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cover Francesca Protopapa – from Frida Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
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The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’
The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag.
Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne, Shaoni Bhattacharya (job share) Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young
Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Peter Olusoga, Blanca Poveda, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Vacant Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Dawn Branley-Bell, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Deborah Husbands, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker
18/01/2022 07:16
the
psychologist february 2022
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14 A good news story worth sharing Emma Young on conversations, plus more from the Research Digest
02 Letters Slow science in scholarly critique, and more
05 Obituaries Albert Bandura 08 News The wider workforce, BPS member vote, honours; and more
20 ‘You have to find a way to bring psychological concepts to life’ Belinda Winder hears from Phil Banyard
48 From interrogation to conversation Kai Li Chung and Ray Bull on global guidelines
24 ‘Storytelling is your best weapon for convincing people’ We meet Will Storr
30 ‘All of the research is pointless if we can’t digest it’ Angharad Rudkin on writing for the public
54 ‘Psychology keeps you asking questions’ We meet Melanie Dawn Douglass
34 ‘It’s just a bunch of people telling your story, and excluding you from the telling’ Caroline Clare on shared formulation with stories
38 ‘Thematic analysis has travelled to places we’ve never heard of’ Astrid Coxon meets Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, to discuss a method where scientists are more like storytellers 44 Our storytelling nature Jonathan Gottschall looks back on the Heider-Simmel experiment
psy 0222 p01 contents.indd 2
56 Jobs in psychology
58 Books Stories changing lives; the hidden diary of an apartheid prisoner; the workplace zoo; and Frank Tallis on storytelling
66 Culture Thomas Dixon and John Geddes in discussion over the Anatomy of Melancholy; the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries; and more
70 One on one Kanthi Hettigoda
72 Updating the BPS Charter, Statute and Rules Vote now on proposed changes; see also letter from the President sent with this issue
I’ve not seen Game of Thrones (‘Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings’ – Stewart Lee). But Tyrion Lannister was spot on when he said ‘There is nothing more powerful in the world than a good story’. Storytelling may even be what defines us as a species. However we gather, people tell stories. We challenge, titillate, scandalise, amuse, change minds. We build worlds, guide our audience on winding roads, tangents and dead ends. We create heroes and villains. People think, feel, do differently because of what we have said. Except when we write about science. Of course, there are brilliant exceptions. But on the whole, psychologists hold back from telling stories around their work, and may even equate storytelling with exaggeration and outright lying. As a magazine we’d love to see that change, so this issue has a storytelling theme throughout. Joining the dots, and adding some personal colour to the story, can bring concepts to life and drive real change. Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag
18/01/2022 07:16
Slow science in scholarly critique
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Tim Sanders
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In recent years, scholars have advocated to ‘slow down’ science, to promote more thorough, thoughtful, and rigorous approaches to research (Leite & Diele-Viegas, 2021). Slow science aims to address concerns with the robustness, transparency, and reproducibility of research, reduce waste, and ultimately shift focus from quantity to quality of outputs (Frith, 2020). However, we argue that there is an inherent disconnect between the values of slow, robust, and open science, and the ways this is translated in how researchers engage in scholarly critique. We are two early-career researchers who have escalating concerns about the nature of scholarly critique, most notably in our discipline of social psychology. We observe tensions between the calls for slow, thoughtful, rigorous research that open science heartily promotes, and the way criticism is expressed in practice. At the core of these concerns is a wider debate about the purpose, value, and norms of academic spaces on Twitter, which regularly hosts scholarly criticism, debate, and discussion. Platforms such as Twitter promote short, fast, instantaneous responses that are consumed in real time by the wider community. We argue that the proliferation of scholarly debate and discussion on Twitter has inadvertently produced a culture of ‘fast critique’, which can result in attacks or jokes at the expense of researchers, rather than constructive dialogue. Scholarly critique is not in itself problematic. Scientific progress requires wider peer-to-peer discussion and debate to advance the field, correct errors, and advocate for methodological robustness. However, we are troubled by the growing culture of fast, hostile, and superficial critiques of research that is not conducted in line with principles of open, transparent science. This is particularly problematic given the hostility, unkindness, and abrasiveness within open science spaces (Whitaker & Guest, 2020), which finds breeding ground on sites such as Twitter. There are cases where scholars do thoroughly and thoughtfully engage in scholarly critique, for example, in the form of a Twitter thread or online commentary. However, such responses typically arise after a burst of responses have already hit the community. Therefore, while this may not always be a reason to be concerned, in some cases, we suggest such public ‘analyses’ are not necessarily made with good intent but may further reflect and perpetuate the existing power asymmetries in academia. With this in mind, we would like you to reflect upon whose research is most often the subject of lengthy online discussion and ‘debate’. As we see it, some researchers are inherently at greater risk of facing laboured online criticism, under the facade of ‘wellmeaning critique’ (Anonymous, 2021). Researchers who occupy marginalised spaces within academia and those who address the existing power relations are disproportionately negatively impacted by this culture
(Pownall et al., 2021). Therefore, if our scholarly critique is not fair, thoughtful, and well-considered, it can exacerbate inequalities and alienate researchers at the margins of the community. We call on the community for a more comprehensive consideration of how scholarly critique can promote the values of open science (as per Ledgerwood et al., 2021). We urge scientists to more readily apply the valued principles of slow, thoughtful, transparent science to the process of engaging in scholarly critique. In concrete terms, criticism should be expressed in the form of published comments that adhere to academic standards of rigour and peer review, as well as reflection on the positive contribution of research. Making published commentary accessible not only benefits the researchers, but also informs and educates wider consumers of research. Finally, we fear that without a more compassionate shift in how researchers engage in critique of each other’s work, academic progress may suffer, with marginalised scholars being pushed further out of the discipline. Madeleine Pownall School of Psychology, University of Leeds Carina Hoerst School of Psychology, University of Sussex References Anonymous. (2021, 17 January). It’s 2021… and we are still dealing with misogyny in the name of open science [Blog post]. University of Sussex. Retrieved from https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/crowdsidentities Frith, U. (2020). Fast lane to slow science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(1), 1-2. Ledgerwood, A., Hudson, S.T.J., Lewis, N.A., Jr. et al. (in press). The pandemic as a portal: Reimagining psychological science as truly open and inclusive. Perspectives on Psychological Science. Leite, L. & Diele-Viegas, L.M. (2021). Juggling slow and fast science. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(4), 409-409. Pownall, M., Talbot, C.V., Henschel, A. et al. (2021). Psychology of Women Quarterly, 45(4), 526-539. Whitaker, K. & Guest, O. (2020). #bropenscience is broken science. The Psychologist, 33, 34-37.
18/01/2022 07:20
the psychologist february 2022 letters
Sharing our stories professionals. For me, it was a deep sense of unworthiness. I think this may be similar for others in the caring professions –
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I was compelled to write after reading the articles by Kyle Kelleher and Annie Hickox (October issue). They really sparked something in me. I am a student on a conversion course, with hopes of pursuing a doctorate in the future, after 15 years in mental health nursing and healthcare management. Despite my professional exposure to the topics covered by Hickox and Kelleher, I have never felt able to disclose my status as a person with ‘lived experience’. I reflected on this a lot after reading these articles and I believe that it wasn’t fear holding me back, as is often assumed by
when you are surrounded daily by people who are in pain or suffer, who have been severely impacted by their experiences, there is almost a sense that you don’t deserve support or help because others have it so much worse. There is even a sense that things can’t have been that bad; look at you now, you have a good job, a decent income, a family, and your health. Perhaps this is a cultural problem as well? In any case, I am now intent on finding a way to share my stories, because I see that there may be value in them. Claire Forkes Aberdeen
Left-wing authoritarianism in psychology The discussion of the concept of leftwing authoritarianism (LWA), its existence and relevance to society today (December issue), does appear to ignore some earlier features of political psychology. While Altemeyer may have concluded that LWA may not be an important feature of political and social behaviour, this was not an opinion shared my many psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s. The seminal book by a forgotten man of British psychology, Hans Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics (1954), and numerous papers by Australian psychologist J.J. Ray
forgotten. But the critiques and dismissal of their work may be as much an outcome of the very large left-wing political bias which exists in American and British social psychology (cf. Crawford’s 2017 Politics of Social Psychology) resulting in the denigration of important work based upon ideological, and unstated, assumptions. The presentday interest in the politics of the discipline of social psychology also itself remains ignorant of work in the area going back several decades. Two comments need to be made with respect to this work. First, LWA does not exist solely in the minds of young PRC soldiers. It is pervasive in contemporary society and social the p s yc h o lo psychology and psychology generally g ist de cembe rshould 2021 d igestbe prepared to study it and its social and political ramifications for society. Second, psychology’s ignorance of its past and the work done by clever and insightful psychologists which is more than five years old should be a matter of concern. To understand the future an understanding of the past is a useful beginning. Mike Innes FBPsS EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence University of South Australia
(e.g. a chapter on conservatism and authoritarianism in 1973’s The Psychology of Conservatism) all considered the existence of LWA and, most importantly, its similarities with right-wing authoritarianism. Eysenck and Ray were both controversial figures in their time (see e.g. Buchanan’s 2010 book Playing with Fire: The Controversial Career of Hans J. Eysenck). There were influential conceptual and methodological critiques of their work (e.g. Christie’s 1956 paper ‘Some abuses of psychology’) and their contributions have been almost
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18/01/2022 07:20
Labels open the door While I applaud the thinking behind both letters on the subject of neurodevelopmental diagnoses in children (January issue), I think both authors are missing a crucial aspect of so-called ‘Special Needs’ education. That is that the entire funding model for this sector is founded in labels such as ADHD and autism. Without them, no child
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could achieve a Statement of Special Educational Needs. It then follows that Schools (and thereby the children) will be deprived of the additional resources available to provide necessary supports, including Special Needs Teachers. It can only be by achieving labels, in themselves a shorthand for the nature of likely difficulties, that a Statement of Needs can be put together. In these documents the specific needs of each child they relate to are given and an outline (at least) of the nature of support required, and how it is to be maintained across the child’s education. Yes, it must be frustrating to see a child apparently reduced to a one- or two-word diagnosis, but the entire funding structure is tied to such fundamentals. Although well-intentioned, both authors are targeting the wrong thing – rather, they should be arguing for a change in educational policy relating to neurodevelopmental differences that does not rely on so heavily on generic diagnoses. Finally, as a point I feel passionately about, can I encourage Katina Offord to look into ADHD a bit more? It truly is a neurological difference that people do not grow out of; witness the many people now being diagnosed with so-called Adult ADHD. Sandie Hobley Retired Psychologist
04
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As psychologists, we are uniquely qualified to help people recognise and understand patterns of conflict in their lives. We give people opportunities to get ‘unstuck’ and move forward differently. This is what we trained for. When someone says, ‘I’m overwhelmed and feel out of control’ we say, ‘come on in, let’s talk about it’. When someone says, ‘my life is falling apart’ we say, ‘let’s figure this out together’. We run towards the emotional fire – or, more accurately, sit near it. Yet to me, there seem to be too many divisions within our profession. Too much focus on identifying how theories or approaches are in separate circles in the figurative Venn diagram, and not enough discussion about where those circles overlap. I believe that a more uniform approach to conceptualising patients, taking a developmental approach and focusing on early childhood
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Running toward the emotional fires
relationships, would benefit both therapists and patients. Looking to the developmental approach for a common ‘therapy language’ – for social workers, counselors, therapists, psychologists, and others who ‘run toward the emotional fires’ – is not an eclectic approach to therapy. It’s the reality of how humans learn. Regardless of
race, culture or religion, all people develop their understanding of how relationships work, who they are, and how to express emotions first as a child. Their understanding of what is normal, possible, and desirable begins with their first relationships and experiences. This remains the same whether their therapist views symptoms as learned behaviours or defences against unconscious conflicts. If people are going to change how they express or regulate their emotions and repair or create healthy relationships, they are going to need help understanding how their symptoms formed, and in sparking new patterns of relating to themselves and others. Jeffrey Karp, licensed psychologist Cleveland, Ohio Read the full piece online at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/runningtoward-emotional-fires
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the psychologist february 2022 letters
Albert Bandura 1925-2021 We both had the good fortune to have Al as a research mentor while we were undergraduate (EE) and graduate (EO) students at Stanford. We experienced his remarkable qualities up close – robust optimism, kindness and humility, his easy distinctive laugh, generosity with his time, and dedication to scholarship. He made others feel that their research was important and worth pursuing, and he lived his theory of selfefficacy – instilling confidence for success experiences. Al had such joy in sharing knowledge. He would explain ideas like a well-organised essay in his mind – with verbal paragraphs often punctuated by references – authors and years, and sometimes even the journal names. Students and anyone who collaborated with him are familiar with the detailed edits he would pencil in the margins. In class, lecturing with an old style overhead projector, he would lay out the problem, the evidence, and the knowledge gaps so clearly, it was palpable. He inspired us to see how we might contribute to science; altering career paths with the vicarious social modeling of his own career. It was like aligning with a strong magnetic force. I (EE) was on a direct path to medicine when I first took Al’s undergraduate class in the late eighties. Learning about the social cognitive determinants of health behaviors was revelatory to me. I was amazed at the self-efficacy interventions showing the power of the mind to shape daily behavior and physiological health such as diet and cholesterol levels. The seeds were planted: I decided to instead pursue the psychology of health. Thirty-plus years later, I am still on this path of understanding how to best alter psychological and behavioral health to promote public health. After taking his class, I decided to do a senior research project testing the power of self-efficacy.
I approached him during office hours, with my heart racing, asking if we could apply social cognitive theory to the problem of homelessness. Together, we devised a study to measure self-efficacy for finding housing but needed access to a family shelter. One after another, the city’s shelters turned me away. But Al was not easily deterred by obstacles. He didn’t blink an eye, but rather asked what was next on my list, confident that we would find an open door if I only kept knocking (literally). I eventually found a shelter system in a nearby city that welcomed us. The outcome of that study was like a parable. Those with low efficacy seemed to give up on searching for housing whereas those with high selfefficacy searched harder for housing (Epel, Bandura, Zimbardo, 1999). In the end, they were no more likely to end up with permanent housing, given how severe the US housing crisis was at that time, demonstrating the hard rule of life that we can control our behaviors, but we cannot always control outcomes. However, if we don’t have sufficient self-efficacy in the first place, the doors may as well be closed. As Al said, ‘Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure’ (Bandura, 1997). Elissa Epel, PhD, and Elizabeth Ozer, PhD University of California, San Francisco Read the full tribute, including ‘the self-efficacy song’, at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/albert-bandura-1925-2021
Sandy Reed 1955-2021 Remembered by Nigel Roberts thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/sandyreed-1955-2021
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‘We should be an inclusive home’ Ella Rhodes on plans around the psychological workforce, and a British Psychological Society vote
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plan to support 60 per cent growth in the psychological workforce over the next two years has been published by Health Education England. The Psychological Professions Workforce Plan for England was created to support the goals of the NHS Long Term Plan and was developed with the support of the British Psychological Society. The plan was developed by the National Psychological Professions Workforce Group – policy and delivery leads at NHS England and Health Education England, stakeholders in the psychological professions (including service user and carer experts by experience), and 13 professional bodies including the BPS. It emphasises the role of NHS bodies, Integrated Care Systems, employers and education providers in working together to help increase the workforce to support the NHS Long Term Plan and the introduction of Mental Health Support Teams in schools, and to increase access to mental health care more broadly. The plan is based around five priorities – expanding the workforce to improve access to psychological care, establishing clear career paths and development opportunities for professionals in psychology, attracting people from all backgrounds, developing leadership locally, regionally, and nationally, as well as new ways of working. It is focused on 12 core professions, including more traditional roles such as clinical psychologists and health psychologists and newer roles including children’s wellbeing practitioners and education mental health practitioners. Claire Tilley, Head of Workforce, Education, Training and Standards at the BPS, explained how the society had been involved with the workforce plans. ‘When HEE and
NHS England were undertaking a detailed analysis of the current workforce and its future long-term needs at the early stages of the Long Term Plan, we did a lot of work with them to identify who’s in our workforce, what the new roles were and how they would be trained. We’ve now moved to become an accrediting body for many of the new and expanding roles – supporting the quality assurance of the training pathways which lead to them. ‘We now also have a registration scheme for Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners and Clinical Associate in Psychology roles. We’ve acted in a very specific way to help NHS England and HEE to realise their vision but in a way that’s robust and sustainable.’ Tilley said that some of the biggest issues in the NHS were recruitment, retention and upskilling. Early discussions explored the transferability of skills between practitioner routes and ways to retain staff. She added that the BPS had tried to be a voice for the professions it represented in discussions and planning. Tilley said the BPS had also been involved in developing apprenticeships and had supported and welcomed the expansion of funding. ‘A lot of the work that is happening now is the fruition of a lot of ongoing work and collaboration over a number of years.’ While the NHS Long Term Plan and the new Mental Health Support Teams in schools have largely driven a need for growth, the workforce plan also explores the employment of psychological professionals beyond the Long Term Plan in physical health settings, forensic services, and drug and alcohol services. It aims to support local systems in meeting this growth target, and also feeds into a wider workforce planning process which Health Education England is carrying out to support the
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the psychologist february 2022 news overarching mental health workforce strategy. To reflect these and other changes, the BPS is holding an historic member vote asking members to agree to changes to its charter and statutes – the first such vote in more than a decade, coming after a review of member grades and governance. Members are asked to agree to a number of changes, including the introduction of Associate Membership aimed at those working in the wider workforce and Full Membership which will offer progression for graduate members who often become ‘stuck’ on this membership grade throughout their careers. Tilley said this vote aimed to reflect the changes to the psychological workforce itself. ‘We are the British Psychological Society and we can offer a place for practitioners to come together to collaborate and learn from each other. It’s important for practitioners to have a professional home and a collective sense of identity that I think has been lacking. We should be an inclusive home. Psychology affects all of us and even those with an curiosity about psychology should see an open door at the BPS – even if it’s not as a practitioner, there should be space for everybody.’ Looking to the future, Tilley said the BPS was interested in exploring numerous workforce issues across all four nations, including a need to focus more on moderate to severe mental health presentations and the expansion of better care for children and young people. ‘We’re learning about pilots in some NHS trusts where practitioners are delivering care in the community so people don’t need to go to hospital. I feel we’ll start to see more work happening in specialist spaces such as eating disorders, severe mental health issues and traumatic brain injuries – there will be a question around whether further more specialist roles or enhanced training are needed to support the roles which already exist.’ The vote will also ask members to agree to new routes to chartered membership where, as well as formal qualifications, competency and experience will be considered; and the introduction of a Chair of the Board of Trustees which will be separate from the President role. Members will also be asked whether they agree with the removal of Vice President, Honorary General Secretary and Honorary Treasurer roles, to change the term of President and President Elect roles from one year to two, and the introduction of three trustees with expertise in areas such as finance and HR. The vote closes on Saturday 12 February. To read the workforce plan in full see: tinyurl.com/ bddtppuv To find out more about the BPS vote see www.bps.org.uk/member-vote-2022 and the letter from President Katherine Carpenter with this issue. BPS votes now happen online as standard. To find out more or to update your voting preferences see www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/modernisingour-voting-system
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Proud achievements for psychologists Academic and practitioner psychologists working in military recruitment, tackling the climate crisis and supporting children and young people have all been named in the 2022 New Year Honours list. Among them was BPS member Margaret Bailey, an occupational psychologist with RAF Recruitment and Selection (R&S) based at RAF Cranwell, who received an MBE for her services to aircrew assessment and aptitude testing. Bailey began working with the RAF in 1992, leading the R&S Occupational Psychology Department which provides support with recruitment strategies, assessment methods and selection policy, carries out analyses to identify operational and training requirements across military specialisations, and undertakes research to develop evaluate and validate aptitude tests, assessment centre procedures and interviews. Bailey said she felt honoured and delighted to receive the MBE. ‘I really do need to thank my colleagues for their support and assistance over the years, without whom all that we have achieved for RAF selection just would not have been possible. I am grateful that our work and effort is appreciated.’ Bailey said she was proud to see the degree to which selection methods had evolved over the years, and how they had become internationally renowned for their effectiveness. ‘Looking back over the years, I am so pleased that as Occupational Psychologists we have been able to build up a strong rapport with our RAF colleagues. It is the trust and respect from them that really has enabled us to explore, develop and implement different psychological measures and build an effective selection system.’ Another Society member, Consultant Clinical Psychologist Dr Beth Mosley (Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust), was awarded an MBE for her innovative work in mental health services for young people. She said she was baffled to receive a letter from the Cabinet Office. ‘It was such an amazing surprise and I felt humbled by it – all I could think about was all the amazing people I have worked with who made it possible.’ After working as the first full-time clinical psychologist at Thurston College in Suffolk between 2017 and 2019, supporting the wellbeing and mental health of students and the school community, Mosley led a pilot project to place clinical psychologists in four Suffolk schools. Although she and her team were redeployed due to Covid, they continued their work supporting school staff, parents and young people with online workshops and training. ‘This support was, and is, incredibly well-received by all, with parents sharing their gratitude for having
Margaret Bailey, MBE (front row, middle)
Dr Beth Mosley, MBE
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access to support and advice and not feeling so alone. Last year 7000 people accessed our parent workshops on supporting young people with common issues and 12,000 people in total have accessed our online training.’ Mosley said that walking into Thurston College as a lone clinician, and leaving with a community backing her work, was one of her proudest achievements. She is now working on an early intervention outreach model for all young people in Suffolk. ‘This work is happening with the invaluable contribution of the Psychology in Schools Team, who I would say I consider as another of my proudest achievements… they are an inspirational team who have turned an idea into a reality and allowed for the expansion of the approach. I feel honoured to work with them and all the other people who are passionate about supporting young people to thrive despite the challenges they face.’ Professor of Environmental Psychology Lorraine Whitmarsh (University of Bath) received an MBE for services to social research in climate change, energy and transport. Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Whitmarsh’s research largely focuses on perceptions and behaviour related to climate change. As well as studying energy efficiency behaviours, waste reduction, and carrier bag reuse, Whitmarsh is also the lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Working Group II and advises government and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication. She said when she
received an email about the MBE she was convinced it was a scam. ‘I couldn’t really believe it! I was delighted and it’s barely started to sink in, but it’s such a nice surprise.’ As well as working with the IPCC, Whitmarsh has also advised the UK government’s Department of Transport on its decarbonisation strategy, and the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy on its public engagement work on reaching net zero. Whitmarsh said some of the proudest achievements of her career so far included being an expert lead for the UK’s first Climate Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh, Assembly and working with the Climate Crisis MBE Advisory Group chaired by former government Chief Scientific Advisor Sir David King. ‘He was actually the person who influenced me to get involved with climate change in the first place, he came to my university when I was doing my PhD and gave a talk saying climate change was the biggest threat facing humanity. Now that doesn’t sound unusual to hear, but that was the first time I’d heard anybody saying anything like that… I realised that we needed to focus psychology on this issue.’ er For more information on Dr Beth Mosley and the Psychology in Schools Teams’ free online workshops, see tinyurl.com/ycy9tjr5 For our December 2020 interview with Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, see tinyurl.com/psychwhit1220
Calling for better Meta analysis
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A global group of academics have signed an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg emphasising a need to investigate the potential impact of social media platforms on child and adolescent mental health. Led by the Oxford Internet Institute’s Director of Research, Professor Andrew Przybylski, it gives three suggested actions to help improve scientific and public understanding in the area. The letter suggested that Meta, a company formerly known as Facebook which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, needed to improve its standards in studying child and adolescent mental health. Its authors wrote that while they applauded Meta’s efforts to understand its platforms and their impact on young people’s mental health, changes were needed. ‘We believe that the methodologically questionable and secretive ways your teams are conducting this important work is
misguided and, in its present state, doomed to fail. Instead of producing reliable scientific insights, the work has – somewhat predictably – been met with intense scepticism from scientists and widespread alarm by lawmakers, journalists, parents, and young people.’ The letter laid out three actions for Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, and the company’s executives, to improve the ways it carries out research. First they have said that Meta should commit to ‘gold-standard’ transparency in its research including independent reviews of all of its research from the past, in the present and future, as well as research conducted in the global north, south and areas of conflict. Second, the authors suggested Meta should contribute to independent research on child and adolescent mental health around the world. ‘Data collected by Meta on how people use their platforms should
be shared with large-scale cohort studies of young people and should be contributed to global studies of child and adolescent mental health, working with researchers worldwide, particularly in the Global South.’ Third, they said a new independent oversight trust was needed for child and adolescent mental health on Meta’s platforms to scientifically vet the risks and benefits of social media in terms of mental health and promote evidencebased solutions globally. The letter concluded: ‘Understanding and supporting child and adolescent mental health in the digital age is a bigger challenge than any one person, company, or team can tackle. We believe your platforms have the potential to play an important role in impacting billions of young people for the common good. This global challenge requires a global solution. We believe Meta can do better and we write to offer our help.’ er
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the psychologist february 2022 news
‘Social media makes a nice bogeyman’ Dr Lucy Foulkes, honorary lecturer at UCL and Senior Research Fellow at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, is hosting a British Psychological Society webinar on social media, and whether it is actually bad for adolescent mental health. How did you first become interested in this area? I’ve been researching adolescent mental health for many years now. There’s evidence that rates of mental health problems in this population are higher now than they were in the past, and I’m interested in why that might be. One common explanation is that adolescents use social media now, and they didn’t in the past. But when you look at the research, the relationship is more complicated than that. I’m keen to dispel the myth that social media is always harmful – so we can better focus on factors that might really be causing the problem. What still needs to change in this area? Lots of things! Despite an enormous amount of research interest in this area, a lot of the work done so far has been poor quality. For example, much of the early work was correlational – meaning that if you find a relationship
between social media use and mental health problems, you don’t really know what’s causing what. This is starting to improve now, and the findings so far are pretty reassuring, but we still have a long way to go. Could you tell us something that might surprise someone not familiar with this area of work? Social media can be good for mental health too. For example, all the components of friendship that we see in ‘real life’ are replicated online: people have fun with each other, confide in each other, etc. And that’s all good for mental health. In fact, this notion of ‘real life’ compared to online life is a bit of a misnomer. Online is real life now, for adults as well as adolescents. And that’s not a bad thing! We need to stop being so scared of social media, I think. What do you hope people will take away from the webinar?
A balanced understanding of the impact that social media has on mental health. There are definitely various problems with it, particularly for vulnerable adolescents, like those who are self-harming or being bullied. But that is true in the context of lots of benefits too. Social media can be both good and bad for mental health. Can you tell us about any common misconceptions/myths in this area? A common misconception is that the recent rise in adolescent mental health problems is because they use social media. It’s a neat explanation and social media makes a nice bogeyman, but the claim is just not backed up by the data. Dr Lucy Foulkes’ webinar will take place between 2pm and 4pm on Wednesday 16 February. To find out more and to book see tinyurl.com/ bdehb6uy
Book awards Topics as diverse as postfeminism and health, talent liberation, and maths are all represented by the winners of this year’s BPS Book Awards. The awards celebrate psychology publications in four categories – academic monographs, popular science, practitioner texts, and textbooks. Professor Rory O’Connor (University of Glasgow) won the popular science category for his book When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It, while Julia Bueno’s The Brink of Being: Talking About Miscarriage was recognised as the runner-up. O’Connor said he was delighted and honoured to win the award: ‘When It Is Darkest is a very personal book to
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Dr Martine Robson me, and I hope that it has provided some hope, understanding and comfort to those affected by suicide, the most devastating of human outcomes.’
The winner in the academic monograph category, which celebrates a significant scholarly work that has contributed to, defined or redefined an area of psychological knowledge, was Postfeminism and Health: Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives by Professor Sarah Riley (Massey University), Dr Adrienne Evans (Coventry University) and Dr Martine Robson (Aberystwyth University). In the practitioner text category author, psychologist, talent strategist, consultant and coach Dr Maggi Evans along with coauthors Professor John Arnold (Loughborough University) and Dr Andrew Rothwell (Loughborough University), were recognised for
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From Talent Management to Talent Liberation: A Practical Guide for Professionals, Managers and Leaders. Evans said that while talent was not scarce, our ability to set it free was in short supply. ‘This book helps organisations, leaders and individuals
Dr Maggi Evans
to find practical ways to liberate talent through creating organisations where everyone can thrive and do their best work’. Finally, the textbook category saw Professor Camilla Gilmore (Loughborough University), Dr Silke Göbel (University of York) and Dr Matthew Inglis (Loughborough University) win for their title An Introduction to Mathematical Cognition. In his nomination Professor Mike Burton said the book was a fascinating introduction to the world of mathematical thinking. ‘A key aspect of human cognition is described from early infant development through to complex adult reasoning. The book is a great example of how educational and psychological insights can interact to help us understand more about ourselves.’
Dr Matthew Inglis Nominations for the 2022 award will open this spring. For more information see tinyurl.com/ bdxp7med Revisit Dr Maggi Evans on talent liberation in last month’s issue, and for an interview with Professor Rory O’Connor about his book (which is now available in audio form), see tinyurl.com/2p93cvy4
A vicious, indeterminate cycle?
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A justice committee inquiry into indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPPs) has heard from forensic psychologist Professor Graham Towl (Durham University), who shared insights on the mental health impact of IPPs. More than 3000 people are currently serving IPPs – which have no end date – and many have already been in prison for much longer than their minimum term, despite the sentences being abolished in 2012. IPPs were introduced by Lord David Blunkett in 2005 during his time as Home Secretary – a decision he later said was wrong. In 2010 the Prison Reform Trust in a report on IPPs said that they were ‘one of the least carefully planned and implemented pieces of legislation in the history of British sentencing’. A government statement pointed out that to be released prisoners have to satisfy the Parole Board that they no longer pose a risk to the public. The statement continued, ‘the first session of the Committee’s inquiry heard of the “vicious cycle” in which many prisoners are being kept in prison in part due to developing mental illnesses whilst being held indeterminately, which has in turn contributed to their risk level.’ At a recent evidence session the Justice Committee heard from Lord Blunkett as well as Professor Towl, a former Chief Psychologist at the Ministry of Justice. Towl was asked by one committee member about the efficacy of programmes offered in prisons and the experiences of people serving IPP sentences – particularly the difficulties they face given the uncertainty about their release dates. He pointed out that having little control over life has been found to lead to poor mental health outcomes. Towl said
he was concerned that questions of risk and need could become complicated – he gave the example of self-harm, which could be an indication that someone is trying to communicate a need, yet it can sometimes be taken as an indicator of personality disorders. ‘There is a danger that individuals will become pathologised for what, in practice, is just a fairly normal reaction to a traumainducing situation – to have no prospect of when they will be leaving prison… all that uncertainty, managing that… is bound to have a negative effect on mental health. And that would be the case, I think, for any of us.’ Towl added that it would be useful to have access to data on the efficacy of programmes run in prisons and pointed to recent findings that programmes aimed to reduce sexual offending had made some people worse – a result which was not released for five years. He said that, given the data which shows those serving IPP sentences are experiencing anxiety and depression, programmes should both aim to reduce reoffending and improve wellbeing and personal development. ‘If we… don’t do work giving them practical skills and practical help linked to employment and education, then I think it is less likely that they will thrive in terms of not reoffending ultimately. I think it’s more likely they will engage more positively in work to reduce reoffending if we show that we have an interest in them too.’ The inquiry has received numerous written and oral submissions of evidence from charities such as Women in Prison, probation officers, academics and individuals affected by IPP sentences. To find out more about the inquiry see: tinyurl.com/b8t7nfcb. er
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the psychologist february 2022 news
Doctors felt like ‘Covid cannon fodder’ Psychologists and experts in emergency medicine have been involved in a series of multidisciplinary studies exploring frontline doctors’ mental health and experiences of Covid-19 over the course of the pandemic. Dr Jo Daniels, Senior Lecturer and Clinical Psychologist at the University of Bath and principal psychologist in the research team, then went on to lead the development of an evidence-based model of psychological care informed by doctors’ experiences. The research team’s first study, called CERA, was led by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Trainee Emergency Medicine Research Network (TERN). It used a longitudinal design to follow the experiences of doctors working in emergency medicine, anaesthesia and intensive care during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. Analysis of the survey results from the start of the first wave of Covid-19, which heard from more than 5,400 doctors in the UK and Ireland, found that just over 44 per cent were experiencing psychological distress. Results from the later phases of the first wave found that distress (measured with the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was highest while the virus was accelerating, declined slightly to 37 per cent when the first wave reached its peak, and declined to 32 per cent towards the end of the first peak. Levels of trauma in the sample were 23.7 per cent during the first wave peak and 17 per cent as it began to decelerate. In January 2021, during the second wave, further surveys found that both trauma and psychological distress had increased to levels higher than during the first wave. These initial studies led researchers to qualitatively explore the best ways to help clinicians by asking the doctors involved in the CERA study about the worst aspects of working through the pandemic. Daniels, who led a team including psychologists Dr Liz Jenkinson, Sophie Harris and emergency medicine colleagues from TERN, said the results were ‘deeply disturbing’. Doctors spoke of feeling like ‘Covid cannon fodder’ rather than heroes, and said they had felt unprotected from the virus. Some said they felt the government and NHS trusts were not supportive of frontline workers and many pointed to the overwhelmed system in which they were working. Daniels and colleagues have been working with input from doctors and national experts, creating the Covid-19 Clinician Cohort (CoCCo) model of wellbeing, which Daniels reported as ‘grounded in evidence and led by what doctors actually wanted’. The model emphasised a need to provide doctors with the basics first – places to sleep and rest and access to hot meals. It suggested that clinical settings should have visible and compassionate leadership, good communication, and access to destigmatising information. The model emphasised that the reactions to trauma which some doctors have experienced should be normalised and acknowledged. The model also suggested that support for doctors’ wellbeing should be embedded into clinical teams, for
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example by introducing peer support, providing opportunities for staff to reflect and access to a known psychologist. Finally, the model acknowledged that some staff may need further support and suggested that any psychological interventions should be tailored to an individual’s needs and the unique demands of frontline working. After speaking with us, Daniels was back in touch to add: ‘I’ve just found out that I have won a UKRI Policy Support fund so that I will be seconded to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine to develop policies and services around doctors and their wellbeing – hopefully pushing forward some of the work I have been doing. Exciting stuff!’ er For an animation about the CoCCo project see: tinyurl. com/2p8naazk For an open-access paper on the CoCCO project see: tinyurl.com/4uvs5pu7 To read the open-access qualitative paper on doctors’ experiences during the pandemic see: tinyurl. com/46khfe98
Faculty for Holistic Psychology
Holistic Faculty 2022 CPD Events Wednesday 2 March 2022 12.30pm to 14.00pm on Zoom Through the Lens of Neurodiversity, in Practice and Understanding Susan Bartrop, Coaching Psychologist Future events dates to be confirmed Yoga for Health and Well Being: Tips for integrating into personal and professional practice Daljit Sandu and Nina Dhiman Beyond The Therapy Room: An exploration of outdoor talking therapy Sam Cooley Free networking events for Faculty members. For more information, please use the following link: www.bps.org.uk/dcpholistic/events To join this Faculty, please visit www.bps.org.uk/dcpholistic/join
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A good news story worth sharing Emma Young digests the research on conversations
Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links, podcast and more on the Research Digest website 14
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Every time we catch up with a friend, we share the stories of our lives, from the mundane to the profound. Swapping stories – and especially secrets – helps to create friendships in the first place. Now new research is providing some intriguing insights into how to get that process going, and maintain it – how to handle conversations, turn acquaintances or even strangers into new friends, and new friends into life-long confidantes.
Do talk to strangers…
Back in 2014, a pair of psychologists published a now classic study of Chicago commuters, which found that although our instinct is to ignore strangers, we are happier when we chat to them (see tinyurl.com/ dig150814). Importantly, this was true for introverts as well as extraverts. The researchers also found that the commuters’ reluctance to strike up a conversation with a stranger was down to a mistaken belief that strangers wouldn’t want to talk to them. In 2021, a team that included Nicholas Epley, one of the authors of the initial paper, published very similar results from a study of train commuters in the London area. Clearly, this phenomenon applies to British people, too. So, go on, next time you’re with a stranger, why not try striking up a conversation — it’ll probably go better than you think.
…But be aware of their personal space
Our preferred personal space – the distance that we like to keep between ourselves and whoever we’re interacting with – varies with sex, culture, context and familiarity, and the Covid-19 pandemic is having an influence, too. A 2017 study of almost 9,000 people from 42 different countries (see tinyurl.com/etuebwxr) found some big geographical differences, especially between what the researchers referred to as ‘contact cultures’ (South America, the Middle East and Southern Europe) and ‘non-contact cultures’ (Northern Europe, North America, Asia), where people prefer to stand further apart. So the cultural background of the person you’re talking to is certainly worth bearing in mind, if you don’t want to make them uncomfortable. The research also found that women from most countries prefer more space than men. And in 2021, a small study in the US (see tinyurl.com/ dig220921) found that the preferred personal distances that these participants had reported before the pandemic grew during it, both in reality and virtually. We’ve got used to giving other people a wider berth. This research suggests that with Covid-19 infections continuing, we still want it.
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the psychologist february 2022 digest Getty Images
consistently found that pairs of friends undervalued the positive effect of compliments made to the other – they underestimated the resulting feelings of warmth in the recipient and overestimated how awkward that recipient would feel. This mistaken viewpoint seemed to have realworld effects: the participants also reported generally giving fewer compliments than they felt they should give, or even would like to give. What if you don’t fully believe in the compliment that you’re giving? ‘People may be reluctant to flatter others with insincere compliments because they overestimate the likelihood that their insincerity will be detected,’ the researchers write. In other words, do it anyway – odds are they’ll take your comment at face value.
Don’t fret after a conversation
Do go deep
We want deep and meaningful relationships with others, and we know that sharing intimate stories can create them. But how soon after meeting someone should we move past the small talk? According to a 2021 study again involving Epley and led by Michael Kardas, the answer is: right away. The participants in this research (see tinyurl.com/digest151121) overestimated how awkward a deep conversation with a stranger would be – and also underestimated how interested strangers would be in their revelations. And though the participants expected to prefer a shallow over a deep conversation with a stranger, this was not the case. The deep conversations left them feeling more connected.
Do be complimentary
Do you worry that saying ‘Oh, I love your dress!’ or even ‘You’ve got a great sense of humour!’ might sound insincere or too personal, and create awkwardness rather than fellow feeling? Well, don’t is the message of yet another new study involving Epley, also published in 2021. Earlier research has shown that giving compliments draws both strangers and friends closer together. It also costs nothing, either financially or in terms of effort. And yet this work, led by Xuan Zhao on participants in the US,
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One of the most positive, feel-good findings I’ve ever reported on was this: other people like us more than we think. This was the conclusion of a study of strangers who were paired up for brief conversations (see tinyurl. com/dig240918). Afterwards, they rated how much they liked their partners and how much they thought their partners liked them. And they consistently underestimated how much they were liked – they’d made a better first impression than they thought. What’s more, the shyer the person, the bigger the ‘liking gap’. So don’t let worries about how you might have come across to a new acquaintance put you off building on an initial conversation; they’re probably keener to talk again than you might assume. In 2021, a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General revealed the existence of another conversation-related gap: the ‘thought gap’. After a conversation, we tend to think about the person we’ve been talking to, reflecting on their stories or perhaps their advice, note Gus Cooney at the University of Philadelphia and colleagues. But though we do this ourselves, the team found in a series of studies that their participants mistakenly believed that they thought more afterwards about a person they’d had a conversation with than the other person did about them. ‘Collectively, these studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know,’ the team writes. One of the reasons this message is important is this: in one of the studies, learning how much the other person was actually thinking about them affected their willingness to reconcile after an argument. Overall, then, for such a social species, we’re surprisingly bad at judging how conversations, and the specific content of these conversations, affect our relationships, and our own wellbeing. But the overwhelming take away message from these studies, at least, is positive: it’s all better than you think, so stop worrying, and get sharing.
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Conservatism, conscientiousness and Fake News Why do people share fake news? All kinds of studies have looked into what encourages it, and which personal attributes play a role. As the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General point out, multiple studies have found that political conservatives are relatively more likely to disseminate false news than those on the political left. However, their new work finds that this is an oversimplification – that the link is ‘largely driven’ by conservatives who are low in conscientiousness. This is an important finding for a few reasons. On the upside, it’s a far less politically polarising message. On the downside, this group does not seem to be receptive to the main identified way of stopping fake news from spreading. Asher Lawson and Hemant Kakkar at Duke University ran eight online studies on a total of 4642 US-based participants. In the first, the participants were given 12 reputable and 12 fake news Covid-19 stories from websites. Participants who identified as conservative were, as expected, more likely to say that they would share fake stories. However, further analysis revealed that this was true for conservatives who were low in conscientiousness, but not for those who were high in conscientiousness (highly conscientious people are those who are more diligent and better at controlling impulses). A second study found the same pattern of results for political stories unrelated to Covid-19. Earlier research has found that giving guidance on the likely veracity of a news article helps to stop the spread of fake news. Indeed, this has been highlighted as a potentially important way to counter its spread. So, would adding fact-checker tags, indicating that the content had been verified or was disputed, reduce the sharing of fake news by low conscientious conservatives? A third study found that it did not. The low conscientious conservatives were more likely to share fake news that aligned with, and so furthered, their own interests. It didn’t seem to matter whether they believed it to be true or not.
This conclusion was supported by the results of an even stronger intervention. When participants in a fresh study indicated they would share a fake news story, they were given an explicit warning that the content was probably false, and asked if they would still like to share. While conservatives were overall less likely than liberals to change their mind, this was especially true for low conscientiousness conservatives. Based on the results of earlier work, the pair wondered whether this group might have a stronger ‘need for chaos’ – a greater desire for anarchy – and that this might drive the effect. They ran yet further studies to investigate, and concluded that this does indeed seem to be the case. Other personality traits, level of trust in the mainstream media, attitudes towards Covid-19, age, gender and time spent on social media were all taken into account in their analyses. Overall, when it came to the spreading of fake news, ‘disparities in sharing behaviour were nearly exclusively driven by low conscientiousness respondents’, with an ‘indiscriminate desire for chaos’, the pair writes. ‘To curtail the spread of misinformation, policymakers should focus on low conscientious conservatives.’ As low conscientious conservatives don’t seem to care whether a story that aligns with their beliefs and interests is true or not, it could be that interventions will need to target conscientiousness itself, rather than simply explaining that a story is fake, the pair writes. How to go about that is another matter entirely. But given the disastrous effects of the spreading of fake news on everything from public health to voter decisions, it’s surely vital that efforts are made to find out. Emma Young Also listen to the latest episode of our podcast, PsychCrunch (sponsored by Routledge Psychology), on misinformation. Getty Images
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the psychologist february 2022 digest Getty Images
Digest digested… A new study has put to bed the sexist stereotype that women are more emotionally turbulent than men. The team looked at the self-reported mood of cisgender men and women across a 75-day period, finding no evidence for any differences in how volatile or cyclical their moods were. (Scientific Reports) Mental health helplines experienced a 35 per cent increase in call volume in the first weeks of the pandemic, according to a recent analysis. This increase appeared to be driven by a higher number of callers discussing fears, loneliness, and worries about physical health. (Nature)
Physical warmth as a sign of safety When we learn that something in our environment signals ‘Threat!’, we start to react to every encounter with a fear response. But recent work has shown that the presence of someone we’re close to can reduce or even eliminate this response. Our brains seem to treat such people as a powerful ‘safety’ signal. Now a paper in Emotion by Erica Hornstein at UCLA has shown that physical warmth does the same thing. In the first of two studies, every time 31 participants were given a rubber ball, a soft fuzzy ball or a heated pack to hold, they were then given an electric shock. One stimulus – a wooden block – was never paired with a shock. The participants’ skin conductance was monitored. This data showed that they quickly developed a fear response to the rubber ball and the fuzzy ball, but not the wooden block – or the warm pack. The warmth seemed to stop them from learning to associate the pack with a threat. When the team then gave the participants all the objects in turn, but without any shocks, the rubber ball and fuzzy ball still triggered a fear response (while the warm pack still did not).
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A second study on 30 people supported and extended this finding. This time, the team paired pictures with electric shocks, so that participants developed a fear response to these pictures. They then showed participants the pictures again, while they held either a warm pack or a rubber ball. The warm pack, but not the ball, completely inhibited the fear response. The team would love to see work exploring how, exactly, both supportive others and physical warmth interfere with the fear response. One possibility is that it’s to do with endogenous opioids – which have been found to be released both when we’re with a close other and by warmth, and which are known to affect fear learning. The researchers see potentially important implications for treating all kinds of anxiety disorders. Perhaps treatments that involve supportive others or – especially for people lacking in strong social bonds – physical warmth could be more effective than current methods for helping people with phobias or PTSD, for example. Clearly, there’s important work to be done. Emma Young
Experiencing a natural disaster can bring couples closer – but only temporarily. That’s according to a study of Texans who lived through Hurricane Harvey. The participants reported a leap in relationship satisfaction after the hurricane, but this initial bump didn’t last long. (Psychological Science) It often feels like people are unable to transcend political boundaries and listen to those they disagree with. But a new study finds that we actually prefer political allies who go out of their way to understand opponents’ views – unless they seem susceptible to changing side. (Psychological Science) A series of studies has found that while we see the wealth of billionaires as a group as unfair, we remain more tolerant of the achievements and wealth of individuals. Participants who read about rich individuals had a stronger belief that wealth was down to personal characteristics, for instance, and were less likely to back an inheritance tax than those who read about a group of wealthy people. (PNAS)
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‘You have to find a way of bringing psychological concepts to life’ Phil Banyard, Head of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, author of over 20 psychology textbooks, and former Chief A-level Psychology Examiner, retired in June 2021. Here, Professor Belinda Winder talks with Phil about his life and times as he embarks upon the Vitus Emeritus.
So, how did you end up being a psychologist? My career has been part serendipity, part design. I got a psychology degree rather by accident because I started off studying physics. I wasn’t really enjoying it, and psychology looked more fun, so I swapped into psychology in my second year at university. I wasn’t a good student, to put it mildly, so didn’t carry on past undergraduate. Some years later, pursuing a fairly dissolute life and having failed to make the Olympics show jumping team, I ended up unemployed and on the terrace at Nottingham Forest Football Club, when someone standing nearby said that the local Further Education college needed a part-time psychology teacher. I thought I could do that, so I applied, got an interview and I happened to be the only person who turned up for an interview. Being the sole interviewee has helped on a number of occasions in my life. In fact, those are the jobs I have got – even for the Head of Department of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, I was the only person left standing after two others had turned the job down.
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So your advice to aspiring psychologists is get rid of the opposition? Make sure nobody else turns out, that’s your only hope. Anyway, I started teaching psychology at the Further Education college and realised I really enjoyed it. Teaching was something I could do. I never thought I would, but I really enjoyed it. When you have to explain something to people, it’s a whole different ball game from simply understanding it yourself. With teaching, I got a chance to stand up in front of people, burble away about things that interested me, vaguely amuse people with my lame attempts at humour, and I largely got very good feedback for it [Phil was awarded the British Psychological Society’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology Education in 2013 and consistently received glowing
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feedback from the students he taught]. And education is a largely very positive place to work. I mean, you, Belinda, are going into prisons and largely they’re very miserable places. They are places of the human spirit being crushed and only a few people getting out of it, whereas in education the majority of people are moving on. And you see people progress and change even more in a further education college than you do teaching at university. Most people at the Further Education college were school rejectors or had been rejected by school and there was such a diverse group of people, it was brilliant. But back to the serendipity, I started to get involved with the Association for the Teaching of Psychology (ATP) as, initially, I hoped it would help me find out how to teach psychology better. I was the only psychology teacher who attended the Association meetings so when the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Exam Board wanted to create a GCSE in psychology, they looked for someone on the committee that would be cheap. Consequently they picked the person from the ATP that would have the least travel expenses and that was me. I presumed they invited me because they’d heard of me or something, but no… it was just that I was cheap. When I got there, no one else on the committee really wanted to write the GCSE curriculum, so I wrote it with a friend of mine, Nicky Hayes. We wrote most of the syllabus over a weekend and it was great fun as we had a blank sheet to write from. The syllabus went well and attracted a lot of students and so I was invited to write an A-level syllabus, again from scratch. You don’t get offers like this very often. So I think my contribution to psychology is really around that: I had an effect on the national curriculums. And what did you do with that blank sheet? What did you put in the GCSE and A-level, and why? I wanted it to be fun so that people enjoyed it when
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the psychologist february 2022 phil banyard
they studied it or taught it. Teachers told us their students sometimes laughed when they saw the exam paper, and why not. We had things in the exam which you couldn’t prepare rote answers for as the questions were so off the wall. But they mostly worked. We also focused on diversity for all manner of reasons but crucially because the GCSE and A-level courses attracted and still attract a very diverse cohort of students. Yes, you have always been a strong advocate for EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion]. I remember we were co-editing a book years ago and you completely rewrote one of the chapters because you were concerned about the (unchallenged) racism that had been inherent in some of the research in the chapter. Yes, it bothered me. And it bothers me a lot now that I didn’t push harder on it. Psychology has a history of promoting and tolerating racist ideas and I think we are being very slow to confront that. Looking back, I think I could have pushed it further. I regret that. I wanted to ask you about your favourite key study in psychology, but I think I can guess which it is. Yes, it’s the doll study on racial identity by Clark and Clark (1940). I think this was the most influential study in social psychology and is still under-rated. The results were used in numerous court cases across the States culminating in the Supreme Court hearing in 1954 where the principles of segregation were ruled unconstitutional. It arguably fired the starting gun for the Civil Rights Movement. There is no study in psychology with greater impact. And this is the only
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study I ever thought of trying to replicate. We got a plan to update it and run it in Nottingham schools but there was no way that the education authority were going to allow something like that to be run in local schools. That was probably a good thing actually, because we had not put nearly enough thought into it. So, returning to your timeline, you are working in Further Education, writing the OCR A-level Psychology curriculum and exams, and it is here you started what has become a prolific publishing career in psychology textbooks. Yes, while working in Further Education, Nicky (Hayes) and I got a book contract. Again we started to write an unusual book; instead of having chapter 1 all about cognitive psychology, chapter 2 about biological psychology, we took a particular concept such as self-efficacy, and tried to say how this concept was used in applied areas, such as occupational, clinical and educational psychology. Looking back, it was a really good piece of work, not perfect by any means, but quite novel in the way we approached the book content. And the books we have been editing together (Sage Essential Psychology and Sage Essential Research Methods)… well, given your input, none of them were going to be straightforward. They were always going to be coming from a slightly skewed angle. And I mean that as a compliment. Yeah, I think you have to find a hook for people, don’t you? Every academic can get lost in their own detail and we have all been to research talks and seen the
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way people just get so excited about their small effect sizes and the imperceptible differences on their graph. Really, you have to find a way of bringing psychological concepts to life. When I write or teach, I’ll take an everyday thing and try and look at the psychology in it. I used to do a revision talk on walking my dog, and how you could see all of psychology in this everyday event. For older readers, this was the equivalent of Deck of Cards. This is one of your trademarks, which we love you for, shaking people out of a rut and doing things differently. I think with psychology you can make people think differently. I mean, psychology hasn’t created anything. Physics split the atom, Chemistry catalogued the Periodic Table, Biology has evolution, Genetics the human genome. What has psychology got? We haven’t even got a by-product of it, like the non-stick frying pan… I made that comment to this magazine’s editor at a conference one, and it sparked a bit of a search [tinyurl.com/cf68nf7e]. Despite that, I think psychology is a wonderful thing because it makes people think differently. And making people think differently, challenging the status quo is a theme in your life whether it’s structures, racism, authority, or convention. I’m thinking now of the infamous cupcakes incident which we cannot possibly leave out. Please tell us how you got into trouble about some cupcakes. Yes, well by now I had been appointed as a lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University and I had to write course descriptor documents for the central university standards committee describing the psychology modules we were running at Level 4 and 5. I knew nobody read them so I included, as one of the Level 4 psychology learning outcomes, making cupcakes with one arm tied behind your back. And as I needed to create course descriptors for Level 5 students at the same time, and because the learning outcomes needed to show progression between Level 4 and 5, I included the advanced learning outcome of making cupcakes with both arms tied behind your back. But I genuinely put it in for a laugh, not to upset people. I thought we would have a giggle, but I missed the meeting that validated the course and it got validated without anyone noticing. Three years later my documents were used at a training meeting as examples of best practice, and I got found out. But it showed how people don’t read these documents. You have got to do stuff like that in life though. It’s waking the world up out of its lethargy. Trying to puncture pomposity I suppose? But I’m taking the high moral ground here, as partly I did it out of boredom. I really can’t bear documents like that and it’s just waiting there to be done. 22
That leads on nicely to an initiative that you have been a champion of – the Ig Nobels.
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Yeah, we’ve brought the conference to NTU a few times and I’ve tried one or two of them. I tried the one about swearing and pain [tinyurl.com/e6hz7p67] in a student conference. I asked for a volunteer to place their hand in freezing cold water to test the hypothesis that swearing relieves pain. But I had two kids in the audience volunteer at the same time so I let them both do the experiment, not thinking it through at all. They competed against each other as to how long they could keep their hands in the ice cold water. Instead of taking their hands out after 30 seconds, they were still there three minutes later, and I started to fear tissue damage. We couldn’t get them to shout out swear words because they just kept their hands in the water indefinitely and were clearly prepared to die to beat the other person. So yeah, that didn’t work so well. But the Ig Nobels are brilliant – their motto is ‘Science that makes you laugh and then makes you think’. Is that not you, summed up? That would be a brilliant epitaph. Well, I think people learn when they’re happy, I don’t see why you shouldn’t laugh when you go into an exam room. So, moving to a horribly conventional question: looking back over your career, with the last four years as Head of Department in NTU Psychology, what is your legacy? I think it’s always a danger when you’re Head of Department that you think you’ve had a greater effect than you have. I’m just one of a number of people at NTU trying to help other people do stuff in a nice way, a compassionate way, with an occasionally quirky sense of humour. I hope that I’ve helped people or contributed to them moving on. Actually someone phoned me up this weekend, an ex-student I hadn’t spoken to for 20 years. She left a message on my answerphone. I think she’d been moved by Covid and just said thank you very much. It was very touching. It makes me reflect on the responsibility of being a teacher. And that’s the delight of it – educating people gives people opportunities. You help people – to think differently, to think for themselves so that people have more control of their lives and a greater awareness of what is possible. Psychology is a moral science of action rather than a kind of natural science of things. What we do in the end is how psychology will be judged. How it changes society, how it makes our lives happier and better, and how it makes people challenge assumptions, think differently and yes, try to have fun while doing so. And where next for you? I’d love to be an advocate for Psychology, nationally and internationally. So, if the BPS are looking for a new president… As long as no one else goes for the role? Exactly. If not, Plan B is to catch up on the back catalogue of Homes Under the Hammer.
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‘Storytelling is your best weapon for convincing people’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling and more There’s the science of storytelling, stories about science, and storytelling in science – bringing elements of storytelling to traditional forms like the journal article. Is that a distinction you’ve considered? Definitely. I’ve done lots of writing about science and had to wrestle with some of the inherent tensions around with that: one of the main ones being that mass market storytelling tends towards simplification and good science tends towards nuance and complexity. For example, there’s often a pressure to identify the hero of the story – this amazing person who discovered this amazing thing – and of course the reality is usually a team of amazing people. Some scientists seem to think storytelling goes beyond simplification, to handwaving and fabrication, a means of obscuring and misdirecting… Yes, and for good reason… if you want to mislead people or sell them your one-eyed view of the world, then storytelling is the best way to do it. It’s as dangerous as it is helpful. But there are ways around that. You don’t have to use storytelling for its most egregious purposes. There are some basic understandings in the science of storytelling that are separate from this – especially things around structure, cause and effect, and simplicity. For my work I have to read a lot of books written by scientists, and even though I’m fascinated by them, they’re often a real struggle for a layperson like me to get through. They don’t understand some of these basic storytelling ideas. They’re often very discursive, overcomplex, tend towards jargon… even the ones that are written for the mass market are sometimes like this. All scientists, but especially ones that are interested in engaging with the public, would be well advised to take some of these basic ideas seriously. 24
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Can you give more examples of those structural
aspects? There’s a basic form that I always used when I was writing longform science, to account for nuance and complexity. You begin in the most simple place possible – hopefully with one person, or one or two people, in a situation. What idea is this person being challenged by, what are they confused about, what puzzle are they trying to solve? Draw the reader in, but you need to wait, I would say even until the third quarter, to add the real complexity. Very often in all kinds of journalism, in all kinds of writing, people try to hit you with that complexity and nuance straightaway and it’s just overwhelming. Most people will stop reading – ‘I’ve been given four names in two paragraphs, loads of jargon, three bits of insight…’. So it’s about being absolutely rigorous about that simplicity. Especially if it’s mass market, if they’re not already immersed in those ideas that you’re writing about… you’ve got to treat them with care and respect, not overwhelm and overload them. When I’m working as a ghostwriter for people, they sometimes have this anxiety ‘I have to tell everything upfront, otherwise people might think I don’t know X Y and Z essential facts’. You should have the confidence that they’re going to judge you on the whole thing, and if they judge you on half the thing then their judgement’s irrelevant. It’s having the patience to wait to add the complexity, until the reader is engaged and really wants to know. If you’re watching a murder mystery, at some point when you’re really into it, you’re going to want to know about all the people involved and all the different relationships they have. But if you’re hit with it up front, it’s ‘What am I watching?!’. Whereas a murder mystery will start with that simple scenario, some people in a room, something has happened, something has changed. You write about change and the fact that we’ve evolved to detect and respond to change, so that makes it an incredibly
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the psychologist february 2022 storytelling
strong opening to any story. That’s right… there’s great work that shows that people There are examples of that from actual journal articles… not many, but the paper that originally become automatically curious about completely described the Dunning-Kruger effect is a good irrelevant matters, of no import, if you do this stuff example. There will often be a scenario that right. That’s gold for a storyteller. I use the example psychologists can use to draw the reader in, but it’s of Malcolm Gladwell… I know he’s become more rare to see psychologists take controversial, with accusations advantage of that. of over-simplifying the ‘10,000 Some psychologists I’ve talked rule’ on expertise, but he’s a “It’s having the patience to to argue that career progression structural master. His story on wait to add the complexity, can depend on storytelling, and psychology and food testing, until the reader is engaged that it shouldn’t. So I wondered if which he frames around ‘Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. and really wants to know” there’s a line to be drawn between your work on storytelling and Why has ketchup stayed the your new book on thirst for status. same?’ [www.newyorker.com/ The conscious mind processes magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchupreality as a story. We tend to feel like we’re moral conundrum]. You might ‘I’m not going to read 10,000 heroes on fabulous journeys, trying to make everything words on ketchup!’, but you start reading and can’t stop because he builds it into this absolute mystery. He better for ourselves and the world. That’s a particularly makes us curious about this, and that’s really masterful. powerful form of cognitive bias. But the subconscious reality of that is that we’re actually playing games It’s that simplicity, a very simple puzzle, and science of status. Our striving for status is the moral heroic writing at its best technique-wise.
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remixed by the conscious mind: the constant striving Selfie. And he was one of the first people to make for status that people go through, but tell themselves me think about perfectionism, we talked about it as and each other ‘I’m being heroic’. a precursor to suicidal thinking. But I do remember That’s what you see in archetypal storytelling interviewing Rory and making quite an effort to draw too: you’ve got these heroes on great journeys, but out some personal stuff from him. That evening I was the subconscious reality of these stories is that the feeling quite pleased with where we got to, and got heroes are often gaining status. They begin orphaned a phone call from him worried about what he’d said. or destitute, in a position of very He eventually allowed me to use low status, and they end up being mostly what I wanted to, and it celebrated and cheered by crowds. “The roots of storytelling was all the more interesting for The antagonist often goes on the his personal insight. It just makes are in tribal gossip that opposite journey, beginning all it come alive, the suicide expert triggers moral outrage powerful and ending up humiliated having had that impact in his own in some way. life. which triggers action
in the world to change
That’s interesting in the context It’s putting the people back in… people’s behaviour” of the open science debate… I’ve Mick Billig writes about how often said that many of the past psychologists have often managed ‘heroes’ of psychology, who mostly to strip away the very subject became so through their ability to tell stories to large matter of the discipline. The depersonalisation of audiences, then went on that journey to ‘villain’… scientific writing… we should be talking about while the ‘stats geek down the corridor’ finds new people and passions and politics and all that side of ideas, new routes and new audiences and becomes it, rather than pretending those things don’t matter or the replicability hero. don’t even exist. I noticed you gave some writing advice to I think that’s right. I became interested in psychology Professor Rory O’Connor, for his book on suicide. in the first place when I was writing a Louis Theroux / Well, Rory’s been much more help to me than I have Jon Ronson kind of book about why people believe in to him. He was the big interview to begin my book ghosts. We can just make fun of people who have silly
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the psychologist february 2022 storytelling
beliefs, and there was a lot of that about at the time with the atheist and sceptic movements. But I became far more interested in the actual people behind the beliefs… why do they believe these things? And with The Heretics I realised to find out the truth I need to learn about psychology. To find the facts behind the so-called crazy behaviour… and clearly the people themselves need to be part of that. Do you think it’s possible to have good clear, accessible, engaging writing, without elements of ‘story’? Well, it depends what you mean by story. Lots of books about storytelling, which are angled towards the business market, have an idea of story that is too literal. They’re trying to take Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ story structure and impose it on academic papers, or advertising, or business communication. But I take a broader view of what we mean by story. You can take pieces and parts of what story is and apply them separately. For example, the most effective communication is rigorous about cause and effect. I think simplicity is also really important. And simplicity and cause effect are both as much aspects of storytelling as the hero facing the challenge, which is what we traditionally think about with storytelling. Can you give an example of that in action? With a lot of science communication, especially when professors write books, they try to pack everything they know into the book, and that makes for lots and lots of discursive material that I would be striking out. Even on the level of the sentence and the paragraph… am I telling you one thing in this paragraph, and one thing alone? Expanding to the depth of the paragraph, and then the next thing we’re going to do is the thing that leads on from that. That takes a lot of discipline, a lot of thinking about structure to pull that off. But it makes the reading experience effortless. We think in causes and effects, we explain the world that way, it’s our natural mode of processing reality. When I’m teaching this, I show a clip from series three of Twin Peaks. With the first series, I was at school at the time, and who killed Laura Palmer gripped the nation that summer. It was perfect storytelling – a body washes up on a rocky beach in this small town, along comes this weird FBI agent Dale Cooper to answer the question, Who Killed Laura Palmer? Classic beginning of a murder mystery. When David Lynch brought back Twin Peaks for the third series a few years ago, he decided ‘I don’t need all this storytelling stuff, I’m an auteur’. It was absolutely baffling. The first 10-15 minutes, you just don’t know what the hell’s going on, there’s no cause and effect, things just happen. What I show in my course is the Gogglebox version – just ordinary people watching it and reacting in real time. And they begin confused, they very quickly become irritated and by the end they’re laughing at it, all over the span of about six minutes. That’s how you lose an audience.
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With people like Lynch their films are often referred to as dreamlike, arthouse, but they have relatively small audiences for a reason. You’ve got to be really into that kind of artistic puzzle and most people aren’t. It should be easy enough for scientists to avoid being Lynchian? Well, sometimes I work as an editor on scientists’ books, and the main thing that I’m offering is structure; cause and effect, one thing leads into another, get rid of all the unnecessary stuff or find a place somewhere else to put it where it fits in this nice cause and effect pattern. It’s unbelievably transformative when you go through that process. I call it a logic map, and the exercise is simply to look at each paragraph, and write down in one sentence the one thing that paragraph is telling you. What you’ll often find is that you’re being told the same thing over and over again. There’s no cause and effect, it’s ‘here’s something about this subject, oh here’s something else, and now here’s that first thing popping up again’. Then you just write yourself a new logic map and rewrite to that plan. Something I’ve found myself doing more and more as an editor in recent years is taking that logic map and looking right to the end of it… that bit at the end where they finally relax, say what they’ve wanted to say all along, speak their mind and bring themselves into it… that goes right up the top, the whole article should be built around that idea and that style. I think many writers want to build up to a big reveal, but it’s too late, you’ve lost your audience by then. It’s interesting what you say about Lynch because he’s probably an example of how to engage an audience, get a really dedicated following, maybe you decide you don’t like them, and then actively try to lose them! The comedian Stewart Lee is another famous example: how far can you push an audience away before that moment where you snap them back in? Oh I’m a real fanboy of Stewart Lee… one show in particular, with the jungle canyon rope bridge… Carpet Remnant World. Carpet remnant world is a work of genius. He even jokes ‘I’m giving you the illusion of structure by saying the same thing over and over’, but he isn’t… it’s an unbelievably well-structured thing. Let’s come back to the why of telling stories. Are they a useful way for psychologists to bring about social change? If you want to bring about social change, I don’t know how we can possibly do that without telling stories. It’s what people are doing constantly on social media, in newspapers, anywhere people are angry about the world and trying to push it in a certain direction, they’re using storytelling techniques. The roots of storytelling are in tribal gossip that triggers moral outrage which triggers action in the world to change
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people’s behaviour. We’ve seen that all through human history, so it would be naive to think you can change things without telling stories. That’s when the darkness comes really… good people and bad people use stories. In Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, his thesis was that Republicans are natural and brilliant storytellers and the Democrats always argue on fact. They think that facts convince people, but it’s feelings that convince people. I’m not sure if he worked directly with the Barack Obama campaign but the ‘Hope’ poster was good storytelling… there’s no fact in the word ‘hope’, but it worked. It’s about the story that people understand is true about the world. These stories are never true, they’re oversimplified accounts of the world which paint opposites as villains and themselves as angels. I consider myself a centrist and that’s why centrists struggle, because our story about the world is really boring: ‘they’ve got a good point over there but they’ve also got a good point over there’. It’s not Hollywood.
We were watching the news recently, about Labour needing to reconnect with voters, and my 16-yearold son reminded me of what he calls ‘the Thomas Dixon Gambit’, based on his experiences of standing for school council in Year 7. My son’s campaign was built around biodegradable cups for the canteen, and strong and consistent representation via a listening forum. Dixon’s was ‘A free KFC for everyone!’. He won by a landslide. You said good and bad people tell stories, and perhaps when I’ve tried to talk about this on Twitter it’s boiled down to ‘some bad psychologists use storytelling, so we don’t like it’, ignoring the fact that it’s possible to use storytelling in a good way. Storytelling is your best weapon for convincing people. It’s been a weapon for convincing people since we were living together in hunter-gatherer tribes. To relinquish that weapon just because people that you don’t like are really good at using it is madness.
Storyteller or fabulist? Thoughts from our editor Jon Sutton, and from a Twitter discussion… When I speak to psychologists about becoming storytellers, there can be a reticence, which seems to be about the potential for tall tales, massaging the truth, smoothing the corners. Liz Neeley, the Executive Director of Story Collider, a non-profit focused on telling ‘true, personal stories about science’, told the NPR Short Wave podcast that as a young scientist: ‘I wanted to be the most serious, scientific scientist who ever lived. I thought that storytelling was somewhere between a distraction and a danger. I thought storytelling was like handwaving… it’s what you did when your data was weak to nudge people towards your preferred interpretation.’ I can understand this, and I was struck by a quote from data fraud Diedrik Stapel: ‘I wanted to manipulate the truth and make the world just a little more beautiful than it is’. Of course, we should be aware of the seductive allure of a beautiful story. But in 2015’s Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs a Story, scientistturned-storyteller Randy Olson bemoans the fact that ‘Science is a profession that is permeated with narrative structure and process, yet scientists are so blind to the
importance of narrative that they don’t even make use of this established label.’ Equally, I think we should remember that uncertainty, incremental change and wrong turns in science can still be beautiful. It’s fine to say ‘We don’t know’, particularly if followed with ‘and here’s why we don’t know: people are complicated, in these ways’. It’s also fine to say ‘We don’t know for sure, but on the basis of the available evidence our advice would be x, y and z’. I think we’re seeing more of this in recent years, including from open science advocates. Rigorous scientists like Andy Przybylski and Amy Orben are aware they need to tell nuanced yet engaging and practical stories around the research findings. And they need to tell them to large and diverse audiences. Yet whenever I have raised storytelling in science as a topic for discussion on Twitter, there has been a mixed response (see below). This is, in my view, an aspect of scientific reform which needs to be discussed more. One very ‘broad brush’ way of characterising the whole ‘replication crisis’ in psychology is that it has been the ‘big picture’ storytellers of
our discipline, comfortable and confident on the popular stage, versus the more methodologically minded, detail driven, cautious and private scientists. Many of the famous names who have felt under scrutiny are fairly undeniably good at emphasising what is simple, broad, elegant, persuasive, surprising and lifechanging about the science of mind and behaviour. For the open science movement to lead to widespread and lasting change, do its advocates need to get to grips with telling the stories of their work, and of open science in general? We asked about storytelling in Psychology on Twitter. Here are some of the responses… Chris Chambers: in psychology, at least, storytelling = bullshitting 99% of the time. The Venn diagram isn’t quite a circle but it’s close. For this reason, any programme that seeks to teach or encourage storytelling skills among scientists needs to explicitly do so within the constraints permitted by openness/transparency/ reproducibility (& build this into the message) or it is really just encouraging more bullshitting.
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the psychologist february 2022 storytelling
Do you have examples of your favourite storytellers in science? I’m a huge fan of Adam Rutherford’s writing, he’s an it as about persuasion, and tell me they have zero extremely talented scientist and also an extremely interest in convincing anyone of anything. talented storyteller. Jonathan Haidt is a naturally gifted I just don’t believe that… it’s not how humans work! communicator. Steven Pinker, Any scientist would surely be although he’s a huge bestseller, invested in convincing people their “These stories are never ideas are correct. I’ve always found quite difficult to read, but that might just be me. I think there’s a suspicion of true, they’re oversimplified When I first decided to learn about storytelling in some scientific accounts of the world psychology, the first book I picked circles – and that suspicion which paint opposites up was Pinker and I found it kind is justified precisely because of overwhelming. Maybe I should as villains and themselves storytelling works. It’s often give him another go. And Dan deployed to appeal to people as angels.” McAdams is a font of knowledge emotionally, rather than factually, for how we use storytelling to and that’s seen as a dangerous and/ navigate our lives. or inappropriate goal for scientists. But I think the answer isn’t no storytelling, I think it’s I still come back to that distinction in my first smart and rigorous storytelling – communication that question – storytelling in science as opposed to about respects the reader and cares about their experience, science. Some psychologists I speak to seem to have and wants to take them along, but also carefully that deep suspicion of the former, because they see includes all the nuance and complexity that’s necessary.
If a sci paper ‘tells a good story’, over & above the clarity of the comms, & while achieving hi standards in rigour, transparency & repro, it is probably down to luck. The story just happened. Focusing on this part is cart-before-horse at best, chasing shadows at worst. Put differently, the story is just an emergent property of what the science revealed. It is not something that makes sense to target through training. This is no ‘skill’ here to be achieved over & above the honest, clear, logically structured, transparent communication of the sci. So I say quite frankly we don’t need storytellers in our field. I’ve had enough of bullshitting & would happily see an end to all storytelling to reduce bullshitting. We haven’t purged bullshitting to such an extent that we earn the right even contemplate storytelling as a “want”. Mary Aiken: Greatest challenge for science is popular dissemination, interestingly great scientific communicators are often derided as being ‘populist’ as if reaching a large audience was a bad thing. Rob Hutton: What’s the point of science if we cannot communicate effectively to non-scientists? What’s an effective way of communicating? Some sort of narrative/ story. What is required to make sense of a
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story? A critical eye! We all need to apply critical thinking, to science too! Aidan Horner: I find it interesting that the open science movement has a clear narrative/story - bad research practices -> replication crisis -> scientific reform. We all tell stories one way or another, it’s just some are more fictional than others.
powerful communication tool. I do think we should use it well, but that probably means respecting the damage it can do (make BS sound more compelling, make the audience remember bad information)
Marc Tibber: I have an academic friend who never reads introduction or conclusion sections of a paper as he says he is only interested in the results, not the authors opinions. This is arguably the ideal of a science without storytelling. If you think storytelling does not play a role in the process, give ten respectable labs the exact same dataset and see how different a paper they each write. My suspicion is that very different stories would emerge without assuming any nefarious practices.
Amy Orben: Narrative and argument are a key part of communicating research and a key part of my paper writing. My papers would not be widely read without strength of argument. However, I have critiqued published advice to researchers that they have to tell the truth but ‘not the whole truth’; and I think that this is when storytelling becomes a problematic priority. We are writers but not *fiction* writers. For me writing fiction allows you to selectively exclude some of the material you collected as an author to make an interesting/compelling story; yet as writers in science we need to include all the material and structure our story around that.
Anne Scheel: I think the concept is illdefined. What do you (I mean everybody) mean by ‘storytelling’? In some sense, all writing is storytelling, and good writing often capitalises on storytelling elements (e.g. making it clear ‘who’ ‘does’ ‘what’, in a sentence, paragraph, paper etc). I increasingly think storytelling (in a richer sense, not sentence-level) is a really
See also recent Twitter threads on the new Johann Hari book, particularly from Dean Burnett, Pete Etchells and Matthew Sweet. These contain lots of concrete examples of when persuasion becomes problematic in scientific storytelling: for example, be wary of ‘the leading scientist…’. Join the conversation @psychmag on Twitter or email jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.
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‘All of the research is pointless if we can’t digest it’ Angharad Rudkin writes practical books for the public, as well as contributing as an ‘agony aunt’ for the Metro newspaper. Our editor Jon Sutton asked her about it.
Thanks for the book you sent – What’s My Teenager Thinking? Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents. Packed with useful tips, particularly for me at the moment! Is writing a book like that easy? It was easy and hard all at the same time. The parenting book market is a crammed one, so we were very keen to take a different angle on parenting. We had three principles for this book. Firstly, that it (and its sister book What’s my Child Thinking?) is strongly anchored in developmental research. Many of the parents I work with in practice want to know what the research says about different ages so that they can adjust their expectations of their child according to this. Yet there are few opportunities for parents to easily access good quality child developmental research. So, we started these books with a summary of the different developmental tasks at different ages. Once we had that foundation, we wanted to write a parenting book based on scenarios so that parents can easily dip into the book when they are confronted with a particular parenting challenge, because we know how busy parents are and how many other activities other than reading fight for their time. We were lucky to have an amazing graphics team, who could put the text for each scenario into a beautiful visual spread. Finally, we wanted to write a book that puts as much, if not more, emphasis on thinking as opposed to action. We explain what could be going on in a teenager’s mind and how that relates to how they’re behaving, as well as what thoughts and beliefs are triggered in parents for certain situations. Understanding why a teen behaves the way they do can take the sting out of the situation, and that in turn helps a parent respond rather than react. So, it was a big task but a thoroughly enjoyable one, thanks to the experienced and brilliant family journalist and author Tanith Carey.
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That ‘respond rather than react’ distinction comes out in the way you split advice into ‘in the moment’ and ‘in the long term’, which I thought worked really well. In terms of the different tasks at different ages, it must be tricky to get that fine grained about it? Child development findings are inherently generalised,
and therefore risk being unhelpful to the individual. But years of clinical practice has taught me that even though everyone is most definitely unique, there are certain patterns that regularly come up with regard to age, context, background. That gave me the confidence to believe in the usefulness of breaking the teenage years into smaller age ranges, and to use the research findings and theoretical models for each age range. Although there will always be exceptions, most parents of 15-year-olds would readily admit that it is a different experience to parenting a 13-year-old or a 17-year-old, so we wanted to capture this – as well as the research – in our book. The hope is that parents of younger teens would also flick forward to the older teen years, so that they can perhaps be pre-emptive in their response to different patterns of behaviour. Do you think you could write books like this on your own? What did Tanith bring to What’s My Teenager Thinking?, for example? Detailing over 100 scenarios in a way that was evidence based, but also avoided repetition, was an enormous task. I really don’t think I could’ve done it by myself. Tanith is an experienced author and journalist, and her ability to pinpoint exactly what we want to say is admirable. While I do a lot of talking in my day job, transferring the communication about often complex ideas into written word is a different skill, so I was pleased to be writing with someone else. A few years ago I had written a proposal for a CBT parent book, but publishers just weren’t clear about what my job meant, so for that and various other reasons it never happened. Clinical Psychologists in general are still sadly under-represented in the media and printed press, and so for me this was a fabulous way of getting started with authorship. What are the challenges of writing with nonpsychologists – for both parties? I have been so lucky to work with brilliant authors who are also natural psychologists. In fact, I think to be an author you need such a deep understanding of feelings and behaviour, that you become quite instinctively a good psychologist. Tanith writes
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the psychologist february 2022 writing for the public
Dr Angharad Rudkin is a Chartered Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the BPS, and HCPC Registered Psychological Practitioner
non-fiction, whereas Ruth Fitzgerald (who I have written two books with; Find your Girl Squad, and The Split Kit) is a children’s author, and so comes to it from a strongly narrative angle. When we wrote Find your Girl Squad, which is a book for girls about friendship, I realised my writing was hampered by my concern about over-stating evidence or over-simplifying concepts. Ruth has an incredible way of keeping all of our ideas evidence-based while writing in a light and humorous way. Writing for Metro is a different audience again. How have you found that? Haha, yes, writing for the Relationship and Sex column of the Metro is a whole other ball game! When I was offered the role, I was initially unsure because I specialise in children and adolescents. Then I realised that many of the readers are adolescents (if we’re taking the definition of adolescence as lasting to age 24), and that a lot of the theories are readily transferrable to
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an adult audience. I try hard to bring in evidence and psychological theory, but sometimes it really is a matter of being that Agony Aunt who just has to state the obvious. When I started writing for the Metro, I was told that people usually answer their own dilemma in the last line of their letter. Time after time, this is true. More often than not, people know what they need to do, but they need the encouragement and impetus to do it. I love the weekly challenge of the relationship dilemma, and the format is very interesting; I write 200 words, as do the two ‘Agony Uncles’, and these are combined by the Editor to form the final answer. So, I have to be very confident that what I have written can still be clear even when merged with other thoughts. Do you think it’s important for a reader or viewer to be able to follow a thread from the things you say back to peer-reviewed research? Or is it a case of taking your expertise on trust? I think different readers want different levels of
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information. If something sounds intuitively right then often readers won’t feel the need to dig around more. At other times, if a concept is new or not quite what the reader had in mind, then having a reference to go back to can help with the acceptance of an idea. A lot of academic papers are written in a way that impresses an academic audience but leaves others baffled and frustrated, so we need some translation process. What’s My Teenager Thinking? has an online reference list which readers can go to if they want to follow up on a certain line of thinking. We all find it easier to accept a fact if it has some ‘scientific’ backing, so it is definitely a strength of the book to have it, and it also made me feel I was doing my job properly! And how much does your own personal experience come into it? Well, one of my school mum friends was slightly aghast when I told her I was co-writing a parenting teens book. ‘But how can you do that, you don’t have teenagers of your own yet!’, she said. It really saddened me that people still think that parenting books are only based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience. While these are both incredibly valuable, I would not deign to assume that others wanted to bring their kids up the way I have chosen to! What about other psychologists, how have they received your work? I guess there can always be that accusation, often levelled at us, of ‘dumbing down’. Increasingly I respond that I don’t even know what that means… if what you’re saying is always grounded in scientific research and professional experience, then what’s the harm in seeking to make it accessible to a wide audience? I remember Tanya Byron talking in a BPS conference a few years ago, saying she was more nervous about talking to an audience of psychologists than she ever would be talking to an audience of thousands on TV. There is something about your own peer group being the most critical, as they know more about what you should know, and are the ones you want to impress most. Tanya Byron is a fabulous role model, and has done more for the public profile of Clinical Psychology than any other person. Celebrating those who choose to translate psychological theory and research into accessible, practical advice is something I wish we could do more as a profession because it benefits us all, as well as all of those people who want to know more about well-being. Working with children quickly teaches you how to convey ideas and concepts in a way that is understandable. I still regularly fail at this, but I have been lucky enough to have a career in which I can attempt to do this clinically as well as through media and co-writing books. I’m a pragmatist at heart, so I still think all of the research is pointless if we can’t digest it for the very people who can use it to make a better life for them and those around them. 32
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Do you have a particular target person in mind when you aim for a wide audience? People in science communication sometimes talk about ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ or ‘Brenda in the chip shop’, but I sometimes wonder if an easily distracted psychologist reading about an area that isn’t their own is as different from ‘the general public’ as we might like to think. When I am writing, I am frequently visited in my head by a child or parent I’ve worked with over the years. I think of my friends and family too, and their confusion, sadness and concern about various difficulties that have cropped up in family life. Parenting is such an enormous task. Your emotions and well-being are tethered to these little beings, and your days can feel like being on a rollercoaster. Being a child is also a bumpy journey. So, as a parent or a child, it is so helpful to be able to access anchors to help you through the day – whether that’s a wise post on social media, a comment by a friend, some words in a parenting book or an idea from a children’s book. Have your books and media work fed back into your practice and teaching? Definitely. It has been a symbiotic process. Thinking about parents and children as I write means I have more to ask them and wonder about with them when we’re in a therapy session together. When it comes to teaching, being put on the spot to answer questions or to review a concept in a clear way, helps with my writing. I don’t think anyone is equally good at writing as they are at speaking – we have a natural leaning towards one or the other. I remember at university feeling so excited about going to a lecture by someone who had written a wonderful psychology book. They stood at the front, shuffling from one foot to the other, mumbling away. It was my first experience of appreciating that talking and writing are not the same skill. I continue to work on both! What’s next for you? I’ve just finished writing my second book with wonderful children’s author Ruth Fitzgerald. Our first Find your Girl Squad was published last year, and we have just finished writing a book for children on how to cope with parental divorce, called The Split Kit, which is coming out in February. Tanith and I would love to do a What’s My Tween Thinking? book, but it’s a developmental phase which is less universally accepted, so we’ll have to see about that. Maybe we’ll branch out to What’s my Husband Thinking? and What’s My Boss Thinking?…
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the psychologist february 2022 shared formulation
‘It’s just a bunch of people telling your story, excluding you from the telling’ Caroline Clare with her experience of implementing shared psychology case formulations for staff in a high dependency rehabilitation unit for adult males, and feedback from some of the service users who were involved
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was at the ‘Developing Trauma informed Services’ conference, delivered by the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology Faculty of Psychosis and Complex Mental Health. Those who had used services, and were now trying to advocate for improved services, were talking about the experience of psychological case formulations from their perspective. ‘It’s still just a bunch of well-intentioned people, telling your story, and excluding you from the telling,’ said one… or words to that effect. Those words gave me a physical, uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. We had tried hard to focus on formulation rather than diagnoses, and understanding a person as a whole, rather than just a label. Psychological formulation is a shared assessment process, where a client and therapist work together to understand a client’s current, and previous, distress. It draws on available psychological theory to create hypotheses, or ideas, of what might be contributing to a client’s current difficulties and what psychological therapy should offer to help that person. A range of different approaches to formulation including systemic, cognitive and psychodynamic are available. We were flexible in the approach used at Cygnet Oaks but there was a common theme: that the formulations were trauma informed. That a client’s ‘symptoms’ could perhaps be better understood as a way of adapting and surviving to the adverse environments they had experiences. I thought we had been getting it right. We were working hard to involve the individuals in developing the formulation. And then we were sharing this with
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staff so that they could understand and support the service user more. But then we were excluding them from the telling, taking ownership of a story that was never ours to begin with. More exclusion – something we know is at the heart of every trauma survivor’s experience already. By the time my train pulled in to Leeds that evening, I had decided we were going to make some changes. We were going to ask the individual to tell their story. Or at least to be there and listen to us tell it. Or at least have the choice. The reaction from staff was interesting. ‘Won’t it make them more distressed?’ ‘What if the other staff don’t respond well to them?’ ‘What if they start talking about things we didn’t know about?’ Our attempts at protecting people from difficult feelings were leading to disempowerment. These individuals had survived the experiences, but we were deciding they were too fragile to talk about it. Yes it is important to recognise that for some people discussing past trauma is re-traumatising and has a negative effect on well-being (Levine, 2010), and this view has been shared by service users before that it could be painful to talk about their past when they weren’t ready to do so (Jennings & Ralph, 1997). But we talk about empowering the individual, and then we were making the decision on their behalf. I asked other colleagues about their systems for sharing formulations and quickly discovered that other services were also excluding the individual from the telling. All had an established understanding of the potential benefits of psychological formulations, which is often cited in best practice guidelines including the comprehensive Division of Clinical Psychology Good Practice Guidelines (2011). People were aware of the
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what was helpful and unhelpful benefits of collaborating during the for them. The drive for more production of formulations, and compassionate forensic services a range of literature supports how (Levenson et al., 2017) felt like it this practice can be empowering was in motion, and motivated me and reduce the unhelpful power to do more. dynamic between professionals Here are some of the and service users (McManus et experiences from the service users, al., 2010; Perkins & Slade, 2012). in their own words: But the collaboration seemed to Caroline Clare, Forensic stop there. The Good Practice Psychologist (BSc, MSc, Rob’s experience: ‘I found it helpful Guidelines do not explicitly CPsychol) for everyone to know that I didn’t suggest involving the service Carolineclare@cygethealth. self-harm for no reason. The reason user in sharing the psychological co.uk I was self-harming was because formulation. A review completed I was raped. I found the meeting by Evans (2020) explored the good as it helped the staff to understand that I wasn’t literature on psychological formulations across attention seeking. I got to tell my truth. I found that different mental health services; no reference of services delivering the formulations with the individual I got a lot more support after the meeting as staff were able to understand me better. The support was more is made within this. tailored to me. There was nothing I didn’t like about So, tentatively, we felt like we were taking a slight the meeting and I would want future formulation step in to the unknown. I approached some of the meetings to be delivered in the same way. My service users with my suggestion, and asked them if psychologist was amazing and supported me through they would like to take part. The reaction was mixed. a crisis. I feel the support changed my life for the Anxiety was high, but this appeared to be more due to better. She [psychologist] reassured me that I wasn’t public speaking, rather than the content of what they in trouble for self-harming.’ were being asked to talk about. Reminding people that they were Adam’s experience: ‘It was a the expert of their experience, and “ Reminding people that new experience. It was alright, that they couldn’t possibly tell their they were the expert of I learned a few things about my own story ‘wrong’, appeared to give some relief. Some individuals their experience, and that past. The psychologist read out wanted to tell their story and help they couldn’t possibly tell my formulation which we worked on. It was a soothing experience other people understand them their own story ‘wrong’, and I felt comfortable whilst she better. Some were keen to attend was discussing my formulation. and listen to what was being said, appeared to give some It was good to know that staff are and to gauge the reactions from relief.” interested in my past. I was told staff. Sadly, some felt that even with that if I had any issues after then them in the room, or even if they I could seek help and guidance. I told their own story, people would think it benefited me and the staff. I think it helped the not be interested and would pay more attention to the staff to learn about my past and to get to know me, and professional telling it. Years of time in services had what kind of person I was in the past and what kind probably reinforced this view. of person I am now. I attended the meeting twice, I So we continued to deliver weekly psychological wouldn’t do it again, one time is enough.’ formulation meetings for staff in the hospital, and some involved the service user leading on telling their Routine practice for us has now changed. Part of the story, whilst others chose to co-deliver, or attend and collaboration in developing psychological formulations listen. I am often struck by the resilience and recovery now involves discussing with the individual how of trauma survivors. Hearing them tell their stories they would want their story to be shared, and who and share them outside of our individual therapy with. Some people may have already been delivering sessions left me with an increased sense of inspiration formulations in this way, and I congratulate you if and admiration. Staff hearing the experience in the so. Others may have thought about it and talked individual’s words, to make sense of their behaviour themselves out of it. For some, it may be an alien as survival responses (rather than ‘symptoms’ or concept to you. We moved up the ladder from ‘doing ‘challenging behaviours’), was more impactful than for’ to ‘doing with’ on the co-production ladder reading a written formulation. The individual got to (National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health choose what was most relevant to talk about, not us. document, 2019) and I would encourage others to Service users would answer questions directly about take the next step. As this document asks professionals to do; ‘make no decision about me, without me’ (Department of Health 2012).
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the psychologist february 2022 books
what to seek out on the
psychologist
website this month
Widening the psychological workforce With huge demand for psychology services, newer roles are being recognised – with potentially historic changes to the British Psychological Society, Deputy Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya explores the issues. thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/widening-psychological-workforce ‘Your vote will modernise our member grades and governance’ To read and share the letter from BPS President Katherine Carpenter which went out with this issue, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ your-vote-will-modernise-ourmember-grades-and-governance See also p.72. Find all this and so much more via
thepsychologist.bps.org.uk
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18/01/2022 09:03
‘Thematic analysis has travelled to places that we’ve never heard of’ Astrid Coxon meets Victoria Clarke and Virginia Braun, to hear about using thematic analysis to explore patterning and meaning in data
Victoria Clarke
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke’s 2006 paper, ‘Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology’, has become widely used and cited in psychology and in many other disciplines. Qualitative approaches like Braun and Clarke’s embrace the idea that any ‘making sense’ of data will be shaped by the researcher’s values and positioning in the world. Researchers using thematic analysis are conceptually more like storytellers or sculptors than scientists. They spend time ‘getting to know’ their data and becoming intimately acquainted with its contents – known as ‘familiarisation’ – before engaging in a systematic process of coding the data. With coding, the
goal is to understand, parse and tag (with coding labels – pithy phrases that evoke the data content and its analytic relevance) the full range of meanings relevant to the research question. Coding produces a lot of codes, and the researcher then clusters together similar and related codes, to develop ‘themes’ – multifaceted meaning-based patterns. The researcher actively works and reworks the clusters, to determine a set of themes that best captures and tells a story about important meanings in the data, related to the research question. In this interview, Victoria (VC) and Virginia (VB) discuss helping qualitative researchers become (better) storytellers. AC: How did you meet and start working together? VC: I had a major mental health crisis as a teenager. As is very common at that age, I had quite a severe depression. Bizarrely, because my dad was working at a local authority that decided to experiment with having health insurance for the staff, I ended up in a private psychiatric clinic. It got me fascinated with understanding how people tick, and training to be a clinical psychologist. I did a placement in a psychiatric hospital as part of my degree at Brunel University, but then encountered people like Karen Henwood, Ros Gill, Corinne Squire, Irene Bruna Seu, Ann Phoenix, a young generation of feminist critical psychologists teaching at Brunel. Their version of psychology really resonated, so I ditched my ambitions for clinical psychology and therapy, and thought, ‘where can I learn more about this?’ That took me to Loughborough University Social Sciences.
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VB: I went all through high school with no clue what I wanted to do. After I didn’t get into photography, I worked for a year and got thoroughly bored. Somewhere along the lines I latched on to clinical psychology as the thing that I desperately wanted and needed for my life. Our university system in New Zealand is different to the UK, and I got into all my courses except psychology. It added to my determination that I must study psychology.
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the psychologist february 2022 thematic analysis
There was one day where you could go to university to try to get into courses you hadn’t gotten into. There must have been hundreds of people waiting in a line. I’d phoned up, shocked at not getting in, because my grades were good, and had been told to skip to the front. It felt really wrong, but I went to the front, got the stamp on my paper, and boom I was in. When I got to my first-year lectures at the University of Auckland, it wasn’t what I thought psychology was at all… but it was still engaging, and I was still determined to do clinical. Then my second year, like Victoria, critical feminist psychology lecturers were the ones that grabbed me. Nicola Gavey was the key person: her work was just fascinating, and felt so right as an approach to psychology. So, I did a Master’s, and was fortunate to get a PhD scholarship and to go to Loughborough. I turned up there having never been to England, on a cold miserable September in 1997. Absolutely out of my depth and terrified, I met a whole lot of scary PhD peers at Loughborough Social Sciences. VC: We used to tease her because we’d ask her to come to coffee, but she wouldn’t… we didn’t realise she was completely overwhelmed by everything that was that was going on. We spent a lot of time together during our PhDs… part of a close network of PhD students doing critical qualitative work, critical feminist work, critical work around sexuality. VB: We became friends very quickly, and we engaged with each other’s work. We had such a rich culture as a community of students, reading each other’s work, feeding back and talking about things. It feels like that has slipped away a lot. Everyone’s stretched, but also the environment is set up so competitively now… ‘do I want to risk giving those ideas to someone else?’ I was reflecting on this the other day, the kind of engagement you get from your peers rather than with the supervisor, where there’s differential power, the terrifying-ness, the awesome-ness, all those aspects. VC: There are so many pressures on students… developing your Twitter profile as a PhD student? That terrifies me! We got to be clueless and stupid. There was no public audience, except when you embarrassed yourself at a conference. Although we felt so incredibly stressed, and pressured, that period was looser, spacious, less professionalised. You were more a student and less a professional academic.
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We were literally surrounded by titans of critical psychology who were defining that area. They cared so much about methodology, about the doing of research, and transmitted that passion to all of us. Almost everyone who was part of that big peer group has written methodological work… we’re not alone. It was only when we got out in the big wide world that we discovered what we had was really special.
Virginia Braun
VB: It also instilled a position that you have to think about what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it… come prepared to be able to defend what you’re doing. That’s part of the empirical research process, but I’m talking more of a fundamental level – an integral part of a process. Being a ‘knowing researcher’… the idea that you don’t just do things. You can be excited and explore, but you have to actually really think about what you’re doing, why and how… AC: From this experience came your 2006 methodological paper, which at last count had over 100,000 citations. It’s a running joke in qualitative student circles: Braun and Clarke 2006, Bingo card! What inspired the development of what’s now become known as reflexive thematic analysis? VB: We both had years of frustration with the ways in which these things were being talked about and written about. Grand ideas that never eventuated, because I was burnt out… but then I had my first sabbatical. I was in Bristol, at UWE, and we seized the moment.
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VC: Our ambitions were quite small. My joke was always that because I was doing LGBT research, I expected an audience of six people for a presentation… the interest in this kind of work was so minimal. We’ll just write this little niche paper that reflects the way we value qualitative research. We wrote it in the house that Ginny was renting a room in. We did the bulk of the work very quickly. We went to the library and got out books on thematic analysis… but even though we quoted people like Richard Boyatzis, what he was offering was not what we wanted to give to our students. So that was it: ‘let’s do this thing that will be useful for our students’. We didn’t have a conceptualisation of researchers having an audience. Academics write papers, academics don’t think about people reading those papers and those papers changing how people do things. I think sometimes people think we had an evil masterplan! VB: We did not! You know, 200 citations for a critical health, gender, sexuality paper is amazing. And now there’s this thing, out there, that has blown that scale out of the water. We literally wrote it together. That way of engaging and working things out – what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it – was a good process. What’s been lost with the pandemic is our ability to be in the same space at the same time. VC: It’s about bringing reflexivity into the heart of our writing practice, isn’t it? We were constantly questioning and challenging each other. Hopefully that’s what makes our writing quite accessible and appealing to people – that dialogue between us when we’re writing. I can remember having a 20-30 minute discussion over ‘rich’: people say that, what does it mean? Trying to think about the terms that qualitative researchers all use all the time, that to students new to the process seem like jargon. Every time someone asks you, ‘what does that mean?’, you understand what doesn’t make sense to people, what needs explaining. It’s a constant learning process… getting better at writing and getting better at explaining things.
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AC: What would you say is the key appeal of reflexive thematic analysis, what sets it apart? VB: When we first started writing, there was so much that was mystifying about qualitative research if you weren’t immersed in the world. What we’re talking about here – bracketing all that complex, theoretical, conceptual stuff, until after you’ve had a go with the data and engaged in the process – is anathema, really… you could be skewered for suggesting such dastardly things. But before I went to Loughborough, a wellknown and senior academic who’d gone to the UK on a scholarship that was the same as mine, told me ‘when you get there, all the British students will have read more than you, they will be vocal, they will be talking about it, you will feel like you know nothing, and that
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will be hard’. It really prepared me for that experience, because it did feel exactly like that. I got there and people like Victoria had so much more training, had done more research or reading. It made qualitative research and discourse approaches feel overwhelming. Suddenly there were arguments about X or Y that I had no idea about. I think that’s analogous to the experience of qualitative research for lots of people. Part of this was about questioning ideas, and this idea you need to have all that sorted out before you get to your data… well, it’s a privileged position. Being able to handle that knowledge and have all that understanding. Those understandings don’t necessarily have to happen first, and they don’t necessarily have to happen in the abstract. Ask a student who’s never encountered qualitative research before, ‘what do you think your data represent?’, they might think, ‘what on earth are you talking about?’ But once you’ve worked through that process of analysing data, you can have a conversation about it that is grounded and located in the kind of analytic work that they’re doing. Then it can make sense. VC: I think its flexibility probably explains why it’s become popular beyond psychology. Often psychological methods don’t travel beyond psychology. I think interpretative phenomenological analysis has done to health research and medicine and so on. But I think TA has travelled to places that we’ve never heard of… I regularly get asked to review manuscripts in areas of research, I think, ‘I have no idea what that is’. It doesn’t have that baggage that ties it to a particular discipline. Academics like teaching it, because it gives a way in to qualitative analysis without saying, you have to do it this way, this is the best method, you need to know all this kind of terminology and so on. We break down the concepts that can mean different things in different disciplines that prevent having conversations. AC: One of the things I love about the fact that your paper is so highly cited is that you are two female psychologists who have dominated this field. VC: I think methodology can be quite macho? For male academics, theory and methodology are ways of performing masculinity. So it does feel nice that we’re in that space; but also, not something we take too seriously. AC: Another thing I like is that you are both constantly evolving the approach and publishing papers to clarify: around your attitudes towards saturation, and sample sizes, and you’ve recently renamed the six stages of the process as well. VC: When you’ve read scores and scores of papers claiming that you say saturation can be achieved in 12 interviews, when we say nothing of the sort… or one that says, ‘following Braun and Clarke’s process’, and then mentioning things that we never talk about… you think, ‘wow’. So it’s seeing how our work was misrepresented, but also reflecting on how we
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the psychologist february 2022 thematic analysis
contributed to that, in how we originally wrote about thematic analysis. ‘Searching for themes’ is a classic example. We thought everyone would understand what we meant by that. But we were wrong, because some see it as a process of digging through the sand, trying to find the buried treasures, the themes that are fully formed within the data. But we didn’t mean that at all.
VC: We talk about this concept of knowingness, and having some understanding of the conceptual foundations of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. It’s a striving, a deliberative process. You don’t arrive at, ‘tick, knowing practitioner, everything I do is now fully informed’. Bad TA comes from a lack of knowingness. People are mashing up code books, coding frames, and coding reliability measures, with things that we outline, because they don’t understand the conceptual foundations of the different approaches.
VB: As you’re talking Vic I realise that our process and evolution of writing is a good example of the way VB: And the flipside is people who treat it as a recipe, a reflexivity is always a work in progress… your insight series of steps or phases. Like it’s a procedure that you into assumptions, into the ways you are shaping what can approach mechanically, rather than thoughtfully. I you’re doing, is always only ever going to be partial can understand how that might sound contradictory… and partly accessible to you. You never have that full we’ve written about the processes as tools, ways to crystal ball to see inside yourself and to see what is facilitate your analytic engagement. unstated, or what is assumed, or The process is a tool to get you to how your context is shaping what “You’re not ‘discovering’, where you need to be. you see in various ways. I think one of the advantages of you’re active, you’re VC: I was thinking about this us living and working in different sculpting” yesterday. People would be contexts, albeit still Anglo-Western horrified if they saw how messy my dominated contexts, is that we approach was. It’s not rigorously come into the writing together from ticking off the phases and stuff like that. In Thematic different places. It adds to our ability to interrogate Analysis: A Practical Guide we use example of my what it is that we’re doing, but we don’t think we’re at grandfather John. He was a proper ‘Downton Abbey’, the final point. This is what we think for now. ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ style cook. When I was a little girl, I’d bake with him. He didn’t use scales, he did VC: I have done a thread or two recently on everything by eye, by judgement, by feel. That disrupts Twitter trying to explain that there are different this idea of baking – that you must follow recipes, and understandings of ‘emerge’ and ‘emergent’, and be really precise. With TA, what we’re trying to achieve we’re critiquing something quite specific when is a bit like how he baked; he knew the underlying we say themes don’t emerge. We’re critiquing the process and chemistry of baking, he knew how conceptualisation of themes as objects that pre-exist ingredients work together. There was looseness and analysis, but also highlighting the researcher’s role in freeformness to how he did things… he knew what he crafting and creating themes. You’re not ‘discovering’, was doing, essentially, he understood the process and you’re active, you’re sculpting. what he was trying to achieve. VB: Your process as a researcher needs to be active and AC: I wonder if one of the challenges of TA for new thoughtful and careful. The analysis is not waiting initiates to qualitative research is that they come from for you to discover, the analysis happens at the this very positivist world, where there are rights and intersection of you and your data, and your reflexivity, wrongs. Students can be excited when they discover your subjectivity, your disciplinary and social context, how flexible, exciting and exploratory it can be, and and all those sorts of things. Your analysis is a product then there is that period of real discomfort… ‘OK, of this cluster of things… you can be more or less so this depends on my personal context and my reflexive, more or less active, more or less engaged. reflexivity? That doesn’t feel right!’ This idea of ‘themes do not emerge’ captures a much VC: Quantitative methods are often just presented more nuanced and complex account of what reflexive as ‘this is how we do research in psychology’. There’s TA ideally looks like as practice. no framing about ‘this is the dominant way. This is the scientific model. This is why we think it’s really VC: I guess it captures as well ‘Big Q qualitative’ good. This is the philosophical underpinnings of it’. researchers’ frustration with positivism creeping into definitions of good practice, into reviewing and editing It’s just, ‘this is how we do research’. And so students go from ‘this is how we do research in psychology’, to processes and so on. By Big Q I mean qualitative some poor qualitative psychologist saying, ‘actually, research conducted within a qualitative paradigm or a there’s this other approach and this other way of doing qualitative research values framework – Louise Kidder things, and it’s quite different.’ That’s challenging for and Michelle Fine’s very helpful way of demarcating the students – you’re basically pulling the rug out non-positivist and positivist qualitative research. from under them. It’d be great if there could be a more collaborative approach within psychology departments AC: What would you say makes bad TA?
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to teaching qualitative and quantitative methods. I know there are some universities where there is that collaboration… that must be wonderful for students, because they’re not having to unlearn everything they just been taught in year one. VB: I used to teach a second year, optional methodology course, which was called ‘producing psychological knowledge’. The whole idea was to disrupt that idea that there is the right way to learn and the right way to do research. The context and practice of methodology teaching needs a lot more deliberation. There’s increased popularity in qualitative approaches, but you’re setting the students up for a really hard task when they have to grapple with not just learning something new, but a context where they’ve sometimes been taught – implicitly, if not explicitly – that it doesn’t align with fundamental values of the discipline. A few immediately love qualitative approaches, because positivism has never sat comfortably with them.
student’s transcript and emailing my co-supervisor in absolute panic – ‘there’s nothing in the data, I’ve read it, there’s nothing in it, it’s terrible, what are we gonna do?’ She was ‘calm down, it’s going to be fine’. And it was. The data was really rich, it’s just that initial panic about, ‘oh, my God, there’s nothing there’. I want to normalise the emotional rollercoaster of qualitative research. It doesn’t stop. VB: Your first engagement with your data is not going to be your last. A data set that can seem fairly ho hum and boring can actually produce things that you get passionate about. In the thematic analysis book, we use a social media data set about people who choose not to have children to illustrate the process. At first, I was ‘there’s a bit there, it’s a bit obvious’, but I got excited by it in the end. The emotional shifts that you can have with data are really common.
AC: It sounds like social media and online data collections are playing a valuable role in your AC: Where would you both like to see thematic research generation. analysis going? Any particular avenues where you VC: There are two methods we’re interested in learning would like to see it developing? more about. The story completion method and the VC: Our core message is around knowing practice. survey method, both are qualitative approaches that Andi Fugard and Henry Potts our PhD supervisors dreamed talk about it being a family of up. They are very innovative “The emotional shifts that methodologically. Celia Kitzinger methods… all these different approaches that lay claim to the you can have with data are wrote a paper about story same name. We’ve developed a completion with a student and Sue really common” typology that draws out the key Wilkinson developed qualitative differences and characteristics for survey methods with students. We students in an accessible way. picked up these two things, and I find it exciting that people are doing things with they are excellent pandemic methods. TA that we didn’t imagine. Work that combines TA What I like about these methods is that we don’t and narrative analysis, that explores themes, but also know a lot about them, we’re finding out about them narrative structures; and approaches to combining TA as we use them. You’re not only learning about the and discursive approaches; using TA and case studies; topic, you’re learning something about the method and just things we hadn’t anticipated. This little industry how it works. The pandemic has taken methods that developing slightly new variations of TA… some I used to have to pitch to students, and made them aren’t awesome, but some are really interesting. You’ve actually want to do them. It feels like the pandemic has created this thing, let it out into the world, and then accelerated certain things. people are doing their own things with it. VB: It’s funny, we worked with Deborah Gray a few VB: We’ve started to see people use TA with visual data, years ago editing a book called Collecting Qualitative not just in textual spaces. Neither of us come from a Data. The hope was to encourage people beyond the background of analysing visual materials. But there’s domination of face to face, in person interviewing interesting scope, to see where and how that becomes and focus groups, to think creatively about virtual, something useful. In the book we give the example of textual and other methods. It was like pandemic Kate Gleeson’s method for analysing visual data, and preparedness… my approach to collecting data wasn’t a student I’ve got is working with data that includes so heavily reliant on going out and interviewing people visual material. When textual data are so familiar to face to face. Research is always a pragmatic activity, and you… how do you even go there? I’ve dabbled, but it you have to make choices in the context that you’re in. feels like I’m just making it up! And we’re currently in a bloody pandemic context.
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AC: I think that will be quite reassuring, particularly for student readers, to hear that we still experience some discomfort at new things! VC: Those emotional reactions to data, I don’t think they ever go away. I vividly remember reading a
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VC: I’m a dissertation module leader, so I look at a lot of projects. In the last year it’s been, ‘I had to do interviews on Skype because of the pandemic’. That’s quite a sad framing of things, as if doing things on Skype is a poor substitute, and not really engaging in
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the psychologist february 2022 thematic analysis
the interesting methodological literature around video call interviews. To any students and supervisors doing online research this year and beyond, I would say read the methodological literature around the method you’re using, and try to construct a more positive narrative around what it is that you’re doing. We can’t go back to normal if we’re ever going to stop the planet burning. And that means doing more research online, rather than travelling all over the country to interview people as I did when I was a research fellow. We travelled all over the southwest, three, four-hour round trips to do a single interview. That’s not sustainable. AVB: I’ve got a student who is interviewing people with chronic pelvic pain. This is a group of participants who might be quite disabled by pain, travelling might be difficult… Zoom provides a potentially far more accessible and encouraging method. Hopefully, what will come out of this is an enriched understanding of all the possibilities for engaging and collecting data. VC: There’s a paper that describes this as an African proverb, ‘the pond you fish in determines the fish you catch’… particular methods will mean certain people participate who might not otherwise take part. The method you use shapes the stories that you’re hearing. That’s something we know really well from sex research – the more intrusive the method, the fewer people will take part, men will be more willing to participate in some methods, women in others. Qualitative psychologists worship the face to face interview as the gold standard for data collection. We need to think more about what works for the participant group. VB: I’ve got a brother who is 19 years younger than me… he’s still my go to check-in with the youth! Young people never pick up a call if it isn’t from a known number… a phone is not necessarily their way of interacting. That becomes a relevant consideration in how we do data collection. With a phone call, the conversation represents to young people a totally different type of encounter… a thing that produces anxiety and stress. When I first heard those kinds of narratives they blew me away – ‘but that’s not what they are, they’re normal!’ They’re not, anymore. No one calls me, ever. That matters, methodologically. AC: I’ll finish on the book: Thematic Analysis, A Practical Guide, and the related website with all the resources in there. Did you want to say a little bit about the book and your hopes and your intentions with publishing this book? VC: It was supposed to be written in 18 months. But every book we’ve done together, one of us has got an autoimmune condition. So Successful Qualitative Research, I got chronic fatigue syndrome, Collecting Qualitative Data, Ginny got post-treatment Lyme Disease syndrome. This book, I got multiple sclerosis.
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It’s your turn next Gin! VB: No more books, no more books! VC: So yes, the books have been really drawn out. But that has given us lots of thinking space. This book’s a culmination of the journey we’ve been on in the last few years – reflecting on misinterpretations, misunderstandings, what could we articulate more clearly, what questions that we’ve been asked, and how can we respond to those. Ginny in particular has been all over the world, teaching in different contexts and settings. We’ve learned so much from that process. The book represents where we are now in our thinking. That’s exciting, but we’re also nervous. Maybe people won’t like it anymore. It’s articulating a particular take on qualitative research. One of our main goals is to argue for non-positivist qualitative research, because at Loughborough when we did our PhDs, the conversation was about, ‘you shouldn’t be doing experiential qual, critical qual is where it’s at’. Our argument now is about trying to get the positivism out of qualitative psychology – it has very limited value, usefulness and meaning. We make a case for Big Q, fully qualitative, however you want to frame it, non-positivist qualitative research. And if that means we’ve passed peak popularity, that’s not necessarily a bad thing! We’ll retreat into obscurity. VB: No more books. My health will just stay as it is, and yours too! VC: Yeah, and no more second editions and third editions. Actually, that’s when we realised we’d never be able to stop writing about this, when an editor emails us enthusiastically with, ‘We’re doing the third edition, we’d like you to revise your chapter’. We did have this ambition that we’d move on to other things, get back to our research and stop being just, or mainly, methodologists. But we’re more or less resigned to our fate. VB: We’re on the Titanic. There’s no getting off. See https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/thematicanalysis/book248481 for the book and additional online resources, and www.thematicanalysis.net for a wide range of other resources. For a longer version of this discussion, plus key sources, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/meets
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Our storytelling nature Jonathan Gottschall on the Heider-Simmel experiment as an illustration of the story paradox
The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed. - David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
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Re-creation of a screen shot from the Heider and Simmel film
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n 1944, the psychologist Fritz Heider and his research assistant Marianne Simmel produced a very short, very crude animated film. They cut geometrical figures out of cardboard and moved them around on transparent glass in the technique of stop-motion animation. The resulting silent film shows a small triangle, a big triangle, and a small circle moving busily around a rectangle. One side of the rectangle flaps open and closed, and sometimes the geometrical figures slide inside. At the end of the film, the small circle and the small triangle disappear offscreen, and the big triangle butts against the big rectangle until it breaks. Heider and Simmel showed the film to 114 research participants, who were simply asked to describe what they saw. (Before reading further, please take 90 seconds to watch the Heider-Simmel film on YouTube.) I first saw the short film about 65 years after it was made and watched in delight as the simple geometry resolved itself into a classic three-act love story. Act One: The two lovers, Small Circle and Small Triangle, move side by side onto the screen. Act Two: Big Triangle decides he fancies Small Circle as well. He uses his pointy nose to wedge the lovers apart, then chases Small Circle into his house (the big flapping rectangle), where he tries to trap her in a corner. Act Three: To my relief, Small Circle slips past the lecherous Big Triangle and reunites with her mate outside. They race side by side around the house, with Big Triangle in hot pursuit. Finally, the lovers escape offscreen. Furious and frustrated, Big Triangle slams against the walls of his house until it collapses. When I showed the film to my students, their reactions surprised and confused me. While many saw a love story like me, others were just as convinced that they’d seen a sordid family drama or a slapstick comedy along the lines of The Three Stooges. I should have been fascinated by the Rorschach element of the film, but I wasn’t – not at first. I was too frustrated by my students’ inability to see the ‘real’ story that I knew Heider and Simmel were trying to tell. At the time, I’d only heard enough about the Heider-Simmel film to look it up on YouTube, but I’d never read the original scientific paper. When I did, I realised to my embarrassment that my students hadn’t been getting the film wrong; I had been. And it wasn’t
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the psychologist february 2022 looking back
until years later that I recognized the film as a powerful illustration of the story paradox: it reveals something wonderful about our nature as storytelling animals while also hinting at something profoundly scary – something like the root of humanity’s largest, deepest evils. Although this wasn’t divulged in the paper of 1944, Heider later explained in his 1983 autobiography that he did have a hazy story situation in mind when he dreamt up his famous film. ‘As I planned the action of the film,’ Heider wrote, ‘I thought of the small triangle and the circle as a pair of lovers or friends and I thought of the big triangle as a bully who intruded on them’ (p.148). So rather than imagining a definite plot, Heider imagined an open framework consisting of a setup, a conflict, and a resolution, which could support a variety of basic plots, including Heider’s visions of either a buddy flick or a romance. Despite its built-in ambiguity, the film nonetheless produces impressive convergence in interpretation. In the original experiment, for example, 97 per cent of the 114 people who viewed the film saw a story. Moreover, there were strong regularities in the stories people saw. First, even though the geometrical shapes look and move more like scurrying beetles, almost everyone automatically saw them not as bugs but as people in conflict. And most viewers automatically gendered the shapes in the same way – the circular female, the spear-headed males. On top of that, in a strong majority of cases people agreed on the basic protagonist–antagonist split: Big Triangle was the bad guy, and the two smaller figures were good. They also tended to give the shapes similar personality traits: Big Triangle was a bully, Small Circle was timid. But there are equally impressive divergences in interpretation. For instance, although the most common story people see is indeed a love triangle, it’s not always my love triangle. Some viewers were convinced that Big Triangle was the aggrieved party, having been cuckolded by Small Triangle. Others thought that Small Circle wanted to be with Big Triangle. He, not she, was the unwilling party. But more times than not, viewers saw no love story at all. Some viewers saw a tale of domestic violence in which Big Triangle was abusing his family. Others saw Big Triangle as a harmless oaf being harassed by Lilliputian invaders. One viewer thought Big Triangle was a witch, trying to catch two children. Over the years, I’ve conducted scores of informal replications of the Heider-Simmel experiment in my classes and in public lectures, with total numbers of participants stretching to many thousands. And I came to love the way viewers project idiosyncratic stories and meanings onto such simple geometry. The diversity of response shows that when we see the film we’re not experiencing story but are actually creating the story through a sequence of unstoppable cerebral reflexes. Even when the film is run backward, and there can be no possibility that the psychologists had a definite
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plot or meaning in mind, people still see stories. When I watched the film backward, I expected to see my love triangle story running in reverse – like the bygone experience of hitting rewind on a VCR tape. Instead, I watched slack-jawed as my love story dissolved into a scene out of A Clockwork Orange in which the formerly predatory Big Triangle (now my stolid protagonist) is harried by a feral pair of anarcho-terrorists. The point here isn’t limited to how people interpret simple animation. The point is that this is what storytelling animals are up to all the time: we’re trying to impose the meaningful and comforting order of This is an adapted story structure on the ambiguities of existence. And extract from The thanks to differences in our minds and experiences, Story Paradox: we will reliably fail to see the same story – just like in How our love the famous film. of storytelling Moreover, though our interpretations of a primitive builds societies cartoon couldn’t matter much less, this effect runs and tears them riot through domains of experience where it couldn’t down, with kind matter much more. Especially because the stories permission from we see can be divisive. When we experience chaotic the publisher events, we naturally construct stories to bring order Basic Books. to the chaos. And, as with all of the most typical responses to the Heider-Simmel film, we’re apt to resolve the chaos into a moralistic trinary of victims, villains, and heroes. The story psychology revealed by the HeiderSimmel effect isn’t the root of all evil. But this humble experiment digs to the root of the most tragic type: the kind otherwise good people get swept up in. I’m referring to the human tendency to glom on to Jonathan a story often for no good reason at all, to cling to it Gottschall is tenaciously, to let it structure our worldview, and to distinguished allow it to project patterns on the world that aren’t research fellow really there. at Washington & In all my screenings of the Heider-Simmel film, Jefferson College debates over the ‘true story’ have often been raucous but always friendly and light-hearted. People don’t get invested in their interpretations, not intellectually and not emotionally. But if you take the same narrative Key sources psychology laid bare by the film and you translate it to situations Heider, F. (1983). The Life of a where (1) there’s a truth that can Psychologist: An Autobiography. conceivably be determined, and (2) University Press of Kansas. the stakes run higher than cartoon Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944). An interpretation, people will dig in for Experimental Study of Apparent their fictions and fight. Behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 243-259. Sometimes it seems to me that Klin A. (2000). Attributing social what I call the Heider-Simmel meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in effect – our tendency to all watch higher-functioning autism and Asperger the same film and see different syndrome: The Social Attribution stories – explains everything about Task. Journal of Child Psychology and the roiling anger and confusion of Psychiatry, 41(7), 831-846. Ratajska, A., Brown, M.I. & Chabris, C.F. modern life. And this effect, souped (2020). Attributing social meaning to up by technological and cultural animated shapes: A new experimental upheaval, helps explain why we study of apparent behavior. The now find it so hard to converge on American Journal of Psychology, 133(3), consensus narratives about the basic 295-312. shape of reality.
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What stories make worlds, what worlds make stories
Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths towards Social Change Edited by Corinne Squire Oxford University Press
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sychologists have always been preoccupied with stories: the ones that dominate and the ones that can’t yet be told. Today the term ‘narrative’ is under considerable scrutiny, even becoming politicised. Take Back Control, Build Back Better, Yes We Can – political leaders harness narratives, their past, present, future temporalities and subtle appeals to belonging. Scientists in universities who work with narratives are often marginalised. Studies which focus on lived realities, on personal truths, are contrasted with large-scale systematic data collection: data is collected by ‘experts’, and stories are collected by ‘partisans’. Amid these tensions and possibilities arrives a book which reveals how narratives work towards social justice. When you pick up a copy of Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change, it is hard to make sense of the choice of cover. A gloomy black and white image of a hospital, office or perhaps university building late in the evening. The light glowing from one lone office. It contrives to obscure more than it reveals, to hint at erasures and persistent darkness. By the end of the book the image, part of a photovoice story collected by Shose Kessi, shines brightly. The book is full of stories. Here’s another: somewhere in Berlin political psychologist Molly Andrews is talking for a second time, after a gap of over 20 years, to the political dissident Jens Reich. But why does he answer her question about the Stasi files by telling Molly a story? Corinne Squire, one of the co-directors of the
Association of Narrative Research and Practice, brings together such an exciting set of contributors that the book grips you like fiction. This is a book of truth and accounting against a backdrop of stubborn structures of racialised power and often seismic social change. It is a book relevant to anyone who wishes to see a public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, with its warnings about public accountability from case contexts such as South Africa and the USA. In our work within the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory (PDPC) we are preoccupied with democracy, public accountability and the dialogue between citizens and their governments. In the opening chapter, written by the late Elliot Mischler together with Corinne Squire, the question of ‘the personal is political’ is re-worked to ‘the political is personal’. How stories perform a social justice function is shown through three examples: Resistance to unfair use of legal authority, the struggle for equality by African Americans and the impact of traumatic brain injury on people’s daily lives. These examples weave a multicoloured thread through the book about the function of storytelling in the development of action for social justice. For example, Michael Murray’s account of community activism is very relevant for anyone interested in the political lives of those on the ground, striving for social justice (and probably achieving more in their own humble way than most high-profile political leaders who hold the power). Several contributors show how Truth and
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the psychologist february 2022 books Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) can be generative spaces which ‘surface and circulate’ untold stories. Yet the assumptions that underpin TRCs e.g. in Canada, Rwanda, Colombia and South Africa – that ordinary citizens can speak truth to power in a process of restorative justice – are in need of interrogation. Working within their own context of Houston, Texas, Alisa Del Tufo and her colleagues show how a full accounting enables a decolonising practice – a different story to be told, which can be translated across time and space. They call this the power of bearing wit(h) ness. Ann Phoenix brings the decolonisation challenge into the European context, tackling racialised responsibilities of joint analysis. The chapter succinctly moves between two interview transcripts, a reflective commentary and the group of researchers’ relationships when exploring these narratives. The two interviewees’ very moving experiences of racist encounters are, in the context of racialised gender, starkly different. Whilst solutions to such issues are beyond the scope of the chapter this is likely to be relatable for any researcher engaged in qualitative analysis. A key question for those preoccupied with stories is not just the power to tell but who is listening. M Brinton Lykes writes about living lives of resistance. Looking at truth commissions amongst the Mayan, Brinton Lykes recognises the risks of an underlying ‘transitional justice paradigm’ of going from the invisible to the hyper-visible, her participatory methods of co-creation act as reflexive and dialogical relations of solidarity. Donna Haraway foregrounds how ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’. Yet Haraway’s post-humanism is not the inspiration for this book that starts somewhere much further south. It is inspired by Homi Bhabha’s right to narrate, psychologists such as Chabani Manganyi and by the African humanist philosophy of ubuntu. Ubuntu exists across many African cultures, Xhosa, Bantu, Zulu, translated as I am because we are or the sharing that connects all humanity. Developed most explicitly in Jill Bradbury’s chapter on the need to resist the reduction of multiple stories into a single-story line in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. As Bradbury articulates more fully in her own book Narrative Psychology and Vygostsky in Dialogue, ubuntu-based ethics are vital to understanding African intellectualism and collective action. If you operate in an environment where you wrestle with disinformation and post-truth politics, or need a detailed articulation of our narrative imaginative capacities and future-orientations, take this troubling book on the power of stories to change lives with you. It is your ally. Reviewed by Kesi Mahendran, Sue Nieland, Anthony English and Nicola Magnusson all within the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory, Open Psychology Research Centre, The Open University
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‘Work is what you do, not a place you go’ Nigel Oseland’s perspective on the return to the office Putting it mildly, Covid-19 has had devastating effect on home and work life. However, it does provide the opportunity to rethink the design and planning of office space. As most office workers are now familiar with flexible working, the balance of office space can be addressed with more thought given to the spaces that are truly required in the office, for the staff and for the success of the organisation, as well as making the office more attractive than staying at home. However, several surveys of corporate real estate professionals have revealed that some organisations intend to reduce their office space rather than address the balance. Implementing desk sharing allows them to reduce the number of desks, and office space, thus saving on property costs. In times of uncertainty an efficiency drive is wise, but reducing office space is a flawed strategy and false economy. Over the last 20 years the occupational density (space per person) in UK offices has increased by approximately 40 per cent, with a loss of almost 7m2 per person across the building. This has been partially
achieved through smaller desks located closer together in larger clusters. This over-densification of desk areas is not good for noise, personal space and cross-infection, and depending on the building services can also impact on thermal comfort and air quality. This can lead to loss of performance, poor wellbeing as well as poorly utilised offices. Now more than ever is the time to invest in people, providing the best facilities, rather than consider the office a cost burden. Well planned, implemented and managed agile/flexible workplaces can meet occupant needs, and provide an attractive working environment, whilst being cost-effective. The return to work and the workplace post-pandemic is one aspect of designing offices to meet psychological needs, discussed in my new book Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office (Routledge). Dr Nigel Oseland is an environmental psychologist and workplace strategist See thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ work-what-you-do-not-place-you-go
Honouring victims of torture into this part of the story, reassuring In the winter of 1969, John the reader of his thriving family life. Schlapobersky, a second-year By the time I arrived at the central university student, was arrested by piece, his diary, I felt cognisant that the South African security police for this is not an account of retribution his opposition to Apartheid. He was or voyeurism but a space then tortured, detained that invites connection and deported. This book and understanding. is a testimony of what When they came This is achieved by happened to him during for me: The Schlapobersky’s this period, and acts as hidden diary of an witness to both the worst apartheid prisoner meticulous inclusion of everyone in the story. parts of human nature and John R. Everyone matters. the most beautiful aspects Schlapobersky Schlapobersky’s of soul, community, family Jonathan Ball generosity in offering and relationship. details of all he I approached this book encountered shows how their with a degree of trepidation. I was lives interweave, and that these aware there would be description experiences happen by, within and to of torture and was not relishing communities. being taken to dark places. However, There is insight into the historical Schlapobersky offers a slow stepping
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context Schlapobersky is speaking from. His family were not new to the horrors of supremacy and oppression, and this embodied understanding and the savvy insight of his family was very likely the reason he was not killed. The ‘diary’ itself is an approximately 100-page account of his 56-day interrogation, torture, solitary confinement, negotiation, release and deportation. As expected with a trauma experience, the narrative functions in two realms. The majority of the physical account is constructed from memory of intermittent blocks of time, supported by some written recordings. This is matched with a highly detailed landscape of intense feeling. The combination is immersive and deeply moving. I found myself humming along to Simon and Garfunkel lyrics; crying at a quote from Ecclesiastes, and horrified at the sudden realisation that the guards were trying to kill Schlapobersky via a coerced ‘suicide’.
A moving epilogue underlines the understandings he has taken from his experience at the hands of an authoritarian state. As a renowned group psychotherapist, in 1985 Schlapobersky helped establish a London based organisation: the ‘Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture’ (now known as ‘Freedom from Torture’). The epilogue and the book’s title, bring to mind the Martin Niemöller speech: First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me. When they came for him, Schlapobersky had people to speak out on his behalf. That is why he survived. But many in his situation did not. The majority of torture victims do not survive, which is why this book is so necessary and important. In writing his memoir, Schlapobersky speaks for those who have been killed and honours them. He also writes for those who are being tortured, detained and deported right now. Reviewed by Dr Libby Nugent, Clinical Psychologist and Group Work Practitioner of Group Analysis Read an interview with Schlapobersky’s daughter Hannah Sherbersky, a family therapist and psychologist, via thepsychologist.bps. org.uk/volume-34/december-2021/ family-story
‘Storytelling is fundamental’ The Act of Living: What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety is the latest book from psychologist and author Frank Tallis. Alison Torn (Leeds Trinity University) asks the questions
FRANK TALLIS
ling and important book, the principle contributions of ng figures associated with the practice of psychotherapy are ated. Viewed as a single, cohesive intellectual tradition, gues that the ideas that have arisen from psychotherapy mmensely valuable and under exploited resource – most addressing the question of how to live in an age of anxiety.
What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety
ndred years, psychotherapists have been developing and ls of the human mind. They have endeavoured to alleviate ey have offered help to people who want to make better life ugh the clinical provenance of psychotherapy is important, psychotherapy has much wider relevance. It can offer original n the big questions usually entrusted to philosophers and of faith: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live?
The Act of Living
ology and western liberal democracy have all had a dramatic quality of life. Compared to previous generations, we have d access to information, increased personal freedom, more orts and more possessions. Yet, even before the shock of re people than ever before report being depressed, anxious As our material circumstances become easier, life seems to hy should this be? Shelves sag under the weight of self-help he internet is awash with the advice of role-models and s; however, to what extent can these sources be expected to ngful, practical answers – the kind of answers relevant to iduals living in a modern, technologically advanced culture?
ISBN 978-1-4087-1136-1
UK £XX.XX CAN $XX.XX
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You refer to what is becoming a common state of unhappiness as ‘problems in living’, a phrase Thomas Szasz used in his paper ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’. What are your thoughts on Szasz’s argument that experiences of distress should be taken out of the realm of psychiatry and medicine? Where should support for these problems lie (the self, psychology)? Attempting to treat ‘mental illnesses’ with drugs in medical settings isn’t something I automatically oppose. That said, I don’t think the medical model should be privileged because of reductionist arguments. Physics doesn’t invalidate chemistry and chemistry doesn’t invalidate biology. They are different levels of description and all of them have value. Likewise, drug treatments do not invalidate or diminish the value of psychotherapy. What we think of as ‘mental illness’ is the product of many contributory factors. Where distress is clearly related to personal history and social context, it seems reasonable to suppose that psychological interventions will be more helpful than drugs, largely because they are more ‘meaningful’. A traumatic experience, for example, can be understood and processed.
‘Tallis writes with clarity and wit’ SEBASTIAN FAULKS
The Act of Living FRANK
TA L L I S What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety
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Broadly speaking, I agree with many of the points raised by Szasz and the anti-psychiatry movement; but not to the extent that I would reject biological psychiatry as a matter of principle. The demand for psychotherapy always seems to exceed supply. Nevertheless, not everyone who could potentially benefit from exposure to psychotherapeutic ideas needs – necessarily – to be in therapy. There are good reasons for introducing young people to psychotherapeutic thinking in schools. I suspect that adolescents would be particularly receptive. Given current and quite alarming trends in mental health statistics, the dissemination of psychotherapeutic ideas in educational settings might be a sensible prophylactic measure. When we look at the proliferation of self-help books, apps, blogs etc., are we in danger of, as David Ingleby would say, ‘the psychiatrization of everyday life’? So personal unhappiness becomes something to ‘treat’, or are we equipping people with the resources they need to live in a more comfortable state of being? In The Act of Living I suggest that instead of viewing psychotherapy as a collection of competing schools,
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the psychologist february 2022 books we should view it as a single tradition that has been evolving for over a hundred years. ‘Psychotherapy’ offers a distinctive ‘worldview’ that can inform and instruct beyond ‘medical settings’. It can supply original answers to the big questions usually posed by philosophers and representatives of faith: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? If self-help books, apps, and blogs, offer advice drawn from the tradition of psychotherapy (as opposed to poppsychology) I think they can be very helpful. Distress can be plotted on a continuum and the precise point at which, say, ordinary sadness becomes ‘clinical depression’ has always been subject to debate. I don’t think providing psychological support to people who are experiencing mild to moderate levels of anxiety or depression qualifies as ‘psychiatrization’. It is simply acknowledging an aspect of the human condition. Psychotherapy has never been overly concerned with cure. It has always stressed management, coping, and acceptance. Freud famously referred to the goal of psychotherapy as being ‘common unhappiness’. Psychotherapy is realistic. Viewed as a tradition, that is one of its greatest strengths. It is the antithesis of the hollow (and ultimately disappointing) inspirational platitudes that flood social media. Looking at what psychotherapy can offer people in current times, one criticism has been around its accessibility. Given that access to psychotherapy has historically been to white, privileged Western populations, how can minority and less-privileged populations benefit from what psychotherapy can offer? There is nothing wrong with nuance and sensitivity, tailoring services for the specific needs of specific groups. But in the end – and forgive me for stating the obvious – we are all human beings. I can’t help feeling that evolutionary pressures have created fundamental commonalities that unite humanity. The basic problems of living are the same for everyone. Which means that the core ideas of psychotherapy are universal and don’t need to be ‘translated’. We have shared objectives; to discover who we are; to satisfy our needs; to seek safety; to love and be loved; to be a valued member of a social group, and so on. Because we are more similar than different, it is relatively easy to identify convergent thinking about the mind and optimal ways of living across time. For example, a very old system of thought, like Buddhism, has much in common with a relatively new system of thought, such as psychoanalysis. The early Buddhist concept of mind, like Freud’s, is rooted in the body. It can be affected by latent tendencies – that is, unconscious thought – and human beings pursue ‘sense gratifications’ according to the equivalent of Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’. Life is suffering – a close relative of Freud’s ‘common unhappiness’. Psychotherapy is based on ideas – and good ideas usually transcend time and culture. The figures you present in your book, for some people may be viewed as consigned to history, for others their
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influence is reflected in their own practice and ways of being in the world. Who are the figures theorising/ researching/practicing now that would make it into a revised edition of your book in a 100 years’ time? One hundred years is a long way ahead and I don’t possess a crystal ball! However, there are lessons to be learned from history. Psychoanalysis was profoundly influenced by figures like Darwin, Helmholtz, and Haeckel. General scientific advances created an intellectual climate that made psychoanalysis possible. This is a recurring pattern. Advances in experimental behavioural and cognitive psychology, for example, eventually influenced the practice of psychotherapy. So, I would guess that we should look at what’s happening in the world of pure (and speculative) research to predict the future of psychotherapy. Recently, there have been some very exciting ‘general’ developments in neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. I am fascinated by Donald Hoffman’s ideas about perception and reality, and Karl Friston’s ‘free energy principle’ (which has already been linked with psychoanalytic ideas). I also imagine that having discovered ‘mindfulness’, psychotherapists will continue to excavate Buddhist psychology to greater depths. What was your favourite chapter to write, or perhaps the one that felt most personally relevant? I particularly enjoyed writing the chapter on narrative. I’ve always thought that human beings are predisposed to make sense of the world (and themselves) by telling stories… this is why a simplistic ‘populist’ narrative is always more seductive than facts. Moreover, psychotherapy can be construed as a process which involves patients presenting chaotic narratives to
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therapists, who then edit them so that they are more coherent. Coherent self-narratives seem to be associated with improved mental health outcomes. I’ve attempted to explain why storytelling is so important to human beings, by exploring its evolutionary origins with reference to Povinelli and Cant’s ‘arboreal clambering’ hypothesis – which suggests that self-awareness and narrative intelligence evolved simultaneously. Storytelling is fundamental. It’s how we organise experience: chains of cause and effect divided into beginnings, middles, and ends. An intuitively satisfying way of thinking about identity is as ‘the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves’. The different roles that we ‘perform’ – mother, daughter, sister, employee, friend – are sewn together by our life story. Therefore, a strong self-narrative prevents divisions opening-up within the self and fragmentations of the self. A coherent self-narrative stops us from ‘losing the plot’. Would any of the great psychologists you discuss fall into the category of forgotten, or underappreciated? Although not forgotten, Alfred Adler is certainly under appreciated. This is something that Henri Ellenberger pointed out as far back as 1970. Adler’s name surfaces quite often, because he was the first of Freud’s disciples to establish his own, independent school of psychotherapy, and his term – ‘inferiority complex’ – has entered everyday speech as a pejorative. However, Adler was also a brilliant psychotherapist who truly understood the importance of social and political context. This isn’t surprising, considering that his chess partner in Vienna’s Café Central was Leon Trotsky. Unfortunately, Adler’s
ideas are frequently ‘borrowed’ without any attribution. From where I am sitting, I can see a volume on my bookshelf – quite a famous one – that makes extensive use of Adler’s ideas without mentioning him once! You’re so prolific, writing fiction as well which has been adapted for a major TV series in Vienna Blood. How do all these strings to your bow come together? Actually, I don’t see psychology and writing fiction as separate strings that must be brought together. In my mind, they are already together. All my fiction is informed by psychology. Sometimes the connection is obvious, as with the Vienna Blood series. Clearly, seven psychoanalytic crime novels set in Freud’s Vienna are going to be ‘psychological’. But sometimes the connection is less obvious. For example, I wrote a supernatural novel (as F.R. Tallis) which is ostensibly about a haunted U-boat in WWII. The sea serves as a metaphor for the unconscious – the deeper you go, the more horrors you are likely to encounter. The relationship between psychology and writing is reciprocal. Writing novels has changed how I now write psychology. Even when I’m discussing abstract ideas, I do my best to present those ideas within a narrative. I try to tell the story of those ideas. Psychology is such a versatile subject. I think this should be stressed more – particularly to undergraduates. I didn’t realise it at the time, but when I was student, I was being introduced to a body of knowledge that would allow me to travel freely between two worlds: clinical and literary. A psychology degree is as much a cultural passport as it is an academic qualification.
Looking for Early Career editors… We’re looking for a person or team of people to come up with a vision for a special edition of The Psychologist devoted to Early Career Researchers. As we write, with many academics taking industrial action, the pressures facing ECRs are in our minds, and we would like to explore any challenges and opportunities that are specific to, or enhanced in, the discipline of Psychology. The guest editor(s) will commission, write, edit and prepare material for publication in a special issue. This would be great experience for someone potentially looking to make science communication a part of their career. But don’t worry if it sounds like a lot to take on: we will be alongside you all the way. We’ve never tried this before, so exactly what form your input would take and the extent of it is all up for discussion. The main requirements are voice and vision.
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Find more information at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/voices-psychology
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PsychCrunch Podcast sponsored by Routledge Psychology episode 29 Why do people share false information?
Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest ‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want? I only wish I’d found this years ago!’ Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry ‘The selection of papers suits my eclectic mind perfectly, and the quality and clarity of the synopses is uniformly excellent.’ Professor Guy Claxton, University of Bristol 64
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‘Burton is a 400-year-old version of that patient voice’ Exhibition Melancholy: A New Anatomy Weston Library, Oxford
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obert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is a huge and innovative encyclopaedia of mental and emotional disorder, as understood in the late Renaissance. The Anatomy examines the causes and symptoms of melancholy (or, in modern terms, depression). Burton emphasised melancholy as a common experience: ‘Who is not a Foole, who is free from Melancholy?’, answering his own question with ‘all the world is mad, is melancholy, dotes’. Suggested remedies included good food and exercise, laughter, reading, music, and friends: ‘be not solitary, be not idle’. A scholar and clergyman in Christ Church, Oxford, Burton was one of the early users of the Bodleian Library and left many of the books in his own substantial collection to the Bodleian. Now an exhibition, running until 20 March, revisits the Anatomy, using objects from the Bodleian Libraries to highlight common experiences and connections over time. One of the curators is Professor John Geddes, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. We asked Thomas Dixon, Professor of History at Queen Margaret University of London, to have a conversation with Geddes about the book and exhibition. So, John, perhaps you could begin with how you first encountered Robert Burton? I’d qualified and gone into psychiatry training, in Sheffield. The place I lived, Hunter’s Bar, had a lovely second hand bookshop at the end of the road. I used to go in and wander, and found this ancient Victorian three-volume version of The Anatomy of Melancholia. I had read about it when I was a house officer, because I’ve been reading another book, by Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time… a 12-volume book in which the protagonist is always doing something on the anatomy of melancholy, but you never really find out why. So I bought The Anatomy of Melancholia and I just didn’t know what to make of it. This huge book, which seems to be a review of melancholy, by an author who said that he was writing it to recover from his own melancholy. It was all over the place in the humanities, one of the most famous books of all time, always comes in the top 10, yet there was very little in the history of psychiatry about this book. That resonated with me… I used to take it along to journal clubs and try and get my colleagues interested.
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Have you read the whole thing? I certainly haven’t … it’s quite off-puttingly enormous. Even academic specialists in Burton will admit to not having read it in a conventional linear way. The only
person who says they have is the author Phillip Pullman. We did an event when we launched the exhibition, and he had been asked by the Everyman Library to do an introduction, so he felt that he should really read it… He’s an exceedingly conscientious person! Your answer hints at the fact that this exhibition is a direct conversation between psychiatry today, and Burton’s text. What struck you, in terms of ways in which Burton ‘anticipated’ modern psychiatry? This is the voice of someone who has a profound personal experience of the problem, and is writing to become expert on that problem, both for his own benefit and the benefit of others. I’ve become increasingly convinced over the last 20 years by the importance of the patient’s voice in the way that we provide care but also in the way we direct research. Burton is a 400-year-old version of that patient voice: he tells the reader what he thinks a doctor should do, and how they should work with an individual patient. That is very striking. It’s not a medical treatise by a doctor, it’s a patient narrative. Burton is giving voice to an experience – is it one you recognise as depression? Is melancholia depression, or a sort of distant ancestor or cousin? Burton does focus on mood disorder, let’s call it that, but again in a way that’s quite modern. This broad, heterogeneous experience, which ranges from what we all experience as human beings, through to the most profound states that I’m happy to view as an illness. There’s no one size fits all… there’s this huge group of both causes, treatments, experiences. But it’s a really central part of what being human is about, so very few people will not understand or be familiar with some of the experiences Burton is talking about, even if there’s varying severity. As a historian of emotions, in a way I’m coming at this from the opposite point of view – about what was different in the 17th century, and why melancholy maybe isn’t the same as depression. There’s that Burton quote in the exhibition: ‘all the world is mad, is melancholy’. Of course, that’s different from depression, where if you go to the DSM or some other standard definition of depression, you have to tick off five out of nine symptoms, and the idea is that a small proportion of the population have that. Is that a difference, the melancholy, for Burton, is universal? Burton’s conception of melancholy includes, but is not restricted to, what we would currently call depressive illness. But actually, if you look at the epidemiology
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Is there an object, text or image in the exhibition that you particularly love, or that you were surprised by? At the beginning of the exhibition we have a portrait of Burton, on loan from Brasenose College. The thing that almost makes me fall to my knees is standing in front of that and looking into his eyes, which are blazing out, gazing down the whole room. It’s an obvious one, but it is so important. It’s the 400th anniversary of his book and it is still just as revered, just as influential. Remarkable. of depression across humanity, it doesn’t fall into this isolated group of depressive illness, and then nothing… there’s a spectrum in the way we experience low mood. What DSM does is try to delineate the experience which would constitute a medical disorder. It’s clearly going to be a very imperfect way of doing that. I’m interested in how to demarcate an illness from an everyday emotion for all sorts of reasons, personal and professional. Some people are very insistent, really want to make that distinction: ‘you might think you know what low mood is, but I’ve got clinical depression’. Whereas in my experience, my whole life has been on a continuum of emotions and moods, occasionally getting to the point
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where someone might say it was a disorder, but for me I don’t see any line at all. For a clinician who had read Burton, how would they approach that question? Within the book, there are descriptions that would quite clearly fit into something that would meet DSM criteria. But it’s more expansive than that. A psychiatric epidemiologist, somebody looking at the distribution of the way humans experience low mood, would recognise what Burton’s talking about pretty easily. I was talking to the gardener and TV personality Monty Don, who has written very openly about his own experience of low mood. He was asking if depression is like respiratory infections: it can vary from a cold all the way through to severe infection that leads to us being
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ventilated in hospital. And I think that’s right, in that we are just talking about the way humans talk about their own experiences. We still rely entirely on the subjective expression of mood when we’re making the diagnosis. And that varies from something that we all experience from time to time and means that we’re a bit below par, all the way through to things that are quite life threatening. I don’t think there’s any good evidence that there’s a clear demarcation that we can point to reliably to say one is different from the other. It’s on the basis of convention – ‘when does this experience become a health problem?’ And of course, the American DSM did that from the point of view of getting reimbursement from insurance agencies. So hopefully, someone who goes to your exhibition will come away with a quite expansive sense of the range of experiences that might come under a broad umbrella of melancholia. Yes, and also the approaches that may be helpful today. Burton goes through all the potential therapeutic approaches – everything from looking at your diet, to exercise, to sleep. We are rediscovering the fact there are lots of activities that might help us manage our own mood. Of course, this should be no surprise… presumably, the reason that we as humankind invented all these things is because they give us pleasure and help us cope in the face of the rather unfeeling universe. Let me ask you about a couple of those specific treatments that are recommended by Burton, and implicitly by your exhibition. One is religion, which features in The Anatomy both as a problem and as a cure. There’s religious melancholy, superstition and ‘religious madness’ of various kinds, and then there’s a consolation of faith and religion. In the literature accompanying the exhibition, there’s a reference to an Oxford psychiatry project today about faith and psychiatry, and your faith-oriented approaches. Does that work resonate with Burton’s views on religion? There’s a general point in Burton that there’s a balance to be achieved between something that in a certain amount is helpful, and if you do too much of it, it’s unhelpful. Exercise is another example. Actually targeting research at understanding the dose effects of exercise and how they relate to individual people would be useful… our evidence base for exercise is pretty limited at the moment. And religion is probably along those lines too, I think that’s an important insight. Of course, Burton was a cleric. We’ve already got lots of insights from religion that might be helpful for mental health: again, in moderation. Mindfulness based cognitive therapy; the whole concept of mindfulness came out of religious practice. The project you mention, with Gulamabbas Lakha, brings together his ministry work as a Shaykh with his academic training in Psychology, to develop new ways of thinking about faith and therapy.
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That also feeds into your point about thinking of Burton as an extended manifesto for listening to patients’ own narratives. If a patient has a faith that is important to their understanding of themselves, then that will surely be important to their understanding of their mental condition, including mental illness and suffering. But let’s say 50 years ago, would there have been a less holistic and harmonious relationship between psychiatry and religion? For me, in Oxford, Burton has become quite symbolic for a number of us that are trying to work with colleagues in the humanities, social sciences, across the gardens, libraries and museums to broaden out the range of research that we do into things that might be helpful for people who have problems with mental health in one way or another… to actually develop the evidence base for things like social prescribing. Burton isn’t dichotomising into a very biological base or a very psychological approach. He’s perfectly happy to tolerate a multiplicity. That might not have always been there, if people tended to take ideological sides on what was important and what was not. We haven’t talked about the exhibits other than Burton’s text, but two jumped out at me because I know them quite well, I’m very fond of them… Mary Shelley’s Journal of Sorrow that she wrote by hand after the death of her husband, Percy Shelley, and then there’s also a reference to C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, which he wrote after his wife Joy died. They’re both described as examples of scriptotherapy, as you call it, which is what Burton is doing as well – writing as therapy. To what extent is psychiatry rediscovering things that people have always known are good for them – reading and writing, going for walks, and so on – and calling them therapy? And is there any problem with that, if some people in the humanities might feel ‘we know this is good, we’ve been doing this for centuries…’? It’s a worry, isn’t it? But this isn’t a way of annexing all those activities, it’s a way of recognising the huge human benefits. I wouldn’t for a minute try to say that all these things should be rebadged as therapy. It’s about how these activities might be helpful, both in a preventive way as hugely powerful ways of helping us navigate our difficult lives, and for some people with degrees of low mood or depression, they might be quite effective treatments, or could be developed as such. You might be able to pick out the mechanisms by which some of these practices help and map them on to people’s problems quicker. There’s an explosion of interests in all these activities. In bookshops, some of the biggest sections are selfhelp books, covering everything from bird therapy, poetry therapy, nature therapy… Where did you start? Do people have to have to go through everything? Or is there a way of saying, ‘In your case, you need something that is going to provide something for your reward systems’? For information, see visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/ melancholy-new-anatomy
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No way out Exhibition The Holocaust Galleries The Imperial War Museum London
As an Environmental Psychologist and Second Generation Holocaust survivor, my visit to this new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) proved to be both a personal and professional challenge. My journey began with a telephone enquiry regarding disabled access as I was being accompanied by a friend who has mobility issues. This set the tone for our visit: the staff were friendly and supportive, but they had no electric buggies, only manual wheelchairs, and there was no disabled parking available at the time we would be visiting. These frustrations were compounded by a lack of both clear instruction and signposting on arrival. We eventually found the right access and were directed to the
entrance. A clear interpretive panel introduced the exhibition, adjacent to a huge digital monitor, about 12’ by 6’ in old money, displaying images of what appeared to be differing locations in Europe: one couldn’t be sure, as there was no written or audio explanation. However, as we moved through the exhibits there was a constant audio accompaniment, but of puzzling sounds that we couldn’t identify. We proceeded into the heart of the very well-attended exhibition. The hall was crowded with powerful exhibits small and large telling the story of the Nazi holocaust in chronological order – too many for myself or my companion to take in during one visit. Many were described using small interpretive cards and it was difficult to identify whether some of the items on display were replicas or original pieces. Travelling through the space was historically and emotionally challenging. My eye was drawn to a family board game ‘Jews Out’ played in German homes from the late 1930s: Jews were rounded up during the game for deportation to Palestine. The person who collected the most Jews was the winner. Vivid images of this vile entertainment and its descriptive text, informing us the Nazis tried to dissuade people from playing the game as it trivialised their
racial policies, remained with me for several days. The full size cattle car used for transportation to the death camps also left a distressing and lasting imprint. At what appeared to be the final section of exhibits, there was another large screen showing small pen pictures of people. These expanded to tell the story of their family’s fate at the hands of the Nazis. I felt it was a more than fitting summary of the horrors people endured to close the exhibition. Unfortunately there were no signs indicating this was the end of the exhibition, and where the exit was. I pushed my friend all the way back to the entrance, to be met by the helpful and now somewhat puzzled volunteer who had earlier directed us to the exhibition hall. He took us through the ‘Exit’ door to show us the signage but to his clear surprise there were indeed no directions for the ‘Way Out’. He apologised profusely, but maybe this was a fitting epitaph to such an horrendous period in human history. When it comes to reflecting on such atrocities, is there ever a true ‘Way Out’? Reviewed by Bernie Graham – see also thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ monster-was-and-still-hate For more information see www.iwm. org.uk/events/the-holocaust-galleries
More online: Find the latest Netflix offerings reviewed at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reviews, including: Priya Ahmed on House of Secrets; Rosie Chandler-Wilde watches You; and Tara Quinn-Cirillo on The Lost Daughter… You explores love addiction, co-dependency, and the extreme ways malfunctional relationships with parents can affect us. Through Joe’s narrative voiceover, we get an insight into a serial killer’s mind and although we condemn his actions, we understand his twisted logic. Forty per cent of people display an insecure attachment style, according to 2014 research for the Sutton Trust led by Sophie Moullin. We probably didn’t have childhoods as stressful as Joe’s or evolve into serial killers, but few parents are perfect, and children are sensitive to abandonment cues. We can see that Joe and Love are motivated by a fear of abandonment… maybe that hits too close to home. Rosie Chandler-Wilde Read a full review: thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/twisted-close-home
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Anger is a rarely talked about symptom of postnatal depression, yet is considered part of the perinatal mood and anxiety disorders… Anger can be overwhelming and lead to additional feelings of guilt and shame, especially the behaviours associated with it. In The Lost Daughter, Leda struggles with guilt over her past behaviour towards her daughters, and the impact this has on her current presentation is evident. As we understand Leda a little more, there is a poignant scene towards the end where Leda is suddenly asked by the young mother whom she has befriended, ‘will it pass?’ She then follows this with the statement: ‘not sure what to call it’. They both know what she means. The intuitive nature of this interaction is quite powerful to watch and confirms suspicions about the long-term impact of postnatal depression upon Leda, now in her late forties. Dr Tara Quinn-Cirillo Read the full review at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ waves-powerful-emotion
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We dip into the Society member database and pick out… Dr Kanthi Hettigoda, Lieutenant Commander Clinical Psychologist, Sri Lanka Navy / Kotelawala Defence University Hospital One unusual thing about my job Being a uniformed clinical psychologist in the military is a challenge as I am expected to play two or more conflicting roles at the same time. We call it wearing two hats. While I am expected to abide by the ethical codes for psychologists, I am also expected to work in the best interests of the military organisation where command and control is the way of managing. I cannot adopt a different way of dealing with seniors and subordinates than the system demands. When I am in a uniform with applets on my shoulder, unconditional positive regard towards the client is not perceived by the client. Also, concepts like informed consent in research, and confidentiality of information are hard to practise. Most of the time, military psychologists and counsellors are expected to engage in other duties in the military which can conflict with the main role.
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One regret I wish my mother – who was illiterate and never went to school – was alive to see where I am today with all my educational achievements. She fed me with all her love and that love made me a compassionate psychologist. Also, I wish I could have my untimely-demised two elder brothers by my side to make me smile and feel proud of their sister. I always wanted to make their lives happier and comfortable. One thing psychologists could do better Psychologists do so much research but often, findings and outcomes do not reach the community. Psychologists should do more to reach the community. One essential item Since childhood, despite having digital gadgets around me, I have needed my wristwatch on. One alternative career path I have an unexplainable connection with nature which makes me calm and relaxed. I would have been an environmentalist or conservationist if not a psychologist.
coming soon… we are ramping up efforts around our summer 2022 edition, inspired by the Society’s Senate-voted theme of ‘tackling class-based inequality’. We’re looking for diverse and creative contributions. We are also planning a special December 2022 / January 2023 issue around predictions and priorities for the year ahead: in the Society, Psychology and the wider world. If you might be interested in contributing to either special, please get in touch with me on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience of over 57,000 BPS members: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …February 2018, ‘The age of illusions’ Search it and so much more via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk
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One challenge Some people can’t imagine that a married woman with a child would complete full-time military training, which includes physical training, parade, firing, jungle training and sea training. But I made it. When I joined the Sri Lanka Navy as a uniformed psychologist I undertook the compulsory three-month military training at the Naval and Maritime Academy. I made history as I was the first
woman to complete this training at age 40. The physical, environmental, and emotional demands were so high that I tested my resilience and ability to cope. This is one of the most difficult challenges I have faced. Without this training I wouldn’t be a successful military psychologist who understands the difficulties experienced by sailors and junior officers while performing their duties. I cannot imagine that a civil psychologist who has not undergone the training and military routine could fully empathise with a military soldier.
the psychologist
One thing psychologists should be proud of Psychologists explore the inner worlds of human beings. And we get to work heart to heart in a professional framework. I believe that being a psychologist is the most gratifying profession as it exactly matches with my meaning of life. Isn’t this something to be proud of?
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One proud moment Though I dreamt of pursuing a PhD in a Western country I could not afford it. When I was awarded a Commonwealth Full Scholarship for my PhD in the UK after a very competitive application process, I think it was the best news I ever heard.
The age of illusions Nicholas Wade looks at a new world that emerged in the 19th century and invigorated psychology
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