The Psychologist October 2018

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

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

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

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Culture Kate Johnstone, Sally Marlow Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack 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

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Letters

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Obituaries

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Opinion

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Dear undergrad self…

From BPS careers speakers

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News

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The psychologists’ tree of life We hear from psychologists around the world about their work with numerous living species, including the octopus, lion, virus, bee, parasite, dog, gorilla, lemon balm, and more ‘Perhaps the difference between us and other species is that we have taken it to the extremes’ We meet Josep Call The Psychologist Guide to Pets With your issue… please pass on to anyone you think might be interested!

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‘Be the best version of yourself… that’s what African psychology does for me’ We meet Erica McInnis

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Jobs in psychology

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Books

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Culture

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Looking back The world of Wilhelm Reich

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A to Z

Koko the gorilla passed away earlier this year, at the age of 46. She gained notoriety for adopting a kitten and creating a name for it, ‘All Ball’, in what her instructor and caregiver calls Gorilla Sign Language. Adam Batchelor’s portrait (left), ‘Obnoxious cat’, references times when Koko would play with All Ball, and if it bit her or wriggled free she would sign ‘obnoxious cat’. Another time, Koko blamed the cat for ripping a sink off the wall…

This month, we meet gorillas, bees, lions, dogs, parasites, herbs, birds and more as we explore the psychologists’ tree of life. I’m sure there are many psychologists who research and practise with all sorts of unusual species, and we still want to hear from them.

As it is, our feature extends to 25 pages, and we’ve experimented with this expansive and personal approach a few times this year now.

As ever, we need your feedback on this, future topics and authors, etc…

Love us or hate us, please take our survey by the end of the month (see p.83).

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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Does psychology face an exaggeration crisis?

Brian Hughes argues that we are prone to accentuating the positive, even when it comes to progress in improving our science

‘Not another article about the crisis in psychology,’ you might complain. Déjà vu all over again? You thought we reached peak crisis some time ago, didn’t you?

We’re supposed to be all post-crisis now: obsessing about the consequences of fear-mongering, disturbed that terminal negativity will prove off-putting to wider audiences (including, worryingly, funding bodies).

Some people suggest that talk of crisis in psychology is overblown. However, my view is that the problem is not exaggerated at all. If anything, the exaggeration lies elsewhere – in psychologists’ proneness to accentuate the positive in their midst.

We overstate what we have achieved in our research.

We overstate the impact, importance, and applicability of our findings. And we overstate our achievements with regard to the replication crisis itself: we congratulate ourselves for the occasional bout of self-flagellation, and exaggerate the extent to which we have successfully addressed our problems.

So, yes, at the risk of engendering reader habituation, here is yet another article about a crisis in psychology – the exaggeration crisis.

How do we know that exaggeration is endemic?

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Psychology’s problem with exaggeration exhibits several symptoms, which I will tackle in turn.

Despite ample warnings, our field still lacks a replication culture. Recent high-profile replication attempts have been extremely important, but there is no sign that psychology as a whole has suddenly started to embrace replication. Fewer than 1 per cent of papers published in the top 100 journals relate to replications of previous research. This shows that statistical significance remains a de facto proxy for replicability, evidence of a virulent inflationary fallacy. We go on attributing unwarranted certainty to tentative statistics, ignoring the rampant false-positive rate. Simply put, despite many treatises on the flaws of NHST, the vast bulk of psychology research published today continues to exaggerate the implications of ‘p < .05’.

We continue to freely cite non-replicable research, including several so-called ‘classic’ studies that have become staples in our psychology textbooks. It is bad enough that most studies cited in textbooks have never been replicated, but it is worse that many of those where replication attempts have occurred – and whose findings have been revealed as unreliable – continue to be cited as though nothing has changed.

We stand by, largely without protest, as extravagant claims circulate widely in popular culture under the banner of psychology. Consider that the second-ever most viewed TED Talk concerns the ropey concept of power posing; or witness the mainstream glorification of Jordan

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the psychologist october 2018 opinion Peterson and his overreach-based mysticism. Rather than urge the public to approach such fads with caution, psychologists (and their professional bodies) often appear more concerned with finding ways to climb aboard the bandwagon.

Echoing Mats Alvesson’s essay in the August issue, on modern grandiosity, researchers today employ far more hyperbole when writing journal abstracts than they did three decades ago. In 1974, one in fifty abstracts employed complimentary descriptors (such as ‘innovative’) to summarise research. By 2014, according to Christiaan Vinkers and colleagues in a 2015 BMJ article, self-praise featured once in every six, an increase of nearly 900 per cent. Ironically, this growth in humblebragging coincided almost exactly with the emergence of the very discourse that now frets publicly about file-drawer effects, underpowered study samples, and problems with research replicability. The spread of crisis talk has done little to engender obvious modesty in scientific researchers (it may even, perversely, have discouraged it).

Notwithstanding the Open Science movement, the file-drawer problem hasn’t gone away. The average psychology study is still feebly underpowered (see Smaldino and McElreath’s 2016 paper on the ‘natural selection of bad science’), a problem that appears to worsen the more it is scrutinised (average power has plummeted from around 50 per cent in the 1960s to around 25 per cent today). And yet, almost without exception, virtually every published research paper reports a significant finding. Given that power to detect significance is mostly lacking, this logically means that a great many reported findings must be false positives.

In other words, the typical reported finding in psychology is an exaggeration of a true effect, or, even, of a null effect. This ‘winner’s curse’ reflects psychology’s incorrigible exaggeration impulse.

It is true that psychology’s existential challenges have received conspicuous attention in recent years. However, It is reckless to claim we have dealt with these problems simply because we have discussed them. We cannot wish the crisis away. Yes, some technical solutions are beginning to appear (sporadically), but an obvious cultureshift has yet to take hold. The incentives in professional and academic psychology remain unchanged, and continue to reinforce the bad habits of the past.

Enablers of exaggeration in psychology

What drives psychology’s hype machine? Some excess undoubtedly results from attribution bias. People instinctively interpret ambiguity in self-flattering ways, attributing positive aspects of their work to merit and negative ones to chance. Psychologists are no exception.

The result is a genuine belief that our insights are profound, our therapies outstanding, and our research more robust than is actually the case.

Some exaggeration emerges from a broader modern culture, described by Alvesson, that promotes unapologetic extravagance in language, attitude, and

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aspiration. Psychology is not alone in inflating wares for modern audiences, in refining image while neglecting substance. But the public gaze produced by popular interest in psychology’s subject matter certainly serves to exacerbate this tendency.

Psychology’s research pipeline is riddled with inflationary features. Journals continue to favour statistically significant findings, editorially institutionalising the file-drawer effect. Professionally, scientists and academics are judged on publication and citation volume (with some amorphous achievements relating to ‘impact’ and ‘reach’ thrown in), a system where the bigger the splash, the smoother the career progression. There is a clear imperative for research psychologists to blow their own trumpets. You could even say that those who don’t are behaving irrationally by choosing to undermine their self-interest.

Further inflation inflects from the interface of academia, public relations, media churnalism, and secondary reporting. When university press officers convert abstracts into press releases, the process frequently involves cherry-picking of results, nonspecialist re-writing, and a sanguine tolerance of error.

These processes of ‘sharpening’ afflict all kinds of news-reporting. The production of psychology news is presumably no exception.

What can we do about our exaggeration crisis?

To avail of a cliché, psychologists’ first step in solving their exaggeration problem is to acknowledge that they actually have an exaggeration problem. This is not as easy as it sounds. Exaggeration impulses are usually self-perpetuating. Optimism about their field leads many psychologists to adopt ‘nothing-to-see-here’ poker faces whenever the c-word is uttered, to liberally afford the benefit of doubt to peers, and to dissuade others from panicking over the state of psychology.

Given that exaggeration is a behaviour shaped by reinforcement, it is important to attack the issue of incentives in a full-on way. Exaggeration is incentivised by editors’ attitudes, the widespread (ab)use of citation metrics, authorship conventions, and the attritional nature of peer-review systems. All of these can be addressed, if the will is there.

Many journal editors (along with associate editors and reviewers) have been at the forefront of promoting good practice in research and reproducibility. However, there remains a need to shift editorial culture across psychology as a whole. In short, editors require reculturation. Replication research – the hallmark of the scientific method, but a unicorn in psychological science – can only be considered a priority format for publication if editors identify it as such. The prioritising of novelty over repetition equates to a desire for sensationalism, which, as well as undermining reproducibility, slowly blights the very tone of what we publish.

Similarly, the policy of publishing statistically significant findings rather than null effects is as demeaning as it is distorting. The file-drawer effect has

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receive much attention (although without altering the practice of journal editors, even after forty years). But the prioritising of significance by journal editors also feeds psychology’s exaggeration impulse. Psychologists are taught to be ashamed of having nothing exciting to say.

Ideally, psychology journals should sign up to a doctrine of publication regardless of p, and a practice of peerreview that focuses on methodological rigour rather than findings.

Citation metrics need complete recalibration, or even abandonment. Valuing research on the basis of virality represents poor quality control. We all know that citation statistics do not reflect the quality of the research that is cited. In this regard, so-called altmetrics face similar problems. The number of times a paper is tweeted is effectively an alternative version of how often it is cited, but with even less connection to the notion of peerreview. Far better to dispense with person-level metrics altogether. A researcher’s h-index should be seen as no more relevant than their star sign.

Finally, if the problem is individualism, then a radical set of solutions would involve removing individuals from the picture. For example, authorship of research could be completely de-personalised: there is no absolute need in science for author names to be published alongside findings. The provenance of outputs could be tracked using study ID numbers, or information about the location where the research was conducted. There need not be a focus on highlighted individuals, and the resultant carving up of authorship credit in Lennon-McCartney terms as if bartering a divorce settlement.

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Alternatively, why not dispense with pre-publication peer-review altogether? In the digital age, the cost of printing no longer requires us to filter out lesser-valued submissions. Moreover, it facilitates organic postpublication review, in the form of online commenting systems. This would remove the accolade of publication, essentially devaluing the currency and dampening the hysteria of wealth. Research would receive attention on the basis of its inherent quality, and the merit of claims would be determined by collective consensual opinion.

Indeed, why publish ‘articles’ in psychology journals at all? Why not move to the production and dissemination of open-access datasets and the formation of scientific consensus over time by expert-network crowdsourcing?

If any metrics were to be involved, perhaps they could focus on the degree to which individuals (or institutions) contribute to the collective effort, with promotions (or rankings) determined on that basis.

Talking towards a bold new world

It is important to acknowledge that human factors underpin the so-called crisis in psychology. Insofar as the crisis revolves around false claims to truth, support for the unsupportable, and achievements that are not always what they seem, it is apparent that it stems from exaggeration.

In recent years we have seen much discussion about reproducibility in psychology and many welcome initiatives to deal with the resultant problems. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the success of these initiatives depends on the spirit with which they are taken up.

A bold new world will be of little consequence without a commitment to the pursuit of truth. New systems won’t amount to much unless there is a determination to make them work. Our inherent proneness to exaggeration is both individual and collective. But as psychologists, we are perhaps best placed to explore, understand, and address what is going on. In my view, were psychologists to neglect the human factors underpinning scientific crises, it would be especially ironic.

So long as exaggeration in psychology is rewarded, it will continue to be prevalent. This just might include a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which our replication crisis is being successfully addressed, and to pat ourselves collectively on the back for all the good work we are doing.

Dare I say, it would be dangerous to exaggerate the progress we are making. It is not yet time to stop talking about the crisis in psychology.

Brian Hughes is Professor of Psychology at NUI Galway.

His latest book Psychology in Crisis is published by Palgrave (2018). See also tinyurl.com/bhrethink brian.hughes@nuigalway.ie

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the psychologist october 2018 news

Professional development The Professional Development Centre provides learning and development opportunities for our members as well as support and advice on issues of best practice and professional growth.

e-learning We are now offering Organisational Access to our three Adult Autism e-learning modules. As an organisation you can register a large group of learners and monitor their progress.

Building awareness of adult autism Supporting adults with autism Working with adults with autism To find out more visit www.bps.org.uk/e-learning or contact us on learning@bps.org.uk.

Follow us on Twitter: @BPSLearning #BPScpd

www.bps.org.uk/findcpd

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Speakers from the British Psychological Society careers events, to be held in Newcastle and London later this year, write to their first-year selves

Be curious, creative, confident…

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I am writing this letter to you as you are starting the final year of your psychology BSc. I know you are worrying about the future and whether you will have a successful career once you graduate.

Clinical psychology as a profession has changed hugely over recent years and services have never been so pressured.

However, despite there being a lot of negativity surrounding this, and it will undoubtedly be a challenging road ahead, I still wholeheartedly believe that a career in psychology can be exciting, rewarding and fulfilling.

I know you want to be a good clinical psychologist. My advice to you would be to be curious: about people, about what makes them tick, about how to make people feel more able to cope and Dr Gemima Fitzgerald studied for be more resilient, and about whatever her psychology degree as a mature particular areas of psychology really student, followed by a doctorate in interest you. There is still so much to clinical psychology. She then worked learn about humanity, and if you find for a hospice in their Specialist what you are passionate about, that Palliative Care Psychology Service will propel you forward in your career. before becoming the lead for the Think creatively about your hospice Bereavement Service. future career and be open to working She has now founded her own in settings outside of the NHS. company and works freelance in Explore possibilities with charities a diverse range of settings, as well as sometimes they can enable more as for the Dementia Carers Count flexibility and opportunities for you to charity as a Resilience Consultant.

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explore your own areas of interest for the benefit of patients.

I know that you often have doubts about whether you are ‘good enough’ to be a ‘proper’ psychologist.

Like lots of people, you frequently experience ‘impostor syndrome’, where you doubt yourself when you do well and often worry that you will be exposed as a ‘fraud’.

Trust me, so many people secretly feel like you do, and you will probably continue to feel like this for a very long time, but the trick is to realise that many people who are high achievers and successful feel like this, and that a thought is not a fact. Learn to be kinder to yourself, and gently remind yourself of your achievements.

And this leads me on to my final piece of advice – to be a good psychologist you will need to learn an awful lot of theory, and theory-practice links, and you will also need to gain as much relevant work experience as you can before you embark on clinical training. But alongside that it is imperative that you develop great reflective skills.

You need to learn from all your life experiences, past and present. I passionately believe that every single one of your life experiences, including personal failures, as well as any successes will be useful, and that no pain is ever wasted. When times are tough, ask yourself, ‘What can I learn through this experience of pain?’ This will make you a great psychologist!

Good luck and keep going. You can do this and trust me, you have a lot of fun and fulfilment ahead!

Dr Gemima Fitzgerald

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the psychologist october 2018 bps careers events

Time to participate…

Welcome to your BSc Psychology programme at Brunel University!

A lot’s coming your way over the next few years, so here’s some tips to help you get the most out of your undergraduate experience: Get curious. Undergraduate psychology courses purposefully give you tasters across the breadth of psychology. You’ll learn about health and clinical psychology, cognitive and animal psychology and loads more.

Enjoy exploring new areas of interest.

If you’re offered modules from other disciplines, consider taking them!

Multidisciplinary thinking helps you get a more rounded appreciation of the world, so don’t restrict yourself!

Ask yourself why things are being taught to you if they’re decades old.

What is their significance today?

Work it. You’re studying a BSc Psychology with ‘Professional Development’. This means you get two six-month work placements during your course. Use the Placement and Careers Service to get the most out of your choices. Fill your summer break with varied work experience. Go international! Get out

of your comfort zone! You don’t know what you like or dislike until you try it.

Be a participant. Join the psychology participant pool (most universities have them) and get credit or payment to participate in as many studies as possible. You’ll get insight into how psychology research works and may stumble across an area of research that really interests you. If you’re lucky, you might even get a scan of your brain to take home too!

Find mentors. Whose work do you admire? Lecturers are (mostly!) always happy to discuss their work and point you in the right direction.

Go to office hours, see them after a lecture, email them and get to find out more about their research. It can open up doors for part-time research during your course and for the future.

Download and save all lecture slides.

You never know when they will come in useful later in life. Stop printing, think of the trees! Also, get moving!

It’s easy to think you can spend your student life on your butt studying, but your body will not thank you for it. Try out some sports and find

Dr Emma Norris is a Research Associate on the Human BehaviourChange Project at University College London something you like… yes I know your coordination sucks but you’ll love it, I promise.

Join the BPS. Get connected to the wider psychology community across the UK by joining the BPS as a Student member. For less than £30 you get access to The Psychologist and PsychTalk magazines, events, discounts and networking opportunities. Look forward to joining Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG) as a postgrad – it’s awesome!

Enjoy the next few years. I’m not jealous at all…..

Future Emma

Invest…

Psychology can be a fascinating subject to know where showing enthusiasm undertake at university, but it can also be and passion for your subject may lead. complex. You might wonder what to do with One of the great things about a psychology undergraduate degree; if you psychology is that there are want to be a professional psychologist, opportunities everywhere. Think you’re looking at many more years of outside the box by contacting some studying into masters and doctorates. local services that provide therapy or Perhaps that’s why only a small percentage psychological services: what might of psychology graduates go down that you be able to provide them with Fraser Smith is a counselling route. whilst you study? A volunteer, or even psychologist in training.

But there are such great opportunities He has a YouTube channel called a paid position? A researcher role available to students who decide to perhaps? Why not also start thinking ‘GetPsyched’, and a blog at pursue a career in psychology – if you’re about developing an online presence? frasersmithcounsellingpsy.com. willing to invest. Make an effort to partake For anyone willing to work hard, in extra roles and activities: positions such as ‘class show passion and think in new and exciting ways, a career representative’ should allow you to get to know your in psychology can be full of endless possibilities and tutors better and take on a leadership role in the incredible prospects. university. It also gets your face out there, and you never Fraser Smith

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Career story So, now that you’ve started your psychology degree I thought it might be helpful to give you some advice on how to make the most out of it and what you can do to support your future… that is, after all, the reason you’re doing this degree isn’t it? Psychology is a really versatile subject: if you do these things I am confident that you will really enjoy the experience.

My first piece of advice is to say ‘yes’ to opportunities that come your way! A small part of your degree is the subject that you are learning: of course it’s important that you put in the effort, attend lectures and get interested in your discipline, but keep an eye on what’s next.

Employers are keen not just on you achieving that 2:1 that you aspire to, but also that you have learned some other skills and challenged yourself outside of your degree. The only way to boost your confidence is to have experiences – some of these will be positive, others will be difficult and challenging, but all of them will be learning experiences.

Dr Vicki Elsey is a Chartered Psychologist, HCPC Registered Occupational Psychologist and Principal Lecturer at Northumbria University Secondly, think about your career story. What differentiates you from the hundreds of others in the same position as you? What got you to this point and what will get you to the next career stage? Document this, draw your career journey… your significant moments, your key achievements and your future goals. Not only is this helpful for you, but when it comes

to applying for jobs you will have some fantastic information to use in application forms and interviews.

Thirdly, use the support that is available to you while you are studying – your lecturers, your fellow students, the careers and employment service just to name a few. Use these individuals as the start of your network, they will be the key to your future. Your lecturers will be well connected: they have been where you are, they will be aware of opportunities that you could get involved in. Make a good impression, be professional, ask questions. This holds true for your fellow students – they could be your future colleagues or employers!

Finally, enjoy your degree! Get interested in the subject – you might not enjoy every module, but trust me, some of the things you hate (probably giving presentations!) will be really useful in your future career. Be open to this and you will learn much more than psychology. You’ve got this!

Yours faithfully, Dr Vicki Elsey

The British Psychological Society Careers events take place in Newcastle (17 November) and London (4 December) For more information on the days and speakers, see: www.bps.org.uk/cip2018 www.bps.org.uk/ciplnd2018 The careers events are sponsored by SLV.Global. They commented: ‘These letters, penned by such esteemed professionals, were interesting and encouraging for us to read. Our organisation has undergraduates at its core and was created, back in 2010, to provide psychology students with the opportunity to gain hands-on work experience in the mental health sector.

We know how important it is for students to be able to put theory into practice, which is why our psychology-focused placements and programs abroad are so necessary. We provide global mental health experience for an increasingly global society and help today’s undergraduates become tomorrow’s BPS keynote speakers.’

Find out more at https://slv.global 14

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The only series to be approved by the BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

BPS Titles in Psychology No other series bears the BPS seal of approval Refreshingly written to consider more than Northern American research, this series is the first to give a truly international perspective.

Every title fully complies with the BPS syllabus in the topic.

Below is a selection of titles on offer. For the full list please go to http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-324340.html

New to the Series:

* For further information and Discounts go to http://psychsource.bps.org.uk/

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the psychologist october 2018 tree of life

The psychologists’ tree of life Psychologists in research and practice work with a surprising number of different species – animals, plants, and even beyond to the world of parasites and viruses. Our journalist Ella Rhodes spoke to some of them, from across the world, about their encounters and what other life might teach us about our own.

A magic well Social organisation, learning and memory in bees

Professor Martin Giurfa is a Researcher at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse

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My memories of bees go back to my childhood, when I would spend hours watching them foraging on the flowers of my garden. I always was what you would describe as an animal lover. I had a menagerie of animals, much to the dismay of my highly tolerant mother. I was particularly attracted by insects, with their fascinating forms, colours and adaptations to all possible lifestyles. I remember admiring the hard work of bees, collecting food not for them but for the colony, and asking myself: ‘How does this work?’ My questions then snowballed: ‘To what extent are humans different?’ and ‘What can we learn about ourselves by studying animals?’ Bees combine two attractive features for someone willing to understand the mechanisms of learning and memory and the biological bases of social behaviour: their sophisticated social organisation and their remarkable learning and memory capabilities.

Bees are one of the best examples known of animal sociality. Their society relies on division of labour and on elaborate communication systems, such as a rich pheromone repertoire and bee dances, which report

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distance and direction to a profitable food source in a unique and exquisite manner. Moreover, bees as individuals exhibit astonishing learning and memory capacities.

The neural and molecular mechanisms underlying these capacities are similar to those existing in vertebrates, so that accessing them in the relatively ‘simple’ brain of a bee – in terms of the number of neurons, not in terms of its sophistication – can provide valuable information about how our brain learns and memorises. The fact that in the last decade, capacities such as concept formation, categorisation and a basic numeric sense have been discovered in bees, opens new perspectives to uncover the neural underpinnings of these abilities in an accessible brain.

In that sense, as Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch said once, ‘the bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water’.

I am interested in learning and memory, which I analyse at multiple levels, from behaviour to their cellular and molecular bases. Studying a brain endowed with these capacities and that allows the use of a series of invasive techniques specially adapted and conceived for its miniature size and characteristics in the laboratory (brain imaging, electrophysiology, RNAi-blockade of receptors, etc.) constitutes a valid way to gain more knowledge on the mechanisms of these capacities. In many cases, these mechanisms rely on ‘universal’ key-molecules and /or circuit organisation, so it is a fundamental way to understand the underpinnings of learning and memory, at the core of both psychological research and theory.

The interesting question concerning bees refers to their higher-order learning capacities, which for many years were considered a prerogative of some vertebrates (e.g. conceptual learning). This finding raises the question of the uniqueness of vertebrates and in particular of humans: where does this uniqueness lie (if it lies somewhere) given that at the end highly elaborate cognitive processing can be found in the miniature brain of an insect? We can definitely provide answers to this question and find capacities, which are not at the reach of an insect brain, but at least the bee case helps questioning some preconceived ideas about the place of humans in nature. Moreover, the discovery of these capacities raises also the question of negative results in the animal cognition literature. Are all animals necessarily limited in their capacities, or is it rather that experimenters have not found yet the clever experiments to uncover what animals can do?

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Curiosity and the cephalopods An encounter with the strange and compelling octopus Dr Alexandra Schnell is a researcher in animal communication, cognition and evolution and works between the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, USA and the University of Cambridge

The alien-like creature was tucked away in an underwater cavern, staring at me inquisitively through a large eye with a horizontal pupil.

As I breathed out, bubbles were released from my regulator. The creature’s gaze followed the bubble trail before its soft-suckered arm extended out to touch them. Engrossed, I reached out with my gloved hand; the creature turned its gaze back to me and then proceeded to wrap the tip of its flexible arm around my wrist. We stared at each other, our limbs entwined, both seemingly enthralled in the oddity of the exchange. That was the moment I became captivated by these enigmatic creatures.

Cephalopods – which include octopus, cuttlefish, and squid – are soft-bodied marine molluscs, with eight arms, blue blood, a concealed parrot-like beak and three hearts. Despite their peculiar appearance, cephalopods are well known for their large-brains and remarkable behaviour. They have been observed to unlock aquarium tanks at specific times of day and to collect shells and other objects to shield their soft bodies from prospective predators.

Their behaviours have led to claims of complex intelligence such as planning for the future and remembering the past. Both capacities were previously thought to be unique to mammals and corvids (a group of intelligent birds) and to have evolved in response to pressures experienced in their physical and social environments. Recently, episodic-like memory has been demonstrated in cuttlefish. This cognitively demanding capacity involves the recollection of personally experienced memories based on what happened, where it happened and when. Cuttlefish

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were shown to selectively revisit locations (where) depending on food preferences (what) and prey availability, as well as the time that elapsed since their last visit (when).

The prospect of complex intelligence having emerged in cephalopods has challenged the traditional understanding of how intelligence evolved, primarily because cephalopods have diverged radically from the vertebrate lineage. Moreover, most cephalopods do not show sophisticated social recognition abilities, suggesting that they, unlike most vertebrates, have not faced strong social pressures. However, apart from the episodic-like memory study in cuttlefish, our current understanding of cephalopod intelligence is largely based on observations, meaning many claims remain unsupported by quantitative data.

Other explanations Currently, observed behaviours labelled as complex cognition can be explained as less complex abilities that involve simple conditioning (i.e. learning that a stimulus is associated with a reward) or hardwired predispositions (i.e. fixed action patterns that are stimulated by an environmental cue). For example, octopuses have been observed carrying coconut shells across sandy ocean floors, leading to claims of anticipating future needs for shelter. Yet, it is possible that this behaviour may be driven by current needs to protect themselves from predators without any appreciation of needing shelter in the future. In another example, octopuses were observed swimming in close proximity to foraging reef fish, leading to

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claims of cooperative hunting. However, it is plausible that octopuses pursue reef fish as a foraging strategy to feed on the remains of prey captured by other taxa. Although such observations are an appropriate source of inspiration for further research into complex intelligence in cephalopods, for the time being these claims must be considered speculative.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not saying that cephalopods are incapable of complex intelligence. Instead, this highlights the fact that excluding simpler explanations for the observed behavioural phenomena remains a persistent challenge for ongoing research. We need controlled laboratory experiments that directly quantify whether such behaviours are underpinned by specific complex cognitive capacities.

My passion for understanding animal minds has resulted in countless hours in the laboratory, and several ongoing efforts to empirically quantify the remarkable behaviours of cephalopods. Most recently, my team tested whether cuttlefish exhibit biases when processing visual information during different ecological activities. We found that cuttlefish predominately use their left eye and associated brain structures to scan for predators, and predominately use their right eye and associated brain structures to search for prey. This manner of processing cognitive information is analogous to the way most vertebrates process cognitive information. These findings highlight that even though cephalopods are separated from vertebrates by approximately 550 million years of evolution, both animal groups use different parts of their brain to process cognitive information.

Yet the central question still remains â&#x20AC;&#x201C; how intelligent are cephalopods compared to cognitively advanced vertebrates?

In my future research, I hope to address this question by directly quantifying complex intelligence in a range of different cephalopod species. The key is to test whether cephalopods are capable of complex capacities that parallel other cognitively advanced animals. I have developed a series of innovative behavioural experiments that will test the capacity for cephalopod cognition in a comparative context.

This data will deliver key insights into whether comparable intelligence can evolve in the absence of strong social pressures. Such findings will provide a unique perspective for understanding the selective pressures that have shaped animal intelligence, and may even have consequences for understanding the origins of human intelligence. Until then, the true cognitive capacities of these large-brained molluscs will remain a mystery.

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‘Yours, in defiance and admiration’ A letter to HIV Dear HIV, Kavita Vedhara Wow! – has it really been is Professor almost 30 years since we of Health first met? I was obviously Psychology at aware of you before then. But the University I think our first meaningful of Nottingham introduction was in biological psychology.

Once in a while we are confronted with information that makes us question who we are and what we know to be true: cognitive dissonance if you will. And so it was with you. There, in my second-year lecture, I realised that you, the most ignominious of viruses, had found a way to destroy the very system that protects us from all other diseases.

At first, your story looked like one of biological determinism. Nature trumps nurture. There appeared to be nothing we could do to combat you. But actually, the power of the mind and human behaviour was to be the real story. From the very beginning there was evidence that the speed with which you progressed could be shaped by how a person reacted to you (in the way they coped, felt, behaved and their social resources).

You also unleashed the gargantuan efforts of a generation of scientists who developed treatments that turned you from a fatal disease to a chronic condition.

So did nurture trump nature? Perhaps not.

There are fault-lines in our ability to contain you.

Some of these are behavioural: like the fact that treatments are only effective if people are able to adhere to their medication regimens. Others are biological: like your ability to mutate. You are clearly a force to be reckoned with; and our rivalry, and with it the sibling rivalry between nature and nature, is set to continue…..

Yours, in defiance and admiration, Kavita

Wayfinding ants Towards a different view of intelligence Dr Antoine Wystrach works at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse

There is no doubt that insects are much smarter than we used to think. In the last few years, research has shown that some insects can count up to four, solve remarkably complex experimental tasks, form mental abstract concepts, use symbolic language, actively teach their knowledge to others, achieve metacognition to evaluate their uncertainty, and can learn things completely off their natural repertoire, such as bumblebees playing golf. The boundary between human and insect cognition is getting blurry, and given the rate of new such publications, there will probably be many more surprises to come before we reach the limit of their intelligence.

What is really surprising is that an insect brain is usually less than 1mm3 – we could fit their entire brain within a single voxel (3D pixel) of an fMRI image.

How can so much intelligence be packed into such a small piece of matter? Why does our own human brain needs to be so big? Questions such as these are pretty exciting, and got me into studying insects’ behaviour.

I started with carefully designed experiments with ants in the lab with a hope of discovering new and unexpected cognitive abilities. The paradigms I was using were mostly inspired by experimental psychology studies with vertebrates such as humans, other primates or rodents. The ants were usually doing well, matching and sometimes even outperforming the scores of vertebrates. However, these discoveries were not so unexpected after all, as each experiment was designed to reveal a given cognitive ability that I had chosen in the first place. At one point I realised that I was not looking for insect intelligence, but for human intelligence in insects.

This is when I decided to go to the field and see what these ants were really doing in their natural environment. I started in the Amazonian rainforest, and it took less than a day to realise that the questions I had been asking in the lab were off the mark. It was now obvious that these ants had evolved to cope with a specific problem – finding their way alone in the rainforest to bring food to their nest. And they were outstanding at it! Each individual ant spontaneously ventures from its nest alone, and can remember visually a 30m long route through the chaos of the forest’s floor… even if you displaced them, on the way back they had no problem returning to the tiny entrance of their nest, a 3mm hole somewhere in the midst of the clutter. This

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is an extremely complex spatial learning task, and what’s more, a single trial is enough for them to remember a route using vision! Put to human scale, this would be equivalent to learning a 3km long route in one go… in this kind of forest, 30m is enough to get most of us completely lost.

From then on, my scientific questions are drawn from such naturalistic observations, rather than purely human introspection. Instead of using a standardised paradigm to compare across species, I try to design experiments that are tuned to the animals’ specific natural tendencies. For instance, if you want to study spatial memory, use route following with ants, food caching with crows, and don’t forget olfaction with rodents. This approach has been paying off. First of all, the animals are much more cooperative and motivated, which usually results in clear-cut experimental outcomes. Also, ensuing discoveries can be truly unexpected, even counterintuitive, and thus very insightful. For instance, after quantifying how poorly sighted ants were, we discovered that parsing the world with such a low-resolution vision is actually better for navigating in natural environments. This may well explain why our human peripheral vision has a similarly low resolution, and why we, counterintuitively, do not need to recognise objects to follow well-known routes.

Insects are also good models for neurobiology.

These are particularly exciting times, as modern neurobiological tools enable us to observe and manipulate insects’ brains at the single-cell level. This allowed us for instance to understand how different neural pathways could compute and store the visual information necessary to recapitulate such a 30m-long route in a complex environment. Actually, by modelling an extremely simplified version of an ant brain, we showed that 10,000 neurons turn out to be enough to achieve this task. An insect brain contains up to 1 million neurons, each of which can make up to 100,000 connections with other neurons. There is still a long way before we fully understand insect intelligence, but the future is bright. Interestingly, the connectivity of some insects’ brain areas turns out to be surprisingly similar to vertebrates’ brain areas, and thus can provide very useful insights to help us understand the building blocks of our own intelligence.

My studies with insects in the field brought me some fresh air, a regular stream of novel questions, and a different view of intelligence – it is something that cannot be isolated in a lab, as it requires the many invisible links that tie an animal to its natural environment.

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A matter of pride Why are lions and the groups they live in a good focus of research for a social psychologist?

Dr Jackie Abell is a Reader in Psychology at Coventry University

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Hands up, who hasn’t been told to go to a conference to ‘network’ at some point in their academic career.

Getting yourself connected into influential social networks can pay dividends both professionally and personally.

In 2013 I took a leap, changed direction, and forged a research career as a social psychologist in lion conservation. Excited by an opportunity I’d been given in Zambia and Zimbabwe to do exactly that, I packed my bags. However, I was warned that there were obstacles to my acceptance amongst fellow lion conservationists. I had the wrong PhD. Mine was in psychology. Worse, it was in social psychology! I was urged to enrol for another PhD in wildlife conservation or something ‘biological’ to ingratiate myself into the influential network of movers and shakers within the lion conservation world. My social science background was irrelevant. How rude. How ironic.

Thankfully, wildlife conservation now focuses on working with local communities to develop initiatives that ensure those who live with the risks of protecting a species also receive benefits from doing so. Having unfenced lions living as your neighbour is not on most people’s wish-lists. We’re developing educational and social programmes that enhance local communities’ access to employment and sustainable income revenues, reducing the need to depend on natural resources to forge a living. These include conservation education, where feasible solutions to mitigating conflict with lions are developed and implemented, without loss to people and an increasingly diminishing lion population.

Here the application of psychology seems obvious.

But what about the lions themselves? Well, lions live in groups. Social psychologists know a thing or two about groups.

Social network analysis (SNA) has a long history within the social sciences. SNA defines a plethora of methods that share a basic premise: social connectedness with others matters. The more networked in you are, communicating with others, the better your access and influence over information. You can see why the social sciences have embraced SNA to explore relationships of communication and power across a variety of domains.

Within the field of animal behaviour, researchers such as Jens Krause have realised the utility of SNA to examine social cohesion and hierarchies amongst non-human animals. If we think of groups as powerful social networks, and assume the players within them are not equal, this might hold the key to understanding how some animal societies function – which might prove crucial for their effective conservation.

Lion prides describe adult females and their cubs.

Males can take over a pride and hold tenure for two to three years (sometimes longer), but will eventually be overthrown by fitter males seeking the opportunity to breed and enjoy the benefits of group living

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Fascinating fruit flies Can such a tiny brain be a good model for study of humans?

including cooperation in nurturing young, hunting and territorial defence. A lion’s chance of success in the wild is improved by pride living. So, to protect lions, we should focus on pride structure and function to maximise their chances.

Considering conservation Prides have tended to be taken for granted in the research literature. They exist. There has been little focus on how they exist, how they are sustained, and the roles of the lions within them. Andrew Sih and colleagues describe ‘keystone’ individuals in SNA; the ‘social glue’ of a group because of their tight connections with all others within the networks.

In its simplest form: Individuals A and B might not be friends with each other, but they are connected through a relationship they both have with C. That makes C key to holding the group together.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with lion prides and study their behaviour to examine their structure and function. Each pride has an adult female ‘keystone’ member who ‘glues’ the pride together.

She holds the most social connections, is the best networked individual, and the most socially influential.

She dictates the pride’s movements. Identifying and protecting these keystones is crucial if we are to maintain the integrity of wild prides. Removal of the keystone can lead to the break-up of the group if no other lion steps up to the plate. If we consider that key threats to lions include persecution and disease, keystones can be prime targets. Efforts to restore lions include the translocation of lions across areas, and the reintroduction of lions to the wild. These efforts must identify and understand the structure of prides to ensure crucial social networks are protected in that process.

As psychologists know, social networks matter.

Including psychology into wildlife conservation networks might prove key to protecting this diverse field.

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I have studied a wide variety of animals, some of them Professor I certainly do love. These Reuven Dukas include blue jays, honey bees, leads a lab bumble bees and wasps. within the I have to confess that fruit Animal flies do not generate, at least Behaviour in me, the same emotions.

Group in the I don’t know why, but research Department on emotion using fruit flies of Psychology, as a model system will likely Neuroscience help us understand why! Can and Behaviour one do research on emotion at McMaster in fruit flies? Yes, indeed one University in can fruitfully study almost Canada anything in fruit flies.

I certainly altered my attitude from indifference to admiration once I started to work with them. These small animals have only about 100,000 neurons in their tiny brains compared to our brains, which contain approximately 100 billion neurons. Yet fruit flies have sophisticated sensory systems, highly complex behaviours and fair learning and memory abilities. And they can even readily fly and land safely – a remarkably challenging activity.

Cerebrally, I am fascinated by fruit flies as well as by the numerous ingenious scientists who have studied them for over a century and developed a vast collection of research tools for examining all aspects of life. One piece of evidence for the remarkably successful use of fruit flies as a model system for biological research is the fact that they have helped earn their tireless researchers six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine.

A fact that surprises even me is that 87 per cent of human mental impairment genes have fruit fly equivalents! This makes fruit flies a powerful model system for psychological research and its biological foundations. This is not a remotely relevant ivory-tower statement.

Fruit flies have provided numerous insights into a variety of human basic psychological features and impairments including autism, ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease as well as other

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neurodegenerative disorders. While it takes time and money for such basic research to translate into human applications, there are many promising lines of such applied research. One example is basic research on fruit fly memory, that has led to the creation of a specialised drug company devoted to the discovery and development of innovative drugs for memory disorders.

I am not ready to suggest what fruit flies can tell us about being human, but expect to have a thorough answer in about ten years. We have been looking into perseverance, which we define as persistence in a course of action despite difficulty or with little or no indication of success. Thanks to some unknown cultural bias, we tend to overvalue intelligence, which has been extensively studied, and to undervalue perseverance. For example, saying that a colleague of mine is a hard worker may be perceived as an insult, implicitly implying he is not very smart. Because of this bias, we know too little about the biological foundations of perseverance. So now we are testing for genetic variation in perseverance and how it is related to individual performance. The next phase of this research will involve a search for the genes that mediate perseverance.

If you are still sceptical, I strongly recommend the highly readable book Time, Love, Memory by Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Weiner. In spite of the title, it is about fruit fly researchers and their fascinating work on key psychological features we all care about.

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Flipper isn’t what you think Dolphins can be quite different from the TV depiction

Professor Janet Mann is a researcher in the Department of Biology and Department of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC

I have been fortunate to observe dolphins close up for over three decades. It began with a trip in graduate school to a remote part of Australia and will continue until I can no longer manage it. We know them as individuals and have followed them from birth to death. Some of the dolphins are well into their 40s (no menopause), but their maximum lifespan is not known. Shark Bay, Australia, is an ideal place to study dolphins because the water is shallow and clear and protected from strong winds.

So we can see what the dolphins are doing and have devised a number of techniques to study them. My background was originally in primatology, and from my first field season, I could see the potential of studying a mind in the waters.

Let us get a few things out of the way first. Flipper, the star of the American TV show which aired from 1964 to 1967, was played by five different female bottlenose dolphins. The image of a male dolphin protecting the marine preserve and saving humans from their foibles persists today. The US Navy has trained dolphins to protect harbours and ships and to retrieve equipment. And, there is the occasional intriguing story about dolphins saving humans.

Female dolphins, but not males, are known to push a struggling calf or human to the surface, and I have witnessed females jointly mobbing immense sharks.

The sound that Flipper supposedly made was modified from a kookaburra – an Australian bird, a bird also used for Tarzan soundtracks. And the mouth agape one sees so often amongst captive dolphins, including Flipper, is a begging gesture. It means: ‘give me a fish!’ Dolphins do not open their mouths to make sounds. Dolphin sounds are produced in nasal sacs and come out through the melon, the fatty organ in the head. No moving mouth parts required. Perhaps this is why I never liked the show.

Social complexity While female dolphins are fairly gentle and maybe kind, it turns out that male dolphins are not. In fact, they can be quite aggressive, and in Shark Bay they form long-term alliances or small gangs, ranging in size from two to 14 males. Alliances cooperate to challenge other male alliances and they even cooperate with other alliances to defeat a third. All of this is with the goal of achieving mating access to individual females.

That is, males fight to gain access to a fertile female, but they also use their power to coerce the female into staying with them. That does not mean that males can force a female to mate. We commonly see females twist and turn belly-up so that the males cannot easily mate with them. While the mating antics might not seem familiar to humans, allied sexual coercion has been

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Getty Images

“These are the hallmarks of a complex mammal with a far more interesting social life than anything Flipper dared to show”

documented in three species – humans, chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins – even though their mating systems are strikingly different. While sexual conflict is widespread in the animal kingdom, alliances are not, and this elaborate and long-term cooperative relationship is considered one hallmark of social intelligence.

Relative to males, it is females who are the most skilled and diverse hunters. They use a variety of tactics, from tool-use with sponges, to strand-foraging where the female hydroplanes in shallow water and launches her body onto the shore to trap prey. Spongetool-use in Shark Bay is famous; about 5 per cent of the population uses basket marine sponges they have dislodged from the seafloor, wear them on their beak and use them to find bottom-dwelling camouflaged prey. Among the many smart things dolphins do, one intelligent aspect of this is that the fish they exploit do not have swim bladders and are thus ‘inaudible’ via echolocation. The sponge allows the dolphins to protect their beak while searching the seafloor for virtually invisible and inaudible prey. This and many other tactics are female-biased and learned almost exclusively from the mother. We have also shown that spongers – as we call them – prefer to associate with one another, while controlling for geo-spatial overlap and genetic relatedness, even though sponging is a solitary enterprise. This preference based on tool-use suggests a sponge-culture as the behaviour is socially learned and differentiates between groups.

Bottlenose dolphins have challenged our views of their intelligence, but not in the ways the show Flipper might suggest. Their social complexity is impressive – and to explain this, and how it compares with humans, we must consider what social complexity is. Most

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characterise socially complex mammalian societies as having well-differentiated, long-term bonds, large numbers of associates to keep track of, and fissionfusion dynamics. The latter term refers to spatiotemporal dynamics of association. Humans have high fission-fusion dynamics in that the entire community is rarely or never in one place. Groups change membership constantly, although there are regular companions (in humans: spouse-partner-kin-friendsco-workers). In dolphins the average group size is four to six dolphins, but many spend half their time alone and groups can be larger than 50. Group composition changes nearly six times per hour on average. Among the hundreds of dolphins we study, each individual has a network of 100+ associates that they regularly interact with. Captive studies have shown individualrecognition that lasts at least 20 years, even without contact, and this resonates with our field observations.

Dolphins have well-differentiated relationships with many individuals, but they also seem to understand the nature of the bonds between others. Male and female dolphins have close, long-term same-sex bonds, lasting decades, but the nature of these bonds differs. Understanding who is with whom and why is compelling area of research.

The parallels between humans and bottlenose dolphins are striking despite a common ancestry that is ~90 million years distant. Individual recognition, long-term bonds, multi-level alliances, prolonged dependency and extended learning, cultural transmission and intricate social networks based on elaborate patterns of fission and fusion. These are the hallmarks of a complex mammal with a far more interesting social life than anything Flipper dared to show.

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Melissa and me The interesting and unusual effects of lemon balm on mood and cognition I first encountered Melissa during a series of studies evaluating the potential mood and cognitive-enhancing effects of botanical extracts with my then PhD student David Kennedy. This included a series of studies that followed a fairly standard, though pretty intense, methodology aimed at capturing any acute mood or cognitive effects of botanicals. In these studies, participants visited the lab on five test days where they received a placebo or one of several doses of a plant extract.

Aspects of participants’ mood and cognitive function were tested at baseline then at five timepoints over the course of the day. So these studies were straightforward but required a huge amount of time to conduct and analyse. In many cases this was the first time the behavioural effects of the herbs had been scrutinised to this extent – despite claims in adverts and websites. Thus they paved the way for future studies in the field. One striking aspect was that in some (but not all) cases, the effects were in keeping with their traditional use.

One such example was Melissa officinalis, more commonly known as lemon balm.

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Professor Andrew Scholey is Director of the Centre for Human Psychopharmacology at Swinburne University, Melbourne Twitter: @scholey

Melissa has a long history as a medicinal plant.

Various historical textbooks have referred to its mood-altering and pro-cognitive properties. For example, in the 17th century in his Complete Herbal Nicholas Culpeper wrote that lemon balm ‘cheers the heart, refreshes the mind, takes away griefs, sorrow, and care, instead of which it produces joy and mirth’. We didn’t have a scale that measured the mood dimension ranging from ‘grief-sorry-care’ to ‘joy-mirth’! But we did have the Bond–Lader visual analogue mood scales, which have been widely used in psychopharmacology for decades. These produce ratings of calmness, contentment and alertness.

Our studies showed that Melissa fairly consistently improved self-rated ‘calmness’ as well as producing certain changes to cognitive performance.

Although the initial studies had been fascinating, we were both interested in moving beyond plugging different herbs into the same system. By lucky coincidence Elaine Perry was working in Newcastle at the MRC Neurochemistry Unit at the same time.

Elaine also had a longstanding interest in medicinal herbs for the brain, and owned a physic garden in Northumberland. She was something of an inspiration to me and the group. She also had access to human brain tissue and introduced us to George Wake, who performed binding assays from various extracts of Melissa, in particular looking at their capacity to bind receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is depleted in Alzheimer’s disease.

David then tested the extracts with the strongest and weakest binding using our model system for assessing mood and cognition. As with previous studies, both extracts improved self-rated calmness.

However, only the extract that bound most strongly to the two cholinergic receptors also enhanced

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memory. This suggested that the cholinergic binding properties of the herb are responsible for Melissa’s memory enhancement, whereas some other physiological property is responsible for its calming effects.

This mood improvement occurred when volunteers simply visited the lab and did very little other than standardised cognitive tests. I was also interested in whether Melissa would help to buffer against stress. I’d met Mark Wetherell a few times at the excellent BPS Psychobiology Section annual conference. He had developed an elegant laboratory stressor – the Purple multi-tasking framework (MTF), which involves simultaneously co-performing four tasks (e.g. mental arithmetic, Stroop, working memory and psychomotor tracking). Performing the MTF for 20 minutes reliably induces a mild negative mood state. I designed a study with a dissertation student, Wendy Little, where volunteers underwent the MTF after taking 300 mg, 600 mg of Melissa or a placebo capsule. Following placebo the MTF produced the typical mood profile of reducing selfrated ‘calmness’. This effect was not seen in those who had taken a 300 mg dose of Melissa extract suggesting that this does was capable of ‘buffering’ the stressful effects of completing the MTF. Many of the plant extracts that myself and colleagues have worked with over the years taste disgusting. One advantage of Melissa is that it is quite palatable, meaning that it can be added to foods at doses that may produce benefits to mood and cognition. We verified this in a couple of studies into the effects of three doses of Melissa delivered in a drink and in a yoghurt. When delivered in a drink,

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one dose of Melissa reduced the anxiety associated with performing the MTF at one and three hours (although a different dose increased it). The beneficial dose also improved working memory and reduced cortisol responses to the MTF. There were also benefits to different measures when Melissa was presented in a yoghurt, but in this case there were also increases in fatigue.

Further work from Elaine Perry demonstrated that lemon balm applied topically in an essential oil reduced agitation in Alzheimer’s disease patients.

We know from work from Mark Moss, another of my former PhD students, that some of the actives in such oils are detectable in plasma following exposure, with plasma levels correlating with cognitive performance.

There’s a long way to go, but these disparate lines of evidence suggest that some part of Melissa may be used to improve mood and cognition during ageing and cognitive decline. This is something I think about whenever I see and smell the small, nettle-like leaves of this plant which grows like a weed in many places.

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Thinking, smelling and saving elephants Comparative cognition and conservation with a beloved pachyderm The question animal cognition researchers are often asked is, ‘When did you first realise you were going to dedicate your life to [insert species here]?’ It’s true that many of us do feel a deep passion for the animals we study, but what drives most scientists are the empirical questions that a certain study species lets us ask about behaviour, cognition and the evolution of both.

I wish I could say that I first ‘fell in love with elephants’ when I visited the Bronx Zoo in New York as a 12-year-old middle school student; back then, I had wanted to be a veterinarian. But instead, it happened sometime in July 2005, when I was a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta. While sitting on the elephant barn roof on a blazing hot day at that same zoo during a summer in NYC, Diana Reiss (now a colleague of mine at Hunter College but then a researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Society) and I sat, holding our collective breaths, watching as Maxine, Patty and Happy (all Asian elephants) stared at themselves in an oversized, acrylic mirror. As a graduate student in the lab of primatologist Frans de Waal, I was excited about research questions focused on understanding the evolution of human behaviour and intelligence that used our closest living relatives, the great apes, as living models. But when Professor de Waal offered me a chance to study the mind of elephants (by looking at their ability to recognise themselves in a mirror), I jumped at the chance.

While watching the elephants from that rooftop, we observed them stick their trunks inside their mouths and pull on their ears, and eventually, in a hallmark test of self-awareness, one of them, Happy, reached up and touched a white X we had painted on her forehead. I realised at the time that we had stumbled onto something really exciting. Elephants, as demonstrated by the mirror test, were self-aware.

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But I also saw that a relatively new area of research, the study of convergent cognitive evolution (CCE), might have a place for elephants as well. CCE suggests that although the similar cognitive abilities we see between the great apes (humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans), are likely due to our shared common ancestry, similarities we see between the same species and dolphins, corvids (the bird family that includes crows and ravens), and elephants are likely due to something else entirely. The study of CCE is exciting because it suggests that intelligence may evolve independently in evolutionarily distant species because of similar pressures these animals face in their physical and social worlds. Thus, one reason elephants and humans may, for example, share the capacity for close, cooperative bonds with family members is that working together with others (and being able to think through the problems you face with them) may have helped these quite different species survive in difficult environments.

For more than a decade I have been studying the cognition of elephants in Thailand. Although years of observational research on elephants in Africa and Asia has shown us that elephants live complex lives in difficult “To best understand how environments, only recently have scientists begun to conduct elephants think, we need controlled experiments on to try to design cognitive elephant cognition in ‘field laboratories’ (think plastic experiments that play to buckets, local artisan-built their sensory strengths… apparatuses and portioned what does it mean to food rewards rather than multimillion dollar lab spaces on know the world through campus). With students and one’s trunk?” a dedicated research team, I’ve investigated cooperation (elephants work together to pull opposite ends of a rope attached to a table in order to gain access to food), consolation (they reassure friends and family in distress by gently touching them and showing similar emotions), human/elephant social dynamics (elephants respond to some but not all human-provided social cues), and, most recently, the use of olfaction in complex cognition (the elephants’ sense of smell seems to be crucially important to them when finding food and solving problems).

One crucial problem the field of comparative cognition faces, in my opinion, is how best to compare the evolution of intelligence in animals that may exhibit similarities in capacity but not in perspective.

In other words, animals that primarily ‘see’ their world through their noses or their ears should not necessarily be expected to do well on problem-solving tasks designed by scientists with visual animals in mind. This means that in order to best understand how

Dr Joshua Plotnik is an assistant professor of psychology in the animal behaviour and conservation program at Hunter College, City University of New York

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The curious, cooperative kea Intelligence in this alpine parrot As an undergraduate I saw Betty the New Caledonian crow Dr Alexander astound the Biology Department Harwood at the University of Oxford by Taylor bending a wire into a hook to is a Researcher pull a bucket out of a tube. This and Senior sparked my fascination with bird Lecturer at intelligence. After over 10 years the University studying the intelligence of New of Auckland in Caledonian crows I’ve recently New Zealand also started focusing on kea, the only species of alpine parrot in the world, which is native to New Zealand.

We work with a population of kea It’s hard to spend five minutes with a kea at Willowbank Nature Reserve near without being curious about what goes Christchurch in New Zealand, providing on between their ears – their levels of physical and mental enrichment for this sociality and play are quite astounding, group, while also gaining insight into as is their love of new objects. how they think. Going into the enclosure

elephants, dolphins and crows think, for instance, we need to try to design cognitive experiments that play to their sensory strengths. For elephants, this isn’t easy; they have a large olfactory bulb in their brain and a multitasking, olfactory and tactile trunk that contains tens of thousands of muscles. How are we as humans to guess what it means to know one’s world through one’s trunk?! We have to enter their physical and social worlds, to look at how they problem solve using their senses of smell and hearing. We hope that this will open up our understanding of how elephants make decisions in the wild, and how their cognitive complexity compares to our own. We are looking at capacities like quantity understanding, distance judgement, and problem-solving, and can’t wait to report what we find.

However, as a scientist studying an endangered species, I also feel that it is critically important for my research to have some impact on elephant conservation. In addition to running education programs for children in the US and Thailand where my colleagues and I bring elephants into classrooms via Skype to encourage critical thinking in middle school-aged students (www.thinkelephants.org), I am also conducting research aimed at investigating how elephant behaviour and cognition can inform

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the kea act so differently from the other bird species I have worked with. They are so, so curious and playful towards the objects around them, including you. They are keen to nibble your shoelaces if you let them and will have whisked away your

human/elephant conflict. In Southeast Asia, the main conservation issues facing elephants involve habitat loss and human encroachment on national park lands.

This means that humans and elephants are competing for the same space and resources, which inevitably leads to conflict between the species. Although conflict mitigation is of tremendous interest to conservation organisations, strategies such as fencing, chemical deterrents, and translocating elephants often have limited rather than long-term efficacy. Our research will aim to identify how elephants decide to raid farmers’ crops, what makes a crop-raiding elephant take risks, and how the study of these choices can help prevent conflict before it begins. It’s an ambitious endeavour, I’ll admit, but super exciting too. The application of animal cognition to endangered species conservation is a new and quickly evolving field, and I am thrilled to try to be a part of it moving forward.

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work into moving the log, or simply perched pen before you know it. As soon as they on the log and let them do all the hard work? get tired of that, they often go straight As humans we understand how cooperation back to playing with each other or other works: we know when we need a helping objects in their habitat. There is a stream hand and when we don’t. We also have a running through the aviary with some logs sense of fairness, termed in it and, apropos inequity aversion in the of nothing, they will scientific literature: we often team up to “they would wait for the track whether we get fair rock the logs from partner to arrive… so reward for our efforts side to side, causing Kea seem to understand compared to others the water to splash. around us, and get upset In general they give aspects of cooperation: are treated unfairly. the impression that they know when they need if weWhile we did not they’re having a help, and when they don’t” find evidence of inequity fantastic time! aversion in the kea, the Behaviours like results from our studies the log splashing on kea cooperation were really exciting. inspired my former PhD student Megan We gave the kea the cooperative pulling Heaney to run a series of experiments paradigm, which consists of food on a board focused on the social cognition of the with a rope running around it held on by kea. We were particularly interested in hooks. If an animal pulls one end the rope if the kea understood anything about will unwind through the hooks and come cooperation. Did they realise they needed out. If it pulls both ends of the rope it will two kea to move heavier logs? Did they move the board towards the puller. Animals pay attention to whether another kea put

start off by learning to pull both bits of rope towards them to get the food. As test we put the two rope ends far and allow two animals to approach at the same time.

We then observe if they pull the ends of the rope together to bring the platform within reach and get the food. We found the kea we tested spontaneously cooperated by pulling the two rope ends together so we ran more tests to try to understand what they understood about cooperation.

How long can a kea wait?

The next stage of testing was to see how well the kea could learn to wait for another partner: could they learn to wait for a helping hand? We began by releasing one kea first and then releasing a second kea a few seconds after and then gradually increased the release time for the second kea, as Josh Plotink did in a recent study on elephants. Josh showed that after training elephants were able to wait for longer periods than those they had been trained

Dear Parasites A married psychologist-and-parasitologist team write Stefanie K. Johnson and Pieter T.J. Johnson are at the University of Colorado Boulder

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Thank you for letting us live in your world. Just as people once believed that the sun revolved around the earth, we have for too long believed that humans are the centre of the world and parasites were a nuisance to be inexorably conquered through medical advances.

But viruses, bacteria, protozoa, parasitic fungi, parasitic arthropods and parasitic worms (i.e. ‘parasites’) comprise more than 40 per cent of all described species and have irrefutable effects on populations, communities,and ecosystems. While we tend to worry about big predators such as sharks and lions, it is parasites that represent the pinnacle of the food chain (some parasites even infect other parasites!).

We often focus on the role of predators in driving change. But how might have parasites affected human evolution, including our powerful immune systems or even our tendency to live in social groups? Some of our most basic human behaviours, like disgust, have been theorised (by Valerie Curtis and others) to be an adaptation to avoid parasite infection.

Now, I know you have gotten a bad rap for things like castrating your hosts, changing males into females,

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the psychologist october 2018 tree of life

with. The elephants in that study were tested up to a wait period of 45 seconds, so we went one further with the kea and examined how they did when having to wait for a partner for up to 65 seconds. They were able to wait that long, which is really impressive, as it suggests these parrots have excellent self-control. We also found they would only wait for a helping hand when they needed to. If we gave them a platform with the two rope ends close together they would pull them immediately rather than waiting for a partner, but as soon as the rope ends were far apart they would wait for the partner to arrive. So kea seem to understand aspects of cooperation: they know when they need help, and when they don’t.

We also got a very interesting result from one bird, Neo, who’s a bit of a superstar for us. In this final stage of our study we used a paradigm previously tested on chimps and children. Subjects had the choice of working alone or with another. We asked the same of kea: did they want to work together and pull a rope cooperatively with another bird or

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did they prefer to work alone? Past work had shown that while chimps show no preference between those choices, children strongly prefer to work with another child. This has led to the suggestion that one of the key difference between human sociality and that of other animals is that humans have a unique pro-social motivation to work together even if they don’t benefit materially from it. But Neo showed the same preference as children, he preferred to work with other kea. So Neo’s behaviour really brings that recent claim into question.

A key part of our work with the kea is focused on understanding their cognition so we can help in their conservation. Kea were recently reclassified as endangered as there are only 5000 to 6000 left in the wild. They face some big issues including invasive predators and lead poisoning. We’ve been talking to the Department of Conservation here in New Zealand and are going to run some studies looking at the basics of how kea learn and smell to inform conservation efforts. Fingers crossed we can help save this amazing parrot!

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and killing more than a million humans each year (mostly through malaria). Your shocking ability to augment host behaviour – from fungus-infected ‘zombie’ ants to worm-infected crickets manipulated to go for a fatal swim – can make you seem like real monsters in the animal kingdom.

But what of parasites’ impact on human behaviour?

We have to look no further than the rabies virus that increases human aggression, or the influenza virus that increases sociability, to realise that our minds and bodies can also be controlled by parasites.

In our recent study, we examined the effect of a widely distributed parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which infects over a billion people worldwide. Building upon previous research linking infection to increases in negative outcomes (schizophrenia, suicide, road rage and car accidents), we explored the parasite’s influence on the human entrepreneurial spirit. At local (students, entrepreneurs) and global (across countries) levels, we found a positive link between infection and entrepreneurship. The data, although correlational, suggest that T. gondii is negatively related to a fear of failure for entrepreneurs, and therefore, an increase in the likelihood of starting a business. Whether the businesses started by infected individuals thrive or fail is yet unclear.

This potential benefit of a parasite sounds surprising at first. But other data also show that exposure to parasites can reduce allergies and autoimmune diseases through the hygiene hypothesis.

The long-term effects of parasites on the human brain, a field we call parasite-psychobiology, has potentially far-reaching implications for our understanding of human behaviour.

Whether you love them, or hate them, one thing is clear – we shouldn’t underestimate parasites. We have long considered parasites as passengers (or perhaps hitchhikers) on our evolutionary journey, but sometimes you have to wonder… who is really steering this bus?

Innovation in chimps Competition, innovation and more Dr Lydia M. Hopper is Assistant Director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago

Like humans, chimpanzees live in large dynamic societies, which are regulated by social norms and local cultures that may promote or inhibit innovation.

Chimpanzee groups are composed of individuals who are each unique in terms of their personality and social standing. These individual characteristics also relate to their proclivity to innovate and their tendency to adopt the innovations of others. While innovation is often considered at the level of the individual – the genius innovator – it is equally important to understand the social world the innovator inhabits.

Consider, for example, a study that we ran recently with a group of chimpanzees housed at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago where I work. In each test session we gave the chimpanzees 150 plastic tokens that they could exchange with two researchers for food rewards.

We wanted to see whether the chimpanzees would be willing to take tokens to the researcher who stood further away in order to gain a more-preferred reward, and whether they could respond flexibly when we changed what foods were available where. We didn’t train the chimpanzees how to exchange tokens, nor did we teach them about the relative value of the food rewards available at each location.

A male chimpanzee, Optimus Prime, was the first to exchange a token for a food reward and he did so with the closest researcher, gaining a piece of carrot.

The majority of his group quickly learned his new skill, exchanging their tokens for the readily accessible, but not-so-desirable, carrot pieces. Competition ensued as the chimpanzees all tried to exchange tokens. This competition was felt most keenly by the youngest, and most low-ranking, member of the group: Chuckie.

In response to the competition, Chuckie innovated.

She was the first in her group to discover that if she

Comparing chimpanzee and bonobo behaviour A conversation between Kirsty Graham and Catherine Hobaiter

Dr Kirsty Graham is a Research Associate at the University of York’s Department of Psychology Dr Catherine Hobaiter is a researcher at the University of St Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience

KG: We’re both primatologists, but I study bonobos and you study chimpanzees. I’ve always thought I’d much rather be a female bonobo than a female chimp, or a male chimp for that matter! Bonobo females have it pretty good – they eat first, decide when to travel, back each other up in a fight against males. Of course, there’s a bit of variation depending on their place in the

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carried her token a little further, she could get a better reward (a grape) for each token she exchanged. And she was the first to do so again in a later phase of the study when we moved the exchange locations. In contrast to teenager Chuckie’s innovative nature, was the behaviour of the dominant male, Hank. Perhaps less in need of additional food given his rank, or his lack of interest in observing the behaviour of lowerranking members of his troop, Hank only exchanged his first token after we had been running the study for a about year! Thus, although this trading behaviour was ultimately adopted by all group members, there was individual variation regarding how and when the chimpanzees exhibited this behaviour.

When we later replicated the study with our family group of gorillas, we saw again individual differences, but also stark species differences. Unlike chimpanzees, which are willing to share personal space allowing others to observe their behaviour, gorillas are less gregarious. Of the six gorillas we tested only two ever exchanged tokens, and the vast majority of exchanges were made by the silverback Kwan, whose dominance allowed him to guard access to the tokens.

The behaviour of the chimpanzees reflects that reported for wild chimpanzees: those most likely

hierarchy but female bonobos seem to generally be much more sociable and central. What’s your impression from the chimp side?

CH: You’re right, bonobos have life pretty well worked out! Especially the girls. Mature male chimpanzees outrank everyone else in the social hierarchy, and they can be extremely aggressive, including killing individuals in their own group. So there is a perception that female chimpanzees have less agency in what goes on in their own or the community’s day-to-day life. But that’s definitely not the complete picture.

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to innovate are typically males and/or young and low-ranking individuals. As someone who has had the fortune of studying primate behaviour for my career, this individual (and species) variation was not surprising. Each primate has their own personality. Indeed, my own research has revealed that chimpanzees rated highly on personality traits related to curiosity, exploration and persistence are more dogged in their efforts to solve novel puzzles. While this is theoretically interesting, it is also what brings most joy to me in my job. Through the relationships I build with the primates I study, I learn their unique personalities, preferences, and skills. Each animal is different, and this keeps me on my toes as a researcher designing tasks to study their cognition.

I have always been curious about what animals are thinking. As a young child I wanted insights into what my pets felt and thought. In school I studied Psychology A-level and almost right away I realised that this was the subject for me! Later, at Liverpool University, and determined to study primate behaviour as part of my Psychology and Zoology combined honours degree, I reached out to Chester Zoo to see if I could observe their orangutans for my final-year project. At the zoo I studied mother–infant interactions in Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, under the supervision of developmental psychologist Caroline Rowland. I realised my passion for research as well as my specific interest in comparative psychology.

In my role now I oversee cognitive and behavioural research with the chimpanzees, gorillas and Japanese macaques at Lincoln Park Zoo, again providing me with a comparative perspective – when and how individuals innovate or use social information and how species differ in their use of social information. I use touchscreens and eye-tracking devices in addition to manual tasks to answer my research questions. Being at a zoo also offers the relative unique opportunity to run studies in view of visitors – to share not just what we learn, but how we study primate cognition.

Females regularly rebuff the sexual attentions of males – from giving little more than side eye to the teenagers trying out their first gestural ‘pick up lines’ to chasing a high rank male down a trail with his (proverbial!) tail tucked between his legs. Some is more subtle manipulation: chimpanzees ‘exaggerate’ the aggression they’re experiencing depending on who might overhear their screams, and they seem to avoid using signals that reveal their identity when there might be eavesdroppers nearby.

KG: Yes! What I really love about comparative work is getting to work

closely with two or more species and seeing where the variation is. Bonobos and chimpanzees both get painted with broad brushes, and it’s so satisfying to pick apart what the similarities and differences really are and where they’re coming from. Take gestures, for example (of course that’s what two gesture researchers would say!). Bonobos and chimpanzees share about 90 per cent of gestures and many of the gestures share the same meanings. But if you listen to a bonobo call and a chimp call they sound really different. It’s kind of odd.

If we were expecting any differences in gestures too, where might we find them?

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The magnificent, deft gorilla Looking for shared characteristics Richard W. Byrne is Emeritus Professor at the University of St Andrews

Hard going keeping up with the tracker over unstable soggy vegetation; ancient moss-covered trees, red bark, silent; sounds of crashing about, and a pok-pokpok-pok-pok sounding more like a woodpecker than a chest-beat. Then, quite suddenly, there are mountain gorillas all around, the adults largely ignoring us, the youngsters nervously curious of new faces. It ought to feel a bit frightening, but it doesn’t.

This experience is shared now by hundreds of ‘gorilla tourists’, part of the conservation effort to save the species by giving Rwandan gorillas economic value. But in 1984 it was a rare privilege, granted to my wife Jen and me by Dian Fossey because we had been

CH: I know! We recently did an analysis where we explored if the overlap in the gestural repertoires existed only because all apes have a similar body plan and use all possible movement + limb combinations.

But we found that chimpanzees use a tiny fraction of the potential gestures available to them – just 12 per cent, which makes the almost perfect overlap with bonobos’ gestures even more striking. There’s so much space for more variety – but they either can’t or don’t need to exploit it for communication. But if we’re looking for differences we might learn something by looking at human speech. Different languages and dialects are incredibly varied

and diverse, but they’re based on the use of a universal shared set of phonemes. These are then recombined, or expressed in very different ways, to produce languages as different as Japanese and French.

Something that I think we’re still coming to terms with as ape researchers is the massive variation within the species we study. There’s no such thing as a ‘chimpanzee typical’ strategy towards even important social behaviour like negotiating rank or sex.

Subspecies, communities, generations, and individuals all differ. You can take one chimpanzee and bonobo group and they’ll look very different – a species

difference? But switch out the chimpanzee group for a different one and suddenly they’re much more similar. I know chimpanzee populations are larger and occupy more varied habitats right across east to west Africa, but do you think we’ll see similar group differences in bonobos as more and more are studied?

KG: Yeah, inter-group differences for bonobos is a definite possibility. I worked with two neighbouring groups of bonobos who encounter somewhat regularly, and females immigrate between groups, so you might expect that their gesture repertoires would be similar. It would be incredible

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researching chimpanzees in nearby Tanzania.

A few years later, she had been murdered, and Jen and I were back at her study site, Karisoke, this time with a research project to tackle.

Great fun, no doubt, but why on earth should a psychologist be interested in gorilla behaviour: surely, we know plenty about chimpanzees already, and they’re closer relatives to humans anyway? That is a common reaction, but it misses the point of how comparative evidence should be used to understand the evolutionary history of our species. Neither chimpanzees, gorillas nor any other animal is a ‘living fossil’ of a human ancestor, unchanged since their lineage diverged from ours. The idea that comparative psychology can reconstruct the human evolutionary path by studying only chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, rats and pigeons is just misled: no species evolved to be a convenient ‘model’ of any stage in human evolution.

What we need to do is look for shared characteristics of species within a group sharing a common ancestor (a clade, technically), since the most likely reason for characteristics to be shared is that they were inherited from the common ancestor. The characteristics can as easily be cognitive abilities as bone structure, the same logic applies. Thus, if chimpanzees, bonobos and ourselves share some ability, likely we gained it from the last common ancestor all three share (the LCA_chimpanzee – that is, the last common ancestor that we humans share with the living chimpanzee and bonobo; the ‘LCA_bonobo’ is the same), because those three species form a clade. However, that doesn’t tell us where the ability arose: maybe the LCA_chimp inherited it from their ancestors – in other words,

to compare the gesture repertoire from Wamba with that at LuiKotale. These are currently the two best established field sites for bonobo research, and are the best candidates for comparison. But Kokolopori is another site where the bonobos are becoming better habituated too, so there might be opportunities for a large-scale group comparison.

Bonobos actually have a fair bit of habitat variation, from those living in deep primary forests; to those who live closer to human communities that experience more secondary forest; to those living in forest-savannah mosaic habitats. We are just starting to learn

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about the behaviour of bonobos in savannah mosaic habitats near Malebo and Lac Tumba. For gesture research, it could be particularly interesting to ask whether in more open savannah habitat where visibility is better they use different gestures than in forests of varying density. These large-scale comparisons require so much long-term data from so many places that it’s impossible for you and me to collect everything – that’s why international collaboration is so important to scientific research!

habitat – could definitely have big implications for their communication.

All vocalisations are audible, but gesture gives you the option to select signals that share information in different or multiple modalities (hearing, sight, touch). So many fun questions still to explore! I love that new technology is allowing researchers from sites around the world to work together and solve these really big puzzles (and it’s a good excuse to spend more time than I should on Twitter). Bye for now! [pant hoooots]

CH: Awesome! I didn’t realise that there were also bonobos with some savannah

KG: Bye from me too! [branch drag into the distance]

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The social dog How have we shaped them, and them us? perhaps the ability is more primitive. To find out, you need equally good data from the next closest relatives: in the case of the human/chimpanzee clade, that’s the gorilla. Suppose the gorilla does show the same ability, that means it had evolved by the time of the LCA_ gorilla; and to find out if that’s when the ability arose, we again need to fan out to slightly less closely related species – in this case, to orangutans. Chimpanzees have indeed been very well studied, in the lab since early in the 20th century, with the work of Köhler and Yerkes, and in the field since the 1950s, with the work of Jane Goodall and others. Gorillas, on the other hand, are relatively neglected, and since their data is just as important to evolutionary reconstruction of humans, their study is more urgent.

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Scientifically important and great fun I was surprised at my own first reactions to gorilla behaviour. At that time, it was generally understood that the gorilla was the chimpanzee’s slow-witted cousin, magnificent but dull. Coming from months in daily contact with wild chimpanzees, I was instead struck by how similar they seemed in most ways. Over the few weeks we spent with them in 1984, we were treated to a series of conflicts between groups, between lone males and breeding groups, and within the large groups themselves: some violence, but also skilled manoeuvring, team-work, and tactical deception.

Gorillas were evidently socially sophisticated, so perhaps it is in the sensorimotor domain that they lag? Certainly, there was no sign of the elaborate and refined tool-making already known from many chimpanzee field-sites. Yet, when I watched the gorillas eating their plant foods, it was not the ‘grab and shovel in’ approach that most sources at that time described: gorilla eating looked deft and clever.

That observation led to our later study, in which we showed that the plant-processing was exquisitely devised to overcome physical problems of the nutritious plants – like stings, spines and inedible hard casing. Each plant’s technique was a sequentially ordered, multi-stage program in which the two hands often took different roles, coordinated together to achieve single results, and in which several successive operations in the overall process could be iterated as a ‘subroutine’ to build up a decent-sized handful, something which relies on the gorilla motor skill to control parts of a hand independently. Moreover, these techniques were found throughout the local population, yet they would be useless elsewhere in Africa since each was specific to a plant that only occurred in the tiny area of the Virunga Volcanoes.

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Dr Juliane Kaminski is Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth

When I was an undergraduate student I had a dog, Ambula. Ambula had a habit, which many dog owners are very familiar with. He was a very well-behaved dog but would steal food, the second I turned my back. I was always very interested in how animals make sense of the world they live in, especially their social world. I am particularly interested in the question of what animals understand about others, others’ beliefs, desires, knowledge states and to what extend their understanding of others is similar or different to that of humans. Ambula’s behaviour annoyed me as a dog owner but fascinated me as a scientist. Could it be possible that he really understood anything about another individual’s visual perspective? That he understood that because I turned my back I could not see? Or had he just learnt a simple rule, seeing the human’s eyes as some sort of aversive stimulus that if not visible meant he could do whatever he wanted.

We showed that, like chimpanzees, gorillas can build up remarkable technical skills, from a combination of individual and social learning, to tackle challenges presented by feeding; the only difference is that one species sometimes uses tools, the other never does. This puts a very different complexion on the best reconstruction of how humans developed the sensorimotor planning abilities on which so much of our culture depends: a quantal jump at the LCA_chimp stage, restricted to the context of tool use, is certainly not what happened! We need to look much earlier in the human lineage, at least back to the time of the LCA_gorilla, maybe earlier.

So, gorilla research is scientifically important – yet it must be admitted that it is also, er, great fun. Every night when comparing notes with other researchers over a shared meal, the topic of conversation was usually the soap-opera of gorilla lives: ‘You wouldn’t believe what Ziz did today! That wee cutie Umarava is getting too big for his boots, he’ll be in big trouble soon. Effie and her daughters are terrible bullies, the new female in group five is having a terrible time.’

Beats The Archers any day. And working every day with huge apes who look you in the eye, completely trusting – except when they think you might want to eat the same thistle – is a huge privilege. The mountain gorilla is the only ape species that is not currently in serious or catastrophic decline, thanks to the efforts that Dian Fossey originally set in motion to protect them. But their state remains fragile, and I can only hope that their few refuges remain safe havens for ever.

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er 2018 In an experimentally controlled study we showed that indeed, even under these conditions, dogs very much distinguish between a human looking at them with their eyes open and a human not looking with their eyes closed. Dogs stole forbidden food when the humans eyes were open but significantly more when the humans eyes were closed. We also showed that human attention mattered for dogs during other communicative interactions. For example, dogs produce more facial movements when a human is looking compared to a situation during which the humans back was turned to the dog. Interestingly, presenting food to the dogs did not have the same effect, indicating that it is not sheer arousal that makes the dogs move their face, but facial movements might be a communicative signal that dogs produce more when someone is looking. I would not say that we have guide to…

Sponsore d by… a conclusive answer to the question to what extent dogs understand seeing in others… this question, p e ts Written by among others, will most likely keep me busy for quite Ella Rhod es, Journa list, The Ps ychologis some time in my scientific career. t Ambula had other habits that caught my (scientific) attention. He would fascinates me so much. What come when I called him. He would fascinates me is that during that look at me when I called his name.

“Dogs seem to have time dogs seem to have adapted He would pay particular attention adapted to their unique to their unique environment when my voice was high-pitched while calling him. When I threw environment in ways that (the human environment) in ways that cannot be found in any the ball for him and he did not see cannot be found in any other animal, including other where it had ended up, I would other animal, including domesticated animals. Dogs use show him by pointing towards and follow human communication it and he would easily follow my other domesticated in ways other animal species do gesture. As a dog owner, I thought animals” not. Dogs follow human gestures, that’s just what well-trained dogs like pointing, and do so more do; as a comparative psychologist, successfully than any other I was excited as I was observing the animal: including humans’ closest living relative, reason why dogs are such a highly interesting model the chimpanzee. And this is not the result of mere species for comparative psychology. So interesting that learning during ontogeny, as already very young dog even Paul Bloom said ‘for psychologists dogs might puppies show similar skills. During communicative be the new chimpanzees’. This is because research interactions with humans dogs pay particular attention over the last decades has shown that what Ambula to the human’s eyes and ignore human gestures if no was doing during these interactions was the result of eye contact with the human was established. They dogs’ adaptations to the human environment. During do not just follow the movement of the human’s arm domestication domestic dogs have evolved social as a stimulus; a communicative context has to be cognitive skills, which seem functionally equivalent established first. to those of humans.

Humans have consciously or unconsciously ‘created’ a species that reacts to human communication flexibly and sensitively, and most likely that’s what A social tool made dogs the ‘social tool’ that was so useful during Dogs are the first species humans domesticated, more several human activities. than 30,000 years ago, and some researchers think For me, working with dogs is highly rewarding. dogs helped us become the species we are today.

Not just because they are such an interesting model This is because during our joint evolutionary history, species, but also because it gives us the opportunity to dogs made our lives easier. They bonded with us. involve members of the public, the dogs’ owners, in They made hunting easier. They made herding easier. our research.

So they helped us to survive. But that’s not what

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How I went to the dogs The path from ‘teenager with dog’ to ‘middle-aged professor studying dogs’ Professor Clive D.L. Wynne is a researcher at Arizona State University, in Tempe

When I was a teenager I honestly thought nobody understood me as well as my dog, Benji. Like a lot of kids that age, I sought solace in the silent support of a beast from a species that many call ‘Man’s best friend’. That might make it seem inevitable that as an adult and a professor of psychology I would be drawn to studying the behaviour of dogs and what makes it possible for them to occupy such an important role in so many people’s lives, but actually the path from teenager with a dog to middle-aged professor studying dogs was anything but straightforward.

Certainly, I knew from quite early on that I wanted to study the behaviour of nonhumans. As a student, I was inspired by several great teachers (particularly Henry Plotkin) to try to understand how psychology fits into evolution. How do minds evolve and how much of the human mind is unique? This led me towards studies of basic behavioural and cognitive processes in standard laboratory species, particularly pigeons. There came a point, however, when I realised that I wasn’t just interested in animal behaviour and cognition in itself… I was also fascinated by how people and other species interact.

It was around this time that, after having been missing from the psychological literature for a few decades, dogs were experiencing a revival of interest from behavioural scientists. In the late 1990s, Brian Hare (then a student at Harvard) and Ádám Miklósi (an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary) independently started publishing very thoughtprovoking papers on how dogs respond to human cues. In an experiment that became archetypal, a human pointed at one of two objects on the ground while the dog watched. If the dog chooses the container the person points at, it gets a treat; the other container is empty. Dog lovers will not be surprised to learn that the dogs typically choose the container the human has pointed towards, but this was a bigger surprise to the comparative psychology community because captive great apes typically fail on this kind

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of task. Hare and Miklósi each also tested hand-reared wolves on the same procedure. All of our modern dogs are descended from wolves, so comparing dog behaviour to that of their wild ancestors informs us about the evolutionary origins of their behaviour.

Both Hare and Miklósi found that wolves failed the pointing test, leading Hare to conclude that, during domestication, dogs had evolved unique forms of human-like social cognition. Hare went on to argue that the ability to respond appropriately to human social cues like pointing gestures was innate in dogs and not found anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

This strong claim for cognitive uniqueness in a nonhuman’s relationship with our own species excited me tremendously, and I set about replicating the very simple tests that Hare and Miklósi had originated.

Initially, the work that my then student Monique Udell

(now assistant professor at Oregon State University) and I carried out matched exactly what Hare and Miklósi had reported. We too found that pet dogs would follow a human point to find food in a baited container. But once we had the opportunity to test hand-reared wolves, we found that our results quickly began to depart from theirs. The wolves we tested were just as good at following pointing gestures as any dogs, and, as we moved on to test more diverse populations of dogs, we quickly found groups of dogs that did not spontaneously follow pointing gestures. At the animal shelter, for example, we found the vast majority of dogs did not spontaneously follow pointing gestures.

These surprising findings have been the jumping off point for all my subsequent research projects.

A unique relationship Our first forays into our local animal shelter opened my eyes to the dark underbelly of our lives with dogs – the millions of animals that are unceremoniously dumped as surplus to human requirements. We found that, although they do not spontaneously follow human gestures, they can quickly be taught how to.

Our subsequent research has focused on finding ways to help these dogs get adopted by studying what behaviours attract and repel potential adopters, and how to change them. We are also looking at what makes shelter life stressful for dogs and finding ways to mitigate that stress.

Although we do not agree with Hare and others who have claimed that dogs show unique cognitive adaptations to living with humans, I continue to be fascinated by how dogs thrive around people and what behavioural adaptations make that possible. We have recently found that dogs share genetic changes with people who have Williams-Beuren syndrome. WBS is a very rare disorder with a wide range of symptoms, the most striking of which is extreme gregariousness.

People with WBS treat everyone they meet as a friend – just as so many dogs do.

We have also been applying behaviour analytic techniques to improving the behaviour of dogs in people’s homes and in the training of bomb detection dogs. Sniffer dogs do not just figuratively save people’s lives, they literally protect people from deadly threats, and yet the techniques that are used to train them have developed very little over the past 50 years.

Benji, of course, has long gone off to that great dog park in the sky, but he lives on in my mind as an inspiration to understand this unique relationship between two species, a relationship that, at its best, can greatly enrich both partners, and which psychologists are uniquely well qualified to facilitate.

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Getty Images

Food and the human–animal bond Improving welfare for our animals is good for us too Dr Zazie Todd writes the evidence-based Companion Animal Psychology blog at www. companion animal psychology .com

I was a cat person first. As a child, I was terrified of dogs. But I’ve come to love dogs just as much as cats, and now I’m always watching them. The lovely openmouthed ‘smile’ of a happy dog, a lick of the lips (in response to stress, not food), the carriage of the tail (high, low or in-between) are just some of the signs that help us infer how a dog is feeling.

But we know many people miss the signs of fear and stress in a range of different contexts. This can have consequences for the dog’s welfare, because their guardian cannot help them out of a stressful situation if they don’t realise it is stressful. But it can also have consequences for the person’s relationship with their dog. And while we like to think of dogs as our best friends, sadly some human–canine relationships break down.

On my blog, Companion Animal Psychology, I write about the science of people’s relationships with their pets. The topic that gets the most engagement from readers is dog training, and specifically dog training methods. Since behaviour problems are the main cause of death of dogs under threeyears-old, getting dog training right (as well as proper socialisation of puppies) would make a big difference.

Of course, psychologists know about operant and classical conditioning, which are the foundation of how we train dogs. And we have an ethical choice, to use reward-based methods or those that rely on aversives. Last year, two reviews of the literature concluded that, although more research is needed, reward-based training methods are better for animal welfare. One of them suggested reward-based training may also be more effective, since people who use it

report more obedient dogs.

Yet we know that most people use a mix of both positive reinforcement and positive punishment to train dogs. I explore the reasons why some people are reluctant to use reward-based methods in a paper in press at the Journal of Veterinary Behavior. Some dog-training books and TV shows still recommend aversive methods, such as prong collars and ‘alpha rolls’ (pinning the dog down on its side). If people aren’t good at spotting signs of stress, they may not notice if the methods they use are stressful for the dog. Different organisations take different positions, and when aversive methods are recommended as a ‘last resort’, it may give the mistaken impression that sometimes they are necessary. We also don’t know how people make decisions if they think positive reinforcement isn’t working (e.g. to use aversive methods or refer to someone else with more experience). The theory of planned behaviour would be a good approach to get a handle on people’s attitudes and intentions to use particular methods.

I would love to see more psychological research on this, as well as on the ways people talk about dogs, in particular the use of wolf-pack metaphors.

One of the things about reward-based training is that the reinforcer has to be something the dog will work for. In my experience, many people are reluctant to use food as a reward and prefer to use praise such as ‘Good dog!’ Perhaps one reason is that for so long we have been told the myth that you just have to be the ‘pack leader’. This makes using food (like little pieces of chicken) to train dogs seem like a weakness, when in fact it’s a sign of someone who knows how to motivate a dog.

Unfortunately, praise is not reinforcing to dogs unless it has already been conditioned. A nice series of studies by Erica Feuerbacher and Clive Wynne look at what dogs like when they are given a free choice, e.g. between one person who will pet them and one who is offering praise. Dogs preferred to hang out with the person who was offering petting. In an earlier study, they found that food is a better reinforcer than social interaction (petting) in dogs and hand-reared wolves.

Much of the research on pets has focused on the question of whether or not they are good for our physical and psychological health. But it’s important to also consider the everyday interactions people have with dogs and how they shape the human– animal bond. For both dogs and cats, there are misunderstandings about what they need and how to train them (yes, even cats can be trained!). I like to think that improving welfare for our companion animals is good for people too.

All illustrations by Adam Batchelor (www.adambatchelor.co.uk).

Find sources and further reading with the online version of this feature.

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Work with a species we haven’t covered? We want to hear from you! Email jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

And look out for a piece from John Cryan in the coming months… are we in fact living in a microbial world?

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the psychologist october 2018 tree of life

Division of Occupational Psychology Applying the science of psychology to work

DOP Annual Conference 2019

Crowne Plaza, Chester

9-11 January 2019

Conference theme ‘Thriving at Work’ What does it mean and what needs to be in place for it to happen? Join us as we reflect on the contribution occupational psychologists can make in the workplace – discuss, debate and challenge how we best use our skills to impact on the world of work.

Keynote speakers ‘Superbly run with vibrant contributions from both practitioners and consultants as well as thought-provoking concepts from keynote speakers.’

2018 Delegate

www.bps.org.uk/dop2019

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Professor Stephen Woods, University of Surrey Professor Rory O’Connor, University of Glasgow Dr Virginia Schein, Gettysburg College Professor Denise M. Rousseau, Carnegie Mellon University Draft timetable available online in October.

Early rates are available for a limited time. Book your place by 6 November to secure the discount.

#dopconf

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Josep Call ‘Perhaps the difference between us and other species is that we have taken it to the extremes’ Our editor Jon Sutton chats to Josep Call, Professor in Evolutionary Origins of Mind at the University of St Andrews

When did you meet your first (non-human) ape?

Up close and personal, my first encounter took place at the Barcelona Zoo while I was a high-school student.

I spent the summer of my first high-school year doing a research project there, and I absolutely loved it. During that time I met one of the staff at the zoo nursery who introduce me to Kena and Bindung, the two infant gorillas who were being raised there. They were tiny and seemed extremely delicate and fragile, just like newborn human infants. I was not prepared for it given how large and imposing the adults are.

Are some apes smarter than others?

Yes, or at least they are smarter than others based on the instruments that we use to measure their intelligence. But it is also the case that different apes have different intellectual strengths. Some are quite good with problem-solving tasks (puzzle boxes) while others are socially savvy (theory of mind tasks). One has also to consider that the reason some individuals do well on multiple tasks is because they are highly motivated to obtain extra fruit treats (by the way, we never food- or water-deprive any of the apes that we test) or they simply like the challenge. We had cases of some apes solving a task for a highly valued treat and once she got it, gave it back to us or she did not end up eating it.

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Is there much to be learned from exceptionally able animals, or are they just outliers and cheap tricks?

The fun part, and what constitutes an integral part of our work, is trying to distinguish ‘cheap tricks’ as you called them, from the operation of other cognitive processes. In other words, our work usually begins with an initial observation. If you want to know why an animal does that, or more precisely what

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stimuli control their behaviour, you need to pose a set of hypotheses and test them. This is exactly the approach that we took with Rico, the border collie that knew words for hundreds of objects. One could have dismissed it as a case like ‘Clever Hans’, the ‘counting’ horse, but Juliane Kaminski, Julia Fischer and I decided to test whether this was the case. As it turns out, it was not a case of Clever Hans. Rico knew the labels for those objects and, furthermore, we were able to document that he used an inferential process to learn new labels for new objects. Quite far removed from a ‘cheap trick’, I would say.

Tell me about Dognition. It seems like a neat exercise in public engagement and ‘citizen science’.

It is. Dognition is a company founded by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. It provides dog owners with a test battery aimed at assessing the cognitive abilities of their dogs using the same methods that scientists use to conduct their studies. It accomplishes two main missions – first, it brings to the general public a wealth of practical and theoretical knowledge that has been accumulated in recent years with regard to canine intelligence. More importantly, it makes dog owners integral players in the scientific endeavour because they collect that data that Dognition then collates and is later used to produce new scientific knowledge. An excellent example of citizen science with clear benefits both for the general public and the scientists. Note that dog owners are keen observers of their pets, and quite often we have used their very valuable observations – Rico’s case, which I mentioned earlier, is a good example of that, to launch the next research question.

I guess there’s always a risk of anthropomorphism?

Not if we rigorously test our hypotheses against hard

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data. Quite often, the hypotheses that would raise no been considered a uniquely human feature, although eyebrows turn out to be unsupported by the evidence, recently we found that apes without any sort of but historically, there is a widespread practice of language training (e.g. sign language) can also refer to uncritically accepting so-called low-level hypotheses absent entities provided the setting includes a human without even bothering to test them. Even a cursory interlocutor. One of our current goals is to find out reading of classics like Lloyd whether displaced reference can Morgan, who is often portrayed also occur even among conspecifics “I tell my students that as someone in favour of low-level without any human intervention. explanations, would show that he they should get their was actually quite open-minded Does working with non-human inspiration from anywhere primates make you wonder (sceptical yes, but open-minded) they can, provided they regarding high-level explanations. where it all went wrong for I tell my students that they should test those ideas rigorously humans? Having said that, I saw get their inspiration from anywhere the film Jane recently, about the and consider alternative they can, provided they test those anthropologist Jane Goodall, explanations and the ideas rigorously and consider and I was struck by the bit alternative explanations and the surrounding chimp warfare and available evidence available evidence as a whole. her reaction to that. as a whole” I think that entertaining some I do not think that ‘it all went daring ideas and embarking on wrong for humans’. We are not high-risk projects can be quite angels, but we are not demons healthy. The case of theory of mind is an instructive either. Our species is capable of the kindest acts and one in this regard. Many of the hypotheses that were the most terrible ones. We are not good or bad all the postulated to explain the behaviour of non-human time, we are a puzzling mix of both. animals in the early 1990s are no longer viable due to the evidence that has accumulated in the last three And is that the same in the species you study? decades. Have we answered all the questions regarding Probably, if you consider the available evidence and ToM in non-human animals? Of course not, but we the different positions currently being discussed in the have made a lot of progress towards consolidating literature. Perhaps the difference between us and other the idea that although those species might not be species is that we have taken it to the extremes. as sophisticated as humans in some regards, their behaviour is not just based on ‘cheap tricks’ and simple What’s the status of primate research these days? learning mechanisms.

There are a number of scholars in the UK studying primate behaviour and cognition in the laboratory Over time, are we finding that humans are less and and the field. From that perspective, I think that less unique? Is there much left that separates us? things are quite healthy. Undergraduate students and I think so, or at least, we can find what we think postgraduate students also show considerable interest are precursors or building blocks of some of the in this subject, which is good because sufficient abilities that have been traditionally student numbers combined with other considerations considered uniquely human. is what contributes to keep a field healthy. Perhaps one of the changes that has occurred in recent years is that If we’re not unique, then why don’t researchers from Universities and Research Centres are other primates talk? collaborating more closely with zoos around the world.

As far as I can tell, there is no silver We have examples in the US, Germany and Sweden. bullet that explains the difference In the UK there is the Living Links and Budongo between them and us. I think that Research Unit consortium based at the Edinburgh Zoo, there are multiple cognitive and where visitors can see researchers from several Scottish motivational changes that have universities at work getting precious data that they taken place in the last seven million cannot obtain elsewhere. I think that the university– years since we shared a common zoo collaboration is an excellent model that benefits ancestor with the other great apes. all parties involved, including the general public who One such change is the motivational can observe scientists at work, thus helping us educate aspect to communicate. Humans not just the students that we see in our lectures but often engage in conversation for the general public, beginning with the schoolchildren the sake of it. I think that primates when they visit us there. use communication in a more instrumental manner, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

With regard to cognitive changes, displaced reference has traditionally

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the psychologist october 2018 interview

What makes what you do different from what a biologist does when they study animals and animal behaviour?

Less than what many people may suspect.

Some comparative psychologists are virtually indistinguishable from biologists. They study the same species, use the same methods and entertain the same theories as students of animal behaviour. In fact, some comparative psychologists are closer to biologists than to some clinical, educational or social psychologists, just to name a few of our specialties. But if you press me, I think that what distinguishes us from biologists is our focus on psychological processes including cognition (and learning), motivation and emotion.

Some biologists also study them, but in general, I think that we spend more time thinking about these issues than biologists.

What next for you?

I am excited about several things. I am preparing to teach a module on comparative psychology that combines neuroscience, cognition and behaviour that I hope will provide the students with a holistic view of my field. The course will also have a practical component that I hope the students will enjoy. We have recently started to work with the chimpanzees at the newly opened Budongo Research Unit in Edinburgh Zoo – this state-of-the-art research

facility of the University of St Andrews will allow us to conduct cutting-edge research on chimpanzee cognition and behaviour. In the coming months we will be investigating how chimpanzees work together to solve a task using touch screens and how they conceive the stimuli that they see on the screen – do they see them linked somehow with their referents in the real world or are the virtual and real worlds kept completely separate? This is an example of a highrisk project that poses an extremely exciting question that may contribute to shape how we conceive other non-human minds.

Do you have animals in your house? If you could have any ‘pet’, practical considerations aside, what would it be and why?

We do not currently have any pets at home, but I really enjoy watching the creatures that roam our garden day and night. I would pick a Labrador retriever as a pet because they are great companions and I think that it would enjoy running around in our garden.

Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities Annual Conference BPS London Office 2-3 April 2019 Registration open!

Submissions deadline 28 November

www.bps.org.uk/fpid2018

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#fpidconf

10/09/2018 10:48

‘Be the best version of yourself… that’s what African psychology does for me’ Erica McInnis talks to Ian Florance about African psychology and her career

Dr Erica Mapule McInnis is a Clinical Psychologist.

She trained as a Disability Psychotherapist (Frankish Training) and has worked for 22 years in the NHS. She is now Director and Principal Chartered Clinical Psychologist with her own company, Nubia Wellness and Healing, a company she set up to disseminate practice after gaining a Churchill Fellowship to research the area in 2016. She is keen to spread knowledge of African psychology, and I asked her to give me some background to its development and ideas.

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‘Black psychology is not a rejection of Eurocentric psychology,’ Erica McInnis tells me. ‘It’s about advancing a science of human functioning for black people around the world, using the best of African thought, culture and rituals to create wellbeing. It centres on wellness, so it emphasises the positive.

Grounded in the sense of spirit, it has its own healing paradigms, theoretical frameworks, and intervention protocols. It is a scientific discipline in its own right.

I see it as choosing from the best of all cultures, including my own, as appropriate.’

The modern discipline developed in the USA with the establishment of the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi). Various definitions developed over the years but the most commonly accepted one is that of the ABPsi (which you can read at www.abpsi. org/pdf/AfricanCenteredPsychologydefinition.pdf ).

Erica emphasises several essential elements of African psychology, including: • the cultural context in which black people exist (globally underrepresented in all the right places; overrepresented in all the wrong ones); • particular issues affecting black communities and who they were before enslaved, using progressive ancient black civilisations as a point of reference; • the impact of melanin; • formulating the present-day impact of historic experiences such as the Maafa – the African holocaust and transatlantic chattel slave trade – and colonisation; • a dynamic manifestation of unifying African principles, values, and traditions; and • communal self-knowledge as the key to emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing.

‘We ask, “Where does psychology come from?”’, Erica continues. ‘The ancient Greeks called it psychology: our position is that they studied in ancient Egypt and took some knowledge from that civilisation

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the psychologist october 2018 careers

while ignoring other parts. They often repackaged this knowledge as their own, as mentioned by George G.M. James in his book Stolen Legacy. The Ancient Egyptians (whose early dynasties were black) studied illumination of the spirit and how to advance communities spiritually, physically and emotionally. This was researched by Wade Nobles in his book Seeking the Sakhu. An understanding of what is called organisational psychology must have existed in Ancient Egypt’s pyramid age. Motivational theory and pre-visioning must have existed to coordinate the various professions and to build to such a high standard. Papyrus texts, wall etchings and other articles document the historic process and the influence of wellness approaches – what we now call psychology – over these civilisations.’

Erica points to a conference of the American Psychological Association in Oakland 50 years ago as a key moment. ‘The ABPsi was founded when a number of black psychologists walked out of that conference.

It was their severe dismay at the way psychology considered black people as intellectually inferior, and often misused psychological testing to enforce unjust conditions which would have major impacts upon families. Furthermore, when interventions were offered, psychologists did not consider concepts highly relevant to black families and used a frame of “normality” which automatically placed black people as inferior rather than just different.’

Erica stresses that African psychology takes a world

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view. ‘When you think about it, there are more black people in the world than Caucasian. Furthermore, by most accounts civilisation started in Africa, so Africans are not third-world people, but first-world people, as proposed by Marimba Ani in her 1994 book Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior. Africans were here first. Maafa is an ancestral trauma which needs to be healed. It traumatised some, it created extraordinary resilience in others. It certainly disturbed attachment mechanisms.’

I asked Erica to give me a specific example of an African psychology approach to these sorts of issues.

She refers to Emotional Emancipation Circles. ‘The Emotional Emancipation Circles were developed by ABPsi leaders in association with the Community Healing Network. They’re becoming a global movement of safe spaces where black people work together on self-healing and emotional emancipation.

Initially, they started as a response to help the community heal emotionally from human-made disasters such as unjust deaths of black people when interacting with law enforcement services and the uprisings which were often a way of the community expressing its hurt. Now, rather than waiting for problems to occur – and we know they inevitably will – the circles work on developing resilience skills pre-emptively.’ What do they consist of? ‘People telling stories, dancing, singing, practising African rituals. We practise mindfulness/resilience tools and share coping and wellness strategies, as well as learn more about

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how historical and social forces affect our relationships and emotions. It’s critical that people feel safe in these circles, and also that they feel completely comfortable with saying what they want to say in front of other members. They are therefore black-only spaces.’

Do these circles replace other forms of psychological treatment? ‘We’re very careful to stress that they don’t. Where necessary, we encourage members to get help outside what is, in effect, therapeutic but not therapy. This is important to me.

As a psychologist, I want to offer a wide range of approaches and this is just one of them. For me, the Emotional Emancipation Circles are the first line of defence. The second line of defence is other forms of African psychotherapy such as optimal psychology as developed by Linda James Myers, or Ntu therapy as developed by Fred Phillips, as well as working using an African psychology framework or in an integrative way with African psychology concepts alongside Eurocentric concepts.’

Erica was invited to add African Psychology to the syllabus of the University of Hertfordshire Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme this year as ‘it’s a tool for any psychologist to use. I feel my ability to teach African psychology has got better with practice. My other interests are pretty wide, including mindfulness, compassionate mind and dialectical behaviour therapy.’

Would non-black psychologists be able to learn and use the paradigm? ‘Actually, white psychologists originally interested me in it. We can’t just leave it to black psychologists to address these issues – if we do we’ll still be here in decades time: there simply aren’t enough. The teaching of African psychology might, in time, increase the recruitment of black psychologists with an interest in advancing Africans and other communities – something that’s badly needed.’

Which brings us to the issue of how Erica became a psychologist Some key concepts in and grew interested in African psychology. ‘My mum was a African psychology psychiatric nurse who worked extra shifts to send me to a private school, so I was used to the area of Maat or Ma’at: the ancient psychiatry and mental health issues Egyptian concepts of truth, from a fairly early age. Originally justice, harmony, balance, I wanted to study medicine but propriety balance, order. was helpfully told that as a black Ubuntu: can be translated as woman I’d end up in “a Cinderella ‘humanity’, but is often used to service – like psychiatry”, so that indicate that all humanity shares I might as well aim for that field in a bond. Ubuntuism came to the first place. I suppose one of the prominence in South Africa in formative experiences was when the 1980s and ‘90s and has been I was working at a nursing assistant popularised by Desmond Tutu at a local hospital during holidays among others. from university. I met psychologists Yurugu: the title of a hugely working on the ward and, after influential book by Marimba Ani. my 7am till 2pm shift I shadowed The word yurugu stems from a them from 2pm till 5pm. I grew to Dogon legend. resonate with their approach.’

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Erica did a degree in Psychology with Biology at the University of Sunderland. ‘I hadn’t done psychology at A-level, so I was quite surprised at what I learnt. I struggled in the first year, not least because the university had real resource issues. But things improved. In the second year I did better as the course involved more scientific thinking.’ She also got involved with the National Union of Students and was on its national women’s committee. ‘I’m quite an activist.’

After working as a nursing assistant and assistant psychologist, Erica started a master’s in applied psychology at Manchester, then got an assistant psychologist post working in learning disabilities in Birmingham ‘while applying for clinical training courses everywhere I could. Initially I got a place at Queen’s University Belfast but declined it when a place came up on the Coventry and Warwick course.’

After her clinical course she worked at Ashworth Hospital. ‘I’d always been interested in forensics, but I found I was not as ready as I could be for that post.

However, the job did give me skills in risk assessment, which I’ve used in the community.’ Erica then worked in Manchester in learning disabilities. In 2008 she went on a ‘Towards Strategies for Success’ leadership course as part of an NHS initiative to develop more black leaders. ‘I was told that I needed further support. I met one of the leaders, Rameri Moukam of Pattigift, on this course and in 2010 attended my first ABPsi conference in USA. It was fantastic. One year had an ABPsi boot camp on the WAIS-IV plus other workshops, and I fell in love with African psychology. In 2016 I received a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to travel to Washington DC to learn more about African-centred approaches to wellness and healing. That convinced me that I could pass on what I’d learnt about the area and when I came back helped to launch the Manchester Emotional Emancipation Circles.’

Erica was involved in setting up the UK chapter of the ABPsi but has stepped down from it (though she is still International Relations Representative for the ABPsi National Board). ‘At the moment my main role in life is as a carer. My father had several health problems and died last year. Sadly, my mother has terminal lung cancer. So, caring for her is my priority.’

I asked Erica to sum up her thoughts on African psychology. ‘As a black person, you need an education that helps you navigate the Eurocentric system. Then you need one that helps you understand and develop yourself to be the best version of yourself… that’s what African psychology does for me. I can now use it to help others too and have had a good response running clinics in Manchester working from an African-centred perspective and running workshops nationally and internationally. African psychology just makes sense of some people’s experiences and they can’t get enough of it.’

More information on the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) can be found at www.abpsi.org

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Save the date Special Group in Coaching Psychology: Upcoming programme of events Webinar: ‘The psychology of team coaching’ - David Webster Date: Thursday 22 November 2018, 13:00- 14:00 Webinar: ‘Working with mental health issues in coaching’ - Prof Sarah Corrie Date: Thursday 21 February 2019, 13:00- 14:00 ‘Neuroscience and Coaching’ - Prof Patricia Riddell Date: Wednesday 10 April 2019 Venue: BPS London Offices Special Group in Coaching Psychology Annual Conference Date: TBC May 2019 Venue: TBC Webinar: ‘Using psychological tools and techniques with clients’ - Dr Natalie Lancer Date: Tuesday 25 June 2019, 13:00- 14:00 Webinar: ‘Working with Goals in Coaching Psychology’ - Prof Anthony Grant Date: TBC September 2019 ‘Using Motivational Interviewing in coaching: a 2-day Masterclass’ – Dr Tim Anstiss Date: Thursday 10 – Friday 11 October 2019 Venue: London BPS Offices Webinar: ‘Coaching Psychology research update’ - Dr Rebecca Jones Date: Friday 6 December 2019, 13:00- 14:00 Further information will be available shortly, please check: www.bps.org.uk/events Some of the events will have discounted rates for Special Group in Coaching Psychology members. For details of how to join SGCP please visit: www.bps.org.uk/sgcp For any queries about any of the events please email membernetworkservices@bps.org.uk quoting ‘SGCP event’ in the subject line.

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10/09/2018 14:07

The godfather of the sexual revolution?

David Bramwell on the strange world of Wilhelm Reich

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efore reading this – if you can – open YouTube and watch the first two minutes of the video for Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’. It is one of the singles released from her 1985 album Hounds of Love, arguably Kate’s finest hour. Such is the haunting power of ‘Cloudbusting’ that you’ll be forgiven for watching it all the way through, but it’s what happens around one minute and fifty seconds that’s key to our whole story.

‘Cloudbusting’ opens with driving strings and a curious lyric,‘I still dream of orgonon’.

The accompanying video is equally strange – it stars Donald Sutherland as a heretical scientist and Kate as his son, hauling a giant cloud-seeding machine up a hill. At the top, while Sutherland is fiddling with pulleys and levers, boy-Kate pulls something from Sutherland’s pocket. For a brief moment we see it is a paperback called A Book of Dreams. After Sutherland is taken away by sombre authority figures in a black car, it is left to boy-Kate to operate the ‘cloudbuster’ and bring on the rain.

It’s doubtful whether many would have understood the meaning of Bush’s opening lyric, the momentary inclusion of The Book of Dreams or why Sutherland the scientist was being taken away by the men in black. To those in the know, Kate was acknowledging the tragic loss of one of the 20th century’s most controversial and misunderstood pioneers in the study of sexual politics, orgasm and psychology – Wilhelm Reich.

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Drawings by William Stein from Wilhelm Reich’s 1948 book Listen, Little Man!

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The perfect orgasm Born in Austria at the end of the 19th century, Wilhelm Reich studied medicine and quickly rose through the psychoanalytical ranks to become one of Freud’s star pupils. Until, that is, the pair fell out over orgasms.

For Freud, the libido was an unruly beast, which needed to be diverted into ‘healthier’ pursuits. He rejected any connection between sexual repression and violence. For Freud, war and aggression stem from a psychological ‘death wish’ – humanity’s innate drive towards destruction.

Reich came to believe the opposite, perceiving the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as a direct result of repressed sexual desire, sublimated into hatred and war. For Reich, impotence, a lack of pleasure from sex or an inability to have an orgasm, were symptoms of ill health and in need of treatment.

He wanted nothing less than a sexual revolution, one which could liberate us from the uptight, aggressive authoritarianism of politics and state. Sexual prowess, Reich believed, didn’t necessarily equate with a fulfilling sex-life. What matters is how much we can let ourselves go during sex to achieve full-body orgasm. For Reich the body language adopted by those in the military says all we need to know about sexual, psychological and emotional repression – stiff controlled body movements, tight pelvis, rigid jaw, unquestioning obedience and stifled emotions. Reich saw fascism as the ‘frenzy of sexual cripples’. To him bigotry, violence and hatred all stem from a longing for love.

From the 1920s onwards Reich travelled around Europe and Russia getting into hot water for his radical ideas. He took mobile sex clinics around cities, handed out condoms to teenagers and couples; he even created spaces for teenagers to explore their sexuality together in private. Reich also advocated the legalisation of homosexuality, abortions and birth control. He fought against monetary dependence of women in marriages and argued that children should be raised in communities, to free them from the exclusive neurosis of their parents. Even now, Reich’s

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the psychologist october 2018 looking back

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ideas seem incredibly progressive; a hundred years ago they were seen as David Bramwell heretical. is a writer. This Reich’s approach to piece is adapted psychoanalysing patients was from an entry equally controversial. He rejected in his book with the ‘talking cure’, having recognised Jo Keeling, The that patients would sometimes Odditorium. lie or merely tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. For davidcheeky@googlemail.com Reich, treatment had to transcend words. He broke the golden rule of psychoanalysis – never touch a patient – and Cloudbusting developed physical manipulation techniques to enable By the time Reich reached America he was on the emotional release. These techniques stemmed from hunt for physical evidence of the orgasmic energy, his belief that unresolved conflict leaves a remnant of for which he coined the term orgone. For him, the muscular tension; and as muscles attach to tendons, level of pleasure derived from orgasm – from wildly which attach to bones, the growing skeletal system ecstatic to non-existent – was a measure of a person’s of a child is fenced in by the patterns of tension from orgone levels, also reflected in their vitality. Those who unresolved conflict. Thus, the psychological history displayed boundless energy, drive and love could be of a person is present not just in the mind, as Freud considered to be full to the brim with orgone. and Jung believed, but in the body too. This might be Reich founded the Orgone Institute in 1942, seen through any number of physical anomalies, from by which time he believed he had physical evidence of hunched shoulders, tight jaw and furrowed brow to orgone and that it could be measured in a human with shallow breathing. a voltmeter when he or she was going through ‘intense Having written books with such provocative emotional release’. For Reich, orgone was the big one – titles as The Function of the Orgasm (1927), The Mass it was the universal lifeforce, the orgiastic energy Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution that gave birth to the universe. And while he wasn’t the (1936), it’s perhaps no surprise that Reich was a target first to believe in an all-pervading universal energy – for the Nazis. The Gestapo were ordered to burn his to the yogis it’s prana, to the Chinese it’s chi, for books and shoot him. Having relocated to Berlin in modern science it’s dark matter – Reich was the first to 1930, Reich escaped certain death a few years later claim this energy could be measured and seen. (It was by disguising himself as a tourist, leaving Germany blue, apparently.) under a false name and heading to Denmark. Here, To stimulate orgone energy in the individual, Reich his promotion of abortion and ideas around teenage invented the ‘orgone accumulator’. Looking like a sex were equally controversial. He fled Denmark to one-person sauna, it was an upright rectangular box Sweden, Sweden to Norway and finally Norway to the made of different layers of wood and metal to amplify US. Everywhere Reich went his ideas were scorned, the ‘orgone energy’ for any user sitting inside, rather his books were banned and often burned for good like heat in a greenhouse. Claims around the properties measure. He was branded a ‘Jewish pornographer’ and of this device ranged from boosting the immune ‘sex fiend’. If Europe wasn’t ready for his radicalism, system and destruction of cancerous cells to ‘orgiastic Reich hoped that America would be. potency’.

While Reich was on a radical mission to bring Reich’s next invention was the cloudbuster. peace and love to humanity, it’s important to While best known for allegedly seeding clouds, its acknowledge that he was not without flaws. Reich principal function was to harness orgone energy in was notoriously grumpy and arrogant, viewed the atmosphere and to zap ‘bad’ orgone energy, which homosexuality as a neurosis to be cured and – like Reich believed was being emitted from the exhaust Jung and Freud – had affairs with his patients. Those pipes of UFOs. It’s fair to say at this point that Reich’s who worked with him often complained that it was his own traumas had led him towards a breakdown. way or not at all. His ‘mad scientist’ haircut didn’t do In relocating to America, Reich had hoped to be him any favours either, though it might have been the welcomed. His isolation and unwillingness to accept inspiration for Doc Brown’s in Back any opinion other than his own didn’t win him many to the Future. friends. He had become deeply paranoid, though not Key sources without reason. By the 1950s, America’s own paranoia about Communism led to the McCarthy witch hunts to root out the ‘reds under the bed’. As a foreigner and Wilhelm Reich, The Man Who Dreamed former member of the Communist Party doing strange of Tomorrow Wilhelm Reich, Selected Writings: experiments out in the wilds of Maine, Reich was an An Introduction to Orgonomy obvious target. He was accused of running a sex racket through his sales of the orgone accumulator, and the

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the psychologist october 2018 looking back

US Food Administration charged him with contempt of court for violation of an obscure cosmetic labelling law.

Arguing that the judges were ill equipped to judge his scientific inventions, Reich requested a panel of scientists. This was refused. He was imprisoned for contempt of court and his books and much of his equipment were destroyed. Twenty years after the Nazis had burned Reich’s books, American justice continued in the same vein. Reich died in prison, eight months into his sentence. Not one scientific or psychiatric journal mentioned his passing.

Make love not war Wilhelm Reich dedicated his life to exploring the nature of the orgasm and taking a radical ‘hands-on’ approach to psychoanalysis to treat both mind and body. He never stopped believing in the need for a sexual revolution. Ten years after his death, the slogan of the 1960s counter-culture ‘Make Love Not War’ summed up his philosophy in just four words.

Over the following decades, zealous advocates of Reich’s orgone accumulator came to include William Burroughs, J.D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Nicholson and Sean Connery. In 1973 Hawkwind sang, ‘I’ve got an orgone accumulator, it makes me feel greater, it’s a back brain stimulator’, while a young Patti Smith, working in a bookshop in Manhattan, found The Book of Dreams, written by Reich’s son Peter, and took it home to read.

It is Peter Reich’s book that boy-Kate takes from her father’s pocket in the video for ‘Cloudbusting’.

The Book of Dreams is written from the perspective of 12-year-old Peter growing up in Orgonon, Reich’s family home in the US. It describes the tender relationship between father and son, and the trauma Peter suffered in seeing his father imprisoned. The

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lyrics of ‘Cloudbusting’ tell the first half of Peter’s story. Ten years previously, Patti Smith’s ‘Birdland’ – the standout track from her debut album Horses – had told the second half of Peter’s story, starting with the line, ‘His father died and left him a little farm in New England.’ Smith’s exquisite beat-poetry goes on to describe a dream Reich and his son had shared – that one day they would be taken on board a UFO, lifted into the heavens and whisked away to other worlds, undoubtedly ones in which Reich was embraced as a hero rather than ‘sex fiend’.

Come the revolution It’s easy to believe that we now live in sexually liberated times. We seem to be becoming more tolerant towards people of different sexual orientations. And having dismantled the many rituals around courtship, sex is more easily available in Western culture. But is it any better? Orgasm, for many of us, has simply taken the form of another addiction. Like coffee, alcohol and sugar, it’s one more quick fix in our busy lives. Shame and hypocrisy around sex are still meted out by tabloid newspapers. Our media may never tire of titillation, sex scandals and clichéd lifestyle tips for the bedroom, but the quality and nature of orgasm – and its relationship to our mental and physical health – is rarely discussed.

Rising cases of body dysmorphia, eating disorders, anorexia and obesity are matched with a growth in plastic surgery. We seem less comfortable with our bodies than ever before. And, somehow, we have even allowed our political systems to become dominated by emotionally stunted, uptight men who behave like tantrumming toddlers. If Reich were alive today he would doubtless see it as proof of one thing – more than ever before we are all ‘longing for love’.

10/09/2018 14:42

AZ the

psychologist

Karla Novak

to

V ...is for Vulnerable

Suggested by Aiden Kearney @AidenKearney10 ‘Creating that environment where vulnerability can be displayed will help to develop trust, with its centrality to team high performance, and can help to manage those biases in decision making which can have drastic consequences. We don’t have all of the answers: so let’s seek collaborative insight, sit with reality even when it’s uncomfortable, connect with our thinking processes and try some vulnerability.’

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We take a more negative view of our own vulnerability than we do of other people’s – researchers call this the In his 2012 interview Ian ‘beautiful mess effect’.

Walker pointed out that key Find the 2018 study, led by issues around protecting Anna Bruk, covered on our vulnerable road users are Research Digest blog. being ignored. ‘What are the social mechanisms In an ‘unparalleled’ underpinning aggression study of traumatic stress towards cyclists? There’s symptoms during a conflict speculation, but very little situation, Talya Greene and data and no real theories.’ colleagues found that the startle response was the In her 2014 article most important predictor broadcaster and of vulnerability to future psychology graduate Sian PTSD symptoms (see our Williams set out advice Research Digest blog). for interviewing people defined as ‘vulnerable’ Why are some people

by Ofcom guidelines particularly vulnerable to (e.g. those with learning mental health problems? disabilities and mental See our May 2018 interview health problems); and with Essi Viding, and Peter for recognising the Kinderman’s public lecture vulnerability of journalists ‘Our turbulent minds’, for themselves. clues and implications.

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