The Psychologist June 2022

the

psychologist june 2022

Reputation matters Uta and Chris Frith

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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the

psychologist june 2022

Reputation matters Uta and Chris Frith

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Display: Engage with 50,000+ psychologists across BPS communication channels 020 7880 6213 bps-sales@redactive.co.uk Recruitment: Promote your campaign to the largest audience of qualified psychologists 020 7880 6224 jobsinpsychology@redactive.co.uk may 2022 issue 47,317 dispatched cover From Two Heads (Bloomsbury) environment Printed by PCPLtd

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

For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@ bps.org.uk.

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www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya 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 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

16/05/2022 07:28

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psychologist june 2022

Life ‘unplugged’ with Depersonalisation Disorder Joe Perkins discusses how his life has been impacted, with Emma Cernis

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Reputation matters Uta Frith and Chris Frith spoke at the Royal Institution around the launch of their ‘graphic biography’

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Help yourself by helping others Nishat Babu on volunteering, including through work

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Letters Plan S and the cobra effect; stories; sci comm; dyslexia; and more

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Obituaries

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News Awards, policy work, student conference, gravity

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Digest Navigation, entitled students, extraverts, podcast and more

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'We need the BPS to understand who we are' Our editor meets Jenny Terry, Chair of PsyPAG 'I kept thinking that I will feel better soon' Claire Foster, Professor Psychosocial Oncology, on her work 'Our difference was really magnified' Waveney Bushell in conversation with Melernie Meheux

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Inclusivity is critical We meet Elizabeth Bates, Chair of the Society's Male Psychology Section

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Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

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Books Trauma-informed forensic psychology with Kerry Daynes; ambivalence; and more

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Culture Still Parents exhibition; Psychology in the classrooom; Severance

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One on one Nandini Jayachandran

Some of our editions are born with a theme; some achieve a theme as we're pulling them together; some have a theme thrust upon them in a last ditch attempt to write a coherent editorial. This issue falls in the latter category.

The thread I'm going to follow is reputation, difference and inclusivity – perhaps not an unusual one in our pages. We say a fond farewell to fine psychologists in our obituaries pages; hear about 'academic entitlement' to special treatment in the Digest; and find Uta and Chris Frith immortalised in graphic biography form, with a consideration of the science behind reputation.

We talk identity and difference with Jenny Terry and with Waveney Bushell.

And we hear about a BPS presence at Pride, and the priorities of the Male Psychology Section.

There's loads more, plus online extras. It's a busy time: we're reshaping both our staff and honorary teams, and gearing up for the lauch of our improved website and app. All this, and a special July/August issue to come…

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

16/05/2022 07:29

Tim Sanders

Plan S and the Cobra Effect…

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At the time of British-ruled India, an apocryphal anecdote circulated about the colonial government offering a bounty to clean the street of Delhi from the numerous snakes roaming free. The initiative was successful.

However, liking the easy cash, people began to breed cobras in their backyards, killed them and asked for the reward. The authorities, displeased by this mocking, stopped the programme. The cobras, now worthless, were freed, resulting in more serpents than before, slithering the streets of Delhi. This story, dubbed the Cobra Effect, exemplifies the unforeseen consequences of an apparently good proposal, advanced with the best intentions (and it inspired my poetic effort opposite).

The unpredicted ramifications of the journal publishing Open Access initiative resonate with the Cobra Effect.

The founding principle of Open Access was to make freely available scientific papers reporting studies funded by public money, rather than by subscription only.

Naively, it was suggested that the publishing costs would be covered by generous international agencies. It soon became clear that the researchers themselves had to sustain most of such expenses. The outcome was that publishing houses increased their dominance on the market as well as their income, at the same time selling subscriptions and getting paid by the authors to publish.

The most harmful outcome of Open Access, however, has been to open the doors to myriad of predatory publishers, infecting the dissemination of science. The model is that of vanity press, pay-to-publish. Anything

gets published in thousands of journals operating at below par integrity standards; too many researchers take their bait with contempt for serious science. Given the economic benefits, several respectable publishers joined the band wagon, launching their own pay-to-publish outlets, making the identification and even the definition of ‘predatory’ challenging. The scientific community should dissuade scientists to publish in these outlets by making it disadvantageous for their career and prestige.

Instead Plan S was concocted; more snakes!

Plan S establishes that, rather than paying for each manuscript, researchers, their institutions or agencies funding their work, will have to strike package deals with individual publishers to publish a determined number of papers per year. These papers will be freely available.

Yet, this policy has severe consequences: • Researchers have to bear part of the cost, creating a disparity across disciplines; • Researchers working in poorer institutions will find it hard to publish their work; • It will be difficult to publish studies not funded by grants, like clinical observations, serendipitous findings, discussions or commentaries; • Younger researchers with less access to financial support will be penalised, forcing them to accept honorary authorship by influential seniors; • Publishing will depend on economic considerations rather than quality, bending the concept of merit.

Ultimately, in a money-dominated market, who

16/05/2022 07:36

the psychologist june 2022 letters

…’More cobras than ever went roaming, oh clever!’

They exploit us and all.

Behind massive paywalls Our papers they put The astute pussyfoot.

Enough is enough Science is no chuff The public who pay Shouldn’t be kept at bay.

Free and open be access Learn is not for possess Down go the heads Ahead with the threats.

will have interest in guaranteeing rigour and quality in scientific publications? Not the publishers, as the more they publish the more they gain; not the institutions which can pre-determine the budget they devote to publications; not the researchers who may enjoy easy publications; and not the readers who have free access to journals previously hidden by paywalls, even if the material reported has not been properly vetted.

Fortunately, good journals do exist, like those managed by learned societies, or by respectable publishing companies, as well as new formats promoting thorough science, like pre-registrations. However, to avoid seeing more cobras around, the scientific community should put their hubris aside and do careful re-thinking.

A (rather utopical) proposal would be that universities recall control of scientific publishing, managing their own journals in Open Access. The difference is that nobody would pay, not the readers nor the authors. Editors would be academics whose work for the journals would count towards their workload. The role of the reviewers would remain as it is, only their work will be acknowledged as part of their duties. To avoid conflicts, researchers will not be allowed to publish in their institution’s journals.

The running costs borne by the institutions would be far cheaper than in the current regime. There will be no economic incentives to publish more, which will guarantee quality control. In sum, more good science, fewer cobras.

Sergio Della Sala Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, University of Edinburgh

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More money though flows Exactly in the claws Of the greedy predators Esurient pseudeditors.

Alas! Were we fool Blind we, and they cruel.

As the India of the Rajas When cobras went jajas; Kill them, and we hey Will give money away.

The peasants were thrilled So many they killed.

No cobras in the ditch Nobody gets rich.

Henc’in backyards The cobras did hatch.

Do you think I’m a clown?

Soon shouted the Crown, “Rupias will now stop We’re not a gift shop”

Hence the poors freed The serps in the street More cobras than ever Went roaming, oh clever!

We fail to foresee When covered in glee!

Didn’t see the upshot The out-turns that we got.

Yet we don’t repent Do kill the serpent!

Reconsider we don’t Much hubris, no honte ‘nother pig in the poke We academic bespoke.

And so conjure up Another plan as back-up Who cares the inequality, Unfairness, disparity.

The skin of the vermin By law we determine And here is Plan esse Let’s go to the press!

‘I am a neuroscientist, never published a poem, nor do I intend to; but I read poetry and admire works done with words not sentiments. Also, I keep sharing my compositions via WhatsApp with my five daughters, who acknowledge receipt with subtle hints of exasperation.

This one fits with the British Psychological Society’s Senate-voted theme of tackling class-based inequality, expressing my aggravation with the foreseeable consequences of Open Access policy now spawning into Plan S, which will grossly disadvantage less wealthy institutions and younger researchers, favouring finance over quality.’

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The restriction of meaning in stories The interview with Will Storr and the subsequent commentary (February 2022) make for interesting and provocative reading. There are many examples of the importance that humans place upon storytelling, and indeed storytelling is vital to educate the public and the student about the excitement of becoming a psychologist and doing psychology, whether as a scientist or a practitioner. But science needs precision, to gather data, to remember the details of theory and method and correlate those data with the predictions of the theory and remember the limitations of the data

in the method. Science need data and it needs precision. Stories can get in the way if offered at the wrong time.

Bartlett (1958) offers a highly significant and old quotation, from the writing of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral.

‘Mathematical demonstrations, being built upon the impregnable foundations of geometry and arithmetic, are the only truths that can sink into the mind of man, void of all uncertainty’ (p.195). Modern psychology may wish to embrace the science of storytelling, but it should also continue to aspire to the formulation of precise and formal

from the president

The Society deconstructed I remember when I first was elected on to a BPS network committee, feeling completely bamboozled by the intricacies of the Society’s structures and processes. Despite, or maybe because, there was so much information available, it always seemed a bit of a blur that went in one ear and out the other!

So, as I approach the end of my year as BPS President, I thought I’d take this opportunity of setting out a mini dummy’s guide for anyone like me who would like to get involved, but isn’t sure where to start.

Part of the problem, I think, can be that lots of us have been involved with the Society for ages, and we can sometimes be guilty of assuming that you know what we know. The second problem is all those acronyms. Sheesh. Like medical jargon, it’s all very useful, but can be pretty off-putting until you get into the swing of it.

The Society is governed by a Board of Trustees which, under the old rules that will remain in place until we receive Privy Council approval for the proposed changes, is made up just of psychologists. The board has legal responsibility for running our charity in terms of governance, risk and strategy, and it meets about six times a year, the minutes being published on the website.

The board is chaired, under the old rules, by the President, but under the new rules this chair will be someone else. It may be a BPS member, or indeed be recruited from outside the Society, as will up to three ordinary board members. This is a significant change which will increase the independence of the board.

theory and the production of data. It may not go unnoticed that current concerns with ‘misinformation’ and the inability of psychological science to counter such perceptions (Davies, 2021; Omand, 2020) may be attributed to the imprecision of much psychological knowledge and theory.

Mike Innes Adjunct Research Professor, Justice and Society, University of South Australia Read the full version of this letter at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ restriction-meaning-stories

The board delegates the day-to-day running of the charity to the chief executive and the senior management team, which reports regularly to the board.

Members volunteer in the various networks of the BPS, which comprise specialty practitioner divisions, specialist academic/ research sections and geographical branches. The chairs of these come together in the Senate, which helps to decide on our policy priorities.

The Board of Trustees is supported by four strategic boards - the Research Board, Education and Training Board, Practice Board, and Member Board. The remits of these are probably selfexplanatory, apart from the relatively new Member Board, which focuses on enhancing the value of membership.

I come to the end of my term as President at the end of July.

As a candidate in 2021, I declared a commitment to bringing stability, improving Society governance, and integrating equality, diversity and inclusion. Building on work begun by previous colleagues, I feel quite proud of having been able to deliver at least some contribution in all three areas.

Under the new rules, the chair of Senate will be a trustee, and my hope is that this will enhance the flow of member views and perspectives up into the board and increase member and officer understanding of the direction and vision of the trustees. We have also formed a new strategy board for equality, diversity and inclusion, the chair of which will also be a trustee.

But… I’m not going anywhere just yet. From July I will still have one year as Past President (under the old rules). My plan is to pass the baton to Nicky Hayes, and to support her in implementing the next important piece of work, the member network review. There is still much to do.

As this is my last piece here as President, I’d just like to thank everyone, trustees, CEO and senior management team, members, staff, student members, who has supported me in what has unusually and necessarily been a steep learning curve into a tough but important year. Thank you all.

Katherine Carpenter President, the British Psychological Society

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the psychologist june 2022 letters

Pursuing an evidence base for science communication If you’re reading this letter it’s because you are reading The Psychologist. As the flagship magazine of the British Psychological Society, its remit may be described, borrowing from the BBC, as to inform, educate and entertain on matters pertaining to psychological science.

The Psychologist takes its place in a canon of scientific endeavour known as ‘science communication’, or ‘scicomms’. Sci-comms can be defined as ‘a matter of successfully transmitting information about science from scientific experts to the public’ (Kappel & Holmen, 2019). While this may be truer of The Psychologist’s sister enterprise, the online Research Digest, still The Psychologist enables psychologists to share their own area of psychological science with a wider audience of psychologists.

Lately I have been reflecting on the psychology underlying effective sci-comms. My interest springs from my career as an academic psychologist researcher with some forays into science communication. This interest also underlies my role as Chair of the BPS committee that steers The Psychologist, known as the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee.

There’s lots of advice out there for budding scicomms writers. For instance, I’m a big fan of Randy Olson, author of the 2011 sci-comms advice book Don’t be such a scientist: Talking substance in an age of style. Olsen took the drastic step of quitting a tenured academic post and becoming a film student. His aim was to harness the power of the arts to more effectively spread, far and wide, messages around reducing pollution of the oceans; for this purpose he had found a purely academic platform limiting.

Olsen advises appeals to the emotions, ‘arouse and fulfil’, use of storytelling techniques such as the ‘3-act structure’ and other methods for grabbing and holding people’s attention. Similar approaches are taught in creative writing classes and journalism courses. But little is known how they work, psychologically. The evidence base for sci-comms remains underdeveloped (Jensen & Gerber, 2020) even though psychology has a rich tapestry of theoretical approaches from which to draw. Yet, the importance of good sci-comms for promoting science literacy and dispelling the anti-science messaging that has recently been gaining traction, is clear.

The purpose of this letter is to ask for insights from readers. What psychology underlies good sci-comms?

Please share via a letter to The Psychologist, or by contacting me directly.

Richard Stephens Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Keele University Chair of The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee r.stephens@keele.ac.uk References Jensen, E.A. & Gerber, A. (2020). Evidence-based science communication. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 78.

Kappel. K. & Holmen, S.J. (2019). Why science communication, and does it work? Frontiers in Communication, 4, 55.

Redefining dyslexia Debates and arguments around dyslexia are many, and have taken up a great deal of psychologists’, teachers’, policy makers’ and others’ time since the term was first coined almost a century and a half ago.

Views on all sides have become entrenched. Here is the crux: dyslexia assessment is complicated, and it is made more complicated by the way we define it. The multitude of varying definitions does not lead to early intervention in children’s early learning when it would most benefit those who have dyslexia.

Ultimately, teachers, psychologists and early years

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workers recognise literacy difficulties without complex assessment. I suggest defining the word ‘dyslexia’ as a difficulty with literacy that results in a person requiring a set of accommodations to be made to enable them to demonstrate their abilities. Accommodations are a set of enabling arrangements that are put in place to ensure that the person with dyslexia can demonstrate their strengths and abilities, and show attainment: thus relieving the frustrations felt by those with dyslexia. Many such accommodations are quick and cheap with little or marginal impact on budgets.

Let’s agree, in the interests of simplifying the assessment process, that we need a definition that is straightforward; that can be assessed without the need for expensive tests which serve to delay appropriate intervention at the earliest possible time when it would be of greatest benefit; and which remains useful into adulthood to ensure positive outcomes.

Dr Margaret Crombie MBPsS Pitlochry Read the full version at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ redefining-dyslexia

16/05/2022 07:36

Poaching, prisons and trauma-informed care Award winners announced

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Dr Esme MonizCook (above) and Giselle Dudley (on facing page)

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he 2021 BPS Professional Practice Board award winners have been announced. This diverse set of researchers and practitioners have been involved in dementia care, working with prisoners in Northern Ireland, women at Rampton Hospital and developing antipoaching operations in Africa.

The winner of the board’s Lifetime Achievement Award is Professor of Psychology, Ageing and Dementia Care, Dr Esme Moniz-Cook (University of Hull) – who has worked across Hull with people with dementia, their families and communities. She also pioneered the establishment of Memory Clinics that have delivered timely diagnosis and support to people with dementia and their families.

Moniz-Cook said that, after working with groups of people with dementia at a day hospital in the late 80s, she was struck by the effects of the double stigma of age and dementia. ‘This fuelled deeply held internalised beliefs and fears.

Engaging positively with people with dementia I learned much about their rich personal lives and assets… through developing the Hull Memory Clinic in collaboration with GPs and primary care, we were able to counteract stigma, manage fear and support families.’

Moniz-Cook’s research has transformed thinking about ‘challenging behaviour’ in dementia and more recently she has moved to focus on translating evidence-based knowledge into practice and mentoring practitioners, applied researchers and clinical dementia networks both locally and internationally. ‘The double effects of ageism and stigma continue to undermine timely support in dementia care, despite our knowledge on what psychosocial care works for many people with dementia and their supporters.

‘This situation has worsened since the Covid pandemic where psychological support appears to have been replaced by antipsychotic drugs which previously were a “last resort” treatment in dementia care.’

Forensic Psychologist Professor Jackie Bates-Gaston has won the award for Distinguished Contribution to

Practice. She worked as the Northern Ireland Prison Service’s Chief Psychologist for 24 years, after working as Senior Occupational Psychologist in the Department of Manpower, Senior Lecturer in Applied Psychology at the University of Ulster, Honorary Professor of Applied Psychology at Herriot Watt University, Edinburgh.

Bates-Gaston has researched and published in a wide range of areas including women’s work performance across their lifespan, repetitive strain injury in female factory workers, prison officer stress and also traumatic brain injury in younger offenders. Her last project in the Northern Ireland Prison Service led to a ministerial call for the review of mental health needs and services for prison staff. ‘I found that working as a psychologist in every post was so fascinating, challenging and rewarding that I just kept expanding my curiosity and pushing my knowledge boundaries.’

The 2021 winners of the Innovation in Practice Award are the psychology team at the National High Secure Healthcare Service for Women (NHSHSW) at Rampton Hospital, jointly led by Yasmin Siddall (Consultant Forensic Psychologist) and Dr Jessica Lewis (Consultant Clinical Psychologist). Over the past two years the team, which also includes forensic psychologists Rachel Beryl, Laura Longdon and Simone Beason, and Assistant Psychologists James Seagrief and Kirstie Mackay, have been implementing the Trauma Informed Care Pathway (TICP) throughout their service.

Their changes took into account some key recommendations about women’s mental health which emphasised principles including co-production, engaging in outreach and holistic working. Their work focuses on patient needs first and seeks to embed TICP in everything

The psychology team at the National High Secure Healthcare Service for Women

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the psychologist june 2022 news

2021 award for Outstanding Doctoral Research

provided within the service.

The team said they were delighted and honoured to receive the award. ‘We are grateful to all the patients and our colleagues in the NHSHSW and sincerely thankful they have embraced the restructuring of our treatment pathway to a trauma-informed care pathway so enthusiastically.’

Experience Psychology Specialist at the Ministry of Defence, Giselle Dudley, has won the 2021 Innovation in Practice Award. Dudley has supported the UK Ministry of Defence by designing and implementing anti-poaching operations across Africa.

Through rigorous and informed analysis of the evidence Dudley was able to demonstrate significant gaps in the success of the current anti-poaching activities and identify solutions to bridge these gaps. This has been so successful it resulted in further funding from DEFRA to continue the British Army’s efforts to reduce illegal poaching and has given them scope to move their efforts to other parts of the globe. ‘This task was given to me last year to identify how we can engage and develop relationships with partner nations. I explored the complexity of poaching, the types and cultural implications relating to supply and demand, which opened my eyes to the challenges faced by nations in tackling this problem.

‘There is so much yet to achieve in this area, as there is no single solution or problem for that matter.

We need to understand the relative implications for all those involved from the poacher, their families and the sources of demand.’ er

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A clinical psychologist and researcher who explores anxiety disorders in children and young people has won the 2021 BPS award for Outstanding Doctoral Research. During his PhD Dr Pete Lawrence (University of Southampton) used quantitative and qualitative approaches to look at the risk of developing anxiety disorders, ways to prevent them, and how to bring down barriers in accessing support.

Lawrence was nominated for two of his PhD papers in particular – a meta-analysis of the risk that parental anxiety disorders have on children also potentially developing these disorders and a longitudinal study exploring whether certain anxiety disorder risk factors in infancy predict social anxiety disorder. These papers have fed directly into two current research trials to prevent anxiety disorders in children at risk (‘MY-CATS’ and ‘Parenting with Anxiety’), on which he is a funded co-investigator.

Lawrence said he found a passion for understanding children’s psychological development and mental health in the face of adversity as an undergraduate student. ‘I read Professor Emmy Werner’s reports from the Kauai longitudinal study – particularly, what characterised children who had shown resilience in the face of adversity. Consequently, I have focused my clinical work and research within young people’s mental health in the face of adversity – in particular, the intergenerational transmission of risk of common mental health problems, such as anxiety disorders and depression.’

Lawrence has been recognised for his research before: at the University of Reading, where he completed his PhD, he received the 2019 Early Career Researcher Output of the Year and PhD Student of the Year awards in the Division of Psychopathology and Affective

Dr Pete Lawrence Neuroscience, first prize in the Springer Nature/Association of British Turkish Academics National Doctoral Researcher Awards in the social science category, and the University of Southampton Dean’s Prize for Outstanding Early Career Research in the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences.

As a scientist, Lawrence said he was excited by the challenge of improving clinical prevention programmes by improving our understanding of how risk is transmitted, while as a clinician, he was excited by the opportunities to prevent children developing mental health problems offered by accessible, online prevention programmes for parents with common mental health problems.

‘As a parent with lived experience of depression, I’m pleased to work at a time when I can see a growing recognition of the value in research placed on people’s lived experiences of mental ill health shown through, for example, major funding bodies’ requirements for Public and Patient Involvement at all stages of research projects.’ er

16/05/2022 08:26

Understanding gravity’s brain effects key to human space success As space tourism becomes reality and astronauts prepare for the Moon and Mars, understanding gravity’s effects on psychology may be crucial. Shaoni Bhattacharya reports.

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Gravity is something we cannot see, feel or hear, but it affects every moment of our lives – and understanding it may be crucial to understanding human behaviour in space, and even on Earth, according to Dr Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, an experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at Birkbeck, University of London. Her laboratory combines psychological and space methods to research the effects of non-terrestrial gravity on cognition and behaviour.

Ferrè spoke about her team’s work at The International Day of Human Spaceflight Conference, held at Birkbeck in April on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first human flight to space.

The effects of microgravity and changes in gravity on human cognition and behaviour is less well explored compared with research on the physical effects of space travel, but its effects can be profound. Results from a series of studies conducted by Ferrè’s team suggest that being in microgravity can make humans worse at detecting pain, slower in performance and lead to poor decision-making.

A better understanding of gravity’s effects on the human mind may be crucial as we may be on the cusp of a new era in space travel. This summer – should all go to plan – the first of NASA’s Artemis missions will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to fly to the Moon.

If the uncrewed Artemis I is successful, then Artemis II will carry four astronauts to lunar orbit in 2024, and then Artemis III will finally take humans back to the surface of the Moon – including the first woman and person of colour around 2025. Beyond this NASA has plans for a lunar outpost, the Lunar Gateway, to provide a permanent staging post for humans to visit the Moon and one day, Mars.

‘We are currently entering a new era of human space exploration which will lead to deep space missions (Moon/Mars) on one side and space tourism on the other side,’ Ferrè told me. ‘Space agencies are planning to create sustainable lunar habitats and send the first people to Mars. Private space companies are competing to make space travel easier and more affordable. In my opinion this is a unique time for space exploration!’

She added: ‘However, this “21st-Century Space Race” will present much greater challenges to human health and performance than the ones we have ever faced.

Unprecedented distance, duration of missions, isolation and increasingly autonomous operations will be combined with prolonged exposure to non-terrestrial gravities.’

The human brain constantly processes and counteracts the effects of gravity, a 9.8 metres per second squared acceleration towards the ground on Earth, said Ferrè. It encodes this gravitational signal through

Dr Elisa Raffaella Ferre

the vestibular organ which is deep inside the temporal bone of the inner ear. It does this through small stones called otoliths which are aligned on a fluid surrounded by receptors. ‘Every time that you move, this steering system is telling the brain the direction, the onset and the offset of the movement and the deceleration of the movement.’

When humans travel to space, our brains need to adapt to a different gravitational environment, ‘and believe me things are complicated’, said Ferrè.

That spaceflight and changes in gravity affect the health and physiology of space travellers is well-known.

Brain changes from space travel are also documented.

An MRI study of cosmonauts showed that the brain’s insula – which contains the vestibular area – was reduced in size and connections to other brain areas after 200 days in space. Other studies show that the ventricles of the brain become larger with space travel because of shifting fluid in the body. Changes in brain structure are

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the psychologist june 2022 news Getty images

aligned with behavioural changes; some 60-70 per cent of astronauts suffer from Space Adaptation Syndrome, which is like extreme motion sickness, both during spaceflight and on returning to Earth. Fortunately, these brain changes revert to normal after weeks or months.

To examine the effects of gravity on behaviour and cognition, Ferrè and her team conducted a series of experiments to simulate space with a number of nonastronaut volunteers in the lab. Using a fingertip pain stimulus, they tested subjects for their pain thresholds first in an upright position – which is a proxy for normal Earth gravity, and then while they were in a ‘head-down bedrest’ position on a 3D tilting table with their heads six degrees lower than their feet to simulate the effects of microgravity in space.

‘We found that when people were in head-down bedrest, they feel less pain. There’s no reason to feel less pain… the poor people have an internal recalibration of pain perception.

The team got the same results when they used virtual reality to give subjects a visual perception of lower gravity.

‘So if the visual information about gravity was not aligned with this internal model of gravity, we found that there was less pain perception,’ she said.

When they tested people’s response times in an auditory task under different gravity environments using the head-down bed rest method and the VR technique, the team found that they were slower in microgravity.

They also looked at people’s decision-making abilities under different gravity environments using a random number generating task. Ferrè said the brain’s frontal area is involved in generating random numbers and this is also involved in executive function and decisionmaking. So they used this as an indirect way to assess people’s decision-making performance. People in the upright position were much better at generating random numbers than those in a head-down bedrest position who were ‘suboptimal in taking decisions’. ‘They were sticking with the same number over and over again, which indicates very poor decision making,’ said Ferrè.

Overall their results might indicate how tricky the effects of gravity changes in space travel might be. ‘Think about these astronauts on the Moon or Mars. They feel less pain, they are slower, they might have poor decisionmaking and also they are happy to take risks. This is not really an ideal scenario!’ said Ferrè.

On a different note, she pointed out: ‘What it shows us is that perhaps terrestrial gravity which is has been largely neglected in psychology and neuroscience might actually be very important for our behaviour here on Earth. In Psychology, you have this bias that if you cannot see it, feel it, or hear it doesn’t matter. But actually gravity that you cannot feel it, see it, or hear it, might be an absolute reference for behaviour, something that helps us interact with the environment every day.’

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‘We stand proudly with the global LGBTQ+ community’ The BPS has been given a place in the London Pride parade later this year. Diversity and Inclusion Manager Neil Baker explained what it means to the Society.

How did we go about getting a place in London Pride?

We had originally planned to attend London Pride in 2020.

However, the pandemic meant the event was cancelled for two years on the trot. But as restrictions began to lift we began the process of exploring the 2022 parade in January this year, working closely with Sexualities Section to make it happen. We ensured Pride was factored into this year’s Diversity and Inclusion budget, and crossed our fingers that Covid wouldn’t once again raise its head and stop the parade and celebration.

What will our involvement in London Pride look like?

For the first time ever in our history, BPS will be marching in the Pride Parade alongside a range of organisations, charities, community groups and businesses who all believe that love is a beautiful mosaic of colour and difference, and trans rights are human rights. Our members will be invited to march, with 50 places available. More details on this will be released shortly.

What does our involvement in London Pride mean to the BPS? Our involvement in Pride is long overdue, and it’s time BPS proudly and openly supported our LGBTQ+ community, especially during a time of increased hate crimes, global persecution and troubling political decisions. We stand proudly with the global LGBTQ+ community and acknowledge the role psychology can play in furthering equality, diversity, inclusion and human rights.

Of course, we are aware that London Pride is only one of the major Pride events taking place throughout the UK this year, and therefore we plan to alternate our attendance at Pride events each year. Next year, all being well, we will be marching at Manchester Pride followed by Glasgow and Cardiff in the following years.

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Celebrating psychology’s power to unite communities for a more sustainable world

Get set for the 18th European Congress of Psychology Brighton, 3-6 July 2023 “We’re extremely excited to be hosting this event, and for the opportunity to get together in the UK after such a long period of disruption and disappointment, with big events like this so often cancelled or postponed.

The European Congress provides an opportunity for us to learn from each other, and to bring together the research, knowledge and innovation that is unique to each country on our continent.

Psychology is a truly global science which has the power to unite communities around solutions to the biggest problems facing us right now. As one, we can build a fairer and more sustainable society, but we can only do it through sharing our expertise.

We’ll have lots more news and announcements coming up between now and July 2023, so keep an eye out – we hope to see you by the shore for four exciting days of sun, sea, sand and psychology.”

Sarb Bajwa Chief Executive

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Hosted by:

These streams include: Interdisciplinary streams Psychological responses to the pandemic Climate change and sustainability Poverty and inequalities Conflict diplomacy and peace

We’ll also be running streams on:

Welcome to Brighton In 2023, the 18th European Congress of Psychology will focus on uniting communities for a sustainable world. We’ll look at what we can do to bring people together from a diverse range of backgrounds to create a future that works for everyone.

There’s no better place to unite people than one of the UK’s leading cities for inclusivity - Brighton - as we prepare for sun, sea, sand and psychology on the East Sussex coast

Clinical psychology Occupational psychology Health, Sport and Exercise psychology Experimental: Cognitive, psychobiology and neuropsychology Teaching Coaching psychology General, conceptional and history of psychology Counselling psychology Forensic psychology Educational and developmental psychology Social, personality and individual differences

The hot topics in 2023 We’ve packed our programme with 18 streams across four days where you’ll hear from keynotes speakers, listen to presentations, soak up symposia and take part in workshops.

Students and early career psychologists Equality, diversity and inclusion Other

Visit ecp2023.eu for more speaker announcements, news and congress updates.

Debate | Network | Discover | Explore | Discuss | Develop | Be inspired

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16/05/2022 08:50

People who grew up in cities tend to be worse navigators Matthew Warren explores a new study

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

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he environment in which you grew up can have a longlasting effect on your navigational skills, according to an analysis of data from nearly 400,000 players of a mobile game.

People who spent their childhood in rural or suburban areas tended to be better at navigating in the game Sea Hero Quest than those who grew up in cities. This difference could be seen decades later, the researchers report in Nature, and was particularly striking in countries where cities are organised in a grid layout.

Antoine Coutrot from the University of Lyon and colleagues looked at data from 397,162 people from 38 countries who had played Sea Hero Quest. This game involves navigating a boat around ocean environments, and was developed by scientists and Alzheimer’s Research UK to study human spatial navigation, one of the first skills to be affected by dementia.

The researchers were interested in the game’s ‘wayfaring’ levels, in which players first see a map of the environment which shows several numbered checkpoints. The map then disappears, and they have to navigate the environment to visit those checkpoints in the correct order. Performance was assessed based on the length of the route players took. Players also reported demographic information, such as age, gender, country, and whether they grew up in a city or in suburban or rural areas.

The team found that younger and more educated players tended to be better at the game, and that men

tended to be better than women. But the really interesting finding related to where people were brought up: those who had spent their childhood outside of cities were better at the game than those who had grown up within cities.

These results suggest that people who grow up in more rural areas develop better navigational abilities.

But, crucially, the finding wasn’t consistent across countries. For nations like the United States and Argentina, there was a clear benefit of growing up outside of cities, but this effect wasn’t as strong in countries like Austria or Indonesia.

The researchers reasoned that the layout of city streets in each country could be an important factor. In countries like the United States, major cities are usually planned out in a grid fashion, making them easy to navigate – so it would make sense that people who grew up in these cities didn’t develop the same navigational abilities as people who grew up in more complex rural environments. But in countries like Austria, cities tended to develop organically over time, and as a result have more winding roads jutting off from each other at irregular angles. Growing up in these cities may have honed people’s navigational abilities just as much as growing up in rural areas.

To test this idea, the researchers analysed city maps to calculate the overall ‘entropy’ of the city street networks in each country – essentially how ordered versus complex they were. As the team had predicted,

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the psychologist june 2022 digest

Academic entitlement and the Dark Triad

in countries where city street networks were more grid-like and orderly, people who grew up in rural or suburban areas tended be better at Sea Hero Quest than those who grew up in the city. But this advantage was diminished in countries with more complex city street networks.

If you grew up in a city designed as a grid, it’s not all bad news. The team found that people from these cities had an advantage in one area: navigating levels that were themselves more grid-like.

‘These results support the idea that humans develop navigation strategies that are aligned with the type of environment they are exposed to, which become suboptimal in other environments,’ the authors conclude.

The study is not without limitations. In particular, players only noted their home country, and not the specific city or region they came from. This meant that the researchers had to look at a single overall measure of how orderly city street networks were in each country, and couldn’t compare the performance of people from individual cities within countries. Yet even within nations there are clearly differences in city layouts: compare the grid of Barcelona with the more complex street layout of San Sebastian, for instance, or the higgledy-piggledy lanes of Oxford with the right angles of Milton Keynes.

Perhaps future work will be able to look in more finegrained detail at the fascinating effects that urban design appears to have on our cognitive abilities.

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Plagiarism and cheating are persistent problems in higher education, note the authors of a new paper in Personality and Individual Differences. Better ways of combatting academic misconduct are clearly needed. And in their paper, Guy J. Curtis at the University of Western Australia and colleagues report that they’ve found one: encouraging students to take personal responsibility for their own learning.

Recent work has consistently linked various forms of cheating to higher scores on the ‘Dark Triad’ personality traits of psychopathy, Macchiavelianism and narcissism, and also to stronger feelings of ‘academic entitlement’. Academically entitled students believe that they deserve special or better treatment than is typically given to others.

As the researchers explain, this can involve a number of distinctly unappealing beliefs: that the student deserves above average grades, no matter what effort they put in; that instructors should be at their beck and call; and that when their assignments are marked, everyday problems should be regarded as reasons to up their grade. (Sound familiar? I can think of a number of academic friends who would immediately agree.)

Work to date has viewed the Dark Triad and academic entitlement as distinct factors that link independently to academic misconduct. But Curtis and his colleagues wondered if Dark Triad traits might in fact drive feelings of academic entitlement, which then drives misconduct. As they write: ‘Feelings of entitlement may stem from narcissistic perceptions that one should be treated as “special”, Machiavellian motivations to “get

ahead”, or psychopathic disregard for the feelings of others.’

To explore this, they recruited 387 undergraduate students from three universities in Perth. The students completed scales that assessed Dark Triad traits, feelings of academic entitlement, and academic misconduct (they used a five-point scale to report on how regularly they ‘used notes during a closed-book exam’, for example).

As the team expected, they found positive correlations between scores on all three scales. But a deeper analysis of the data revealed that the link between higher scores on each of the Dark Triad traits and academic misconduct was driven by one of two aspects of academic entitlement: ‘externalised responsibilities’.

A student who feels this way believes (implicitly or explicitly) that responsibility for learning lies less with them, and more with others.

So, for example, if they miss a class, they might feel that it’s their tutor’s responsibility to get them the notes, not their own.

The other aspect of academic entitlement is ‘entitled expectations’ – feeling that a professor must be entertaining to be good, or that they deserve lenient grading, for example. Why wasn’t this aspect, too, linked to misconduct? The researchers suggest that students with entitled expectations might think that any failure to meet them justified cheating, but if these expectations are actually being met, that justification isn’t there. In a student’s mind, though, externalised responsibilities might justify cheating no matter how their tutors behave: ‘If learning, per se, is not seen as the student’s responsibility, then taking shortcuts in assessment, such as cheating, may be considered

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acceptable,’ the team writes.

One note of caution about the results: the students all self-reported their past cheating, plagiarism, and so on. As the team notes, it’s highly likely that they under-reported these behaviours. But that doesn’t change the main thrust of their findings.

And they do suggest a potential route to reducing misconduct: if students who score relatively highly on psychopathy, Machiavellianism or narcissism (or all three) can be convinced to take responsibility for their own learning, the link between the Dark Triad and misconduct could

be broken. ‘Our findings suggest that educators and institutions should communicate to students their personal responsibility for their academic success,’ the team concludes.

Emma Young

Extraverts are considered to be poorer listeners Extraverts are hugely sociable – they really care about their relationships, and possess outstanding social skills.

Well, that’s how extraverts are generally portrayed. But, according to new work, that’s not exactly how other people see them. In a series of studies in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Francis J. Flynn at Stanford University and colleagues consistently find that more extraverted people are considered to be poorer listeners.

In a preliminary study, 147 first-year business students, who met weekly in groups of six to work on leadership skills, rated the listening skills of everyone else in their group. The participants then completed a scale that assessed their own extraversion. The team found that those with higher self-reported extraversion got poorer marks for listening.

However, people’s perceptions could have been influenced by the actual social relationships they had with other members of their group. So in subsequent studies, fresh groups of participants rated the listening skills of fictional people who were described as falling at various points on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. Results from these studies supported the preliminary finding: time and again, extraverted people were rated as being

poorer listeners in social situations.

An online study of 337 US-based adults suggested why this might be. Fictional people who were portrayed as highly extraverted were also perceived to be better at controlling and modifying how they come across to others.

‘To observers, this signal of malleable self-presentation suggests that extraverts are more interested in “looking the part” than attending to what others have to say,’ the team writes.

Are extraverts actually poorer listeners? Only further research will tell – but such work will be tricky to do, because it’s not necessarily easy to ascertain whether the person we’re talking to is really listening. In any case, the team adds, the lack of objective information on a conversational partner’s listening means that we rely heavily on our pre-existing assumptions as well as limited behavioural cues. ‘Thus, although it might be an interesting exercise to test the validity of the lay belief that extraverts are worse listeners, it might not matter much.

Instead, people may continue to rely on their lay beliefs to judge whether the other person is listening or merely pretending to listen.’

Emma Young Getty Images

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People are more motivated in the pursuit of personal goals when they interpret feelings of discomfort and awkwardness as a sign of progress, and something to strive for rather than avoid.

(Psychological Science)

Digest digested Getty Images

A new analysis finds that Trump supporters showed an increase in racial and religious prejudice after he became president — and this seems to be because they believed these views had become more socially acceptable. By contrast, prejudice decreased among Trump’s opponents. (Nature Human Behaviour) The experience of a ‘good’ person doing something immoral makes us doubt our ability to judge character and also makes the world feel like a more confusing place. Seeing a bad person doing something bad isn’t as unsettling, suggesting that it is the violation of our expectations that makes us feel threatened. (Social Psychology and Personality Science) Last year, a paper made headlines with the finding that simple text message reminders can increase

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uptake of the Covid vaccine. But a new analysis finds that these reminders no longer worked later on in the pandemic, among more vaccine-hesitant people, showing how crucial it is to time these ‘nudges’ correctly. (Nature)

Pupil dilation is a subtle signal that someone is paying attention to us.

A new study finds that we pick up on this, directing our own attention to people with larger pupils – and this all happens outside of our conscious awareness. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General)

16/05/2022 08:54

Have you heard…

The podcast from The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest

Check out our website for the latest episode of the PsychCrunch podcast, on the psychology of superstitions.

From carefully avoiding cracks in the pavement to saluting every magpie that you meet, superstitious behaviour is really common. But why do we have superstitions? Where do they come from? And are they helpful or harmful?

To find out, our presenter Ginny Smith talks to Stuart Vyse, former professor of psychology at Connecticut College and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition.

Ginny also chats to Laramie Taylor, professor of communication at the University of California Davis, who explains how superstition and magical thinking is linked to being a fan of both fiction and sports.

The latest episode of our Research Digest podcast PsychCrunch, sponsored by Routledge Psychology

Listen via digest.bps.org.uk Follow us @ResearchDigest

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Dating and attraction Breaking bad habits How to win an argument The psychology of gift giving How to learn a new language How to be sarcastic Use psychology to compete like an Olympian Can we trust psychological studies?

How to get the best from your team How to stop procrastinating How to get a good night’s sleep How to be funnier How to study and learn more effectively Psychological tricks to make your cooking taste better Is mindfulness a panacea or overhyped and potentially problematic?

Bonus episode: what’s it like to have no mind’s eye?

How to make running less painful and more fun How to boost your creativity

19. Should we worry about screen time?

20. How to cope with pain 21. How to stay connected in the ‘new normal’ 22. Drifting minds 23. Whose psychology is it anyway?

24. How children learn through play 25. How to change your personality 26. How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected our mental health?

27. The Psychologist presents… at Latitude Festival 2021 — Child food poverty 28. Why songs get stuck in our heads 29. Why do people share false information?

30. The psychology of superstitions Routledge Psychology are proud sponsors of PsychCrunch podcasts

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16/05/2022 09:10

Reputation matters Uta Frith and Chris Frith spoke at the Royal Institution around the launch of their ‘graphic biography’ Two Heads, written with their son Alex Frith and illustrated by Daniel Locke.

W

e are going to give you a pot of money. You can give as much (or as little) as you like to us. Then we’re going to triple the amount you gave us and give it to someone else. They can give as much (or as little) from the pot back to us, and this time we’ll triple the amount and give it to you.

What do you do?

This is the Trust Game, developed by accounting professor Joyce Berg. Giving away money advertises that you are a trustworthy person, but you take the risk that the other player in this game simply takes the money and runs. Because of this risk, classic economic theory predicts that you would keep the money, particularly if you are player two. So what actually happened?

Berg and others have found only about 11 per cent of player ones give no money. In fact, most player ones

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give more than half of what they have, and most player twos are even more generous. It seems more important for players to advertise they are trustworthy than to keep the swag. Why? Craving a good reputation Adam Smith, the Scottish enlightenment figure known as the father of Economics, claimed that nature has endowed us with a craving for a good reputation.

He believed that humans value good reputation, even more than money. In the game, we want to advertise that we are generous. Some experiments use multiple players, mixing up the pairs each time. In this version, players learn who will be generous, and who won’t be.

Of course, as two neuroscientists, we want to know what is going on in the brain during this game, in those little spaces in the interaction. Studies scanning the brains of players while they play have found two contrasting areas showing the most activity: the caudate nucleus, and the amygdala (Rilling & Sanfey, 2011). They are both part of the brain’s basic learning mechanism. After every iteration of the game, if your opposite number is more generous than you expected, the caudate nucleus activates. In other words, you get a signal telling you this is a good and trustworthy person. They earn a good reputation. Meanwhile, the amygdala activates when you encounter something you should avoid – such as a person who continually gives no money. They earn a bad reputation.

Economists may be surprised that most people are instinctively nice. Psychologists aren’t. Many people are generous and altruistic, even in situations where they wouldn’t be punished if they were selfish. Learning to win games like this can reveal how our brains are building up, and testing each other’s, reputations.

Keeping the money for yourself is not always the best policy. If you have a good reputation, you can get even more money.

Separating truth from noise But why should you believe what we are telling you about reputation? Many aspects of science have started to lose their own reputation in recent years, including brain imaging. Craig Bennett’s 2009 study on ‘neural

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correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the postmortem Atlantic salmon’, comes to mind. Research by Deena Weisberg and others on ‘the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’ suggests we believe studies more if they include pretty pictures of the brain, even if the image has nothing to do with the content of the paper (although see also Martha Farah and Cayce Hook’s 2013 paper on the ‘seductive allure of the seductive allure…). We often see articles showing a brain with a nice red splodge on it, indicating the location of some bit of thinking, but no live brain scan will show such an image. So, should we be wary? How do we separate the truth from the noise in our data?

Firstly, imaging one brain is not enough. You have to image several and overlay them, and this is a problem because brains are like people – all different shapes and sizes. To overcome this, all the images are distorted until they fit a standard brain (belonging to

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someone called Colin, from Montreal, since you ask).

You slightly blur the image, so that if they don’t quite fit they will still overlap.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the technique we’re talking about, is very good for finding out where things are happening in space. In terms of time – when the activity is happening – it’s much better to use EEG. But again, one brain is not enough.

Consider Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment, showing that the researcher is able to ‘see’ when a person is about to move their fingers… a wave of activity up to 600 milliseconds before someone reports having made the decision to do that. Libet didn’t actually combine the data from his five subjects, he presented them separately. He did, however, combine over time, because subjects had to lift their finger many times before you could see the signal. The line that showed a consistent, repeated change across all repeats

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must, surely, show the brainwaves that relate to the task at hand. It’s a little like trying to ignore a clutter of images in one’s mind to focus on just one thing.

That one thing, one line on the EEG graph, is now called the signal – and this is where we start to see the truth. And Libet’s study is robust, it has been replicated many times with different paradigms (see Frith & Haggard, 2018). But what does it say about free will?

Does it show that we could look into your brain, and predict when you’re about to turn the page? No, because averaging across trials means that although there is a robust signal, you cannot see it on a single trial so we cannot know your next move before you do.

So, by averaging across space and time we can extract our signal from the noise in the data, but is this enough to believe these pretty pictures of the brain in action? You must always be suspicious. It’s rather like tossing a coin. How many heads in a row before you decide this coin is special because it’s biased?

Five heads in a row, 1 in 32 chance, that becomes suspicious? Our rule of thumb in science is that we get suspicious if we see activity that only has a 5 per cent chance. The only trouble is, when you are doing

Key sources Bargh, J.A., Chen, M. & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-44.

Bennett, C.M., Baird, A.A., Miller, M.B., & Wolford, G.L. (2009). Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic salmon: an argument for proper multiple comparisons correction. J Serendipitous Unexpected Results, 1, 1-5.

Berg, J., Dickhaut, J. & McCabe, K. (1995). Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic Behaviour, 10, 122-42.

Chaplin, L.N. & Norton, M.J. (2014). Why we think we can’t dance: Theory of mind and children’s desire to perform. Child Development, 86, 651-58.

Collins, K. & Hong, H. (1991). An audience effect on smile production in 10-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 2, 45-9.

Delgado, M.R., Frank, R.H. & Phelps, E.A. (2005). Perceptions of moral character modulate the neural systems of reward during the trust game. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1611-18.

Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C. L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). Behavioral Priming It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind PLoS ONE, 7, e29081 Farah, M.J. & Hook, C.J. (2013). The seductive allure of ‘seductive allure’. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 88-90.

Frith, C.D. & Haggard, P. (2018). Volition and the brain: Revisiting a classic experimental study. Trends in Neurosciences, 41, 405-7.

John, L.K., Loewenstein, G. & Prelec, D. (2012). Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling. Psychological Science, 23(5), 524-32.

Mann, J.D. & Labrosse, E.H. (1959). Urinary excretion of phenolic acids by normal and schizophrenic male patients. AMA Archives of General Psychiatry, 1, 547-51.

Raihani, N. (2021). The social instinct. How cooperation shaped the world. London: Random House.

Raihani, N.J. & Power, E.A. (2021). No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour. Evolutionary Human Sciences 3, e40.

Rilling, J.K. & Sanfey, A.G. (2010). The Neuroscience of Social Decision-Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 23-48.

Sommerfield, R.D., Krambeck, H.J. & Millinski, M. (2008). Multiple gossip statements and their effect on reputation and trustworthiness. Proc Biol Sci, 275, 2529-36.

Spacks, P.M. (1982). In praise of gossip. Hudson Review, 35, 19-38.

Tennie, C., Frith, U. & Frith, C.D. (2010). Reputation management in the age of the worldwide web. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 482-88.

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brain imaging, you are getting data from thousands of different brain areas or voxels, not just the ones we are interested in. That means you are going to reach this level of significance many times by chance. This is why you have to correct for multiple comparisons, and if you read a paper which doesn’t do that you should be particularly suspicious.

Tricks and guarding against them All too often, this suspicion is lacking. Experimenters can blind themselves and others with data, especially if they’re looking for a very particular result. For example, they could just keep running the experiment on more subjects until enough of them conform to the hypothesis. Or they could use a variety of different statistical methods to analyse their data, until one of them produces an interesting result – so-called ‘data dredging’. Solutions to these problems have emerged, such as pre-registration of studies.

More difficult is helping people to see that when data disproves a hypothesis, it can be just as valuable, if less fun. It’s up to editors to be bold enough to print those papers, again, even knowing that finding nothing tends to be a less dramatic story to read than finding something (see John et al., 2012). It’s also incumbent upon scientists to accept that science is slower than we imagine. It’s always tempting to give ‘the answer’ – it seems kind to give practical solutions, to improve lives – but often we simply don’t know. That doesn’t mean that we will never know, we just need more studies.

It can be useful for scientists to say, for example, ‘this is a big problem’, rather than falling into the trap of seeking to provide definitive answers.

Here’s an example of a study that has failed to replicate, contributing to Psychology’s reputation problem. In 1996, John Bargh and colleagues found that, if they primed a room full of students to think about old age, those students would then walk measurably slowly once they got up to leave the lecture hall. Like a lot of Psychology findings, it sounds so plausible that you may be tempted to shrug and say ‘sure, of course’. It turned out it couldn’t be replicated.

Is the original study wrong, or the replication? Could it even be that society had changed in the interim, away from the stereotype of older people moving more slowly? We think this is unlikely.

In 2012, a group in Belgium led by Axel Cleeremans added a twist to the priming story. They primed the experimenters before asking them to carry out the test. One set were told that the original 1996 study was definitely true. Another set were told the opposite. Both sets found exactly what they were primed to find. The irony, of high-level priming causing experimenter effects in a study on priming! This alludes to one of the main problems in Psychology: we have not taken enough account of what the subject actually thinks the experimenter is trying to do, and whether they want to help them or not. When we talk about top-down control, the top is

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not the frontal cortex but the experimenter.

Even if you get that strong signal, the ‘right’ result, it all appears true, we can still run into problems – such as the well-known fact that correlation is not causation. A nice example is from Mann and Labrosse, back in 1959. Patients diagnosed as schizophrenic all excreted high levels of substances called phenolic acids. Could this point the way to some brain or hormone-based cause? No, the differences were tracked to another factor – the patients drank more coffee than the controls.

If we know about these tricks that scientists can consciously or unconsciously use to mislead themselves about their data, we can guard against them. That’s a silver lining of the ‘replication crisis’: you should have become more suspicious about what you read, in scientific journals and in the wider world of the media. That’s a good thing: we must always be suspicious.

The audience effect The science that we’re drawing on here is under the shadow of a dramatic loss of reputation, and that matters. It matters how others see us. On the title page of our book, the two of us are seen dancing. We’re only happy to be seen dancing in a drawing: it makes us wince to think that someone might actually watch us dancing (a privilege reserved for our grandchildren).

The audience effect is a sign that reputation matters.

If nature has endowed us with a craving for reputation, as Adam Smith said, do we even need to teach it to children, or do they spontaneously get it?

Remarkably, children as young as 10 months can be seen adjusting their behaviour (for example, smiling differently: Collins & Hong, 1991) when they know there’s an audience watching. But, perhaps this has more to do with early attempts at communication.

There are certainly marked changes as children grow up.

As they grow up, they learn to value different audiences differently, but there are not actually many studies of this. In one, ‘theory of mind and children’s desire to perform’ (Chaplin & Norton, 2014), children were given the choice of two activities: singing and dancing, or sitting quietly and doing some colouring.

About half of the 3-4 year-old children chose to sing and dance, but none of the 11-12 year olds made that choice. They were afraid to be judged by some audience. They cared about their reputation.

It seems this is quite a spontaneous change in their development, it does not have to be taught.

How does the audience effect work when we can’t see our audience, for example when we use the internet? We actually published a study ten years ago with Claudio Tennie in 2010, on reputation management in the age of the world-wide web. It seems we don’t know much more than we knew then.

Subjective experience has shown us that Twitter – as with most forms of social media – has a weirdly

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addictive quality, and it is based on reputation management. It has both rewarding and punishing effects on us, but punishment does not seem to diminish our dependency.

The power of gossip Of course, Twitter and other forms of social media can be a timesaver and powerful source of information, but this information is only as reliable as the people posting it. This makes social media very similar to old-fashioned gossip. Gossip has always been a key part of human interaction – something we constantly indulge in, and that we might also be a bit addicted to. We often feel guilty about this and hear the advice that we should ignore gossip, but that would be a mistake. Instead, a case can be made in praise of gossip (Spacks, 1982).

We heard earlier that we can learn through our direct experience whether to trust a stranger, and therefore choose him as a co-operator, and we don’t even have to think about it. We can do this through our evolved ability to learn through reward and punishment, depending on the accuracy of our assessment of others’ trustworthiness. But we only rarely have time to learn by direct observation. Gossip offers a shortcut. It is more efficient to learn through other people: they have already filtered the information you need. Gossip tends to come from several sources (Sommerfield et al., 2008), and that’s more reliable than information from a single source (even if it’s yourself). You can learn from other people’s mistakes.

At least we should respect gossip, and in the lab it has been taken quite seriously. We’re even learning, from behaviour and brain imaging studies, that gossip is a more powerful factor than our own observations…

Dame Uta Frith is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London.

Chris Frith is Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London.

Their book, Two Heads: Where Two Neuroscientists Explore How Our Brains Work, with Alex Frith and illustrator Daniel Locke, is out now with Bloomsbury Publishing.

A deep influence We come back to the Trust Game. Remember that the caudate nucleus was automatically tracking guesses about the trustworthiness of your partner, and it responded particularly when you were pleasantly surprised. A 2005 experiment tried a variation of the game, adding an element of gossip (Delgado et al., 2005). They told participants about the moral character of their partner beforehand: for example, either they were someone volunteered at a food bank and had once saved a child from drowning, or they had once been accused of plagiarism and read comics in science classes. People gave more money to partners who had been presented as more trustworthy.

What was more interesting was that the brain itself behaved differently. The caudate nucleus was practically asleep – it seems people were relying on the gossip, rather than on building up their own picture during the game.

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In that study, though, information was supplied by the experimenter. What about more real, everyday gossip? Would you pay attention to subjectively gathered information, or go against it if your own observation went against it? One study [Sommerfield et al., 2008)] involved multiple groups of people, who started by watching each other playing a trust game.

After watching several rounds, they gossiped with each other about the way the players behaved during the game. The experimenters then observed the group as a whole playing rounds of the trust game with each other. They took careful note of how each person made decisions, based on what the gossip had said about their opponents (these were actually statements that had been written down by the observers). It turned out they were deeply influenced by the gossip. They made quick and firm decisions in rounds played with people who had been the subject of ‘positive’ gossip, and they did not override these when the actual behaviour of

Non-human reputations Gossip is just the high-end level of a universal truth: that most of what we know about the world, we learn from others. This applies to fruit flies as well as people: they learn from watching other fruit flies.

In the book, we talk about meerkats; and about cleaner wrasse.

These fish guard their reputation very carefully. They bite the fish they are cleaning less often when they are being watched by potential ‘clients’ (see Nichola Raihani’s book The Social Instinct). All the audience effects are happening. The difference with us is that they have hundreds if not thousands of these interactions every day, which is probably sufficient for basic learning processes to achieve that reputation, but we can sometimes do it much more quickly. The basic evolutionary drive is the same, just with a different mechanism for achieving the same result.

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the partners contradicted it.

This finding may not strike you as surprising, and this is of course a problem with psychological science: when it confirms what we already know from this great experiment called ‘life’, we forget all the other things that we know science has not confirmed.

To sum up, gossip should be respected, at least to protect us from trusting an untrustworthy person.

It can quickly allow us to accept a trustworthy person as a partner. In this way, gossip is an aid to our human ability to cooperate. We may, of course, all have to abandon that wonderful convenience of pooling information from many other people because, in the age of the internet, we have far more uncertainty and reason to worry about gossip. Anyone can make up anonymous accounts, give higher ratings for goods and services to themselves and their friends, and spread misinformation. Anonymity should be taken as a danger signal.

In our graphic biography we abandon anonymity and reveal some of the more personal side of ourselves.

We hope you will take it as a signal to trust us. We have laid our reputation on the line by appearing so prominently in this book. We often worried about this, but our son, who actually produced the book and wrote every line of text, assured us that we would often be portrayed in a ridiculous light, because after all, you would expect ridiculous figures in a comic.

There is another reason that we agreed to act as leads. We hope to demonstrate that scientists are not special, but ordinary people. Equally, we hope that revealing a more personal side to ourselves will be taken as a signal to trust us as scientists.

A fine line As ordinary people and as scientists we have personally experienced the ‘craving for a good reputation’ that Adam Smith identified long ago. The question that haunts us is whether the craving matches reality. This question is not for us to answer, but for the reader.

The reader, we hope, will remember that we think a genuinely good reputation is about doing good things, that are noticed and talked about. And in our case, this is not just a matter of doing good science, but also about encouraging our colleagues and, especially, encouraging and helping our students. It’s also about being consistently good. Perhaps only saints can achieve this.

But there is a final twist. Those who are doing good deeds must be careful not to advertise their goodness too blatantly. This is to guard against the anger of those who are not doing good deeds. They don’t like to be shamed, and that’s why good deeds are sometimes punished (Raihani & Power, 2021).

We are always treading that fine line. Reputation management – in personal and professional lives – is hard, because we are not entirely in control. But we are all dependent on each other, and we can do better together.

LLAABBLLEE I A V I A A V S A E RS ES W CCOOUURS NNEEW

We’ve launched BPS Learn so you can access cutting-edge psychology CPD at the touch of a button.

Training that fits around your schedule, it’s easy to use, delivered by experts and available whenever you want.

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16/05/2022 10:51

‘Our difference was really magnified’ Educational Psychologist Dr Melernie Meheux in conversation with Waveney Bushell, Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society Waveney Bushell is often referred to as the first black female educational psychologist in the UK. She was a founding member of the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association (CECWA) and its first chair.

More recently she appeared in the BBC documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal by Lyttanya Shannon (produced

by Steve McQueen), highlighting the disproportionate numbers of black children labelled as ‘educationally subnormal’ in the 1960s and sent to specialist schools, and her role in challenging the existence of these schools.

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Waveney, I’m delighted to find out more about your history. Tell us about growing up, your early childhood.

I was born in Guyana, and my father died when I was very small, and my mother as well. I really don’t know my father at all, my mother I remember having to read to her. She was an avid reader. Growing up in Guyana was being loved. Even though my mother died when I was six, her sister, my Aunt, brought us up – three of us. The emphasis was on keeping us together, and loving us. My father’s sisters were teachers, and I remember always wanting to teach when I grew up.

And I did! I went to high school, and was successful. I had the highest senior Cambridge score, and applied to the local teacher training college and became a teacher.

It sounds like education just runs through the family, and inspired your path when you came to the UK. Yes. I came by chance, really. A friend I met in teacher training college, her friends had been to the UK, and came back saying ‘they want teachers’. This was after the war, the local authorities were really trying to recruit teachers. To be able to teach in England, that caught our imagination.

The emphasis amongst Black people in those days was studying. Social advancement was achieved through study. My friend, she joined her husband who she married soon after she left college in Guyana. She literally pestered me, ‘when are you coming?’ When I got here, which was two years after she left Guyana, I realised the reason for her asking that, over and over again. She was lonely.

At her advice, I applied to the London County Council, to become a teacher, and was accepted. I came to join the teaching force in England.

What was it like, when you arrived?

Life here then was different from at home. At home we knew everybody. I lived in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown. Everyone knew who had gone here and there… life here was so different. It was lonely. We soon realised that we were different, and we were made to keep within our little groups. There was no mixing… because of that, we were eager to maintain

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the psychologist june 2022 interview

friendships amongst our own groups. If you walked down the street on a Saturday and you saw a Black person, whether you knew that person or not, you waved.

In the shop windows, there would be cards with ‘No dogs, no Blacks’ and so on. You realised that you were now something quite different, something not accepted. That made you feel more lonely than you really were.

How did you manage those feelings?

The West Indians were known for their dancing, and we met socially and just kept ourselves happy in that way. It was a way of feeling that you belonged to a group, whereas society showed you that you didn’t.

The sense of belonging and community was really important. I know you then looked at education, at supplementary schools… how did that work come about?

I came in 1956, and the supplementary schools didn’t start until the ‘60s. As children came to the country, there was much more emphasis on differences, which we were seen to represent. Our children were different,

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our educational system was different. In Guyana, there was a greater emphasis on nursery rhymes, and on children’s ability to repeat those rhymes correctly. The educational system was built on things like repetition, and ability to remember what was being told. There wasn’t this emphasis on children’s ability to analyse things, there was no reference to that at all. That made quite a difference, in terms of performance in schools, on tests – which I became involved in. Our difference was really magnified.

Did the supplementary schools support the development of those skills?

Yes. They were started by West Indians themselves.

They saw the difference between what was expected of the children who had just arrived, and what had been expected of those children while they lived in their countries. There was a vast difference. That was the topic of conversation when we met – what was the expectation of our children, were we meeting those expectations, did we feel about our children the same way the local people felt? We thought the answer was to be able to teach the children in the way teaching was seen to be in this country.

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Many supplementary schools focused on children’s ability to see themselves as important members of the schooling community. So not only school work, but emphasis on one’s culture and history. It was felt by many of the teachers that children needed to feel good about themselves, that was necessary in order for them to produce work in the classroom.

What was it like studying Psychology?

I went to Bedford College. I applied because it was a London school, and I thought during the college holidays I would be able to teach at my old school.

I didn’t realise that Bedford College was a girls’ school, and therefore rather an upper class compared with University College, which I also applied to. I did get into Bristol, but didn’t want to go out of London.

The college was exclusively middle class, and to my knowledge just two Black girls there – myself, and a girl from Jamaica reading Sociology. Our timetables weren’t the same, but we saw to it that we met in the Common Room every day. We became very good friends. I felt very lonely there. Our class had about 14 girls, who obviously thought that they were a cut above other people, especially the Blacks. So I didn’t make a lot of friends, and I don’t think my friend did either. I had two… one was a Jewish girl who sought me out, befriended me. And an English friend, I think she was lonely too. We became friends.

I soon realised that expectations of me were really poor. I got fairly good marks, but looking back I know that my work was inconsistent. What struck me was what happened to me in my second year. Our tutor said ‘Be as critical as you want to be’, and I was critical.

My essay was good. I got it back without a mark.

Written at the bottom was ‘Quote your references’.

I couldn’t understand this. I went to the tutor’s room, he was rather dismissive of me. He said ‘I just said quote your references’. I said ‘I have, there’s nothing else to quote’. He just dismissed me. I was very hurt… there was no discussion. Years ago I met Diane Abbott, and she said exactly the same thing happened to her.

This tutor’s behaviour was quite the opposite to another tutor, who called me when I did some work and asked ‘Are you worried about anything? What’s the matter?’ He didn’t say it quite like this, but he was asking why my work wasn’t as good as it had been.

I was in a very strange environment, looking back on it all. But I survived. It was the first experience I had of academia being prejudiced. One tended to hold on to the idea that when one’s intelligent, one isn’t prejudiced, in the world of academia people wouldn’t have such feelings… but that wasn’t so at all.

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What about the content of the course?

I was a bit disappointed in what we had to learn… what rats can do and so on. It was the social psychology that interested me. I couldn’t wait for the time when I would go on to the postgraduate training, which I did at the Child Guidance Training Centre.

There, I flourished. It could just be the atmosphere.

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I never got the feeling there that I was doing the impossible. We used to have case conferences every day, presenting some work that you had done. The Centre trained social workers and psychiatrists, there were only four psychologists trained per year. We had a varied audience to our case conferences, and it wasn’t unusual for people in the common room to say ‘Oh, today’s your case conference, I’m coming!’ I think I did fairly well.

But from the moment I was exposed to tests, I realised our children wouldn’t be able to cope with this. In the pre-school days, education was centred around learning not how to abstract and relate what you have learned to the work you are doing, but just repeating what you heard. This began before school, with grandmothers, who were always the people who tested children in that way, starting education at home using nursery rhymes. Education itself was really geared to that repetition of words. Our children, when they came here, found it was different. I’m sure that they felt insecure when questions were asked of them which had never been asked before.

Something else that affected our children was the use of words… we in the West Indies were still using the language that people like Somerset Maugham used. When I opened his books, I realised we were still using those words… ‘grip’ for a suitcase, ‘pipe’ for tap. Language moves, and in the West Indies it moved too slowly for our children, to bridge the gap between what and how they learned in the West Indies and here.

So the language in the tests meant they didn’t do as well as they could do?

Oh yes. No doubt. I was disappointed that nobody, for example the school’s psychological service, seemed to be interested in that and didn’t do a small project/research into this. It was all left to individual psychologists, who just believed what was written in the book by the Americans. It was copied from the Americans, no doubt. Intelligence tests…WISC, Stanford Binet…

What impact do you think that had on Black children and Educationally Subnormal Schools (ESN)?

It meant they were placed in the wrong schools, with acceptance of it. I got a message from an American psychologist over here, asking ‘was there a Black psychologist?’ I got a similar message from an American social worker. They were both disappointed that there was nobody who came forward and said ‘let’s look at this again, let’s look at ourselves and see what we are not doing.’ I blamed the British Psychological Society quite a lot for that. I went to their annual conference, and found myself asking myself ‘what are you doing here?’

I feel the Society should be much more involved.

I’ve been out of it for such a long time, but the emphasis seems on the academic side of things. I enjoy reading journal articles, but there should be more

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the psychologist june 2022 interview

emphasis on how children learn. That emphasis is better for our society, for the children, for the parents, for the whole country.

I think you’ll be pleased to know there is more work being done with the British Psychological Society in that area, but I think it’s good to hear from you on what can be improved.

How do you feel about the fact that IQ tests are still used?

There came a time when I thought ‘away with you, this doesn’t help me at all’. It doesn’t help me to tell the teacher how they must approach a child’s learning in the classroom. It doesn’t help me to find out why the child’s approach to schoolwork is the way it is.

I noticed it from the start. Why give our children these tests, which have words they never use and concepts they aren’t aware of? I feel that much more work should be done, much more direct work. When I was working, it seemed the child was punished academically for what they didn’t know.

You were instrumental in supporting the knowledge the children did have. You were on the Select Committee that led to the Rampton Review, and led to the Swann report, of 1985.

I was not a member of the Rampton Review, I was co-opted. There were people there who had done more direct work with children. Everybody was written to by the committee about something in education, and there was nothing that was sent back that didn’t reflect prejudice. It was so sad. There wasn’t any empathy, there wasn’t any understanding. Not only children, but their parents, were dismissed… in a way, for being here! ‘You don’t belong here, what are you doing here?’

Those questions weren’t asked direct, but they were at the bottom of everything.

In my report, I had to say that’s how I felt.

I was certain that the approach of the teachers and headteachers was out of order. They never thought about the effect of their own attitude on the children.

I once gave a talk to some teachers at a London university, and a questionnaire I submitted was around teachers’ feelings about the children. The teachers objected strongly to that. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. If you’re in any relationship – and it is a relationship, you meet the same child every day – you must have some sort of feelings about these children.

There was a denial. Very few answered the question.

But it led to a number of recommendations about teacher attitudes, feelings and belief, and the impact on educational outcomes.

When you think about the Swann report, how far do you think it went in terms of being implemented?

Many members of Rampton pointed to things like prejudice, and he went too far in allowing some of the members of the committee to say what they had found.

Swann succeeded him, and didn’t go further than

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saying this was all a cultural thing, children weren’t bright enough and so on.

You said that IQ tests led to high numbers of Black children being placed in ESN schools, ‘educationally subnormal schools’, a term we wouldn’t use now.

Can you tell me about your experience of working with some of those Black boys?

I worked with some in the Saturday schools. They seemed to me to be quite different in their behaviour from that seen during the school week. They didn’t feel extended at all in the school environment, so they behaved very badly. In one school, the headteacher asked the social worker to have them deemed ‘maladjusted’. The social worker felt they had one label, and the headteacher was asking them to be labelled a second time. She was American, and that’s when she started to ask around to see if there was any Black psychologist who could help her. Someone more sympathetic to their needs, to avoid getting them labelled. She was surprised there wasn’t a Black group who would take up that case for the community. She was left with me.

I agreed to see these children, but I was not allowed to do so.

In spite of that, you went on to be involved in the book How the West Indian Child is made educationally sub-normal in the British School System, by Bernard Coard.

A group of us met often – parents, who became community workers. We talked about what we felt was the injustice facing our children, how we could redress that. We decided to go nationwide, by holding a conference and inviting teachers. We called ourselves the Caribbean Education Community Workers Association. Bernard was invited to sepak, and he was really electrifying. He was a student and had been teaching in ESN children in his holidays from university. He felt that these children were not being extended in the classroom. He was passionate about the injustice, he was sure this was prejudice.

I felt that people honestly believed that these children were dull, and to me that was worse. It meant that our whole group was regarded as dull, that we just didn’t know what we were talking about, that we didn’t know how dull we were! That really hurt.

What would you hope Educational Psychology as a profession would take away from all of the work you’ve carried out so far?

I would hope that people will learn to understand all the influences on children, the good and the bad. The good were those that they learnt at home, and they did learn a lot at home. The bad would be what people thought about them. I hope that whenever they’re thinking about Black children, they would think beyond what is produced in the classroom. If work is mismarked, or not marked at all… we need to consider the impact that has on people. I’m living proof of that!

16/05/2022 10:42

Trauma-informed forensic psychology What Lies Buried: A forensic psychologist’s true stories of madness, the bad and the misunderstood (Endeavour) by Kerry Daynes is out now.

Forensic psychologist Nisha Pushpararajah asks the questions.

You’ve authored and co-authored other books, what makes this one stand out from the rest?

I hit my storytelling stride with this book. It is the follow-up to The Dark Side of the Mind: Stories from my life as a forensic psychologist, and so remains an easyread memoir about the warts-and-all world of forensic psychology… but I was more confident when writing this and I think it shows. The success of the first instalment gave me a huge boost and proved to myself that it was possible to describe cases in a way that engages lay readers, without sacrificing professional standards.

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An interesting title. How would you relate it to aspects of forensic practice?

It never fails to amaze me how many people confuse me for a forensic pathologist… the title of the book might not help much in that regard! The title refers to what lies buried in someone’s history that, when revealed, becomes key to understanding how and why their problem

behaviour developed. I’m a huge advocate for trauma/ adversity-focused thinking and practice in forensic settings; each story essentially details the evolution of a trauma-informed psychological formulation and how that impacted (or not) on the treatment and management of the person involved.

Your book offers an insight into the challenges of working within forensic settings and with diverse forensic clients.

What has been the most challenging case you have worked with and why?

There is no single case that I can point to, as they all have their different challenges. I find the systems and organisations that I work in far more difficult and frustrating than any of my patients could be.

On a personal level, I have written about how I went through a phase of burnout and hopelessness, working day in and day out on what seemed like a neverending tide of cases involving men who had sexually

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the psychologist june 2022 books abused children. I went to the trial of Mark Bridger (who murdered five-year-old April Jones) in 2013 and found myself waking up in the small hours of the morning, overwhelmed by anger. My ability to remain professional and objective was under strain and I seriously considered whether I could continue in my job.

I like the concept behind your book. Each chapter seeks to provide an overview of the key issues many practitioners face in their day-to-day practice. Some are all too commonly known, such as the debate surrounding personality disorder diagnosis, the external control measures that are pivotal to the prevention of harm and reoffending, and the key limitations of offending behaviour programs like SOTP (Sex Offender Treatment Programme). What is the best strategy you’ve used to date that has helped you overcome or ethically navigate your way through these practice issues, ensuring the best possible outcome for your client?

I have left jobs where I have been required to uncritically adopt what I considered harmful or insensitive practice – a drastic but effective strategy (for me)! I try to stay upto-date with research, new and best practice in forensic work and broader debates in psychology. But I don’t keep this all to myself, I discuss everything I plan to do and why with my multi-disciplinary teams (and patients where possible, of course). It’s not rocket science; providing people with good quality, accessible information and involving them in the process leads to better outcomes.

Sadly, many settings don’t allow the time for these crucial discussions.

I get the sense that you aim to capture the nuances and individuality of different clinical presentations, and rightly so. You include an individual experiencing psychotic symptoms, and an individual affected by certain trauma memories, for instance. Why did you feel this was important to include in your book?

Most of the people I work with and therefore write about would be described as ‘mentally disordered’ in some form. I felt that I owed it to them to tell their stories in a way that brought them to life as unique individuals, not merely diagnostic labels or lists of ‘symptoms’.

A book about forensic patients could so easily reinforce ‘dangerous lunatic’ or similar stereotypes and I wanted not simply to avoid those, but directly challenge them.

I was at pains to show how our attitude to different manifestations of mental distress influences our treatment of those people in law and psychiatry.

What advice would you give to anyone deciding to embark on a career in Forensic Psychology working within secure services, whether in a prison or hospital setting?

Read my books (obviously!). And if they don’t put you off, try to gain some paid or voluntary work at the ‘coal face’ of one of these settings. It will inform you very quickly if this is the field of psychology for you. Spend as much time as you can chatting informally to service users about their experience of prison/hospitals etc., as it will give you an insight that no amount of study can replicate.

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Social and sexual abuse and the long-stay bins In this book, Anne Goodwin draws on the language and landscapes of her native Cumbria and on the culture of long-stay psychiatric hospitals where she began her clinical psychology career. It’s the story of Matty, a woman with delusions of grandeur who’s lived for 50 years in a psychiatric hospital scheduled for closure. Most psychologists working today are probably too young to remember these ‘long-stay bins’. I went to several during my training and afterwards – they were truly dreadful.

In some, like Leavesden and St. Lawrence’s, many of the residents living in the upper storeys never got to go outside at all.

In these days of Community Care, with all the problems of cuts, it is worth remembering that if there are problems now, previously they were probably worse. At least it is no longer possible for people who find someone inconvenient to get rid of them by committing them to a bin. This used to happen to many, including unmarried mothers and their children. This reason for admission is a major theme in the plot and characterisation of Matilda Windsor, though it may seem astonishing to younger psychologists.

It also highlights how important it is to assess people in their own social context. Matty (Matilda) is from a higher social class than her carers/nursing assistants, and sex education and sexual abuse were not discussed. She was sent away, but so was her dear little brother, Henry, to a boarding prep school.

However, there is more to a novel than what can be learnt from it. Readers may enjoy the gentle mockery of multidisciplinary teams, of the novice professional (we all start as novices), and the insights into how people close to clients can be affected by what happens to them. And for me – I worked in learning disabilities which was the first area where Health & Social Services worked in a single team – the involvement of the Council rang some bells. I have not forgotten being asked to depart in my assessments from standard definitions to one cooked up by Social Services which would limit access to services!

I enjoyed and I recommend this book.

Matilda Windsor is Coming Home Anne Goodwin (Inspired Quill)

Reviewed by Charlotte Green, retired clinical psychologist

16/05/2022 12:09

Creative encounters for ACT practitioners Traumafocused ACT: A practitioner’s guide to working with mind, body, and emotion using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Russ Harris Context Press

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) espouses at its core, a call for flexibility in thinking, feeling and behaviour as an antidote for becoming drawn into unhelpful patterns. This is also true for the trauma focused approach based on ACT. Russ Harris invites clients to actively explore and better understand the fullness of experience, rather than directly aiming to reduce distress.

One of the most attractive facets of ACT work remains its adaptability around the client and their needs.

The practitioner and client work collaboratively to explore the path the client wishes to take, and at all times the work is guided by a thorough underpinning of values and value-based actions. Whether confronted with shame, grief or fear resulting from trauma, the client is invited to cultivate compassion, rather than criticism, and is inspired to learn more about their emotions, physical sensations, cognitions and behaviours as understanding is coupled with creating space for discomfort, as an antidote for fighting or pushing it away.

Acknowledging the components of trauma to extend to the past, Harris includes information about attachment styles and soothing practices for child parts affected by trauma. The use of exposure to traumatic events is firstly situated in a safety blanket of grounding (called ‘dropping anchor’) and is then focused on the main components of the model, which are ‘being present,

opening up and doing what matters’.

At its core, the guide suggests a novel and creative encounter, which is built around client need, rather than a fixed process or fixed order of components to follow.

The guide could be useful for the experienced ACT practitioner as well as those taking their first few tentative steps into using ACT. It is full to the brim with metaphors, client session extracts as well as acronyms to guide components of exploration.

However, it is not for the faint hearted, as it understandably requires a thorough familiarity with the model, prior to then moving on to the use of trauma specific components.

Anyone reading and using the guide is invited to join a Facebook group, drawing heavily on the openness and inclusivity found amongst ACT practitioners. There is also access to other free resources and examples to further build on the concepts introduced in the guide itself.

Reviewed by Dr Lelanie Smook CPsychol Principal Counselling Psychologist at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust

How to train a cat Zazie Todd with an adapted extract from her new book, Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy.

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thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/how-train-cat

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the psychologist june 2022 books

‘Ambivalence is normal human nature’ On second thought: How ambivalence shapes your life

by William R. Miller is published by Guilford Press.

Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne asks the questions.

How did you come to view ambivalence as a virtue?

Whether it’s for an individual, an organisation or a nation, it’s wise to weigh the pros and cons of different courses of action, which is essentially what is happening in the experience of ambivalence. A fairly common response to ambivalence is to shut down consideration of alternatives, filtering out information that is inconsistent with a single-minded direction.

What I see as a virtue is remaining open to considering possibilities, at least long enough to get a clear picture of their relative merits and make a choice in relation to your larger values.

Why do we tend to think of ambivalence as a bad thing?

Some people prefer closure, making a decision and moving on even if it may not be the best possible choice. Others like to consider the different options more fully before deciding.

The former may call the latter indecisive or procrastinating, while the latter may perceive the former to be impulsive and arbitrary. Some of us are just more comfortable or patient with the experience of ambivalence.

Are there evidence-based ways of working through ambivalence effectively?

A longstanding approach that was described by Ben Franklin is to take a few days and compile a full list of the pros and cons of different choices. Psychologists Janis and Mann formalised this in a ‘decisional balance’ approach, which I describe in the chapter on Getting the Big Picture. It’s a way to be at peace with a decision you made based on what you knew at the time. Then once you do make a choice there is the challenge of Getting Out of the Woods (that’s another chapter) and not being sidetracked by enduring ambivalence.

Talk us through your metaphor of ambivalence as an inner committee.

We talk to ourselves when faced with choice or change. It’s a

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more conscious process for some of us than for others, but in essence we are voicing the pro and con arguments. You can think of these voices as being like members of an inner committee having a debate. Some members may express impassioned arguments in favour, whereas others may be strongly opposed. There may be other members of the committee who are reluctant to make a decision at all, or who suggest a third possibility. You get to decide how much time you give each of these voices to speak.

Is there a moment in your own life where ambivalence led to an important choice?

So many times. We make countless choices each day, most of them quite minor. In the book I described my reluctance about having children – ultimately we adopted two boys and a girl – and for me a big part of this ambivalence was unconscious. In my 20s I was deciding whether to go into psychology or music. Deciding about a life partner was a momentous choice, and we’ve been married for 49 years now. My simple childhood religious understanding did not work for me as I grew and learned, and I went through an ambivalent agnosticism before developing an adult faith.

What can we do to embrace ambivalence?

Well, first of all, ambivalence is normal human nature. If you feel uncomfortable about it, there are various ways to shut it down like selective attention, but ambivalence is a fact of life.

Conscious of it or not, we make choices. Erich Fromm wrote about a desire to escape from that freedom, and that is also a choice you can make. For me it is normal to experience hope and despair simultaneously without needing to choose one or the other. William Blake wrote that we were ‘made for joy and woe, and when this we rightly know, through the world we safely go’.

16/05/2022 12:10

Michael Pollard

An honest and raw insight into baby loss Rebecca White and Helen Wilson visit what is described as ‘the first exhibition of its kind, creating a platform to share personal stories open conversations and break the wall of silence that continues to surround baby loss’

exhibition Still Parents – Life after Baby Loss The Whitworth, Manchester

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till Parents is the first exhibition of its kind. The project began in 2019 with a series of workshops which brought together professional artists and people who had experienced baby loss either during pregnancy or shortly after birth. The works on display are artworks curated by the group from the Whitworth’s collection, as well as loaned personal items and pieces produced as part of the project.

For two women with experience of miscarriage, the prospect of visiting the Still Parents exhibition was daunting, especially as it would be our first meeting after connecting online. We arrived separately, steeling ourselves as we approached the red brick exterior of the gallery which houses this important but potentially painful exhibition. Reflecting later we drew a parallel between the building, exhibition within and the often-unseen grief of pregnancy loss; by entering the exhibition space we were stepping into a part of ourselves that is often hidden and not outwardly visible.

Inside the space was calm and quiet, with the collection spread across two rooms. Works include

pottery, photography, poetry, sculpture and paintings.

There are a series of memory boxes, one from each member of the participatory group. The boxes contain keepsakes from pregnancies that didn’t end as hoped or imagined – a printout from a heart rate monitor, a babygrow with the tags still on, a cast of a tiny foot and perhaps most poignantly, one had simply been left empty.

Around the bottom of the room names are written. These are the names of babies, submitted by parents who never got to take their child home. On the Whitworth’s website it says that the intention is to add names periodically throughout the exhibition. The fact that they are around the bottom of the room perhaps speaks to the experience of pushing down and trying to supress traumatic memories and feelings of grief.

Miscarriage and baby loss is often not spoken about – one of the reasons this exhibition is so significant.

Whilst the organisers are clear the project is not art therapy, one of the aims of the Still Parents project was to provide an artistic outlet for the stories and experiences of the participant group, something they say is lacking.

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the psychologist june 2022 culture

‘Everyone is brave’ - Ruth Chester-Lees Indeed, there is much work to be done in terms of improving the provision of care for people who have experienced miscarriage or baby loss. In her article for The Psychologist in 2020, Dr Petra Boynton highlighted the inequalities that affect baby loss. We would add to this that there is a lack research regarding the causes of miscarriage and baby loss, as well as a lack of traumainformed care in this area.

The Miscarriage Association estimates there are 250,000 miscarriages every year in the UK, with 1 in 100 women experiencing three or more consecutive miscarriages – referred to as recurrent miscarriage (Duckitt & Qureshi, 2011). Worryingly, these figures could be substantially higher, as many miscarriages are not accurately recorded. Research has demonstrated that symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are more common in women and their partners who experience early pregnancy loss, compared to those who experience healthy pregnancies. A follow-up study (Farren et al., 2020) expanded upon these findings, highlighting significant psychological challenges associated with early pregnancy loss, particularly within the first month; 1 in 10 women experienced moderate to severe depression, 1 in 6 experienced long-term PTSD, whilst 1 in 4 experienced moderate anxiety. This research is crucial, as chronic health conditions such as PTSD have long-term implications on well-being and relationships.

The recent Lancet series Miscarriage Matters discusses how common miscarriage is, the associated risk factors and consequences of miscarriage.

Despite the significant step forward in research regarding miscarriage, care gaps still exist regarding psychological support and a specific trauma-informed approach. Currently women are not eligible for support, tests, or treatment for miscarriage from the NHS until they have experienced three consecutive miscarriages.

Given the impact of miscarriage it makes sense that a trauma-informed approach is adopted to help manage miscarriage and to provide appropriate care for subsequent pregnancies.

Overall, the Still Parents exhibition makes a valuable and much needed contribution to the conversation about miscarriage and baby loss. The collection is honest and powerful. For those with lived experience, a visit is likely to be emotional. For those without, it will provide an honest and raw insight into the experience of baby loss. We identified with the artwork and words on display. However, we recognise our position as white women and that the participant group for the exhibition was also comprised almost entirely of white women.

There is still a need to increase diversity when it comes to the conversation about miscarriage and baby loss – something that future projects and research should consider.

Still Parents is a free exhibition running until 4 September at The Whitworth, Manchester. Open Tue–Sun, 10–5. @WhitworthArt #StillParents Reviewed by Rebecca White, Associate Lecturer, University of Manchester @BeccyBeccyWhite; Rebecca.white@manchester.ac.uk and Helen Wilson, Trial Manager, Greater Manchester Mental Health. Helen.Wilson@gmmh.nsh.uk.

‘I am preparing a PhD application with support from Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and researchers at the University of Manchester, to investigate trauma-informed care for recurrent miscarriage. My interest was borne out of personal experience of recurrent miscarriage spanning a decade.

I noticed a shift in care provision for the management of miscarriage (i.e., from inpatient to outpatient) and a change in terms of how miscarriage is discussed – it doesn’t seem as “hush hush” anymore, the voices are getting louder, and women are openly talking about this “taboo” subject that so many are privy to. I am passionate about women’s health, perinatal health and want to see improvements in the care provided for women, couples and families experiencing miscarriage.’

Michael Pollard

Support for miscarriage and baby loss www.tommys.org; www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk; www.theworstgirlgangever.co.uk

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References Farren, J., Jalmbrant, M., Falconieri, N., et al. (2020). Posttraumatic stress, anxiety and depression following miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. American Jnl of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 222(4), 367-e1.

Duckitt, K. & Qureshi, A. (2011). Recurrent miscarriage. BMJ clinical evidence.

16/05/2022 12:25

Education for the ears

Podcasters Lucinda Powell (Psychology in the Classroom) and Shahana Knight (The Therapeutic Teacher) on their work.

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Teachers generally share one common goal – to make a difference to the lives of children. However, making a difference has become a lot harder over the last five years, with increasing numbers of children struggling with their mental health and wellbeing. Staff are feeling disempowered and deskilled and they are finding it hard to know how to respond. Conventional behaviour management strategies are not

the energy and time required to find, read and digest the research is usually impossible. As such, teachers have to wait for someone else to read the research and translate it into language that they can understand and make it applicable to the classroom. This is no easy feat as the subtlety of research can be lost in translation, trainers can have other agendas, independent consultants may not fully understand the research themselves, and training programmes can lag several years behind the research. This can lead to pervasive and enduring misunderstandings within the education system (yes, there are some out there still talking about learning styles!).

Perhaps one silver lining of the pandemic has been that it has opened up access to research in many ways.

Teachers are now more flexible and creative about where they get their CPD from. It has been a boom time for podcasting – pretty much anyone with a microphone and an interest can make one and push it out onto major platforms such as Spotify, Amazon and Apple.

I present at conferences, run teacher training courses, and work as a coach on the School Mental Health Award at the Carnegie School of Excellence for Mental Health in Schools. I am also an associate lecturer and the lead tutor for the Psychology PGCE for Initial Teacher Training at Coventry University. I have led the Oxfordshire Schools Mental Health and Wellbeing Network but will be returning to the classroom in September 2022. My next project is to follow a large trial from start to finish over the next four years, with the aim of helping teachers really understand the research process. I am always on the lookout for new guests, so please do get in touch if you would like to join me to discuss your research.

Lucinda Powell is an Educational Consultant. www.changingstatesofmind.com Podcast (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon): Psychology in the Classroom.

working and, as a result, many schools are realising that they need professional guidance which is underpinned by psychological research.

For me, there is so much that needs to change about the way we respond to children who are struggling, and we must become

Getty images

I don’t profess to be an expert in any field of psychology but having taught it for 15 years in London and Oxfordshire schools, I am passionate about ensuring teachers understand how psychology can help inform and improve their practice. Podcasting can be that bridge.

Since September 2017, I have been working as an Educational Consultant specialising in the links between psychology and education, with a focus on mental health and wellbeing. I started my podcast, ‘Psychology in the Classroom’, in September 2020, and have been producing it weekly ever since. Whilst I started by doing a mix of solo episodes and interviews, I quickly ran out of things to say so it has become an interview podcast. It has been listened to all around the world and I have had some amazing guests.

The best thing about podcasts for teachers is that they are accessible anytime, anywhere – on their daily commute, when they are exercising, when they are cooking supper. Teachers can choose exactly what they listen to, curating their own personal CPD. And psychological research has so much to offer education.

Schools are notoriously complex environments and psychology can contribute to understanding the social context, the cognitive learning processes, the individual differences, the developmental stages that may boundary learning, how mental health can impact learning, and so much more.

Yet invaluable psychological research is inaccessible to most teachers for a host of reasons. Firstly, it is often behind a paywall that schools and teachers can’t get past (though open source access is getting better). It is also full of jargon – the first six months of embarking on a Psychology course is essentially learning a new language.

To read and critically evaluate research requires a degree of research literacy. Most teachers do not come from a social science background (their degrees are usually in their subject specialism, especially at secondary) and they will have little, if any, experience of research during their teacher training. Simply put, this means that many cannot grasp the more nuanced aspects of psychological research.

Even if they have had this training once they are in the job, teachers are notoriously time poor and so having

trauma informed in our approaches.

Teachers can make a real, tangible difference through their day-to-day responses to children, they just need to know how! But the way in which

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the psychologist june 2022 culture

the information is communicated holds significant importance as it directly impacts whether there will be a change in practice, and therefore, outcomes for the children.

Although there is a lot of relevant research out there, there is often no obvious connection to the day-today experiences teachers are having.

How does neuroscience link to why Jack is pulling down the display or why Sarah hides under tables? Why does shouting not work as a method of responding to a distressed child?

Psychology most definitely has a place in education. It can be used to raise standards and explain why old methods and approaches are outdated and no longer work. It has the power to help change culture and shift mindsets, if particular attention is paid to how the information is communicated. It makes the difference between something that resonates, and something that is forgotten and cannot be applied.

We must begin to close the gap between theory and practice if we want psychology to have any tangible impact.

I work with schools to help close the gap between theory and practice in a practical, tangible way.

My aim is to make trauma informed, attachment aware theory relevant in the classroom setting. I help head teachers roll out whole-school approaches to change mindsets and culture, to ensure children are guided through their emotional states in a connective way. This helps raise their emotional intelligence and their own awareness of their mental health, as well as upskilling the teachers.

Podcasts can be a great way to weave research and theory into CPD, to ensure it is easy to understand and is relevant to day-to-day scenarios. I have witnessed the significant impact this can have on the lives of children.

Shahana Knight is a Childhood trauma specialist. www.tpctherapy.co.uk Podcast (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon): The Therapeutic Teacher Podcast with Shahana Knight.

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A novel work-life balance solution

tv Severance Apple TV+

When you’re at home, do you spend too much time thinking about work problems? When you’re at work, do you daydream about being anywhere but there? Maybe severance is the answer.

Severance is in the small but perfectly-formed tradition of what one might call neuro fiction – think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. In Severance, the Lumon Corporation have invented a brain implant which means that when a worker is on the ‘severed’ floor of their offices, they have no memories at all of their home life. Travelling back in the lift to leave work, the worker switches to home mode: nothing at all of work is remembered. It elegantly solves the problem of wasting time thinking about the place where you’re not.

We pick up with Mark (Adam Scott) finding himself promoted to team leader, replacing Petey (Yul Valaquez), who seems to have quit.

Mark is diligent and likeable. He is immediately tasked by his sinister manager Ms Cobel (Patricia Arquette) to induct new team member Helly (Brit Lower). We quickly understand that inducting staff on the severed floor is not like any other place of work. Whilst there’s a need to understand the actual work – although it seems largely pointless – the severed employee has absolutely no idea why they are there, and no frame of reference. A recording from her ‘outie’ gives validity to the fact that Helly (and all other severed staff) made an independent decision to become severed – but why?

As the series progresses, ‘outie’

Mark starts to make discoveries, prompted by the appearance of Petey – a stranger to him, but apparently his best friend at Lumon. Petey thinks Lumon is up to no good. What, after all, are Lumon’s reasons for developing the severed procedure? Is it a benign way of allowing workers to concentrate on work without intruding on their home life? Or is it necessary for workers to be unable to share what Lumon do? Petey seems to have reintegrated his mind, but at what cost?

The questions mount up for ‘innie’ Mark as well. What is the nature of free choice, if you are only ever in possession of half the facts?

The severed person is physically the same at work and home, and their personality is unaltered. But are we ourselves without all our memories?

The artificial separation of memories effectively creates two people, who seem increasingly at odds with each other.

The world-building in Severance is deft and intelligent, always showing and not telling – which pays off in buckets in the case of the ‘waffle party’. There’s bleak humour throughout, but it’s perfectly balanced with subtle emotions, shot through with fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

There were points when I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen, yet was confident that it was going to make sense in this world.

Treat yourself and watch this – work won’t look the same again.

Reviewed by Kate Johnstone, Associate Editor for Culture

16/05/2022 12:25

We dip into the Society member database and pick out…

Dr Nandini Jayachandran Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology & Head of the Department of Clinical Psychology, Institute for Communicative & Cognitive Neurosciences, Trivandrum, Kerala One challenge at work My job entails clinical case management, teaching, and research in neurodevelopmental disorders. In a typical workday I apportion time to handle therapy sessions, evaluate and assess new clients, and have discussions and offer guidance to my research staff. In addition, I take up teaching assignments which I thoroughly enjoy.

Handling all these roles together is often challenging, but I am a novelty seeker – I find something new in them every day.

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One article from The Psychologist ‘A revolution for the at-risk’ by Emily J.H. Jones and Mark H. Johnson in September 2016 sheds light on the changes needed to target the mechanisms underlying the surface features of conditions like autism and ADHD, so that children at heightened risk can be helped, rather than waiting for the emergence of a recognisable clinical syndrome.

coming soon… our special July/August issue around the BPS Senate theme of ‘tackling class-based inequality’; 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

One book During my initial days in clinics, autism was a challenging condition to manage, and I was finding it difficult to figure out what meaning the restricted behaviours and interests might have for them. Thinking in pictures by Dr Temple Grandin, a scientist and autism advocate, was an eye-opener which resulted in a sea change in the way I began to offer therapies to autistic people.

Also, Fractured Minds: A case study approach to clinical neuropsychology, edited by Jenni A. Ogden, helped me learn the neurological underpinnings of conditions in simple and lucid language, and about neuropsychological testing and its interpretation.

One challenge In India there is a lopsided importance given to Clinical Psychology, which in itself has a vast number of sub-specialities. At times it gives a wrong impression that Psychology is limited to that only. The challenge is to start more diverse practical courses, both Degree and Diploma level, in areas like Organisational Behaviour, Rehabilitation Psychology, and Educational Psychology. This will ensure that specific client populations get quality psychological assistance.

One thing psychologists should be proud of We are often looked upon by the public with hope, as people they can depend on, share their concerns and deepest problems with, and ultimately help them to be better.

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… …June 2020, ‘Psychology has a sexual harassment problem…’ …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist the

psychologist june 2020

june 2020

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One nugget of advice No psychologist, however qualified, is competent enough without years of experience with patients/clients. They are your best teachers. Each case shows another aspect about a diagnosis or symptom which you may not have noticed before, which will surprise you, if you are open enough in each new case as your first case. This will stir your interest and curiosity, inspire you to read and

learn more, and help you to become a better psychologist.

the psychologist

One film The Hundred-Foot Journey is a 2014 IndoAmerican comedy drama about the cold war between two chefs – a Michelin-starred restaurant owner (Helen Mirren) and an immigrant Indian chef (Om Puri) who work 100ft across the road from each other. I remember its portrayal of jealousy and bitterness, and the slow eventual acceptance of the culinary skills of the Indian chef’s son (Mangal Pandey). It is a reassuring depiction of how a true professional with integrity can appreciate, mentor and support others who are talented in their sphere of expertise.

one on one

Psychology has a sexual harassment problem… … and tackling it requires reckoning with the past that brought us here, argue Jacy Young and Peter Hegarty

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Much more via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

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The Psychologist is one part of the British Psychological Society’s communications, centred on being a magazine about psychology and psychologists.

See also the society website, member emails and more…

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

Society Trustees www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are President Katherine Carpenter President Elect Dr Nicky Hayes Honorary General Secretary Christina Buxton Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Professor Niamh Stack Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Member Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Andrew Tolmie Trustees Dr Peter Branney Dr Esther Cohen-Tovee Dr Adam Jowett

Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa Change Programme Director and Deputy CEO Diane Ashby

society notices

society vacancies

Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton

Essential knowledge for the expert witness p.19 European Congress of Psychology p.22-23 BPS at London Pride p.33 BPS Learn p.60 DcoP Annual Conference p.63

Practice Guideline revision p.45 Chair of Practice Board p.39

Director of Finance and Resources Phil Hodgett Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards Karen Beamish

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

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