The Psychologist December 2021

the

psychologist december 2021

The uncanny The familiar becomes unfamiliar, as we explore uncanny places, thoughts, bodies, tech…

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the

psychologist december 2021

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The uncanny The familiar becomes unfamiliar, as we explore uncanny places, thoughts, bodies, tech…

www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

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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, or tweet us on @psychmag.

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

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Peter Olusoga, Blanca Poveda, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Alison Torn Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Dawn Branley-Bell, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Deborah Husbands, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker

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psychologist december 2021

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Letters Pathocracy debate continues; mentoring; and more

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Obituaries

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News BPS awards; universal credit; hybrid working; and more

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Digest What happened with all the Covid research?

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Changing the language of care Carmel Jacob-Thomson with a professional and personal reflection on the words used to talk to and about care experienced children and young people

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Diagnosis – only part of the picture Lauren McGregor on neurodevelopmental labels

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The familiar becomes strange…

Pippa Goldschmidt and Gill Haddow on the uncanny in life

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Eroding the uncanny valley Emma L. Barratt hears from researchers understanding our reactions to robotics

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Uncanny places Lucy Huskinson explores

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‘The uncanny depends on a disruption to the self’ Ella Rhodes uncovers uncanny thoughts and cognitive paradoxes

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The same but different: A new reality following limb loss Clare Uytman

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You do the hokey cokey and you turn it around…

Kerenza MacLennan on Makaton and more in her journey in forensic psychology

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Jobs in psychology Featured job, latest vacancies

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Books The fun in feminism, with Madeleine Pownall and Wendy Stanton Rodgers; the painful truth; the teacher and the teenage brain; uncanny dehumanisation; and more

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A family story …with Hannah Sherbersky

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Culture Scenes From A Marriage; Squid Game; a new normal; and an exploration of pain science and art

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One on one…with Kelly Dunn

A few weeks into the first pandemic lockdown, I stood at the top of my road and looked out to the British Psychological Society offices in the distance. It’s a three mile bike ride which I have done many thousands of times, yet all I could think was ‘that is so far away… imagine going over there!’.

The familiar had become unfamiliar – uncanny.

I wasn’t alone in this, and just yesterday in The Guardian Professor Chris French commented on the launch of a new BBC podcast ‘Uncanny’ by saying that such feelings and beliefs tend to increase at times of stress, uncertainty and lack of control. So I hope you will find our collection around the uncanny, beginning on p.32, as timely as it is engaging.

That’s another year’s worth of issues done, and I’m proud of what our small team have produced in often challenging circumstances. See thepsychologist.bps.org.uk /archive to pick out your favourite, and do reach out on Twitter with feedback and ideas for future topics and authors.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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Developments in psychology’s Covid research Emma Barratt on ways of working and areas of interest

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds, Emma Barratt and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website 18

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arly in the pandemic, there was a rapid shift in the pace of research. With the situation evolving quickly, lockdowns coming into effect, and the massive loss of life that followed, researchers across academia were racing against the clock to produce papers.

This haste was unusual for most scientists, more used to detailed scrutiny, further investigations, and collaboration. As a result, some were concerned about the rigour of papers that would ultimately see the light of day. Early on, psychologist Vaughan Bell tweeted with regards to Covid research, ‘If it’s urgent, the urgency is to do it right’. Now, almost two years into the pandemic, we can begin to assess how robust our efforts were, and see where developments are leading us.

An imperfect world There is no escaping the fact that some initial fears about the quality of Covid research (mentioned in our May 2020 piece, tinyurl.com/3dx8t227) did come to pass. It was always going to be the case that an expedited timeline, as well as the torrent of Covid-related papers – some estimates have it at over 200,000 papers in 2020 – would bend traditional publication frameworks to breaking point.

As early as August 2020, a systematic review by Inés Nieto and colleagues highlighted that while the majority

of mental health research pertaining to Covid did report the expected statistical and methodological information, the reliance on convenience samples, lack of power analyses, and lack of pre-registration called into question both their generalisability and validity.

And this was not by any means an issue unique to psychology. A systematic review from February 2021 published in Nature Communications looked at the quality of published research on Covid during 2020 compared to papers from before the pandemic began. When compared with non-Covid articles published in the same journal before the pandemic, Covid papers generally achieved lower quality scores. They were also subject to substantially shorter turnaround times; on average, Covid papers had just 13 days from submission to acceptance, as opposed to a typical 110 days for prepandemic papers. Out of the 686 articles on Covid included in their systematic evaluation, Covid research generally achieved modest methodological quality scores, though low journal impact score and rapid turnarounds in particular were in many cases associated with significantly lower methodological quality.

The sheer speed at which research moved did lead to some questionable papers slipping through the net of peer review. As Michael Scheeringa notes in a blog post

the psychologist december 2021 digest for Psychology Today, some researchers from outside of psychological disciplines also tried their hand at psychological research to varying success. Others from within psychological disciplines swiftly drew tenuous links between their work and Covid to ride the wave to swift publications and impact. Retraction Watch currently lists over 160 Covid papers that have been withdrawn or retracted from journals, many of which fall within the boundaries of cognitive sciences. What’s more, even though these papers were retracted, the potential damage done by many of the questionable findings within them continues. Thanks to other researchers scooping up Covid research as soon as possible, many will have already been cited in other articles before they were caught and retracted, leading to a proliferation of inaccuracies.

This particular problem spread beyond just peer reviewed work. In an effort to overcome delays imposed by peer review, masses of pre-prints were uploaded to repositories. And while this increased speed and access to novel findings, it also resulted in unchecked studies being treated similarly to peer-reviewed articles, and risky citations by both scientists and media. Tweaks that would come about during review were undoubtedly lost in many cases, which may prove difficult to correct in the coming months.

However, even though typical research and publication frameworks bent and broke in some places, that doesn’t mean that we dropped the ball – rather, the urgency with which we needed to move superseded the risk of letting a percentage of imperfect papers see the light of day.

In an ideal world, every Covid-related paper would have been immaculate. But researchers are human, and the situation was unprecedented in the truest sense of the word. This is important to remember as we turn attention to how we managed to rapidly reconfigure our research processes into systems that met the moment.

Organised efforts In the wake of social distancing, formats such as letters to the editor and social media (particularly Twitter) became powerful ways to spotlight areas in need of urgent research and organise efforts to rapidly fill those gaps.

For example, the Psychological Science Accelerator – a distributed network of labs that collaborate on studies to increase the generalisability of findings on chosen research projects – quickly created the Rapid Response Covid-19 Project, creating calls for collaboration via social media. The three chosen projects focus on loss gain, cognitive reappraisal, and self determination. As of writing, all have been submitted for peer review, and the study on cognitive reappraisal has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

In a commendable move, several large journals, including Elsevier, also made all of their Covid-related publications Open Access. This effectively removed institutional access barriers from those seeking to contribute to Covid efforts, and reduced access issues caused by working from home. And in response to the tidal wave of pre-prints, many repositories got pickier

about the types of submissions they allow in order to ensure things that absolutely required peer review (such as predictions about potential treatments) received it.

Following the flurry of papers in early 2020 that focused on the spread of Covid, research on the mental health impacts of the pandemic have more recently taken centre stage. According to analyses in Nature, from November 2020, papers on mental health and Covid outpaced PubMed publication rates from other disciplines such as public health, diagnostics, and even epidemiology.

Valuable psychological insights, new issues, and new approaches have begun to emerge from the chaos.

Several topics are likely to be of great relevance in the coming years, both for clinicians and academics. Here are just a few of those research topics that we are beginning to cover in more depth now that some of the dust is settling.

Brain fog Following Covid recovery, many people report experiencing a wide array of extended symptoms, which have collectively been dubbed Long Covid. Many of these symptoms are neuropsychological, and while theories exist as to what may be causing these symptoms, no single mechanism has been agreed upon yet.

One of the more widespread and under-supported cognitive consequences of Long Covid is brain fog. Though it is not a diagnosis in itself, the condition is widely recognised by medical professionals, poses severe issues for those going through chemotherapy, and is prevalent among those with HIV, as well as other conditions.

Despite this, misinformed associations between brain fog and malingering persist in the general population, creating extensive barriers to treatment.

To illustrate the difficulties faced by those suffering from post-Covid brain fog, researchers based at Oxford University recently published a qualitative study which takes a detailed look at brain fog sufferers’ lived experiences. Recruiting via online support groups, the discussions participants had during small focus groups detail the life changing impacts of cognitive impairment, from difficulties completing the weekly shop to extensive struggles with dismissive healthcare professionals.

Several experienced issues conducting their jobs, and while some recovered over the course of the study, many did not, suggesting this may become a widespread longstanding issue for both patients and healthcare professionals going forward.

With research suggesting that around 81 per cent of those with Long Covid may experience brain fog, there is an urgent need for specialised health and support services that are easily navigable by those suffering from the symptoms of brain fog, such as extremely low energy, confusion, and poor memory, to name a few.

Transitioning from the ICU Through the course of the pandemic, there have been thousands of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions within the UK. A large number of these were older individuals, as may be expected, but a remarkable number were also

younger, generally healthy individuals. For all patients, the shock of being admitted to ICU and their experiences while being treated are extreme, and for many can make readjusting to everyday life a struggle. Some researchers have wondered whether Post-Intensive Care Syndrome may pose a ‘crisis after a crisis’. Cognitive deficits and mood disorders are common in those who survive the ICU, with 47 per cent suffering from depression or anxiety even two years post-ICU. Social factors stemming from physical injuries, such as financial instability or changes in identity may exacerbate this further in times of covid.

Though research in this area with regards to Covid is still somewhat immature, psychologists such as Adam Guck and colleagues have drawn from extensive existing literature on the psychological consequences of ICU stays with different diseases to create a probable list of psychological issues Covid patients may face post-ICU. Using existing publications on Covid, SARS, MERS, conditions requiring ventilation, and other considerable medical interventions, the team identified five broad areas of issues that commonly occur in post-ICU patients: medical trauma and post-traumatic stress, cognitive deficits, fatigue and depression, social stress and readjustment, and illness anxiety. Combining this with their own observations, the authors then provide treatment recommendations for each of these areas, with emphasis on those that can be delivered as outpatient or telemedical interventions.

These sorts of recommendations are a promising start, and several academics highlight the need for future research to verify the efficacy of suggested approaches, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and diaphragmatic breathing, in Covid populations. It may be the case that cognitive behavioural therapy’s effect may be lessened by cognitive difficulties particular to Covid recovery, or that Getty Images

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Millions of families around the world have been faced with the sudden death of loved ones due to Covid

typical breathing exercises may draw attention to negative emotions or lasting physical effects concerning the respiratory system. Similarly, ensuring that therapies are effective across cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds will be vital to the world’s recovery from Covid.

Prolonged Grief Disorder Millions of families around the world have been faced with the sudden death of loved ones due to Covid. Beyond this tragedy, the shock of these losses, combined in part with the disruption of typical death and mourning rituals, appears to have given rise to Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD).

PGD is a condition recently added to the DSM and ICD in response to ongoing mass death due to Covid, as well as other natural disasters and wars. Those with the condition experience bereavement difficulties which persist or grow, rather than diminishing over time, and can remain indefinitely without treatment.

Pre-Covid prevalence estimates sit at around 10 to 20 per cent for the recently bereaved. However, some initial estimates of PGD’s prevalence during the pandemic within Chinese populations place this figure much higher.

Using online versions of the International Prolonged Grief Disorder Scale and the Traumatic Grief Inventory Self Report, researchers Suqin Tang and Zhendong Xiang assessed grief in 422 Chinese participants who had recently lost a loved one to Covid. From this, they were able to arrive at an estimate that between 29 and 38 per cent of participants were experiencing symptoms of PGD. Study of this condition is still in its infancy, and more research is needed to establish its prevalence, factors associated with Covid that may be making it more prevalent – such as fear or disrupted mourning practices – and how it may vary between cultures. But, given the potentially high prevalence of PGD brought on by the pandemic, combined with the sheer number of people requiring support from bereavement services, continued attention should be paid to this sector.

Towards the future Though it’s still too early to assess the quality of recent months’ research as a whole, several different psychological topics that still require urgent insights, such as the above, are emerging. This small list is by no means exhaustive; questions remain about Covid’s long term impacts on both physical and mental health, and it’s likely that new issues will come to light in the coming years.

The pandemic has shifted the ways in which we collaborate, and thoroughly tested the processes guarding the gates to publication. Efforts of the research community over the last two years of the pandemic have been incredible, and have helped us get our feet on the ground. From here, it’s unclear how quickly we’ll need to move in order to keep pace with Covid developments.

However, it’s likely that the lessons we’ve learned in how to organise effectively and research as quickly as possible will help us return to some sort of normality when it comes to Covid research in the near future.

the psychologist december 2021 digest

Taking left-wing authoritarianism seriously in political psychology

The researchers then ran studies using fresh batches of participants and an array of self-report scales to look at everything from personality, to mood, to cognition. They found a few differences between left-wing and rightwing authoritarians. People who scored highly on the LWA scale reported more negative emotions and were more neurotic than average (unlike RWAs). They were

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Authoritarianism has been well-studied by psychologists – well, right-wing authoritarianism has. As that’s overwhelmingly the type that’s studied, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s what authoritarianism is.

The very idea of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) has received not only little academic attention, but a lot of scepticism from psychologists. ‘I think I have not found any authoritarians on the left because if there ever were any, most of them have dried up and blown away…’ wrote Bob Altemeyer, pioneer of work on right-wing authoritarianism, in 1996.

But as Thomas Costello at Emory University and colleagues write in their new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences: ‘From Maoist China to the Khmer Rouge (and perhaps even the French Reign of Terror), history abounds with examples of LWA at the broader societal level, rendering psychology’s inability to identify left-wing authoritarians puzzling.’

LWA does indeed exist, concludes the team in their study, in which they define not only its characteristics but the characteristics of the people who subscribe to it. They also reveal substantial similarities between authoritarians on the political right and the left.

First, the team used a bottom-up approach to devise a scale to get at LWA. As well as scouring research papers for items that might relate to authoritarianism, they solicited ideas for items from psychologists, political scientists and philosophers. Using multiple batches of online participants, the team gradually whittled down and revised these items. They ended up with 39 items that reflected three conceptually distinct dimensions of LWA. The definitions (taken directly from the paper) are: • Antihierarchical Aggression – the belief that those currently in power should be punished, the established order should be overthrown, and that extreme actions, such as political violence, are justifiable to achieve these aims.

• Anticonventionalism – the rejection of traditional values, a moral absolutism concerning progressive values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral, and a need for political homogeneity in one’s social environment.

• Top-Down Censorship – preferences for the use of governmental and institutional authority to quash opposition and bar offensive and intolerant speech.

also more likely to report schadenfreude. The RWAs, meanwhile, scored higher for unjustified certainty in their beliefs and confirmatory thinking (a tendency to favour information that supports your beliefs). RWA was also more strongly linked to cognitive rigidity and low openness, as well as a lower than typical belief in science.

However, there were a lot more similarities between the two groups than differences. So much so, that it seems there is a shared constellation of traits ‘that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism’, the team writes. These shared traits include, they say, a ‘preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behaviour, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy and moral absolutism’.

In terms of potentially dangerous implications for others, both left- and right-wing authoritarianism was linked to the endorsement of political violence; but for the LWAs, that was violence directed at the state (violent protests, for example), whereas for the RWAs, it was in support of the state (supporting police crackdowns, say).

As well as analysing this self-report data, the team ran a study to look at LWA and actual behaviour. Online participants selected the difficulty level of a set of puzzles that they believed they were giving to another participant

to complete. Before they chose the puzzles, though, they were shown what they were told was the Facebook profile of this ‘partner’. Those who scored highly for LWA ‘punished’ partners with right-wing profiles with harder puzzles and ‘helped’ those with left-wing profiles with easier puzzles. This was the case even when the strength of participants’ political ideology was taken into account, which they say shows that LWA can be linked to actual aggressive behaviour towards the political outgroup above and beyond any effects of political ideology.

None of these studies were on groups of participants who were representative of a general population, however.

So the researchers ran a fresh study on 834 people who were selected to be representative of the population of the USA. Again, they found large correlations between LWA scores and dogmatism, as well as schadenfreude, moral disengagement and violence towards out-groups.

This included actual participation in the use of force for a political cause over the preceding five years. It also included support of violent group action during protests

against police brutality towards black Americans over the summer of 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

All in all, the team presents a lot of studies and analyses. There are some limitations to the work, however. Because of the nature of the scales, it’s not possible to tell whether right-wing authoritarians are more authoritarian than the left-wing type, or vice versa.

Also, the route to LWA may be more well-meaning than the route to RWA, the researchers write; for example, someone who wants passionately to challenge inequality in society may end up thinking violent protest is the only option. ‘Any similarities across LWA and RWA notwithstanding, we endorse no claims of motivational or moral equivalence (or lack thereof) across the two constructs at present,’ they write.

The team concludes that excluding left-wing features from studies of authoritarianism ‘has limited the kinds of knowledge we can produce as psychological scientists’.

EMMA YOUNG

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Have you ever felt a little anxious or low, and decided that a beer or a glass of wine would help?

If so, you’re hardly alone. But new work concludes that alcohol does not relieve negative feelings – and that people who ‘drink to cope’ can even make their symptoms worse.

These new findings, based on selfreports whenever a participant had an alcoholic drink, suggest that the very concept of drinking to cope is a fallacy – at least, in relation to the anxiety and depressionrelated measures used in this work.

(Journal of Abnormal Psychology) 22

the psychologist december 2021 digest

‘Zoom fatigue’ disproportionately affects women and new hires Getty Images

Anyone who has worked from home will probably be familiar with the miserable, draining feeling of having spent too much time on Zoom. Such is the pressure of all-day-every-day video calling that some companies have even announced Zoom-free Fridays.

The fact that video-calling is tiring will not be news to many of us. But a new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology explores in more detail who is affected the most, finding that both gender and length of time spent within an organisation both impact fatigue. And this suggests that a one-size-fitsall approach to combating video call burnout may not work for everyone.

Participants were recruited from a company with a largely remote workforce, used to online meetings even before the pandemic. The company has a camera-optional policy, with around 50 per cent of staff turning their cameras off before the study started. Over 19 working days, participants were asked to participate in meetings with cameras either on or off for two weeks before switching to the opposite option for the following two weeks.

Every day after work they also completed measures assessing how fatigued they had felt during the day, how engaged they had felt in meetings, and whether or not they felt they had a voice in the meetings.

The results showed that having cameras turned on did indeed make participants feel more fatigued. And this had a knock-on effect. Those who were more fatigued also felt less like they had a voice in their meetings, and felt less engaged.

Gender and length of time at the organisation also had an impact.

The relationship between having the camera turned on and fatigue was stronger for women than men, and for those who were new to an organisation compared with those who had been there for a longer time. The indirect impact on voice and engagement was also stronger in women than in men and in newer than older employees.

The team hypothesise that these

penalties are incurred due to issues around self-presentation – that is, that being or feeling ‘watched’ increases the need to manage others’ impressions and ‘directs our focus inwards’, tiring us out. Women and new hires may be particularly prone to anxious self-presentation because of existing appearance standards and a heightened need to appear competent and effective.

The team also notes that other forms of camera – those placed at different angles, for example – may reduce this fatiguing effect; it would also be interesting to see whether having the camera on but hiding the feed from your own screen has

similarly negative effects. It would also be worth exploring the longterm impact of Zoom fatigue on general wellbeing.

There may also be positive impacts of having your camera on.

People may feel more connected with others when they turn their video on; they may feel more comfortable when presenting; or they may contribute more confidently in meetings. And there may be a secondary positive impact – being in a meeting with others with their camera on could be more reassuring or connecting than one where everyone else’s camera is off.

EMILY REYNOLDS

Digest digested…

Whether we fully experience the benefits of leisure time may depend on the way we view leisure time itself. A new study finds that people who believe leisure time is unproductive find it less enjoyable, but also that these beliefs are associated with depression, anxiety and stress.

Overall, the study suggests that viewing leisure as wasteful or unproductive can significantly impact not only our enjoyment of downtime but actively counteract the positive effects of such time on our wellbeing. (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology)

People at the top of major corporations sometimes seem content to exploit large groups of people for their own financial gain.

Strangely, this is somewhat at odds with research in behavioural economics, which tends to find that people are generally quite prosocial, honest, and overall unwilling to steal considerable amounts from others. To investigate this mismatch, researchers used a new task called the Big Robber game to look at how acting upon a larger group of ‘victims’ influences a robber’s willingness to be selfish.

The results indicate that harming many individuals seems to be easier than harming just one person. (Nature Human Behaviour)

what to seek out on the

psychologist website this month

Psychologist embarks on 500-mile cycle to COP26 Ella Rhodes talks to Dr Carl Harris ahead of him setting off on Ride the Change - a 475-mile bike ride to reach Glasgow for the start of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26

A more humane approach Paul Williams on the life and work of Jack Tizard, a pioneer of community services for people with learning disabilities Find all this and so much more via

thepsychologist.bps.org.uk 24

PsychCrunch episode 28 Why songs get stuck in our heads

Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest ‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want? I only wish I’d found this years ago!’

Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry ‘The selection of papers suits my eclectic mind perfectly, and the quality and clarity of the synopses is uniformly excellent.’

Professor Guy Claxton, University of Bristol 66

Changing the language of care Carmel Jacob-Thomson with a professional and personal reflection on the words used to talk to and about Care Experienced Children and Young People

Carmel Jacob-Thomson is an Educational Psychologist working for a local authority in Scotland. ‘I am an Independent Report Writer for Children’s Hearings Scotland. I am also Care Experienced and consider myself an activist for Care Experienced people. I am a Board of Director for WhoCares? Scotland, a charity that provides independent advocacy and campaigns for a lifetime of equality, respect and love for Care Experienced people.

I was a workgroup member (Health and Wellbeing workgroup) for Scotland’s Independent Care Review.’ carmelpamelajacob@gmail.com Twitter: @Carmel_Jacob 26

the psychologist december 2021 language of care

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y earliest memory of stigma was being called a ‘weirdo orphan’ in the playground.

I was deeply hurt by this, more so because I already considered myself to be weird. The representation of ‘normal’ that had been taught to me was modelled around the nuclear family.

Kids live at home with their Mum and Dad and if they don’t, they are different. ‘Volatile… aggressive… argumentative… attitude problem’ – just some of the terms I recall being used to describe me as a child.

These words reflect the protective shell I created for myself as I tried to navigate my world, a world shaped by loss and change and the accompanying emotional turmoil.

The anticipation of these words shaped my attitude towards others and towards life. I may have seemed ‘uncaring’ or ‘aloof’, but that was a manifestation of feeling not good enough. It has taken years and lots of hard work to modify my world view and I remain hypersensitive to the words of those around me. Not only words used about me, but those used about the children and young people I work with as I navigate the world of Educational Psychology.

I want us to critically reflect on the language/ words we use, as professionals, in reference to Care Experienced children and young people. Ultimately, I want change. The magnitude of this ask is huge.

Language is cultural and professional discourse can become so ingrained and habitual. People desensitise themselves to the words and terms that can be emotionally scarring to those they describe. But if we take on this challenge – if we commit to making change in ourselves as individual practitioners and together as a collective group – we can and will make a difference in children’s lives.

New working models ‘Kids in Care’ have always been stigmatised. When my husband and I watch crime-based fictional films or dramas, we always comment ‘I bet they turn out to be Care Experienced’. Our tone is light-hearted, but

I carry the weight of this culturally-ingrained stigma each day. It has shaped my ‘internal working model’, to use John Bowlby’s term, the cognitive framework that develops in childhood through our interactions with the world and our attachment relationships with people in our world. Our working models are invisible glasses we wear each day that guide the way we perceive the world, ourselves and others.

The good news is that neuroplasticity means these relationships and models can continue to morph throughout our lives, and so those working directly with children and young people have an important opportunity to support the continued development of internal working models. We want to create glasses that elicit a positive view of the world, self and others.

The first step, I believe, involves thinking about the words we use when talking to and about children and young people.

And such discourse is in the spotlight now.

WhoCares? Scotland is a (charity) membership organisation actively challenging media portrayals: shining a light on TV and film characters destined to become sadistic murderers because of a childhood in children’s homes, reminding the world that there are real human lives involved when a mop is used to depict a child in an advert recruiting foster parents. Several agencies and organisations working directly with or in the care sector have called for reflection and reform.

Most recently, I watched a video on the BBC news website portraying the work of Voice of Young People in Care (tinyurl.com/sxd4v3e4), who collaborated with young people to create a new dictionary of terms to be used when talking to and about children in care. The video captured magnificently my hope for the field of education.

The conclusion of the Independent Care Review (see www.carereview.scot) led Scotland to make a Promise to drastically change the way our children are cared for – to put ‘love’ at the centre when supporting children (and families) in and on the edge of Scotland’s Care ‘System’. Acknowledging that such radical overhaul calls for a change in culture, a change in how society views Care Experienced people, the Care Review questions the language of care. Terms such as ‘Looked After Children’ (LAC), ‘unit’ and ‘respite’ are

highlighted as ‘stigmatising’ and ‘compounding a sense of being different’. Alternative terms are not explicitly suggested yet, but when they are… will we be ready?

Care Experienced ‘LAC’ is a term that has been under scrutiny for some time. Children have questioned whether it means ‘they are lacking in something’. As a Care Experienced person, I find this term rather de-humanising. It compounds the idea that kids in care are separate to kids who are not in care. It reinforces the expectation that their life is not normal.

It allows us as professionals to acknowledge that they may be adversely impacted by this ‘abnormal’ or ‘adverse’ experience. It gives room for us to accept lower expectations. It predates the predicted poorer outcomes of Care Experienced people (see Morrison & Shepherd, 2015 in Communicare; and a report from Education Scotland at tinyurl.com/enb2z4zk). It is the first word, of many, that we often hear used when talking to and about our Care Experienced children and young people. It sets a precedent.

I use the term Care Experienced to describe myself, and this term is now used by the Scottish Government.

It has helped form my personal narrative and led me to be more accepting of my identity as an individual who was raised away from my biological parents. It has also granted me a sense of belonging to a community

of wonderful individuals who also identify as Care Experienced. It acknowledges, beyond terms like ‘Care Leaver’, that much of our experience will stay with us forever. It is an inclusive term used to refer to any individual who is or has been in care at any point in their life. This might include residential care, foster care, kinship care, those who are adopted and those who live at home with a supervision requirement.

Using a term like ‘Care Experienced’ also helps maintain focus beyond the ceasing of a Compulsory Supervision Order or, the commencement of a Permanence Order. The length of time a child has their ‘looked after’ status is sometimes short, yet the impact can be lifelong. The difficulty is in the need to identify whether children on school rolls are currently subject to a legal order or not. This helps justify terminology like ‘LAC’. People know what it stands for, so generating ‘LAC lists’, holding ‘LAC reviews’, and asking the question ‘is he/she LAC?’ is just the day-to-day.

Associations Terms such as LAC bring cultural associations.

Words that describe children in distress who are needing support. Words that taint education and wellbeing planning as they are sprinkled throughout the paperwork. Words that influence the opinions and expectations that professionals have of children

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the psychologist december 2021 language of care

and young people they have never met. Words like ‘violent’, ‘controlling’, ‘manipulative’ ‘unmanageable’ and ‘aggressive’. Terms like ‘problem behaviour’ and ‘chosen behaviour’. Would we use these words to describe a child whose parents have the capacity or are likely to read the paperwork and ask questions? It feels easier to talk to social workers and even foster parents about ‘problem behaviours’ and ‘unmanageable kids’ than it does to talk to well-informed biological parents.

You are less likely to be challenged. You are also likely to be reinforcing the negative self-view the child or young person may already have.

I’ve not been immune from this myself. The first report I wrote as an Educational Psychologist was about a boy with extensive social work involvement and diagnoses of Autism, Hyperacusis and Learning Disability. I described his behaviours as ‘physically aggressive and socially inappropriate’. Whilst his anxiety (along with his Autism and delayed social emotional development) was discussed in detail and highlighted as the cause of observed behaviours, I still feel uncomfortable that I used these terms to describe a child in crisis. I also spoke of him being charming and caring and socially motivated but what sticks with me now is the ‘aggression’ and the ‘inappropriate’ behaviours. I wish I had said that he was ‘highly anxious and struggling to navigate this complex social world and sometimes this can lead to physical behaviours…’. I didn’t say that. But I want to be better.

When writing my thesis, I opted to use ‘LAC’ to describe the children living in residential care that my research focused on. I did so because the term Care Experienced was relatively new and I worried that people would not know what I meant. For a long time, I went along with the use of a term that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable personally and professionally because it was so widely used. I get that uncomfortable feeling to this day, and I can no longer avoid vocalising my desire to remove this term from our vocabulary.

Admittedly, I don’t overtly challenge every person I hear say ‘LAC’, but I repeat back and model the language I want to see. Every opportunity I get, I talk about language and the impact it has using ‘LAC’ as an example.

A long road WhoCares? Scotland published a report overviewing their involvement in a Care Records Campaign in June 2019 (tinyurl.com/3s2s447e). They shared personal stories of people who have accessed their care files.

Those involved explained, ‘It can be distressing to read how professionals have spoken about a Care Experienced person and the people important to them in their files and judgemental comments can be extremely upsetting’. When moving to a new house I stumbled across some reports written about me. I lived in Kinship Care with my Gran from age three and in one report it spoke of no-one else ‘claiming me’. The absence of my biological Dad in my life has certainly

influenced my internal working model and the presentation of me as this object that was not ‘claimed’ by her parent hit me hard: like I was some piece of lost or abandoned property that sits in a box for some time longing to be owned before being candidly discarded.

It regurgitated old feelings of being unwanted and feeling insecure.

The author of this report will not have known that her words would cause such an emotional reaction so many years later, but it did. Immediately I began thinking about all the children and young people for whom I have written reports and whether I would be able to sit next to them with my head held high should they ever wish to read them.

If I could speak directly to Care Experienced children and young people who believe they are all the things professionals say they are, I would tell them that I too was ‘volatile’ and now, I am spontaneous and fun. I too was ‘aggressive and argumentative’ and now, I am passionate and determined. I had an ‘attitude problem’ and now, I have grit and character. Maybe those that spoke of me in my younger years would still see me in the same way, but I have changed the way I see myself thanks to other, more positive influences in my life. This has gifted me opportunities to grow and have goals and to achieve those goals. To those positive influences I thank you, with all my heart.

To those children and young people that I have written and spoken about, where I didn’t show enough regard for my language, please know that I am sorry and I am still learning. I will continue to work on myself because words are exceptionally powerful.

The novelist Angela Carter says, ‘Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation’. Words can motivate and inspire. They can also damage and disempower. The words we are exposed to from birth not only drive our language development, but they shape the lenses through which we view the world. They form the narrative through which we think of ourselves. Words change lives.

So to those professionals who like me are still learning, please don’t rely on children and young people having a significant other to override the negative impressions that professional discourse can leave. Be that significant person. Change your narrative, challenge the narrative of others. Next time you are preparing a minute from a meeting or writing a report, ask yourself if you would be happy to read this directly to the child or young person. Ask yourself if you would be happy to learn they read it themselves a few years down the line. Ask if your words would be non-judgemental, humanising and sensitive enough for your own child. Overriding ‘the norm’ takes time. In recent years we have explored language around gender and sexuality. If Care Experience were a protected characteristic too, our journey to understand and improve the language of care would be well on its way.

It is not, and this is the start of a long road, but we will get better… we must.

The familiar become strange…

Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press), edited by Pippa Goldschmidt, Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani, is an anthology of papers and stories by academics and writers. Dr Clare Uytman, psychology lecturer at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, contributed to the book, and spoke to Pippa and Gill about the uncanny in life as well as the uncanny in putting the book together.

Clare: The project stems from the 100th anniversary of Freud’s essay on the uncanny. What do we understand by ‘the uncanny’, and why did you decide to revisit it?

Gill: Pippa and I had been talking about how technology such as implantable heart devices in the body had this weird effect of ‘othering’ the body. Pippa started to bring up the idea of the uncanny – making things that were once familiar strange.

Pippa: I remembered an essay that I’d read by the German author Kleist from the beginning of the 19th century, called On the Marionette Theatre. It’s about this idea that puppets are more graceful than humans can ever be because they’re mechanised, they don’t have this self-conscious sense of who they are. In that

sense they are more completely who they are. We started talking about the uncanny, Freud’s idea that the uncanny is ‘not the strange, but the familiar become strange’. It can be the sense that you are slightly out of kilter within your own body, you’re estranged from your own body, whether that’s through illness or through the treatment of illness through medical interventions. Both of these can cause a feeling of uncanny.

The uncanny is large – it’s impossible to define and pin down. We realised there was quite a lot to explore, and it would be more fruitful to explore it in a genuinely uncanny way, by getting people from different backgrounds, academics and writers, to explore it together – not by trying to define it, but through their own experiences and their own arts.

The whole idea was to get together people from very different backgrounds and just see what would happen if we put everyone together in a room.

Clare: These changes in technology and medicine are leaving us with a really different understanding of our bodies, our relationships with our bodies, and actually of what humanity is. From a psychological perspective, I think about it in terms of how we make sense of what human is, and how the uncanny fits in with this everchanging world. It’s quite interesting to think about Freud’s uncanny, and the uncanny as it is developing within this everchanging world.

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Gill Haddow

Pippa: Freud tries and fails to define what the uncanny means for him. The essay is very uncanny itself, as it circles round and round, but he never pins down what the uncanny is. It is always a failure, but it’s a very interesting prospect to try and do it. The uncanny is inherently the idea that we are always trying and failing to categorise the world and ourselves within the world.

The fact that we always try and put boundaries where we think humanity is and where it isn’t obviously tells us about ourselves. I think that’s why it’s a useful thing to do and why it’s always updating itself.

I like the idea that Freud started with language, trying to define it using dictionary definitions and fiction. He draws upon a variety of sources, and that’s

the psychologist december 2021 the uncanny

why we wanted to draw together the fiction writers and poets with academics who work in the ‘real world’.

I’ve thought for a long time now that fiction writing has a lot to tell us about navigating the real world.

Clare: And what’s really interesting is that when you try to find dictionary definitions of these things, you can’t, because there are emotional, intangible parts.

You can’t write a definition of how it makes you feel because you can’t put your finger on it – the whole point of the uncanny is that you can’t put your finger on it. The use of fictional writings in combination allows more of a breadth to that understanding, and that exploration of the uncanny that academic work alone wouldn’t be able to do. That real depth of exploration is quite unique here.

Pippa: I really like to see what happens when you hash together different disciplines. It has its problems too, but it’s always fascinating. You always get people who are very nervous to start with and very uncomfortable about leaving their own expertise. They don’t want to make a fool of themselves, they don’t know what they’re going to be able to do in this different area, but they trust the process and trust their own innate creative sense. Then people always produce wonderful fascinating work.

Clare: When we got in that room, I did feel very out of my comfort zone. I felt like I might not be able to produce the work, but what was nice was I felt I might inspire some work. Just sharing knowledge and world understandings allowed us to take a little bit of knowledge from each other and use that to build on.

We’re all quite guilty of only talking to people who already have our own worldview, and so this sort of project is really good for taking inspiration from the views of others. It really did push contributors to think beyond their own comfort zones.

Pippa: The academics really rose to the challenge.

They were quite prepared to leave their comfort zone behind and work in quite different styles, in different modes of writing. I think all the academics really produced work that’s not only interested in its content, but also in its style, and I think that was probably the most interesting aspect of the book. It might be an encouragement to academics who are keen to explore how they can break out of the conventions of their discipline.

Gill: The writers were really open as well. They showed real patience in giving the academics a little bit of space to find their comfort zone. I think we were a wee bit naive in thinking that we would team one academic and one artist and just get them to work to and fro together in their unit to produce something amazing – it wasn’t like that at all really, which was just

Pippa Goldschmidt

how it should be. There are quite a lot of textbooks on how to work with other disciplines, but this is a book that just does that and shows it.

Clare: It was a little bit like creative writing speed dating. I went on three creative writer dates, and Jane took the bait for the stuff that I was talking about, and she’s produced a phenomenal short story. I was hit by the way she had taken all the discussions I’d had with her about the experiences of individuals living with amputation, and formed something situated not just within the individual, but in the environment – the city, the street, the weather and everything. It just all merged. It’s really phenomenal that she managed to work with what I see as being quite an academic, almost bland or boring narrative that I don’t know what to do with.

All the way through the book, you can really see the relationships that have developed. It really deals with so many different elements of embodiment and identity and how we fit in the world and make sense of it all… and what happens when we can’t quite make sense of it. The uncanny just flows like a big, golden thread all the way through this book. It’s in the process and in the output.

Gill: It started very much focusing on the human body

and how alterations to the body could have some quite far-reaching identity implications. But the more we got into the uncanny, the more we began to realise that this wasn’t just an issue around embodiment and identity.

It encompasses so much more than that, and so the Freudian idea of uncanny, of the familiar being strange, could stretch out to relationships with the environment or other people, or even with other things.

Clare: There’s the whole section of the book looking at situating bodies – the uncanny of the city and the forest, and taking it beyond your own individual world and into all these other places that are uncanny.

Gill: For me, the uncanny is still endemic, and it’s possibly going to become even more relevant. We’re muddling our bodies up with so many different interventions, whether it’s something that we put inside the body, or on the body, or the way we mediate our body and its relationship to the environment. As we follow on with this human desire to use technology

to progress the human condition, then Freud’s uncanny is just going to be all over us.

Pippa: So much of our culture today is about trying to find a neat identity for ourselves. The uncanny teaches us that that’s always doomed to failure because we have this porous relationship with our wider environments.

Identity is complex. I’m living in Germany and I am legally German, but I’m not German… I’m uncanny here because I’m not a local, but I’m not a foreigner either, so I’m very difficult to categorise. So I think a lot about how to identify who you are in a place, and how that identity varies from place to place. I think the uncanny can be very useful in reminding us to stay with the unease. To stay with the current difficulty of the uncanny, and exploit that, is probably my most important take home message.

Clare: Sometimes we need to embrace the uncanny and enter into it to explore it. We can learn from it rather than rejecting it because it feels unknown.

Eroding the uncanny valley Emma L. Barratt hears from researchers understanding our reactions to robotics

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We’re all familiar with the ‘creepy doll’ horror movie trope. For many people, seeing those dead glass eyes is an instantaneous one-way ticket to spooksville. If you’ve ever found yourself squirming during one of these movies, congratulations – you’ve experienced the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley, however, isn’t just a horror movie device. In fact, it’s so pervasive outside of the silver screen that it poses problems out in the real world. Nowhere is this more of an issue than in the field of robotics.

The uncanny valley was first described by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. He had observed that, as a robot became more human-like in appearance, people’s feelings towards it shifted gradually towards empathy and positivity. That is, until a somewhat undeterminable point where it begins to look a little too human. His classic diagram of this phenomenon (which is more illustrative than empirical) shows a sharp plummet in viewer receptiveness to robots that appear ‘almost’ human, with onlookers seemingly inexplicably experiencing feelings of revulsion.

The bottom of this emotional dip is generally illustrated with labels such as ‘corpse’ or ‘zombie’,

but in an increasingly technological era, we can often find examples of robots that occupy that dip.

Though technology marches forward, becoming more impressive and capable by the year, many efforts to create a human-like robot are dampened by the responses of outsiders who feel uneasy about the machines’ appearances. For many, human-like designs fall into that uneasy space of seeming ‘almost human, but not human enough’ – the familiar, yet unfamiliar.

Though psychologists and robotic engineers may seem like strange bedmates, these two fields are beginning to turn Professor Mori’s conceptualisation of the uncanny valley into something more operationalised, more easily understood in the context of existing cognitive theories... and maybe even something avoidable.

Near-human agents Dr Stephanie Lay’s work takes a closer look at the role faces play in producing uncanny feelings. Throughout her PhD, she conducted a number of studies investigating the role of face processing, emotions and other factors that might produce uncanny feelings in onlookers. She places particular emphasis on eeriness

the psychologist december 2021 the uncanny Getty Images

for creating the uncanny valley – much in the way series of composite faces. These faces showed either that Freud highlighted the ‘unhomely’ as pivotal to congruous emotions in the upper and lower facial producing uncanny feelings. features (happy eyes and a happy mouth, for example), In the first year of her PhD, Dr Lay took an or incongruous ones (such as angry eyes and a happy exploratory look at how people described uncanny mouth). If the uncanny valley arises, even in part, from faces. Participants were presented with five images of an issue with faces conveying emotions atypically, faces faces, previously established as uncanny, and asked with two different expressions in their features should to provide a detailed description that would help be rated by participants as being more eerie than faces someone pick the entity shown out in a crowd. While showing one consistent emotion. analysing detailed descriptions of the uncanny faces Sure enough, the incongruous expressions hit that provided by participants, it became clear that the eyes eerie space. Though previous research had highlighted were grabbing a lot of attention; moreso than any other neutral eyes as producing the eeriest expressions, feature.

Dr Lay observed that stimuli with With eyes being so often extremely happy mouths with referred to as the window to the fearful or angry eyes were most “Artificial faces that soul, it’s perhaps easy to imagine unnerving to participants. ‘Artificial can’t show believable or why this particular feature seeming faces that can’t show believable a little ‘off’ might raise the uncanny or trustworthy expressions were trustworthy expressions alarm. As such, it seemed the were definitely uncanny” definitely uncanny,’ she told me. perfect entry point for further ‘That’s not [an expression] that investigation. people often face in real life, but ‘I had also observed that many when they do, it’s indicative of a of the eerier near-human agents in my own research threat or a reason to be suspicious.’ were those with exaggerated or distorted eyes,’ Dr Lay Together, these results indicate that robotic faces states on her website. ‘I wondered if I would be able that veer too far towards mimicking humans may leave to demonstrate this experimentally if incongruent us trying to read intentions from facial emotions that expressions were presented in the eye region… would just aren’t up to the job of conveying them. Instead very happy, angry, disgusted, frightened or sad faces of finding something familiar and trustworthy, we’re with “dead” eyes really be rated as the most eerie?’ confronted with faces that just aren’t quite right, and To get a closer look at how emotions conveyed by leave us instinctually uneasy, wondering what threat the eyes might produce these eerie, uncanny feelings may be lurking that led to that expression. in onlookers, Dr Lay presented participants with a Robiticists are well aware of this issue, and instead

of trying to conquer it, instead seek to avoid it altogether by stylising their designs, often favouring non-realistic features and sleek panels that could never be mistaken as human. The robot assistant Pepper (from SoftBank Robotics) is a particularly influential example of this. Instead of leaning into realistic human features, its design instead remains blocky and abstract, with simplified eyes and a touchscreen on its chest – just in case the rest wasn’t enough of an indicator it isn’t human.

However, with technology advancing, more complex designs that can handle a more advanced range of tasks are needed. As such, roboticists are looking towards mimicking biological motions to give their robots brand new capabilities. Designing nimble robots that can navigate tough terrains, open doors and more makes these machines suitable for a range of applications that previous types of robot could only dream of. But this has led to a new uncanny challenge – one that many of us may not have anticipated…

Violating expectations We’re all familiar with describing unsettling faces as uncanny, but how many of us found ourselves reaching for that word when we saw BigDog? Boston Dynamics’ first attempt at a quadruped robot capable of carrying supplies for troops during combat prompted uneasy uproar when videos of the prototype surfaced online. As this model’s design became more advanced (turning into the well-known Spot model), its movements became more refined and dog-like, and as it started performing complex tasks like opening and walking through doors, discomfort intensified.

Public commentary continues BigDog’s video comment sections. ‘Incredible and Scary!’ ‘[It] is alive, I swear.’

The comment that may get closest to the uncanny issue, however, reads ‘The way it crawls back onto its feet... oh my lord... it reacts too realistically for my comfort.’

Though no faces are involved, this too – says Dr Burcu Ayúen Ürgen of Bilkent University – is likely the fault of the uncanny valley. ‘I think the key point here is whether some non-human agent violates your expectations or not, and this is what we think underlies the uncanny valley experience. In [Spot’s] case, you see a completely metallic robot, and based

International meeting An international meeting and workshop is in the planning stage for May 2022, probably to be hosted by the British Psychological Society’s Psychotherapy Section, about the potential clinical aspects of uncanny experiences, which trouble some people and which they find difficulty in coping with.

More information: Erica.brostoff@btinternet.com (convenor) 36

on this appearance, you may not expect that it could do the extra-ordinary things it does, like jumping over the boxes without falling. So, in other words, when it does those amazing movements, your expectations are possibly violated. At least, mine are really violated.’

Through a series of experiments, Dr Ürgen and her colleagues found reliable electrophysiological signals suggesting that a mismatch between what we expect robots to do and what they actually do seems to instigate uncanny feelings.

One of her EEG studies, published in Neuropsychologia in 2018, took a look at participants’ brain activity while viewing video clips of either a human, a mechanical humanoid robot, or a realistic android robot in-between from the waist up. Here, the mechanical and realistic robots were actually the same machine, just with or without its human-like skin, respectively. Extra jarringly, the human in these videos was also the model for this robot’s appearance.

Analyses focused on a potential called the N400 – a relatively large spike in neural activity that occurs 400 milliseconds after seeing something that violates your expectations. The relationship between this potential and expectation violations is well established. After its discovery in relation to linguistics in 1980 by Dr Marta Kutas (who also collaborated on this study), further experiments showed that the N400 was a reliable electrophysiological indicator of unexpected outcomes across many different domains.

When participants watched these videos of robots or their human model, the research team observed large spikes in the N400 during the android robot in-between’s movements (though not when it was static). There was no expectation-violation-indicating N400 when either the robot or human performed the same movements. Taken together, this means that the incongruent movements shown, but not the overall form of the android robot, were what set it apart.

This, the team believes, strongly supports the prediction violation theory of the uncanny valley effect. When we see something human-looking moving in non-human ways, the N400 appears strongly as our brains flag it as a cause for concern and unease. And what’s more, though the robots used in this study all looked human, it’s not just things that look uncannily human that can violate our expectations.

Boston Dynamics’ BigDog is a great illustration of this lesser-known extent of the uncanny valley effect. When videos of this huge, black quadruped marching through wilderness surfaced in 2004, the internet was extremely weirded-out, to say the least.

This same brand of movement expectation violation in this study can be found when watching a video of BigDog, despite its non-human appearance. Our brains find the biological-like movement of its robotic legs jarring, because we expect them to move the way we’ve always seen robots move. When viewers saw it march

the psychologist december 2021 the uncanny

Emma L. Barratt is a cognitive scientist and science communicator who writes for our Research Digest. @E_Barratt

Getty Images

and sway on difficult terrain with almost deer-like movement patterns, many people (judging from the social media uproar) seemingly felt that uncanny type of discomfort.

In future, Dr Ürgen hopes electrophysiological signals may be of use in empirically measuring uncanny feelings produced by different types of robot designs. ‘Our N400 study is just the beginning.

This type of approach can be used in future research to better characterise what makes us feel uncomfortable with almosthuman agents, and hopefully give feedback to roboticists who design and produce these agents.’

The uncanny valley may pose some hurdles for the wider adoption of robotic helpers now, but whether this phenomenon will persist into the future is not so certain. Even in the few short years since BigDog’s debut, public opinion has begun to shift. Videos of robots with biological motion dancing and doing parkour, complete with out-takes, work hard to give us a friendlier, more comfortable impression of this advanced technology and the movements they’re capable of. And that may just be eroding the uncanny valley.

‘If our prior knowledge with robots changes, our expectations will change as well,’ Dr Ürgen shared.

‘So, if we get more familiar with robots over long periods of time, it is possible that we may begin to move past the valley.’

This is great news for roboticists looking towards wider adoption of robotic assistants, but Dr Lay is unconvinced that such complete acceptance is truly imminent. ‘It’s going to take a while for us to calibrate to have these near-human agents in our lives,’ says Dr Lay, who emphasises the role trust will play in this process of acceptance. ‘For near-human agents to be acceptable, we need to have seamless interactions where we don’t fear or doubt our near-human agents, and we’re still a way off from that.’

Psychologists, however, don’t just have to wait patiently for that change to happen. By using our skills to untangle the factors that maintain the existence of the uncanny valley, we can develop tools and approaches to overcome it and, perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, eliminate it entirely.

Uncanny voices Think the uncanny only relates to visuals? Think again! Research shows that mismatches between expectations and reality can create uncanny feelings in the auditory domain too.

For example, one study published in 2011, led by Wade Mitchell at Indiana University, took a closer look at uncanniness caused by voices with 48 US-based undergraduate participants. Each participant viewed four 14-second videos of robot or human figures reciting neutral phrases with one of two types of voice – human, or synthetic. These videos played on loop while the volunteers completed several Likert questions rating the agent’s humanness, eeriness, and interpersonal warmth.

Analyses revealed that the participants found videos with mismatched agents and voices – ie. robot with a human voice, and human with a synthetic voice – to be significantly more eerie than those that matched. Once again, expectations as to what kind of voice each agent would produce were violated, creating uncanny feelings in viewers. So take note, roboticist readers: In order to avoid the uncanny valley of voices (at least until we’re more familiar with robotic assistant technology), picking a voice that matches your agent’s appearance is your best bet.

Funnily enough, the agent rated as warmest in this study wasn’t the human – it was the robot. As the authors state, this can probably be ‘attributed to its cuteness, relative to the seriousness of the ex-Marine human actor’. Maybe humanoid robots won’t have to be perfect and cuddly to gain wider acceptance after all!

During the pandemic, many people reported that their familiar neighbourhoods, towns, and cities had transformed into strange places.

No longer alive with the hustle and bustle of people going about their daily business, places seemed to take on new identities. Some likened once familiar places to an apocalyptic film set.

The places we took for granted suddenly became noticeable, strange, even hostile.

They had become uncanny.

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the psychologist december 2021 uncanny places Getty Images

Uncanny places Lucy Huskinson explores…

I

t doesn’t take a pandemic for places to become uncanny. The uncanny is lying in wait for you right now, ready to appear when you least expect it.

Simply put, uncanny places reveal a curious slippage or mismatch between our expectations of a place and our experiences of it. Uncanny places appear as if a slightly skewed copy or double of a familiar place. They make us feel uneasy because they undermine our confidence in all that is familiar and they challenge our prevailing assumptions about things, including ourselves. Uncanny places bring us to the daunting realisation that we are not in control of our environments as we had initially thought, and, worse still, an uncomfortable suspicion that the places we had come to trust may be in control of us. Uncanny places are anxious places. If you find yourself in one, you are likely to feel suddenly self-conscious. Perhaps you’ll have a sense of foreboding or an uneasy anticipation of something or someone just about to make an appearance from around the corner. You know not what or whom, but they know you.

Mapping recesses of the mind Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) sought to discover the identity of this unknown presence. As the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Freud attempted to map the ‘corridors’ and ‘recesses’ of the mind in analogous manner to an urban geographer who surveys the physical and social terrains of towns and cities. Although Freud didn’t concern himself with the nonhuman environment or to consequences of urban living for health and wellbeing, his psychological approach can uncover important features of the places we use and inhabit: not least, places that have become uncanny.

The term ‘uncanny’ was already widely used and psychologically scrutinised before Freud developed it into the idea that is recognised today. Freud’s understanding of the uncanny is explored in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny). The German word Unheimlich is often mistranslated as ‘unhomely’; a more appropriate translation is ‘unconcealed’, ‘unhidden’, or ‘un-secret’. Freud defines it using words taken from the

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philosopher Friedrich Schelling as an experience of something which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (1919, p.224). In short, the uncanny for Freud is an experience of the ‘return of the repressed’.

The uncanny achieves its curious double nature – as something both familiar and unfamiliar, alluring and repelling – because it expresses the return of a forgotten experience that has been recalled to mind but without the memory of its original content.

It is familiar because it is a recollection of experiences from our own past, but it is unfamiliar because we have no memory of the occasion when we originally experienced it. To illustrate the repetitious element of the uncanny, Freud describes an occasion when he found himself lost within the labyrinthine streets of an Italian town. Every attempt he made to exit the town led him to return to the same street each time.

Another example he describes is the occasion he found himself colliding time after time with the same piece of furniture when trying to find the light switch in a dark room. These uncanny places thwarted Freud’s intentions and his expectations of them. In doing so they appeared to be playing a game with him, in accordance with their own undisclosed rules.

Freud often says that the conscious ego likes to regard itself as ‘master of its own house’ – having full control over its experiences. This it manages by discarding (through repression) all it considers inappropriate to its needs. Importantly, this neglected material is never completely eradicated. It doesn’t just disappear, it lays dormant or unconscious, and when the conditions are right (and much of Freud’s work explores and elaborates on what these conditions are), it seeks conscious recognition once again, and in the process of achieving this it inevitably destabilises or realigns the ego. The return of the repressed can be likened to an intruder in the ego’s ‘house’, or in more extreme cases, it can threaten to evict the ego from its house, making it altogether homeless.

Key sources The ‘double’ nature of the uncanny can, then, be understood de Certeau, M. (1980). The Practice of as a doppelgänger or alter-ego of a Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell, person or place. To experience the University of California Press: Oakland, double is to feel the presence of 2011.

Freud, S.(1919). ‘The Uncanny’ in an experience that had once been The Standard Edition of the Complete expunged from ego-consciousness Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, and split-off from conscious vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey et awareness but has since returned, al., Hogarth: London, 1955: 217–256. unsettling the ego in its attempt to Huskinson, L. (2018). Architecture and be made conscious again. In our the Mimetic Self: a psychoanalytic study of how buildings make and break our lives, everyday experiences, we prioritise Routledge: London and New York. all that is familiar, coherent, Simmel, G. (1903). The Metropolis certain, and stable, but when a and Mental Life, in Georg Simmel On place reminds us of specific ideas Individuality and Social Forms, Donald and feelings that we had once Levine (ed.) trans Edward Shils, Chicago dissociated ourselves from, it gives University Press: Chicago, 1972: 324–339. us an opportunity to revisit these ideas and feelings, and by the

same token, encourage us to experience the place and ourselves anew.

A house of several storeys The most familiar of places, those that we feel most attached to and contained by, are fertile grounds for uncanny experiences. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that the place we call ‘home’ has its double in the most recognisable of uncanny motifs – the haunted house. The haunted house is a violation of the most familiar and welcoming of places by an unwelcome intruder of unknown origin who threatens to usurp the cosy domesticity of its inhabitants. A related uncanny trope is the dolls’ house and its little mannequins who live within and whose simulated domestic arrangements are controlled by the playful mindset of the person who establishes the rules for the dolls’ activity and behaviour.

Following in the footsteps of his colleague, Josef Breuer (1842-1925), Freud compared the mind or psyche to a house of several storeys, each of which corresponds to a different layer or strata of consciousness. The dark basement rooms (or attic space) came to represent the unconscious realm of the mind, for these rooms in our homes are rarely visited and they tend to be where we store our forgotten possessions (see also Box, ‘Hidden rooms’).

It is perhaps unsurprising that fictional depictions of haunted houses or of homes besieged by unknown intruders tend to locate the origins of the threat within the kinds of places or rooms of the house that Freud and Breuer associated with the unconscious – within the dark basement (The Babadook, 2014), in the otherwise empty spaces of cavity walls and crawl spaces under floorboards (Within, 2016), and in dusty attic rooms (Psycho, 1960). These fictional narratives like to explore the ambiguous nature of the ‘double’, playing with the boundaries between reality and imagination, often leaving the reader or audience uncertain as to whether the mysterious threat is of otherworldly origins, an actual person, or the projections of a disturbed mind.

Cities in transition We could extend this metaphor to other liminal places that house unconscious conflict and incite uncanny experiences – to places that are out of sight, but which nevertheless provide support to the life of a neighbourhood, such as metro systems, urban sewers, breakers yards and cemeteries. Such places are often thought to invite acts of moral transgression, crime, corruption, and other insalubrious or ‘underground’ activities – which is to say, activities that we may prefer to turn a blind eye to, keeping them at a distance to our carefully cultivated egos or personas. Whole cities can also appear to take on a split identity or ‘double’ nature, such as those slowly recovering from political turmoil and social unrest. These are cities in transition,

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struggling to reinvent themselves and stuck in a liminal state between uncertain futures and the haunting memories of former regimes.

Freud is just a starting point for exploring uncanny places. Other notable theorists shed light on our bewildering yet alluring experiences of the double nature of cities.

German sociologist, Georg Simmel (18581918) in The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), and French cultural historian, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) define the city as having a split identity, which cultivates a mismatch between the inhabitants’ expectations of what their city ought to be and their actual experiences of it. The cities of Simmel and de Certeau are most uncanny indeed. On the one hand, their cities present themselves as an organised, governed system of visible and calculated relations, which lead most citizens to believe that they are living within ordered and rationalised environments. But, on the other hand, these cities disclose to their citizens a cacophony of bewildering and unpredictable social experiences that often disrupt their personal lives.

Simmel’s city is a paradigm of ego-functioning, an ‘intensification of consciousness’ as he describes it, where experiences are reduced to rational calculation (1903, p.326). In response, inhabitants develop what he calls a ‘blasé attitude’, where emotions and feelings are heavily defended against and ultimately repressed.

This encourages people to focus more intently on the task at hand, which, he asserts, is to negotiate the intellectual challenges and ‘intellectual shocks’ that

the city continually inflicts on them (1903, p.329-330). Simmel’s city presents itself as a conglomerate of rational calculations, but its citizens engage with it from a position of irrational, dream-like bewilderment. The urban subject is profoundly alienated from their emotional self. They live in a place that is ripe for uncanny disruptions.

For de Certeau, the double nature of modern cities is evident in the mismatch between the systematic organisation of its spaces and the lived experience of those who negotiate these spaces according to their own subjective needs.

He alludes to the visible grid plan of cities, where space is compartmentalised into areas with prescribed meanings. The grid plan, he says, is an attempt to control and manage its citizens, directing them efficiently through designated pathways to where the city thinks they need to go. But contrary to this rationalised approach to urban living are the subjective movements of the city’s inhabitants – of people who often cut across routes and cultivate their own shortcuts through the city, or who move through its spaces at an unregulated pace, perhaps stopping to chat or to look in a shop window before moving on again.

Simmel and de Certeau show us that uncanny places reveal an existential gap or mismatch between the city and citizen. Their cities cultivate double identities, seeking to supress aspects of human subjectivity while at the same time presenting themselves as the proprietors of normalcy. People who live in such places become doubles too. Divided and estranged from themselves and their environments, they are probably anxious and apprehensive as to what or who lies in wait at the end of the street...

Lucy Huskinson is Professor of Philosophy at Bangor University.

L.Huskinson@ bangor.ac.uk

Hidden rooms In March 2021, when New York resident Samantha Hartsoe discovered a secret apartment behind her bathroom mirror, her exploration captured the imagination of TikTok and the media. ‘I can’t not know what’s on the other side of my bathroom,’ she said. Her familiar residence had become unfamiliar.

Carl G. Jung discusses the ‘hidden room’ in relation to the fairly common experience of dreaming of a version of one’s own house or neighbourhood that appears strangely different. Jung often dreamt of hidden doors opening up to vast libraries, and famously, of a hatch in his hallway that led down stone steps to an archaic cellar. It was from these dreams that he developed his idea of the collective unconscious – which he describes as an additional storey to Freud’s ‘house of psyche’, one below ground containing the bones and remnants of humanity’s past (rather than just the person’s own forgotten possessions).

While the uncanny is the ‘return of the repressed’, the experience of discovering hidden rooms is equivalent to the gradual acceptance and processing or integration of the repressed material. It represents for Jung the acceptance of the forgotten past, returning as if in a new form. The personality is enriched as a result – just as the house is enlarged with its new rooms.

A reset Despite the anxious trepidation they elicit, uncanny places are places to embrace, not to avoid. Michel de Certeau famously remarks, ‘haunted places are the only places people can live in’ (1980, p.108). And he is right. The uncanny displaces us but it does so for good reason. The disclosure of neglected and repressed aspects of ourselves can enlarge and enrich our attitudes to life, and it can even overcome unhelpful prejudices that we had, till then, upheld. Uncanny places alert us to the fact that we have become overly familiar with ourselves and our environments and require a reset. It is only when our expectations are every so often ruptured that our imaginations are stimulated by new possibilities. Uncanny places wake us up to creative insights and challenge us to drop outmoded ways of relating to ourselves, to others, and to the places we inhabit.

And so, when you are next out and about, and especially when you are relaxing at home, spare a thought for the uncanny. It knows who you are, it knows your secrets and it is looking forward to meeting you.

Ella Rhodes uncovers uncanny thoughts and cognitive paradoxes…

There’s something about the in-between, liminal, spaces in our minds that allow unbidden, unwelcome, uncanny thoughts and experiences to emerge.

Whether hearing voices, experiencing déjà vu or the call of the void, the uncanny puts us in a position where, as Jaques Lacan said, we cannot distinguish bad from good, or pleasure from displeasure…

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have a clear childhood memory of standing on the high edge of a deep, green valley during a walk when a friend of my mum’s asked me whether I ever felt I wanted to jump into the vast space. As a lifelong acrophobic the answer was a firm ‘no’, but she wasn’t the only one to feel the uncanny pull of such a place.

This phenomenon – l’appel du vide, the call of the void, also known as the High Place Phenomenon in research – is a startling example of a reaction to a normal situation becoming strangely skewed. Even among people who have never had suicidal thoughts this feeling is common, and can also encompass other fatal urges. Have you ever thought, just momentarily, about driving into oncoming traffic or stepping into the path of a speeding train?

Some studies have linked this urge to the anxiety felt while in a high place, others suggest it could be due to our inaccurate perception of vertical distance – we tend to overestimate heights, particularly if we’re afraid of them. Meghan B. Kelly, writing for Boston public radio station WBUR, spoke to associate professor of psychology April Smith (Miami University in Ohio) who has researched the phenomenon and co-authored a paper on the topic, titled ‘An urge to jump affirms the urge to live, an empirical examination of the high place phenomenon’.

Smith found that around half of people have had this feeling of being pulled ground-wards when in a high place. She explained to Kelly: ‘It could be the case that when you’re up somewhere high, your brain

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‘The uncanny depends on a disruption to the self’

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test this in children would be more than a little tricky.

However, as people get older they tend towards being less curious about the morbid. ‘Maybe that’s not too surprising if morbid curiosity is a motivation to learn about threats. Hopefully as you age you do learn about those things whether you intentionally expose yourself or not and so they become less important.’

It also makes sense that children would be relatively morbidly curious – many enjoy gruesome fairy stories, cartoons can be outlandishly violent at Cognitive paradoxes times, and games such as hide and seek and tag have In l’appel du vide, then, our body’s natural, a predatory overtone. Why might we have developed unconscious, reaction to a threat is suddenly brought this uncanny curiosity? Scrivner says that seeking out to the fore. If you’ve ever found yourself enjoying a information about threats in our environment, rather grisly true crime podcast, horror film, or apparent than facing those threats head-on, gives us a safe way ghost sightings caught on CCTV, you may just for to learn about what might be out to harm us. a moment wonder to yourself – why am I actively ‘When Coronavirus cases started to grow in the US enjoying scaring myself silly? Why am I choosing to the number of people watching the movie Contagion insert horror into my otherwise mundane, regular life? spiked. Why would people seek out a pandemic The University of Chicago’s Coltan Scrivner, a movie at the beginning of a pandemic? Of course fan of horror films and all things spooky, started his people weren’t watching it to learn about Covid, you’re research career looking into cognitive paradoxes and watching it because you want to be entertained, but ended up exploring why violent sports, like boxing entertainment is fuel for learning. People are probably and mixed martial arts, were popular. He later asked subconsciously feeling motivated to learn about a why people put themselves in scary situations for fun, threat – rather than going outside and catching it to and now his work has moved into exploring morbid learn for themselves.’ curiosity.

Around the start of the Covid pandemic, Scrivner Scrivner tells me that there has not been a huge began exploring whether people who were horror fans amount of research in the area and one of his first were dealing with the pandemic missions has been to define what better or worse than those with morbid curiosity really is. Does it “people who purposely no interest in horror. If, in Jaques encompass ghosts, witches, the Lacan’s terms, people were regularly supernatural, violence, death? So expose themselves to with the uncanny, putting far Scrivner has found that people feelings of fear and anxiety toying themselves in positions which seem fascinated by anything that through entertainment blurred bad and good, pleasure and might lead to death – rather than displeasure, might they be better death itself – such as aliens, cults, would not be feeling at coping with feelings in the real serial killers, and violence in as distressed” world? Scrivner’s hypothesis was general. He says that people who that people who purposely expose are social rebels tend to be more themselves to feelings of fear and morbidly curious, as this kind of anxiety through entertainment would not be feeling as curiosity involves exploring those things that your distressed as non-horror fans. culture says you shouldn’t. ‘Social rebels are interested And that’s what he found, ‘even when you control in things that are threatening probably because they’re for a lot of other things. For example it could be the interested in the counter-narrative or the counterculture. Another personality trait that tends to correlate case that people who are really good at escapism are getting along better, but we did control for a with morbid curiosity is social curiosity – people who general interest in movies. We also thought about the are interested in what other people do. This may be personality traits that could account for this – things due to the fact that many threats come from other like neuroticism or extraversion might be influencing people, things like serial killers and true crime.’ how well you’re handling the pandemic, but even Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who have a when you control for those, and the rest of the big five lower sensitivity to disgust are also more likely to be traits, you still get this effect.’ morbidly curious, and despite what you may have Scrivner also asked participants whether they heard men and women tend to be quite similar in their were struggling with physiological symptoms during levels of morbid curiosity. However, men and women the pandemic, such as sleeplessness and anxiety; do differ in an interesting way – with men being more whether people were still able to find things they drawn to violence and women more likely to have an enjoyed doing; and whether they were finding the interest in true crime. pandemic interesting, even if it was scary. Horror fans When I ask Scrivner about any work on the were experiencing physiological symptoms less, and development of morbid curiosity across the lifespan, morbid curiosity was correlated with still being able to he sensibly points out that getting ethics approval to is basically sending an alarm signal – you know, be careful. And that could actually lead you to take a step back, or notice your surroundings... Then that more deliberative process kind of kicks in and you start to think, why did I just take a step back? I’m totally fine.

There’s no reason for me to be afraid. Oh, I must have wanted to jump.’

find things enjoyable, and interested in the pandemic unfolding.

Dividing the self According to Sigmund Freud, the uncanny ‘is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror’. But there’s something more everyday about the uncanny too. Freud’s essay on the topic was titled Das Unheimliche, and he noted that the German word is the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’] and ‘heimisch’ [‘native’], casting the uncanny as ‘the opposite of what is familiar’. There’s a circular nature to the uncanny, with Freud deciding that coming at the uncanny from different directions will ‘lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.

Inevitably it’s also more complicated than that, with Freud saying that ‘something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny’.

Consider the concept of doppelgangers. Ever glimpsed someone who looks exactly like you? Perhaps a wave of unease followed – but why? Dr Stephanie Lay (Open University) tells us that doppelgangers featured heavily in the writings of Freud and Jentsch, who related doppelgangers to a fear that we could be usurped by something that is almost, but not quite, like us. Our original selves are left as ‘broken echoes’. Lay says this is a trope which we see playing out in popular culture in ideas about robots or AI taking over the world.

Lay questions whether this is a truly uncanny experience or more of an existential fear that our

Already seen, or even lived…

A moment, a phrase, an image, a sound… you stop and wonder, hasn’t this happened before?

According to a Science Focus article by Thomas Ling there is no definitive model of what is happening in the brain when we experience déjà vu, but it is likely it occurs when information is sent to frontal areas suggesting that an experience from the past is happening again.

Dr Akira O’Connor (University of St Andrews) told Ling that the frontal areas of the brain will explore whether a person has actually seen or experienced this occurrence before. ‘If you have actually been in that place before, you may try harder to retrieve more memories. If not, a déjà vu realisation can occur.’

Déjà vu affects younger people more regularly than older people, can be more common if someone is tired or stressed, and drugs which involve the dopamine system can also increase experiences of it. There have been cases of persistent déjà vu, including one man in Finland who took a particular combination of flu drugs. Some people even experience an uncanny phenomenon without the instantly dismissible quality of déjà vu. With ‘déjà vécu’ or ‘already lived’, the sensation is that a whole sequence of events has been lived through before…

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individuality could be replaced by something we don’t understand – something familiar yet altogether different. ‘From my perspective, the doppelganger fear steps outside the uncanny valley into something a little more primal about our individual sense of place in the world, our agency and ability to control our lives.

It’s more than just uncanny… it could be downright terrifying and we don’t need to access a subtle sense of disquiet to understand why people might be unhappy.’

Freud talks of the uncanny in terms of ego disturbance, of ‘a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’. What could be more familiar than our own sense of self, our own bodies? Dr Ben Alderson-Day (Durham University) is a co-investigator on the Hearing the Voice Project, and has spent much of his career researching voice-hearing and auditory hallucinations, and presence hallucinations, in clinical and non-clinical, populations. He says that roughly 5-15 per cent of people, in the non-clinical population, have reported hearing voices in their lifetime (though these estimates vary quite considerably).

Some of the more common experiences include hearing someone calling or shouting your name.

People may hear particular sentences or be able to converse with the voices in their minds, sometimes using them as a confidante. Certain contexts are much more likely to induce people to hear voices – when swaying on the boundary of sleep people often have unusual experiences including hearing sounds and voices. Alderson-Day tells me this is likely due to the way the brain gradually ‘switches off’ from the outside world as we drift off to sleep. ‘The resting networks for the auditory areas of your brain tend to stay more active – even when the rest of your brain is essentially going to sleep, which is why we can get woken up by different sounds.

‘But it also means, for example, that areas of the brain related to things like reality monitoring or executive function are not carrying out their usual oversight processes on auditory regions. One idea is that, essentially, our auditory perception is still ongoing, perhaps taking guesses at what’s out there, but we’ve let the wheels keep spinning, and so people start to hear unusual things – often just single words, a shout, or a sudden noise or murmuring.’

Social isolation may also lead to a higher likelihood of hearing voices. Alderson-Day points to Ralph Hoffman’s social deafferentation hypothesis of hearing voices in schizophrenia, which suggests that without the usual sensory input we come across in our daily lives, our brains will start to generate their own signals. ‘We see examples of that in things like Charles Bonnet syndrome with visual hallucinations.

But Hoffman argued that maybe you could have Social Deafferentation – where a complete lack of social contact leads to us to create our own social percepts.’ The solitary, monotone, environments often experienced in endurance sports see people often reporting voices, visions, or a sensed presence.

There have also been links drawn between

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sensory integration – the rubber hand illusion is a childhood trauma and adversity and hearing voices, although it is difficult to find a cause-effect relationship classic example of that. As soon as you start disrupting the sense of self then you very suddenly start to get in this case. But Alderson-Day says that there does feelings of the uncanny, and very often but not always, seem to be a set of people who have a completely different experience of the world from a relatively early people start to get feelings that another person is present.’ age, with vivid perceptual experiences which persist Another related process, Alderson-Day says, is into adulthood. ‘Those might be of deceased relatives, predictive processing or predictive or of magical or mystical figures, coding, which suggests our and they might be quite meaningful and important for the young people “Social isolation may also perceptions are a product of a balance between prior expectations having them… Their perceptual lead to a higher likelihood or knowledge and prediction error. world is different, they see the Someone may make a prediction world through different eyes, they of hearing voices” about a sensory experience, based hear the world through different on prior experience, which doesn’t ears.’ quite fit the sensory signal coming It makes sense, Alderson-Day in. ‘I’ve done research myself which supports this says, that such experiences can lead people towards idea. It certainly seems like there’s a range of different a community that ‘believes that spirit is something contexts in which some people seem particularly that people can connect with’, including after death. susceptible to drawing more upon prior knowledge Religious studies scholar Dr Adam Powell (Durham and expectation in how they perceive the world, and University) and psychology researcher Dr Peter seemingly that relates to their propensity to have Moseley (Northumbria University) recently released unusual experiences too.’ the results of a survey with people from the spiritualist movement in the UK. Almost 45 per cent reported that their experience of hearing voices they believe King of the castle? are from the spirit world started before they joined Alderson-Day also points me to the work of medical the spiritualist community. ‘I think we’re surrounded and psychological anthropologist Professor Tanya by unreality,’ Alderson-Day adds. ‘We think that Luhrmann (Stanford University) who has explored everything’s fairly on the straight and narrow in the many aspects of uncanny experiences – including outside world but unusual things are happening, and how cultural differences in theories of how the mind mostly people don’t talk about it. There’s a lot more of works impact upon how people interpret unusual it out there than you might think.’ experiences.

Alderson-Day is also interested in presence ‘Tanya’s thesis argues that if you think the mind is hallucinations – the feeling that someone, or this inviolable place that only you have control over, something, is near you. After writing an article for The something passing through it that doesn’t belong can Psychologist in 2016, he began collecting accounts via be seen as a violation. But if you think of the mind or a survey. Around 250 people shared their experiences, the body or the soul as being something which can be across a range of contexts. ‘The big question is are we open to other spirits, for example, or other people’s talking here about different experiences where the thoughts or other people’s voices, then you might still term presence is a bit of a misnomer – it’s just people get distressing experiences, but it’s not like that that struggle to describe these experiences and grab onto impregnable castle has been pulled down… there isn’t the best term – or psychologically are we talking necessarily this world-changing impact.’ about pretty similar phenomena?’ There are intriguing Luhrmann has, for example, compared people differences though: ‘My feeling about bereavement hearing voices in America, Ghana and India. ‘If we experiences is that identity often really stands out, it comes first. In something like sleep paralysis it’s almost look at someone in America,’ Alderson-Day says, ‘that idea of you being in charge of your own mind is so like a feeling of intent first – the malevolent intent. powerful that actually then it makes some of these In survival situations the presence emerges with a voice experiences even more distressing. Your reaction function first – it’s what we need from this experience to them is based on your core belief about what the right in that situation.’ mind is and the way the mind should work.’

The exact cause of all these unusual, uncanny I wonder whether our sense of how the mind phenomena is somewhat murky, but Alderson-Day should work is shifting, uncovering the uncanny. Life tells me many of these experiences will be linked to has always, and will always, included the light and self and non-self experiences. ‘I would argue that, dark, paradoxical urges to live and to die, pleasure more often than not, the production of the uncanny and pain. But as a whole host of familiar experiences depends on a disruption to the self in some way. We – work, travel, communication, dating and the like – know from various studies on the embodied self that become more unfamiliar in our ‘new normal’, perhaps there are ways in which you can convince people the boundaries will begin to blur. The uncanny that other things are part of their own body usually awaits… via processes like synchronisation of cues and multi-

The same but different: A new reality following limb loss Clare Uytman

Limb loss and prosthesis use create a new reality.

Experiences are on a fluctuating spectrum from grief and shock to relief and gratitude, particularly where the limb removal relieves pain or limited movement. However, these experiences can vary from month to month, day to day, even hour to hour…

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t the crux of the variation in how a person responds to limb loss and prosthesis use is how the experience differs from their expectation or desired outcome.

The changing sense of what people consider ‘normal’ and what they expect life to be following amputation carries a huge weight in their understanding and sense-making of their circumstances.

My work follows a phenomenological approach, attempting to unpick and understand this sense-making from the individual’s perspective. It is this contrast, and often conflict, between the expectation and experience within the lived perspective, that can lead to the uneasy or uncanny element.

Unique normality Through limb loss, individuals must come to terms with a variety of new versions of themselves: pre-amputation, post-amputation, their ideal selves. There is a constant renegotiation of new personal identities alongside the maintenance of pre-amputation identities. This includes how they feel about their bodies, how they look, what they can do and their perceptions of their place within their lifeworld.

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Vanishing time

Discussions of post-amputation reality often involve considerations of ‘normality’, but this is an entirely subjective concept. A more specific, personalised ‘unique normality’ accounts for specific needs, expectations, and desires. When I discuss this with my research participants the phrase ‘get me back to me’ sums up this focus on personal goals and expectations. Some have a need to appear and function as close to their pre-amputation self as possible. For others, a clear set of priorities emerges, with a focus on specific areas that will allow them to function and fulfil the same roles as before – such as playing with grandchildren or walking with friends. One contributor encapsulates this with: ‘as long as I can do what I want, function as I want, achieve what I want, then I am me’.

A person’s unique normality is a core consideration in using a prosthetic device and weighing up the varying elements of function and cosmesis – the preservation of physical appearance. Certain cladding materials which may make the device look more realistic, can impede function. Some prosthesis users are happy to display their device and are confident that the functional ability outweighs any concerns of negative judgments from others, but this is certainly not the case for all.

Others feel wary of allowing others to see their device. They find it unnerving and think that having their device displayed is akin to revealing personal and intimate details. They will wear clothes that hide their device, even if this leads to discomfort. This constant sense of renegotiation and adaptation can lead to uncanny elements. Being me, but not quite myself, having to contend with others viewing me and treating me in this ‘the same but different’ way, can lead to inner conflict as people navigate through this change in their life.

Renegotiating the way someone views themselves may also require a renegotiation of their previously held understandings of disability. This can present a challenge if there is a conflict in terms of the way a person understands disability and the way they see themselves. This is not a static, stable understanding but often fluid and varied according to context and

In Uncanny Bodies, Goldschmidt, Haddow and Mazanderani (2020) brought together a group of fiction writers, poets and academics from humanities and social sciences, to explore the concept of ‘the uncanny’ (find out more on p.32). We were encouraged to find common ground and interests which could spark a train of thought. I met Jane Alexander and we began sharing thoughts and knowledge, shaping ideas for both her creative writing and my reflections on how the uncanny can be experienced and understood in my research. This culminated in Jane’s story called The Lag, and my own contribution to the anthology reflecting on the uncanny in amputation and prosthesis use.

In The Lag (Alexander, 2020), Jane skilfully integrates our discussions of my research participants’ experiences and other findings, and her own skill and ideas as a story writer, all with the sense of uncanny that flows through her story; from the uneasiness her characters exhibit to the feeling of uncanny within the city itself.

There are many things that define life with an amputation, from the relationship developed with the healthcare professionals and a new reliance on technology. In addition, there are aspects which can feel out of your control, and which impact the user on a day-to-day basis.

As Jane expresses in The Lag: There are so many ways for time to vanish in this new life of hers.

All the medical appointments, for a start. The extra minutes in the morning, getting ready to leave the house; in the evening, tending to rubbed and broken skin. But it’s the lag that frustrates her most.

Something about the almost-inevitability of it. The perfect crime; the theft of a second with every step. (Alexander, 2020, p.185).

Consideration of these myriad of elements which make up the experience of living with limb loss, and the priorities of each individual is essential in supporting them to achieve their own goals for adjusting to life after amputation, whatever they may be.

circumstances. People vary in their acceptance and use of the term ‘disabled’ in their definition of themselves.

For some this offered a self-identification which allowed them to make sense of their new lifeworld and find kinship within the disabled community. Others appeared to reanalyse and adapt the term and their understanding of it to fit their view of themselves.

Adjusting and readjusting to technology Devices can maintain a level of functionality equal to pre-amputation, but can impede lives if they do not function adequately. A well-functioning, well-fitting device becomes part of the body, allowing people to function without thought or limitation. However, some feel controlled by the device and by the system they rely on when things go wrong. If the device is broken, or not fitting as it should, it must be relinquished for repair. This entirely limits the individual who must now compromise their activity or find an alternative and often less agreeable solution such as using a wheelchair or crutches, which immediately impacts

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the Uncanny Valley, producing where they can go and what they a strong sense of discomfort and can do. lack of affinity with the prosthetic This often has an impact on Dr Clare device. Work in the 1970s by Mori how other people treat them, Uytman (see Mori et al., 2012) suggested leading to frustration at being is a Senior that prosthetists would be better treated differently on days using Lecturer aiming for less anatomically a wheelchair compared to days at Queen realistic devices in order to increase using a prosthetic device. As a Margaret University, Edinburgh affinity with the device. This result, people often self-manage CUytman@qmu.ac.uk may go some way to explain why their device, tinkering with it and some individuals prefer to opt for modifying with padding or tape to a device that doesn’t appear realistic at all, that isn’t ensure that it continues to meet their needs without ‘pretending’ to be a real limb. They understand that the the need for external intervention. The technology device is always going to look somewhat unnatural and needs to work for them. Users understand the so reconsider their priorities for their device. Many of importance of integrating technology into their selfthe contributors in my research comment that the issue identity and ability while also recognising the flipside is with finding a device that works well, that finding of being controlled by it. a device that both looks realistic and works well is Prosthesis users continually reflect on the device often difficult so opting for function over appearance as part of the body versus an inanimate object used is preferred. As related by Tim (who had a below knee as a tool (for further reflection on this see Murray, amputation 15 years previously): 2004). For many, the distinction is linked to function.

You get confidence with what you are wearing.

When the device works well, enabling people to fulfil You are walking well. You are walking with assurance, their functional goals, it is part of them, integrated jumping over stuff, the fact that it is an artificial limb into their bodily awareness. When it fails, causes pain, is negated (…) You know? I’m saying it’s kind of ‘Hey, or limits the person in some way, it feels separate look at me! I’ve got this technical stuff on and it’s from them – a mechanical element rather than part carbon fibre and hey, isn’t it smart?’ And so it turns of their body. Again, this sensation of being ‘me, but around, so rather than trying to put this cosmesis on not me’, fluctuates over time and context and can and hide the fact that you are an amputee, you are impede adjustment and daily lives. This continual saying ‘hey bollocks, I’m an amputee and I’m O.K. readjustment can be frustrating and unsettling.

The prosthetic device plays a key I don’t care cause I am as good as you. (Uytman, 2020, role in post-amputation adjustment. p.196) Key sources More recent studies have attempted to clarify For some, the prosthetic device which specific elements of the device relate to the allows them to hide their missing uncanny, measuring eeriness as elicited by viewing limb, to avoid appearing ‘different’ Alexander, J. (2020). The Lag. In devices of varying anatomical likeness. For example, and the potential judgements from P. Goldschmidt, G. Haddow & F. Mazanderani (Eds.) Uncanny Bodies (pp. less human like, rather than more human like hands onlookers. For others, hiding is less 184-193). Luna Press. elicited a more eerie response from students who were of a concern as long as the device Goldschmidt, P., Haddow, G. & not prosthesis users (Poliakoff et al., 2018). Similarly, provides a favourable function in Mazanderani, F. (2020) Uncanny Bodies. both non amputee and amputee participants found comparison with others and their Luna Press. the more realistic images of prosthetic hands more pre-amputated self. In recent years Mori, M., MacDorman, K.F. & Kageki, there has been a move towards more attractive than less realistic alternatives (Sansoni et al., N. (2012). The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robotics & Automation 2015). However, given the importance of functionality personalised devices, printed with Magazine 19(2), 98-100. of prosthetic devices, and the consideration of the favourite images of football team Murray, C.M. (2004). An interpretative impact of movement in the sense of eeriness reported colours (see the work of limb-art. phenomenological analysis of the in the Uncanny Valley, these results may have differed com for example).

With the advent embodiment of artificial limbs. Disability had the devices been viewed functioning in a 3D form of 3D printing technology and and Rehabilitation, 26(16), 963-973. rather than in 2D, static format. This finding does advances in bionic technology, Poliakoff, E., O’Kane, S., Carefoot, O. et al. (2018). Investigating the uncanny however provide pause for thought. Prosthetists need there is also a move towards more valley for prosthetic hands. Prosthetics to consider the function, appearance and suitability of affordable and functional devices and Orthotics International, 42(1), 21-27. the prosthetic device for users and the variation that (see openbionics.com for example).

Sansoni, S., Wodehouse, A., McFadyen, may be inherent in experiences of users.

A. & Buis, A. (2015). The aesthetic As with many therapeutic relationships, appeal of prosthetic limbs and the consideration of the experience from a variety of Into the valley uncanny valley. International Journal of Design, 9(1), 67-81. angles, being open to thinking outside the box and Recent research has looked at Uytman, C. (2020) Amputation, ensuring a focus on the expectations and experiences the concept of the uncanny with Prosthesis Use and The Uncanny. of those who have experienced this phenomenon firstregards to reactions towards In P. Goldschmidt, G. Haddow & F. hand, offers us the best potential for meeting their prosthetic devices with varying Mazanderani (Eds.) Uncanny Bodies (pp. needs and goals, and enabling adjustment in a positive levels of realistic appearance. A 194-203). Luna Press. and personally relevant way. realistic prosthetic device falls into

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The fun in feminism Madeleine Pownall and Wendy Stainton Rogers share their journey in writing A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology, published by Open University Press

‘T

he host will let you in soon’ blinks the message. Zoom bursts into life and we are grinning and waving at each other, ready to get down to business. Over lockdown we spent countless hours like this gossiping, poring over each other’s writing, sharing papers and excitedly bouncing ideas off each other for our book, A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology. We first got together in June 2020 – a marriage arranged by our Series Editors, Hannah, Rose and Sarah, who invited us to write the first in a new series of Feminist Companion books. They thought we might work well as co-authors (how right they were!). There followed many supportive, intriguing, silly and serious calls and emails, and two garden meet ups.

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Sussing each other out We are a pretty unlikely couple. With over 50 years between us, we each bring very different experiences and perspectives to feminist social psychology. One of us is an experienced and popular writer on critical psychology, with a fair few books under her belt. The other (not naming names) is a ‘keen-bean’ PhD student early in her academic career, with a motley repertoire of up-to-theminute knowhow on ‘what’s hot’ in psychology, running

primarily on caffeine, intellectual highs, and enthusiasm.

After a short email exchange, our co-authoring journey officially began in Wendy’s garden on a drizzly June afternoon. Socially distanced and armed with tea, biscuits, hand sanitiser, an empty flipchart page and a pile of post-its and pens, we got to work. We decided that we needed to suss each other out and find out where we were each coming from. For several hours we threw ideas at each other, setting out what mattered to us and hinting at the stories we wanted to tell. As we talked, we shuffled our notes on the chart, taking titles away and replacing them with better ones. We included obscure aspects of feminist theory, fun ideas for interactive activities, the need for feminism to be practical, and building a feminist toolkit to make it happen. As the detailed chart of our chapters began to steadily take shape, we stood back to admire our handiwork. ‘You know what?’, Madeleine beamed, ‘I think we could have real fun with this’.

Finding the fun in feminism To us, being a feminist is about taking action against gendered violence, challenging injustice, championing gender equity, and calling out misogyny, sexism and

the psychologist december 2021 books gender bias wherever we find it. Being a feminist can, therefore, be pretty miserable at times, and also make you alarmingly unpopular. As Sara Ahmed famously put it, there is often a duty to be a ‘feminist killjoy’ – the person seen as ‘ruining the fun’ by flying the feminist flag. While killjoy-hood is indeed an important part of a feminist consciousness, there is much to be gained, as we discovered over the past year, in finding the fun in feminism. So much so, that this quickly became our motivational motto.

‘Finding the fun’ in being a feminist psychologist does not mean laughing off injustice and shrugging your shoulders at gender inequality. It is about harnessing your energy to find ways to enjoy being feminist by being amused and playful in addressing the serious issues.

It can be a tough trick to pull off, but it gets easier over time. As feminists we need to be alert to a multitude of serious, urgent, socio-political issues – such as exposure to constant sexist put downs, sexual harassment and the threat of violence. But we have found that if you can approach issues like this with a kind of wickedly wry suspicion, a leavening of dry feminist wit, and a steely determination to discover and expose where and how the wool is getting pulled over your eyes – then, yes, you can certainly have a lot of fun. Pointing out ludicrous claims of intellectual superiority and calling out mansplaining, bropriation and sealioning (look them up!) can be greatly entertaining. Getting familiar with the bounty of clever feminist research on issues like these sparked many heated and excited conversations that we fed into our book. Being playful allowed us to tackle the meaty issues while also caring for and nurturing our own wellbeing.

Finding the joy in feminism We believe that there is much joy to be found in feminism too. The beauty of writing a feminist textbook together, supported by a likeminded editorial team, is that we can take so much for granted. As feminists we share a set of unwritten ground rules, based on values of respect, nurture and kindness, and a real commitment to decolonise, dismantle hierarchies and value each other’s strengths and creativity. Importantly, we are both deeply conscious of systemic issues that can make contemporary academia toxic. We have often had to cope with an academic world in which aggressive competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ rule.

We are impressed with our own ability to resist the lure of competition when working together.

Competitiveness and individualism are two of the big neoliberal constructs that we actively critique throughout our book, so it felt right to champion resistance in the way we worked together. This was evident from that very first garden meet up. ‘I want to make one thing quite clear,’ Wendy said. ‘I’m not going to play this like some academic diva, posing around and telling you what to do. We’re going to do it together.’ We made hugging gestures (social distancing) and from that moment, we worked on creating an equitable partnership that genuinely championed the values of feminism.

Feminist writing in action Although it has been fun, it certainly hasn’t been easy.

Working with someone you deeply respect (and want to impress) can be tough, particularly with tight deadlines and lots to sort. Our big breakthrough was to agree from the start to ‘expose our soft underbellies’ and avoid ‘hoarding’ what we wrote for fear of criticism. We decided to wholeheartedly embrace ‘bad writing’ and share inadequate, unformed, possibly ridiculous, and certainly wacky writing. In initial drafts, sentences were unfinished, words were out of place, and paragraphs were abandoned mid-flow. In sharing these ‘quick and dirty’ drafts, as we grew to call them, we became comfortable sharing writing as it developed. It didn’t need to be finished. It just needed to be done. Once we established this strategy, we were able to develop a partnership that positively nurtured risk taking, creativity and adventure. ‘This is slightly outrageous, but see what you think,’ read one comment.

We toyed with the outrageous throughout our writing, we merrily butchered each other’s paragraphs to create something more playful and interesting, and we added jokes into each other’s work – many of which remained in the final edit!

An important aspect of our partnership is that we each bring a unique flavour to feminism and social psychology. Madeleine brings an understanding of the ‘newer’ goings on in the world of psychology, such as the Open Science movement, concerns about reproducibility of psychology research, and methodological discussions on Academic Twitter. Wendy brings a deeper knowledge of the history of social psychology, the teething pains of feminism and psychology, and a more expansive and impressive feminist vocabulary. We also enjoyed sharing ‘bits of ourselves’. Madeleine introduced Wendy to the wonderful worlds of TikTok and Slam Poetry [see her 2017 article via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/new-voices-slamscience], and Wendy shared gossip about the Founding Fathers and book recommendations (which were often shipped in the post as a ‘well done’ for finishing the latest chapter). This too followed feminist psychology’s value of blurring the personal with the professional, to celebrate that we are whole, messy humans with lives beyond academia.

Feminist psychology has a strong legacy of championing creative and critical approaches to mainstream psychology. In fact, it was founded with an excited sense of possibility and enthusiasm (as Catriona Ida Macleod and colleagues attest to in their 2021 article ‘Celebrating 30 years of Feminism & Psychology’). We have ignited our own versions of that excitement over the past year and have enjoyed the fun and friendship that academic co-writing can inspire.

Madeleine Pownall is a lecturer and PhD researcher in social psychology at the University of Leeds.

Wendy Stainton Rogers is a Professor Emerita with the Open University.

A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology (Open University Press; £19.99) is out on 12 November.

Uncovering the mystery of pain The Painful Truth: The new science of why we hurt and how we can heal Monty Lyman Bantam Press; £20

The almost universal experience of pain often seems a mystery. With so many people living with chronic pain, it is amazing that age old myths are only now being dispelled.

Pain science has typically delivered the message that pain equals tissue damage, though new research has started to disprove this. Why do we feel pain when we are sad? What is pain communicating to us? How can we help patients with chronic pain manage this experience?

These questions and more are explored in Monty Lyman’s brilliant book, The Painful Truth.

Lyman, a medical doctor, writes anecdotally and formally about personal and professional experiences that traverse the realm of pain. Rich and emotional stories about life with and without pain are told through interviews, metaphors, and scientific explanations.

Lyman’s gripping, entertaining and sincere writing conveys complex concepts and key arguments, including that pain is a protective mechanism. This mechanism may signal more than physical injury, communicating psychological and emotional distress too. For example, psychological disorders such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder may exacerbate experiences of pain. In such conditions, our brain is repeatedly flooded with neurochemicals like adrenaline and cortisol to protect us, enabling us to remain alert to identify and avoid threats within our environment, but which in turn may lead to muscle tension, hyperarousal and other experiences

related to physical pain. This process is seen in other conditions such as anxiety and helps to explain the common co-occurrence of chronic pain and mental illnesses.

Stepping outside of the medical model, where pain has predominantly resided, Lyman considers the social, cultural and psychological implications of living with chronic pain. Stressful jobs, sedentary lifestyles, uncertainty, and a global sense of unease contribute to the experience and maintenance of chronic pain.

The common perceptions of pain are systematically discounted with research and evidence, enabling the reader to question the dominant narratives we have been given. Lyman outlines holistic treatments for chronic pain such as psychological therapy and physical activity, moving away from medical interventions including medicines. The central idea is that people need to feel safe in order to start understanding and treating their chronic pain.

Having worked in a pain service prior to starting my clinical training, much of what I read resonated strongly.

Lyman is a brilliant and engaging storyteller, and this book feels incredibly important. It is a beacon of hope for those in pain, those supporting a loved one, and healthcare professionals in this field.

Reviewed by Talia Drew, Trainee Clinical Psychologist

Going analogue I Ride Tsunami Arthur P. Johnson Independent Publisher Network; £6.99

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Johnson’s poems and polemics form a well-structured story arch of a man overcoming the entrapments of technology and soul-destroying work to reconnect with his creativity and purpose. He explores feelings of regret and panic at a cookie-cutter suburban life, chasing money and status rather than appreciating the moment. He also explores technology companies’ exploitation of our psychology to make us slaves to our screens, encouraging readers to break free and ‘go analogue’ instead.

Ultimately, his work encourages people to be more mindful and aware of the ways society tricks us into following life paths that spiritually drain us.

Reviewed by Rosie Chandler-Wilde, Crisis Recovery Worker

Extracts online: Find exclusive book extracts and more reviews via www.thepsychologist.org.uk, including: ‘Uncanny dehumanization’, from David Livingstone Smith.

the psychologist december 2021 books

‘Adolescence is one of the most fascinating stages of human development’ The teacher and the teenage brain by John Coleman is published by Routledge.

Annie Brookman-Byrne asks the questions.

You say that there is a tendency to focus on the changes that take place in the teenage brain and the consequent difficulties teenagers face, but ‘there is another side to the story’. What are the positives that are sometimes neglected when we talk about teenagers?

One of the most striking things about teenagers is that they represent a paradox. The good and the ‘not so good’ are combined, so that often it appears to be a contradictory and puzzling stage. I frequently say that inside every teenager is both a child and an adult, and this duality represents the positives and as well as some of the difficulties. With regard to the brain, yes indeed there is another side to the story.

As well as the challenges represented by pruning and the upset of the hormone balance, there is also a hugely positive element that results from increasing maturation of the brain during this stage. This maturation makes possible increasing capacity for abstract thought and scientific reasoning, as well as improvements in working memory and greater communication skills.

Is there any danger in encouraging teachers to use an understanding of neuroscience in their teaching? Despite attempts to debunk neuromyths, they are clearly still present. Is there a chance that conveying neuroscience to teachers causes more harm than good?

Yes indeed, this is a live issue and one that comes up frequently.

Some believe it is too soon to translate the findings of neuroscience into the world of education, whilst others believe that doing so will just confuse teachers or raise expectations that cannot be realised. I address these questions directly in the book.

An understanding of brain development will not help teachers with curriculum design or teaching their particular subject. But there are many examples of how this knowledge has changed teachers’ understanding of their pupils. It helps teachers to know why teenagers are drowsy in the mornings, why they don’t always understand consequences, and how they can be motivated more effectively.

I am very careful to draw only upon research that is accepted by all reputable scientists. I address the issue of ‘neuromyths’, and emphasise that there is now a body of knowledge that can be found in any reputable textbook on the adolescent brain.

Are there any simple changes that teachers can make in the classroom that draw on evidence from neuroscience?

Definitely. Teachers give lots of examples. Knowing that the

brain is not all set in Year 7 when pupils transition from primary school is very helpful as teachers can see the capacity for change. Having a better understanding of motivation makes a big difference, as does knowledge of the role of dopamine and the importance of reward. Knowledge of teenage sleep patterns means that schools can rethink what they do in the first lessons of the day – there is still melatonin in the teenage brain at this time, and this makes some drowsy in the early part of the day. A better understanding of executive function, and how this alters with brain maturation can also assist teachers to learn more about cognitive change and development.

You’ve worked with teenagers for a long time. Our understanding of adolescence has grown hugely, but have teenagers changed?

Well, I don’t think teenagers themselves have changed, but what has changed is the environment around them. There has been enormous social change over the last 40 years, and all these changes impact on young people’s lives. The changing family, the changing world of work, and the ubiquity of the digital space are all aspects of our lives that have had profound effects on the way teenagers grow up today.

I outline the findings from my ‘Change Questionnaire’ in

the book. This is a very simple questionnaire, asking how young people themselves think they have changed since they became teenagers. I have used this with over 500 young people aged 13 and 14. The result that struck me most was that 95 per cent believe that they are more stressed as teenagers than when they were younger. What is this about? The answer is universal. It is school that creates the stress – homework, tests, exams, as well as pressure from teachers and other adults. That is what has changed.

It is a more stressful world for young people than it was for previous generations.

When I run workshops in schools on the adolescent brain, pupils find the information helpful and reassuring. They discover that they are not alone in having complicated emotions, and perhaps most importantly, that things will not stay the same. They will change and develop, and thus what they are experiencing is a process, a part of their movement towards adulthood.

Your book is a result of the work you’ve done to develop those workshops. What challenges did you face in designing those workshops? And what advice would you give to others who want to share our understanding of the adolescent brain with teachers, parents and teens?

This question is about the translation of research into practice, or about public engagement with science. There were lots of different challenges depending on the audience. For professional adults the key issue was to make the workshops lively and interesting, but also to deliver a basic understanding of the brain and how it functions without losing their interest or blinding them with science.

The major problem with the workshops for parents was to encourage them to attend schools in the evening. Being able to deliver the workshops online has enabled us to get to more parents involved. My experience with adults has been almost entirely positive, and hugely rewarding. Having a better understanding of teenage brain development seems to have a big impact, with people talking about ‘light bulb moments’ and ‘leading to a change in family relationships’.

Developing the workshops for pupils has been the most challenging. There are all sorts of questions that arise with this content. Where does it fit in the curriculum? Who will teach it? For what age is it most appropriate? Why should we add this when the curriculum is already so crowded? And so on.

When I was originally contracted to design this workshop, I was asked to do something that would fit into one 45 minute lesson.

However, when running training sessions for teachers who wanted to deliver this material, without exception they believed that the content needed more time. They wanted to make their own modifications, so where this is being delivered in schools it is probably being taught in a somewhat different manner from how it was envisaged at the start of the project.

A key issue here is training the trainers. Clearly, I cannot continue to deliver workshops to everyone who shows an

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interest. This is a significant problem if this knowledge is to get into the public domain. Some local authorities (e.g.

Hertfordshire) have taken on the challenge of training a cohort of trainers, whilst some voluntary sector organisations have also contracted me to train their trainers (e.g.

The Charlie Waller Trust).

You ask what advice I would give to others interested in this work. I believe the work I have described is relevant, not just to developmental psychologists, but to all psychologists who work in health and social care, in the criminal justice system, and in human resources. For this reason, I believe that anyone working with this age group, no matter the setting, should learn about brain development. This is a live field, with new findings appearing every year. Even in the last few years, important findings have been published to do with reward processing, teenage sleep, the impact of early childhood trauma on teenage brain development, and the relation between physical puberty and brain development. It is exciting, as we are at the early stages in a new field of scientific endeavour.

There are too few psychologists working with this age group.

Yet adolescence is one of the most fascinating stages of human development. Puzzling, contradictory, yet full of promise and opportunity. My advice to anyone reading this – working with teenagers offers rich dividends.

What questions are you excited for psychologists researching adolescence to address in the coming years?

A range of questions arise as a result of this endeavour.

We need to understand the brain better. The human brain is immensely complex. We still know relatively little about individual differences. There are variables which may affect brain development that have hardly been addressed – gender and race are the two most obvious ones. We need more longitudinal studies which will help us understand the way these changes in the brain influence development into adulthood.

I suppose for me the most obvious answer to this question is that I would like more psychologists to become involved in translating our current knowledge into practice. This branch of neuroscience is relevant in a number of fields, so it would be good if others were able to take my work as an example.

We need evaluations of the impact of workshops like mine. We need explorations of new ways of delivering this material to a variety of groups of adults and young people, in a variety of settings. Most importantly we need to know what difference this knowledge makes in the real world of education, in health, in the care system, and of course, in the home.

I have found this work hugely rewarding – I hope other psychologists can discover the same rewards as I have found in making scientific knowledge more widely accessible to the public.

the psychologist december 2021 books

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A family story Hannah Sherbersky is a family therapist, Associate Professor and Deputy Director of Cedar (PGT) at the University of Exeter.

Tony Wainwright heard about her work, and her father’s book on being an apartheid prisoner…

You and I met because we both work at Exeter University in various clinical training programmes.

How did you get started in your professional career?

I come from a family of therapists. My early ‘training’ as a family therapist started there, perhaps like many of us: that sense of social utility and commitment to working within the public sector, it has always been around in my family context. I trained originally as a mental health nurse, and depending on the context I introduce myself as a family therapist, but also talk about my nursing background. It has been integral in my clinical practice. I worked in Brighton for a few years, in acute adult mental health… earned my stripes, I suppose, as lots of mental health nurses do, on an inpatient ward. It was an old Nightingale Ward with flimsy curtain separating the bays. It was a disturbing environment for the patients and the staff a lot of the time.

I then sidestepped and started doing some work in sex and relationships education. That took me into the realms of research, and then I got a job in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and I worked for quite a long time here in Devon before I retrained as a family therapist and started teaching at the university.

I’ve been doing that ever since.

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So that mental health nursing background has always been important to you?

It’s interwoven, really, with my work now, as a trainer,

thinking about the provision of care for those with mental health difficulties… and thinking about whole team training, how we work with services, not just with individual trainees in our mutual roles.

I trained as a family therapist at the University of Exeter, and I’ve just never left. I was invited to join a couples clinic that I was running with Professor Janet Reibstein, and then was appointed to teach on the qualifying course for family therapy training at the university. Things have spring boarded from there.

Mark Rivett and I are co-directors. We started with just a small cohort of MSc trainees and we’re now putting approximately 220 trainees through our systemic portfolio, which is amazing.

I deliver some teaching on the clinical psychology training, and that’s where you and I have come together, around ethics, diversity, power, organisational issues. Family therapy and systemic thinking has a lot to say about all of those ideas.

And you’re interested in sharing those ideas in different contexts.

Yes, I try not to be a family therapy evangelical, but a couple of years ago I was invited by a team from BBC Three, to be part of a short documentary. It’s not actually about family therapy, it’s a 20-minute piece of family therapy. I work with a mother and daughter, Dammy and Arinola, and it’s an edited version of a three-hour session of family therapy that I did with

the psychologist december 2021 interview

them. It was broadcast January 2019 and is still on BBC iPlayer – I Blame My Parents.

It was an incredible experience. I was connected to these amazing women, and I’m still in contact with them. I also got the BBC to agree to pay for me to continue family therapy with them, so once the cameras stopped I carried on working with them for a couple of months. And it has been an incredibly useful resource for training – a lot of trainees, our clients and the mental health population, people don’t know what family therapy really looks like. It’s been helpful to be able to show that.

Obviously I had concerns about confidentiality, ethics, informed consent. I spoke quite a lot to the UKCP and to my professional body about whether it was the right thing to do, and on balance I feel it was.

I’m really pleased I did it.

for a while and then he came to the UK. This book is a memoir of that experience, but it’s also a lot more than that. It provides historical context to what was happening at the time, and it also speaks to what became part of his life’s work, with victims of torture.

Along with Helen Bamber he was a founder member of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which went on to become Freedom From Torture. He used his own horrific experiences to develop what became a kind of Centre of Excellence in the UK for the support and treatment of those who’ve been tortured elsewhere. He’s been exploring how he might share part of his story for many years.

For me, it was a very powerful and moving book.

What a wonderful man. The revelations about his own practice, the context it provided, together with the details about his actual experience… but it was And now, are there areas of practice you’re expanding all so humane, even for these perpetrators. And the personal notes… into?

I think for anybody who’s had their family story So many! Last year I finished my own research, which written about in a particular way, there’s something was looking at notions of home within an adolescent interesting about that process. It is a family story, with inpatient unit. It was a qualitative piece of research repeated references to my whole family, how they were that explored the clinical implications for young impacted, how they rallied round. And it is also the people spending periods of time, essentially living, story of how we came to this country. At the time my in in a psychiatric hospital. It felt like a blind spot. I parents left South Africa, my father in particular had became very aware that clinically, there was almost no idea if and when he’d be able to no research into inpatient work go back. In fact, he rather naively generally, and certainly the curative “there was a kind of thought he’d be going back quite elements of an inpatient admission. soon, and of course that wasn’t This question of home and the ambivalence with staff case – apartheid carried on for implications of young people often and the young people and the many years after he left. travelling many miles away from parents about whether the their family to come and live in a unit felt fascinating. I noticed unit should or should not The atmosphere at the time – people were being picked up by there was a kind of ambivalence be treated like a home” the police and security services, with staff and the young people and friends were being picked up and parents about whether the unit just because they were mentioned, should or should not be treated and your Dad didn’t understand why he was being like a home. It really accorded with this notion of the detained and thought he could probably be out in a secure base. few days. You feel as though you were there because That has led to lots of exciting things. I was already doing some whole team training for adolescent of the way he describes it: how it became more obvious that he wasn’t going to get out quickly, the inpatient psychiatry, and that’s flourished. And I’ve experience of isolation… now got a wonderful research grant to bring a team Albie Sachs, an acclaimed activist and former judge from Drexel University and colleagues in Belgium in the Constitutional Court in new South Africa, to pilot an attachment-based care milieu training in wrote the foreword to the book and talks about the adolescent psychiatry in the South West. That’s a huge innocence… my father was 21 when he was arrested. project which should link to lots of different ideas in In contrast to Albie and others who were known the future. I’ve got my fingers in quite a few pies! activists, my father wasn’t in that category, he was just trying to live an ethical life.

That must run in the family! Your Dad, John Most of us in this country, we can’t begin to Schlapobersky, is a group analyst but also an author. imagine what it must be like to live in a police state.

Tell me about his new book: When They Came For Albie describes whiteness as being both a mitigating Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner. and an aggravating factor in terms of how the police My father has been considering writing this book for approached my father as a detainee. The fact that he a long time. Fifty-two years ago, he was arrested in was a white man meant that he survived – he probably South Africa, and detained and then tortured through wouldn’t have if he had been a black man – but also, sleep deprivation. He was detained for 55 days, and there was a kind of aggravation from the special police was then deported from South Africa, straight to Israel

force. They were embittered by the fact that he was engaged in something… they felt a betrayal, I think.

These were eight guiding principles that were developed over years of practice at the Medical Foundation, through the guiding inspiration of Helen Bamber. They speak to the question of our responsibility, as therapists, psychologists and psychotherapists, and therapy as a politicised act.

They invite us to think about where we place our own ethical positions of power, particularly in relation to those who’ve experienced oppression.

My father describes some of these principles.

They include the Human Rights commitment, and organisational commitment. He talks about the reclamation of space and time, survival as a process of bearing witness… those of us Absolutely. I was around back who work with anybody within in the day, and involved in anti“It’s a very disturbing part the mental health service who has apartheid demonstrations. But abuses of any kind of our history, to reconcile experienced even though I was on the road can connect with that. Often in and to think about the to being a psychologist, I hadn’t our psychotherapeutic work, what realised how much psychologists we’re doing is bearing witness psychological processes had been involved in the and supporting somebody’s associated with a regime to establishment of apartheid. Saths testimony in their experience of such as apartheid” Cooper was an anti-apartheid injustice. activist and has been president Which of those principles stood of South African Psychological out for you, Tony, how relevant are Association. He has said that when he was they amongst our clinical trainings? imprisoned in Robben Island, he was surprised at the number of psychologists who were there – but none I thought that bearing witness and so on is part of a of them were imprisoned. They were leading figures. strand of psychological work usually thought of in Hendrik Verwoerd was a professor of psychology and post-genocide situations and so on, but it has very is often described as the architect of apartheid. general relevance. We have so many ways in which It’s a very disturbing part of our history, to reconcile the world has become politicised… having some and to think about the psychological processes framework for thinking about how psychological associated with a regime such as apartheid. And of psychotherapeutic work needs to think of itself course, the form of torture used against my father was within a more political frame is very helpful. essentially a psychological process. He was deprived I totally agree. We were confronted with it last year of human contact. He spent 55 days in solitary when we saw responses from organisations around confinement, he was sleep deprived and made to stand the Black Lives Matter movement. Many organisations on a brick for five days. He was tortured in such a way became quite self-searching and rather perturbed by that the harm wouldn’t be evident on his body, but it the invitation to step forward and to take a particular was evident in his spirit, his mind and his psyche. To position around Black Lives Matter. That’s highlighted be denied human contact… the need to have some guiding principles, and for us to be thinking about how we do confidently step forward The other side of that, though, was your father’s into that political arena. It hasn’t always felt safe or description of his relationship with that brick… appropriate to do so.

He was able to have interesting conversations with the brick, which actually appeared to talk back to him and With the British Psychological Society’s Human give him comfort and resilience.

Rights steering group, we’re thinking about human It’s such a great example, isn’t it, of the incredible rights based approaches in practice, generally. lengths that our human psyche will go to, to protect I’m working with family therapists in a similar way to us. We’ll find comfort and companionship in anything think about our roles and responsibilities. But many we can. clinical staff feel very disenfranchised, and don’t feel like they have a sense of agency within the wider You’ve said a bit about lessons from the book, but mental health system. So there’s something about I particularly wanted to ask you about appendix helping us all to be thinking about how we politicise three: the principles for the political application ourselves (with a small ‘p’), to be working with a of psychotherapy [see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ shared endeavour to support those who are most at family-story]. risk and most vulnerable.

And do you recall mixed feelings towards you as a family in that way?

Oh yes. As a child, in the 70s and 80s in the UK, I remember feeling quite confused about other people’s attitudes towards my South African family. There was such a sense of hostility towards white South Africa: it was the time when sanctions were being brought in.

There was a hostility towards white South Africans… shame, almost. And I think of the wider context now, the level of scrutiny, and our thoughts about social injustice and Black Lives Matter. This is a story from 52 years ago, but the ideas, sadly, are as pertinent as ever.

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the psychologist december 2021 interview

I remember a paper that you sent me about your work with families, where they have very different perspectives. I think it was primarily religious families you were working with.

Yes, families where a kind of fundamentalist mindset around their religious beliefs seemed to be predominant. It forced me to think about our position as family therapists. We pride ourselves on thinking about power and diversity, race and religion. But I was finding a sense of trepidation around engaging in conversations with people who had very different ideas about power and abuse, or women’s rights or children’s rights, for example, than our own. The situation invited me to start exploring that – what are the limits of family therapy, of psychology, any form of psychotherapy, when the very notion of inviting a family or an individual to take an alternative position threatens the family’s epistemological worldview?

The idea that there might be an alternative view to the prevailing one was so threatening that we had to understand that as a real risk to the very fabric of that family.

These feel like taboo areas that we don’t always get into. As therapists we might assume that it’s always going to be possible to work with people… that there’s always work to be done. But we sometimes get into situations, working with any kind of fundamentalist mindset – and that might be a kind of secular mindset that becomes fundamentalising for us, so that we

become very polarised around a set of ideas, you know, views on the medical model or psychotherapeutic model – and that can be unhelpful.

So very relevant to many areas?

I think so. It was in some ways quite a provocative paper that I wrote. But I wanted to write it from a position of curiosity, collaboration and inquiry. I’m inviting us to engage in those tricky conversations that aren’t clear, where we end up in murky waters trying to make sense of how to manoeuvre ourselves ethically and professionally.

Yes. Because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, coming back to the book, in some ways, is an example of trying to get away from the polarisation and give people an opportunity to think where they stood.

Absolutely. And it’s so pertinent… here’s a story, my father’s story, where there is an element of rage, still… about the injustice that was done not just to him, but to thousands of people. It continues, you know, the situation in South Africa is incredibly complex and desperately sad in many ways. How do we support people to befriend and forgive, but also in validating and providing their testimony – to be heard? And we somehow have to do those things simultaneously.

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Rooms with a view on coupledom Dr Drusilla Joseph reviews Scenes from a Marriage on Sky Atlantic.

I

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t’s no accident that right from the start of Scenes From A Marriage, we the audience are invited to the ‘breaking of the fourth wall’; theatre terminology that denotes the separation of fiction and reality. In this case, breaking the fourth wall invites the audience to witness a crossover of reality and fictional worlds. It is beautifully and powerfully portrayed; a statement that whether it’s Jessica Chastain or Oscar Isaac (the actors) or Mira and Jonathan (the characters), in these worlds marriage remains the same.

It’s about partnership, living the American dream, a means to an end, maintenance, raising a family, having equilibrium and making hard decisions.

The series follows the disintegration and aftermath of Mira and Jonathan’s marriage; through intense scenes where they are usually alone, the couple ignites the psychological concept of Johari’s window coined by Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916– 1995). Here we peer into four rooms or quadrants of ourselves.

Room one is ‘the part of ourselves that we and others see’. For example, Jonathan grew up as an Orthodox Jew and Mira is a mother. Room two: ‘what others perceive, but the subject does not’; such as Jonathan describing Mira as a big shot at her profession, or Mira stating if she had another child she could never leave. Room three: ‘what is not known to others but known to self’: where Jonathan’s asthma defines him, but not to Mira, and Mira being annoyed or irritated by being pregnant for the second time. And lastly, room four: ‘the unconscious (what is not known to others or the self)’: the lacklustre in identifying the religious undertone underneath their marriage.

In addition to this, the flickering of roles, position of power, attachments and love language styles this couple portrays also gives way to another well-known psychological theory that comes to mind – Transactional Analysis. Developed by Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne, we move in and out of ego states every day by being a

the psychologist december 2021 culture

Zimbardo and Milgram’s tentacles reach out

Parent, Adult or Child to each other.

For example, within the Adult ego state, Jonathan tries to be calm, level-headed, rationale and logical to save his marriage. Whilst within the Parent state, they both try and convince each other of their own perspective: Jonathan wanting to talk things through, and Mira wanting to go to couples counselling to separate. Mira beautifully demonstrates in the Childlike ego state; her repressed emotions and tantrums by crying and sulking to get her own way.

This is demonstrated behaviourally by being stubborn, erratic, and rebellious. Jonathan, on the other hand, physically cannot let go of Mira in fear of what it seems like, separation or abandonment.

Underneath it all, Mira is controlling, truly lonely, in denial, detached, and is suppressing her internal pain.

Jonathan seems self-loathing, co-dependent, lacks confidence, and is a people pleaser, who at times can’t share his truth or comprehend his internal world.

This makes you wonder are we truly ourselves in a coupledom? Can we express our full potential alongside another until the end?

Overall, a well written piece with wonderful acting; a must watch.

Reviewed by Dr Drusilla Joseph, Counselling Psychologist in NHS & Private Practice. drusillaj1@gmail.com

be one winner, but this comes at the Viewers around the globe have been cost of making the other players enthralled by this dystopian South suffer, which mirrors Milgram’s Korean thriller, the premise of which famous obedience experiment. The reflects modern-day capitalism using protagonist Seung Giinnocent ‘child playground hun (Lee Jung-jae) takes games’ as part of a sadistic tv centre stage, a gambling experiment. I couldn’t shake Squid Game addict desperate to make off the parallels to classical netflix amends with his mother social psychology theories, and daughter. Alongside in particular Zimbardo’s some of the other players prison study. he challenges authority, much like in In both Zimbardo’s experiment Zimbardo’s experiment, and forms and the Squid Game, volunteers are an alliance. Unwilling to submit their recruited and given a social role. Half were prison wardens (masked guards fellow players to death, echoing Milgram’s study, establishing trust in or monitors in the game) and the other half were prisoners (referred to those group circumstances is risky; in episode 4 interestingly titled ‘Stick as players in the game), both known to the Team’, we see the extent of by the numbers assigned to them to this at lights out. further deprive them of their identity.

In episode 2 ‘Hell’, the players The most striking resemblance was are split between a simple choice the ‘prison like’ set up to distort to either end the game or continue reality for the trapped prisoners/ with the game if the majority agrees. players, with guards hiding behind A divide in moral reasoning occurs, their black masks. This is when the with realities in the outside world real ‘experiment’ begins… ‘what happens when you put good people in as unforgiving as those in the game. This was an interesting twist, an evil place?’ questioning the community spirit In the game, the odds are present in South Korean culture. against the players. There can only It also takes Zimbardo’s study to another level: how do collective decisions fair in situations of financial hardship?

There are strong resemblances to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series and the Japanese original Battle Royale; the power of situational factors which overwhelm individuals who hold good intentions. The final two episodes, where identities are revealed, raise serious questions: did the players unwillingly conform to their role or did they just internalise roles when identifying with the groups that create them?

Ultimately, both the experiments and game come down to simple reasoning in extreme situational circumstances. Do we have free will if the majority of us conform to authority despite moral objections?

Reviewed by Priya Ahmed, PhD Health Psychology Student at Teesside University; Twitter: @PriyaAhmed94; E: Priya.ahmed@tees.ac.uk

The new normal Normality is currently under scrutiny

by Grayson Perry, touring the country in A Show for Normal People. Selfdescribed as a ‘TED talk – the panto!’, Grayson is interested in what society thinks is ‘normal’. Skipping around the stage in a silvery babygrow, he personifies the idea that appearances are almost always deceptive, and that normality is for the birds.

The format is driven by audience polls via our smartphones. These range from the obvious (how we voted), the fun (predominant colour in our wardrobe) to the challenging (‘Did you get enough attention as a child?’

Yes or no response only). There are some interesting insights as Grayson comments on how the responses of this affluent London audience differ from those in other parts of the country – he was in Blackpool only days earlier. Interspersed with some original songs sung with passion, if not overwhelming talent – as he would be the first to admit – the show flits from silly to serious, although it never quite takes flight. But it’s a fun night out.

Sophie Willan is also interested in what we mean by ‘normal’. She plays the eponymous Alma in Alma’s Not Normal, commissioned on the

back of her BAFTA win for the pilot episode. The award is more than deserved: her writing is sharp, black and laugh out loud. Alma is entering her thirties, recently split from her childhood sweetheart and unemployed. Her past is traumatic, yet she seems to be able to not let it weigh her down. She’s a grown up version of ‘the baby from Trainspotting, if she’d lived’, and if she can’t be normal, she’s going to be fabulous.

Her mother Lin (Siobhan Finneran) was the heroin addict in her life, now clean but in a psychiatric

unit due to drug-induced psychosis (‘the Iggy Pop of the psych ward’).

Lin is one of the most convincing representations of someone with psychosis I’ve seen: bolshie, funny, righteously angry, and extremely vulnerable. Joan (Lorraine Ashbourne) is Alma’s grandmother, the relative voice of normality, lover of animal prints, sex and fried spam.

We learn that Alma and Joan had their troubles themselves – hardly surprising with what Alma had experienced – and Alma spent time in care.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a semiautobiographical element to all this, although even when it turns to Alma’s sex working, you could never describe it as ‘confessional’. Willan has managed to craft something both charming and life-affirming, whilst addressing powerful truths about the harm that can be done to children, and the ways in which they can be healed. A brilliant and memorable watch.

Reviewed by Kate Johnstone, Associate Editor for Culture

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A Show for Normal People - Grayson Perry (www.fane.co.uk/grayson) is broadcasting live from Bath on 14 November.

Alma’s Not Normal is available on BBC iPlayer. Sophia Willan’s outreach arts organisation, focused on young people in the North West who have experienced being in care, is at https://storiesofcare.co.uk/

the psychologist december 2021 culture

An exploration of pain science and art The Bath Centre for Pain Research, which is based at the University of Bath, has recently been involved in an art exhibition inspired by their work into the psychology of pain. We wanted to hold a public engagement event with the local community in the Bath and Bristol area to showcase our work and celebrate our ten-year anniversary as a research centre. Our research focuses on how pain affects us, and the lives we live; seeking to better understand the mechanisms, function and impact of pain, and to develop more effective ways to manage it. We explore the way cognitive, emotional and social processes are involved in pain; pain across different settings and groups, including children and adolescents; the evidence for pain treatment, assessing what works best and in what way.

As well as researching pain, we also seek to raise awareness about it and the role that psychology can have.

This includes requires us finding novel and accessible way to start conversations about pain, what it means to people and how it affects their lives. One core theme is how pain is a personal and subjective experience, and finding ways to effectively communicate pain to others can be a challenge. This got us thinking about the different ways in which pain can be expressed and represented, which brought us to art. We reached out to Katie O’Brien who runs the 44AD artspace, which has a walk-in gallery that the public can visit for free, and is situated in the very centre of Bath. We applied funding from the University’s Public Engagement Unit, who were not only keen to see this project happen, but offered valuable support and guidance along the way.

We hosted a briefing event in January 2020 for about 25-30 artists, talking about our work on the psychology of pain. They took this all on board, went off to develop these ideas – creating a variety of pieces that explore the nature of pain and how it might be represented.

They also suggested the name for the exhibition – Ouch! An exploration of pain science and art.

Due to the pandemic the exhibition had to be postponed several times from its original date of April 2020, although Katie was able to develop an online version during the second lockdown. We finally held the exhibition in the 44AD

Box Tc : 104 “Pain Signature” Melzack’s Neuromatrix: A Maquette for ‘Ouch!’

by Robert Lee

exhibition Ouch!

University of Bath / 44AD

artspace for two weeks in early October 2021 – opening it up to the local community; talking to visitors about our work and why we had created the exhibition. An artist’s talk was also held, where those who had contributed to the exhibition explained the thinking and methods behind their work. Some of artists chose to represent their own experiences of pain, drawing on how pain had affected them in their lives. Others explored the links between mind, body and culture – considering the physical and psychological aspects of pain.

It was also a great example of a shared collaboration between pain researchers and the artists. As Katie O’Brien from 44AD explained at the start of the exhibition: ‘Art and science are both driven by curiosity and discovery and it has been an invaluable experience collaborating with Professor Ed Keogh and the Centre for Pain Research. The result being ‘Ouch!’, a showcase of artworks by 20 artists, visually interpreting the nature of pain, and the impact it can have on our lives. We hope that this exhibition will present individual stories in an engaging and accessible way, whilst collectively highlighting the work undertaken at the Centre for Pain Research.’

My colleagues and I found that the exhibition was an excellent opportunity to get people thinking about pain, what it is and how it affects us, and in a way that is both visually engaging and thought-provoking. As a pain researcher, it was such a highly rewarding experience to see your ideas being generated in such as creative way.

I would highly recommend this as an activity for anyone interested in public engagement, and certainly one to repeat.

Professor Ed Keogh is Deputy Director of the Bath Centre for Pain Research at the University of Bath

Warried (sic)

by Jeanette Weston

To find out more about ‘Ouch! An exploration of pain science and art’, and view some of the artwork, see www.bath.ac.uk/events/ouch-an-exploration-of-painscience-and-art/ and tinyurl.com/kwetpud8

We dip into the Society member database and pick out…

Kelly Dunn, Psychologist and Director/ Co-owner of KEYFORT

One work book Adrian Furnham’s The Psychology of Behaviour at Work is my go-to when working through projects with a focus on the individual, the team and the organisation.

One fiction book The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom – it reminds us to never underestimate the impact we can have on others and our influence on the paths we take in life.

One person I couldn’t do without My amazing business partner at KEYFORT Emily Dunn, the yin to my yang. We started a small business 15 years ago supporting people with acquired brain injury and neurological conditions. We now provide support to over 500 individuals and their families in the North of England – this includes 24/7 support at home as well as support for people in employment and education. We have an amazing team that have absolutely shone during Covid. I love my job and I am really passionate about making a difference and unlocking potential. Emily and I are very lucky and love supporting people to achieve their goals and aspirations.

One psychological superpower Positive mental attitude (PMA). I have had very positive influences in my life including my mother and grandmother, and they’ve always approached things with a solution-focused PMA.

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One proud moment Bringing each of our three babies home – they make my husband and I smile every day. I’m also super proud of being part of the Covid-19 Vaccine Team assisting roll out of the vaccine in 2021.

one on one

One passion Occupational Psychology. I worked in Vocational Rehabilitation for a number of years supporting people with acquired brain injury and this appealed to my interests in Clinical and Neuropsychology. However, overseeing the business allows me to work within a vast array of Occupational Psychology fields including training, leadership, development, wellbeing, recruitment, contracting, organisational change, learning and work design.

One place Machu Picchu in Peru. I did the five-day Inca trek when I was in my early twenties, and it was an incredible experience and a reminder that we are tiny beings within a colossal history – one of the best reminders not to sweat the small stuff!

One song The Bare Necessities from The Jungle Book.

I loved this film as a child and it has many life lessons; being curious and inquisitive about things we don’t know much about, respecting that a person’s strengths can make up for another’s weakness when working together, about loyal friendships and most importantly how to live a simple and happy life.

One nugget of advice Even the most experienced Psychologists are still learning. Don’t be overwhelmed by the experience or qualifications of others especially in the early days.

One thing about the BPS There are always opportunities for CPD. I have recently trained as an Assessor for candidates going through the Occupational Psychology Stage Two Qualification at the BPS and I have gained immeasurable experience – both for my own personal development and in assisting the process of new candidates in training.

Psychologists are real people – there are some really good changes happening that highlight this at the BPS in recent years. Get involved, use your voice and influence positive change.

More at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

coming soon… meaning, transition, habit and resolutions; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and 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 of over 57,000 BPS members: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …December 2020, ‘The allure of mysteries’ …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist the

psychologist december 2020

The allure of mysteries Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan meets researchers to look behind the painting

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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

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

President Katherine Carpenter President Elect Dr Nicky Hayes Honorary General Secretary Christina Buxton Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Professor Niamh Stack Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Member Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Andrew Tolmie Trustees Dr Peter Branney, Dr Esther CohenTovee, Dr Adam Jowett

Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa Change Programme Director and Deputy CEO Diane Ashby

society notices

society vacancies

BPS conferences and events See p.9

Election of President, 2023-2024 See p.8 Chair of the Ethics Committee See p.25 Practice Board seeking a coaching psychologist See p.51

Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton Director of Finance and Resources Phil Hodgett Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards Karen Beamish 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).