The Psychologist October 2019

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the psychologist

psychologist october 2019

october 2019

Under‌ A special issue

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

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Under…

A special issue

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

The Psychologist needs you!

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

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

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

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Emma Young, Matthew Warren

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Culture Kate Johnstone, Sally Marlow Books Emily Hutchinson 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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40 The psychology of underwear Carolyn Mair

42 The ‘human’ underpinning workplace resource Rosalind Searle on working under a hierarchy

60 Books

Under land, water and consciousness

44 The underdog effect

Ciaran O’Keeffee on the appeal,

and how things change

66 Culture This Way Up, The Patient Gloria, exhibition previews and more

48 Under the weather Trevor Harley

72 One on one …with Michelle Hamill

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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Psychologists have been going ‘under’ since the dawn of the discipline… delving into the depths of the subconscious, studying the effects of being under pressure to perform, going ‘under’ in hypnosis.

But last year, while reading Robert Macfarlane’s excellent Underland (see p.60), it occurred to me that there are modern-day psychologists inhabiting both metaphorical and literal ‘underworlds’.

So the idea for this special issue, loosely themed around the word ‘under’, emerged.

Through these pages we dig into the psychology around diving and caving, our own hidden depths (or lack of them), the impact of working under a hierarchy or rooting for the underdog, and more as a seam running through much of the edition.

What aspects of ‘under’ have we failed to surface?

If you’re feeling under represented, under funded, under appreciated, do raise a hand as we would consider a follow up. And of course, don’t get over-excited, but there may be scope for a flipside issue on ‘over’…

28 Fixing problems under

the surface

Laura Walton takes psychology underwater 02 Letters

Beyond

tokenism in autism research,

and more 06 Obituaries

Past

President

Ian Howarth 10 News

Prevention,

music

therapy, PsyPAG… 22 Digest

Under pressure…

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34 From underworlds to outerworlds

Nathan Smith 38 What lies beneath?

Nick Chater on the perils of

looking under our glittering surface

52 ‘Negotiators are advanced communicators’

Stephen McAllister on his

police career

54 ‘If you treat clients as adults, they’ll treat you the same way” We meet Holly Price

56 Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

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Closing the ‘prevention gap’ T

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he prevention of mental health problems has become a focus for government, illustrated by the publication of its recent green paper and the NHS Long Term Plan.

Given that one in eight children and young people have a diagnosable mental health condition, this has also been an increasing focus of UK public policy in recent years.

In June, then-Prime Minister Theresa May announced that every new teacher in England would be trained to spot early signs of mental illness in pupils, while the NHS Long Term Plan outlined aims to embed mental health teams in schools and to increase the use of ‘social prescribing’. More recently, in its green paper on prevention, the government laid out its aims to close the ‘prevention gap’ – putting the prevention of mental health on an equal footing with preventing physical illness.

While prevention covers a wide range of issues, the British Psychological Society is seizing this opportunity to raise its own work in this area as well as its more focused policy campaign on children and young people’s mental health. At both Labour and Conservative party conferences, the Society will host events where panels of MPs, psychology and policy experts will be asked how we can support the mental wellbeing of children in schools.

At the Labour event in Brighton BPS Director of Policy Kathryn Scott will be joined by MPs Bambos Charalambous (Enfield and Southgate), Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) and Julie Cooper

(Burnley) Shadow Minister for Community Health.

Also featuring on the panel will be Tom Milson, Founding Headteacher of the Eagle House School, Dr Nihara Krause, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and CEO of stem4, and Emily Dobson, Policy and Parliamentary Officer for YoungMinds.

Scott said: ‘Given that 93 per cent of teachers agree that the current education system places a greater focus on academic performance than the wellbeing of children and young people, the time is right… there are many opportunities for policymakers and practitioners alike to press for real change for children and young people. The BPS has done substantial work on the subject through this year’s Children and Young People Campaign.’

Some of Dobson’s recent work with YoungMinds has involved a focus on prevention and early intervention. In a recent survey of 7000 young people the charity found that 77 per cent felt that pressure at school was impacting on their mental health. Through its Wise Up campaign, YoungMinds has been calling for wellbeing in schools to be at least as highly valued as academic performance.

Dobson said, to this end, it is important for schools to adopt a whole-school approach to student wellbeing – rather than it being a single person’s responsibility or delivered through a single lesson in school. However, she added that schools cannot address all factors which can lead to poor mental health – including poverty,

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Conflict of interest?

Are we transparent enough about potential conflicts of interest (COIs) in psychology? This question was posed by science journalist Tom Chivers in a Nature article in which he asked whether high-profile psychologists who are paid to give talks by businesses, or work in consultancy roles on the basis of their research, should be declared as COIs in journal articles or elsewhere.

Chivers outlined the work of Jean Twenge whose research has looked into ‘Generation Z’ (those born between the mid-1990s and early-2000s), and potential links between screen time and mood, loneliness and narcissism. Twenge gives paid talks and workshops to corporations and other groups, including not-for-profits, and has carried out consultancy work… but had not declared this work as a COI on journal articles in the past.

Others, including business psychologist Adam Grant, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance author Angela Duckworth and growth mindset researcher Carol Dweck, are also named for their paid speeches and consultancy work – usually not mentioned in conflicts of interest sections. However, since the publication of Chivers’ article Dweck, Duckworth and David Yaeger published a new study into growth mindset which did declare that the authors had disseminated research to wider audiences and had complied with their institutional financial disclosure guidelines.

The article surprised some psychologists; as Chivers wrote, this kind of approach is relatively standard within psychology. But should it be? Guidelines from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, used by many academic publications, suggest these

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discrimination and family issues. ‘Our Act Early campaign is calling on the Government to commit to a brave new integrated approach to prevent the development and escalation of mental health problems by introducing a cross-Government strategy on children and young people’s mental health. This will bring together all departments, from education to housing, to act on the principles of prevention and early intervention throughout every aspect of care to reduce the demand on specialist NHS services.’

The Conservative Party Conference panel in Manchester will also feature Scott and Krause along with Marc Bush, Director of Evidence and Policy for YoungMinds, Cllr Ian Hudspeth, Chairman, LGA Community Wellbeing Board, and Neil Carmichael, Senior Advisor at PLMR. Prior to joining PLMR, Neil was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Stroud from 2010 to 2017 and acted as chair of the Education Select Committee.

Another BPS-organised event at the Conservative conference will involve a timely discussion on the psychology of democracy featuring the Society’s Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa, MP for Gloucester and Chair of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Richard Graham, Economist and former Joint Head of the UK Government Economics Service Vicky Pryce, Psychology Lecturer (University of Salford) Dr Ashley Weinberg, and Dr Hannah White, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government.

Scott said that interventions rely on a democracy that ‘remains fit for purpose’, often failing when they do not connect with those they’re meant to serve.

‘This can be linked to an inherent flaw within the design of the policy itself, a lack of understanding of the environmental, social and financial contexts or the failure of including the very people affected by these political decisions. This can in turn lead to feelings of inequality, disenfranchisement, stigma and populism.

Understanding people, how they work, and what pressures they live with, is therefore of paramount importance… The Society is proud to be a part of this conversation.’

The policy team’s presence at party conference is likely to continue expanding in years to come, as the Society continues to take psychological evidence into the heart of government in order to secure lasting change in public policy. ‘Bringing together two strands of our work – children and young people’s mental health, and prevention – is an unparalleled opportunity to highlight the expertise of psychologists and the value of the wider discipline to policy-makers and elected officials,’ Scott added.

The Society’s Senate, made up of chairs of each of the Society’s member networks, is voting on its policy priority for the year this month. On the table alongside prevention are age inequality and wellbeing in later life, and ‘from poverty to flourishing’. The Society is also calling for contributors to its response to the prevention green paper. The deadline is 26 September: see tinyurl.com/y2eny2ed for details. er

personal fees should be declared as a potential COI. Given both the fiveand six-figure sums which some academic psychologists can earn for such talks, and recent moves in the discipline towards greater transparency, it could be time for a culture change.

A later letter in Nature suggested that potential conflicts of interest may also exist on the boards of psychological societies in giving awards and prizes. Andrea Stoevenbelt and colleagues examined 58 psychology society websites to assess whether any award winners had close ties to those on committees awarding prizes.

Almost three quarters of the societies did not point out any potential conflicts of interest in its awarding committees; 45 per cent did not publish any conflict of interest regulations. Among those websites which did have regulations, only 28 per cent mentioned avoiding potential conflicts in relation to choosing awardees. The authors suggested societies address this: ‘We urge psychology societies to avoid conveying the impression of hidden nepotism by openly publishing their policies on personal COIs.’ er To read Tom Chivers’ full article see tinyurl.com/y5gq2h5z, and to read the preprint version of Stoevenbelt et al’s paper see tinyurl.com/y54fbsfb.

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

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‘We all have unique relationships with music’ Ahead of World Alzheimer’s Day on 21 September, music therapist Grace Meadows speaks to Ella Rhodes about her work with the Utley Foundation’s Music for Dementia 2020 campaign, which is aiming to give all people living with the condition better access to music.

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Grace Meadows

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I completed my training in 2011 and worked in a range of special educational needs settings, in adult mental health, then most recently in a child development service for an NHS Trust. But back in 2006 I was researching what music therapy is, and I had perhaps my first encounter with the impact and power of music. I was with a music therapist working with a group of older adults with dementia.

This group of adults who were all quite withdrawn and not connecting with each other, came together through the music. They were in the here and now, and had this beautiful and moving shared experience together. It was the music and the music therapist who facilitated that. It was seeing that, feeling that, being part of it… that made me think ‘this is how I want to be using my music’.

I saw people who were quite withdrawn and physically quite closed off. Their postures suggested they weren’t really available for contact, with their heads bowed and arms folded and legs crossed. When the music started to work and reflect the feelings in the room, that all

changed. Heads were lifted, eyes started to look around and engage with other people, social gestures started happening, people started making contact. The body postures changed and then movement started. People couldn’t resist tapping along to the beat, whether that was a hand on the side of a chair or their foot tapping, or using their whole body to physically move in their seats. It did get to the point where we were all up on our feet dancing together. It was just incredible.

I was really taken with how the music therapist was able to modulate what she was doing. She was able to temper the music so that it didn’t become too much, but it continued to be motivating and stimulating enough.

She managed to make it what it needed to be in that moment for those people. It was very much tailored to them moment by moment. She was very carefully taking in what they were doing and reflecting their movements and the feeling that was in the space. If someone started singing a little bit of a melody she’d weave that into the music that she was improvising so they could hear they’d been acknowledged and heard, and you could see them recognising that acknowledgement of them. That’s when you know you’ve got those really powerful connections taking place. It was beautiful, it was amazing.

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I’ve not recently worked with people living with dementia but I have been experiencing other music therapists’ work by observing them or visiting them, and I’ve been following the research developments that have been happening in this area.

I previously worked for the British Association for Music Therapy and we had an awareness-raising week we ran every two years. In 2015 we chose to focus on embedding music and music therapy into dementia care pathways. That’s where my first contact came with the Utley Foundation. Music and Dementia is a strong area of focus for them and I came on board with the Music for Dementia campaign in 2018 when the opportunity arose for me to join, which I was absolutely thrilled to do.

It’s been fantastic. We’re really of the moment: everybody working in this space is so determined to see change happen for people living with dementia. We don’t have a pharmacological answer for dementia and I don’t know when that’s coming – I’m not sure any of us are. What we do know is we have this power, to enhance and enrich the quality of life for people living with dementia. We can do that through music in its really rich, broad and varied ways. Everything from a playlist right through to music therapy. One of the delights of music is you can tailor it to make it personal. Your playlist or ways of experiencing music will be different to mine but that’s fine, that’s what music is there for. We all have unique relationships with it.

The role of our campaign is to make sure everybody has access to the right music for them at the right time and in the right ways. Our approach in encouraging

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people who are working with people with dementia is to think about a person’s potential and work with this and the skills they have, as well as skills they may acquire through musical experiences. Rather than a deficit model approach we encourage a working with potential approach. That way, people with dementia can be contributors to their care and have a sense of agency and autonomy. We hope to move away from music being something that is done to people with dementia to an experience that they have a central role in creating.

There’s a whole range of ways of using music to improve someone’s daily experience. When people have been diagnosed recently and are still living at home they may feel concerned about losing contact with people and there are a variety of local groups available.

Whether that’s a participatory music group or a dementia cafe that’s got a music element to it, or it might be working with an orchestra who runs dementia friendly performances. It could be about having a music therapist come and work with you at home if you need that kind of psychological support. We’re also thinking a lot about care settings and how they use music in open spaces or how they might support daily tasks. We know music can be incredibly motivating for people living with dementia. They often experience quite high levels of apathy and agitation, and we know music can counter those two feelings. With care settings, we’re thinking about how you can drop music in at times of day and in ways that can really help to improve someone’s experience of their day.

In my role I’m involved with everything from helping an individual care home to think about what it is they’re doing with music and how they can increase it, right through to informing policy and influencing various different sectors involved with supporting people with dementia. The other thing I feel very fortunate to be doing is drawing people together. We know there’s a huge range of excellent work going on out there but not everyone is aware of each other’s work. I might speak to someone

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this afternoon doing excellent work in Devon, but that work in Devon is looking very similar to some work in Cumbria so I might connect them up so they can share best practice and think about how they can offer each other support. Equally there might be someone next door in Devon who is doing something very similar and they could be signposting people between their services and sharing resources.

I’m also managing the PR campaign and do a lot of liaison with our ambassador Lauren Laverne, presenter of BBC Radio 6 Music’s Breakfast Show and current presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. We know Lauren’s an incredibly passionate advocate for the power of music and felt she was a perfect fit for us. When we approached her she very quickly came back and said she’d love to be involved. We feel very honoured to have her as the face of our campaign. With all the experience she brings as a musician, but also in her radio roles, she has the respect of many people not least in the music industry. We need people to get behind the campaign and understand the power of music for people living with dementia… she beautifully articulates why music is so important.

We’ve got a huge awareness-raising campaign, a website with a great deal of information, resources and tools people can use. We know there’s lots of information

out there but it’s located in lots of different places. We’re sharing this very broadly with sectors, encouraging colleagues to share their resources and findings, so people are kept up to date with the latest research, practice and evidence.

The other thing we’re doing is trying to connect people locally. In September we launched an online musical map, which allows people to type in their postcode and view at a glance all the dementia-focused musical provision in their area. These musical choices range from singing groups, choirs, music therapists to relaxed live musical performances. This is a really powerful tool and we hope people will start talking to each other, as well as helping us spot gaps in provision.

The reaction to the campaign so far has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem so grateful and people who have got in touch have told us about the difference music has made to their lives. There’s lots of people out there doing this brilliant work and they’re really excited to get behind a shared vision and message.

If we speak together on this then we’re much more likely to bring about change in dementia care where music has this fundamental, central role.

For more information on Music For Dementia 2020 visit www.musicfordementia2020.com

Pioneer in behaviour change recognised A pioneer in behaviour change research has been named winner of the British Psychological Society Research Board’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Susan Michie, Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London and a chartered

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Professor Susan Michie

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psychologist in the clinical and health areas, is recognised throughout the world for her work creating a coherent language of behaviour change. Her groundbreaking research synthesises interventions through the use of machine learning techniques (see the January issue: tinyurl.com/y6j73oka).

Michie’s research has established a taxonomy to ensure the same labels and definitions are used across the field of behaviour change interventions. She also developed the Behaviour Change Wheel which brings together behaviour change theories around a central model of capability, opportunity and motivation, with interventions which can address gaps in any of those three conditions.

Michie is principal investigator on the Human Behaviour Change Project,

funded by Wellcome, a collaborative project bringing together academics and IBM computer scientists to develop an artificial intelligence system. The system will have the ability to scan literature in the field to find the best interventions for certain behaviour change challenges and provide new insights on those interventions and surrounding research.

Also a Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society, American Society of Behavioral Medicine, Academy of Medical Sciences and Academy of Social Sciences, Michie has published more than 400 peerreviewed papers, nine books and has received a grant income of more than £96 million across the course of her career. Michie has also been involved in working with policy makers including at the House of Lords, and has worked as an advisor and expert consultant for the Department of Health, Public Health England’s Behavioural Insights Expert Advisory Group and NICE. er

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Elections at Society AGM

Dr Hazel McLaughlin

Dr Roxane Gervais

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The British Psychological Society’s new president, trustees, honorary treasurer, honorary fellow, and five honorary life members were all elected at this year’s annual general meeting. Together they hold decades of experience in various areas of psychological work and voluntary BPS roles.

Taking over as President for 2019 to 2020 was David Murphy (see the September edition) and his successor, Dr Hazel McLaughlin, was elected as President for 2020 to 2021. Dr Roxane Gervais was chosen as the society’s new Honorary Treasurer and Christina Buxton, Dr Esther Mary Cohen-Tovee, Dr Adam Jowett and Professor Clifford Stott were elected to the Board of Trustees.

Forensic Psychologist Dr Ruth Mann was elected as an Honorary Life Fellow. She has worked in the past as Head of HM Prison Service’s Sex Offender Treatment Programme, and has made an extensive contribution to the literature on the treatment and assessment of those convicted of sexual offences, and strengthbased approaches to working with this population.

Mann was also previously Lead for Evidence to Support Commissioning for Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, monitoring and translating research to support commissioning.

In her current role Mann has turned her focus to national initiatives to develop rehabilitative cultures in prisons, including the implementation of such a culture at HMP Berwyn. She has also been an advocate for both treating those convicted of sexual offences with decency, and for evidence-based practice.

The meeting also saw the election of five new Honorary Life Members: Professor Michael Berger, Martin Fisher, Nicola Gale, Professor Ray Miller and Professor Jill Wilkinson. Berger’s career spans six decades and his involvement with the British Psychological Society (BPS) spans almost five. In the past he has worked as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Education, Head of Child Psychology at St George’s Hospital and as District Psychologist for one of the UK’s largest psychology services. Berger retired in 2004 but remains Emeritus Professor and recently represented the BPS on the Professional Records Standards Body which develops national standards for electronic health and care records (see the May issue).

Fisher is a Chartered Forensic Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the BPS. He has worked in criminal justice since 1988 – largely within Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Since 2008, he has also held appointments within NHS Secure Mental Health Services and teaches on the MSc in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth.

Also an expert witness, Fisher’s applied work involves working with service users who have risk-management needs in the areas of violent and sexual offending. As an active member of the BPS Fisher has worked as Continuing Professional Development Lead for the Division of Forensic Psychology, Chair of the Committee

for Test Standards, the Mental Health Act Working Party, the Behaviour Change Working Party, and the Forensic Faculty of Clinical Psychology Executive Committee.

Former BPS President and BPS Fellow Nicola Gale started her career in accountancy but since becoming a psychologist has worked in the NHS as Lead Clinician and Head of Service for the Staff Psychological and Welfare Service at the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Gale now works as a Senior Lecturer teaching on the Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at City, University of London.

Gale has carried out various voluntary roles within the BPS over the past 10 years, including working on the Board of Trustees and as President of the society from 2017 to 2018. Gale was elected as Treasurer at the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations General Assembly held in Moscow earlier this year.

Clinical Psychologist Ray Miller previously worked in the NHS as a Health and Clinical Psychologist in England for 20 years before returning Christina Buxton to Scotland working for 15 years until his retirement, at which time he was Professional Advisor for Psychology to NHS Lothian. Miller was BPS president from 2006 to 2007 and stepped down as its Honorary Treasurer at this year’s meeting. Miller, who has an Honorary Professorship awarded by Heriot Watt University, also worked to establish a London base for the BPS and negotiated with the HCPC to have practitioner psychologists included on its register.

Wilkinson, Chartered Clinical and Health Psychologist currently works largely in independent practice and teaches part-time at the University of Surrey as Visiting Professor of Psychology. Between 1985 and 1999 she worked as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey and helped to establish its MSc in Health Psychology and the first Counselling Psychology course which was accredited by the BPS. Wilkinson has been deeply Professor Clifford involved with BPS boards and Stott committees for many years, sitting on the Counselling Psychology Division’s Committee, the Board of Examiners for Counselling Psychology, the Special Group of Independent Practitioners and others. At this year’s meeting Wilkinson stepped down from the Board of Trustees after three years in the position. er To read more from The Psychologist on many of those featured above please see tinyurl.com/yxkaq34q

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Just the beginning of the story…

Ella Rhodes reports from another fantastic annual conference of the Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG).

The Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group (PsyPAG) recently held its annual conference at Sheffield Hallam University. Amongst scores of excellent talks, themes of change, careers and wellbeing ran throughout.

Our journalist Ella Rhodes and Managing Editor Dr Jon Sutton were there.

Change

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In his opening keynote Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, Professor Sir Chris Husbands, described our radically changing world and the importance of scientists and their stories in combatting the worrying trends we see today. ‘Focus on big ideas not small problems, a question that’s increasingly important is what are you doing with your time? What’s the big story behind the small, focused problem your work is focused on? Tell your story beyond the academy.’

The importance of telling the stories of science, and the role of change as part of that process, was also tackled in a workshop led by PhD student Olly Robertson (Keele University), with Dr Jon Sutton. Robertson – who also spoke earlier in the conference, on the ‘ineffable release’ provided by swearing, and its possible psychobiological basis – pointed out the many problems in science communication, from plain inaccuracy to the extreme over-stating of findings. Good storytelling has a role to play in engaging audiences with research, she said, leading a series of tasks for the workshop participants to develop their own research stories.

Sutton has worked for 20 years helping psychologists tell the stories of their work. He said that while telling stories in psychology was relatively easy given people’s innate interest in others, many seem cautious about doing so. Change is a great place to start, he said, pointing to

Will Storr’s recent book The Science of Storytelling. Human beings are primed to notice change and beginning a story with a focus on something which either has changed or is about to is a good way to engage readers.

While the move to open and transparent science has led to what some call a ‘renaissance’ in psychology, Sutton said we need to find the story around open science to truly engage those outside the academy – including the media and policy makers. Many of psychology’s big names have, in the past, been master storytellers while sometimes smoothing over the facts or not including necessary caveats. As Diederik Stapel said about his fraudulent practices in his own work: ‘I wanted to manipulate the truth and make the world a little more beautiful than it is’. However, Sutton argued, in real, messy, uncertain science there is still room for narrative, storytelling and true public engagement (for example, recent discussions over screen time). He gave some advice: Try to find the story of change in your work, try to convey big ideas in small phrases (‘complex doesn’t mean clever’), and put the people back into your story – they are, after all, what makes the subject so interesting.

Change is also at the heart of Dr Emma Norris’ work at UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change. A former PsyPAG Chair Norris’ keynote covered the post-doctoral life, her PhD work on physical activity in children and her role on the Human Behaviour Change Project. Norris is working to develop an ontology of human behaviour change for the project, which aims to synthesise evidence on behaviour change interventions using machine learning techniques.

Eventually this system will be able to identify key interventions and research for specific behaviour change questions and challenges.

Norris said it had been a big change moving from

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the psychologist october 2019 news relatively independent research during her PhD to working at post-doctoral level and being one small cog in a large machine. She encouraged the post-graduates in the audience to seize opportunities to become more involved with groups such as PsyPAG, to embrace existing skills and work towards developing them, concluding: ‘Everyone’s route post-PhD is really different. Don’t feel under pressure to do a certain thing… you don’t have to have the perfect job straight out the gate, sample the variety and remember there is always something to learn from rejection.’

Reinforcing Norris’ view of the importance of the connections made through PsyPAG, Professor Madelynne Arden opened her keynote speech pointing to her various roles in PsyPAG in the 90s. It’s remarkable that all of those she served alongside – Professor Chris Armitage, Professor Rory O’Connor, Professor Diana Harcourt, Dr Heather Buchanan, and Professor Neil Coulson – have gone on to great things in our discipline. PsyPAG can certainly lay a claim on being the future of psychology.

Since 2013 Arden’s work has explored ways to help people with cystic fibrosis stick to their demanding medication regimes. She has recently completed a trial of an intervention which uses interviewing techniques to identify motivations for taking treatment, educates patients on the importance of treatment and tracks patient medication adherence and feeds back to patients when they reach goals. The intervention focuses on

successes rather than failures and encourages those who are low-adherers to initially set achievable goals and build on them.

Patients are also given action plans to help them to form a habit of taking medication – for example encouraging them to think ‘when I make a cup of tea I’ll take my treatment’. Results from a larger randomised trial of the intervention across 19 sites and 608 participants is expected later this year. Arden said she hoped adherence data would become part of the care package for everyone with cystic fibrosis and she and her colleagues are on track to achieve this with support from NHS England.

Careers

Career development, public engagement and the messy routes into academia many experience were all up for discussion. PhD student Alex Lloyd (Royal Holloway, University of London), who was selected and trained in giving a talk at a TEDx event, gave some excellent advice on communicating research to the public. He suggested seven ways to open a talk including asking a question, telling a story or using humour – but only if you’re funny.

In developing the body of a talk he suggested using a story arc, and gave examples of seven types including the hero’s journey, involving a ‘hero’ leaving their familiar land, or layering multiple narratives called nested loops.

To finish a talk Lloyd suggested zooming out, moving onto

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International Academy for Professional Development Centre for Stress Management

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promoting the cognitive behavioural approach for 30 years

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Certificate Courses 1 Coaching 30 Sep-4 Oct; 25-29 Nov; 13-17 Jan; 2-6 Mar 2 Stress Management and Performance Coaching (6-days) modular 11-15 Nov; 16-20 Mar 3 Psychological Coaching OR Coaching Psychology 11-15 Nov; 16-20 Mar Stress Management, Health and Wellbeing Coaching (4 days) Courses 1-3 are the taught work for our Advanced Diploma in Coaching Accredited by Association for Coaching

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Our courses are British Psychological Society Learning Centre Approved and are held at the BPS London, Edinburgh or in-house. We have trained 1000s of practitioners on our recognised modular courses since the 1980s. The Founder Director of the Centres and Academy is Prof Stephen Palmer PhD. Our experienced trainers have authored books and/or articles in their particular fields. They include Chartered Psychologists: Prof Stephen Palmer, Dr Siobhain O’Riordan, Nick Edgerton & Kasia Szymanska.

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Diplomas† Two-day & Three-day Courses

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10/09/2019 15:10

Wellbeing

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Drabble’s talk was not unusual in its focus on wellbeing.

As a group PsyPAG has always had an ethos of providing support and encouragement, and this was a theme which ran throughout the conference. One lunchtime session brought the worlds of heavy metal and wellbeing together in grand style.

Clinical Psychologist Dr Kate Quinn set up Heavy Metal Therapy after speaking with a client about their

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the bigger picture of what your talk may mean, calling people to action, or returning to a point or story you told at the beginning.

Critical Psychologist Dr Laura Kilby (Sheffield Hallam University) reassured the audience at her workshop that even when a career in academia starts ‘really badly’ it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the road. Kilby had finished school at 16 and had a previous experience of being quite cruelly dismissed by an academic at a university open day when enquiring about courses. She had five children under the age of eight when she started her undergraduate degree; while she felt initially as if people would mistake her for a member of staff, and had thoughts of quitting after her first statistics lecture, she persevered.

Kilby gave some excellent advice and said she hoped that sharing the disastrousness of her own start would be helpful. Getting her first post-doctoral position was a case of ‘dogged determination’: although she applied for 11 posts during her PhD, she was shortlisted for only one. She suggested that people use the contacts they have in fields which interest them, find allies early, and seek out conferences in your own field so as to avoid networking nerves. Eight years on from beginning her first academic post as a Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, Kilby is now a Reader in Social Psychology and the REF Coordinator for UoA 4. ‘I love doing what I do’, she concluded, ‘and I am so glad I persevered through the early challenges’.

Dr Jennie Drabble (Sheffield Hallam University), Senior Lecturer in forensic psychology and self-confessed Game of Thrones fan, posed a question in her keynote talk on moving from PhD to post-doc – how do you know there is an afterwards? Also a former PsyPAG member, Drabble spoke of the support and encouragement offered by meeting others in postgraduate study and found her first academic job to be something of a baptism of fire – helping to write a new accredited MSc in Forensic Psychology, dealing with heaps of paperwork and balancing research and teaching.

Drabble’s own research on the wellbeing of 10,000 students found half had experienced suicidal thoughts at least once; she is keen to extend this work to look at academics. The people in the room, she said, could help to change the culture of academia from within, help to move away from the publish or perish culture, the expectation of working extremely long hours with little time for life, and taking leave without the subsequent guilt. ‘Get into the habit of carving out time for yourself’, she advised.

Parents in India experienced higher levels of stress than UK parents recovery journey. While it is not strictly speaking a therapy it offers a place for metalheads to share their love of the music and the ways it helps them cope.

We have come a long way since the moral panic over metal in the 80s and 90s, with many finding solace in its themes, sound and emotion. This was illustrated beautifully by a mindfulness session to the sounds of Metallica led by mental health nurse Angela Glaves.

Quinn explained that metal can help people to honour the aspects of themselves which are sometimes buried away. The Heavy Metal Therapy website, and its presence on social media platforms, brings together metalheads who want to share their experiences of the music, song lyrics, writing and poetry. Quinn and her colleagues write blogs on some of the evidence behind the group, which has found metal can bring benefits to wellbeing.

Counselling Psychologist David Smith led a workshop on the importance of compassion and mental health for students. He explained that our primitive reptilian brain, which notices threat in our environment, and the laterevolved rational parts of the brain, add up to a somewhat disastrous combination which give humans the unique ability not only to feel stress when under threat, but to ruminate over those threats and potential future threats.

By developing our compassion, or the brain’s ‘soothing system’, we can learn to calm those overly threat-sensitive areas of the brain. Smith said by practicing mindfulness we can become more aware that we have evolved to feel certain ways, but these feelings do not always reflect reality. ‘We need to have compassion, it can be easy to slip into being critical about what’s going on, but compassion would say we’re not to blame for this; it’s how evolution, life and the environment has shaped us.’

Second-year PhD student Fathima Kodakkadan (Anglia Ruskin University) has been looking into the stress and resilience of parents in the UK and India who have autistic children. Originally from India herself, and having worked in the country as an assistant psychologist, Kodakkadan saw the stress of parents first-hand.

Psychology in India often incorporates western values and uses western diagnostic tests without looking for cultural factors and their effects.

In India autism is experienced very differently

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the psychologist october 2019 news compared with the West. Kodakkadan explained there is a great deal of stigma with many ascribing religious explanations for the condition, and given the stigma surrounding such conditions many attempt to keep their child’s autism within the family without seeking outside help. There is a distinct lack of cross-cultural research on autism and Kodakkadan wanted to test a hypothetical model of stress and resilience with parents in India and the UK which included the roles of stigma, perceived social and emotional support, child functioning and parents’ attitudes towards their children. She carried out both a quantitative survey of 120 parents from the UK and 120 in India, as well as 15 in-depth interviews with UK parents and 15 with Indian parents.

She found that parents in India experienced higher levels of stress than UK parents and these levels of stress in both UK and Indian populations were predicted by poor parental mental health, lower child functioning, lower perceived social and emotional support, more negative attitudes to the child and stigma. In the Indian parents she found that higher levels of resilience were predicted by higher levels of child-functioning, perceived emotional support, and lower stigma and negative attitudes towards the child. Similar findings of resilience were also found in the UK parents, however a child’s functioning did not affect resilience while perceived social support did.

This could only ever be a snapshot of a packed threeday conference. Other talks we saw included Anna Robson (Sheffield Hallam University) on validating words to

measure the concept of self-disgust; Nikki Dean Marshall (also Sheffield Hallam) on whether you can ‘force the other language to come out’ of bilinguals when they don’t want it to; Vytautas Nastajas on how virtual environments can affect episodic memory; and Rachel Nesbit (Royal Holloway) on whether social emotional factors in adolescence relate to facial emotion recognition.

Completing the keynote line up was Dr Dan Smith (University of Durham), a cognitive psychologist with a particular interest in attention and the eye-movement system. He presented a series of elegant experiments which investigated interactions between the eyemovement system, attention and working memory, building to a ‘Motor Bias Theory of Attention’.

As incoming British Psychological Society President David Murphy tweeted after the event [see the online version of this report for more of his comments], this was ‘an absolutely fantastic conference. Huge thanks to @SuzanneHodgson3 & all the organizing team @ sheffhallamuni for such a great job of ensuring every detail was perfect …’.

Do check out slides from the presentations, and details of the PsyPAG award winners. And if the testimonies of PsyPAG’s keynote speakers are anything to go by, you can expect to hear much more from many of these students and clinicians in the future.

Next year’s PsyPAG conference will be held at the University of Leeds: to find out more see psypag.co.uk.

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Psychologists and therapists were on hand during this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe to support performers through two drop-in sessions.

Sessions in various psychological therapies aimed at improving mental health and wellbeing were run by clinical psychologists, art therapists, nurse therapists and psychologists in training drawn from NHS Lothian and the British Psychological Society’s Scotland Branch.

Mindfulness, relaxation, cognitive strategies, art therapy and self-soothing were some of the therapies offered to performers.

Beth Hannah, Chair of BPS Scotland, said she hoped the sessions would help performers look after themselves and their mental health during the festival and beyond. ‘The Edinburgh Fringe is a great event which takes over the city for a month, but there is a pressure on performers to sell tickets and get up on stage every day.’

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Under pressure Emma Young digests the research on whether we thrive or choke…

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Full reports and much more on the Digest website 22

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ou’re preparing for an important meeting, and the pressure’s on. If it’s bad now, how will you cope when you actually have to perform? Will you fly? Or will you sink?

Psychologists have a lot to say about how to cope under pressure… both the chronic kind, which might involve ongoing high expectations at work, for example; and the acute, single-event variety such as a vital meeting, a make-or-break presentation, or a sports match.

The stress mindset

A concept that’s increasingly recognised as important in relation to pressure is your ‘stress mindset’. If you recognise that stressful challenges can sharpen your focus, strengthen your motivation, and offer learning and achievement opportunities, then you have a ‘positive’ stress mindset. In contrast, viewing stress as unpleasant, debilitating and negative constitutes a ‘negative’ stress mindset. And there’s evidence that this is harmful. A 2017 study led by Anne Casper found that when faced with a day that they know is going to be challenging, people with a positive stress mindset come up with coping strategies,

boost their performance, and end the day feeling more energised. For people with a negative stress mindset, the opposite happens.

Alia Crum at Stanford University is one of the bestknown advocates of the positive stress mindset. She’s found that it’s not just adults who benefit. In a study of adolescents, Crum and her colleagues found that those who believed in the potential benefits of stress were less prone to feeling stressed in the wake of difficult life events. ‘These findings suggest that changing the way adolescents think about stress may help protect them from acting impulsively when confronted with adversity’, the researchers concluded.

If you do have a negative stress mindset, there are ways to turn it around. In another study, Crum’s team found that adult participants who’d watched a film clip that focused on the ‘enhancing’ nature of stress, and were then put into a stressful social situation, afterwards felt more positive and showed greater cognitive flexibility than participants who’d first watched a ‘stress is bad’ clip.

If you’re feeling anxious because you’re under increased pressure at work, or there’s a particularly challenging opportunity/stressful event (you now know

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the psychologist october 2019 digest which adjective you should pick…) coming up, one short-term fix might be to go and watch a horror movie.

Deliberately scaring ourselves can calm the brain, leading to a ‘recalibration of our emotions’, according to a US study led by Margee Kerr which involved visitors to an immersive theatre attraction at the ScareHouse in Pittsburgh. Those volunteers who were more stressed or tired beforehand showed the biggest emotional benefits afterwards.

There is also some tentative evidence from Heidi Fritz and others that taking a cheerful perspective on life is associated with less stress over time, while self-defeating humour – the sort that involves disparaging yourself – is associated with more distress.

The evidence from this particular study is not strong.

But some support for the idea that trying to big yourself up, rather than to put yourself down, can help in high pressure situations comes from a study in which Sonia Kang at the University of Toronto and her team studied a group of MBA students. The researchers put some into positions of low power in a negotiating situation, and found that these participants performed worse under pressure than those who’d been given more power over the outcome. However, when ‘low power’ students first spent five minutes writing about their most important negotiating skill, this neutralised the power differential effect on performance. ‘Anytime you have low expectations for performance, you tend to sink down and meet those low expectations’, Kang observed.

‘Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize that threat.’

Time

However, if you are going into a negotiating situation, you may also want to bear this in mind: when put under time pressure, people tend to act more like themselves, according to a recent paper in Nature Communications.

Researchers Fandong Chen and Ian Krajbich, based in China and the US, found that when there was little time available to make a decision about how to divide a pot of money, selfish people tended to act more selfishly than usual, while pro-social people behaved even more prosocially. In theory, either could be useful – depending on what you want out of an interaction.

However, time pressure can also improve decisionmaking, according to a simulation of a realistic disaster event overseen by Liverpool’s Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology. It’s thought that this is because it forces people to make tough decisions – and when these people are experts, they’re more likely to be the right ones.

A helping hand

Whether you’re a hospital manager awaiting an influx of injured patients, or a lecturer or a student about to go into a vital meeting or exam, you’re likely approaching the point of maximum pressure. What can help?

You might hope for a text message from a friend or romantic partner. Recent research from Emily Hooker and colleagues confirms that sending a text to a partner confronted with a difficult task really can make them feel

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more supported. This particular study involved 75 women who were asked to do a set of stressful tasks, including mental maths and public speaking, while their blood pressure and heart rate were recorded. While they were waiting to perform, some received text messages from their romantic partner, who was waiting in another room.

These scripted texts were either explicitly supportive (for example, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a psych study.

You’ll be fine’) whereas others were more mundane (‘It’s cold in here’).

Analysis of the physiological data revealed that the mundane texts, though not the ‘supportive’ ones, reduced the women’s blood pressure during both preparation and the task itself. When you’re under psychological pressure, being reminded that there’s someone out there who really cares for you seems to be more helpful than receiving targeted advice. In fact, the potential risks of offering ‘helpful’ advice have been highlighted in other work.

A recent meta-analysis of 142 studies looking at how to help struggling employees concluded that simply making job-related support available – for example, new equipment or career counselling – is often helpful, but overtly discussing a problem can backfire. ‘That finding might be because not all support is good support’, said Michael Mathieu at San Francisco State University, who led the study. For example, reaching out to try to help a co-worker might be taken as an insult, he suggests.

If your partner somehow neglects to send a simple reminder of their implicit support before you go into your important meeting, or stand up to give that paper, they may still be able to help you. Just visualising your partner can moderate your body’s physiological response to stress, according to research at the University of Arizona led by Kyle Bourassa. (In this study, the stressor was physical – volunteers had to submerge their feet into cold water – but in theory, the same effect could hold for other forms of stress.) In some trials, participants actually had their partner in the same room. These people reported less pain than those who just imagined that their partner was there, but the blood pressure data for the two groups were statistically equivalent. ‘The results suggest that accessing the mental representation of a romantic partner and a partner’s presence each buffer against exaggerated acute stress responses to a similar degree’, the researchers write.

Choking and clutch

It’s possible that, in modulating physiological arousal, this kind of technique may reduce the risk of choking under pressure. This phenomenon is familiar to many of us. When the pressure gets ‘too much’, our skills suddenly deteriorate, and we perform more poorly than we, or anyone else, expected. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon has been extensively studied in sport. One analysis of the performance of elite tennis players, led by Danny Cohen-Zada, concluded that the male players were about twice as adversely affected by high pressure as the female players, perhaps because men typically show a bigger spike in levels of the stress hormone cortisol when under pressure than women do. (‘Our robust evidence

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that women can respond better than men to competitive pressure is compelling’, the researchers noted.)

The opposite to choking under pressure is sometimes called ‘clutch performance’. A group led by Christian Swann at the University of Wollongong, Australia interviewed 16 top athletes and asked them to describe what they were thinking and feeling during a recent outstanding ‘clutch’ performance. This led them to identify 12 characteristics associated with excelling under pressure. Six were similar to the state of flow (they became so involved in their task they became unaware of the crowd, for example). But six were different. They included being deliberately focused on the task in hand, maintaining intense effort over a period of time, feeling high arousal levels, and not thinking about what would happen if they failed. The athletes talked about making a big effort to monitor their own performance as they played, to raise their game. (It’s worth noting that though the athletes talked about feeling high levels of arousal, their actual physiological arousal was not monitored. There’s certainly work finding that arousal helps with performance – only to a point.)

It’s interesting that the athletes mentioned not thinking about the negative consequences of failure.

Because this brings us back to mindsets. Work published earlier this year (led by Vikram Chib) found that simply altering how you view what’s at stake in a high-pressure situation can dramatically reduce the risk of choking.

The participants in this study were asked to play a computer-based game in which they could win money.

But when they were instructed to imagine that they already had the high prize money on offer, and were playing for the chance to keep it, rather than to gain it, they were much less likely to choke. (The researchers tied this to altered levels of activity in a region of the brain called the ventral striatum.) A skin conductance measure also showed that this reappraisal prevented heightened stress when they failed. Playing make-believe had, it seems, taken the pressure out of the situation.

More work needs to be done to explore the potential benefits of this approach, as well as the positive stress mindset, in real-world situations. But next time you’re under pressure to perform, why not try embracing the opportunity to achieve — and imagine that you’ve already succeeded?

Find out more about many of the studies cited here via digest.bps.org.uk

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Digest digested

The popularity of ‘microdosing’ psychedelic drugs has exploded over the past decade, with proponents claiming that the practice can enhance wellbeing and creativity.

But a recent review has concluded that there is a ‘lack of scientific proof’ that microdosing is effective, with few placebo-controlled studies, a lack of safety-testing, and no real consensus on what the term even means. (Journal of Psychopharmacology).

Researchers studying a cohort of French children have found that young kids with a big brother tend to have poorer language skills than those with an older sister or no older sibling at all. Older brothers may take up more of their parents’ attention, which could otherwise be spent teaching and conversing with the younger child.

(Psychological Science).

A week spent acting like an extravert can boost people’s positive emotions, a study has found, while behaving like an introvert can put a dent in your wellbeing. The research suggests a possible behavioural intervention for increasing happiness – but psychologists will first need to figure out how individual differences influence its effectiveness. (Journal of Experimental Psych: General).

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Hawaiians experienced heightened anxiety for days after a false missile alert sent out in early 2018, according to an analysis of tweets from Hawaii residents. The proportion of tweets containing anxiety-related words leapt up on the day of the false alarm, and remained elevated long after the all clear was given – particularly in people who seemed the least anxious to begin with. (American Psychologist).

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Brain imaging studies are unnecessarily excluding people who are left handed or ambidextrous, according to an analysis published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

Lyam Bailey and colleagues at Dalhousie University looked at 1008 neuroimaging papers published in three major neuroscience journals in 2017, noting whether each study reported participants’ handedness – and if so, how many non-righthanded, or ‘adextral’, participants were included.

A little over half of the studies reported participants’ handedness.

But only 3.2 per cent of participants

in those studies were adextral, considerably lower than the rate of 10-13 per cent in the general population. Overall, fewer than one in five of the studies that reported handedness included any adextrals at all.

Language and movement are often represented differently in the brains of adextrals – but that doesn’t mean they should be excluded from neuroimaging research, the authors say. Handedness should be explored like any other individual difference, they write, and statistical methods can be used to control for any potential effects.

Matthew Warren

09/09/2019 14:58

the psychologist october 2019 digest

Throughout our lives, we set ourselves goals – to pass an exam, run a marathon, lose 10 kilograms of excess weight or gain a promotion. Given the importance of such goals to our physical and psychological wellbeing, it’s not surprising that there has been a wealth of research into how best to set, work towards, and achieve them.

But let’s say you succeed – what then? Psychologists have paid less attention to people’s behaviour after they’ve achieved their goals. And although it’s generally good for us to continue to study, exercise, eat healthily, work hard, and so on, this doesn’t always transpire. For example, one follow-up of contestants who’d won the weight-loss TV show The Biggest Loser found that six years on, most weighed even more than they had at the start of the show.

However, a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition offers a solution. People are more likely to maintain good behaviours, the researchers find, if instead of thinking about achieving a goal as ‘arriving at a destination’, they view it as ‘completing a journey’.

We rely heavily on metaphor when considering abstract concepts and aspects of our lives. So Szu-Chi Huang and Jennifer Aaker at the Stanford Graduate School of Business reasoned that thinking about a goal as the completion of a journey might prompt people to reflect on how they had been at the start, and all the ups and downs along the way. This might make them feel that they had changed to be the kind of person who engages in these specific behaviours, and make them more likely to maintain them.

In a series of six studies involving more than 1600 people, this is exactly what the pair found. They first looked at two groups comprising more than 400 American students and university staff who had recently achieved either an academic or a fitness goal. Participants were asked to think about how their experience of attaining the goal was like ‘completing a journey’ or ‘reaching a destination’, or were just told to think about achieving the goal without a metaphor attached. Those who viewed the goal as the completion of a journey not only expressed stronger intentions to continue the goalrelated behaviours, but actually did so (the fitness journey group were more likely to sign up for an ongoing fitness programme, for example).

In subsequent research, the team further characterised this effect. In one study, 265 dieters set themselves daily calorie intake goals and tracked their consumption over seven days. After the end of the diet programme, those who thought about their achievement as the completion of a journey were again more likely to indicate that they would continue their dieting behaviour.

And importantly, this group also had greater feelings of personal growth, suggesting this could be the underlying mechanism for the effect.

Another study, which involved a 14-day walking programme with a goal of achieving 100,000 steps, revealed that the journey metaphor encouraged beneficial

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Metaphors matter

behaviour after participants had attained their goal, but not when they were getting close to achieving it. When a goal is in sight, but not yet achieved, ‘focusing on the destination aspects of this path could be more motivating, likely because it accentuated the end goal that one still needed to achieve’, the pair notes.

And the phenomenon was not just restricted to American participants. In a final study, the researchers followed 106 executives who were finishing a business education programme in Ghana. In what they were told was an exit interview, the participants were encouraged to describe their attainment of their qualification using a journey or a destination metaphor. Six months on, members of the journey group were more likely to be using practices they had learned on the course.

It’s true that getting people to think about their journey to achieving a goal might not always work, or may even backfire — if the journey has been very hard or unpleasant, for example. However, the researchers add, ‘it is our hope that this research serves as the beginning of a journey of diverse research programs that utilize a variety of metaphors to enhance goal pursuers’ chances of maintaining their success’.

Emma Young

09/09/2019 14:58

Laura Walton takes psychology underwater

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uring one scuba dive as part of my advanced course, I was required to use a compass to navigate a square route underwater (at about 10 metres deep). The task was to swim a specified length by counting fin kicks, then turn 90 degrees and swim the same length again, and turn 90 degrees... until returning to the starting point. I found it a difficult concept to grasp; it was the only dive I was not looking forward to.

The instructor gave me the signal and I set off.

I was using rented equipment and the fins had started to rub on my big toe. I couldn’t focus… the pain became all I could think about, I became overwhelmed by the thought that my toenail was being ripped off. I

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indicated to my instructor that something was wrong with my foot. I’m not sure what I expected, but I know I was looking for some sort of get-out.

He assumed I had cramp, and responded supportively by stretching out my foot and rubbing the back of my calf. I indicated that the problem was much worse and pointed to my toes. He was puzzled, but attempted to assist by taking off my fin. This meant that I could feel the toe with my hands, and I realised that there was actually very little wrong.

My instructor’s attitude to fixing the problem made it very clear to me that he expected we address the issue right there, underwater. Unless I wanted to specifically request an end to the dive, there was no escaping this task by heading for the surface.

We put the fin back on, and I set off. I had learned

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the psychologist october 2019 under

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a fundamental lesson in scuba diving: we face the problem under the surface.

The physical and physiological To understand the psychology of scuba diving, we also need to understand the physical and physiological aspects. Water is heavy. The weight of the water above a diver increases as they descend, so the deeper we go, the more pressure. The weight of the water compresses the gas we breathe. So, when we breathe gas under pressure, it moves around our bodies at a higher density than usual. If we bolt for the surface or come up too quickly, this can have a catastrophic effect on our biological systems. If we have been under for a while, nitrogen has gathered in all our tissues

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and organs and we are pressurised. Coming up too quickly is a bit like shaking a can of coke then opening it! The bubbles grow, and they cause problems. The worst case scenario is bubbles of nitrogen expanding in the nervous system, in the brain and spinal cord, leading to stroke or permanent paralysis. Also, if a diver holds their breath when ascending, this can cause air to become trapped in the lungs; it expands and can rupture the tissues of the lungs. One potential consequence of this is air migrating to the brain and causing an embolism.

This all means that fleeing to the surface when a problem crops up is simply not an option: you need to learn to deal with it then and there. Perhaps this may mean a decision to end the dive, in a controlled manner; not a sudden exit, but a rational decision

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supported by effective emotional regulation. As a general rule, the more advanced the diving the slower the rate of return to the surface. For a recreational scuba diver, taking fun dives to 18-30 metres, it is possible to return to the surface within minutes. When Ahmed Gabr set the record for the deepest scuba dive – 332.35 metres in Dahab, Egypt – it took him 12 minutes to dive to that depth, and 14 hours to come back up! There are also commercial divers tasked with completing work such as maintenance to underwater pipelines or oil rigs. These ‘saturation divers’ stay down so long that their bodies become saturated with inert gases like nitrogen. They descend in teams in a type of diving bell, and stay down for days. These operations are carefully planned and managed by surface support.

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Psychological theory can be applied in training programmes to produce effective learning. Ultimately it can make diving safer. Psychologists have already informed the diving community about cognition, perception and memory underwater (and we have also learned about those processes from divers, for example Alan Baddeley’s work on the importance of context on learning). Yet, ‘dive psychology’, as a discipline, is very much in its infancy. A recent literature review by Dorota Niewiedzal and colleagues across four Polish educational institutions, concluded that there is a lack of knowledge about the effect of personality and social functioning, mental health and psychoeducation in relation to human divers.

But interest in this area is growing, and there are several examples of behavioural science being taken underwater: in sports psychology, clinical psychology and human factors. Examples are beginning to emerge across the scuba diving spectrum and from a range of behavioural science disciplines.

Going under Whether on recreational, technical or commercial dives, all divers encounter problems. Within such an extreme environment, human processes can be amplified. A minor stressor can trigger Human factors full-blown panic if the diver Technical diving is a specialist area cannot see a way to address “a huge part of how these of scuba diving in which people go the issue. Responses are often deeper and longer on their dives. dependent on communication, and problems are faced is It requires additional equipment miscommunication is common behavioural and social: and gas supply. The pressure of if you are talking to each other the human factors” breathing at depth means that in hand signals. So, a huge part using ordinary air is not advisable. of how these problems are faced Air contains oxygen, nitrogen and is behavioural and social: the carbon dioxide. Oxygen becomes toxic to humans at human factors. For example, the person’s ability to around 50-60 metres deep. This can cause seizures of self-regulate under stress, to calm themselves and the nervous system, convulsions, unconsciousness and retain rational thinking ability. If the limbic system subsequent drowning. of the brain takes over and disconnects from the In addition to this sobering effect, the density of pre-frontal cortex, the person is in trouble, because the gases breathed has an effect on the diver’s nervous the human brain in an underwater crisis will make system, in a phenomenon known as ‘gas narcosis’. drastic attempts to reach the surface. A human in The diver becomes temporally intoxicated, an panic loses awareness that the equipment in their experience similar to consuming alcohol. They may mouth is supplying them with air and the mask on become confused, disorientated, anxious, paranoid or their face allows them to see. A panicked diver will frequently pull out the regulator and rip off their mask, even euphoric. This may lead to dangerous actions.

For these reasons, those who dive beyond 40 metres in an instinctive response to access or so will use different mixtures of gas to breathe: more air. Alternatively they may combinations of gases that are better suited to life at enter ‘passive panic’, the divers’ Key sources depth. term for a state of dissociation in Laura Walton www.scubapsyche.com The complexity of technical diving means that which the person is shut-down and Gareth Lock there are often multiple systems operating to execute a disconnected.

Surrounded by water, www.thehumandiver.com dive, for example, the gases need to be mixed properly neither of these states are helpful. and labelled accurately, computer software is used Therefore, basic psychological Niewiedział, D., Kolańska, M., to plan the dive and teams of humans work together skills for emotion regulation and Dąbrowiecki, Z. et al. (2018).

Psychological aspects of diving in to follow that plan. Higher complexity of systems management of thoughts are selected theoretical and research introduces more opportunities for problems to occur, essential in scuba diving. perspectives. Polish Hyperbaric Research and in most cases these problems arise from human Psychologists need to go 62(1), 43–54. error. No diver wants to deal with the consequences of under the surface because the Walton, L. (2018). The panic triangle: mistakes underwater. Yet, as humans, we are subject to application of research, theory Onset of panic in scuba divers. Undersea cognitive biases that prevent us from taking effective and practice to scuba diving can and hyperbaric medicine, 45(5), 505-509.

Jevon, M. South-West Technical Diving, action. The behaviour of an individual is shaped by make a difference. It can improve https://swt.ie the context of the system, so how do we create systems communication, awareness that increase safety and effectiveness? and optimise performance.

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heart rate and, importantly, rate of All industries that employ breathing, and therefore deplete the humans in systems face this supply more quickly. This is also issue, and the aviation industry in the case on deep technical dives, particular has demonstrated success but the presence of a barrier of rock in the application of human factors. between the diver and the surface Gareth Lock is a retired Royal Air has a subtly different effect than Force senior officer Navigator of when the barrier is a depth of water 25 years, who was both a senior which must be ascended through supervisor and a tactical flight slowly. instructor. Noticing the relevance Laura Walton is a Clinical One common stressor is the of human factors to diving, he Psychologist and a qualified loss of visibility due to silt being undertook doctoral research scuba instructor stirred up in the water. If the diver examining the role of human laura@scubapsyche.com becomes distressed by this, the factors in scuba diving accidents. changes in breathing may cause He now offers Human Factors Skills in Diving: high performance development programmes them to make movements that agitate the silt even to improve the knowledge, skills and safety of all divers further. Increasing physiological arousal could lead to poor awareness and faulty decision making, leading [see also p.61]. to errors and exacerbation of the problem. It’s one In diving, like in aviation, mistakes are often thing to be unable to see through silt, but the situation attributed to ‘human error’. But this is not a useful becomes a lot worse if the diver’s awareness becomes causal explanation; rather it is an outcome of a series foggy too. Furthermore, the task requirements of of events which were influenced by known human navigation and the laying of lines and markers mean factors such as cognitive bias and social influences on that there are cognitive challenges faced by the diver. behaviour. Lock’s ‘Human Diver’ training puts teams Cave divers tend to operate in teams, and therefore of divers into a situation that will bring out these human factors, by placing them under stress. For safety those tasks are completed by people working together.

There is potential for miscommunication to lead to reasons, it is not sensible to needlessly increase stress in any extreme environment, certainly not underwater. errors which may have disastrous consequences.

Technical diving, whether on shipwrecks or in So, the training, inspired by flight simulators, is a caves is a high performance activity. Matt Jevon is a mission to be completed by team within a simulated technical diving instructor and Sport Psychologist. computer programme. The programme simulates the One of the few psychologists to work directly occurrence of stressors that lead to task loading and underwater, he trains people in technical diving loss of situational awareness, and puts pressure on techniques, and also in applying psychological theory cognitive processes and communication. After the mission, structured and reflective debriefs elicit insights to optimise performance. During formal diving courses he includes psychological skills for diving, for example, into factors such as individual trigger points, core techniques for retaining situational awareness using beliefs, personality traits and habitual responses. For pre-learned processes, effective regulation of emotion individual divers this gives perspective on why divers and applications of procedures for communication to make mistakes and how they themselves can adopt minimise errors. Jevon is quick to stress that the role procedures to reduce risk of incidents. On a wider of a sports psychologist is in training and preparation level, Lock is working to change culture, procedures before the activity, i.e. ‘you don’t interrupt the game’. and attitudes within the industry.

Skills are taught in advance of the dive and the most intervention during performance would be a cue to connect to those skills.

Sports psychology and performance To illustrate how psychology is applied under the Changing systems and improving diver awareness surface, Jevon gave me an example of a training dive of human factors may be useful, but we can also consider how psychology can support improvements in with three divers in the team going into a cave system.

Jevon was at the front, leading the group into a cave, individual human performance. following him, another experienced diver, and at the In cave diving, scuba divers are both underwater back the diver in training. The plan was that Jevon, and underground – a direct escape is impossible. as the instructor, would lead the dive on the outward Therefore cave divers require superior skills in selfregulation. The diver’s air supply is carefully calculated journey, then the order of the team would reverse and the diver in training would lead the return to the exit. to be sufficient to perform the dive, with a reasonable However, on the journey into the cave the diver in reserve to use in an emergency. The diver must ensure they leave the cave and return to the surface while they training stopped still. There were no obvious stressors, and it was not apparent what had caused the diver to still have air to breathe. This fact can act as a potent stop. Jevon used his torch to signal a question: ‘are you psychological stressor, yet the diver needs to find a okay?’. The diver made little response, vaguely moved way to deal with that. If they allow themselves to react their torch but gave no clear signal. The diver was to stress, the physiological reactions serve to increase

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conscious, but apparently disconnected. Jevon gave two further signals to remind the diver to attend to situational awareness, and emotional regulation.

These were simple, hand signal cues linked to procedures that the diver had been taught before the dive. The diver regained composure, engaged in communication and continued the dive as planned.

This may not appear a particularly dramatic example, but consider that it may have been the ability of the diver to perform specific psychological skills and the reminder given that led to this safe conclusion.

When a diver disconnects, loses awareness and is unable to communicate with the rest of the team, there is potential for sudden deterioration of the dive. In this case, it was vital that the diver remained in control of their actions in order for the group to return to the exit. Had the diver become stressed by perceived problems, then their behaviour may become a risk for everyone in the cave.

Clinical Psychology Diving is not all about extremes: for most scuba divers it is an enjoyable and relaxing activity. Recreational diving is the term used for people scuba diving for fun.

The need to focus on certain skills and the tendency to become enthralled by the underwater world means that divers tend to leave their worries on the surface.

Yet even in recreational scuba there are many issues that psychology can be useful for. People often hold specific fears about depth, sea creatures or open spaces. Anxieties can develop around particular skills. These issues develop in much the same way

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The author on a dive. Is it better down where it is wetter?

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as any surface phobia or anxiety, and can potentially be resolved with the application of evidence-based techniques, such as graded exposure and response prevention. As a scuba diving instructor, my awareness of psychological processes has been useful, particularly in training new divers. I recall one beginner diver course where a student was overwhelmed by the experience of breathing underwater for the first time.

We were in a swimming pool, about a metre deep. He had grown up in and around water, could swim and dive holding his breath, but the sensation of breathing underwater was creating such a strong reaction that he could not remain underwater. We stepped out from the rest of the group and I investigated the issue.

He was not frightened, and could understand that breathing was possible, but could not seem to stop himself from coming up. His brain simply could not process breathing underwater. I broke the skill down into simpler steps, starting with breathing with only his face in the water, while standing up. I had him work through each step until comfortable enough to work to the next. At one point he was descending, swimming for a few seconds, coming up saying it was okay, then going back down again. I could see that he was inadvertently creating a behaviour sequence that could easily trap him: by learning that in order to feel safe he needed to keep returning to the surface. So I simply instructed him to swim under water, breathing normally, notice when he felt okay, but then to continue to swim around for several minutes and come up only when feeling calmer than he had been initially.

This worked well, and his brain began to habituate to the new sensations. He rejoined the group and began learning more skills. This could so easily have ended up with a person frustrated and unable to understand why they could not keep up with the group. In fact, this social aspect can be especially problematic in diver training, with fear of failure, social judgement and rejection being easily raised.

Another important issue in diving is panic. Even for recreational divers, seemingly small issues can appear insurmountable when they occur underwater. For example, water can leak into a diving mask, it is easily cleared if the diver is competent in that skill, but if the diver is unable to clear the water they may become distressed. With water around their nose they may inhale a little and experience unpleasant sensations. This stress increases emotional and physical reactions and, as they become more stressed, the less capable they become of fixing the problem.

Their ineffective actions confirm the

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threatening nature of the situation and the diver enters a positive feedback loop of escalating panic. In an analysis of snorkelling and scuba diving deaths in New Zealand between 1980 and 2000, led by Michael Davis, panic was a factor in 68 per cent of accidents in scuba diving where the diver’s state was noted.

Yet there is little discussion of preventing panic. In clinical psychology, there are theories to understand stress, anxiety and panic, and approaches to educate people and help them to regain control of their actions in coping with panic. Frequently, when divers panic, the explanations are short: either (1) blame the equipment or (2) blame the diver. In fact, scuba equipment rarely fails, but the shame and embarrassment of losing control of behaviour and a memory of an event impaired by stress makes this an obvious explanation. When divers panic, other divers may say it was the person – ‘they shouldn’t have panicked’ – perhaps referring to personal qualities or lack of skills. The formulation process can help to develop a more complete explanation that is more likely to indicate potential solutions. Theoretical models of stress and panic may also be useful in helping divers to understand this behavioural and physiological phenomenon. I recently published on the ‘panic triangle’, describing panic as sparked only when three elements are present: a deficit in diver readiness, a difficulty in emotional regulation and a stressor. This

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model may be useful in encouraging divers to stay within the limits of their competence and develop the necessary skills for the dives they are undertaking in order to reduce the risk of panic.

Bringing it back to the surface Interestingly, whether issues have basis in survival or social fears, it all seems to be intensified in scuba diving. It appears as if the extreme environment brings aspects of the psyche into focus, and certainly there is clear and direct feedback. For example, underwater it is possible to see stress! If a diver breathes fast they produce more bubbles than a relaxed diver. If their breathing is erratic, their ability to control their position in the water is compromised, so they may bounce up and down and flail their limbs. In so many ways, psychological processes have a direct impact on the diver. This creates possibilities, sometimes bringing to life psychological issues that were hidden under a metaphorical surface become all too visible under the surface of the water. They become tangible. They can be worked with.

Divers will often remark on how learning to dive has changed their lives. Whether by improving confidence through challenge, or facing issues that were previously avoided, what we learn under the water can be brought back to the surface.

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From underworlds to outerworlds

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Nathan Smith gets to the bottom of how we might reach what’s way above…

he term ‘underworld’ usually subsumes a negative meaning.

Various definitions point towards the morbid and illicit nature of these lower regions. In ancient mythology, Hades was the god of the underworld, whose name eventually came to describe the home of the dead. Fast-forward several millennia and underworlds are now most commonly attributed to the social spheres in which criminal organisations go about their daily business. However, beyond these culturally and socially-defined hierarchies, there are many people actually living and working in literal and geographical underworlds. The study of these people will pave the way for humankind’s most daring voyage yet: an expedition into the ‘outerworld’. The goal? To stand on the surface of Mars and accelerate our transition to becoming a truly spacefaring interplanetary species.

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Long duration space travel Long duration interplanetary space exploration poses a number of risks to human physical and psychological health. It’s an inherently dangerous endeavour.

But alongside that, issues related to prolonged confinement, lack of personal space and privacy, delayed communication, separation from friends and family, and monotonous work and living conditions can all contribute to impaired performance and experiences of ill health.

In the depths of space, long away from the safety and relative tranquillity of planet Earth, this breakdown in function can have severe and potentially deadly consequences. Thankfully, safety, performance and health risks may be mitigated via a number of processes. These range from selection and training to sympathetic human-centred design and the development and application of effective stress countermeasures (Sgobba et al., 2018). When implemented successfully, such processes should enable crew members not only to withstand the demands of a long duration space mission, but actually thrive and experience the journey as the life-changing and affirming experience it should be.

To better understand the risks to crew members

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and how to support their wellbeing and optimal function during a long interplanetary voyage, requires the study of people in comparable conditions. These comparators are often referred to as analogues.

Although not directly replicating the demands of an interplanetary expedition (it is very hard to simulate microgravity), analogue settings do provide an ecologically valid context for collecting physiological and psychological data on topics ranging from sleep and immune function to teamworking and conflict resolution (Sandal et al., 2018; Suedfeld, 2018).

Analogues also offer a platform for testing and developing skills. A range of underworld analogues have been identified and used for these purposes.

Literal underworlds include those found beneath the Earth’s surface. This includes subterranean caves, deep-sea saturation chambers and submarines.

Geographical underworlds are found at the bottom of the world in Antarctica, where fieldworkers spend long durations living and working in isolated microsocieties, sometimes under conditions of extended confinement.

Caves Subterranean caves are one of the most interesting underworld analogue settings. Unlike the growing number of highly controlled space simulation experiments, these hinterlands offer a very real, physically demanding and potentially dangerous context for studying human behaviour: and compared to simulations, an experience that more closely resembles what it might be like to voyage into the cosmos. A 2018 article by Nicolette Mogilever and colleagues makes a compelling case for using caves to advance psychological and neuroscientific spaceflight research. The authors highlight many overlaps between the challenges faced in caves and those encountered in space: including isolation and confinement, high levels of risk, reliance on protective equipment for safety, information uncertainty, unusual lighting and sensory conditions, limited communications, and supply and escape difficulties.

By the early 1960s, scientists had already recognised the value of conducting research in caves.

Most notably, between 1962 and 1972 the French

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geologist Michel Siffre conducted numerous cave experiments – in the process isolating himself and others in darkness for periods of up to six months.

Siffre identified that living in these dark underworlds resulted in significant perturbations to a person’s sense of time and, at that point, provided groundbreaking new insights into human sleep/wake cycles.

Interestingly, this work captured the attention of the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), who contributed analytical expertise and funding to Siffre’s endeavours.

Despite offering a unique natural laboratory for spaceflight research, and being of keen interest to space agencies, psychologists have rarely used caves as a context for study. An exception is the recently published work by MacNeil and Brcic (2017), who

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Getty images

Long duration space travel will bring particular psychological challenges. Can the study of human performance in ‘analogue’ situations – including caving and Antarctic expeditions – prepare us for celestial voyage?

systematically analysed the diaries of cave explorers to understand the coping strategies used to counteract stress in these trying and toilsome settings. Consistent with many other extreme populations, MacNeil and Brcic noted that cavers tended to rely on problemfocused coping approaches, such as planful problemsolving, putting in more effort and seeking support.

Emotion-focused strategies, such as positive reappraisal, were suggested as a method for securing salutogenic stress reactions; used by cavers to identify the enjoyable and rewarding aspects of what is, from an objective point of view, a fairly torrid experience.

Despite receiving relatively limited academic interest, caves are currently used for practical purposes and as a context for astronaut training. Since 2008, the European Space Agency (ESA) has used a cave

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system in Sardinia for their Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behavior and performance Skills (CAVES) programme. During a 6-day expedition, astronauts-in-training, or ‘cavenauts’ as they are sometimes known, live and work in a deep cave system to learn and practice a range of skills that map on to the International Space Station Human Behaviour and Performance Competency Model (Bessone et al., 2008). This includes skills related to teamworking, group living, cross-cultural awareness and decisionmaking. Ultimately, the purpose of this training is to equip astronauts with the competencies to live and work effectively in a small interdependent team in the restricted confines of space.

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Antarctica There is an underworld that has benefited from sustained research interest, and regularly been used as a spaceflight analogue. Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest and highest continent on Earth. It has regularly been suggested that living in Antarctica is as close to inhabiting another planet as you can get without actually leaving Earth. A collection of early findings and observations on the psychology of living and working in Antarctica are presented in the seminal textbook, ‘From Antarctica to Outer Space: Life in Isolation and Confinement’ (Harrison et al., 1991), and psychologist Ron Roberts reviewed ‘Psychology at the end of the world’ in The Psychologist in January Key sources 2011.

Today, probably the most Harrison, A.A., Clearwater, Y.A. & McKay well-known space analogue in C.P. (1991). From Antarctica to outer the Antarctic underworld is the space: Life in isolation and confinement.

French-Italian research station New York: Springer Verlag.

Concordia. Concordia is extreme.

MacNeil, R.R. & Brcic, J. (2017). Coping It is approximately 1100 miles With the Subterranean Environment.

Journal of Human Performance in from the coastline, sits on Dome C Extreme Environments, 13. above 3000m of altitude, and has Mogilever, N.B., Zuccarelli, L., Burles, an average external air temperature F. et al. (2018). Expedition Cognition: A of around -50 degrees Celsius.

Review and Prospective of Subterranean During the dark winter period, Neuroscience With Spaceflight station personnel are truly cut off Applications. Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Palinkas, L.A. (2003). The psychology and, for several months, evacuation of isolated and confined environments. is almost impossible in the event American Psychologist, 58, 353-363. of an emergency. Crewmembers Palinkas, L.A. & Suedfeld, P. (2008). stationed at Concordia have aptly Psychological effects of polar named it ‘White Mars’. Each year, expeditions. The Lancet, 371, 153-163.

ESA support research activities at Siffre, M. (1965). Beyond Time. London, UK: Chatto and Windus.

Concordia and station personnel Suedfeld, P. (2018). Antarctica and space contribute to projects across a whole as psychosocial analogues. REACH, range of human science disciplines.

9-12, 1-4.

There are many studies on the psychological and social dynamics Full list in online / app version that take place in Antarctica

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(Palinkas, 2003; Palinkas & Suedfeld, 2008). We will explore two recent examples of research conducted at Concordia. In 2015, Michel Nicolas and colleagues examined the affective, social and cognitive outcomes of a winterover season. Their findings suggest that over the course of 12 months crew members perceived the confinement to be gradually more stressful, and in particular found the social dimensions to be increasingly difficult. In their study, perceived control was positively related to mature defence mechanisms, stress-recovery, and feelings of success and wellbeing.

Such factors are highly relevant to long duration space missions.

Acknowledging that Antarctic confinement can be stressful – particularly during the mid-winter period – Sandal and colleagues (2018) examined the changes in coping strategy use, sleep and affect during an Antarctic winter season. Conducting monthly assessment on two separate Concordia crews, the researchers observed only slight decreases in sleep quality and positive affect, but no changes in negative affect towards the dark Antarctic midwinter. However, the changes in coping strategy use were striking. On average, all coping strategies – including both problemfocused and emotion-focused techniques – decreased towards the middle of winter and then rebounded as the light returned. This reduced effort to cope was interpreted as a psychological hibernation response, which served to protect resources during conditions of uncontrollable chronic demand. Prior studies in Antarctica (Barbarito et al., 2001) and anecdotes from Concordia crewmembers (such as the European Space Agency’s Research Doctor Beth Healey: see tinyurl.com/ yy8ka64x) support this interpretation. The extent to which this hibernating response might be facilitative remains to be tested. Being able to actively induce a state that helps people maintain their resources, pass the time and withstand chronic stress would almost certainly be beneficial for an interplanetary voyage and the long trip to Mars.

Dr Nathan Smith is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester nathan.smith@ manchester.ac.uk

From underworlds to outerworlds Planning for a return to the Moon, and beyond, ESA, NASA and other international space agencies have developed research roadmaps to de-risk the human side of future long missions. Recent evidence from confinement studies, and serious dysfunctional behaviour observed after a long deployment in Antarctica, suggest that we still have a lot to learn before we can safely send people off on long duration space exploration missions. Nevertheless, knowledge gained from our current efforts in the underworld will help us make progress, tackle these risks, and, one day, enable our species on its next great adventure, into the outerworlds and further into the unknown.

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what to seek out on the

psychologist

website this month

Did you know that you can meet many more psychologists via our website? In recent months we’ve had online pieces from…

Sabah Khan …on couples therapy https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/life-changes Brendan O’Mahony …on work as a registered intermediary https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/slowly-i-established-connection Martin Andrew …on working with marginalised young people https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/we-need-recognise-vulnerability

Find all this and so much more via

thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

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09/09/2019 14:47

What lies beneath?

Nick Chater on the perils of looking under our glittering surface Faces are everywhere. Humans have faces, of course; so do other mammals, birds, fish and even insects. Faces emerge from scrambled drawings, cartoons, Cubist paintings, and the ‘smileys’ and emojis of text messages. But are faces – along with other ‘surface’ such as the words we use – a portal to a wondrous underworld, or simply window dressing?

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Accidental faces (reprinted with permission from The Mind is Flat, and Ruth Kaiser’s Spontaneous Smiley Project)

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aze into the ‘eyes’ of the leather bag (below). Perhaps you see a complex and uncertain soul, both startled and a little angry.

The cheese grater is desperately eager to please, but nervous that its rigid posture and forced grin will not win our approval. The fencing is friendly, wondering, but surely slightly inebriated. The anxiety and anticipation written so eloquently on the features of the sink unit invoke our sympathy and concern.

We often see ‘found’ faces incongruously and accidentally embedded in our everyday surroundings.

To see such a spectacular diversity of patterns as faces is remarkable enough. More remarkable is that these faces are not merely recognised, but are imbued with ‘hidden depths’ of personality and emotion. Yet all of this emotional ‘inner life’ is, of course, complete fabrication, a product of the wild inventiveness with which we interpret the world. For all their humanlike appearance, these images are no more than unremarkable snapshots of inert objects.

Rembrandt’s wonderful series of self-portraits are, in many ways, quite the opposite of these accidental faces. Indeed, they are constructed with care and astonishing subtlety to conjure, in the viewer, a sense of almost limitless inner depth and possibility; the person we see is not merely an embodiment of stylised ‘cartoon’ emotion. The gaze that looks back at us is penetrating, inquisitive, perhaps slightly careworn.

Each ‘reading’ of the painting seems slightly different from the last; the artist both reveals himself plainly and yet remains shrouded in ambiguity.

It is of course tempting to imagine that faces, whether natural, accidental, or artfully created by a great painter, allow glimpses into an inner mental world: the world of the soul, spirit, or thought itself.

But, on reflection, this is surely an illusion. Accidental faces and painted canvases have no inner life, lurking under the surface of the image. The imagined and ambiguous depths are an act of creative interpretation by the viewer. And our interpretation of real faces (whether our own, or Rembrandt’s) are no different.

Suppose, for a moment, that we could observe, or even interrupt, Rembrandt in his workshop in 17th century Leiden. How could we gain additional insight into the inner depths of thought and feeling? Quizzing him on his state of mind would surely not uncover

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the artist’s secret thoughts, but instead trigger some mix of surprise, bafflement or downright irritation.

And gazing into his own eyes, whether in the mirror or canvas, Rembrandt surely sees just the same sense of uncharted, ambiguous hidden depths that we do ourselves. Rembrandt is not setting a crossword for which he alone knows all the answers; he is, rather, creating a mysterious image whose very wonder, from both viewer and artist, is its endless ambiguities and reinterpretations.

The same story applies to language. Consider how we interpret each other through words – whether through poems, prose, or the banter of everything conversation. A fragment of poetry (perhaps Andrew Marvell’s ‘But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’), a kindly tone of voice, or an uncharitable remark, may sometimes strike the hearer as a revelation. Yet, as with our readings of faces, what precisely has been unearthed remains a matter of creative interpretation, filled with ambiguity and uncertainty. We can, of course, be challenged to explain ourselves. But, as with Rembrandt viewing his own self-portrait, we have no special insights into precisely what we meant by that line of verse, verbal inflection, or tactless comment. Our words are no more a window into a hidden inner world than our facial expressions.

From the point of view of literary or artistic criticism, this line of argument is familiar enough.

But, I suggest, it is less familiar when turned on the interpretation of human behaviour. We are happy to admit that works of art and literature are rich and fascinating precisely because of their openness and ambiguity – we accept that there is no ‘true’ interpretation, lurking beneath the images and words.

Yet most of us balk at the idea that the complexity and subtlety of the people around us – ourselves included – has the very same source.

Indeed, interpreting ourselves, and the people around us, is no different, in principle, from the interpretation of characters in fiction: we are, quite literally, imaginary characters of our own creation.

Our sense of our depth and richness depends on the open, ambiguous nature of our literary creations.

There is no crisply defined ‘real me’, hidden behind by my words and actions, any more than there is a precisely delineated ‘real Rembrandt’ below the surface of his painting; or a ‘real meaning’ encrypted in lines of poetry. For artworks as for human beings, what matters are the multiple patterns conjured by the glittering surface; there is no single ‘real essence’ submerged in some shadowy inner realm. If we’re trying to make sense of the flow of words, images, and actions that compose our lives, we can generate stories, and explanations, clarifications. If challenged further, we can back up, elaborate, or revise these initial explanations; and reinterpret these later explanations, and so on, forever. But we are merely laying interpretation upon interpretation, not uncovering some bedrock truths about contents of our minds.

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Rembrandt’s hidden depths.

Decades of perceptual, cognitive and social psychology show that we can’t simply introspect the feelings, thoughts, memories and motives that lie under our mental surface. To pick a few well-known examples, from a very long list of possibilities: • Self-report in perception falls at the first hurdle: I report that I see a world in full colour and detail.

But outside the few degrees of the fovea, the image is blurry; and colour-sensitive cone-cells almost entirely absent. Perceptual richness is Daniel Dennett’s ‘Grand Illusion’; introspection about even our immediate perceptual experience is a mirage.

• We interpret, rather introspect, our own emotions: recall Schachter and Singer’s celebrated studies, in which people unknowingly given adrenalin interpreted their ‘jittery’ feelings as indicating heightened irritation or amusement in later social interactions, just as we interpret found faces or lines of poetry.

• False memories can be implanted all too easily by the devious experimenter. The brain has to interpret what we recall, rather than merely look up records in an inner library.

We can’t uncover the depths of our own minds, not because those depths are murky or difficult to fathom: but because, just as with an accidental face, or a Rembrandt self-portrait, there are no depths to uncover. The stream of our conscious experience is a flow of improvised interpretation and re-interpretation: of our environment, art-works, poems, other people, and even ourselves.

Our mental depths, then, like the depths of Rembrandt’s steady gaze, are compelling products of our imagination. But trying to plumb those mental depths, whether by word associations, conversation, interpretation of dreams, or brain imaging, is no more likely to succeed than searching for the inner life in Rembrandt’s self-portrait by peeling away successive layers of paint.

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and author of The Mind is Flat (Penguin Allen Lane, 2018), winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for the best book in the category Clinical Psychology nick.chater@ wbs.ac.uk

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Carolyn Mair is a Chartered Psychologist and Consultant carolyn.mair@gmail.com

Key sources

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Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16-49).

Jantzen, C., Østergaard, P., & Vieira, C.M.S. (2006). Becoming a ‘woman to the backbone’ Lingerie consumption and the experience of feminine identity.

Journal of Consumer Culture, 6(2), 177-202.

Merskin, D. (2004). Reviving Lolita? A media literacy examination of sexual portrayals of girls in fashion advertising.

American Behavioral Scientist, 48(1), 119-129.

Ross, F. (2007). Extreme lingerie design: from ‘Bizarre’ fantasy to High Street. In Extreme Fashion: Pushing the Boundaries of Design, Business and Technology (Conference Proceedings of the International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institute).

Steele, V. (1996). Fetish: Fashion, sex and power (p. 96). New York: Oxford University Press.

Zunino, G.Q., Jackson, M., Nasr, M., et al (2014). Conditioned ejaculatory preference by a male rat for a somatosensory cue on a female rat.

Presented at the 44th Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Washington DC, USA, November 2014.

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The psychology of underwear Carolyn Mair on a ‘technology of our inner self’

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lothing is often described as our second skin; a form A qualitative study published in 2006 by of self-expression; and an Jantzen and colleagues reported that women spend outward display of our identity. considerable effort choosing, buying and putting Although many people say they’re on specific underwear for specific occasions and not interested in fashion, we all that underwear can be a representation of ‘who I wear clothes and whether we like really am’. However, the effort and money spent on it or not, what we wear sends a underwear is not always pleasurable. Adverts for message to those we interact with.

We choose clothes to protect us from the elements, underwear generally involve images of models with slim, toned and youthful bodies so our self-esteem to make our activities safer, or to make a statement and self-confidence might be reduced when we don’t about who we are. While social identity is directed match up to this. Jantzen’s respondents stated that towards an external world of shared values and while underwear can affirm, it can also challenge. symbols, personal identity is directed towards how Respondents described an off-white cotton brief by we feel about ourselves. Foucault (1988) described the brand Sloggi as ‘matronly’, how practices and instruments ‘grandma’s gigantic underwear’, and generate a sense of ‘self’ as ‘Eros killers’. These perceptions ‘technologies of the self’. “…underwear is a implicitly infer underwear’s role in If clothing is a technology of the technology of our most romance and sex. self, underwear is a technology In an interesting study of our most inner self. Yet while inner self” presented at a neuroscience there is growing interest in the conference in 2014, Quintana psychology of fashion and an Zunino and colleagues mated virgin male rats with exponential increase in research on body image, female rats wearing specially designed jackets. The the evidence on the relationship between psychology researchers found that when the males were offered and underwear is sparse. another chance to mate with naked female rats or rats Anecdotally we observe that over the lifespan, wearing the jackets, they preferred to mate with the importance we give to our underwear is likely to jacket-wearing female rats. Because the male rats change, but we still need to buy and wear it. When we touched the jackets with their whiskers during sex, want to attract potential ‘mates’ we choose underwear which we perceive as more appealing and which makes the researchers argued that – like humans – the rats associated the sight and feel of clothing with sex. This us feel ‘sexy’. Once we feel secure in a relationship, we drew parallels with the arousing effect of lingerie on might decide that comfort takes priority, but there are human males. I’m reminded of the fashion perspective times in any life that underwear needs to be practical in literature on fetishism, from Frances Ross (2007) first and appealing second. However, the fashion and Valerie Steele (e.g., 1996 onwards); and also the industry is relentless in pressurising women, and sexualising as described by psychologists such as increasingly men, to have the ‘body beautiful’ which Merskin (2004) and others. is toned and fit. In achieving this look, women may Like any items of clothing, underwear has the succumb to wearing uncomfortable underwear that ability to shift identity, change how we feel about controls and reshapes their bodies to fashion’s physical ourselves and others. The psychology of underwear, ideal. For many of us, the need to conform like this is like the psychology of fashion, is under-researched. problematic. However, technology is helping designers Given the necessity and increased interest in create attractive, practical and functional underwear underwear, psychologists could build on the sparse for individuals with particular physical needs – literature that currently exists. We should better this might include beautiful, 3D printed scoliosis understand our relationship with our undergarments – braces, attractive mastectomy bras and designer our most intimate items of clothing. colostomy bags.

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09/09/2019 16:08

The ‘human’ underpinning workplace resource Rosalind Searle on the psychological implications of working ‘under’ a hierarchical structure.

Organisational psychology has an important role to play in reinjecting human aspects into large hierarchical workplaces. But smaller organisations, and the self employed, face their own challenges and need our attention too.

Key sources Joo, B.-K., Zigarmi, D., Nimon, K., & Shuck, B. (2017). Work cognition and psychological well-being. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 53(4), 446-469.

Masi, C.M., Chen, H.-Y., Hawkley, L.C., & Cacioppo, J.T. (2010). A meta-analysis of interventions to reduce loneliness. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(3), 219-266 Parasuraman, S., & Simmers, C.A. (2001). Type of employment, work–family conflict and well-being: A comparative study.

Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22(5), 551-568.

Tims, M., Bakker, A.B., & Derks, D. (2013). The impact of job crafting on job demands, job resources, and well-being. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18(2), 230-240.

Full list in online / app version

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any of us work in quite large organisations, under a traditional hierarchical structure. UK employment statistics show that over 10 million people are employed in workplaces with between 250 and 1000 staff. But in fact, the most common size of employer for UK workers are small firms (under 250), with 13 million workers earning their crust in workplaces with an average of just five people. There can be significant differences in the experiences of those working in these different sizes of organisations, but what type of workplace is best for worker wellbeing? Is the grass always greener on the other side?

While there is considerable longitudinal research on those working in large organisations, such as the unique UK civil service studies (Bogg & Cooper, 1995), the experiences of those working in smaller business or for themselves have received far less attention. So what do we know?

Trust, conflict and control Large organisations, while able to offer development and progression opportunities, can also have lower levels of trust for their employees (Searle et al., 2011). For example, it can become difficult to keep employees informed at the same rate about the same things within a large organisation (Hope-Hailey et al., 2012). Larger organisations can also be more political contexts, which can be more detrimental for non-majority groups, such as women and Black And Minority Ethnic (BAME)

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et al. 2012). In contrast, ‘mastery employees (McCord et al., 2017). climates’ emphasise learning and Indeed the current UK evidence development through promoting of gender and ethnicity wage gaps autonomy (Gagné, 2009) and shows that the remunerations of collaborations between co-workers staff can be very different even in (Nerstad et al., 2017). Wellbeing the same workplace. will be enhanced as employees In contrast, research shows that can avoid repeating other’s failures self-employed people report the and become better in their work, highest level of job satisfaction and Rosalind Searle is Professor in making the organisation more job involvement. However, they Human Resource Management effective. also experience the highest levels of and Organisational Psychology Yet these positive climates are home/work conflict (Parasuraman at the University of Glasgow. not just the preserve of smaller & Simmers, 2001). In addition Rosalind.Searle@glasgow.ac.uk organisations operating without while autonomy and work a hierarchy. Instead they rest on flexibility are highest for this group the skills of local managers able to model knowledge of workers, there are also important gender differences to these results – self-employed women still experience sharing behaviours by trusting the employees (Nerstad et al., 2017). Therefore, in large organisations more blurring of their home and work obligations. it is important to emphasise the role of positive Studies have long shown that having more control over your work can help to mitigate the negative effects organisation and supervisor support (Joo et al., 2017). of stress (Hessels et al., 2017). However, studies of those working in in small business reveal that they can Job crafting be far more stressed due to their heavier workloads, with more negative reported health alongside increased Evidence shows that crafting your own work is often not an option within hierarchal organisations. Larger isolation and loneliness than those either working in workplaces often restructure work so that it is divided larger organisations or alone (Godin et al., 2017). up into smaller, and thus often less meaningful, If you’re working under a large hierarchy, perhaps components (Hackman & Oldham, 1974). Yet the you feel like an invisible cog in a big wheel. And benefits of ‘job crafting’ are clear in terms of not only indeed, such organisations are often are less aware of retaining staff, but also in enhancing their engagement the contributions of their individual workers. They and job satisfaction (Tims et may use performance management al., 2013). Job crafting does not systems that promote competition reduce the demands of a job, but between divisions and teams, “…having more control it does enable individuals to think in the mistaken belief that such over your work can help about the resources that they have drivers for behaviour will make to mitigate the negative around them and to use them the firm more effective. Evidence more effectively. It is a process suggests that while in the shorteffects of stress” that encourages dialogue and term a performance focus can cooperation. Interventions such have organisational benefits, the as shared work-hubs are useful impact on workers’ wellbeing in stemming the social isolation of self-employment: is less positive – asymmetric distribution of high working alone or in small workgroup can result in salaries, bonuses and promotions to those deemed to loneliness, which is known to reduce wellbeing (Masi be excelling, while at the same time punishing and et al., 2010). demoralising other workers (Sapegina & Weibel, What can we conclude? That whether you are 2017). These competitive cultures drive out pro-social working under a hierarchy or under your own steam, behaviour that can make workplaces less pleasant attention must be paid to positive organisational to work in. As psychologists we have been relatively supports: the way jobs are designed and carried out, late in considering the corrosive impact of large pay the selection and development of good local leaders, differentials for those working in the same team the creation of cooperative climates that promote (Carr et al., 1998). We have also left to economists more effective exchanges of information, and the use discussion of what the level of remuneration, such as of fairer performance management systems. It is overliving wages, has on workers (although see Yao et al., simplistic to think that working in large and hierarchal 2017). workplaces is necessarily detrimental to human beings; Studies also show differences for workers working for yourself can also be depleting and result in operating in performance-orientated climates (Ames poor mental health. Ensuring that work is meaningful, 1992), with social comparison, achievement and whatever it involves, is hugely important to our therefore competition valued above development identities and wellbeing. So is ensuring that we are and learning. Such a climate can reward the remunerated in a fair way that allows us to feel some acquisition and consolidation of knowledge – this control over our finances. may lead to ‘knowledge hoarding’ (Connelly, Zweig

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Adam Scott

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The underdog effect Ciaran O’Keeffe on the appeal, and how things change…

Zach Johnson’s beaten-up camper van sat in the car park. Since the beginning, it had taken him from one minor golfing tournament to the next, with barely a whisper of victory. Zach had felt that even this van, his constant companion, was losing faith. Even Zach’s parents discouraged his chosen path, hoping he’d take the more secure route of accountancy.

But golf was his passion and he still hoped to hit the big-time… one day…

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he US Masters, April 2007, and Zach Johnson was the outsider bookies refused to take bets on. Only one bookie had him at 100-1 odds simply out of ‘sympathy’. Amongst his opponents was Tiger Woods, a behemoth of a golfer whose record-breaking trail of victories left his opponents foundering. Tiger was the highest paid professional golfer in 2006, earning over $100 million from winnings and endorsements. He was four times Masters’ champion and had had more wins on the PGA Tour than any other active golfer. As the world watched for Tiger to dominate Zach and his opponents, walking away with yet another trophy, a classic underdog tale played out.

Even if, like me, you are not a golfing fan, are you rooting for Zach? Is there something appealing about his underdog status that wins over your support? When opponents clash, the battle against insurmountable odds fascinates us and provokes unwavering emotional support. And indeed the crowds at Augusta, Georgia, rallied behind Zach as he began to creep onto the leader board. After his dramatic win, headlines everywhere described Zach as the diminutive David in a contemporary battle against Goliath battle, a true underdog tale of triumph.

Zach had only turned professional in 1998 and was the first person outside the top 50 Official World Golf Ranking to win the Masters tournament. But what if I now tell you that in 2003, Zach topped the money list on the Nationwide Tour with then record earnings of $494,882? That he won his first PGA Tour event at the BellSouth Classic three years previously and, prior to the 2007 Masters, had won 12 other tournaments?

What has changed? Is he still an ‘underdog’?

Unveiling in front of us The ‘underdog’ in competition is the one who is expected to lose. Just over a decade ago, leading names in underdog research reported on a series of studies which explored the appeal of the underdog.

Their opening sentence read: ‘When people observe competitions, they are often drawn to figures that are seen as disadvantaged or unlikely to prevail’ (Vandello et al., 2007, p.1603).

The context for consideration of the underdog is often sport. In 2012, Professor John Brewer, Professor of Applied Sports at Bucks New University, was Chair

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of the British Handball Association. He talks here about the appeal of one of the underdogs in the Olympics: As host nation GB were able to send men’s and women’s handball teams to the London Olympics, but as huge underdogs since handball is not seen as a mass participation sport in the country. It was a great example of what could be achieved with determination, coaching and talent. Whilst the GB teams did not win, they did inspire many of the thousands who came to watch, and as a result handball is now one of the fastest growing sports in British Schools.

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Associate Professor Nadav Goldschmied is based at Department of Psychological Sciences, University of San Diego, where he researches the psychology of inequality, disadvantage, and competitive asymmetries.

Having been enthralled by his MA thesis and follow-up article on the appeal of the underdog, I was fortunate enough to interview him. He contemplated the reasons for the popularity of underdogs in sport: ‘I think it’s because in sport it’s unveiling in front of us. We see the competition, we see the emotions… so it’s the most transparent, I guess, of all.’

The underdog effect can be demonstrated,

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however, in many other domains – in politics, business, indeed any competitive context. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants, regales the reader with a number of unusual underdog challenges and triumphs: dyslexics becoming highly successful entrepreneurs; an individual living in extreme poverty during the Depression-era who rose to become a legendary oncologist; an undersized novice girls’ basketball team succeeding through exploitation of opponents’ conventional tactics. The lessons are that people are able to take inspiration from these figures (and many others) explained by the ‘theory of desirable difficulties’ (which originates with the psychologist, Robert Bjork, in 1988). This theory posits that successful individuals need to have those disadvantages because the struggle to succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds is important for growth. This explains the importance for underdog status, but it does not account for why underdogs hold such a favourable appeal.

Nadav Goldschmied has looked at a number of possible explanations. One of his many studies focused on the characteristics needed for people to regard a competitor as an underdog. He explains: ‘In essence, we had two teams and we either mentioned their expectations to prevail in the upcoming competition or we mentioned what the resources were without mentioning any expectations… and then we had two conditions where expectation and resources were congruent. In the incongruent condition the underdog Key sources based on expectation had much more resources or money than the Allison, S.T. & Goethals, G.R. (2011). topdog. There was support for the Heroes: What they do and why we need underdog across the conditions them. Oxford: Oxford University Press. except that last one… where the Bjork, R.A. (1988). Retrieval practice and underdog has a lot of resources the maintenance of knowledge. In M.M. available to it, the topdog was Gruneberg & P. E. Morris (eds), Practical aspects of memory (Vol. 1, pp. 396–410). supported. And we concluded, New York: John Wiley & Sons. indirectly, that there are possibly Fehr, E. & Schmidt, K.M. (1999). A justice or fairness concerns that theory of fairness, competition and translate into underdog support.’ cooperation. Quarterly Journal of It is all relative, however.

Economics, 114, 817-868.

Even if an apparent underdog has Gladwell, M. (2013). David and Goliath: Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling a lot of resources available to it, giants. New York: Little Brown & Co. they will still be regarded as an Goldschmied, N. & Vandello, J.A. (2012). underdog if the resourcing (or The future is bright: The underdog label, perceived financial investment) is availability, and optimism. Basic and perceived to be significantly less Applied Social Psychology, 34, 34–43. than its competitor. It is, perhaps, Goldschmied, N., Ruiz, J. & Olagaray, S. (2017). The underdog narrative in as Nadav said, that perceived movies. Heroism Science, 2(1), 1-11. inequality is regarded as unfair Messick, D.M. (1995). Equality, fairness and by supporting the underdog and social conflict. Social Justice it is a way to restore that sense Research, 8, 153-173. of fairness – almost a form of Vandello, J.A., Goldschmied, N. & compensatory justice (Vandello Richards, D.A.R. (2007). The appeal of the underdog. Personality and Social et al., 2007). There are also a Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1603–1616. number of social preference models that point to people’s aversion to

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such inequalities which suggest that people become less satisfied with results as the differences between competitors’ outcomes increase (e.g. Fehr & Schmidt, 1999; Messick, 1995).

Professor John Brewer again, but this time in role a few years after the London Olympics:

In 2014 I was chair of British Ski and Snowboard.

With the exception of Scotland, GB is somewhat lacking in both snow and mountains, so as a nation we are often seen as snowsports underdogs. But with targeted investment in individuals and disciplines of the sport where we could excel, GB won its first ever Olympic medal on snow at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. This unexpected success has resulted in further funding and awareness of the snowsports, and subsequently GB won two more Olympic medals at the 2018 winter Olympics in South Korea, showing that underdogs really can do well.

The GB team, then, gained support as underdogs in the 2014 Winter Olympics given the lack of success and medals leading up to that point, and the perceived lack of resources. This, may be exacerbated by the history of underdogs in the sport (for example, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards in the 1988 Olympics). Having won more medals in the 2018 Winter Olympics, however, will the GB Team still be regarded as underdogs?

Nadav recounts a study that neatly illustrates this point: ‘There is one study that I saw that was asking about the topdog and underdog in a playoff series in sports, and you could see that people were asked and there was a strong support for the underdog… they asked again after three games, they were told the underdog won those three games so what do you think now? People shifted to the team that was the topdog before and has now become the underdog.

So I definitely think there is a temporal sequence here that needs to be taken into account.’

Underdogs as heroes More recent research has tackled this memory and changing status aspect, and commented on how inspirational underdog stories capture our attention.

If anything such stories should, as Nadav and his colleagues have stated, ‘influence probability estimates for future underdog success’ (Goldschmied & Vandello, 2012, p.39). It would lead to an optimism bias since people would remember the underdog success stories and ignore the base-rate information of losing underdogs (therefore creating an availability heuristic as shown by Tversky and Kahneman in other contexts). If anything, underdogs would be perceived as heroes and winners. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Nadav’s most recent writings on the subject are titled ‘Underdogs as Heroes’.

Nadav is keen to point out the real world implications of underdog identity. ‘The notion of being perceived as an underdog can be manipulated – you can see that being done time and time again in politics.

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sometimes, the nuanced narratives are forgotten as we remember only a stereotypical underdog story.

For example, Goldschmied and his colleagues are now finding that the underdog story framework is now so engrained in our culture and psyche that we can often forget outcomes that are inconsistent Ciarán O’Keeffe is with our perception of what Associate Head of School of should happen when an underdog Human & Social Sciences competes. The classic Rocky I film, at Buckinghamshire New for example, has Rocky Balboa University pitched throughout the whole Ciaran.OKeeffe@Bucks.ac.uk film as an underdog yet he loses How recollections are shaped the final fight with Apollo Creed.

We are enthralled with underdog Goldschmied and colleagues are finding that less than fights, what Goldschmied lovingly now calls half of participants correctly recall this actual final ‘a special sub-category of heroes’. They permeate sport and politics, but contemporary cultures have also fight, yet they accurately remember other stereotypical underdog stories. embraced our fascination and support for underdogs Effectively, this takes underdog research in their own modern form of storytelling. For example, into a hitherto unconnected area of psychology: reality television emphasises the underdog qualities of how ‘recollections can be shaped by a rather distal individuals as we witness their exploits in ever-more social schema’ (Goldschmied et al., 2017, p.8). complex, and sometimes humiliating, competitions.

The implications are far-reaching with, for example, Talent shows invite the viewer to become engrossed the potential to examine whether participants are in an emotional life story of challenges and seemingly similarly influenced into misremembering inconsistent under-resourced failures, only to then marvel at the outcomes in non-fiction, historical events – in sport, flawless performance and rapturous applause. war and, highly pertinently, politics.

We are also drawn to underdogs in fiction where, If you search on the internet, for the election for the presidency, put the name of a candidate and the term underdog and I would say that more than half of them would say at some point “I am the underdog in the race”. Barack Obama said “I am an underdog. With my name I have to be the underdog”. People know the magical connotation that an underdog has in terms of support, and they use it.’

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Under the weather?

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Trevor Harley

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Key sources Denissen, J.J.A., Butalid, L., Penke, L. & Aken, M.A.G. Van. (2008). The effects of weather on daily mood : A multilevel approach. Emotion, 8, 662–667. doi.org/10.1037/a0013497 Klimstra, T.A., Frijns, T., Keijsers, L. et al. (2011). Come rain or come shine: individual differences in how weather affects mood. Emotion, 11, 1495–1499. doi.org/10.1037/ a0024649 Harley, T.A. (2018). The psychology of weather. London: Routledge.

Moore, F., Bell, M., Macleod, M.,et al (2018). Season, weather, and suicide – Further evidence for ecological complexity. Neurology, Psychiatry and Brain Research, 30, 110-116. doi:10.1016/j.npbr.2018.08.002

s I sit writing one gloomy Scottish winter morning it is near impossible to believe that the weather is not affecting my mood.

Yet it turns out that the evidence for such an effect is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.

Early research found small and contradictory effects of weather on mood, but the research is difficult to do, small effects needing large samples and robust methods. The most influential paper argues that effects of weather on mood are complex, and often very difficult to find (Denissen et al., 2008).

On reflection there are good reasons why this should be so. Our behaviour is subject to many factors.

We no longer spend as much time outside as people did in the past. We live in temperature controlled living spaces, bathed in artificial light. There are also considerable individual differences in our preferences for weather. An important note by Klimstra et al.

(2011) examined the effects of weather on selfreported mood among people classified as summer lovers, summer haters (there are such people), rain haters, and those unaffected by the weather. The weather does not matter for many people, but there are some who like sunshine and whose moods are raised by it, and some who like it wet. These preferences are partly transmitted by our families, although of course there are many reasons why this should be so.

There are also individual differences in the extent to which people are affected by the weather. For many a dull day might mean nothing, but for people suffering from Seasonal Affect Disorder a lack of sunshine in winter can have a pronounced effect of mood.

If we were slaves to every vagary of the weather all our lives would be close to unbearable. For a few people the weather can push someone over the edge.

In line with previous research, we have found an increase in the suicide rate in late spring and early summer in some locations but not all, and a complex pattern involving meteorological variables befitting a complex system (Moore et al., 2018). Sunshine, temperature, and rainfall may be involved, but are moderated by other variables. Men are more sensitive to seasonality and weather, a finding perhaps related to my research showing that men are much more inclined to be obsessed by the weather than women (Harley, 2018). Back to waiting for the snow.

Trevor Harley is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Psychology, University of Dundee taharley@dundee.ac.uk

See also Trevor’s ‘Notes from a weather observer’ in the June 2019 edition.

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09/09/2019 15:08

A journey to the core of being Our editor Jon Sutton reviews Underland by Robert Macfarlane

Underland Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton; £20

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obert Macfarlane is on a mission to get us to ‘see more deeply’. His latest book is described as ‘a time-travelling journey into wonder, fear and the worlds beneath our feet’. A suitably vast exploration of the subterrane as it exists in myth, memory and place, Underland has psychological roots creeping throughout.

While it may not be immediately obvious what treasures an audience of psychologists can mine from beneath our feet, Macfarlane writes that ‘What I thought would be my least human book has become, to my surprise, my most communal’. There are indeed nuggets buried throughout – strata of individual, relational and societal insight.

It’s a dark, deep book; Macfarlane has ‘rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it’, and he must confront the symbolism of ‘what cannot openly be said or seen’: loss, grief, the mind’s obscured depths, and what Elaine Scarry calls the ‘deep subterranean fact’ of physical pain. Language can shape our thoughts and behaviour, and in many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’; ‘catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ a ‘downwards violence’. Macfarlane’s journeys into darkness – descents made in search of

knowledge, to understand – have Freudian echoes of ‘the starless rivers of the id that rush beneath the sunlit uplands of the conscious mind, here and there surging powerfully up’.

But importantly Macfarlane is not alone on these adventures… he journeys jovially with ‘mappers, really, of networks of mutual relation, endeavouring to stitch their thinking into unfamiliar scales of being, seeking not the scattered jewels of personal epiphany but rather to enlarge the possible means by which people might move and think together across landscapes, in responsible knowledge of deep past, deep future and the inhuman earth’. Fostering that deep time awareness ‘runs against the mind’s grain’. Macfarlane quotes fellow writer Simon McBurney’s view that in our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us.

We need, Macfarlane argues, ‘a new language altogether’, the soil of grammar and syntax to reshape the way we relate to each other and to the living world.

We exist in an ‘epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope’. We can look to ‘forest wisdom’ to appreciate the ‘gradual growing-

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the psychologist october 2019 books towards and subterranean intertwining’ of a long love; fungi can challenge our sense of what is whole and singular, what defines an organism, what descent or inheritance means. Our lives are ‘an assembly of entanglements of which we are messily part’. We can and should be ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms. Here, Macfarlane admits, he is ‘presenting as revelation what indigenous societies regard as selfevident’.

In Macfarlane’s hands, the underland is a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, ‘become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface’.

Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks, and at its more political fringes, urban exploration becomes a radical act of disobedience and liberation: ‘a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city’.

We meet ‘cataphiles’ – lovers of the below, boosted by the arrival of the internet. There are aweinspiring sections on modern discoveries of ancient cave paintings, heartbreaking passages on the pits of war, and reminders of the power of myth around journeys into the underworld (with the Thai cave rescue as a modern example). And there are takehome messages for scientists too. Merlin Sheldrake (son of Rupert… Google him) muses on writing the ‘dark twin’ for each scientific paper – ‘its underground mirror piece – the true story of how the data for that cool, clean, hypothesis-evidence-proof paper actually got acquired… the frothy, mad network that underlies and interconnects all scientific knowledge – but about which we so rarely say anything’. They discuss how different metaphors of the ‘wood’ wide web – such as ‘free-market’ or ‘socialist’ – drive the scholarship.

‘Discourse choice forcefully shapes research directions.’

The spores of this book will continue to spread through my mind. It has inspired this issue, and I would love to unearth the social scientists advising the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico: ‘an atomic priesthood charged with conveying warnings across generations in the form of folklore and myth’. This brings me to the stunning cover of the book: Stanley Donwood’s ‘Nether’, which the artist has described as ‘the light of a nuclear blast that has just detonated. When you look at “Nether”, you’ve got about 0.001 of a second of life remaining, before the flesh is melted from your bones.’ For Macfarlane this made it perfect for the book: ‘Lustrous and lethal, fatal and beautiful, the image beckons the viewer’s eye on and down into the underworld. As such, it could hardly be truer to the preoccupations of Underland. For the underland is where we have long placed both what we fear and wish to dispose of, and what we love and wish to preserve.’

Macfarlane began his writing in the mountains, and says he has now ‘completed a journey downwards to the darkness at the core of our earth and our imaginations’. Where will he take us next?

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Going under to rise above mistakes relating to neuropsychology, such as Extreme environments and perception, situational awareness circumstances place all human and attention processes. There processes under pressure and are chapters relating to individual present fascinating opportunities and social psychology including for observation of communication, communication and teamwork, decision-making and problemleadership and solving. There is followership. Broader no more extreme Under Pressure discussions relating environment than one Gareth Lock to just culture and in which we cannot Human in the System psychological safety breathe without Consulting; £30 illustrate contextual specialist equipment. factors. Other themes Under Pressure include the variable examines human attitudes to risk and behaviour in just this risk management, as environment: under well as responding to water and (sometimes) failure and learning underground in cave from experience. diving.

When mistakes Developed in happen, the kneejerk response to a series response is to attribute of aeroplane crashes blame and deliver in the 1970s, in which consequences. The the behaviour of the problem with using pilots had caused human error as an questions to be raised, explanation is that it is the interdisciplinary a dead end. It creates Human Factors a feeling of knowing that satisfies approach has been applied within curiosity and soothes uncertainty. But aviation and engineering to improve outcomes by working with the human human error is not an explanation; it is the outcome of a series of events in the system. Sadly, scuba diving with the context of the system. is another industry which suffers Psychological and social processes from highly preventable injuries are complex, and to understand why and deaths occurring as a result of something went wrong, we need human biases, decision-making and to examine all the data. However, if social influences. there is a risk of being blamed and As a retired RAF instructor and shamed, people are reluctant to be technical diver, Gareth Lock realised open their experience and behaviour. that the lessons from aviation could Shaping culture is therefore essential be applied in diving. His book brings in enabling learning. By gathering together genuine diver experience information and applying theoretical with the theory and application of knowledge to the analysis of such human factors. The case studies incidents, we develop a richer usefully illustrate the everyday and explanation for how a mistake life-and-death scenarios faced in the occurred, and this is invaluable in the underwater world. The examples prevention of future incidents. also give revealing glimpses into This book is essential reading for the thought processes of people in anyone interested in these issues, situations from which some divers and it achieves the impossible: sadly never returned. Sharing making a book about health and their reflections allows the diving safety an enjoyable and enlightening community an insight into what read! goes through a person’s mind when under extreme pressure as a diver, Reviewed by Laura Watson, and what influenced their decision Clinical Psychologist and qualified making. scuba diver (see also p.28) Under Pressure covers topics

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Tracking the footprints of consciousness The Feeling of Life Itself by Christof Koch is out now, published by The MIT Press.

We asked him some big questions.

What is consciousness?

Somebody is conscious if, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is ‘something that it is like to be’ in that state, such as experiencing the delectable taste of Nutella, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the slow passage of time when bored, or the sense of vitality and anxiety just before a competitive event. Reflecting on one’s own consciousness is a category of conscious experiences unique to adults, not developed in infants and children and not present anymore in patients suffering from dementia and other neurological ailments.

Consciousness is fundamentally about being, not about doing. As a consequence, I can never directly experience the conscious feelings of someone else, but can only infer these from their behavior, including what they tell me (assuming they can speak).

Allen Institute

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Are animals conscious?

All the behaviors and states associated with human consciousness have their precursors in non-human animals, including episodic memory, symbolic communication, courtship rituals, emotions, decision making, imitation learning, counting, food caching, tool making, recognition of self and on and on. Furthermore, consciousness is far more elementary than just having abstract thoughts. There is little refined, reflective or abstract about an itchy nose, a throbbing toothache, the smell of rotten cheese, or a full belly. The majority of biologists and those of us who have dogs and cats have no doubt that most, if not all animals, experience the sounds, sights and smells of life.

Charles Darwin, in his last book, published in 1881, wanted ‘to learn how far the worms acted consciously and how much mental power they displayed’. Studying their feeding behaviors, Darwin concluded that there was no absolute threshold between complex and simple animals that assigned higher mental powers to one but not to the other. No one has discovered a Rubicon that separates animals that have experiences from those that are pure zombies, without any feelings.

Again, I can never directly experience the way dogs experience the world, redolent in odors. I can just infer, from evolutionary continuity, from the fact that our genomes and our brains are so similar, that they too have subjective experiences.

Where does experience hide?

More than a quarter of a century ago, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick and I defined the neuronal correlates of consciousness as the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one conscious percept. These are the brain regions and assemblies of active neurons that are the physical substrate of any one subjective experience.

Powered by advanced instrumentation, neuroscientists are tracking the footprints of consciousness within its principle organ, the nervous system. Surprisingly, many brain regions do not contribute meaningfully to experience. This is true for the cerebellum, the ‘little’ brain at the back of the head, despite having more than four times more nerve cells than neocortex, the outmost convoluted layer of the brain.

Even in neocortical tissue, the most complex piece of

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the psychologist october 2019 books highly excitable matter in the known cosmos, the parts in the back have a much more intimate relationship to experience than others, such as in the front (prefrontal cortex) that are more related to reasoning, planning and intelligence.

Is the scientific study of consciousness getting anywhere?

Yes, many questions concerning consciousness are beginning to be answered by clinical and basic neurosciences. We can now safely and rapidly turn consciousness off and on again (for instance, using a variety of anesthetic agents). We are getting better at detecting its presence or absence in neurological impaired patients unable to signal, such as minimal conscious state or locked-in state patients using a consciousness-meter called zap and zip (a magnetic pulse is used to excite cortex and its response is measured across the skull using EEG electrodes).

As discussed above, we can track the neuronal footprints of consciousness using brain scanners, EEG, microelectrodes and other devices and track its onset and disappearances in wake and during sleep in humans and in related species. And we can study consciousness in animals very different from us, such as bees or octopuses. This is real progress in the ancient mind-body problem.

Does consciousness have a function?

It may be true that in a narrow sense, consciousness does not subserve any evolutionary function. That is, it is certainly possible to imagine a creature just like us, but without any conscious experience what-so-ever.

This is the fictitious zombie that David Chalmers and other philosophers use to argue for the impossibility of ever arriving at a fully satisfactory scientific account of consciousness.

However, consciousness appears to be closely intertwined with highly flexible and adaptive behavior and cognition, such as intelligence, memory, planning, self-reflection, language and so on. In that sense, consciousness could be a by-product of the selection of other characteristics. In evolutionary language this is known as a spandrel. Popular examples of spandrels are humanity’s wide-spread love of music or the ability to engage in higher mathematics. It is likely that neither music appreciation nor math skills were directly selected for in hominid evolution, but that they emerged when big brains made these activities possible.

Will AI ever be conscious?

Despite the near-religious belief of the digerati in Silicon Valley, most of the media and the majority of AngloSaxon computer and philosophy departments, there will not be a Soul 2.0 running in the Cloud. Consciousness is a not a clever hack. Experience does not arise out of computation. Siri 10.0 will never feel like anything.

The dominant mythos of our times, grounded in functionalism and dogmatic physicalism, is that consciousness is a consequence of a particular type of algorithm the human brain runs. According to one of

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the two dominant theories of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory, nothing could be further from the truth. While appropriate programmed algorithms can recognize images, play Go, speak and drive a car, they will not be conscious. Even a perfect software model of the human brain will not experience anything, because it lacks the intrinsic causal powers of the brain. It will act and speak intelligently. It will claim to have experiences, but that will be make-believe. No one is home.

Intelligence without experience.

That’s the difference between the real and the artificial. A supercomputer simulating a rain storm won’t cause its circuit boards to become wet. Nor will a computer simulating a black hole twist and warp space-time around its chassis; you won’t be sucked into its simulated massive gravitational field. It’s the same with consciousness – clever computer programming can simulate the behavior that goes hand-in-hand with human level consciousness, but it’ll be fake consciousness.

That’s not to say there is something magical about brains; they are a piece of furniture of the universe like any other. A computer could acquire human-level consciousness, but it would have to be built in the image of the human brain, including its vast complexity, so called neuromorphic computers.

As this is the ‘Under’ issue, why are many concepts around consciousness expressed in terms of spatial relations, e.g. ‘going under’, ‘subconsciousness’, ‘a higher state’?

Great question! I think this is a specific instance of a general phenomenon – we have spatial metaphors for many aspects of mind – we move forward to an event in the future, we look back with regret at a lost opportunity, we fill our mind with ideas, the mind soars upwards.

Most of these embody the idea of forward and upward being associated with the future and with higher aspects of mind; the converse is the Freudian sub-conscious and ‘going under’ during anesthesia.

Ultimately, these all reflect the universal phenomenology of space – whether defined in the visual, auditory or somatosensory modality – and the fact that we live on a planet with gravity that inexorably pulls us downward. Maybe as we make the transition from a planetary species to one where at least some of us of us are born in space and spend most of our life there, we will have fewer directional metaphors but even these future humans will have spatial metaphors as that is a universal aspect of existence of any organism.

What strikes you as remarkable about your own personal ‘feeling of life’?

I am continually amazed that I live in a universe that I can experience. Nothing in the foundational equations of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, in the Periodic Table and in the endless ATGC chatter of my genomes, is about consciousness. Yet here I am – seeing and hearing the world, being sad about the state of affairs or content when lost in play. That this should be so remains the fundamental mystery of our existence.

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From under to this way up…

Kate Johnstone, our Associate Editor for Culture, reviews a new comedy series

tv This way up Channel 4/All 4

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hat are the odds that after one self-penned comedy drama featuring a single 30-something woman with uncertain career prospects, overshadowed by her supremely successful older sister, struggling with loneliness, sadness and grief, that a second should follow so soon? This Way Up goes some way to fill the Fleabagshaped hole in our lives.

It was written by and stars Irish comedian Aisling Bea as Aine, a TEFL teacher trying to get on with her life after a spell in a rehab facility – no spoiler, as the opening scene is Aine leaving the facility with her sister Shona (Sharon Hogan, who executive produced the show).

Unlike Fleabag and Claire, Aine and Shona seem to have a close relationship. Perhaps too close. Shona seems more like a substitute mother, to whom Aine turns for any and everything.

Yet in some ways Aine seems to be doing well. She’s a wonderful teacher, inspiring her class of foreign students into making their voices heard. She’s such a good teacher that she’s recommended for private tuition of a young French boy Etienne, the son of Richard (Tobias Menzies).

Richard says Etienne’s mother is dead, and seems to have had little or no relationship with her or the boy previously.

The house is soaked in sadness. Aine provides a vital

line of communication between boy and man, and finds herself being drawn into their lives.

What we start to see is how much effort Aine is putting into keeping her life ticking over. She’s desperately lonely, in the way that seems more obscene when you live cheek-by-jowl with others. She goes out of her way for her students, and Etienne, and responds to Richard’s obvious pain (a terrific performance by Menzies). But she won’t let others help her: she lies to Shona about having grand nights out with non-existent friends, so Shona won’t worry about her. It’s shame, and pride, and fear of where admitting her feelings might lead.

This Way Up has a large and diverse cast, and cracks along without seeming rushed. Like Fleabag, it can shift from comedy to seriousness in a blink. In one short scene, a family crowd round the father in celebration of his birthday. He tears up: cut to Aine, Shona and their mother (Sorcha Cusack) on the couch, close to tears themselves for completely different reasons. It’s whip smart on how much we feel we can tell other people, how high the cost of not speaking can be, and the bravery required to be honest with yourself. Enjoyable and thought provoking.

Reviewed by Kate Johnstone, Associate Editor for Culture

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the psychologist october 2019 culture

An unvarnished view of the therapeutic process Gloria Szymanski was a 31-year old, divorced and single mother when she allowed herself to be filmed in therapy with Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis in 1964. She had been recruited by her own therapist, Everett Shostrum, and told that the videos would be seen by students for educational purposes only. The story which follows is shocking. The videos were turned into a motion picture (The Three Approaches to Psychotherapy) which were known widely as ‘The Gloria Films’. Szymanski (played by Liv O’Donoghue) took legal action but lost, and the videos are still available on YouTube today.

This is the premise on which The Patient Gloria is based. The show is a feminist interpretation of the films and the events surrounding them, which casts a sceptical eye over the therapeutic process. ‘Rogers is paternal, Perls is aggressive and Ellis is predatory’, Gina Moxley writes, in an information sheet given out at the start of the show. Moxley is the energetic, uncompromising narrator of the show; she also plays each of the three male therapists (‘because I can’, as she explains on stage).

The Patient Gloria is a juxtaposition of adroit observation and crude symbolism. From the start,

it seeks to impart information about Syzmanski and her experiences; at the end, a flying penis (attached to a small drone) sits on the stage.

It’s explicit, punctured with sexual references throughout, and not for the faint of heart.

The narrative of the play centres on gender issues. We watch as Rogers patronises Syzmanski, and we are told that he only asks her three questions through the entire session. Perls, by contrast, is aggressive. At one point, he leaps on to the sofa, pummelling his fists in the air. We are told that in the real event, he bumped into Syzmanski outside after filming and took the opportunity to flick his cigarette ash

into her cupped hands. Interestingly, the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy has subsequently sought to distance themselves from the videos.

The scene with Ellis is the most brief; he is portrayed as being sexually suggestive and predatory throughout.

Moxley uses these interactions as a series of case studies for wider gender issues, weaving in her own experiences of being patronised, ignored and harassed by men as the play progresses.

As a psychologist, I found The Patient Gloria deeply provocative. Its unvarnished view of the therapeutic process highlighted the power differential inherent to all forms of psychological therapy, showing that the line between collaborative warmth and paternalism can be fine. It also highlighted the gender dynamics within the profession: despite around 90 per cent of Clinical Psychologists being female, the key approaches which have influenced the development of the discipline have been popularised by men. I left the Traverse Theatre wondering, would therapy be the same if women had instigated it first?

play The Patient Gloria Traverse Theatre Edinburgh fringe

Reviewed by Judith Johnson, University of Leeds

To not follow under…

A new exhibition and events season at Science Gallery London combines art, design, psychology and neuroscience to highlight positive and creative responses when dealing with anxiety. ON EDGE: Living in an Age of Anxiety reflects on individual experiences, the environmental and societal factors that can cause worry or stress and explores our evolutionary impulse to be on alert.

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Thalia Eley, Professor of Developmental Behavioural Genetics at King’s, acted as ON EDGE Season Advisor, with Dr Colette Hirsch, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at King’s College London, and Dr Errol Francis, Chief Executive, Culture&. Eley said: ‘King’s College London is home to outstanding mental health research, including on the causes and effects of anxiety.

This season brings new perspectives to a phenomenon that affects so many of us. ON EDGE invites visitors to reflect on their own wellbeing in a wider context.’

In the film To Not Follow Under (pictured left), Leah Clements explores the relationship between sleep and anxiety in a new sound and moving image commission developed with Dr Guy Leschziner from the Sleep Disorder Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital.

The exhibition runs from 19 September 2019 to 19 January 2020 at Science Gallery London (King’s College London) and entry is free. A programme of free events, including talks, workshops and Friday Lates will continue the conversation.

Exhibition ON EDGE Science Gallery London

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Stop plastering over problems tv Dispatches: Young, British, and Depressed C4

Recently, the debate between the medical model of distress and psychological alternatives has continued to grow, increasing public awareness. After a recent flurry of programmes talking about mental health focusing on more medical approaches, I was sceptical about yet another program. However, this focus on Britain’s youth depression crisis offered a fresh approach.

It began with a number of hard-hitting facts which highlighted the extent of the crisis with over 700,000 referrals to mental health services last year for those under 19, a 45 per cent increase from the two years prior. Dr Marc Bush from Young Minds then highlighted the chronic underfunding of children’s services and the need for them to move away from diagnostic criteria to recognise all distress and offer the correct support. Whilst

this isn’t ground breaking for those in psychology, it sent a strong message to those watching and set a precedent for what followed.

Lucy Johnstone discussed how viewing mental health problems as an ‘illness’ detracts attention from the true causes – we should be asking ‘what’s happened to you?’ not ‘what’s wrong with you?’. This was furthered by Gerri Robinson, a headteacher in a deprived area of London who explained the different challenges that children face today, including social media and the unequivocal evidence linking poverty to human distress. At a time when record numbers of children are living in poverty, this was a welcome take-home message. Professor Sami Timimi also suggested that by sending the message out that its ok to have a mental health problem we’ve

The world under pressure…

Left: The World Under Preassure, Batol S’Himi, 2012–2014 Top: Athol, No Human Being Is Illegal (in all our glory), Deborah Kelley and collaborators, 2014-2018.

Above: Dignity, Dolly Sen, 2018

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All part of the Wellcome Collection’s new permanent exhibition Being Human opens 4 September 183 Euston Road, London

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the psychologist october 2019 culture

made people scared of their emotions: ‘putting intense emotions into a bracket of something other than ordinary to experience when growing up’.

However, what Sanah and the program did so well was capture the voices of the young people trying to access services. One such voice was Parveen, who had visited her GP after a difficult period within her family and was referred for talking therapy – but the wait was over six months. When she returned to her GP, she felt that she never had a conversation with them about how she was feeling and was instead prescribed antidepressants.

Parveen’s story highlighted the complete lack of choice that many young people face and ultimately, the failure of our services.

The programme then discussed the extreme pressure that GPs are under in such cases; with 86 per cent of 1000 GPs surveyed citing a lack of services as the reason for increases in prescribing antidepressants, and 39 per cent of them would prescribe them to under 18s, whilst only 1 per cent of those think it’s the best treatment for depression. Sanah’s heartfelt acknowledgement of the bravery it takes to seek help and the subsequent reality of a prescription pad instead of being listened to was moving, and raised further questions about the messages we’re sending to our young people in distress.

Overall, I felt Sanah encapsulated the empathy and rapport of psychologists listening to individuals’ stories. She offered validation and reassurance to the young people in a very genuine way and personified the opportunity to talk about their feelings which Parveen, and others interviewed, so desperately need.

This felt like a change in the tide of the massive wave of mental health programs on TV and one which was seamlessly delivered in an accessible and thought-

provoking way to the general public. The succinct array of opinions from a range of experts, and considered use of stats, made this highly informative without feeling overwhelming. Whilst it was only 30 minutes in length it shared the thoughts of many psychologists regarding how we understand distress as individuals, communities, and society as a whole. It hopefully paves the way for further discussion leading to meaningful action to address the vast inequalities children face. The message was clear: we need to stop plastering over the problems our young people face, and instead properly fund services to provide the type of support that they genuinely need.

Reviewed by Dale Whetter is a Research Assistant Psychologist at LifePsychol Ltd.

Where does inspiration come from?

How can one find their voice and create something original? Phelim McDermott, in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, as well as puppeteers and musicians, gave us a first-hand insight into the creative process, in the Tao of Glass.

The performance tells the story of the experiences and processes that inspired Phelim to write the play, including being mesmerised by the play ‘Billy’s magic kettle’ as a young lad, and, centrally to the performance, his collaboration with Philip Glass. The performance puts the creative process itself under the magnifying glass in a magical and illuminating way.

Having recently immersed myself in the study of creativity,

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the performance reminded me of several concepts I came across in the literature, such as the role of conscious and unconscious processing in the creative process and the effect of personality traits and states on creativity.

I was intrigued by the effect of autobiographical memories and the long-term incubation of ideas described in Tao of Glass; how ideas and experiences can float around in our minds for years, to later become building blocks of our creative output.

I have studied both psychology and music for more years than I care to admit and I am presently enjoying the privilege of training aspiring psychologists. Witnessing Phelim’s adventure and listening to

Philip’s mesmerising music made me wonder: what is the effect of formal education on creativity? Do we do enough to help our students find their voice?

Overall, this was a magical performance, leaving my collaborator and myself even more inspired to start exploring the factors that influence creativity. Who knows, perhaps we will eventually write a play describing the adventures behind our research! Tao of Glass would certainly feature in our play – possibly along with kettles and pianos.

play Tao of Glass Manchester International Festival

Reviewed by Aspasia Paltoglou, a Lecturer in Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University

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We dip into the Society member database and pick…

Dr Michelle Hamill consultant clinical psychologist at East London NHS Foundation Trust One thing psychologists should be proud of Contributions to improving dementia care, from Tom Kitwood to Ian James, emphasising the centrality of relational understandings and relationship-centred care, through applied methods and research. We still have a way to go but their work in particular has helped to set the scene for further improvements.

One moment that changed my career Working with Dr Laura Sutton, a brilliant consultant clinical psychologist, on my older adult placement as a trainee clinical psychologist. I didn’t want to leave after the six months ended and I was fortunate that she agreed to have me back for my third year to specialise further in CAT (Cognitive Analytic Therapy) and neuropsychology. I knew I had found my field working with older adults and I have never looked back.

One motto ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent’, Eleanor Roosevelt. A work in progress for me.

One thing I am proud of The team of clinical psychologists and arts therapists that I work with across East London. Their energy and passion is uncompromising. They are always up for trying new things to improve service provision and address inequalities.

One surprising thing about older adult mental health Trainees are often surprised by the change that is possible, regardless of a person’s age and presenting difficulties, and the extent of people’s resilience over many years despite complex trauma. This work really is a privilege. I don’t think many of us would stay in this job if that wasn’t the case.

One essential for self-care Regular private CAT professional supervision / personal therapy. You can’t be a psychologist and not take your personal self to work. Making links between personal and professional relational patterns helps me to keep perspective.

contribute… reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …October 2018, a special feature on the psychologists’ tree of life …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist

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One hope for psychology To develop more opportunities for intergenerational service development and community-based initiatives, where people of all different ages can learn and socialise together, and ageism and ageist stereotypes can be challenged – that goes both ways between younger people and older adults, where the divide can feel very polarised especially given the current political climate.

The Toddlers who Took on Dementia (with Professor Bob Woods) and Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds are great examples of how much change is possible given the right circumstances and relationships. We have a lovely developing partnership between CAMHS and our Older Adult Mental Health service, so watch this space.

coming soon… the psychologist Guide to Retirement, plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

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One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Try to get involved in psychology research whilst at University. I didn’t appreciate or understand the wealth of opportunities and possibilities available for research whilst I was doing my undergraduate degree.

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One composer I’d be lost without music. Einaudi is a favourite, especially when I’m travelling on the tube. I work with some brilliant music therapists, who are based on our inpatient wards. Their work is truly transformative.

We co-facilitate psychology supervision and reflective sessions for the multi-disciplinary teams and often start by doing a mindfulness body scan to Einaudi, which sets the tone

nicely. Thankfully, the importance of music therapy in dementia care is finally being recognised.

the psychologist

One book Irvin D. Yalom’s Gift of Therapy. His writing is so accessible, human and wise. I dip in and out of this. To me it’s like getting a good dose of supervision.

one on one

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Find more on our website…

10/09/2019 10:05

Society Trustees www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are President David Murphy The British Psychological Society was founded in 1901, and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1965. Its object is ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied and especially to promote the efficiency and usefulness of Members of the Society by setting up a high standard of professional education and knowledge’.

President Elect Dr Hazel McLaughlin Vice President Vacant Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Dr Juliet Foster Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Public Policy Board Vacant Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor Co-opted Trustees Dr Chris Lynch Professor Clifford Stott Dr Ester Cohen-Tovee Christina Buxton Dr Adam Jowett

society notices Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Psychology See p.7 CPD workshops 2019 See p.27 BPS conferences and events See p.50 Technical Support in Psychological Teaching Award 2020 See p.70 Technical Support in Psychological Research Award 2020 See p.70

Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa Change Programme Director Diane Ashby Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton Director of Corporate Services Mike Laffan Director of Finance Harnish Hadani Director of Policy Kathryn Scott Director of Membership and Professional Development Karen Beamish Governance Manager Christine Attfield

Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk psy 1019 p72 motm.indd 73

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

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