The Psychologist, August 2010

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Computers and the mind Padraic Monaghan and colleagues on what we have learnt

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

forum 618 news 624 careers 678 looking back 694

attentional bias and addiction 636 identity among British Muslim gay men 640 feeling the blues 648 psychologists in the family justice system 650

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

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THE ISSUE

news, digest and analysis financial crisis; birthday honours; educational neuroscience; Rhona Flin on Deepwater Horizon; nuggets from the Society’s Research Digest; and more

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media beyond the stereotypes of psychologists, with Lucy Maddox

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‘I’ve…seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

All those…moments…will be lost in time, like…tears...in rain. Time to die.’

Impressively ‘human’ last words, from android Roy Batty in 1982’s Bladerunner. Science fiction, but considered by many then – and indeed much earlier, in Alan Turing’s 1950s – as the future of computing.

Yet in 2010 we are still waiting for truly effective computer models that can even translate between languages sensibly, or identify faces accurately. Thankfully, the failure of artificial intelligence models to match human performance provides us, as psychologists, with insight into the way in which the mind is actually solving these tasks (see p.642).

Also, don’t miss Ron Roberts ‘Looking back’ on the enduring relevance of Thomas Szasz (p.694).

Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor)

BBC

forum 618 diversity in clinical training; unnatural beliefs; psychopathy; and much more

640 648

Can’t take my eyes off of you Matt Field, winner of the Society’s Spearman Medal, on attentional bias in addiction and anxiety disorders

636

Identity threat among British Muslim gay men Rusi Jaspal on the challenges faced by those viewing sexual identities through a religious lens

640

Feeling the blues Gareth Morris looks at place attachment and identity in a musical genre

648

Let’s play happy families Solicitor Richard Gregorian argues for an interdisciplinary approach to help those in the family justice system

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book reviews 654 emotion regulation; great myths in psychology; oppositional defiant disorder; discovering research methods; and the mindfulness solution society 658 underperformance, glib excess and psychopathy in the President’s column; new journals partnership and online news service; forensic news; and more 678 careers helping the helpers, with Lisa Lim Ah Ken; animal behaviour counselling, with Anne McBride; the latest jobs, and how to advertise looking back the continuing relevance of Thomas Szasz, with Ron Roberts

694

one on one …with Gill Aitken

696

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Computers and the mind Padraic Monaghan, James Keidel, Mike Burton and Gert Westermann investigate what psychologists have learnt by using computational models 642

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Deepwater Horizon and beyond Rhona Flin, Professor of Applied Psychology, Industrial Psychology Research Centre, University of Aberdeen

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references

n 20 April 2010 there was a blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers and created the worst oil spill ever experienced by the USA. A major investigation and congressional hearing are now under way in an attempt to discover the cause of the accident and to evaluate the adequacy of the response. As our American colleagues are now discussing at www.siop.org, what contribution might psychology make to our understanding of this type of oil industry accident?

Industrial psychologists have been studying worker well-being and safety in the UK and Norwegian sectors of the European offshore oil and gas industry since the mid-1980s (see Flin & Slaven, 1996; Hellesøy, 1985). The North Sea platforms and rigs operate in remote, hostile locations, on top of hazardous oil and gas wells containing high-pressure hydrocarbons. Each installation is crewed by a hundred or more technical and support staff, working 12-hour shifts, typically on a 14- to 21-day offshore rotation, with no rest days during the offshore period. In a rare journalistic account of this workplace, Alvarez (1986) wrote: ‘The oil installations are strange in the same way as the awkward, seemingly patched together contraptions NASA puts into orbit are strange. And the jobs in turn, are so complex that, to the outsider, the ingenuity required to do them seems like magic.’

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Alvarez, A. (1986). Offshore: A North Sea journey. London: Sceptre.

Bryden, R., Flin, R., Vuijk, M. et al. (2006).

Holding up the leadership mirror then changing the reflection. In Proceedings of the 8th SPE Conference on Health, Safety and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Abu Dhabi, April.

Richardson, TX: Society of Petroleum Engineers.

This unusual industry was not easy to access for psychological research 25 years ago. The problem was not just the remote locations or the need to undertake helicopter underwater survival training before travelling offshore. In the UK, the main barrier was the lack of interest from the oil companies in having their workforce studied, especially on psychosocial topics. The early exploration and production phase had been characterised by extremely innovative engineering successes to find the subsea hydrocarbons and to design the huge platforms that would extract them. The solving of technical challenges was the priority and of course, the industry was almost entirely staffed by engineers.

Although there were some early studies examining occupational stress (Sutherland & Cooper, 1986; Sutherland & Flin, 1989), the human element in offshore operations did not seem to be high on the research agenda. This was not peculiar to the North Sea. House (1985), a Canadian researcher, wrote: ‘Worldwide, there have been few systematic investigations of the offshore oil industry and its impact upon oil workers and their families. The dearth of empirical material has not been due to the lack of interest by researchers, nor even primarily, by a lack of available funding. Rather, the main cause has been the successful resistance of the offshore petroleum industry to have itself investigated and the reluctance of most governments that it be studied against its will.’

Cullen, D. (1990). The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. Vols. I & II. London: HMSO. Flin, R. (1996). Sitting in the hot seat.

Leaders and teams for critical incident management. Chichester: Wiley.

Flin, R., Mearns, K., Gordon, R. & Fleming, M. (1996). Risk perceptions by offshore workers on UK oil and gas platforms. Safety Science, 22, 131–145.

Then everything changed. In July 1988 the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea, situated 120 miles from the Scottish coast, suffered an explosion and fire, killing 165 of the crew, plus two rescuers. This was one of Britain’s worst industrial disasters and a large-scale public inquiry ensued. A primary cause of the accident was a failure to transfer essential information about a pump between the day shift and the night shift.

Unfortunately the emergency response on Piper Alpha platform and its adjacent platforms was problematic, leading to questions about the competence of the offshore managers to take command in a crisis. Underlying factors influencing both the safety management and the command of the emergency were linked to an organisational culture in the operating company that appeared to prioritise production more than safety. None of these deficiencies was going to be remedied by engineering solutions.

Lord Cullen’s influential report (1990) made 106 recommendations, for regulation, management, technical operations and procedures. It was clear that a greater understanding of human behaviour would have to be factored in to many aspects of the new safety management documents that the oil companies were busy writing. Suddenly there were requests for psychological input. We became involved in two research projects funded by the newly created Offshore Safety Division of the Health and Safety Executive, both addressing problems identified in Lord Cullen’s report into the disaster.

Flin, R. & Slaven, G. (1995). Identifying the right stuff. Selecting and training on-scene commanders. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 3, 113–123.

Flin, R. & Slaven, G. (Eds.) (1996).

Managing the offshore installation workforce. Tulsa, OK: PennWell.

Flin, R., Slaven. G. & Stewart, K. (1996).

Emergency decision making in the offshore oil industry. Human Factors,

38, 262–277.

Hellesøy, O. (1985). Work environment Statfjord Field. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

House, D. (1985). Working offshore. St John’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial Uni. Hudson, P. (2007). Implementing safety culture in a major multinational.

Safety Science, 45, 697–722.

Mearns, K., Whitaker, S. & Flin, R. (2001).

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The first project was to examine the selection, training and competence assessment of the offshore installation managers who were in charge of these platforms and rigs, with particular reference to their ability to take command in an emergency. This necessitated visits to organisations such as military, emergency services, airlines and NASA to learn how they selected, trained and assessed the competence of their incident commanders. Despite domain differences, they all sought similar characteristics and skill sets. Much use was made of both

high-fidelity simulation to discover who had the ‘right stuff’ to take command in stressful, risky situations. What they looked for was leadership, stress resistance and the ability to take autocratic decisions rapidly in uncertain

Benchmarking safety climate in hazardous environments. Risk Analysis, 21, 771–786.

Roger, I., Flin, R., Mearns, K. & Hetherington, C. (2010). Leading safely: Development of a safety leadership tool for senior managers.

In Proceedings of the 10th SPE Conference on Health, Safety and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Rio de Janeiro, April.

conditions. Beyond those attributes, they were not concerned with a particular personality profile but wanted commanders with awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses (Flin & Slaven, 1995).

It transpired that very little was documented about these processes and the collated information became a book called Sitting in the Hot Seat (Flin, 1996).

This also discussed the available psychological evidence on key skills relating to situation assessment, decision making, leadership and stress management. Classical decision research had minimal relevance for these highpressure domains where life-saving decisions had to be made in minutes.

But the emerging science of naturalistic decision making, where psychologists were studying fire fighters, military commanders and airline pilots (Zsambok & Klein, 1997), offered an ecological validity that could be applied to the offshore domain. The oil industry introduced simulator training and assessment for the offshore managers, which enabled studies of their decision making that confirmed the importance of practice in quickly assessing a situation with little time for considering options (Flin, Slaven et al., 1996).

Following Lord Cullen’s report, the oil companies were required to produce safety cases for each installation, showing the regulator that the hazards had been identified, risks quantified and measures put in place for risk control.

There was a flurry of activity across the industry to conduct quantitative risk assessments. But what also had to be taken into account was how the workforce perceived these risks, and this was the basis of our second project.

Collaborating with Norwegian psychologist, Torbjørn Rundmo from Trondheim University, Kathryn Mearns and I began to design risk perception questionnaires for the offshore workforce (Flin, Mearns et al., 1996). What became apparent was that workers were in fact aware of the hazards. What we needed to

Richardson, TX: Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Sutherland, K. & Flin, R. (1989). Stress at sea. Occupational stress in the offshore oil and fishing industries.

Work & Stress, 3, 269–285.

Sutherland, V. & Cooper, C. (1986). Man and accidents offshore. London: Lloyds.

Zsambok, C. & Klein, G. (Eds.) (1997).

Naturalistic decision making. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

explain was why they actually took risks.

What was driving unsafe behaviours? Our risk-perception questionnaires evolved into safety-climate surveys which showed that managers and supervisors were key influences on the patterns of behaviour that were accepted at the worksites (Mearns et al., 2001). Risk perceptions were important, but motivational factors and expectancies were also playing a powerful role in workplace safety. Several studies of supervisors and site managers ensued, showing that transformational leadership styles could be linked to safer behaviours on both oil platforms and oil tankers.

But it was not only the site managers who influenced safety. The offshore workforce knew all too well that site managers were directed by more senior managers onshore. There was a degree of scepticism as to the safety priorities of the top managers. This was found across companies, but in one of them, the CEO of exploration and production was sufficiently concerned to trigger a programme of work to develop an upward appraisal tool for senior managers to be assessed on their safety commitment by the managers who reported to them.

Confidential reports were provided to each manager showing the contrast between self and upward ratings, then aggregated data were presented to groups of managers so that areas where they were not demonstrating safety commitment to subordinates could be addressed (Bryden et al., 2006). This approach was subsequently extended to hundreds of managers across the company’s international sites and the rating tool, ‘Seeing Yourself as Others See You’ is now available on the web (www.energyinst.org.uk/heartsandminds).

Other psychologists, such as James Reason and Dianne Parker from Manchester University with Patrick Hudson from Leiden University, also developed safety tools for the oil industry (see Hudson, 2007), several of which are on this website.

Currently the Energy Institute is sponsoring research by one of our PhD students, Isabella Roger (2010), who is endeavouring to identify the leadership behaviours of strategic managers that influence organisational safety. As anyone who watched the questioning of BP CEO, Tony Hayward at the congressional hearing into the Deepwater Horizon disaster will realise, it is not only the behaviour of the oil industry workers that is about to be scrutinised in the months to come. And this time it will be lawyers doing the investigation rather than psychologists.

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Good, bad and the garden of language Imagine a garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers and weeds. The flowers vastly outnumber the weeds, but the latter are more varied. And there’s another asymmetry – whereas the flowers have a pleasant scent, the weeds aren’t just scentless, they’re poisonous, they can kill. According to a new study, life is like this garden. Positive events outnumber negative events, but negative events are more varied and potent. Paul Rozin and colleagues say that the English language reflects this state of affairs and so do at least 20 other languages.

Rozin’s team began by analysing a corpus of 100 million words of spoken and written English and found that positive words are used far more often than negative words – just as you’d expect if positive events are more common (to take one example, ‘good’ is mentioned 795 times per million words compared with 153 mentions per million for ‘bad’).

Moreover, the researchers say we’ve adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be ‘unmarked’ – that is, the positive is the default (e.g. ‘happy’) whereas the negative is achieved by adding a negating prefix (i.e. ‘unhappy’). Rozin cites four more such habits. Here’s one more: when stating pairs of good and bad words together, it’s nearly always the convention to mention the positive word first: as in ‘good and bad’ and ‘happy and sad’ rather than the other way around.

Turning to the dark side, the greater In the April issue of variety of negative events in the world is Cognition and Emotion also reflected in English usage. Many words referring to negative states or situations don’t have an opposite: for example, ‘sympathy’ (i.e. there is a word for caring about another’s misfortune, but no word to describe taking pleasure at another’s good fortune), ‘murderer’ (there’s no word for ‘giver of life’), ‘accident’, etc.

To see if these patterns are reflected in other languages, Rozin’s team interviewed the speakers of 20 languages, from Arabic to Brazilian Portuguese to Cantonese. Overwhelmingly, the patterns found for English also applied in these other languages. For instance, for eight sample adjectives, including ‘pleasant’, ‘dirty’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘pure’, it was the convention in 83.9 per cent of cases across all 20 languages for the positive word to be stated first alongside its negative opposite.

Likewise, the negative-situation words ‘sympathy’, ‘murderer’, ‘risk’, and ‘accident’ nearly always lacked a positive opposite.

‘We hope that this study calls the attention of emotion researchers to some interesting and widespread valenced biases in the use of language,’ the researchers said. ‘We believe these biases are adaptive responses to asymmetries in the world, as it interacts with organisms.’

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How hunger affects our economic decision making under risk In PLoS One (see http://bit.ly/cpuqvo) The hungrier an animal becomes, the more risks it’s prepared to take in the search for food. Now, for the first time, Mkael Symmonds and colleagues at University College London have shown that our animal instinct to maintain a balanced metabolic state influences our decision making in other contexts, including finance.

Nineteen male participants performed the same gambling task on three occasions, a week apart: either after a 14-hour fast; immediately after eating a standard 2000-calorie meal; or one hour after eating a 2000calorie meal. The task simply required participants to choose repeatedly between pairs of gambles, one of which was always riskier but more lucrative than the other.

The immediate effect of the meal was to neutralise risk aversion. For the men with more adipose tissue and higher baseline levels of leptin (a hormone that suppresses appetite), who are generally more risk averse, this meant they became less risk averse when performing the task right after eating. By contrast, for men with less adipose tissue and lower leptin levels, who are generally low risk averse, their risk aversion was increased immediately after eating, just as you would expect based on the behaviour of hungry animals.

An hour after eating gives time for hormonal effects to kick in. As expected, men who

reported feeling less hungry an hour after eating, and whose levels of acyl-ghrelin (a hormone that increases appetite) in the bloodstream had fallen, played the gambling game in more cautious fashion.

‘This parallels findings in foraging animals,’ Symmonds told the Digest, ‘where changes in metabolic state promote changes in behaviour to maintain or reach a metabolic benchmark (to take more risk if intake rate is relatively low, and less risk if intake is relatively high), but here we see the effect in the economic domain.’

The researchers said their findings have implications for understanding the behaviour of dieters, the obese and people with eating disorders. ‘Prandial ghrelin suppression is reduced in obesity,’ Symmonds and his co-authors wrote. ‘Thus we predict greater risk-seeking in obese individuals following feeding, augmented by larger immediate post-prandial effects on risk taking due to higher baseline adiposity.’

The authors claim that this mechanism may underpin a component of the aberrant decision making seen in obese individuals, including impulsivity and reward-seeking behaviour.

‘We also predict profound effects on decision-making for individuals operating at very low baseline energy reserves, and note such an explanation has been invoked to explain increased impulsivity in anorexia nervosa.’

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The homeless man and his audio cave

For a longer life, say cheese!

In the June issue of the British Journal of Social Psychology

In the April issue of Psychological Science

We’re defined in part by where we are, the places we go and what we do there. We adorn our homes with paraphernalia caught in the net of life – the photos, the books and pictures.

But what happens when you’re homeless? How do you define your space and identity when your home is a public place?

To find out, Darrin Hodgetts and colleagues have conducted an unusual ‘ethnographic’ case study with ‘Brett’, a 44-year-old homeless man in Auckland.

The researchers gave Brett a camera, asked him to take photos representative of his life and then they conducted two indepth interviews with him, using the photos as springboards.

The clearest finding to emerge was the way that Brett used a portable radio to insulate himself from the outside world – what the researchers called an ‘audio cave’. ‘I’ve got a sound bubble around me,’ Brett said, ‘and I can wander through the streets without paying attention to what’s going on around me.’ At the same time, by consistently listening to his favourite station George FM, Brett was able to develop a ‘fleeting sense of companionship and “we-ness” with the station’s other listeners’, the researchers said.

Brett is a self-confessed loner who avoids contact with other people where possible and who tries to conceal his homeless status. He told the researchers about the places he went that enabled him to do this, including a former gun emplacement with stunning

views of the sea; Judges Bay where there are free showers and gas barbecues; and in the city centre, the church, bookshops and libraries. These places allow Brett to experience ‘life as a “normal” person who has interest in books and reading, or simply escaping the city to sit and reflect,’ the researchers said. By contrast, returning to photograph the public toilets on Pitt Street was an ordeal for Brett, reminding him of his time as a drug addict.

Brett referred to how other homeless people spend a lot of time sitting round talking and how it [homelessness] psychologically unhinges them.

By contrast, the researchers said Brett had never ‘lost himself’ to the streets. ‘[H]is memories, imagination, and daily practices, including his use of space, provide anchorage to an adaptive sense of self and belonging.’

Look at a person’s photo and it’s tempting to think you can see their personality written all over it: stony-faced individuals appear sombre; others flashing a big, toothy grin seem more genial. An intriguing new study claims that these smiles are a reliable marker of underlying positive emotion, and as such are predictive of a person’s longevity.

Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger had five people rate the smile intensity of 230 baseball players according to photos featured in the 1952 Baseball Register. The researchers used a three-point smile scale: no smile, half smile (mouth only), and genuine ‘Duchenne’ smile (muscles contracted around the mouth and corners of the eyes).

Focusing on the 150 players who’d died by the time of the study and controlling for extraneous factors such as BMI and marital status, the

researchers found that those who were flashing a genuine ‘Duchenne smile’ were half as likely to die in any given year compared with non-smilers.

Indeed, the average life-span of the 63 deceased non-smilers was 72.9 years compared with 75 years for the 64 partial smilers and 79.9 years for the 23 Duchenne smilers.

A follow-up study was similar to the first but observers rated the attractiveness of the same players rather than their smile intensity. Unlike smile intensity, attractiveness bore no relation to longevity.

‘To the extent that smile intensity reflects an underlying emotional disposition, the results of this study are congruent with those of other studies demonstrating that emotions have a positive relationship with mental health, physical health, and longevity,’ the researchers said.

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett.

Visit the blog for full coverage, more reports, an archive, comment and more.

This month, make sure you check out the special feature on the bloggers behind the blogs. The Digest caught up with the people behind the increasingly influential psychology blogs to find out about their mission, approach and advice for those thinking of joining them in cyberspace. Read all about it at www.bps.org.uk/bloggers.

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What computers have shown us about the mind Padraic Monaghan, James Keidel, Mike Burton and Gert Westermann investigate

W

questions

Which aspects of the brain’s structure are important for understanding the mind’s function?

resources

www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/monaghan http://grey.colorado.edu/emergent/index. php/About_Emergent Churchland, P.S. & Sejnowski, T.J. (1994).

The computational brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

references

Over the last half century or so, artificial intelligence models have failed to match the flexibility and adaptability of human performance.

However, by incorporating statistical learning and interactivity into modern computational models in the form of neural networks, psychologists are able to gain insight into how our minds operate across a range of cognitive tasks.

This article considers several of these tasks, namely reading, face processing, cognitive development and brain injury, in order to give a snapshot of the range of techniques and questions addressed by researchers using computational models in psychology.

Antonov, I., Antonova, I., Kandel, E.R. & Hawkins, R.D. (2003). Activitydependent presynaptic facilitation and hebbian LTP are both required and interact during classical conditioning in Aplysia. Neuron, 9, 135–147.

Bruce, V., Henderson, Z., Greenwood, K. et al. (1999). Verification of face identities from images captured on video. Journal of Experimental

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Are there limits for computers in performing cognitive tasks? Is it a matter of processing ‘power’, or is the type of processing fundamentally distinct?

ith the advent of modern computing in the 1950s, there was an enormous amount of optimism about how quickly and effectively computers would be able to accomplish many of the tasks conducted by humans (Turing, 1950). Skills such as language comprehension or visual object recognition, which are learned early and almost effortlessly by human infants were early targets for constructing competent models, with potentially lucrative outcomes in industrial applications.

However, almost 60 years later, we are still waiting for truly effective computer models that can, for instance, translate between languages sensibly, or recognise speech effectively, or identify faces accurately.

These large-scale computer modelling efforts have been driven by the aim of finding a model that works, usually without regard to how humans solve a specific task. But the failure of artificial intelligence models to match human performance provides us, as psychologists, with insight into the way in which the mind is actually solving these tasks. For example, speech recognition systems can become reasonably accurate when they are tuned to a single voice speaking in a regular way within a fairly constrained context. If one or other of these external constraints is not present, then difficulties can arise. So what does this mean for human processing? It means that adaptability and flexibility with regard to contextual information is constantly being utilised by our minds. Clearly, determining how this adaptation to context is

Psychology: Applied, 5, 339–360.

Burton, A.M., Jenkins, R., Hancock, P.J.B. & White, D. (2005). Robust representations for face recognition: The power of averages. Cognitive Psychology, 51, 256–284.

Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C. et al.

(2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204–256.

accomplished – whether it is the context of the speaker’s voice, or the topic of conversation – is of great importance to understanding the cognitive system performing complex tasks such as speech recognition.

The properties of adaptability and flexibility are evident in computational systems that instead of depending on fixed sets of rules, as in early attempts to simulate human behaviour, actually incorporate statistical learning and interactivity in their functioning. Such properties are hallmarks of systems in which information is distributed and interacting, and so the metaphor of the neural network, as implemented in the neural structure of the brain, has been an attractive starting point for many current computational models of psychological processes. Artificial neural networks were originally inspired by the neural architecture of the brain in terms of sets of interconnected neurons transmitting signals via axons, dendrites and synapses between them (McCulloch & Pitts, 1943).

In the brain, neurons that are co-active tend to increase the strength of their interconnection (Antonov et al., 2003; Hebb, 1949), and so the statistics of the environment and the task can be incorporated into the neural system itself.

Artificial neural networks, then, instantiate the computational principle arising from the brain’s cellular structure in terms of reflecting the statistical properties of the task, by employing many small interconnected processing units and adapting the strength of the connections between these units.

In the remainder of this article we provide a set of examples of how this neural network approach to exploring how psychological processes can be implemented in the brain has revealed a great deal about how our minds operate across a whole gamut of cognitive tasks.

The next two sections provide two cases in which our understanding of brain function has proceeded in tandem with developing computational models of complex tasks: reading and reading impairment, and then

Galaburda, A., Menard, M. & Rosen, G. (1994). Evidence from aberrant auditory anatomy in developmental dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 91, 8010–8013.

Hebb, D.O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory.

New York: Wiley.

Jenkins, R. & Burton, A.M. (2008). 100% accuracy in automatic face recognition. Science, 319, 435.

Keidel, J.L., Welbourne, S.R. & Lambon Ralph, M.A. (2010). Solving the paradox of the modular and equipotential brain: A neurocomputational model of stroke vs. slow-growing glioma.

Neuropsychologia, doi:10.1016/ j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.019.

McCulloch, W. & Pitts, W. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin

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visual processing (in particular face recognition). Then we discuss the advantage of neural networks in reflecting human development, in terms of the adaptability and flexibility in the way in which these models learn. Finally, we report with more detail a further advantage of this approach to describing and understanding impairments to psychological functioning as a consequence of brain injury.

and so on. To deal with these exceptions to rules, such models proposed in addition that the reading system also contains word-level representations with a stored pronunciation of the whole word (e.g.

Coltheart et al., 2001).

However, an alternative is to consider that the brain is learning not a set of rules for converting letters to sounds, but rather the statistics of the relations between certain letters or sets of letters, and certain sounds or sets of sounds. There is, then, no distinction between reading an Reading exception word compared to reading There are many different levels of a regular word, it is just a matter of the language structure that can be modelled: degree to which the statistical associations from discourse, where topic and style are used by the model are regular in forming considered, right down to the the letter-sound mapping. Models that interpretation of acoustic events as speech have employed neural networks to learn sounds. In this section, we focus on just these statistics are more successful in one level – that of learning to read words. reflecting the graded effects of various In order to recognise a word, we need levels of regularity in spelling–sound to be able to identify the letters, and correspondences in words and nonwords convert the letters into speech sounds. An (Zevin & Seidenberg, 2006). early computational account of how this Neural networks can couple this may be achieved assumed that our minds learning of statistical regularities with apply a set of rules gross anatomical about which letters constraints in the make which sounds. brain (e.g. in terms So, the letter ‘b’ is of how visual always pronounced information is /b/, the letter ‘s’ is integrated in the pronounced /s/, reading system) to unless it is followed solve the problem by ‘h’, in which case of how we learn to it is pronounced /∫/, read. Such models and so on. Such have investigated rule-based systems how the left and are evidently useful, right hemisphere and can support division has an children’s reading impact on when development in and where the many cases, as visual information attested to by must be combined phonics training. in order to read We are still waiting for truly effective However, some effectively computer models letters are (Monaghan & pronounced in Shillcock, 2008). If irregular and largely the two halves of the unpredictable ways, such as the ‘i’ in ‘pint’, model do not integrate their visual which is usually pronounced differently in information at an early enough stage, then similar contexts as in ‘tint’, ‘lint’, ‘mint’, dyslexic behaviour emerges in the model,

of Mathematical Biophysics, 7, 115–133.

Monaghan, P. & Shillcock, R.C. (2008).

Hemispheric dissociation and dyslexia in a computational model of reading.

Brain and Language, 107, 185–193.

Rogers, T.T., Lambon Ralph, M.A., Garrard, P. et al. (2004). The structure and deterioration of semantic memory: A neuropsychological and computational investigation.

Psychological Review, 111, 205–235.

Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460.

Zevin, J.D. & Seidenberg, M.S. (2006).

Consistency effects and individual differences in nonword naming: A comparison of current models.

Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 145–160.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

consistent with accounts of hemispheric dissociation in some dyslexics (Galaburda et al., 1994).

The model can also implement other accounts of developmental disorder resulting in dyslexia, for example by simulating accounts of dyslexia in terms of disturbance of visual input, or phonological impairments (see Monaghan & Shillcock, 2008, for a review). The benefits of computational modelling mean that the different natures of these impairments and their behavioural manifestations can be explicity compared.

Face processing The study of face recognition has always been closely associated with modelling.

This is partly for the standard psychological reasons (modelling helps theoretical development) and partly because of the desire to automate face recognition for security and surveillance.

Engineers aiming to build working systems have to solve the same problem as human observers: how to associate two pictures of the same person, when those pictures may be superficially very different.

In fact, neither problem is solved. Brain imaging and electrophysiological studies have identified some of the neural systems involved in recognising faces, but how this is achieved remains a mystery. On the engineering side, newspapers continue to announce pilot schemes to implement automatic face recognition to enhance security (e.g. on high streets, banks and airports), but fail to report the results of these schemes because they never live up to the early expectation.

This is an area in which engineering could take more notice than it does of psychological results. At first pass, the problem of face recognition is simply stated: We need to store a set of photos in a database. We then need to take a new photo of someone (for example at a border crossing) and match it to our database.

If we have a sufficiently clever matching algorithm, it should be possible to establish whether the person is in the database, and if so who it is. However, it turns out that this is a very difficult task, and one which humans cannot do reliably.

In the last 10 years it has become clear from a great many studies, that viewers are surprisingly bad at matching two photos of an unfamiliar person, even when the photos are of very good quality, and taken minutes apart (e.g. Bruce et al., 1999). We are perhaps misled by our own competence here. It turns out that we are extremely good at recognising faces when they are familiar to us, and can do so even

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in severely degraded images. This expertise perhaps leads us to the false conclusion that we are good at face recognition generally. We are not.

Recently, studies have begun to ask whether it is possible to re-cast the problem of automatic face recognition to be consistent with human capabilities.

Instead of concentrating on ever more sophisticated matching algorithms for comparing two individual photos, an alternative is to instead build into a computer something which captures familiarity in human perception (Burton et al., 2005). This approach explores the possibility that automatic recognition may be improved if, instead of saving individual photos of a person, an abstract representation is stored, derived from a statistical analysis of many instances.

In fact, computing a very simple average appears to capture this ‘learning’ very well, and can lead to very substantial improvements in automatic face recognition (Jenkins & Burton, 2008).

Development In the past decade a new field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has emerged that makes links between brain development and cognitive development in infants and children. Computational modelling has made a vital contribution to this field by providing explanations of how changes in the brain can lead to changes in a child’s behaviours and abilities. A large part of developmental psychology is about investigating at what age children have which abilities, and arguably the main challenge is then to explain why and how these abilities change and develop, that is, to identify the mechanisms underlying cognitive change. Connectionist models, which are (loosely) inspired by the functioning of brain neural networks, are ideally suited to exploring these mechanisms.

Candidates for aspects of brain development with relevance to behavioural change are changes in how individual neurons process signals, the wiring up of brain networks according to experience, and the integration of different brain systems into interacting networks that affect each other’s functioning.

Of particular interest is the development of categorisation abilities in young infants using modelling techniques.

Infant categorisation is often studied by presenting pictures on a computer screen and measuring how much time infants spend looking at each picture. The underlying assumption is that infants look longer at novel, unusual stimuli than at

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familiar ones. In a typical familiarisation study infants are shown a sequence of pictures of objects from one category (e.g. cats) until their looking time decreases.

Then they are shown a new object from the familiarised category, such as a new cat, and an object from a different category, such as a dog. In this case researchers have found that even three- to four-month-old infants indeed look longer at the dog, indicating that they have formed a category for cats that excludes dogs.

The looking behaviour of infants has been modelled in neural networks by using models that have to learn to regenerate on the output side what they see on the input side. The idea here is that the model, like the baby, builds an internal representation of the observed object, and the more unusual this object is, the longer the looking time, and the longer it takes to train the model to recreate an accurate representation of the input.

Four-month-olds have been shown to base their category formation on the features of objects (e.g. shape of the head, tail or legs), but 10-month-olds are also sensitive to which features occur together (e.g. a specific shape of head with a specific tail). Therefore 10-month-olds found drawings of animals that contained previously seen features, but in novel combinations, surprising, whereas fourmonth olds did not. Modelling research shows that a change in the way neurons process information could explain this development. Visual neurons in the brain have an associated receptive field, which is the area of the visual space in which a presented stimulus activates the neuron.

These receptive fields shrink with age, possibly based on visual experience. By including this change in a neural network model of object categorisation the model provided a precise account of how changes in neural processing can explain behavioural change during the first year of life.

Brain injury The principles of adaptability and flexibility of the brain’s functioning are observed par excellence following brain injury. If you wished to understand how a computer works, taking off the cover and simply watching it run could only tell you so much. Instead, you would be better served by removing individual parts and observing the effects. Unfortunately, though, computers do not react particularly kindly to such treatment.

The function of a computer is very often an all-or-nothing proposition: one minute you are typing up a document and the next you are confronted with your chosen

operating system’s method of telling you how horribly wrong things have gone.

Compare this with the brain’s reaction to damage. At the most general level, we are struck by its ability to maintain a significant degree of function in the face of extreme injury. Further, the impairments that result are neither random nor a simple matter of on versus off, as in a computer. Instead, the specific patterns that result from different types of damage tell us a lot about normal brain function.

One of the key insights of connectionist modelling has been how systems with distributed representations account for the varying patterns of cognitive impairment observed in different patient groups.

For instance, Rogers et al. (2004) explored the pattern of impairment that results from semantic dementia, a syndrome associated with bilateral anterior temporal lobe atrophy. These patients exhibit a progressive loss of knowledge concerning objects and their properties, and this loss follows characteristic patterns including an initial loss of specific characteristics of objects (e.g. that a camel has a hump), and overextension of general properties of a category to all members (e.g. drawing four legs on a bird). After training and introduction of damage, the model displayed patterns of damage across multiple tasks highly similar to those observed in semantic dementia patients.

The insight available from modelling this behaviour was that information about word meanings was stored in a distributed manner such that meanings gradually eroded as damage increased.

Alternatively, localised damage can sometimes result in rather selective impairments; for instance damage to the right fusiform gyrus is associated with prosopagnosia, or ‘face-blindness’. The specificity of these deficits, coupled with the apparent inability for other brain regions to fully restore normal function, has led to a modular view of neural architecture. On this view, the brain is composed of a set of domain-specific encapsulated processors that efficiently perform single tasks, a theory that seems to fit quite well with the effects of acute damage such as stroke.

Recent investigations into the consequences of slowly expanding brain damage have also benefited from connecting brain damage to patients’ behaviour via insights available from computational modelling. The sequelae of low-grade glioma (LGG), which are slow-growing brain tumours, has greatly expanded our understanding of the potential plasticity in the adult brain, and how these can alter neural structure.

Though LGG often cause damage equal to

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words or recognition of faces from visual input.

For the model, there was no overlap between the two tasks, so the inputs and outputs were distinct in each case.

Because of the sparse crossconnections, it would be Haemorrhagic stroke damage. Coloured magnetic resonance possible for the angiography (MRA) scan of the brain of a 68-year-old woman two two subnetworks years after she suffered from a ruptured aneurysm (purple). At the to share resources most general level, we are struck by the brain’s ability to maintain in solving the two a significant degree of function in the face of extreme injury. simultaneous tasks.

But this is not what or greater in extent than that observed in happened. At the end of the initial training stroke, they typically have only a minimal phase, before impairing the model, the full effect on cognitive functioning. This leads model composed of the two subnetworks to a seeming paradox: if the adult brain is had mastered both of the training tasks to so plastic, as observed in LGG, why is a level of 100 per cent correct. recovery from stroke often so poor?

Interestingly, removal of all of the sparse Recently, a connectionist model cross-connections (equivalent to about 25 designed to account for the effects of acute per cent of the model’s representational versus gradual damage to the brain has capacity as measured by number of links tackled this question (Keidel et al., 2010). between units; note these links were not There are three key factors posited to removed for the simulations described account for the greatly varying cognitive below) had no effect on network and behavioural outcomes observed in performance. Thus, a form of emergent different types of brain lesion: modularity resulted in the model, even I the age at which the damage occurs; though the possibility for interdependence I the speed at which the damage existed in the model’s structure. progresses; and To see how this might help account for I the existing pattern of connectivity the varying recovery profiles in stroke and in the brain.

LGG, Keidel et al. (2010) introduced two types of damage into the model. For the To illustrate how these principles interact, stroke simulation, they simply removed Keidel et al. (2010) employed a novel the resources within one subnetwork that dual-stream architecture, in which two formed the mapping between input and parallel subnetworks had full internal output representations, meaning that the connectivity but only sparse crossinput and output layers could only connectivity. This enabled the model to communicate via the other unlesioned develop modular processing within each subnetwork, using the sparse crosssubnetwork but also with the facility to connections. After significant retraining, distribute processing across the two the stroke simulations were only able to subnetworks. The age of the model recover to a performance level of about was implemented in terms of gradually 70 per cent correct on the lesioned task, reducing its flexibility to subtly adapt whilst performance on the unlesioned task its performance. This was achieved by remained perfect. Thus, as is observed in increasing entrenchment in the model’s the patient population, acute damage processing, by biasing the model to yielded a specific deficit that could only be produce binary (0 or 1) values at the partially ameliorated through relearning, as model’s output instead of a more graded in cases of strokes affecting the right range of outputs. Each of the fusiform gyrus resulting in prosopagnosia. subnetworks was trained on a single task, To simulate the effects of LGG, Keidel forming mappings between certain inputs et al. (2010) introduced a gradual and outputs to represent the essence of decrement in the resources available to a range of tasks, such as recognition of map between inputs and outputs in one of

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the subnetworks. This manipulation had the effect of slowly reducing the resources to zero, at which point they could have no contribution to processing in the model.

Unlike the result of the stroke simulation, the LGG simulation was able to adapt to the gradual damage, and at no time did performance dip below 90 per cent. After extended relearning, it was possible to remove the entire lesioned hidden layer with only a negligible effect on performance. The computational model thus simulated the effect of instantaneous versus gradual impairment to brain tissue, highlighting that LGG is less catastrophic in terms of loss of function due to the interactivity and distributional nature of processing in the brain.

Conclusion What each of these different examples of computational approaches has in common is the property of interactivity as a fundamental for brain functioning, which is reflected in connectionist models of the brain’s processing. Interactions increase the complexity of the system, but also provide great benefits in terms of adapting to novel circumstances, whether those are externally imposed by the environment, or internally generated, in terms of brain damage.

Though we are a long way from achieving the ultimate aim of simulating human performance in all its complexities, we hope that this snapshot has shown how computer models that incorporate aspects of human processing into their structure and representations have provided enormous insight into the way the human mind processes information.

Padraic Monaghan is Professor of Cognition at Lancaster University p.monaghan@lancaster.ac.uk

I James Keidel

is a Research Officer at Bangor University pssc08@bangor.ac.uk I Mike Burton

is Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow mike@psy.gla.ac.uk I Gert Westermann

is Professor in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University gwestermann@brookes.ac.uk

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Madness, myth and medicine Ron Roberts on the continuing relevance of Thomas Szasz, now in his 91st year

Only after we abandon the pretence that mind is brain and that mental disease is brain disease can we begin the honest study of human behaviour and the means people use to help themselves and others cope with the demands of living (Szasz, 2007a, p.149).

F

references

ifty years ago American Psychologist published a seminal article by the Hungarian-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, ‘The myth of mental illness’ (Szasz, 1960). The thesis was elaborated at length in a book of the same name a year later (Szasz, 1961).

As the decade got into full swing, Szasz’s critique of psychiatric theory and practice was herded into the same conceptual basket as the musings of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and his erstwhile friend and collaborator David Cooper. The quite different ideas of these men came to be bracketed inappropriately under the rubric of ‘anti-psychiatry’ – an expression coined by Cooper though disclaimed by Laing and rejected outright by Szasz.

Since then biological psychiatry has developed a stranglehold on research, teaching and practice in the field of ‘mental health’, and Szasz’s opposition to psychiatry and the basis for it has been mislocated in the art and culture of the day, its relevance for today denied. Szasz’s view has become viewed by many as a supposed child of its time – a component in the social manufacture of the so-called anti-establishment Swinging Sixties. To let

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Laing, R.D. (1960). The divided self.

London: Tavistock.

Laing, R.D. & Esterson, A.E. (1964). Sanity madness and the family. London: Tavistock.

Mullan, B. (1995). Mad to be normal: Conversations with R.D.Laing. London: Free Association.

Petit, P. (2002). To reach the clouds.

London: Faber and Faber.

Schaler, J. (Ed.) (2004). Szasz under fire:

such misapprehension pass unchallenged into the history of the behavioural sciences would be a serious error, and Szasz for his part has constantly endeavoured to set the record straight.

First it must be said that Szasz’s insights into the shortcomings of conventional psychiatry pre-date the 1960s by some considerable margin.

In a brief autobiographical sketch Szasz makes clear that the absurdity of psychiatric fictions had dawned on him long before Fellini’s masterpiece was highlighting the shallowness of La Dolce Vita: ‘Everything I had learned and thought about mental illness, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis – from my teenage years, through medical school, and my psychiatric and psychoanalytic training – confirmed my view that mental illness is a fiction; that psychiatry, resting on force and fraud is social control, and that psychoanalysis – properly conceived – has nothing to do with illness or medicine or treatment’ (2004, p.22).

Szasz graduated in medicine in 1944, having migrated to the US from his native Hungary in 1938, a fugitive from the looming menace of Nazism. He undertook a psychiatric residency and trained in psychoanalysis. The appeal of psychoanalysis, besides its intellectual and interpersonal attractions, lay in its ostensibly consensual and contractual nature. Less well known than his other works, his dissection of the nature of

The psychiatric abolitionist faces his critics. Chicago: Open Court.

Szasz, T. (1960). The myth of mental illness. American Psychologist, 15, 13–118.

Szasz, T. (1961). The myth of mental illness. New York: Harper & Row. Szasz, T. (1965). The ethics of psychoanalysis. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Szasz, T. (2001). Pharmacracy: Medicine

power in psychoanalytic relationships – published as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Szasz, 1965) – is central to his thinking and stands complementary to the assertions that mental illness is a myth.

In this Szasz effectively provides a practical guide on how to ensure a level playing field in psychotherapeutic relationships, to the benefit of both parties. He is honest and open enough to explicitly explore the role that money may play in distorting therapeutic means and ends. As such, it not only stands the test of time but stands squarely against the numerous vested interests, both pharmaceutical-financial and professional, which dominate the mental health industry past and present

Anti-psychiatry or pro-consent?

Szasz is not ‘anti’-psychiatry. He advocates the right to agree consensual contractual relations of any kind, including consensual psychiatry if that is what suitably informed people want. He has proposed, for example, the use of advanced psychiatric directives whereby people could agree to accept or refuse specific interventions to be made ‘on their behalf’ in the event of their becoming extremely distressed and ‘irrational’ in future. Such ideas have unfortunately been rejected outright by leading figures in both psychiatry and medical ethics, and accordingly Szasz sees little possibility of any kind of consensual psychiatry until the use of coercion, whether explicit or tacit, is relinquished.

As psychiatry continues to function for the most part as an extension of the criminal justice system, Szasz asserts that psychiatry in its current form must be abolished. This would require a concerted challenge to its support structures, premised as they are on the notions of behaviour as disease, the fear of dangerousness and the necessity for medical treatment under the guise of protecting the individual from his or herself. The championing of the latter notion in particular owes much to an ignorance of its origins. A careful reading

and politics in America. London: Praeger.

Szasz, T. (2002). Liberation by oppression: A comparative study of slavery and psychiatry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Szasz, T. (2004). An autobiographical sketch. In J. Schaler (Ed.) Szasz under fire. Chicago: Open Court.

Szasz, T. (2007a). Coercion as cure: A critical history of psychiatry. New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Szasz, T. (2007b). The medicalization of everyday life: Selected essays.

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Szasz, T. (2008). Debunking antipsychiatry: Laing, law, and Largactil. Current Psychology, 27, 79–101.

Szasz, T. (2009). Antipsychiatry: Quackery squared. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

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of Szasz’s historical analysis of the origins of the insanity defence in 17th-century England goes some way to clarifying where behavioural scientists got the idea from that people of ‘unsound mind’ were not responsible for their actions and could not be held accountable for them.

In Coercion as Cure, he writes With suicide defined as a species of murder, the persons sitting in judgment of self killers had the duty to punish them. Since punishing suicide required doing injustice to innocent parties…the wives and minor children of the deceased – eventually the task proved to be an intolerable burden. In the seventeenth century, men sitting on coroners’ juries began to recoil against desecrating the corpse and dispossessing the suicide’s dependants of their means of support. However, their religious beliefs precluded repeal of the laws punishing the crime. Their only recourse was to evade the laws; The doctrine that the self-slayer is non compos mentis and hence not responsible for his act accomplished this task (Szasz, 2007a, p.99)

And so a social practice became reified into an imaginary biological disease process ravaging through the brains of its unfortunate victims, necessitating psychiatric intervention!

The label of ‘anti-psychiatry’ that continues to be attached to Szasz is one which he has been at pains to condemn (Szasz, 2009), used as it is to stultify and nullify any criticism of contemporary psychiatry. While Laing saw himself as ‘essentially on the same side’ as Szasz (Mullan, 1995, p.202), Szasz sees considerable distance between them, for a number of reasons. Perhaps at the forefront of these Laing was known to have forcibly drugged one of his patients (Szasz, 2008) and for all his eloquence and insight into human misery his writings do not in principle condemn the forced treatment or incarceration of people against their will on psychiatric grounds. Finally whilst The Divided Self (Laing, 1960) and Sanity Madness and the Family (Laing & Esterson, 1964) amongst other outpourings proclaimed the intelligibility of going mad within a human rather than biological framework, Laing did not reject outright the notion of mental illness, which in Szasz’s view remains at best a metaphor.

Szasz has throughout his career stood firmly to his principles and steadfastly eschewed psychiatric practice in an environment where people have been deprived of their liberty. He has on occasion appeared in court both to represent individuals deprived of their liberty and to uphold the principle of criminal responsibility in murder cases where those accused have sought to evade it through the insanity defence (see Szasz, 2007b, chapter 13 in particular). Such consistent challenges to institutional psychiatry have been made at some professional cost. Szasz has not simply been the recipient of fierce criticism from the psychiatric fraternity, who feel betrayed by his actions, but has also endured attempts to limit his academic freedom. In the aftermath of the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness, for example, attempts were made to ban him from teaching at the state hospital medical school – citing his beliefs as

‘proof’ of his ‘incompetence as a psychiatrist’ (Schaler, 2004, p.xix).

Some confusion about Szasz’s work has arisen through the quite different political cultures within which it is interpreted, even by those who oppose institutional psychiatry in its current incarnation. His work has been claimed and repudiated by those on both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ – deemed a liberal in some quarters and a fascist in others – with the claims and counterclaims rooted in the predilections of the critics for different configurations of state power. European intellectual tradition on the left, for example, clings to a belief and a desire that state power can be harnessed for the good. This means that while Szasz’s attacks on psychiatric authority are applauded, his admonitions against the

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‘therapeutic state’ (Szasz, 2001, 2002), with its merging of psychiatric and state power on the one hand and private and public health on the other, are glossed over. In truth, if such a thing can be said, Szasz’s ideas belong to neither the right nor the left. His work challenges and questions all operations of organised power from the state downwards, as long as they are used to crush and oppress human freedom. His work implies unanswered questions concerning the forms of community and social organisation which people can harness for the individual and common good in order to enable them to deal elegantly with the insatiable demands of living.

Addendum While preparing this article I encountered Philippe Petit’s (2002) wondrous account of his high-wire walk across the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Immediately after performing his ‘artistic crime of the century’ Petit was arrested and subject to psychiatric examination. Petit was judged to be sane, but the outcome of the psychiatric interview is less revealing than the fact that psychiatrists were willing to play their part in a pseudo-medical intervention provoked by nothing more than social rule breaking of the highest imaginative order. It struck me that Petit – an imaginative, unusual and beguiling figure – exemplifies much that modern psychiatry stands in antipathy to. Petit cares not for the rules and regulations that structure and govern the lives of citizens and lives, in his terms, only to dream ‘projects that ripen in the clouds’ (Petit, 2002, p.6). There can be little doubt that psychiatry is an enterprise that is engineered to destroy these – that it cannot tolerate idiosyncrasies of thought, whether grandiose or mundane. Petit succeeded in his outlandish and highly improbable quest – but why should one have to achieve outlandish success to be embraced by society and enjoy the right to pop one’s head in the clouds or spend the ‘afternoons in treetops’? Szasz’s efforts over the years can be seen in many lights, but without doubt he has toiled on behalf of the dream of human accountability and responsibility, for the freedom to be different and to take charge of one’s life, free from the machinations of statesponsored psychiatric interference.

I Ron Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University R.A.Roberts@kingston.ac.uk

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