The Psychologist November 2021 by The Psychologist

the

psychologist november 2021

The problem of pathocracy Do psychologists have a responsibility to help prevent ruthless, amoral people attaining positions of power? Steve Taylor considers the arguments…

Also: Work in the real world… we preview the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology Congress, due to be held in Glasgow in January

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

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psychologist november 2021

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps

The problem of pathocracy Do psychologists have a responsibility to help prevent ruthless, amoral people attaining positions of power? Steve Taylor considers the arguments…

Also: Work in the real world… we preview the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology Congress, due to be held in Glasgow in January

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

The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

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issn 0952-8229 (print) 2398-1598 (online) © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless speciﬁcally stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@ bps.org.uk.

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

The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag.

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

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

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psychologist november 2021

Letters Reaction, trauma, Society President and more

Obituaries Jack Rachman and more

News UK Repro, student EDI, fear, and much more Digest Anger, and more

From Scotland to Italy, from Psychology to Maths and back again Fraser Lauchlan on an unusual journey

‘Trauma work is a search for meaning’ We meet Noreen Tehrani

Jobs in psychology

Books Mari Fitzduff on ‘our brains at war’; the psychological roots of the climate crisis; and more

Books as friends Keith Oatley wonders whether Marcel Proust might stand alongside William James as a psychologist

Culture Where the River Meets the Sea; Derriere Les Fronts; postpandemic gigs; Oliver Sacks

One on one Dominic Abrams

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

Work in the real world Ian Bushnell introduces a set of conversations between Ingrid Covington and keynotes for the upcoming BPS-hosted Congress of the European Association for Work and Organizational Psychology… ‘Unfreezing moments are here… we have to be ready to work together’ Stuart Carr ‘How can we ensure people have a career that shapes them in a positive way?’ Ans DeVos ‘Open your eyes to collective dimensions’ Alex Haslam ‘How individuals impact the place – not just how the place impacts individuals’ Gilad Chen

I write in an empty ofﬁce, which I’ve returned to one day a week mostly for a change of scenery. The world of work is clearly changing, and packed ofﬁces and large real world conferences still feel some way off. That makes for an interesting backdrop to our collection of interviews with keynote speakers from the BPS-hosted Congress of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, set for Glasgow in January. Sustainable livelihoods, career inaction and the collective dimension are on the agenda. Pack your ‘resilience to uncertainty’ (p.46). A warning: this issue contains Trump. Every time this happens I get a few e-mails from self-proclaimed ‘right wing’ members, so by now I’m well aware that one person’s ‘ruthless, amoral’ leader (p.40) is another person’s beacon of compassion. That makes Steve Taylor’s starter for debate, ‘The problem of pathocracy’, all the more intriguing and challenging. And if it, or anything else in this issue, makes you angry… see p.20..

The problem of pathocracy Do psychologists have a responsibility to prevent ruthless, amoral people attaining positions of power? Steve Taylor considers the arguments. Resilience to uncertainty Elenore Batteux

Tim Sanders

Understanding Depression: Opportunity rather than threat?

More openness is needed within the psychology professions about psychologists’ and our families’ experiences both of mental health difficulties and of services. Lived experience can be an asset in our work. We therefore applaud Dr Annie Hickox’s openness in this regard (The threat is coming from inside the house, October). We condemn personal attacks on anyone who discusses such experience, via Twitter or elsewhere. However, as the editors of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology’s public information document Understanding Depression (tinyurl. com/arnxc6hw), we are concerned about Dr Hickox’s suggestions that Understanding Depression contributes to barriers in being open about mental health difficulties (a) because it takes a stance of normalisation within what she calls ‘the two perspectives of normalisation and illness’ (p.30), (b) that this minimises people’s difficulties and (c) that it equates to saying ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ (p.31). In Understanding Depression we acknowledge that depression can be severe and even ‘life-threatening’ (p.16). We also acknowledge that there is a debate about how best to understand depression and that ‘calling it an illness is only one way of thinking about it, with advantages and disadvantages’ (p.16). In terms of

normalising, the stance in Understanding Depression is the same as in the DCP statement on psychologists with lived experience of mental health difficulties (https://tinyurl. com/54hd4yeh) quoted favourably by Dr Hickox, namely that we need change so that people experiencing mental health difficulties ‘are able to feel confident in receiving normalising, compassionate and accepting responses’ (p.2, our italics). Nowhere in Understanding Depression, of which one of the main editors was a psychologist with experience of severe depression, was there any suggestion to ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ (Hickox, p.31) or have ‘resilience training’ (Hickox, p.30). We are also concerned that The Psychologist published misleading messages about Understanding Depression, a document that was produced over several years, and drew on huge amounts of evidence and the input of many psychologists with specialist knowledge, and on lived experience. Dr Sue Holttum, CPsychol, AFBPsS Dr Gillian Bowden, MBE, AFBPsS Dr Rashmi Shankar, CPsychol Anne Cooke, CPsychol Professor Peter Kinderman

the psychologist november 2021 letters

In her recent article Annie Hickox writes about the very real barriers faced by people with lived experience of mental health problems who work in the mental health system, in ‘talking openly with our colleagues about our struggles’. I agree that the current emphasis on ‘resilience’ is unlikely to encourage anyone to reveal vulnerabilities. However, Hickox’s main concern is barriers or ‘threats’ she sees as coming from within her profession, likened to ‘….the creepy phone calls that come from the last place one would expect, the safety of one’s own domain’. She locates these threats firmly in the views of some psychologists ‘who appear to normalise mental illness and refute the widely accepted position that diagnosis and medication can have significant therapeutic value’ and in ‘[a]dvocates of ‘critical psychology’[who] consider diagnostic constructs to be invalid and also consider the term ‘mental illness’ to reflect a failed and outdated psychiatric paradigm.’ As someone who has produced a fair number of critiques of psychiatric diagnosis and the concept of mental illness, I must take issue with these depictions and the threats they supposedly pose. ‘Critical psychology’ has questioned many of the assumptions, theories and practices of conventional psychology and, crucially, highlighted their links to the operation of power and to potentially harmful social and economic processes. This includes theory and practice about psychiatric diagnosis and so-called ‘mental illness’ where critiques and suggestions for alternatives have been produced not just by critical and mainstream psychologists but by many psychiatrists, service users/ survivors, sociologists and philosophers. Hickox claims that we ‘appear to normalise mental illness’. This is doubly misleading. It takes for granted the very idea (mental illness) that is in dispute without engaging in any of the evidence and arguments we have put forward. It also links ‘normalising’ with ‘minimising’ – ‘…the current emphasis on resilience and/ or normalisation of what for many is a paralysing illness can sound like ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’’. In fact, what critical psychologists and many others aim to do is convey the understandability and meaningfulness of those extreme and distressing mental states, emotions and behaviour that are so often labelled as symptoms of a medical type illness. This means highlighting their links not just with people’s life experiences, but also with wider power-based social processes such as racism, misogyny, unrealistic social expectations, economic policies and so on. There are many reasons in services and society why these links get obscured and why revealing them may be seen as threatening. If we have to use the word ‘normal’ then the message is not minimising but that, ‘You are reacting normally to damaging circumstances.’ Hickox’s claim that ‘some psychologists refute the widely accepted position that diagnosis and medication

can have significant therapeutic value’ is also misleading. Many of us support a ‘drug-based’ rather than ‘disorder based’ approach to medication and know that it can be helpful (Moncrieff, 2020). But we also argue that too little attention is paid to the harms of psychiatric drugs, and that service users are often not given enough information to allow informed consent and even if they refuse, can be overuled. As for diagnosis, it’s difficult to argue for the therapeutic value of a system which has amassed so much evidence against its validity that even its devisers concede its lack of scientific value. But diagnosis can serve many personal and social functions and some people find these helpful. Indeed diagnoses may be required to access some services and benefits. It’s ironic that Hickox should imply that questioning medicalisation and diagnosis is linked to ‘shaming and silence’ when evidence suggests that an unquestioned medical approach can make stigma and discrimination more likely (Read et al., 2013). It’s also ironic that she should imply that these criticisms are a barrier to people telling others ‘who [they] really are, rather than let[ting] them tell us who we are not’. Many service users feel that the diagnostic system imposes an identity they do not want, but haven’t any way of resisting. As one woman put it, ‘Service users who identify with their diagnosis – you have pretty much an entire mental health system that agrees and supports your perspective. Those of us who feel utterly hopeless and oppressed by diagnosis – where do we go? (cited in Johnstone et al., 2019, emphasis in original). Hickox and those who criticise medicalisation seem to have the same goals – that people with experience of more and less extreme states of distress and troubling behaviour should have access to evidence-based knowledge and be able to make informed choices about how they make sense of their difficulties and the kind of help they receive. The value of their experiences should be openly welcomed by our profession. I’d hope that constructive questioning of medicalisation and diagnosis, whose problems are widely acknowledged, as well as suggestions for alternatives, would be seen as a necessity and not a threat to all of this. Mary Boyle Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology, University of East London References Johnstone, L., Boyle, M., Cromby, J. et al. (2019). Reflections on responses to the Power Threat Meaning Framework one year on. Clinical Psychology Forum 313 (January), 47-54. Moncrieff, J. (2020). A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs (2nd edn). PCCS Books. Read, J., Haslam, N. & Magliano, L. (2013). Prejudice, stigma and ‘schizophrenia’: The role of biogenetic ideology. In J. Read & J. Dillon (Eds). Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. (2nd edn; pp 157-77). Routledge.

Election of President 2023-24 Are you interested in becoming our President in 2023? The President is the visible ﬁgurehead of the Society, and the most important elected role that we have. In early 2022, we will be seeking nominations of members to stand for election to the role of President in the Presidential year 2023-2024. The successful candidate will also be President-Elect in 2022-23. Nominations go live in January 2022. Before this, you may wish to explore what the role involves and whether you would be interested in being a candidate. Descriptions of the role and responsibilities, together with requirements and time commitments, are available on request. Please contact Kerry Wood: kerry.wood@bps.org.uk.

the psychologist november 2021 news

Are you a passionate and visionary advocate for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion? The British Psychological Society is seeking applications for the Chair of the new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board The Board will be empowered to hold BPS governance structures to account to ensure the principles of equity, equality, diversity and inclusion are embedded in the society’s strategic objectives and all of its activities. Taking an intersectional approach, the Board will champion EDI delivery to challenge bias and discrimination. The Chair will automatically join the Board of Trustees ensuring EDI awareness, scrutiny and impact is at the heart of our strategic agenda.

The Society welcomes applications from the following groups of people who are under-represented within our committees: Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people, people with disabilities and people who identify as LGBTQ+. CL O SING DAT E F OR A PPLICATIONS 21 November 2021 For more information visit

www.bps.org.uk/about-us/jobs

“OUR DESIRE FOR CHANGE IS GREATER THAN OUR DESIRE TO STAY THE SAME ” Guy Kawasaki

‘We’re changing the behaviour of researchers and institutions…’ A

consortium of universities which aims to drive the uptake of open research practices has been given a funding boost from Research England. The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), made up of 57 local networks of researchers and university staff, 18 universities, and external stakeholders, has received £4.5 million from the Research England Development fund and £4 million from match-funding from partner institutions and organisations for the next five years. Chair of the network’s steering group, psychologist Professor Marcus Munafò (University of Bristol), said that open research practices were becoming more of a priority for funders. He pointed to recent statements from G7 and UNESCO on open science practices, as well as the UK’s Research and Development Roadmap and UK Research and Innovation’s new open access policy. ‘This is definitely the direction of travel… for a number of different reasons. Partly because that transparency allows publicly funded research to be visible and available to those who funded it, which is obviously appropriate; but also, it allows those granular intermediate contributions to research to be recognised and that feeds into the work on research culture around how we can recognise diverse contributions to research rather than just the end product… it’s definitely something that’s only going to grow in importance over the next few years.’ Munafò said the funding will allow the UKRN to deliver training in open research practices to as broad a range of disciplines as possible, and to evaluate the uptake and impact of that training, as well as helping the network to work collaboratively to develop incentives which promote both the uptake of this training and

engagement in open research practices. ‘One of the advantages of that collaborative approach is that we will be able to effectively coordinate this activity across the sector so different institutions are working in a broadly similar way. One of the features of our training will be that much of it will be delivered via “train the trainer” courses, so representatives from those institutions can come in and then deliver workshops on that topic back at their home institutions in a way that’s tailored to the needs of that particular audience or institution.’ Psychology, Munafò said, had been at the leading edge of promoting open research practices in recent years. ‘What we’re engaged in, effectively, is a kind of large scale behaviour change project – changing the behaviour of researchers and institutions by intervening at the level of the institution with the support of a grassroots community of local networks and plugging into our external stakeholder group of funders and publishers and learned societies. It’s very much a systems-based approach to behaviour change and of course that’s exactly the kind of thing that lots of psychologists have something to say about, so it’s deﬁnitely something where psychology has a prominent role to play… but what we’re trying to do is broader than any one discipline.’ Munafò said the funding provided an exciting opportunity and emphasised that the work of the UKRN was an enormous team effort. ‘With these things a huge number of people are involved, both locally in terms of the people in ﬁnance who helped us put the bid together, and the consortium and the network and all of the institutional leads – the project is very much a team project, and I think the recognition needs to be of the team.’ ER

the psychologist november 2021 news

Inclusive goals for student community The BPS undergraduate student group has, for the first time, introduced an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead onto its committee. Ella Rhodes spoke to Felix Ndebele about what he hopes to achieve during his time in the group, as well as the new Chair of the committee Aiko Leung. While working in the NHS for 15 years as a mental health nurse and later as a cognitive behavioural therapist, Ndebele said he became aware that there was an underrepresentation of staff from BAME communities in both psychology positions and senior roles in the organisation. Now a first-year online psychology conversion master’s student (University of Derby), Ndebele said he wanted to join the committee due to a belief in equality. ‘I believe that all human beings, when given a fair chance in life, can achieve their goals and reach their maximum potential. Sadly, life is not utopian, and people are confronted by inequalities daily which cause a lot of frustration and despair to those on the receiving end. ‘Through doing research, I have realised that the BPS mirrors the NHS in that there is a lack of representation in staff from the BAME community in the senior positions (see Roger Kline on the ‘snowy white peaks of the NHS’, and Romila Ragavan on the experience of BAME clinical psychology doctorate applicants). Katrina Scior and others indicate that the under-representation of people from BAME backgrounds begins at the selection stage onto Doctorate Clinical Psychology courses. From the GCSE, A-level and undergraduate courses, there are a lot of students from the BAME community, but they do not seem to make it to the top, which raises questions on the impartiality of the BPS.’ Ndebele said that while he was aware that inequality affected many protected characteristics including age, disability, sexual orientation and gender, examining issues which BAME people face is an important first step in tackling inequalities across the board. Leung, the new Chair of the Student Committee, is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Psychology with Education at UCL. She said she wanted to apply for the role for numerous reasons – partly due to an appreciation for the diversity of BPS events and activities, a desire to work with the student community, and given her experience as a student who is originally from Hong Kong. ‘I do think that a lot of international students are struggling to find a path to get into psychology careers in the UK. Since the procedure and access to funding to enter psychology-related careers and postgraduate studies here in the UK can be quite different – I feel like there is currently a lack of information and advice for these individuals.’ Leung said many international students can struggle with getting placements for valuable work experience to move into psychology-related professions, and said, in general, during her time as Chair she hoped to create an environment where all people can feel included. ‘I want to

create a harmonious platform for all people from different backgrounds regardless of their race, age, gender, language and social status, which they can actively participate in and grow. Not only can they feel included, but they can also bring in their unique points of view into enhancing the community as a whole.’ Leung also stressed the importance of getting to know the demographics of student members and to reach out for regular feedback to understand their needs. She said it was important to recognise that not all undergraduate students were aged between 18 and 22, and that the format and content of student events, advice and activities should be more inclusive. She also spoke of a desire to promote research participation in the student community and said she hoped to create a research participant recruitment portal for student projects and to launch a postgraduateundergraduate research mentorship scheme. During her time as Chair, Leung said she aimed to create more inclusive academic, career, and research opportunities for students across the UK and hoped to collaborate more with other international psychology-related student organisations. During his time as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Ndebele said he hoped to drive change, speak out about inequalities in BPS programmes and have conversations with the BPS leadership and champion the reform of psychology positions. ‘I want to reach out and encourage students from BAME backgrounds to take up psychology courses and to aspire to take up roles in the psychology discipline. I also want to ensure that the BPS leadership listens and addresses the concerns raised by the student committee. There are some changes to be made on how students are recruited to the doctorate programmes, and I want to ensure that there is representation of the BAME community in teaching and recruitment to psychology programmes.’

Felix Ndebele

Aiko Leung

Supporting the journey of recovery The BPS has published a report on supporting schools in the wake of a crisis or disaster – featuring psychologists who have worked to support children and young people following the Grenfell Tower ﬁre and Manchester Arena bombing. Produced by the Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Section of the British Psychological Society in collaboration with the Educational Psychology Group at UCL, the report is aimed at educational and applied psychologists as well as those who work in mental-healthrelated roles in schools. In his introduction to the report Dr Ben Hayes pointed out that, following a traumatic event, around 80 to 90 per cent of children and young people will recover, while around 20 per cent may experience ongoing reactions to an event which they need support with, this number may drop to 10 per cent one year following a traumatic event. ‘…Knowing how to promote coping within and across communities can make a huge impact on community cohesion and collective agency so that there is the maximum chance of ensuring that the 80 per cent recover with normal community support. Experiences may even lead to growth and learning in time.’ The report includes insights from psychologists including co-founder of the Children and War Foundation and author of Grief in Children Professor Atle Dyregrov (University of Bergen) whose work has been used with

children in Iran, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Iraq and Syria. Senior Educational Psychologist Jane Roller and Helen Kerslake, Assistant Principal Educational Psychologist, also wrote of their approach working as part of the educational psychology service which supported schools affected by the Grenfell Tower ﬁre. The Greater Manchester Resilience Hub was set up in response to the Manchester Arena terrorist bombing in 2017 – an attack which killed 22 people and injured more than 350. Consultant Clinical Psychologist Dr Kate Friedmann wrote about the work of the hub in the aftermath of the attack as well as the lessons she and her colleagues learned along the way – some of which have been put to use recently in supporting health and social care staff and their families during the Covid-19 pandemic. The report also featured discussions of the use of psychological ﬁrst aid, a trial of the Supporting Students Exposed to Trauma programme, posttraumatic growth, the experiences of staff in schools following a critical incident and and the development of resources for schools following partial closures in the face of Covid-19. To read the full document, Psychological support for schools following a crisis or disaster: The journey of recovery, see: tinyurl.com/yz2duhka

A boy today

An all-party parliamentary group on issues affecting men and boys has produced a new report, ‘A Boy Today’, with input from British Psychological Society members. Nick Fletcher, MP for Don Valley and Vice Chair of the Group, said that ‘between April and July 2021 we took evidence in four sessions, from seven leading UK experts, which help paint a picture of the disadvantages and problems that so many boys face and the ideas they have to solve them.’ The result is a report in four sections, covering Family Life/Fatherlessness, Education, Community/Social inﬂuences and Health. Speaking on Education, Professor Gijsbert Stoet explained that British boys fall behind girls in educational achievement in all stages of our education system. He said that research data shows clearly that the ‘boy problem’ starts early, so they are behind even when they

come into school. Stoet’s policy recommendations included more investment in raising boys’ literacy skills, including the encouragement of reading for fun; and greater access for educational researchers to educational data. On Community, the Group heard from Naomi Murphy – Clinical Director of The Fens Unit at HMP Whitemoor and an honorary Professor of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. By the time men get to her they have typically been assessed on multiple occasions by a probation ofﬁcer and a psychologist, ‘yet six months after they’ve been with us we see a statistically signiﬁcant increase in the kind of disclosures that men talk about. These are typically disclosures of vulnerability. The men are highly resistant to sharing stories about their vulnerability, about trauma early on in life and mostly men take

much longer to talk about that than they talk about their offending.’ Murphy called for more willingness to hear about the vulnerability of boys, a more balanced debate about the sexes, greater investment in parenting skills and investment in ‘ﬁnding ways to create and publicise positive male role models’. Martin Seager, Past Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Male Psychology Section, said that being invited to address the APPG was ‘another important milestone in getting “male gender blindness” recognised as a key public health

the psychologist november 2021 news

Young people to help citizen science project a focus on developing evidence that is both useful and used – this is done by working with people who will use the information, understanding what they need and cocreating meaningful work. ‘If you go into this work assuming there’s a nice research-shaped gap in people’s minds that you can just ﬁll, you’ll be disappointed!’ she said. ‘People have their own opinions, their own knowledge, and they interact with evidence more critically than we tend to give credit for.’ Knowles was inspired to launch the project after working on a Cochrane Mental Health Children and Young People Satellite, led by Associate Professor Dr Sarah Hetrick (University of Auckland). Hetrick had been working on co-producing priority outcomes for a systematic review and asked Knowles to run a similar study running online workshops with people aged 18 to 21 asking what they would prioritise in a systematic review of interventions for self-harm. Knowles said their feedback blew her away. ‘For example, straight away they said that reduction in self-harm shouldn’t be the number one priority, because actually recovery and relapse are “a wiggle” not a straight line (their word!) and because this was focusing on the consequences not the cause. They wanted to focus on emotions and coping skills. They also had a much more holistic view – it wasn’t just about changing the individual behaviour, but understanding the context of shame and stigma around self-harm, and so the need to change the environment Vice-Chair Fletcher concluded that and attitudes around it.’ ‘…if we are to live in a fully inclusive Knowles said this made her country, we need to address the even more keen to work with young disadvantages that men and boys people and involve them throughout face alongside the disadvantages the work, rather than just asking women and girls face. We all live for feedback on a single aspect. in our society together – boys are ‘I’m really keen to see how a citizen sons, brothers and future husbands, science way of working compares partners, dads and work colleagues. with the things we’d typically do. So Resolving the issues boys face today far, I think there’s a much bigger means a better society for all, now focus in citizen science on the activity and in the future.’ itself being meaningful and valuable Dr John Barry, Chair of the Male – so does the young person learn a Psychology Section, said: ‘The Male new skill, or earn something for their Psychology Section of the BPS is glad CV, or just have a really fun time?’ to have contributed to this important She added: ‘In health report for parliamentarians and involvement, we tend to focus on policy-makers. We think it represents what the researchers can get from a signiﬁcant step forward in bringing the people involved, rather than wider recognition to, and awareness thinking about how to make it a of, the main issues facing boys and rewarding experience for them.’ ER men in the UK today.’ JS For more on youth involvement in research see: https://generationr. Read the report via tinyurl.com/ org.uk/ appgmenboys

A new citizen science project will ask young people with experience of mental health problems to help identify gaps and priorities in research in this area. Run by academics at the University of York, citizen science group The Parenting Science Gang, and charities including The Mental Health Foundation, the Youth LIVES project will launch this autumn. The project will begin with a series of online Q&As between young people and mental health experts. Dr Sarah Knowles, who works in health services research with a particular focus on mental health, is leading the project. She told me that it aims to give young citizen scientists an understanding of the kinds of research currently being done and generate ideas for studies from this. Groups of young people will be teamed up with researchers to help them to co-create studies, being encouraged to be active in the research itself. Knowles, Research Fellow in Knowledge Mobilisation from the Cochrane Common Mental Disorders Group at the University of York, is also collaborating with Leaders Unlocked, a London-based organisation which specialises in supporting young people to get involved in issues which concern them, including education and justice. In the ﬁeld of knowledge mobilisation, Knowles explained, there is

issue for our society’. He called for a closer link between policy and good data; a more positive and inclusive societal and political narrative with respect to men and boys; and the inclusion of male psychology in psychology training and academic courses. The report identiﬁed three overarching themes from the input of the seven experts invited to the group: • the mainstream narrative leads to a lack of action on disadvantage and issues negatively affecting boys and men, even when the facts are in plain sight. • the psychological, behavioural and developmental differences between boys and girls needs to be better understood. • early trauma will have a lasting impact on boys and men; this is not men’s fault or something that is intrinsic in being male.

The sweet spot of fear Ella Rhodes reports from a conference hosted by the Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark exploring why so many people enjoy scaring themselves silly… Dr Mathias Clasen and Dr Marc Andersen, both Associate Professors at the Recreational Fear Lab (Aarhus University) opened the event with a quote from David Hulme, written in 1777. ‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions which are, in themselves, disagreeable, and uneasy.’ In a survey with American people Clasen and his colleagues found that 55 per cent enjoyed horror, while 17 per cent were undecided and 28 per cent did not enjoy it. He said when people who enjoy horror predict what emotions they will feel during scary entertainment horror-lovers, compared with horror-haters, anticipate experiencing much more joy, while both groups predict similar levels of fear. The Recreational Fear Lab has been using a unique environment to study people’s experiences of being frightened for fun – carrying out experiments on visitors to a haunted house called Dystopia Entertainment. ‘Visitors are asked or invited to become protagonists in a horror story that unfolds in real time in a physical environment that is full of cues of danger. Visitors… will be accosted by scare actors who get way too close to them, all their senses will be stimulated, there’s scary sounds, scary sights, nasty smells… it’s a very immersive very emotionally engaging experience.’ The ﬁrst study they did at the haunted house in 2016 involved 280 visitors and asked them to either attempt to maximise the fear they felt or limit it during the experience, and afterwards to share their levels of fear, satisfaction and the strategies they had used to either enhance or decrease their fear. Those in the maximisefear group felt much higher levels of fear, while those in the minimise-fear group still felt fear but did reduce it, both groups felt equal satisfaction from the experience, Clasen said this suggests that there are different ways people derive pleasure from fearful leisure activities. Andersen shared the results from a later study – which explored the relationship between enjoyment and

fear more closely. They, and a ‘small army’ of research assistants, recruited 110 visitors to the attraction and equipped them with heart-rate monitors and asked visitors about their enjoyment of the experience. He said that there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between subjective reports of fear and subjective reports of enjoyment. ‘If you ask people how much they enjoyed the attraction and how scared they were you find this sort of sweet spot of fear – if it’s too scary enjoyment starts going down and if it is not scary enough then enjoyment goes down.’ Looking at the heart-rate data from this study Andersen and his colleagues found an interesting effect – people whose heart rates fluctuated to a greater degree for a longer period enjoyed the experience less than those whose heart rate only strayed slightly away from their baseline rates for shorter periods of time. Andersen said this type of effect has been seen in research on play and developmental psychology too, children and infants enjoy moderately surprising situations or slightly incongruent information. ‘There are many findings like this, in peekaboo it has been documented that these just-right deviances from the adult’s action pattern increases smiling and laughter… we know from other fields as well, including the cognitive science of music, that humans tend to enjoy rhythms that have these just-right deviations from the main beat, which is called syncopation.’ Assistant Professor and Philosopher of Cognition, Dr Mark Miller (Hokkaido University), has been exploring the paradox of horror – or why we enjoy experiencing difficult emotions – through the lens of predictive processing. This idea suggests that the brains and nervous systems of humans can be thought of as a prediction engine whose primary task is to learn about the environment and then use that information about how the world works to make predictions about what might happen next, and it also works to reduce discrepancies between its predictions and what actually happens.

Expert witness best practice

The BPS has published the ﬁfth edition of its best practice guidelines for psychologists who may be called as expert witnesses. Developed by the Expert Witness Advisory Group, under the society’s Practice Board, the document outlines the role of expert witnesses, settings where expert witnesses may be called, and other considerations for psychologists who

work in this area. It points out that psychologists working as expert witnesses should be competent to offer an expert opinion to court and should be trained to do this. It also gives an overview of what psychologists who are asked to be an expert witness, or who receive instructions, need to keep in mind – for example

discussing the time frame for any work to be done and clarify terms including payment and fees. The document also covers conflicts of interest, confidentiality, appearing at court and practical and financial considerations. To read the guidance in full see: tinyurl.com/4natpjxz

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As people’s love of scary stuff shows, humans are drawn to uncertainty – as Miller pointed out people are always pushing themselves beyond predictable limits, jumping out of planes, free-climbing El Capitan, or dreaming of living on Mars for example. He said to understand this we need to understand the role of affectivity and emotion. ‘Simply put… we feel good when we do better than expected at reducing our prediction error, when we get to where we expect to be faster… and when we don’t we feel bad. And those feelings they play a really central role in this system, they tell us how confident we should be in the predictions we have going, in the model that we have growing, and so they alter how we select our actions.’ Miller said that if we feel good when we improve our predictive grip on the environment, and if our brains are devoted to reducing predictive errors, we may be drawn to errors which we can learn from. However, too much error means that the environment is too volatile to learn from and too little error means the environment is boring, Miller said we need a sweet spot – he and his colleagues call these situations consumable errors – or errors we are prepared to engage with that will yield high rates of learning – and scary and fun environments are ripe for creating consumable errors. Why then do people enjoy horror films? Miller said horror films are carefully structured through narrative and cinematography to create temporary uncertainty and temporary errors, and then resolve them. He suggested that when thinking about our past and future we are trying to gain insight into how errors are created and their results – and horror films may work in the same way. ‘They offer us an opportunity to do externally what we’re doing internally in imagination all the time, that is to refine our predictive model. So they introduce scenarios, and more importantly they introduce agents, responding

to those scenarios and we, as good predictive machines, guess what will happen next and then you update your model relative to expectations. ‘[They] could be enjoyable, in part, because it provides us an opportunity to play around, ofﬂine, in a sort of imaginative mode, with what scares us and what disgusts us and so horror ﬁlms allow us to bring down prediction error over our lifetimes, by potentially creating a situation where we can play out some of those scenarios and help tune our predictive model to what’s possible and what’s not possible.’ Master’s students Lauritz Holm Petersen and Emilie Schjoldager (Aarhus university) who work in religious studies and psychology respectively, spoke to nursery and kindergarten teachers in Denmark about the ways they use recreational fear in their classrooms, why they use it, and the consequences of scaring children. Schjoldager said some of the most common fearful activities teachers use are games such as tag, hide and seek, singing games, stories, and using activities in nature to evoke fear. Looking at the elements that all of these activities share, Petersen said many involve repetition and a build up of expectations and tension and a climax. In their interviews the ‘sweet spot’ of fear was mentioned, Schjoldager said that teachers were aware of this and ensured the fear remained fun by monitoring the children’s responses, they were also very aware of when children were in the right mood to be frightened or when they needed to calm the children down. Petersen said the teachers felt that these types of activities helped to build resilience and counteract what is known in Denmark as ‘curling culture’ or over-protective approaches to rearing children. Teachers said this type of activity helped children to become comfortable with their emotions and develop fear-regulating strategies.

Crowdsourcing equality

Hetashi Bawa

Sharon-Lin Harwood

Aspiring clinical psychologists have been working to remove barriers to accessing the profession providing free mentoring and support. We spoke to the founders of The Psychology Platform and members of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology Minorities Subcommittee about their work with those from minoritised and disadvantaged backgrounds. First-year trainee clinical psychologists Hetashi Bawa and Sharon-Lin Harwood co-founded The Psychology Platform early this year. The platform provides free mentoring for aspiring psychologists and runs events on applying for the clinical psychology doctorate and preparing for interviews. Harwood said they had noticed organisations and others charging people for support with job and training applications. ‘We felt confused that the same people preaching about removing barriers to the profession were charging between £20 and £50 to read a single application. We appreciate and understand the time and skills needed to support people with applications, but no one is regulating how much people are charging for this service… our scheme was created in response to this. We wanted to give people who, like us, are from working class and minoritised backgrounds, an opportunity to access to free support.’ The Psychology Platform works with clinical psychologists and those wanting to follow a path within other areas of the field, particularly those who identify as having a minoritised background. Bawa said it had been rewarding to see people benefit from the mentoring and events they have been organising. ‘From only being active over the last nine months, it feels like we have been a little overwhelmed with events selling out and mentee capacity being filled fairly quickly but this personally gives me the motivation to continue to support people. I get to see people create professional relationships and do well in their career. We can’t take the credit because that isn’t The Psychology Platform making a difference, but those who help it run and provide their time, information and support and this really makes a difference to our mentees.’ Bawa and Harwood have also started liaising with undergraduate university courses to support people earlier in their psychology careers – they said there was a need to support people who wanted to work in areas

outside clinical psychology. ‘Part of the challenge comes when choosing a career or pathway, this is often pushed at secondary school, and for psychology there’s very little help from this young age to direct you. The same can be said about many fields. We hope that mentoring and events can be made more widely available for all disciplines of psychology as a first step, especially for those from minoritised backgrounds.’ Co-Chair of the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology’s Minorities Subcommittee, Runa Dawood, and the group’s Mental Health and Social Media Lead, Camilla Hogg, are reaching the end of their clinical psychology training and are set to start their first posts. This group has run free application and interview support events for aspiring psychologists from minority backgrounds since 2012, but when Covid-19 hit they had to shift their approach. ‘We asked for trainee and qualified psychologists to offer mock interviews by replying to a Twitter thread we created. We provided a list of Runa Dawood interview questions and asked applicants from minoritised backgrounds to get in touch directly. ‘We were overwhelmed with the amount of support that people provided. As a result we have continued to use this model adapting it for our application initiative. For this we have created a thread on Twitter, again asking for interested trainee and qualified clinical psychologists to reply offering support in reading UK clinical Camilla Hogg psychology applications.’ Hogg encouraged other areas of psychology to use a similar approach for those who want to start a career in the field. ‘It’s really easy to set up and takes minimal effort, I think the mutual offer is in use in other professions but this takes the nepotism out of it.’ ER Bawa and Harwood have recently set up a not-for-profit fundraiser via GoFundMe to raise money for their events and to provide support for those who need help with application fees. If you would like to support their work see: tinyurl.com/fxxntxc4 To find out more about the work of the BPS Minorities Subcommittee, and to find out about future events and support, see twitter.com/minoritiesgroup

Have you heard…

The podcast from The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest

Why do you get earworms? And how do you kill them? The latest episode of our Research Digest podcast PsychCrunch, sponsored by Routledge Psychology

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Can anger be a force for good? Emma Young digests the research

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

At times, it feels that the world is awash with anger. From the streets of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to any form of social media you’d care to mention, anger and outrage are seemingly everywhere. New research helps to reveal why this is. It also reveals anger to be itself a Jekyll and Hyde emotion – if we can rid ourselves of the dark, destructive side, what is left can act as a force for good.

Anger sells Why is anger everywhere? One reason is that it ‘sells’. There’s plenty of evidence (e.g. see https://tinyurl.com/ digest280721) that if you want to go viral online, lacing a social media post with negative emotions – like anger – is the way to go. Social media posts that stir anger against political opponents get more views, and fake news that triggers anger or anxiety is more likely to be spread than real news. In fact, according to the China-based authors of that fake news research (which is available as a preprint via tinyurl.com/24dffvbx): ‘The easier contagion of fake news online can be causally explained by the greater anger it carries’.

2018, though, Zlatan Krisan and Garrett Hisler reported the results of a US study exploring the potential impact of a two to four hours per night reduction in a person’s normal sleep time over two nights. The team brought this group plus another group of people who had followed their regular sleep routine (averaging about seven hours a night) into the lab. They were subjected to various irritations, like the harsh ‘white noise’ sound of static. As a group, the sleep-restricted individuals became ‘substantially’ angrier. There’s evidence of dangers for younger people, too. An Australian study of healthy teenagers found that when their night-time sleep was restricted to five hours a night for five nights, this increased anger, confusion and symptoms of depression, and sapped their energy. Even more surprising, perhaps, was that two 10-hour ‘recovery nights’ were not enough to reverse these negative changes. ‘Given the prevalence of insufficient sleep and the rising incidence of mood disorders and dysregulation in adolescents, our findings highlight the importance of sufficient sleep to mitigate these risks,’ commented researcher Michelle Short.

People are tired Poor sleep is common – about a quarter of British adults report suffering from insomnia – and this makes us angrier. As anger can itself worsen sleep, whether sleep disruption also hiked anger was unclear until recently. In

Triggered Other everyday experiences hike anger. ‘Hanger’ – a term that combines ‘hunger’ and ‘anger’ – is a well-documented phenomenon. Exactly what accounts

the psychologist november 2021 digest for it has been less clear, however. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be triggered by a simple drop in blood sugar levels, according to a 2019 study in Emotion. Jennifer MacCormack at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues found that hunger was indeed linked to more negative emotions, including anger, which caused some participants to judge another person more harshly. However, their analysis suggested that this only happens when a person fails to realise that hunger is making them feel bad, and instead mistakenly puts the blame for those negative feelings on something else – like another person’s behaviour. This could make them lash out, instead of fixing the problem by finding something to eat. The team advises paying attention to signals from your body, and, if you’re feeling irritated, mentally checking whether this might be down to hunger. This, they argue, could help with everything from day-to-day social situations to long term mental health. Some people have more unlikely anger triggers, however. For some, the sound of chewing, slurping, nail clipping or breathing can be enough to send them into an explosive rage. These people suffer from ‘misophonia’, and in 2021 a study in the Journal of Neuroscience (reported by us at tinyurl.com/digest170821) provided a fascinating explanation: misophonia isn’t caused by hearing a specific ‘trigger sound’ so much as an ‘overmirroring’ of the other person’s physical actions. As this over-mirroring is an unpleasant experience, it causes the anger. This insight opens up potential routes to treatment. Given that misophonia can destroy relationships and even lead to suicide, these are badly needed.

Harmful for health Too much anger is bad for you, as well as others. Strokes and heart attacks have both been linked to anger outbursts occurring during the preceding few hours. But in raising body-wide inflammation, regular feelings of anger may also hike the risk of chronic diseases, including heart disease, arthritis and cancer, according to research published in Psychology and Aging in 2019. In fact, anger could be more harmful to older people’s physical health than sadness, according to the team, led by Meaghan A. Barlow at Concordia University, US. The researchers found that, among participants aged 80 or older, at least, those who reported experiencing anger daily had both higher levels of inflammation and more chronic illness. Of course, chronic illness could easily disrupt sleep, which, as we know, increases anger, but this is certainly not the first study to link anger (and the stress hormone cortisol, which is raised during anger) to increased general inflammation. However, anger is not all bad…

The upsides There are deﬁnite upsides to anger. If something in your life or in society is wrong, anger can signal to others that you feel wronged; expressions of anger can be a sign of innocence in the face of a false accusation, for instance (see tinyurl.com/digest270821). Anger can also push you into doing something to try to set things right.

A 2020 study in Emotion, led by Julia Sasse, provided experimental evidence for this idea. The researchers staged the embezzlement of project funds from a lab. They found that the level of anger felt by a witness to this predicted whether or not they intervened to try to stop it. This study provided evidence of ‘the important role of anger in the psychological process underlying moral courage,’ the team wrote. Of course, a person’s individual moral framework is crucial here, though. If the sight of women venturing outdoors alone or going to work, say, deeply offends you, then your resulting outrage will likely propel you to action, too. Expressing anger can also make you seem more authentic and sincere. At least, this was suggested by a 2021 study of Kickstarter pitch videos, led by Benjamin Warnick. Entrepreneurs are often encouraged to be only positive about their ventures, commented the researchers. But they found that those who expressed anger and fear as well as happiness had more fundraising success than those who conveyed only happiness. An angry expression can convey how much you care about something, the team explained. If you don’t actually feel angry, you could always fake it, though; I can’t refer to angry ‘expressions’ without noting the compelling theory that facial displays are not emotional expressions but ‘tools for social inﬂuence’ (see tinyurl.com/digest252018). However, circumstances can affect our perceptions of anger in others…

Anger and bias We can misperceive anger. In fact, student teachers in the US are more likely to misperceive black children as angry than white children, according to a 2020 paper in Emotion. The 178 prospective teachers in this study watched brief video clips of children aged 9-13 showing happiness, sadness, anger, fear or disgust (as these emotions are conventionally considered to be ‘expressed’). Overall, boys were more likely to be misperceived as angry – rather than afraid, say – than girls. But black boys and girls were more likely to be misperceived as angry than white children, and black boys were misperceived most of all. This bias could help to perpetuate racial differences in educational success, argues the team, led by Amy G. Halberstadt at North Caroline State University. The following year, Halberstadt and colleagues published another paper (see tinyurl.com/digest2921), ﬁnding that the older adults believe black children to be, the more likely they are to (incorrectly) judge them to be angry, too. Perhaps educating student teachers about this bias will help them to avoid it – only future research will tell. Misperceiving anger is clearly a danger not just for pupil-teacher relationships but for all kinds of everyday interactions. But it’s not as though there isn’t much genuine anger in the world to accurately perceive. To twist the title of one of Richard Curtis’s best-known movies, anger actually is all around – but the better we understand it, the more we can channel its positive aspects and take steps to ensure that it helps rather than harms us.

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From the very beginning of the pandemic, activists and charities raised concerns that lockdown could be having an impact on domestic violence. Like data from the UK, a new study from the US suggests that domestic violence increased during lockdown – and that this was particularly linked to stress. In addition to individual interventions designed to reduce domestic abuse, the team suggests that wider policies that relieve stress could also reduce intimate partner aggression. (Psychology of Violence)

It’s a good life: the role of ‘psychological richness’ belongs alongside happiness and meaning as a third major dimension of wellbeing. In one early study, 500 students reported on the extent to which a series of characteristics described their lives. Some were related to happiness (‘enjoyable’, Getty Images

What is it that makes someone feel that theirs is a ‘good life’? Of the ideas put forward over the past few millennia, two are most often extolled and researched today. The ﬁrst is hedonistic wellbeing, or ‘happiness’, characterised by plenty of positive emotions and general life satisfaction. The other is ‘eudaimonia’ – feeling that your life has meaning and that you are realising your potential. Now in a new paper in Psychological Review, Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia and Erin Westgate at the University of Florida suggest that we’ve been missing something: ‘psychological richness’. A psychologically rich life is one that is characterised by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. In their paper, the pair presents an array of initial evidence in favour of the idea that this concept

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for example), some to meaning (such as ‘fulfilling’), and some to what the researchers felt related, positively or negatively, to the notion of psychological richness. This last group included ‘interesting’ and ‘dramatic’, and also ‘uneventful’ and ‘monotonous’. The results suggested that happiness, meaning and richness are indeed three distinct factors. ‘Psychometrically, psychological richness cannot be reduced to an aspect of meaning or happiness,’ Oishi and Westgate write. They also analysed the adjectives used in a few hundred obituaries published in newspapers in the USA and Singapore. Again, their analysis showed that the words could be grouped into these three distinct dimensions. Further studies found that psychological richness, happiness, and meaning also all show distinct patterns of association with personality traits and socioeconomic status (SES). Data from participants in the USA, India and Korea all suggested that the traits of openness and extraversion are both associated with leading a psychologically rich life, while SES is not. However, SES, along with extraversion and conscientiousness, was linked to happiness. Feelings of meaning weren’t associated with any particular pattern of Big Five scores. Because psychological richness is associated with unexpectedness, novelty, complexity and perspective change, Ohio and Westgate reasoned that certain types of experiences might enhance it. And indeed, they found that students who went to study abroad developed significantly higher psychological richness scores than those who had stayed on campus. (Their initial scores had been similar; and their scores for happiness and meaning did not change.) It seems, then, that aspects of both personality and life experience can make for a psychologically richer life. Yet further studies highlight distinct links between each of these three factors and people’s outlook more broadly: people who reported having happy or meaningful lives tended to report preferring to maintain social order and the status quo; they were more politically conservative. In contrast, those with psychologically richer lives were more in favour of social change; they were more politically liberal. None of this establishes that anybody actually feels that a psychologically rich life is a good life. But when Oishi and Westgate asked participants from nine different countries to describe their ideal lives by choosing from a list of features associated with a happy, meaningful or psychologically rich life, overall they chose elements from all three. When asked which they would go for if they could only choose one type of life, most chose happy, meaningful came second and psychologically rich came last. However, as the team notes, there was a ‘substantial minority’ of participants – ranging from 7 percent in Singapore to 17 percent in Germany – who would opt for a psychologically rich life above a happy or a meaningful one. For this group, at least, this most defines a ‘good life’ for them. Feeling happy and that your life has meaning are both

When asked about past vs. future change, most people, no matter what their age, report more change over a period of time in the past than they predict for the same period into the future. This ‘End of History Illusion’ has been welldocumented, at least, among WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations. A new paper reports some cultural differences in susceptibility to it – Americans tended to report more past than predicted future personality change than the Japanese participants. (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)

associated with better health and relationships. But why should someone desire psychological richness? From an evolutionary perspective, such people might cope better in more difficult, changing environments. For an individual, a desire for psychological richness could protect against boredom. And, the researchers suggest, it may also help people to cope with difficulties in life, and even tragedy. Someone who values the perspective change that a difficulty can bring ‘may find value in experiences and lives that are not otherwise happy or meaningful’, the pair writes. Oishi and Westgate stress that they are not suggesting that psychological richness, happiness and meaning are wholly independent of each other – or that there are only three components of a good life (as there could be more). They also note that a lot more work is needed to better understand the importance of psychological richness. Overall, the pair suggets, the ‘addition of psychological richness broadens, deepens and enriches empirical research on a good life’. EMMA YOUNG

Work in the real world 26

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

Ian Bushnell, Programme Chair for the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology Congress which is set to take place in Glasgow in January, introduces a set of conversations with the keynotes…

he European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, or EAWOP, emerged from the European Congress of Work and Organizational Psychology in 1983 at Nijmegen. The congress was a great success and further congresses were organised around Europe every two years. EAWOP was formally established at the congress in Rouen in 1991. A 1989 event in Cambridge was the last time the congress was held in the UK, so the British Psychological Society hosted event at the SEC in Glasgow on 11-14 January 2022 will be a big deal – not least as it’s likely to be the ﬁrst signiﬁcant face-to-face academic conference to be held within Europe for quite some time. The appetite to return to ‘real’ conferencegoing is enormous, despite all the inherent challenges. Since those early days with several hundred members, EAWOP has grown substantially, with nearly 2000 delegates at the last congress in Turin. Over the years EAWOP has expanded its activities and its membership, particularly developing activities to support countries emerging from behind the Iron Curtain, and engaging with both practitioners and academics. EAWOP has developed positive relations with Work and Organisational Psychologists from around the world through the alliance with the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the International Association of Applied Psychology Division 1 – but it primarily provides an outlet for European areas of interest, independent of the dominant American journals and themes. Ideas such as job crafting, and the importance of longitudinal research, have emerged from the European community. A third of all submissions to the current congress are related to well-being; a similar congress in the USA would arguably focus more on enhancing performance at work. EAWOP may be unique in terms

of the activity and engagement level of its members, with around 80 per cent contributing at some level, in particular presenting at congress. Many members of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology (DOP) are also EAWOP members, with the DOP leading the BPS bid to host it within the UK and DOP members forming the organising committee. The crossover is synergistic. What we share is a strong desire to network and to learn from each other through dynamic, warm and friendly conferences that cut across boundaries, be those topicrelated or cultural. The congress theme is ‘Interventions at Work – Integrating Science and Practice’, which we chose as it indicates the importance of viewing science and practice as a conﬂuence rather than as two entities where one provides the material for the other and one is fundamentally more ‘important’. The event will bring together scientists and practitioners to collaborate for the future of our profession, and to increase our inﬂuence on policy and practice. There have been many times when scientists and practitioners have not effectively shared evidence and ideas, and this has hindered progress. With the development of the Open Science model and a heightened awareness of evidence-based practice, EAWOP 2022 will provide so many opportunities to share, disseminate, discuss and challenge ourselves and others. We have received 1600 submissions and there’s a varied workshop programme. There is a special welcome for students and postdocs, with a support programme in place for those who are new to the conference experience. A strong invited programme will cover topical and perhaps controversial content, with speakers who can change the way that we think about ourselves, our research, and our practice. We reached out to many of these keynotes to ask about their topic, the Congress theme, and how they feel about a return to conferences in the physical world…

Our interviewer… Ingrid Covington (CPsychol) is Co-Founder of the Centre for Psychology at Work (www.centpsychwork.com) and winner of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Practitioner of the Year. She has over two decades of experience building teams and advising leaders and organisations on leadership and culture, wellbeing, gender equality and future of work.

‘Unfreezing moments are here… we have to be ready to work together’ Stuart Carr is Professor of Psychology at Massey University in New Zealand/Aotearoa. He will be delivering the opening keynote at EAWOP. The congress is to be hosted in Glasgow in January 2022; tell us about your Scottish heritage. Kia ora, Ingrid, it’s a huge privilege to be here. Yes, my father was from Gorbals in Glasgow, and then more generations before him. So I’ve got a bit of Scottish blood. My mother was from Guernsey and the Channel Islands. It will be lovely to reconnect with Scotland, and Glasgow, especially at this time.

We were talking before about the importance of motherland and sense of belonging, especially during times of insecurity. So your work is in the humanitarian space… tell us about that. It starts with a connection to Scotland again. I studied at Stirling University, was a social psychologist, did a PhD in social change, and then got my first job in Malawi in southern East Africa. It was and still is a relatively poor country, economically, although rich in culture, people and many other things. Very beautiful country. I got my first job there and it was an upheaval, it was an adjustment. I very quickly realised that if psychology was going to be valuable, it probably had to be applied, to be useful. And I looked around for something to be useful in. Access to decent work was being touted then – and to some extent has been touted ever since – as a way to eradicate or at least help to reduce poverty. So I ended up becoming more of a work psychologist – like a figure-ground reversal between social psychology and work psychology. The social psychology started

out being front and got pushed a wee bit to the back, and applied organisational work and organisational psychology became something that I grew into. In recent decades, the application has been around the eradication of working poverty: the great irony is

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

for living wages to their employees, as well as in the that we have more people in work than ever before supply chain’. Quite a few cities in America have gone (although that’s changing a bit with Covid), but then down that pathway, and here in New Zealand/Aotearoa we also have this working poverty issue. Most of our capital city Wellington moved to a living wage the work in the world is fairly low-grade in terms of ordinance some time ago. security of income, security of tenure, formality, social In the midst of this pandemic, Hamilton City protections and so on. If you’re in relatively harsh Council, here in New Zealand, was having a council and hard conditions, having a half decent wage can debate about whether to move to a living wage make a huge difference to the quality of life and work ordinance, which could make a big difference to a lot life. So I’ve ended becoming more focused on work of people in terms of bread on the table. They invited psychology and wages. HR departments, small to medium enterprises, council We may over-psychologise work, and the wages members and so on. We were the only research group. aren’t the only reason people go to work, but they can We’ve done extensive survey work, case studies, make a huge difference to the various colours of life. We’ve got global debates about living wages, minimum interviews, and so on, and we were able to show our interpretation of the relationship between wages and wages, maximum wages, and Covid has underscored well-being, both individual and new fracture lines in the world organisational. It was a ﬁerce of work. Fixing wages to actually enable people to have decent “…poor working conditions debate, evidence was challenged. Well, we’ll say no, it’s been peer quality work and life is probably is the number one reviewed in, you know, high quality why I’m here today. challenge for the sustainability journals and work psychology journals. And at the And do you think the topic is world of work” end of the day, the council did particularly timely now? actually move to an ordinance. Just before the pandemic came, the We know that’s made a difference International Labour Organisation to at least hundreds of workers in Hamilton region, World of Work report was saying that poor working and likely many more because of the ripple effects. conditions are the number one challenge for the The point of the story is we weren’t the only world of work. That was before the pandemic. voice in the room. It involved partnerships between Around the world, there are big differences between researchers, practitioners in HR and so on. It was countries in terms of income and in terms of wages. evidence-based practice, and it made a difference. But unfortunately, poverty knows no borders… even That stands out as a career highlight because of the in countries like New Zealand/Aotearoa, which are change that happened from it, and it came about relatively prosperous, we have a child poverty issue, because of the very thing the conference stands for. a homelessness issue, we have people going to work that are sleeping in cars. Wages have lost track with the cost of housing. And so poor working conditions is the What a wonderful story… what was the glue that number one challenge for the world of work, and there held you together as a team? The evidence, a vision, can’t be a louder wake up call for us as a discipline and or a combination? It was a partnership across Human Resource profession. Management and Industrial/Organisational Psychology, I do think we have done quite a bit. When I went with the business community and non-government to Malawi, it became apparent to me that ours is a organisations too, like the Living Wage Movement very applied discipline, it has got legs, it is relevant. Aotearoa New Zealand and Poverty Action Waikato. And you have people at the World Bank saying, Lots of stakeholders, a real dialogue. And as I say, ‘we need to protect people, not jobs’, because many that can get a little bit heated. But my advice is to jobs have become low grade and low paid. Well, have as many voices in the room as you can. That’s protecting people is our role. We’re seeing multiple, where your strength comes from. You’ll get asked associated crises – health, gender equity, racial justice, nuts and bolts questions: ‘if you raise the wages, environmental, economic – so now is the time we what’s going to happen to those people who were can step up. That means academics and practitioners previously doing quite well compared to everybody working together, which is a timely theme of the else?’. Then you bring in your work justice theories, conference. and your transparency of explanations and so on. So partnerships all the way through, wherever you look. How are you doing that in your own work, including I had that experience in Malawi: research had to be at the policy level? practical and practice had to be informed by research. I mentioned the difference between a living wage That’s a synergy. You know that space very well, Ingrid. and a legal minimum. One of the ways those two can And it does actually become quite seamless after a be fused is through city ordinances. A city can say, while. ‘we are going to commit to paying the living wage to all of our employees, and any contractors that want The questions you were asked, they’re looking to the to bid for contracts with the city need to budget in

future, what change will impact over here and over there. I think we look at change as if it’s something that’s easy to do or not. One of the great lessons is that it often takes a long time for those things to happen. People come into the profession wanting to make a difference. It will happen, sometimes not when you expect it! You have to be ready to say what you know, and know what you say, when the opportunity comes. It will come. Those unfreezing moments that Kurt Lewin used to talk about, we’re in a huge number of them right now in the world of work. Here they are, and we have to be ready to work together as researchers and practitioners to say what we need to say and to do what we need to do. Hamilton City Council came to us at short notice but we were ready, we had the partnerships in place. It’s like planned happenstance! You can be ready for it. Each of us has a corner of the world we can help change when the time comes.

I’m really happy to be to be poised and ready, and see that we’re laying foundations for change. What would you like to see more of from other psychologists? Lots of psychologists are doing their work around making work more humanitarian, and there has been work in EAWOP and the BPS… I’m thinking of the manifesto for the future of work and organisational psychology that Matthijs Bal and a big team of I/O work psychologists put together, and some of the articles I’ve been reading in The Psychologist including by Ishbel McWha-Hermann and Rosalind Searle. I’m thinking of Project GLOW, the global living organisational wage, a network of 27 countries now. So there’s a lot going on, but there are still wake up calls. In organisational work and organisational psychology we often focus on one organisation, and I don’t think we do halfway near enough to focus on whole supply chains. GLOW, for example, is focused on living wages along entire supply chains and decent work conditions between organisations as well as within them. Why haven’t we got a work psychology of fair trade? I’ve been working with early career and other scholars recently, to put together theoretical think pieces for the profession, so we can pull together a big partnership around academic researchers and practitioners to work together on that. I think as well, we’ve put a lot of faith in the concept of a job – job selection, job analysis, job evaluation, job performance, job well being. The concept of a job is quite individualised, formalized, regular, predictable. And if you’ve got one, it’s brilliant, right? You’re really lucky. But the digital way of working, gig work, all of that is changing what we mean by work. Maybe the job has done its dash. Two-thirds of the world’s workforce, 3.3 billion people, don’t have a formal job. They’re in the informal economy. They’re on what they call own account work, micro businesses, no formal status, very few resources and so on, dirt farmers… we need to broaden our

Two-thirds of the world’s workforce, 3.3 billion people, don’t have a formal job. They’re in the informal economy…

concept out. We’ve got ‘decent work and economic development’ in there as Sustainable Development Goal eight with the United Nations, but I’d like to suggest ‘sustainable livelihood’, as a set of conditions that can enable people to achieve goals that they have through work. I think sustainable livelihood takes in more forms of livelihood. My colleagues Darrin Hodgetts and Shiloh Groot, for example, have been working on radical commerce, which is how you make a street intersection a workplace and make a living out of it, window washing or whatever. That’s just one example. There are so many people around the world in livelihoods, some less sustainable than others, and we can broaden our focus to the conditions that enable a sustainable livelihood. That would be a fantastic change to see, and I just know that when you deliver your opening keynote you’re going to be inspiring. You’ve gone above and beyond to do everything you can to be there in person. What’s it’s going to feel like attending and presenting in this ‘new normal’? To be honest, I never used to think conferences made that much of a difference. But the more I’ve gone on in my career, the more I’ve realised that they really do. The opportunity to actually have that conversation… not always in the formal sessions, either, it’s the corridor conversations, the informal and unexpected. The connections that are struck up, they’re not initially task-based, they’re more relationship based. You get to know somebody, or learn about their perspective, and then that becomes something years down the track. Sustainable livelihood is about livelihoods being connected to one another. That’s the look at the deﬁnition. And I’ll talk more about the deﬁnition at the conference. But it’s about people being connected to one another. And in a way, that’s what those live conferences are all about. So, kia ora koutou, and ka kite ano – I’ll see you soon!

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

‘How can we ensure people have a career that shapes them in a positive way?’ Ans DeVos is Professor of Antwerp Management School at the University of Antwerp. Ingrid Covington asks the questions. You’re a holder of the ‘SD Worx Chair Next Generation Work: Creating Sustainable Careers’. Does that give us a clue what you’ll be presenting on at the Congress? Absolutely. My core ﬁelds of interest, in my research and in my work in general, is everything related to the sustainability of careers. How can we ensure that across the lifespan, people have a career that shapes them in a positive way? One that is giving them more energy than it takes, that gives chances to increase their employability and embrace new career opportunities, rather than taking them all away and becoming obsolete? But it’s also referring to sustainability from a more inclusive perspective: how can we ensure that this holds for all workers and not only the high potential or the talents that everybody is looking for in the labour markets? That’s interesting. I can imagine through Covid you’re not short of case studies and different environments to study. But how did you become interested in this area? I’m a psychologist, but I worked from the start of my career in a business school environment, and also my major focus when studying psychology was social psychology. So I’ve always been interested in this crossing between an individual perspective and the context, and applying that to work. My interest from the beginning has been how we can ﬁnd better ways to align an individual’s perspective with an organisational and a broader labour market perspective. I see so many people starting with a career at a very young age without much planning at that moment. That’s normal at a young age when people make real choices, but then end up feeling stuck in a career that they feel is not really what they would have opted for, if they could turn back time. Yet they feel they’re not equipped to address this within their organisation, with their manager or HR or whatever… or they don’t dare to. They prefer to hold on to what they already have. From an individual perspective, I see that struggling… but at the same time, I also see organisations struggling. They may say ‘we want to have more dynamic careers, we feel we are lagging behind in terms of innovative career policies, where we can ensure that there is mobility, that people learn new things throughout their career. But at the same time, a lot of our HR systems hold on to stability and the status quo, and prefer that people keep on doing what they’re doing now.’ That has led me to explore further how can we make careers more sustainable

from this individual but also from more of a contextual perspective. Is that particularly timely now? It has been timely for a long time before Covid… the debates about the ageing workforce, digitisation etc. I see many workers feeling not that concerned about the length of their career, but rather how long they will stay employable in their current job if they look at the automation or the degree of digitisation taking place in their ﬁeld of work. And there’s burnout, people feeling they can no longer continue at the high pressure they feel in their work. Those tendencies were there already. But it’s also a human tendency to think ‘OK, we’ll manage, we’ll postpone real drastic action, keep on working with the recipes we already have’. Covid has seen all that come to the surface, with a very rapid pace challenging us, as organisations and as individuals. It comes back to that question: how can we make sure that the work we do every day is sustainable, is doable? I hope Covid will really help organisations and individuals break through some of the mental models:

There are opportunities for our field to facilitate those discussions, that way of thinking which might not come naturally to some organisations. The theme of the Congress is interventions that integrate science and practice. Can you give an example of how your Have you seen any evidence that’s happening? own work does that? Yes if I look at the research we have been doing since I’ve been involved in policy interventions from the start of Covid, among employers in Belgium, the beginning of Covid, in an advisory committee but I see it also in more international research. The of experts advising the Flemish government on challenges regarding tele-working, hybrid working, I the relaunch of the labour markets, and also in think they’re on high on the agenda. Combining that particular, the Flemish minister with a shortage of professionals in of employment on that topic. certain fields in the labour market is “Why is there so much I’m also taking up a role now as also forcing employers to embrace chair of a partnership for lifelong these new ideas, and make it not an stability and inertia in exception but a basic part of their HR companies and people and learning with all the social and educational partners here in policy to have that flexibility. That labour markets when it Flanders. That’s a valuable way to will be, I think, a prerequisite to keep bring those ideas to a higher level talent. comes to careers?” of policymaking – the insights I’ve What is worrying me is that I’m obtained from my studies among not seeing that momentum used both individuals and organisations to look at employability and the is a new angle I can bring in that debate. Often the sustainability of careers. I’ve seen so many people individual concerns of people in organisations are a doing different tasks over the past months, and little bit overlooked. being very flexible. But now that work is starting to get normal again. And the focus on HR is, I think, Do you have any unusual evidence-based advice for not enough on how can we also use these learning people applying your work to their personal and opportunities as a way to look at the employability of professional lives? people. What new avenues can we follow to let people Use this pandemic experience as a learning develop in fields they have discovered over the past opportunity to look for yourself on this learning months, that is something they like to do or to explore curve. This situation has challenged me to learn new more? How can we continue using this flexibility in competencies, but also to stretch myself in ways that our career policies, rather than just going back to I did not anticipate that I would have to do it, that I normal? could do it or even that maybe I would like doing it. As psychologists in our practice, having those kinds of questions being asked not only to ourselves, but also the people we interact with, or the companies we work with… we can take that with us into the coming years. ‘this is how we have always done it, and this is how we should proceed’. It might really be a time for change in that sense.

Leadership and employee well-being

Professor Deanne N. Den Hartog heads the Leadership and Management Section and is Director of the Research Institute of the Amsterdam Business School. Her keynote will consider leadership and employee health and well-being. ‘Our meta-analysis and a ﬁeld study show that both the beneﬁcial and harmful effects of leadership are stronger for vulnerable and more precarious workers. Leaders also strongly affect employee psychological health during crises. In research during the Covid-19 pandemic we found that common responses of leaders to the crisis were showing consideration for employees or pressure for performance and a focus on the bottom-line. The former enhances a sense of control and protects employee psychological well-being and the latter harms it, and the role of leaders was again more pronounced for vulnerable workers who experience higher personal and national economic threat.’ 32

I think you’re right, it’s a great opportunity to reﬂect on our own practices, and the catalyst for us to refresh, reﬂect, learn and adapt. I know you’re also going to be chairing a symposium with perspectives of careers from different time frames and different perspectives. What would you like to see more of? Of course, in our research we always have to narrow down and focus on a particular target group or a concept or problem we would like to address. But the career is something holistic. We could learn much more by integrating or relating back insights from research on the school to work transition, but also how can we use those insights to also look at mid-career workers, how can we help them and motivate them to make further transitions. The second one relates more to my work on career inaction that I’ve started on with Marijke Verbruggen… to look further into the reasons why people are not doing things, why they are preferring the status quo. Why is there so much stability and inertia in

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

companies and people and labour markets when it comes to careers? That’s going to be an important line of research to explore in the future. How important is context to understand the push and pull around careers? We had a conference at the beginning of the year talking about career transitions, and we had a group of delegates from Ghana who were saying their context is quite different. Yes, that’s central to our understanding. When we look at careers from a European perspective, and certainly also from a Belgian perspective, we have a social security system, a labour market, that is characterised by certain industries, by certain supplies in terms of people with certain proﬁles. That’s enormously important in understanding people’s individual attitudes and actions they’re willing to take or not, but also the opportunities and the limitations they’re

facing. You cannot understand the sustainability of careers without considering the context. In terms of context, has anything changed for you in terms of attending and presenting at physical conferences? Maybe my longing for physical conferences has only increased as the months passed… for me, it’s part of the whole experience of my career as an academic. Not only for learning the latest ideas, but also for connecting with people and growing as a person, your social capital. I won’t be the only one looking forward to it that way. Yes, it’s almost like being a musician and not having an audience to play to! Everyone I’ve spoken to is craving and excited by that – getting inspired, seeing new ideas take shape.

‘Open your eyes to collective dimensions’ Alex Haslam is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. He studies group and identity processes in organisations, societies and the clinical context. Are you looking forward to EAWOP? I’m really excited about the conference. It’s a community of fellow scholars that I identify with very highly. I think we’ve all been missing the opportunities that conference life affords. Just being at a conference can renew and invigorate our valued social identities.

How did you get interested in the topic of your keynote? Initially I did my PhD in social psychology, and I didn’t particularly have any interest in organisational psychology. But when I got my ﬁrst job [at the Australian National University], there were a lot of social psychologists in my department but no organisational psychologists, and someone needed to teach it. I was handed a set of old notes from someone who had been giving this course… I looked at them and thought they were missing things that I would expect to be in there, and a lot of what was there didn’t ﬁt with my understanding of social psychology. So I started creating new materials, and developed my own take through that teaching and through engagement with interested students. It’s great to hear that your passion is fuelled and reinforced through your engagement with students. Perhaps they give you fresh insights, new questions, so your ideas are continuously evolving. Why do you think group and identity processes are timely now? There’s lots of great work in organisational science and organisational psychology. But if it’s had one failing it’s that the unit of analysis is pretty much always – either explicitly or implicitly – the individual as an individual. There’s very little focus on individuals as group members. But world events in recent years, including but not limited to the pandemic, have shown the importance of group memberships as drivers of key behaviour. Whether it’s compliance with rules or guidelines around social distancing or vaccination

developed now and tested fairly extensively with colleagues in Belgium and the UK. Here in Australia that’s called 5R, and that’s starting to get quite a lot of leverage. We’ve delivered it to a range of organisations here in Australia and into the House of Commons in UK. We’re keen to close the loop so that we get data from that intervention work that speaks to the processes and the efﬁcacy of the approach… rather than something which effectively stops at the front door of practice and doesn’t knock and go in, if you like. We’ve got some big trials, a lot of people involved in the process of data collection… they are some of the most exciting projects that I’ve been involved in “it’s about creating precisely because they bring on structures that allow board people who maybe hanker to people to live out and be part of those large-scale research celebrate those identities. projects but have lacked the support and the opportunity.

rates, you see that group memberships are a key factor in shaping how people think, the emotions they have, and ultimately what they do. I think that’s starting to come through in psychology as a whole… a refocus onto the collective aspects of organisational life and the forms of collective mind which underpin group-based behaviour. Over the last 20 or 30 years there has been a groundswell of research that explores those issues and demonstrates distinct value in reaching and explaining parts of organisational life that traditional approaches haven’t done desperately well at dealing with – everything from group-decision making to leadership.

Do you feel confident that the whole discipline is starting to catch up? There’s still a lot to be done… the social identity approach is far Conferences are a firstfrom being a dominant one. It class example of that” Do you have any unusual hasn’t taken hold at the core of the evidence-based advice for people discipline. Social identity is still a applying your work to their bit of a fringe issue, though much personal or professional lives? less so in Europe than in the US, The core theoretical point is when it comes to I think. In Europe it’s close to being a mainstream organisational psychology, don’t always bring it back approach, but in the US – notwithstanding the fact to the individual. So when you’re talking about selfthat some of the very best social identity research has esteem or self-actualisation or self-determination been done there – due to ideological leanings, and also or self-care, thinking at a collective level opens up just training and exposure, it’s seen as a framework of specialised interest. In my view, it should be absolutely possibilities that people routinely neglect. Just to take one example, people tend to think part of the ballast of the discipline. about self-determination as whether I have autonomy, mastery and so on. But think about that on a group On social identity, the theme is interventions that level. And self-care – what does collective self-care work… integrated insights and practice… can you mean? Is my group looking after itself, am I looking give an example of how your work does that? after my group, is my group looking after me. That I’ve got over 200 colleagues working in this space leads to all sorts of productive possibilities, because around the world, we give a lot of talks, and a pretty lots of problems around resilience and mental health standard experience is that someone will come up and become pretty intractable if you only look at them say ‘That makes perfect sense to me, but now I’ve got at the individual level. Open your eyes to collective to go back to my organisation… what am I meant to dimensions of these phenomena and you’ll be do?’ Most other approaches were associated with a suite of packages or tools that people could use in their surprised what you find. The most effective organisational psychologists practitioner-focused work. So in recent years we’ve done a lot more on that. Work on identity management I know are doing just that, and that’s where they get leverage – picking up bits of the picture that other and organisations, and how you manage multiple identities, morphed into a practical program that we’ve approaches aren’t reaching. That should just be part of our standard arsenal for tackling these theoretical and empirical issues. This is still a very vibrant and generative stream of research and there’s a lot more mining to be done.

If you think of the conferences themselves, they’re a critical way in which we become a collective without really trying… And that’s a critical point we make in our work on leadership… it’s not about ‘talking the talk’ or having a particular mindset, it’s about creating structures that allow people to live out and celebrate those identities. Conferences are a ﬁrst-class example of that. They are

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

places where people rehearse their ideas, share them, build, embed their ideas. For that reason they’re a hugely important part of the intellectual landscape. They’re also critical in generating and driving an impetus for change, and walking through that change so people get a feel for what it might look like and are able to engage on an intellectual and practical level. For the vibrancy and vitality of academic life, conferences have this huge identity function. There’s hard work, but you also make connections and forge links and bonds – particularly for young researchers you can end up carrying them with you throughout your career. I think of the energy I get from conferences as a kind of rocket fuel. For many of us, this would be the ﬁrst conference in person since the pandemic. How do you feel about attending and presenting? Those of us who appreciate what conferences can do have to get back out there… in the thick of it, the hurly burly and circus of academic life. I think people will be relieved and happy and maybe a little bit anxious. Being there will be partly about answering those questions on why we need conferences, and how we can work together to create a new normal that is going to work for everybody. Collectively refuelling, but also collectively regrouping and reorienting.

Evolution of emotions and empathy Dutch/American biologist and primatologist Frans B.M. de Waal is C.H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. He will address the congress on the evolution of emotions and empathy in the primates. ‘Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behaviour – from “social bonding” to “alarm calls” – yet are still regularly avoided as explicit topic in scientiﬁc discourse. Given the increasing interest of human psychology in the emotions, and the neuroscience on animal emotions such as fear and attachment, the taboo that has hampered animal research in this area is outdated. It is crucial to separate emotions from feelings, which are subjective experiences that accompany the emotions. Whereas science has no access to animal feelings, animal emotions are as observable and measurable (face, voice, physiology, neural activity) as human emotions. They are mental and bodily states that potentiate behaviour appropriate to mostly social situations. I will discuss early ideas about animal emotions and draw upon research on empathy and the perception of emotions in primates to make the point that the study of animal emotions is a necessary complement to the study of behaviour. Emotions are best viewed as the organisers of adaptive responses to environmental stimuli.’

‘How individuals impact the place – not just how the place impacts the individuals’ Dr Gilad Chen is the Robert H. Smith Chair in Organizational Behavior at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. What are you presenting on, and how did you get interested in it? I’m going to present three projects where the common themes are how individuals impact collectives or units (being in teams or organisations); looking primarily at how individuals make a difference in that environment. There’s a lot of interest in individual outcomes, but I was always fascinated by how individuals impact the place – not just how the place impact the individuals. These projects look at different ways in which individuals come together and are able to impact either organisational units or whole organisations. I imagine there are lots of applications to understanding the impact individuals can have on groups. It’s one of those topics that has long had interest, particularly from work organisational psychologists. Back from the First World War into the Second World War, a lot of the history of the application of psychology to organisations started there. But it moved into other organisational settings. We hear a lot in the

last decade or two about generational differences; how younger employees getting into the workforce really want to make a meaningful impact. The three studies that I’ll offer tie into timely topics as well. The ﬁrst one will touch on how individuals can have different levels of impact in voicing suggestions in teams. It has actually been inspired by some major disasters such as NASA’s Columbia shuttle disaster, where some engineers tried to speak up and express concerns and weren’t heard. We obviously see cases like that in big ethical scandals and other organisations. The second project will be more about entrepreneurial teams and their formation, but from the more organic versus organisational-driven perspective. So how do a group of co-founders get together? And how do the strategies of ﬁnding co-founders impact the collective success of the new venture? The third is interdisciplinary work that is still ongoing. Some experts in economics and information technology got together with me to apply machine

learning principles to look at ways in which employees rated their firm on the jobs website Glassdoor. We’re trying to see whether we can characterise organisations based on engagement, particularly how employees identify or do not identify with their organisation. We were particularly looking at how the differences based on those reviews before Covid, enabled organisations to adapt better financially during Covid. What great case studies, the applicability is enormous. The theme of your keynote is interventions at work, integrating science and practice – can you give an example of how your own work does that? The studies that I’ll talk about have interventions; the first one is in a laboratory setting, in a simulation, the second one is a field intervention. Interventions help us establish causality and add to the basis of knowledge in research. It also makes for a much simpler leap from research to practice when you have an intervention that can guide an organisation in applying the knowledge of work organisational psychology. For example, we had an opportunity to create an intervention to form an entrepreneurial team based on different principles. It’s a fairly simple application that allows us to establish better causal inference. It could be used by mentors of new venture teams, or by investors. We can help train based on that knowledge and make decisions around who to invest in based on team attributes. That’s interesting – are you seeing demand out there from these different stakeholder groups, like people looking to invest? We do. We were working with a Centre for Entrepreneurship, in our business school here at the University of Maryland, where we often bring coaches and investors to help train entrepreneurs. We’re not there yet, but we’re engaging in more and more discussion and there’s a lot of interest in learning how to help teams. There’s actually some evidence that showed that investors in new ventures look for the dynamics in the team, not just the idea per se. So they invest just as much in the team as in the ideas. Our research quantifies a little more what is it about the team that they should key into when they make those decisions? I think that the economic engine of many economies in the world are now based on entrepreneurial activities. Understanding what makes a new venture team successful very early on in its lifespan has enormous economic implications.

For sure, I remember seeing Michael Frese deliver a keynote looking at entrepreneurship within developing world nations. How applicable would you say your research is to other cultures and other contexts? It’s very much so. What is nice about Michael Frese’s work is that he took a lot of research on productivity that has entrepreneurial connectivity and has been

done primarily in the Western or developed world, and showed that it can apply very well particularly in small villages, and particularly in women entrepreneurs. Our research is different but it shows that, again, the principle of assembling teams can really apply in making those teams more successful. You touched on evidence – do you have any unusual evidence-based advice for people applying your work to their personal and/or professional lives? Yes, I think that the third study is an example: the initial evidence is pretty promising. It suggests that the immediate reaction when an organisation hits a crisis is to economise. And oftentimes, people look at employees as cost. What we show is that actually investing in employees – so that they’re more engaged, more connected to the organisation – is especially critical to the organisation’s success during crisis situations such as Covid. Much of the research on engagement has been done at the individual level, but we really don’t know whether that actually aggregates upwards to impact organisation success. The evidence we show integrates psychological understanding of identiﬁcation, and engagement processes to organisational level. The organisations we look at – S&P 500 organisations – are very large and we’re able to quantify the market share of the stock value of companies that were top quartile versus low quartile in our index of engagement. There was quite a large difference in terms of how much market capitalisation they were able to gather as a result of having a more engaged workforce. If nothing else, it shows that it really pays off to invest in engaging employees, all the way to actual stock market performance. That sounds very impactful. Are you noticing a

the psychologist november 2021 work in the real world

response from these large companies? I teach in an executive programme where we have about 40 executives from a variety of industries: government, hospitality, financial and medical sectors. I presented those initial findings to them a couple of weeks back. When you show them the results – ‘here’s how organisations that do a better job engaging their employees perform in the stock market relative to those that do poorly’ – they immediately get it. You change the mindset of executives to think ‘maybe we should really care about the motivation of our employees’. What would you like to see from other psychologists in terms of changing research or practice in your area, or more broadly? Our field is literally over a century old: we celebrated that with the 100-year anniversary of the Journal of Applied Psychology a few years back. I think one lesson

learned is that the intersection of workforce, society and development of psychological principles has always been what really drives a new development in our field. So I’d like to convey how psychology should keep up from the basic to the applied areas. This will be the first in-person conference in our field for two years. How do you feel about presenting at a conference in this kind of new normal? It’s a combination of excitement and fear! I can’t wait to have in-person conferences again. There’s definitely been some innovations in technology that connected people around the world virtually. But some things are just not substitutable: the in-person aspect, the ‘Happy Hour’ when we get to meet people and learn about them. You can’t replicate that in Zoom. I hope that the Covid situation will be bearable so we can do that. Time will tell – I’m hopeful.

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EAWOP Congress 11-14 January 2022 SEC, Glasgow, Scotland

eawop2022.org

In communist countries, psychology could be a dangerous profession. As with any role, if you didn’t use your expertise in service of state propaganda, you were in danger of falling foul of authorities. The Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski was persecuted especially harshly, since the focus of his research was political power, and how it can be misused… Getty Images

Above: Worker ﬁxing ﬂowers in front of Stalin’s portrait in 1940. Right: Former US President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 2021

the psychologist november 2021 pathocracy

Getty Images

The problem of pathocracy

Do psychologists have a responsibility to help prevent ruthless, amoral people attaining positions of power? Steve Taylor considers the arguments.

fter spending his early life suffering under the Nazis, and then under the Soviet rule of Stalin, Andrzej Lobaczewski recognised that ruthless and disturbed individuals were strongly drawn to political power, and often constitute the government of nations. He began to study the relationship between power and personality disorders – like psychopathy – and coined the term ‘pathocracy’ to describe the phenomenon. As he put it, pathocracy is a system of government ‘wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people’. Since he was living under a ‘pathocratic’ regime himself, Lobaczewski took great risks studying this topic. He was arrested and tortured by the Polish authorities, and unable to publish his life’s work, the book Political Ponerology, until he escaped to the United States during the 1980s. According to Lobaczewski, the transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness. Soon other people with psychopathic traits emerge and attach themselves to the pathocracy, sensing the opportunity to gain power and influence. At the same time, responsible and moral people gradually leave the government, either resigning or being ruthlessly ejected. In an inevitable process, soon the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience. It has been infiltrated by members of the minority of people with personality disorders, who assume power over the majority of psychologically normal people. Soon the pathology of the government spreads amongst the general population. As Lobaczewski

wrote, ‘If an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic’ (2006, p.25). The pathocratic government presents a compelling simplistic ideology, promoting notions of future greatness, with a need to defeat or eliminate alleged enemies who stand in the way of this great future. The government uses propaganda to stoke hatred towards enemies, and to create a cult of personality around the leader. In the general population, there is an intoxicating sense of belonging to a mass movement, inspiring loyalty and self-sacrifice. Present sacrifices become immaterial in the movement towards a glorious future. In addition, the mass movement inspires acts of individual cruelty, including torture and mass murder. Once they possess power, pathocrats usually devote themselves to entrenching, increasing and protecting their power, with scant regard for the welfare of others. However, Lobaczewski also noted that pathocracies never become permanent. At some point, they are destined to fail, because their brutality and lack of moral principles are not shared by the majority of the population, who possess empathy and conscience. This was certainly true of the two pathocracies that Lobaczewski himself experienced, Nazi Germany and the communist regime of Poland. Power and pathology Reading the above, it’s difficult to avoid reflecting on the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States. Psychologists and other mental health professionals are justifiably reluctant to make judgements about the mental health of public figures. Many are careful to follow the ‘Goldwater Rule’ – the convention of the American Psychiatric Association that it is unethical for psychiatrists to voice their professional opinion about public figures without examining them in person. However, many psychologists and other mental health professionals felt compelled to voice concern about Trump. For

example, the psychologist John Gartner formed the ‘Duty to Warn’ organisation, which declared that Donald Trump ‘suffers from an incurable malignant narcissism that makes him incapable of carrying out his presidential duties and poses a danger to the nation’. The president’s niece, Mary Trump – herself a clinical psychologist – also stated her belief that the president suffers from malignant narcissism, and possibly other conditions such as sociopathy and dependent personality disorder. Whether these psychologists were right to speak out or not, it’s easy to identify many of the elements of pathocracy in Trump’s presidency. For example, there was certainly an exodus of conscientious figures from the administration, the Whitehouse officials who initially saw themselves as ‘the adults in the room’ but were soon replaced by loyalists. Trump’s simplistic ‘make America great again’ agenda is certainly an example of promoting a notion of future greatness. Other pathocratic aspects are his demonisation of ethnic and religious groups, and the appeal of his impulsive narcissistic personality for a large section of the US population. But is there any hard evidence that people with personality disorders – or more specifically, with psychopathic and narcissistic traits – are attracted to political power, as Lobaczewski suggested? Let me begin with a caveat. I’m somewhat reluctant to use labels like ‘psychopath’ or even to speak in terms of specific disorders like psychopathy or narcissistic personality disorder. My view is that – partly as a result of books like Hare and Babiak’s Snakes in Suits and Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test – the term ‘psychopath’ has been bandied around too freely. There has been a tendency to think of psychopaths as a distinct group, like alien beings who are walking secretly amongst us. In reality, it’s more sensible to Key sources think in terms of a continuum or spectrum. On the positive side of Boddy, C.R. (2011). Corporate the continuum, there are people psychopaths: Organisational destroyers. relatively free of psychopathic traits Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. like ruthlessness and cruelty, and Hare, R.D. (1999). Without conscience. also free of the traits associated with Guilford Press. narcissistic personality disorder, Hughes, I. (2018). Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying such as grandiose self-importance Democracy. Zero Books. and a sense of entitlement. Such Jones, D.N. & Figueredo, A.J. (2013). people have a high level of empathy The core of darkness: Uncovering and compassion, and often act the heart of the Dark Triad. European selflessly, for the benefit of others. Journal of Personality, 27(6), 521–531. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Lobaczewski, A. (2006). Political ponerlogy: A science on the nature of evil there are people who possess strong for political purposes. Red Hill Press. psychopathic and narcissistic traits, Nai, A. & Toros, E. (2020). The peculiar who are unusually ruthless and selfpersonality of strongmen: Comparing centred, and lacking in conscience the Big Five and Dark Triad traits of and empathy. You could even go to autocrats and non-autocrats. Political the extreme of letting go of terms Research Exchange, 2, 1-24. like psychopathic and narcissistic Full list available in online/app version. altogether, and just speak in terms of people who are abnormally

ruthless, self-centred and lacking in empathy and conscience. In addition, rather than viewing such traits as wholly innate, the traits may be enabled and encouraged by our social values and institutions. In hierarchical non-egalitarian societies, where power is unevenly distributed, it is perhaps inevitable that some individuals develop a sense of superiority and privilege, and tend to oppress and exploit others. This relates to the suggestion by some theorists that leadership positions in themselves increase narcissism. Haslam, Reicher, and Platow (2011) have described this in terms of a ‘leadership trap’. Once leaders attain positions of power, they begin to think of themselves as superior and special. Although they may owe their own success to the combined efforts of the group they have emerged from, the leader figure is ‘singled out’ for credit and admiration, which feeds their narcissistic tendencies and ultimately undermines the group’s success. With all of that said, there certainly is evidence for the link that Lobaczewski suggested between pathology and political power. First of all, there is a good deal of evidence that people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits (or people who are just ruthless and lacking in empathy and conscience, if you prefer) are attracted to high status positions. Many psychologists have suggested that, as Steffens and Haslam summarise, ‘like moths to a flame, narcissists may be drawn naturally to positions of power and influence and that, once there, their narcissism will tend to be accentuated by the opportunities for selfadvancement that high office affords’ (2020, p.3). According to some psychologists’ estimates, around 1 per cent of the general population exhibit psychopathic traits (Neumann & Hare, 2008; Coid et al., 2009). However, in a survey of the work experiences of Australian white-collar workers, Clive Boddy (2011) concluded that 5.6 per cent were working under a psychopathic supervisor. In an article based on his own research published in the business magazine Fortune earlier this year, Professor Simon Croom of the University of San Diego suggested that 12 per cent of corporate senior managers display psychopathic traits. Studies have also suggested that students with psychopathic tendencies are highly concentrated in business and commerce degrees (Wilson & McCarthy, 2011; Hassall et al., 2015). In recent years, the concept of a ‘dark triad’ has gained prominence, focusing on three ‘socially aversive’ traits – psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. According to Paulhus and Williams (2002), although the traits are distinct constructs, they overlap to such an extent that they should be studied in combination. Research suggests that the ‘dark triad’ is strongly associated with a desire for dominance and power, and is significantly more common than normal at the level of upper-level management and CEOs – psychopathy and Machiavellianism, in particular (Hodson et al., 2009; Jones & Figueredo, 2013; Lee et al., 2013).

the psychologist november 2021 pathocracy

people with a lack of empathy and All of this certainly suggests conscience seem to be attracted that the values and structures of to positions of power, surely we modern capitalist-individualistic should take some measures to societies favour psychopathic and restrict their access to power? narcissistic traits. In hierarchical To an extent, this has always societies where ruthless been the purpose of democracy. competition and even exploitation As Ian Hughes (2018) points out are condoned, people with high in his book Disordered Minds, levels of ruthlessness and a lack of Dr Steve Taylor is a Senior the aim of democracy is to try to empathy are bound to thrive, since Lecturer in Psychology at protect the mass of people from they are more manipulative and Leeds Beckett University, and disordered authoritarian leaders. exploitative than others, and are Chair of the Transpersonal This is why, as Hughes also points unconstrained by feelings of guilt Psychology Section of the British out, authoritarian leaders with or conscience. Psychological Society. psychopathic or narcissistic traits It would not be surprising if www.stevenmtaylor.com distrust democracy. Once in power, such individuals are attracted to they do their utmost to dismantle political positions too. After all, and discredit democratic institutions, including the the role of politician offers the opportunity to exercise independence of institutions and the freedom and power very directly, and confers prestige, attention legitimacy of the press. Moreover, such leaders are and potential wealth. As Hare put it: ‘Psychopaths unable to comprehend the principles of democracy, are social predators and like all predators they are since they regard themselves as superior, and see life looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, as a competitive struggle in which the most ruthless prestige and money you will find them.’ A recent deserve to dominate others. Any of this sounding study of 157 leaders (from 81 worldwide elections familiar in a UK context? from 2016 to 2019) found 14 ‘strongman’ leaders with The problem is that while democratic systems pronounced autocratic tendencies, all of whom scored provide checks and balances that limit the power of significantly highly on the ‘dark triad’ traits, especially ruthless and amoral people, they do little to prevent in psychopathy (Nai & Toros, 2020). such people attaining power in the first place. As The ex-politician and medical doctor David Owen Lobaczewski (2006) noted, pathocracies only emerge – working with the psychiatrist Jonathan Davidson – because we do not take sufficient measures to protect developed a construct of a personality disorder that he termed the ‘hubris syndrome,’ which he believed heads ourselves from a pathological minority with an intense desire for power. Like other psychologists who have of government are especially prone to (see tinyurl. studied ‘corporate psychopathy’, Clive Boddy has com/psychmagowen). Owen and Davidson posited 14 suggested that companies should ‘screen leadership characteristics of the hubris syndrome, most of which candidates for psychopathy because organisational overlap with psychopathic and narcissistic traits. success and psychopathy are inimical’ (2017, p.156). (In fact, Owen suggested that the syndrome could be Could we do something similar in politics? seen as a sub-type of narcissistic personality disorder.) However, there are also criteria that specifically apply to politicians, such as ‘exhibits messianic zeal and Egalitarian sanctioning exaltation in speech’, ‘conflates self with nation or Anthropological reports of hunter-gatherer groups organisation’, ‘displays the unshakable belief that who live an ‘immediate return’ way of life – meaning he will be vindicated in that court’ and ‘displays that they consume their food almost straight away, incompetence with disregard for the nuts and bolts without storing surpluses – have typically shown of policy-making’ (Owen & Davidson, 2009). Owen them to be extremely egalitarian and democratic. In and Davidson suggest that these traits arise from the the words of the anthropologist Bruce Knauft, such leadership role itself, along the lines of the ‘leadership groups are characterised by ‘extreme political and trap’ I described earlier. At the same time, they suggest sexual egalitarianism’ (1991, p.391). They have well that such leaders were originally attracted to power developed processes of maintaining social harmony, by their narcissistic traits. Once in power, the traits including measures to ensure that unsuitable became intensified and distorted, sometimes partly individuals do not attain power. Any person who through the intake of alcohol and performanceshows signs of a desire for power and wealth is enhancing drugs (Owen & Davidson, 2007). usually barred from consideration as a leader. In the words of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1999), contemporary hunter-gatherer groups ‘apply Regulating power techniques of social control in suppressing both Since there does appear to be a link between the dark dominant leadership and undue competitiveness’ triad traits and political power, surely the attainment (p.64). If a dominant male tries to take control of the of political power needs to be more strictly regulated. group, the group practise what Boehm calls ‘egalitarian Or to put it more neutrally, since ruthless, narcissistic

sanctioning’. They gang up against the domineering person, ostracise them or desert them. As Boehm has noted, ‘This egalitarian approach seems to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic’ (1999, p.69). Our societies clearly require some measures of egalitarian sanctioning too. Most importantly, I believe we should follow the example of hunter-gatherer groups in attempting to limit access to power of individuals with high levels of the dark triad traits. And this is where the expertise of psychologists and other mental health professionals would be essential. In my view, every government (and indeed every organisation) should employ psychologists to assess the personality and behaviour of potential leaders, and hence determine their suitability for power. Of course, there are a variety of inventories to assess for psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder, but since people with such traits are frequently manipulative and dishonest, it is unlikely that self-report inventories will be reliable. But a wide variety of other assessments could be implemented. There could be ‘observer ratings’ from a variety of sources, including previous supervisors and co-workers. Beyond inventories, psychologists could examine the candidate’s life history, looking for evidence of empathy and compassion (or their reverse). They could interview past acquaintances, former schoolteachers or university tutors, and so on. It is widely accepted that there are early life predictors of psychopathic traits, such as callousunemotional traits, a lack of empathy and guilt, and shallow or deﬁcient emotions (Salekin, 2006; Frick, 2009; Glenn, 2019). In the light of this, early teachers and childhood friends or relatives of political candidates could be interviewed to examine evidence for these traits. Of course, all of the above types of assessments could be manipulated too, but a range and variety of assessments could provide a broad and detailed picture of the candidate’s personality, and their suitability for a political position.

Starting a debate I can imagine reactions to this article. I may appear idealistic and naive. I admit that I do not have a clear strategy on how we could assess potential leaders, or how such assessments could be implemented. More than anything, I would simply like to start a debate about the issue. One thing we need to consider is how we determine whether a person is ruthless or amoral. After all, while many mental health professionals (and many Americans) viewed Donald Trump as dangerous, millions saw him as a force for good and viewed his democratic opponents as ruthless and amoral. There is no objective standard of goodness or malevolence. However, to my mind, a responsible, moral and benevolent person is someone who experiences a strong sense of connection to others, which expresses

itself through empathy, compassion and altruism. Because of their empathy and compassion, such people are likely to treat others with respect and promote justice and equality. A ruthless, amoral and malevolent person is someone who experiences a strong sense of disconnection, which expresses itself through selfishness, callousness and lack of empathy. Such people are likely to exploit and abuse others and promote injustice and inequality. In this way, personality disorders such as psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorders can be seen as disorders of disconnection. What we call ‘human nature’ can be seen as a continuum of connection, from the extreme disconnection of dark triad personalities on one side, to the extreme connection of highly compassionate and altruistic people on the other. One criticism might be that what I’ve suggested gives too much power to psychologists, who would effectively become kingmakers, and perhaps themselves become vulnerable to corruption and narcissism. This is true, but it is surely much less hazardous than the present situation, when there are no safeguards at all on people who put themselves forward for positions of political authority. As a friend of mine remarked recently, we live in societies where you need to pass a test to drive a car, but you don’t need any training or test to drive a whole country. Anyone is free to put themselves into seats of political power, and it is all too often the most reckless and ruthless people who occupy them. Other measures are essential too. Empathic and conscientious people should be encouraged to take up positions of power. In ancient Athens, the cradle of modern democracy (albeit one built on slave labour), the practice of sortition was common. Officials and assembly members were chosen by lot, as a means of ensuring that ordinary people were represented in government, and of safeguarding against corruption and bribery. Such a measure would also, more broadly, help to safeguard against pathocracy. Deeper social and cultural issues also need to be addressed. The frequency and ease with which people with psychopathic and narcissist traits rise into positions of power suggests deep-rooted problems with our social institutions and values. These encourage competition and selfishness, and devalue compassion and empathy, enabling people with ruthless amoral traits to thrive, and facilitating the development and expression of such traits. We clearly need to develop more egalitarian and responsible values and institutional structures so that such traits become less socially acceptable and desirable. In the same way that corporations can be brought to their knees by the behaviour of a small number of disordered individuals in high positions, our whole societies – and the world itself – are being badly damaged by the actions of a small number of disordered politicians in positions of high power. And more than anyone else, psychologists and other mental professionals have a moral duty to help.

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‘Trauma work is a search for meaning’ Ian Florance interviews Noreen Tehrani, a founder member of the Society’s Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Section and Deputy Chair of the Division of Occupational Psychology

I first came across Noreen’s work when I was joint editor of the book Emerging Conversations in Coaching and Coaching Psychology. Noreen wrote a chapter with David Lane, arguing that an understanding of trauma is not only an issue for clinical and counselling psychologists but that all practitioner psychologists should recognise trauma, and respond appropriately with individual and organisational clients. Her company, Noreen Tehrani Associates, offers trauma support services, psychological screening, and training to organisations and individuals. Noreen has helped in dealing with major disasters such as the London Bridge terrorist attacks and Grenfell Tower. I asked her what drives her passion for this difficult area. ‘I work to make people and organisations well again. The people I see have been through a trauma; childhood abuse, traumatic loss of a loved one, lifethreatening accident are examples. The trauma symptoms of many people prevent them from working, functioning socially or in their family. Over the years I have been approached to work with concerned individuals and organisations as diverse as banking and insurance, government, and emergency services. ‘Typically I start with screening questionnaires dealing with symptoms and coping capacity, followed by a full assessment covering personal history, background, employment, strengths and an outline of what happened. Feeding back these results is the basis for further discussion, though an acknowledgement of what they have been through may allow them to use their own resilience to move forward. ‘I chaired a Society Professional Practice Board working party on Psychological Debriefing in 2002 so I’m aware of the controversy surrounding the process. However, there is a role for this early intervention particularly when used with organisational groups. For instance, I worked with Public Health England on establishing the principles for an early intervention specially designed for emergency services. Debriefing principles are central to Trauma Focused CBT (TF-CBT) where the traumatised person is gradually re-exposed to their trauma. Part of the TF-CBT process is to look for alternative endings or to find sources of support. I recall working with a police officer who

had seen a young woman jump out of a building and land on the pavement in front of him. The ofﬁcer was constantly having ﬂashbacks and nightmares where he saw the woman’s face and open eyes looking at him. I asked him what would have made the situation better at that time. He said she should have been shown more respect and covered up. I asked him what he could use to cover her. He said, “I had a blanket in the back of the police car”. I asked him to visualise the scene, get the blanket and cover her. Immediately, he seemed more relaxed. I told him that if he saw the face again to get the blanket.’ Explaining the biology of trauma Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR) has received a lot of media coverage recently. ‘I was initially very sceptical of it. My preference is for a much more relational approach to trauma. However, after training in it, I found to my surprise, the technique worked well. There has been lots of discussion about what is the active element in EMDR but holding a person in a safe place and using bilateral stimulation in the form of eye movements, auditory clicks or taps, can help re-process painful trauma memories.’

the psychologist november 2021 careers

Has trauma work changed since you became interested in it in the mid-nineties? ‘I started as a research biologist so was interested in the biology of trauma. We know more about how the brain works and the role of the amygdala, hippocampus, and pre-frontal cortex. Explaining the biology of trauma to clients seems to make things clear to them. The amygdala is the early warning system, which is constantly looking out for danger, but sometimes it overreacts to sensory information associated with trauma. For me this has revalidated Pavlov’s classical conditioning with a trauma response being triggered by the pairing of the trauma with a sound or smell present when the trauma occurred.’ Noreen describes her work in major disasters as largely organisational nowadays. ‘In a disaster you support a large number of people. Initially the support involves providing shelter, food, rest, and immediate social support. The next stage is to triage to identify those in greatest need and provide support for those involved in providing primary care as they can become secondary victims. Whenever I’m called to a crisis or disaster, I prepare myself carefully and take as much rest as I can between sessions. If I have been involved in dealing with a major incident over a number of weeks, it can take time to recover. After the 7/7 bombings in London I stopped doing any trauma work for two months to allow myself time to recover. Trauma work is not for everyone; before you get involved you must think about whether you can cope.’ ‘I’m an insider-outsider’ ‘My career has been guided by accidents and serendipity. A talk at school when I was 14 years old convinced me that I wanted to be a psychologist. My father said “No” since I would, in his words “end up working in an asylum”. My other love was biology so my first career went down that route.’ After several jobs, Noreen moved to the Hammersmith Hospital Postgraduate Medical School ‘where we did some really interesting research including organ transplants, contraceptive pills and testing plastic hip joint which we used to treat arthritic greyhounds from the local White City racetrack. ‘ ‘After time off to have a family, it was difficult to find a suitable job. It was the Margaret Thatcher era, and I had been demonstrating against the cuts in early child education. I remember walking over Richmond Bridge thinking “I’ve never been to university”. I decided there and then to take Biology and Psychology at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. I loved it. In my second year they wanted to close the psychology department, I was determined this would not happen and organised a sit-in and demonstrations. We forced them to call a meeting of the governors, chaired by the Bishop of London. I was asked to make a presentation to the governors and pleaded with them to keep the department open. The course was saved and a thank you letter from the Dean addressed me as

Noreen Tyranny – a Freudian slip perhaps.’ Noreen’s love for psychology has never diminished and she has become chartered in occupational, health, trauma, coaching and counselling psychology. ‘I got interested in each area as the need and opportunity arose. I could have added forensic: a lot of my work is involved with criminal behaviour. I don’t feel a member of one group – I’m an insider-outsider. I love to attend conferences which mix different psychology specialisms.’ ‘Overcoming fear of managing is critical to organising responders to major disasters. I also learnt this when I worked for Courage Managed Pubs. This was a strange role for me, as someone who is teetotal. Using what I had learnt in psychology I moved from being a temporary receptionist to Retail Operations Director in seven years. What I had learnt was the importance of managing through people, to support and motivate. You must understand the output of the process you’re managing but not the detail of how you get there.’ Noreen joined the Post Office in 1991, initially working in Occupational Health but then moving over to head up the new Employee Support Service. ‘I became involved in trauma psychology there. Robberies of Post Offices and attacks on Post Office staff happened regularly. I was also responsible for the wellbeing of the Post Office staff in Northern Ireland when the troubles were at their height. It was nervewracking when you heard that a hotel you’d stayed in a week before had been blown up. There was very little written about trauma psychology at the time – maybe three papers – but I used these as the basis for developing a training programme, filmed materials, and an approach to debriefing. I found this work wonderful: you could be creative and you could see positive results very quickly. ‘When I moved to head up Employee Support, my commercial experiences helped me to “sell” the benefits of psychology. I professionalised and “productised” wellbeing services, enabling different Post Office businesses to budget for our psycho-social services. My way of working and commercial approach did not suit everyone, and for a time I was exposed to bullying which lasted for around 18 months, but as with all of life’s experiences “what does not kill you makes you stronger”. I have written a couple of books on bullying using my experiences and those of others to deal with organisational bullying.’ After leaving the Post Office Noreen set up her own company and has become an acknowledged national expert in the areas of bullying, stress and trauma which is why we’d asked her to co-write the chapter in the book I mentioned at the beginning. Our meeting took place outside the café in Marble Hill Park, St Margarets, a welcome change from long Zoom sessions! As we got up to leave, Noreen restressed a core point. ‘Trauma work is a search for meaning. If a person can understand the experience, they will get better.’

The conﬂict in conﬂict Deputy editor Shaoni Bhattacharya talks to Professor Mari Fitzduff about psychology’s role in global peacebuilding, Trump and Brexit, and the crisis in Afghanistan

You’ve worked on conflict programmes in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and elsewhere – could you tell us a bit about your work on peacebuilding? During the 1980s I was living in a place called ‘The Killing Fields’ – a rural area so called because it had the second highest murder rate in Northern Ireland – the highest was one square mile in Belfast city where 600 people had been murdered. At that time, I had two young boys. One morning, finding myself between a group of young IRA men, who were fighting with violence for a united Ireland, and a group of young British soldiers tasked with preventing such violence, I decided enough was enough – we had to end this crazy war that was killing so many, and particularly so many of our young men. I was a trained family and relationship mediator, so I decided to see if we could extend such skills to the

sectarian and political problems we were having. At that stage the conflict resolution/peacebuilding world was relatively new – when I first set up a mediation class in a university in Belfast half the people who turned up thought it was a meditation class! However, subsequently, a few colleagues and I set up ‘Mediation Northern Ireland’ in 1988, which eventually became the go-to institution for many of the community mediations leading up to the Belfast agreement in 1998, which effectively ended most of the violence. Given the confusion and fear involved in reconciliation work, I also wrote a book called Community Conflict Skills which had a hundred ways of talking about difficult issues and which became the go-to book for much of the work. In 1990, I was appointed chief executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, that with

the psychologist november 2021 books the assistance of the European Union and the British government, became the main funder and developer of dialogue and relationship building work with politicians, paramilitaries, prisoners, churches, youth and women’s groups etc. Much of such work was subsequently deemed instrumental in achieving the peace deal (see tinyurl.com/ dsc6z3y5). In 1997, as the Peace Process moved to a political agreement, I moved to direct UN/INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute), an outpost of the United Nations University at the University of Ulster. We developed close ties with colleagues assisting peacebuilding in the Basque country, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, the Caucasus, Indonesia, the Philippines, Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia, Colombia etc. We assisted each other’s work and shared and learned from the best practices among us – as well as from our failures! Subsequently, in 2004, I became the founding director of the Master’s programme in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at Brandeis University in the USA. This was a programme for mature international professionals who were involved in trying to solve over 70 conflicts around the world. The course was based on what I and many international policymakers and practitioners would have liked to have known about conflict and peacebuilding before we were thrown in at the deep end of the work. What is your academic background; how has psychology informed your work on conflict? My own background is in Social Psychology. For my PhD, I researched what had effected positive change in people who had once been involved in sectarian activities – including murder, but who were later committed to dialogue as the way forward in searching for a solution to the conflict. Interestingly, my research indicated most of my subjects had not reasoned their way out of their beliefs, which surprised and worried me somewhat, as the little reconciliation work that was ongoing was based mainly on rational discussions. What my research revealed was that the majority of those who had changed had done so because of emotional dissonance i.e. experiences which changed their emotional and instinctual senses about their erstwhile enemies. Through my research I also grew to know paramilitaries from all sides, who had had no compunction about murdering or maiming those whom they had considered their enemy, but who, in their own communities were often the most caring about developing youth activities, assisting the elderly and anyone in need in their community. None were psychopaths. Trying to understand why so many were willing to give up their lives for a cause, and to be able to disassociate their best selves in pursuing hatred and the murder of others – even those who had been neighbours for decades – was a key incentive behind my work. In a nutshell, what’s your latest book Our Brains at War about? Many of our physiological and genetic tendencies, of which we are mostly unaware, can all too easily fuel our

antipathy towards other groups, make us choose ‘strong’ leaders over more mindful leaders, assist recruitment for illegal militias, and facilitate even the most gentle of us to inflict violence on others. The book examines and draws upon emerging areas such as behavioural genetics, biopsychology, and the social and cognitive neurosciences to investigate the sources of these compelling instincts and emotions which can make the emergence of international, national, and societal conflict so easy – and so difficult to manage and end. The book suggests that if we can acknowledge, understand and better manage such forces, we can develop our conflict prevention and peacebuilding programming more effectively. Why did you write it now? I have been thinking about these issues for about a decade. However, the advent of Donald Trump, and the struggle to understand why so many had voted for him was the impulse behind my last book, an edited volume called Why Irrational Politics Appeal which looked at the instinctive appeal of Trump, particularly to people who often could not explain why they responded so positively to him. Simultaneous to the Trump campaign, in the UK we had the bitter divisions over Brexit. That debate was very worrying as it was, as Russell Foster wrote in 2016, ‘dominated not by sober analysis and evidence based reason, but by hysteria, hatred, savage emotions, and the sinister monster of exclusionary, ethnic nationalism’. To me it was evident that in both the Trump and Brexit campaigns the leaders did not appeal to their followers’ rationality, but emotionally to their instinctual fears and emotional biases. Without understanding why it was so easy for these campaigns to succeed through such appeals, I believe we can find ourselves at a loss as to how we can usefully address such divisions in the future, nationally and globally. Do you think the Western world is at a particular point of conflict given internal disunity in countries like the USA over Trump, and the UK over Brexit? If so, how? Yes. Encouraged by Trump, we may face a future where, by following his example, any national leader can declare a victory in an election, despite agreed upon democratic processes. In addition, many of the old certainties about war are now under threat. The horrific cost of the failures in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya have proven the lack of utility of the old paradigms of war, and these failures are raising huge questions about the utility of military force in what we now call, in the words of a British General Sir Rupert Smith (2018), ‘war amongst the people’. The supposedly sophisticated and intensive training in the Army colleges of e.g. West Point and Sandhurst has proven to be almost useless in the face of these ‘new’ wars, which are mostly within national borders although other nations often do try to influence such wars for their own agenda. We now know that spending even trillions of dollars cannot buy us military weapons that are useful in creating and preserving the peace in

such conflicted contexts. As noted in the book, we are also increasingly immersed in social media that can change our emotions with clicks or bots, and whose strength in fomenting and continuing wars appears already to be proving infinite. How can understanding and harnessing psychology help governments and international agencies strive towards harmony where military force fails? How could our politicians and military ever have believed that sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan would oust tiny groups of extremists from Saudi Arabia, from where the 9/11 perpetrators had come? Twenty years later, trillions of dollars poorer, and countless lives wasted, we are back where we started with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan. And we continue our massive spending on ever more powerful and more expensive weapons. Have we forgotten that 9/11 was carried out though the use of pepper spray and paper cutters by a small group 19 militants? Here in Ireland the presence of over 40,000 security forces were helpless to end the murder and mayhem of a few hundred Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries dedicated to their causes. Understanding the emotions both positive and negative that drive such militants’ groups across the globe is crucial to ending such violence. While killing them may give momentary pause to their violence, it often serves only to recruit more ‘martyrs’ and the conflicts will recur unless their contexts are changed. As the book shows, such groups are not driven by psychopaths, but by people whose logic and emotions make evident sense to them in terms of their context. If the trillions of dollars spent failing to oust extremists from their lairs were spent helping to ensure inclusive and fair social development within their societies and nations, and by thoughtful and proportionate security processes where necessary, we might achieve a safer world. The processes however would be much less dramatic than wars – and, unfortunately, as the book suggests, we quite like wars and violence for all sorts of personal and group reasons.

What are the limitations of psychology and neuroscience in conﬂict resolution? My work is complementary, and not contrary to existing ‘realist’ theories in International Politics work, which explain conﬂicts as being about the national interest, and the balance of power between states. Nor is it contrary to proportionate security force work to contain violence where necessary. However, understanding the power of unexamined instincts and emotions is also critical to such approaches particularly in today’s new wars which are assisted in their development by many of the instincts that have made us successful as human beings in developing functioning communities and nations. But unexamined,

these same instincts can easily trap up into emotive processes that are a legacy of what may have been useful to us in our past but may be the very opposite of what we need today to create and maintain peaceful societies, and a fruitful interdependent world. How could psychology/conflict resolution help in Afghanistan at this current moment of crisis? The most obvious need for most people in Afghanistan at the moment is safety, a first basic need, both for those who are fleeing and staying, and how much such safety is assured is still in question. However, Afghanistan is also one of the poorest countries on Earth, and will remain so without a continuance and expansion of external food aid and development help. Without such, it could soon be facing a massive food emergency, poverty will worsen, and restlessness against the new Taliban government will increase. It will thus be in the interests of the Taliban (and Pakistan their backstop ally) to avoid mass hunger, and they will have to negotiate to retain such humanitarian aid as people are willing to give them. Most non-profit development agencies now have local representatives, many of whom are now trained as mediators, and these will be cognisant of the need to distribute aid in a way that it can increase rather than decrease local trust between local communities. They may also be able to mediate some more positive social contexts in return for aid and development assistance. Also, the Taliban are from the Pashtun tribe, but they number only 42 per cent of Afghans, and there are serious differences between ‘included’ Pashtuns and ‘excluded’ non-Pashtuns such as the Tajiks in the Panjshir valley, and Uzbeks, Hazaras, Aimaqs and other small ethnic groups. Feelings are very deep indeed in many communities, and murder is not uncommonly spurred by grievances associated with identity differences. In order to govern, the Taliban will need to make alliances with other non-Pashtun tribes and with many of the Afghan government representatives who have been part of the mediation processes in place before the Taliban takeover. While many of the international agencies assisting the peace process will have had to leave, local conflict resolution practitioners, who have been helping many of the ongoing discussions over the last few years about a possible unity government, will probably reframe their work to take account of the new needs for co-operation. They will continue to assist processes that can facilitate the reduction of violence, and ensure where possible that the work of health and other governmental agencies can reinstate themselves without which chaos will ensue, and without which the new Taliban state will not be able to function. Ultimately, what the last few decades have shown us is that any Afghan peace process must be led by the Afghans themselves if it is to be lasting and the

the psychologist november 2021 books next few months will be crucial for the work of local and national mediators. While it is difﬁcult to hope for much social freedom as yet from the rule of the Taliban, it has been interesting to note their initial overtures contained assurances about e.g. the continuance of women’s education, and the wearing of the hijab, rather than burkas, and to project some semblance of liberalism if they are not to become a pariah state. Also, 20 years on from the US/ UK invasion they face a more highly educated citizenship in Afghanistan and a wide cadre of young women who have been pursuing careers that will probably be vital to harness if they want to move Afghanistan beyond its appalling poverty. In addition, despite the Taliban destruction of journalistic freedom, most middle class Afghans have and will continue to have access to social media, which will be impossible to control. It will continue to expose their citizens to freedoms and resources available elsewhere, which will be a continuous pressure on any conservative Taliban-dominated government. What is the likely psychological fallout from the events in Afghanistan in the short- and long-term? Obviously, in the short-term, the coming months will be anxious ones, especially for those in fear of retribution for their assistance to the US and other governments during the last two decades. Ironically, however, some

communities may find themselves feeling safer after a Taliban takeover. The previous Afghan government in both its local and national forms was perceived as unstable and corrupt by most people, and my research suggests that people are often willing to accept a strong group in charge of their communities if they provide stability, which they often prefer over freedom. In many parts of Afghanistan, particularly the rural parts, little may change. It should also be noted that the main message of the central leadership is that the Taliban can deliver a return to law and order based on Islam, and this has broad familiarity and resonance across the country whose population is approximately 99.7 percent Muslim. Over a third of countries in the world today have some version of Sharia Law, either alongside other civil law, or as one in which authoritative Islamic sources are central. It is likely that Afghanistan, if the Taliban government survives, will become a firm theocratic state like Iran, with all the political and social problems that come from being a theocratic state that is also trying to unite and serve its people, and thrive economically in a globalised world. Mari Fitzduff is author of Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding, published by Oxford University Press. She is also Professor Emerita at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Towards a more sustainable world This is a pivotal decade for global action to protect humans and other species from catastrophic climate and ecological harm. Climate scientists, including the UK government’s own Climate Change Committee, warn that despite warm words, vital political and economic regulatory changes are far from happening. Why not? As Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh said in the December issue, almost every area of psychology has something to contribute to our understanding. This book is no exception. It is a fusion of Sally Weintrobe’s expertise in depth psychology and her lively perspective on the complex political and cultural forces that shaped Western minds during the twentieth century, rooted in centuries of patriarchal colonial exploitation of land and peoples. It forms part of an honourable tradition of women including Wangarī Maathie, Polly Higgins, Madeleine Bunting and Christiana Figueres, who call for shifts in values towards greater care, tolerance of uncertainty and

complexity, concern for future generations, and critical challenge to prevailing law and politics. Weintrobe offers advice for thinking about the climate: be willing to shift perspective from

small to large scale, and from the personal to the political; ‘wait and see’ rather than trying to rush at understanding; do not avoid the difficult feelings that facing climate damage may bring. She suggests that only through engaging, rather than denying distress and harm, can we individually and collectively face reality and work towards a better and more sustainable world. Weintrobe follows her own advice, gradually weaving together insights from a wide range of sources including and beyond her own field of psychoanalysis, to develop a thesis linking our inner emotional worlds with the outer world of politics and culture. She sees environmental harm being driven by a mindset of self-centred exceptionalism and entitlement in those who profit from neoliberal capitalism. This ‘exceptionalism’ has tipped (westernised) cultural values away from shared responsibility, care and community, towards selfish, competitive and extractive

Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare Sally Weintrobe Bloomsbury Academic

carelessness, ‘encouraging people to consume, devour, take over, over-run, the caring reality-based self through a gradual process of corrupting what things really mean’ (p.107). If we are to stand any chance of halting and repairing climate and ecological catastrophe, Weintrobe concludes, we humans must grow up. We need to widen our gaze in space and time, across disciplines, cultures and generations. Depth psychology is rooted in understanding human developmental processes, and there

is much for practitioner psychology, and academic disciplines of social and developmental psychology, to contribute in response to this impassioned wake-up and grow-up call. There are no simple answers to the wicked problems we face. Interdisciplinary collaboration is vital, along with attention to voices from indigenous and spiritual traditions which hold compassion as a vital force for sustainable living. As environmentalist and communicator

George Marshall said in The Guardian this year, governments will not make the necessary changes without a strong public mandate. With unprecedented public interest in psychology and wellbeing, this intelligent, accessible and engaging book will help inform and deepen our public debate about what the mandate for climate action should be. Reviewed by Annie Mitchell, Clinical and Community Psychologist

Many ways to be a clinical psychologist

Life as a clinical psychologist: What is it really like? Paul Jenkins Critical Publishing

The cover of Life as a clinical psychologist shows an illustrated Freud-like character, perhaps representing a traditional, stereotypical psychologist. The bearded white man has a stern glance, is formally dressed, and sits on an imposing expert’s chair. Opposite this character is a smiling young black woman with a more open and warm expression. She appears informally dressed and somehow more relatable and approachable. The ambiguity of the scene immediately piqued our interest. What are the roles of the characters? Are they client and therapist? If so, who is who? Or do they represent the changing perceptions of psychologists over time? Perhaps the illustration is intended to reflect the main feeling we were left with after reading the book – that there is not one way to be a clinical psychologist. The profession is ever developing, changing and moving forward. This book offers a broad and realistic perspective on what it’s like to be a clinical psychologist, including an understanding of the diversity of the role beyond the therapy room, and in the current climate of the NHS. Much to our happiness, the book is not a ‘how to’ guide for clinical psychology training but an honest and open reflection on the profession itself. The reader is frequently encouraged to explore their motivations to train in clinical psychology. Reflections are prompted on both ‘do I want to be a clinical psychologist?’ and ‘what type of clinical psychologist do I want to be?’. We have each been through the interview process this year. The book gave us a number of interesting points to discuss in preparation of and in our interviews. For example, Jenkins considers the validity of evidence-based treatment, practitioners’ differing perspectives on this, and the limited number of clinical psychologists actively engaged in research.

Find lots on becoming a clinical psychologist, being an Assistant Psychologist and more via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/beyond-baptism-ﬁrebecoming-applied-psychologist

When reﬂecting on ‘what is a clinical psychologist?’ we both came back to the following quote from Jess, who offers a simple but powerful explanation of the role: ‘Ultimately, I believe it is our job to listen, really listen and hear. To bear witness to another’s suffering, seeking to understand all that they bring, offering guidance at times, but most importantly, be a fellow human alongside them... as clinical psychologists we can be present in the darkness without needing to turn the light on.’ (p.38) Case studies such as Jess’s offer snippets of other clinical psychologists’ journeys and careers, adding a range of voices alongside Jenkins’ own story. Jenkins drives home key points, such as: it’s not the experience you already have, it’s what you learn and there truly isn’t one way to get there. This is a balanced and comforting perspective on the route to clinical training. It offers a space to ground yourself in what clinical psychology is and what it can be. It will be helpful at any stage of the journey – we all need to come back to these reﬂections occasionally. Reviewed by Katie Voss @katievoss16 and Alice McNamara @AliceMcNamara_ Assistant Psychologists

the psychologist november 2021 books

What do we know? Ptolemy’s epicycles, conceived to reconcile the planets’ apparent motion with the belief that they revolved round the Earth, worked nicely for navigators but suffered from one drawback – the theory was efficacious, but incorrect, concealing the truth of the planets’ actual motion. ‘The Ptolemy Problem’ is one of a dozen such difficulties which Grayling illustrates throughout this authoritative work to help us identify problems with what we think we know. What do we know? How have we come to know it? We are taken through a detailed history of how we have arrived at the current state of play and pitfalls on the way. There follows an inspection of the landscape of ignorance which our increased knowledge paradoxically reveals. Grayling’s grasp of modern physics and cosmology is detailed and impeccable, to the extent that non-scientists may struggle with the odd paragraph. Grayling first takes us from the earliest attempts to construct stone tools to our current efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. Next, Grayling marvels at the vast expansion of our understanding of what the past is – until very recently, history was what the Bible said it was, fitting into just 6000 years. He carefully distinguishes between history as the study of the past and history as the past itself, the two often having been confused; he acknowledges the great but inevitable difficulty besetting any study of history – that we see and judge the past through our current prejudices. As these alter over time, our construction of history changes; he delineates where this is necessary, such as the revision of our

understanding of colonialism, and where it is egregious, such as Holocaust denial. Grayling then brings a philosopher’s clarity to the conceptual morass surrounding concepts such as ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’ and ‘self’. Whilst the behaviourists are described, there is no reference to the analytical schools and neither Freud nor Jung get a mention. This seemed an odd omission, so I asked Grayling about it. He explained that ‘the empirical basis in both cases is slender and anecdotal, and the connection to empirical brain science tenuous’. He also thought that they held ‘the same kind of relationship to contemporary neuroscience as hypothesising about the structure of the universe in pre-Copernican cosmology bore to cosmology from the 17th century onwards’. Some clinicians and even neuroscientists may well disagree. The numinous landscape of the human psyche as revealed by depth psychology, stretching out in all its exuberant irrationality, is another ungraspable frontier of knowledge, the existence of which the more extreme rationalists prefer not to acknowledge. Whilst some of the concepts of depth psychology may be Ptolemaic in nature, they are much better than nothing for those who navigate these areas. Any gripes aside, this is a masterful, scholarly yet accessible work which I greatly enjoyed reading, and I imagine that many of my colleagues will too.

The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Now Know About Science, History and The Mind A.C. Grayling Viking

Reviewed by Galen Ives, Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Enliven your people An adapted extract from Powered by Purpose: Energise Your People to do Great Work by Sarah Rozenthuler (FT Pearson). Read the full extract online. An individual leader finding and following their purpose, operates at two levels. Firstly, a leader needs to be in touch with what is theirs to do. We cannot energise another without being energised ourselves. We cannot engage a team unless we are engaged ourselves. Leadership begins with attending to our own flow of energy; our vitality positively ‘infects’ others more than anything we do. Secondly, a leader needs to take others with them across the ‘bridge’ from feeling flat, exhausted or drained to feeling fulfilled at work. I’ve seen more times than I care to remember talented people leave organisations because their leaders didn’t engage and energise them. Whilst leaving might be the right decision, a leader can connect their people with zestful work, which encourages them to stay.

Reviews online: Find more book reviews at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ reviews, including: Managing our colourful emotions through connection My Intense Emotions Handbook: Manage Your Emotions and Connect Better with Others (Jessica Kingsley Publishers) by Sue Knowles, Bridie Gallagher, and Hannah Bromley; reviewed by Jo Kirk.

Looking beyond the surface ﬁlm Derrière Les Fronts Alexandra Dols Now available as VOD in English, Arabic and Spanish

Dr Samah Jabr – Chair of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, associate clinical professor at George Washington University, and fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Science and Policy – is both the guide and subject of Dol’s exploration of Palestinian narratives of resistance and resilience. As Dr Jabr navigates the physical landscape of the West Bank, driving to and from her clinics, she provides Dols and the audience with insights into the psychological impacts of lived experiences in and of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Drawing on her observations from clinical practice, Dr Jabr contextualises individual disturbances within a broader reality of intergenerational collective trauma. Methods of torture associated with incarceration alongside the more insidious apparatus of social control are explored. The series of events Palestinians now call the ‘naqba’, its expression or internalisation, is understood as an ongoing process. Through further interviews, Dols explores the quality of sumud (steadfastness) with a rich spectrum of differing yet ultimately uniﬁed Palestinian voices. Sumud is emblematised by the olive trees, chthonic and fertile,

and the act of their cultivation. Sumud is witnessed in personal, collective and political consciousnesses. It is embodied, for example, by Ghadir Al Shaﬁe, an activist connected with Aswat Palestinian Feminist Centre for

Photo taken just before the Birmingham (and UK premier) screening of Derriere Les Fronts: Alexandra Dols (Director of Derriere Les Fronts) Dr Ghada Karmi (Medical Dr, Author and Academic) Dr Alan Kessedjian and Dr Samah Jabr

the psychologist november 2021 culture

Gender and Sexual Freedoms, who powerfully articulates the intersectionality of her experiences as a queer Palestinian woman. It is embodied by Archbishop Theodosios Atallah Hanna, who speaks of his sense of Christian duty to defy oppression. It is embodied by academic Rula Abu Diho, who has guarded her humour and therefore humanity despite long years of incarceration. Dols’ craft as a filmmaker and interviewer is in her seeming unobtrusiveness. She creates space for a range of Palestinian voices to define their own lived experiences on their own terms and reinforces their words through artful choices of imagery. Intransigence and gridlock are expressed visually through the repeated motifs of being stuck in traffic and queuing at checkpoints. Resistance and liberation are represented through movement: young Palestinian men showcase parkour under the awkward gaze of patrolling guards and the cinematographically arresting final moments of the film capture a glimpse of uncontrived and unbridled freedom as a horse gallops over open terrain. As mental health professionals we have much to learn from our global colleagues. Derrière Les Fronts makes compelling viewing for anyone interested in Palestinian experiences of mental health, postcolonial thinking applied to clinical practice, that which Jabr describes as the ‘colonisation of the mind’ and the psychology of sustained collective trauma. Reviewed by Dr Alan Kessedjian, Consultant Clinical Psychologist OHFT and Co-Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology EDI & Anti-Racism task and finish group

A collective experience of joy and harmony Chris Cocking, social psychologist and crowd behaviour expert at the University of Brighton, and Kate Johnstone, associate editor for Culture, consider their first live music experiences in the post-pandemic environment. Have you been to any gigs recently and if so who? Chris: I saw Idles at the Eden Project in Cornwall in mid-September and it was great! Their music isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but they are very good live, and yes, I saw my first Wall of Death at it (see my Twitter feed for a discussion about it @DrChrisCocking). Kate: I saw Elbow at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in September and they were wonderful – warm, engaging and brilliantly sentimental. Perhaps the perfect band to channel a collective experience of joy, shot through with deep sadness at what we have all gone through the past 18 months. Has the experience changed for you? Chris: While there some minor changes in my behaviour (wearing a mask in confined indoor places, trying to avoid large groups of young, drunken unmasked people), I was surprised how normal it felt to me as

I was concerned that I would struggle to settle back into live gigs after not being to one since February 2020. I was particularly struck by how normal it felt, because we had gone to the gig straight from the Isles of Scilly where we had been on a week’s holiday. We were at the Eden Project with twice as many people as the entire population of the islands – but that felt ﬁne. Kate: What had changed was the mental contortions I went through beforehand. I had decided not to go to a gig at the O2 four weeks earlier, as it felt too soon, the venue was too big, there would be a crush on the tube. The Elbow venue was a quarter of the size, infection rates in London were dropping… but I knew that this was me rationalising my feelings. I just really wanted to go. Once I was standing in the audience, the lack of masks and social distancing was brieﬂy unnerving. But this evaporated in minutes – social conditioning must

be one of the most powerful forces in society! Have you learnt anything from a psychological perspective, e.g. about how we need to behave in order to be safe? Chris: People seemed to cope well with the restrictions imposed by the Eden Project (proof of vaccination and/or a negative Covid test were conditions of entry) and it reminded me of the importance of outdoor

events where people come together to have a shared experience. I think overall, it shows how easily people can slip back into previous social norms (such as doing the Wall of Death), but that we can also introduce new ones to ensure crowd safety and reduce Covid transmission risk. Kate: Everyone had to show proof of vaccination or similar to get in, but it would be exceptionally easy

to fake this. We also had to step through metal detectors and have our bags searched, additional safety measures introduced over the years and a reminder that Covid isn’t the only problem in crowds. There was an element of ‘security theatre’ about all this, designed to reassure us. But it worked – by the time we got to the inevitable encore of ‘One Day Like This’, with Guy Garvey conducting the audience singing in harmony, Covid was eradicated from our minds.

A lifesaving conversation play Where the River Meets the Sea by Sergio Roveri, at the Bridewell Theatre in London

Marcelo runs down from the bridge with a look of despair on his face. He heads toward the footpath and leans over the edge. As he contemplates jumping into the river, he’s interrupted by Apollonio, who sits a few metres away. Apollonio tells him matter-of-factly that if he waits for the tide to rise, the current will carry him away rather than his body crashing into the rocks. So begins a lifesaving conversation between the two men. We learn Marcelo’s backstory; he met a cute guy at a party and after a magical few hours they drive away together. His lover dies in the ensuing car accident and Marcelo is riddled with guilt and love lost. While the play only offers a snapshot into Marcelo’s life, my work in psychology has taught me that a single traumatic incident would not be the sole factor in Marcelo’s trip to the footpath. Suicide is complex and other risk factors like mental distress, physical health conditions, unemployment and isolation can also play a role. Additionally, research – see, for example, Illan Meyer and David Frost on the health of sexual minorities – indicates that minority stress like homophobia/biphobia lead to worse physical and mental health outcomes in LGBTQ+ people. I first notice Apollonio as we enter the theatre to find our seats – he’s already on the footpath working on his trinkets. He’s ignored by much of the audience, who walk by with drinks and carry on their conversations until the lights go down. This felt symbolic of the way homeless people like Apollonio are often ignored in society. He’s an interesting character, whose initial pragmatic approach to stop Marcelo jumping into the river is later supplemented with a spiritual perspective. He talks to Marcelo about crystals and astrological signs, before delving deeper and reading him passages from the Bible. Apollonio demonstrates the different ways people find purpose and meaning in life. Something else that struck me is that the play features two men. In the UK, the Samaritans suicide statistics report of 2019 showed that men are three times more likely than women to die by suicide. Despite this fact, most media and art I have consumed about suicide focus on girls and women. It was refreshing to

see this interaction between the men play out on stage. Partway through their conversation they are interrupted by a policewoman who suddenly appears on the bridge. Apollonio grabs Marcello and they hide out of her sight. Apollonio tells Marcelo to keep quiet and explains that the police come by twice a day to monitor the bridge as it’s a popular spot for people to die by suicide. This scene perhaps serves as a contrast with Apollonio’s respectful and compassionate approach to connect with Marcelo. This one-act Brazilian play, translated for an English audience, tackles the often taboo topic of suicide by showcasing the power of human connection. Although the subject matter is dark, I still found myself laughing at times. The narrative of two seemingly different men, and their profound impact on each other, stayed with me long after the ﬁnal curtain. Reviewed by Aisha Walker MSc; Assistant Psychologist at Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @aishawalks

the psychologist november 2021 culture

Quite the ride In Gratitude, published after his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks wrote: ‘I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers’. As Sacks reads that passage towards the end of this film, and his life, the viewer is left in no doubt as to the centrality of storytelling in his 82 years on ‘this beautiful planet’. Sacks, the self-proclaimed ‘inveterate storyteller’ – ‘some comic, some tragic… some tuning here and there’ – recounts ‘turning my life into writing’. When people asked if he was doctor or writer, he would reply with ‘equally both, and in important ways they work together’. They blend in case histories. Journalist Robert Krulwich – one of many insightful friends and colleagues appearing in the film – explains that Sacks ‘was asking as hard as a person can, “Who are you? I need to know, I need to know more, even more”. He could get secrets. He will tell stories about people in terrible trouble, take this thread out of them and pull them out, pull them slowly out. But what he did simultaneously, which was the great part, was he pulled the whole world in. He would tell these stories so well… people who are lonely and left out are storied back into the world.’ However grateful Sacks ended up at having ‘loved and been loved’, he was often one of those lonely, left out people. ‘We all have our solitary consciousness’, he says, forever pondering what it’s like to be a bat, an octopus, ‘or anyone else for that matter’. His partner Bill Hayes says ‘life threw so many things at him’, including his mother’s reaction on discovering his homosexuality – ‘You are an abomination, I wish you had never been born’. ‘Her words haunted me for much of my life,’ admitted Sacks, perhaps going some way to explaining why Hayes is initially introduced on camera with the rather underwhelming ‘Billy, fellow writer, lives in the building, to whom I dedicate the book’. This makes the part of the film where we hear of the ‘enormous sigh’ of their final years together, of Sacks ‘finding balance’, a particular joy. That balance was hard-earned, with Sacks opening the film by saying he’s in his 50th year with his therapist, and ‘beginning to get somewhere’. There must have been plenty to work through: his mother bringing home the occasional foetus and urging Sacks to dissect it, time at a ‘hideous boarding school’ in the Midlands, painful shyness, faceblind, accident prone, and perhaps most significantly his schizophrenic brother Michael: ‘I had to create my own world of science so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction, of his’. Yet making his way in that world of science, Sacks still found the time to be a ‘supreme fuck up’, a ‘menace’ who should ‘get out, see patients, you’ll do less harm’. We hear of amphetamine-fuelled 500-mile overnight

motorcycle rides to the Grand Canyon, ‘playing with death’, lying flat on the tank, hour after hour. ‘Inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, the world turning beneath.’ Sacks found solace in numbers, minerals, metals, elements, plants. We hear that ‘humanity was the very last thing’ Oliver developed empathy for. Lawrence Weschler describes Sacks as ‘extraordinarily empathic’ though, obsessed with that question ‘how are you? How do you be?’ Colleagues describe the project of doctor and patient as finding a way of living with what can’t be changed, and we hear how Sacks would compose a story, together, to turn their situation into a narrative. ‘Not just spinning tales, he’s giving people a sense of narrative.’ It’s a narrative that clearly became increasingly important to Sacks as he looked to complete his own life, ‘whatever that meant’. The film suggests it meant a rapprochement in writing with his mother, finding a new creative energy in friendships with neuroscientists, an increasing focus on time and, in his idea of cinematic vision, ‘timeless moments welded together by some higher mechanism’. And of course getting to finally be himself – and end decades of celibacy – with Billy. ‘He gave a masterclass in how to die’, a friend says (much like another genius, David Bowie). For psychologists, the film is a reminder of what Sacks contributed to our discipline. He’s the ‘point at which biology and biography intersect’: ‘all my patients are at this intersection, all of us are at this intersection’. Sacks revived the case history: qualitative writing, description, observation, imagination. He knew his patients so well, colleagues say, that he ‘had no choice but to chronicle them’. Sacks says he ‘never had much intellectual self-confidence’ – he was rejected everywhere, derided in some professional quarters as ‘The Man Who Mistook His Patients For A Literary Career’. ‘I don’t have any theories, I just describe, I observe,’ he says humbly, before admitting ‘there’s no such thing as just observing. I’m a fieldworker, I show things.’ Or, as Temple Grandin put it, an ‘astronomer of the mind’. Finally, a note on the photo with this review. How could I use any other? Just look at the man. It’s what Sacks describes as ‘an earlier me, an earlier incarnation’. But it’s an important part of how he should be remembered: as a man of contrasts – ‘I’m not entirely easy to decipher, to categorise’. The man, much like the film of his life, is ultimately encapsulated in his obsession with the periodic table he carried in his wallet: ‘It stands for order, stability, but also imagination, mystery’. Or, in his own words on his full name Dr Oliver Wolf Sacks, part ‘kindly doctor’, part ‘lupine lone motorcyclist at night’.

ﬁlm Oliver Sacks: His Own Life Altitude Films Director: Ric Burns

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life plays in selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 September, and then on digital on 4 October. See www.altitude.ﬁlm

We dip into the Society member database and pick out… Dominic Abrams, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent One book Georg Simmel’s The Web of Group Afﬁliations (1955) is highly readable and it sets the scene for how groups actually work, both as a set of relations within groups and between groups. It won’t look at all like (modern) psychology to most readers, but it is (see also a 2015 overview of its place in sociology by Mary Chayko, tinyurl.com/4tz8vrfp). One psychological superpower Perhaps instead of conducting power analysis to determine the necessary size of a sample, it could be superpower analysis – the ability to anticipate substantively relevant effect sizes for new research questions. Current conventions rely on statistical tools, and default assumptions when asking a new research question (e.g. determining sample size needed for an 80 per cent chance of detecting a small effect). But the reality of capturing an effect also depends on how stable the phenomenon is, how perfect one’s measurement is, and how well biases and errors can be controlled. It would be great if we could be surer, ahead of time, what effect size might actually matter and therefore is worth detecting. Some easily detected large effects are trivial and some nuanced or small effects may be enormously consequential over time or when aggregated across whole populations or the world.

One thing psychologists could do better When conveying our insights to non-experts, we could try not to talk like psychologists. Psychology has a great deal to offer… but we are not very good at looking outwards to engage with ideas beyond psychology and we too easily slip into jargon and concepts that are obscure and inaccessible to others. People are people, not just ‘participants’, and ‘stimuli’ are

one on one

things people experience, see, or have done to them in the context of other things, not neutral events or information. Some psychologists are brilliant plain language public communicators but undergraduate training often replaces clear and vivid communication with APA7-ese. We should at least aim to be competent in both dialects!

coming soon… the uncanny; stories in psychology; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...

One thing about the BPS An organisation typically has individuals, not always their leaders, whose work and commitment are fundamental to its success. Over my many years as a BPS member the most constant person, and a great pleasure to work with, has been Lisa Morrison Coulthard [who recently moved on from the Society]… her understanding of the complexity of the BPS itself, and the professional, academic, basic, applied, teaching and research landscapes occupied by its members across the whole of psychology has been crucial and exceptional. The Psychologist has also been a consistent and excellent monthly companion under outstanding editorship over the years.

contribute… reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573

One ﬁlm The Third Man – everything about it is brilliant and the theme tune inspired me to learn that and a wide range of other pieces on the guitar.

maybe you missed… …November 2015, Wu-wei, wanting more and doing less …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychs Decide whether your question is worth asking and, if it is, explore and persist until you ﬁnd a good method to get at it, and have unearthed some informative answers.

comment… email the editor, the Leicester ofﬁce, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover

the

psychologist vol 28 no 11

november 2015 www.thepsychologist.org.uk

One alternative career path According to my daughters, my options could have been children’s author, problem solver, handyman, or (possibly) musician. Almost certainly not wallpapering, scheduling or navigating. One lesson learnt Whatever our strengths, we all make mistakes; it is a good idea to work with people who make different ones from our own! More online at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

Wu-wei – doing less and wanting more The only way to succeed is not to try, argues Edward Slingerland

letters 858 news 866 interview: Cary Cooper 904 looking back: the Great War 944

prisoner suicide 886 choice and control for captive animals 892 a perceptual control revolution? 896 organisational psych of Jurassic World 906

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

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

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

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

society notices

society vacancies

BPS conferences and events See p.25 Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme See p.38 Becoming a Chartered or Registered Scientist See p.39

BPS President 2023-24 See p.11 Chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board See p.19

Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton Director of Finance and Resources Phil Hodgett Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards Karen Beamish Head of Legal and Governance Christine Attﬁeld

The Society has ofﬁces in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main ofﬁce in Leicester (St Andrews House, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester, LE1 7DR).