The Psychologist July 2017

the psychologist

the

psychologist july 2017

july 2017

Faces in the wild Brian Parkinson on interpersonal effects of facial expression

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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12/06/2017 16:26

the psychologist

the

psychologist july 2017

july 2017

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

CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB recruitment Kai Theriault 01223 378051 kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk display Michael Niskin 01223 378 045 michael.niskin@cpl.co.uk June 2017 issue 49,427 dispatched design concept Darren Westlake www.TUink.co.uk cover Latitude Festival: we will be appearing again this year! printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper 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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Faces in the wild Brian Parkinson on interpersonal effects of facial expression

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera, Emma Young

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Culture Kate Johnstone, Sally Marlow Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus, Asifa Majid The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Phil Banyard, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Peter Olusoga, Richard Stephens

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psychologist july 2017

Tony Dale

02 Letters 10 News Terrorism; and more

20 Summer activity!

Quiz,

crossword;

and more

24 Excellence amongst piers Reports from the Society’s Annual Conference in Brighton

38 Is slowness the essence of knowledge?

Eloise Stark

42 Pull up a chair Matthew Pugh on chairwork

48 False memories of childhood abuse Chris Brewin and Bernice Andrews consider the evidence

54 Faces in the wild Brian Parkinson

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‘A man got to do what he got to do’ Chris Athanasiadis on men and the stoic approach

66 ‘Living well with dementia has become a key focus of policy’ We meet Linda Clare

72 Careers We meet James Olav Hill, and Hugh McCredie

Books 78

Including Jackie Abell’s shelfie

Culture 84

Reviews, plus a special feature

on ‘the power of the arts’

92 Looking back

Immanuel Kant’s influence

96

A to Z

This was my 18th British Psychological Society Annual Conference, and still they can surprise me. In Brighton, it was James Pennebaker (see p.35). At the first evening social event, on the pier, he had spent it being generous, interesting and attentive. As the night drew to a close, he asked me hopefully ‘Do you know Catherine Lido? I heard her give an absolutely fascinating talk this morning, I’d really like to meet her.’ What point am I making related to this month’s content?

None really, I just thought Pennebaker’s presence at the conference from beginning to end was an example to all, and the type of thing that makes Society conferences so valuable.

I know it’s not always easy to make time for The Psychologist (in print, let alone our increasing amount of exclusive online content). And many of you will ruefully say ‘summer break? What summer break?’ But I hope you get a chance to dip into another packed and varied issue, including some summer fun on p.20.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

We stand together I

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n the wake of terrorist atrocities communities erupt with questions, polarised debates gain traction on both sides, and in the information age we are more overwhelmed with hearsay, witness accounts and theories than ever before.

We may never fully understand the psychology behind radicalisation and actual attacks, but there are numerous practitioners and researchers up for the challenge – our Twitter call quickly revealed several of them.

‘Terrorism today involves men, women and children from all walks of life, all socio-economic backgrounds and all levels of religiosity and ideological commitment,’ said Professor John G. Horgan (Georgia State University).

‘Surprisingly there is so much we don’t know about terrorist psychology. For too long, psychologists haven’t really tackled the question of terrorism seriously.’

There are many paths into terrorism, Horgan added, but typically it is a gradual process characterised by a very supportive group psychology. Moral outrage is common among those who become terrorists: they will often begin to believe that they represent a broader, victimised community that needs vanguards to stand up for them.

Horgan said it’s important not to overlook the more mundane qualities of involvement, which act as a magnet for recruits. ‘The promise of a better life, a sense of adventure, excitement, camaraderie, identity and purpose. These are the day-to-day motivational factors that help convince new recruits that this is something worth doing. Ideology is also important, but it’s unclear precisely how and when it matters. Some people are ideological to begin with, others become ideological only after joining.’ Motivation shifts the longer a person spends in a group: ‘New recruits eventually learn how to better convince themselves and others why they are doing what

they are doing. They learn the ideology, they talk the talk as it were. This is tremendously empowering.’

Professor Coral Dando, a Consultant Forensic Psychologist (University of Westminster), worked for the Metropolitan Police for 13 years before moving into academia. She emphasised the vital importance of communities, and community policing, in helping to halt radicalisation. ‘There are a number of preconditions which motivate potential terrorists, such as racial and religious discrimination, economic exclusion and social exclusion, all of which happen within communities.

Certain triggers, both large and small scale, can lead a person to act on their beliefs, and these things occur in a community environment.’

The evidence shows a reluctance to report suspicious behaviour (see tinyurl.com/ycg4aju4). The monumental impact of pointing the finger at a neighbour or friend, Dando said, may be just too great. She added: ‘For me as an ex-police officer I wonder if a reduction in community policing may have an impact on someone’s ability or desire to tell. Community policing helps build up rapport with communities, people feel they can come and speak to you. I suspect that people feel socially and economically excluded, and when groups feel marginalised they tend to look inwards rather than outwards.’

How might we improve people’s ability to speak about any suspicions they may have? Dando said we should help to support people to come forward to authorities in a supportive environment, in a way that protects them and emphasises they are doing the right thing. She added: ‘After the recent attacks communities who felt they were being grouped together as being part of that radicalised and terrorist agenda, which of course they aren’t, came

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the psychologist july 2017 news out very, very quickly and very verbally, to say “don’t include us in this group”… that’s really useful. As the MP Jo Cox said, there’s far more that unites us than divides us. That’s a very useful thing for us all to bear in mind.’

Recent terrorist attacks in the West have, with some exceptions, been unsophisticated, often a lone actor using knives, cars and guns. Dr Paul Gill (University College London), an expert on lone wolf attacks, said this type of action was originally promoted by right-wing groups around 25 years ago. Gill said the biggest reason jihadis were slow to adopt these low-tech attacks ‘was because there was a sense that, in order for them to gain international press coverage, they would need a very sophisticated plan. What helped broker that divide, I feel, was the attack on Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich. They showed how they could do something that was low-key, hard to detect, but ultimately would create enough theatre that their identities and so on would be out there.’

It emerged soon after the recent attack at London Bridge and Borough Market that only one of the three perpetrators was unknown to UK police and security services, but Gill noted that ‘the UK hasn’t got bad at counter terrorism overnight’, and that they can point to a number of big successes in the last few months.

‘From what we can tell, the individuals were reported as displaying signs of radicalisation. That doesn’t fit the threshold that would necessitate an immediate intervention, given the large numbers of individuals who are of concern in the UK at the moment.’

Gill’s own research on lone actors saw that around 60 per cent of people in perpetrators’ social circles knew the specific details of their upcoming attack. Similarly, research by Horgan found an overwhelming majority of at-risk young Somali men in America would not tell authorities if a friend planned to travel to Syria – largely out of a fear of getting their friend or themselves into trouble. Gill added: ‘We’ve done some survey research, and sometimes people just don’t know where to come forward with information or what to report. There’s a tricky balancing act for the police and intelligence services… it’s already a case of finding a needle in a haystack, and if they have some really, really risk-averse people reporting all sorts of nonsense that might just be throwing more hay at the problem.’

Theresa May, shortly after the London Bridge and Borough Market attack, suggested heavier regulation of the internet would help to combat radicalisation and extremism. Gill said while that is a politically useful factor to target, radicalisation is rarely a fully online process. ‘If individuals want to carry out a violent act they will find a way to do it whether they have the internet or not. It might be helpful in some investigations, but I think there’s a lot of other factors going on and root cause grievances that aren’t being addressed.’

From a lay perspective it seems likely these low-tech attacks could lead to more copycats (perhaps especially when the perpetrators receive so much media coverage, not always unfavourable). Indeed, Brusthom Ziamani was foiled in his attempt to copy the murder of Lee Rigby, and had even memorised the speech one of the original

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attackers made following the killing. Gill said: ‘We know there’s diffusion and intuitively, to me, it feels like these attacks cluster in time. I feel there’s an elevated risk in the immediate aftermath of a successful attack. In those instances there are people that are radicalised, have an intent, but haven’t built up the psychological fortitude to go out the door and do something, and seeing others get out over the line builds up their courage to do it.’

The rolling coverage in traditional and social media may also make images of carnage more salient, thus increasing feelings of risk. While it’s difficult to find the true level of threat, it is important to think about attacks in context. Gill said: ‘We’ve had three successfully executed attacks here in a very short space of time. But these are largely amateur, they’re not like the very sophisticated, command-and-control-oriented attacks of the IRA. The UK survived that, so we shouldn’t be cowed and in fear. The reason these guys are turning to vehicles, knives, and so on is because of the successes of the counter terrorism services in preventing larger-scale bombings and attacks.’

Research Fellow Dr Julia Pearce (King’s College London) has been looking into the public responses to terrorist attacks and how best to communicate risk to the general population. In the immediate aftermath of an attack the public play an important role in warning and protecting others as well as helping those who have been injured. ‘Depending on the scale and nature of an attack, the ability of hospitals to cope with an influx of patients may rely on the cooperation of the public.

The speed with which a city can “return to normal” will also be determined by people’s willingness to use public transport and return to affected areas.’

Pearce said her and colleagues’ work had shown that communicating with the public about terrorism doesn’t necessarily increase the perception of risk, but can provide reassurance that security services are well prepared to respond. She added: ‘Effective advice on what to do in the event of an attack should be targeted at encouraging specific behaviours and should take into account public risk perceptions, as well as their perceptions regarding the efficacy of recommended behaviours and the ease of carrying out these instructions. The emotional costs also need to be considered. For example, instructions to shelter in place may not be followed if this prevents parents from collecting their children from school. Furthermore, the success or failure of risk communication is strongly and consistently mediated by levels of trust in the communicators of the message.’

Other respondents to our Twitter call included Orla Lynch, researching British Muslim youth; Simona Di Folco, exploring perceptions of terrorism through art; Paul Hutchings, researching attitudes to attacks; Laura Kilby, looking at how we talk about terrorism; and Kate Hooper, studying how British Muslims culturally construct terrorism. Just as there has been a huge public response to the latest attacks, it seems there is an ongoing scientific response: talk to us about it @psychmag or by emailing psychologist@bps.org.uk. er

12/06/2017 16:34

‘Never before had such a witch hunt been initiated’ Amnesty International has urged the government of Turkey to end the mass dismissal of public servants, including academics, on vague and generalised grounds.

Around 100,000 people in total and 5000 academics, including psychologists, have been affected.

In January 2016 the campaign group Academics for Peace held a public press conference to announce a petition signed by 1128 academics, demanding an end to human rights violations by the government in Turkey.

Immediately after this President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan publicly denounced all those who had signed the petition, accusing them of treason. Newspapers printed the names and photos of signatories, with many then fired from their jobs and some receiving death threats. One academic we spoke to, Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu, described the atmosphere following this as ‘one of lynching’.

Professor Değirmencioğlu, who was dismissed from his post at Istanbul’s Doğuş University in April 2016 due to his involvement with Academics for Peace, added: ‘Never before had such a witch hunt been initiated in the history of the Republic of Turkey. Away from the metropolitan cities, the situation was quite scary. In smaller cities, the danger was more imminent. An assistant professor from the local university came home to find police officers at work. They had raided her home, they took her laptops, flash disks and even her mobile phone.’ Değirmencioğlu, who has also served as the Vice President of the Turkish Psychological Association, has been declared an ‘at-risk’ academic by the Scholars at Risk network. He is now a visiting scholar at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

In July 2016 things took a turn for the worse after a failed coup resulted in the government enacting a state of emergency, which is still in effect, allowing it to assume extraordinary powers. The government of Turkey can issue executive decrees thanks to the state of emergency, Chris McGrath/Getty Images

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which have been used, among other things, to close NGOs and dismiss public sector employees en masse. According to the Amnesty report No End in Sight, these decrees are subject to little scrutiny from parliament or the courts.

The report states that more than 45,000 people have been remanded in pre-trial detention and the government has closed 375 NGOs in one decree alone, 165 media outlets and hundreds of associations, foundations and institutions. Those who have been dismissed following the coup were dismissed as ‘members of, connected to, or in communication with a terrorist organisation’ without any evidence being presented. Many feel they have been targeted due to their opposition to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) or other ‘illegitimate’ reasons.

As well as academics, 24,000 police officers, 22,000 teachers, and 6000 doctors have been dismissed; and 120 journalists are still awaiting trial since the coup attempt.

Ayşe Dayı, a former Assistant Professor and chairperson at the Department of Psychology at Istanbul 29 Mayis University, was dismissed from her role just days after the Academics for Peace petition was released to the public. Now a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, she has been helping colleagues in Turkey. Dayı told us of the huge impact of these dismissals as well as how to support colleagues in the country.

She said the mass dismissals and arrests clearly impacted on all aspects of academics’ lives: ‘We have heard of suicides already.’ Dayı suggested some practical ways to support those affected in Turkey, including donating to organisations such as Education International, which sends money to the Turkish Education Union that supports dismissed academics and other public workers.

A crowdfunding campaign has also been started in the USA by the Research Institute on Turkey (tinyurl.com/ momwgvc).

Universities can also join the Scholars at Risk Network, which, in part, helps to arrange positions for academics whose lives, liberty and wellbeing are under threat, or who have been forced to flee. The UKbased Council for At-Risk Academics similarly supports academics to find a place of safety to work.

Dayı highlights the Academics for Peace’s international call for an academic boycott of Turkish universities that have opened academic investigations or dismissed academics for signing the petition (academicboycottofturkey.wordpress.com). She added: ‘We call on our colleagues and the higher education institutions in all countries to suspend immediately all academic collaboration with these institutions that act against academic freedom. We ask universities to suspend all memoranda of understanding signed with these Turkish universities, research and education institutions, to withdraw from any joint research projects

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the psychologist july 2017 news or conferences organised with or by these universities, not to invite to academic conferences and meetings the chancellors and deans who were involved in making the decisions to undertake disciplinary investigations, dismiss or take other unlawful action against the Academics for Peace and remove such academics names from academic journals’ editorial boards and not elect them for international academic duties.’

We also spoke to Professor Steve Reicher (University of St Andrews), who is attending a meeting in Istanbul in June, organised by one group of academics. ‘There are a number of initiatives,’ he told us. ‘Both the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) and the European Society of Social Psychology (EASP) have been taking

action and there will be a discussion about solidarity with “at risk” academics – specifically Turkey – at July’s EASP meeting in Granada.’

Reicher says these discussions are aimed at clarifying the best ways we can help. ‘For instance, finding posts through the Council for At Risk Academics (CARA) for those who need to leave Turkey will be very valuable. But it won’t work for everyone. Lots of people are not only losing their jobs but also having their passports taken away. So we can’t support them by giving them jobs here. We might be able to help by funding jobs there. For instance, if people want to generate research projects which could be – at least in part – conducted in Turkey, then they could employ Turkish researchers on grants.’ er

A no-brainer in Bangor ‘Notice to all civilians… The risk of infection is high, please report to the safe quarantine zone in Pontio Base Five at 1200 hours on Friday 30 September. Stay safe, stay alert, and avoid the Infected.’ Imagine enrolling on a psychology course and receiving this message. That’s exactly what second-year behavioural psychology undergraduate students experienced at Bangor University at the beginning of a fully gamified module that taught behavioural psychology via the survival of a zombie apocalypse.

When the class arrived for their first lecture they were greeted by actors dressed as military personnel who asked them to be scanned for infection before entry.

Later they received ‘top secret’ documents explaining the game and their mission to fight the infection. Students received fully themed lectures and materials and each week were given online quizbased missions by key characters in the game encouraging them to read between lectures and gain points. These points helped students advance from ‘civilian’ level up to ‘resurrection prevention leader’ and could be exchanged for incentives (such as choosing the next assignment topic).

Senior Lecturer in Psychology Dr Rebecca Sharp said she carries out pedagogical research to find innovative and evidence-based ways of learning. She told us: ‘Psychology at Bangor has an international reputation in behaviour analysis and

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behaviour change, and using nudge techniques and gamification is an area of interest in the School. In fact, I learned about gamification from the Festival of Behaviour Change held in Bangor in 2016. It piqued my interest and I discovered that it has not often been applied systematically to university teaching.’

She explained: ‘Lectures involved a quiz at the beginning that covered the material from the previous lecture, called the “screening questions”, to check for infection. Lectures also used videos to illustrate the content being taught – for example, in a lecture teaching the factors influencing choice, the lecture was interrupted by a video of a young girl asking to be admitted to the safe base. Students were then asked to choose, thinking about the factors affecting choice they had just learned, whether to allow the girl to enter or not.’

The response from the students, she added, has been very positive.

The feedback at the end of the module found 70 per cent of students felt the gamification enhanced their learning, and 77 per cent enjoyed the gamification of the module. Sharp has been analysing students’ achievement in this module compared with a non-gamified version of the same module, as well as their performance on other modules they have completed so far. She added: ‘Preliminary results show a strong correlation between attendance and achievement, and

that attendance was much higher in the gamified module than in other modules and the previous year.’

Sharp and her colleagues hope to run the module again in the first semester of the next academic year and said she would like to develop software that would put more of the game components and data collection online. She told us the experience as a lecturer had been thoroughly enjoyable: ‘I loved seeing students engaging with the tasks and materials so enthusiastically. I was initially nervous to see the students’ reaction to such an immersive experience, the presence of actors, the events in the lectures, which were very dramatic! But my concerns were soon allayed by their enthusiasm.

It fuelled my passion for innovative teaching even further.’ er To read an article by Dr Sharp on the module written for The Conversation see tinyurl.com/ybp7bfvr

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Research digest ‘The truth is that everyone is bored,’ according to Albert Camus. But a study in the journal Emotion led by Alycia Chin, collaborating with a team from Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that experiences of boredom are rare; that boredom is more to do with what a person is doing than their individual characteristics; and that boredom has a strong relationship with anger (which goes against the idea that boredom, itself lowarousal, cannot mix with more intense feelings).

Do ‘Open’ people literally see the world differently? Anna Antinori and her colleagues, writing in the Journal of Research in Personality, claim to have ‘provided the first evidence that individuals reporting greater openness to experience may also have characteristically different low-level visual perceptual experiences’.

According to a new paper in Developmental Psychology, led by Kaili Clarkson at the University of Cambridge, children as young as 12-months-old can be taught to get better at focusing their attention – which may help with their acquisition of language, and other types of learning.

A new paper currently available as a preprint at PsyArXiv has tested whether findings from some subdisciplines in psychology may be more robust than others, in the sense of replicating reliably. Rolf Zwaan at Erasmus University Rotterdam and his colleagues found that all nine effects they examined from cognitive psychology, related to perception, memory and learning, replicated reliably. ‘These results represent good news for the field of psychology,’ they said.

These studies were covered, along with many more, by Dr Christian Jarrett, Dr Alex Fradera and Emma Young on our Research Digest blog at www.bps.org.uk/digest. Visit for daily studies, archive, podcast and more.

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5 minutes with…

Julie Stokes Winston’s Wish, the child bereavement charity, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. We spoke to its founder Julie Stokes, now an executive coach working with large businesses, about the charity’s work, the shift in approaches to child bereavement, and how all this has informed her work within business.

What do you think looking back over 25 years of Winston’s Wish?

It’s so often you hear that vulnerable children have experienced a bereavement… around 41 per cent of youth offenders have experienced childhood bereavement compared to the 4 per cent national average.

These are the areas where Winston’s Wish really fly a flag: sometimes the key preventative work done early on can make a tremendous difference.

The 25-year story of Winston’s Wish is so lovely to look back on now.

So many of those young people that we’ve worked with are doing amazing things. A fantastic example for me is Gemma Allen, who is now a wonderful senior practitioner within Winston’s Wish and is a champion for the work we do with children who have been bereaved by murder. Recently Channel 4 made an exquisite portrayal of life through the eyes of a child whose parent has been murdered, called A Killing in My Family. Gemma led that project and worked with the team at Winston’s Wish to bring together a group of families who were able to tell, in a confident way, their story and look at the benefits of what we would call peer support.

What’s changed in the approach to child bereavement over last 25 years?

We are talking about death, and I do think as a society we are becoming much more able to embrace the concept and reality of a good death. A child said to me years ago ‘Children can be seen but not sad’, but now we’re more able to tolerate the sadness of children than we were in the past. It’s one thing if adults can talk about it, but we’ll know we’ve

really made it in society when we can be genuinely inclusive of children when they’re going through loss.

The discussions around child bereavement are really coming of age now. When you get Princes Harry and William being able to talk about their bereavement, under a strategic flag of mental health, that shows a maturity of conversation you could not possibly have had 25 years ago. I always wanted to position Winston’s Wish as a non-pathological service.

These children are not sick, they’ve had something very difficult happen in their lives and they need to make sense of it. It’s quite a difficult message to give, because some will require more of a mental health approach. But in the main I think, as a society, we have got better at realising that the death of a parent is one of the most fundamental losses a child will ever face.

What does the future hold for Winston’s Wish?

Winston’s Wish creates a real sense of unity. One thing it’s looking to do this year is try and get that sense of belonging for adults who were bereaved as children as well. Social media really helps with some of these conversations too, and Winston’s Wish is really looking into that and how we can have some important conversations in different ways. I just love the way people are having much more open discussions with others online about this stuff.

How has your work in child bereavement informed working with businesses as an executive coach?

I have worked in very different sectors, and I think the thing that

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the psychologist july 2017 news

Gendered expectations

unifies those different sectors is the psychological skill base, though it gets dressed up, presented and valued in slightly different ways. I have colleagues who are consultant clinical psychologists working exclusively in the NHS, and sometimes you do forget how relevant and valuable that skill set is. Those skills are so relevant to people because, at the end of the day, wherever you’re working the core issues of how people think, feel and behave are the same. So, many of the rules and regulations on navigating your way through the career needs to open up. It’s a wonderful skill set to have to know what it means to be psychological.

What have been some of your proudest moments of the last 25 years?

I think the most delicious for me are the almost microscopic moments when somebody says something or a child comes out with a wisdom with confidence. I think some of the proudest moments are when you see 25 children united in sadness and then within moments afterwards you see them joking together and laughing and having a sense of togetherness. There’s something really beautiful for me about belonging. It’s the teamwork, the volunteers who were with us in the beginning too. My best friend’s husband, who was bereaved as a child, suggested all the presents for their wedding should be donated as money, which bought us our first ever leaflet on Winston’s Wish. The people make me most proud.

See winstonswish.org.uk for more

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A father and his son are involved in a car accident and taken to different hospitals, the boy to a children’s hospital and the father to the general hospital. When the boy arrives at hospital, the doctor on call is shocked, saying ‘I can’t treat this boy, he’s my son!’ The answer to the riddle, clearly, is that the doctor is the boy’s mother. Yet when I first heard this riddle, I was stumped: testament to the strength of negative stereotypes surrounding women’s scientific abilities.

Women who take degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects do just as well as their male colleagues, even though they are far outnumbered by them: in the UK, only 14 per cent of engineering and technology students, and 17 per cent of computer science students are women. The picture is similar in the USA, where Catherine Riegle-Crumb and Karisma Morton carried out a study, published recently in Frontiers in Psychology, to investigate why the numbers are so low.

The researchers focused on the time of life when occupational ambitions begin to take shape: adolescence. Adolescence is also a time when, for better or worse, individuals become increasingly conscious of their peers’ opinions.

In light of this, it stands to reason that teenagers’ decisions about their future could be influenced by the attitudes of those around them, both positively and negatively.

The researchers first measured the science and gender-related attitudes of male and female students aged 13 to 14 in science classrooms across a number of schools. On average, just 2 per cent of girls believed that boys were better at science, and 29 per cent of girls were very confident in their science ability, but 16 per cent of boys endorsed gender/STEM stereotypes.

Then the researchers caught up with the same students a year later, and asked them to indicate which subjects they were likely to study at university. The findings

differed markedly by STEM subject: of those intending to study biological or physical sciences, slightly more (52 per cent vs. 48 per cent) were girls, and for these subjects, neither the proportion of boys endorsing stereotypes nor the proportion of girls with high science confidence influenced girls’ intentions to pursue these subjects.

By contrast, only 33 per cent of students intending to study computer science or engineering were girls.

Crucially, girls’ intentions to study these subjects were influenced by their classroom environments, decreasing as the proportion of male classroom peers with stereotypical views increased, and increasing as the proportion of female peers who were very confident in their scientific ability increased. Boys’ intentions to study STEM subjects were not affected by these factors.

These new findings suggest social attitudes swirling around the classroom are affecting girls’ scientific ambitions in important ways. But if we can’t eradicate gender stereotypes, what can we do?

The findings give us an answer: provide girls with positive role models, whether these are female peers who are confident in their scientific abilities, or women scientists who can talk about their achievements and passion for their fields. Initiatives such as the WISE campaign and Inspiring the Future facilitate opportunities for women to speak to young people about their own careers and areas of interest.

And there is reason to be optimistic – the girls in this research were not deterred from studying biological or physical sciences, despite the presence of unhelpful stereotypes in their classrooms. With the right support and guidance, it may not be long before we can say the same about other STEM subjects as well.

Elizabeth Kirkham (PhD student, University of Sheffield) for the Research Digest. www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the study: tinyurl.com/ycafa4ue

12/06/2017 16:34

Hopeful dementia messages at the Imagination Café

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Robbie Lane, the Alzheimer’s Society

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A pop-up café that aimed to challenge the negative stigma around dementia and spread the word on innovative arts-based research appeared in Nottingham recently. As well as attracting This Is England actress Vicky McClure the café displayed artwork by those with dementia and gave visitors the chance to sample a ‘dementia-friendly afternoon tea’.

The Imagination Café, as it was called, was created by head of dementia care Professor Victoria Tischler (University of West London) in partnership with the Nottingham Contemporary gallery, an art space that has supported dementia research since it opened. As well as providing information about dementia itself courtesy of Dementia UK and the Alzheimer’s Society, and new research in the field, the café offered activities specially designed for those with dementia, including visual art, music, storytelling, drama and yoga – underpinned by the research of Tischler and her colleagues.

Tischler told us she was initially keen to exhibit some of the artwork created by people with dementia as part of the Dementia and Imagination project she has been involved with.

She said: ‘The art was not made to be exhibited, but some of it was very accomplished and interesting, yet would probably be discarded.

I thought that if it were framed and exhibited, many people may be surprised that someone with dementia could paint or draw so well, and create something interesting or even beautiful.’

This evolved into something more. Tischler said she was inspired by the trend for pop-up shops and food trucks to create a welcoming, fun environment where people would feel comfortable to come and talk about dementia. She explained: ‘Dementia is viewed so negatively, in fact it is the condition that people are most afraid of, so the Imagination Café was an opportunity to challenge this negativity as part of Dementia

Awareness Week. The artwork showcased the innovative research work that I and others are doing, and the café and other activities gave the public a chance to visit to find out more about dementia.’

The project also included posters displayed at bus stops in Nottingham that featured art made by research participants from the Dementia and Imagination project and a call to action to #UniteAgainstDementia.

Students from the Alzheimer’s Society’s Arts and Dementia Doctoral Training Centre, the Dementia Arts and Wellbeing network, and the Centre for Dementia (University of Nottingham) were also involved, along with volunteers who are living with dementia and their carers.

Actress Vicky McClure, who is an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society, went to the event and sampled a dementiafriendly afternoon tea created by nutritionist Jane Clarke with the help of Michelin-trained chef Andreas Wingert. Tischler said hundreds of people had visited the café, and

added: ‘There was singing and dancing, tears as well as laughter.

Overall people said they felt welcome, and relieved, to get a hopeful message about dementia in contrast to the often negative coverage. Many people had questions about dementia and worries about their own or a loved one’s health.’

Tischler said she hopes to take the café to Llandudno in North Wales, Edinburgh and London, working alongside collaborators in each place to give the event a bespoke feel.

She will also be appearing for The Psychologist at this year’s Latitude Festival alongside BPS Vice President Professor Peter Kinderman (University of Liverpool) and consultant psychiatrist Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, in conversation around ‘a manifesto for psychological health and wellbeing’. er See also our interview with Linda Clare in this issue (p.66). For more information on the Dementia and Imagination project see tinyurl.com/o3bp6jp

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the psychologist july 2017 news

Psychedelic drugs and ‘heightened consciousness’ data analysed by the new paper was led by Robin CarhartHarris, at Imperial College, London. Carhart-Harris (who is listed a co-author on the new paper) has previously argued that his team’s findings of greater ‘entropy’ – greater disorder – in patterns of brain activity observed in people who had taken psilocybin could be interpreted as evidence in support of the claim that psychedelics can ‘expand consciousness’.

Whether they heighten it, and/or expand it, the new findings will feed into discussions about the medical and therapeutic uses of these drugs, including in treating PTSD and depression – though it’s still early days for this research.

In the new paper, Seth and colleagues reported a correlation between changes in the diversity of neural signals and the intensity of experiences – such as feelings of floating, of time being distorted, of a disintegration of the self and of sounds influencing vision – reported by the volunteers.

At the moment, it’s not clear which specific changes in brain activity underpin which aspects of the psychedelic experience. But the researchers involved in the new paper are planning work to investigate this.

Bestdesigns/Getty Images

Is there anything psychedelic drugs can’t do? A recent wave of scientific scrutiny has revealed that they can elicit ‘spiritual’ experiences, alleviate end-of-life angst, and perhaps treat depression – and they might achieve at least some of all this by ‘heightening consciousness’, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A team at the University of Sussex, led by Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, re-analysed existing magneto-encephalography (MEG) brain-imaging data recorded from healthy people who had taken doses of either psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD or ketamine in the lab and then focused on their ensuing experience. MEG uses magnetic fields at the brain’s surface to identify patterns of neural activity – it’s very sensitive to changes from one moment to the next but not so accurate in terms of locating activity.

Compared with people in a normal waking state, all the dosed-up volunteers, regardless of which drug they’d taken, showed a ‘sustained increase in neural diversity’.

‘During the psychedelic state, the electrical activity of the brain is less predictable and less “integrated” than during normal conscious wakefulness – as measured by “global signal diversity”,’ Seth explained in a press release from the university.

Since this unpredictability and diversity is greater in people who are awake (so who are conscious) than people who are asleep (who are not conscious), the data from people under the influence of psychedelics could be interpreted as signifying an even higher level of consciousness than is experienced during normal wakefulness, the team argued.

The original brain-scanning study that produced the

Emma Young, Staff Writer, for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest For the journal article: tinyurl.com/y8eufd5a

Lifetime achievement Occupational Psychologist Dr Angela Carter has been given a lifetime achievement award for her work in the European Association of Work and Organisation Psychology (EAWOP) enhancing communication of psychology across the continent. Dr Carter, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, lobbied for the Division of Occupational Psychology to join the association and helped increase membership from 10 to 34 countries.

Dr Carter also established a

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regular international forum for practitioners in the form of the Worklab, which is taking place this year in Riga, focusing on organisation and culture change. Dr Carter (Institute of Work Psychology, Sheffield University Management School) also established the e-journal EWOP in Practice, which focuses on the application of work and organisational psychology in Europe and was first published in 2006.

‘I have a passion to apply learning to practice. Success to me isn’t just imparting learning to other people

– it’s encouraging others to do the same. I have been able to apply learning to various activities I have been able to undertake through EAWOP - the recognition of my work through this award is a delight to me,’ she said.

Dr Carter also remains active in the British Psychological Society and is the Division of Occupational Psychology’s leading voice on youth employment, her main area of research (see our June 2015 issue), as well as being a former Chair of the Division. Dr Carter was presented with the award at the recent EAWOP conference in Dublin. er

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A psychology summer

Crossword

across 1 Having a problem, in a sense? Doctor had for trial (4,2,7) 8 Work on nervous spasm pertaining to sight (5) 9 Take in tea, perhaps (3) 10 Some nutmeggy hallucinations backed by a cosy concept explored by Maik Wiking in May (5) 12 Former partner’s nice pot turned out to be a special case (9) 13 Support at home provides location of the circle of Willis (5) 14 Preparing for publication, but shifting 19d when calorie watching (7) 15 Sees about Anglican diocese to start with, but formally withdraws (7) 17 Body of knowledge, not against knowledge of right and wrong (7) 20 Concealed mic next to short loft space reveals Italian car (7) 22 Set of people in therapy, perhaps, become mature before losing direction (5) 24 Relating to sitting – losses in a criminal fashion (9) 25 Second long part of book binding (5) 26 Long time to mature (3) 27 Store cremated remains in tavern round old city (5) 28 Control debate she only twisted (4,2,3,4) down 2 Case involving half of attachment theories conservatives dismissed? (7) 3 Paltering, say, with unfortunate poetic end (9) 4 Love affair without extremely emotive sentiment (7) 5 Furthest ends of former shelters? (7) 6 Restorative therapy shortly given in pure habitat (5) 7 Mean one to be pullin’ up (7) 8 Excessive uses of drugs - or saved egos after treatment? (11) 11 Province’s ability seen in short rules in town (11) 16 Process of reasoning without note on acknowledgment (9) 18 Love stories heard after one party (7) 19 Feeling of bliss in subject of drug education programme (7) 20 Do some appealing French art in wood (7) 21 Among Chinese criminals, EU turns to mouth organs (7) 23 Request soft metal (5)

We set some challenges to keep you occupied over the holidays 1 Send a friend, anonymously, something you think will brighten their day; plus a note encouraging them to do the same.

2 Take a walk to a street with a psychological name, and when you get there tweet us a photo.

3 Think about three novel uses for a white bear.

And then stop thinking about it.

4 Tweet us a ‘news cliché photo’ related to your life in psychology: for example, you holding an oversized grant cheque, looking angry in front of the thing that’s making you angry, or leaping in the air with a group of your mates while holding your exam results.

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the psychologist july 2017 summertime

5 Embrace your failures by writing a ‘negative CV’ (you can find Aidan Horner’s online).

6 Write and post a letter of gratitude to someone who has helped you along the way in psychology.

7 Tweet us a photo of you ‘hadouken-ing’, ‘Vader-ing’, or achieving a perspective illusion using your copy of The Psychologist. (If you’re visiting Paris or Pisa this summer, this one’s for you).

8 Tell us what makes you laugh by adding a comment at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ what-i-seek-when-i-need-laugh 9 Reimagine a chart hit as a journal article title, for example Michael, G. & Ridgeley, A. (1984). Living organ donation: recipient rejection predicts donor regret at one-year follow up. Journal of Christmas, 1a, 51.

Identify the three famous figures. Email your answers to psychologist@bps.org.uk with the subject line ‘Summer quiz picture round’: one randomly selected person will win an autobiography from one of the people.

10 Find and play a song in your musical collection which has a link to psychology.

11 Dig out the earliest piece of your own psychology writing you have, and marvel at the neatness of your handwriting.

12 Write us a cathartic letter saying how this is all frivolous nonsense and it would never have been allowed in the days of the Bulletin.

To share your progress on Twitter, please tag @psychmag and use the hashtag #PsySummer

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Is slowness the essence of knowledge?

Eloise Stark looks at whether ‘slow and steady wins the race’

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enerally we associate speed with positive outcomes. Being ‘fast’ is perceived as good; being ‘slow’ is perceived as bad. Quiz shows demonstrate the benefits of fast thinking – speedy responses win prizes, while hesitation costs points. In most careers, including academia, speed is valued. But speed isn’t everything, and slowness may in fact be more beneficial to us in many circumstances. In our age of snap judgements and instant opinions, slowness and deliberative contemplation may be more important than we realise.

In his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman suggested that the human mind consists of two competing systems. His central hypothesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: ‘System 1’ is fast, instinctive and emotional. ‘System 2’ is slower, effortful, more deliberative, conscious, and more logical. To illustrate the two, imagine you see an angry face in a crowd – you will instantly focus on that individual because your brain perceives a threat and works quickly to identify it in order to keep you safe.

This is an example of the ‘fast’ system. Our brains are hardwired to respond quickly to certain cues in the environment, and this helps us to survive.

In the battle of the popular science books, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2007 Blink exalts the virtue of ‘thinking without thinking’. His central idea is that spontaneous decisions are often as good as, or superior to, carefully planned and considered ones. Gladwell’s acclamation for snap judgements and first impressions has many parallels with Kahneman’s concept of ‘fast’ thinking.

Yet there are many situations when our brains take longer to complete tasks – using Kahneman’s ‘slow’ system. For instance, complete this sum: 498 + 813. I bet you really had to think – that is your ‘slow’ system which allows you to process more tricky situations.

And as I will demonstrate here, slowness is vital to many situations, and may also provide a hallmark of a healthy brain and mind.

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Slowness and food In 1986 there was uproar when a McDonald’s fast food restaurant was scheduled to open in the picturesque Piazza di Spagna in Rome. This was led by a man called Carlo Petrini, who subsequently inaugurated the ‘slow food’ movement. In contrast to fast food, diners were encouraged to source food from sustainable sources, but also to increase gastronomic pleasure by eating in a slow, relaxed way. Taste and pleasure of food are linguistically linked to slowness, such as in the phrase ‘to savour’ what you are eating. In keeping with the mantra of the ‘slow food’ movement, there is evidence that slower eating leads to greater satiety, and greater pleasure (Andrade et al., 2008). In contrast, fast eating can lead to obesity, and healthier individuals tend to engage in slower eating. Given the worldwide obesity epidemic, such findings may be significant.

Slow brain processes – cognitive reappraisal There are many brain processes that could be labelled ‘slow’ processes, but one that stands out is cognitive reappraisal. Reappraisal is defined as the regulation of inner states, primarily emotions, through modification of the original reaction. Emotions prompt rapid responses within us. Just like ‘fast’ thinking, emotions involve changes to multiple response systems: behavioural, experiential and physiological.

An emotion generally has an identifiable impetus or trigger, either in the external environment or internally, such as a thought. The stimulus that prompts the response may have intrinsic affective properties, such as an aversive shock, or may have a learned emotional value.

If emotions prompt rapid responses, cognitive reappraisal is the ability to more slowly re-evaluate our initial reaction. This slower process allows us to regulate our own emotions and respond more appropriately to situations. For instance, imagine we are walking down the street and we pass a friend. We lift our arm and wave to them and say hello, but they simply carry on walking as if they don’t know us.

Our first, fast, reaction may be to suppose that they deliberately ignored us, perhaps prompting emotions such as anger or sadness, which can spiral into a negative mood. However, if we are able to reappraise

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the psychologist july 2017 slowness eve_eve01genesis/Getty Images

‘Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

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the situation more slowly, and come to a more balanced view, we may be able to avoid the negative emotional consequences. Perhaps he just didn’t see us? Perhaps he was having a bad day and didn’t feel like talking? Reappraisal allows us to focus on the facts, considering more balanced opinions and thereby regulating our emotions.

There is good evidence that the slow process of cognitive reappraisal can be good for us. Successful reappraisal lowers measures of negative emotions and is linked with adaptive long-term improvements in everyday functioning (Dillon & Labar, 2005). Cognitive reappraisal may also be a crucial factor within Key sources cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT. Its importance is demonstrated Buhle, J.T., Silvers, J.A., Wager, T.D. by the finding that reappraisal et al. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal alone has been found to mediate of emotion. Cerebral Cortex, 24(11), the effects of individual CBT for 2981–2990. social anxiety (Goldin et al., 2012).

Chang, C. & Glover, G.H. (2010). Timefrequency dynamics of resting-state Crucially, individual differences in brain connectivity measured with fMRI. the ability to regulate one’s emotions Neuroimage, 50, 81–98. using processes such as cognitive Garety, P., Waller, H., Emsley, R. et al. reappraisal might be related to (2015). Cognitive mechanisms of change both normal and pathological in delusions. Schizophrenia Bulletin. 41, variations in wellbeing (Ochsner & 400–410.

Goldin, P., Ziv, M., Jazaieri, H. et Gross, 2005). The role of cognitive al. (2012). Cognitive reappraisal reappraisal variations in mental self-efficacy mediates the effects of illness is an interesting route still individual cognitive-behavioral therapy to follow. for social anxiety disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80(6), 1034–1040.

Kringelbach, M.L., Lehtonen, A., Squire, S. et al. (2008). A specific and rapid neural signature for parental instinct.

PLoS ONE 3(2), e1664.

Kringelbach, M.L., McIntosh, A.R., Ritter, P. et al. (2015). The rediscovery of slowness: Exploring the timing of cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10): 616–628.

Kringelbach, M.L., Stark, E.A., Alexander, C. et al. (2016). On cuteness: Unlocking the parental brain and beyond. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(7): 545–558.

Lakens, D. & Evers, E.R. (2014). Sailing from the seas of chaos into the corridor of stability: Practical recommendations to increase the informational value of studies. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(3): 278–292.

Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 242–249.

Parsons, C.E., Young, K.S., Mohseni, H. et al. (2013). Minor structural abnormalities in the infant face disrupt neural processing: A unique window into early caregiving responses. Social Neuroscience, 8, 268–274.

Full list available in online / app version.

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Slowness and mental illness The distinction between fast and slow thinking has yet to be applied explicitly to the realm of psychiatry, yet many forms of psychopathology revolve around repeated failures to adaptively regulate our emotional responses. A deficit in ‘slow’ thinking processes may underlie these difficulties, and slowness may even be a hallmark of the ‘healthy’ brain (Kringelbach et al., 2015).

In psychosis, a disorder where people lose touch with reality,

recent research has also pointed towards slowness and ‘slow’ thinking as a marker of recovery. In a 2015 study Philippa Garety and colleagues found that helping people with persecutory delusions to slow down their thinking, and be aware of ‘fast’ thoughts, reduced their levels of paranoia. Their patients stopped instantly jumping to conclusions in keeping with their persecutory beliefs, and were able to challenge them.

Slowness may here too be a route to recovery and could provide a cognitive index to help clinicians to work out when patients are getting better. Garety and colleagues also suggest that slowness should be a prime target for cognitive mechanisms of change in delusions.

New therapies may greatly benefit from inducing ‘slow’ thinking in patients. As many psychiatric illnesses and substance-use disorders involve impulsivity and compulsivity, interventions that aim to induce slowness may become more widespread.

Slow science At the heart of the slow science movement is a strong opposition to performance targets, and an emphasis instead upon slow, methodical processes and quality-driven research. Proponents such as Uta Frith argue that the current academic environment encourages scientists to strive for fame, promotions and tenure by propelling their results and reviews into print. However, they argue that the emphasis upon productivity is too aggressive, leading to mistakes being made and a lack of quality.

The pressure to publish facing many academics is said to drive down the quality of research. Daniel Sarewitz argues that large bodies of published scientific research are unreliable or of poor quality, citing a ‘compulsion’ to publish as a causal factor. Indeed, the mantra ‘publish or perish’ appears to have become a widespread marker of the academic lifestyle. There is even statistical evidence that many low-powered studies yield more statistically significant results, suggesting that the most ‘productive’ researchers may in fact be the least reliable (Lakens & Evers, 2014).

Slowness and the human brain The virtues of slowness have also been explored within neuroscience, where slowness of thought has been found to be an important property of brain function.

This work directly translates Kahneman’s fast and slow systems into tractable brain mechanisms and dynamics. For instance, neuroimaging studies have consistently demonstrated that the correlations in activity between brain regions evolve over time (Chang & Glover, 2010). Time is therefore an important property of the brain’s dynamics; spatial patterns are formed, dissolved, and reformed over time. Both rapidity and slowness are intrinsic properties of the human brain. Research has further shown that the global phase synchrony of the time-series of brain activity evolves over a characteristic ultra-slow

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the psychologist july 2017 slowness

timescale (< 0.01 Hz). The brain at rest has a steady temporal variation Whereas in cognitive in the formation and dissolution reappraisal, the initial ‘fast’ response of multiple communities of may need altering, in the context harmonised brain regions. of infants our fast response is The neuroscience of slowness beautifully timed to coordinate has been studied indirectly with the following slowly mediated regard to cognitive reappraisal, a caregiving behaviour. The fast burst typically slow cognitive process of activity in response to a cute that occurs often as a response to Eloise Stark infant face or a distress cry may bias initial ‘fast’ emotional reactivity. is in the Hedonia: Transnational the adult’s attentional resources to One meta-analysis of neuroimaging Research Group, and the prompt action immediately, thereby studies of cognitive reappraisal Section of Child and Adolescent securing the survival of the baby combined 48 fMRI studies Psychiatry at the Department of by making it the prime focus of the involving the downregulation of Psychiatry, University of Oxford caregiver. At this point, however, negative emotion in a slow manner slow processes take over and are (Buhle et al., 2014). They found eloise.stark@psych.ox.ac.uk fundamental to the flourishing that reappraisal appeared to occur parent–infant relationship. These by prefrontal and parietal regions slow processes involve mentalisation exerting changes in lateral temporal – the ability to treat an infant as an independent areas associated with semantic and perceptual psychological agent and guess their needs and desires – representations. By actively altering the mnemonic and emotional scaffolding – the appropriate regulation representation of the event, the individual is able of infant emotions. It is these appraisal behaviours to alter the emotional significance of the event. For example, someone who has seen the horrific aftermath that require slower processing but provide the much-needed developmental support for the infant. of a motor vehicle accident may be able to tell themselves ‘that’s not blood, it’s just ketchup’, therefore Such processes are also substantiated in the brain, spanning a network of regions involving capacities changing the valence of the triggering mental image. such as emotion, pleasure and social interaction.

Looking back at the results of Garety’s team, with Becoming a parent can at first be daunting, but the reference to patients experiencing delusions, it would be interesting to study the neural dynamics underlying interplay between slow and fast processes in parenting demonstrates how we are well equipped for the role their initial, fast, paranoid thoughts, and their later, (Kringelbach et al., 2016). slow, reasoning.

The integration of slow and fast thinking My own research into parenting has benefited greatly from considering how slow and fast thinking operate together to achieve optimality in both brain and behaviour.

We know that baby cues, such as a cute baby face or a piercing distress cry, operate to attract adults’ attention rapidly (Kringelbach et al., 2008).

This is a key example of the ‘fast’ system, where an environmental stimulus related to a helpless infant prompts a rapid orienting to the baby. This fast response is even substantiated in the brain, with neural activity at 140 ms, too fast for conscious appraisal, in the reward-related region of the orbitofrontal cortex.

Interestingly, we find that if the typical ‘cute’ infant face is disturbed with a craniofacial deformity such as cleft lip, this burst of orbitofrontal activity is absent (Parsons et al., 2013).

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Conclusion As the ‘slow movement’ advocates a cultural shift towards slowing down life’s pace, so does the evidence.

Slow processes, be it eating, cognitive reappraisal or slow thinking in the context of psychiatric disorder, are beneficial to us. Slowness may even be an index of recovery in mental health.

Speed is evidently important in many contexts.

Quick reactions and instinctive responsiveness aid survival. But we also have a subsequent ‘slow’ response, which is conscious and deliberative, and may be beneficial for more complex social interactions and moral emotions. Perhaps ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking are really two sides of the same coin – intrinsically related, but with their own independent virtues. In our fastmoving society that frequently prioritises speed, the importance of slowness should not be forgotten.

How can we apply slowness to our own lives? Well, the ‘slow science’ movement encourages scientists to halt multitasking in favour of slow, steady methodical processes. It calls for increased time to think and muse about the scientific questions we pursue. The manifesto says that society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time.

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Investigating faces in relation to their social context allows for the development of more sophisticated theories, which are unsettling some of our assumptions

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the psychologist july 2017 faces Nick Oliver/www.nickoliverillustration.com

Faces in the wild Brian Parkinson (University of Oxford) reviews the evidence on interpersonal effects of facial expression

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f you look hard enough at someone’s face, can you tell what they are feeling? Let’s say they seem puzzled, frustrated or relieved. How much information do you get from the face itself and how much comes from what else is happening: what the person is up to, where they are, and who else is around? Imagine that you don’t know the person and have no idea what they are doing. Could you still work out what their expression meant?

In everyday life it is highly unusual to see faces without any knowledge of the person or their current situation. However, this is exactly what happens in some of the most famous research into facial expression, such as the classic studies led by Paul Ekman in the 1960s. Participants try to work out which of six emotions is represented by each of a series of carefully selected mug-shots, showing six distinctive expressions (see over for examples). The response options are happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. Even if you didn’t already know, you could probably work out which emotion each of these faces is intended to show. And most English-language speakers would agree with your answers.

Consistent judgements of these faces confirm that some faces can convey emotion-related meanings even without any information about the surrounding context. But what does this tell us about how faces operate under less constrained circumstances? What if there are other sources of information to consider?

What if the face is moving rather than static? And what if it does not look like any of these six photographs?

(See box ‘Are some emotions more basic than others?’)

Outside psychology experiments, conversations are where we see facial expressions most often. We gauge other people’s reactions while speaking, and their expressions help us understand what they are saying (or not saying) in return. Their face responds to our face, and our face responds back, with both of us matching, complementing or countering each other’s changing smiles, grimaces or glances. Faces also respond to events happening outside conversations, and can communicate information about these events to other people. However, directly investigating these complex dynamic and interactional processes can be highly challenging. Instead, psychologists have

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begun to investigate how adding further sources of information affects how faces are perceived and how they influence other people’s responses. Piecing together their results may help us appreciate how the meaning of interpersonal facial activity depends crucially on the context of its production.

Gaze direction The faces typically shown in psychology studies are looking directly at the camera. It is as if they are responding to something right in front of them, around the place where the viewer is positioned. We cannot see whatever it is that might be causing the reaction, but its apparent location may provide clues about what might be happening.

A wealth of research, going back to Michael Argyle and Mark Cook’s 1976 book Gaze and Mutual Gaze, shows that eye gaze in an important social cue. We track each other’s eye movements during interaction and are acutely sensitive to differences in their direction of focus (e.g. Farroni et al., 2003).

Gaze direction also affects perceptions of emotional expressions. For example, Sander and colleagues (2007) found that ‘angry’ faces were seen as more angry when looking directly at the perceiver, but ‘fearful’ faces were seen as more fearful when gaze was diverted (see also Adams & Kleck, 2005). One possible explanation is that a front-facing scowling gaze suggests that the person is angry with you as viewer, and this self-directedness increases its emotional impact. By contrast, fear directed away from you indicates that you may need to be alert to some frightening event happening somewhere close by, which makes it more frightening. More generally, gaze direction provides clues about what the emotional reaction is about, changing our perception of what the face is doing. When the object of attention is also visible, this provides much clearer information about what is happening and how the person feels about it.

Object-directed expression Gaze can change perceptions of the objects at which it is directed as well as the faces doing the gazing.

A 2007 study led by Andrew Bayliss showed that

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‘disgust’ faces directing gaze at household objects worsened perceivers’ evaluations of those objects.

Gaze directed at other faces has similar effects. For examples, Mumenthaler and Sander (2012) found that a fear face was seen as more fearful when a scowling face gazed at it (see picture). Perceivers evidently registered that someone at whom anger is directed is likely to feel more afraid. This effect occurred even when the scowling face was presented subliminally (Mumenthaler & Sander, 2015), suggesting that perceivers are highly attuned to the relational properties of facial expressions.

More generally, these findings show that facial expressions convey information about objects at which they are directed. In social referencing, faces also regulate other people’s behaviour towards those objects. For example, Sorce and colleagues’ classic 1985 study showed that toddlers approaching an apparent precipice covered by glass were unwilling to cross this ‘visual cliff’ if their mothers showed fear faces rather than smiles, presumably because they concluded that venturing beyond the edge was too risky to attempt.

Similar processes can also operate in interactions between adults. My colleagues and I (Parkinson et al., 2012) recruited pairs of friends to complete a collaborative task involving real-time nonverbal interaction across a video link (with the sound turned off to avoid verbal communication). One friend (the player) inflated a simulated balloon by pressing a key on the computer (the Balloon Analogue Risk Task or ‘BART’, designed by Carl Lejuez and colleagues). Each pump earned additional points, but the balloon might pop at any time, losing all the points earned so far.

Meanwhile, we surreptitiously instructed the other friend (the observer) either to express or suppress anxiety as they watched the player’s progress from a

Most studies investigating facial expressions have focused on the six so-called ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ emotions, which many psychologists believe have a special status because they have evolved to meet important adaptive or reproductive challenges. For example, fear prepares the body to deal with impending environmental threats and attunes sensory systems to relevant stimuli. Other ‘nonbasic’ or ‘secondary’ emotions – such as guilt, embarrassment, or pride – are often seen as emerging later in infant development as combinations or articulations of these basic emotions, and as being less likely to have distinctive facial expressions.

However, the distinction between basic and nonbasic emotions may not be as clearcut as once believed (e.g. Draghi-Lorenz et al., 2001).

Further, some studies have begun to suggest that even nonbasic emotions can be inferred from nonverbal information if facial stimuli are dynamic rather than static, if vocal cues are added, or if the pictures include bodies as well as faces (e.g. see Dacher Keltner and Daniel Cordaro’s work on understanding multimodal emotional expressions).

Facial expressions as communications So far, I have focused mainly on the perception of facial expressions and its effects on other people’s judgements and behaviour. But what about the production of facial expressions? Does that also depend on context? Indeed, do our faces move in certain ways precisely to exert effects on other people?

Although many psychologists assume that facial expressions are symptoms of internal states, other researchers see them instead as ways of displaying our orientation to what is happening to the other people around (e.g. Alun Fridlund’s 1994 Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View). For example, an ‘anger’ face conveys the message ‘Back off or I’ll attack!’ and a ‘fear’ face serves as an appeal for consolation or support.

Clear evidence that the production of facial expression is specifically attuned to interpersonal Nick Oliver/www.nickoliverillustration.com

Are some emotions more basic than others?

separate cubicle. Players were less willing to inflate the balloon to the point of popping if observers expressed, rather than suppressed, anxiety. In other words, observers’ ongoing facial reactions changed players’ levels of risk-taking.

These results also show that facial expressions can communicate object-directed information by means other than gaze orientation. The real-time coordination between facial movements and a simultaneously unfolding sequence of events made it obvious what they were communicating. In fact, dynamic expressions often provide clearer information than static expressions even when no further contextual information is available (e.g. Krumhuber et al., 2013), perhaps because their temporally contoured changes provide stronger clues about the nature of the events to which they refer.

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the psychologist july 2017 faces

When your partner’s worry expression is intended to solicit comfort, providing this comfort is likely to alleviate the worry.

However, when your partner’s worry expression is intended to alert you to a cause for concern, any attempt to provide reassurance or comfort is likely to backfire.

Attempting to minimise the seriousness of the situation is likely to encourage intensified worry expression in a redoubled effort to persuade you that the impending concern should not be treated so lightly.

Some preliminary evidence for the operation of these interpersonal dynamics was provided by my research group’s recent study of romantic partners’ conversations about shared concerns (Parkinson et al., 2016). Our specific focus was on how one partner’s emotionregulation style affected the other partner’s use of emotional expression. For example, does selectively reinterpreting negative Brian Parkinson aspects of the situation to reduce is at the University of Oxford unpleasant emotional reactions brian.parkinson@psy.ox.ac.uk (reappraisal) necessarily make Interpersonal emotion your partner feel better about regulation things too? In fact, we found that The face’s capacity to alter other partners of habitual reappraisers were more likely to people’s responses to events permits us to use facial express worry in order to make those reappraisers expression strategically as a means of social influence. appreciate the seriousness of events (interpersonal In the social referencing studies described above, alerting). In other words, your partner may try to participants regulated their other-directed fear counteract your attempt to see things as less worrying expressions, thus affecting the other person’s riskby communicating greater worry themselves. In some taking. Outside the laboratory, it seems likely that circumstances, this might lead to a self-defeating people make similar regulatory attempts in order interpersonal spiral, where one partner increasingly to influence other people’s emotional reactions. For tries to alert the other partner to the worrying nature example, I might try to look more worried because I want you to be less blasé about something that is about of concerns, only to be met with increasing calmness.

In our study, it was also evident that the female partner to happen (interpersonal alerting). Thus, regulating was significantly more likely to do the alerting and my emotion can also serve to regulate your emotion. the male partner was more likely to adopt a calming Worry expression not only communicates demeanour, suggesting that gender-role stereotypes that a concern may need to be addressed, but also relating to masculine mastery impact on interpersonal indicates a potential need for support or comfort emotion regulation in heterosexual relationships.

(Parkinson & Simons, 2012). Correspondingly, interpersonal responses to someone else’s expressed worry may involve either expressing worry yourself Faces in social interaction (acknowledging a perceived alerting attempt) or As we have seen, facial expressions can communicate displaying the contrasting emotion of calmness (in information about the person expressing them, the response to a perceived request for comfort). But what object or person at which they are directed, and the happens when the interpersonal response does not relation between that person and object. We have also match the intention of the person expressing worry in seen how facial communication is attuned to the other the first place? person’s anticipated and actual reactions. How then do these processes fit together when faces interact with other faces in ongoing interactions? Intensive analyses responses comes from studies into audience effects (see Parkinson, 2005). These studies consistently demonstrate that many kinds of expression are more common or more intense when an appropriate addressee is available. For example, viewers laugh more when watching comedy films in the presence of others, especially friends who are close by (e.g. Chapman & Wright, 1976). Similarly, bowlers smile less when the skittles first fall than after turning to face their friends (Kraut & Johnston, 1979).

Their expressions thus seem to be communications directed to other players rather than symptoms of a direct emotional reaction to success. Indeed, Bavelas and colleagues (1986) showed that empathic winces in response to an observed injury were precisely timed to capitalise on eye contact with the victim. Observers apparently made sure that their facial response would be seen before showing vicarious pain.

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‘Although I’m usually willing to give others the benefit of the doubt in everyday conversations, something about the scientific claims they make always brings out my sceptical side.

That’s why I’ve always resisted the idea that emotions are simply and entirely private and subjective feelings. For me, they operate in the spaces between rather than within people. And facial movements are part of this process, not just expressions of something inside. Once you start to look at faces from that perspective, it’s hard to stop appreciating the subtlety, dynamism and flexibility in how they work.’

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of how such interpersonal processes play out are still relatively rare, but recent methodological advances are likely to make them increasingly common (e.g. Butler, 2011).

A few earlier studies explored temporal contingencies between partners’ emotional behaviours, but usually lumped together verbal and nonverbal expressions making it difficult to isolate specific effects of facial communication. For example, Biglan and colleagues (1985) focused on problemKey sources solving interactions between wives suffering from depression Adams, R.B. & Kleck, R.E. (2005). and their husbands. Wives were Effects of direct and averted gaze on more likely to express depression the perception of facially communicated immediately following aggressive emotion. Emotion, 5, 3–11. behaviour from their husbands, Biglan, A.A., Hops, H., Sherman, L. et al.

(1985). Problem-solving interactions of and husbands were less likely to depressed women and their husbands. behave aggressively immediately Behavior Therapy, 16(5), 431–451. following their wives’ expression Crivelli, C., Russell, J.A., Jarillo, S. & of depression. It therefore seems Fernández-Dols, J.M. (2016). The fear possible that one interpersonal gasping face as a threat display in a function of expressing depression Melanesian society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 113, is to solicit less aggressive 12403–12407. treatment from your partner.

Draghi-Lorenz, R., Reddy, V. & Costall, Indeed, some theorists have A. (2001). Rethinking the development suggested that depression is of ‘nonbasic’ emotions. Developmental partly sustained by the favourable Review, 21, 263–304. responses it can solicit from Johnson, S. & Jacob, T. (2000).

Sequential interactions in the marital others. However, Coyne (1976) communication of depressed men argued that these initially positive and women. Journal of Consulting and interpersonal effects are likely to Clinical Psychology, 68(1),4–12. diminish over time as partners Keltner, D. & Cordaro, D.T. (2016). become susceptible to growing Understanding multimodal emotional compassion fatigue. Indeed, expressions. Emotion Researcher.

Retrieved from tinyurl.com/lwryvbk studies of interactions between Krumhuber, E.G., Kappas, A. & depressed partners in longerManstead, A.S.R. (2013). Effects of term relationships show different dynamic aspects of facial expressions: interpersonal contingencies (e.g.

A review. Emotion Review, 5, 41–46.

Johnson & Jacob, 2000). Recent Mumenthaler, C. & Sander, D. (2015). advances in automated coding of Automatic integration of social information in emotion recognition. facial expressions may permit a Journal of Experimental Psychology: closer focus on interdependencies General, 144, 392–399. between partners’ communication Parkinson, B. (2005). Do facial patterns and how they may change movements express emotions or during an ongoing interaction and communicate motives? Personality and across the wider time-frame of a Social Psychology Review, 9, 278–311.

Parkinson, B., Phiri, N. & Simons, G. developing relationship.

(2012). Bursting with anxiety: Adult social referencing in an interpersonal Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART).

Emotion, 12, 817–826.

Parkinson, B. & Simons, G. (2012).

Worry spreads. Cognition and Emotion, 26, 462–479.

Parkinson, B., Simons, G. & Niven, K. (2016). Sharing concerns: Interpersonal worry regulation in romantic couples.

Emotion, 16, 449–458.

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Full list available in online / app version.

psy 0717 p54_59 parkinson.indd 58

Pulling faces out of context Given that the social context has such consistent effects on the perception and production of facial expressions, how is it that some decontextualised faces still seem to convey consistent emotional meanings? One answer is that the highly selected facial stimuli used in most judgement studies provide

clear clues both about the nature of the object at which they are directed and about the person’s relation to that object. For example, the scrunched nose of the ‘disgust’ face suggests that something smells bad, prompting metaphorical associations with the related emotion.

Similarly, the focused stare of an ‘angry’ face coupled with the furrowed brow and pressed lips suggests that the person is directing attention at something that they want to resist or push away. In fact, perceivers who are not directly asked to infer emotional meanings often describe these facial expressions in situational and behavioural terms.

The fact that faces trigger inferences about what else might be happening allows them to serve as a kind of shorthand for emotional situations in everyday conversation. I can show that I empathise with your pain by wincing, or sympathise with your moral disapproval by scrunching my nose, for instance.

However, not all associations between situations and emotions are consistent across cultures, meaning that the same face may come to stand for different emotions.

One striking example of such a dissociation is provided by recent research conducted in a small-scale society that remains relatively isolated from external influence. In a study published last year by Carlos Crivelli’s team, investigators showed photographs of facial expressions to participants from the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea, and asked those participants to point to the picture corresponding to the relevant ‘basic emotion’. Unexpectedly, islanders pointed most often to the Western ‘fear’ face when asked to select the anger face. They were also most likely to point to this same ‘fear’ face when asked to select the face communicating the message: ‘Back off or I will attack you’. In interpreting these findings, Crivelli and colleagues point out that some societies also use similar ‘gasping’ facial configurations as ritualised symbols of threat (for example the Maori threat face). In other words, a supposedly universal expression of fear in fact communicates a different emotion in societies where it is associated with a different kind of behavioural intention or situational context.

Conclusion In The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin rejected the idea that facial muscles were ‘specially created for the sake of expression’.

Instead, he argued that facial movements performed more direct adaptive functions such as biting or stimulus rejection (‘serviceable associated habits’),

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the psychologist july 2017 faces

the consistent emotional inferences people make when and that their connections with emotion arose as a judging them. And perhaps people learn to show faces secondary consequence. Because someone getting of a similar kind precisely because of their capacity to ready to attack is often angry, the ready-to-attack face prompt contextual inferences in others. also became associated with anger. Paradoxically, Psychological research into facial expression has however, many emotion researchers inspired by moved beyond the restrictive tasks Darwin soon reverted to precisely used in early judgement studies. the view that he had set aside.

Investigating faces in relation to Just as eyes are seen as windows “a supposedly universal social context permits us to to the soul, faces continue to be expression of fear in fact their develop more sophisticated theories investigated as if they are direct communicates a different that unsettle some of our previous readouts of internal emotions. assumptions and distinctions.

Here I have taken a different emotion in societies For example, it is no longer tack by focusing on how faces where it is associated clear that the distinctive facial communicate information about with a different kind of configurations associated with six the expresser’s orientation to or so basic emotions correspond external objects and events, and behavioural intention or to spontaneous facial reactions on how their interpersonal effects situational context” produced when experiencing those depend on the relational meanings emotions. The same emotion may they convey. But what if we pull be expressed in a variety of different the face out of this context and ways (or not at all) depending on context. Further, the strip away all the relational processes surrounding interpersonal orientation of facial expressions means it? Does that leave an unadulterated expression of that they may share some of the characteristics of more underlying emotion? Or do we instead read context deliberate forms of facial communication, including into static pictures of expressions, by imagining what conversational gestures. Faces do a lot of things in kind of situation the person must be in to be showing addition to communicating emotional meanings. It is a face like that, looking in that intent way, wanting important to understand their operation in the context to approach or withdraw? Perhaps the fact that some highly selected faces imply context so strongly explains of these other activities.

Postdoctoral Conference Bursary Scheme This Research Board bursary scheme supports the work of postdoctoral researchers and lecturers.

Conference bursaries are available to support Members of the Society who are UK psychology postdoctoral researchers and lecturers to attend any academic conference, either in the UK or internationally, relevant to the applicant’s work. Each bursary consists of up to £250 (UK) or £500 (international) to contribute towards the costs of registration and travel to attend the full conference.

psy 0717 p54_59 parkinson.indd 59

There are two rounds of the scheme each year, with submission deadlines on 1 April and 1 October. Get your applications in now for the October deadline.

For the full criteria and an application form please contact Carl Bourton at the Society’s office carl.bourton@bps.org.uk Note: For the purposes of the bursary scheme, a postdoctoral researcher/lecturer is defined as a person who is employed at a UK HEI and is within three years of the completion of their doctoral research degree in psychology.

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the psychologist july 2017 false memories

NottiNgham 2018

The British Psychological Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Annual Conference East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham 2â&#x20AC;&#x201C;4 May Confirmed Keynotes Professor John Antonakis, University of Lausanne Professor Brian Nosek, Centre for Open Science Professor Cathy Creswell, University of Reading Stephen Reicher, University of St Andrews Visit our website now to register your interest for exciting conference updates.

Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf.

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

www.bps.org.uk/ac2018

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what to seek out on

the

psychologist website this month Credit: David Brohede

‘You find some little tiny seed, kernel of potential connection, and you cultivate it’ Kal Kseib meets Professor Kelly Wilson in an online exclusive http://tinyurl.com/kellygwilson This is the final part of an ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy trilogy’: see also Kal’s interviews with Kirk Strosahl and Steven Hayes (links at the bottom of Professor Wilson’s interview).

Find all this and so much more via

thepsychologist.org.uk

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Linda Clare ‘Living well with dementia has become a key focus of policy’ We meet Linda Clare, Professor of Clinical Psychology of Ageing and Dementia at the University of Exeter. Professor Gail Kinman poses the questions.

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You have recently set up a project to improve people’s experience of dementia. Tell us more about this.

Living with dementia is challenging and all too often people with the condition and their families feel they do not receive adequate support. People with dementia want to remain involved with their families and communities and wish to enjoy their life, despite any limitations the condition imposes. We aim to understand how to make this possible.

To accomplish this, we are following a large group of people with dementia and carers over time to find out about the things that influence their experience and make a difference to their lives. The IDEAL project – Improving the Experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life – was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research, and we have an outstanding team working on this unique project. There is an increasing

recognition that a social science perspective has a great deal to offer in providing insight on how people can live well with dementia.

And that’s a shift from the usual perceptions of dementia, which tend to be very negative?

Yes – it is often described in the popular press as a ‘living death’, and it is one of the most feared health conditions among the over-50s. Although it will inevitably progress, for many people dementia is a long-term disability and we need to consider what will improve quality of life through the course of the condition.

‘Living well’ has become a key focus of UK government policy; we wanted to find out find out what living well with dementia means and what makes it possible. We are exploring how psychological and social factors influence the possibility of living well and what

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the psychologist july 2017 interview

resources people need at different stages. We are currently following up 1500 people living with the early stages of dementia over a two-year period to see how things develop and change for them. Many of our participants have a caregiver who is also taking part, but we also wanted to include people with dementia who are on their own. These people are often excluded from studies as there is nobody to report on their behalf. We are visiting our participants at yearly intervals. Our first set of funding covered three timepoints, 12 months apart… additional funding from the Alzheimer’s Society is allowing us to follow our participants and carers for six years in total.

come from our first set of qualitative interviews and a large systematic review of factors associated with better or worse quality of life. The systematic review synthesised statistical information from over 100 studies, including data from over 30,000 people with dementia. We found that factors reflecting positive relationships and social engagement were most closely associated with better quality of life, whereas poor mental and physical health was linked with reduced quality of life. Our qualitative findings also emphasised the importance of positive relationships, as well as engagement and purpose in life.

These findings fit in well with our enablement approach to intervention that aims to help people reclaim their independence and enhance their feelings of self-efficacy and agency, while also knowing that they do not have to cope alone.

What methods are you using to get your data?

IDEAL is a longitudinal cohort study using a mixedmethods approach. People with dementia and carers are completing questionnaire surveys during visits You have been working with various agencies to from a researcher. The questionnaires cover a wide ensure that people with dementia have a considerable range of issues, and we have also included several input into your research. open-ended questions asking How does that work? people to describe what living well “People we have The IDEAL project is being with dementia means to them. We are looking at social, economic, interviewed often describe conducted in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society and environmental, physical and a protracted period Innovations in Dementia CIC. psychological factors, access to and of trying to figure out These two organisations have use of health and social care, and helped us form an engagement uptake of community resources. what is going” group of experts by experience – Our group is also exploring the the ALWAYS network (Action on challenges of living with dementia Living Well: Asking You). The group advises us on and other physical and mental health problems that different aspects of the project based on their personal participants may have, and the extent to which they experience, skills and expertise. For example, they are dependent upon others for help. Where caregivers helped formulate the qualitative interviews and provide are involved, the perceived quality of this relationship is also being considered. The study is also investigating valuable information on how best to approach people how people adapt to the condition, the challenges they with dementia and enable them to tell their story. The ALWAYS group members are also helping to convey experience and how they cope with them, together our findings to different audiences; for example, they with key indicators of living well with dementia, such as level of wellbeing, quality of life and life satisfaction. recently gave a session at the UK Dementia Congress, and they will contribute to presentations at the British Participation in social activities and the experience Society of Gerontology Annual Conference in 2017. of positive emotions are also being explored. Carers complete their own questionnaires and also provide information about the person they care for. We are also What about people who develop dementia at a interested in the services people with dementia use and younger age and may still be working? Do they have different experiences to older people? the associated costs. To find out more about this issue, People in this situation often say that they started we will be linking data from the IDEAL survey with making mistakes at work or became very forgetful participants’ health records. and disoriented. Their behaviour may be put down to A small subgroup of participants is being stress or depression and they can feel very confused interviewed in more depth. We are targeting people and alone. People we have interviewed often describe a who have changed markedly between the different protracted period of trying to figure out what is going phases of the research – those whose ratings of quality on that is very distressing for them. In this situation, of life and wellbeing have either improved or declined. diagnosis can come as a relief – at least they can make This will provide insight into what they think might sense of what is happening to them, even if it isn’t have made a difference and will feed back into our something they welcome. On the other hand, services analysis of the quantitative data. tend to be more geared to older people and may not always suit people diagnosed at younger ages.

So how can you live well with dementia? What are For younger people, the symptoms of dementia your initial findings? may present more acutely as they may be more We are currently analysing the statistical data from the noticeable sooner, but most people who develop the first wave of assessments, so the main findings so far

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condition are of retirement age. In the early stages of dementia, it can be much more difficult for them to determine whether symptoms such as forgetfulness and needing more help from others are a normal part of the ageing process or whether they really have a problem. Very often it is a specific incident that triggers a sense that what they are experiencing isn’t normal after all. One person I interviewed said he used to laugh with his wife about his poor memory and then one day he got into the car and looked at the controls and couldn’t remember what they were for; this was the point when he decided to seek professional help.

We have a number of participants in IDEAL who are living with early-onset dementia, and we will be able to look at their experiences in more detail.

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people with dementia can be emotionally demanding and require great sensitivity and practical skill.

You mentioned your intervention work earlier. What methods do you use and how effective are they?

I have always found it important to tailor interventions to individual needs, and people with dementia are a very diverse group. My PhD supervisor, Professor Barbara Wilson, emphasised the potential of rehabilitation and the need for practical benefits.

I applied this philosophy in my work with people who have dementia, with the aim of enabling them to function at the best level they can, continue to participate in activities, and remain socially engaged. This led to the development of a cognitive rehabilitation intervention, which is an individual What about carers’ experiences? Studies show problem-solving approach to tackle the impact of that caregiving can be very demanding but also cognitive impairment on everyday functioning and immensely rewarding. help people manage their everyday lives better.

Family carers are hugely important as they provide a An initial pilot trial that I ran in North Wales with great deal of support that cannot easily be replaced by Professor Bob Woods had positive results, and we formal provision. Over the years, we have learned that are now testing it in a large, multi-centre trial (the caring can be very demanding and stressful, but it also GREAT trial). In this approach, a therapist works has many positive aspects. People with the person with dementia to can find meaning in providing care identify personal goals that would “Although family carers and in expressing the love they improve their daily life - this could feel for their relative, and they may be something they would like to need support, it is also also experience a sense of doing manage better, do differently, take vital to protect the the right thing, or of mastering up again, or learn for the first wellbeing of paid care the skills of managing a difficult time. The goals are very practical situation. Most importantly, carers – for example, somebody may staff” need to feel that there is somebody want to go out shopping without there to support them when fearing they will get lost, or may required. The opportunity to link with other carers is wish to cook a meal without getting distracted. We also crucial so they can share experiences and ideas, work with the person to identify potential solutions to as well as make personal connections with people in help them maintain their independence. People with the same situation. One of our IDEAL PhD students dementia can learn if we tailor our methods to match is investigating the needs of carers who remain in the their abilities, while considering their environment workforce and how we can best sustain the wellbeing and any risk factors. By helping people solve specific of this group. problems and finding strategies that work, we hope Some carers are faced with a difficult transition they would be able to apply this approach to other when the person with dementia moves into residential areas where they wish to make changes. This method care. This is not always the worst option – often doesn’t appeal to everybody, as some people feel they people with dementia can do very well if the home are already managing as well as they need to. We know, provides high-quality care and is the right environment however, that it can help people to achieve their goals for them. Ensuring that care is person-centred and and manage everyday activities more effectively. Carers individualised is one of the biggest challenges that we can also benefit from this approach by learning some face and is an area where psychologists can make a useful strategies. lot of difference. People with dementia are sometimes prescribed antipsychotic medication to manage Tell me about your arts-based programme – behaviour such as agitation that can be distressing to ‘A Life More Ordinary’. observe and difficult to manage. Psychologists, and This project aims to create a series of activities and other health professionals, can help care staff develop outputs to provide a positive but realistic portrayal of alternative ways of dealing with such behaviour living with dementia. We are working with a group tailored to individual needs. This reduces distress for of well-known artists – photographer Ian Beesley, the person with dementia and allows the staff and poet Ian MacMillan, and cartoonist Tony Husband. their family members to interact with them in more We organise workshops across the country for meaningful and rewarding ways. Although family people with dementia and their carers and relatives carers need support, it is also vital to protect the using photography, poetry and drawings. Some of wellbeing of paid care staff, as working effectively with the resulting images will be used to create a touring

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out 1 13/01/2014 11:18

the psychologist july 2017 interview

exhibition to encourage more positive portrayals of people with dementia and their experiences of care.

Stereotypes of dementia are so implicit that we often don’t even realise we are using them, and we hope that this initiative will challenge such views. The artists will be producing a series of ‘chat-books’ on different themes that will make the work more widely accessible. We are also planning an exhibition about how dementia has been viewed in art and literature over the centuries, illustrating how perceptions of the condition have changed over time and, we hope, prompting consideration of how our own current perceptions might change. We have also started working with the Exeter Northcott Theatre, directed by Paul Jepson, to explore how we can use performance to influence understanding of dementia and how best to support and care for people with the condition.

our priorities? What is society prepared to pay to care for older people, and especially those with dementia?

Improved care for people with dementia does not always need to involve a drastic increase in resources – in fact, some improvements could be achieved by finding better ways of deploying resources we already have or integrating new techniques into existing initiatives. Currently, services can be quite fragmented, and it is challenging for people to navigate through the care system. This can be a huge source of stress for people who may also be coming to terms with a diagnosis of dementia. Providing people with a single point of contact where they can obtain information and help with accessing services on a consistent basis could be very helpful. We want to make sure that what we learn from the IDEAL project translates into improvements in care and support and leads to new initiatives to enable people to live well with dementia.

We have an increasingly ageing population and the Find out more at www.idealproject.org.uk/ and rate of dementia is set to increase dramatically. What @IDEALStudyTweet are the implications of this?

Information on GREAT can be found at: IDEAL will provide the first large longitudinal dataset http://psychology.exeter.ac.uk/reach/great/ exploring the experience of living with dementia over a significant period of time. It will be a unique resource The British Psychological Society Dementia Advisory Group, which Professor Clare chairs, released for research in the UK and other countries, and will at Work Jan-Feb 2014_coaching at work 25/11/2013 23:33 Page 1 Page 1 to establish what kinds of services Coaching a report last year: Psychological Dimensions of help and support Dementia: Putting the Person at the Centre of Care. would be most useful. We need to consider the bigger See http://tinyurl.com/bpsdementia picture in terms of the availability of funding: what are

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‘I was doing my childhood dream job, and I don’t think it would have happened without psychology’ James Olav Hill is a psychology graduate and a freelance shooting producer director for television

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Since I first started studying psychology, at A-level, I have been fascinated by people: why we do what we do, act the way we act, say what we say and feel how we feel. This passion grew during my time studying psychology at university and I’m blessed that I now get to use my psychological background in my career every day. The most basic function of my job is to film people; ranging from families who have never had a camera pointed at them, to very experienced talent who are filmed for a living. But there’s more to my story.

I grew up with two brothers who are seven and eleven years older than me. They introduced me to amazing cinema from a very early age. I fell in love with all the different stories and was drawn to how these films were able to tell them so vividly. As I struggled with severe dyslexia, trying to read was embarrassing and filled me with a lot of anxiety, so I gravitated more towards film.

When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I didn’t say a fireman or a cowboy; I’d say a director. As I got older I started messing around with the family camcorder. I would make videos with my friends, editing together little movies by playing the camcorder through the TV and quickly pressing ‘record’ and ‘stop’ on a VHS player. I enjoyed it, but with age came the realisation that wanting to be like Spielberg or Scorsese was the same as wanting to be a rockstar. I turned my academic attention to English and intended to study it at university.

I struggled through my GCSEs, and when I came to decide on which subjects to take for A-level I was presented with the opportunity to study psychology.

I had always been aware of psychology as my mother had worked in child welfare, and now lectured on childhood development at a university in Birmingham.

But I knew little about the subject. I decided to give it a go, as it sounded interesting and I didn’t think it would get in the way of my English studies.

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the psychologist july 2017 careers

I initially struggled as I did with every subject, getting red every time I fumbled through a passage when asked to read out loud. But then I took to it, and even won a school award for the most improved student. Meanwhile I was failing in English and after getting an E grade on my AS-level exam I started to worry it wasn’t going to be my path. I got an extracurricular tutor, studied for a year, retook the exam… and got a lower mark than I had the first time.

I was lost. I loved psychology but still wanted to pursue stories. Then it dawned on me. The reason I enjoyed psychology as much as I did was that I was studying the core of any story: people. Instead of examining make-believe narratives and premises, I was analysing real people’s journeys through the world, and not only that, why they were on that journey.

After scraping together a passing grade and begging my university over the phone to let me in, I was accepted to study psychology at degree level.

Once there, learning no longer seemed a chore.

Psychology helped me become more empathetic, in turn allowing me to create a more authentic connection with people. In my job this has made me more able to comfort and support contributors who are going through difficult times. I have filmed with people who are going through a divorce, who have lost their homes and whose children have been taken away.

I commonly film with people over several months and conduct many interviews, which often turn into what I like to think of as therapy sessions for some.

The people I film get to tell their worries and problems to someone who is really listening. I’m always trying to use my psychological knowledge to gain a deeper understanding behind their stories. Often this results in people sharing a lot of bottled up pain. My degree taught me the importance of airing these issues, and while I feel I’m able to help a lot of people do this, one of the most challenging aspects of my job is finding the right balance of care and support while remaining professional and impartial.

Psychology taught me to take a step back and investigate moments from a more clinical perspective.

It helps in getting to know the back story… it pushes me to look back into people’s past and allows me to see how it is shaping their future.

My degree also helped me understand how my dyslexia could be an advantage, rather than the burden I had always viewed it as. For my dissertation, I investigated the effects of stress on the symptoms of dyslexia, and I made an unpredicted finding: that dyslexic participants were better at the creative task than non-dyslexic participants, in both stressed and non-stressed conditions. This has always stuck with me. I truly believe my dyslexia gives me a more creative way of looking at the world, connecting stories and seeing patterns in narrative where others may not. I’ve also noticed during my career that when the pressure is on and things get stressful, my ability to work is not hindered and I’m more adaptable than others.

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While I was at university, I continued messing around with filming and progressed to using more sophisticated equipment. I learned more about cameras and editing, about how an idea becomes footage and how that is put together. Once I graduated I started looking into how I would be able to do this for a living, while also being able to work with people and tell real stories. I discovered the television industry and it seemed like a perfect fit. I started working voluntarily at a few television companies to gain experience, crashing on friends’ couches and eating a lot of pasta.

This led to an entry-level paid position as a runner.

One day I was assisting a shooting producer and director (driving, carrying kit, getting tea and lunch, packing away equipment). During some downtime he kindly showed me how a broadcast camera worked.

I practised his lessons every time I could, evenings and weekends, and gradually learned to shoot for broadcast. As I continued with the show, they allowed me to recce potential contributors, which meant interviewing them on camera and editing the footage.

I was amazed and elated as I discovered I was able to tell stories through questions and a lens better than I would have been able to with a pen and paper.

I progressed very quickly and become a shooting producer director on Discovery’s highest rated show at the age of 24. I have been doing this a number of years now and am truly blessed that I have been able to pursue such a satisfying and varied career. I have found myself on construction sites, eco retreats, live studios, goldmines in the Yukon and homesteads in North Carolina. Not only does my career allow for travel and such varied experience, it also affords me time off to travel and pursue my personal projects.

There have been some tough times. Breaking into the industry was very hard, but I was one of the lucky ones. I have met many people who have been runners for years, or who have given up on TV altogether as they were never able to step up and weren’t able to support themselves as a freelance runner.

I’ve also struggled with meeting many people in their darkest hour and not being able to help them as much as I would have liked. One memory that stays with me was when I filmed a couple in their seventies who had been swindled out of all their savings. I was able to talk to them and support them as well as giving them a voice, but I couldn’t do anything beyond that.

I have been witness to many people breaking down in tears. Many times this has been constructive, or the first step in assisting someone, but when I have had to leave someone as I met them, it stays with me.

Recently I was in a bar in the USA during some downtime on location. The TV was showing an episode of a show that I had worked on. People began cheering and discussing a scene that I had shot and directed, and it struck me that I couldn’t have imagined when I was making stupid videos with my friends that it would have led to this. I was doing my childhood dream job, and I don’t think it would have happened without psychology.

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The power of the arts Sally Marlow and Kate Johnstone, Associate Editors for Culture, consider its novel use in mental health

A

rt bridges the gap between mental illness as disease and mental illness as an integral part of the human experience, in a way that science cannot. Artists of all shapes and forms have tapped into their own mental suffering to find creative power. Artistic representations of mental illness can increase understanding and empathy for those who are ill, and the act of making art has been incorporated into the therapeutic process as art therapy.

Right now, we seem to be on the cusp of a shift. Art and science are moving closer together in new ways, in a quest to throw light on some of humanity’s biggest questions, including mental health. In this article we explore how this shift is shaping mental health research and practice.

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Art as therapy Within treatment paradigms, art therapy has long played a part, and the evidence base shows there is much support for the use of art in therapeutic settings. In the 1940s an early and far-sighted push by Key sources Edward Adamson pioneered the use of art as therapy, bringing it into Ander, E.E., Thomson, L.J.M., Blair, K. hospitals. It was while working on et al. (2013). Using museum objects this programme that Adamson was to improve wellbeing in mental handed a set of drawings by a patient health service users and neurological at the 960-bed residential psychiatric rehabilitation clients. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(5), 208–216. facility in Netherne. The patient had Bickerdike, L., Booth, A., Wilson, P.M. created the drawings using burnt et al. (2017). Social prescribing: Less matches, as he did not have a pencil. rhetoric and more reality. BMJ Open, Adamson realised the power of art in 7:e013384. the therapeutic process, and began O’Neill, M. (2010). Cultural attendance campaigning for the use of art as and public mental health – from research to practice. Journal of Public therapy in mental health. Indeed, he Mental Health, 9(4), 22–29. has the distinction of being the first Scope, A., Uttley, L. & Sutton, A. artist employed by the NHS, and in (2017). A qualitative systematic review the intervening years the evidence of service user and service provider has built that art therapy can improve perspectives on the acceptability, mental health outcomes. This work relative benefits, and potential harms of art therapy for people with noncontinues today, not only in mental psychotic mental health disorders. health treatment environments, Psychology and Psychotherapy, 90(1), but also in physical health and 25–43. in hospices – see the excellent Uttley, L., Stevenson, M., Scope, A. paintingsinhospitals.org.uk. et al. (2015). The clinical and cost Adamson built up an extraordinary effectiveness of group art therapy for people with non-psychotic mental collection of art by patients, now health disorders. BMC Psychiatry, housed at the Wellcome Collection, 7(15), 151. parts of which are currently being exhibited at Birkbeck (see review in

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the July edition). In the same vein, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind has art displayed alongside artefacts from Bedlam in days gone by. It is a small, local museum, but it is respected and well known, and was shortlisted for Museum of the Year in 2016 (and reviewed by us in the July edition of that year). Sitting right underneath the museum, and attracting its fair share of the visiting public, is the Bethlem Gallery, which displays art created by patients currently being treated for mental illness at the Bethlem Hospital.

Others have expanded the range of artistic endeavours that can be used therapeutically. For example, the Alchemy Project is a dance collaboration between Dance United and the Maudsley’s early intervention in psychosis team. It has demonstrated significant improvements in mental wellbeing (see tinyurl.com/ huob9jp). A recent review (Scope et al., 2017) identified outcomes from art therapy for service users, including improved relationships; gaining perspective; personal achievement and empowerment; relaxation; and crucially, an understanding of illness, self and future. Although the cost-effectiveness of art therapy remains uncertain (Uttley et al., 2015), this is almost impossible to quantify – what is the value of the pieces created by those receiving art therapy, which can be so powerful and illuminating?

Art to raise awareness Working on the basis that the first step to engage the public is to forge connections with those not suffering

Helen Greig, The Foetus/ Rebirth. Credit: Adamson Collection/ Wellcome Trust.

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the psychologist july 2017 culture from mental illness, in recent decades art has been harnessed in awareness-raising programmes as a way of reaching out and engendering empathy. Academics and clinicians actively seek out artists for collaborations to find new ways to reach the wider public, but also clinical populations, carers and policy makers. For example, in the Maudsley mental health hospital the corridors are given over to installations of art by patients, and photographic documentation of artistic projects including patients.

This has been taken further through immersive multimedia installations, which can convey something of the experiences of mental illness. A recent installation at Copeland Park in Peckham, southeast London saw a collaboration between Dr Helen Fisher, MQ Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; Creative Director Rich Maskey, representatives from Voice Collective; and mental health campaigner Jonny Benjamin MBE. It asked the question ‘How “normal” do you think you are?’, and recreated two key aspects of psychotic experiences: audio hallucinations and paranoia.

The audience were given audio guides before walking through rooms to view the art. The audio guides were linked to out-of-sight actors, who were observing the visitors through CCTV. The actors spoke to each visitor: ‘Touch the painting. Go on. No one’s looking… Touch the woman next to you, smile at her.’ The voices created a sense of paranoia as the visitors realised they were being watched. Were the voices in the headphones, or in the head? Why was it so compelling to obey the voices? How much more compelling must it be for those who feel as though those voices live alongside them in their heads.

This small, bespoke exhibition drew much attention, and was covered by Claudia Hammond for the BBC World Service.

Artistic works of those in treatment can go further than increasing empathy, and can contribute to addressing negative attitudes towards mental health, and the breaking down of stigma. The Koestler Trust, a charity that works with offenders, secure patients and detainees, holds an annual exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre, including talks, exhibits and performances; and it is hosted by ex-offenders. This September it will be curated

by Antony Gormley. The exhibitions challenge attitudes by illuminating the relationship between mental illness and offending behaviours, and showing work from highly stigmatised groups of people. In the process, attitudes are nudged away from moral censure towards understanding.

The future of arts and mental health Increasingly we are noting intriguing new developments in art and mental health, with projects moving beyond art therapy and awareness raising. We hear much about social prescribing in mental health, where patients are prescribed exercise, or a class, or a social intervention.

Under the umbrella of social prescribing, there is a growing recognition that by prescribing arts and culture we might be able to improve mental health outcomes.

Pioneers are piloting work in this area, and measuring

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results. This work is not taking place just amongst thirdparty organisations with a link to mental health, it’s happening in the NHS itself.

In 2014 NHS commissioners in Gloucestershire and Kent were selected to pilot a structured framework for incorporating arts and culture into health and wellbeing services, including mental health. The three-year programme, funded by Arts Council England, aimed to explore ‘the opportunities for using arts and cultural organisations to deliver health and social outcomes’.

Gloucestershire CCG has prioritised and funded an innovative and active approach to commissioning the arts and cultural sector to support a range of health and care needs. They piloted a programme of cultural commissioning, in which they piloted 12 ‘test and learn’ feasibility projects, using a co-production model designed and steered by patients, clinicians, artists and commissioners. Their brief to the cultural sector was to work with the CCG to develop innovative offers to meet a range of identified needs that were not currently effectively met by more traditional services, thereby also using the programme to help work towards reducing identified health inequalities. Ellen Rule, Director of Transformation and Service Redesign at NHS Gloucestershire, is clear about the benefits: ‘This has challenged me down to my commissioning roots… but it inspired us to see things differently, lose the labels and see the potential of how arts and culture can break into a world where previously there might not have been any other solutions.’

One of the projects involved engaging with young people about their mental health, and determining positive steps they could take to self-manage what might be described as ‘low-level’ needs to prevent these exacerbating their situation. The Roses Theatre was culturally commissioned to deliver a project called ‘Secrets and Lies’. Separate teams worked with boys

Martin Birch, White cat face on red. Credit: Adamson Collection/ Wellcome Trust.

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and with girls to give both an opportunity to explore issues that they may not feel comfortable expressing in front of each other, including pornography, selfharm and family relationships. The boys developed a performance piece in the form of the film, and the girls performed a short acting piece for peers, school staff and commissioners. For the young people involved one clear unintended outcome was that the girls developed a peer-support network through working with each other in the project. For the CCG this project has contributed to the understanding of how to increase a targeted early intervention to young people in a schools context. For the Roses Theatre, the work has informed a successful bid to Children in Need for future work.

Other respected organisations are getting on board with the challenges of harnessing artistic projects to mental health outcomes. Lizzie Raby is a designer and researcher at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art. She created some prototype liver models for Alcohol Specialist Nurses within hospitals.

The novelty here is that the concept is sensory, and the models are designed to look and feel stiffer as they move from healthy to fatty then cirrhotic. This tactile component comes into play when patients hold a diseased liver in their hands – the engagement with the materiality of the object disrupts the process of cognitive dissonance that those dependent on alcohol often display. It’s hard to give yourself a message that your liver is healthy when you are forced to feel a sclerotic version created by an artist. The liver models themselves would look at home in a Damien Hirst exhibition, and large-scale production has now started by a company more used to creating prosthetic makeup for films such as the Harry Potter series.

There are also initiatives that prescribe attendance

at cultural spaces, such as museums. The ‘Who Cares’ project in the northwest of England brought together six museums with the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire to research the potential of museum collections to improve outcomes for people with mental health issues. South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust ran a similar initiative in their Journeys of Appreciation Programme, in which older adults with mental health problems and dementia visited partner museums and galleries. The Trust reported that it provided a turning point in nurse–patient relationship, and noted the difference the project made both to patients and to staff. Other projects have noted that museum object-handling sessions with patients can bring about decreasing negative emotion; increasing vitality, participation and sense of identity; and enjoyment and positive emotion (Ander et al., 2013).

Crucially, arts and culture programmes are difficult to evaluate, at least using traditional evaluation methods.

Most projects are generated locally, and evaluation is often an afterthought, with no agreed method of evaluation. We were unable to find any reviews specifically of cultural prescribing, but in a recent review of social prescribing Bickerdike et al. (2017) identified evaluations of 15 small-scale projects, three of which were cultural. They reported that projects often use multiple interventions, so there is little direct line of sight to outcomes, and commented that ‘most evaluations have presented positive conclusions, generating a moment for social prescribing which does not appear to be warranted’. However, by their own admission the studies they considered were limited by both design and reporting, as well as a lack of standardised and validated measuring tools in design and reporting.

‘Art was my salvation’ exhibition Mr A Moves in Mysterious Ways: Selected Artists from the Adamson Collection Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck School of Arts

Mr A Moves in Mysterious Ways is a wonderful collection of pictures and objects from the Adamson Collection curated by Dr Heather Tilly and Dr Fiona Johnstone. The Adamson Collection is one of the world’s largest collections of works by psychiatric patients, compiled by Mr Adamson (aka ‘Mr A’) between 1946 and 1981 when he worked as an art facilitator at the Netherne Hospital in Surrey.

Abandoned Goods, a short film in the exhibition, tells the uplifting story of how, with support from the Wellcome Trust, these vulnerable works were rescued by the Adamson Collection Trust from hospital store cupboards and disused shower rooms as well as from the more befitting galleries of

cultural institutes. This movement and juxtaposition from something forgotten and largely discarded to something emplaced and cared for is what, for me, underpins the vigour and import of the exhibition.

Not only does this movement signify a caring for these works but also a caring for those who created them. And as Val Huct, Chief Executive Officer of the British Association of Art Therapists, noted at the launch event, there has never been a stronger need for valuing and caring for difference than in these heightened times of ‘othering’. Care for the ‘other’ is extended through the exhibition not only in highlighting the therapeutic value of art and its story-telling capacity, but also by exposing the ‘other within’.

‘Art was my salvation’, says one of the artists, Rolanda Polonsky. Vividly, we see how art works as a way of exploring and expressing internal thoughts and feelings. J.P. Sennitt’s painting of the ‘Christmas Party’ depicts, Mr A says, her isolation from the community, whilst Helen Greig’s ‘The Foetus’ shows a sense of renewal and rebirth. Art helps communicate what words alone cannot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Metamorphosis series

by Ron Hampshire, who arrived at hospital mute and ceased to paint once he regained his voice.

While the pieces in the collection sometimes challenge our sense of beauty, they all tell a story. In Martin Birch’s series of sketches – one of which is used for the exhibition title

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the psychologist july 2017 culture Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but as social prescribing grows as a discipline, and cultural prescribing grows within it, there is a need for proper evaluation to have evidence for what works, and what is cost-effective. One problem is that traditional evaluation methods may not always be appropriate. As the 2016 annual Social Prescribing Network Conference noted (see tinyurl.com/y82wxjq8), the first barrier to growing the evidence base is the lack of an agreed definition of what social prescribing is, and the same applies to this new wave of cultural prescribing – should it include everything from exposure to large-scale civic artworks, through museum attendance, to immersive therapeutic spaces, to art therapy, to being prescribed a single cultural output such as a book or a piece of music?

And as with social prescribing, the outcome measures in cultural prescribing are varied, and it may be difficult to capture benefits using purely quantitative data. These barriers to growing the evidence base stem from a lack of research and evaluation methodology around

cultural interventions and prescribing. Many projects do not have academic partners to help in the design and measurement, which means data on what works cannot be easily generalised. Further, if evaluation is small-scale, then that may to some extent reflect that engagement with the arts in a therapeutic context generally involves small numbers (O’Neill, 2010).

Things appear to be changing, however. Gladwell famously talks of a Tipping Point in his book of the same name, and the dots are beginning to join up in the UK with some high-level converts, as evidenced by the formation of the National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing , linked to an All Party Parliamentary Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing, and the more specialist National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing.

The All Party Parliamentary Group is carrying out a twoyear Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry in collaboration with King’s College London and in partnership with Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity and the Royal Society for Public Health. These initiatives have been set up to look at health and wellbeing across the spectrum of health care, but mental health forms a large part of the remit.

Although it has long been known that the arts could play a positive role in health outcomes, it seems to have taken longer for health care to see the possibilities beyond art therapy and awareness raising. The initiatives described here are exciting not only in and of themselves, but also because they point to something in the zeitgeist, as it is recognised more and more that the power of the arts can be utilised in new ways. We believe these are genuinely exciting times for the arts and mental health, and look forward to reviewing developments for The Psychologist in the future.

J.P. Sennitt, Christmas Party. Credit: Adamson Collection/ Wellcome Trust.

– he draws the ‘art department’ falling over a cliff. Perhaps it tells of his frustrations with the psychiatric hospital at a time when most patients were hospitalised for 30–50 years.

Thea Hart and Mary Bishop both depict the often vulnerable and fractious doctor–patient relationship.

Gwyneth Rowland’s painted flints tell another story – a story of her travels and education before her breakdown.

In the sometimes difficult audiencing of these pieces, questions

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are raised – not only about what makes something aesthetically pleasing, but also about the value we put on these works and, more importantly, the value we put on the artists. What do these paintings, drawings and objects tell us about what it’s like to be excluded? How do we treat such people, and what parts of ourselves do we recognise in them? How do these works, for example, makes us relate to our own mental health?

It seems that art travels, not only literally, as beautifully illustrated in the film, which I recommend should commence every visit, but affectively.

The art exhibited here moved the artists, for therapeutic purposes, and continues to move the audience, for questioning our relationship to those who are socially different or do not conform. Listening to these stories is needed now more than ever. If you can, please visit this exhibition.

Mary Bishop, Cri de Coeur.

Credit: Adamson Collection/ Wellcome Trust.

The exhibition runs until 25 July 2017 at the Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck School of Arts https://mramovesinmysteriousways. wordpress.com Reviewed by Dr Fay Dennis, who is a researcher in addictions at King’s College London

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AZ the

psychologist to

G ...is for Gratitude

‘Gratitude promotes the wellbeing of the person who feels grateful, but it is also beneficial for the wellbeing of others. This social component of gratitude promotes relationships that are important for social support. When you transform feeling grateful into a habit, you can develop a grateful trait that shows to be beneficial in both wellbeing and mental health related problems.

So let’s appreciate gratitude!’

In a 2013 study reported on our Research Digest, Amy Blume-Marcovici’s team found that therapists’ tears during sessions were often associated with gratitude, suggesting such tears ‘are different in nature than tears shed in daily life’.

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In their 2007 article for us, Alex Wood (then of the University of Warwick) and colleagues discussed research suggesting that grateful people have better social relationships, characterised by greater closeness and heightened reciprocal social support.

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Karla Novak

Suggested by Lilian Jans-Bekan, a PhD candidate in psychology at the Open University Netherlands @lilianjansbeken

Professor Richard Bentall, in his 2011 ‘One on One’, felt the world should be grateful he decided not to become a pilot. ‘I’m far too neurotic… Instead of the laconic “Ladies and gentleman, we seem to have a bit of a problem with our wing falling off, so please tighten your seatbelts as we will be landing shortly”, the passengers would hear a Basil Fawlty-like cry of despair from the cockpit.’

‘Gratitude exercises’ can actually lead to reductions in self-esteem for some people, according to a 2011 Sergeant and Mongrain study covered on our Research Digest.

coming soon… driverless cars, presenteeism, forgiveness, and much more...

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