The Psychologist September 2018 by The Psychologist

the psychologist

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psychologist september 2018

september 2018 www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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psychologist september 2018

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk

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The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

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

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

The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, tweet us on @psychmag or call /write to us at the Society’s Leicester ofﬁce.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera, Emma Young Vacancy Deputy Editor: see www.bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs

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

the

psychologist september 2018

Letters Policy, mTBI, Maslow and more

The broken hearts club Dinsa Sachan talks to psychologists about their research on the effects of relationship break-up

Yawning at the apocalypse Cameron Brick and Sander van der Linden on how psychologists can help solve the largest social dilemma in history

Obituaries 38

News Awards, PsyPAG, research, and more 42

‘Open the black box, see what’s in it’ Andrew Clement meets Karina Nielsen to talk interventions in organisations An awakening Steve Taylor on a type of experience he feels has been neglected by psychology

Ciaran Murphy

‘I don’t want people to experience what I experienced’ We meet Alexandra Stein

Jobs in psychology

One on one …with new Society President Kate Bullen

Books Q+A with Lucy Maddox

Culture

Looking back Yoga meets psychedelics

A to Z

Relationship break-up undoubtedly shaped me, defining my personality in frustrating ways. Sure, it got easier… I’m often reminded of a line from the 1996 film Swingers: ‘Sometimes it still hurts. You know how it is, man… you wake up every day and it hurts a little bit less, and then you wake up one day and it doesn’t hurt at all. And the funny thing is… you almost miss that pain… for the same reason that you missed her... because you lived with it for so long.’ It’s a sentiment echoed in the great break-up album Requiem for an Almost Lady, by Lee Hazlewood. On p.22 Dinsa Sachan takes a more scientific approach to a painful topic. Humanity doesn’t come out of our cover feature too well either, but thankfully our new Society President Kate Bullen (see ‘One on one’, p.58) remains ‘optimistic about human beings’. Finally, please take your opportunity to shape The Psychologist – complete our survey (p.28), and consider applying to be our new Deputy Editor (www. bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs). Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

Bridging psychology and neuroscience T

wo of this year’s British Psychological Society award winners have been announced, both of whom have explored some of the most pressing issues in neuroscience. Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, has been named winner of the 2018 President’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge. Blakemore, known for her years’-long exploration of the teenage brain, expressed delight for the recognition of her work describing it as a ‘wonderful honour’. When she ﬁrst began her doctoral research at UCL, Blakemore was studying the symptoms of schizophrenia. After post-doctoral research in France she decided to change her focus to the development of the typical adolescent brain – a relatively unexplored area at the time. Since then her work has provided important insights into behavioural and structural and functional brain changes that occur during adolescence. Blakemore’s research has investigated the social

brain and social cognitive development, mental health, peer influence and learning during adolescence. Her findings have significant implications for both public health and education and have been published in more than 125 peer-reviewed articles. She described the field of adolescent development as one which is ‘growing and thriving’ and within which a significant amount of work has been done in a relatively short period of time. Looking at her career so far Blakemore credited the ‘invaluable mentoring’ she has received over the years, noting the important guidance she has received from Professors Uta and Chris Frith. Blakemore said mentoring early career researchers and watching their careers thrive was one privilege of her career. She also pointed to the many public engagement activities she has been involved with, including the youth theatre project Brainstorm – a play about the adolescent brain written and performed by teenagers. Over the years she has delivered more than 600 talks across the world, and gave a TED talk on adolescent brain development, which

the psychologist september 2018 news has amassed millions of views. She appeared in our first ‘The Psychologist Presents’ session at Latitude Festival, in 2015. More recently Blakemore has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy and her book Inventing Ourselves: the Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, published in March, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Looking to the future Blakemore said: ‘The field of adolescent brain development is still very young and there are many questions that have yet to be answered. While quite a lot is known about average adolescent brain, much less is known about individual differences in brain development. This is a key question for future research: what genetic and environmental factors underlie individual differences in brain and behavioural development, and what are the consequences of this variation in development?’ Blakemore also pointed to outstanding questions over why most mental health problems first appear in adolescence. ‘What is it about adolescence that makes it a period of vulnerability to mental illness? What are the risk factors and what can be done to prevent mental illnesses before they start? Is adolescence a sensitive period for learning and training? If so, this makes it not only a period of vulnerability but also of opportunity. Adolescence is an exciting and formative stage of life, we need to understand adolescent development and to support and nurture young people in this critical period of development.’ Professor Trevor Robbins from the University of Cambridge Department of Psychology and Director of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute has been named a winner of the 2018 BPS Lifetime Achievement Award. Robbins, one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world, has spent his career researching cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology and codeveloped the computerised CANTAB cognitive test battery. When he arrived at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student Robbins hoped to become a molecular biologist studying the Natural Sciences Tripos. However, in his second year during a psychology module, Robbins became fascinated by the subject,

being particularly influenced by Professor Susan Iversen. Although initially Robbins hoped to move into clinical psychology he was swayed to embark on a Behavioural Neuroscience PhD with Iversen and head of Department Professor Oliver Zangwill, moving full circle to incorporate his interest in molecular biology with the study of the brain and initially working largely with animals. ‘I’m interested in making bridges between psychology and neuroscience and between animal and human research and basic neuroscience and clinical neuroscience. I’m interested in treatments ultimately because I think they are the best proof of your theory – if you can get a treatment to work you’re probably on the right lines.’ Since those early days Robbins’ work has explored the frontal lobes of the brain and their connections to other systems including the reward system and limbic system and their links with addiction, Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia and Huntington’s Disease. He uses experimental psychology to explore cognitive functions in clinical groups and the general population, MRI and PET imaging to reveal more about the brain systems involved with certain cognitive processes and is interested in the effects of drugs on brain chemistry and behaviour. Robbins has published more than 800 articles in scientific journals, co-edited eight books, and has been ranked as the fourth most influential brain scientist of the modern era. He has been President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society, The British Association of Psychopharmacology and The British Neuroscience Association. He has also been a member of the Medical Research Council and is a Fellow of the BPS, Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society. He told me that, as well as becoming a Professor and Head of Department at Cambridge in 2002, winning the Brain Prize in 2014 for his work on cognitive disorders was a particular highlight of his career. He used pharmacological, anatomical and behavioural methods to model the regulation of behaviour in animals and humans and showed that the abuse of drugs depends on the formation of habits not just on the disruption of reward and pleasure mechanisms in the brain. He demonstrated that certain circuits in the brain regulate the formation of addiction to drugs and how disturbances in these circuits may also lead to ADHD and OCD. More recently, thanks to a major Wellcome Trust grant, Robbins is exploring impulsive and compulsive disorders and the role of the frontal and striatal systems in the brain. ‘I’m interested, in particular, in obsessive compulsive disorder and drug addiction which are compulsive disorders, and ADHD which is an impulsive disorder. The main hypothesis is that these disorders arise from the disruption of neural systems which connect different circuits of the frontal lobes to the basal ganglia in the brain.’ MARIA ATTER AND ELLA RHODES

An end in sight for ‘bogus and abhorrent’ conversion therapy

The Coalition Against Conversion Therapy recently celebrated a memorandum of understanding backed by all major psychological, psychotherapeutic and counselling organisations in the UK, including the British Psychological Society. This event, held at the Houses of Parliament, was uncannily timed, coming one day after the government released the shocking results of the largest national survey of LGBT people in the world and announced a move towards eradicating conversion therapy. Ben Bradshaw MP, who was only the second MP to be openly gay at the time of his first election in 1997, opened the event by welcoming the future ban on conversion therapy. However, he pointed out that this kind of so-called therapy, which aims to change a person’s sexuality, often occurs in the fringes of society and in the fundamental branches of some religions, which would make a ban difficult to enforce. This move by the government, he added, was just the beginning of the journey rather than the end. Chair of the Coalition Against Conversion Therapy psychotherapist Dr Igi/Lyndsey Moon said the coalition represented 100,000 psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors across 16 organisations that offer clinical and therapeutic services for LGBT people. Moon made clear that while conversion therapy is harmful, they did not wish to dissuade LGBT people from accessing therapy, and anyone with problems, whether related to sexuality and gender or not, should feel able to speak about their personal feelings and thoughts with a qualified professional. Conversion therapy, Moon explained, is aimed at ‘curing’ LGBT people and can describe many ‘treatments’ from pseudo-psychological therapy through to so-called ‘corrective rape’. It is often offered by faith organisations and healthcare professionals, and the national LGBT survey of more than 100,000 people found 7 per cent had undergone or been offered conversion therapy, with young people being more likely to have it offered to them than older people. One particularly sad finding from the survey, Moon said, was that more than two thirds of LGBT people are scared to hold their partner’s hand in public: ‘I want to hold hands with the person I love, I want us all to be able to hold hands with those we love in public and in safety.

To live in safety is our freedom and to have our freedom is the greatest form of equality we can ever share.’ Bradshaw took to the stage once more and said he was grateful to now have the listening ear of government ministers, compared to 1997 when he was called a ‘sterile, disease-ridden homosexual who would put my constituents’ children at risk’ by a Conservative opponent. He pointed out there was a new generation of MPs for whom equality is a given and who have been working hard to achieve it. Minister for Equalities Baroness Susan Williams pointed to more of the shocking findings from the national LGBT survey. LGBT people, she said, are less satisfied with life than the general population; 67 per cent of trans respondents said they were not open about their gender identity; two in five respondents said they had experienced an incident in the previous year because they were LGBT; and more than nine in ten did not report these incidents because ‘it happens all the time’. However, she added, the most striking results relate to conversion therapy, which she described as abhorrent and bogus. She pointed to the statistic that 19 per cent of those who had undergone conversion therapy did so at the hands of healthcare providers or medical professionals. She affirmed the government’s commitment to tackling LGBT issues in its 75-point action plan to improve the lives of people in the community, and £4.5 million in funding to address findings from the survey. Bradshaw finally introduced Crispin Blunt MP, who came out as gay in 2010 after being married for 20 years. Referring to the LGBT survey Blunt said he had come across starkly different reactions to his holding his partner’s hand in public, being told by one passer-by that it was ‘disgusting’ and later being approached by a cyclist in New York City who simply said ‘fab-u-lous’. ‘This is why I will continue to support the great work being done on this because I know precisely how much it means to finally be myself.’

the psychologist september 2018 news

The last psychologist standing Would you be brave enough to take part in two weeks of online chats with schoolchildren – who can ask you absolutely anything – only to potentially be voted out X-Factor style? I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here does just that, bringing together groups of academics in themed zones who are available for online chats with classes of primary and secondary school pupils. This summer’s two psychologythemed zones – Society and Wellbeing – were sponsored by the British Psychological Society and included researchers in sport and exercise psychology, health psychology, alcohol, and autism. Throughout the two weeks schools could sign up to chatrooms to speak with the six psychologists in each zone. The psychologists also answered questions posted by students on the I’m a Scientist website, which are archived as a resource for pupils. Towards the end of the two weeks students began to vote to ‘evict’ scientists and eventually chose a winner of each zone who was awarded £500 to put towards public engagement. Dr Daniel Jolley (Staffordshire University) researches conspiracy theories and was the last scientist standing in the Society zone. He said initially he was nervous about the online chats but ended up becoming slightly addicted to them.

‘The questions were so varied, the students asked everything from what my favourite pizza was to my experience of university and why I wanted to be a psychologist. It was awesome. The chats were 30 minutes long with children from Year 6 to Year 12, and for those 30 minutes the students can ask whatever they like. Usually there were two to three scientists in a chat at any one time.’ Jolley said it was challenging, but a useful experience, communicating science with a wide range of ages. ‘The chats were very different, when we signed on to our chat with Year 6 pupils, we were greeted by a barrage of hellos and the kids asking to be our friends! But their questions were great, they really made us think about our responses. From Year 9 and above the students got straight into their real-world questions!’ Sam Burton, a PhD student at the University of Liverpool who is studying self-control in heavy drinkers and alcohol addiction, won the Wellbeing zone. He said he was motivated to put himself forward to show pupils what scientists are really like and to speak to potential future scientists. ‘There is a real image of scientists, going around in white lab coats and being total nerds (partly true the nerd bit), but most of us don’t wear a lab coat and do everyday things like play sports or go the cinema.’

Burton said the experience had helped him think about ways to explain science in simpler terms, but he also learned much from the pupils. ‘They’d ask questions on anything, including the aquatic apes theory! My favourite part was the ask zone, any question could be asked, but there was a particular question on the effect of cannabis. Legality of cannabis and the effects it has on people is a highly topical issue and something I’m really interested in, so being able to talk about it was brilliant.’ The next I’m a Scientist event will take place from 5 to 16 November and will include psychology zones suitable for a wide range of scientists in the ﬁeld. To apply to take part you just need to write a single sentence, aimed at a 13-year-old, about your work and ﬁll in the online form at imascientist.org.uk/scientist-apply.

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports, including: we met the speakers ahead of a a British Psychological Society supported meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Psychology, on mental health in the criminal justice system; and Madeleine Pownall’s report from the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Psychology of Women and Equalities Section. For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

‘If we could actually listen to what’s important to our patients…’ July saw Professor Karen Rodham (University of Staffordshire) appear as our nominated speaker at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. In front of a packed audience in the ‘SpeakEasy’, Rodham took part in a panel discussion on ‘The future of healthcare’. In a session chaired by presenter and comedian Robin Ince, Professor Rodham provided a vital health psychology perspective. The other participants were Professor Daniel Davis, author of The Beautiful Cure, who discussed how research in understanding the human immune system leads us to new ideas for medicines for treating cancer and other diseases; and Professor Greg Hannon, director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute who is internationally recognised for his contributions to the discovery of cancer genes. Following up on themes from her July ‘Rated’ article for us, Professor Rodham pointed to the need for the more medically minded approaches to work with psychologists over effective behaviour change. ‘If we could actually listen to what’s important to our patients we are working with… what’s important to health professionals is

to manage the symptoms, but often what is important to the patient is to live well with their condition despite the symptoms. There’s a subtle difference there.’ Professor Rodham pointed to numerous examples from her own research and practice, and that of other health psychologists, including one man who had autism and was diabetic, and was struggling to manage his condition. As a consequence, he had to have some toes amputated. ‘The nursing staff were really cross… they had given him the literature. My colleague asked to see the leaﬂets, took them away and found them really confusing. He went back to the chap and started from basics, talked him through the literature… at that point this man said: “So that’s why they took my toes”. That’s why he had been aggressive, he’d been worried about what else the health professionals were going to take when he turned up at the hospital that day.’ These are ‘interesting times’, Rodham concluded… ‘the most immediate need is that people living with chronic conditions for longer are sometimes labelled a being a burden… but it’s just that our health needs have changed, and we need to look better at how we can help these people cope, so that they aren’t cycling back into the system.’ Our thanks as ever to arts curator Tania Harrison for including us in this year’s event. For transcripts of previous sessions, search our website or see the free special edition in our app.

Early Career Network

European award

Professor David Cooke, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Association of Psychology and Law at the annual conference in Turku, Finland. Cooke is a Visiting Professor (part-time) in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway. He told us: ‘I was very grateful, surprised and honoured… my thanks to all my colleagues and friends who have helped me over the years.’

The BPS is looking to extend the services it offers to early-career psychologists: ‘postdoctoral’ researchers, lecturers and practitioners. Where the BPS already supports the work of PsyPAG, a body of support and funding for postgraduate psychologists, we are now looking to better support psychologists in the next step of their career journey. Are you a current early-career psychologist? Are you a current postgraduate with ideas on how you’d like the BPS to best serve you in the future? We need your voice to help us shape the development of the Early Career Network. We have developed a brief survey (link below) to help us identify what early-career psychologists would like from a network. We look forward to hearing how a BPS Early Career Network could best serve you. Please share far and wide around your departments, peers and social networks. You can complete the survey, which runs until Friday 28 September, at https://response.questback.com/britishpsychologicalsociety/ earlycareernetworkconsultationsurvey

the psychologist september 2018 news

Listening vs. watching Audiobook sales are booming, almost doubling in the UK over the past five years. Some are now sophisticated, being voiced by multiple actors and featuring extensive sound effects. But even single-narrator audiobooks are, it’s been argued, more cognitively and emotionally engaging than print – in part because a listener can’t slow down, as they can with a print book. As a writer whose latest psychology-themed novel She, Myself and I is now being produced as an audiobook, I can’t help wondering about the benefits, and the costs. Personally, I like to be able to control my pace through a print book, to reread sentences or paragraphs that I particularly enjoy or that I don’t quite process properly on a first read. However, as Daniel Richardson at UCL and fellow researchers point out in a new study, available as a pre-print on the bioRxiv service, ‘Our oldest narratives date back many thousands of years and predate the advent of writing… For the majority of human history, stories were synonymous with oral tradition; audiences listened to a story-teller imparting a tale.’ Humans did not evolve to read, so perhaps there’s something primordially special about listening to a story. But, as the researchers go on to write, ‘in the modern era, video has emerged as a major narrative tool as well’. So, which is more engaging – video or audio? That’s the focus of the new paper. And I’m intrigued. I’ve also sold TV rights to the novel, and TV, of course, is the medium of mass-appeal. If my book is ultimately turned into a TV series, might viewers become more involved in the story than my audiobook listeners? Video offers more information than audio, the researchers point out (while two people both hearing ‘The house was ablaze’ would imagine slightly different things, watching a film showing a house on fire leaves nothing to the imagination). Oral stories might therefore elicit more engagement, as the listener has to construct a personalised interpretation of the narrative.

But because audio is also more demanding than video, is there a bigger risk that listeners will lose interest in the story, and switch off? To investigate, the researchers asked 102 men and women, aged 18–55, to wear a wrist sensor that captured their heart rate, sweating and wrist temperature while they listened to and watched a series of emotionally charged scenes. These were a mix of audio and film-version extracts from eight works of fiction, including Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. The order of the presentations, and whether a particular story was presented as a video or as an audiobook extract, varied across participants. At the end of each trial, participants completed a questionnaire that assessed four aspects of their perceived involvement in the story: their emotional engagement; their understanding of the narrative; their attentional focus; and the ‘narrative presence’ (indicating to what extent they agreed or disagreed with ‘At times, the story was closer to me than the real world’, for example). Though the participants reported feeling more engaged in the videos, their heart rates, body temperatures and skin conductance readings were all higher while they were listening to the audio. Increased heart rate was taken to indicate greater cognitive effort (there were no differences in levels of fidgeting between the audio and video trials), especially given the other data: the skin conductance and temperature readings suggested that the participants were more emotionally involved when listening to audio, the researchers argued. This paper has not been peerreviewed yet. And, due to sensor failure, the researchers were not able to gather the full set of physiological recordings for all of the participants (they got electrodermal data for only 62, for instance). But if as this work suggests, people are at a

physiological level more emotionally engaged by audio than watching ﬁlm, this is good news for novelists. People might love watching TV dramas, but, in getting people more involved in a story, the form of the novel – whether in print or audio – reigns supreme. Emma Young for bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ ycyclwdo

Research digest The burgeoning psychological subdiscipline of experimental philosophy or X-phi is producing robust results that replicate with a higher success rate than many other areas. This may be in part because of the nature of the studies, which focus on how participants’ behaviour, beliefs or judgements change depending on the task or stimuli they are given – an approach that is known to produce highly replicable findings. (Review of Philosophy and Psychology) Theories of wellbeing have neglected sex, according to psychologists who have conducted a three-week diary study to fill this gap. They found that sex on one day was associated with not only better mood the next day, but also having a greater sense of meaning in life, possibly because it fulfils the basic need for belonging. (Emotion) A bias in our perspective-taking abilities means that senders underestimate how much of a positive impact their thank-you messages will have on potential recipients. Senders also overestimated how awkward recipients would feel and underestimated how competent recipients would judge them to be. (Psychological Science) Part of the rationale for open-plan office spaces is that they will foster in-person collaboration and dialogue. However, a pair of quasi-experimental field studies involving two Fortune 500 companies that kitted out staff with digital trackers found that after the shift to open-plan face-to-face collaboration dropped by 70 per cent, while email use increased by around 50 per cent. (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B) By Dr Christian Jarrett. These studies were covered, along with many more, by him, Dr Alex Fradera and Emma Young on our Research Digest at www.bps.org.uk/digest

Science of behaviour or science of questionnaires?

Part of my role at the Digest involves sifting through journals looking for research worth covering, and I’ve sensed that modern social psychology generates plenty of studies based on questionnaire data, but far fewer that investigate the kind of tangible behavioural outcomes illuminated by the field’s classics, from Asch’s conformity experiments to Milgram’s research on obedience to authority. A new paper in Social Psychological Bulletin examines this apparent change systematically. Based on his findings, Dariusz Doliński at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland asks the bleak question: Is psychology still a science of behaviour? Doliński is following in the footsteps of a paper published over a decade ago, which looked at the January 2006 contents of what Doliński describes as social psychology’s ‘flagship” publication, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association. Roy Baumeister and colleagues sought research that involved behavioural outcomes more active than ‘finger movements’ – typing on a computer, clicking a mouse or filling in a survey by hand. They found active behavioural outcomes were measured by only 12 per cent of studies published in the journal that month, compared with an estimated 80 per cent in the same journal 30 years earlier. Was this a blip, or a trend? Doliński looked at six issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published in the second half of 2017. He found that from 45 empirical articles, only four went beyond participants answering questions or filling in surveys; overall, only 6 per cent of the analysed studies measured actual behaviour. Moreover, when behaviour was studied, it was frequently nothing more than another case of finger

movement. One study measured whether people would overreport their achievements on an experimental task; another looked at endurance in solving cognitive tasks; a third involved the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, a financial game that doesn’t require any overt behaviour as such. Only one study looked at a truly active behaviour – the social interactions of pre-school children. Doliński likely had his tongue only partly in cheek when wondering whether this approach would still have been used if pre-school children were comfortable filling in questionnaires. What’s behind this antibehavioural turn? Some of it is connected to the cognitive revolution: the recognition in psychological science that internal processes like memory, learning and attention are crucial to understanding behaviour. This has been immensely useful and worth celebrating, but it doesn’t exclude studying a diversity of behaviours as well. Doliński raises a few other obvious pressures that are harder to celebrate. Studying behaviours is more difficult, and often more costly and expensive, than studying verbal declarations. Behaviours are also harder to verify (was that spontaneous gesture friendly or unfriendly?) and to record. It may also be harder to convince ethics boards to approve a behavioural study than another survey study. In addition, observed behaviour is often binary and one-shot per participant. You offer help to cross a street; you return the found item; you go to vote; you sign the petition,… or you don’t. Not only does this often call for larger sample sizes, it limits how you can analyse the data, making it harder to produce persuasive models of pathways between mechanisms. As a concrete example of how the behavioural instinct has been blunted, Doliński points to a piece of research on physical intimacy

(from the journal issues he reviewed) that did make the effort to go into the field. Experimenters visited a clinic providing flu shots, but did they observe how waiting patients interacted, or how closely they approached the receptionist or stood in line? No: they simply asked people more questions. This matters because declarations of behavioural intentions do not always translate to behaviours. For instance, lottery winners rarely donate their cash to charity, even though more than a quarter of survey respondents claim they would give substantially. Also, while the very robust ‘bystander effect’ shows that people are less likely to act to counter a transgressive act when others are present, people asked to describe their hypothetical actions believe they would be as likely to act whether several other people are also present or not. Similarly, recent work canvassing opinions on the Milgram experiment showed that most people believe they would not have carried out the experimenters’ orders, even though most people do. Doliński worries that social psychologists doing the important work of field studies, and those studying behaviour more generally, are being shut out of the best journals in their field. Social psychology is already going through a process of reform as it responds to concerns about research quality. Perhaps it should take this opportunity to also consider adjusting its incentive systems to make more of research that does the best it can to see how psychological manipulations impact the world. Dr Alex Fradera for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ ydhfgzu6

HARROGATE 2019

The British Psychological Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Annual Conference Harrogate International Centre, 1â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2 May

New two-day format Visit our website to register your interest for exciting conference updates. Submissions open in September. Save the date and join us in the spa town of Harrogate. Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf.

Credit: Catherine Aldred, www.catherinealdred.co.uk Watermark Gallery, www.watermarkgallery.co.uk

www.bps.org.uk/ac2019

An inspired wander through PsyPAG The 33rd Annual Conference of the Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG) was held at the University of Huddersﬁeld, our Journalist Ella Rhodes was there.

This year marked my fifth time at PsyPAG, a conference which brings together PhD and masters students as well as recent psychology graduates. PsyPAG isn’t like other conferences – the camaraderie is infectious. These students are enjoying the experience of academia, being open and honest about the real struggle of PhD life, admitting mistakes and missed targets and deadlines to a room of knowing laughs, and taking failure on the chin. Other conferences could take a leaf from its book. This year PsyPAG boasted fascinating research and fantastic workshops, and to tap into all this knowledge I decided to ask the delegates about the advice they would give to the first-year undergraduate versions of themselves. The first keynote speaker was Professor Viv Burr (University of Huddersfield), who gave a broad introduction to the ideas behind social constructionism. This theory suggests that what we think of as objective reality is actually multiple and diverse constructions of the world, and those who share a society and culture will have a common perception of the world. After some milling around and chatting with PhD students a common thread in the advice they gave their first-year undergraduate selves was to keep more of an open mind during their early studies. Many said they wished they had realised earlier that clinical psychology was not the only option. Current chair of PsyPAG Holly Walton, also a PhD student (University College London), gave several pieces of fantastic advice to her first year undergraduate self. ‘If you didn’t get the A-level results you wanted you might have to go through clearing, so may not get into the university you wanted to get into to. I want to say to my younger self that’s absolutely fine! Although it might seem like a big deal at the time it could be a good thing.’ Walton said that during a degree, undergraduates should not underestimate the role of friends, family and colleagues to provide support throughout what can be a tough three years. ‘I had a very set idea on what my

career would be – I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. But I’d say be more open minded. As I went through the undergraduate degree I realised research was a good thing to do and was very interested in that, although I hadn’t really considered that before I did my degree.’ Walton also suggested that undergraduates should seek out groups that marry with their own interests – the skills you pick up working on committees or attending conferences are more valuable than you may realise. ‘It’s okay to find things difficult and it’s okay not to do well in something – everyone has strengths and weaknesses and that’s fine. So do your best, keep going, and take the advice and feedback you get on board, and do what you love – your passion will shine through.’ Forensic Psychologist in training Anna Thompson (University of Nottingham) kicked off a crime symposium with her research on community interventions for people convicted of intimate partner violence. She has been exploring why drop-off rates in these interventions are so high and pointed out that those who half-complete such a programme have an increased risk of reoffending. Thompson found those offenders who completed a brief scale exploring their goals and concerns for the future – the Personal Aspirations and Concerns Inventory for Offenders (PACI-O) – were more likely to complete the intervention. Those who completed the PACI-O and dropped out were more likely to do so for employment reasons than those in the non-experimental group – Thompson suggested the PACI-O may have made them consider their employment goals. She suggested that PACI-O could be a useful, brief motivational tool to use prior to an intervention to impact on the rates of drop-out. One of this year’s award winners for his work on the Nuffield Research Placement programme at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University, was Michael Scott Evans. The programme gives young people from low socioeconomic groups the chance to learn about university life and learning. He was awarded the DART-P (Division

the psychologist september 2018 news for Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology) and PsyPAG Teaching Award for excellence in teaching psychology. I asked him to tell me the main piece of advice he’d have for his firstyear undergraduate self: ‘My advice would be to have the confidence to approach academics whom I found inspiring, and engage with them in an informal mentoring capacity so that I could gain a deep understanding of the various career paths that a psychology degree would open to me. In parallel, I would also advise myself to have the confidence to present a poster at the BPS student conference in order to meet inspirational and motivational keynote speakers whom are able to ignite passion and enthusiasm.’ Bethan Elliott (Cardiff Metropolitan University) won the PsyAPG Undergraduate Award for her dissertation research on the role of Instagram in recovery from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). She pointed out that on Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, there exists many accounts set up by people who have struggled with serious mental illness and who use their accounts to document their experiences and offer support to others in a similar position. Elliott interviewed six current and former account-holders aged from 18 to 25 all of whom had a diagnosis of MDD and other comorbid diagnoses. Using thematic analysis she found four themes within the content of her interviews – the view of Instagram as a therapist, as a search engine for health information and as a social instigator for finding friends. The fourth theme was that of Instagram as a perpetuator – some of the interviewees highlighted the darker side of this type of account, some people with mental-health related accounts post disturbing content regarding self-harm or suicidal ideation and some became overreliant on the platform. Finally Elliott asked her participants whether they would recommend a recovery account and all said no. She concluded while the platform is helpful for seeking support and information it may also be harmful.

Winner of the Rising Researcher award, Tamsyn Hawken (University of Bath), told us in a pre-recorded talk about some of her research exploring the experiences of young carers. She then gave some stellar advice on how early-career researchers can look after themselves and foster a resilient attitude toward their research. Hawken said reaching the point of experiencing burnout encouraged her to explore self-care: she suggested that people try it for themselves by making the most of tea and lunch breaks and seeking activities they enjoy. Asking oneself ‘If I could give my mind and body one thing right now what would it be?’ can help guide you towards self-care that helps you as an individual. Athina Tripli (University of Derby) was named as this year’s Master’s Award winner for her research on police officers working with young convicted offenders in the Youth Offending Service. She found a majority of her 480 participants reported high levels of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and moderate levels of reduced personal achievement. After a psychogeography-inspired wander (or dérive) led by Dr Alex Bridger, exploring how capitalism and gender seeps into our built environment, we were treated to a keynote speech by Professor Nigel King (University of Huddersfield). His research has examined the assumption that nature is universally more appealing to humans than manmade environments. His indepth qualitative work has shown that people experience nature in wildly different ways and a single natural scene can be viewed in myriad different ways – affected by a person’s own life experiences and circumstances. On the final day of the conference Professor Daniel Boduszek gave an energetic keynote on his work on psychopaths. While previous models have suggested that criminal or antisocial behaviour are key aspects of psychopathy, Boduszek argues this is not the case. Instead he suggests while criminal behaviour may be an outcome of psychopathy it isn’t a core component of all psychopaths.

Boduszek has put forward a new four-factor model of psychopathy which includes affective responsiveness, cognitive responsiveness, interpersonal manipulation and egocentricity as its main components. Testing this model in various demographic groups including children, students, the general population and prisoners he has found no significant difference between the samples in terms of the prevalence of psychopathy. I found some time to garner more words of wisdom from the PsyPAG crowd. Hanouf Alshaer, a third year PhD student at the University of Bedfordshire, said she was confused at the start of her undergraduate course but working and speaking with others had revealed the right path for her. ‘I have spent time reading and meeting lots of people at conferences, talking with people about the issues we need to tackle and what we need to see in the future, where research should be going. These conversations help you choose whether to go this way or that way, this time is a good opportunity to understand what has been done and what needs to be done and form your direction.’ Tim Dlamini, University of Huddersfield, another third-year PhD student encouraged undergraduate stydents to come to conferences. ‘You don’t have to present anything just go and see other researchers and students presenting, it helps you get into that mode and get that real-world engagement with other academics. When you are an undergraduate you really don’t know when you’re going to end up and it really motivates you to see people talk about their research, where they started as undergrads and their personal journey through academia and that could also help you get research ideas as early as possible.’ Next year’s PsyPAG conference is being held at Sheffield Hallam University. To find out more about PsyPAG and its activities see psypag.co.uk. For more ‘advice to your undergraduate self’, see next month’s ‘News’ where we will put the question to speakers from the Society’s forthcoming careers events.

The broken hearts club Dinsa Sachan talks to psychologists about their research on the effects of relationship break-up

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tan Tatkin was devastated by his divorce 19 years ago. ‘It was a loss I had not expected ever in my life,’ he says. Tatkin, now an assistant clinical professor at the department of family medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles, grieved and moved on. The experience of heartbreak informed his work. At the time, he had been deeply immersed in learning about developmental neuroscience and bonding between babies and mothers. ‘When the divorce happened, I started to switch my concentration, because I was trying to figure out what happened,’ Tatkin recalls. He explored how childhood experiences, ones specifically pertaining to emotional conflicts with parents, affect individuals’ love lives later in life. That led Tatkin to his current career as a couples expert. While Tatkin ultimately learned and benefited from his experience, the dissolution of a romantic union

brings tremendous pain and trauma to many people. There is a huge body of research that shows that heartbreak and rejection can alter the course of people’s lives, often for the worse. But there is also evidence that humans are capable of weathering that storm and moving on. The pain is real A 20-year-old marriage collapses. A two-month summer ﬂing comes to a screeching halt when the gap year ends. Someone cheats on their partner of two years. A person is in love and those feelings are unrequited. Heartbreak can result from a variety of romantic situations, but its experience has some universal characteristics. ‘It’s a terrible disappointment when you think you have something and it’s gone,’ says Stanley Charnofsky, a clinical psychologist and professor at California State University Northridge. ‘When you get married to someone, you don’t say “I do

the psychologist september 2018 break-up Ciaran Murphy

for four years”: you think you’re going to last a lifetime. tolerable hot sensation that felt as if they were dipping their ﬁnger in hot water. Other times, they were given But when it doesn’t, of course there’s disappointment.’ a moderately warm sensation. The scans showed the Charnofsky has been divorced for 30 years himself. activated regions during the hot sensations were the When a heartbroken person laments that they same ones that lit up while they hurt, they mean it. A 2011 study viewed their ex. published in the Proceedings of Perhaps the pleasure centres the National Academy of Sciences “Heartbreak can result are equally important. Rutgers and led by Ethan Kross showed from a variety of romantic University anthropologist Helen that a romantic break-up activates situations, but its Fisher’s studies have shown that brain areas that are associated lovers tend to behave like drug and with physical pain. The team experience has some addicts in some ways. They scanned the participants’ brains universal characteristics” alcohol experience cravings, sleeplessness using fMRI while they performed and lack of appetite. Not tasks. First off, they had to look at surprisingly, the end of a romance, a picture of their ex, with whom then, can result in a kind of withdrawal – obsessively they’d recently broken up, while thinking about them. calling their ex or begging for their love. One of Then they stared at a friend’s picture and reminisced Fisher’s studies showed that rejection activates some of about a positive episode with that person. Next up, the same areas that are involved in cocaine addiction. the researchers plugged a thermal sensitivity device to In some people, heartbreak can even trigger mental their forearms. Sometimes, they received a painful but

illness. A University of Oregon study led by Scott Monroe found that adolescents are especially prone to depression after a break-up. Almost half of the respondents in the study developed depression for the ﬁrst time after a break-up within the past year. What stings most? If a person is undergoing a painful divorce, colleagues and bosses often show empathy towards them

Friends or clean break? To be friends with your ex or not? That’s an important question many people face after their split. Research led by Melinda Bullock (Saint Louis University) and published in the Journal of Social Psychology in 2011 found that people were more likely to end up being friends if their relationship with their ex had been satisfying. Even if the romantic union had to be dissolved, they found the ensuing friendship meaningful. Friendship with an ex, however, can land you on murky terrain. Research published in Personality and Individual Differences found that some exes simply want to stay in touch for pragmatic reasons – sex and money. Justin Mogilski, a psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan and lead author of the study, identified a collection of reasons why people stay friends with their exes. He found that people who score higher on ‘dark personality’ traits – a collection of psychological features and tendencies characterised by impulsivity, willingness to exploit others for personal gain, aggression and self-aggrandisement – were more likely to report that they would find it important to stay friends with an ex for pragmatic reasons. The idea of being friends after a break-up may sound appealing – I can’t have you, but I can still be friends with you – but this kind of camaraderie can be hard to maintain. ‘I don’t think every friendship will be as reciprocal or mutually gratifying as someone might hope,’ says Mogilski. People need to ask themselves – why do I wish to be friends with an ex lover? ‘If both people are uninterested in a committed romantic relationship and are simply looking to be friends with benefits, then wanting to stay friends for sexual reasons may not cause much distress,’ Mogilski says. ‘But if ex-partners’ reasons for staying friends are discordant – one person hopes to rekindle the romance while the other just wants to be friends with someone who can fix their car – then this may lead to unrequited love or resentment when one partner doesn’t reciprocate.’ Barnett favours a clean break. ‘Generally, it is advisable to maintain a period of complete separation, at least initially, so as not to reignite distress, or to avoid the temptation of a temporary reunion only for the heartbroken person to find themselves rejected all over again,’ she says. But a clean break is often not possible, especially when children and co-ownership of a house are involved. Australian relationship coach Marianne Vicelich observes that clean breaks, though recommended, are hard to achieve in the modern world. ‘Social media has changed the world of ex-relationships, and has made it difficult to make a clean break, to grieve and to move on,’ says Vicelich. ‘Thanks to social media, your exes will pop up on your screen at any time.’ 24

and grant days off. But break-ups in unmarried relationships aren’t taken so seriously. People have to often put their feelings aside, plaster a fake smile on their face, and head to the office. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology followed 1300 people over a period of 20 months and found that break-ups in unmarried relationships caused significant distress and reduction of life satisfaction in 43 per cent of participants. Galena Rhoades, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver and the lead author of the study, says that cohabitation was a huge predictor in the decline of life satisfaction after a heartbreak. ‘People who are living together have a lot of the same constraints and structural issues to work through. They are more likely to have children and more likely to have to disentangle financial commitments.’ But that doesn’t make break-ups of couples who were not cohabiting less frustrating. ‘Emotionally it can be really hard to adjust, especially if the people who were dating saw a future for that relationship,’ says Rhoades. One the other hand, a rejection can sting even more if a person is replaced by someone else immediately – or even before a formal break-up is announced. A study by Sebastian Deri and Emily Zitek, published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that people feel more rejected after comparative rejection (rejected for someone else) than a non-comparative split (not rejected for someone else). The study also found that if the cause of the break-up is not clear, people tend to assume there was infidelity involved. A 2010 study by psychologist Erica Slotter, who was then at Northwestern University, shows that one reason break-ups are distressing is because they diminish the ‘self-concept’ of the person – they begin to question their own identity. ‘It’s me that was invested in you that I’ve lost. And in some ways I may not recapture that part again. It’s like this: you and I represent a unique combination that’s like a fingerprint… we cannot have that again because of the way you and I are,’ says Tatkin. Two sides of the coin Break-ups are rarely mutual. Typically, one person initiates it (dumper), and the other (dumpee) has to accept that decision. The dumpee and the dumper have two different experiences following the split. ‘The dumper is generally not as upset,’ says Tatkin. ‘They usually have a reason they want to get away from the relationship.’ Even if the dumpees had expected the split – they may have even wanted it – they tend to suffer more. ‘Because they are not making the choice, they tend to feel more of the pain. There’s a part of them that almost forever asks the question why,’ says Tatkin. The dumper is also ahead of the dumpee in the grieving process. ‘The person that initiates the break-up has already processed many of the thoughts

the psychologist september 2018 break-up

and the feelings related to that kind of separation and has looked forward to some extent – what is coming up in life, there may be a new relationship or a new lifestyle that is emerging,’ says Peter Kanaris, a clinical psychologist based in New York. To make matters worse, not everyone discloses the real reasons for the break-up. ‘Whilst the motivation for this is to make the break-up easier – “it’s me, not you” – it often leads to more confusion and distress as the “dumpee” struggles to make sense of it,’ says Georgina Barnett, counselling psychologist and author of The Mottos: The Guiding Principles Behind Creating an Enchanting Relationship. ‘The person who is being rejected will often fall into irrational ways of thinking initially due to the intensity of their emotions.’

for closure is often an effort to gain an understanding of what happened and to regain equilibrium.’ Tatkin believes closure is a sticky proposition. ‘It’s subjective and can continue to be an itch that cannot be scratched,’ he explains. ‘Heartbreak never entirely goes away, does it? It fades into the background only to be tickled or poked by a memory.’ He advises people to focus more on grieving and processing their emotions – sadness, anger, fear – than on ﬁnding closure.

What’s personality got to do with it? Different people cope with rejection differently – and their understanding of personality may influence it. In a series of studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Lauren Howe and Carol Dweck decided to investigate whether individuals’ views on personality change had any impact on how they The vicious cycle of finding closure dealt with heartbreak. They conducted five studies A 2008 study published in the Journal of Experimental to explore this question. They asked participants to Social Psychology found that people who are deeply in fill out a survey that had questions about personality love often overestimate the intensity of distress from change. For example, did they think that a person’s a future break-up. Led by psychologist Paul Eastwick, personality doesn’t change much over the course then at Northwestern University, the research revealed of a lifetime, or that everyone, that the actual emotional toll from no matter who they are, can the break-up was much less severe. “reaching out for significantly change their basic People who were less in love with their partner (and were more often emotional support is one characteristics? In some studies, the the ones to initiate the break-up) of the best ways to handle participants were asked to recall more accurately predicted the a heartbreak – at least, a past break-up that was painful. severity of the distress caused by Then, they answered questions the break-up. It goes to show that in the immediate about the recency of this break-up, break-ups are sometimes not nearly aftermath of the event” their current relationship status, as anguishing as we predict. and their beliefs about the Yet, clinical psychologists break-up. For example, did they observe plenty of unhealthy worry that there was something ‘wrong’ with them that behaviour in their clients post break-up, such as drug prompted the rejection? Did they think that potential and alcohol abuse. ‘Another bad choice is trying to get partners would believe they were undeserving of their the other person to come back, and spending all your affection because they were rejected? Would they hide time trying to do that,’ says Tatkin. Some people, he the details about their break-up in future relationships? says, use methods of fear and guilt such as a suicide The researchers found that the participants who threat or attempt as a tactic. Casual sex and rebound believed that personality is fixed were more likely to relationships become respite for some, Tatkin says. On believe that being rejected indicated that there was the other hand, some people plunge into an ‘I’ll never something wrong with them, and they were more get into a relationship’ kind of despair. Tatkin, Kanaris and Charnofsky agree on one thing: likely to think that others, especially future partners, would think something is wrong with them. They were reaching out for emotional support is one of the best ways to handle a heartbreak – at least, in the immediate more likely to worry that they would face rejection in future unions. And, the studies found that endorsers of aftermath of the event. But if that’s not enough, a person should seek a professional counsellor. ‘They can this type of personality mindset were less likely to take away positive lessons from the experience of rejection, really wear out their family and friends by being that like that it was a stepping stone to satisfying future person who is constantly talking about the break-up,’ relationships. says Tatkin.’They need to protect those relationships What makes these people so vulnerable? ‘They from being overburdened from their obsessiveness.’ He look at the things that happen to them in the world likens heartbreak to a case of bad flu. ‘There’s nothing they can do about it. There’s nothing they can do to not as evidence about what their traits are,’ says Howe, the lead author on the studies, who is a postdoctoral feel that way – they have to ride through it,’ he says. scholar at Stanford University Mind & Body Lab. Many spend an inordinate time seeking ‘closure’. ‘If you get a bad grade on a math test, that becomes ‘The break-up can have the effect of shaking a person’s a piece of evidence that you’re bad at math or maybe sense of reality and how they had formerly organised even that you’re not smart. So when it comes to and understood their world,’ says Kanaris. ‘The search

rejection, when a person didn’t want to be with you, someone who has a fixed mindset about personality might think “oh, this is a piece of evidence that I’m undesirable”, and this might prompt them to start questioning who they are.’ Others agree with the findings. ‘It is possible to hold on to the pain as it is what keeps the person alive in our minds. I don’t know that it is ever possible to completely let go anyway,’ says London-based counselling psychologist Nikos Tsigaras. ‘But we can get stuck because we can’t bear to let go.’ He also adds some people can become defined by a break-up. ‘We could think ourselves as unlovable or not good enough, if the breakup is felt to confirm a terrible pre-existing suspicion about ourselves.’ Galena Rhoades’ life-satisfaction study also had a surprising finding that could point towards a personality connection. ‘We expected that people who had lower levels of relationship quality would see the break-up as relief,’ says Rhoades. ‘But, in fact, we found the opposite – people who had better, stronger relationships tended to have smaller declines in life satisfaction after the break-up.’ She speculates that individuals who tend to have happier relationships – or are happier people in general – may also tend to adjust to life changes better.

Does it get better? When Scarlett O’Hara’s ﬂamboyant third husband, Rhett Butler, walks out on her towards the end of the movie Gone with the Wind, O’Hara, true to her indomitable spirit, reassures herself: ‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’ It really is possible to move on. In a study published last year in Journal of Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers led by Leonie Koban found that the placebo effect could help people deal with the break-up. Participants who had faced rejection were given a nasal spray. Half the people were told the spray would improve their emotional pain, while the other half were told it was a saline solution. The people in the ﬁrst half reported feeling better emotionally as well as physically after the nasal spray treatment. Their brains showed increased activity in areas that regulated emotion and reduced activity in areas that felt pain. The authors noted that if someone assured themselves they were doing something about dealing with the break-up – socialising with friends, picking up a new skill and meditating – it could go a long way in their recovery. But, yes, they actually have to do those things. Dinsa Sachan There’s also reassurance that is a freelance writer time heals from Helen Fisher’s http://dinsasachan.com rejection study – as time passed,

Tomorrow is another day

the brain’s attachment centres showed less activity in spurned lovers. Of course, the pain caused by a break-up can blind us to our own faults and role in the split. ‘People often need to move past the trauma of heartache before they can begin to reflect,’ says Georgina Barnett. ‘Many people say they do not fully understand why a relationship failed until months or years after the event. However, taking responsibility for how we may have contributed to the break-down of the relationship – provided this is done without self-blame, which is counter-productive – can empower us and give us faith in our ability to create a new relationship with another person.’ Sometimes though, if someone’s had a string of unsuccessful relationships, the biggest lesson perhaps is that they need to find better partners. ‘A breakup is often (but not always) a call to reflect on our partner choice and make more informed choices in the future,’ says Tsigaras. At other times, it is a reminder to address unresolved issues from the past. The experience of heartbreak, many psychologists say, is a lot like bereavement. ‘We may all experience losses very early in our lives,’ says Tsigaras. ‘To loosely quote Freud, sometimes it is the loss of a parent or the loss of the parent’s love, or the loss of love from ourselves. If there are previous losses that have not been sufficiently mourned and worked through then a heartbreak could be felt to be a kind of repetition of those earlier losses.’ The two Stans – Tatkin and Charnofsky – reclaimed their lives after their heartbreaks. Tatkin, now 63, is happily married to his current wife, Tracey. Charnofsky, who is in his eighties, is ‘best friends’ with his ex-wife. They keep in touch via e-mail. They have children – and even grandchildren – that they are involved with. ‘We had heartbreak at one point, but now we’ve worked it through,’ says Charnofsky.

DSEP Annual Conference 2018 3-4 December – Hilton, Belfast Keynote Speakers: Professor Juergen Beckmann Professor Cathy Craig Professor Zoe Knowles Professor Paul Wylleman

Programme is now available online. Early Rates available until 3 October.

www.bps.org.uk/dsep2018

#dsepconf @bps_dsep

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Have your say in our future Both The Psychologist and Research Digest have developed and grown in recent years, reaching out to ever-growing audiences in print and online. Every few years, we seek to survey members of the British Psychological Society to ﬁnd out how this is being received. It’s also a chance to gather your ideas for formats, topics and authors. This time, in recognition of our increased online presence, we’re calling on Society members but also casting the net more widely via our website and social media. Whether you love us, hate us or regard us with consistently mild indifference, we need to hear from you. Only a large and representative sample of our readers can help to shape us over the coming years. And these are exciting times: the increased resource of a full-time Deputy Editor we’re recruiting will hopefully keep us pushing on towards our goal of becoming the go-to places for diverse, engaging and informative discussion of psychological theory, research and practice. So please complete the survey now (at tinyurl.com/y8nx6ghd). It should take 10–15 minutes, and it will be live to the end of October. Spread the word! Dr Jon Sutton, Managing Editor, and Professor Catherine Loveday, Chair of the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee

Yawning at the apocalypse Cameron Brick and Sander van der Linden on how psychologists can help solve the largest social dilemma in history

n a Washington Post article in 2009, journalist David Fahrenthold wrote: ‘If someone set out to draw a problem that people would not care about, it would look exactly like climate change.’ Naomi Klein and others have argued that it’s not that people don’t care: it’s just that the problem is so enormous and encompassing that people feel helpless and disempowered. Either way, psychology is central to understanding how we perceive and respond to climate change. After decades of discussion, and several pieces in this very magazine, it could be argued that little practical progress has been made. Why is climate change proving to be such a stubborn problem?

Trade-offs We make important trade-offs every day between what’s good for ourselves and what’s good for other people, society and the planet. These trade-offs reﬂect a fundamental social dilemma: do we choose the selﬁsh option that comes with an immediate and high personal reward or do we go with the long-term socially cooperative choice that is in the best interest of society? The paradox of the health of our planet is that at a societal level, we would all be better off if everyone acted sustainably, but at an individual level, behaving unsustainably is typically the default, easier, less costly

A pig ate his ﬁll of acorns under an oak tree and then started to root around the tree. A crow remarked, ‘You should not do this. If you lay bare the roots, the tree will wither and die.’ ‘Let it die,’ said the pig. ‘Who cares so long as there are acorns?’ (adapted from a fable by Andreyevich Krylov)

the psychologist september 2018 climate change www.elizasouthwood.com

www.elizasouthwood.com

and psychologically more attractive choice. Psychologists have been studying how to solve collective action problems for decades. And society has tackled similar issues in the past, such as the diffuse and long-term health problems of agricultural pesticides highlighted by Rachel Carson in her famous 1962 book Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement. Other examples include Elinor Ostrom’s Nobelprize-winning research on how small communities successfully manage shared commons. However, in comparison to most other environmental issues, climate change is unique in two important ways. First, as an environmental problem climate change is exceptional because its enormous scale will lead to cascading problems across ecosystems, including on agriculture, biodiversity, international conflict and human health and thriving. Second, climate change is psychologically unprecedented as a social dilemma because of the unique cognitive and social challenges it presents to people. For example, it is very difficult for humans to grasp threats that are sometimes perceived as invisible, gradual, distributed and long-term (Gifford, 2011; van der Linden et al., 2015). Humanity is seriously at risk of yawning towards one of the greatest existential risks of our time because abstract and invisible threats aren’t terrifying to brains that evolved to solve local, experiential and imminent problems. This is complicated by the fact that although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reaffirmed the high degree of confidence in the role of human activity in driving climate change, Kahneman and Tversky’s famous work on biases has shown that when potential future losses are paired with uncertainty, people tend to become more risk-seeking. Now that the physical science is clear, the fundamental problem of climate change is psychological. How will humans manage the largest social dilemma in history? Decades of educational effort have resoundingly shown that although education remains effective and necessary for informed action, giving people (or politicians) facts is insufficient for behaviour change. Inaction on climate change is psychologically fascinating because the central facts about greenhouse

gases are extremely well veriﬁed and documented, and assessable even by non-experts. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence, public engagement and policy lag far behind the consensus of expert recommendations. In a recent review of the literature van der Linden et al. (2015) distil key psychological principles to help explain this gap. Here, we integrate the central arguments into three overarching ‘psychological challenges’ for action on climate change, along with potential solutions. Climate change is not seen as a moral issue Polling data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests that less than 35 per cent of people see climate change as a moral issue. In an important review, Markowitz and Sharif (2012) provide compelling arguments to help explain why global warming does not generate strong moral intuitions. One of the reasons Markowitz and Sharif touch on is especially key: the blamelessness of unintentional action. In the words of Harvard psychologist Dan

the psychologist september 2018 climate change

Gilbert, ‘If climate change was some type of nefarious plot visited upon us by very bad men with moustaches, then I guarantee you that our president would have us fighting a war on warming with or without Congressional approval.’ A clever 2003 experiment by Yale cognitive scientist Joshua Knobe reveals how important perceived intentionality is to people. When a CEO says that they don’t care about the environment at all – just about increasing profits – and a new corporate programme ends up harming the environment as a by-product, 82 per cent of people will say that the CEO intentionally harmed the environment. However, in an identical scenario where the programme happened to help the environment, only 23 per cent of people agree that the CEO intentionally helped the environment! In short, we’re careful in dishing out credit but are quick to assign blame. So shouldn’t that mean we’re quick to point the finger at multinational corporations with poor environmental records? Well, perhaps one problem is that it’s hard to care about invisible gases… in the absence of a clear potential villain, there’s nobody to blame except ourselves, and this can trigger a range of defensive biases. Moral feelings evolved to respond to agentic, imminent threats. Climate change is a statistical abstraction, and this makes it very difficult to activate the cognitive architecture that evolved moral feelings to thwart threats. This is important because many theories of prosocial conduct conceptualise moral norms and perceived moral responsibility as a key driver of human cooperation and prosocial behaviour (Schwartz, 1977; Stern et al., 1999). How then do we establish a moral imperative? 1. Frame communications around the specific values of the audience. Moral foundations theory suggests that different groups rely on different moral foundations (Graham et al., 2009). For example, environmental messages could focus less on harm to nature (think polar bears), which appeals primarily to liberals, and more on community cohesion, enhancing national security and preserving nature, which appeal more to conservatives (Feinberg & Willer, 2013; Wolsko et al., 2016). 2. Highlight the villains. An example is the systematic suppression of evidence and public deception by groups like Exxon Mobil (as discussed by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt). Heroes and villains are powerful tools to capture human imagination – climate change has both. 3. Appeal to intrinsically valued long-term environmental goals. It’s tempting to use external rewards to motivate behaviour, but external rewards have two

Key sources major problems. First, the desired behaviour often vanishes when the external reward is removed (van der Linden et al., 2015), and it is rarely feasible to continue the rewards indeﬁnitely. Second, we know from Deci and Ryan’s research that the presence of external rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. Lasting behaviour change is more likely to result from connecting sustainable behaviour to morally desirable goals and being a good citizen (Tauﬁk et al., 2015; van der Linden, 2018).

Gifford, R. (2011). The dragons of inaction: Psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation. American Psychologist, 66(4), 290. Markowitz, E.M., & Shariff, A.F. (2012). Climate change and moral judgement. Nature Climate Change, 2(4), 243–247. Pearson, A.R., Schuldt, J.P. & RomeroCanyas, R. (2016). Social climate science: A new vista for psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(5), 632–650. Swim, J., Clayton, S., Doherty, T. et al. (2009). Psychology and global climate change: Addressing a multi-faceted phenomenon and set of challenges. A report by the American Psychological Association’s task force on the interface between psychology and global climate change. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. van der Linden, S., Maibach, E. & Leiserowitz, A. (2015). Improving public engagement with climate change: Five ‘best practice’ insights from psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(6), 758–763. van Vugt, M. (2009). Averting the tragedy of the commons using social psychological science to protect the environment. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3),169–173.

There is little social kudos for action Humans evolved living in social groups, so we are naturally sensitive to the thoughts and behaviours of other people, especially our close friends, family and important others in our valued social groups. Group memberships help shape our social identities, and more often than not we do what others around us are doing and pay attention to what Full list available in online/app version. others want us to do. Importantly, Bob Cialdini’s focus theory of normative conduct highlights that social norms only direct human behaviour when they are active and salient. For example, in the now infamous ‘hotel towel’ study, a simple message making the following norm salient – ‘75 per cent of guests who stay in this room reuse their towel’ – increased towel reuse by a remarkable 50 per cent (Goldstein et al., 2008). Unfortunately, sustainability norms, whether descriptive (information about what other people do) or prescriptive (what other people think you should be doing), are neither active nor salient in many places and contexts. In fact, sustainable behaviour, such as eating less meat, is often counter-normative (Sparkman & Walton, 2017). This is important because one of the most successful psychological solutions to social dilemma situations is to establish a norm of cooperation (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). However, such norms cannot be leveraged if they are not active and salient in the ﬁrst place. Moreover, at present there is little social judgement associated with unsustainable consumption; that is, you won’t be judged with disdain by your neighbours if you eat meat or fail to recycle. Therefore an important strategy is to signal the desirability of sustainable norms, communicate

that others also value conservation behaviours and highlight situations in which people are acting sustainably. Here’s how we can promote social norms around sustainability: 1. Leverage relevant social group norms. Signal the desirability of sustainable norms by communicating what others are doing to help and tying those behaviours to valued groups, such as the local community or town. Because people are more attentive to norms that are relevant to their own group, it may help to expand deﬁnitions of the ‘ingroup’ by appealing to larger collective identities; for example, joining together in the ﬁght against climate change as ‘UK citizens’ or ‘Europeans’ (Markowitz & Sharif, 2012). 2. Avoid pairing desired behaviours with unwanted identities (Brick et al., 2017). A person with a conservative ideology might be in favour of conserving resources, but if they don’t want to be seen as an environmentalist, they won’t carry a reusable bag emblazoned with an image of Mother Earth. 3. Support advocates across social, religious and political boundaries. Speaking only with others similar to you

makes it harder to simulate what diverse others are thinking. Facts are almost worthless if the audience sees the communicator as part of a rival outgroup. For example, Al Gore is so widely reviled among Republicans that even evidence-based messages associated with him could potentially be rejected out of hand. Instead of politicians, some research shows that scientists can be non-partisan mediators of consensus (van der Linden et al., 2018).

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Our brains intuitively underestimate climate change Behavioural economist Dan Ariely once wrote that it is pretty difﬁcult to predict what peanut butter tastes like based solely on reading the ingredients. The point is that the human brain strongly prefers experience over analysis. Mark Twain intuitively understood this when he joked: ‘A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.’ Unfortunately, climate change is an abstract statistical phenomenon that does not easily trigger our intuitive, associative and affective warning system, which is largely based on experience and evolved to map visible environmental cues into concrete threats (Marx et al., 2007). In addition, the ‘psychological distance’ of climate change (Spence et al., 2012) spans social, temporal and spatial dimensions so that people think climate change is more likely to happen to other people in other places at some point in the distant future. Thus a host of familiar cognitive biases make climate change seem less important, including heavily discounting future risk and rewards, undue optimism bias about our ability to mitigate potential harms, justifying the status quo, and affective forecasting errors that lead us to assume that the future will generally resemble the present. The research challenge is to help people grapple with a largely faceless enemy that strikes gradually. Van Lange and colleagues (2018) point out that we need to cross psychological borders of thought, space and time. For example, climate change is often portrayed in the media as a future, distant, global, nonpersonal and analytical risk, and seen more as a loss than an opportunity. Research suggests that there are beneﬁts to reversing these associations. Emphasising present, local and personal harms and

the psychologist september 2018 climate change

benefits will become increasingly easier as climate changes unfold. To counteract these biases in human cognition, we should: 1. Facilitate more affective and experiential engagement. Make connections between people’s lives and the environment, for example by highlighting increasing trends in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events or changes in local biodiversity and food production. Bring people to nature, as nature experiences can facilitate human cooperation (Zelenski et al., 2015) and help individuals form personal and affective experiences to supplement their abstract understanding of climate change. 2. Reduce psychological distance. Think global, act local. Emphasising concrete local impacts and local opportunities to help can be effective, but keep in mind that there is a trade-off between proximising the impacts of climate change and encouraging people to view climate change as an important global issue (Brügger et al., 2015). 3. Frame policy solutions in terms of what can be gained from immediate action. Nobody likes losing, but most people enjoy winning. Policy options should be framed in terms of expected benefits, for example to public health, rather than expected losses. This includes more than physical health and economic growth: for example, Bain et al. (2015) found that emphasising the interpersonal and social benefits of climate action appeared effective for communicating with the disengaged across 24 countries.

‘I see climate change as the deﬁning problem of our era. In graduate school I became aware that many barriers to sustainability are more social and psychological than technological, and I think a robust science of decision making and collective behaviour is necessary to overcome our challenges.’

social, cognitive and cultural psychology. Psychologists of all stripes can see opportunities in studying climate change in topics ranging from individual differences such as ‘green personalities’ (Brick & Lewis, 2016), mental health (projections and treatment plans), identity and intergroup processes such as polarisation and negotiation, and behaviour change Cameron Brick is in the at both the individual and political Department of Psychology, level. For example, a recent special University of Cambridge issue in Group Processes and cb954@cam.ac.uk Intergroup Relations was dedicated to how climate change research can inform psychology and vice versa ‘Climate (Pearson & Schuldt, 2018). change is Work on climate change can also the ultimate inform cross-cultural psychology: psychological for example, the association dilemma: between pro-environmental beliefs it’s abstract, and behaviours varies wildly by depersonalised, country (Eom et al., 2016). long-term, there’s Finally, a robust science intertemporal trade-offs, of how people respond to intergroup conflict, and a environmental issues should think lack of social incentives. I of individuals as embedded within came to realise that if we can changing social structures. Some understand the psychology environmentalists argue that our of climate change, we can power as individual consumers potentially solve many is extremely limited, with George difficult puzzles about Monbiot suggesting that beyond human behaviour and make a reduction of air travel, meat a difference all at the same consumption and car use very time.’ little is going to have an impact. Change is required at a Sander van der Linden is in corporate and national level. the Department of Psychology, Social movements have tipping University of Cambridge points (van der Linden, 2017): sander.vanderlinden@psychol. think of how quickly opinions A wicked truth cam.ac.uk have shifted on same-sex marriage. The massive intergroup trade-offs A key opportunity is to study how of climate change are driving a and when people engage in collective action (Lubell renewed interest in the tragedy of the commons and et al., 2007; van Zomeren et al., 2008). The changing governance of resources from local to international climate also offers a unique social context in which to policy. These topics spill way beyond environmental test general models of attitudes, behaviours and social psychology: they bridge findings and questions across influence. In short, climate change is an immensely wicked problem. But psychologists have a tremendous opportunity to serve society through telling the human story of how people come to perceive the world and why they behave the way they do.

Division of Clinical Psychology Annual Conference 2019 23â&#x20AC;&#x201C;24 January, Renaissance Manchester

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Tom Shakespeare

Clare Jones & Alan Barrett

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Food: Disorder or Wellbeing Friday 26 October 2018 8.45am till 4.30pm BPS London Ofﬁce, Tabernacle Street

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An awakening Steve Taylor on a type of experience he feels has been neglected by psychology

For more than two decades now, positive psychology has brought an emphasis on positive human experiences. But is there one type – perhaps the most positive of all – that has not been adequately investigated? Welcome to the ‘awakening experience’.

few years ago, on holiday with my family in Wales, I decided to explore the farmland around our rented bungalow. I climbed over a gate and found myself looking down at a valley, with farmers’ fields sloping as far as I could see. Hundreds of sheep dotted the hills. After I’d been walking for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the sky, there was a shift in my perception, as if a switch had been pressed. Everything around me became intensely real. The fields and the bushes and trees and the clouds seemed to be powerfully there, as if an extra dimension had been added to them. They seemed more vivid, more intricate and beautiful. I also felt somehow connected with my surroundings. As I looked up at the sky, I felt somehow the space that fills it was the same ‘space’ filling my own being. What was inside me, as my own consciousness, was

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also ‘out there’. Inside me, there was a glow of intense wellbeing. This is a fairly typical example of an ‘awakening experience’ – a temporary expansion and intensification of awareness that brings significant perceptual, affective and conceptual changes. As a psychologist, I have been studying such experiences for a decade. In this article I will discuss some of that research, explaining the characteristics and after-effects of these experiences. Most importantly, I will explain why they are so significant, and why psychology needs to pay more attention to them. Positive roots One of the roles of psychology is to examine different facets of subjective experience, and to investigate their possible causes and effects. When Abraham Maslow formulated his concepts of ‘peak experiences’

and ‘self-actualisation’ in the 1950s, he believed that psychology had been ‘selling human nature short’ by focusing too much on its negative aspects and ignoring its positive. At the beginning of the 1990s, when American psychologists such as Martin Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi initiated the field of positive psychology, they made much the same complaint: that there was an imbalance in psychology. The discipline, they argued, needed to focus more on what makes life worth living and what can make human beings flourish, rather than just on investigating and curing mental illness. Since then, positive psychology has been everywhere. But in my view, while positive psychologists have studied experiences with superficial similarities to awakening experiences, nobody has quite nailed what makes awakening so special. According to my research, the three most common characteristics of the experiences are:

• positive affective states (including a sense of elation or serenity, a lack of fear and anxiety); • intensified perception; and • a sense of connection (which can be towards other human beings, nature, or the whole universe in general). Other significant characteristics include: • a sense of love and compassion; • altered time perception (which often includes a sense of being intensely present); • a sense of a deeper knowing (as if the person is becoming aware of realities that are normally obscure); and • a sense of inner quietness (as if the normal associational chatter of the mind has slowed down or become quiet). There is a strong sense that a person has transcended a limited state and that awareness has become more authentic than normal. These experiences are sometimes associated with spirituality or religion, where they are typically described as ‘mystical experiences’. However, I think this is misleading, and may have led to the neglect of awakening experiences by mainstream psychology. I prefer to interpret the experiences in a secular context. This is partly Key sources due to personal reasons: I am not religious (in fact, I consider myself an atheist). But more significantly, Aaen-Stockdale, C. (2012). my research has found that Neuroscience for the soul. The awakening experiences are rarely Psychologist, 25(7), 520–523. Chalmers, D.J. (1996). The conscious about religion. For example, in a mind: In search of a fundamental theory. study of 161 reports of awakening Oxford: Oxford University Press. experiences published in the Journal Laski, M. (1961). Ecstasy. London: The of Transpersonal Psychology I found Cresset Press. that only 22 per cent occurred in Maslow, A.H. (1994). Religions, values, a spiritual context – that is, as and peak-experiences. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1964) a result of spiritual practices such McBride, R. (2014). Secular ecstasies. as meditation, reading spiritual The Psychologist, 27(3), 168–171. literature and prayer or fasting Taylor, S. (2012a). Spontaneous (Taylor, 2012a). The great majority awakening experiences: Exploring of the experiences occurred the phenomenon beyond religion and unexpectedly in a wide variety of spirituality. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 44(1), 73–91. everyday settings, to people who Taylor, S. (2012b). Transformation knew nothing of spirituality or through suffering: A study of individuals religion. who have experienced positive psychological transformation following periods of intense turmoil and trauma. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 52, 30–52. Taylor, S. & Egeto-Szabo, K. (2017). Exploring awakening experiences: A study of awakening experiences in terms of their triggers, characteristics, duration and aftereffects. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 49(1), 45–65. Full list available in online/app version.

Secular ecstasy and other concepts Some well-established psychological concepts incorporate characteristics of awakening experiences. For instance, there are certainly clear similarities with Maslow’s concept of peak experiences. However, the ‘peak experience’ is a very wide-ranging concept that embraces a host of other types of experience. Maslow referred to peak experiences generally as ‘moments of highest happiness and fulfilment’ and gave examples such as ‘being in love… listening to music or suddenly “being hit” by a book or painting, or from some creative moment’ (Maslow, 1962, p.67). Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992) concept of ‘flow’ also has some superficial similarities with awakening experiences. Both are states of intense wellbeing and connection, in which one loses one’s sense of being a separate self. However, there are also significant differences. For example, unlike flow, awakening experiences usually aren’t related to states of absorption; in them, attention is usually very open and wide-ranging rather than intently focused on a particular activity or task. The concept of ‘awe’ is related to awakening experiences too. As studied by psychologists such as Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe refers to an experience of ‘deep appreciative wonder’ at the ‘immensity, beauty and complexity of a phenomenon that takes on universal significance e.g. through art, nature, human excellence’ (Haidt, 2002, p.864). However, although awakening experiences may sometimes feature awe, they are really a much broader phenomenon with a much wider range of characteristics. Awe can also potentially include characteristics of confusion, fear and dread, which are absent from awakening experiences. In other words, flow and awe are not equivalent to awakening experiences – they simply share a small number of the same characteristics. You could compare it to negative psychological experiences such as episodes of depression or panic attacks, which share some of the same characteristics, but are essentially different. In my view, therefore, psychology has merely touched on elements of awakening experiences, and has neglected their study as a category in themselves. In fact, one of the most significant studies of awakening experiences came from outside psychology. In 1961 – coincidentally, at around the same time that Maslow was formulating his concept of the peak experience – the English author and broadcaster Marghanita Laski researched the concept of ‘ecstasy’ in a non-religious context. She showed that such experiences could readily arise from secular activities such as enjoying natural scenes or works of art. In 2014 Rory McBride discussed Laski’s work in the pages of The Psychologist, highlighting characteristics such as ‘intense joyful sensations’, ‘feelings of unity and oneness’, and ‘a sense of profundity and release from mundane reality’. It is easy to see from these characteristics that the concept of ‘secular ecstasy’ is

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very close to that of an ‘awakening experience’. Like me, McBride voiced concern that these experiences have been researched so little within psychology.

frequency to contact with nature – is spiritual practice. This primarily means meditation, but also includes prayer and psycho-physical practices such as yoga or tai chi. The relaxing, mind-quietening effect of these practices seems to facilitate awakening experiences. It is important to point out that, even here, there may not be a connection with religion. With the exception of awakening experiences associated with prayer, those who reported these experiences did not follow a conventional religious path. They belonged to the category of ‘spiritual, not religious’, and were following certain practices because of their beneﬁcial effect, rather than through a religious conviction. After these three triggers, there are several slightly less signiﬁcant ones, including watching or listening to an arts performance, reading (particularly spiritual literature), participating in a creative performance (such as dancing or playing music), love and sex. Only a small number of sexual awakening experiences were reported, but it is of course possible that participants were reluctant to divulge such intimate experiences.

Triggers My own research has included two general studies of reports of awakening experiences (Taylor, 2012a, Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017) and a study of transformational experiences related to psychological turmoil (Taylor, 2011, 2012b). This research has found three contexts that consistently show up as major triggers of awakening experiences, as well as a host of less significant ones. The most common trigger may initially seem puzzling: around a third of awakening experiences occur in situations of stress, depression and loss. For example, a man described how he went through a long period to of inner turmoil due to confusion about his sexuality, which led to the breakdown of his marriage. But in the midst of this turmoil, he had an awakening experience in which ‘Everything just ceased to be. I lost all sense of time. I lost myself. I had a feeling of After-effects being totally at one with nature, with a massive sense Even though awakening experiences typically only of peace. I was a part of the scene. There was no “me” last from a few moments to a few hours, they anymore. I was just sitting there watching the sun set over the desert, aware of the enormity of life, the power frequently have a life-changing effect. Many people described an awakening experience as the most of nature’ (Taylor, 2012a, p.86). A woman described significant moment of their lives, reporting a major how she was devastated by the end of a seven-year change in their perspective on life, relationship, ‘facing a suffering that and in their values. I didn’t imagine could possibly In our 2017 study of 90 exist’. However, in the midst of this “…flow and awe are not awakening experiences, the most suffering, she ‘began to experience equivalent to awakening significant after-effect was a greater a clearness and connection with experiences – they simply sense of trust, confidence and everything that existed… I was in a state of such pure happiness and share a small number of optimism. For example, one person that even though ‘that acceptance, that I was no longer the same characteristics” reported whole experience was brief, it left afraid of anything. Out of that a little piece of knowing and hope. depth arose such a compassion While I still was and am on and connection to everything that a journey of self-reflection, it left me knowing that surrounded me’ (Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017, p.61). The second major trigger of awakening experiences your inner truth is always there for you’ (Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017, p.56). Another person reported identified by my research is contact with nature. that, ‘To know that it’s there (or here, I should say) is Around a quarter of the experiences take place in a great liberation’ (p.55). natural surroundings, apparently induced by the One person had a powerful awakening experience beauty and stillness of nature. People reported while suffering from intense depression during which awakening experiences that occurred while walking she ‘felt the most intense love and peace and knew that in the countryside, swimming in lakes, or gazing at all was well’ (Taylor, 2011, p.4) The experience lasted beautiful flowers or sunsets. For example, one woman only a few minutes, but in its aftermath she found that reported an awakening experience that occurred when the feeling of dread had disappeared from her stomach, she was swimming in a lake, when she ‘felt completely and she felt able to cope again, which led to a new, alone, but part of everything. I felt at peace… All my troubles disappeared and I felt in harmony with nature. positive phase in her life. As she described it, ‘I looked around and thought about all the good things in my It only lasted a few minutes but I remember a sense of life and the future. I felt more positive and resilient.’ calmness and stillness and it soothes me now’ (Taylor, Such changes in attitude sometimes led to 2012a, p.77). These are the types of experiences significant lifestyle changes, such as new interests, that were often described by romantic poets such as new relationships and a new career. Speaking of the William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. peak experience, Abraham Maslow wrote: ‘My feeling The third most significant trigger of awakening is that if it were never to happen again, the power of experiences according to my research – with a similar

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experiences are the result of stimulation of the the experience would permanently affect the attitude temporal lobes. Persinger (1983) has even claimed to toward life’ (Maslow, 1964/1994, p.75). This certainly induce mystical experiences with a ‘helmet’ – popularly applies to awakening experiences too. referred to as the ‘God helmet’ – that stimulates the However, in a small number of cases, there were temporal lobes with magnetic fields. Another theory, negative after-effects. After the exhilaration of their put forward by Newberg and d’Aquili (2000), is that awakening experience, some people came back down mystical experiences of oneness arise when the part of to earth with a bump. They found everyday life dreary, our brain responsible for our awareness of boundaries and felt frustrated to be immersed in their normal (the superior posterior parietal routines and responsibilities again. cortex) is less active than normal. As one person stated, ‘I feel myself (In fairness, Newberg and d’Aquili being buckled down by the hustle “An experience that is don’t actually say that the state and bustle of everyday life’ (Taylor so common, and has so actually cause spiritual experiences, & Egeto-Szabo, 2017, p.56). much significance for just that they correlate with them, although others have interpreted individuals, should not their theory in this way.) Causes be neglected…” However, these theories are very It might be tempting to explain speculative, to say the least. In his awakening experiences in terms of 2012 article for The Psychologist, unusual neurological functioning. Craig Aaen-Stockdale provided an overview of the Perhaps they are related to unusual levels of activity research that relates spiritual or religious experiences (or lack of activity) in certain parts of the brain. For to brain activity, and found numerous flaws, example, neuroscientists such as Michael Persinger particularly a lack of control groups and successful and V.S. Ramachandran have suggested that spiritual replication. As he concluded, ‘Sceptics are, in my opinion, far too quick to claim that God is “all in the brain” (usually the temporal lobe) when in fact the evidence base is disturbingly weak’ (2012, p.523) While a small number of temporal lobe patients may have spiritual-type experiences, they are more likely to experience feelings of anxiety and disorientation. In fact, some studies have suggested that temporal lobe patients are actually less likely to have religious or spiritual experiences than others. At the same time, Newberg and D’Aquili’s claim that spatial awareness is associated with the posterior parietal cortex is disputed by other neuroscientists, who generally associate this with the temporal lobe (Karnath et al., 2001). In a more general sense, such neurological explanations suffer from a simplistic assumption that conscious experience is directly produced by brain activity. This assumption may seem logical, but there is no viable explanation of how the soggy grey matter of the brain could give rise to the richness and variety of conscious experience. In the field of consciousness studies, this is referred to as the ‘hard problem’ (Chalmers, 1996). According to the philosopher Colin McGinn (1993), to assume that conscious experience is produced by brain activity is like saying that ‘numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb’ (p.60). This doesn’t mean that there are no neurological correlations with awakening experiences. They may well exist, but as no more than correlations. At the same time, it is difficult to see how the correlations could be discovered, since awakening experiences almost always occur unintentionally, and so there is little possibility of producing them in brain-imaging labs. In my view, there is probably no need to resort to simplistic neurological explanations of awakening

A signiﬁcant number of awakening experiences are related to states of relaxation and mental quietness. This is certainly true of meditation, and also of contact with nature, watching arts performances and participating in creative activities.

the psychologist september 2018 awakening

experiences, since they can be largely explained in psychological ‘I’ve been terms. A significant number fascinated by of awakening experiences are awakening related to states of relaxation and experiences mental quietness. This is certainly since I began true of meditation, and also of to have them contact with nature, watching arts myself as a performances and participating in teenager. In fact, my main aim creative activities. in becoming a psychologist Consider what happens when was to study them – to find a person sits down to meditate, out how common they were, for example. They purposely and why they occurred. They remove themselves from activity are important because they a parallel here with the concept of and external stimuli, and then suggest that our normal post-traumatic growth, which also attempt to quieten their mental awareness of the world, and highlights how positive after-effects chatter by focusing their attention our normal understanding of – such as a heightened sense of on a specific object, such as a life, is not reliable or complete. appreciation, purpose and meaning mantra, their breathing or a candle They suggest that we are, – follow a wide range of traumatic flame. As a result, mental energy to some degree, asleep. events.) is no longer expended to the same They offer us a glimpse of a degree as normal, and begins to wider potential, and a more intensify inside them. This may fulfilling life.’ A second wave of explain the heightened awareness positive psychology that awakening experiences feature. Mine are only speculations, The American psychologist Arthur Dr Steve Taylor is a senior of course. I hope that other Deikman – who was perhaps lecturer in psychology at psychologists will investigate the first person to study the Leeds Beckett University, and awakening experiences and psychological effects of meditation a committee member of the develop their own theories. An – referred to a process of BPS Transpersonal Psychology experience that is so common, ‘de-automatization of perception’. Section and has so much significance Perceptual processes that normally s.m.taylor@leedsbeckett.ac.uk for individuals, should not be function to save attentional energy neglected, particularly now that (by automatising the perception the experience need not be associated with religion, or of familiar phenomena) no longer function, because even with spirituality. Awakening experiences could of the increased mental energy. As a result, our be investigated in a similar way to experiences of flow surroundings become more real and vivid. – as an optimal psychological state that arises from A similar process may happen when a person is certain unusual psychological conditions, themselves in natural surroundings. Natural scenery may have generated by certain activities and situations. a similar effect to meditation, in providing a focus While my own field of transpersonal psychology for a person’s mind, and a retreat from being busy can easily accommodate the study of awakening and bombarded with stimuli. This may lead to a experiences, in positive psychology there has long been similar build-up of mental energy and also the same an emphasis on quantitative research over qualitative, de-automatisation of perception. The most important in an attempt to establish the scientific credentials of factor seems to be quietening of associational mental chatter, which normally expends a great deal of mental the field. For the same reason, positive psychologists have tended to avoid any experiences that might energy. be seen as ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’. Awakening But how can we explain awakening experiences experiences are difficult to study quantitatively; rather, linked to psychological turmoil? It’s difficult to they lend themselves to phenomenological qualitative interpret these in terms of relaxation and mental research. As a result, positive psychology has not quietness, since they usually occur in states of mental embraced the study of such experiences. However, agitation and distress. But here a factor may be that psychologists such as Itai Ivtzan and Tim Lewis have the sense of shock and loss often associated with initiated a second wave positive psychology that does psychological turmoil may bring a deconstruction emphasise the importance of qualitative research and of normal psychological structures and processes. is open to spiritual or transpersonal aspects. Perhaps In most states of turmoil, this may only cause further the study of awakening experiences could form a part distress – with the possibility of breakdown – but of this second wave positive psychology. This would occasionally this may have a positive effect, causing a de-automatisation of perception, and a transcendence go some way to filling a significant gap in the study of psychological states. of familiar modes of cognition. (There is, incidentally,

‘I don’t want people to experience what I experienced’ Ian Florance meets Alexandra Stein, a writer and educator specialising in the social psychology of ideological extremism and other dangerous social relationships

‘We know how totalism works and could educate students about it, but we don’t. What I would hope for is to see the issue addressed at a policy level.’ This is only one point, but a central one, that Alexandra Stein wants to make in our chat. The photographs with this article show Alexandra in the 1980s when she was a member of The O.

What is totalism? It’s sometimes used to describe dictatorial oneparty states, but Alexandra uses it to describe totalitarian parties, fundamentalist religions, cults of any kind and extremist organisations that use the same underlying techniques to recruit and retain followers. One of her passions as a social psychologist is to spread this understanding as extremism grows. But this is not a purely theoretical issue for her. Her first book, Inside Out, recounted her 10 years as a member of a Minneapolis-based political cult: the story of that involvement informs and underpins much of our talk. I suggested it was difficult to sum up what she now does. ‘I’m an academic – a social psychologist… I’m an author, a creative writer and an activist.’ What does she mean by activism? ‘I am involved politically and also raise awareness and help those affected by totalist groups. I was brought up breathing left-wing air. My maternal grandfather worked on the Daily Worker; my father was a Jewish South African involved in the anti-apartheid movement. Our house in London was always full of political, artistic and literary figures, and I was a young veteran of the Aldermaston marches and the Grosvenor Square demonstration.’ She clarifies another of her self-descriptions. ‘I’d probably have been a creative writer all along but got diverted! So, I’m not really a conventional academic. I’m an Orwellian about language – I want my work to be understood and used by as wide an audience as possible. I want to be useful. I describe myself as a public scholar; becoming an academic so late in life meant that I couldn’t build a standard academic career.’ Alexandra was told she was too old to do her PhD in a psychology department in Minneapolis. ‘I’ll always remember the professor there said that the psychology department wouldn’t take me because they “want young students who’ll run rats through mazes”.’ She looked for another department who would have her and ended up in sociology. It didn’t seem crazy to be secretive I asked Alexandra to tell me about her experience as a member of the left-wing cult The O. ‘In 1972 I went to San Francisco. I was 18, lively, naive and committed to the left. I stayed there for some while. By the end of that decade Thatcher and Reagan were in power and the AIDS epidemic was about to happen, though we obviously didn’t know that. Several of my peers had originally moved to San Francisco motivated by the idealism of the 1960s. Now they were migrating back to their home states and settling down.’ ‘I met someone who was doing union organising very well. I admired that and asked him how he did it. That was the start of my journey into a political organisation in which I hoped to help make the

the psychologist september 2018 careers

become a Scientologist. Some people I knew in The O came from quite stable families. There is no data to support the idea that a certain type of person joins a cult or extremist organisation. Look at extremist Islam: we simply don’t have data to identify the sort of people who might drive a bus into a crowd or plant a bomb. We must avoid that fundamental attribution error and look at the external situation not immediately leap to explanations inside people.’ The O was not the clichéd cult of much filmmaking. Members lived in houses, often with families and had jobs. ‘I lived with my husband and our two adopted children and held down two jobs. I worked in the bakery and in IT – The O had told me to train in computer work. But we had to keep our organisational commitment secret and we lived a psychologically and emotionally isolated and miserable existence. It was a miserable existence. I was – at least at first – rebellious and questioning, and that meant I was often criticised and kept in the lowest rank of the group.’ world a better place. It might seem crazy that I joined a secret group, structured around small cells, in which written instructions, criticisms and rules arrived from a leadership group I did not know. I have never met the overall leader to this day, though I know people who knew him and some who had relationships with him. But it didn’t seem crazy to be so secretive then. Leftists were being persecuted, even assassinated. That made secrecy seem essential. In retrospect of course, silence and secrecy are classic techniques used in totalism to control members. As I got more involved, I moved to Minnesota.’ The O’s early history, under different names, involved taking control of food co-ops in the mid-1970s. ‘By the time I joined it had gone completely underground. It ran a bakery, a very bad childcare centre and a book store. It had a print shop, but in those days every left-wing movement had one!’ Alexandra describes her behaviours and attitudes at that time as ‘ego-dystonic’: at odds with her fundamental pre-cult beliefs and personality. She comes across as warm, funny, fiercely independent and holding strong opinions. So, it came as a surprise to learn that she entered into ‘an approved – not arranged – marriage to another cult member. To be clear, at that stage we didn’t know it was cult. I didn’t make the connection till I was out of it.’ Didn’t your family worry about you? ‘I’d run away at 15 so they were used to me being off on an adventure. And they really didn’t know anything about what I had become involved in. They didn’t know enough to worry. But there’s a fundamental point here that psychologists, in particular, should bear in mind. Psychologists – and others – not trained in understanding how cults operate tend to say things like, “It sounds like you lived in an unstable, leftwing, unconventional family, so no wonder you joined a cult.” My family had difficulties; so do others. Everybody from such a family doesn’t rush away to

Putting the right glasses on Over the years Alexandra became exhausted, had panic attacks and ‘secretly went to a therapist. Like most cults, The O had no time for therapists or psychologists. Then the pressure lifted for a year. Although we didn’t know it, the leader was in prison for killing a man and so not able to send directives. This gave us time, and that’s the last thing a cult should give its members. I started talking with another member, and we finally admitted to each other that we thought there were power problems in the organisation. She had talked to her husband about it and from there we formed an island of resistance. Cults rely on dissociation as a primary technique. They must destroy all attachments because with an ally you can start to reintegrate your dissociated thinking. We were recreating attachments and trust.’ I wondered whether the ‘sudden revelation’ of what had been happening was a fictional trope. ‘It happened to me. Ten years of experience suddenly erupted. It was like realising you were short-sighted and putting the right glasses on. They’d taken writing away, but I rediscovered it and started on my first book.’ ‘“What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” was an obvious question to ask. It took me time to extricate myself from the cult, but I’d become a pretty good systems integrator and wasn’t broke. My husband left the cult a year after me, but you don’t really know each other till you leave and so the marriage ended soon after. We both looked after the children and we still see each other.’ Three months after leaving, Alexandra saw a small ad headed ‘Combating Cult Mind Control’ and she began to realise what The O was. ‘The scales fell from my eyes and I started to read, discuss and write about the issue. My first book was to understand the experience. Later I signed up for a university class on Cults and Totalitarianism, where I first read Hannah

Arendt, then got a master’s in liberal studies and grew interested in attachment theory. It left me with a question which I needed to answer. I got on to a PhD programme largely on the strength of a paper I’d written on mothers in cults, an area that hadn’t been researched before. For my PhD I came up with the idea of comparing a cult with an organisation that wasn’t a cult using an attachment theory framework. The whole experience was a great privilege.’ After finishing her PhD Alexandra came back to the UK and wrote Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, which was published in 2016. ‘I wrote the book, lectured at Birkbeck – where I currently hold an honorary research fellowship – and the University of Westminster. I did and do some post-cult recovery counselling. This is a specialist field, and, because of the common misunderstandings, a regular therapist can do more harm than good. A colleague and I are currently developing a workshop to train therapists. I am on the board of the Family Survival Trust and lecture at the Mary Ward Centre, a central London adult education college. I’m also very involved in trying to spread understanding of totalism and what we need to do about it.’ Alexandra argues passionately that people need more knowledge of extremism. ‘We didn’t know about political cults in the 1970s – we thought cults were religious weirdos. And it’s still true that we know too little. There are cults in religion, politics, yoga, lifestyle, art, therapy, among academics. As you’ve suggested, some businesses are cults.’ So, this issue is not about the content of an organisation’s beliefs. ‘No, it’s the structure of control and of the ideology that matters. It isn’t what you believe unless you hold that your beliefs are exclusive and explain everything. Hannah Arendt is brilliant on this point.’ Alexandra gave a practical example. ‘Islamic fundamentalists tried to recruit students at a university where I lectured. Now, people have a right to hold the opinions they want – what’s important is understanding the organisation behind those beliefs. Is it dangerous? I look at this via my five-point definition of a cult: (1) The leadership is charismatic and authoritarian; (2) The structure of the group isolates people; (3) A total, exclusive ideology meaning other belief systems have no relevance whatsoever; (4) The process of brainwashing: isolation from safe relationships, engulfment within the group and

Might you have an interesting story to tell about your career path, the highs and lows of your current role or the professional challenges you are facing? If you would like to be considered for a ‘Careers’ interview in The Psychologist, get in touch with the editor Dr Jon Sutton (jon.sutton@bps.org.uk). Of course there are many other ways to contribute to The Psychologist, but this is one that many ﬁnd to be particularly quick, easy and enjoyable.

instilling of chronic fear; and (5) The result, which is followers who do what you say, ignoring their own survival interests.’ Alexandra wanted to stress an important point here. ‘It is critical for families who are affected by this to make every effort to keep in touch with someone who has become involved in a cult group.’ In another interview you suggested Trump has the makings of a cult leader. ‘His government has many of the characteristics of a cult. Arendt is relevant again – cults are rule-bound but have no bureaucracy. A single point of power – a leader or a leadership team – controls everything.’ You see this as an increasing problem. ‘Extremism is on the rise. It was a largely hidden phenomenon until ISIS, which is rightly described as a death cult, as well as the growing global crisis of rightwing extremism. I don’t want people to experience what I experienced, the key to which was not my stupidity but not knowing what to look out for. Let me make a comparison – if you know the ways AIDS is transmitted you can take steps to protect yourself from it. You may want sex, but you don’t want HIV. The same is true of cults. You may want to help people but not join a cult. If you know the ways in which cults recruit and indoctrinate people, you can protect yourself. Appropriate education about safe versus dangerous relationships is key. It will help combat extremism and as a side-effect, help young people avoid damaging 1:1 relationships. Prevent and related strategies try to train teachers to spot radical students. My view is we need to give students the tools to spot radicalism themselves. We need to empower them, and that’s not being done.’

To check the latest jobs please go to www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk To discuss the opportunities for advertising and promotion in The Psychologist, www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk and Research Digest, please contact Kai Theriault on 01223 378 051 or email kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk. 56

‘The role is not about me, it’s about the Society’

Tony Dale

We meet Kate Bullen, the new President of the British Psychological Society

the psychologist september 2018 one on one

One person who inspired you It is difficult to choose one person, but there have been some hugely inspirational women in my life. My mother, Gwyneth and her best friend Jean were of the generation of bright working-class women who left school at 14 or15 years of age and took jobs until they married. Both were intelligent, curious and great readers, but lacked the opportunity to engage with education. They both encouraged and supported me to achieve more than they did. At school, later as a student radiographer, and when I was newly qualified, I was fortunate to be taught by a series of unmarried women who had chosen their professions rather than a family life. They taught me that developing an educated mind is what matters, regardless of the subject you study, because training your thinking enables you to see the world in a different way. And my famous inspirational figure has to be Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement. She saw what had to be done and got on with it. One moment that changed the course of your career An industrial accident in work, on 18 January 2002. It left me with a chronic injury and enduring pain; it also ended my career as a therapeutic radiographer. It was the following year after surgery that my GP suggested that I take a psychology degree (I had already started counselling training). My 35th birthday in 1993 saw me starting that degree, changing my career and helping me to re-assert my sense of identity and worth. I owe Swansea University and Psychology a debt of gratitude for turning my life around. One book that you think all psychologists should read That’s a tough one; psychology is such a broad subject. But one book I have always enjoyed is Aging with Grace: The Nun Study and the Science of Old Age by David Snowdon. It’s a really interesting epidemiological study with a specialist group of participants, and I learnt so much from it. One thing I’m aware of as incoming Society President The role is not about me, it’s about the Society. As President you are just passing through, and your role is to act as a trustee and critical friend to the CEO and the management team. In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy challenged his audience saying ‘ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’. I think it is worth any incoming President to take note by just substituting ‘Society’ for ‘country’. One regret That my darling mum didn’t live long enough to see me become a professor. She died the year after I received my PhD. One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Whenever possible find opportunities to work in multidisciplinary teams. Psychologists know a lot, but looking at problems without psychological blinkers really does help to broaden perspectives. It’s one of the reasons why the whole cross- and inter-disciplinary research perspective is so exciting. Complex human problems can rarely be solved in simplistic ways – nice as that would be. One alternative career path you may have chosen I’ve already had two! Knowing what I know now I think a degree in Law and then becoming a coroner. It’s a difficult job, but having had

some experience of a coroner’s court, the combination of the legal and the psychological, together with the human skills of dealing with people who are experiencing grief, is one that I think I would have been good at. Other than that, I think I would enjoy running a tea shop, or an inter-generational play café! One thing that makes me laugh My daughter Alys, who has an acerbic wit – both spoken and written – that has reduced me to helplessness many a time. One of my greatest achievements Professionally, two achievements. Firstly, setting up a successful and thriving cancer support charity in South Wales during the time I was injured and before starting my degree. Secondly, establishing the Psychology Department at Aberystwyth University. On the personal front, seeing my daughter develop and overcome challenges to become the inspirational doctor and fantastic mother she is. One hero from psychology past or present Not a psychologist, but a philosopher: Baroness Onora O’Neill. She has always been clear in her commitment to equality, human rights, international justice and ethics. I attended an ethics event with her in Keele some years and ago and almost fell off my chair when she said that I had made a ‘very good point’ during a debate. An extraordinarily talented but deeply ‘human’ individual. One great thing that psychology has achieved I think it’s tricky to single psychology out uniquely in many situations, but if it has achieved anything it’s the way in which it has been able to identify the uniqueness of every human being. I still ﬁnd it spine tingling to think of how we have found that, even in apparently genetically identical twins, they can become such very different people due to their experiences and their interpretations of those experiences. The plasticity of the brain, and the resilience of human beings to survive and thrive despite huge challenges, is extraordinary. One psychological superpower you’d like to have The ability to bring about effective and lasting behaviour change to promote tolerance and acceptance of difference in society. One proud moment The birth of my grandson Marcus, who will be three years old in October. I had always been told that becoming a grandparent is a completely unique experience; and now I know that is true. He is a total joy and the times we spend together are so very special. One ﬁnal observation I remain optimistic about human beings. We are an intensely frustrating but constantly intriguing group who continue to fascinate me. My sadness is that all too often we concentrate on our differences rather than on our shared humanity. A bit more listening and a little less talking could really make a difference. Carl Rogers quoted Epictetus stating that ‘God gave us two ears and one mouth, so we ought to listen twice as much as we speak’. I try to heed that advice, sometimes with more success than others.

‘One day a week I’d sit in a café and write – it was a total pleasure’ We speak to psychologist and author Lucy Maddox, about her new book Blueprint: How Our Childhood Makes Us Who We Are How did your childhood make you who you are? I feel really lucky to have felt very cared for in my childhood. Working with young people who have had a really difﬁcult time has often made me realise how grateful I am for this. Growing up in the hippy town of Totnes in Devon was quite a creative place to be as well, and I think that helped me to be interested in both arts and sciences, and both mind and body. I went on to study psychology, philosophy and physiology at Oxford University, which was all about thinking about both mental and physical perspectives. I was an only child, which I think made friendships very important to me too. Again, I feel lucky to have a fantastic family of friends and colleagues past and present, as well as my actual family. Although the book is all about how our childhoods make us who we are, I don’t think this is set in stone, and I think that the relationships we have throughout our lives continue to shape who we are.

Tell me about how you ended up working with young people and caregivers. I didn’t always think I’d be a clinical psychologist. In fact I really didn’t know what I wanted to do at the end of my undergraduate degree. I moved to Paris in France for a year with a good friend and we had an amazing year of not knowing. We drank a lot of cheap rosé wine in the bar beneath our ﬂat and I basically learnt French there. I was working teaching English to business people and small children (not at the same time) and that was the ﬁrst time I’d worked with children. I really liked it, although I was terrible at getting them to behave). When I came back to the UK I studied neuroscience for a year at the Institute of Psychiatry, and then I got a job as a research assistant. I still didn’t have a grand plan, but everything I ended up enjoying tended to be about people. When I was studying for my MSc I also had two part-time jobs with young people to help fund the course, one as an Explainer in the Science Museum children’s galleries and one as a tutor for teenagers struggling with A-level Psychology. I liked the way children and teenagers tend to just tell it as it is. They don’t sugar-coat things. If you’re boring them, they’ll yawn and wander off, so at least you know if you’re explaining things well or not.

I also had some work experience at the BBC at this point, working on Child of Our Time, the documentary series that’s all about child development, which again I loved. And after that? I got onto clinical training, and one of the great things about it is that you get six different placements in quite different services. My child and adolescent placements were where I felt the best fit, and my placement in an adolescent mental health ward really hooked me in, so when I qualified I got a post at one of the adolescent units in South London and Maudsley Foundation Trust, and worked in different adolescent inpatient settings for most of the next 10 years, with a brief break of a couple of years to work in an NHS expert witness team, again with children and families. I still really like working with and thinking about children and young people, although I’ve expanded a bit now I’m not working in inpatient settings, and I also work with university students, foster carers and social workers. So you still practise, and you’re increasingly combining that with writing? Yes, I’m in a patchwork of different roles at the moment. I work for Action for Children with foster carers and social workers, I do a small amount of private practice with young adults, and I work for the British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies as their senior clinical adviser which is a mix of strategy, policy, public engagement and communications. I try hard to guard time to write as well as I really enjoy it. This is your first book. Have you found the writing process easy/enjoyable? I absolutely loved it. I was working on an adolescent ward four days a week for most of the time I was writing it, and then one day a week I’d sit in a café and write – it was a total pleasure. Who’s the book pitched at? What particular challenges did that bring? The book is for a general lay audience. It’s not a parenting guide or an academic text, it’s a popular psychology book on the experiments I think are really juicy and that

the psychologist september 2018 books development for ﬁve years at the Anna Freud Centre, so I’d done a lot of the research that made the backbone of the book, but I still learnt loads as I interviewed experts and revisited the literature. Each time I teach or write about a topic I usually learn something new. Also things change as research gets renewed, for example the marshmallow test experiment, which I brieﬂy mention in the book, has recently been revisited and reinterpreted.

everyone could get something from. Everyone’s been a child, and there’s lots in child psychology that can help us understand ourselves as grown-ups, yet most people aren’t taught about the classic psychology experiments, unlike the way we are taught about classic physics studies like Newton’s apple or Archimedes’ bathtub. I wanted to explain child development and psychology in clearly accessible language for anyone interested in how they’ve become who they are, and also reassure people that although our childhoods are important, not everything is set in stone. That brings with it the challenge of trying to simplify jargon without being patronising or oversimplifying ideas, but I quite like to try and write in that way anyway. It’s felt challenging to market it in some ways because the potential audience is quite broad. Why do you think it is that the ‘classic’ studies that cross into the mainstream don’t tend to be the ones on how we learn, how we grow close to those around us, how we become who we are? It’s a really good question. I’m not sure, but maybe something about nuance. Often psychology studies like this tend to be less clear-cut than ‘x leads to y and we are certain about that’. In my mind that makes the subject all the more interesting, but it also makes it harder to explain and remember. What was your favourite chapter to write and why? I really enjoyed writing the chapter on identity, thinking about how we become who we are [you can ﬁnd this on The Psychologist website]. I also enjoyed writing the chapter on attachment, and explaining how although today it seems really obvious that how we are cared for is crucial, not that long ago people saw love and affection as more the cherry on the cake and food and shelter as more crucial needs. I also enjoyed chapters which debunked myths to some degree, like the gender chapter and the one on siblings. Did you learn much about development through the writing, or was it a case of marshalling all those years of study and experience and getting them on the page in the best way? I had been teaching on and convening a module on child

I increasingly think that the best writing about psychology is actually about psychologists. Would you agree? Hmm… I think I have a slightly different view. I do agree that the interface between the personal and professional is really interesting. Whatever job we do, we all bring our personal selves to it, and our professional roles also affect who we are personally, and that personal/professional boundary is really interesting to me. But in terms of the best writing about psychology, I also really love reading about elegant experiments and clear theories. I think sometimes it’s tempting to believe in a theory because it has a charismatic person telling you about it, but really we need to clear that stuff out of the way and have a good look at the theory and the research behind it – really hold it up to the light and examine it for holes. It’s interesting how, at the end of the book, you bring a theoretical understanding of development back to what therapies are on offer. Does your own approach as a clinical psychologist draw heavily on the influence of those early years? I think a good assessment and formulation of difficulties needs to include some curiosity about early experiences, even if the treatment target isn’t necessarily on talking about that loads. Sometimes it is helpful to understand where things have come from, and that difficulties might be a result of a previously helpful reaction to a difficult experience or environment that isn’t now helpful. Sometimes understanding this can cause a shift in itself. Having said that, it depends what the problem is, what the model is you are using, and what clients want to work on as to how much that would be in the foreground of the therapy. What next for you? I feel like I should be able to say something really shiny here, like I’m about to finish another book and change career to be a tap dancer… but actually just more of the same really. I’m continually trying to have a good balance of clinical work, more academic-type work and more creative communication and engagement in what I do, so I’ll be carrying on with that juggling act, including more writing. I hope I’ll write another book at some point but at the moment there’s no firm plan. I’ll be sure to let The Psychologist know though! Dr Lucy Maddox is a consultant clinical psychologist, lecturer and writer. Blueprint, published by Robinson, is available now. An extract, ‘Who am I?’, is reproduced on our website with kind permission.

The only series to be approved by the BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

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Deputy Editor, The Psychologist The Psychologist is the magazine sent out to 50,000+ members of the British Psychological Society each month, alongside a website at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk which reaches out to a large and international audience.

the

psychologist july 2018

Windows on our inner and outer worlds Christina Richards introduces psychologistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; musings on their own art, in a variety of media

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

We are looking for a diligent, creative full-time team member to work with an experienced editor in order to help take us to the next level. If you are passionate about psychology and science communication, this is a rare opportunity to make a real impact. You will build connections across psychology and beyond in order to source regular, high quality content; your attention to detail and drive will help to maintain standards and regular output; and your ideas will help to ensure the magazine continues to evolve. Salary: ÂŁ33,264. Initial one-year contract, with possibility of extension. Based in Leicester. For a job description, see www.bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs To apply, send CV and covering letter to personnel@bps.org.uk. You should outline, in not more than 800 words, why you want the role and what you would bring to it (including an idea for a format, topic or author which you feel would engage and inform our audience). Closing date 14 September; interviews week commencing 24 September; planned start date around the end of 2018.

Yoga is mainstream. Communities, care homes and schools employ yoga for a variety of economic, learning and healthcare purposes. But yoga has deep, trippy roots in 1960s counterculture and alternative health. This history helps us understand the current role of yoga in our lives.

the psychologist september 2018 looking back

Supple bodies, healthy minds

Yoga meets psychedelics in the 1960s, with Lucas Richert and Matthew Decloedt

n a 2016 study, over 31 million American adults reported having practised yoga at some point in their lives. Linked to many health benefits, yoga purportedly enhances both mind and body. Doctors have prescribed it for natural healing, and clinical psychologists use it for depression. The American Yoga Foundation has promoted Yoga Month and Yoga Journal, established in 1975, now boasts two million readers. Ashtanga, Bikram, Hatha, Iyengar and Vinyasa have become household terms for many. What role have psychology, psychiatry and psychedelics played in this story? In the 1960s many people were receptive to new thinking and practices. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who came up with the hierarchy of needs, suggested people were adrift in a postmodern world: ‘We’re stuck now in our own culture… stuck in a silly world which makes all sorts of unnecessary problems.’ To break free, all manner of isms came to the fore: ecologism, conservationism, vegetarianism, veganism, holism. These accompanied growing anti-war sentiments and the human rights movement, as well as uncertainty. With society in flux, people sought peace of mind. And this led many to strive for perfection in mind and body. Meanwhile it also became apparent that transcending the present and greater communication were ways of coping with radical changes in the 1960s. Yoga and psychedelic drugs were seen as equally valid routes to spiritual fulfilment and mental health. As the San Francisco Oracle put it in 1965: ‘Yoga and psychedelics. Different means, same end.’ Supple bodies were related to healthy minds. Many felt that tripping out and artful poses led to new perspectives. Eastern religion, experimentation with yoga,

and psychedelics all seemed a suitable alternative to capitalism, conservatism, militarism, racism, violence and the prospect of nuclear war. Experimentation also seemed a useful substitute for existing mental health strategies. At the same time, purely positive accounts of mental health services gave way to increasingly critical approaches. Think R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz. Think Foucault and Fanon. Psychiatrists themselves had become ever more ‘sceptical’, and I’ve written in the British Journal of Psychiatry (tinyurl.com/ y74s2uk8) about 1968 in particular as a year where psychiatry was in transition: a year that rocked the world, changed everything and made us who we are. So much was happening 50 years ago in the realm of anti-psychiatry, diagnostics, and the politics of mind and drugs. People were looking for answers, for transformation. A mixture of yoga and psychedelics was the solution for some. One could effectively ‘trip’ towards God in the Downward Dog or on LSD (or both). Research and experimentation ﬂourished. LSD, in particular, spawned a global interest in the crosscultural dimensions of hallucinogens during the 1950s. Many researchers working in the mental health ﬁeld expected to produce a ‘wonder drug’. Yet, the fusion of psychedelics and yoga was also driven by various personalities and organisations. For instance, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, combined a belief in the potential of psychedelics with Eastern religious thought and practice. He drew attention to the similarities between religious ecstasy and chemical bliss. The result of this mix, Huxley posited in 1958, would be a widespread religious revival based on ‘radical transcendence’.

The famous Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California – which I wrote about in these pages in January 2018 – was founded in 1962 by Stanford graduates Michael Murphy and Richard Price. Murphy was apparently inspired to found Esalen by Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and yogi. He had spent time at the guru’s retreat in Pondicherry, where he absorbed Aurobindo’s cocktail of Eastern and Western thought that combined yoga and psychology. Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), similarly, was able to take a transformative trip to India, where he immersed himself in Hinduism, Buddhism, meditation and yoga. He combined these perspectives with his psychedelic research, investigating the intersection of drugs with spirituality. Alpert viewed psychedelics, especially LSD, as the ‘sacraments’ of the countercultural movement and believed ‘that those religions which still provide an opportunity for direct religious experience will ﬁnd a place for the psychedelic chemicals’. Timothy Leary took a more institutional approach to drugs and religious transcendence. His Acid Churches in New York State married the two practices with an eye to expanding America’s capacity for spiritual transformation. Then there was Stanislav Grof, an émigré Czechoslovak psychiatrist, psychedelic researcher, and one-time scholar at the Esalen Institute. In a feature piece for Yoga Journal in 1985 Grof recalled how he had mined Eastern thinking to supplement orthodox medical therapies. His goal was to create ‘a Key sources bridge between the relatively limited Western point of view and the maps Crame, H., Ward, L., Steel, A. et al. of consciousness provided by the (2016). Prevalence, patterns, and major mystical traditions’. (He also predictors of yoga use: Results of a believed that breathing was essential U.S. nationally representative survey. to achieving transcendence.) Other American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 50(2), 230–235. mental health professionals featured Hoffman, E. (1988). Abraham Maslow, in the pages of Yoga Journal too, transpersonal pioneer. Yoga Journal, 81, including Arthur Janov (creator of July/August. primal scream therapy), Abraham Huxley, A. (1958, 18 October). Drugs that Maslow (mentioned earlier), and shape men’s minds. Saturday Evening the world-famous R.D. Laing. Post. Miller, D.P. (1990). Altered states revisited. Yoga Journal, 93, July/August. Richert, L. (2018). 1968: Psychiatry in transition – psychiatry in history. British Journal of Psychiatry, 212(2), 121. Syman, S. (2011). The subtle body: The story of yoga in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Full list available in online/app version.

Lucas Richert is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde lucas.richert@strath.ac.uk

Matthew Decloedt is a Doctor of Juridical Science student at Central European University, Budapest Decloedt_Matthew@student.ceu.edu

Not surprisingly, the response wasn’t all positive. And pushback to the blending of yoga and drugs centred on arguments about the cultural appropriation of Eastern spiritual language and metaphors. Yoga gurus with ‘large American followings’ regularly ‘dismissed psychedelics… and frowned on any mingling of drugs and discipline’. Why was this? Indian yogis had long valued altered states of consciousness, but some felt that drug-related experiences had the potential to be trivial regarding dharma. Worse still, the trips might even be dangerous. Meher Baba, a Sufi spiritual teacher in India, was a noteworthy opponent of yoga/psychedelic practices. In 1966 he penned the antipsychedelic article ‘God in a pill?’ and described LSD, mescaline and psilocybin-fuelled ‘spiritual’ experiences as ‘superficial’. Psychedelics were ‘positively harmful’ for the spirit, according to Baba, and he believed such substances should only be used ‘when prescribed by a professional medical practitioner’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Yoga Journal published a series of retrospective articles on the 1960s’ preoccupation with altered states of consciousness. An emphasis on psychedelics immediately jumped out, and this reflected the deeply embedded role such substances had in American yoga culture. One article, for example, relayed how the trippers and yogis of the era had rediscovered ‘ancient knowledge about the potentials of the human mind’. Americans’ journey deep into Eastern religion was an attempt to break the ‘consensus trance’ that dominated ‘normal’ life. The meeting of psychedelics and yoga, according to this perspective, was simply a natural reaction. Drugs were a useful tool. So what can we conclude? The 1960s saw ancient beliefs and modern drugs adapted to needs. It was a transformative period. Even if the more grandiose designs of the countercultural movement were not realised, minds were opened as a result of the experimentation. ‘Some of it is flaky openness, being open to nonsense,’ one commentator put it, ‘but a lot of it is a good openness.’

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The History of Emotions Thursday 16 October 2018, 10:00am–3:45pm Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London Dr Paul Sullivan (Bradford University); Professor Fraser Watts (University of Lincoln); Dr Sally Holloway (Oxford Brookes University); Dr Sarah Chaney, Dr Richard Firth-Godbehere, Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith and Professor Thomas Dixon (Centre for the History of the Emotions, QMUL) Cost: £15 including welcome refreshments & buffet lunch (Registration is essential) For more information and to register, go to www.bps.org.uk/stories History of Psychology Centre (e) hopc@bps.org.uk

Lifetime Achievement in Psychology Award The Professional Practice Board invites nominations for this annual award which recognises and celebrates exceptional and sustained contributions in a career as a practitioner psychologist. It is anticipated that this award will be made to a psychologist near or after the end of their career. Award The Award will confer life membership of the Society, and a commemorative certificate will be presented to the recipient at the Society’s Annual Conference. The recipient will also be invited to deliver an address at the conference. Criteria The Lifetime Achievement Award is open to current or retired Chartered practitioners in any area of professional applied psychology. Nominees need to be members of the Society and it is expected that award winners will not only have enjoyed outstanding personal success but will also have reinvested in psychology through encouraging and developing others; displayed a wisdom and depth of service/leadership that has made a significant difference to a number of individuals or groups; and demonstrated exceptional practice over a significant period of time, including impact outside their primary job role. It is not limited to residents of the UK. Nominations should be sent to the Chair of the Professional Practice Board at the Society’s office to arrive no later than Monday 3 December 2018. Full details are available from Carl Bourton at the Society’s Leicester office (e-mail: carl.bourton@bps.org.uk).

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In his March 2018 interview, social psychologist Paul Stenner cited the German poet Rilke, who wrote about a life of ever-widening circles: ‘he was conveying a kind of optimism about such “worlds”, our spheres of activity which are bound together into one big circle that gives our life as a whole a kind of unity… as we get older, the limits of our “world” come to expand, qualitatively as well as quantitatively.’

In his 2011 ‘One on one’, Adrian Furnham highlighted the challenges of ‘coherence and unity’, saying that: ‘The tectonic plates seem to be moving and the archipelago of psychology drifting further apart. The ﬁrst inaugural lecture I read was a man who in 1950 said he would probably be the last Professor of Psychology because all the signs were that the different parts would dissociate

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