The Psychologist April 2012

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psychologist vol 25 no 4

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The person in psychological science Alison Lee argues that psychologists need to get to know their participants

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 256 careers 316 new voices 324 looking back 326

personality disorder 276 social anxiety in higher education 280 the brief alcohol intervention 286 viewpoints: the cost of caregiving 294

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Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR tel 0116 254 9568 fax 0116 227 1314

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

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Associate Editors Articles Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Miles Thomas, Monica Whitty, Jill Wilkinson, Barry Winter Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff Interviews Nigel Hunt, Lance Workman Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

The Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee David Lavallee (Chair), Phil Banyard, Nik Chmiel, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Rowena Hill, Jeremy Horwood, Catherine Loveday, Peter Martin, Victoria Mason, Stephen McGlynn, Tony Wainwright, Peter Wright, and Associate Editors

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letters 256 emotional response; impact; theoretical work psychology; Little Albert; and more

THE ISSUE

news and digest 266 rows over replication; psychoanalysis; security and neuroscience; apps; coercive self-citation; mapping well-being; and nuggets from the Research Digest

‘Whenever I talk about real cases, real lives, the students love it, and it sparks discussion and ideas. There must be some way of showing that our discipline is about people, about personal stories… they are changed by psychology, but they change psychology as well.’ So said Dr Catherine Loveday, from the University of Westminster and a member of the Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee. Our discussions led to ‘Viewpoints’ (see p.294), hopefully the first of many accounts from individuals who have taken part in psychological research or practice. We hear their story, that of the researchers, and also get the perspective of an organisation hoping to make use of the findings.

To complement that series opener, I sought a piece (p.292) from Dr Alison Lee (Bath Spa University), after seeing her using personal stories to great effect in the Society’s student lectures. More than any other science, psychology is about the tales behind the t-tests, and what we can learn from our subject matter. Do get in touch if you could contribute to an increasing reflection on the person in psychological research in The Psychologist.

Dr Jon Sutton

media Fiona Jones on planned changes to the Society’s media and press function; when Ariely met Gladwell; curiosities; and more

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KAREN ELZINGA: TINYURL.COM/KELZINGA

The person in psychological science Alison Lee, from her perspective in neuropsychology, argues that psychologists need to get to know their participants Viewpoints: The cost of caregiving The first of a new series focusing on the person in psychological research and practice

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pull-out

At the age of 37, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung felt that he’d lost meaning in his life. According to psychology historian Sonu Shamdasani (University College London), he had reached ‘an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth’.

Over the coming years, Jung engaged in a process of selfexperimentation which he himself termed a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. It took the form of provoking an extended series of waking fantasies in himself, and then attempting to understand them psychologically. He called this the method of ‘active imagination’,

and developed it as psychotherapeutic method. Drawing from these materials, he composed a work of psychology in a red Image taken from Carl Jung’s Liber Novus (‘The Red Book’), and explained by leather journal which he illustrated with his own psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani. E-mail ideas to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk. paintings, continuing to work on it up to 1930.

‘To the superficial observer, it Jung’s fantasies in his childhood Professor Shamdasani got hold will appear like madness,’ Jung in which he saw Alsace being of a copy in 1996, and after years wrote. Yet Shamdasani says ‘there submerged by water and Basle seeking to understand it and wasn't anything like a psychosis’. turned into a port. ‘I approach convince the Jung family to allow Indeed, the images and ideas in its publication, he translated Jung's these as a historian,’ Shamdasani ‘The Red Book’ were perhaps the says, ‘so I refrain from speculation words into English and added an foundation of Jung’s theories on or interpretation of the images. It's introduction and extensive archetypes, the collective clear that Jung thought about each footnotes. First published in 2009 unconscious, and the process of element of these images, and

by W.W. Norton, it was one of the individuation – the journey one sometimes said it would take him most influential unpublished works must undertake in order to become many years to figure out what they in the history of psychology. an individual. actually meant.’

This image represents one of

Jung’s childhood daydreams

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Problem solving for personality disorder Mary McMurran and Stephen Coupe describe a promising approach

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Social anxiety in higher education Phil Topham and Graham Russell

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The brief alcohol intervention Daniel Regan looks at an evidencebased strategy for reducing drinking

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book reviews 298 mental models in the novel; modern CBT; dyslexia; House and psychology; and more society

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President’s column; sexual and gender minority guidelines; Big Bang; work–life balance; DSM-5; expert witnesses; Gordon Allport prize; and more

316 careers and psychologist appointments working in Cambodia, with Angela Simcox; we speak to Kimberley Wilson at HMP Holloway; featured job; latest vacancies; and how to advertise new voices 324 counting on language in numerical thinking: Cassie Barton with the latest in our series for budding writers looking back learning disability: from the Devil to DSM-IV, with Chris Goodey

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one on one …with Carole Allan

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The Psychologist – who’s who th e

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he Psychologist is produced by a small team of staff in the Society’s Leicester offices, supported by honorary input from a panel of Society members. We are refreshing and expanding this panel, and thought that an update would be timely.

Your chance to join the team We are seeking expressions of interest for the following voluntary roles:

ntrol – Self-cooral muscle the m on willpower ter umeis Roy Ba depletion o and eg

nts pointme gist Ap Psycholo of orating Incorp to members Society ical £5 or free Psycholog tish The Bri

94 letters 2 news 10 152 careers 4 16 g back lookin

116 minal e of a cri 2 the fac e 12 evolving of languag n 126 kind 128 a new Jo Gree r statistics? th wi w ou intervie confident in be can we

Associate editor(s) for conference reports: Do you have a gift for communicating psychology in an engaging and informative manner? Do you love attending conferences? We are looking for one or more Society members to help organise our conference reporting coverage, and chip in with their own reports. Expenses will be available.

Send samples of your writing to psychologist@bps.org.uk, by 1 June.

Associate editors for interviews: Do you love talking to psychologists about their life and work? Are you knowledgeable, able to think on your feet and good at building a rapport?

We are looking for Society members to conduct interviews for us. In return, you receive expenses and reach an audience of 50,000.

We are particularly interested in receiving applications from Society members who may be able to add a multimedia approach to interviews.

Send three suggestions for your ideal interviewee, plus any samples of your work, to psychologist@bps.org.uk, by 1 June.

Welcome Dr Catherine Loveday (University of Westminster) has joined the team to coordinate our new ‘Viewpoints’ format, showcasing the personal stories of those participating in psychological research and practice. See contents page and p.294 for more information.

Nathalie Chernoff (Lancaster University) has taken over from Julie Perks as Associate Editor for ‘Looking back’. Many thanks to Julie, who has done a fantastic job in steering the section through its first four years.

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The new Psychologist ‘International Panel’ We are proud to announce that the following psychologists have agreed to serve The Psychologist on a new ‘International Panel’, providing advice and advocacy on an international level: Vaughan Bell

Dr Vaughan Bell is a clinical and research psychologist.

Uta Frith

He’s affiliated with the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and has just returned from a stint with Médecins Sans Frontières in Colombia.

Uta Frith is currently splitting her time between being an Emeritus Professor at University College London and a Research Foundation Professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, USA. Alex Haslam is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Exeter, just about to move

Elizabeth Loftus

Alex Haslam

to the University of Queensland in Australia.

The committee The Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee is responsible for all matters of policy development, maintenance and coordination, as well as overseeing the performance of the Managing Editor. Its current Chair is Professor David Lavallee (University of Stirling). He says: ‘As a longstanding member of the Society, I think The Psychologist plays a vital role in representing members and forging links across our diverse discipline.

We’re at a key point in the evolution of The Psychologist and Digests, redesigning the Psychologist website and always looking to develop the publications. Honorary input is so important to us, and it’s rewarding as well – so keep an eye out for opportunities to support your publications!’

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The staff The day-to-day running and production of The Psychologist and Digests is down to a team of four FTEs: Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor), Peter Dillon-Hooper (Assistant Editor), Debbie James (Editorial Assistant), Mike Thompson (Production), Dr Christian Jarrett (Psychologist journalist and Research Digest editor), and Dr Alex Fradera (Occupational Digest editor).

Managing Editor Dr Jon Sutton says: ‘With a relatively small team and budget, we are heavily reliant on voluntary input from Society members at a variety of levels, whether it is contributing a letter or serving in an honorary capacity. We are very grateful for all the membership do for our publications, and we’re always here to help!’

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The pe rson in psych ologica science l Ali

son Le psycho e argues tha log know the ists need t to ge ir parti cipants t to

Incorp ora

£5 or free ting Ps ych The Bri to members ologist Ap tish Psy pointme of cholog nts ical Soc iety

letters 25 careers 6 316 new vo ices 32 4 lookin g back 326

persona lity dis order social 276 anxiety in the br ief alcoh higher educ ation 28 ol inter viewp 0 oints: the cos vention 286 t of careg iving 29 4

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BIG PICTURE

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At the age of 37, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung felt that he’d lost meaning in his life. According to psychology historian Sonu Shamdasani (University College London), he had reached ‘an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth’.

Over the coming years, Jung engaged in a process of selfexperimentation which he himself termed a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. It took the form of provoking an extended series of waking fantasies in himself, and then attempting to understand them psychologically. He called this the method of ‘active imagination’,

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Jung’s childhood daydreams

and developed it as psychotherapeutic method. Drawing from these materials, he composed a work of psychology in a red Image taken from Carl Jung’s Liber Novus (‘The Red Book’), and explained by leather journal which he illustrated with his own psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani. E-mail ideas to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk. paintings, continuing to work on it up to 1930.

‘To the superficial observer, it Jung’s fantasies in his childhood Professor Shamdasani got hold will appear like madness,’ Jung in which he saw Alsace being of a copy in 1996, and after years wrote. Yet Shamdasani says ‘there submerged by water and Basle seeking to understand it and wasn't anything like a psychosis’. turned into a port. ‘I approach convince the Jung family to allow Indeed, the images and ideas in its publication, he translated Jung's these as a historian,’ Shamdasani ‘The Red Book’ were perhaps the says, ‘so I refrain from speculation words into English and added an foundation of Jung’s theories on or interpretation of the images. It's introduction and extensive archetypes, the collective clear that Jung thought about each footnotes. First published in 2009 unconscious, and the process of element of these images, and

by W.W. Norton, it was one of the individuation – the journey one sometimes said it would take him most influential unpublished works must undertake in order to become many years to figure out what they in the history of psychology. an individual. actually meant.’

This image represents one of

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NEWS

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Rows over replication: the ‘cornerstone A row has erupted online after an eminent social psychologist in the USA reacted angrily to a failed replication of one of his classic stereotype priming studies. John Bargh, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University, used his blog on Psychology Today to launch a stinging criticism of the researchers who failed to replicate his 1996 study, the journal they published in, and the British science blogger who reported on their new research (tinyurl.com/7xjyxtq).

In a post that extends to several pages, Bargh implied that Stéphane Doyen (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and her colleagues are ‘incompetent and ill-informed’; he claimed that the openaccess journal PLoS One allows researchers to ‘self-publish’ their studies without appropriate peer review so long as they are willing to pay the $1350 fee; and he described Ed Yong’s Discover magazine blog coverage (tinyurl.com/7nenrtn) of the failed

replication as ‘superficial online journalism’.

The new paper by Doyen et al.

‘Behavioural priming: It’s all in the mind, but whose mind?’ (PLoS One; tinyurl.com/7n5zy6m) attempted to replicate Bargh’s highly cited 1996 article, co-authored with Mark Chen and Lara Burrows, which showed that participants primed non-consciously by the elderly stereotype walked away from a psychology lab more slowly (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: tinyurl.com/7km8bqk).

Doyen’s team made some changes to Bargh’s methodology, including doubling the number of participants and using infra-red beams to time participants’ walking speed (as opposed to a research assistant with a stop-watch). Their attempt at replication failed – participants exposed to ageing-related words in a scrambled sentence task didn’t walk away any more slowly than control participants.

However, when the study was repeated with the experimenters knowing the expected results of the study and which condition participants had been allocated to, the slowing effect was observed. In another twist, experimenters told to expect participants to walk away faster actually obtained data supporting this reverse-effect, but only if they used a stop-watch. A final important detail is that there was evidence that some participants in the prime condition had noticed the ageingrelated words they’d been exposed to, thus casting doubt on the scrambled sentence task as a way to deliver primes non-consciously.

Based on their results, Doyen’s team concluded that ‘experimenters’ expectations seem to provide a favourable context to the behavioural expression of a prime.’ They argued further that it was important to consider the limitations of automatic behavioural priming: ‘…it seems that these methods

DOES PSYCHOANALYSIS HAVE A PLACE IN HEALTH SERVICES? There was a time not so long ago when psychiatry and psychotherapy were dominated by the psychoanalytic approach. Today, observed Professor Robin Murray, chair of the latest Maudsley Debate, psychoanalysts are an ‘endangered species’. For this, the 44th Maudsley Debate hosted by the Institute of Psychiatry, the house proposed to a packed auditorium that ‘psychoanalysis has a valuable place in modern mental health services’. The audience’s initial vote was 251 for the motion, 32 against with 42 abstainers.

First to propose the motion was Peter Fonagy, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the BPS and the Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at UCL. Fonagy said this was a ‘deadly serious’ issue and that psychoanalytic psychotherapy was ‘fighting for its life’. In the race to demonstrate the relative merits of different therapeutic approaches, Fonagy said psychodynamic psychotherapy was at a distinct disadvantage. Most randomly controlled trials are focused on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and success is measured by symptom reduction. Despite psychodynamic psychotherapy not being focused on symptoms, Fonagy said the few trials that had been conducted with this approach were showing it to be an effective treatment. He added that brain science and its revelations about developmental effects were also converging with the psychoanalytic model and its emphasis on early relationships.

BPS Fellow Paul Salkovskis, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science at the University of Bath, was the first to oppose the motion. He said it was a ‘confidence trick’ to confuse psychoanalysis with psychodynamic psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis, he argued, was wedded to several harmful beliefs and doctrines: including the rejection of a symptom focus, the rejection of evaluation, the idea of training by undergoing one’s own analysis, and ‘really bad’ theories

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from the comic (e.g the Oedipus complex) to the dangerous (e.g. in relation to obsessive compulsive disorder). ‘Go and look at the psychoanalytic explanation for OCD and tremble’ Salkovskis,’ said.

He concluded that the philosophical and theoretical tenets of psychoanalysis put it at odds with a modern mental health service – remove those tenets and it’s not psychoanalysis any more.

The motion was seconded by Alessandra Lemma, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the BPS and Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL. She argued that CBT only works for 50 to 60 per cent of clients and that there’s a need for an alternative approach for the remainder. Psychodynamic psychotherapy focuses on the person, not the disorder, she said.

For chronic, complex difficulties you need a theory of interactional processes, she said, and ‘psychoanalysis is unrivalled in providing a highly sophisticated theory of interactional processes’.

Last up, Professor Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist and the author of Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (which charts his own experience of the illness), said he’d undertaken psychoanalysis and it was a ‘total disaster’. He stressed how it is conscious thoughts that play a central role in conditions like depression, not the unconscious. It’s things that happened yesterday – losing a job, being ill – that most often trigger depression, not events in childhood. He said there was no evidence for the basic psychoanalytic ideas of ego, super ego and so on – ‘mystical nonsense’, he called them. Psychoanalysts were not interested in cure, he claimed: ‘It’s all nonsense and we should abandon it completely.’

At the closing vote, there were 260 for the motion, 43 against and 35 abstainers. CJ I See www.kcl.ac.uk/iop/news/Podcasts.aspx

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REPLICATION – YOUR VIEWS

need to be taken as an object of research per se before using it can be considered as an established phenomenon.’ In his blog post, Bargh argued there was no way that experimenter expectancies could have interfered with the results he and his colleagues obtained. He blamed the replication failure on ‘gross’ methodological changes made by Doyen’s team. For example, he quoted them as having instructed participants to ‘go straight down the hall when leaving’, in contrast to his study, which he said let participants ‘leave in the most natural way’. In fact, as Yong has pointed out in a response on his blog (tinyurl.com/7ffztux), Doyen’s team wrote that ‘participants were clearly directed to the end of the corridor’; similarly, Bargh and his colleagues wrote in their study that the experimenter told the participant that ‘the elevator was down the hall’.

Bargh concluded his blog post by arguing for the robustness of the concept of stereotype priming, which he said has been replicated ‘dozens if not hundreds’

We are looking to curate an ‘Opinion special’ on replication in the May issue. If you are reading this in the first few days of April, there may still be time to contribute – e-mail the editor on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk. Otherwise, we are as ever interested in your views for the ‘Letters’ pages on psychologist@bps.org.uk.

of times and is solidly embedded in several theories across multiple scientific fields. ‘I am not so much worried about the impact on science of essentially self-published failures to replicate,’ he wrote, ‘as much as I’m worried about your ability to trust supposedly reputable online media sources for accurate information on psychological science.’ As we went to press the controversy was playing out online with several psychologists contributing their views: Matt Craddock commented on Bargh’s Psychology Today post; Matthew Lieberman has written a piece on his blog Social Brain, Social Mind (tinyurl.com/7gty5k4); and Daniel Simons posted his views on Google+ as ‘A primer for how not to respond when someone fails to replicate your work’ (tinyurl.com/7rctma7).

In a related incident, the failed replication attempt of Daryl Bem’s ‘precognition’ study, by Chris French

(Goldsmiths, University of London), Stuart Ritchie (University of Edinburgh) and Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire), has finally been published, also in PLoS One, with Bem responding in the comments. Their report was rejected by several journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see ‘News’, June 2011), which originally published Bem’s findings along with his appeal for attempted replications. Writing in The Guardian, Chris French said: ‘Although we are always being told that “replication is the cornerstone of science�, the truth is that the “top� journals are simply not interested in straight replications – especially failed replications. They only want to report findings that are new and positive.’ CJ

Behavioural insights to save £millions The UK government’s Behavioural Insight Team, led by psychology graduate David Halpern, has claimed that hundreds of millions of pounds could be saved using simple, psychologically inspired interventions to reduce fraud, debt and error.

The claims are made in a new report, published in February, that details seven ways public organisations could save money: make it easier for people to fill out forms, including tax returns; highlight key messages early in communications; use personal language; prompt honesty at key moments when people are filling in forms or answering questions; use the influence of social norms by emphasising that most other people behave prosocially; reward desired behaviour; and highlight the risks and impact of dishonesty.

These ideas are being put to the test in eight ongoing trials by the $SSO\LQJ E HK Behavioural LQVLJKWV WR DYLRXUDO UHGXFH IUD Insight Team XG HUURU DQG G in partnership HEW with public bodies. For instance, HM Revenue and Customs has experimented with tax reminder letters and found that they seem to be more effective if they include a message saying that the person’s untaxed car in majority of people in the reminder letters. Another with recipient’s local area pay their HM Courts and Tribunals Service is testing whether tax on time. A trial with the people are more likely to Driver and Vehicle Licensing respond to text message Agency is testing the influence reminders to pay fines if the of including a picture of a

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Public sect or fraud, erro which are borne by law- r and debt cost the UK an integral part of the abiding taxpayers and government billions government of pounds ďŹ rms. Insig each This docu hts strategy to men reduce this from behavioural scien year, costs debt to iden t is intended to help cost and the ce can form thos tify practical tax gap. interventions e who administer syste , while mak ms to tack ing it easie le r for citizens fraud, error and and ďŹ rms to comply.

Behaviour al Insig

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text mentions them by name and states how much they owe. ‘This is the first time that the Government has explicitly sought to draw upon behavioural insights to tackle fraud, error and debt in a systematic way,’ the report says. ‘The insights outlined in this document, applied in a range of different contexts and settings, show that not only is it possible to apply behavioural insights to reduce fraud, error and debt, but also that it can be done in a highly costeffective way.’ CJ

I Applying Behavioural Insights to Reduce Fraud, Error and Debt is available to download at tinyurl.com/7gwwcbe

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Psychology apps The ubiquitous rise of smartphone and tablet applications (‘apps’) is beginning to filter through to the world of psychology.

An app called Buddy that allows users to keep track of their activities and feelings has just been rolled out to mental health service providers nationally after a successful trial.

The Buddy app (www.buddyapp.org) was designed by London-based Sidekick Studios in association with South London and Maudsley Foundation Trust and with financial support from the NHS Regional Innovation Fund and NESTA. The app works via the sending and receiving of text messages to users’ phones (this makes it compatible with any phone).

The app sends reminders, helps with diary keeping and goal-setting, allows analysis of patterns between a person’s feelings and behaviours, and aids session planning.

In trials, clients using the app were less likely to miss therapy sessions.

The app has now been adopted by four boroughs in south east London, by North East Essex, and by the Five Boroughs Partnership in the north west.

Organisations purchase licences for the app allowing them to provide it to a given number of people.

Meanwhile, Wiley-Blackwell, which publishes the Society’s journals, has also launched a free psychology app called Spotlight (http://t.co/NJJWv4TI) for use with iPhones and iPads. The app allows users to keep track of psychology conferences, abstracts, books, blogs (including the Society’s Research Digest) and journal special issues.

Elsewhere, Richard McNally’s lab at Harvard University has reportedly just completed a trial of an iPhone intervention for anxiety. There’s a Mobilyze app in development at Northwestern University, which is designed to detect signs of depression; a Tell Me About It! app – a language development tool for autistic children based on the principles of applied behavioural analysis; there’s an app in development at Samsung that determines user emotions based on factors such as typing speed and shaking of the phone; and the memory training guru Tony Buzan is planning a series of iMindMap apps around his Mind Mapping techniques. CJ

I Have you come across any good-quality psychology apps? Let us know via Twitter on @psychmag

Coercive self-citation Have you ever submitted to a journal and received a request from the editor to add in some extra citations to unspecified papers published in that same journal? According to a survey by Allen Wilhite and Eric Fong (University of Alabama in Huntsville), published in Science (tinyurl.com/892qvkz), this practice is called ‘coercive self-citation’ and it’s worryingly widespread. Receiving editorial advice on relevant papers to cite is acceptable, they say, but being asked to add superfluous papers, presumably to boost a journal’s impact factor, is unethical.

Of 6672 social science researchers (including psychologists; most were American) who answered a survey, around 20 per cent said they had been subjected to these kinds of requests. A further 20 per cent were aware of the practice but hadn’t experienced it firsthand. Junior researchers were more likely to say they’d been coerced, as were the authors of papers with fewer co-authors. The practice also varied with discipline, being more common in business and economics, and less common in psychology and sociology (although Wilhite and Fong stressed that ‘every discipline reported multiple instances of coercion’). More highly ranked journals were more likely to coerce, although it’s not possible to say whether their ranking was a cause or consequence of the practice.

Overall, although 86 per cent of survey respondents said the practice of citation coercion was unethical, 57 per cent said that, prior to submission, they would add superfluous citations to journals known to coerce. Junior researchers were more likely to acquiesce. Familiarity may breed acceptance: researchers who admitted to adding superfluous citations viewed the practice less harshly.

‘We find that coercion is uncomfortably common and appears to be practiced opportunistically,’ Wilhite and Fong wrote. The pair concluded by calling on academic associations to condemn the practice and for journal self-citations to not count towards a journal’s impact factor. CJ

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NATIONAL STALKING CLINIC The world’s first National Stalking Clinic has opened in London and is run by Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (tinyurl.com/6waumgu). The clinic takes referrals from multiple sources including courts, probations services and mental health trusts and will provide psychological treatment, assessment and rehabilitation of stalkers. The head of therapies at the clinic is Chartered Clinical and Forensic Psychologist Sarah Henley, an Associate Fellow of the BPS.

ONLINE CHILD THERAPY The NSPCC’s ChildLine service has launched an online therapeutic game, The Sky’s The Limit (tinyurl.com/86yzyqm). Lucy Mann, ChildLine Digital Manager, said: ‘Games like this are designed to have a therapeutic element to them; we hope that the young people who play them can use the game to take their minds off things that are making them feel sad, like family problems or being bullied.’ The game involves the player naming things that make them sad and then jumping through the sky via springs on clouds. They can smash through rocks with their sources of sadness written on them, or just relax and fly through the sky.

HISTORY PODCASTS Psychologists at York University in Canada have launched a series of podcasts about the history of psychology. Christopher Green, co-founder of the Advances in the History of Psychology blog (http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca) and the former producer and presenter of the This Week in the History of Psychology podcast series, is to front a new occasional series Discussions in the History of Psychology. He’s also started two other new series: History of Psychology Laboratory and This Week in the History of Psychology: Shorts (see www.yorku.ca/christo/podcasts/).

Collaborators include Jeremy Burman and Jacy Young.

TWEETS PREDICT IMPACT The amount of buzz generated by a journal article on Twitter is a reliable predictor of the ultimate scholarly impact that article will have. Gunther Eysenbach (University Health Network, Toronto) analysed thousands of tweets about new articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Articles that generated a high number of tweets in the days following their publication were 11 times more likely to be highly cited 17 to 29 months later compared with less-tweeted articles (jmir.org/2011/4/e123/).

CJ

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Security applications of neuroscience The Royal Society has published the report from the third of its sensory performance and to help with rehabilitation from injury; Brain Waves modules, which is focused on the military and civil and for drugs to overcome fatigue and help with recovery from law enforcement implications of new neuroscience findings. The PTSD. In relation to degrading enemy performance, the report report calls for increased awareness among describes work on the use of chemical scientists as to how their findings could be turned agents designed to affect the central to potential military and enforcement uses. It also nervous system, and the development calls for the UK government to be more open of non-lethal high-energy laser weapons about the research that it is funding is this area. designed to interfere with The module ‘Neuroscience, conflict and neurotransmitter release and other security’ was chaired by Rod Flower, Professor of physiological functions.

Biochemical Pharmacology at the William Harvey A substantial section of the report Research Institute, Queen Mary University of deals with the treaties related to the ban London. There was psychological input from of the use of biological and chemical Susan Iversen, Emeritus Professor of weapons, to which the UK is a signatory Experimental Psychology at the University – The Biological and Toxin Weapons of Oxford, and BPS Fellow Trevor Robbins, Convention of 1972 and the Chemical Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Weapons Convention of 1993. The University of Cambridge, both of whom were latter includes an ambiguous exception members of the module’s working group. allowing for ‘law enforcement including Urgent need for clarification?

Professor of Experimental Psychology Barry domestic riot control purposes’. The report Everitt at the University of Cambridge was says there is an urgent need for the UK a member of the review panel for the module. government to clarify its position in relation The report describes how neuroscience advances can be to this exception, in particular whether it applies to used to enhance the performance of the military and to harm incapacitating chemical agents and not only to riot control the performance of its enemies. On the side of performanceagents, which have a less drastic, irritant effect. CJ I The third Brain Waves report Neuroscience, Conflict and Security enhancement, it highlights the potential for neuroimaging to is available at tinyurl.com/7o963j8 improve recruitment; for brain–machine interfaces to enhance

Mapping well-being A preliminary map of the nation’s happiness is taking shape following analysis of initial well-being results collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS: see tinyurl.com/6vth933).

It seems we are a relatively content people. The average life satisfaction score was 7.4 out of 10; the average ‘life is worthwhile’ score was 7.6 out of 10; ‘happiness yesterday’ averaged at 7.3 out of 10; whilst the average ‘anxiety yesterday’ score was 3.2 out of 10.

The ONS began including four subjective well-being questions from last April in its Annual Population Survey of 80,000 UK citizens aged over 16 (for background see ‘News’, January 2011: ‘National well-being and the wandering mind’). Respondents were asked how satisfied they were with their lives; to For funding opportunities this month, see www.bps.org.uk/funds Funding bodies should e-mail news to Elizabeth Beech on elibee@bps.org.uk for possible inclusion

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what extent their life is worthwhile; how happy they felt yesterday; and how anxious they felt yesterday (all scored 1–10). The questions are designed to tap three aspects of subjective well-being: evaluative, eudenomic (people’s sense of meaning and purpose), and experiential.

The initial data was collected from April to September last year.

There were age and gender differences in the results. Women scored marginally higher then men on all four questions, especially life feeling worthwhile. Life satisfaction and life worthwhile scores were higher for younger and older participants relative to middle-aged respondents. Conversely, anxiety was higher among the middle-aged.

In terms of geographic differences across the UK, subjective well-being scores were highest in Northern Ireland (7.6 out of 10 compared with 7.5 for Scotland and 7.4 for both England and Wales). Within England, well-being was lowest in London and the West Midlands and highest in the South East and South West. Anxiety yesterday was highest in

London compared with all other UK regions.

Other observations to emerge from the initial data: people living in a household with children rated life as more worthwhile, but showed no advantages in life satisfaction or happiness yesterday, and they reported no more anxiety; having a partner was associated with higher scores in satisfaction, life worthwhile and happiness yesterday; conversely, being unemployed was associated with lower scores on those three questions.

‘It’s good to see the project under way, but this initial account is not likely to inspire politicians or the public,’ said Peter Warr, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield. ‘The approach is almost entirely through average subgroup scores with no apparent overarching framework or psychological basis. Findings to date repeat what is already known, but maybe more sophisticated analyses in the future or observed changes over time will be more interesting.’ CJ

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Doubts cast on influential theory of visual processing Psychologists in Germany have challenged one of the most influential theories in neuropsychology – the dual stream model of visual processing proposed by Mel Goodale and David Milner. This model (see tinyurl.com/b3ktap for Psychologist article) proposes that visual information entering the brain splits down two parallel paths: the dorsal path heads to the top and rear of the brain where the information is used for guiding actions; the ventral path reaches the temporal lobes where it is used for conscious perception and recognition. The model is hugely influential and will be familiar to all contemporary psychology graduates. The three seminal papers proposing and supporting the model have been cited over 930 times.

Much of the supporting evidence came from studies of the brain-damaged patient known in the literature as D.F. This woman’s damage to her occipital and parietal lobes from carbon monoxide poisoning appeared to have left her with a rare form of ‘visual agnosia’ – she was unable to recognise everyday objects but was perfectly able to grasp and use them. In other words, she appeared to have an impaired ventral stream but a preserved dorsal stream.

Marc Himmelbach and his team at Eberhard Karls University say that D.F. has become one of the most influential brain-damaged patients in neuropsychology, comparable to Paul Broca’s aphasic patient Leborgne and Phineas Gage – the 19th-century railway worker who survived an iron rod passing through his brain. However, as is the case with Leborgne and Gage, the German team believe that standards of testing have become more stringent since the seminal work with D.F. was published back in the 90s. In particular, conclusions were drawn about D.F. without comparing her performance and behaviour to age-matched controls.

For their paper, Himmelbach and his team have replicated the three main tests performed on D.F. with 20 female, age-matched healthy controls (mean age 36.5 years). These tests included indicating the size of various rectangular wooden blocks using the thumb and forefinger; actually reaching and picking up the blocks; indicating the orientation of a narrow slot in a disc; posting a card through that slot; and indicating the size and shape of odd-regular shapes and then actually picking up those shapes. Results from the original work with D.F. were compared against the results from these new healthy controls.

Himmelbach and his colleagues don’t dispute that D.F.’s performance was far more impaired for recognition tasks compared In the January issue of with the reaching and grasping tasks. However, compared against their Neuropsychologia (see new control data, they say it’s clear that D.F. was also severely impaired tinyurl.com/7azzyfn) in her reaching and grasping performance, seemingly undermining the neat interpretation that she had a preserved dorsal stream. The German group also point to more recent tests of D.F. showing that she has obvious motor deficits when the task is more complicated – for example, she was unable to grasp a disc through three holes in its surface using her thumb, index and middle fingers.

Other evidence highlighted by Himmelbach and co concerns a more recently identified patient ‘J.S.’ who has a similar pattern of brain damage to D.F. and who is more impaired on recognition than motor tasks, but who nonetheless is clearly severely impaired on motor tasks compared with healthy controls. Based on a scan of J.S., the researchers also doubt that the pattern of brain damage suffered by D.F is as circumscribed as previously claimed. Finally, the researchers are critical of the lack of ‘kinematic data’ from the original tests of D.F. – things like reaction times, peak velocity of movements and so forth. Such data, they say, would show whether her movements were really normal, or if she were, for example, taking longer than normal to compensate for her difficulties.

‘In conclusion,’ the researchers said, ‘the behaviour and anatomy of D.F. on its own does not provide firm grounds for the perception vs. action interpretation of dorsal and ventral stream areas.’ They added that other sources of support for the dual stream model ‘do not provide unequivocal evidence in favour of or against [the model] without reference to D.F. and could also be integrated by alternative models that do not explicitly state an action–perception dissociation.’

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Lost sleep and cyberloafing In the Journal of Applied Psychology (see tinyurl.com/85t7359) When the clocks went forward at the end of March, did you have an urge to watch the 1982 snooker championship final on the internet at work the following day? A new article suggests that we may be more prone to ‘cyberloafing’, frittering away work time on unrelated online activities, when we haven’t had enough sleep.

The researchers, led by David Wagner, began sifting through Google’s publicly available data for rates of entertainmentrelated searches, judged to be a proxy of cyberloafing. Using a ‘quasi experimental’ approach, the investigators recognised an event that affects everyone’s sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust. The researchers used data from 203 metropolitan areas in the USA, weighted by area size, across 2004–2009. They found that entertainment-related searches on the Monday after DST were 3.1 per cent higher than on the Monday before, and 6.4 per cent higher than on the Monday after.

A second study took this to controlled lab conditions.

Ninety-six undergraduate students wore a sleepmonitoring bracelet overnight before attending a lab session to complete a computer task – assessing a potential new professor for the university by

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watching a 42-minute video lecture. What the researchers were really interested in was the amount of time they would spend surfing the internet instead. Cyberloafing was higher for participants who experienced more instances of sleep interruption or less sleep overall, as recorded by their monitoring bracelet.

This is another piece of research advancing the ego depletion theory, which states that willpower is a resource that is used up through effortful acts. Researchers have previously argued that sleep is a means of recharging our regulatory resources, and these studies confirm that less sleep does indeed make us prey to counterproductive activities like cyberloafing. However, those who naturally exercise selfdiscipline may be somewhat resistant: in study two, the effect of sleep interruption on cyberloafing was weaker for participants who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness administered beforehand. (The effect of less overall sleep still remained.) This is consistent with ego depletion, as highly conscientious types are more likely to actively use methods to regulate their effort to overcome counterproductive behaviours, rather than taking the path of least resistance.

The costs of cyberloafing have been estimated at around £300m a year, so it’s worth understanding when we're more vulnerable to its temptations.

I This item is from the Society’s Occupational Digest, written and edited by Dr Alex Fradera – see www.occdigest.org.uk and follow @occdigest.

Easily embarrassed and altruistic In the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Social interactions can feel like walking a tight-rope, an excruciating pit of embarrassment always just one tiny misstep away. But could embarrassment also function in our favour, helping to advertise some of our better, more desirable qualities?

Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley conducted five experiments in total, involving hundreds of undergrad participants. The first two studies were designed to test whether people who experience more embarrassment are more prosocial. In the first, participants were videorecorded as they recounted a time they’d been embarrassed.

The videos were coded and it was found that the students who displayed more signs of embarrassment (e.g. gaze aversion, nervous face touching and laughter) also tended to endorse values of fairness more, and they were actually more generous with money in an economic game. In the second study, participants who said they would be more embarrassed in a range of hypothetical social scenarios tended to be more generous in an economic game, and they also scored more highly on a questionnaire measure of their prosociality.

Further studies tested whether embarrassed people are perceived as more prosocial.

It was found that individuals who had appeared more embarrassed in the videos from the first study were rated as more prosocial by new

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participants. Another set of participants rated actors displaying an expression of embarrassment as more prosocial than those displaying pride or a neutral expression.

Still more participants agreed to cooperate more fully in an economic game with people who they’d seen pictured looking embarrassed.

A fifth and final study was the most realistic. Participants saw their research partner praised for his or her superb performance on a mental performance test. Unbeknown to the participants, their partner was an accomplice of the researchers. On being praised, this actor either responded with embarrassment or with pride.

Crucially, later on, the participants tended to cooperate more with their partner if he or she had shown embarrassment earlier, as opposed to pride.

What’s more, the greater the intensity of their partner’s earlier display of

embarrassment, the more participants tended to trust and cooperate with him or her. The researchers also ruled out the possibility that the actor was displaying shame, rather than embarrassment. One final important detail: the researchers checked and these effects of embarrassment weren’t because the participants saw their embarrassed partner as weak, liked them more, or because they felt compassion towards them.

‘Our data are the first to reveal that people who feel and show intense embarrassment are indeed more prosocial,’ the researchers concluded, ‘and that this display triggers prosocial inferences and actions.’ The researchers said there was a need for more research – for example, to find out whether it’s possible for people to feign embarrassment and thereby benefit from the flattering assumptions onlookers make about them.

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest Follow the Digest editor at www.twitter.com/researchdigest

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Bringing psychology to the public: Have your say Fiona Jones on planned changes to the Society’s media and press function embers of the British Psychological Society, in common with scientists M of many persuasions, are sometimes unhappy about the quality of press coverage of their discipline. Too often the psychology that reaches the media, and particularly the tabloids, can seem trivial and not representative of the best the subject has to offer. Psychology stories clearly reach the media by many different methods over which the Society has no control. So how does the BPS try to ensure quality research reaches broadcast and newspaper journalists?

Sometimes journalists will contact

MEDIA PRIME CUTS

contribute

What exactly is Susan Greenfield’s problem? http://t.co/Cb6q7L4O http://t.co/GLo5iqe2 John Bargh on priming, failures to replicate, and the PLoS One publishing model http://t.co/OtVFzDli (see ‘News’) ‘The emotional oracle effect’, from @jonahlehrer http://t.co/gabWpszs Incompetent people lack the competence to recognise their incompetence http://t.co/b8N85Mx9 Which psychology study would you most like to see replicated? http://t.co/xW8eVAUS

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The Media page is coordinated by the Society’s Media and Press Committee, with the aim of

individual psychologists themselves or via university press offices, but very often they will ask for recommendations from the BPS Media Centre. For example, in 2011 the office took around 2000 queries from the media. Undoubtedly, there is a great demand for psychological comment on issues relating to the activities of celebrities or issues of topical concern, such as obesity, work stress or childcare, for example. There is inevitably much less demand for information on cognitive or statistical psychology! The PR team therefore have very little influence on either the type of enquiry or the resulting output. Thus it can be hard to ensure that the full range of psychology is represented.

Where the PR team and Society members themselves have more influence is over the press releases that are produced. These include releases of new research from the Annual Conference and member network conferences as well as a selection of research from the latest BPS published journals. The PR team work very hard on behalf of the Society to produce a stream of press releases throughout the year. For many years now they have worked closely with the BPS Media and Press Committee, a team of approximately 12 psychologists who represent every branch of psychology and work in both academic and applied settings.

The committee role includes selecting appropriate presentations to be the subject of press releases at the Annual Conference. In addition they review BPS journals prior to publication to try to identify research suitable for release.

Together with members of the PR team and the researchers themselves, they write press releases which are always checked for accuracy with the original authors.

The involvement of the qualified and experienced psychologists on the Media

promoting and discussing psychology in the media. If you would like to contribute, please contact the ‘Media’

page coordinating editor, Ceri Parsons (Chair, Media and Press Committee), on c.parsons@staffs.ac.uk

and Press Committee helps to ensure that good-quality research, including research from the less obviously media-friendly areas can sometimes reach the press.

Equally importantly, we are able to advise that, while some research might be ‘popular’, it may be exploratory or not empirically rigorous and should not be recommended for release. We support the view that publicising empirically weak ‘pop’ research leaves the Society open to criticism and we are in a position to advise members of the PR team where we feel this is a risk. Members of the committee are also present in the press office at the Annual Conference to liaise between journalists and the researchers who are presenting at the conference.

They are also often a first port of call for journalists looking for advice on stories and are committed to offering a fast response wherever possible.

In short, the Media and Press Committee is a major way in which members of the Society are able to contribute directly to the press outputs and in addition gain useful experience and skills in this area. Regular collaboration between an expert PR team and psychologists representing every area of psychology helps ensure that a wider range of the best-quality psychology research is publicised than would otherwise be the case.

It is therefore particularly concerning that the recent Board of Trustees Communications Review has decided that the Media and Press Committee be dissolved. This decision came with no apparent consultation with members on this specific issue. The review seeks to implement a more strategic approach to the BPS PR coverage, designed to ensure a rapid response and to present a unified view on major issues on which the Society needs to comment. This has been an area of weakness in the past. However, there also is a need for regular work, such as put in by committee members, to ensure that the work of BPS members, in all its diversity, is represented. At present it is unclear how the regular input from committee members – around two to three weeks a year each – will be covered.

It is likely to result in more work for an already stretched PR and marketing team and could potentially lead to a reduction in coverage of research in the less obviously media friendly areas.

The BPS is a membership organisation, and it’s important that members have a say. If you have any comments or suggestions please write to the Psychologist letters page or e-mail either F.A.Jones@leeds.ac.uk or C.parsons@staffs.ac.uk.

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When Ariely met Gladwell Through a series of bestselling books, picture.” … It’s very hard to tell a good Duke University behavioural economist story [that says], “I’ll tell you a story and Dan Ariely and New Yorker writer at the end of the day I’ll tell you it Malcolm Gladwell have both made explains 20 per cent of…”’ Gladwell significant contributions to the public’s counters that it’s OK ‘to tell stories the understanding of social science research. way we do’, because ‘the experience Last year, Ariely doesn’t end on the interviewed Gladwell as final page. It is part of his ‘Arming the feeding into an Donkeys’ podcast series, ongoing discussing the challenges of conversation that translating and representing people have about academic research for a their lives.’ mass audience. The audio Sticking with the and a partial transcript have theme of complexity, now been made available Ariely asks whether via the ‘Journalist’s there are any topics Resource’ website (see that Gladwell has tinyurl.com/arielygladwell). decided are just too Ariely asks Gladwell opaque to tackle. how he picks his topics.

Gladwell’s answer ‘I see things and I collect is a fascinating Malcolm Gladwell them, and I think they summary of the might be interesting,’ challenges of Gladwell replies. ‘But there’s no theory or communicating science to large and system. I go to the library sometimes, and diverse audiences: I just sort of roam around; or I go on the This is one of the things that databases and I just type in things at academics sometimes fail to grasp random, or I get articles and read through about popular writing. Sometimes the bibliography… But there’s no rhyme there are, I feel there is, some friction or reason. Someone will say something to between me and the academic world; me interesting, and I’ll follow up on it or not a lot, but there’s a little bit something. To be a writer I think you’re sometimes. Part of it is that I don’t kind of constitutionally disposed toward think they understand the limitations optimism.’ of the form. There’s almost no How do you decide what’s central to occasion when they are writing for the story and what nuances to leave out, their own audience where they can’t Ariely asks. It’s impossible ‘to reflect the tackle a topic because of the difficulty full complexity of the underlying explaining it. Someone’s always going academic data’, Gladwell admits. ‘So what to be able to follow, or some huge you try and do is either represent the bestpercentage of their audience is always supported position, or make it clear that going to be able to follow it… It’s a what you’re arguing is an interpretation of small audience, but that’s the beauty the data and there might be others. Or of academic work. you use this in the service of a larger idea.’

Whereas I literally cannot discuss What about explaining variance: that something that my audience cannot something is a really important effect, understand. I can’t do it, I lose them, but that there’s still more unknown than they’re gone… and then I’ve failed. So known? According to Gladwell, ‘you can that limits the way in which I talk only tell the story about the part that’s about – not hugely or dangerously – known’, but thankfully readers are ‘a good but it limits. It means I will tend to deal more sophisticated than we give stress some things sometimes more them credit for. I don’t think anyone reads than others. And that is, you know, a book like yours or a book like mine or this is – to use to use my favourite a book like Freakonomics and thinks that quotation from The Godfather – as what we’re talking about explains Hyman Roth said to Michael Corleone: everything.’

“This is the business we’ve chosen.”

At this point, I admire Ariely’s honesty Right? You know, you accept when you in saying: ‘But when you write or I write, take a position in a certain kind of a I don’t feel that you or I make it explicit field… the limitations of it, and that’s that [we’re saying], “I’m going to tell you one of them.

JS a story about the small part of the

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

MEDIA CURIOSITIES Sometimes, you just want people to shut the hell up. Not my view, you understand: it’s that of two Japanese researchers who have introduced a prototype for a ‘SpeechJammer’ which can ‘disturb remote people’s speech without any physical discomfort’.

In their paper (tinyurl.com/speechjam), Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada point to situations of ‘unavoidability’ and ‘occupancy’ where the usual rules of turn-taking in conversation and quiet in public places are broken. Never fear, SpeechJammer is here!

A direction-sensitive microphone and speaker, combined with a distance sensor and some other technical gubbins, becomes a portable gun exploiting the principle of delayed auditory feedback (DAF). Playing someone’s voice back to them, with a slight delay of around 200 milliseconds, can jam a person’s speech.

After the researchers’ paper went viral and they posted a video online showing the prototype in action (see tinyurl.com/6ljh3xw), Professor Sophie Scott from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience was moved to write a blog post on the topic (see tinyurl.com/7ujzw35).

‘Need we worry about this? It’s clearly at least technically feasible, but remember not everyone is as affected by DAF as everyone else (and some people are dramatically improved by the technique). There are DAF apps which you can use to find out what DAF is like, if you want to know more about how you’d react. Also, consider other technology that can come to your aid – wear noise cancelling headphones, and turn them on if you suspect long range DAF might be used on you.’

The arms race continues!

JS

MEDIA PRIME CUTS Robin Murray on schizophrenia and his life’s work http://t.co/3iLuoJc4 Psychologists, torture and confidentiality: ‘what price is too high to be able to look yourself in the eye?’ http://t.co/Mbaoet8l Why Adele makes us cry http://t.co/PSs3Wink Survey on life crises from Greenwich’s Oliver Robinson http://t.co/lXEP98jS ‘Female sexual dysfunction’ is about relationship dissatisfaction http://t.co/o633cssY Mainstream media and neonatal death, from @DrPetra http://t.co/vjxNfjdN

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The person in psychological science Alison Lee, from her perspective in neuropsychology, argues that psychologists need to get to know their participants

O

references

ne of the reasons I enjoy being a neuropsychological researcher is that it allows me the time to get to know my participants. I mostly work with people who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder primarily affecting the elderly, and they typically approach the lab with some trepidation. The idea of a laboratory, not to mention the idea of a psychologist, can be quite scary, especially when you are ill.

I learned pretty early in my career that it would make more sense to collect data from people who were relaxed, because then they would both understand and be engaged in the process of research.

Part of this process involves talking to the participant, not particularly about psychology specifically but also about their lives outside of my lab. It did not take long for me to realise that a benefit of this would be that I could learn of specific problems that would directly feed into my research. I might get ideas for future experiments, and I could help the participant too.

Of course, lab protocol exists for a reason. If you are doing cognitive experiments or psychophysics, it is important to ensure that each participant’s lab experience is identical as far as possible. This is important for neuropsychology as well, but we do not always have to be quite so proscriptive, particularly when working with clinical participants. Could other areas of psychology perhaps learn a thing or two from our approach?

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Barnes, J., Boubert, L., Harris, J. et al.

(2003). Reality monitoring and visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease.

Neuropsychologia, 41(5), 565–574.

Lee, A.C., Harris, J.P., Atkinson, E.A. & Fowler, M.S. (2001). Disruption of estimation of body-scaled aperture width in Hemiparkinson’s disease.

Neuropsychologia, 39, 1097–1104.

Marshall, J.C. & Halligan, P.W. (1988).

Blindsight and insight in visuospatial

Neuropsychology deals with the braindamaged individual, whether that damage occurs after stroke, a neurological condition such as Parkinson’s disease, or traumatic brain injury. One of our methods is to do a single-case study, especially when that single case can tell us something interesting about the patient’s condition or rehabilitation or something about the brain generally. Another common method is to take a small, closely matched group of patients with a similar functional or anatomical deficit and compare them with a healthy control group. Both methods can reveal a lot about neural functions and also provide loci of interest for imaging investigations.

Yet neuropsychological case studies frequently get a bad press within wider psychology. For example, cognitive scientists have told me that an in-depth study of one patient is not particularly scientific. They argue that we cannot generalise to a wider population on the basis of the performance of one person.

Additionally, as comparative statistics in case studies (for example, comparing one person’s behaviour with a control patient) are not really useful or appropriate, it can sometimes be difficult to get such studies published in general psychological journals. However, small group studies with a clinical population emphasise the individual differences between people in a way that is never made apparent with experiments on a larger scale. In an attempt to achieve statistical significance, we can sometimes forget that our

neglect. Nature, 336, 766–767.

McNeil, J.E. & Warrington, E.K. (1993).

Prosopagnosia: A face-specific disorder. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 46(1), 1–10.

Warrington, E.K. & James, M. (1967).

An experimental investigation of facial recognition in patients with unilateral cerebral lesions. Cortex, 3(3), 317–326.

experimental population comprises a group of individuals. As psychology is the study of individual behaviour, this seems a little strange to me. As neuropsychology is predominantly the study of people’s acquired deficits after brain injury, it simply makes more sense to me to treat each person individually. The experimental protocol remains the same with each person, but it makes sense to talk to each participant about their perceptions of the experiment within the context of their own lives. Interpretation of that context has led to some interesting experimental findings.

For example, when one participant (I will call her Susie) who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease visited my lab, I noticed that she had nasty scrapes and dents along one side of her car. When I asked if she had been in an accident, she told me that it was because she always hit the left gatepost when

“…we can sometimes forget that our experimental population comprises a group of individuals” I Alison Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Bath Spa University a.c.lee@bathspa.ac.uk

pulling onto her drive. She continued doing so even after the drive had been widened.

I found this really interesting because I had previously been involved with a questionnaire study that revealed that some patients always bumped into the same side of a doorway (Lee & Harris, 2001). Susie’s problem sounded very similar (but much more expensive).

When this was examined experimentally, we found that some people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease had a small but consistent visual neglect of one side of stimuli. Susie hit the gatepost because she was not sure where it was. The answer to her problem was to put a mark on the inside of the windscreen that corresponded to a mark in the centre of the garage door. Susie stopped hitting the gatepost the moment she stopped worrying where it was.

Doing experiments like this allows the researcher the opportunity to look at problems in the context of the participant’s life. We could have simply tested lots of Parkinsonian people with a paper and pencil test of neglect (such as line bisection), but that would not have

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revealed the implications of reported that that neglect. I would argue the houses that working with were identical participants as individuals (as would be simply offers richer data. typical in Talking to a participant USN). can also help illuminate However, otherwise hidden problems. when asked For example, take the which one she reticence of some of my preferred, she Parkinson’s disease group preferred the Susie hit the gatepost because she to talk about their one not on fire was not sure where it was symptoms. One of my nine out of eleven group, ‘Peter’, was very times, even though relieved when I asked him whether he she thought the task was a bit silly. After had ever experienced an hallucination as seeing the stimuli with the flames coming a part of his PD. He had, but had not out of the right hand window, PS mentioned this to anyone because he was suddenly saw the flames on the original concerned that the hallucinations were a stimuli. Marshall and Halligan concluded symptom of dementia. He didn’t want to that the conscious perception of the mention them to his neurologist in case flames showed that on some level PS had he confirmed that fear. PD hallucinations attended to all of the stimuli and that this were experienced by many patients in the perception had eventually filtered through late 1990s as a side-effect of a particular to consciousness. PS told us something medication. If we had not routinely talked about USN (that it was a failure of to each volunteer about their personal conscious perception) that had not been experience of PD, then Peter would have understood before, and led ultimately to done a lot more worrying. His a better understanding of that condition. hallucination was a benign and Simply showing a group of people with comforting one, of the weight and heat USN similar pictures would have of his childhood dog sleeping beside him. confirmed that they cannot see things He left us feeling a lot better, and looking presented on the left hand side of stimuli, forward to his hallucination, even though but the single case investigation of PS I tried hard to persuade him to tell his revealed something of great importance neurologist (see Barnes et al., 2003). in the study of unilateral spatial neglect.

Not only can experiences or worries Another example is the study of the become more readily explicable after prosopagnosia patient WJ (e.g. simply talking them through; sometimes Warrington & James, 1967). these conversations give ideas for future Prosopagnosia is a deficit affecting experimentation as well. For instance, recognition of previously familiar faces another questionnaire about akinesia in when presented visually. WJ eventually PD (also known as ‘freezing’; losing the began sheep farming as a hobby after ability to move in particular settings, such several strokes, and McNeil and as on a zebra crossing) revealed that Warrington (1993) showed that WJ was many respondents had tried and tested better at recognising photos of his sheep methods to ‘unfreeze’ themselves. For than familiar human faces. He also example, one man mentally sang a performed much better than other marching song and managed to move on similarly aged sheep farmers. WJ showed the beat. Another respondent’s wife threw that prosopagnosia affects human faces, a piece of paper on the floor to act as a whereas recognition of non-human faces target. Ultimately these responses gave can be preserved. It was suggested that WJ rise to several specific rehabilitation could learn to recognise the faces of his strategies that we could test sheep on the basis of pattern recognition experimentally and report to people (the individual black and white shading of involved in PD rehabilitation. their faces). That he could not do so for I am obviously not the first person human faces was an indication that human to do this. For example, studies such as face perception is different in some way, Marshall and Halligan’s ‘burning house’ supporting other theorists’ view that faces study (1988) reported a single case that were special. The acquired ability of WJ helped our understanding of unilateral when seen in the context of his hobby spatial neglect (USN). The patient, helped us understand a facet of a complex known as PS, was shown line-drawings human behaviour. If WJ had not decided of two houses, one on top of the other. to acquire a flock of sheep and then talk One house had flames coming out of about this with the neuropsychologists a window on the left. PS neglected the testing him, it would have taken a lot left-hand side of the world and so she longer to establish this theory.

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Papers such as these really add flesh to what can be otherwise impenetrable neuropsychological problems. They also help people like me teach and attract students to this particular branch of the discipline. Describing the behaviour of an individual can offer greater insight to a problem than an averaged representation can. For example, studying the memory problems of Henry Molaison (HM) or Clive Wearing leads to a greater understanding of the specific problems of different types of amnesia than reading descriptions of amnesia in cognitive textbooks ever could. Case studies provide a human face for psychological theories. The heterogeneity of human behaviour becomes apparent in a way that large cognitive samples or descriptions of neuropsychological dysfunction tend to mask.

A neuropsychological case study allows investigation of an individual’s dayto-day living and therefore feeds both the rehabilitation of a patient and theory generation that can be applicable to more general psychology. More than this, you can sometimes directly help people with complicated functional deficits instead of merely studying their behaviour.

Given how rewarding talking to someone about their experiences can be, for both participant and experimenter, why is it so rare in quantitative psychology? To be clear, I am not talking about debriefing. I mean simply talking to the participant about their life and their experience of your experiment. You find out about a patient’s unique problems and perspective only by asking them. You come to realise that the stuff of psychology is real lives, not data points, and these lives and our work as psychologists should be locked in a reciprocal relationship.

Fundamentally, psychology is a science based on the observation of behaviour. Most psychological theories are generated on the basis of wanting to find out how someone perceives something or why people act in a certain way in a particular situation. We are all individuals and we each behave uniquely – I would argue that it is important to remember that. I would like to hear more of the stories of those who have taken part in psychological research of all types: what did they bring to it, how were they affected by it, and how did their personal take subsequently change the perspective of the researchers?

It might be more scientific to collect huge piles of averaged data to test a theory, but I would argue that it is more useful and fun to work with one person at a time.

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We also measured levels of social support. Caregivers felt that they received less social support than parent controls, but, more interestingly, within the caregiver cohort, greater perceived availability of social support was related to reduced distress, fewer health complaints and more adaptive endocrine function. These results The first of a new series focusing on the person in psychological suggest that levels of social support may research and practice buffer against the harmful effects of stress.

Our results provide further evidence that stress can “get inside the body” through biological pathways and lead to The aim The researchers negative health outcomes; however, social Without people, there would be support may help to reduce its impact. very little psychological research. he study of caregivers has become Social support has been identified as a Yet too often the individual is a well-established paradigm for potential stress buffer in a variety of other reduced to a data point, and we assessing the psychophysiological contexts; for example, men demonstrate forget that the person has a voice, consequences of chronic stress and a reduced stress responses when facing is changed by participation in number of studies have observed greater a stressor when their partner is present, psychological research and has psychological distress, dysregulated and women who report greater levels of the potential to impact upon the endocrine activity and reduced immune support from their partner secrete greater process in return. In this series we efficacy in elderly caregiver cohorts. The levels of the hormone oxytocin – “the tend hope to address that, by hearing study of parental caregivers of children and befriend hormone”. the viewpoints of those who have has, by comparison, been a relatively As for how our research could conducted published psychological understudied area. Parents of children inform practice, the well-being of a research, those who have taken with autism face tremendous physical, caregiver goes hand in hand with quality part in it and those who may put financial, emotional and social pressures of life of the care recipient; therefore, by those findings into practice. and these can lead to prolonged activation identifying factors that might buffer the of stress responses, which might place harmful effects of stress in the carer, we them at greater risk of adverse health can improve quality of life for the care outcomes. The consequences of these recipient. The fact that social support We want to hear the stories of those effects are far-reaching, and can influence can be beneficial to carers may not be who have taken part in published the ability of the caregiver to provide new to people who already deliver care research. Contact the Associate Editor, consistent, effective and sustainable care and resources to the families of children Dr Catherine Loveday, on for their child. with autism; however, these findings C.Loveday@wmin.ac.uk.

In our research, we demonstrate its found that caregivers potential buffering of children with effect in terms of Lovell, B. & Wetherell, M.A. (2011). The cost of autism reported health and markers caregiving: Endocrine and immune implications markedly greater levels of disease vulnerability. in elderly and non elderly cohorts. Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Review, 35(6), 1342–1352. of depression, anxiety We would, therefore, Lovell, B., Moss, M. & Wetherell, M.A. (2012). With a and perceived stress hope that the findings little help from my friends: Psychological, and greater incidences could spark the endocrine and health corollaries of social of commonly development of support in parental caregivers of children with occurring ailments, initiatives aimed at autism or ADHD. Research in Developmental such as coughs, colds, greater utilisation of Disabilities, 33, 682–687. See headaches, etc., social support, both tinyurl.com/walhfmf compared with parents practical and Lovell, B., Moss, M. & Wetherell, M.A. (in press).

The psychosocial, endocrine and immune of typically developing emotional, to carers consequences of caring for a child with autism children. This may not and their families. or ADHD. Psychoneuroendocrinology. sound too surprising We’re always looking Kiecolt-Glaser, J.K., Dura, J.R., Speicher, C.E., Brian Lovell and Dr Mark especially given that to collaborate with other Trask, J. & Glaser, R. (1991). Spousal caregivers Wetherell, Stress Research Group, the caregiver paradigm areas within psychology. of dementia victims: Longitudinal changes in Northumbria University is founded on high The development and immunity and health. Psychosomatic Medicine, levels of distress in delivery of relevant 53, 345–362. caregiver cohorts; interventions that can Gallagher, S., Phillips, A.A., Drayson, M.T. & Carroll, however, caregivers also differed in levels alleviate the burden associated with stress D. (2009). Parental caregivers of children with developmental disabilities mount a poor of biological parameters. In particular, they in caregivers would be the next logical step antibody response to pneumococcal had higher levels of C-reactive protein in this programme and the findings vaccination. Brain, Behavior and Immunity, 23, (CRP) which is a marker of inflammation. regarding social support provide a logical 338–346.

Although the levels we observed would area for development. Health and clinical Vedhara, K., Cox, N.K.M., Wilcock, G.K. et al. (1999). not be considered clinically elevated, high psychologists and others experienced in Chronic stress in elderly carers of dementia levels of CRP is a risk factor for the development of effective interventions patients and antibody response to influenza cardiovascular-related diseases and has also would, therefore, make a valuable vaccination. The Lancet, 353, 627–631. been linked to diabetes. contribution to this next step.

The cost of caregiving

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The carer – Claire Sowerby

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eing responsible for a daughter with autism is all-encompassing. It can be wonderful, because my child has such a unique perspective on life, is loyal, can be helpful and kind and in a lot of ways quite straightforward. The hard part is other people making judgements about me and my child, because they do not understand her differences and think I can change her, or she can change in ways she cannot. It makes life very stressful, and my world has shrunk, so that there are only a few people in it. The ones left are those who try to understand or are in the same position. My daughter has withdrawn socially outside of school. I now find it’s easier to “go with the flow” and withdraw with her, than hope to go and do things we used to do.

Having ASD means she will not follow a clear development towards independence, which parents of a non-disabled child plan for. Therefore my life will not follow the cycle others can expect. Because she is on the autistic spectrum (rather than having a clearly defined label of autism) I have never been entitled to any respite and do not expect any future intervention or support in her future life plans. I have given up hope of having a relationship. I cannot go out socially (apart from when my child is at school) or plan for a future with anyone when everything is so uncertain.

My daughter’s development is ageappropriate in some ways, for example wanting to wear make up or watch “15” films, but then not in many other ways, such as not going out with peers, instead being dependent on me for all her social needs and watching Teletubbies. I do not know how independent my child will ever be and cannot make future plans in which she is not central to these. I don’t know if she will have a partner or family (she says she would love children). If she did have a child, would she be able to look after it?

Will she be able to work? Go out without

Conducting this research has inevitably taught us a bit about what it’s like to look after someone. If you’re a parent, you’ll be very aware of the ups and downs of parenting and the benefits of having good social support. What is striking in our meetings is the consistent delivery of care that these parents provide their children, despite their extremely high levels of psychological distress and a perceived unavailability of the social support that they think they need.’

being taken advantage of?

I am a qualified nurse practitioner but no longer work. I could not work the hours required in this type of job or at that level of responsibility now. I did have other jobs in clerical/teaching support assistant type work more recently, but have had to finish all of those jobs due to lack of childcare, stress and lack of employer flexibility. My daughter was placed in an inappropriate school environment and became highly stressed, developed risktaking behaviour and refused to go to school. I spent three and a half years writing letters, keeping diaries, appealing against statements to get her moved, which meant that work was out of the question.

Her non-autistic sister developed issues too, as we were living in a very volatile situation, and this impacted on her mental health.

There is and has been no childcare appropriate to the age and needs of my child (who is now 15). She cannot be left on her own as she is too vulnerable. I have tried to share care with other parents in a similar position, but because autistic children are used to everyone in the house bending to their needs, they often do not like someone else in the house trying to get on the computer or touching their things. It is horrible being dependent on benefits. It makes me feel very vulnerable, particularly when there are to be cuts to benefits and they have to be reapplied for over and over again (e.g. disability benefit). Having to give up so many jobs has knocked my confidence and I hate being judged by society. I want to work but cannot leave my child alone and do not know of any time in the future that I can. Financially things are difficult, for example replacing broken electrical

equipment, providing luxury items, like holidays, etc.

Participating in the research project with Northumbria University was nerve-racking when I first went there, but I was put at ease by the staff. Everything was explained clearly and was fairly simple to do. I was disappointed more parents did not get involved, as I think this research is valuable to us. Without evidence, how will our stress and the costs of that stress (financially, emotionally and socially) ever be recognised?

I was pleased to be provided with the findings of the research, as I felt it validated my experiences. It helped me feel less alone and inadequate, knowing other parents were exhibiting similar stress reactions.

I would be interested to know of any other relevant research that has been done, and would be happy to take part in other research. The only intervention I have had is when things have reached a crisis. This can make you feel inadequate, when the rest of the time you may have coped very well under very difficult circumstances.

It would be good if there was more preventative type of help for parents, e.g. a supporter of some sort being available once a month/every few months to see and talk to about all the issues dealt with successfully (so you feel more empowered and strengths are recognised) and those that are a worry, to prevent these issues becoming critical. A friend told me about emotionally focused therapy, which she found helpful, and I think it would be a good technique I could to use to reduce stress levels. Also maybe I would benefit from being taught meditation.’

The health professionals What are the most frequent difficulties or anxieties that carers talk to you about?

One of the major anxieties carers express is the uncertainty around how their child’s diagnosis of autism may affect their child in the future and what impact this will have on their development. Associated with this are their anxieties around future service provision, managing transitions,

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independent living and future employment prospects. Families will often describe having anxieties in relation to managing certain behaviours without this having a detrimental impact on their ability to participate in social activities.

Anxieties in relation to educational provision are often centred on how to communicate the diagnosis, how to negotiate further support for their child

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and how to choose which educational provision will best support their child.

How do you feel about psychologists wanting to carry out research with people caring for a child with autism?

Working in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service it is important that we are providing a service that is evidence-based and that families feel well supported by. Conducting research with carers can provide rich and detailed information based on real experiences, which is invaluable. This research can then inform future policies, guidelines and practice to ensure that evidencebased services are being provided. The importance of this is highlighted in the Autism NICE guidelines (2011), which state that treatment and care should take into account the preferences and needs of both the young person and their carers.

Carrying out research with carers is therefore providing them with an opportunity to make their preferences and needs heard and for this to impact on service delivery.

What do you think of the recent findings and can you envisage how this might help to inform carers and those

supporting them? the important role of listening to and This research has provided carers with an containing carers’ initial anxieties as well opportunity to reflect on these findings, as helping families to make sense of a perhaps giving them permission to diagnosis. Furthermore, they can make acknowledge and voice thoughts and parents aware of the impact that feelings that may have felt too difficult to caregiving can have on their own acknowledge previously. Furthermore, by emotional well-being and encourage highlighting the impact of caregiving it the use of social support and respite, normalises this experience as it is shared and signpost them to other agencies. by others in Psychologists can play a key similar situations. role in supporting carers in This research has developing strategies for “Conducting research with also emphasised managing difficulties, carers can provide rich and to services that promoting skill learning detailed information� there needs to be and maximising the child’s greater strengths. Psychologists can also consideration develop and deliver therapeutic and given to the impact that caring can have psycho-educational groups about autism, on an individual and that this should be comorbid mental health difficulties and discussed openly with carers. This behavioural interventions. Their research further identifies a role for involvement in planning services and services to spend time with carers organising multi-agency pathways can identifying social support and ensuring ensure that carers feel well supported by that the treatment plan encompasses the different services. Furthermore, they can carer’s needs as well as the child’s. offer teaching, training and supervision to professionals and services who work with Are there any other ways the carers, ensuring that a high level of psychology profession could inform or support is being provided. support people caring for a child with Dr Laura Rollisson and autism?

Dr Catherine Wright Following diagnosis, psychologists have Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services

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