast, in mature health professions and management education, there is regular investment in ‘professor of practice’ positions aimed very specifically at ‘translation’ from know-what to know-how. Exploring how we may learn from these alternative approaches to support effective psychological input to policy questions about work and health would be helpful and timely.

See also tinyurl. com/wilde0618 for Joanna’s ‘other CV’.

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Gender and the gatekeepers of Psychology Matthew Warren on a new study of journal editors

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

ournal editors are like science’s gatekeepers: they decide what gets published and what doesn’t, affecting the careers of other academics and influencing the direction that a field takes. You’d hope, then, that journals would do everything they can to establish a diverse editorial board, reflecting a variety of voices, experiences, and identities. So a new study in Nature Neuroscience makes for disheartening reading. The team finds that the majority of editors in top psychology and neuroscience journals are male and based in the United States: a situation that may be amplifying existing gender inequalities in the field and influencing the kind of research gets published. The researchers, led by Eleanor Palser from the University of California, San Francisco, looked at the top 50 journals in both psychology and neuroscience, noting the country of affiliation and gender of the editors at each journal. They classified each editor’s role according to three levels of seniority: editors-in-chief and their deputies; associate and section editors; and editorial and advisory board members. For comparison, the team also estimated the overall proportion of male and female psychology and neuroscience researchers in the US, based on data from a national survey and conference registrations. They also looked at the geographical spread of senior authors who had recently published in the two fields. Men accounted for 60 per cent of the editors of psychology journals – significantly more than the 40 per cent of editors who were women. There were more

male than female editors at each level of seniority, and men made up the majority of editors in just over threequarters of the journals. Crucially, the proportion of female editors was significantly lower than the overall proportion of psychology researchers who are women. In terms of geographical spread, almost all psychology editors – 91 per cent of them – were based in either North America or Europe. In fact, 61 per cent of editors were from the US alone, a significantly higher proportion than you’d expect given that only 45 per cent of senior authors of psychology papers were based in the US. The differences were even starker in the neuroscience journals: overall, 70 per cent of editors were male, and men held the majority of editorial positions in 88 per cent of journals. In this case, the proportion of female editors was not significantly lower than the proportion of female researchers working in neuroscience – a finding that reveals enduring gender disparities in the field more broadly. Again, most editors came from either North America or Europe, and 52 per cent came just from the US – significantly more than the 36 per cent of senior authors who were US-based. Based on their results, the team concludes that ‘the ideas, values and decision-making biases of men, particularly those from the USA, are overrepresented in the editorial positions of the most recognised academic journals in psychology and neuroscience’. Gender inequality in science is often attributed to the

the psychologist may 2022 digest

‘Conspiracy theory’ label does little to stop people from believing fact that senior academics are more likely to be male, because historically science was male-dominated: it’s argued that as time goes on and more women rise to senior roles, the field will become more equal. Yet this study showed that even the junior roles in psychology journals tended be held disproportionately by men, despite the fact that there are actually more female than male junior psychology faculty (in the US, at least). This implies that a lack of female academics is not the problem. Instead, there are structural reasons that women are disadvantaged in science, which could make them less likely to be appointed to editorial boards. Women receive lower salaries and face greater childcare demands, for instance, which can result in fewer publications and grants – the kinds of things that journals look for when deciding who to appoint. And when childcare or other family commitments fall disproportionately on women, female academics are left with less time to take on editorial roles on top of their academic position. Rather than simply blaming the inequality of editorial boards on tradition, we should be actively breaking down these existing barriers. In neuroscience journals, the proportion of female editors did reflect the gender balance of the field. But this shouldn’t be an excuse not to include more women on those editorial boards as well – instead, it’s a good reason to make sure that these boards are more diverse, providing more opportunities and influence for women in a field that lags behind psychology in terms of gender representation. A lack of diversity among journal editors also likely contributes to psychology’s WEIRD problem. If journal editors are largely men from the United States, then they will probably place higher value on papers that are relevant to Western, male populations, whether consciously or not. Other work has shown how the identity of editors can influence publishing decisions: for example, over the past few decades, the vast majority of editors of top-tier psychology journals have been White (listen to Episode 23 of our PsychCrunch podcast for more on this) – and under White editors, these journals published fewer publications about race. The current study didn’t consider editors’ race, or indeed other aspects of identity like sexuality or ethnicity – a limitation that the authors acknowledge. Still, it represents an important step towards improving representation among those who hold positions of power in science.

The label ‘conspiracy theory’ is often slapped on unsubstantiated ideas. But does labelling something a conspiracy theory actually discredit it? A new paper in the British Journal of Psychology suggests not. Karen M. Douglas at the University of Kent and colleagues find that people call an idea that they already consider unbelievable a ‘conspiracy theory’ – rather than being influenced by that term to disbelieve it. In an initial online study on 170 US adults, the team explored whether labelling a statement an ‘idea’ or a ‘conspiracy theory’ made any difference to the participants’ attitudes towards it. The statements were taken from an existing conspiracy theory scale; they included: ‘The power held by heads of state is second to that of small, unknown groups who really control world politics’, for example. The results were clear: whichever label was used made no difference to how seriously the statement was taken, or to participants’ ideas about how controversial or believable it was. These findings support and extend earlier work that suggested calling an idea a conspiracy theory doesn’t actually reduce endorsement of it. And this is important, because as the team writes: ‘This suggests that people’s belief that the label has the power to discredit these narratives may be misplaced.’ The team then ran a second study on 199 students. The participants read a list of statements and rated the extent to which they would call each a conspiracy theory, and also their own level of agreement with the statement. The results showed that the less participants believed the statements to be true, the more likely they were to call them ‘conspiracy theories’. This hardly seems surprising. But the team takes it as

evidence that pre-existing disbelief leads to use of the term. In further studies, participants were shown pairs of statements, one more plausible than the other. For example, a statement about the loss of Malaysia flight MH370 came in two forms: ‘Malaysia flight MH370 was hijacked by North Korea, a fact known but suppressed by the Malaysian government’ and ‘Malaysia flight MH370 was consumed by a black hole, a fact known but suppressed by the Malaysian government’. The researchers found that participants tended to rate the less plausible statement as more likely to be a conspiracy theory and were more likely to call people who believed these ideas ‘conspiracy theorists’. ‘Taken together, the present results…suggest that the label “conspiracy theory” is likely to be a consequence rather than a cause of (dis)belief in conspiracy narratives,’ the team writes. Why does the ‘conspiracy theory’ label have little power to encourage people to be sceptical about an idea? As the researchers suggest, one possibility is that we know from experience that the label tends to be used by sceptics, so we may decide that the person using that label is biased, and resist their influence. Other work has also found that some people are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories that they think are unpopular because it satisfies their need to feel special. For these people, it’s possible that if the label is applied, this could backfire, and make the idea more appealing. Clearly, more work is needed on how to tackle belief in conspiracy theories. But this research certainly further builds the case that simply calling them conspiracy theories won’t help. EMMA YOUNG

When we learn more about a stranger, we feel like they know us better too Getty Images

After finding out details about a stranger, we mistakenly think that they also know about us. As a result, we act more honestly around them, according to a recent study in Nature. And this can have a real-world impact: the team finds that after residents are given biographical information about neighbourhood police officers, the crime rate in nearby areas reduces. Past research has found that we tend to assume social relationships are reciprocal. Most of the time, this assumption is accurate: someone you think of as a friend will usually consider you a friend too, for instance. But sometimes our social ties are more onesided: for example, you might learn something about a stranger who doesn’t know you at all. Anuj K. Shah from the University of Chicago and Michael LaForest from Pennsylvania State University wondered whether, in this situation, our tendency to believe that social ties are symmetrical could lead us to mistakenly feel that a stranger does actually know us. In a series of lab-based studies, this is exactly what the researchers found. In each experiment, online participants were ostensibly paired with another participant (in reality, this partner didn’t exist). Some participants were given information about their partner

while others were not, before rating how well this stranger knew them. In one set of studies, participants answered three multiple-choice questions about their lives; half then saw their partner’s responses to the same questions and half did not. All participants were then told that their partner was trying to guess their own answers. Participants who saw their partner’s responses believed that this stranger understood them better than those who did not. In further experiments, participants wrote down four

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Do elephants weigh less than ants? Clearly not – but a new study ﬁnds that claims like this start seeming a bit more true after being repeated several times. The work suggests that the ‘truthby-repetition effect’ applies to even the most implausible statements. (Cognition) 20

the psychologist may 2022 digest true statements and one lie about themselves. Some participants also saw statements supposedly written by a partner. Again, this group believed that the partner would be more likely to guess which of their own statements was a lie than those who didn’t read their partner’s statements. And in another study, the team found that people were more likely to give honest answers to a question if they had read information about their partner – and this effect seemed at least partly driven by the fact that these participants felt their partner knew them better. These studies all suggested that when we know about strangers, we erroneously think they also know about us. But the really interesting finding came when the researchers stepped out of the lab, to conduct a field experiment in collaboration with the New York City Police Department and Housing Authority. The team developed leaflets containing fairly mundane information about local community police officers, such as their favourite food, hobbies, or reasons for joining the police force. They then sent out these leaflets to every apartment in a number of housing developments in disadvantaged areas. The officers themselves also dropped off cards to local residents containing similar information. Two months later, the researchers surveyed residents at these housing developments as well as control areas that did not receive leaflets or outreach cards. Residents imagined they had committed a crime that they could be fined for, and were asked how likely it would be that local

officers would find out about it. They also rated how well the officers in the area knew them. The team found that residents of the developments that had received the intervention believed it more likely that local officers would find out about illegal activity than residents of the control areas (though there was no significant effect on residents’ perceptions of how well police officers knew them). Even more strikingly, the team found that immediately after the intervention, there were fewer criminal complaints and arrests in the areas around the developments that had received the intervention than around the control developments. Giving people information about local police therefore seems to reduce their own sense of anonymity, and by doing so may even reduce crime rates. It’s worth noting that the reduction in crime was only seen in the first three months after the information was sent out, so this may not be a long-term solution. And, as the authors acknowledge, increasing trust in the police requires much broader reforms and changes at a societal level. Still, the reduction in crime in this study was comparable to the reduction seen when police forces increase their presence in crime hotspots. This suggests that giving people more information about their local officers could be a straightforward method to achieve similar results, ‘without increasing the number of potentially fraught officer–citizen interactions’, the researchers conclude. MATTHEW WARREN

Digest digested

How does age affect our ability to empathise? Some researchers think that our ability to understand and respond to others’ feelings peaks in middle age before declining again in older age. But a new study suggests that the pattern is more complex: although older adults may ﬁnd it harder to work out what someone is likely to be feeling, they are just as good at ‘feeling with’ others. (Neuropsychology)

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Human decision-makers can be just as much of a black box as algorithms. But we still think that we have a better understanding of the decisionmaking process used by human experts. This leads to a paradox where we demand transparency regarding how algorithms make their decisions, but don’t hold decisionmakers like judges or recruitment consultants to the same standard. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General)

Picture a boring person. If you’re imagining someone who loves watching TV, has no sense of humour, and works in ﬁnance, your stereotype of a boring person is similar to those described by participants in a recent

study. And these stereotypes can have damaging social implications: people have a low opinion of those with ‘boring’ traits, and will try to actively avoid them. (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)

the psychologist may 2022 food

Cupboard love Unwrapping the comfort in food Getty Images

When Andrea Oskis left home, the ﬁrst dish she cooked was her Mum’s version of spaghetti bolognese. Here, she explores the intrinsic connection between food and feelings…

ood and feelings become mixed and mingled from early doors – via cupboard doors more precisely, according to early theories of relationships which were based on food and feeding. Right from the start food becomes a way to feed our feelings, and throughout life feelings inﬂuence when, what and how much we eat. One of the most reliable, everyday examples is that many of us tend to be bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger – a feeling that has come to be known as ‘hangry’ (MacCormack & Lindquist, 2019). But sometimes the greatest insights into feelings occur when we eat but are not even hungry. Sometimes the food itself allows us to work backwards to ﬁnd the feelings and the context; opening a bottle of champagne tends to signal the celebration of success, whereas Nigella Lawson suggests her chocolate fudge cake is ‘the sort of cake you’d want to eat the whole of when you’d been chucked’. The power of sugar to soothe appears to be present from the very beginning, with effects demonstrated in those as young as one day old (Blass & Smith, 1992). Nigella’s philosophy takes us to an area of food literature and research that still has many unresolved questions: emotional or comfort eating; the kind of eating where the body is in no real need of calories and feelings take over.

Of chicken soup and chocolate Sadness would likely be one of the feelings that motivates baking and eating Nigella’s chocolate cake

in its entirety, and research supports the comforting effects of chocolate to some degree. Eating milk chocolate after watching a sad film scene improved negative mood in a group of participants to a greater extent than consuming dark chocolate with 70–99 percent cocoa, or no food at all, but effects were shortterm, only lasting for three minutes (Macht & Mueller, 2007). Other work however found that chocolate did not have a special comforting effect in improving anger, sadness and anxiety after watching ‘feel-bad’ film clips; in fact, ‘comfort food’ had the same effect on emotions as ‘non’ comfort foods or even no food at all (Wagner et al., 2014). The inconsistent findings likely reflect that responses to ruptured relationships, whether temporary or more long-term, as in the case of divorce or death, are inconsistent in and of themselves; separations can elicit a range of responses in the individual, including despair, anger and a lack of selfcompassion (attacks on the self). Does this mean that one might not have to eat a whole chocolate cake, or indeed any cake, after being ‘chucked’? The findings mentioned are just some of the conflicting results from the research on comfort eating and emotional eating. The issue seems to be that despite having a similar research interest, people follow different ‘recipes’ and use very different methodologies for studies, which for some has led to the conclusion that ‘comfort food is a myth’ (Wagner et al., 2014). The process of defining variables into measurable factors is fundamental to research methodology and for comfort food this is challenging. For example, chicken soup is often a front-runner for comfort food, coming in first place first for nearly half of the participants in one study (Wood & Vogen, 1998). One study

however found that chicken soup was comforting only for those who considered chicken soup to be a comfort food (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011). This makes sense – the choice of comfort food depends on unique memories, and remembrance and reward association with both good and bad times; what’s comforting to me, might not be to you. The experiential aligns with the empirical, and comfort foods have been shown to vary by age, sex, culture, the type of food itself and the feeling that elicits comfort eating (see Spence, 2017 for a review) – it is a big melting pot. Taken together, ﬁndings from the psychological research indicate that we might have to go beyond the cupboard, beyond food and beyond emotions to ﬁnd some clearer evidence regarding food and feelings. Some suggest that the emotions themselves are not responsible for comforting eating, but rather the strategies used to regulate those emotions; for instance, there is evidence that individuals who regularly use suppression, a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy, consume more calorie-rich snack foods when emotional (Evers, 2010). Here, calorie intake could be seen as a form of suppression – a way of forcing out the unwanted feelings by replacing them with food that is wanted.

From feelings to physiology ‘Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise,’ said Hans Selye (1956, p. vii), According to Selye, stress, like food, is one of the unavoidable ingredients in life. Considered the father of stress research, Selye’s work took the Key sources pathway from physics to physiology to feelings. The term ‘stress’ had only previously been used by Annan, J., (2020). In the Kitchen: Essays On Food And Life. London, UK: Daunt physicists to refer to the interaction Books. between a force and its opposing Finney, C. (2021). Love and microwaved resistance. Selye applied this to eggs – my dinners at dad’s. The his work in medicine, showing Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ that a diverse range of ‘stressors’ food/2021/jun/20/love-and-microwavedhad similar physiological effects in eggs-my-dinners-at-dads. Foster, K. (2019). The dysfunction of patients, including effects on bodily food. http://www.kim-foster.com/thesystems involved in regulating dysfunction-of-food/ metabolism, the immune system, Gregersen, S.C., & Gillath, O. (2020). and other essential functions, How food brings us together: The ties including food intake. Selye defined between attachment and food behaviors. stress as the ‘nonspecific response Appetite, 151, 104654. Oskis, A. (2021). MasterChef: a Master of the body to any demand’ (Selye, class in fight, flight, or flambé?. 1975, p.37), that is, anything that Gastronomica: The Journal for Food disrupted the body’s usual state. Studies, 21(1), 58-64. John Bowlby shared Selye’s view Vittles: A food newsletter for novel times that stressors were environmental https://vittles.substack.com conditions that produced negative Zauner, M. (2018). Crying in H Mart. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ physiological states, but he was culture-desk/crying-in-h-mart particularly interested in the personal experience of this, which Full list available in online/app version. he said is one of distress (Bowlby, 1982). Stress can lead to distress

in a variety of ways, ranging from physiological (e.g. hunger for food) to psychologically or emotional (e.g. hunger for comfort). To our brain, these stressors are the same and our body will respond in the same way. An important part of Selye’s work involved identifying specific hormones involved in the body’s stress response. Regardless of the type of stressor, if our brain perceives it to be threatening the critical hub of the brain’s stress response – the hypothalamus – will be activated. The hypothalamus is responsible for orchestrating the appropriate physical responses at the time, whether fight, flight, or feed, because the hypothalamus is also responsible for hunger. We have two basic physiological response systems to stress: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. These systems are interacting, but distinct too. The SNS is associated with ‘fight-or-flight’ responses, which come on rapidly and have classic visible signs, including sweaty hands, dilated pupils and increased breathing rate. An important difference is that the SNS is not uniquely activated by threat – it can be activated by positive arousal, such as excitement, whereas activation of the HPA axis is fine-tuned to threat, making it a ‘cleaner’ gauge of stress (Clow and Smyth, 2020). The HPA cascade culminates in the release of the classic stress hormone cortisol. But cortisol also performs a wide range of ‘house-keeping’ duties to protect the body’s overall health and well-being, including important food-related drives, such as regulating the accumulation and storage of body fat, and increasing appetite, food intake, and body weight gain. Cortisol’s role in food and feelings begins early, literally pre-food. Research suggests that the path may go from mother’s stress, to food, to child’s feelings, with elevated cortisol in mother’s milk negatively influencing infant temperament (Grey et al., 2012). If a mother is stressed while pregnant, her child is substantially more likely to have emotional or cognitive problems, but interestingly, the quality of child-parent bond can buffer some of these adverse effects, particularly regarding the child’s later attachment behaviours (Bergman et al., 2010). For this reason, cortisol, and stress more generally, are at the core of food and feelings. Perhaps it is now time to shift our feeling-focus to stress. Fight, flight – or feed? It makes no sense that we eat when we feel stressed. Stress promotes survival behaviours. Evolutionarily, feed, instead of fight or flight, is not a sensible strategy. The body’s resources need to be prioritised to deal with the imminent stressor otherwise we risk danger from attack. (Death by chocolate could indeed be a reality if a predator crept up on us while we were tucking into our favourite confectionary). Physiologically, our stress system works in line with this idea. Here, it is

the psychologist may 2022 food

helpful that our systems for controlling stress and food in the literature as reward-based stress eating (Adam & share the same anatomy. When we are faced with acute Epel, 2007). stress the hypothalamus will not only initiate the stress cascade of the HPA axis, but it will inhibit the systems normally responsible for stimulating feeding behaviour All the sweeter Chronic stress, however, poses a potential recipe for so that our appetite is suppressed (Maniam & Morris, disaster. No matter what, if our brain perceives threat 2012). The end product of the stress cascade however, and we are continuously ‘fire-fighting’ then cortisol cortisol, promotes food intake, particularly of certain production is not switched off. And this is especially kinds of foods. This is because it is sensible to eat the case when it comes to attachment disturbances. after stress – the energy used to cope with the stressor Our attachments are one of the key resources we needs to be replaced. If we are not required to fight have for dealing with disruptions and demands in the lion anymore, we can go back to eating that Lion life. In my own clinical practice, I have found that bar. Indeed, those who are highly sensitive, as shown attachment often has a seat at the table with chronic by their cortisol reactions, eat significantly more sweet stress; attachments in and of themselves are ‘chronic’, food after stress (Epel et al., 2001). in the sense that they are built up from continuous At this point however the story is half-baked. interactions. If attachment experiences include Stress involves both physiology and feelings, and unavailability, inconsistency and a comfort and pleasure are powerful lack of attunement, then this can feelings that are linked to stress. be incredibly distressing. When Most individuals when stressed “…calorie intake could stress reactions are persistent will increase their food intake, be seen as a form of and sustained, the body will and crucially, the intake of foods end up turning down its ‘stressjust like Lion bars – foods that are suppression – a way of so to speak, to mitigate calorie-dense and high in fat and/ forcing out the unwanted ometer’, the damaging effects of cortisol or carbohydrates, especially sugar feelings by replacing them (Fries et al., 2005). The brain and (Epel et al., 2004, Ip et al., 2019; Oliver and Wardle, 1999). These with food that is wanted” body’s receptors for cortisol can get ‘burnt’ over a of prolonged period foods have stress-reducing effects of hyperarousal and as a result they that appear to be controlled by will not work as well (McEwen, the amygdala – one of the brain’s 2007). Chronic stress can therefore lead to decreased regions associated with emotion (Ulrich-Lai et al., sensitivity to immediate stressors in the environment. 2015). All food, but especially comfort food, literally And exactly this less sensitive, less reactive cortisol feeds the feeling part of our brain, which is contained response to acute stress has been linked to greater within the larger ‘reward system’. Eating is therefore designed to feel good and be rewarding, but even more stress eating in those with chronic stress (Tomiyama et so when we feel stressed. Laboratory studies reveal that al., 2011). So, stress eating appears to have a specific both acute physical and emotional distress increase comfort food intake in humans and animals even when signature, which is high chronic stress, but low acute stress reactivity. One study found that chronically they are not hungry and have no physiological need for calories (Dallman, 2010). This is because the body’s stressed women showing low cortisol reactivity to an acute laboratory stress task consumed significantly stress system interacts with the reward system, hence more calories from chocolate cake in response (Tryon the comforting feelings we get from eating those more et al., 2013). Chronic stress also increases the salience palatable, comfort foods (Adam and Epel, 2007). The feeling itself is a cocktail of increased comfort/pleasure/ of pleasurable activities, so comfort food will feel more comforting – sweet foods taste sweeter and we soothing and decreased stress. Sugar is particularly want more of them (Dallman et al., 2003; Kuo et al., powerful; it not only inhibits stress-induced cortisol 2008). This may be what perpetuates the stress-eating but at the same time it stimulates opioid release – one cycle. Research has shown that stress-induced eating of the body’s ‘feel good’ chemicals (Tryon et al., 2015). behaviours lead to a greater reduction in negative Another of the body’s chemicals that comfort feelings in those with high chronic stress (Klatzkin et food increases is dopamine. It is interesting that such al., 2018). These are findings that we can take straight evidence has made its way into the culinary world from the lab to the consulting room, and beyond. For – The Dopamine Diet is the name is the name of a those individuals for whom comfort eating becomes bestselling cookbook by Chef Tom Kerridge (‘assured uncomfortable, and a serious problem, an approach to make you happier in the process…. it’s a diet which goes further than the provision of dietary that will make you feel good!’). Dopamine appears guidance and goals is necessary, particularly one to be involved in the motivational aspects of eating that involves an exploration of Adverse Childhood (‘wanting’), whereas opioids more affect the hedonic Experiences (see Williamson et al., 2002) and life experience of food (‘liking’) (Berridge & Robinson, events (see Bidgood and Buckroyd, 2005). 1998). So, stress eating is indeed real, but comfort So, comfort food is most comforting to those who eating is a key part of stress eating, and this is known

when participants’ sense of belongingness was threatened, feelings of loneliness were attenuated when participants were instructed to write about an experience of eating a comfort food, but only for those who were securely attached. For participants with Coming back to comfort – and to the cupboard an insecure attachment style, writing about comfort ‘If I’m being honest, for me all food is comfort food, food did not serve to buffer loneliness. Following but there are times when you need a bowlful of this, Troisi et al. (2015) found that securely attached something hot or a slice of something sweet just to participants actually enjoyed eating comfort food more make you feel that the world is a safer place. We all compared to insecurely attached individuals when get tired, stressed, sad or lonely, and this is the food they experienced a threat to their sense of belonging. that soothes.’ – Nigella Lawson Findings also showed that real-life experiences of loneliness were associated with increased comfort food What do we want when we stress eat? Nigella talks consumption, but again only for those secure in their about feelings of safety and soothing – two concepts attachment style, and this effect only held for comfort that attachment theory and research know very well. food and ‘not just any food they could get their hands It is this sense of felt security – the experience of the world as a safe place in which to explore – that appears on’ (Troisi et al., 2015, p.61). For those who are insecurely attached, it could be that food is just like to regulate our attachment system (Sbarra & Borelli, people in life – uncomforting, because it never quite 2018). fulfils whatever need is at hand, Attachment-related concepts and in true Goldilocks fashion, are key ingredients that help make “I made that dish because relationships feel like either too sense of the research on stress much (insecure avoidant) or too eating and its associations with I missed my mum. I was (insecure anxious) – they are cravings for comfort. Bowlby saw alone and I wanted to feel little never just right. The conclusion attachment behaviours as part of close to her” from this research is that comfort the infant’s ‘capacity to cope with food has ‘real significant, and stress’ (Bowlby, 1982, p.344), the consequential psychological most stressful experience being roots’ (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011, separation from the caregiver. This p.752) – that are attachment-based. Comfort food is original idea has been studied extensively, and we now comforting, but only for those who know the comfort know that stress is linked to a range of attachment of relationships. experiences across the lifespan, from divorce to saying What is interesting is that studies not using an goodbye at the airport to just thinking about the attachment-based stressor do not find the same picture death of a loved one (Simpson & Rholes, 2017). So, emerging for comfort food. Wagner et al. (2014) might the stress underlying stress eating be related found that comfort food, in this case chocolate, was no to attachment needs? If we look more closely at the more effective in improving mood than eating other research, this seems to be where the physiological research on stress eating and the psychological research foods, or even no food at all. There is an important methodological difference however, Wagner et al., on comfort eating meet in the middle. (2014) chose to induce negative feelings in participants For stress, the most consistent cortisol findings using 18 minutes of scenes from ‘feel-bad’ movies come from studies employing the gold-standard compiled by the researchers. On the other hand, the of laboratory protocols – the Trier Social Stress belongingness threat of Troisi and Gabriel (2011) Test (TSST; Kirschbaum et al., 1993; Oskis et al., involved writing for six minutes about a fight with a 2019; Smyth et al., 2015). The task consists of close other – a stressor which activates the attachment public speaking and surprise mental arithmetic, all system. Bowlby (1982, p.42) states: ‘The goal of performed in front of a panel of experimenters in attachment behaviour is to maintain an affectional lab coats and recorded on camera. What makes this bond, any situation that seems to be endangering the so stressful is that the experimenters are absolutely non-responsive; they do not smile or nod or encourage bond elicits action designed to preserve it.’ Troisi and Gabriel’s (2011) findings suggest that task performance in any way and their only comments comfort food fulfils a function of our attachment are rejecting ones. The task therefore involves behavioural system – it maintains the affectional bond negative evaluation and social rejection, likely evoking by reminding us of our close others. If attachment shame, which threaten our universal needs to attach behaviour is ‘any behaviour that results in a person and to belong. Research outside of the physiology attaining or retaining proximity’ to another individual laboratory has shown that comfort food produces its (Bowlby, 1982, p.39) then comfort food appears psychological effects via these very feelings. One study to achieve this set-goal for those who are securely found that when participants consumed their comfort food of chicken noodle soup, they thought more about attached – it brings that close relationship closer during an experience of stress. And so we find relationships (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011). ourselves returning to cupboard love, as this most In Troisi and Gabriel’s (2011) second experiment have experienced the most stress. But what exactly is the comfort that we are looking for?

the psychologist may 2022 food

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‘When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love’

‘It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.’ Food writer, M.F.K. Fisher, 2017, p.2 A relationship with the caregiver is a by-product of ‘the early simple path between eating and feeling happy’. Essayist and writer, Adam Gopnik, 2011, p.6 ‘This is the sort of cake you’d want to eat the whole of when you’d been chucked. But even the sight of it, proud and tall and thickly iced on its stand, comforts.’ Food writer, Nigella Lawson, 2011, p.47 ‘When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it … and it is all one.’ M.F.K. Fisher, 2017, p.2

likely happens via a process of association, whereby a particular food comes to be associated with a ‘differentiated and preferred individual’ (Bowlby, 1982, p.39). In those who are securely attached this process will also likely involve what Bowlby called the ‘internal working model’ (Bowlby, 1982), also known as a ‘secure-base script’ (Waters and Waters, 2006). This script is essentially a recipe for relationships, based on our early caregiving experiences, that we use over the lifespan. And just like a recipe, it includes ‘if–then’ propositions that lead to the set-goal, such as ‘If I am stressed, I can approach my mother for help, she is usually available, sensitive, and supportive. Then this closeness will comfort and soothe me and help me to deal with the stress.’ By relying on the secure-base script, secure individuals can stay relatively calm in times of stress. Therefore, just as a positive recipe can take the stress out of the kitchen, a positive secure-base script can take the stress out of the relational world. It may be that the ‘comfort food secure-base script’ works in the same way to provide its buffering effects. An attachment dish The ﬁrst dish I cooked for myself in my own kitchen after leaving my family home, was spaghetti bolognese, not because I had a craving for pasta (although now that I understand the link between carbohydrates and stress, perhaps that was somewhat in the mix at the time); I made that dish because I missed my mum. I was alone and I wanted to feel close to her. My mum’s version of spaghetti bolognese has an evocative quality

about it, but not one that takes me to the metropolitan city of Bologna or the Apennine mountains. Hers in no way resembles the original recipe for maccheroni alla bolognese that Pellegrino Artusi first published in 1891; she uses no sofrito, only a little chopped onion fried in olive oil (never butter), she uses minced pork instead of veal, tinned chopped tomatoes provide the liquid rather than wine or broth, and her featured herb, in line with our Greek Cypriot ethnicity, is dried mint, which gives the sauce a fresh, lively tang, rather than the deep, robust savouriness associated with the original recipe. Long spaghetti strands as opposed to squat macaroni are the pasta of choice. Finally, grated halloumi cheese is sprinkled on to the dish before serving, which unlike parmesan has a mellow rather than sharp saltiness. It’s not an authentic dish; it’s an attachment dish – my idea of Noshtalgia. It is fitting that this play on words involves the Greek words for pain and return/home. Food can be a powerfully comforting remedy to the pain of separation. The attachment-related qualities of comfort food may shed light on some of the inconsistent research findings. One recent laboratory-based study found that eating ‘unhealthy’ (i.e. processed foods high in sugar and/or fat) compared to ‘healthy’ (fruits and vegetables) comfort food made no difference to participants’ psychophysiological stress (Finch, Cummings and Tomiyama, 2019). But curiously, the authors recognise that participants would have perhaps felt more comfortable eating comfort food in the privacy of their own home and that the laboratory setting may have inhibited comforting effects, and this may be especially so for the eating of unhealthy

foods, which could be linked fear of negative judgment from onlookers and consequently feelings of shame and being exposed. So perhaps the term security food is more fitting than comfort food. I have come to think of food and feelings in line with the Circle of Security (Marvin et al., 2002), Andrea Oskis is a Senior which symbolises a child’s need to Lecturer in psychology have a secure base from which to at Middlesex University, it comes to cooking: judgment. go out and explore the world and a London, and a UKCPFear of negative social appraisal has safe haven to return to for physical registered attachment-based been associated with home cooking and emotional nourishment. The psychoanalytic psychotherapist in a range of ways, from using idea is that parents need to be in private practice. This article pre-prepared ingredients to feelings attuned to where their child is ‘on is an abridged version of her of obligation and duty about being the circle’, in other words, does chapter ‘Food and Feelings’ in a ‘good’ parent or partner (Costa, the child need to explore their Attachment, Relationships and 2013; Daniels et al., 2012). environment, or do they need to Food: From Cradle to Kitchen, So if the context has the return to familiarity for comfort? published by Routledge. potential for judgment, then Similarly, in relation to food, we cooking can be stressful – our can think of where we are ‘on the social self, as well as the food, is plate’. Comfort food is a familiar safe haven, which plated. It is exactly this uncontrollable threat of our restores our sense of felt security. Accordingly, Troisi social self being judged negatively that the Trier Social and Gabriel (2011) found that securely attached Stress Test uses to activate the HPA stress system. The participants experienced less loneliness after writing signature stressful ingredient when we cook is the about their comfort food, but not after writing about food potentially being judged by others; if the cooking a new food. Food neophobia has been defined as itself is not judged, then our body’s stress system is not reluctance to eat and / or avoidance of novel food, and triggered – there is no change in cortisol (Osdoba et al., is considered to be protective in a potentially hostile 2015). Other research has shown that when we cook food environment (Pliner and Hobden, 1992). just for ourselves our body’s other stress system, which So although we need novel foods for diversity is more associated with excitement and other forms in our diet, the unfamiliar can create anxiety. Rozin of positive arousal, is turned on instead. One study (1977) describes this relationship between new foods demonstrated that when it is just us, our heart rate and anxiety as the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ which results goes up during ‘crunch time’ moments of a recipe e.g. from the dilemma of needing to both approach and adding the curry paste and taking a bite at the end – in avoid novel foods. This contradiction represents a other words, moments that are emotionally significant, ‘double bind between the familiar and the unknown, but not threatening. And it is not just our body that monotony and change, security and variety’ (Rozin, talks during these emotionally salient moments when 1987, p.278). New foods can therefore never be we cook for ourselves – they feel more exciting and comfort foods because they tend to evoke feelings of pleasant (Brouwen et al., 2019). Perhaps it does not anxiety. But this does not make new food bad food. always have to be the Trier Social Chef Test. And Once again, perhaps it is best to take advice from perhaps Nigella is right (again), after all. Nigella Lawson, where the best recipe for food and feelings comes from ‘mixing the comfort of the familiar with the exuberance of the new, and believing in Some take-away points balance’. If comfort food has the power to comfort without even being eaten then that says something significant. It is not about calories, but nourishment of a different sort, The kitchen as the jungle provided by those we hold close – the person who Sometimes however, cooking is far from comfortable; opened the cupboard at the very beginning, or who it can be stressful enough to activate ‘fight-or-flight’ cooks for us in the kitchen, or who sits with us at the responses. On MasterChef, tears, fearful wide eyes, table. Both researchers and cooks appear to agree that sweaty brows and shaky hands carrying plates to the comfort food serves to restore our sense of felt security, judges for reckoning are commonplace. Why and and thus helps to regulate our attachment behavioural when did the kitchen become the jungle? When it system. Bowlby said that ‘to suppose that nutrition is in comes to cooking for others, Nigella tells us that ‘the some way of primary significance and that attachment most important thing is to remind yourself that people is only secondary would be a mistake’ (Bowlby, 1982, are coming to have a good time, not to judge’ (Lawson, p.249). It seems that Bowlby had much in common 2017), and she draws our attention to a key issue when with Nigella Lawson.

the psychologist may 2022 interview

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‘I think of technology as a tool’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Genavee Brown (Northumbria University). thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/i-think-technology-tool

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Beyond the battle of the dinner table Sally Wiggins Young with some evidence-based advice for family mealtimes

ou invite guests to your home for dinner. One of the first things you might ask is what they like to eat, or if they have any food allergies. You would prepare something that you hope they might like. If they are close friends or family, you may not need to ask; you most likely know their favourite foods already. But what if they’re bringing their children? When children are invited, it is typically their parents who are asked, ‘what do they like to eat?’. Knowing their children’s food preferences is part of parental responsibilities and a logistical manoeuvre. It is this issue that is typically at the root of what have been called family mealtime battles. These so-called battles might play out in different ways, but the core principles remain the same: a conflict between parent and child regarding what, and how much, should be eaten. Here, I am going to explain how you can prevent or at least reduce the scale of mealtime battles by small adjustments in the words you use. This is not about getting your children to ‘like’ the food that you provide, but rather about changing the way we talk about food dis/likes and removing the basis on which many of these mealtime battles are based. Why liking food is part of the problem As a child growing up in northern England in the 1980s, saying ‘I don’t like it’ was no guarantee that I could avoid eating a particular food. This was the decade in which news of the devastating famines in Ethiopia were broadcast on a global scale and people were, literally, starving. My flippant suggestion that ‘they can have the rest of my dinner’ clearly did not go down well with my parents. Fast-forward a few decades and food dis/likes (often referred to as ‘food preferences’) have become one of the most researched topics in psychological research on eating, particularly with regards to children. An overwhelming amount of work is focused on topics such as the development of food likes, overcoming the avoidance of novel foods (‘neophobia’)

Nick Oliver, www.nickoliverillustration.com

Providing food for the family can feel more complex than a large-scale research project: a balance of economics, time, ethics, knowledge, skills, and the patience to deal with a four-year-old who won’t eat the Bolognese because they can ‘taste the onions’. When it comes to children, our knowledge of their food likes and dislikes becomes both a marker of how much we know them and also a matter for negotiation…

the psychologist may 2022 family mealtimes

in infancy, and how young children can learn to like a wider range of vegetables. It is not just within academic research that we have become so preoccupied with children’s food dis/likes. The language of eating during mealtimes is heavily weighted toward mundane food assessments. This has become an almost ubiquitous topic at mealtimes – what we ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’. Video-recorded infant mealtimes even reveal parents voicing eating pleasure and food likes on behalf of their children as they have

their ﬁrst tastes of solid food (Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021). While such talk about food dis/likes is commonplace, it is also part of the problem of mealtime battles, for three reasons: • Knowing the food likes and dislikes of children is, as noted above, an accountable thing for parents, and something that they might reasonably claim, having seen them eat every day for most of their lives. Parents are expected to know what

their children like to eat. This expectation – and responsibility, you might say – means that parents are likely to be fairly adamant about their knowledge. • When children state whether they like or don’t like a food, such statements are treated as referring to an underlying internal state (i.e. a taste experience). In the case of stated dislikes, children are often challenged about the authenticity of their claim, sometimes with quite blunt arguments that suggest that the children are simply wrong. • Liking or not liking has become a binary state, an either/or situation in which someone can either like a food or not like it. The in-between, ‘sort of’ like is still acceptable, but not in terms of deciding whether the family might eat that food again. Children are typically pushed into one response or the other. The combination of these three elements means that mealtime battles are likely to arise when a child makes a comment about not liking a food that their parent maintains that they should like. Let’s examine how this works in more detail.

Food likes as ‘knowables’ Food likes and dislikes are not just personal preferences, they are also things we know about our friends and family. This is what enables parents to develop repertoires of familiar meals that will be enjoyed by everyone. There is, of course, a difference between knowing about someone’s food likes and the person themselves knowing it from an experiential perspective. Food dis/likes are an example of what Anita Pomerantz (1980) described as ‘Type 1 knowables’, that is, knowledge of something that a person might have both the rights and obligation to know because they have primary epistemic access to that knowledge. Any bodily experiences or mental states would be included in this category. If you tell me, for instance, that you hate seafood or don’t like asparagus, it would be very strange if I disagreed. I don’t have access to how something tastes to you nor how you experience ﬂavours or textures. And yet this is what can happen when children state their food dislikes during family mealtimes. Claims about what they ‘like’ often go unchallenged, but any comments about things they don’t like, and parents will often react by trying to argue otherwise. This is where the battle begins. Parents and children are stuck in a double-bind situation with regards to knowledge about the child’s food dis/likes. Any discussions about this during a mealtime could then pull these two knowable stances in opposite directions. It is a bit like a knot in a piece of string; the harder you pull on each end of the string, the tighter the knot becomes and the harder it is to unravel. Consider the following example (taken from Wiggins, 2014), which follows a brief exchange in which a Mum asks her 5-year-old daughter Isla if she would eat some home-made apple cake, to which Isla responds ﬁrst by shaking her head. Mum then follows this with a claim about what Isla likes:

Nick Oliver, www.nickoliverillustration.com

Example 1: apple cake 1. Mum: you love apples 2. Isla: I don’t like apple cake, 3. Mum: you’ve never tried it 4. (2.0) ((Isla visibly slumps in her seat)) 5. Mum: specially not home-made

In the above example, Mum draws on a knowable thing about Isla – she loves apples – and uses this as part of a negotiation to encourage her to eat the apple cake. When Isla states a dislike about the cake, this is then challenged with the argument that one must try (or taste, or eat) the cake to really know whether you like it or not. This is a bit like the ‘seeing is believing’ argument, but in this case, it is ‘tasting is believing’, when parents might insist that their children ‘try’ the food before they make a judgement. While this might seem a rational statement, an appeal to opening up sensory experiences of food, when used in this way in mealtimes it is more likely to be treated as pulling in the opposite direction to the child’s stated preference.

the psychologist may 2022 family mealtimes

In other words, treating the child’s prior assessment as not valid, and that the parents have greater understanding of what they ought to like. What happens when we assess food When we talk about what we like and don’t like about food, we are drawing on a broader set of discursive practices deﬁned as assessments. Food assessments are common in mealtimes and they typically follow a pattern in which either the person (‘subject-side’) or the food (‘object-side’) is foregrounded, and either an item (e.g. ‘these carrots’) or category (e.g. ‘carrots’) of food is being assessed. For instance, ‘these carrots are horrible’ is an example of an object-side item assessment, whereas ‘I hate carrots’ is an example of a subject-side category assessment. It is this latter type – also known as SCAs (see Wiggins, 2014 and van der Heijden et al., 2022) – that is used when we state a food dis/like. They are also the most consequential form of food assessment for psychological matters, since they suggest a food preference that transcends the current mealtime. They hint at permanence, implying dis/liking that exists regardless of time and place. If today you tell me that you like broccoli, I might reasonably assume that you will like it tomorrow. Food dis/likes are thus a speciﬁc form of food assessment that contains in its grammatical form a set of psychological implications. In essence, SCAs construct food likes as a noun, as a thing we know about ourselves and other people. This is how food dis/likes as knowables become part of our everyday language about eating. What happens in family mealtimes is that SCAs are often used by parents about their children when making an offer of food or trying to persuade the child to eat, such as with the apple cake example above. They might even use arguments that recollect past experiences, for instance, saying ‘you liked it when you were little’ as a means to challenge a current refusal to eat. The fragility of this argument is apparent when you compare it to other childhood favourites. I loved ‘My Little Pony’ and my Sindy doll when I was little but had very different interests as an older child. The point is that food dis/likes, as knowable things, become used as part of mealtime interaction for particular purposes. It is not just that the parent claims knowledge about the child’s food likes, but that this knowledge is being used in the negotiation of what can and should be eaten. We see another illustration of this in the next example, taken from Wiggins and Laurier (2020). Nine-year-old Joseph hasn’t eaten much of his risotto and toward the end of the meal his Mum tries to encourage him to have a bit more: Example 2: risotto 1. Mum: could you- eat a bit more: (.) Joseph please (0.2) 2. ‘stead of [staring into space 3. Jos: [na::h: (0.4) I don’t °like it° 4. Mum: a little bit more if you don’t mind

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Jos: Dad: Mum: Dad:

no::: ((shakes head)) I’m surprised n:- >yeh< he had all the bacon (1.0) Mum: he likes bacon, he likes peas (0.2) and rice. 11. Dad: yep

Key sources Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: “Limited access’ as a “ﬁshing” device. Sociological inquiry, 50(3-4), 186-198. van der Heijden, A., Te Molder, H., Huma, B. & Jager, G. (2022). To like or not to like: Negotiating food assessments of children from families with a low socioeconomic position. Appetite, 170, 105853. Wiggins, S. (2014). Adult and child use of love, like, don’t like and hate during family mealtimes. Subjective category assessments as food preference talk. Appetite, 80, 7-15. Wiggins, S. & Laurier, E. (2020). Our daily bread and onions: Negotiating tastes in family mealtime interaction. In E. Falconer (Ed.), Space, Taste and Affect (pp. 115-128). London: Routledge. Wiggins, S. & Keevallik, L. (2021). Enacting gustatory pleasure on behalf of another: The multimodal coordination of infant tasting practices. Symbolic Interaction, 44(1), 87-111.

The use of a subject-side item assessment (‘I don’t like it’) can be seen on line 2, which Joseph states as a reason why he doesn’t want to eat any more. Mum doesn’t directly respond to this but instead restates her request, and Joseph refuses again, with a ‘no’ and a head-shake. Both sides are thus pulling in different directions and the disagreement knot simply gets tighter. What happens next is that Mum and Dad start putting together a more nuanced argument about what he does like in order to undermine his ‘I don’t like it’ statement. In the end, the offensive food was discovered to be the onions, and the battle was never fully resolved. Onions are just too central an ingredient for many dishes and not liking them is simply not an option. The parents were not going to give up on this one.

Liking is a process, not an ‘either-or’ state It is not so much that there might be differences in what parents and children claim about their food dis/ likes, but also therefore that these differences have consequences. If a child states a dislike of onions or other staple foods, then the family’s repertoire of meals is under threat. This is why things might work differently in nurseries, schools, or at friends’ houses; while disliked foods might still matter in such settings, they don’t matter as much as in the home because they don’t impact on the future of family meals. Resolving this problem, and preventing mealtime battles, is not about trying to get your child to like the food that you provide. Not liking food is not the problem here. The problem is that the words we use to talk about food dis/likes reinforces an assumption that the dis/like is a ﬁxed state and a knowable thing about that person. To solve this problem, or unravel the knot in our arguments, we need to treat the word ‘like’ as a verb and not a noun. That’s it. Liking is a process, not a state-of-being or some quality about ourselves that remains unchanged through time. And as a process, liking a food can change from mouthful to mouthful, from day to day. Changing our words from ‘like’ to ‘liking’, from categories of food to speciﬁc items, can make all the difference.

When we use the word ‘like’ as a noun rather than a verb, it sets up food dis/likes as being two separate and mutually exclusive categories. Either we like the food or we don’t. While there is the possibility of a middle-ground (as in ‘I like the flavour but I’m not sure about the crunchy bits’), when it comes to children’s eating practices, it frequently becomes an either/or question. The final example below shows how this can play out. The family are eating a meal accompanied by different breads such as naan and chapati, when Emma (aged 5 years) turns to her Mum (see Wiggins & Laurier, 2020): Example 3: naan 1. Emma: there’s something different about the naan bread 2. Mum: >is there< 3. Emma: mm 4. Mum: <good different or bad different> 5. Emma : I don’t know 6. ((talk about other things briefly)) 7. Mum: do you like it? 8. Emma: like the naan bread? 9. Mum: mm 10. Emma: ((brief shoulder shrug and headshake)) 11. Mum: >no< 12. (2.0) 13. Mum: okay >fair enough<

While the non-verbal food assessment (line 10) is accepted here by Mum, and indeed she demonstrates an interest in her daughter’s food preferences, the upshot is that an initial curiosity about ‘something different’ becomes distilled into a binary concern: do you like it or not? Since the food in this case (a type of bread) is an addition rather than the staple to the meal, the consequences of this now-stated ‘dislike’ are much less than if they had referred to a food that formed a substantial part of the meal, such as the onions in the risotto from example 2 above. In this case, a potentially open discussion about ﬂavours is turned into a binary choice that then treats the ‘like’ as a noun and thus a knowable thing about Emma. The result: those particular naans will probably not appear at their future meals.

Word-choice as the key Preventing mealtime battles is not straightforward and the advice I offer here won’t help your children to enjoy their food any more than if you added chocolate sprinkles or a portion of chips. But it should help to avoid the disagreement knot being tightened any further and allow room for discussion that does not pull parent and child in different directions. Small adjustments in the words we use can make a big difference. • Use ‘liking’ as a verb, rather than ‘like’ as a noun. Liking food is a process that can change from mouthful to mouthful, not a static state that deﬁnes who we are.

Sally Wiggins Young is Professor of Discursive Psychology at Linköping University, Sweden. sally.wiggins.young@liu.se

• Don’t ask children if they like their food. Ask them if they are enjoying it. That keeps the focus on pleasure without individualising it. • If children voluntarily say they don’t like something, acknowledge it with a slight shift in emphasis: ‘you’re not enjoying it, that’s ﬁne, maybe it will taste better another time’. Don’t try to challenge their assessment even if it seems like they are just saying it to be difﬁcult. Pulling in a different direction will only make the knot harder to untangle. • It’s only a battle if you take different sides. Any comments about the food are not a personal attack on your cooking abilities or capacity as a parent, even if it might feel like it sometimes. Our vocabulary for talking about eating is limited and even as adults we often use the same phrases (e.g. ‘this is nice’) over and over again without thinking through their consequences. Children are just learning how to use language about eating and they learn most of this from their parents. • It’s not just about the kids. We talk about what our friends and our pets like to eat. Enjoying similar foods can enhance the connections we have with others. Talk about these as practices and shared moments (as in ‘you look like you’re enjoying that as much as I am’), rather than as knowable facts (‘so you like pasta too’). • Let your words provide possibilities for change. Once you verb ‘liking’ then it can make it easier to accommodate changes, to allow both children and adults to be able to say ‘I’m liking this now’ in a way that doesn’t challenge a ‘I don’t like X’ standpoint. This is going to be even more important if we are to open up to eating new foods that are more sustainable both for families and for the planet. The key to preventing mealtime battles is therefore not to treat comments such as ‘I don’t like it’ as a statement of fact about your child’s food preferences. Treat them for what they are: assessments in the here-and-now, drawing on our limited (English) vocabulary about eating. Once you stop pulling in the opposite direction, and stop trying to argue differently about these knowable dis/likes, you can start having conversations that allow both parents and children to explore food tastes that everyone can enjoy.

the psychologist may 2022 family mealtimes

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Football adopting the Olympic model Bradley Busch is a sport and exercise psychologist who has worked with elite footballers and Olympic competitors. Ian Florance talked to Bradley about how sports psychology is changing, and some of the other areas he works in. Bradley begins by telling me he’s a director at InnerDrive, the company. ‘We started out in sport at a time when there were few advertised roles for sport psychologists. Education is now a major area of our activity and we do some training and presentation in commercial and not-for-proﬁt organisations.’ Bradley’s article ‘Is Sport Psychology Doomed at Premier League Clubs?’ stimulated this interview. As the title suggests, it draws on his experience in football to argue that sport psychology’s role

Bradley Busch, @BradleyKBusch

has changed and will continue to do so. ‘Football was slower than, say, sports like rugby or cricket to adopt psychological approaches. Perhaps that’s because of their backgrounds and culture. A lot of cricket and rugby players go to university and are exposed to psychological thinking and other social sciences. Football was traditionally a working-class sport. Its culture reflected the fact that you didn’t complain; that you either “had it or you didn’t”. That’s changing. Individual managers have pioneered the use of psychology while coach training is helping. Younger players who have experienced the benefits of psychological help are now moving into management.’ Continuity and comfort About five years ago, Bradley started working more for individual players rather than for clubs. ‘There were a number of reasons for this. Clubs are very unstable: managers change quickly and tend to bring in their own backroom experts. Since the backroom staff – including sport psychologists – may move from club to club there’s a confidentiality issue and a feeling that they’re not on the “individual player’s team”. So, Premier League footballers began to build their own personal teams, sometimes without their club’s knowledge. These might include a chef, a strength and conditioning coach and a psychologist for instance, providing players with a degree of continuity even when they move from club to club. I see this as adopting the Olympic model. The 2012 Olympics were a huge influence as players and staff from different sports cross-pollinated ideas.’ How do individual players choose a sport psychologist? ‘I’ve never been asked about my registration, my approach to psychology or whether I’m insured. I make a point of raising these sorts of issues for my own peace of mind but they don’t seem to affect decisions to use you. Often, you’re referred: elite footballers are a small circle who often live close to each other. The players have to believe you can help them improve their performance. Elite footballers lead very constrained lives – they’re constantly scrutinised and depend on a small, close-knit circle. I sympathise

the psychologist may 2022 careers

with them because they often live lonely, pressurised lives. So, they need to feel comfortable working with you. It’s not a question of friendship: comfort is probably the right word.’ Do you need to have been involved deeply in football? ‘No. I’m a fan and a season ticket holder but I got into sport psychology with experience of playing county level tennis and questioning what impacted my performance from day to day. In fact, not having directly relevant experience can help. You need to talk in a way that shows you understand the technicalities and context but not the detail, that you are invested in their livelihood. Football is much more complex than it sometimes seems to the over-opinionated fan and many footballers are deeply knowledgeable about the game. Never having played at a professional level means I don’t overstep the mark and try to compete.’ ‘Confidentiality is critical to successful work in this environment. I refer to specific teams I work with and that’s OK but I don’t mention individual players. This might be a tactic for strengthening your profile but it’s certain to destroy a business in the end, apart from being unethical.’ What sort of issues does Bradley work on? ‘In some cases there is a “problem” to solve with a set goal. Once this is achieved the contract/relationship ends. Longer term clients focus on performance improvement in the future. It’s clear that players I have worked with at certain clubs, such as Manchester United, focus on learning, on improving themselves. For players at other clubs, the issues have more been about dealing with outside issues and circumstances: getting on with a particular teammate, for instance. We do still work at a team level and here open discussion is the key.’ The company still gets involved in group projects. ‘We have worked directly with coaching teams and set out to improve on-field communication. We still work with academy players. Working with these groups was my introduction to practical work in football. When I was doing my MSc there was a grant for football-related topics and I did mine on fear of failure among academy footballers. After completing it I wrote round to all 92 FA clubs offering a free talk on my MSc. I got a reply from Sunderland and after a while that resulted in working at Watford Football Club for five years.’ Bradley has worked with individual Olympians and Paralympians, as well as in other sports. I wondered if there was a difference between team sports like football and cricket and individual sports like golf and tennis. ‘Less than you think: that distinction doesn’t really apply in certain sports. Football is highly competitive within as well as between teams. Cricketers and footballers have to perform individually as well as within a team.’ Education and cognitive science The company’s work in education reflects the growing interest in cognitive science in the education sector. Bradley is quite clear that ‘we do training, CPD, INSET

days and twilight sessions. I think of us as a Google Translate for educators – taking existing research and theory, then turning it into stimulating, relevant language. We are not trying to replace educational psychologists: my wife is a child and educational psychologist so I’m very clear on that. We could not do the assessment and special needs work educational psychologists do whereas they could easily do what we do if the funding and time were available. Many educational psychologists are trying to widen their remit and use more of the knowledge and skills they possess.’ ‘A lot of our work addresses metacognition – skills like that help pupils to learn more effectively given the knowledge-rich curriculum, so we look at areas like retrieval practice and cognitive load theory. Resilience is also important as are areas like self-awareness and self-reflection. We do less work in business but again we’re basically a training organisation. You have to be engaging for these audiences. Managers hire us to give sessions and keynotes that genuinely inspire their teams.’ Bradley started out, as he describes it, as a proper tennis brat. ‘I did A-level PE and Psychology. Since the same teacher taught on both courses, I was able to attend the same lessons twice – which convinced me I could succeed at sport psychology! At the start I was rather impressed with the idea of working with sports stars but I’m less star-struck now.’ Given how his career and the discipline of sport science has developed how does the future shape up? ‘We do more work online because of Covid. It doesn’t work as well as face-to-face sessions. For instance it’s harder to break the ice with small talk on-screen, but it does have advantages which means it will continue. Equally I don’t see the cognitive science revolution losing pace in the near future. There are more roles for sport psychologists advertised now than when I started.’ Bradley predicts that more individual, highprofile players will seek the edge psychology gives to their performance. ‘As I’ve suggested they are a small network. I suspect our business will develop internationally since sport is increasingly transnational. Our new initiative is running some CPD seminars online for young recently trained psychologists, looking at basic issues like how you apply for work, what do you wear to a meeting. I’m excited about this.’ Bradley is currently working on a book that looks at how do we present key psychological findings and concepts. ‘I am very interested in data visualisation – how people design infographics to make data easier to understand. At some stage, I’d quite like to write a sport psychology book with my brilliant colleagues, Edward Watson, Matthew Shaw, and Hanna GildamClark, but in a style that varies a bit from your traditional sport psychology text. In the short term, though, sleep is the main objective… I have a very young child!

The end of trauma as we know it? Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne meets Professor George A. Bonanno, author of The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD (Basic Books).

The conventional view is that people who have been through a terrible experience like a severe accident will be psychologically really badly affected for a long time. In your book, you tell the story of Jed who goes through a horriﬁc accident which leads to the amputation of his leg. And after a few days, the intense psychological reaction to his memories subsided and he was actually doing okay. And he asked himself why he didn’t have PTSD, as the narrative is so clear that that’s what will happen. And you explain that Jed’s response is more common than we think. So why is it that we have this idea that these awful life changing events lead to PTSD? There are a number of reasons. A lot of the early work on trauma and PTSD came from the clinical realm, from people who were looking for a way to treat highly severely traumatised individuals. And that led to the development of PTSD and treatment initiatives. All of the focus was primarily on psychological damage. Mental health

professionals were seeing mostly traumatised individuals, and they assumed that it’s more prevalent in the general population than it actually is. Also, media outlets play their role. Something attention grabbing is more likely to get people to read or click. Algorithms focus on what’s provocative – like trauma. As human beings, we’re drawn to the idea that trauma is common because it grabs our attention. When we hear about a trauma it’s much more memorable than when we hear about someone who was okay. And often people who are okay don’t even talk about the event. I think those are the primary factors that contribute this idea that trauma is ubiquitous and happens when you’re exposed to one of these events. In your keynote at the 2021 BPS conference you described events as potentially traumatic rather than traumatic.

the psychologist may 2022 books Yes. I think there’s a lot of misconception there, when people talk about ‘trauma histories’ – the idea that most of us are carrying past traumas. It’s not true. There’s a big focus now on trauma-informed care. I understand the intent there, but I think it’s not a good idea and I think it’s quite misleading, because it allows a misinterpretation of one’s past as traumatic. The research is very clear on this. The epidemiological research has shown that when people experience potentially traumatic events but are not traumatised, they do not carry the event forward as a traumatic experience. And you’re not talking about post-traumatic growth, you’re talking about simply not being traumatised by the event. What would you say to psychologists who argue that anyone who goes through one of these events is traumatised at some level, and there are just degrees of covering that up? That would mean, essentially, that the entire world is traumatised, which of course makes no sense. If we were all carrying with us hidden traumas, how could we ever possibly function? What’s more, epidemiological research has shown that almost everyone experiences at least one, and often several, ‘potentially’ traumatic events in their lifetime. And my research, and the research of others, has repeatedly shown that the majority of people exposed to these events move on with no lasting psychological damage. You argue that flexibility, and not resilience, helps people get through potentially traumatic events because the traits and behaviours that help in one scenario might not work in another. How do you define flexibility? One major component is a way of thinking, a mindset. It’s conviction and a kind of optimism that we will be able to get through something. If you have that attitude, you’re more likely to engage with the stressor and get into the steps of flexibility. The event becomes less threatening. When I’ve had disturbing, difficult, or painful events happen to me in recent years, it’s been easy to think that I’ll have a terrible life now. But I’ve ultimately been able to look at the challenge at hand and focus on getting through the moment, one step at a time, as it were. It’s less threatening and more manageable this way. It’s not just empty optimism, it really helps us engage with the second component which I call the flexibility sequence. It is a series of steps where we embrace the challenge. We first look at the situation and ask what’s really happening. It’s not easy because sometimes these situations are very painful or make us very frightened. But we need to understand what is happening to get past it. That first step is context sensitivity. The second step is called repertoire, when we try to decide what we can do with the skills and tools at our disposal. And the third step is the feedback monitoring step. We pay attention to what happens when we use a strategy. We ask if it worked, if it’s helping. If not, we go back to the first step and try something else. You’re not done there because usually events go on for a while, or there may be another event the next day, week

or month. This is applicable to both everyday difficulties and more severe difficulties. It means addressing the problem as it happens. Is your thinking around this that if people develop their flexibility, that will lead to ‘the end of trauma’, which is the title of your book? No, actually I don’t think anything will lead to the end of trauma. The title was deliberately provocative. It’s really a call for a new way to think about trauma – it’s the end of trauma as we know it. But there is evidence that people can develop the pieces of flexibility. We’ve done research on the individual pieces, and they are amenable to both practice and education. Several of my colleagues use this in their clinical practice already, so I think it’s learnable. But most people have these tools to some degree already, only they may not know it. I think the book itself may help to people to become more flexible, through learning about these things in depth – that’s part of my hope. You’ve interviewed so many people who have gone through awful events, including survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Has that had any impact on you, and have you needed flexibility to cope? I think it’s actually had a positive impact on me. In my research we try to include interviews, even when we’re doing experimental and psychophysiological studies, because people like to tell their story. It’s also endlessly fascinating. Pretty much from the beginning, it made me feel much more hopeful about our capacities in the face of the worst things. I assumed that over time, it would get harrowing. Well, I don’t watch TV or read books about grief and trauma in my spare time because I can’t saturate myself too much with it. Where next in your work on trauma? I really want to further understand flexibility and how it works. I’m engaged in more and more computational analysis and machine learning with colleagues, and I think it’s possible to do a lot more sophisticated analyses to try to understand how people use flexibility over time. And if we can find ways to harness the enormous amounts of data in smartphones, we can further understand how it works in real time. I also want to understand why people are so resistant to the idea that we’re not so traumatised. Right now, the idea that we all have hidden trauma is very popular. I’d like to do more research on that. Finally, after your BPS keynote, I told my partner about your concept of ‘coping ugly’ – using an unhealthy strategy to get through a situation. Now whenever something bad happens, he says, ‘I’m having a beer, it’s allowed, I’m coping ugly’… So he asked me to thank you. Totally. You can tell him I said totally, especially if it’s a good beer. It should be a good beer.

Organisational communication An adapted extract from Neuroscience for Organizational Communication: A Guide for Communicators and Leaders, by Laura McHale, courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan.

Strong modals and weasel words A modal is a grammatical term used to describe a word that is used with a verb to express possibility or intention. Modal words are usually described as strong or weak, depending on the degree of certainty that they signal. For example, weak modal words are terms such as may, might, could, depending, possibly, and appears, and signal less certainty than strong modal words such as can, will, shall, and are. Weak modal words are also known, more colloquially, as weasel words (Loughran & McDonald, 2016). Studies have shown that the use of modal words in corporate communications can be an important measure of a company’s financial health. For example, one study of publicly traded American firms showed that companies with a high proportion of weak modal words in their annual reports and/or IPO prospectuses showed higher subsequent stock return volatility than firms that did not (Loughran & McDonald, 2016). This insight makes a compelling case for textual analysis as part of an investment strategy. Organisations understandably tend to downplay negative news in their formal communications, and often carefully couch it among other, more positive messages. The problem with this approach is that negative information is so padded with positive words that the overall meaning becomes obscure. This is a big problem for investors and financial analysts alike. To solve this conundrum, two Finance professors at the University of Notre Dame, Tim Loughran and Bill McDonald, conducted a sweeping textual analysis of American corporate 10-Ks (e.g., annual reports) over a ten-year period, to see if they could ferret out ways that companies employed avoidance strategies in their communications. They evaluated expressions of sentiment and created six different (and often overlapping) word lists to categorise them: Negative, Positive, Uncertainty, Litigious, Strong modal, and Weak modal. Their overall goal was to identify words that signal avoidance strategies in communication style (Loughran & McDonald, 2011). The resulting Loughran and McDonald (LM) sentiment lexicon is extensive. The biggest lists are of the Positive and Negative words; they found over 300 Positive and 2300 Negative words. Given that ratio, it is plain to see how many organisations will take great pains to invent countless ways of describing negative events, often at the expense of simple and straightforward language. By the way, the ten most frequently occurring LM Negative words are: loss, losses, claims, impairment, against, adverse, restated, adversely, restructuring, and litigation. These ten words represent less than 1 per cent of the LM universe of words, yet they account for more than 33 per cent of the negative words which appeared in American 10-Ks (Loughran & McDonald, 2011). Based on their analysis, Loughran and McDonald (2011) argued that the readability of financial documents could be a reliable predictor of return volatility, as well as a predictor of

forecast errors and earnings forecast dispersion among ﬁnancial analysts. But the biggest takeaway from the LM dictionary is that language matters, especially in times of stress or turmoil, and that many organisations have a problem with communicating in a way that is transparent, straightforward, and open. The LM dictionary is most pertinent to investor relations and the communication of ﬁnancial results. But these types of words creep into all types of organisational communication, and not just publicly traded companies. There are important lessons here for internal communications as well, which we will explore more closely in the next section.

Text mining and sentiment analysis The LM dictionary project is part of an emerging field known as text mining, sometimes referred to as natural language processing. Text mining is a research technique that uses computer algorithms to extract useful information and patterns from large amounts of textual data (Das et al., 2019). Sentiment analysis, like that done by Loughran and McDonald, is a sub-field of text mining, which focuses on the sentiments or opinions contained in a piece of text (Liu, 2020). Some researchers are using text mining and sentiment analysis to study the communications patterns of organisations to see if, among other things, they can create a possible early warning system of fraudulent business activity (Das et al., 2019). The Enron debacle provides a riveting example of what this research can yield. In the aftermath of Enron’s implosion, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released a treasure trove of information, including Enron’s corporate communications and internal emails for a two-year period leading up to the firm’s collapse. In an analysis of over 100,000 emails sent by Enron employees, as well as over 1000 articles that appeared on PR Newswire from January 2000 to December 2001, Das et al. (2019) found that these corporate communications effectively predicted the crisis. They did this by measuring how positive sentiment declined both internally and externally. But even more interestingly, they found that certain structural characteristics, such as average email length and number of emails sent, were even stronger predictors of trouble than the sentiment analysis. A striking finding was, for one 13-week period, that for every 20-character decline in email length, there was a 1.2 per cent drop in stock price – in fact, email length declined by 50 per cent into 2001. However, even though emails were shorter, senior executives at Enron communicated more frequently, a trend presaging the coming collapse (Das et al., 2019). The beauty of textual analysis is that it avoids the privacy concerns around reading individual employee emails because its treats datasets systematically and searches for broader trends. As such, Das et al. (2019) believe that regular sentiment and structural email analysis would be an important risk management strategy for organisations and regulators. Find the full extract and references online

the psychologist may 2022 books

Facing life’s challenges In a sea of misinformation and unfounded psychology ‘tips and tricks’ online, for many it can be challenging to navigate the field of mental health. For a variety of reasons, only a proportion of people who struggle with mental health difficulties or who want to develop and exercise their psychological wellbeing seek support from a professional. And so, accessible and evidence-based information and advice through other media like self-help plays a vital role. In her bestselling book, Dr Julie Smith explores what contributes to the development of different emotional states, and how to manage difficulties including low mood, stress, and anxiety. Smith collates her years of wisdom and experience as a Clinical Psychologist to guide the reader through proven techniques and skills from psychological therapy. Relatable client stories and Smith’s own personal encounters give useful context. These examples convey compassion and empathy, and help normalise different

experiences of distress. Smith models the scientist-practitioner stance by expertly weaving research throughout, dispelling myths such as why simply ‘thinking positively’ doesn’t work in overcoming negative unhelpful thoughts and explaining how employing curiosity and awareness can be more effective. The metaphors for psychological concepts are particularly engaging, for example, the basic requirements of exercise, sleep, nutrition, routine, and connection are the ‘defence players’ for mental health. Educational material and activities are taken from a range of therapeutic modalities including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy to name a few. They are designed to support the reader to understand themselves from a psychological perspective and to make positive changes to their wellbeing, whether during a time of struggle or as a personal-

development strategy. Widely shared challenges are discussed, including how to understand and manage grief through accepting and expressing emotions, adjusting expectations, and spending time remembering who or what has been lost. As a clinician, this book reminded me of the value of supporting individuals with their psychological wellbeing whether or not they are struggling with mental health challenges. As Smith describes it, ‘The more work we do on building self-awareness and resilience when all is well, the better able we are to face life’s challenges when they come our way’. Smith’s work is hugely important in bringing applied psychology into the public realm. Her wise words and compassionate tone will stay with me as I navigate my own journey working in the world of Clinical Psychology.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? Julie Smith Michael Joseph

Reviewed by Poppy Harding, Trainee Clinical Psychologist, University of Surrey

Our fallible senses For those of us with no known sensory impairment, the senses appear infallible, an exact reﬂection of the world around us. But according to Guy Leschziner in his book, The Man Who Tasted Words, they are anything but. Tastes, smells, sounds, sights, physical feelings, and even the awareness of our own body’s location are in fact a clever concoction of the mind. It isn’t until something changes in our body’s ability to sense incoming stimuli that we realise the scale of our senses’ fallibility. In this easy read, stories and science are pleasingly woven together from Leschziner’s fascinating and curious career as a neurologist in the NHS. Story by story, the feeling of certainty surrounding our senses – that they are permanent and a true reﬂection of the world – evaporates, leaving in its place gratitude and awe at the complexity of the relationship between the world and our complex bodies. Leschziner explains that for many, altered senses are the only reality they’ve ever known. A change in a single gene removed Paul’s and his sibling’s ability to feel pain, with playtime ending in blood, burns and broken bones. Valeria’s and James’s synaesthesia (a joining of the senses) created the taste of pineapple chunks when hearing gentle piano music, and a crispy fried egg when hearing the word ‘Tottenham’. For others, Leschziner says, altered or impaired

senses are a dramatic and unwelcome change from the norm. Joanne’s lingering cold and subsequent sinus issues left everything smelling and tasting of decaying, putrid food for years. Poisoning through the consumption of coral trout on holiday resulted in hot-cold reversal for Alison, her glass of cold water feeling as though it was scolding her hand. Not all of examples in the book are so extreme. Billions of people worldwide have sensory impairments, and we all experience fading senses as we age. As someone with (seemingly) no sensory impairments at present, I ﬁnd it easy to take the everyday wonders of the senses for granted – the smell of freshly baked bread, a cool glass of water on a hot day, the sound of a blackbird at dusk, and even the pain of stubbing my toe. Not only does this book leave me with a new appreciation of my own wonderful version of reality, but it reminds me that we each experience a subtly or radically different world, constructed from our unique minds. Our senses are fallible; they do not reﬂect a singular reality. And with a subtle change in our bodies at any moment, that world we know could radically shift in ways we can’t yet imagine. Georgina Lamb, MSc psychology student at Northumbria University

The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses Guy Leschziner Simon & Schuster

‘You can’t really study grief without studying love’ Our editor Jon Sutton hears from Mary-Frances O’Connor, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, about her new book The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss.

You describe grieving as ‘ultimately a type of learning’. Can you outline how an understanding of the brain informs this approach? It is across many years of investigation, and many research projects of my own and others, that I have come to see framing ‘grieving as a form of learning’ captures many aspects of this process. At its most broad, bereaved people have to learn how to live in the world while carrying the absence of their one-and-only with them. That learning, to restore a meaningful life, is one aspect. At a more basic level, bereaved people have to relearn every small habit that incorporated the ‘we’, beyond just ‘you’ and ‘me’. So, every time you cook a meal and don’t have to automatically consider your child’s food preferences, or every time you reach for the phone to call your mom with the news of the day – each of these is the learning to not take into account the other person on this earthly plane. We see lots of activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) when we do neuroimaging studies of grief, a region involved in self-referential memory, and learning requires updating how the hundreds and thousands of days of predictions from our selfreferential memory no longer applies in the here and now.

Most people who have been bereaved might recognise your distinction between grief, ‘the intense emotion that crashes over you like a wave’, and grieving, as a process with a trajectory rather than a moment. Do you see that distinction adequately considered in bereavement science itself? Making this distinction came from designing studies to investigate grief – and recognising that when we are eliciting that wave of emotion in the scanner, by showing participants photos they have brought us of their deceased loved one, the data from how the brain elicits grief is not the same as how the brain changes over time with adaptation to the loss. This would require several scans on the same person, to observe the trajectory of changes in that feeling. Very few of these studies exist in the neuroscience of grief, although we have some excellent studies looking at how the psychological experience changes over time, such as George Bonanno’s work with the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study. I think the surprise to me was realising that this distinction isn’t just helpful in doing scientiﬁc work, but for people who might believe they won’t feel grief again, that someday this will be ‘over’. It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the death, when you become aware of the loss of something so important, you will feel that momentary wave of grief. But that doesn’t mean it won’t also change over time, become more familiar, more manageable, or even the source of great compassion for others –even though it will never go away.

You write of ‘yearning’ being at the heart of grief, and the brain needing to update its virtual map of the person you have lost. Does this suggest that immersing yourself in the person and the hard fact that they have gone is better way to grieve than avoidance? I’m a big fan of having a big toolkit of coping strategies. I believe that avoidance has its place – if you need to just pretend nothing has happened, and cheer for your son’s football game for 45 minutes – that’s a great moment to choose avoidance. Coping strategies work best when they are appropriate for the moment at hand. In addition, grieving is very stressful for the body and the mind, so denial can give you a break for a while. But if that is the only strategy we keep reaching for in the toolkit, it is likely that we won’t learn how to manage our waves of grief, we won’t come to understand how this new life we are forced into really works, how to connect with the living loved ones around us. We may also need to spend time crying on the shoulder of a dear friend, a friend who can really listen to us without judgement. And we might need to do some ‘instrumental coping’ – finding someone who can show us how to fix the toilet or how to cook an egg. We might need to pray, or vent our anger, or take a trip back to our childhood home. These are all coping strategies that enable us to manage the fact that we are now a person who might be overtaken by grief at any time, and who understand the irrefutable mortality that we’ve come to know through the death of someone close. The neuroscientific approach presumably has implications beyond grieving. For example, you write that ‘the ephemeral sense of closeness… exists in physical, tangible hardware of our brain’. You can’t really study grief without studying love. There has to be something that is ‘lost’, and that means there has to be a bond before the bond can be broken by death. The neurobiology of attachment has taught us a great deal about how that bond is physically encoded in the brain. We know that the process of bonding, falling in love with our partner or our child, is part and parcel of a huge change in neurochemicals like oxytocin and dopamine, that encode this as our one-and-only, and motivates us to seek them out and spend time with them, taking comfort in their presence and offering our unconditional caring. An aspect of that bond is in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward network of the brain. But it is also in the overlapping representation of self and other that occurs in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the brain. Perhaps the most common bit of advice given to bereaved people is ‘give it time’. Is this trajectory of grieving actually reflected in brain imaging work? As I mentioned, we don’t have many neuroimaging studies of grieving to date, or that change over time. But we know from excellent clinical science that yearning

the psychologist may 2022 books tends to decrease over time, while acceptance tends to increase. This is not a line from A to B, however, as many ups and downs in our emotions occur over this period of adaptation. We know from careful research that the anniversary of the death, holidays, and birthdays tend to temporarily increase our grief, our yearning, and sadness. This doesn’t mean that the trajectory is still moving toward a more manageable place, it is a temporary awareness of the loss again, and will recede like the tide. In normalising the grief reaction, do you get to the point where you believe there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to grieve? You also point out that the Kubler-Ross model has been wrongly taken as a ‘prescription for how to grieve’, rather than a description. I believe that there are as many different ways to grieve as there are ways to love – which makes sense, since they are closely related processes. Most of us find that marriage, for example, is very different than we expected, and this is usually true with grieving as well. Everyone I know has a very different marriage, with different emotions, different ways to approach problems, different rituals and interpretations of events. Yet, they are all still marriage. So, scientists look for patterns across these very different expressions of grief. Dr Elisabeth KüblerRoss was a brilliant scientist, using the best technology at the time in psychiatry – the clinical interview. She had the revolutionary idea of actually talking to terminally ill patients, and accurately described their experiences of grief, which were then applied to grief of bereaved people as well. But research since the 1960’s has shown that although she gave us an accurate description of grief, of moments in time, that grieving does not occur in a linear way through these stages. Much longer studies – by Holland and Neimeyer, for example – have shown that we go back and forth, with more and less acceptance over time. The trouble is that many people think ‘the five stages’ is a prescription for grieving, and feel like there is something wrong with them if they don’t experience anger, for example. You describe Complicated Grief Treatment, revisiting intense and overwhelming emotions again and again. Is that suitable for everyone? Complicated Grief Treatment, now called Prolonged Grief Disorder Treatment, includes teaching clients a number of different skills, including understanding grief, managing emotions, seeing a promising future, strengthening relationships, narrating the story of the death, learning to live with reminders, and connecting with memories of the person who died. This is done because for some people, the support of their living loved ones does not enable them to get past the ‘stuck points’ that are quite natural in grieving, but persist longer in some people than others. So, if a year after the death of a loved one, a person is flexibly able to move into and out of those waves of grief, is able to find connection with their friends and family, and able to find moments of enjoyment in the day, then they do not need intervention. Remember that grief never goes away, but we can find ways to still

have a good life, however we define that personally, even after devastating loss. It also helps to know that people can both have major depression and also prolonged grief. But careful research has shown us that they are distinct, and that evidencebased, grief-focused psychotherapy is a better treatment than therapy for depression. These randomised clinical trials, funded by NIH, also showed that anti-depressants do not help the feelings of yearning we see in prolonged grief disorder, although they may help symptoms of depression, if those are present. It’s one example of how this type of careful diagnostic science can help us to see what doesn’t help, as well as what does. You also include a C.S. Lewis quote from the book he wrote after the death of his wife: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’ What do you see as the great unspoken of death? The neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, actually labeled the neuroanatomical system as the PANIC/GRIEF system, which I think is a little bit brilliant. Think of losing your child in a grocery store – the panic that we feel in that moment is extended in some ways, throughout grieving. What remains to understand, for you and all the other great bereavement researchers you mention? Umm… how long do you have to discuss this? In all seriousness, we really are in the infancy of our scientific understanding of grief and grieving, and the role of the brain and the body in this painful experience. We need many more people who understand grief and grieving – as researchers, as clinicians and doctors, and even as neighbours and friends and family. The more we know in general, the higher the floor from which future great researchers can take us further to deeper understanding. In terms of writing the book, you weave three characters throughout – the brain, science, and yourself as a trusted guide with your own experiences of loss. Do those characters define how you approached the whole process? Do you think it’s a good approach for any author writing about Psychology? Well, I think it can be difficult to study a phenomenon with which you have little experience. My grieving experience has been very different from other people’s – for example, I have never had prolonged grief disorder, after the death of my mother at 26, or after the death of my father. I did experience depression, and so I felt more attuned to the difference between them, perhaps. But thinking of framing the information as three characters is more a method of an author, an artist, I suppose. I wanted to find a way to convey the knowledge we have from grief research, and make it useful for those who could apply it to their own lives. The realm of the author is framing, interpreting, and telling stories in ways that are accessible and interesting. I hope I’ve been able to do that. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss is published by HarperOne.

See over for more on grief

‘These people all looked within themselves’ Elaine Kasket, Counselling Psychologist and author, meets Bjørn Johnson: co-director of the BAFTA-nominated Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11

n the aftermath of 9/11, artist Ruth Sergel constructed a simple plywood video box in New York City. Hundreds of people – survivors, witnesses, emergency responders, bereaved family, and friends of the lost – entered to tell their stories. In the 20th anniversary year of the attacks, ﬁlmmakers Bjørn Johnson and David Belton released Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11. Rather than being yet another factual or sensationalist rundown of that day’s tragic and terrifying events, their ﬁlm weaves its narrative from extraordinarily intimate threads of experience. Interposed with the standard news-archive material are carefully selected excerpts from Sergel’s original video-box recordings and new video from a reconstructed ‘memory box’. The result is a poignant meditation on unimaginable loss and a portrait of post-traumatic growth, and I spoke with Bjørn about it.

Why 9/11? I’d never really experienced grief until shortly before 9/11, at the age of 21, when I lost my mother unexpectedly. She’d gone to a hospital appointment on Friday, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and was gone by Sunday. Understanding at such a young age that life can change in an instant, that someone who’d been this bubbly, constant person in your life can just be gone – that hit me hard. When 9/11 happened, it struck a chord with me. Across the Atlantic, thousands of people were feeling the same things I was feeling, and there was a kinship there. But our family struggled for years. My dad closed up, and I closed up too – I think I always suppressed it. Years later, my wife would ask why I was watching videos of 9/11. I didn’t really know. I just had the feeling I wanted to tell the story of 9/11. But it’s probably the most well-documented event in human history, so how could I

the psychologist may 2022 culture make a film that had anything unique to say in that space? I held onto the idea that if I could capture what I felt, and what people felt at the time, maybe that would be a route in that was unique, personal, and genuine. About 16 years after Mum’s death, I found Ruth’s project. One of the first things you hear in the film is someone giving instructions to a person entering the video booth: ‘When you’re ready, push go’. Then there’s a series of people settling in to confront this freedom to do whatever they feel ready to do. They have to start somewhere. There’s a camera, but no other person, no expectation. They’re literally in a plywood box. You’d think it’s very easy to go in and press the button in a wooden box, but I don’t think it is. It takes incredible courage and bravery to face all those things… it’s so easy, in the face of extreme grief, to suppress it. When there wasn’t a director saying, ‘I’m going to ask you this question, and you give me an answer,’ people had to look much, much deeper and process feelings and emotions, anger and shock. That’s what Ruth’s project did and why it’s so remarkable. It speaks not just to 9/11, but to grief and trauma on a much broader scale. The first video I watched from Ruth’s collection was an African-American police officer called Michael Westcott. He was witness to the whole thing and lost colleagues, and he went into this booth mere months after it happened, confronting his feelings and having the bravery to speak out. I remember being incredibly moved by his video, because what struck me was that he was doing something I couldn’t do at the time. It made me realise that in 16 years, I had never done that. As a victim of sudden loss, it was incredibly cathartic process to make this film. I’ve come out the other end of it feeling like I have processed it and confronted it. I didn’t have a wooden box like these people, but I could see the benefit they were getting from speaking. So I went and had my own sessions, found a lovely therapist. I’d never done it before, and it took me a few sessions to get warmed up, but all these things came out. Everyone is different. It’s so

Bjørn Johnson

individual, how you process grief. I think people put time pressures on themselves – it’s been a year, or it’s been two years, you should be over it by now. And that’s not necessarily true. There’s no timeline. Many years out from your own loss of your mother, you had an experience that was so valuable to you, not just through making of the film, but also through doing your personal therapeutic work. I was thinking about the ways stories are shaped in documentaries. People criticise projects like Making a Murderer, for example, saying the agenda of the filmmakers infects or distorts the story. But in Memory Box you left this space, honoured people’s stories. There’s an archival news clip in your film, of a reporter trying to stop people in the street for an interview. His clothes and skin and equipment are clean – he must have been in a van or building. The people coming towards him are silent and covered in ash, and he’s shoving the microphone in their faces, saying, ‘Can you tell me what you saw?’ He’s not considering their experience – he’s only using them as conduits to his story. What you’re doing with Memory Box feels quite different. David [Belton] and I are both seasoned filmmakers, and you spend your career constructing narratives – it’s what we do. In many ways, Memory Box was counterintuitive. These videos were never intended to be edited. When we built the trust up with Ruth, the original artist who created the project, she was naturally very concerned that we’d do something sensationalist with this material. Every step of the way, we had to reassure her this wasn’t our intention. We always had the mindset that we wanted to step back as filmmakers. If there was ever a moment in the film where you’d feel the filmmaker’s hands, or something felt contrived or manufactured, then we would step back. We would go, no, it’s Mary’s moment. It’s Donald’s moment. It’s Daisy’s moment, this is what she’s saying. The images that we choose to reflect that should contextualise rather than sensationalise. So that was always a huge mantra for us throughout the whole process. And I think for the most part, we were successful. I hope their words come across. We had to make choices along the way, and that can’t be helped. But I think we built a strong cast of characters who have a lot of things to say, not just about grief, but about trauma itself, in all its guises. Donald Byrd, for example, the choreographer. I loved him, and I loved the visuals of the dance he created from what he witnessed at the towers. Donald didn’t lose anyone, but his trauma was real. It’s traumatic to bear witness to something so horrific. It’s not on TV, you don’t have that filter in front of you. It’s there. The way he channelled his trauma into dance was amazing. He took his life’s passion and his skillset, and he used it for good. That experience didn’t just heal him in the moment but became the framework for his entire career since. It’s remarkable. These people all had support networks in place to some extent or another, but they all looked within

themselves. I found it fascinating, the resources they pulled on. Mary lost her brother in the north tower, Charlie, and she turned to the work she does with vulnerable kids, and they found hope and solace in each other. Donald did it through the dance, Daisy through her activism. They all drew on their own experiences, their own passions in life to get through their traumatic event. It took me 20 years and making a film to do it, but I came out the other end a different person. I don’t want to say a more grounded person, but I feel in a different space. I’ve talked more about mum in the past year than I had in the previous 19, and that was through the process of making this film and confronting my grief. And it was lots of emotions mixed up. It’s totally irrational, but there was a lot of anger that was there. It’s not her fault that my mum got ill, of course not, but I got angry that we went to see the doctor so late and, you know, surely you were feeling poorly before we went in, and that’s not fair. She must have been terrified. You’ve made space for a lot of emotions instead of suppressing them, and it sounds like it’s been important for you to be able to do that. It’s been incredibly important for me. Ultimately what I hope the film does is act as an inspiration to people. A friend who’d lost his sister recently watched the film and didn’t go into details of why but said it really helped. That was so lovely to hear because that’s what [David Belton and I] both wanted. That was the whole purpose of bringing the people back to the booth 20 years later, to see how they’ve moved on with their life and to inspire hope. Grief is a terrible thing, and everyone processes it differently, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s being patient, and it’s not feeling guilty. It’s okay to move on and feel happy in your life and find joy in other aspects. That’s not a betrayal to the people you’ve lost. I think Lisa says it in the film. It’s about understanding you can have these feelings. You can feel the grief and sorrow for your loss, but you can find happiness too. And it’s just finding a balance between those two things. It’s one thing to read that in an article or have somebody say it to you, whether it’s a friend or a professional, but to be able to show it and demonstrate it, in the way that you’ve arranged the different voices and stories, it has a different impact. It’s such a tricky business to simultaneously serve as a container while also getting out of the way. I think that’s what both the film and Ruth’s original project have done, and perhaps what therapy does as well. We had to retain the essence of the box. If we’d lost that, if we’d manipulated it too much, we would’ve gone too far. So we always reined ourselves in. Just like Ruth did in her original project, we had to give space for these people. A respectful space. And I think we did that.

Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 is available in the UK on Sky Documentaries. For more information, see www.yard44.com.

How is it possible to go on living – and even thriving – after an unimaginable loss? How do we use the arts, and our individual creativity, to navigate through and grow from collective and personal trauma? What can it mean to have a space without judgment or interference, to process what we’ve experienced however we want and however we need? I delved further into the themes raised by Memory Box with Jane Harris, a therapist, bereaved parent, co-founder of The Good Grief Project and ﬁlm-maker (A Love that Never Dies and Beyond the Mask)…

‘There is no expiry date to grief’ Elaine Kasket meets Jane Harris, a close supporter of the Memory Box project. Jane: I’m Jane Harris, co-founder of the Good Grief Project. I’m a therapist and I’m also a bereaved parent. I wear the three hats. When Josh died in 2011, my life changed in the blink of an eye. I began to walk a different path, which you do after trauma. I use the word trauma because I think you can’t be a bereaved parent and not be traumatised. It’s in the wrong order of things, to lose your child – no, to experience the death of your child, I didn’t lose him. I like to try and normalise the language around grief and loss. Jimmy, my husband, Josh’s dad, is a photographer and we’d met at film school way back… we’d always made films together. And the first realisation was that we were going to have to carry on doing what we’d always done. To survive the death of our son, being active and being creative was going to be part of our process. That is what led us to create the Good Grief Project, because that is about creating a more comfortable language around grief. It’s about looking at how being active and creative can help you process your grief, find a new and more comfortable way of folding that person into your heart, where it’s less jagged around the edges. We noticed early on everybody wanted us to be over it. They wanted us to find closure. They wanted us to be who we were, and we slowly realised none of those things were going to happen. We didn’t want closure. We wanted openings. We didn’t want to be over it. We wanted to carry Josh with us. We wanted to know about continuing bonds. We wanted to be creative. We wanted to look at photographs and we wanted to work through the trauma. Elaine: I hadn’t known before about Ruth Sergel’s original project, shortly after 9/11, when she had set up this video box in the aftermath of the attacks. The way she situated that project was focused on people having complete freedom, within the solitude of that box, to tell their own stories in their own way. She said she felt that there was damage when people were prevented from being able to tell their own stories in their own words. And she wanted to make a space for that to happen. Jane: The beauty of this film is that it provides a therapeutic container that is safe. You’re not trying to

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make it okay for other people when you’re in that box, but in the world we wear a mask. We’re constantly trying to make it okay. I can remember an instance where I went back to London, not long after Josh had died, and I was walking in the street, and someone said to me – they didn’t know Josh had died – they said, ‘How’s Josh?’ And I said, ﬁne. And I did that. Not because I was protecting myself, but I could not bear to pick someone else up off the ﬂoor. I couldn’t bear to deal with their pain. I felt terrible about that. And I didn’t ever have to do that again. But I think the thing about creating a safe space, a box, a therapeutic environment, is that people can say it how it is without having to look into the eyes of someone else and think, oh, are they scared? Are they going to run away from me? Are they going to faint? Elaine: It doesn’t look like what most people would think of as a therapeutic space. It’s a plywood box in the middle of some room. There’s a velvet curtain behind and the door gets closed and there’s the camera there. They click it on. But it’s not the setup of the space, it’s what that space makes possible. Jane: I’m not religious, but it felt really biblical to me. Going into a confessional, I’ve not done that. I’m a non-religious Jew, but the whole idea of going in and confessing… that’s always been quite attractive to me. You can go and say something, and it is received hopefully without judgment and you come out feeling lighter. Of course, therapy is all about that. It’s about that suitcase

that is absolutely bursting at the seams and you’re sitting on it and you’re trying not to let anything out and you realise you’ve got to get off the suitcase and go in there and start to throw away some of the garments that are slightly torn. So that box is a bit like the suitcase, you go in there. It must’ve been so cathartic. Elaine: The original memory box was very soon after the events. You hear people almost searching for coherence or understanding. They talk about smelling something or hearing something and not understanding what that is. They talk about seeing paper ﬂoating down from the sky and not understanding what that is. And there’s a lot of incredulity. One woman is talking and then she says, ‘that was just too much for me to think about’. And then she turns the camera off. And then Donald Byrd, the choreographer who created this incredible dance piece that was rooted in what he observed at the towers, also says, ‘oh, it was just too much’. Someone else says ‘it was beyond my mentality’. Jane: What’s happening clearly is that people are suffering from PTSD as you do. It’s not a dirty label. It’s the reality. How could you not be traumatised? PTSD is about feeling overwhelmed by memories, feeling shocked, having ﬂashbacks, smelling something, and you’re suddenly back there and you have to cut off. The courage it took to do the early stuff is enormous because in a way there wasn’t a guiding or supporting person. If you’re in a room with someone else you can say, ‘OK, let’s just stop there. Let’s just hold that thought

Jane Harris and above, Jane throws Joshua’s ashes into the Grand Canyon (both photos by Jimmy Edmonds)

and maybe come back to it.’ It’s a lonely place in the early stages of the process. But it’s the beginning of a cathartic journey, which creates hope when all hope has been lost. Elaine: The people who speak in the ﬁlm, are doing all sorts of different kinds of work, both in the immediacy and the aftermath. The Staff Sergeant who was at the Pentagon, she said ‘I realised how important serving my country is’. Somebody else is helping at the site of one of the attacks and says, ‘I’m an American, I have to do this’. He becomes very emotional at this. And then I absolutely love the account of the choreographer, Donald Byrd, who had the trauma of seeing people falling. What that was like, to see people who weren’t struggling, but who held onto each other and leaned into it. He took that incredible pain and transformed it into this dance, footage of which is in the ﬁlm. You see people making meaning and creating, appreciating things, connecting with communities and values. Jane: Finding meaning is at the heart of how we move forward after trauma. When you’ve been traumatised, you know, meaning has gone from your life, everything that was supposed to happen has collapsed around you. Rebuilding that meaning is terribly complicated, but it’s an essential component of recovery. Finding your safe place in the world again. Elaine: It occurs to me that PTSD is very much in the consciousness and popular discourse, but post-traumatic growth is not. Jane: It is the most remarkable thing. You can rebuild something out of the most nightmarish scenario. Posttraumatic growth is where your value of life lies. My post traumatic growth has brought me to a place where I value each minute more than I ever did before. I would never have believed that, after Josh died. If someone had said that to me, ‘Oh, don’t worry, eventually you’ll value life’, I’d have said, ‘Please just leave me alone’. But that just shows post-traumatic growth is the result of hard labour.

Elaine: When the film reconnects with people, years later, that feels really meaningful. You get to see these people not frozen in time. The end of the film is full of vitality and meaning. One of the things that moved me was when they reconnected with the young, Orthodox Jewish man, Erik Tischler. He’d had this interaction with Jojo, who escaped from the tower and was sitting on the kerbside. He approaches her and offers help and says, ‘You can come to my parents’ home and you can get cleaned up. Call your loved ones.’ She doesn’t answer. She can’t. But before he leaves, because he’s a photographer, he took a picture, which he had conflicted feelings about. But then Jojo saw this picture in an exhibition. She said it was this transformative, moving thing – quite contrary to Erik’s impression that he’d been of no help to her. She had been incredibly moved that he had done that, even though she wasn’t able to respond in that moment.

From left to right Joe, Jimmy, Jane, Rosa with photo of Joshua (image by Gill Mann) His care and his presence had meant a lot to her. Jane: Photographs enable so much recovery and it’s at the heart of the work we do on the Good Grief Project. Photography is everything. Within a photograph you can actually move forward. The photograph isn’t necessarily of the past. It can be of the future, and bring hope. When we run our creative and active grief retreats, we use photography as a way of illustrating the importance of continuing bonds. People turn up and they don’t want to share their photos, they wouldn’t even let you see. By the end, they’ve created a new photograph, which is based in the present. It gives you permission, I suppose, to be active in that taking of the photograph and what you do with that photograph. Even in re-photographing a photograph, 20 years on, and thinking ‘I’m holding that photograph now, I’ve survived, I’m growing and I’m changing. I lived to tell the tale. Elaine: One witness says the struggle to survive is a powerful part of being a human being. We do survive all sorts of things, things that are unimaginable to us. And he says, once we’re surviving, then the struggle to be happy… well, that’s something else. Then he says – and this has big resonance with mindfulness of course, for me – it’s just learning to be OK with not being OK. Embracing discomfort and being OK with it until it passes. Jane: It’s so important to find the right place where you can do the things that you feel uncomfortable with, so that you can move forward. Jimmy had made a book of photographs within a month of Josh dying, focused on Josh’s ashes. They’re beautiful and they really helped him. To begin with, I remember being terrified of what the ashes represent, but then thinking they’re a thing of beauty, not a thing to be afraid of. And that’s what, in a way, this film is about. People are learning to embrace the reality of their trauma and their loss, to get right in there to immerse themselves and to come out feeling stronger. For more on the Good Grief Project, see www.thegoodgriefproject.co.uk. For a full version of this conversation, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk or watch via tinyurl.com/ harriskasket

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A new hope for mental health in schools Teaching is an emotionally demanding and fast-paced role that requires juggling many responsibilities. I was, therefore, interested in the mental wellbeing of teachers and chose to focus my MSc dissertation on this topic. Unsurprisingly, research in this area highlighted that teaching is associated with high levels of burnout and poor mental health. The pandemic has continued to stretch teachers, parents, and students’ ability to adapt to ongoing restrictions and education demands. So, naturally, I gravitated to the podcast, ‘Our Kids in Mind’ featuring Pooky Knightsmith, and particularly the episode, ‘Mental Health in Schools’, facilitated by Clinical Psychologists, Bettina Hohnen and Jane Gilmour. Pooky discusses her recent book called The Mentally Healthy School’s Workbook. The book is a guide created for schools to improve mental wellbeing support for their students, families, and staff. This book was inspired by Pooky’s work with Leeds Beckett University. The book focuses on core themes that can help to create mentally healthy schools. To help achieve this, the book includes proactive and practical steps and action plans. Pooky also mentions the importance of using several case studies and voices of different schools in the book, which ensures that a variety of experiences and reﬂections are captured.

There are several important aspects relating to supporting children’s mental wellbeing. Pooky highlights the importance of parents working in partnership with schools. This helps bring together two people’s expertise and encourages open discussions about the child in two settings; at home and in school. Pooky emphasises that working constructively together helps to address concerns relating to the child’s wellbeing and performance, as well as seeking early intervention. I believe it is important for the partnership to be based on mutual respect and an open understanding of different views of mental health, considering, for example, how culture, generational barriers and stigma may prevent these open discussions, and how teachers and parents can overcome this respectfully and safely. Pooky sheds light on contemporary challenges within schools for teachers. The podcast discusses whether it is feasible for teachers to notice students’ struggling with their mental health, especially because this can manifest in different ways. The podcast declares that teachers are brilliantly placed to support students’ wellbeing. Pooky’s experience of speaking with staff found that teachers are passionate about working with students to help them

achieve academic and future success. Many understand students’ mental wellbeing is interlinked with different aspects of school life. Despite this, there is pressure for staff to hold on to information as they struggle to ﬁnd organisations where students can be referred to without parental support, as well as the importance of working in a supportive workplace culture where all staff are conﬁdent with safeguarding procedures. The podcast sources ‘a new hope’ that mental health specialists can work in schools across the country that may help to lessen the pressure on teachers. Additionally, Pooky enforces the importance of simplistic things, such as smiling at a child so that they feel valued and recognised. Overall, the podcast is a great listen for those working in an education setting, and also parents, guardians and anyone passionate about wellbeing not just in schools but other work environments too. It leaves you feeling empowered and motivated to work collaboratively in ensuring students’ mental wellbeing and expands our thinking of the importance of wellbeing in any and all workplaces.

podcast Our Kids in Mind Pooky Knightsmith

Reviewed by Ravina Rao BSc (Hons), MSc; Psychological Wellbeing and Mental Health Practitioner; Email: ravinarao@hotmail.co.uk; Instagram: ravina.rao_ ; Twitter: RavinaRao27

Reviews online: Find more reviews at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reviews, including: Anxiety healing through psychoeducation Daniela Alves reviews a podcast, The Anxiety Chicks The tangled web we weave Jody Houston watches Chloe on BBC We are breaking free Julie Raworth watches the new Disney/Pixar offering, Turning Red

The darkest knight yet Travis Langley, Professor of Psychology and Batman expert, with his take on the new movie.

Since his debut in 1939’s Detective Comics #27, Batman has remained one of the most popular superheroes and, frankly, one of the most famous fictional characters of any kind. This bat-themed hero is defined not by superhuman abilities such as outrunning locomotives or leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but instead by his humanity, symbolism, and purpose – by the psychology of his character. As both light-hearted Caped Crusader and brooding Dark Knight, his appeal reaches across generations and throughout the world. He can fit into tales of almost any type from comedy to horror, thoughtful detective mystery to action-packed adventure, children’s stories to more adult fare. Everyone needs a hero. Directed by Matt Reeves

and starring Robert Pattinson as the eponymous hero, the 2022 motion picture The Batman presents the darkest version of Batman seen on screen yet. Unlike previous depictions, The Batman does not show him juggling dual public lives that alternate between careful playboy Bruce Wayne and masked avenger Batman. Bruce is so reclusive that he has neglected to develop any public persona for the Wayne alter ego. In his few outings, once at a memorial and once in a club, he barely interacts with others. He doesn’t seems to know how. His obsessive focus on the crime-ﬁghting campaign has impaired his development of social skills and has blinded him to emotional needs, not only the needs of others such as Alfred (Andy Serkis) but also of his own. In the book Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Langley, 2012, 2022), I outlined ways in which Batman, as usually written, shows certain symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but normally not enough to qualify for the condition by DSM or ICD criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; World Health Organization, 2022). For example, he does not avoid crime, dark alleys, or other reminders of the traumatic event that claimed his parents and rerouted his life. He seeks them out. Furthermore, he functions well by his own standards and priorities: when it comes to ﬁghting crime, he is the best. The Batman motion picture, however,

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perhaps nearly half (Sansone & Sansone, 2010). BPD does not show Batman as usually written. As Bruce is such a chaotic condition that its manifestations vary Wayne, he hardly functions at all. As Batman, though he more than expressions of many other disorders, so please is skilled and capable as both fighter and detective, he is not sure what he has accomplished so far. In the two years approach this idea with caution and be careful not to extrapolate this fictional character’s qualities he has been Batman, the crime rate has gotten when forming expectations about real people worse. Fear of failure weighs upon him. with BPD. Perhaps instead of strictly suffering film The film’s gangster characters such as PTSD, though, this may be Bruce Wayne at his The Batman the Penguin (a nearly-unrecognizable Colin most depressed. As indicated by his intense Dir: Matt Reeves Farrell) and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) sadness, misery, dysphoria, and pervasive show little motivation beyond irritation, selfguilt, he suffers ongoing depressivity. Although preservation, and lust for power. Those are their roles in he says that he does not actively want to die, he pairs that this story, the ways in which their efforts impact the three with explicit indifference to his own survival. This is one plot-movers’ lives, particularly Bruce Wayne’s. They are version of the character who never smiles, not even at not complicated – perhaps because Bruce, Selina, and his own successes, and may exhibit anhedonia, inability Edward do not have complicated views of them. Batman’s to feel joy. Selina Kyle (Catwoman, though she is never called that in the film, played by Zoe Kravitz) intrigues him particular perspective colours every scene, which may be why most of the story takes place at night and amid so and their sexual chemistry is clear, and yet he never fully much rain. responds to her advances. The Batman shows greater psychological complexity Anger drives the three main movers of this film’s plot. than any previous Batman film, and does so despite how Three orphans carrying grudges from their childhoods little Batman talks. Considering how quiet this version of grow up to don masks and assume identities as the bat, the character tends to be, Pattinson’s ability to convey an the cat, and the master of riddles. Each feels cheated and array of emotions and thought through body language, wants to lash out. Unlike billionaire Bruce, the other two especially with his eyes, is impressive. Though this is the grew up poor, without a butler as caretaker and confidant. darkest depiction of the Dark Knight yet, its exploration of Unlike Selina, who can develop close connections to his violence and his need to start inspiring hope actually others such as her friend Annika, the boys keep to makes this film more optimistic about his future than themselves. And unlike Edward (the Riddler, played many of these films have tended to be. by Paul Dano), who remains mired in his aggression, unwilling and maybe unable to advance, both Bruce and Travis Langley, PhD, distinguished professor of psychology Selina grow. As the most violent version of the Riddler ever seen on at Henderson State University, is best-known as author of the book Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight. screen, the supervillain challenges Batman as detective He has been editor and lead writer on a dozen other books and is thematically fitting while the hero struggles with about popular culture psychology, most recently The Joker his own violence. The insecure Riddler may demonstrate Psychology: Evil Clowns and the Women Who Love Them. a pattern of identity disturbance, affective volatility, preoccupation with abandonment, and other instability References suggestive of borderline personality disorder (BPD). He American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical tries to fill a void in himself by making a big mark in the manual of mental disorders (5th ed.) [DSM-5]. Author. world and by identifying with someone else. The Riddler Kramer, J., de Roten, Y., Perry, J. C., & Despland, J. (2013). Beyond and Batman have incomplete lives, but Batman at least splitting: Observer-rated defense mechanisms in borderline seems to learn that he can expand his life’s roles. Both personality disorder. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 30(1), 3-15. Edward and Selina helped him see that. Kreisman, J. J., & Straus, H. (2021). I hate you—don’t leave me: Understanding the borderline personality disorder (3rd ed.). The Riddler shows a feature often associated with TarcherPerigee. BPD by splitting, starkly and childishly dichotomizing Langley, T. (2012). Batman and psychology: A dark and stormy knight. everyone into categories such as good or bad, often Wiley. vacillating between these extremes regarding specific Langley, T. (2022). Batman and psychology: A dark and stormy knight (2nd individuals (Kramer et al., 2013; Kreisman & Straus, ed.). Wiley. 2021). When his long-desired meeting with Batman finally Sansone, R. A., & Sansone, L. A. (2010). Fatal attraction syndrome: Stalking behavior and borderline personality. Psychiatry MMC, 7(5), takes place but does not fulfill his fantasies, he becomes 42-46. dismayed and distraught. Although most borderline World Health Organization (2022). International classification of diseases individuals do not become stalkers, a disproportionate and related health problems (11th ed.) [ICD-11]. Author. number of stalkers in forensic populations may have BPD,

We all create our own language

Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater on what the forgotten story of Laura Bridgman tells us about the astonishing ﬂexibility of human communication

magine that you all of a sudden found yourself in utter darkness. Unable to see, in complete silence unable to hear, with your tongue tied unable to speak, and with your senses of taste and smell gone, too. Your only remaining connection to the world is through your sense of touch… Devastating as this darkness scenario may seem for someone who has sampled life through combinations of sights, sounds, ﬂavours and odours, you’d still have the ability to use language. Although it would be hard to understand others, you could at least make yourself understood by writing down what you wanted to say. But imagine that this sensory loss happened when you were just two years of age, before you had developed much command of spoken language, let alone Key sources spelling. This was the fate of Laura Bridgman. Laura was born in 1829 on a Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). farming homestead on the outskirts The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance of Hanover, New Hampshire. She for cognitive science. Behavioral & Brain was a frail child, small and skinny. Sciences, 32(5), 429–448. When she was two, the Bridgmans Kidd, E., Donnelly, S. & Christiansen, contracted scarlet fever and two M.H. (2018). Individual differences in of her siblings died. Although it language acquisition and processing. was touch and go for Laura for a Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(2), 154-169. while, she survived. But the fever Menand, L. (2001). Laura’s world: what took away her sight, her hearing, a deaf–blind girl taught the nineteenth and most of her senses of taste and century, New Yorker, June. www. smell. Whatever little language newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/ she had learned before the fever lauras-world. soon disappeared, too, and she Trecca, F., Tylén, K., Højen, A., & Christiansen, M.H. (2021). Danish as became mute within a year. Her a window onto language processing physical recovery took two years and learning. Language Learning, 71(3), and left her thin and delicate799–833. looking – with her sense of touch as Wheeler, B., Searcy, W.A., Christiansen, her only connection to the world. M.H. et al. (2011). Communication. Still, she was a spirited child, who In R. Menzel & J. Fischer (Eds.), Animal thinking: Contemporary issues used an old boot for a doll and in comparative cognition. Strüngmann a few rudimentary gestures to Forum Reports (pp. 187-205). communicate with her family. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Charles Dickens would later describe Laura’s world: it was, he

wrote, as if she were ‘in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened’. This awakening came when she was seven. Dr Samuel Gridley Howe learned of Laura’s unfortunate story and brought her to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where he was the director. At that time, deaf–blind individuals were considered to be unreachable imbeciles, destined for a non-communicative existence in silence and darkness. Howe was eager to showcase the power of the human mind by demonstrating that a deaf–blind child could learn language. Rather than using some kind of sign language, where every object or situation would get its own sign, Howe decided to teach Laura English words spelled out using raised letters that could be differentiated by touch. To begin, he would label common objects, such as spoon, knife, book and key, with these letters. Laura soon learned to associate each object with its corresponding letter sequence, so that when handed the detached labels she would carefully place them by the right object: SPOON would be placed on the spoon, BOOK on the book, KEY on the key and so on. Next, Howe gave her each raised letter on a separate piece of paper, arranged next to one another to spell the words she knew: S-P-O-O-N, B-O-O-K, K-E-Y. All the letters were then mixed up in a pile, and Laura was prompted to order them into the labels for the objects she knew. It took a while, but she eventually learned to do this too. Eventually, Howe reported that, after several weeks of determinedly imitating her teacher, Laura had an epiphany: ‘The truth began to flash upon her – her intellect began to work – she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind.’ Once Laura had grasped the idea that things have names and that we can use language to talk about them with each other, she was eager to learn words for everything in her world. Howe then introduced her to finger spelling, where the ‘speaker’ uses the fingers of one hand to form individual letters, and the ‘listener’

the psychologist may 2022 looking back

places their hand over the speaker’s hand to feel the shape being signalled. Laura quickly mastered finger spelling, liberating her burgeoning language skills from the confines of her desk where the raised letters were kept. She could now ‘finger-talk’ wherever and whenever she wanted – and because her inquisitive mind was insatiable, she was soon pestering everyone with an unending stream of questions. Laura even learned how to write by hand. With a certain flair for publicity, Howe described Laura’s ever-growing language abilities in the Perkins School annual reports. Her linguistic awakening captured the public’s imagination, and she soon became a household name in America. Laura’s fame turned international after Charles Dickens met her in 1842 while touring North America and told her story in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation. She remained one of the most famous women in the world for the rest of the 1840s. People in the thousands would attend Perkins exhibition days, where Laura would demonstrate her language skills, and clamour for her autograph, some of her writing, even strands of her hair. Girls created their own ‘Laura’ dolls by poking the doll’s eyes out and tying a green ribbon across them, just like the real Laura did. Today, Laura Bridgman has been all but forgotten. Her accomplishments are now overshadowed by those of Helen Keller, who 50 years later would go through the same journey as Laura and of whom many erroneously think as the first deaf–blind person to learn English. But it was Laura who in the early 1880s taught Anne Sullivan the finger-spelling skills that she would later use to bring Keller into the world of language. Fundamental flexibility What can we learn about language from Laura’s case, as described in this excerpt from our new book, The Language Game: How Improvisations Created Language and Changed the World. First, it shows us just how resilient human language is. Laura is one of a few people, perhaps the only one, who got their entry into language through printed words. Even in Laura’s severely limited sensory world, language found a way through the darkness, enabling her to communicate with others. Human language appears to be unique in such fundamental flexibility. Contrast this with the inflexibility of other animal communication systems. There is tremendous variability in the way animals communicate with each other, ranging from the chemical quorum sensing of bacteria and archaea to the famous waggle dance ‘bee language’ and dazzling visual signalling of the common cuttlefish, also known as the ‘chameleon of the sea’, to the virtuosity of songbirds like the common nightingale and the vervet monkeys’ separate alarm calls for leopard, eagle, and snake. These are just a few examples of the spectacular variations in the ways of communicating observed across the animal

kingdom. However, if we home in on a single type of organism, then we find that all members of that species communicate in identical ways as specified by their genes. Human language is not like that at all – rather, diversity abounds. Unique to language, our main communicative signal can take several different forms, whether it be vocal as in spoken language, gestural as in sign language, or tactile as when Laura ‘read’ finger spelling. And within the spoken languages, people variously use clicks, tones, and even whistles to signal differences in meaning. Humans seem capable of almost limitless inventiveness in finding ways to communicate, whatever the obstacles, while communication in other animals is rigid and unchanging. As field linguists have documented ever more of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages, they have found no hidden patterns, but ever more profligate variety. For example, it was once widely assumed that all

languages have nouns (dog) and verbs (runs), as in English; but Dr Christiansen Strait Salish, a First Nation language is the William in Canada, appears to have no R. Kenan, Jr., noun-verb distinction. Moreover, Professor of a better explanation for how while most languages combine Psychology genetic blueprints straitjacket the consonants and vowels to form at Cornell development and functioning words, Nuxalk (another Canadian University, USA, of many animal communication First Nation language) has many and professor in the cognitive systems. But it’s incompatible with words that consist entirely of science of language at Aarhus the breadth and depth of diversity consonants (such as sts’q, meaning University in Denmark. among the world’s languages – it animal fat). And whereas we need is the sheer variety of linguistic 13 words in English to say ‘he communication, not its supposedly Dr Chater is had not yet said again that he was universal patterns, that is uniquely a professor going to hunt reindeer’, you can human. of behavioral get by with a single (admittedly science at morphologically complex) word Warwick in Yupik, spoken in western Language in the moment Business School Alaska and north-eastern Siberia: Linguistic diversity, however, doesn’t in England. tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq. stop with individual languages Intriguing diversity shows but extends within each language This article is adapted from their up even in ordinary European as well. Each of us has our own book, The Language Game: How languages, like Danish. This idiosyncratic mix of favoured words Improvisation Created Language Scandinavian language has long and grammatical patterns; and and Changed the World, published had a reputation for being hard none of us can quite agree on the in the US by Basic Books on 22 to understand for foreigners. The meanings of even the most basic February and in the UK by Bantam German author, Kurt Tucholsky, words, like space, time, the good, or Press on 14 April. even quipped that ‘The Danish causality, as millennia of philosophy language is not suitable for speaking attest. And more fundamentally, … everything sounds like a single word’. But what psycholinguists have measured substantial variations has surprised language scientists is that even Danish in linguistic abilities across individuals. For example, children have problems learning their native tongue. a substantial fraction of adult native English speakers Danish has a very opaque sound structure due to a consistently fails to understand simple passive large inventory of vowels combined with a tendency sentences such as The boy was photographed by the by Danes to omit consonants. This seems to make it a girl, misinterpreting it as if it was the boy who took the difficult language to learn, not just for foreigners but picture. also for Danish children. Compared to Norwegian Such individual differences make sense if language children, learning a very similar language, Danish is a skill – like music, art, or computer programming kids know on average 30 per cent fewer words at 15 – where we expect to find that each person performs months and take nearly two years longer to learn the in their own unique way, and that some people are far past tense. Of course, Danes eventually learn their more adept than others. But it contradicts the universal native language successfully. But the ambiguous nature grammar account, according to which the innate of Danish speech patterns appears to principles of language would be the same for everyone. cause adult Danes to rely more heavily on The development of the ‘language organ’ is presumed context to figure out what is being said, to be no more variable than the growth of a bodily when compared with Norwegians. organ, such as the heart or the liver. The astonishing variety of human Language depends on us improvising, in the languages contradicts the hypothesised moment, to find new ways of expressing ourselves well existence of an innate ‘universal grammar’, enough to get the point across. And each of us do this supposedly hardwired into our brains and in our own way – even Laura, who would often coin restricting children’s language acquisition her own words, such as generalising the word ‘alone’ to to a limited number of common patterns. ‘al-two’ when she wanted to bring a friend after being It was first championed by one of the told to come alone. Through learning, we all become founders of modern linguistics, Noam like experienced jazz musicians, great at improvising Chomsky, and subsequently popularised while staying in tune with one another, though few by the Harvard psychologist, Steven of us become improvisational geniuses, like Miles Pinker’s concept of a ‘language instinct’. Davis or John Coltrane. So, there is a very real sense in Ironically, even though they argued which we all speak different but mutually intelligible that this presumed innate facility for languages, that each die with us, as Laura Bridgman’s language is uniquely human, it provides did when she passed away in 1889.

the psychologist may 2022 looking back

More online Find all our ‘Looking back’ pieces, on the history of Psychology and the psychology of history, at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/lookback

Includes: A life in cybernetics Bernard Scott (pictured, then and now) with a look back

We dip into the Society member database and find… Dr Jane Iles Clinical Director (Clinical Psychologist), PsychD Clinical Psychology Programme, University of Surrey One aspect of my job that I love I feel fortunate to work on a Clinical Psychology training programme, focusing on how we train dynamic psychologists who continue to have a positive influence. I’m passionate about supporting others to achieve their career ambitions, helping trainees think about their own values and passions and how they can become the individual psychologists they want to be. One alternative career path While growing up I dreamt of being a children’s book illustrator. I used to spend hours drawing and painting; art was my escapism. I left my artistic days behind me when I finished college, and only recently started painting again. But the creativity emerges every now and then, and certainly influenced my passion for starting my clinical career working in services with children and young people.

One aspect of my career I’m proud of There are so many ways in which we can have a positive inﬂuence, whether on a direct level interacting with people, or more indirect ways, such as through development of policies and guidelines, research and evidence. I’m proud of the eclectic roles I’ve worked in since graduating. I was the ﬁrst psychologist in the UK accredited as a trainer of an early-years parenting programme; I’ve been involved in numerous research studies looking at perinatal mental health and the wellbeing of children and families; I’ve worked clinically across services working with children and young people; I now work in a role training Clinical Psychologists; and recently co-authored a Good Practice Guide for Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Services, commissioned by NHS England. And there are

one on one

many other roles I’ve collected and contributed to along the way. The variety of these roles helps maintain my motivation and sense of achievement – but can certainly add to a sense of juggling a few too many balls! One challenge We could all achieve so much if only we had more time and resources. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to carve out a career I love alongside having a family, but despite the increased efforts society appears to make towards supporting working parents, it does feel difficult to have it all and to really be there for everyone. I’ve had to make difficult choices and some hard sacrifices along the way. One song ‘Human’ by the Killers is one of my ‘happy songs’ – if it comes on I can’t help dancing. I haven’t got a musical bone to my name, I’m useless in a pop quiz, but I absolutely love music, dancing and singing (much to the embarrassment of my two young children). One thing I can’t live without My glowsticks! After having my youngest son, I needed to find something that was just for ‘me’; despite having never been remotely sporty (or coordinated), it turned out that my ‘thing’ was clubbercise. There’s something immensely satisfying about dancing wildly around in the dark; five years on and I’m still hooked.

coming soon… Uta and Chris Frith on reputation and their ‘graphic biography’; 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 of over 50,000 BPS members: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …May 2018, Unlocking the social cure with the new psychology of health. …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist

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One motto ‘Feelings aren’t facts.’ That phrase – learnt early on in my clinical training – has deﬁnitely got me through a few challenging situations! One thing psychologists could do better As a profession we need to overcome our modesty and share the work we do on a much wider, more public level; not necessarily to improve our own careers or fulﬁl our ambitions, but to disseminate information that holds the potential to have a positive impact on others.

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

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