The Psychologist October 2020

the

psychologist october 2020

Massive collaboration Jon Brock goes inside the Psychological Science Accelerator, as part of a special collection

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

th psychologist

the

psychologist october 2020

t b 2020

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

Massive collaboration Jon Brock goes inside the Psychological Science Accelerator, as part of a special collection

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates.

CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB contact Kai Theriault 01223 378051 kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk september 2020 issue 52,760 dispatched cover Sofia Sita https://sofiasita.com environment Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper.

Please re-use and recycle.

Mailing bag is potato starch-based and fully compostable. issn 0952-8229 (print) 2398-1598 (online)

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

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

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

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 Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Harriet Gross, Kimberley Hill, Deborah Husbands, Peter Olusoga, Richard Stephens, Miles Thomas

the

psychologist october 2020

02

07

10

18

Letters Gender guidance; racism in therapy; from the President; and more Obituaries Bob Audley and Alex Hossack News Attainment gap; awards; WHO; and more Digest What is universal?; bad luck; and more

44

From poverty to flourishing An update on the Society’s policy theme, plus a call for next summer’s special edition

24

Massive collaboration Jon Brock goes inside the Psychological Science Accelerator

54

‘I don’t take on roles for a badge… I just want to make a difference’ We meet Robina Shah

30

Supporting Team Science Katherine Button on building diverse roles into the fabric of Psychology

58

‘It’s about connection’ Jenny Boyd (‘Jennifer Juniper’) on a colourful life and coming to psychology late

34

Keep your friends close, your adversaries closer Chris Ferguson and Danielle Lindner

60

Jobs in psychology Latest vacancies

66

Books Emily and Laurence Alison on ‘Rapport’ plus reviews

68

Culture ‘Unframed lives’ photo exhibition, plus our call for an additional Associate Editor for these pages…

72

One on one Taide Riley-Hunte

36

Partnerships for impact Nicola Pitchford introduces perspectives from those at the ‘coal face’ of education

38

Sharing across fields Marcus Munafò on interdisciplinary collaboration

40

‘Our children have told us off for talking too much about episodic memory’ Chris Moulin and Celine Souchay on a professional and personal marriage

To my eyes, 2020 has been defined – for the world, for the British Psychological Society, and for The Psychologist – by Covid-19, diversity and inclusion, and inequality. All three issues seem like good examples of where psychologists need to collaborate widely in order to drive change.

That collaboration might involve scale, diversity of roles and viewpoints, and partnerships with end users and other disciplines. All are considered in this month’s special collection, alongside a look inside a professional and personal marriage.

Pulling together these issues, alongside a huge amount of online material, often feels like the ultimate collaborative effort. Month after month we feature dozens, sometimes hundreds, of you. The only way we can genuinely be a ‘forum for communication, discussion and controversy’ is by hearing from a range of voices, in particular from right across the Society membership. There are so many ways to get involved.

See our website, or email jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

Getty Images

Which human experiences are universal?

Emma Young digests the research

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website

Have you heard?

See p.70…

18

A

s everyone knows, American undergrads are not representative of all humanity – and the perils of drawing conclusions about people in general from WEIRD studies have been well-publicised. To really understand which human experiences are universal, and which are a product of our individual cultures, we need big, wellconducted studies of people from many different cultures.

Fortunately, there are studies like this. Here are some of their most fascinating insights…

Personal space How big is your ‘personal space’? As a Brit, I’d expect mine to be larger than that of the average Italian’s, say.

That’s because I know there are studies finding that people living in cultures that favour physical contact tend to have smaller ‘personal bubbles’. However, until recently, decent cross-cultural analyses of this concept had been lacking.

That changed with a 2017 paper on ‘Preferred interpersonal distances’ in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology from authors representing a total of 59 institutions, based everywhere from Beijing to Uruguay to Iran. In total, the team, led by Agnieszka Sorokowska, collected data on almost 9000 participants from 42 countries. They looked at preferences for ‘social distance’ (physical distance when interacting with a stranger), ‘personal distance’ (when with an acquaintance), and ‘intimate distance’ (when interacting with a family member, for example).

There were positive correlations between all three measures, but especially between the first two: people who preferred to stand closer to a stranger also tended to like being closer to an acquaintance. And when it came to country-by-country variations, the team found some big differences. People in Argentina had the smallest bubbles: they were happy for acquaintances to get within about 60 cm, and allowed close friends and family about

another 15 cm nearer. England and the US fell about a third of the way up the acceptable distance chart – people in England preferred acquaintances to stay about 20 cm further away than Argentinians did, for example.

The list was topped, though, by Romania, Hungary and Saudi Arabia. The average Hungarian’s preferred personal distance was almost twice that of the average Argentinian’s.

Exactly what might drive these country differences isn’t clear. But the team did note that, on the whole, women, older people and residents of colder countries preferred to keep strangers further at bay. Right now, however, Covid-19 means that of course we’re all used to more personal space than normal. But fear of the virus, along with long, stressful periods in lockdown, have led to a doubling in the personal distances perceived as comfortable among people in Lombardy, the region of Italy most affected by the virus, according to Tina Iachini at the University of Campania. ‘Social distance is like an invisible buffer around us that we always carry,’ she’s been quoted as saying. ‘It is our shield of safety and that is why we are so sensitive to the safety value of this space.’

Emotion terms What does ‘anger’ or ‘happiness’ mean to you? And do these, and other emotion labels, mean essentially the same thing to an English-speaker as their nearest translations do to people who speak other languages?

Earlier this year, a team led by Joshua Conrad Jackson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published a paper in Science that looked for variations in the meaning of 24 emotional concepts across 2474 languages. The team examined the pattern of ‘colexification’ in the different languages: that is, the way that single words are used to describe multiple concepts.

For instance, in Persian, ænduh means both grief and regret, while in the Dargwa dialect, spoken in Dagestan

the psychologist october 2020 digest in Russia, dard means grief and anxiety. So speakers of the two languages might have slightly different understandings of what ‘grief’ is.

The team found important variations between language families. For example, in some languages, ‘anger’ was related to ‘envy’, whereas in others it was linked more with ‘hate’ or ‘proud’. In some Austronesian languages, ‘pity’ and ‘love’ were associated, whereas in others, they were not. (In general, though, there was agreement about which emotions are ‘positive’ and which are ‘negative’.) The work suggests that there are indeed shades of culturally-influenced emotional experience.

Sensory perceptions The octave system is not only intrinsic to Western music, it’s also mathematically-based: move up an octave, and a given note doubles in frequency. Perhaps, then, Western music has come to use this system because it relates to the way that sound waves physically stimulate the cochlea in our inner ear – in other words, there’s something biologically fundamental, and universal, about the way we perceive pitch.

The problem with this suggestion is that, until recently, researchers hadn’t tested the musical perceptions of people who had not been exposed to Western music. In 2019, that changed. In a paper in Current Biology, a team led by Nori Jacoby at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics revealed that a remote group of people living in the Bolivian rainforest don’t process pitch in the same way as Americans. Unlike those of us used to listening to Western music, these people don’t perceive similarities between two notes occurring an octave apart.

This work adds to other research, notably in vision and smell, revealing that, while of course we humans all possess the same hardware, culture influences our sensory perceptions.

Mate preferences Back in 1989, the American psychologist David Buss published an influential paper concluding that there are some clear gender differences in mate preferences.

Based on a study of data from more than 10,000 participants from 37 different cultures, he and his team suggested that women tend to be more interested in ‘good financial prospects’ than men, and that men, more than women, consider ‘good looks’ to be important in a mate. Cue a heated debate, and all kinds of follow-up studies. The big question was this: if these differences indeed exist, are they driven by biology, or by culture – and specifically by gender inequality? In cultures with markedly greater gender equality, might these differences disappear?

In 2020, against a backdrop of old data and conflicting methods and conclusions, a huge international team, led by Kathryn Walter at the University of Santa Barbara, published a large-scale replication study on more than 14,000 participants across 45 countries. Across groups, men were more interested in physical attractiveness than women, who in turn preferred older mates with good

financial prospects. In countries with greater gender equality, couples tended to be more closely matched in age, but beyond this, levels of gender equality did not have an impact. The researchers concluded: ‘Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust.’

Human values Do we all fundamentally value the same things? And do these values vary at all with age – or between genders?

These are more than theoretically important questions. As the team behind a recent paper in Frontiers in Psychology led by Paul Hanel (Cardiff University) note, immigration is triggering some conflicts over perceptions of value. For example, a 2016 poll reported that three quarters of people living in Ontario, Canada, felt that Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values to their own.

However, other surveys have found that people around the world agree on values. In one study by Shalom Schwartz and Anat Bardi, people from 50 different countries tended to agree that benevolence, universalism and self-direction are highly important; tradition and power were valued least.

So what can explain these discrepancies? Hanel and his colleagues recently studied people living in three different cultures: Brazil, India and the UK. They concluded that people in different nations can differ in the behaviours associated with certain values, while still holding similar ideas about the meaning and importance of those values.

In 2020, a separate team led by Roosevelt Vilar looked at age and gender differences in values among more than 20,000 people living across 20 countries with ‘substantial’ cultural variability. They found slight differences between men and women through most life stages. In general, women were more focused on social and ‘central’ goals (helping others, for example) whereas men were more focused on personal goals (excitement and promotion).

Older people, too, valued social and central goals more than younger people, who were more enamoured of personal goals.

However, the team reports, culture had virtually no impact on the results. This, they argue, ‘supports the lifespan developmental psychological idea that values reflect a universal pattern of human agency in facing challenges over the life span’.

Broadly, then, this study, at least, argues that we are all driven to have fundamentally the same values – and the same slightly diverging values, according to age and gender – no matter where we live in the world.

While all these studies help us to understand which aspects of the human experience are universal, they don’t actually fix the WEIRD problem, of course. What we really need are for researchers to include non-WEIRD participants in studies as standard. But while this should make results more generalisable, clearly there could also be situations in which there are meaningful differences in results between cultures – and these should be appreciated, too.

More entitled people get angrier after experiencing bad luck We’ve all had the experience of losing our temper when being treated unfairly by someone else. And while anger isn’t the most pleasant emotion, it can be a useful social tool to signal to another person that we’re not happy with how they’re acting towards us.

But what about when we suffer because of bad luck, rather someone else’s actions? In that case it would seem to make little sense to get mad. And yet, a new study in Personality and Individual Differences finds that a certain group of people are more likely to show anger in such situations: those who feel like they are particularly entitled in the first place.

Psychological entitlement is essentially a belief that you deserve more than others. People who score highly in entitlement tend to think that others should be accommodating of their own needs and schedules, for instance, and are more likely to see themselves as being mistreated. When their high expectations aren’t met, they can experience reduced wellbeing and feelings of anger.

In a series of studies, Emily Zitek from Cornell University and Alexander Jordan from Harvard Medical School looked at whether these emotional effects of entitlement extend to situations solely involving bad luck. First, the pair asked 162 participants to fill in the Psychological Entitlement Scale, which asks respondents to rate their agreement with statements like ‘I honestly

feel I’m just more deserving than others’. Participants were also asked how good they would expect their luck to normally be when rolling dice.

Participants were then told that they would be randomly allocated by dice roll to either a fun task (rating comic strips) or a boring task (counting the letters in a paragraph). In reality, all participants were told they had had ‘bad luck’ and been assigned to the boring task. They then rated how unjust they felt this was, and indicated how angry they were.

The team found that those higher in entitlement had a stronger feeling of injustice and greater levels of anger. More entitled participants also generally expected to experience better luck when rolling dice, suggesting this is another instance where entitled people have (unrealistically) high expectations.

In a second study, participants were asked to recall either a time when something bad had happened to them solely because of bad luck, or when someone had treated them unfairly. They then indicated how fair and just they felt the event was, and rated their feelings of anger.

People high in entitlement again showed greater anger than those low in entitlement when recalling an instance of bad luck. But when remembering an instance of unfair treatment, those high and low in entitlement showed similar levels of anger. That is, entitlement

Babies seem to remember things better when their mood matches how they felt during learning. The findings suggest that young infants rely heavily on internal cues to retrieve memories. This could help to explain why we’re unable to recall memories from our earliest years: as we grow our internal state changes considerably, and is never again going to match that of our first years of life. Child Development 20

the psychologist october 2020 digest again seemed to be an important factor in determining anger after bad luck, but not when there was a specific individual to blame.

Finally, the researchers looked at how entitlement related to feelings of anger and pity when someone else experiences bad luck. Participants read a scenario in which their flight had been cancelled and the airline was randomly selecting a customer to hop onto another plane with a spare seat. In one scenario they were told that they had been unlucky and someone else had been picked; in another they were the lucky one.

When the participants read that they had had bad luck, higher entitlement was once again related to greater feelings of anger. Unsurprisingly, participants didn’t feel much anger when they were assigned the seat and the other person was unlucky. But they did experience pity towards that person – and interestingly, those with a greater sense of entitlement reported less pity.

Overall, then, the studies suggest that entitled people expect to have good luck, and get angry after experiencing bad luck – even though by definition there is no-one to direct that anger towards. (The authors do acknowledge it’s possible that people implicitly blame God or some higher power for their bad luck).

So what are the consequences of experiencing anger in those situations? The researchers suggest that feelings of anger and injustice could reinforce people’s sense of entitlement, though they add that there could be benefits too – if anger motivates someone to try and improve their performance in the future, for instance (though that may be difficult in cases where a bad result is purely down to luck).

Similarly, it remains to be seen how the results translate to the real world. In most cases an instance of ‘bad luck’ doesn’t occur in isolation, but often in a social setting – so it would seem prudent to examine whether this kind of anger is taken out on others.

MATTHEW WARREN

People prefer strangers who share their political views to friends who don’t Friendships tend to be based on some kind of shared experience: working with someone, for instance, or having the same interests. Politics is important too – we can be pretty intolerant of those with different political positions. But what happens when you discover that a trusted friend has different politics to you?

To find out, Elena Buliga and Cara MacInnis from the University of Calgary, Canada recruited 70 Republicans and 142 Democrats.

Participants were presented with four vignettes in a random order.

In the first two, they were asked to imagine meeting someone at a party who either had the same political views as them, or different views. In the final two scenarios, participants thought about a close friend whose views they were not already aware of, and imagined a conversation in which their friend espoused a shared political belief or in which they revealed that they were a member of a political out-group.

After reading each of the four vignettes, participants rated how they would feel in the situation and answered questions on how willing they would be to maintain that friendship (e.g. ‘would you make an effort to spend time with this

person?’). They also rated their trust and satisfaction in, and hope for, the ongoing friendship.

Overall, people were more positive towards in-group members than out-group members: participants had more trust in and hope for the longevity of relationships with both friends and strangers of the same political leanings than they did even for established friends with different politics. Positive emotions were highest when discovering a friend had shared beliefs, followed by the stranger with shared beliefs.

Out-group friends and out-group strangers tailed behind.

Negative affect was also highest for the friend with different political views, followed by the out-group stranger. This makes sense – you’re likely to be much more invested (and therefore much more disappointed) in a friend than someone you don’t know.

The study suggests that friendships may not fare well after someone discovers that a friend is of a different political persuasion.

However, the measures only looked at immediate reactions – it’s possible that people could mellow out over a longer period of time.

EMILY REYNOLDS

Digest digested…

The shape of a glass can subtly influence our drinking behaviours.

People drank more of a soft drink from a glass with sloping sides than a straight-sided glass, which seemed to be due to the physical shape of their lips when drinking. The findings could help ‘nudge’ people towards healthier behaviours, though more research is needed in real-world settings. Scientific Reports We think we’re better than our peers across a variety of skills and traits – but not in our ability to remember names, according to a recent study. Both older and younger adults failed to show a ‘better-than-average’ effect when rating their own ability to remember names, perhaps because past failures to remember names are

particularly salient and embarrassing.

Psychology and Aging People who say they would be willing to make sacrifices for their partner show higher personal and relationship wellbeing. But when someone actually makes sacrifices, their wellbeing is reduced. The researchers say that when making sacrifices, people should focus on what they gain rather than what they lose, in order to prevent their wellbeing from taking a hit. Psychological Bulletin A 2015 study made headlines worldwide after finding that people prompted to think of God make significantly riskier decisions. But a replication study on more than 1000 participants has failed to replicate two of the key findings from this work, suggesting that the original high-profile effect may have been nothing more than an exciting false positive. Psychological Science

24

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration Sofia Sita/www.sofiasita.com

Massive collaboration Jon Brock goes inside the Psychological Science Accelerator

A

t school, Neil Lewis Jr was always the ‘smart Black kid’. Aged nine, he and his family emigrated to Florida from his birthplace in Jamaica and he soon learned that his new classmates had low expectations of Black students. ‘They had a stereotype that Black people are not smart’, he explains, ‘so it surprised them that I did so well’. That sense of being judged in the light of racial stereotypes, he adds, has never really gone away.

Through high school, university, and even now, as an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, he admits to a constant, nagging concern that any slip-ups on his part would only confirm other people’s preconceptions.

‘For me it’s still a regular experience being an academic where I’m often the only Black person in the room.’

As an undergraduate studying social psychology, Lewis learned about a study that resonated with his own experiences of racial stereotypes. The researchers, Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson, gave students at Stanford University a brief test. Some were told that it was measuring their academic aptitude. Others that it was a puzzle to be solved. For White students, these instructions made no difference to their performance.

But amongst Black students, being told that their academic ability was being assessed led to poorer performance. In a further experiment, Black students

performed worse if, prior to the test, they had been exposed to negative stereotypes about Black people.

Again, White students were unaffected.

Steel and Aronson named this phenomenon ‘stereotype threat’. They argued that the distraction and anxiety caused by stereotypes can lead to poorer cognitive performance, becoming, in effect, a selffulfilling prophecy. ‘I found it fascinating that scientists had actually studied this’, Lewis says. ‘It was one of the theories that really got me interested in becoming a social scientist in the first place.’

Since it was published in 1995, Steel and Aronson’s original study has been cited by over 9500 other research papers. It has also had real world impacts, prompting colleges and universities to adopt programs aimed at minimising stereotype threat and improving educational outcomes. In 2013, the concept of stereotype threat reached the US Supreme Court when the University of Texas at Austin was forced to defend its racial diversity policy for student admissions. It’s also been applied to other stereotypes – that girls aren’t cut out for maths, for example, or that elderly people necessarily have poor memory.

Lately, however, the evidence for stereotype threat has started to come undone. Attempts to replicate key findings have failed. Meta-analyses that pool the results of many individual studies suggest that the effects are smaller or more variable than originally thought –

if they exist at all. Like others in the field, Lewis has begun to have doubts. ‘The phenomenon of being concerned that you might be judged in the light of these negative stereotypes, I think that’s real’, he says.

What remains unclear is the extent to which those experiences actually affect performance. ‘Right now’, he admits, ‘I don’t know that we have a good sense of that’.

To try and answer this question, Lewis has turned to the Psychological Science Accelerator, a worldwide network of researchers prepared to take part in largescale collaborative psychology studies.

26

Core features The plan, described in a preprint co-authored by Lewis and 43 other Accelerator members, is to conduct the largest ever test of racial stereotype threat with 2650 students recruited from 27 different sites around the United States. The locations are diverse in terms of the demographics and history of the area, the racial mix of students, and the nature of educational institution, ranging from elite universities to community colleges.

This, as Lewis explains, is by design. ‘We’re really trying to figure out what’s going on’, he says. ‘How robust is the phenomenon? How heterogenous is the phenomenon?’

By pulling their data together, the team can investigate whether the stereotype effect varies systematically. Theory predicts, for example, that it should be stronger in more prestigious institutions where the pressure for academic success is greatest and where under-representation of minorities is most apparent. This could perhaps explain why some researchers can find the effect and others cannot. But most importantly, Lewis argues, understanding this variability could help predict where interventions are most likely to be effective. ‘The Accelerator provides a platform to tell us pretty precisely where these things are likely to work and where they’re not going to work’, Lewis says.

The stereotype threat project is one of six currently being run through the Psychological Science Accelerator. The studies ask different questions and are at different stages of completion. But each project shares core features – large and diverse samples collected in multiple locations and, correspondingly, a large and diverse team of research collaborators. It’s a new – or at least a non-traditional – way of conducting psychology research.

Until recently, experimental psychologists typically worked in small teams. They tested a few dozen research participants, often students at the university or members of the local community. And they inferred from those experiments general principles of how the human mind works. This approach has been productive in terms of generating interesting new observations, ideas, and theories. But the past decade has seen growing concerns about the trustworthiness and validity of many of these findings.

It’s not only stereotype threat that is being questioned. Other phenomena such as age priming, power posing, and ego depletion were also widely accepted, featuring prominently in textbooks and introductory lectures, but they are now under clouds of suspicion with independent researchers unable to replicate the core findings. Even when the findings can be replicated, the small-scale, parochial nature of psychology research means that it’s often unclear whether they generalise to other cultures or demographics.

The Accelerator is an attempt to address these issues. As the name suggests, it takes its inspiration from physics, where massive collaboration has become the norm. Chris Chartier, the Accelerator’s founder, admits that it’s something of a rhetorical device, ‘a bit tongue-in-cheek’. In physics, he notes, international research consortia have emerged from the need to share million (and sometimes billion) dollar infrastructure – CERN, LIGO, the Square Kilometre Array, and suchlike. There are no comparable research facilities in psychology. But the idea of physicists around the world working together to solve fundamental problems like gravitational waves and the Higgs boson provides ‘big picture inspiration’ for what psychologists might be able to achieve.

Improving psychological science Chartier is an Associate Professor at Ashland University, a small teaching university in rural Ohio, midway between Cleveland and Columbus. When he moved to Ashland in 2013, he imagined his research career winding down. ‘I thought I was going to have this quiet life in the country’, he says, ‘teach my students, raise my kids’. He realised that the best way to make an impact with less time and fewer resources was to join a larger collaboration. As a first step, he and his students signed up to two collaborative projects – the Reproducibility Project: Psychology and Many Labs 3 – that were attempting mass systematic replications. That led, in 2016, to his participation in the first meeting of the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS).

SIPS, Chartier says, is unlike a normal academic conference. Instead of the traditional keynote presentations and poster sessions, the program is full of workshops and hackathons where people discuss problems and brainstorm solutions. In one of those workshops, he came up with the idea for Study Swap, a website where researchers can post study ideas or resources they need to pull off a study. It launched in March 2017 and has already spawned a number of collaborations, allowing small labs to join forces to increase their sample sizes or replicate each other’s findings. But by the time of the second SIPS meeting, he was already starting to think bigger.

The inspiration for the Accelerator came a few weeks later, Chartier says, with the August 2017 solar eclipse. ‘I guess the eclipse itself puts you in the right

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

have been accepted. Five (including the stereotype frame of mind’, he tells me. ‘But I was also moved by threat study) are in progress. But the first has now been the concept that we – I mean the global human we – completed. could so confidently predict such an event so far in advance. At one point, how baffling it was that this thing would occasionally happen and now we know when it’s going to happen to the second. And obviously A model of the whole world Lisa de Bruine is a professor at the University that’s a cumulative contribution of many, many people of Glasgow and a pioneer of online psychology over many years.’ experiments. With her colleagues Ben Jones and Jessica That weekend on a long bike ride, the concept of Flake, she has been leading the Accelerator’s first study, a ‘CERN for psychological science’ was born. ‘I came investigating the judgements we all make when we home, asked my wife if she would continue to solo encounter new faces. ‘When we look at somebody, we parent for another hour, hammered out the blogpost, make these social judgements immediately’, De Bruine tweeted it out. And then it just took off from there.’ explains. ‘We make category judgements like what sex That initial blogpost envisaged a network of they are, what age they are. But also, do they look nice? hundreds of data collection laboratories around the Do they look dominant? Do they look like they want world working collaboratively on shared projects. to hurt me?’ These social judgments, it transpires, are There would be a commitment to the highest levels far from accurate. They’re not reflected in the person’s of transparency throughout the life cycle of a study. actual personality. And that, essentially, is the point of Projects would not just be replication attempts but the research. ‘They’re extremely not reliable’, De Bruine would include original investigations of new ideas. says. ‘But we’re all making them all the time. And they And critically, there would be a democratic process for influence our behaviour in consistent and important the selection of studies. The idea, Chartier admits, was ways.’ the easy part. The real challenge has been sorting out Facial appearance, she notes, can affect whether the nuts and bolts. ‘It’s been two years of “That’s cool, you are hired for a job, how long you’re sentenced we should do that. But how the hell do we do that?”’ for a crime, and, of course, whether The experience with the someone wants to be in a romantic Reproducibility Project and relationship with you. Once we get Many Labs replication projects “Even when the findings to know someone, their appearance has been important, Chartier can be replicated, the matters less, but those first visual says. It’s shown how some of small-scale, parochial impressions influence who is given those practical hurdles can be that chance. ‘Many of these biases overcome. But with those and nature of psychology are totally unfair’, De Bruine says. ‘So other similar projects – there research means that it’s figuring out how we get around them have now been five Many often unclear whether means we need to understand them Labs projects, not to mention better.’

Many Babies, Many EEGs, and they generalise to other the stereotype threat project, Many Analysts – each was a cultures or demographics” the Like face perception study is based one-off. A central team would on a classic experiment. In 2008, set the agenda, propose the Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander project, and put out a new call Todorov at Princeton University in the United States for collaborators. The vision for the Accelerator was asked undergraduate students to rate a series of faces for it to be more of an ongoing, sustained, and selffor 13 different traits – their attractiveness, confidence, organising institution. That required a new process for intelligence, for example. The researchers’ analyses making decisions.

Members of the Accelerator are able to put forward indicated that faces were judged along two main dimensions – how trustworthy the person looked and project proposals for consideration by the collective. how dominant. When De Bruine and her colleagues ‘It’s similar to journal peer review’, Chartier explains. in Scotland replicated the experiment they found ‘We do an initial check. At a base level, does this the same result. But then her student Hongyi Wang seem up to snuff? Is it something we should even ran the study in China and found a subtly different look at? Why is it that this question really needs the pattern. Faces were judged for trustworthiness but Accelerator? Is it feasible within the network and not dominance. ‘It was more like intelligence or resources we have?’ If it passes that initial screen, the competence was the other dimension’, De Bruine says. proposal is then sent to around 10 peer reviewers, Independently, a group of researchers at the University including members of the Accelerator and external of York found similar results with Chinese participants. experts. It’s also shared with the full membership who It appeared that those initial results in Western are asked to rate the proposal. Is it a strong project? countries might not be representative of all cultures.

Is it a good fit for the Accelerator? Would they run ‘We really need a model of the whole world’, De Bruine the study in their lab? ‘The committee then takes says. those and essentially acts as an editor’, Chartier says.

To achieve that goal, she and 242 other members ‘Collates those. Makes a decision.’ Thus far, six projects

would then inspect the videos before giving the lab of the Accelerator have replicated Oosterhof and the go ahead to collect data. Then there was the fact Todorov’s experiment on a global scale, testing almost that the experimental materials all needed translating 11,500 participants from 41 different countries. into different languages. That alone took dozens of The results, published as a preprint on PsyArxiv, are translators and involved extensive back and forth to remarkably consistent over much of the world. Not and from English to ensure that the different language only in the USA and Canada, Australia and New versions were comparable.

Zealand, and every region of Most challenging, she says, Europe, but also in Central America was nailing down the details and Mexico, South America, the “Putting together data of the study. Consistent with Middle East, and Africa, people from hundreds of the Accelerator’s open science rate faces according to their trustworthiness and dominance – individual experiments in principles, the team preregistered the pattern identified in Oosterhof a reproducible way is very the study, describing in detail the plan for recruiting participants and and Todorov’s original study. This challenging” collecting the data, the criteria for was also true in Asia, which would excluding participants who were appear to contradict those earlier not performing the task properly, findings from China. However, as and the protocols for analysing the data. Thinking De Bruine notes, the Asia sample includes data from a ahead like that can be difficult at the best of times but number of countries other than China. massive collaboration throws up new challenges. How The results, though, are perhaps less important should participants be recruited to ensure meaningful than the practical lessons the team has learned. As comparison across labs? How should the data from the the first Accelerator project, De Bruine’s study has run different labs and different countries be combined? up against numerous challenges inherent in large‘Putting together data from hundreds of individual scale distributed data collection. For example, across experiments in a reproducible way is very challenging’, the many different labs, they had to ensure that data De Bruine says. ‘I thought it would be straightforward were collected in a consistent way. To this end, each to just run the code I wrote on the data, but things that participating lab was required to video themselves seem minor when you’re running a small study in your running a fake participant. The leadership team

Bringing professional training to your screens As you will know, we have had to cancel or postpone all face-to-face BPS events until further notice due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you had already booked onto an event and we’re not able to reschedule, you will receive a refund.

But while we can’t hold these events, we can provide virtual training through our webinars and there will be more of these available over the coming weeks.

Keep your eyes on our website for the latest updates on webinars and our new portfolio of events. We hope our online training will prove useful to you or a colleague, and most importantly hope that you stay well at this time.

www.bps.org.uk/events 28

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

for testing the same hypothesis to own lab, like excluding the test see whether they converge on the run you did at 9am the day before same conclusion. ‘I think the power you started data collection, become of the Accelerator to do really much more difficult to document informative research on a large when you’re dealing with dozens scale is unmatched by anything else of labs, thousands of participants, in social psychology right now’, she and hundreds of thousands of data says. points.’

Lewis’s ambition for the Having started later, the Dr Jon Brock is a Freelance Accelerator is to eventually move stereotype threat project is at Science Writer beyond computerised lab-based an earlier stage but has also drbrocktagon@gmail.com experiments. ‘Right now’, he says, encountered challenges. The ‘we’re really set up to do web-based most significant so far has been experiments where you can give everyone the same negotiating ethical approval at all the participating link and then they can run that on their campus. institutions. Black students are considered a special But so much of human life is beyond computers.’ research population, Lewis explains, and ethics review In his work outside of the Accelerator, Lewis is looking boards differ in what they consider best practice for at doctor-patient interactions in health clinics, but it’s recruiting and working with special populations. unclear, he says, how well his findings generalise.

The challenge, he adds, is not only gaining approval ‘I really don’t know if what I’m finding is just about for the study but thinking about how differences in New Yorkers’, he admits. ‘I would eventually want recruitment strategy might affect results from different to do that research in multiple settings. So again labs and how the data should be analysed to take that you can learn how much of our findings are about into account. ‘There are all these things that come this particular clinic, this city, urban versus rural up when you’re doing this large scale collaborative settings, all these other dimensions that in our gut we research’, Lewis says. ‘Ultimately I think it moves us know matter. Finding ways to build these large-scale towards a more generalisable understanding of the collaborative networks is the only way to test that.’ phenomena. But it takes a lot more logistical work up The ultimate goal, he argues, is to create research front.’ infrastructure that allows predictions to be made about how different individuals will think, feel, and behave in different contexts. ‘We can develop Next steps interventions and we can know precisely where those From a blogpost and a tweet less than three years interventions would work and where they would not’, ago, the Psychological Science Accelerator has grown Lewis says. ‘This would not only advance our practical into an organisation with 760 researchers from 548 knowledge… it would really refine our theories.’ laboratories in 72 different countries. Although all the For Chartier, the most pressing concern is funding. continents (with the exception of Antarctica) are now Unlike its namesakes in physics, the Psychological represented, it remains the case that most of those Science Accelerator is currently run on a shoestring labs are in North America and Europe, with only one budget. A Patreon crowd-funding account raises of the six projects – a study led by Sau Chin Chen of a few hundred dollars a month to help labs in Tzu-Chi University in Taiwan – having leadership underrepresented countries pay participants. But teams outside of those Western countries. Making otherwise, the entire enterprise is run on the voluntary psychology research truly global and representative is efforts of its members with expenses covered by one of the key objectives of the Accelerator, De Bruine the participating labs. In Chartier’s ‘Utopian view’ says. But it’s important for the ideas as well as the the Accelerator would integrate the entire scientific participants to come from researchers in other parts of workflow. Members would submit a research proposal the world. ‘We don’t want to be an organisation that is exploiting labs in underrepresented countries to collect and, if approved, the Accelerator team would then data for us’, she says. ‘We’re committed to keep looking seek funding for the project together. The Accelerator could also have its own journal for peer review and at ourselves to make sure it’s not just a Western driven publication of its projects and archiving of the data. organisation.’

‘Right now’, Chartier says, ‘we’re figuring out Now they have completed the first Accelerator processes, getting all the hiccups along the way. These project, De Bruine and her colleagues are already are like little fledgling studies. But eventually I think thinking about the next step. ‘Our project was we could get to the point with the Accelerator where specifically designed to test out the capacity of the the studies we conduct end up being the biggest Accelerator’, she explains. ‘We wanted to design a straightforward study that would clearly benefit from a difference-makers, the highest impact studies where we consider them the highest evidential value, getting cross-cultural sample of the size that we could achieve truly global evidence. I think we’re going to look back with the Accelerator. But I think we can do even more and think that these 12,000 participant studies are exciting things now.’ One idea she is keen to explore is quaint, somehow small.’ having teams of researchers devise different methods

Supporting ‘team science’ Katherine Button argues that we need to build a diversity of roles into the fabric of the psychology department, as well as thinking about our role in bigger interdisciplinary projects

There is growing awareness that the challenges of the 21st century will be best met by interdisciplinary collaborative efforts. The main UK funding bodies have been integrated into UK Research and Innovation, and we are increasingly seeing cross-council funding calls to encourage truly interdisciplinary and team science approaches. Human health and behaviour are high on the agenda, and psychology is key. But are we ready to be active team players?

T

eam science has been defined as output-focused research involving two or more research groups (tinyurl. com/acmedteamsci) and it is on the rise. Authorship lists are getting longer, and the proportion of papers involving multiple disciplines and international collaborations is increasing year on year (Adams, 2013). And for good reason. Team science works.

We all know the classic examples; CERN, the EU Graphene initiative, the human genome project, all have yielded game-changing results and involved large international teams and extensive funding. There are also the examples of longitudinal cohort studies; UK biobank, international clinical trials, such as those Sofia Sita/www.sofiasita.com

30

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

looking at heart disease and statins, and more recently the international team efforts between academic researchers and industry in the hunt to find a vaccine for Covid-19.

Smaller-scale team science approaches are also increasing as groups seek to collaborate with others with specialist expertise in advanced skills such as imaging, mathematical modelling or statistics, or by researching the interface between unusual combinations of conventional subjects, such as economics and psychology.

It is at these interfaces were science has advanced the most. In a 2013 Science article, Brian Uzzi and colleagues analysed 17.9 million academic articles.

They found that the highest impact science was grounded in highly conventional combinations of prior work but with an unusual combination of disciplines facilitated by team-authored papers. Papers high in novelty but low in conventionality or vice-versa fared less well.

This is important, given that we often prize novelty above all else in our grading criteria for student assignments and research grants alike. Yet it seems the most productive sort of novelty emerges from the building of a diverse team where members are steeped in expertise and the conventions of their disciplines, and the novelty arises from the meeting of these different perspectives.

Indeed, one of the benefits of collaboration is exposing dogma within our fields and the transfer and sharing of best practice. It was working on clinical trials where sample size justification is so vital that exposed how relatively small the samples used in neuroscience and psychology studies tended to be (Button et al., 2013).

What makes a good team?

After graduating from Cambridge with a BA in Neuroscience, I moved to Bristol to undertake an MEd in the Psychology of Education as a BPS accredited conversion course in preparation for applying for a doctorate in clinical psychology. I got waylaid working as a research assistant on a large multicentre clinical trial of online CBT for depression in what is now Bristol Medical School, and ended up doing a PhD in Psychiatry (investigating information processing biases in social anxiety) instead.

Working in an epidemiology department and being involved with multi-centre clinical trials hugely influenced my view of psychology research. I didn’t think of it as ‘team science’ back then, but the multicentre RCTs were the archetypal team science effort.

Meetings involved input from statisticians, clinicians, methodologists, qualitative researchers, research assistants, therapists, lay representatives, from multiple

sites, each bringing their own specialist expertise and having their own area of responsibility.

I benefited enormously from the availability of these varied experts, and in particular being able to walk down the corridor and knock on multiple doors for statistical advice. So what makes for a good team?

Diversity and complementarity in skills, effective leadership and organisation and a mix of breadth (i.e. big picture thinkers) and depth in knowledge and expertise. We need those that can sit at the interface of disciplines, those that provide deep topic knowledge and those with the technical skills to realise the work.

The disconnect Team science is beneficial for scientific progress and we should be facilitating it at every opportunity, rewarding and recognising it through career pathways and training our students in team science approaches.

But this is where we hit a snag. Our current structures for recognition and reward in academia are based on an old model of small research groups led by a principle investigator, the typical teaching-research academic track, and assessment based on individual work.

The metrics of success by which we currently recognise, and reward academic researchers are publications and grant funding. As we all know there are only two authorship positions worth having; first or last, indicating you wrote the paper or were the senior investigator respectively. Relying on these ‘key’ authorship positions becomes problematic as authorship lists increase with team science. It may even act to disincentivise collaboration or can lead to friction and power struggles within the team as the ‘big beasts’ fight it out for prominent authorship positions.

The metric of publication and previous conventions for authorship are simply too narrow to encompass the many and varied contributions to team science. Statistical methods, data visualisation and curation, resources, software development are all increasingly roles that contribute to the work in modern publications and a middle authorship position may simply not reflect the significant contributions made to the work.

Similarly, successful funding bids often involve large teams – yet for hiring and promotion decisions it is PI funding that is most important. Again, this is problematic, particularly in cross-discipline grants where the two groups might be contributing equally to the project but a co-PI model isn’t supported.

This model also leaves skills specialists in a tricky spot, as their role is vital but seen as supporting and thus rarely suited to being the lead applicant.

So how can we can change to recognise and reward team scientists, and to train for the future of team science?

In 2016 the Academy of Medical Sciences published a working group report on ‘Improving recognition of team science contributions in biomedical research careers’ (tinyurl.com/ acmedteamsci). This report highlighted key areas where the current conventions for reward and recognition have failed and made several recommendations for how these could be improved.

The three which I find particularly relevant are the need for career paths for skills specialists, the CReDiT taxonomy for authorship contributions and training for team science.

32

Career paths for skills specialists In psychology we are very good at training a particular type of student: one who writes exceptionally strong, well-argued and constructed essays, has an excellent grasp of the relevant psychological theories, enjoys grappling with the societal issues and the psychological applications. A student who also excels in statistical and technical skills is less common. Given the central importance of the methods and analysis to the soundness of psychological research, this asymmetry has always intrigued me.

I see this reflected in the composition of our academic staff – many senior psychologists are topic experts that feel uncomfortable with numbers and this discomfort may be socially transmitted to our students.

It is also reflected in our academic articles. Lengthy introductions set up the theoretical framework, followed by lengthy discussions full of interesting speculations, while the strengths and limitations of the study design – crucial for evaluating the veracity of the findings – is often buried at the end like the small print on a loan agreement. (Worse still, some journals do actually relegate the methods to small print.) At the student level, if an empirical dissertation is a terrible piece of research with a convincing write-up which reflects at length on the shortcomings in the research design, the student can still obtain a first class mark. In contrast an Key sources excellent piece of research poorly written up will always be heavily penalised.

Adams, J. (2013). The fourth age of The asymmetry is also reflected research. Nature, 497, 557–560. in those we promote and those Button, K., Ioannidis, J., Mokrysz, C. et al. (2013). Power failure: why small we don’t. Post-docs are often the sample size undermines the reliability most productive, talented and of neuroscience. Nat Rev Neurosci, 14, enabling people in a department – 365–376. they have the specialist skills that Button, K.S., Chambers, C.D., are the engines of papers (they Lawrence, N. & Munafò, M.R. (2019). analyse, build experiments, process Grassroots Training for Reproducible Science: A Consortium-Based Approach data). But to progress they must to the Empirical Dissertation. Psychology find an academic post where this Learning and Teaching, 19(1), 77-90. specialist skill set rather quickly Uzzi, B., Mukherjee, S., Stringer, M. & becomes somewhat obsolete in Jones, B. (2013). Atypical combinations the face of teaching, admin and and scientific impact. Science, 342(6157), team management. And we tend to 468-472. promote the ‘big-picture’ thinkers

while the skills specialists run the risk of becoming a perpetual post-doc. The few mathematically minded staff in the department are often inundated with requests for statistical support from colleagues and students alike.

The idea that methods and statistics are just some sort of inconvenience to be got through before we get to the good bits may also be reflected in authorship positions. Writing the paper can earn a first authorship position while the statistical analysis, which can take considerably longer, is often rewarded with a second author position. The strength of findings is intrinsically linked the rigour of the methods and the integrity of the statistical analyses. If we routinely gave these the proper consideration they deserve, perhaps we would see as many psychology professors specialised in methods and statistics as we do in topic area.

As our methods and techniques become increasingly sophisticated, skills specialists will become increasingly important. We need career paths and development opportunities for the skills specialist and other researchers and support staff who provide key roles in team science but fall outside the traditional ‘PI’ track. Psychology is a broad discipline encompassing many new and advancing fields and techniques such as mathematical modelling of decision making, brain imaging and changing research cultures. We need to increase diversity within the ‘PI’ track as well to reflect this increasing diversity.

We also need to recognise excellence in teaching and ensure career progression for those whose teaching is the main focus of their role. In recent years we have started to see this reflected in different types of career tracks; ‘research only’ and ‘teaching only’ have been added alongside the conventional teaching and research track. However, we have yet to achieve true parity in career advancement across these tracks.

Research only posts tend to be post-doc positions or other short-term grant dependent posts where steady career progression is challenging. The more secure teaching positions are often seen as less prestigious and the average time to progress to professor slower than the research-teaching track.

CReDiT taxonomy for authorship contributions The reliance on first and last authorship positions no longer reflects the diverse and complex inputs into modern scientific papers. While some people advocate for the removal of authorship lists at altogether, most acknowledge that changing cultural conventions takes time. Widespread adoption of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT: https://casrai.org/credit/) is an excellent first step to acknowledging the diversity in contributions to a paper. At present it includes 14 roles from conceptualisation, writing the original draft, formal analysis, funding acquisition, and supervision through to providing resources, data curation, visualisation and project administration. Each author can be assigned multiple roles and it makes each

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

current convention for individual student assessment (BPS, 2016: see tinyurl.com/y2nj3ndt).

Working in teams has many benefits – by pooling their data collection these projects achieve reasonable sample sizes (usually in the 200-400 range) and the students benefit for the networking Dr Katherine Button is a Senior and sharing of ideas and practices.

Lecturer in the Department of The projects are led by a PhD Psychology at the University of student who gains experience in Bath. K.S.Button@bath.ac.uk ‘PI’ leadership skills whilst under close academic supervision. It’s a flexible model, working equally well as a simpler team Training for team science of students working in a single department.

We need diversity within and across departments, The consortium approach has many pedagogical and the leadership skills to get us to that position. benefits, equipping students with the transferrable Interestingly the current focus on reproducibility and open science, as well as the era of big data, may already skills required for effective teamwork. However, for these skills to be fully realised they must be recognised be changing things. They highlight the need for skills and rewarded in assessment alongside the current and technical specialists as well as the need to train criteria focused on individual assessment. our students in transferable skills such as coding and data curation. We may also find we need to employ more specialised support staff such as data librarians You are not alone to help us navigate the legal requirements as open data Academia is a weird system. We spend years honing becomes the expectation. very specialised skills as PhD students and post-docs, Many psychology departments are grappling with to then move to an academic post which often requires how to move from the traditional statistics teaching minimal use of those skills. Instead we are required to based on point-and-click in SPSS to one based on rapidly learn how to teach, apply for grants, manage teaching analysis through scripts and coding using research groups and perform admin roles. This may open source software like R. It’s tough, as many of lead to selective career advancement where the topic us academics feel outdated and need to learn how to experts and big-picture thinkers are promoted over code ourselves so we can support our students. But skills specialists who may end up leaving academia. for our students, it seems vital for them to have some On top of this we now have emerging trends of basic grounding in a transferable skill like coding to increase their employability both within and outside of big data and open research, and as techniques and methods advance it becomes increasingly challenging academia.

There are universities leading the way. Glasgow has for a single group to stay cutting-edge. Likewise, as the teaching excellence framework and the Covid-initiated switched all their quantitative methods teaching to the need to move teaching online require a shift in how programming language R and they are already reaping we teach large swathes of the syllabus, it becomes the benefits. Their skilled undergraduates are able to take on challenging analyses in their final year projects. increasingly challenging for a single academic to excel in both research and teaching.

This move was enabled by hiring new staff tasked But embracing a team science ethos can be with developing and delivering their world leading liberating – no longer do we need to be able to do all PsyTeachR course (https://psyteachr.github.io/). This of these things alone, we just need to work as part of may also be paving the way for a new generation of a team or a department where between us we have psychologists well-versed in coding and data science a diversity of expertise covered. For this to work we who can bring the new skills to the psychology need to ensure we reward all types of contribution to department team. the team effort and ensure we train the next generation We also need to ensure we train our students in the skill sets required to support team science. By in the soft skills of teamwork, collaboration and building career paths to reward diversity into our own leadership. An ambitious model we have adopted departments, we create an environment for effective is an undergraduate consortium for the final year team science both within and beyond our field. empirical dissertation project, which we wrote about The green shoots are there – exciting new teaching in the March 2016 issue of The Psychologist (and initiatives and a bright and inspiring generation of see also Button et al., 2019). Students collaborate early career researchers working towards the future with other students, PhD students, post-docs and of reproducible team science. We must play our part academics across multiple psychology departments and ensure outdated conventions for reward and on a large research project designed to train students recognition don’t stifle their growth. in reproducible team science whilst also meeting the author’s contribution clear.

Applicants for jobs could be encouraged to list their CRediT statements alongside their publication list to make their contributions to papers explicit.

The range of evidence used in deciding grant funding and career progression could be broadened to include published study protocols, published datasets, pre-prints, patents, software and code.

Keep your friends close, your adversaries closer

F

Chris Ferguson and Danielle Lindner might only agree on their need to collaborate

or at least the last 10 years, psychology has been shaken by the replication crisis. Many ‘sound’ findings have proven shaky when re-examined using more rigorous approaches (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), and the spotlight has fallen on ‘false positives’ – finding something in the data which isn’t truly there. Publication bias, incentives for publishing hypothesis-supportive findings, the perception that flashier results may attract more grant funding or newspaper headlines; these are all problems Sofia Sita/www.sofiasita.com

34

By combining viewpoints, the involved scholars can challenge each other…

in psychology. But there’s an even more fundamental issue – researchers are human and often favour certain results over others.

This bias may be particularly present in highly emotional topics in social science, which may unwittingly be an extension of an individual’s advocacy efforts or ideological beliefs. In such an environment, scholars may push either for or against outcomes according to their perceived utility for a particular cause or belief, or unconsciously develop study methodologies that are likely to favour a desired outcome. One research area that has been notoriously emotionally valenced, and where researcher beliefs both for and against an effect are often highly impassioned, is media and body image.

In this area, some scholars are very passionate about advocating for media effects, while others are more skeptical (Ferguson, 2018). Two issues can come to the fore. First, it may be easy to dismiss the findings of a particular research group as ‘they are just skeptics/ believers’. Second, ambiguous results can be selectively interpreted. Consider for example the case of Whyte et al. (2016), an excellent study with specific innovations such as careful matching of media conditions, standardised outcomes and distractor tasks designed to minimise false positive results. For two outcomes, one result was non-significant, the other of threshold significance (p = .045). Removing a covariate from the latter result rendered this outcome also non-significant.

Thus, even a well-designed study returned an ambiguous result, easily interpreted according to a scholar’s a priori beliefs about effects.

One way to reduce these problems is through adversarial collaboration. This doesn’t mean scholars need to hate each other (indeed, adversarial collaboration may be difficult in an environment lacking in trust and respect). Rather, two or more scholars with differing beliefs about a research field come together and design a study they mutually agree would be convincing with clear criteria for interpreting results. By combining viewpoints, the involved scholars can challenge each other both to develop better, more convincing designs and also limit selective interpretation of ambiguous results.

Recently, we came together to examine the potential impacts of sexualisation in a video game

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

on women player’s body satisfaction and aggression toward other women (Lindner et al., in press).

Key sources negative evaluations of the Our collaboration was adversarial not because we female research assistant). These loathe each other (we don’t), but simply because we Ferguson, C.J. (2018). The devil wears had different views on media effects. This presented an findings were consistent with Stata: Thin-ideal media’s minimal excellent opportunity to test our views using a rigorous Chris’s other research on the topic, contribution to our understanding and inconsistent with Danielle’s preregistered design. of body dissatisfaction and eating research. I [Danielle] wasn’t I [Chris] was aware of developing a reputation as disorders. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6, 70-79. especially bothered by this finding. a skeptic in the area of media effects. Approaching Lindner, D., Tantleff-Dunn, S. & Jentsch, In my teaching, I talk about how media effects as an adversarial collaboration offered F. (2012). Social comparison and the theories can’t possibly explain all an opportunity to challenge my perspectives and ‘circle of objectification’. Sex Roles, 67, behaviour. I also educate students test them in a more rigorous format. Adversarial 222-235. about the lower rates of publication collaborations can be one element of open science and Lindner, D., Trible, M., Pilato, I. & for null findings, and how this can improving the rigour of data more generally.

Ferguson, C.J. (in press). Examining the effects of exposure to a sexualized have a negative impact on a field of I [Danielle] chose to pursue this project for female video game protagonist on study. Being open to the possibility two reasons. First, I had published primarily women’s body image. Psychology of of null findings and being willing correlational studies (e.g. Lindner et al., 2012).

Popular Media Culture. to publish them when they arose As an early career faculty member building a research Open Science Collaboration. (2015). is part of ‘walking the talk’. We did program, broadening the research agenda to include Estimating the reproducibility of talk at length about our findings and experimental studies made sense. More importantly, psychological science. Science, 349(6251), 1-8.

I was interested in the intellectual exercise of designing their implications. Particularly in Thompson, J.K. (2004). The the Discussion section, it is possible a rigorous study with a colleague who had a different mis(measurement) of body image: Ten for researchers to present findings in viewpoint given that null findings can be just as strategies to improve assessment for ways that reflect their own scientific interesting and meaningful as significant findings. applied and research purposes. Body agendas rather than what the data For us, the actual process of the adversarial Image, 1, 7-14. actually show. It was important collaboration was in fact very collaborative. Our Want, S.C. (2014). Three questions regarding the ecological validity of that our findings were represented research questions emerged out of a series of experimental research on the impact of in a way that we both felt was conversations about the field. In designing the study, viewing thin-ideal media images. Basic scientifically accurate. To this end, we were able to bring together knowledge from and Applied Social Psychology, 36(1), we explained how our findings were our previous research experiences (i.e. rigorous 27-34. consistent with other findings from experimental study of media effects and knowledge Whyte, C., Newman, L.S. & Voss, D. Chris’s area of research, and utilised of video games for Chris, deep understanding of (2016). A confound-free test of the effects of thin-ideal media images on findings from my area of research to objectification theory for Danielle) to develop body satisfaction. Journal of Social and explain why our results turned out methodology that avoided many of the pitfalls Clinical Psychology, 35(10), 822-839. the way they did. common in experimental studies of media effects Did the results change either and body image (e.g. Thompson, 2004; Want, of our minds? Definitely not! We 2014). We worked together to determine how still send zingers at each other across the hallway! best to operationalise our variables and develop Kidding… we still have our own views of media and study procedures that would minimise demand sexualisation and that’s fine. Results like these help us characteristics. Pre-registration required us to clearly both to shape our views and consider them from new establish not only our study design, but also our angles and, of course, design new research studies. statistical procedures, prior to running the study.

We’re already working on our This level of decision making, while follow-up examining impacts on important in any collaboration, male players. Who knows what is especially important in an we’ll find, but it will be exciting adversarial collaboration to ensure Chris J. Ferguson however it turns out! there is no allegiance to either is a Professor It’s worth noting that not every researcher’s agenda. We were of Psychology at adversarial collaboration is likely fortunate to have undergraduate Stetson University to work. In some research fields, students help with data collection, and lives in debate may have descended into and two students helped prepare Orlando, Florida outright acrimony, possibly even the final manuscript. legal proceedings! Remember, you’ll The results of our study showed likely have to live with this person that exposure to a sexualized Danielle Lindner for months at least, quite often female video game protagonist is an Assistant years (our collaboration took about had no effect on college women’s Professor three years). Such collaborations self-objectification, body shame, Psychology at can be rewarding and fun, so long body dissatisfaction, aggression, Stetson University as there is mutual respect, but a and negative attitudes toward in DeLand, Florida nightmare if that is lacking. women (operationalised as

Partnerships for impact Nicola Pitchford introduces perspectives from those at the ‘coal face’ of education

I

Professor Nicola Pitchford is at the University of Nottingham Nicola.Pitchford@nottingham.ac.uk

36

started working at the intersection of education, academia and international aid in 2013, having a background in developmental neuropsychology. At the time, my research centred on understanding how children acquire basic foundational skills, especially in response to adverse neurological events such as stroke or tumour. Through working with external partners, I have now broadened my focus to applying scientific knowledge to enhance learning outcomes for marginalised children worldwide.

A random pathway of events led me to two of the most inspirational leaders I have ever known: Dario Gentili – Head of Business Development for Southern Africa & Sierra Leone for the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), a large international NGO; and Marc Faulder – Apple Distinguished Educator and Early Years Specialist in Nottingham.

Our work is focused on using educational technology to support the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy skills in children that, for various reasons, are struggling to learn. It connects learning challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa to those in the UK by implementing a common educational app-based technology developed by the UK non-profit ‘onebillion’, joint winners of the Global Learning XPRIZE. In doing so, we are able to identify factors that impact all learners and contextuallyspecific influences. This informs the implementation process.

Working with Dario and Marc in vastly different contexts has been enlightening. They bring tremendous insight into the research design and process from their wealth of knowledge through working on the ground.

This adds to the quality of the research and provides a direct pathway to apply the research findings to people that matter. I feel valued for my expertise and can see, first hand, the benefits that research can bring to children and educators.

This couldn’t have come at a more critical stage in my career.

After 20 years of working in a sector that had become unrecognisable from when I joined, the marketisation of academia had left me demoralised and dejected. As a sector, we must never underestimate the importance of feeling valued and appreciated. Through working with Dario and Marc I regained a sense of purpose that encouraged me to continue my academic career by focusing directly on developing opportunities for my research to have meaningful impact.

This was no ride in the park, however. I had jumped straight onto a steep learning curve, that required a flexible and fast way of working which is not aligned to the academic year. Quickly, I had to acquire a new vocabulary of terms: theory of change, logframe, and logic model became part of my repertoire, leaving many of my colleagues wondering what I was talking about. And there was big money at stake. At first, I underestimated the resources I would need to be able to conduct highquality research at a level that will have global impact.

I was also shocked by the competitive nature of this field. On one of my first visits to Malawi I met an aid worker from the US and proudly told

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

The Implementer (Dario Gentili) I have been working with Nicola since January 2013, with a particular focus on addressing the stubborn development issues of innumeracy and illiteracy, particularly in Sub-Saharan African countries, in an initiative called Unlocking Talent. The academic institution (the University of Nottingham) and the implementation organisation I work for (VSO International) bring different yet complementary perspectives to achieving impact.

Nicola, through the University, brings rigour to the learning and evaluation processes, providing credibility and confidence in our understanding, through structured evidence of the realities of our interventions. VSO International provides the platform for the research and works to provide sustainable long-term ‘impactful’ solutions for our clients, based on the learning through research.

The benefits of the relationship are significant and wide-ranging.

Nicola’s enthusiasm and depth of knowledge in her technical field, her approaches to research and the contextual realities of the countries we work in, are invaluable and have significantly contributed to the success that we have achieved to date. Within the scope of multiple projects, we are raising the quality of foundation years education. https://www.vsointernational.org/fighting-poverty/where-we-fightpoverty/unlocking-talent-through-technology

her what we were doing and what we were hoping to achieve.

She immediately stated ‘the market is already saturated’. Naively, perhaps, I didn’t perceive improving children’s chances as a ‘market’. And after seven years of working in this field, I still don’t!

I have always preferred collaboration to competition. Global challenges, such as providing quality education for all, require genuine cooperation from multiple sectors to enable policy-makers to make informed decisions on the best available evidence. This is a difficult landscape to navigate and one that a traditional academic career does not prepare you for. But I have found the rewards substantially outweigh the difficulties. Working collaboratively with Dario and Marc towards a shared goal, and working with humility, is what makes for long-term sustainable change.

I asked my two partners to explain how this collaboration adds value to what we do.

The Educator (Marc Faulder) I first met Nicola in 2014 when I was looking for ways to show the impact educational technology has on learning. At this time, my school had just began implementing iPad across the curriculum and as the subject leader I was looking for ways to show that technology can play an important role in learning beyond the computing curriculum. Hearing about Nicola’s research in Malawi and the first pilot in the UK, I was keen to partner with her to add to the evidence base.

I began a partnership with Nicola that year, through Burton Joyce Primary School where I work. Following the success of the initial pilot studies in the UK of the effectiveness of the onebillion apps, we agreed to trial the software further with our Reception classes. The success of these early studies was positive and raised further questions from both the school staff and staff at the University. Together, we designed a Randomised Control Trial and recruited 12 schools from Nottinghamshire. This trial gave us all a better understanding of how the software can be used in the UK context but also helped our school continue to build our network as the Apple Regional Training Centre for Nottingham.

As the project grew with funding from the Education Endowment Foundation, our school is recognised nationally for our excellence and expertise in using educational technology. This is beneficial to our School Improvement Plan as we are in a position to develop skills of teachers across the country. The results we have seen from working with Nicola has extended within our own practice. This year all of our classes will be involved in trialling other educational software, such as guided handwriting apps and structured phonics software. We hope that implementing these apps in a similar way to the apps developed by onebillion will close the attainment gap for pupils in other areas of learning.

https://www.burtonjoyce.notts.sch.uk/

Sharing across fields

T

Marcus Munafò on the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration

he robustness of published scientific research, including psychology, has been in the news for several years now, and is something I have a long-standing interest in. This stems from my early experiences as a PhD student, where I was unable to replicate a high-profile finding and was fortunate enough to be reassured by a senior academic that I wasn’t alone. However, the debate has moved on from the ‘epidemiology’ of reproducibility, to the development of interventions – how can we

learn from this debate and do better? And here my own experience resonates.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with a wide range of colleagues, across disciplines and departments, learning as I went. My undergraduate degree was in psychology and philosophy in a psychology department with a strong experimental focus, whilst my MSc and PhD were in the much more applied area of health psychology. So far, so (relatively) conventional for a psychologist. But after my PhD I worked in a public health and primary care department, a clinical pharmacology department, Sofia Sita/www.sofiasita.com

38

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

analysis had to be agreed across groups, new norms and a psychiatry department. I worked on systematic of authorship were agreed to ensure fair recognition reviews and meta-analyses, clinical trials, molecular of the contribution of those involved in data collection, genetic studies… data analysis and so on. The very large sample A key lesson from this experience was that every sizes that could be achieved through collaboration, field does something well (often very well). Clinical together with the potential for replication, meant trials have led the way in protocol pre-registration, that the results of GWA studies were astonishingly systematic reviews and meta-analysis have provided robust. much of the foundational material that has informed What is perhaps even more remarkable is that the reproducibility debate, genomics has a strong the culture of data sharing, which was a consequence culture of data sharing, and so on. Sharing these ways of this collaborative approach and the need to share of working, and integrating them into a common summary data for synthesis across consortia, has led model of best practice (which may not apply fully to every discipline, but may at least form a starting point) to other, unexpected benefits. There is now a thriving literature that makes use of summary data generated by is, I think, something that will be key to improving GWA studies and posted publicly by these consortia. research quality.

Mendelian randomisation and genetic correlation One area that I have worked in illustrates how analyses are providing new insights into causal we can achieve a step change in research quality in pathways and shared genetic architecture, bringing a relatively short period. During my postdoc career together yet more disciplines across the social and I worked on candidate gene studies – looking for biomedical sciences, all using these summary data. associations between specific genetic variants This integration of different approaches can also (typically assayed manually) and behavioural benefit in deeper ways. One limitation on the focus outcomes. This field was notoriously unreliable – on reproducibility is that we may in fact, my early forays into what is arrive at very robust observations now known as meta-research used that nevertheless give us the wrong systematic review and meta-analysis “A key lesson from this answer (if the results are an artefact skills, learned whilst working with experience was that every of the experimental design, for the Cochrane Collaboration, on the candidate gene literature. This field does something well example). One solution to this problem is triangulation – the suggested the evidence was weak at (often very well)” prospective application of different best, and effect sizes very small. methods to address the same I was certainly not alone in question, each resting on different questioning the robustness of (and unrelated) assumptions, and subject to different evidence from candidate gene studies. The advent of (and again unrelated) sources of bias. genome-wide association (GWA) technology, which We have produced an animation that describes the allowed the simultaneous interrogation of 500k+ logic of triangulation [https://youtu.be/JEQ_tcweqz8]. genetic variants, coupled with a growing awareness Triangulation relies on team science and that the effect sizes of common genetic variants for collaboration. This will make for richer, deeper complex traits would be small, meant two things. (and perhaps longer) articles. We may need to re-think We would need very stringent statistical standards to our models of scientific publication, as well as how we correct for multiple testing, and (in part given this, attribute different contributions – from an authorship and in part because of the likely small effect sizes) we model to a contributorship model, for example. would need very large sample sizes. And this meant These issues are being discussed already, but illustrate collaboration. how efforts to improve research quality intersect, The result was a radical change in the approach and need to be considered together in a coordinated to genomics research. Consortia were formed, partly way. I have benefited enormously from the rich and because researchers themselves realised this would varied experiences I’ve enjoyed throughout my career. be necessary, partly because funders had the will to This should be the norm. encourage and support these. Approaches to data

Marcus Munafò is Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Bristol. marcus. munafo@ bristol.ac.uk

‘Our children have told us off for talking too much about episodic memory’ Chris Moulin and Celine Souchay on a professional and personal marriage

T 40

his is a collaboration. Who knows which one of us produced which bits of it. In about 15 years, we have co-authored – it seems – 34 articles and chapters together, jointly spent nearly one million euros of public money on research and co-supervised four PhD students. We also have two sons and live together in a crazy renovation project in the Alps. Putting all our professional and personal eggs in one basket has been a fun and fruitful way of organising our lives, and it has defined our collaboration.

We met at a British Psychological Society conference one of us was organising in 2004. It wasn’t very long until we were married, and by 2005 we were organising the same conference again, this

the psychologist october 2020 collaboration

Chris Moulin and Celine Souchay are in the Laboratoire de Psychologie & NeuroCognition at the Université Grenoble Alpes, France. chris.moulin@ me.com celine.souchay@ me.com @chrsmln @souchayc

working on almost identical questions before we met, time together. The marriage wasn’t about scientific and we weren’t about to give up on our reputation in collaboration, it was more like a common story one domain just to separate ourselves. What is difficult of meeting someone at work: our jobs led to our is the nagging prejudice whereby people want to romance. All we shared initially was a similar view on identify whose work a co-authored paper really is (and work-life balance and a mutual enthusiasm for science their default resolution of this question is usually in and higher education (oh, and our PhDs were nearly the direction of everyday sexism). It’s a question which identical in scope and topic). In the end, scientific is frequently asked of us, but it doesn’t occur for our collaboration was inevitable. collaborations with other people.

It needn’t have been like this. We could have been It’s a collaboration with a few rules. We put our each other’s nemesis: scooping the other’s findings or ‘other’ (i.e. non-scientific) projects first in our spare proposing alternative evaluations of the same data, time. Renovating the house has been a tremendous perhaps even clashing in our reviews for the rest adventure, a collaboration of another type. There’s no of our careers. We conducted very similar PhDs in exaggerating the importance of our work, either. It’s different countries at the same time, both investigating no good coming home from work saying, ‘I simply awareness in Alzheimer’s disease. We only became must re-write the discussion section of a paper this aware of each other when we started publishing, at evening, it’s terribly important’, the end of our theses, and we got because we both know it is not to review each other’s papers before we met in person. Our first work “All collaborations thrive true. Another rule is not to talk about work at home. Our children together was to understand some on openness, trust, and are probably the best judge of discrepancies between our two sharing of failures as well whether we achieve this. They research programmes: one of us have occasionally told us off for tended to find intact metacognition as successes” ‘talking too much about episodic in Alzheimer’s disease, and the memory’. One imagines they other impairment. One big name aren’t inviting us to talk more in our field was astonished to find about semantic memory. we were married; ‘Wait! You’re together? How do We think it is possibly more unusual for other you go to bed at night with your different findings on people than it is for us. We have to work hard to metacognition?’ ‘We tend not to talk about it much’, separate ourselves and justify our contributions to one of us said. others. They in turn have to understand that we don’t The first collaboration wasn’t a joint effort on spend all of our time talking to each other about meta paper; it was a single author review article which d-prime. Like any other collaboration, we have pockets brought together various research findings both from of unique and shared knowledge, and just because we within the marriage, and beyond. We imagine this synthesis of the literature would have occurred anyway, live under the same roof does not mean we both favour the same correction for multiple comparisons. but for us, it seems very much like our emotional As with all collaborations, in the end we are always closeness and cooperation were the drivers for this hoping for the whole to be greater than the sum of the work. Plus, we talked about nothing else whilst parts. It often suits us to ask the other one to help out walking to work for a period of about two months. It when we are stuck or don’t know something; our skills meant we learned a lot about each other’s work and are complementary. But if collaboration was limited approach, and critically, the things we had tried that to just the two of us, we wouldn’t have got very far in hadn’t worked. All collaborations thrive on openness, our careers. We are far more dependent on the brilliant trust, and sharing of failures as well as successes. and motivated early career researchers, and our wise Married academics are not such a rare breed. Many and patient mentors than we are on each other. We are of our most admired colleagues and mentors were far too alike to really make a go of research without married to academics. Our work is somewhat more broader help and expertise. intertwined than other couples we know; we were

44

Getty Images

the psychologist october 2020 from poverty to flourishing

From poverty to flourishing We get an update on the Society’s campaign, and call for contributions to a special summer edition

H

to empathise with, and be galvanised on behalf of, those in poverty. Is it the impact of Covid; are people more able to imagine what it’s like to be trapped in circumstances beyond their control? Or is the empathy limited to children, the narrative ‘poor things let down by their feckless parents’?

Really engaging with the impact of those living in poverty requires us to think about how poverty increases stress, anxiety and low mood across the lifespan and how the impacts of poverty can be passed on from one generation to another, for example through stress and increased risk of post-natal depression (see the World Health Organization’s 2014 report, Social Determinants of Mental Health).

Bringing adversity into the light It requires us to see the impact of financial insecurity, Dr Denise Burford, Educational Psychologist, working multiple shifts, or worrying about debt.

Luton Council It requires us to think about the impact of overMarcus Rashford ruined this article. In April, I wrote crowded accommodation, where the small shared that it was almost impossible to imagine that people living space must function as eating space, space to living in poverty could be afforded the same level of empathy and celebrity attention that those with mental work, storage for clothes, and children of different ages share bedrooms and sometimes beds, making health concerns have received in recent years. it difficult to play, work There simply isn’t much willingness, sleep. We need to I argued, to think about what life is like for “are people more able to and think about how increased people living with week to week financial imagine what it’s like to be stress pre- and postnatally insecurity. The 2018 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report How to build lasting trapped in circumstances affects our stress regulatory systems leading to, in support to solve UK poverty identified three beyond their control? Or the words of Stanford beliefs people have about poverty that stops is the empathy limited Psychologist Anthony them engaging with the issue: the UK is ‘post-poverty’, we are now a prosperous to children, the narrative Wagner, ‘neurocognitive privilege’ (tinyurl.com/ nation; ‘self-makingness’, an individual’s ‘poor things let down by y2c2lhfb). situation is solely the result of their their feckless parents’?”

Perhaps most of all, we decisions and motivations; and ‘the game need to think about how is rigged’, we’re all at the mercy of elites our services, institutions so nothing can be done. No chance, and societal responses may add to stress and shame I thought, of celebrities falling silent on prime time TV to encourage us to ‘break the silence about poverty’, for those living in poverty. Or more positively, what we can do to reduce the adverse effects on people living in as they did, last year, about mental health. poverty at different levels in the system.

Then along comes Premier League footballer One approach is to incorporate a wide lens about Marcus with his campaign to extend the vouchers for free school meals over the summer. The Government is adversity when thinking about institutions, such as schools. Some have suggested broadening the concept forced into a U-turn as the campaign gains widespread of trauma-informed schools to adversity, including support. Suddenly, we do seem to be a nation able ow might we use psychological knowledge to help people move from poverty to flourishing?

This is the question raised by the British Psychological Society’s policy priority area for this year, now extended into 2021.

Ella Rhodes asked members of the Expert Reference Group about the ways that psychological theory, research, or practice either is, or should be, helping people make the change.

Getty Images

poverty and racism. Such ideas were prominent in this year’s Early Intervention Foundation report Adverse childhood experiences, and in Lucy Johnstone’s contribution to Lisa Cherry’s ‘trauma resonance resilience’ podcast. This would include understanding of the psychological impacts of poverty, including stress, shame, and sleep difficulties. This empathy and understanding would need to extend to parents, moving us beyond the causation of the family, stigma and blame that families sometimes feel, which can be a barrier to their accessing services. School staff need to be well supported and given time and space to be curious about the experiences of students, and their families.

An adversity-informed approach could be taken in other institutions, for example the benefits and housing system. Local and central governments could introduce poverty impact assessments to new policy to avoid increasing stress, stigma and shame for people in poverty. We might then prioritise relationships and support which are responsive to people’s needs rather than external timeframes. We might avoid policy initiatives using language such as ‘troubled families’ or using shame as a tool to target behaviour that impacts people in poverty disproportionately, such as the use of outdoor public spaces during lockdown.

At a societal level, a national conversation about poverty would need to include the limits of psychological solutions. If the government adopted a wellbeing measure, as advocated by some economists such as Richard Layard, psychologists need to highlight the social determinants of mental health and that a wellbeing measure will lead back to looking at socio-economic causes as contributing factors. No psychological measure will mitigate the need to eradicate poverty.

Psychologists can make an impact by bringing into the light the impact of poverty on children’s ability to thrive, for example through population level measures or a ‘thrive index’, which would include the conditions of adults as well as children.

At an individual level, practitioner psychologists can talk about socio-economic factors with our clients, those we work with and in our formulations. The British Psychological Society and course directors can consider whether they are effectively preparing psychologists to consider and talk about the social determinants of mental health in initial training courses and look for ways to ensure the profession includes those with lived experience of poverty.

We are collectively experiencing a national crisis, but we will be experiencing it differently. Those in poverty will be some of the hardest hit from Covid.

As the country resets itself, there may be space to generate empathy for those living in poverty.

Psychologists can help break the silence on the structural causes of mental distress. But some celebrity gold dust wouldn’t go amiss… Marcus Rashford, you’re not done yet!

Marcus Rashford

46

Mental health is not a DIY project Dr Jen Daffin (Clinical Psychologist) and colleagues Dr Sarah Brown (Clinical Psychologist) and Dr Kiran Guye (Clinical Psychologist). With thanks to Lynsey Skinner Mental health is fundamentally about social health.

It’s about our sense of belonging, feeling safe and connected, having meaning, trust, and good relationships within our families and communities as much as our access to good housing, education, and employment. It’s about our sense of hope, how we understand ourselves and are understood in relation to others. Our access to these will determine how well we are able to thrive and have our basic physical and emotional needs met. But to date the predominant approach to dealing with trauma and distress has largely centred on screening and treatment akin to the medical model.

Individual intervention to these social health issues can feel critical for many people. But it’s often at best insufficient and at worst, maintains inequality by shifting responsibility for change on to the individual.

It’s crucial that attention goes beyond this focus both for cost-effectiveness and sustainability reasons, but also because we need to think preventatively and create the right conditions for people to thrive.

Interventions that address trauma and distress at a community level are needed too. (It’s worth checking out the Prevention Institute’s ‘framework for addressing and preventing community trauma’.) This means thinking about our basic physical needs (see the Health Foundation’s infographic on what makes us healthy, via tinyurl.com/y3f58p5j) alongside our psychological ones at a public health level. Only by creating the right conditions can we break the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage, trauma and distress many people are trapped in.

In Wales, the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act gives a directive for public services to include the social determinants of health in their approaches to wellbeing. To work towards the prevention of trauma we need to understand and tackle the oppression of violence, neglect, social, cultural and economic disadvantage, and discrimination that create such trauma. Many of the children and young people growing up in these contexts will not be in a position to ‘think their way out of their problems’ through the use of psychological therapies. They are in survival mode, as are their families. Community focused, psychologically driven approaches are needed to complement the traditional clinic based mental health services.

In our Child and Family Psychology and Therapies

the psychologist october 2020 from poverty to flourishing

It is critical that we, as academics and practitioners, service based in Aneurin Bevan University Health bring their voices to the forefront and ensure that they Board, Wales, we have been exploring these ideas. are heard. In addition we need to ask what works, and Using the metaphor of a tree we began to develop the mechanisms by which we can enable people move a socio-cultural ecological psychology framework to a position where they are flourishing. (tinyurl.com/y4vcsx8t) to show how our life The research that we do needs to permeate the circumstances impact us psychologically and how public sphere, giving voice and hope to people who distress is perpetuated. We co-produced this with are experiencing poverty and disadvantage, shifting people who were accessing support and it is guided stigmatising beliefs and influencing policymakers. by lived experience. Together a narrative about This cannot be achieved via publishing alone and silo experiences and literature on social determinants of working; we need to use contacts in the third sector, health, trauma and attachment theory and resilience government agencies and the NHS to ensure that were collated. This was occurring whilst the UN our research is targeted, relevant and sensitive to the rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights was populations we are trying to help. visiting the UK, and so we decided in partnership with These organisations are also critical in negotiating Psychologists for Social Change Cymru to send it as access to populations who may otherwise be harda letter to the Welsh Government. We intended to to-reach, and in advising on appropriate recruitment highlight that disadvantage and poverty are as much a strategies. Pursuing appropriate recruitment strategies consequence as a cause of poor mental health. during this pandemic is perhaps more important Building on this work, alongside local authority than ever, since there are physical and health board partners, we restrictions on how we can access have been exploring the delivery “hidden, vulnerable and already hard-to-reach groups. We will of place-based community trauma approaches across some hard-to-reach groups are need to be creative in how we access communities, for example using of the most deprived local areas. typically underrepresented social media networks and remote In this work, we are seeking in both research and technology platforms. to move towards collaborative Moreover, research concerning socio-cultural ecological social spheres” disadvantaged groups is often psychology approaches to localised – particularly where it is addressing these issues. We addressing specific issues facing a work alongside a diverse range specific community. To enhance impact, academics of partners, from the police to local residents, and our need to demonstrate how research at a local level can aim is to develop and deliver a new way of working be interpreted and applied to other contexts nationally. that overcomes some of the inherent inequality of In qualitative research, generalisability is a contentious access, sustainability and financial issues embedded in issue, but we must at least consider the transferability medical and clinic-based approaches. Mental health is of findings and how we can lift what we know works absolutely not a DIY project. It’s a collective effort and in one context to another. Integration of theory into it takes the village. intervention design, analysis and evaluation – as Read more about our approach via tinyurl.com/ endorsed by the Medical Research Council in their commreswellbeing 2008 guidance on Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions ¬– may be one mechanism via which we can promote transferability of research findings.

Hearing the hard-to-reach To illustrate, a study by a research group I Dr Kathrine Gibson Smith (University of Aberdeen) previously worked with responded to a local NHS To promote a move from poverty to flourishing grant call to conduct research on the experiences of we need to promote equality in access to social, homeless persons relocating from a specialist homeless health, educational and economic domains for practice to a mainstream general practice. The those experiencing poverty. This is particularly research, published in the British Journal of General important in the face of the current pandemic, where Practice in 2018 (tinyurl.com/y5gvm75q), was tailored inequality is being exacerbated due to reduced to address a specific need of the homeless practice: economic opportunity. But it will also be crucial in to help identify factors which promoted relocation to the period after, in enabling people to move towards mainstream general practice and those which served a position where they are flourishing again. Rising as barriers. Relocation of those who were formerly unemployment, furloughing of staff and home homeless from the specialist practice to a mainstream schooling will mean that many more individuals and families will experience poverty, reduced opportunities general practice served two functions: to promote patients’ recovery and to ensure that the specialist and exclusion. practice had the capacity to treat those who were We need a deep understanding of issues facing currently experiencing homelessness. those who are experiencing poverty. Sadly, hidden, Integrating a behavioural change framework in vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups are typically this research, we highlighted the importance of beliefs underrepresented in both research and social spheres.

about consequences, intentions, the environmental context, emotions, skills and identity in facilitating and hindering patient relocation from the specialist homeless practice. These findings were two-pronged – they gave important information on what enabled relocation within the local context and what could be done to further support patients, and also provided evidence on conceptual behaviour change factors which could be lifted into similar settings elsewhere.

This transferability of research findings is critical in ensuring we are developing interventions and strategies which are evidence-based. But if we can collaborate and use existing research, this expedites the process whilst still retaining reliability and quality.

Communities are being hard hit right now, and to promote flourishing, academic communities will need to be responsive and timely in identifying how we can best support them. The ‘From Poverty to Flourishing’ campaign was very much needed before… given economic forecasts, it will require an even bigger movement post-Covid to help individuals and families get back on their feet.

Getty Images

Parenting, precarity and poverty Professor Abigail Locke (Head of School of Psychology at Keele University) As I write this, with the UK starting to come out of lockdown, the issues of parenting, precarity and poverty are more pertinent than ever. Many workers have been furloughed or lost their employment during this pandemic and families have become increasingly stretched, trying to balance a lack of childcare with caring, parental and working responsibilities. Austerity in families has been a prevalent feature in the UK for the past decade. For those who are already at the brink, the additional push that the pandemic has given may be too much to bear.

As we know from the 2017 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, 14 million people in the UK – one in five of the population – are living in poverty, with 4.5 million of them children. Given that the UK is one of the richest economies in the world, these are troubling statistics. As noted in the recent Marmot review on health equity in England, ‘Ten years on’, ‘Child poverty is not an inevitability, but largely the result of political and policy choices in areas including social protection, taxation rates, housing and income and minimum wage policies’.

A key focus on this British Psychological Society Senate-voted priority is on children and families, to unpick the impact of poverty on their opportunities and relationships. For example, the precarity of

48

employment status within the UK over the past decade, with the growth of zero hours contracts and the ‘gig economy’, adds a level of complexity to family relationships. Parents become stretched, with competing work and caring demands, perhaps working for a number of different employers and with no certainty of a reliable and consistent pay packet.

The growing number of families who are reliant on foodbanks has been steadily increasing, with some suggestions that at least one third of those who access foodbanks are parents with children to support (see Edwina Prayogo and colleagues on foodbank access).

This number will likely be increasing given current domestic and world events.

Whilst many of these aspects have been known but have been relatively unseen in many quarters, the impact of Covid-19 and the effects of that on employment and income across many in the UK have brought the importance of this to the fore. People with ‘stable’ incomes are suddenly feeling the pinch. The question then becomes, what insight can we offer as psychologists?

We know from research that parental wellbeing has positive impacts on the wellbeing of their children.

What also becomes apparent, when examining much of the popular literature about parenting, is that it is somewhat de-contextualised and without consideration of the myriad of intersectional characteristics that can impact on parenting experiences. There has been a focus on individualistic psychological traits such as ‘building resilience’ and developing ‘parenting skills’, both of which do have a place… within context.

However, as psychologists we can sometimes fail to have a full consideration of the conditions which impact on familial health and wellbeing.

Social class and precarity of working and relationships are some of these factors. It seems obvious that the experiences of parenting within difficult economic and social conditions will vary greatly from parenting with secure economic and social landscapes. As research from the past decade has shown us, this effect is both gendered and classed – it is mothers who typically bear the responsibility for child rearing as well as being more strongly impacted by the inequalities of the past decade within the UK (see the Marmot review). We also know from the literature around contemporary mothering cultures and ‘intensive mothering’ (see Sharon Hays’ 1996 book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood), that mothers are working to inhabit a ‘good mothering’ identity and do their best for their children. However, as Val Gillies noted in her 2007 Marginalised Mothers, working class mothers are somewhat sidelined in these good mothering discourses.

With even less to go around in austere times, the impact on families’ wellbeing and parental identities of living and parenting in poverty needs to be more thoroughly considered. This Senate priority is working on a series of evidence-based strategies in order to tackle this.

the psychologist october 2020 from poverty to flourishing Getty Images

The power of decent work and living wages Dr Ishbel McWha-Hermann (Occupational Psychologist, University of Edinburgh Business School) Often, as psychologists, when we think about poverty we think about the impact it has on people’s lives.

We try to document what it’s like for those who are living in poverty and to address the physical or psychological consequences it brings. But as an occupational psychologist I want to emphasise the importance of employment, and specifically good quality employment, as a way of enabling people to shift ‘from poverty to flourishing’.

Employment is crucial for lifting people out of poverty. Good quality employment, which the International Labour Organization (ILO) calls ‘decent work’, contributes to financial security and improved quality of life. Conversely, a lack of decent work traps people in poverty, unable to shift beyond their current status. Psychologists have studied decent work in a range of cultural and geographical contexts, finding good support for its connections with mental health as well as physical health (see Ryan Duffy’s ‘psychology of working theory’ via tinyurl.com/yxdw9bhu).

The ILO, in their 2019 ‘World Employment Social Outlook’, estimates that ‘a majority of the 3.3 billion people employed globally in 2018 experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equal opportunities or scope for human development’.

These workers may be engaged in precarious work, such as the gig economy, where a lack of job security can erode decent work, forcing people to work in sub-standard working conditions in order to make ends meet. Others may have more secure jobs, but are in jobs that don’t provide sufficient wages in order to ever move out of poverty, to increase their own skills, to move on in their careers. These people are sometimes called the ‘working poor’, or said to be experiencing ‘in-work poverty’. They’re working and managing to get by but not earning enough to be above the poverty line. Indecent work like this perpetuates the cycle of poverty.

Of course, low quality work is not representatively experienced by everyone. Those with marginalised identities tend to be overrepresented amongst the working poor, and face greater barriers to shifting out of poverty (see Mindi Thompson and Jason Dahling’s ‘Why work matters in understanding poverty’). As well as issues of gender, disability and ethnic minority status, other marginalised groups, such as refugees and solo parents, face substantial challenges to finding decent work. There’s some important work to be done by occupational psychologists to extend our existing vast body of research on the experiences of members of marginalised groups at work, to understand how different groups are impacted by, or experience, poverty.

A key area of research which I have been involved in recently is around the living wage and the importance of having a wage that really enables people’s lives to flourish and enables people to make choices about how to live their lives. Project GLOW (Global Living Organisational Wage, https://projectglow.net/) is a collaboration between predominantly psychologists in more than 25 countries. The project is underpinned by the idea that psychology has a lot to contribute to the discussion on living wages, both through understanding the tipping point at which a wage can enable a better quality of life, and through recognising the value of talking to people about living wages and learning from their experiences in order to provide evidence to organisations and decision makers. Psychologists can and should be playing a key role in understanding how living wages enable people to increase their own capabilities, to be able to achieve more, and to have a better quality of life.

Here in Scotland, Rosalind Searle (University of Glasgow) and I have been working with EAWOP and Living Wage Scotland to develop a series of policy briefs on living wage topics (see www.eawop.org/ reports), and we hosted an event with employers in November 2019 to showcase the experiences of living wage employers and discuss living wage issues.

Influencing employers to understand the positive consequences of living wages for their employees is a key role we can play in helping shift people from poverty to flourishing. This work is particularly important now as we look ahead to a post Covid-19 world, where organisations have an unprecedented opportunity to reassess their policies in ways that really maximise the wellbeing of their people.

To sum up, psychology, and particularly occupational psychology, has a critical role to play in advocating for decent work, and work which pays a living wage. Through highlighting inadequate and low quality employment as a key cause of poverty, we can draw on interventions that focus on improving the quality of work people experience. We can provide evidence for when and how wages become decent, and ultimately enable a shift from poverty to flourishing.

Getty Images

The complexity of addiction Professor Philip Murphy, Edge Hill University When the pandemic eventually passes, the problems of poverty will remain in both British society and globally too. Although it is still early days for the ‘From Poverty to Flourishing’ campaign, my involvement in it has brought back to the forefront of my mind – as an academic psychologist whose education and ability to work owes so much to the public purse – the importance of participating in the search for solutions for society’s problems. I’ve become more aware of how easily such a perspective is lost in the day-to-day demands of our jobs.

With regard to my own work, I am a psychobiologist whose main research area for the past 34 years has been addiction and the harmful use of drugs outside the remit of prescription usage.

There is undoubtedly a very large literature on the socioeconomic factors related to the harmful use of drugs (including alcohol) which highlight the role of poverty as leading to addictive behaviours, and conversely, the role of addictive behaviours as sustaining a situation of poverty. Having little access to socially legitimated means of improving one’s situation is a feature of poverty associated with the related issues of criminal activity and harmful drug use (see, for example, Danya Fast and colleagues on the material, moral, and affective worlds of dealing and crime).

As a psychobiologist I have always argued that any understanding of the behaviours associated with addictive and harmful drug use which exclusively focus on social processes will be as incomplete as an understanding based solely upon knowledge of neurobiological processes. The central nervous system does not exist in a vacuum, and the impact of a complex network of social influences involving peer pressure, enmeshment in crime, and broader socioeconomic factors upon engagement in harmful drug use also has empirical support.

Addressing the problems in peoples’ lives due to addictive and harmful drug using behaviours is inextricably linked to fighting poverty in society. Psychology is the scientific discipline best placed

50

the psychologist october 2020 from poverty to flourishing

to serve as a bridge between the different domains of knowledge which society needs in order to understand such behaviours and to make what will hopefully be the most appropriate and effective decisions in response to them. And there are other areas: I am aware, for example, of other psychobiologists whose work highlights the relationship of poor nutrition in children to impaired cognitive engagement in education (see the work of Katie Adolphus and others at Leeds). As poor childhood nutrition can be a result of growing up in poverty, and poor educational attainment limits the ability to escape situations of poverty and deprivation, this is another area of psychological research which will hopefully come to the fore as the From Poverty to Flourishing campaign proceeds throughout the year. I am sure that there must be many other such areas… we all have much to offer!

Sustainable livelihoods for refugee children and their families Dr Mike Wells While child poverty remains a serious problem in the UK, children and young people of asylumseekers (especially failed asylum-seekers) live in some of the very poorest households, where parents cannot work while their claims are being processed.

These children and young people are excluded from several of the anti-poverty measures available to other children in the UK, as discussed in my PhD ‘Resilience and Vulnerability: Supporting the Integration of Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Minors in the UK’. Ensuring access to sustainable livelihoods is a fundamental bridge that will enable refugee and asylum-seeking children, young people and their families, to smoothly cross-over from poverty to flourishing.

The sustainable livelihoods framework uses the psychological concepts of self-efficacy and resilience to understand ways in which people can be empowered to tackle poverty. Sustainable livelihoods generally seek to enhance the capacity of poor individuals and households to gain access to and control over economic and social resources, and assets which open up opportunities and possibilities for the future (see Karen Jacobsen and Susan Fratzke’s 2016 ‘Building livelihood opportunities for refugee populations’; and Heaven Crawley and colleagues’ Centre for Migration Policy Research report on ‘Survival and Livelihood strategies of refused asylum seekers living in the UK’).

The goals of sustainable livelihoods are to encourage and promote the capacity of individuals and households to adopt a means of living which can maintain itself, while reducing the possibility for them to become impoverished or slip into poverty.

Sustainable livelihoods also include advocacy to restore personal dignity and independence of individuals and households, fostering a thriving environment that promotes and protects their rights in accordance with

the relevant bodies of international and domestic laws.

During the last two decades, a wide range of third sector organisations across the UK have directly or indirectly implemented various sustainable livelihoods initiatives to help refugee and asylum-seeking children and their families to become economically self-reliant in order to reduce being dependent on welfare or becoming impoverished and destitute. This includes programmes that aim to facilitate refugee employability or entrepreneurship, such as technical and vocational skills training, English language proficiency, programmes that increase access to information and communication technologies, and programmes that facilitate access to higher education institutions.

Sustainable livelihoods programming can create work opportunities for refugee and asylum-seeking families, alleviate poverty, promote psychological wellbeing, build resilience, and foster integration into the host community of resettlement.

Despite the surging interest and investment in sustainable livelihoods programming, there are structural constraints. The policies of successive UK governments restrict asylum seekers’ access to welfare support, education and work, resulting in social exclusion, increase in poverty and destitution.

Moreover, even after legal barriers are removed, some refugees who may successfully complete training programmes may be unable to find work. Employers may be reluctant to hire them due to concerns about skills or security, discrimination on the part of employers, mental health and other psychosocial issues.

These structural challenges have long-term implications for the psychological wellbeing of the refugee population and the socio-economic development of the host communities in the UK. Recognising these challenges, the British Psychological Society’s priority campaign could provide the platform for advocacy to encourage investment in sustainable livelihood programmes. We must create the space for refugee and asylum-seeking children and their families to thrive and flourish.

Find out more at www.bps. org.uk/ povertyflourishing

Our summer edition, 2021 With our combined July/August 2020 issue ‘Towards a new normal, and beyond’, we attempted to produce an issue which was a meaty and diverse print reading experience, a souvenir of a time, and a genuine collaborative and creative effort. The plan is to do the same in coming years, using the Society’s member-voted theme as our guide.

So for 2021, we would like to move ‘From poverty to flourishing’.

We need to hear your ideas for topics and authors, coming at that theme with evidence-based perspectives from all corners of the discipline.

Contributions can be a mix of the professional and personal, and we’re also open to artistic input (illustration, photos, creative writing and more).

Please get in touch with me on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor

The Psychologist app …

Available as a free download via your iOS/Android store.

Complete access for British Psychological Society members.

Read on the go, search across editions, and get the occasional special.

‘Your Psychologist, Your way’: log in via tinyurl.com/YourPsych for other options.

With thanks to our app sponsors, SDS Seminars Ltd – see www.skillsdevelopment.co.uk/seminars.shtml

don’t miss our Research Digest app: the latest research, digested, every weekday!

52

www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk If you are looking for a change in career or just getting started, the BPS job site has the latest vacancies in all areas of psychology throughout the UK and overseas.

Register on the site today to be notified of new jobs in your area.

If you need to advertise your vacancies, please contact Kai Theriault t: 01223 378051 e: kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk

Unframed lives Bruno De Oliveira, a Lecturer in Psychology at Southampton Solent University, on using art and research as a community dialogue to reflect on lived experience of homelessness

E

68

ver since the financial crisis in 2007, scholars have written about the economy, the reshaping of the welfare system, cuts to health care budgets, reduction of social care funds, the growth of mental health problems, emerging poverty, destitution and homelessness, which I have experienced. But rarely have we attempted to understand the impacts of austerity through the voices and images of the people being impacted by deep systemic change. I set out to ensure that people with lived experience of homelessness could actively participate in contesting their marginalisation. One result has been ‘Unframed Lives’, a photographic exhibition, panel Our community alliance

event and installation for Brighton Fringe, the largest annual arts festival in England.

It’s a creative collaboration between individuals who have experienced homelessness, artists, and researchers.

It’s a chance to share journeys and histories, experiences and commonalities. The start point was research-based photo elicitation with people with lived-experienced of homelessness, organised by me alongside the MYBRIGHTON & HOVE Photo Project. As a psychological researcher, I did not want the lived experience of the participants to be limited to within academic walls.

I wanted the community to engage with it.

Participants were accessed by placing posters and sending emails to gatekeepers via Clock Tower Sanctuary, JustLife, the Local City Council and Brighton Housing Trust, First Point, Worthing Churches Homeless Project (WCHP) and the YMCA. Five participants aged 35–62

the psychologist october 2020 culture

Are you a ‘culture vulture’?

We are looking for a new Associate Editor for Culture, to help our other Associate Editor for these pages, Kate Johnstone.

This voluntary role would suit a psychologist with a passion for all things linked to the media, arts and culture: film, theatre, exhibitions, music, podcasts, TV, radio and more.

We aim for psychologically-informed reviews of such offerings, Q&As with the people involved, and regular features where psychologists reflect on how their lives and work are informed by the arts.

We’re looking for someone who has an eye/ ear for what’s on offer, consumes several forms of culture, and has a passion for writing about it (and encouraging others to do likewise).

You will work to regular deadlines, but always with the support and input of Kate and the editorial team.

Please email me with your interest, including a few lines on why you think you’re right for the role.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

years (four males, one female) participated in this project.

Two were Black British, three White British. All of the participants had experienced homelessness since 2012.

The shortest homelessness experience duration was one year, the longest three years.

In discussion with the participants about the possible title for the photo exhibition, I suggested the title ‘Unframed Homeless’. One of the participants said it shouldn’t have the word homeless in the title because it was more about their lives. Then, the title of ‘Unframed Lives’ was suggested. At one of the meetings to discuss a

possible venue, one person said that most things with universities are at universities.

‘Why can’t we have this in the local community?’

Community spaces can bring a level of ground between academics and participants.

What followed was an evening of discussion, impactful networking, and innovative co-produced problem-solving.

We brought together 75 people from the local community to explore how creativity can play a role in challenging views on homelessness. The Unframed Lives Project received a certificate of achievement by the Festival of Learning, supported by the Department for Education.

Above: Hope is not enough Left: A piece of our mind

Have you heard…

The podcast from The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Dating and attraction Breaking bad habits How to win an argument The psychology of gift giving How to learn a new language How to be sarcastic Use psychology to compete like an olympian.

Can we trust psychological studies?

How to get the best from your team How to stop procrastinating How to get a good night’s sleep How to be funnier

13. How to study and learn more effectively 14. Psychological tricks to make your cooking taste better 15. Is mindfulness a panacea or overhyped and potentially problematic?

16. Bonus episode: what’s it like to have no mind’s eye?

17. How to make running less painful and more fun 18. How to boost your creativity 19. Should we worry about screen time?

20. How to cope with pain

21. How to stay connected in the ’new normal’ Listen via digest.bps.org.uk Follow us @ResearchDigest Routledge Psychology are proud sponsors of PsychCrunch podcasts 70

The only series to be approved by the BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

BPS 7LWOHV in Psychology No other series bears the BPS seal of approval Refreshingly written to consider more than Northern American UHVHDUFK WKLV VHULHV LV WKH ¾UVW WR JLYH D WUXO\ LQWHUQDWLRQDO SHUVSHFWLYH (YHU\ WLWOH IXOO\ FRPSOLHV ZLWK WKH %36 V\OODEXV LQ WKH WRSLF

1HZ WR WKH 6HULHV

)RU IXUWKHU LQIRUPDWLRQ DQG 'LVFRXQWV JR WR KWWS SV\FKVRXUFH ESV RUJ XN

66

We dip into the Society member database and pick out…

Taide Riley-Hunte Senior Assistant Psychologist at Riley-Hunte’s Psychological Consultancy (RHPC) One proud moment Completing my first children’s book, The Little Boy in the Shadows. I love to write and being able to contribute to the growing number of books that feature black characters makes me extremely proud.

One alternative career path I would have chosen to become a full-time author.

One thing I’m grateful for The opportunity to experience life in the Caribbean when I moved to Barbados at 11 with my family. Very quickly I became aware that I was no longer a minority. It is hard to explain what this feels like for a child, when for years most of the people in your world – on television, teachers and other professionals – don’t look like you. Another significant experience was making important links between my upbringing in England and my rich African and Caribbean heritage, which was taught proudly by black teachers and educators. When the predominant image of a black person is portrayed negatively, it’s amazing how being faced with these black professionals changes the way you perceive yourself and your entire world view, in terms of your place within that world. This was definitely the most impactful experience of my life and one that I will forever be grateful for.

72

One thing I love about my job I love administering cognitive assessments.

I find it fascinating being able to see the workings of the mind, through the strategies applied when completing subtests. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle coming together (and I love jigsaws). I also enjoy being part of the feedback session and watching as parents

one on one

begin to see their child and their difficulties in a new light. The understanding that this brings, and for some, a complete change in their attitude towards their child and their child’s abilities, is truly humbling. I think this is one of the greatest gifts that a cognitive assessor can give to a child or young person who has believed for so long that they are ‘stupid’ and will never succeed.

One wish I wish there was a Psychometrist profession, in the same way there is in the United States. A profession involving administering psychological assessments. I think it could be so helpful in reducing the number of people on waiting lists for assessments in the NHS, and could potentially bridge a gap between assistant and qualified psychologists, providing jobs for those who don’t want to go on to become professional psychologists or those like me who enjoy the assessment side of psychology.

One thing that needs to change In the light of Black Lives Matter, Mr George Floyd, and the disproportionate numbers of the ‘BAME’ communities who have succumbed to Covid-19, one thing that needs to change is the commitment of widening the predominantly white psychology profession, to include more people from these communities.

This could go some way to addressing the mistrust and trauma that has occurred and has led, in many cases, to an increase in mental health challenges. As a black assistant psychologist, with a degree in psychology, a distinction in my Master’s, and years of experience, albeit largely in the private world (ever tried getting an assistant psychologist position lately? #UnconsciousBias), I have been rejected at the application stage three times already. Still, we as black people constantly hear about the BPS’s intention to create a more diverse profession. Until this is demonstrated in an application process which does not result in 86 per cent of successful applicants being from white backgrounds, then it is hard to see how meaningful progress can be made.

coming soon… using examples in psychology; selfharm; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more... 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 2019, an ‘Under’ special issue …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist

Society Trustees www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are

Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk

President Dr Hazel McLaughlin President Elect Dr Nigel MacLennan Vice President David Murphy Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Vacant Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Membership Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor

Getty Images

Trustees Chris Lynch, Dr Ester Cohen-Tovee, Christina Buxton, Dr Adam Jowett

Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa

society notices

society vacancies

BPS Workshop Development See p.8 BPS Learn: Psychology Learning Online See p.23 BPS conferences and events See p.28

Chair of the Education and Training Board See p.16

Change Programme Director Diane Ashby Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton Director of Finance and Resources Harnish Hadani Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership and Professional Development Karen Beamish Director of Policy Kathryn Scott Head of Legal and Governance Christine Attfield

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).