The Psychologist September 2016

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psychologist vol 29 no 9

september 2016 www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Experiencing the ‘surveillance society’ Darren Ellis, Dave Harper and Ian Tucker

letters 658 news 668 careers 710 looking back 730

the social psychology of cybersecurity 686 untying the hardest knots 690 interview: Judith Rich Harris 696 new voices: who cares for the carers? 698

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Experiencing the ‘surveillance society’ We are increasingly being watched. Darren Ellis, Dave Harper and Ian Tucker ask whether psychology has been slow to cast a watchful eye over the implications.

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The social psychology of cybersecurity 686 John MacAlaney, Helen Thackray and Jacqui Taylor consider motivations for hacking, and how the problem is best addressed

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August 2016 issue 52,786 dispatched Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use or recycle.

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Untying the hardest knots Dan Jones delves into the work of Eran Halperin, in the field of conflict resolution

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New voices: Who cares for the carers?

Jane Smallwood with the latest in our series for budding writers

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...reports encountering pain; 20 years of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience; Society awards; British Academy Fellows; on the front line of boardroom change; and more 668 698

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

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

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Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Matt Connolly, Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Reviews Kate Johnstone Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus, Asifa Majid

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psychologist vol 29 no 9

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the issue ...debates letters police armed response; Black Lives Matter; Jerome Bruner, 1915-2016; President’s Letter; and more

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...digests how the brain deals with blinks; expert schmoozers; OCD; and more, in the latest from our Research Digest (also available as blog, email, app, and more)

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...meets news 5 minutes with Marc Chevreau on encouraging wellbeing and resilience in children

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interview we hear from Judith Rich Harris about her extraordinary fightback against entrenched views of child development

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careers we meet Peter Hobson, Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London; Thomas Hoare describes his voluntary work in Nigeria; and Hope Christie offers a practical guide to the final undergraduate year

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one on one with clinical psychologist, trainer and author Lucy Johnstone

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...reviews Notes on Blindness; Dr Broks’ Casebook; ‘Wounded’ at the Science Museum; The Spoils; and books

With barely a day passing between tragic terrorist atrocities, and the blood-saturated media coverage that flows from them, it’s easy to form the impression that we live in very insecure times. With this month’s loose theme of ‘security and policing’, you will encounter several pieces that consider countermeasures, and whether they genuinely make us feel safer.

Our cover feature (p.682) looks at surveillance, and argues that psychologists have been slow to cast their own watchful eyes over the implications of increased levels.

A relative lack of psychological inquiry is also a theme of Peter Squire’s consideration of police armed response (p.658). Other articles look at those putting psychological theory and research to practice in areas such as cybersecurity and conflict resolution.

Often when we publish such a collection, I receive emails saying ‘I work in this area, I wish you had asked me’. Well, unlike the UK’s CCTV system, I can’t possibly have eyes everywhere… please don’t wait to be asked, get in touch now!

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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...looks back Phantom suffering?

Joanna Bourke looks into physical and emotional wounding after the First World War

The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Phil Banyard, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Peter Olusoga, Peter Wright

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…more Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for exclusives and our archive, and download our free iOS/Android app

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Big picture centre-page pull-out Beyond Seizures: from a series by Angela Farragher for the London Brain Project

LETTERS

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Split-second responses?

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In July, five Dallas police officers were shot dead by a black activist angered by the grossly disproportionate death toll of African American men following police encounters. More than ever we need calm heads, clear thinking, effective communication, the sensitive application of training principles, minimum use of force, and public accountability. Unfortunately, when split-second decision-making is called for in a fast-moving and potentially dangerous situation, these ideals may be hard to come by – especially when overlaid by fear, uncertainty, suspicion and, yes, the baggage of racist working assumptions sometimes conflated with an idea of ‘racial profiling’.

The issues raised resonate in recent British debates about police use, and misuse, of force. British police firearms instructors I’ve interviewed have referred to the need for officers to develop ‘muscle trained’ reactions. Facing immediate threats, their training routines should kick in and they, almost instinctively, do the right thing – legally, procedurally, mechanically, effectively – to ‘neutralise’ (interesting word, that) any threat.

Yet, even as the Dallas police deployed a weaponised robot against the sniper, police officers are not robots. Instead cultivating professionalism and ethical integrity is seen to be the key. A lot hangs on that phrase ‘almost instinctively’. Whereas those of a psychological orientation might want to unravel the distinct ‘learned’, ‘trained’, ‘perceived’, ‘co-produced’ and ‘situationally determined’ factors – which, vying with adrenalinerushed, fight-or-flight responses, influence police action and decisions – sociologists like me have tended to look elsewhere.

The notion of ‘police culture’ looms large in sociological studies of policing, invoked to explain the non-correspondence between policing practice and policing theory (law, training, ethics, professionalism, etc.). This issue has arisen in many Independent Police Complaints Commission investigations.

The IPCC operates according to what it calls a ‘learning from mistakes’ philosophy, but it sometimes appears as if the causes of the original ‘mistake’ are insufficiently well understood. The argument goes beyond relatively crude contrasts between socalled ‘rotten apples’ and ‘rotten orchards’ and picks up on the ways in which organisational routines, institutional practices, customs and procedures are shaped by certain non-official values and traits such as ‘group loyalty’ (the infamous ‘thin blue line’), an action-oriented sense of mission, masculinity, suspicion (accompanied by often derogatory stereotypes of major ‘client’ groups (youth, street populations, ethnic minority groups),

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‘black’ humour, and residual elements of sexism and racism.

When these traits are factored into tactics and use of force, the evidence suggests that, just as police deploy legal powers (such as vehicle checks, stop and frisk), they may also use nonlegal powers such as ‘DWB’ or ‘driving while black’, a form of racial profiling relating to US vehicle checks; the ‘attitude test’, a judgement reached by British police officers concerning whether a suspect was suitably compliant and deferential, where failing the test could result in an arrest for ‘obstruction’; and the ‘Ways and Means Act’, a non-existent piece of legislation cited

by UK officers to legitimise their actions vis-à-vis some unsuspecting petty offenders.

Another central issue is that officers often deploy the equipment they have to achieve the purposes they seek. Other issues enter the frame of reference, especially, for instance, officer safety, but the message is generally that police will deploy the equipment they are given. Use of CS sprays increased dramatically following their introduction, arrestees sometimes being given a little spray once handcuffed (and contrary to regulations) as a de facto field punishment for non-compliance during the arrest; Taser use, likewise increased 45 per cent during 2011, when they were deployed to more UK police forces (see tinyurl.com/zhjz5dp). And the same goes for guns.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of cultural differences in policing dictated by whether the police force in question was routinely armed is demonstrated in two articles (Hendy, 2014; Knutsson & Strype, 2003) exploring differences between the Norwegian and Swedish police (the latter routinely armed, the former, not so). Evidence showed that the Swedish police routinely approached crime incidents with guns drawn, challenged and confronted suspects with drawn weapons and, perhaps as a result, fired weapons five to six times more frequently. The message was pretty clear; weapons exerted a powerful influence upon officers, upon how police officers approached suspects, how they managed incidents and, ultimately how they ‘performed’ their roles as police officers.

Beyond these stark differences in approach, there is a wide range of psychological research (both experimental and situational) that Peter Kennison and I summarise in our book Shooting to Kill? (2010, Wiley-Blackwell, pp.90–91). This adds another layer of findings to the mix: police officers briefed about the ‘dangerousness’ of the suspect being sought, were more likely to shoot; officers who had to race to get to the scene (perhaps already adrenaline charged) were more likely to shoot; …and much more We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience.

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letters

Black lives matter officers able to contain a suspect (for instance, in a building) were less likely to shoot; officers who had drunk large amounts of coffee were rather more likely to shoot, and officers witnessing a weapon were more likely to shoot. White officers were also more likely to shoot black suspects; officers who heard gunfire were more likely to open fire themselves (‘contagious gunfire’).

Not all of these findings lend themselves to easy policy responses, though they do underpin the idea that violent policing responses are the product of many potential influences, contexts and narratives, and not just street-level encounters. Eradicating unnecessary violence from policing encounters must be as far-reaching. There is enormous scope for further psychological inquiry here.

All of which may bring us back to Police and African American confrontations in the USA in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter protests. While most US police officers will work their entire careers without firing their weapons, gundriven street encounters have become increasingly fraught. They are overlaid by a climate of fear and Charles Kinsey – shot mutual mistrust, allegations of racism and alleged impunity when sensitive triggers are too easily pulled and few legal consequences follow. Discussing the earlier ‘Jim Crow’ era when justice and race relations fell markedly out of step with US law and the Constitution, US historian Kevin Boyle writes of how racist violence was part of a way of life in the South: ‘whites learned to have hair-trigger tempers’ to keep blacks in their supposed place. A scenario, surely, to be avoided, but under ‘concealed-carry’ and so-called Castle-Doctrine laws, many states have delegated the right to kill even to private citizens. At least police officers are trained and, as noted already, it is in training, careful briefing, more effective communication, incident de-escalation management, and community centred and accountable policing that solutions will need to be found. After all, the so called ‘fleeing felon’ laws which, in the US South, had seen a huge disproportion in the numbers of black men shot in the back while apparently fleeing the police, were gradually abolished in the late 1960s and 70s, and police departments were required to bring the practices of their officers back within the law.

Peter Squires Professor of Criminology and Public Policy, University of Brighton References Hendy, R. (2014). Routinely armed and unarmed police. Policing, 8(2), 183–192.

Knutsson, J. & Strype, J. (2003). Police use of firearms in Norway and Sweden – the significance of gun availability. Policing and Society, 13(4), 429–439.

Editor’s note: I would like to feature more on this topic in a later edition. I know there is research out there – see the excellent summaries by BuzzFeed journalist Peter Aldhous (tinyurl.com/zu8ppqf and tinyurl.com/zp3zwf4) – so I would be very grateful if any psychologists researching police armed response could get in touch with me on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

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Do the lives of our children matter?

Do the lives of our brothers matter?

Do the lives of our sisters matter?

What about the lives of our husbands, fathers, wives and mothers?

Most people would probably answer yes to these questions. How do we then explain the lives lost in seemingly normal moments like walking down the street in a hoodie, selling CDs on a street, or driving to a new job?

Trayvon Martin. Alton Sterling. Sandra Bland. Mzee Mohammed. Sarah Reed. Jermaine Baker. Since 1990 156 BME deaths in police custody in the UK. Their lives mattered, but tragically they are no longer here. It is not a coincidence that on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps more frequently in the US, a number of young black men and women have suffered at the hands of the authorities and paid a price with their lives.

As counselling psychologists we stand up for those we engage with who are impacted by these very sad incidents. The truth be told, these young men and women look like us. Our privileges as professionals do not by any stretch of imagination protect us against these occurrences.

One only has to look to the experience of Charles Kinsey, an African American behavioural therapist who was shot, even after he demonstrated he was unarmed. He was doing his job, endeavouring to calm his autistic client. Like many others before him, the colour of his skin prompted a response from police officers

that is becoming all too frequent – the kind of response that suggests a black man or black woman is threatening or dangerous.

And subsequently, a need to react based on a fear of this danger. This is not a new reaction. The difference now, is the magnification of these events through the world stage of social media platforms.

There will be people out there (psychologists and nonpsychologists) thinking why black people? And we ask why not black people? As a profession, we know what the invalidation of an experience can do to an individual, a group or a community. Our work does not begin and end in the therapy room. As psychologists, we have a duty to be a part of the narrative, to openly advocate for our clients and to adopt a stance that strengthens the narratives of individuals who have been disenfranchised.

Black lives matter because, for far too long, black lives have been ignored and minimised. This statement does not take away from the significance of other lives.

Instead, it sheds light on issues that many still find too uncomfortable and difficult to talk about. We cannot afford to be uncomfortable and do nothing – not when a black boy can get killed walking to a store to buy skittles.

How can we all contribute to Black Lives Matter? By educating our peers; having open dialogues around race, racism and discrimination; recognising privilege and exploiting it in service to others; speaking up and contributing our knowledge; by standing alongside individuals who march in the name of justice and lives lost; and by pushing for change and accountability.

Dr Yetunde Ade-Serrano CPsychol, AFBPsS Dr Ohemaa Nkansa-Dwamena CPsychol, AFBPsS London

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NOTICEBOARD I would like to highlight to psychologists a website I have developed to provide emotional support to parents of disabled children (www.affinityhub.uk).

Parents of children with special needs sometimes feel like their life is very different from other families and can become isolated. The website aims to reduce isolation by including quotes from other parents to remind people that they are not alone. It outlines many of the complex emotions parents may feel in relation to their child’s disability, including anger and denial, so as to normalise these feelings. The site also lists organisations that provide emotional support as well as private practitioners who have experience of supporting parents in a similar situation.

Any practitioners who have relevant experience and would like to be included on the site, please email me.

Jo Griffin CPsychol, AFBPsS griffinpsychology@gmail.com

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In DSM-5 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by persistent deficits in social communication, interaction and imagination, associated with restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests and activities and potential sensory difficulties. In the UK, NICE Quality Standards target a three months waiting time between assessment referral and first appointment. However, on average, adults wait two years. Termed the ‘diagnosis crisis’, this has been experienced by many within the community.

England’s community adult ASD prevalence is estimated at 0.98 per cent (Brugha et al., 2011) compared to 2.3 per cent within secure psychiatric settings (Scragg & Shah, 1994), suggesting ASD is potentially going unrecognised elsewhere within forensic settings, which may be due to a number of factors. ASDs may be masked – relatively rule-adherent behaviour creating minimal management issues; missed – poor staff understanding of ASD presentations resulting from inadequate training; or overlooked – even if suspected, from lack of awareness of the benefits associated with referral to specialist services (and even the process), or owing to unavailability of resources. Recent research has suggested individuals with ASD within prison often have more traumatic experiences because their additional needs are not recognised and subsequently met (see tinyurl.com/ho4d8ls).

Within forensic settings it may seem if a diagnosis is reached, a person’s pathway may not be altered; so ‘What’s the point?’ (a question heard asked in clinical practice).

However, receiving a diagnosis can help provide explanation for difficulties experienced, as well as contributing towards the formulation of risk issues, and reasons they have come to forensic services’ attention. On the basis that understanding risk is the key to reduction and management, and the fact that forensic patients deserve the same levels of care as other non-forensic individuals, there is a clear ‘point’ to assessment in forensic settings. Despite this, resources for assessment are limited. This article calls for more attention and investment to move towards this subpopulation of offenders.

Even if forensic healthcare professionals are alerted to a potential case, diagnosis generally requires detailed neurodevelopmental history to inform NICE-recommended clinical assessment.

This detail is often difficult to obtain for forensic populations. Additionally, instruments are often lengthy and costly, limiting their use in these financially austere times. Shorter (cheaper) screening tools have been trialled to overcome these issues regarding other mental health disorders; however, despite preliminary studies, no such instruments are employed systematically within forensic services regarding ASD. Whilst general mental health awareness has had a recent focus for forensic staff, there appears to be need for specialist ASD awareness training and clarity regarding the pathway for screening, assessment and referral.

Despite governmental publications promoting appropriate assessment and support for those with ASD, more needs to be done regarding forensic populations. Although the update Think Autism (tinyurl.com/z9c3x9w) contains a chapter focusing upon ASDs within the criminal justice system (a development from the past lack of focus) overall, only five out of 33 action points focus upon this population.

Accurate recognition is a starting point to understanding potential links with offending behaviour, vulnerability to victimisation, and TIM SANDERS

I am seeking Excel files of Ravens APM from 2005 or later, devoid of identifiers except for age and gender. This is with the hope of showing more light on the Flynn effect. Two of my papers, identified an anti-Flynn effect in Piagetian tests of a drastic reduction of the proportion showing Piaget’s formal thinking, coupled with a reduction in those at lower levels of concrete thinking: both in relation to 1976. There was also some evidence suggesting these changes were post 1995 only.

I wish to see if the same effect shows in psychometric tests (i.e. that the score range has become squeezed between the middle and upper-middle score range).

Could anyone please supply?

The ages covered should be between 11/12 and 15. Also I would also like to get APM data limited to the years 1992 to 1997.

Michael Shayer Emeritus Professor, King’s College, London m.shayer@btinternet.com

Adult autism – hidden in forensic settings

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Sarah Ashworth Forensic Psychologist in Training University of Nottingham Dr Ruth J. Tully Centre for Family and Forensic Psychology University of Nottingham References Brugha, T., McManus, S., Bankart, J. et al. (2011). Epidemiology of autism spectrum disorders in adults in the community in England. Archives of General Psychiatry, 68, 459–466.

Scragg P. & Shah, A. (1994). Prevalence of Asperger’s syndrome in a secure hospital. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 679–682.

MARK PINDER/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

subsequently the ability to provide effective support and treatment. However, services are limited. There needs to be increased awareness, specialised support and interventions in place; in forensic settings and the community in general. However, without accurate identification and recognition, support that is available (charities, prison champions, specialist forensic teams) may be inaccessible.

Appropriate identification is the first (and vital) step.

Lack of recognition limits opportunity for: accurate offence analysis and subsequent riskmanagement plan development; awareness regarding increased vulnerability (bullying/exploitation) or heightened risk of psychiatric comorbidity; and mismanagement of potentially challenging behaviour as a result of social and communication skill deficits.

Clearly all of these issues are problematic in themselves and costly; inadequate risk management and subsequent reoffending costs more than assessment and support, both financially and regarding public safety.

The government’s commitment to support individuals with ASD to lead ‘fulfilling and rewarding lives’ should not exclude the incarcerated. The hidden population within forensic services deserve our attention; for their care, and for the safety of potential future victims. In summary, we suggest accurate identification could facilitate effective assessment and management of challenging presentations, the risk of developing additional mental health issues, specialist support and service needs, and risk of future offending. In order to provide intervention, focus needs to be placed on assessment within forensic settings, we call for greater investment specifically in this area.

ASD should not be invisible within forensic services, and we hope to promote debate in this area.

More complex than scapegoating In his letter entitled ‘Brexit – how do we go forward?’ (August 2016) Dr John McGowan notes that it is ‘tempting to generalise’, then asserts that the Scottish National Party’s appeal to the voters of Scotland is based on scapegoating ‘Sassenachs’. I suggest that this is a fundamentally misguided understanding of the political situation of the

last few years north of the border, and bears little relationship to the outward-looking SNP. By engaging with issues of inequality and public health, for example, the SNP has developed a very broad constituency, and one that reaches far beyond the political gains that ‘Sassenach scapegoating’ would have made possible. The consistent misconception of the

SNP’s stance as being fundamentally antiEnglish is one of the reasons the SNP have been running rings around the Conservatives and Labour here. There seems no lack of ‘considering greater complexity’ in the current Scottish political situation, in my view at least.

Ewen McLachlan Edinburgh

Publishing and self-publishing I sympathise with Richard Hallam (Letter, ‘Rewards of academic life’, August 2016). I am fortunate in having a very good publisher for my textbook, but some publishers do appear to prey on the good will and aspirations of academics by offering very low returns (‘Oh, but it will be good for your career, though…’). Perhaps the low fee reflects the publisher’s view of the sales potential of the book? Self-publishing e-books (on Amazon Kindle, for example) is as easy nowadays as submitting a paper through a journal’s

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electronic submission system and the royalties are high. Richard might experiment by self-publishing the material as an e-book to see if it makes more than £560.00. My own experiences of self-publishing e-books are that it costs practically nothing, is tremendous fun, but sales are poor without the benefits of professional marketing and other services provided by good publishers.

Dr Robert Bridger Institute of Naval Medicine Gosport, Hampshire

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NEWS

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Pain – the backdrop of our lives A truly unique conference, which set out to explore alternative ways of communicating, sharing and assessing suffering, was held at University College London. Encountering Pain emerged after a three-year interdisciplinary project at UCL called ‘Pain: Speaking the Threshold’ which assessed the value of images and image-making processes to the management of chronic pain.

Ella Rhodes was there for the first day of the conference, which truly put clinicians, patients and academics on the same level and opened up fascinating discussions. Pain: Speaking the Threshold drew on a previous project Face 2 Face, a collaboration between artist Deborah Padfield and facial pain consultant Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and patients and staff from University College London Hospitals (UCLH). It focused mainly on facial pain but also explored the impact of visual images on medical dialogue in more detail.

During Face 2 Face, sufferers worked with Deborah Padfield to co-create images of pain, which were subsequently piloted by other patients in NHS clinics. The conference was a chance to share the results with patients and clinicians involved in the study, to hear the testimonies firsthand of those who co-created the photo cards, based on their experience of pain, and to bring together high-profile medical professionals, psychologists, a linguist, historian and neurobiologists to speak about pain and the projects alongside poetry, dance and performances.

Professor Zakrzewska (UCLH), a doctor with a specialism in facial pain, explained that pain could often be difficult to express using language alone, and with 14 million people in the UK suffering from chronic pain it was an important area to address. The photo cards created during Face 2 Face feature visual metaphors, such as an electrical wire sparking or a leg with a heavy weight tied to it, giving patients a new way to explain their pain to medical professionals. Zakrzewska explained that the images encourage the exploration of different aspects of pain between patients and the person listening to their story.

Padfield said she was initially encouraged to use art to express her own pain by her GP and subsequently wanted to assess whether this approach could be helpful to other patients.

She said, after meeting pain specialists, and in particular talking to her own pain specialist, Dr Charles Pither, then Medical Director of Input Pain Management Unit, St Thomas’ Hospital,

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she discovered pain’s incommunicability was as frustrating for clinicians as it was for patients. Its invisibility and subjectivity make it a difficult thing to capture using objective measures, she added.

In an earlier project, Perceptions of Pain, Padfield collaborated with Pither, where she co-created with patients photos that represented their unique experiences of pain. In 2004 they carried out a feasibility study to see if these images could benefit other patients, and the feedback received encouraged her to look further into the role of images in patient–clinician communication.

This developed during the subsequent collaboration with Zakrzewska, Face 2 Face, which additionally explored patient experiences of facial pain. This kind of pain presents another problem. ‘Our faces’, Padfield said, ‘are often the canvases we use to express pain, but when the face itself is in constant pain these feelings become harder to express in a way which others can read.’ One of the strands of this project involved workshops for clinicians and patients to attend together at both UCLH and the National Portrait Gallery to encourage them to share their experiences outside a clinical context.

Padfield worked with facial pain patients to co-create pain photos. A group of these were integrated with a selection of those from Perceptions of Pain, compiled into a pack of 54 laminated cards and tested out in real consultations, which were filmed. Ten different healthcare professionals from the pain management teams at UCLH offered to have their consultations filmed. The clinicians saw two patients each without images and two new patients with images, both groups under the same conditions. The filmed consultations and postconsultation questionnaires made up a unique body of material that was analysed during the recent Pain: Speaking the Threshold project by experts from different disciplines.

Professor Elena Semino, Head of Linguistics at Lancaster University, analysed these consultations and compared those in which the photos were used and those where they weren’t. She assessed the kinds of language used in the consultations and whether the photos changed the amount of speech used by doctors compared to patients. She found that patients spoke much more than clinicians in consultations where the photos were used. In these consultations patients also described their

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DEBORAH PADFIELD WITH ALISON GLENN FROM THE SERIES FACE2FACE, 2008 – 2013, DIGITAL ARCHIVAL PRINT© DEBORAH PADFIELD

pain in metaphorical terms. Patients using the photos spoke frequently about their sense of self being worn down due to pain and also disclosed emotional narratives and suicidal feelings. Semino said the photos seemed to encourage people to speak in similes, and from that point more information emerged.

Semino concluded that the use of photos allowed a patient to speak about pain differently as well as increasing references to thoughts and feelings, as well as making it more likely for patients to make personal disclosures, such as suicidal thoughts.

Clinical Health Psychologist Dr Amanda C de C Williams (UCL) steered the audience through an analysis of the nonverbal interactions in the filmed consultations. She said pain was an area of particular interest due to the subjective nature of our experience of it; people bring their own individuality and social role to pain whether as a patient or observer. She found little difference between the general ratings, by both clinicians and patients, about the quality of the consultations as whole; overall these were uniformly quite high. It did emerge, however, that the images seemed to impact on the non-verbal behaviour and in particular more on clinician than patient behaviour.

Williams took a sample of one minute out of every five minutes of each consultation, which were rated by two observers for behaviours around rapport, affiliation, dominance and submission. They saw that patients showed roughly the same level of affiliation whether using images or not, while clinicians showed more positive affiliation when using the images. It appeared patient and clinician behaviour was more attuned in the with-image condition.

After a beautiful dance performance by Anusha Subramanyam, based on the patient experiences used in the project, came a fascinating keynote by Professor Rita Charon (founder and Executive Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia and Professor of Medicine at CUMC, New York) on narrative medicine and the talk of pain. Charon coined the term ‘narrative medicine’ pioneering a new field.

Facial-pain sufferers Liz Aldous and Ann Eastman also shared their moving experiences of being involved with the Face 2 Face project and creating images of their own pain, which have since been used by other patients.

Professor Christopher Eccleston (University of Bath) opened his keynote speech on embodied experiences by suggesting pain

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news

was a ‘fundamental psychological experience’, adding: ‘You were born in pain, likely you’ll die in pain, significant episodes of your life can be in the context of pain. Pain is the backdrop of our lives, but although it’s ever-present and we live in a form of collective denial. We try to pretend it doesn’t exist.’

He said that many psychologists see the body simply as a taxi for the mind, and in trying to apply psychology to pain many see it through the lens of abnormal psychology. However, Eccleston said, this does not always ‘fit’ with a person’s experience, as those suffering with chronic pain are usually not psychologically disordered in any way.

Eccleston described himself as a ‘normal’ psychologist, interested in the everyday and usual. He asked whether there was another way to look at pain aside from thinking about mental states or observed behaviour, he said potentially it sits where it can’t be pinned down – between mind and action.

Although individual experiences shouldn’t be trivialised, Eccleston added, the only time pain can be seen as abnormal is when it doesn’t go away. He said what had fascinated him most about patients was that they were successful in many aspects of life but somehow pain would disassemble them. He added: ‘The only way we’ll understand the experience they have of pain is to apply normal not abnormal psychology.’

He asked how we could build a non-judgemental, enabling psychology around pain. Eccleston said that much psychology suggests that chronic-pain patients are fear-avoidant, but he added: ‘Most of the people I have met have courageous engagement, they’re not passive at all. I am not denying their suffering, but people are actively fighting for a way out or a solution.’

We should put the body back into psychology, he concluded, and encourage people to have liberating narratives, and provide treatments that allow them to restructure their own experiences. He said: ‘We can have a positive psychology that allows us to recognise what pain is about – being active, engaged and searching.’

The second day saw talks from Professor Joanna Bourke, Dr Preeti Doshi, Professor Maria Fitzgerald, and more. For a special issue on pain, find our June 2011 issue in our archive at www.thepsychologist.bps.org.uk.

FUND TO EFFECT SOCIAL CHANGE The Cabinet Office has launched an £80 million fund to support Social Impact Bonds (SIB) to help transform people's lives.

The Life Chances Fund, launched in July by Minister for Civil Society Rob Wilson, will tackle entrenched social issues, improving people’s life chances by looking at local solutions for local problems to bring better life chances to individuals. The fund will also support a new academic centre to understand and measure new approaches for the public sector to commission services.

The fund is structured around six key themes: drug and alcohol dependency; children’s services; early years; young people; older people’s services;

and healthy lives. Applications for proposals focused on children’s services and tackling drug and alcohol dependency are open until 30 September, to be followed by the other themes over the next 12 months.

The Cabinet Office has also partnered with Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University to launch the Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab), to establish an independent centre of academic excellence for the commissioning of public services. The GO Lab will deepen understanding of outcomesbased commissioning, including social impact bonds, by researching new ways for the public sector to commission services.

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The past, present and future of cognitive neuroscience Tess Brown reports from UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience 20th Anniversary Conference, 'Mind the Brain' A sold-out crowd of over 300 attendees, made up of academics, students and the general public, made their way into UCL’s Jeffery Hall to be a part of ‘Mind the Brain’. This conference aimed to celebrate 20 years of groundbreaking research at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), but also to bring the future of cognitive neuroscience to the public by featuring short (15-minute), engaging and accessible talks by all 12 speakers and four panelists.

Host of the conference, Steve Cross, kicked off the day with lighthearted humour, which relieved the nerves of the speakers while exciting the packed crowed for the first block of talks. Cross welcomed the first speaker to deliver the keynote address, Tim Shallice. Shallice, the founder of the Institute of Cognitive

Valerie Curran speaking at ‘Mind the Brain’

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Neuroscience, spoke on the history of the ICN, from its foundation in 1996 to its current research. His talk humbled attendees by allowing them to have a perspective on how far the field of cognitive neuroscience has come in the past 20 years, and how much of an integral role the ICN has had in that development, and will continue to have into the future.

Block 1 continued with talks from prominent researchers at the ICN, Leun Otten, Oliver Robinson and Lucy Foulkes.

All three are highly focused on how their research can impact the future of cognitive neuroscience. For example, Leun Otten spoke on the importance of brain states when forming new memories. She used her research to suggest a future in optimising learning and education,

whereby teachers could utilise brain-state detectors, such as a portable EEG like EMOTIV, to analyse when students are at their optimal brain states. Then, teaching can take place in order to maximise efficiency. Otten dazzled the audience by featuring a demonstration of how the EMOTIV technology works, and just how easy it is to implement in an everyday learning environment.

Robinson and Foulkes wrapped up the first block of speakers by discussing the importance of understanding the underlying causes of psychiatric disorders instead of simply treating symptoms.

Robinson focused on anxiety, while Foulkes spoke about disorders of social reward, specifically, psychopathy.

The second block of speakers widened the scope, by extending beyond research done at the ICN. Cognitive neuroscience research is prominent all over UCL’s campus. In Block 2, Robb Rutledge spoke about his work on happiness. Rutledge said: ‘Happiness does not depend on what you have in your life, rather, you are happy when things are going better than you expected.’ To illustrate, silver medallists tend to feel less happy than bronze medallists, because the silvers were so close to winner, whereas the third-place winners are just happy to be on the podium! Therefore, Rutledge concluded, happiness and reward are not one in the same.

Other speakers in the second block were Valerie Curran (pictured), who discussed on the medicinal uses for cannabis, Camilla Nord and Sarah White. Nord explained the anomaly of antidepressants. Her answer to explain why antidepressants take at least four to eight weeks to change mood is rooted in the idea that antidepressants change negative biases first, as a bottom-up approach.

After many negative biases are changed, improvements in mood follow. On the other hand, White gave the audience an insight into autism, and how a novel, augmentedreality, pretend-play game can work as a treatment for autistic spectrum disorder children.

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The third and final block of individual speakers started out with Katerina Fotopoulou who spoke on the social aspects of subjective experience. For example, when a child falls in the park, that child often tends to look around for its parent before it starts to cry. Why is this? Fotopoulou explained that having social confirmation of pain gives this child the ‘green light’ to start crying. In a way, Fotopoulou said, this is because there is an innate biological need for social interaction. This research sheds light on the difference between subjectivity and individuality of experience, whereas pain is often thought of individualistic, however, this talk provided evidence as to why it is indeed a social experience.

Steve DiCosta, Jo Hale and Bahador Bahrami followed with talks on how sensory cues give a sense of agency, how avatars can help form the future of social mimicry, and the neuroscience of persuading others, respectively.

To conclude the day of talks, a panel discussion featuring Martin Eimer, Nima Khalighinejad, Anna Kuppuswamy and Geraint Rees looked to answer questions on the future of cognitive neuroscience both from the audience and from the live Twitter feed. The questions led to an enlightening conversation, not just with the panellists amongst themselves, but

with the audience and twittersphere as well. All audience members were engaged in a dialogue on topics ranging from neurobunk, ethics, happiness, and Brexit.

The unique perspectives of the panellists allowed the audience to gain a holistic understanding of the future of neuroscience.

At the beginning of the panel discussion, each panellist gave a fiveminute synopsis of his or her thoughts on the future of cognitive neuroscience.

Martin Eimer started by saying, ‘One thing that has changed is the way we talk about our mind, mental states and brain states.’

He observed that there is now an effortless and natural talk about brain states and functions when interpreting mental states.

The way neuroscience has infiltrated everyday language and thought has impacted the fields of economics, law and theology, showing how the brain has become a mainstay in how we think about ourselves.

Next, Nima Khalighinejad suggested that the future of cognitive neuroscience depends on a shift from encoding to decoding. In the years to come, Khalighinejad believes the field of cognitive neuroscience will help us gain a richer understanding of who we are as humans.

Anna Kuppuswamy followed by

foreseeing bridges being built between different neuroscience fields, and how an all-encompassing view will help understand those with disorders of the brain. She used the example of fatigue, which is not well studied in the field of cognitive neuroscience, despite the fact that fatigue is a major symptom in a lot of neurological problems. Interestingly, fatigue falls in neither the sensorimotor camp nor the cognitive camp. It acts as a crossroads for body-brain-mind research.

Kuppuswamy concluded by saying, ‘My hope is that cognitive neuroscience will help people with conditions, and we can learn more about the brain when studying pathology.’

Lastly, Geraint Rees took the podium to discuss the future of cognitive neuroscience. Rees believes the following three points to be true, ‘First, the future is not about me, it is about you. Second, the future is a lot more like the past than you think. And third, cognitive neuroscience is about understanding what people do, in reference to the brain.’ By saying this, Rees made the future of cognitive neuroscience a field that is no longer controlled by a small, academic elite, but one that everyone is responsible for.

I Tess Brown is a Cognitive Neuroscience Candidate at University College London

Presidents’ Award An expert on the psychology of political crisis is to receive this year’s Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge from the British Psychological Society.

The winner is Alexander Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter and Professor of Psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland .

Working with Professor Michelle Ryan at Exeter, Professor Haslam developed the concept of the ‘glass cliff’ – the tendency for women to be promoted to high-level jobs at times of crisis. They found, for

instance, that companies who appointed a woman to their board had experienced consistently poorer performance in the five months preceding the appointment than those who appointed only men.

Professor Haslam is also known for his work with Professor Steve Reicher reinterrogating issues raised by the Stanford Prison Experiment – this was the basis for the groundbreaking BBC documentary The Experiment (see www.bbcprisonstudy.org).

The pair also collaborated on the award-winning 2011 book The New Psychology of Leadership, which has provided the framework for a new analysis of phenomena as

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diverse as the rise of terrorism, the allure of Donald Trump, and Leicester City FC’s success (www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ leicesters-lesson-leadership).

Society President Professor Peter Kinderman said: ‘Psychology is a fascinating and broad discipline, and Professor Haslam’s research is at the cutting edge of some of our most fascinating subjects – the psychological processes operating in groups, political change, and in the sometimes banal psychology of evil. His work is important – and very timely. Given our current turbulent political context, I can think of few occasions when a study of the consequences of prejudice, groupthink, the psychology of crisis and the role of female leaders is more relevant.’

Commenting on the award, Professor Haslam said:

‘Receiving this award is a great honour, and I feel humbled to receive it. But it is largely an acknowledgement of the power of great teamwork and a testament to the range of fantastic collaborators that I have worked with over the last 25 years. Their support has made it possible to tilt at some very big windmills, and it has ensured that the research process has always been a lot of fun. However, I am also conscious of the fact that we still have a lot more work to do – and this award provides great motivation to get on with it.’

I Professor Haslam has been a regular in our pages over the years – search our archive at www.thepsychologist.org.uk for his contributions. In particular, you will find his 2011 interview ‘Free from the shackles’.

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT A ‘TOUR DE FORCE’ A passionate campaigner for social justice is the 2016 recipient of the British Psychological Society’s Research Board Lifetime Achievement Award.

During her successful career Professor Celia Kitzinger (University of York) has made several significant contributions to psychology. Her lengthy campaign to found the BPS Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section (now Psychology of Sexualities Section) laid the foundation within British psychology for the development and legitimation of the field.

The publication of her award-winning book The Social Construction of Lesbianism (1987) inspired researchers to engage in sexualities research and is highly cited in psychology and social science journals.

Another key contribution is to the field of language and social interaction, in which Professor Kitzinger has conducted research on how social worlds are produced and sustained in everyday interaction. Professor Kitzinger’s article ‘Doing feminist conversation analysis’ has been heavily cited and has had a profound influence in shaping research on gender and language. Her work in this area underpinned a research trend within the psychology of sexualities focusing on the mundane production of heteronormativity and heterosexism. She also contributes to ‘pure’ conversation analysis and her article (jointly with her wife Sue Wilkinson) ‘Surprise as an interactional achievement’ won the 2008 BPS Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section Outstanding Research Award.

More recently (jointly with her sister Professor Jenny Kitzinger), Professor Kitzinger has focused her research on catastrophic brain injury, end-of-life decision-making and advance decisions to refuse treatment (see her article with Sue Wilkinson in our December 2015 edition).

This includes an online multimedia resource for family members of people in prolonged vegetative and minimally conscious states, which won first prize from the British Medical Association for Patient Information on Ethical Issues – and also first prize in the ESRC Celebrating Impact Awards (2015).

Along with her numerous research interests Professor Kitzinger continues to teach and inspire undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as health and social care professionals working in mental capacity and end-of-life care. She believes in the importance of mentoring postgraduate students and early-career researchers and continues to provide opportunities for scholar-activists wanting to create a more just world.

Daryl O’Connor, Chair of the Society’s Research Board said: ‘Celia’s contribution to British psychology, and psychology internationally, has been extraordinary over a long and sustained period of time. She has been a tour de force in terms of her research, and her campaigning has inspired a generation. She has changed aspects of the British Psychological Society for the better. Without Celia we might never have had the Psychology of Sexualities Section and the many other excellent developments in qualitative methods, sexualities research and, more recently, in family decisionmaking about patients with traumatic brain injuries.’

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Celebrating impact The winners of the annual Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Celebrating Impact Prize have been announced and include psychologist Theresa Gannon, (University of Kent). She and her team were awarded a prize of £10,000, for research on deliberate firesetters and a resulting treatment programme, in the Outstanding Impact on Society category.

Professor Gannon spoke to The Psychologist about this work and the impact she hopes it will have in many other countries. She and her research team examined whether deliberate firesetters in hospitals and prisons had any distinctive characteristics compared with people who had never set fires – also in prisons and hospitals – to assess whether they required specialist treatment.

She said prior to this work it was assumed firesetters were the same as other offenders with no particularly different psychological characteristics. However she and her team, comprising Dr Caoilte Ó Ciardh, Dr Emma Alleyne, Dr Magali Barnoux and Dr Nichola Tyler, found that, indeed, they are a special population who require a tailored therapeutic approach.

This group, Gannon added, appear to have a much higher interest in very serious fires such as house fires or hotel fires. They also seem to identify much more with fire, for example saying things like ‘I’d be no one without fire’. She added: ‘They also appear to normalise the misuse of fire and think it’s quite usual to have fire accidents in the home. They ruminate more about perceived wrongs committed against them, are provoked more easily and have much lower self-esteem than other offenders.’

From that work, and a review of the existing literature, Gannon and her team developed the first comprehensive theory of how adult deliberate firesetting evolves and developed a pilot manual including a treatment programme

for people who set fires. This treatment uses a CBT approach with psychotherapeutic elements and looks at the psychological characteristics or risk factors for firesetting as mentioned above.

She explained: ‘The programme looks at intimacy in relationships and communication style, because the research suggests people who misuse fire aren’t very good at communicating their needs or getting them met in a prosocial way. It also looks at thinking styles and self-regulation problems. The most pertinent part of the programme is that we teach people to reflect back on how their firesetting happened, dissect it and build an events-chain of how it happened and then develop a risk-management plan so if anything similar came up in the future they would know how to handle those situations.’

Gannon said she and her colleagues will use the money from the ESRC award to translate the treatment manual into other languages and teach practitioners in other countries how to use it.

She has already travelled to America to teach practitioners how to use this treatment programme and will take the same training to Australia and Belgium.

She added: ‘We’re also going to use the impact prize money to perhaps develop online training that can be distributed more widely and we’re hoping to translate it into other languages such as Chinese and Japanese.’

Dr Alan Gillespie CBE, Chair of the ESRC said: ‘The ESRC focuses on supporting the highestquality independent research with the power to aid growth, promote innovation and shape society. By encouraging and supporting ESRC-funded researchers to maximise the impact of their work, we ensure that their research has a significant impact across all policy areas and helps make a genuine difference at the local, national and international level.’ ER

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Four psychologists elected to the British Academy Perhaps the UK’s funniest psychologist, Professor Sophie Scott, was among four academics in the field to be elected to the British Academy this year. The national body for the humanities and social sciences recognised psychologists working in a vast array of areas along with 62 new Fellows.

Scott, Deputy Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL), well-known for her research and subsequent TED talk on laughter, said she was genuinely surprised to be nominated as a Fellow. She told us: ‘I’m very interested to explore the networking possibilities the Academy will open up, science is always a collaborative process.

I was elected into the Academy of Medical Sciences a few years ago and it’s an interesting process that opens up lots of conversations.’

She said throughout her career she has seen those in the discipline progressing from fellowships in the British Academy and on to fellowships in the Royal Society, including Uta Frith. She added: ‘It sends an important signal that people care about the area you’re working in and that you’re part of a bigger endeavour. It’s exciting to be part of that process.’

Many of these academics, Scott said, had helped her throughout her own academic career: ‘I’ve benefited from people who have been part of these associations, some really use it as leverage to encourage and help other people. Climbing that ladder of progress in academia can be very difficult, and you’ll hear descriptions of it that can make it feel like people are stepping on your fingers. But there are people on higher rungs who are looking to give young academics a lift up.’

In the future, Scott said, she hopes to continue her work combining two key areas of neuroscience. She added: ‘I’m really interested in how we can better understand the way communication systems fit within social neuroscience and interactions, because speech and language are our main way of interacting socially, but if you look at social neuroscience journals you won’t see much about it, the two things are kept quite separate. I’ve been trying to do this for a few years now, but I think we’re getting better,’ Professor Nilli Lavie (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), who developed the perceptual load theory and continues to study the brain’s capacity and the role of attention in information processing, said she was delighted and honoured to be elected as a Fellow. She added: ‘I’m looking forward to the opportunities this fellowship will give me to communicate, interact, and network with other public intellectuals and have the chance to influence policy.'

Lavie said she hopes to continue to highlight the implications of human brain capacity limits to a wide array of areas, such

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as technology, health and quality of life. She added: ‘This is a natural progression from my load theory, which I’ve worked on over the years, and in the future I hope to drive the important impact this scientific knowledge has for other areas. But at the same time I’d like to think I can be creative and inventive and can’t predict what other future directions I might start on!’

Peter Cooper has worked in a number of areas in the general field of psychopathology, including eating disorders, anxiety and depression. A major focus has been the impact of adversity on child development, especially maternal psychopathology, where he has been concerned to develop and evaluate interventions to disrupt intergenerational transmission of disturbance.

In recent years he has been working in Africa where he and his colleague, Lynne Murray, have developed a promising intervention for improving child cognitive and socio-emotional development. Professor Cooper said: ‘While I am truly delighted by this award, anyone who knows me knows that all the work I have ever done has been a collective effort which, in a just world, would carry collective reward.’

Professor Martin Eimer, Director of the Brain and Behaviour Lab at the Department for Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms of visual attention and working memory, and studies face perception and recognition and their impairment in prosopagnosia. He was also responsible for organising the last three research assessment exercises, RAE and REF, for the department and has also served on Birkbeck’s steering groups for the RAE 2008 and REF 2014.

He said: ‘This is a great honour not just for myself, but also another acknowledgement of the research excellence of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, which was ranked among the top five UK Psychology and Neuroscience departments in the REF. My team and I could not have conducted our work without the fantastic research infrastructure provided by the department and the college, and without the help and support of our excellent colleagues.’ ER

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On the front line of boardroom change FTSE 100 companies, particularly at executive and governance level, are notoriously white, male domains. But psychologists have become an integral part of actively challenging this status quo, working at senior government levels.

Two psychologists in particular have been involved with shaping the ways FTSE governance boards can become more diverse, in both ethnicity and gender. Dr Doyin Atewologun (Queen Mary, University of London) has been involved with the Parker Review, which is exploring ethnic diversity on boards and gathering information on where some of the country’s largest companies stand on diversity.

Her PhD focused on the leadership identities of black and Asian men and women in senior management positions.

As a result her former PhD supervisor Susan Vinnicombe, Director of the International Centre for Women Leaders, recommended her to be part of the government review and Atewologun is now Research Lead on it.

Atewologun’s research has developed an index of black and minority ethnic people on FTSE 100 boards and compared this with gender trends for boards. She told The Psychologist: ‘I’m now looking for a way to capture the lived experience of directors, whether this be their career journeys or their specific experiences of

the selection and board appointment process.’ The whole report should be released later this year.

Psychology has been central to such research, Atewologun notes, and to the potential strategies that will eventually be used to encourage chairpersons to diversify their boards. ‘There’s really significant and untapped potential in psychology. If we look at board-level dynamics, or any dynamic between groups, psychology has so much to say around decision-making, biases and assumptions. It can contribute so much to sense-making around data and communication, and how we deal with perceived differences, social and cognitive.

5 minutes with…

Marc Chevreau An educational psychologist from Blackpool is part of a team leading a strand of a £10 million programme to help encourage resilience and wellbeing in young people. The Big Lottery Fund programme, HeadStart, is going into its third phase following trials and piloting studies; local authorities in Cornwall, Hull, Kent Newham and Wolverhampton have also been funded for this third phase.

Specialist Senior Educational Psychologist and BPS member Marc Chevreau spoke to Ella Rhodes about his part of the innovative programme, which aims to help 10- to 16-year-olds in the area. It encompasses 17 strands including assistance for looked-after and vulnerable children.

Chevreau has been involved with Headstart, on a secondment from his work with Blackpool Council, since 2014 and has been piloting and developing materials to be used in a whole-school approach.

Can you tell me about your involvement with HeadStart?

The programme I’ve been working on is about the universal building of resilience, we have a whole-school programme and the aim of the programme is to work with schools and individual teachers to build an understanding of how the resilience model works. The core of this is something called a ‘resilience conversation’, and that involves facilitating a school working party, that would have a range of different perspectives on what life in school is like, and that working party would work through a series of statements that we’ve pulled together out of the research on school resilience so it becomes a self-audit tool.

How will this work in practice?

I’m contacting schools to create these working parties with them, and they’re booking in a term’s-worth of fortnightly meetings of this working party. The school will decide who will be involved.

You might have a Key Stage 1 and 2 teacher, a teaching assistant,

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someone on a support team, to get a wide range of perspectives, but the work will be led by the head teacher. They will start their resilience conversation facilitated by me and by the eight or ninth week may have 10 or so areas of development and we prioritise them and develop an action plan based on those. One of my roles is to make sure we have good outcome measures to see how well they’re progressing and what difference it has made to interactions and relationships in the school.

How will these goals be filtered through to the children?

It depends on what schools choose, but for example, if a school were concerned about e-safety they might go out and talk to children about how concerned they are about this or might do a survey in school. If they set that as a priority they could put in a programme of e-safety for the school and monitor it through children in the school to see if it’s made a difference to their social media lives.

This sounds like a unique programme.

We’ve been using resilience, and the academic resilience materials piloted by the University of Brighton through its Social Enterprise Boingboing. They have a programme called Academic Resilience, which includes surveying staff and looking at priorities, but in a different way to the resilience conversation.

This is really a typical school improvement programme and we’ve used that model and applied it to resilient interactions in school.

What’s the experience been like for you?

It’s been really exciting. We’ve just come out of the end of phase 2 and it’s a unique experience to have the chance to go really, really deep into the area of resilience. Developing materials and models is something I wouldn’t normally be able to do to this extent, for example the resilience conversation is in its seventh incarnation! It’s always been an aspiration of educational psychology to do as much whole-school work as they can, and what’s been special about this is the chance to spend so much time on it.

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In many ways it’s more of a psychological issue than anything else,’ she said.

Psychology has also given us evidence that diverse boards can be much better boards, Atewologun added: ‘Quite a lot of research says that greater diversity, managed and harnessed effectively, results in better-quality decision-making and enhanced innovation.’

Dr Ruth Sealy (City University London) has worked for many years examining and encouraging gender diversity on FTSE boards. Most recently she has been involved with the Davies Review, and subsequent Davies Report, which set a target in 2011 to have 25 per cent female board membership by 2015, as well as giving 10 recommendations of how boards could affect this change.

During this review Sealy examined various aspects of gender diversity on boards, including the appointment process and code of governance. She also worked with the media to encourage a change in discourse around women in these positions: ‘They changed the language they used from “Why do we need to do this?” to “How do we do this?”,’ she said.

Last year the 25 per cent voluntary government target for boards was exceeded hitting 26 per cent, as an aggregate across the FTSE 100 companies, with a range in female board membership of between 10 and 50 per cent in individual companies. The next target is to increase this to 33 per cent by 2020 in line with an EU Directive, and despite Brexit this target will still stand for the Hampton Alexander Review to tackle this.

However, it is clear that after the closing of the Davies Review in October 2015 progress on the numbers of women on boards has stalled. Sealy said: ‘We made progress because numerous stakeholder groups were engaged in the change process. Our latest Female FTSE Report (http://tinyurl.com/jtezukh) reveals that if you take your foot off the pedal things slow down, the forces of inertia are great. Unless you consciously and proactively manage increasing diversity, it will not happen.’ Sealy said she sees her role as quashing the myths in this area.

Psychology has had a direct impact in the world of FTSE 100 board gender diversity and one of the biggest practical changes, which Sealy has been involved with, is companies having more transparency about their governance.

The Financial Reporting Council, thanks to evidence Sealy gained in Australia, now asks members to include the percentage of

‘…unless you consciously manage diversity, it will not happen’

men and women across all levels of the company in their annual reports. They also have to have a diversity policy, stating what they as a company are doing to increase diversity year–on- year and report progress; As Sealy said: ‘It’s not so much a nudge, as a huge shove.’

The recent British Psychological Society response to the non-financial reporting consultation this year made similar representations to the UK government for both gender and ethnicity.

Meanwhile the BPS Board Effectiveness Working Group, chaired

by Professor Ros Searle (Coventry University) and Michael Webster, has been actively addressing the psychology of governance, decision-making and board effectiveness. The group is currently developing a report. Searle told The Psychologist: ‘Trust is critical to governance, but our work shows organisational control and external regulation can support trust, but are only part of the solution. We see trust and active distrust as an increasing problem for complex organisations to manage due to the scrutiny given to the symbolic actions of high-profile people.’

Dr Joanna Wilde (Aston Business School), a senior evidence-based organisational psychologist practitioner and also a member of the working group, said she hoped psychology could firmly position itself within this area to point out and examine psychosocial risks to board effectiveness. The new report will aim to explore these in more depth, and Wilde pointed to two clusters of these risks that

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warrant a psychosocial audit, rather like the finance audit already required.

She said: ‘The first encompasses psychosocial processes that impact information-processing, for example confirmatory cognitive bias which goes unattended and unmanaged. This can happen throughout the organisation skewing what gets reported upwards and also skewing what the board focuses on.’

The second, she added, are factors that impact negatively on employees themselves, for example through clues and signals, such as lack of transparency in board recruitment, overpayment of senior people and in the failure to manage workplace culture, distress and distrust.

Psychologists are already having an impact in this area, identifying barriers to board diversity and generating change through long-term monitoring, but psychological expertise has far more to offer in diagnosing and addressing the relevant individual and group dynamics that generate risk. ‘While lawyers such as Chilcott can identify evidence of groupthink, it is psychologists such as Professor Jo Silvester (Cass Business School) that have shown how we actively change composition and competence in government. Far more is now required to enhance the psychosocial dynamics of top teams in organisations,’ Wilde said. ER I Psychologists who wish to contribute relevant material or evidence for the report should contact Professor Searle (rosalind.searle@coventry.ac.uk) with their suggestions. The deadline for these submissions is Friday 30 September.

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Psychologists still don’t know how the brain deals with blinks If you were sitting in a dark room and the lights flickered off every few seconds, you’d definitely notice. Yet when your blinks make the world go momentarily dark – and bear in mind most of us perform around 12 to 15 of these every minute – you are mostly oblivious. It certainly doesn’t feel like someone is flicking the lights on and off. How can this be?

A new study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance has tested two possibilities – one is that after each blink your brain ‘backdates’ the visual world by the duration of the blink (just as it does for saccadic eye movements, giving rise to the stopped clock illusion); the other is that it ‘fills in’ the blanks created by blinks using a kind of perceptual memory of the visual scene. Neither explanation was supported by the findings, which means that the illusion of visual continuity that we experience through our blinks remains a mystery.

One experiment involved students making several judgements about how long a letter ‘A’ was presented on a computer screen (the actual durations were between 200ms and 1600ms; 1000ms equals 1 second). Sometimes the ‘A’ appeared at the beginning or end of a voluntary eye blink, other times it appeared during a period when the participant did not blink. If we backdate visual events that occur during blinks, then the ‘A’s that appeared at the beginning or end of a blink should have been backdated to the onset of the blink, giving the illusion that they'd been presented longer than they actually had, as compared with ‘A’s that appeared when there was no blink. In fact, the

researchers found no evidence that the students overestimated the duration of ‘A’s that appeared during blinks.

Another experiment involved students making a voluntary blink while a letter ‘A’ was already onscreen and making a judgement of how long the ‘A’ was visible, and also making judgements about the duration of other ‘A’s that were onscreen during non-blink periods. If perceptual ‘filling in’ occurs during blinks, then the students should have judged the time onscreen of an 'A' of a given duration as the same whether they blinked during its appearance or not. But this isn't what the researchers found – rather, the students consistently underestimated the duration of ‘A’s if they blinked during their appearance.

We do know from past research that the brain to some extent shuts down visual processing during blinks – a study from the 1980s shone a light up through people's mouths and found their ability to detect changes in its brightness was reduced during blinks, even though the blinks obviously didn't impede the light source. But what the new research shows is that it is still unclear how the brain weaves the loss of visual input during blinks into a seamless perceptual experience.

Summing up, the University of Illinois researchers David Irwin and Maria Robinson said the brain seems to ignore the perceptual consequences of blinks, but they're not sure how this is done. ‘Having ruled out the temporal antedating and perceptual maintenance hypotheses,’ they said, ‘the question still remains: Why does the visual world appear continuous across eye blinks?’ CJ

In Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

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Even a four-year-old can tell when you’re contradicting yourself (and now they won’t trust you) In Child Development ‘Yes, Victoria, eating chocolate is unhealthy, but not when I eat it’ – you might wonder just how long you can get away this kind of contradictory logic with your kids. If you’d asked Jean Piaget, one of the founding fathers of child psychology, he would probably have told you that you’ll be fine until they’re at least eight. After all, he had observed that children younger than this age often describe things in contradictory ways, such as saying that a candle sinks because it’s round, but that a ball floats because it's round.

Recent research has largely backed up Piaget’s view, but in a new study in Child Development, psychologists have shown that children’s recognition of logical inconsistency starts much earlier – around four years of age – when they are exposed to it in a conversational context. This makes sense, say Sabine Doebel and her colleagues, because reasoning probably evolved as a way to evaluate what we’re told by others – an especially important skill for children.

A first experiment with 74 children aged three to five involved them watching video clips of one woman asking two others a series of basic questions, like ‘Can you tell me about the ball you saw today?’. One woman answered all the questions in a contradictory way (‘Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the smallest ball ever’) whereas the other woman answered the questions in a logically consistent way (‘Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the softest ball ever’). After each clip the children were asked to say which woman did not make sense.

Four-year-olds and five-year-olds, but

not three-year-olds, correctly identified the women who did not make sense because they were making contradictory statements.

This also affected the way the five-year-old children perceived the trustworthiness of these women. For instance, in a later part of the experiment, these children said they'd rather ask the logically consistent woman about the meaning of a new word, rather than ask the woman who'd contradicted herself.

Another experiment with more four- and five-year-olds replicated these findings in the same conversational context, but found that only the five-year-olds were unable to detect logical inconsistencies when they were attributed to books, rather than to people in conversation (to do this, the researcher presented the children with two books and, to take one example, told them that one book said someone saw a ball that was the biggest and the smallest ever, whereas the other book described someone seeing a ball that was the biggest and the softest).

Because the four-year-olds could detect

logically inconsistent utterances in a conversation, but not when attributed to a book, this suggests there’s something more engaging or motivating about listening to an actual conversational exchange that improves their performance. ‘Put another way,’ the researchers said, ‘the testimonial context may serve to prompt an epistemically vigilant stance, and as a result children may evaluate arguments and claims more carefully than they would otherwise.’

Alternatively, perhaps they are just extra trusting of books – this would certainly chime with earlier research.

Another aspect to this second experiment was that the children also completed tests of their memory performance and executive control (they had to remember strings of numbers or recite them backwards), and those who scored higher on these tests tended to do better at detecting logical inconsistency.

A final note – although based on their average performance four-year-olds were able to identify the women who were being contradictory, not all the children at this age were able to do so, and even among fiveyear-olds there was plenty of room for improvement in their performance. So if you’re lucky, you might just get away a little longer with convincing your five-year-old that chocolate is bad for them but good for you, especially if you tell them that's what a book says. CJ

How expert schmoozers trick themselves into liking their target In Academy of Management Journal Big-wigs have much to gain from ingratiating themselves with even bigger ones, because having an in with important people sways decisions made in the executive washroom, on the golf course, or over plates of wagyu carpaccio. But ingratiators face a problem: noone likes a suck-up, and people at the top of the food chain have plenty of practice in detecting and dismissing them.

A new article in the Academy

of Management Journal finds that company directors get around this problem by employing a clever psychological tactic – before meeting up with those they plan on winning over, they think about them in such a way that they come to like them more, making any flattery or ingratiation seem all the more convincing.

Participants in the study were directors at a range of large US companies, each of

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

whom had at least one scheduled meeting with another director who had something they wanted: a say in the board membership at another company. The meetings occurred during the six months running up to the board nominations meeting, so if the participants played their cards right, maybe they would get appointed.

So what’s the best way to play? Researchers James

Westphal and Guy Shani suspected that the key to successful ingratiation is to believe it. Detecting unnatural behaviour comes fairly easily, especially if you know what to look for, meaning pretenders are one feigned smile or wavering compliment away from being dismissed as a brown-noser.

Acting is hard!

When we really like someone, on the other hand, we don’t need to act, just let our

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feelings come through.

Increasing one’s authentic liking for a person would therefore be very helpful. Westphal and Shani predicted that one way to do this would be for the participants to mentally emphasise to themselves what they have in common with the director they wanted to influence. After all, there is copious evidence showing that we like more those who resemble us, and that we are more likely to credit the achievements of (and therefore respect) people like ourselves, rather than putting their success down to external factors.

In the study, the 278 participants were surveyed at multiple time points prior to their crucial meeting(s) with the other director, on how much they thought about their similarities, or about their differences. For example, a black woman prior to meeting

a much older white male might choose to reflect on how they both spent some years in the same industry. The researchers also surveyed the ingratiation behaviours in the meeting itself: compliments and expressions of admiration, together with the amount of non-verbal affirmation like smiling or laughter.

The data showed that the more a participant had turned their thoughts towards what they had in common with the other director, the more their ingratiation behaviours paid off – they were more likely to get an invitation to join the board in the months that followed – presumably because their flattery was more convincing.

Furthermore, participants were more likely to adjust their thinking in this way when their counterpart was more dissimilar to them – where intentionally searching for common ground is

those with an average amount of regulation of their thoughts around the meeting.

The psychological strategy uncovered in this research was certainly effective, but what we don’t know is how aware the

participants were of what they were doing. Did they deliberately trick themselves into liking the other director, or was it a more automatic and instinctive process?

Either way, these results aren’t only relevant for top dogs trying to bound their way further up the hierarchy. The study provides another demonstration that changing how we think about other people has an important role in smoothing social interactions. Similar processes might help explain why social contact between outgroups is sometimes found to be helpful, and sometimes not: are the different factions looking for what they have in common, or what sets them apart? This approach is about more than a cushy seat in the board room; it’s about how divided people can find a way to sit down together. AF

also to the importance the participants attributed to these thoughts and the need they had to control them.

While cautioning that their results are only preliminary – the sample is relatively small, the measures depended on selfreport, were correlational, and there was no control group – Melli and his colleagues believe there could be important clinical insights here. For instance, some patients with OCD might

benefit from help realising their obsessive thoughts have no basis in reality and are not a reflection of their ‘true self’.

The findings also build on past research that's shown, for example, that people with OCD find intrusive thoughts more troubling when they seem to contradict a valued aspect of their sense of self, and that people with OCD are more uncertain than healthy controls about their self-concept. CJ

going to be particularly important – and in these cases, use of the tactic was even more likely to be rewarded with a nomination. These effects were striking: those following this strategy to its fullest were nearly three times more likely to get a recommendation than

Is OCD fuelled by a fear of the self?

In Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy Most of us have unwanted thoughts and images that pop into our heads, and it's not a big deal. But for people with a diagnosis of obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) these mental intrusions are frequently distressing and difficult to ignore. A new article in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy explores the possibility that the reason these thoughts become so troubling to some people is that they play on their fears about the kind of person they might be.

The reasoning goes something like this: If, for instance, you or I had a sudden mental of image of stabbing someone, we might find it strange and unpleasant, but – assuming we are mentally well – the moment would quickly pass and be forgotten. In contrast, to someone with an ongoing, nagging fear that they are dangerous and that they might one day harm somebody, the unwanted image could fuel their anxieties and end up becoming part of long-running

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obsession, no matter that their fears have no basis in reality.

Gabriele Melli and his colleagues recruited 76 participants diagnosed with OCD who were about to embark on psychotherapy at a private clinic in Italy. The researchers interviewed the participants about their OCD-related symptoms, their anxiety and depression, and their selfrelated fears. This last measure featured items like ‘I fear perhaps being a violent, crazy person’; ‘I am afraid of the kind of person I could be’; and ‘I often doubt that I am a good person’ to which the participants rated their agreement.

Even after factoring out the part played by anxiety, depression and a general tendency for obsessive beliefs (e.g. thinking that having a bad urge is as bad as carrying out that urge), the researchers found that a greater fear of the self was independently associated with having more unacceptable and repugnant thoughts, and

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.bps.org.uk/digest, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett and contributor Dr Alex Fradera.

Subscribe to the fortnightly e-mail, friend, follow and more via www.bps.org.uk/digest New: download our free app via your iOS or Android store to keep up with the latest psychology research every day, on the go!

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DIGEST DIGESTED Full reports are available at www.bps.org.uk/digest A qualitative analysis of the closing remarks made by Australian judges in domestic murder cases found they described husbands who kill their wives in far more forgiving and lenient terms than wives who kill their husbands. For example, the men are ‘stressed’ while the women are ‘wicked’. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law

If you do everything you can to avoid plot spoilers, you’re probably a thinker

Teenagers with autism demonstrated automatic facial mimicry just as much as their neurotypical peers. The study involved participants performing one facial expression while trying to ignore someone else’s face performing another. The result undermines the idea that autism is caused by ‘broken’ mirror neurons. Autism Research

In Psychology of Popular Media Culture It’s a vexing First World Problem – how to avoid people giving away, on Twitter or at the water cooler, the events of the latest Game of Thrones episode before you've caught it. Psychologists are beginning to study this modern scourge, albeit in the context of written stories rather than TV shows, but so far their findings have been contradictory – one study suggested that spoiled stories were actually more enjoyable (possibly because they’re easier to process), while a later investigation found the precise opposite. Now a research team led by Judith Rosenbaum has entered the fray with a study in Psychology of Popular Media Culture that suggests one reason for the contradictory results is that the effects of spoilers depend on how much a person likes to engage their brain, and how much they enjoy emotional stimulation.

In psychological jargon these traits are known as ‘need for cognition’ and ‘need for affect’, respectively. The former is measured through disagreement with statements like ‘I only think as hard as I have to’ and the latter via agreement with statements such as ‘Emotions help people get along in life’.

The researchers first presented over 350 students, mostly African Americans at a university in Southeastern USA, with several previews of classic short stories, some of which contained plot spoilers and some that didn’t, and then asked them to say which of the stories they’d like to read. The students also completed measures of their need for cognition and affect, and the critical finding was that those who scored low on ‘need for cognition’ tended to say they would prefer to read the full versions of stories that were previewed with plot spoilers. ‘When choosing between stories, low need for cognition individuals appear to have found spoiled stories as potentially more comprehensible and more in keeping with their preferred level of cognitive processing’, the researchers said.

Next, the students read some classic short stories (such as Two Were Left and Death of a Clerk) in full, some of which had been ‘spoiled’ by a preview, and some not, and then rated their enjoyment of the stories. This time, ‘need for cognition’ was unrelated to enjoyment, but ‘need for affect’ was, in that people with a greater desire for emotional stimulation got more pleasure from unspoiled stories, as did the students who read fiction more frequently.

One positive way to look at these findings is that encountering a spoiler may not ruin your enjoyment as much as you think it will (if you’re a deep thinker), but probably will be a downer if you're the kind of person who likes emotional surprises. Alternatively, perhaps this study is just too far removed from reality to offer much insight – after all, as the researchers acknowledge, they didn't look at TV shows or movies (where plot spoilers are arguably more common), nor did they consider important variables such as genre (spoilers are presumably much more of an issue for horror and suspense) or story/show length. CJ

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Is altruism a ‘costly signal’ showing that a person would make a good mate?

Previous research has supported this theory by showing that altruism boosts the sex appeal of men and women. A new study follows through on this logic finding that altruistic people also have more sex. British Journal of Psychology It’s easy to mind wander while studying. One solution is to find material that is in your learning sweet spot – not completely mastered, but not overwhelmingly difficult. Researchers found that people mind-wandered less when they were learning material that fitted this description, and as a result they actually learned better. Memory and Cognition After being reminded of our own mortality, most of us engage in psychological defence mechanisms – thinking in ways to boost our self-esteem and about things that have meaning to us. However, when heavy metal fans listen to songs like Angel of Death, they don’t need to do this, presumably because the songs serve the same purpose as the defence mechanisms.

Psychology of Popular Media Culture Facial expressions of intense joy and pain are indistinguishable.

Researchers presented students with stills of joyful faces taken from returning soldiers as they surprised their relatives with a visit home, and with the anguished faces of people as they witnessed terrorist atrocities. Ignorant of the context, the students rated the faces as similarly negative in emotion. Emotion

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in large databases and then analysed and offered as a saleable commodity.

The second relates to the ways in which people increasingly use social media as a way of sharing information about themselves, thereby allowing for peer-topeer surveillance.

It is clear that we are living in an Darren Ellis, Dave Harper and Ian Tucker ask whether psychology has been slow increasingly technologically sophisticated to cast a watchful eye over its implications society, as electronic devices of various sorts have become inextricably embedded in our lives. Internet and mobile phone use has exploded since the 1990s, and he images that circulated following identified the development of two forms social networking sites such as Facebook the November 2015 Paris attacks of ‘dataveillance’ (Clarke, 1998). The first and Twitter have seen massive growth. and the August 2011 UK relates to the ways in which personal It is perhaps not surprising, then, that disturbances have reminded us of the information is gathered through researchers and media commentators ubiquity of surveillance. In the UK we information technologies by governments have been arguing for some time that we may be aware of the CCTV owned by and commercial organisations, collected are living in a ‘surveillance society’ (e.g. local councils and shops; the Ball et al., 2006; Lyon, 2007). helicopter-borne cameras of the police What is a surprise, though, is and news crews; and mobile phone that psychological research cameras used by the public. Britain has not focused in detail on has become well-known the variety of forms of digital internationally for its use of CCTV, surveillance. Consequently, and even conservative estimates we know relatively little about suggest there are approximately 1.8 how ordinary people million CCTV cameras in the country experience surveillance. Social (Gerrard & Thompson, 2011). In psychologists Alex Haslam London, Freedom of Information Act and Steve Reicher note that requests have revealed that there are one of the offshoot findings at least 25,000 cameras. However, of the Stanford Prison CCTV and other cameras are not the Experiment, that they only forms of surveillance. Since the partially replicated for a BBC revelations in 2013 by Edward documentary, was the Snowden (Greenwald, 2014) and the importance of surveillance. ensuing public debate, we are more They state that ‘psychology aware of the capabilities both of needs to devote far more intelligence agencies like the NSA and effort to developing a science GCHQ and of companies like Apple, of surveillance’ (2002, p.13).

Google and Microsoft.

Where such research has With the rise of information been conducted, it has technologies in society, a new breed of generally used survey-based surveillance has emerged. In addition methods to garner general to the embodied surveillance of attitudes towards surveillance CCTV cameras, we have the (Dinev et al., 2008; Joinson et surveillance of information – what al., 2006), although there are Roger Clarke (1988) has called some notable exceptions. For Since the revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, we ‘dataveillance’ – harvested through example, Levine (2000) argues are more aware of the capabilities both of intelligence people’s use of information that there is a lack agencies like the NSA and GCHQ and of companies like technologies. psychological work in this area Apple, Google and Microsoft Increasingly, researchers have and puts forward the SIDE

Experiencing the ‘surveillance society’

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Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). http://firstmonday.org/article/view/21 42/1949 Amick, B.C. & Smith. M.J. (1992). Stress, computer-based work monitoring and measurement systems. Applied Ergonomics 23, 6–16.

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Society, 2(2), 77–81.

Ball, K. (2010). Workplace surveillance: An overview. Labor History, 51(1), 87–106.

Ball, K., Lyon, D., Murakami Wood, D. et al. (2006). A report on the Surveillance Society. Wilmslow: Office of the Information Commissioner/ Surveillance Studies Network.

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productivity and quality of performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 4, 211–227 Clarke, R. (1988). Information technology and dataveillance. Communication of the ACM, 31(5), 498–512.

Dinev, T., Hart, P. & Mullen, M.R. (2008).

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model (the social identity model of deindividuating effects: Reicher et al., 1995) to facilitate insights into CCTV use and its effects. He states that ‘the transformation of public space through constant visual surveillance’ has ‘psychological implications’ (Levine, 2000, p.164). More recently, O’Donnell et al. (2010a, 2010b) have empirically investigated the role of identity in perceptions of surveillance, finding that surveillance is understood as more acceptable when it derives from a group or a leader with whom one shares an identity. The same group challenged the common conception that people work more productively when monitored .

Although high surveillance led to higher productivity on a task, the actual quality of the work suffered (O’Donnell et al., 2013) (see box, p.684).

Theorising surveillance In contrast to the relative silence within psychology, the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies has grown apace over the last 20 years, drawing on sociology, media studies, computer science, security studies, criminology and the hacking community (Lyon, 2007). Early in the history of surveillance studies the dominant theoretical approach drew heavily on Foucault’s (1979) conceptual examination of the ‘panopticon’, Jeremy Bentham’s design for a building enabling maximum surveillance (a design apparently influencing the designs of many public buildings, especially prisons). Here, surveillance of the person was intimately connected with issues of power. Some combined this notion with popular notions of totalitarian state surveillance following George Orwell’s 1984 (which itself owed a lot to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in 1921 and which Orwell had reviewed for Tribune in 1946).

This approach led some to focus on surveillance as inherently repressive, although Foucault’s point was actually more subtle – the panopticon was

Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US surveillance state. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Haggerty, K.D. & Ericson, R.V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 605–622.

Harper, D. (2011, May). Paranoia and public responses to cyber-surveillance.

Paper presented at CyberSurveillance in Everyday Life: An International Workshop, University of

designed so that residents never knew when they were being observed, and so had to regulate themselves. However, over time, as more and more ‘Our interest in surveillance emerged through broader people have willingly given work focused on the social psychological implications of information about themselves increasing technologisation of everyday life. Data continue online and to companies like to be produced at an exponential rate, affecting all parts Google, it is clear that not only of life. Psychology needs to analyse the impacts of this on is a wider range of actors agency, power, identity and privacy.’ involved, but also our relationship with surveillance For more detail on the work of this group see: technologies is a nuanced one. https://coresearch.wordpress.com/tag/surveillance Following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Darren Ellis Haggerty and Ericson (2000) is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial have conceptualised Studies at the University of East surveillance as an ‘assemblage’ London – in other words, a complex web of heterogeneous but interconnected elements, including people, technologies, institutions, and so on (see Dave Harper also Harper et al., 2014). is Programme Director and Surveillance is not seen as Reader in Clinical Psychology a stable entity but rather at the University of East London as multiple, relational and shifting over time.

However, although people are part of this assemblage, much of the surveillance Ian Tucker studies literature focuses on is Reader in Psychology at the the technology of surveillance University of East London and on the surveillers rather i.tucker@uel.ac.uk than the surveilled. One of the ways that psychologists can contribute to this area is a concern with how ordinary people experience surveillance.

How do they orient to, Dataveillance construct and respond to visual On social networking sites such as surveillance and the widespread Facebook, people disclose all kinds of collection of personal information? personal data – photos of themselves, How has the technological revolution – friends and family, updates on their and its embedded surveillance location, information about their capabilities – affected the way we view behaviour and activity. All this data is ourselves and the society in which we potentially visible to others; whilst people live? The August 2011 disturbances, may be aware of privacy issues in terms for example, showed that many of those of what other Facebook users can see of captured in images were ‘surveillancetheir data, they are often not so aware aware’ and had their faces covered or of how Facebook itself collects and stores obscured in some way.

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Surveillance. In T. Teo (Ed.) Encyclopedia of critical psychology, (pp.1887–1892). New York: Springer.

Joinson, A.N., Paine, C., Buchanan, T. & Reips, U.D. (2006). Watching me, watching you. Journal of Information Science, 32, 334–343.

Koskela, H. (2000). ‘The gaze without the eyes’: Video-surveillance and the

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Meet the authors

changing nature of urban space.

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Larson, J.R. & Callahan, C. (1990).

Performance monitoring: How it affects work productivity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75, 530–538.

Levine, R.M. (2000). SIDE and closed circuit television (CCTV): Exploring surveillance in public space. In T. Postmes, R. Spears, M. Lea & S.

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information about its users, with the aim of using it to attract advertising. An online search engine like Google operates on a model of collecting the searches of people and collating them into mass databases, which it can use to attract advertisers. This model’s success means Google is now worth over $500 billion – as internet security commentator Bruce Schneier puts it, ‘surveillance is the business model of the internet’ (2015, p.49). An exchange takes place: people are able to use dataveillance technologies, but they have to disclose personal information (which can be recorded, stored and used).

This exchange presents new challenges to notions of privacy and identity. Our thoughts, feelings and desires – as represented in our search histories – are now recorded in the databases of huge technology companies.

People risk becoming commodified, through their personal information. In social psychological terms, we could say that with the incessant rise in the prominence of information technologies in everyday life, people are increasingly defined by information as well as biology.

It is also notable that much of this dataveillance takes place in ‘private’ spaces (e.g. the home). The spread of surveillance across public and private space presents the potential for people’s sense of self and identity to be shaped by surveillance. People can also engage in ‘participatory surveillance’ (Albrechtslund, 2008) through watching each other (e.g. via social media).

Moreover, media technologies are facilitating ‘bottom-up’ surveillance, which Mathiesen (1997) terms ‘synopticism’. Here the powerful too are subject to surveillance (as with the

Surveillance in the workplace Surveillance in the workplace has risen significantly in recent times, catalysed by an increase in the role of electronic media (email, social media). Psychological research has featured as part of a range of studies into the impact of surveillance in occupational settings (see Ball, 2010, for a useful summary).

Research undertaken prior to large-scale use of the new forms of digital media has focused on issues such as task design and supervisory style, finding for example that workplace monitoring that was regular and intermittent was reported as less stressful than constant surveillance (Larson & Callahan, 1990). Also, being monitored as part of a group, rather than individually, is seen as less stressful (Brewer & Ridgeway, 1998). This has led to guidance stating that workplace surveillance practices need to be supplemented by feedback and coaching, so that employees understand what monitoring processes exist and how to respond to them (Amick & Smith, 1992).

Recent psychological studies have addressed issues of compliance with, and resistance to, workplace monitoring and surveillance technologies, such as computer activity including email, websites visited, keystrokes, and even screen shot capture (Spitzmuller & Stanton, 2006). Research has focused on behavioural intention, which has been found to be shaped by organisational factors (commitment and identification) as well as attitudes (Spitzmuller & Stanton, 2006). Such work has relied primarily on attitude and survey data.

The importance of addressing the psychological impact of workplace surveillance was shown recently by the European Court of Human Rights January 2016 ruling in the Bărbulescu v. Romania case that personal use of the internet at the workplace is not necessarily protected under Article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

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Mathiesen, T. (1997). The viewer society: Michel Foucault's 'Panopticon' revisited. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 215–233.

O'Donnell, A.T., Jetten, J. & Ryan, M.K. (2010a). Watching over your own.

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O’Donnell, A.T., Ryan, M.K. & Jetten, J. (2013). The hidden costs of surveillance for performance and helping behaviour. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 16(2), 246–256.

Reicher, S.D. & Haslam, A. (2002). Social psychology science and surveillance:

inadvertent recording of then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the 2010 UK general election ‘Bigotgate’ episode).

Surveillance is no longer conducted solely in an Orwellian manner, where the citizens of the state fall under the powerful gaze of the ruling elites. Rather it is becoming more complex and fluid, operating at many levels, subject to control and initiation by many different actors, from large organisations and government departments to people tracking themselves and others through social media.

Towards a psychology of surveillance Psychological research has recently come to focus on people’s knowledge and experience of surveillance. Some distinct themes have emerged that capture some of the complexity and variability of our understanding and engagement with surveillance technologies.

Three dominant constructions appear to be culturally available in public discourse about surveillance (Harper, 2011; and see tinyurl.com/zjbs53v): a narrative of suspicion (that we are all now paranoid because of the rise in CCTV); a narrative of indifference, or more pejoratively, complacency (e.g. that we are ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’); and, finally, a narrative involving the balancing or trading of competing imperatives (privacy, security, convenience, etc.). Our analysis of interviews with 31 people from London and the South East suggested that the suspicious and indifferent constructions were deployed throughout the interviews but the ‘balancing’ construction less so, at least explicitly. However, what was interesting was that different formulations were drawn upon at different times, partly because of the different contexts of surveillance and partly because of the interactional context of the interviews themselves. It is this fluidity that quantitative surveys miss because they are oriented to identifying an ‘average’

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Social Psychology, 5, 7–17.

Reicher, S.D., Spears, R. & Postmes, T. (1995). A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena.

European Review of Social Psychology, 6(1), 161–198.

Schneier, B. (2015). Data and Goliath: The hidden battles to collect your data and control your world. New York: W.W. Norton.

Spitzmuller, C. & Stanton, J.M. (2006).

Examining employee compliance with organizational surveillance and monitoring. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 79, 245–272.

Tonks, A.P. (2012). Photos on Facebook: An exploratory study of their role in the social lives and drinking experiences of New Zealand university students. MSc thesis presented at Massey

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Youth drinking cultures and social media Making oneself visible to peers through social media brings many benefits for young adults in constructing their identities, but it also means exposing oneself to the commodifying practices of commercial organisations. Lyons et al. (2015) reported that young adults in New Zealand focus primarily on the ongoing social relations revolving round drinking practices, rather than the possibilities for commercial surveillance that their behaviour enables. Indeed the visibility that social media affords is key to the existence of networks of drinking culture, as the posting of photos and comments in between events maintains social relations. Moreover, ‘re-living’ drunk nights through posting photos or videos online is seen as a positive beneficial practice in its own right.

However, the researchers also found that an awareness of the potential for surveillance in young people can emerge in relation to drinking cultures, with females, in particular, wary of being photographed in drunk states or with alcoholic drinks, for fear of such photos being posted on social media (primarily Facebook). As Tonks (2012) discovered, ‘these photos are no longer confined only to friends’ Facebook pages’ as commercial photographers like Snapstar Live www.facebook.com/SnapStarLive and https://vimeo.com/snapstarlive ‘photograph people out clubbing at different bars’ and upload the photos onto an external website where ‘Facebook users can tag themselves to connect the photos to their own profile’ (p.91).

attitude across situations. The quite complex and ambivalent responses to surveillance we reported could not be easily categorised as pro- or antisurveillance. Rather, people appeared to construct their options for action as limited, given the ubiquity of datagathering when using the internet.

Perhaps this partly explains why, apart from the debate over ID cards, there has been little political traction in the UK for a rolling back of surveillance.

A relationship between surveillance and emotion has been identified as core to everyday experiences of surveillance (Ellis et al., 2013). The continued expansion of the surveillance society leads to the development of new social norms where the expectation that one is being surveilled becomes normalised.

Surveillance is ever-present and yet absent (unnoticed), material (embodied through the CCTV camera) and yet ethereal (the CCTV operator is not visible), geographical (located in a particular time and space) yet transgeographical (transmitted to other times

University, Wellington, New Zealand.

Tucker, I.M. (2013). Bodies and surveillance: Simondon, information and affect. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 14(1), 31–40.

Tucker, I.M., Ellis, D. & Harper, D. (2012).

Transformative processes of agency: Information technologies and the production of digitally mediated selves. Culture and Society: Journal of Social Research, 3(1), 9–24.

and spaces). Thus the thoughts and feelings that emerge as a consequence of living in a highly surveilled society can be equally complex and ambiguous; for example, simultaneously producing multiple forms of spatialised affects – what Anderson (2009) has called ‘affective atmospheres’ – such as affects related to security (notions of safety) and insecurity (invasions of privacy).

These findings relate to cultural geographical research in which experiences of surveillance are framed as laden with ambiguity and ambivalence, often appearing vague, imprecise and incoherent. These experiences are difficult for individuals to interpret and articulate (Koskela, 2000). Because of its overbearing normalisation, complexity and clandestine character, individuals see surveillance as a complex, normalised backdrop to everyday life. They may see it as having minimal effect on them: ‘I have done nothing wrong, nothing can be done about it, so why bother about it?’ (Ellis et al., 2013).

However, for some people there is a sense of compulsion over surveillance through digital technologies. They may report feeling a pressure to use online technologies in order to avoid feeling ‘left out’ of society, and potentially being positioned as old-fashioned (Tucker et al., 2012). One conclusion we reached was that, despite proactively engaging with a range of information technologies, many people did not comprehend the extent of surveillance made possible by these technologies. This is even more the case given the rapid pace of technological change so that people

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need to regularly update their knowledge (e.g. of new technological capabilities).

As a result, there is a need to study how these changes reshape people’s everyday psychological experiences (Tucker, 2013).

Discussion Recent psychological research has laid some of the groundwork for understanding the complex and multiple relationships people have with surveillance technologies, but so many questions remain. A number of the studies cited in this article focused on London, a highly surveilled city. It would be worth looking at other UK urban and rural areas. Cross-cultural studies, particularly with cities in developing countries, would inform us about the psychological effects of the technologisation of developed countries.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to investigate whether responses to visual surveillance (e.g. CCTV) correlate with responses towards forms of dataveillance.

The CCTV camera has become an iconic signifier of the gaze of ‘others’, but how will people respond to surveillance activity that is increasingly organised and enacted by complex software algorithms?

How might social media enable new modes of subjectivity in relation to performing oneself online? Surveillance, in its many different configurations (see boxes) is increasing throughout modern society; psychological researchers need to engage in more interdisciplinary work to address its influence on the shaping of individual and social life.

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FEATURE

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willingness to work towards the elusive dream of peace. ‘Much of the psychology of conflict in the past has been descriptive, and has shed a lot of light on the barriers to peace,’ says Halperin. ‘Our main contribution in recent years has been to show how to use psychology to overcome these barriers.’

‘Eran’s doing outstanding and Dan Jones delves into the work of Eran Halperin, in the field of conflict resolution innovative work,’ says Emile Bruneau, a social and cognitive neuroscientist at MIT who specialises in conflict. ‘And he’s doing work that few other people are.’ It’s not that social psychologists have ignored n the evening of 19 November 1977 conflict, or haven’t tried to develop ways profile of the world’s intractable conflicts.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to reduce it through a variety of Persisting for decades, such conflicts have made history when his official plane interventions based on diverse theoretical proved resistant to traditional diplomacy, landed at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport and approaches. It’s just that few have been mediation and negotiation. Other notable he became the first leader of an Arab validated in the field. When in 2012 cases include India and Pakistan’s 50-year nation to visit the Jewish state. After conflict researcher Elizabeth Paluck standoff over Kashmir, and Colombia’s meeting with Israel’s then Prime Minister, published a review of psychological 50-year battle between the government Menachim Begin, Sadat delivered a nowinterventions for dealing with conflict, and the rebel group FARC. famous speech to the Knesset (Israel’s she found only a dozen or so that have Attempting to untie the Gordian knot parliament), where he spoke of a wall been evaluated with well-controlled of the Arab–Israel conflict, with its separating Israel and the Arab world: studies in the context of real-world intertwined threads of history, politics and This wall constitutes a psychological conflicts. ‘There are interventions out religion, might seem like a fool’s errand, barrier between us. A barrier of there, but they’re not always tested and requiring hubris and chutzpah in equal suspicion. A barrier of rejection. A evaluated using rigorous research measure. Yet that has not dissuaded barrier of fear of deception. A barrier procedures,’ says Linda Tropp, a social psychologist Eran Halperin of the of hallucinations around any action, psychologist and conflict Interdisciplinary deed or decision. A barrier of cautious expert at the University Centre (IDC) “both pro- and anti-Israeli and erroneous interpretations of all of Massachusetts Amherst.

Herzliya, on the students perceived the and every event or statement. It is ‘Eran is really at the outskirts of Telcoverage to be biased against this psychological barrier which forefront of doing this.’

Aviv, from trying I described in official statements as Part of the reason for to find a way. ‘If the group they sided with” representing 70 per cent of the whole the dearth of tried-and-tested psychology is problem. conflict interventions is that for the problem, the past few decades psychologists have then maybe psychology might also be Sadat’s visit has been hailed as a turning been more focused on working out what the solution’, says Halperin. point in Middle Eastern relations, but psychological processes fuel conflict, nearly 40 years later these barriers are still often in lab studies with undergraduates, A toolkit of interventions in place, and possibly even more fortified than trying to tackle the messy conflicts among some communities in this Over the past five years Halperin, in that people get swept up in. contested land. The years of 2000 and collaboration with a diverse group of Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of 2005 witnessed two Palestinian intifada, researchers, has been gathering the social psychology who had a keen interest or uprisings, that led to violent clashes evidence to show that this is more than in conflict, famously called for a 50/50 and further rounds of recrimination. The just a pipe dream. Together, they’ve split between what he called ‘exploratory’ Gaza war in the summer of 2014, in created a toolkit of psychological and ‘action’ research. ‘Right now the split which thousands of Palestinians died, and interventions that can change how people is maybe 90/10,’ says Bruneau. ‘Eran is a spate of stabbings of Israeli civilians by embroiled in conflicts think about each developing brand-new interventions, or other, in ways that promote more Palestinians, ensured that the Arab–Israel adapting interventions that have been conciliatory attitudes and greater conflict remained among the most highused in other contexts, and trying to

Untying the hardest knots

references

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Cohen-Chen, S., Crisp, R. & Halperin, E. (2015). Perceptions of changing world induce hope and promote peace in intractable conflicts. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(4), 498–512.

Cohen-Chen, S., Halperin, E., Crisp, R.J. & Gross, J.J. (2014). Hope in the Middle East: Malleability beliefs, hope, and the willingness to compromise for peace. Social

Psychological and Personality Science, 5(1), 67–75.

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Halperin, E., Crisp, R., Husnu, S. et al.

(2012). Promoting intergroup contact by changing beliefs: Group malleability, intergroup anxiety and contact motivation. Emotion, 12(6), 1192–1195.

Halperin, E. & Gross, J.R. (2011). Emotion regulation in violent conflict: Reappraisal, hope, and support for humanitarian aid to the opponent in wartime. Cognition & Emotion, 25, 1228–1236.

Halperin, E., Porat, R., Tamir, M. & Gross, J.J. (2013). Can emotion regulation change political attitudes in intractable conflicts? From the laboratory to the field. Psychological

Science, 24, 106–111.

Halperin, E., Russell, A.G., Trzesniewski, H.K. et al. (2011). Promoting the peace process by changing beliefs about group malleability. Science, 333, 1767.

Hameiri, B., Porat, R., Bar-Tal, D. et al.

(2014). Paradoxical thinking as a new avenue of intervention to promote peace. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111,

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apply them to real intergroup conflict.

And that’s very exciting.’

Halperin, who grew up in the context of Israel’s violent conflict, began his path towards psychological interventions working with his PhD supervisor Daniel Bar-Tal, now emeritus professor at TelAviv University, on what they called the socio-psychological barriers to peace. BarTal had spent the previous decades characterising the cognitive and emotional basis of these barriers, and how they jointly help sustain an ‘ethos of conflict’ that keeps all sides locked into cycles of distrust, violence, hatred and despair.

‘People living in societies caught up in long-term conflicts have to develop some kind of psychological shield that enables them to cope with the challenges of the conflicts, and to live a normal life in abnormal times,’ says Halperin. ‘They develop narratives that provide a coherent, one-sided story of their

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Wohl, M., Cohen-Chen, S., Halperin, E. et al.

(2015). Belief in the malleability of groups strengthens the tenuous link between a collective apology and intergroup forgiveness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 714–725.

situation. The only way to cope is to believe in such black-and-white stories.

People will not sacrifice their lives if they have doubts about the righteousness of their roles.’

As a post-doc, Halperin moved to Stanford University to work with influential social psychologist Lee Ross, who had also been studying the cognitive biases that fan the flames of conflict. In the 1980s Ross, working with Stanford colleagues Robert Vallone and Mark Lepper, had described what they called the ‘hostile media effect’.

In one study pro-Israeli and proPalestinian students on Stanford campus watched the same news coverage of the 1982 massacre by a Christian Lebanese militia of between 800 and 3500 civilian refugees, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, in the Shabra neighbourhood of Beirut and the nearby Shatila refugee camp – an atrocity that many people claimed the Israel Defence Forces had allowed to unfold before their eyes. The students were then asked about the news reports they had seen. Even though all students had watched exactly the same footage, both pro- and antiIsraeli students perceived the coverage to be biased against the group they sided with.

The hostile media effect is just one manifestation of a broader bias Ross and colleagues have called naive realism – the tendency to see our interpretation of events as factually objective descriptions of reality. ‘Naive realism is inevitable,’ says

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Ross. ‘We can’t not believe that the way we see things is the way they are. If I say “The car looks blue to me but I’m sure it’s really green” then I really believe the car is, in fact, green.’

One consequence of naive realism is that we often make negative inferences about people who make different choices to our own, as it seems that they must be either acting irrationally, given the objective pros and cons of the decision in question, or simply do not have an accurate picture of reality, like we do, and therefore choose differently. More generally, when people disagree with us, especially on some contentious issue, we think they must be biased. ‘If I think the world’s black and you think it’s white, and someone comes along and say it’s grey and complicated, we both think that person is biased or unfair to our side,’ says Ross.

Naive realism fuels polarisation in enduring conflicts and creates a clear psychological barrier to seeing things from the other’s side. So a few years ago Halperin, working with Meytal Nasie, Daniel Bar-Tal and Ruthie Pliskin of TelAviv University, and Eman Nahhas of the Arab College for Education in Israel, set out to see whether the insidious effects of naive realism could be countered. The intervention was inspired by research suggesting that making people aware of their psychological biases can help them overcome their effects. To this end, the team recruited Jewish Israelis and Israeli Palestinians and gave them a description of naive realism, along with its dire consequences for people locked in a conflict – in this case referring to a married couple rather than specifically relating it to the Israel–Palestine conflict.

Participants then read about Israeli and Palestinian views on three historical events – the 1948 War, the 2000 Camp David Peace Summit, and the 2008–2009 Gaza War – and were then asked a series of questions that gauged how open they were to the other side’s view of things.

Compared with control groups, those who went through the naive realism manipulation showed greater openness to the other side’s narrative. But not everyone was affected equally, just as the researchers anticipated. Among Jewish Israelis, ‘doves’ on the political left – who are typically already open to the Palestinian narrative – showed little change; conversely, the narrative-opening effect of the intervention was greatest for more ‘hawkish’ individuals on the political

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right. Similarly, among Palestinians, those most committed to an ethos of conflict showed greater change in their openness compared to their more peace-seeking peers.

Crucially, this intervention, like others Halperin has developed, avoids mentioning the specifics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or even naming the opposing factions. As a result, it circumvents another key barrier to peace studied by Ross called reactive devaluation – the tendency for people to react negatively to any proposal for peace or compromise with the other side when it’s proposed by the enemy, or a third party who may be suspected of bias.

‘Most people, because of their ideology and worldview, don’t want to hear about peace-promoting interventions,’ says Halperin. ‘One of the biggest advantages of our approach is that we bypass these obstacles, because we don’t talk about the conflict but talk about other things that indirectly influence their beliefs about the conflict.’

Plus ça change…?

The value of this approach has also been demonstrated in a series of studies directed at shifting beliefs about the possibility that people can change their ways. Take the old saying ‘A leopard never changes its spots’, which captures the widespread belief that the way people

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have acted in the past predicts how they’ll behave in the future. Psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University calls this belief a ‘fixed mindset’, which she contrasts with a ‘growth mindset’, the belief that people can instead grow and change.

Dweck describes these mindsets, which may not be explicitly articulated, as ‘implicit theories’ of personality, and for the past few decades she’s been studying how they affect behaviour and motivation.

In one particularly influential strand of research, Dweck has shown that children with a fixed mindset are less likely to persevere with academic tasks when the going gets tough, because they interpret their temporary struggle as a sign that they don’t have what it takes to do well – and if you can’t change this, why keep trying? Children with a growth mindset, on the other hand, often see difficult tasks as a welcome challenge and a chance to grow (Dweck, 2006).

In reading Dweck’s work, Halperin saw how a fixed mindset could drive conflict, in part by sustaining hatred on both sides. ‘Hatred is the most problematic emotional barrier in conflict,’ says Halperin. ‘But what is the essence of hatred? We suggest that hatred is fundamentally based on seeing the other side as fixed and unchangeable.’

The good news to have come out of Dweck’s earlier research is that whatever people might think about personality and

change, mindsets themselves are not set in stone. A growth mindset can be nurtured, for example, by presenting kids with information about how the brain changes as we learn, and how our intelligence and abilities are not fixed at birth but are malleable. So in recent years, Halperin has been working with Dweck to explore the role implicit theories about personality play in maintaining violent, intractable conflict. After all, in situations in which both sides in a conflict can point to misdeeds carried out by the other, a fixed mindset severely imperils the prospects of progress towards peace – why reach out to the other side, or offer concessions and compromises, if your adversary will simply take advantage of this gesture and then carry on as before?

A series of studies reported by Halperin and Dweck in 2011 confirm that this is exactly what happens when people have a fixed mindset (Halperin et al., 2011). In the first study, a nationally representative sample of Israeli Jews were interviewed by phone to assess whether they had a fixed or malleable mindset regarding the ability of groups to change (without specifically mentioning Palestinians), by asking them how strongly they agreed with statements like ‘As much as I hate to admit it, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – groups can’t really change their basic characteristics’ and ‘Groups that are characterised by violent tendencies will never change their ways’. In addition, the respondents were quizzed about their attitudes towards Palestinians and willingness to compromise for peace.

Halperin and Dweck found that people of a more fixed mindset were more likely to agree with statements such as ‘All Palestinians are evil by nature’, ‘All that Palestinians really want is to annihilate Israel’, and ‘Palestinians should never be trusted’. They were also less willing to compromise for peace – for example, they showed less support for territorial concessions with Palestinians based on the 1967 borders and less endorsement of shared sovereignty over holy places in Jerusalem, or were less likely to advocate more active conciliatory initiatives by Israelis.

Next, Halperin and Dweck set about seeing whether mindset could be influenced to foster attitude changes in peace-promoting ways. To find out, they recruited 76 Jewish-Israeli undergraduates, who were then told they would be performing a reading comprehension task, which was in fact an experimental manipulation, followed by some questions about Israeli society.

For the reading comprehension task

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the researchers had invented two versions into a decades-long, sometimes violent of an article that summarised studies on conflict – belief in the malleability of the behaviour of violent groups over time, group behaviour in general leads to lower although without specifically mentioning levels of anxiety at the prospect of mixing any of the parties in the Israeli–Palestinian with members of the other side, which conflict. One version, read by those in the increases motivation to make that contact malleability condition, argued that the happen (Halperin et al., 2012). behaviour of violent groups changes over Other studies suggest that it’s not even time, and that their violence is often necessary to make people change their driven by extremist leaders and other beliefs about group behaviour to promote contextual factors. The other, designed peace. Recently, Halperin, working with to foster a fixed mindset, claimed the Smadar Cohen-Chen of Northwestern opposite, that violent groups do not University, Illinois, and Richard Crisp of change, and pinned their aggressive Aston University in the UK, has shown behaviour on the nature and culture that, among Israeli Jews, the more general of these groups. belief that the world is a dynamic, Participants in changeable place fosters both conditions then hope, and a greater completed the survey enthusiasm for making “the more general on Israeli society, peace-building concessions. belief that the world is which was really cover As in previous studies, the a dynamic, changeable for asking questions researchers induced beliefs place fosters hope” that, as in the first about the fixedness or study, tapped into changeability of the world attitudes towards Palestinians and by having participants read fictional whether it was worth compromising summaries of research on social and for peace. In line with previous results, political dynamism, without any mention priming Israeli Jews with a malleable of conflicts in general or the Israelmindset improved attitudes towards Palestine case in particular (Cohen-Chen Palestinians, and also their motivation et al., 2015). to seek peaceful solutions through Other recent results suggest that compromises. mindsets may also be the key to creating These findings were echoed when something lacking but much needed in all Halperin and Dweck ran the same study conflicts, especially deeply entrenched with Palestinian citizens of Israel, who ones: hope. People with a more malleable make up roughly 20 per cent of the mindset have more hope that peace is population, with a slight modification of possible, and inducing this mindset the wording: instead of talking about the fosters greater hope. What’s more, these possibility of violent groups changing, this studies have shown that hope mediates article focused on oppressive and racist the link between a malleable mindset groups (though without explicitly and greater support for peace-building mentioning Israelis). Again, inducing concessions (Cohen-Chen et al., 2014). a malleable mindset promoted more Along with hope, forgiveness is also positive attitudes towards Israeli Jews often in short supply when groups have and greater willingness to compromise for been fighting and killing each other for peace. Remarkably, the same findings were decades. Political leaders sometimes make replicated among non-Israeli Palestinians, apologies on behalf of their collective many of whom were members of militant constituencies, but, as welcome as they groups like Fatah and Hamas – sworn are, they frequently fail to lead to genuine enemies of Israel with little stake in the forgiveness. Forgiving an enemy for their state’s future. past misdeeds implies that they’ve ‘We’ve shown that changing changed their ways and won’t simply people’s beliefs dramatically affects their repeat what they’ve done in the past. And willingness to make compromises,’ says in a recent study, Halperin and colleagues Halperin. ‘We don’t have to tell Israelis or found that Israelis who view Palestinians Palestinians that the other side is moral, as an immoral outgroup were more but just convince them that each side receptive to an apology from Palestinian can change. And we don’t even have to leadership after being induced into a more mention specific groups, just suggest that malleable mindset (Wohl et al., 2015). groups in general can change.’

In the past few years, Halperin and Emotion regulation Dweck have expanded on these early Many of the interventions developed by results, and extended them to other Halperin and colleagues indirectly change conflict settings. In a similar study, they the emotional attitudes of people locked in showed that among Greek and Turkish conflict by first changing their more Cypriots – two communities also locked

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general beliefs. Others, however, target emotions more directly. Working with Stanford’s James Gross, an expert on emotion regulation, Halperin has been looking at ways to dampen down the emotional reactions – grief, fear, anger, hatred – that fuel enmity and feed into cyclical patterns of blame, revenge and continued fighting. Halperin and Gross have largely focused on ‘cognitive reappraisal’ as a means of preventing negative emotions from arising in the first place – or at least reducing their magnitude.

‘The basic assumption is that your emotions are usually a reaction not to an event itself, but how you evaluate that event,’ says Halperin. ‘In cognitive reappraisal training, we ask people, after they’ve already appraised a situation, to reappraise it by taking an external perspective, like a scientist, or looking at things from the perspective of the other side. This can get people to realise that their emotional reactions are driven by specific appraisals of situations but that there are other ways to appraise the situation. It’s a practical and short-term skill that can be learned quickly.’

Cognitive reappraisal has been shown to be effective as an emotion regulation tool in a range of settings, and Halperin and Gross have now extended this to the conflict arena. In an early study carried out during the Gaza War of 2008–2009, they found that among Jewish-Israelis the tendency to spontaneously engage in cognitive reappraisal correlated with support for providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian citizens in Gaza (Halperin & Gross, 2011).

In further studies in which participants have either undergone reappraisal training or not, Halperin and Gross have found that the training increases political tolerance of Palestinian citizens of Israel by Jewish-Israelis after they’ve read text criticising Palestinians.

As with previous interventions, the positive effect was largely seen among those to the right of the political spectrum, as those on the left were already more tolerant (Halperin et al., 2013).

In a more real-world test of the cognitive reappraisal approach, JewishIsraeli participants were recruited to receive reappraisal training (or not) one week before a controversial political event, the Palestinian bid to join the United Nations in September 2011. A week later, those who had undergone the training reported fewer negative emotions and more conciliatory attitudes towards Palestinians – an effect that persisted when they were surveyed again five months later, and that was mediated by

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decreased levels of anger towards Palestinians (Halperin et al., 2013).

The power of paradox One of Halperin’s most novel and recent interventions has an unusual backstory.

In 2009 singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen announced plans to perform in Tel Aviv and soon became the target of criticism amid calls to support a cultural boycott of Israel. Cohen resisted and went ahead with the show. But he decided to donate the proceeds to peace efforts, including the award-winning Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), set up in 1995 by businessman Yitzhak Frankenthal after his 19-year-old son Arik, a soldier in the Israeli army, was shot and killed by Hamas.

PCFF brought together Israelis and Palestinians who had lost family members in the conflict, and who through shared grief reached mutual understanding of each other. With the new money Frankenthal set up The Arik Institute of Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, with a plan to find new ways to change the mindsets of Israelis and Palestinians locked in a conflict mentality. He soon met with Halperin, and they began a collaboration to develop a novel anticonflict intervention.

Halperin and his academic colleagues chose a technique called ‘paradoxical thinking’ to unfreeze them from an ethos of conflict – and make them more open to ways to end it. Instead of trying to change people’s views by directly challenging them, paradoxical thinking gets people to alter their current beliefs by exposing them to absurd extensions of those beliefs. So someone on the hawkish end of the political spectrum who morally backs their side’s military actions in a conflict might become uncomfortable with their support if they encounter a

case for further military actions that presents it as a good thing in itself – for example, as a way to keep acting morally.

Working with an advertising agency, Halperin and his team developed a series of short videos that presented paradoxical messages. After carrying out pilot studies, a video conveying the message ‘We need the conflict in order to have the strongest army in the world’ was selected for a longitudinal study that recruited 161 Jewish Israelis (60 per cent right wing, 20 per cent centrists, and 20 per cent left wing). Participants watched the video every three or four days for a total of seven times in the month leading up to the 2013 Israeli elections, at the end of which they answered questions about the role of Palestinians in the conflict, and their own willingness to compromise for peace. The day after the election they were asked who they voted for, and a year later completed a short survey on Israeli–Palestinian relations. Meanwhile, a control group watched a short video promoting tourism in Israel.

Repeated viewings of the paradoxical thinking video led participants to rate Palestinians as bearing less responsibility for continuing the conflict, which made them more willing to compromise for peace. These attitudinal changes translated into political action: viewers of the paradoxical message were more likely to vote for dovish parties while those in the control group tended to take the hawkish options.

These effects were long-lasting. A year later, those exposed to the paradoxical message were more willing to make compromises on contentious issues at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, such as the evacuation of settlements in the West Bank, demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, control over Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, and the division of Jerusalem (Hameiri et al., 2014).

See also our web resource ‘Can psychology find a path to peace?’ www.thepsychologist.org.uk/can-psychology-help-us-out-mess

Over the past year, Halperin and his colleagues have been focused on doing rigorous field tests of these interventions, with larger and more diverse samples.

This work remains largely unpublished as yet, but Halperin says the results are promising. One study used the malleability mindset approach in a field intervention delivered to more than 500 Israelis and looked at the effect it had on their political views six months later. ‘We consistently find beneficial effects, even during times of ongoing violence,’ says Halperin.

Giving peace a chance There’s no doubt Halperin has had great success in developing new and effective interventions for intractable conflict. But how can these be applied outside the psychologist’s lab? ‘This is the milliondollar question,’ says Halperin.

To try to provide some answers, in 2012 Halperin set up an applied centre at IDC in order to help disseminate these ideas. Halperin, like Frankenthal, is a firm believer in the power of grassroots movements to create social change. ‘My feeling as an Israeli is that politicians and leaders will not promote peace unless the people put very serious pressure on them,’ says Halperin. ‘It’s too risky, too complicated, and the political costs are too high.’

So Halperin and his team at the applied centre have been working with a variety of NGOs, who spend their days trying to change attitudes on the ground.

The applied centre regularly runs workshops for Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, where they learn about the latest psychological insights into conflict resolution. Afterwards, Halperin and colleagues meet with the NGOs every week or two and provide feedback on their projects that draw on the psychological research.

‘We’ve had an amazing reaction from NGOs, both Israeli and Palestinian,’ says Halperin. ‘They often feel very frustrated but feel that we’re bringing them something that they haven’t seen before.

Right now we don’t have enough experts to meet and run workshops with all the organisations who are asking for our help.’

All of which gives Halperin even more drive to keep going. ‘For me, this is the real mission of social psychology – not just doing basic research, but actually trying to influence the world,’ he says. ‘It’s an amazing experience.’

I Dan Jones is a freelance writer in

Brighton. dan.jones@multipledrafts.com

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The British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference

3–5 May, Hilton Brighton Metropole Submissions now open Themes O Wellbeing O Looking forward O Social justice General submissions invited for all other research.

Submission deadlines Symposia, Oral Presentations, Haiku Deck and Workshop: Noon 26 October 2016 Poster: Noon 11 January 2017

Credit: Suzanne O’Leary, littlebeachboutique.com

www.bps.org.uk/ac2017

‘big picture’ pull-out www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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BIG PICTURE

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London Brain Project is a not-for-profit initiative that aims to engage the public with brain sciences and mental health through the arts. It was created by Michelle Downes, Louise Croft and Georgia Pitts, researchers in developmental neuroscience at University College London, and Julia Vogl, an award-winning artist who specialises in social art.

This image is from a wire and photography series produced by people with epilepsy and neuroscientists, and facilitated by Angela Farragher Photography, as part of ‘Beyond Seizures’ – an exhibition that aims to deconstruct the notion that epilepsy is defined by seizures alone. Beyond Seizures is part of a series of workshops and exhibitions that are run to empower patients and engage the public.

London Brain Project engages through many different formats: interactive exhibitions and art-science workshops, theatre, film, music, sound art, and outreach talks. They are currently planning their next project, ‘Beyond Memories’, which will be about Alzheimer’s and dementia. Check out more about their workshops and projects at www.londonbrainproject.com.

From a series by Angela Farragher for the London Brain Project

Beyond seizures

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INTERVIEW

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‘When life hands you a lemon, just bite in’ Judith Rich Harris takes Lance Workman through her extraordinary fightback against entrenched views of child development

first become aware of you when I1998.

I read The Nurture Assumption in In it you proposed that a child’s peer group has greater influence on development than her parents. Can we begin by outlining this theory?

Group socialisation theory was my attempt to solve a puzzle I had encountered while writing child development textbooks for college students. My textbooks endorsed the conventional view of child development – that what makes children turn out the way they do is ‘nature’ (their genes) and ‘nurture’ (the way their parents bring them up). But after a while it dawned on me that there just wasn’t enough solid evidence to support that view, and there was a growing pile of evidence against it.

The problem was not with the ‘nature’ part – genes were having their expected effect. But ‘nurture’ wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. In studies that provided some way of controlling for or eliminating the effects of heredity, the environment provided by parents had little or no effect on how the children turned out.

And yet, genes accounted for only about 50 per cent of the variation in personality and social behaviour. The environment must be playing some role.

But it wasn’t the home environment. So I proposed that the environment that has lasting effects on personality and social behaviour is the one the child encounters outside the home. This makes sense if you think about the purpose of childhood.

What do children have to accomplish while they’re growing up? They have to learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to the other members of their society. How do they do this? Not by imitating their parents! Parents are adults, and every society prescribes different behaviours for children and adults.

A child who behaved like his or her parents (in any context other than a game) would be seen as impertinent, unruly or weird. So the first step in becoming socialised must be to figure out what sort of person you are. Are you a child or an adult? A male or a female?

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In complex societies there are more categories, but age and gender were probably enough for the small groups of hunter-gatherers of our ancestors.

Once a child had identified with a particular social category – let’s say, female child – her next job would be to learn how to behave like the others in her category. A social category is an abstract concept, not necessarily an actual group of children. My use of the term ‘peer group’ turned out to be misleading.

I should have said ‘social category’ or perhaps ‘reference group’.

Why? The problem with ‘peer group’ was that it made people think ‘friends’. Group socialisation theory is not about the influence of friends. Friendships are relationships. Socialisation is not a product of relationships.

The expanded theory presented in my second book, No Two Alike, explains why.

The theory is based on the idea, put forth by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, that the human mind is modular, a collection of specialised devices which each evolved as a solution to a specific problem or need.

I proposed that there are three such devices involved in social development – the relationship system, the socialisation system and the status system. These systems work more or less independently; sometimes they even issue contradictory

commands. They collect different kinds of information from the environment and process it in different ways. Friendships – like parent–child relationships – are in the purview of the relationship system, which collects data on specific individuals and makes fine distinctions among them.

The socialisation system, in contrast, doesn’t bother with individuals – it computes means. It forms a prototype for each social category. The child is influenced by the norms of the social category she identifies with, even if she never interacts personally with any of its members.

The Nurture Assumption completely split the field. People either said it was a serious step forward in our understanding of child development or they just weren’t having any of it. I’m in the first camp – it changed my view of child development. But why do you think there was so much hostility?

Part of the problem was the media coverage, which was often headlined ‘Do parents matter?’. Parents were understandably irked by the question.

(My answer, by the way, is: Of course parents matter!) But the real opposition to my work came from the academic world – from professors of developmental psychology. Some of these people had spent their entire careers doing studies designed to support the traditional view of child development. Then some troublemaker pops up – a complete nobody, with no PhD and no academic affiliation – and announces that the professors are wrong and their studies are worthless. You wouldn’t expect them to greet me with open arms, would you?

You were particularly critical of their correlational studies of development.

I still see those worthless studies all the time – they get a lot of publicity. I see them as a shameful waste of time and research money. I see them as reminders that I failed in my goal of reforming the methodology of developmental psychology.

The studies are worthless because the results they produce are ambiguous, so the researchers can interpret them any way they please. Let’s say they find a correlation between how often a family eats dinner together and how well their teenager manages to stay out of trouble.

Such results are presented as evidence that eating dinner with their parents has ‘protective’ effects on teenagers. But the research method provides no way of controlling for, or estimating, the effects of inherited genes on the teenagers’ behaviour. (Conscientious parents tend

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to have conscientious children.) No way of controlling for what I call ‘child-toparent effects.’ (Parents are more likely to enjoy eating dinner with well-behaved teenagers.) No way of controlling for the teenagers’ own willingness to show up at dinnertime. (Teenagers are less likely to enjoy eating dinner with their parents if they are doing things their parents don’t approve of.) The researchers assume that, even though these other factors might play a role, some of the correlation must be due to the beneficial effects of family dinners. That is a logically indefensible assumption, not supported by studies that do provide the necessary controls.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to state that The Nurture Assumption pretty much made you famous almost overnight. It’s not only a radical alternative to traditional ideas, but also a real ‘page-turner’. Was it your intention to write in that style?

Actually, I started out by writing a traditional article and publishing it in a traditional journal, the Psychological Review. No one called it a page-turner.

In fact, though it did get some favourable responses from people in other areas of psychology, it was completely ignored by the audience I was hoping to reach – those professors of developmental psychology.

So I decided to go over their heads, as it were, and take my message directly to the general public. If you’re writing a book on a complex topic and you want people to read it, you have to make it interesting. It also helps if you can give your readers an occasional laugh. My model for how to write a book for the general public was Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.

Pinker of course went on to write several more books for the public – all page turners, and in many cases game changers. I noticed that he dedicated The Blank Slate to ‘Don, Judy, Leda and John’. I would assume that three of these are Don Symons, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Would I be right in thinking you are the Judy?

Yes. Steve and I became e-mail friends after I sent him a copy of my Psych Review paper and some comments on The Language Instinct. After we had exchanged a few e-mails, he asked, ‘Have you ever thought of writing a book?’ It wasn’t exactly a new idea to me, but it was nice to have the encouragement.

I think Steve was particularly receptive to my arguments because he’s a psycholinguist. I often use examples from psycholinguistics in explaining my theory,

for two reasons. First, the outcome is usually obvious. You don’t need fancy statistical tests to decide whether or not someone has a foreign accent. Second, language and accent are among the very few social behaviours in which genetic differences play no role at all. Whether you speak Japanese or Swahili, whether your accent is Oxbridge or Liverpudlian, has nothing to do with heredity. But it does have a great deal to do with social context. The children of immigrants have the same accent as the other kids in the neighbourhood, even if they use their parents’ native language at home. Around the world, it is quite common for children to use one language at home and a different one outside the home, or one language with Mummy and a different one with Daddy.

A central tenet of my theory is that social behaviours are tightly linked to the context in which they were acquired.

It’s a mistake – one that’s incorporated into all the major theories of child development – to assume that children automatically generalise what they learn, from one context or person to another: Mummy is nice to them so they expect everyone to be nice to them. But discrimination, not generalisation, is the default setting of the baby’s mind.

Many of the behaviours that children acquire at home would be counterproductive elsewhere. Children who dominate their younger siblings at home would be making a mistake if they tried to treat their schoolmates the same way, especially if they happen to be small for their age. Fortunately, children don’t make that mistake. Firstborns are no more likely than laterborns to try to dominate their peers.

Of course, some of the things children learn at home are useful elsewhere. Those who learn to speak the local language, or to read, or to play a musical instrument, don’t have to acquire these skills all over again when they step outside. But they don’t trot them out automatically. They are tentative at first, until they’re sure that the behaviour or skill they learned at home will also work in the new setting.

For a young child, it’s safer to discriminate than to generalise. The child’s mind is not short of storage space.

A child can store different rules of behaviour for every setting, and different expectations for every individual he or she encounters.

Your goal in No Two Alike was to explain why individuals differ so much, even if they grew up in the same family, right?

Right. I realised a couple of years after

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Nurture Assumption was published that I had done only half the job: I had explained only how children get socialised. Socialisation is a process that causes children to become more similar in behaviour to their same-sex peers.

And yet, despite being socialised, children continue to differ from one another in personality and social behaviour. If anything, the differences widen during childhood and adolescence.

I made some ineffectual efforts to deal with that problem in The Nurture Assumption, but I didn’t have a theory to account for it till I wrote the second book. The improved version of the theory presented in No Two Alike explains how children can, at the same time, become more similar to their peers in some ways and more different in other ways.

There was a fair bit of replying to arguments put forward by critics of The Nurture Assumption. Was that one of the aims?

It was. I was tired of journalists telling me that my theory must be wrong because some expert at some big university had told them that there were plenty of studies that disproved it.

I searched diligently for the studies they cited. In some cases they were nowhere to be found; at any rate, they had never been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In other cases a study had been published but the results didn’t do what the experts claimed – they didn’t disprove my theory. In one case, a study they cited actually did the opposite – it supported my theory!

That 1995 Psychological Review piece you mentioned won the George A. Miller award for an outstanding article in general psychology. There was a certain irony about that?

In 1960 I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard.

One day I got a letter saying that the Department had decided to kick me out of their PhD programme. They doubted I would ever make a worthwhile contribution to psychology, the letter said, due to my lack of ‘originality and independence’. The letter was signed by the acting chairman of the Department, George A. Miller!

Sometimes, when life hands you a lemon, you should just bite in. Getting kicked out of Harvard was a devastating blow at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that Harvard ever did for me. It freed me from the influence of ‘experts’. It kept me from being indoctrinated. Many years later, it enabled me to write The Nurture Assumption.

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REVIEWS

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Existential and poetic

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Bereaved Understanding Grief Richard Gross

The English poet Alexander Pope believed that our task as human beings was not to explain life, the universe and everything, but to explore the microcosm that is the self. ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Professor John Hull, whose loss of sight changed his life for ever, follows in this Delphic tradition. An academic theologian by profession, Hull records every detail of the experience of losing his sight and coming to terms with the fact that he is now a blind man. Unsurprisingly, given his religious persuasion, Hull consciously or unconsciously adopts the position of those who believe that adjustment to sight loss can only be achieved by being reborn as a new person, rather than by acquiring alternative means of maintaining a continuity of personal identity.

From a psychological perspective, Hull employs phenomenology and introspection: methods alien to modern psychologists. So that, rather than arriving at general truths applicable to a blind population, he instead gives us a vivid portrayal of his own experiences and changing beliefs, initially through his words in Touching the Rock (1990, Sheldon Press) and now through images, thanks to James Spinney and Peter Middleton’s screenplay and visual interpretation of the book.

The film immerses the viewer in dark, out-of-focus images and odd perspectives that disorient and draw one’s experience as close to that of Hull as one could imagine. Sometimes the screen goes black; at other times it is simply pure white, and it caused this viewer to drift off into a private reverie on more than one occasion. As a consequence of this I missed some bits, but the fact that it happened at all testifies to the technical success of the film in addressing Hull’s contention that dreaming and waking are variations Notes on Blindness of consciousness that remain a mystery.

James Spinney & Peter I was reminded of Kierkegaard’s concept of a Middleton (Writers and Directors) subjective truth when Hull describes how space, time, objects and people become devoid of meaning and reality as his visual memory fades. For a number of years Hull becomes withdrawn and fearful as he strives to regain his personal identity through minute examination of his experiences. With the loss of visual information about objective reality, he finds that his very self becomes unmoored and when he turns inwards for answers he initially finds nothing more than further confusion.

Nonetheless, after years of struggle Hull eventually experiences his Damascene moment and, as a result, he reframes the curse of blindness as the divine revelation that it is a gift, albeit an unwanted one. However, the film ends before showing us how he uses that gift, other than communicating his journey to us.

Lip-sync acted from Hull’s own audio tapes, the actors Dan Renton Skinner as John Hull, and Simone Kirby as his wife Marilyn, present as a highly plausible loving couple living in fear that their marriage might not survive as John journeys into a private world into which Marilyn is unable to accompany him. Sadly, John Hull died after only a few weeks into the filming, but the film ends with a shot of Hull himself against an ocean vista that brings the world to him on waves of sound.

Hull’s struggles in coming to terms with his blindness are faithfully conveyed in the film, which, together with its subtle soundtrack, takes the viewer into a dark and disturbing place. Yet in my own experience of working with blind people, Hull’s journey is a highly individualistic one, and few blind people whom I know well would easily identify with it. As a good American friend of mine who lost his sight in childhood once admitted to me, ‘Blindness is just a pain in the ass’. But then Hull was an intellectual and his response was more existential and poetic than pragmatic.

A virtual-reality event accompanies the film, and I was keen to experience the simulation of sight loss. Although the experience was forceful, I was not convinced of its veridicality. It does, however, assist the listener in becoming more aware of the audible landscape and Hull’s recorded voice accompaniment adds an emotional tone to the experience. Why not take on board yourself the world of this blind man and make of it what you will?

Death is the only certainty in life, yet most of us feel unprepared when the bell tolls. The thought of death, of our loved ones and eventually our own, is so unsettling that most of us don’t dwell on it until the final hour. The death of our nearest and dearest can reorient the compass of our lives in many ways.

Here, Richard Gross provides a comprehensive overview of the research literature on grief. As the experience and manifestation of grief involves personal, social and cultural factors, he explores bereavement and the concomitant emotions it unleashes through myriad lenses. For a developmental view, Gross looks at stage theorists and explores the links between adult grief and early attachment relationships. The book also discusses models of grief and examines how familial, social, religious and cultural dynamics impact its expression.

Gross explains how our unique kinship with the deceased could result in different experiences and also examines gender differences and ‘disenfranchised’ forms of grief that do not necessarily have societal sanction or support. A final chapter is on the loss of pets and our ubiquitous fear of death.

In a reasonably concise volume, the book lives up to its name by trying to understand grief in its entirety. Written in an accessible style, it provides a holistic sweep of past and recent research. This book would be an asset to those who work with bereaved individuals, but it may have been enriched by some firstperson accounts, as a purely academic view cannot quite convey the intensity of emotions that can engulf a bereaved individual. Even if we are extremely sensitive and have excellent perspective-taking skills, being bereaved is very different from how we might imagine it to be.

I The film is playing throughout the UK and is available on demand. See www.notesonblindness.co.uk for information, including the virtual reality experience Reviewed by Dr Allan Dodds who is Former Director of The Blind Mobility Research Unit, University of Nottingham

I Routledge; 2016; Pb £24.99 Reviewed by Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Director, PRAYATNA, a centre for children with learning difficulties in India

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Apposite and appealing The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World Howard Gardner & Katie Davis Most readers of this text, I expect, will belong to the so-called ‘App Generation’. As one who is well past it, I was curious to see what the authors had to say. Basically the argument is set out in the preface to the second edition (published in 2014) (not the first edition) where the authors have had time to reflect on what they have achieved and what the critics have made of it.

The text weaves its way through three main issues: (a) the effects of technology on our modern lives – contrasting the experiences of an older person (Howard Gardner), a younger one (assistant professor Katie Davis), a much younger one (Katie’s sister, Molly, aged 16 at the time of writing and, occasionally, an even younger one – Oscar, Howard’s grandson, aged six; (b) the nature of different kinds of apps – labelled app-dependent and app-enabling; and (c) the roles of apps in relationship to personal identity, intimacy and imagination.

For a person like myself who, like Howard Gardner, has lived through the development of personal computers from their origins in the 1970s, to the mobile phone and the all-encompassing apps of today, it was good to reflect on both the positive and the negative side of what has been achieved. Seen from the point of view of the four protagonists – Howard, Katie, Molly and Oscar – we get a picture of the beginnings of the new technology, its midpoint and its ubiquitous nature today.

As noted above, two main kinds of apps

are distinguished. Appdependent apps are used when we (children and adults) use their apps as ‘a starting point, endpoint and everything in between’. Such apps are what we use to look up the weather, to find a restaurant, to search for the answer to a question. Such apps imply that everything can be answered immediately and efficiently. Enabling apps are used to develop new experiences and areas of knowledge, meaningful relationships and creative expression.

Gardner and Davis explore appdependence and app-enablement with respect to three areas of experience that are particularly salient for young people: their sense of personal identity (Chapter 4), the intimacy they experience in their relationships (Chapter 5), and the ways they express their imagination (Chapter 6).

Apparently, the youth of today ‘take care to present a socially desirable, packaged polished self on line: many students identities are prematurely foreclosed because they don’t allow themselves space to explore alternatives’, but, intriguingly, communicate with their parents more. Apps allow children to take shortcuts in how they carry out their interpersonal relationships; these shortcuts make interacting with others much quicker, easier and less risky.

Today, apps that support art, music and photography are readily available – but, according to these authors, ‘an app

mentality can lead to unwillingness to stretch beyond the functionality of the software and the packaged sources that come with google search’. However, in another chapter, the authors compare children’s artwork and short stories produced today with that produced in the 1960s. Here they find more complexity in the artworks of today, not only in how they are painted but also in the techniques used to produce them but different changes are reported for children’s fiction. Here there is a shift to more conventional texts, despite an increase in less formal wording.

As expected, any book by Howard Gardner and colleagues is a pleasure to read. Many points are further expanded and discussed in end-of-chapter notes.

Nonetheless, I have some criticisms. The arguments outlined in this text are based on data drawn from the authors’ studies of teachers and students with different-sized samples – mainly in New England and ‘a smaller sample’ in Bermuda - together with brief one-sentence summaries of other relevant publications. An appendix outlines the procedures and the sample sizes, but it provides no data. Thought-provoking?

Readable? Yes – in spades. But without the data it is hard to judge the validity of the conclusions.

I Yale University Press; 2015; Pb £8.99 Reviewed by James Hartley, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Keele University

A holistic approach to sex offending Sex Offenders: A Criminal Career Approach Arjan Blackland & Patrick Lussier (Eds.) Current literature takes a clinical approach to sex offending by exploring how individual pathologies, childhood trauma, cognitive distortions, low victim empathy, deviant sexual preferences, poor attachment style and sexual regulation create a typology of patterns linked to sexual offending. This text, however, merges biopsychosocial and criminological perspectives, raising the debate that current theories and methods of research are outdated. It draws on evidence that considers the individual offender’s etiology and

the developmental precursors that a criminal career involves, to determine why and how such individuals partake in sex offences. Longitudinal studies are used to build a holistic view that challenges the differences used to separate the ways in which sex and non-sex crimes are managed today.

The criminal career approach aims to conceptualise the development and offending trajectory of each individual in order to merge preventative strategies of sexual offending

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with those of non-sexual offence crimes. Typographical theories aimed at early prevention and maturational theories are combined in order to modify sex offenders’ criminal careers at certain ages and career stages, in the pursuit of building guidance on policy as to where efforts should be targeted and how current interventions can be revised.

The authors of this text request further research aimed specifically at understanding the commonalities between sex and

non-sex offending and propose refinements in risk assessment and treatment in this area. This book offers new insights into sexual offending in an accessible, informing and engaging style and is highly relevant to students, practitioners and researchers in the fields of forensic and criminological psychology alike.

I Wiley-Blackwell; 2015; Pb £36.99 Reviewed by Louise Mullins who is an undergraduate psychology student and voluntary worker on a sex offender treatment programme

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A comprehensible darkness?

The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism Willem Koomen & Joop Van Der Pligt Images of terrorism are present daily, with the questions ‘What causes it?’ and ‘How can we prevent radicalisation?’. A complex, emotive subject that challenges beliefs and feelings on individual and societal levels, where explanations are often simplistic, inaccurate and biased. For example, the psychological literature shows there is no evidence that terrorist acts can be explained by mental illness or by some form of psychological deviance. Koomen and Van Der Plight’s book definitely provides us with explanations and answers.

Highlighting the difficulties and inconsistencies describing ‘terrorism’, the authors use the Global Terrorism Database definition: ‘the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation’. They use a

multifactorial model to describe the polarisation, radicalisation and terrorist violence pathway, and subsequent chapters examine each variable in detail.

Organised using helpful chapter sub-headings, results from a wide range of interesting studies are summarised to support their model, with a reference list at the end.

Whilst reviewing the book, broadcast and social media went into commentary overload about radicalisation and terrorism links to the Orlando shootings, the murder of Jo Cox and the EU debate. I became aware just how much the book’s content was relevant and explaining this for me, particularly chapters on stereotyping, threats and social identity.

The book’s key message is the

Woody Allen meets Friends The Spoils Trafalgar Studios, London (Scott Elliott, Director) The billboard for The Spoils proclaimed this as a dark new comedy play that delves into the everyday lives of an emotionally charged set of characters.

I jumped at the opportunity to see it, considering the saturation of musical razzmatazz elsewhere on the West End. Nevertheless, this play also offered glitz, since it was written by and starred the American actor Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network,

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and Kunal Nayyar of The Big Bang Theory.

The fast-paced, quick-witted script is perfect at portraying the dysfunctional relationship between the protagonist, Ben (Eisenberg) and his flatmate, Kalyan (Nayyar). Ben presents himself as an existential filmmaker who is working on a ‘new kind of art form that doesn’t yet have a name’ (cue rolled-eyes).

Of course, in reality he spends much of his time smoking weed,

importance of psychological understanding. The role of context, beliefs and emotions in shaping behaviour is clear.

Counter-terrorism strategies must be guided by our knowledge of individual, cultural, social, political and economic factors.

I would definitely recommend this book to psychologists and related disciplines. I’d also strongly suggest it should be on the bookshelves of policy makers, as well as police and security specialists.

I Routledge; 2016; Pb £31.99 Reviewed by Ged Bailes who is Lead Consultant Forensic Clinical Psychologist, Secure & Criminal Justice Services, Norvic Clinic, Norwich

whilst struggling to find his own artistic ideas and narrative. Kalyan, on the other hand, is a Nepalese immigrant trying to make it in the financial world to better his life chances.

Their economic and class backgrounds could not be more different, yet their lives have somehow come together in a peculiar friendship based on dependency and control. Ben holds much of that control: they live in his flat, which his father bought, and he allows Kalyan to live rent-free as an act of good will towards his ‘underprivileged’ friend.

However, Ben depends on the emotional support that Kalyan provides, despite being frustrated at his aspirations to make it in the Western world, which Ben himself rejects.

Kalyan consistently gains our sympathy as he seems to bear the brunt of Ben’s discontent and struggles in his own attempts to ‘succeed’. Not to give too much away, the arrival of Ben’s old high school crush triggers a series of evolving (and surreal) events… Ben can take these as an opportunity of selfreflection and change, or he can retreat further into his own emotional turmoil.

I imagine that if Woody Allen

wrote an episode of Friends, then The Spoils would be close to what is produced: a portrayal of inner conflict, friendship and control in a witty format. What makes this play stand out is that Ben is not a likeable character and there are no explanations, or excuses, for why he behaves the way he does towards others.

This is a welcome break from the often over-dramatised, saccharine parade of plays that seek to tell an uplifting tale of the extraordinary and unusual.

Although focused on Ben, the play delicately interweaves the narratives of Kalyan (and others) producing something that addresses the normal, almost mundane, existential struggles of ‘everyday’ people. With these insights, we can start to think about why so many of us feel so unhappy within the wider framework of race, class and economics. Ironically though, at £65 a ticket this production was likely to have been inaccessible for many, but it was nonetheless entertaining and certainly worth a watch.

I Reviewed by Anita Mehay who is a doctoral researcher and health psychologist in training at Royal Holloway, University of London

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Memory in context Contextualizing Human Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding How Individuals and Groups Remember the Past Charles Stone & Lucas Bietti (Eds.) Is there such a thing as contextfree memory? Can memory function in a social vacuum?

Whilst it may be simplistic to claim that cognitive psychologists have traditionally viewed memory as being context-free, the role of context has tended to be seen as little

contribute

more than an additional factor.

In Contextualizing Human Memory Stone and Bietti have drawn together a collection of work that asserts the central role context plays in human memory.

Stone and Bietti recognise that ‘context’ can be an unhelpfully vague and amorphous concept: a term that can be invoked to describe

anything and everything. This volume attempts to examine just what this thing ‘context’ is.

What does it turn out to be?

Lots of different things.

Amongst other issues, the chapters focus on: cultural and socio-historical contexts; social interactions; joint activities; linguistics; nonverbal communication; and even the context of silence.

This is not simply a miscellaneous collection of essays. The chapters are organised in three main parts: cognitive and psychological perspectives on context; social and cultural perspectives; linguistic and philosophical perspectives (with emphasis on scaffolding). Although several different facets of context are examined, the overall themes are coherent and there is a common focus on the social context of remembering. The volume’s emphasis in this regard serves to promote what one of the contributors (William Hirst) refers to as ‘the social turn’ in memory research.

In drawing attention to the importance and ambiguity of context, Stone and Bietti are building on the work of figures such as Frederic Bartlett and Susan Engel. There is also a

Find more reviews on our website at www.thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/reviews – including our editor on the movie adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Sample titles just in: Peak Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool Evolving Insight Richard W. Byrne Work and Sleep Julian Barling et al. (Eds.) For a full list of books available for review and information on reviewing for The Psychologist, see www.bps.org.uk/books Remember, ‘Reviews’ covers more than books: for other opportunities, contact the editor jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or follow on Twitter @psychmag

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strong Vygotskian influence, but this book is concerned less with reviewing historical issues and more with the present and future of interdisciplinary memory research. It highlights the scale of what context represents in memory research but also provides a strong case

for its serious examination and indicates the kind of vital insights such an endeavour can yield.

I Routledge; 2016; Hb £95.00 Reviewed by Andrew Hart who is a Lecturer at the University of Bradford

An excellent introduction Free Will and the Brain: Neuroscientific, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives Walter Glannon (Ed.) A compilation of chapters from experts across a range of fields, Free Will and the Brain provides an array of insights into defining free will, determining its existence, implications and clinical relevance.

Glannon begins with an introductory chapter, in which he puts across his own views and opinions of the existence of free will, primarily based on conclusions of the chapters that follow. This overall summary gives the reader an easy-to-digest and informative entrance into the quite complex and somewhat deeply philosophical later chapters. Glannon’s claims do often seem to be based greatly on personal opinion, and the introduction feels relatively biased against neuroscientific explanations of free will.

The main body of the book consists of multiple chapters from different authors, each focused on discussing free will from a different perspective. Specific chapters discussing the implication of the notion of free will in neurological, psychological and mental disorders are particularly insightful and thought-provoking. Such real-world impacts provide an area of common interest to wide audiences from neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and law. Clinical and pathological examples of possible deficits in free will, as well as the consequences of lack of free will in terms of the law, make for a compelling and realworld relevant read.

Throughout many of the chapters, the authors focus heavily on the famous investigations of neuroscientist Libet into the existence of free will. It would have been refreshing to read about some of the many more recent neuroscientific findings in this field, which perhaps would have provided greater support to some of the biological arguments that are repeatedly criticised. This aspect again points towards a general bias against neuroscientific evidence throughout Free Will and the Brain.

Free Will and the Brain is an interesting and thought-inducing read, relevant to readers from a wide range of backgrounds. The unique structure breaks down what would otherwise be a very dense and complex discussion of a deeply philosophical debate. Although it only touches on the available biological literature, Glannon provides an excellent introduction to the notion of free will from multiple perspectives.

I Cambridge University Press; 2015; Hb £65.00 Reviewed by Stacey A. Bedwell who is at Nottingham Trent University

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Everywhere and nowhere Dr Broks’ Casebook BBC Radio 4 ‘I had a patient, a very unusual case,’ says neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks, as he introduces ‘Martin’, a man who fully believes he is dead. Dr Broks’ Casebook takes the listener on a psychological and philosophical hunt for ‘the self’, introducing each of the five episodes with an equally fascinating story of an individual whose sense of self is disrupted in some way.

Martin, we are told, suffers from a condition known as Cotard’s syndrome. He says he doesn’t feel anything at all, his thoughts are not real and that his brain has rotted away – a reallife zombie if you like. Adam Zeman, Professor of Neurology at Exeter University, is brought in to explain what might be going on. One of his patients, Graham, has also been diagnosed with Cotard’s syndrome and is so convinced he is dead that he hangs out in graveyards. Further investigation with neuroimaging reveals that his brain is behaving like that of someone who is in a coma – he has markedly less activity in the ‘default mode network’, a series of brain circuits that allows us to reflect on the past, imagine the future, and experience the now.

So, the producer asks, does this mean we’ve found the self? Dr Broks explains that the answer is not that simple and over the next four episodes he introduces us to Natalie, a woman who has a sudden onset of psychogenic amnesia and doesn’t know who she is any more; Laura, who suffers from sleep paralysis and experiences terrifying visitations at night; Joe, a man who experiences dramatic ‘out-of-body experiences’ as a result of his epilepsy; and Jason, a young man with anarchic hand syndrome, a condition in which one hand seems to behave outside of conscious control, stubbing out cigarettes or fighting the other hand.

Throughout the series, Dr Broks calls upon an impressive panel of experts – Adam Zeman, Andrew Mayes, Chris French, Peter

Halligan, Michael Gazzaniga – and together they explore the neurological, psychological and philosophical approaches to defining and locating the sense of self. What role does the ego play? Where are the boundaries of the self? How does sense of self change through different stages of sleep and after brain injury? What can we learn from phantom limbs?

Every episode is compelling, entertaining and informative in equal measure and while each of these questions is answered, Paul Broks concludes that maybe we shouldn’t think of the self as a unified entity and questions whether it even exists. So has he failed in his quest? I don’t think so. Adam Zeman probably summarises it most accurately and succinctly when he says: ‘The self is represented countless times in the brain in a whole variety of different ways – it is everywhere and it is nowhere.’

I Listen on BBC iPlayer via www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hjcz5 Reviewed by Dr Catherine Loveday who is at the University of Westminster

Structuring a complex past Enlivening the Self: The First Year, Clinical Enrichment, and the Wandering Mind Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Frank M. Lachmann, & James L. Fosshage Enlivening the Self is split into three essays, charting the processes that are involved in developing a psychological sense of self. The text is beautifully fleshed out with what is evidently great experience from all three authors.

The process of selfexperience is ‘about feeling enlivened’, and the book begins specifically with the authors detailing what they term are 12 qualities important in the early development of the self. It makes sense that the book chronologically presents the material starting with early developments. The structure of chapter 1 lends itself to giving a clear foundation on which subsequent case vignettes are

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based. I am particularly intrigued by a discussion of not only the personal sense of autonomy that the person develops, but also the interaction and processes in those early experiences with the environment around them that may be supportive or be a hindrance.

Of particular usefulness was the manifestation into adult life, seen in the book through descriptions of enactments in the therapy space. The idea of therapy process as a reflection of the person’s process in day-to-day life draws attention to the importance of looking at the person as a whole, a way of

concept without economising on the necessary vignettes that never fail to bring an example to life. In the same breath, this also encourages the reader to evaluate their own clinical work in this way; certainly for a starting psychologist, this structure provides one very useful way of making sense of human complexity.

A deeply thought-provoking, challenging, yet enjoyable book. creating a meaningful formulation.

As a counselling psychologist in training in the midst of developing a working knowledge of psychoanalytical concepts, this book provides clear concise material to give an overall understanding of the

I Routledge; 2016; Pb £28.99 Reviewed by Candy Wong who is a Senior Mental Health Practitioner, Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, and counselling psychologist in training, University of East London

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Legacies of war Wounded: Conflict, Casualties and Care Science Museum One hundred years after the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, when the British army suffered over 57,000 casualties, a third of them killed, on the first day, the Science Museum opened a fascinating exhibition entitled ‘Wounded: Conflict, Casualties and Care’.

Representing the British Psychological Society at the preview evening, I found that the exhibition covers protection (through luck, superstition, armour and equipment), first aid, life-saving equipment and rehabilitation, with many examples of talismans and charms, armour, gas masks, first aid kits, stretchers, anaesthetic and surgical equipment, as well as many examples of early prosthetic legs and arms (officers’ and soldiers’ arms were, rather disturbingly, of different quality!), and, one of the most grisly exhibits, a case full of glass eyes…

The opening of the exhibition by Science Museum Director, Ian Blatchford, and Chair of Trustees, Dame Mary Archer, included an inspirational speech by Falklands War veteran, Simon Weston, who spoke at length about the hidden wounds of war. He was accompanied by the singing of three beautiful songs – with words by A.E. Housman set to music by the composer George Butterworth who, as an officer in the Durham Light Infantry, was killed by a German sniper during the Battle of the Somme in the early hours of 5 August 1916. The tenor Roderick Williams was accompanied by Iain Burnside.

Some 20 million people were left disabled, disfigured or traumatised by their experiences in the First World War, and it was these 20 million wounded that the exhibition had as its focus.

The exhibition was produced in association with the charities BLESMA (Limbless Veterans), Blind Veterans UK and Combat Stress (The Veterans’ Mental Health Charity). Thus, in addition to a focus on

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physical injury there was a large emphasis on the psychological effects of war. Even by the end of 1918, 30,000 war pensions had already been awarded for ‘shell shock’. The figure continued to rise thereafter.

For me, a highlight was a facsimile of the medical record of the document transferring the war poet, Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, for treatment at the Slateford Military Hospital at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh (now the home of the main building of Edinburgh Napier University). Following treatment at Craiglockhart, where he formed a close friendship with fellow officer, poet and author Siegfried Sassoon, Owen returned to the front to his unit, the 2nd Manchesters, where he was killed in action on 4 November 1918, almost one week to the hour before the signing of the Armistice.

Many, like Sassoon, were comparatively lucky, in that they survived, intact, with their lives; many, many were treated with psychotherapy for ‘neurasthenia’, ‘shell shock’ and other ‘not yet diagnosed neurological’ disorders; some were ‘treated’, in fairly barbaric fashion using, for example, Lewis Yelland’s electrofaradism machine, also on display; but the 306 who were shot at dawn were perhaps the unluckiest of all.

Post-traumatic stress, as we now term it, lives on. Thousands continue to suffer, and so the film and poetry by Combat Stress veterans that closes the exhibition was especially poignant.

I The exhibition will run until 15 January 2018 (see http://sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/ exhibitions/wounded). See also this month’s ‘Looking back’ article.

Reviewed by Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes who is Vice President of the British Psychological Society

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LOOKING BACK

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Phantom suffering?

Joanna Bourke looks into physical and emotional wounding after the First World War

he First World War did not end in health. (His files can be found in the 1918. The suffering inflicted during National Archives WO 339/12060 the war continued for decades after (P1030322) and PIN 26/21799.) the ceasefire. Millions of men returned This all changed on 12 August 1917 home with distressing psychological and when a bomb smashed his left leg into physical wounds. Their lives were ruled fragments. His leg became infected with by pain, despair, and conflict with pension gas gangrene and was amputated three authorities and medical personnel. The times. Hopkinson was distraught. He was war-afflicted body-in-pain was a life to spend his life on crutches and never sentence. experienced prolonged periods of I was reminded of this fact when employment again. opening two bulky files in the National Hopkinson also suffered from shell Archives in Kew (London) a few months shock. While being evacuated to hospital, ago. It was the pensions file for Hopkinson ‘had to wait some hours under Lieutenant Francis (‘Frank’) Hopkinson, who died on 17 December 1974 at the age of 85. He had lived for over half a century in severe pain as a result of having been wounded during the Third Battle of Ypres on 12 August 1917. Hopkinson had undergone numerous surgical operations, including having his left leg amputated three times.

He had also been hospitalised with shell shock. From those terrifying months in 1917 and 1918 until his death in 1974, Hopkinson endured profound physical and mental anguish due to an agonisingly tender stump Hopkinson’s life sheds light on the treatment of men and phantom limb pain. wounded during the First World War An exploration of Hopkinson’s life sheds light on the treatment of men wounded during Railway arches during Air Raid’. The the First World War. strain was too much: he ‘developed Who was Frank Hopkinson? He was confusion of thought with suspicions and born in 1889. He was the second son of hostility’. On 1 October 1917, he was sent Canon Charles Girdlestone Hopkinson, for treatment to Palace Green Hospital in rector of Whitburn (in Sunderland), and London for shell-shocked officers. He was was educated at Marlborough. When war described as having an ‘anxious was declared, this strapping, six-foot tall, expression… He is confused and young man who enjoyed riding horses suspicious of his surroundings, doubtful eagerly joined the 11th Durham Battalion. as to dates and times. Afraid…’. It took The recruitment officer judged him to be nearly five months for his doctors to ‘not particularly nervy’, with ‘normal’ report ‘Mental condition now clear’.

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Nervousness, insomnia and impaired memory would plague him his entire life.

Medical attention, however, initially focused on his phantom limb. The phenomenon was first described in 1551 by the great French military surgeon, Ambroise Paré. In Paré’s words, A most clear and manifest argument of this false and deceitfull [sic] sense appears after the amputation of the member; a long while after they will complain of the part which is cut away. Verily it is a thing wondrous strange and prodigious, and which will scarce be credited, unless by such as have seen with their eyes, and heard with their ears the Patients who have many months after the cutting away of the Leg, grievously complained that they yet felt exceeding great pain of that leg so cut off. (Ambrose Paré, quoted in Thomas Johnson, The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion, Ambrose Parey [sic], London: Author, 1649)

Most famously, though, post-amputation sensations were brought to public attention during the American Civil War when neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell coined the term ‘phantom limb’ and went on to provide the first modern clinical description of ‘these hallucinations… so vivid so strange’. He observed that Nearly every man who loses a limb carried about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself, and sometimes a most inconvenient presence, faintly felt at times, but ready to be called up to his perception by a blow, a touch, or a change of wind. (Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences, 1872, p.348)

Hopkinson described the pain more evocatively: it felt as if ‘the foot was being crushed but… at stump level only’ and ‘like electric shocks’ that made him ‘shout out’.

During and immediately after the war, Hopkinson’s anguish attracted sympathy.

But as the years passed, he had difficulty persuading his doctors that his suffering was ‘real’. It did not help that his ‘shell shock’ had not been a direct consequence of combat but had begun when he was exposed to an air raid in England. This showed a lack of soldierly self-control and was interpreted as further evidence that he had a pre-existing mental weakness.

From the 1930s, medical reports increasingly reiterated the view that Hopkinson was of a ‘marked neurasthenic type’ and exhibited a ‘hypochondriac type

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of personality – rather an “old womanish” He offered Hopkinson a radical treatment: type’. In the words of the Medical Board chordotomy (also spelt cordotomy). This in January 1936, Hopkinson was a ‘man involved dividing the pain pathways in of sensitive temperament, not a good the spinal cord, thus ‘interrupting the type’, perhaps an allusion to his pathways of the painful impulses in order homosexuality. to abolish or modify their effects on the At the very least, pension officials sensorium, either before they reach it or concluded, Hopkinson’s psychoneurosis in the brain itself’ (Lambert Rogers, was ‘constitutional’ and therefore not ‘Refresher course for general practitioners: eligible for financial compensation. When The surgical relief of pain’, British Medical Hopkinson complained about agonisingly Journal, 16 August 1952, p.383). Many painful hands (after spending decades neurosurgeons believed it could reduce or using crutches, his hands looked like even eliminate intractable pain. ‘discoloured raw beef’), the Medical A particularly eloquent defence of Officer concluded that the root cause of chordotomy was mounted by Murray A. his disorder was Hopkinson’s ‘general Falconer, the director of Guy’s-Maudsley nervous disposition’. For Neurosurgical Unit.

Hopkinson, it must have For Falconer, the seemed like he was caught effectiveness of the “their inability to solve his in an impossible bind: his treatment was itself crises eventually led each suffering either pre-existed proof that phantom of them to turn away” the war or was limb pain was not constitutional. It was as if ‘a psychological the war never happened. disturbance’. When it The chief problem for Hopkinson was was suggested that performing a major that he was confronting deeply embedded operation might itself be curative for clinical beliefs about stump and phantom psychological reasons, Falconer was pains. From the late-1930s onwards, it dismissive: ‘I find it difficult to believe’, he was widely assumed that these pains were scoffed, ‘that in my hands antero-lateral neurotic in nature. At the hospital where chordotomy acted as a psycho-therapeutic Hopkinson received most of his treatment procedure, when previous operative – Queen Mary’s Hospital at Roehampton – procedures on the stump had failed to R.D. Langdale Kelham concluded that the give relief’ (British Medical Journal, 7 typical phantom limb patient was February 1953, p.301). more often than not a person with When told of the operation’s an unsatisfactory personality. It may distressing side-effects, including be he is an anxious, introspective, weakened sphincter control, Hopkinson dissatisfied, ineffective [sic] who, decided to try physical, or ‘peripheralist’, becoming obsessed by his symptoms, forms of treatment for his phantom pains. and brooding upon them and his In the 1930s and 1940s, therefore, he disability, tends to dramatise their tried anodal galvanism or electricity degree, using undoubted treatment. In the 1950s, he opted for exaggerations in his description of percussion therapy, that is, thumping his his sufferings. (Artificial Limbs in the painful stump with a mallet and wooden Rehabilitation of the Disabled, London: peg. In the words of the neurologist W. HMSO, 1957, pp.131–139) Ritchie Russell, of the United Oxford Hospitals, with percussion therapy a Kelham’s assessment dominated the field. patient would learn to ‘knock away his Only rarely did physicians suggest the phantom pain whenever it was opposite causality – in other words, that troublesome’ (British Medical Journal, chronic pain might lead to psychological 11 June 1949, pp.1024–1026.) distress, rather than being caused by it.

The failure of all these treatments led Hopkinson ended up being treated by both Russell and Leon Gillis, the author physicians on both sides of a major divide of the highly influential 1954 book in the treatment of chronic pain – in Amputations, to reconsider Hopkinson’s shorthand, this was the difference case. Gillis believed that treatment needed between those who focused on the brain’s to encompass ‘psychological as well as reaction to painful stimuli (‘centralists’ or physiological factors’ (p.339). He noted cerebralists) and those who were that Hopkinson’s stump and phantom peripheralists (the painful sensations pain worsened when he was upset or originated from ‘excitation of nerve ends’ when he heard people singing hymns. in the scar or stump).

Russell went even further. He argued Cerebral theorists placed their bets that it made ‘no sense saying that one on the efficacy of neurosurgery. In 1943 pain is functional and one organic’ Geoffrey Jefferson, the doyen of because ‘all pains are both physiologically neurosurgeons, examined Hopkinson. determined and functionally graded

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according to a wide variety of personal factors’. Even when the pain was largely the result of emotional factors, physical treatments might work. This was why he was willing to endorse ‘old methods of treating pain with electricity’ since, at the very least, it would provide ‘a physiological distraction’ that might actually reduce suffering. Russell believed that ‘the successful therapist for intractable pain treats the problem like a game in which he endeavours to outmanœuvre the tricks played by the C.N.S. [central nervous system] of his patient’. He had no scruples in encouraging therapists to use ‘the deception of the poker player and the confidence of the quack’. To those critics who believed that he was ‘too optimistic’ about curing chronic pain, his response was simple: ‘I think it important to be over-confident in treating pain, so I make no apology’ (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 52 (1959), pp.984–987).

Unfortunately, Hopkinson was too disillusioned and too disenchanted to believe in any positive outcome. He died on 17 December 1974.

Hopkinson’s war lasted 57 years.

Although his symptoms changed relatively little throughout his life, his sufferings cannot be summarised under any single headings. His pain was acute, chronic, physiological, psychological,and emotional; it gripped him within hospital wards and when he was ‘sitting alone in my Bedroom’. On the surface, Hopkinson should have been able to elicit sympathy: he was a white male who had been born into a privileged family and had served as an officer in war. In fact, his class-status was a further cause for agony: as one doctor reported, The officer is a man of sensitive temperament and a loss of his leg affects him more than one of coarser fibre. He… hates people looking at him and sympathizing with him.

Those physicians who witnessed his pain often attempted to sympathise and provide succour but their inability to solve his crises eventually led each of them to turn away – sometimes in despair; other times, in annoyance. The invisibility of his wound – his stump seemed to be ‘normal’ and the limb that burned like fire did not exist – trumped all scientific theorising. But his suffering was anything but ‘phantom’.

I Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London j.bourke@bbk.ac.uk

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