New treatment guidelines for conduct disorder in children were published in March by the government's independent health advisory body NICE, in collaboration with the Social Care Institute for Excellence.

According to the new recommendations, conduct disorders are the most common reason for a child's referral to mental health services and they are 'characterised by repetitive and persistent patterns of antisocial, aggressive or defiant behaviour that amounts to significant and persistent violations of age-appropriate social expectations'. A child diagnosed with conduct disorder is at increased risk of poorer educational outcomes, criminality and mental health problems later in life.

According to the guidelines, existing interventions have in common a strong focus on working with parents, recognition of the importance of the wider social system, and a focus on prevention. The guidelines specifically recommend preventative in-school emotional learning programmes for children who are in a class with a high number of pupils at particular risk for conduct disorder. Risk factors include harsh parenting styles, abuse, mental health problems, being in care, and poverty. The guideline points out that nearly half of all boys with a conduct disorder diagnosis also have a diagnosis of ADHD. Contact with the criminal justice system is also common among children with a conduct disorder diagnosis.

For children aged 3 to 11 with suspected or confirmed conduct disorder, the guidelines recommend group parental training programmes. For children aged 9 to 14 with a conduct disorder, group social and cognitive problem-solving training is recommended for the child. The drug Ritalin is recommended for children with conduct disorder who also have a diagnosis of ADHD, and it is advised that the anti-psychotic (and sedative) risperidone be considered for 'the short-term management of severely aggressive behaviour in young people' who have not responded to psychosocial interventions. Professor Stephen Pilling, a Chartered Psychologist and Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (of which the BPS is a partner member), said: 'The new guideline highlights the importance of supporting the child's parents or guardians in the treatment of the condition - recommending training programmes tailored specifically for them - as aspects of parenting have been repeatedly found to have a long-term association with antisocial behaviour.

'Many parents do an excellent job in caring for a child with a conduct disorder,' he added, 'but it can be incredibly challenging. Parent training programmes provide them with strategies for dealing with difficult children and how to better handle them going forward.'

Other psychologists involved in the new guidelines were Chartered Psychologist Peter Fonagy, Professor of Psychoanalysis at UCL and Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre; and Chartered Psychologist and former Chair of the Division of Clinical Psychology Jenny Taylor.

The new guidelines were not welcomed by all. Chartered Psychologist Gordon Milson, a clinical psychologist and Head of Children and Young People's Services in Bury, took to his blog to criticise the guidelines' adherence to the medical model of mental illness and its use of terms like 'condition' and 'disorder', as if the behavioural problems lie within the child.

'My admittedly crude illustration of this is that if someone punched me in the face would it be right to label me with "Punched in the Face Disorder?" That sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?' he wrote. 'This has to stop,' he added. 'This systematic labelling of children as disordered when they are simply trying to get by in the world is inhumane and extremely unhelpful and potentially damaging.'

Christian Jarrett

The debate over the possible harms to children of spending too much time watching TV took another twist in March, with publication of a new study that assessed thousands of British children when they were aged five, and then again two years later (Archives of Disease in Childhood: tinyurl.com/d5nrw5e). Controlling for a range of family and child factors, Alison Parkes and her colleagues at the University of Glasgow found that watching more than three hours TV or DVDs a day at age five was associated with a small increase in conduct problems at age seven, but was unrelated to other emotional problems, hyperactivity or relationships. Time spent playing video games at age five was unrelated to any outcomes at age seven.

Most previous research on this issue has been conducted in North America, and while excessive time watching TV has been linked to negative outcomes, results tend to be inconsistent. 'Our findings do not demonstrate that interventions to reduce screen exposure will improve psychosocial adjustment,' the researchers concluded. 'Indeed, they suggest that interventions in respect of family and child characteristics, rather than a narrow focus on screen exposure, are more likely to improve outcomes.'

Findings from a new brain-imaging study have raised the spectre of a dystopian future where people's freedom is curtailed on the basis of crimes they have yet to commit (PNAS).

Kent Kiehl at the Mind Research Network, New Mexico, plus his colleagues, among them lead author Eyal Aharoni and neuroscience luminary Michael Gazzaniga, scanned the brains of 96 male prisoners just prior to their release. While in the scanner, the prisoners completed a version of the well-known Go/No Go task, which tests impulsivity and inhibitory control.

Those prisoners who showed less activity in a frontal brain region - the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) - during the task were about twice as likely to reoffend over the next four years, as compared with prisoners who showed more activity in this brain region. Focusing on non-violent crimes alone, the increased risk was almost doubled again.

'These findings have incredibly significant ramifications for the future of how our society deals with criminal justice and offenders,' said Kiehl. Co-author Walter Sinnott-Armstrong added: 'Much more work needs to be done, but this line of research could help to make our criminal justice system more effective.'

In their journal report, the researchers adopted a cautious tone, admitting that the diagnostic relevance of the findings to individuals had yet to be established. 'We are skeptical that emerging neurobiological markers could ever independently outperform... existing [risk assessment] tools in sensitivity and specificity,' they wrote, 'but they could potentially improve overall risk estimates in combination with known psychosocial risk factors.'

The Neurocritic blog pointed out that a basic application of the high and low ACC activity criterion to prisoners in the current study would have wrongly identified 40 per cent of those with low ACC activity as future offenders, while missing the 46 per cent of high activity ACC prisoners who did commit future crimes. 'It's not all that impressive and completely inadmissible as evidence for decision-making purposes,' said Neurocritic.

Christian Jarrett

Adults on the autistic spectrum would like earlier diagnosis to be made a research priority. That's according to a survey published in April by Autistica, one of the UK's largest autism research charities. The charity's One in a Hundred report included
a survey of hundreds of parents of autistic children, 187 adults with the condition, plus face-to-face focus groups held in English cities with 33 mothers and 10 fathers of children with autism or an autism spectrum condition.

Ninety-four per cent of parents said they were worried about their children's future. 'It's scary that they'll be on their own,' said a mother about her non-verbal autistic children. 'Who is going to listen to them? I don't want them to be shoved in a corner and forgotten about.' Many parents reported frustrations with the NHS, especially the lack of information and support made available after a diagnosis.

Attitudes to autism research were largely positive, with 82 per cent of parents and 57 per cent of autistic adults agreeing that more medical research into autism would be of benefit to their lives. These figures could be positively biased because much of the sample was sourced from research registers.

Whereas early diagnosis was the favoured research priority for adults with autism, parents prioritised research into interventions for the months after a diagnosis, and interventions for the problems that often exist alongside autism, including sleep problems and epilepsy. Worryingly, around a third of parents, and a third of adults with autism, said they had resorted to interventions that they knew had no evidence base.

The report was authored by Alison Hardy, director of Headstrong Thinking, Simon Wallace, a former psychological researcher into autism who now works as Autistica's research director, and Jeremy Parr, a consultant in paediatric neurodisability. 'Autism research continues to be poorly funded in the UK, despite the significant social and economic costs associated with the condition,' they concluded. 'Families have communicated clearly what their research priorities are, and these will shape Autistica's future research strategy.'

Christian Jarrett

After all the rumours, speculation and commentary (see April news), the Obama administration's multi-million dollar project to map the brain finally received its official launch early in April. Speaking to an assembled audience of eminent neuroscientists, Obama struck a patriotic tone, saying this would be the 'next great American project'. He also revealed its name: The BRAIN Initiative, which stands for 'Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies', and said he hoped it would change the lives of billions of people by facilitating cures for Parkinson's, epilepsy, PTSD and more.

Coinciding with Obama's speech, a new project website appeared - nih.gov/science/brain - where it was made clear that the emphasis is on developing new technologies with which to better visualise the brain in action, 'for the first time, show[ing] how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space'.

Obama didn't mention the pan-European Human Brain Project which launched earlier this year with over one billion euros of funding: humanbrainproject.eu. Whereas the American initiative is focused on visualisation technologies, the aim of the European project is to model the brain, but each claims their work will lead to better diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases. Although it's tempting to see the projects as rivals, in reality the progress made by both will be complementary in furthering our understanding of the brain.

Christian Jarrett

The University of York has appointed cognitive psychologist Professor Koen Lamberts as its new Vice-Chancellor.

Born in Hasselt, Belgium, Professor Lamberts undertook both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Leuven, culminating in the award of his PhD in psychology in 1992. He has developed an extensive track record in experimental and theoretical research on human perception and memory (for which he has won prizes from the Experimental Psychology Society and the British Psychological Society's Cognitive Psychology Section), and is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost of Warwick University. He will take up his new post on 1 January 2014.

Professor Lamberts said: 'I am enormously proud to be chosen to lead this great University. In only 50 years, York has forged a reputation in the UK and internationally for its outstanding teaching and world-class research. I look forward to the challenge of making sure that the University continues to make a difference in the world in the years ahead.'

Jon Sutton

Captain Duncan Precious has become the first-ever clinical psychologist to be commissioned into the British Army at a ceremony held at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in April. Jamie Hacker Hughes, Society Fellow and Visiting Professor of Military Psychological Therapies at Anglia Ruskin University, has been lobbying for a uniformed role for clinical psychologists in the Army since the late 1970s. In his role as Defence Consultant Advisor on Clinical Psychology to the MoD, he initiated discussions with the Director General Army Medical Services and the British Psychological Society on the establishment of posts, drafting of terms and conditions of service and the initial planning of recruitment. These have been taken forward by his successor, Dr Rachel Norris.

Dr Precious told us: 'Our profession has a lot to offer the armed forces and by being better integrated into the army, I hope that we can achieve a great deal. The Sandhurst course challenged me mentally, physically and emotionally and now, I am very keen to crack on with my job.

Jon Sutton

Jon Sutton reports from a talk at Goldsmiths, University of London

If Professor Elizabeth Loftus had her way, the solemn oath taken before witnesses take the stand would be 'Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?' So far, she said with a wry smile, it hasn't caught on.

Professor Loftus - who has been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time - was speaking at this special event presented by the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths, and the Centre for Inquiry UK. Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory.

Beginning with some classic cases of political figures reporting memories that can't be true - such as Mitt Romney's account of the Golden Jubilee that occurred nine months before he was born - Loftus showed that 'all that Yale school or Harvard training doesn't stop you having false memories'. And this has implications way beyond goofing politicians: DNA exoneration studies suggest that faulty memory is responsible for wrongful conviction in more than 75 per cent of cases.

In case the assembled audience thought they were somehow immune to this, Loftus showed otherwise with a fascinating paradigm involving photos of faces. A post-event activity that induced us to pick a wrong person led to around half of the audience subsequently picking the wrong person in the test phase. 'You're wrong because I made you wrong,' said Loftus, 'right here in the middle of a lecture on false memory'.

But that's somewhat artificial, say the critics (and Loftus says she has had a fair few, who do not like the message of her research). OK, says Loftus, what about our new study looking at military personnel taking part in a mock prisoner phase of survival school training? Here, the provision of misinformation following four days of evasion and half an hour of interrogation led even highly trained soliders to make false IDs with high confidence.

Loftus admitted to 'nagging concerns' around the ethics of such findings. 'Aren't we putting a recipe out there that could help bad people do bad things?' On balance, she and her collaborators feel that it's best to get the research out there in the hope that awareness could lead to ways to overcome the problem. And there is a lot to counter: Loftus' research has shown that false memories can be induced in a variety of ways, including the use of imagination, dream interpretation, hypnosis, the provision of false information or doctored photos, and even simple exposure to other people's memories.

It's a research journey that has taken some tremendous turns. I love how the way the 'lost in the mall' analogue - convincing participants that they got lost in the shopping mall as a child - evolved in response to the repeated insistence of reviewers that 'maybe that really happened'. When that accusation was even levelled at a study that persuaded people that they had been licked by Pluto at Disneyland - 'disturbingly and persistently' - Loftus and her team simply switched to Bugs Bunny, a Warner Brothers character!

Loftus had provided ample demonstration of the repercussions of false memories, in accounts of repressed memory accusations. ('There is no credible scientific support for the notion that memories can be massively suppressed in this way', she concluded). But what about positive effects? If psychologists can convince adults that they got sick eating a particular food as a child, could this technique be used to help people avoid fattening foods? Yes, and others have now found that this effect lasts, and affects actual eating behaviour. Welcome to the mental diet!

Can these false memories be distinguished from true ones? Not by rated emotion, and neuroimaging reveals only small differences, with true memories showing more activity in the visual cortex and false memories showing more in the auditory. But, said Loftus, 'we are a long long way from taking a memory, examining it in the brain scanner and saying whether it is true or not.' Memory is malleable, concluded Loftus, and if there was one take-home message from her life's research it was this: 'Just because memory is expressed with confidence, detail and emotion, doesn't mean it's true.'

After the talk, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Professor Loftus at dinner. I very much enjoyed our chat about a potential revolution in memory, as wearable devices and large, cheap storage bring 'memory prosthetics' to the masses. If we all have 'personal CCTV', like the dashboard cam footage of the Russian meteor strike, do our own memory failings become less of an issue? The professor quickly reminded me that such footage could be doctored, potentially leading to an arms race for the truth. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come.

The impact of the long-running Time to Change mental health anti-stigma campaign has been assessed comprehensively in a series of open-access articles published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (tinyurl.com/bmhx9ws). Results were mixed for the multi-million pound advertising and events-based campaign, which was launched in 2007 by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness with funding from the National Lottery and Comic Relief.
A survey of mental health service users suffered from an extremely low response rate, but there was an overall reduction in experienced discrimination of 11.5 per cent, and a particular reduction in stigma when dealing with friends and family. There was no evidence of reduced discrimination when dealing with health professionals.

A survey of thousands of members of the English general public found a trend towards more positive attitudes and intended behaviour towards people with mental illness, but no improvements in knowledge about mental health or in actual behaviour. Newspaper reports showed an increase in anti-stigmatising articles, but no reduction in stigmatising articles, and a reduction in neutral articles. Employers showed an improved awareness of mental health problems, but still believed in disclosure of problems when applying for jobs.

Unfortunately, there were signs that some of the documented anti-stigma gains were regressing in 2011, perhaps due to the effects of the recession. In their editorial, two researchers involved in the evaluation, Claire Henderson and Graham Thornicroft of the Institute of Psychiatry, concluded that 'stigma and discrimination against people with mental illness are global challenges, and the evidence of our evaluation of phase 1 of Time to Change is that they can be successfully tackled with a focused, determined and long-term approach'. The campaign is now entering phase 2, which runs to 2015 with funding from the Department of Health and Comic Relief.

Christian Jarrett

The specific inability to recognise other people by their faces - prosopagnosia - was first documented in the 1940s in brain-damaged patients, and for decades it was considered a rare condition that only arose after injury. In recent years, however, it's become clear that many more people have a developmental form of 'face blindness'. Now Sarah Bate, a psychologist who leads the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at Bournemouth University, has launched an awareness campaign for all forms of the condition.

'I imagine there is such low awareness of prosopagnosia because it has traditionally been thought of as a rare disorder, and only recently has it become clear that it affects many people,' said Bate, who estimates that one in 50 people may be affected. She's started a petition to get prosopagnosia discussed in Parliament. For this, Bate needs 100,000 signatures, although she'd collected only 314 at the time of writing. cj
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/46715

The Obama administration plans to invest in a project to create an activity map of the brain, the ambition of which is being compared to the space programme that landed a man on the moon. Delivering his State of the Union address in February, President Obama said: 'Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to
our economy. Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain...'

And that was the only hint, until the next day the Director of the NIH, Francis Collins, tweeted 'Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU'. The following weekend, the scale, if not the detail, of the project was made clear in a front-page New York Times article that claimed the Obama administration is planning a decade-long project to 'build a comprehensive map of [the brain's] activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics'. The news comes hot on the heels of a €multi-billion EU announcement to create a computer model of the entire brain (see February News).

At the time of writing in March, there has yet to be a formal announcement from the US project. However, further details have started to emerge from some of the scientists involved in the 'Brain Activity Map' (BAM). Miyoung Chun, Vice President for Science Programs at The Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California, is a key player. She told Nature Medicine that the project arose out of a workshop held at the Kavli Royal Society International Centre in Chicheley, Milton Keynes in 2011, involving her own foundation together with the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the London-based Gatsby Charitable Foundation. 'We understand how brain activity works at the micro and macro levels, but we don't know the in-between,' Chun told Nature Medicine. 'It was clear from that very first day when the idea first came up that this
was an unmet need.'

Clues to the nature of the project can also be found in a position paper published in the journal Neuron last year by many of the BAM scientists, including Chun . The abstract summarises the main idea: 'The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. This technological challenge could prove to be an invaluable step toward understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes.'

In the paper itself, the authors outline a five-year ambition to map the entire brain activity of the roundworm and a 10-year ambition to map the brain of the more complex fruit fly, 'or the CNS of the zebra-fish (around 1 million neurons), or an entire mouse retina or hippocampus, all under a million neurons.' Longer-term, the researchers refer to mapping the entire neocortex of an awake mouse and proceeding towards primates. 'We do not exclude the extension of the BAM Project to humans, and if this project is to be applicable to clinical research or practice, its special challenges are worth addressing early,' they add. According to Science Insider, this is exactly what's happened, with the initial proposals having been adapted with help from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and others so as to bring human applications to the fore.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have wasted no time in taking to the internet to share their thoughts about the ambitious plans. Writing for the New Yorker, Gary Marcus (Director of the NYU Infant Language Centre) at first suggested that Obama was backing the wrong plan. 'What we need is not simply a wiring diagram of the brain...,' he said, 'but an understanding of how brain circuits work, the language the brain uses to encode information, and an understanding of how that circuitry works together to govern human behavior.'

However, in a later update Marcus sounded a more reassured tone after speaking to one of the BAM scientists, Rafael Yuste, co-director of Columbia University's Kavli Institute for Brain Science. Yuste explained that the aim is not to create a static wiring diagram (akin to the related Connectome project; see News, July 2012), but to visualise an entire brain as it functions. 'If the commonly-used fMRI technique peers at the earth from ten-thousand feet, the BAM project aims to finally land boots on the ground and watch the action from close up,' Marcus said.

Another NYU psychologist Steve Fleming used his Elusive Self blog (tinyurl.com/alpbo75) to highlight the need to study the mind alongside the brain. 'Studying one level without the other is rather like building the Large Hadron Collider without also investing in theoretical physics,' he said. 'The new technologies championed by the BAM scientists will produce a rich harvest of data about the brain, and they are a crucial part of a long-term investment in the brain sciences. But without similar investment in the mind sciences we will be left puzzling over how the pieces fit into our everyday lives.'

Christian Jarrett

Several British psychologists, including BPS Associate Fellow Keith Laws and Dorothy Bishop, are on the editorial board of a new open-access psychology journal BMC Psychology that sets out an explicit intention to 'put less emphasis on interest levels, provided that the research constitutes a useful contribution to the field'.

Writing for the Guardian website, Professor Laws at the University of Hertfordshire explained that the remit of the UK-based journal 'unquestionably includes null results and replications and the more central role they must play within the discipline. We cannot avoid the conclusion that psychologists, editors and reviewers have conspired to deny the rightful place of negative results and the importance of replication - psychology's dirty little secrets. We must change.'

Across the pond, similar initiatives are being put in place to ensure the scientific rigour of the discipline. In March, the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science based in Washington DC, announced a new article type: 'Registered Replication Report', which will feature 'multi-lab, high-quality replications of important psychology experiments along with comments by the authors of the original studies'.

In its mission statement, the journal states that the new format 'fortifies the foundation of psychological science by publishing collections of replications based on a shared and vetted protocol'. It further states that this will make it possible to estimate the true size of experimental effects (see psychologicalscience.org/index.php/replication).

These moves come after a series of research fraud scandals in psychology; concerns about widespread 'questionable' research practices; as well as rising doubts about the replicability of many reported psychological effects, especially in the field of social priming (see various Psychologist news reports over the last two years, and our special issue).

Also in March, the University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek launched the Center for Open Science (centerforopenscience.org). The Center plans to develop software tools that will make it easier for researchers to archive and share their work, bringing greater transparency to science. The Center unites projects already launched by Nosek, including the Open Science Framework (openscienceframework.org), which provides a way to share data and workflow, and the Reproducibility Project, which is in the process of conducting replications of psychology studies published since 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Christian Jarrett

New NICE guidelines on the treatment of psychosis in children and young people reveal the urgent need for more research in this area. The guidelines recommend a combination of antipsychotic medication and psychological interventions for children diagnosed with prolonged psychosis or schizophrenia (such cases are rare, with onset of schizophrenia usually occurring in late adolescence or early adulthood).

Psychological therapies receiving endorsement from NICE include family interventions, CBT and art therapies - the last being recommended especially for the reduction of so-called 'negative symptoms' (e.g. the flattening of affect). It is not recommended routinely to offer psychotherapy or counselling, social skills training or adherence therapy.

However, the guidelines caution that there is little research into the efficacy of drug or psychological interventions for the treatment of psychosis in children. The new document calls for more research in this area, including the use of omega-3 fatty acids, which one limited trial found to be beneficial. There's also a need for more research into factors that predict the likelihood of milder psychosis-like symptoms becoming more serious.

Psychologists involved in the new document include Tony Morrison (University of Manchester and the Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust) and BPS Associate Fellow Dr Kirsty Smedley (Cheadle Royal Hospital).

Christian Jarrett

The RSA in London has published an ambitious new report linking society's ills to the bi-hemispheric nature of the human brain. Divided Brain, Divided World: Why the Best Part of Us Struggles to Be Heard is authored by Jonathan Rowson, director of the RSA's Social Brain Centre, and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose critically acclaimed book The Master and His Emissary provided the inspiration for the new report.

The RSA publication begins in the form of a conversation between Rowson and McGilchrist, with the latter expatiating on his theory that the two brain hemispheres have contrasting takes on the world, and that here in the West we've become dominated by the left-hemisphere way of looking at things.

Unfortunately, according to McGilchrist, the dominant left 'does not understand things', 'jumps to conclusions', 'is narcissistic', and its purpose is to 'use the world'. In fact, it 'sees everything - education, art, morality, the natural world - in terms of a utilitarian calculus only'. Worse still, McGilchrist says the left is 'the Berlusconi of the brain - a political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour.'

The right hemisphere has been side-lined, the RSA report claims, which is a shame, since it takes a more holistic, reasoned approach, understands context and is more interconnected with the body. In fact, McGilchrist says, it's the 'right hemisphere that sees more, that is more in touch with reality, and is more intellectually sophisticated'.

McGilchrist emphasises that these arguments are more than metaphor - his book draws on evidence from split-brain patients, brain-imaging studies and more, and took over 20 years to research and write. He sees the shift to predominantly left-hemisphere thinking as hugely consequential, invoking this brain change to explain all manner of Western societal problems from the recent financial crash to the rise in depression and environmental problems. 'We may be the least perceptive, most dangerous people that have ever lived, and at the same time we have more power, for good or ill,' he writes, going on to contrast our neurologically induced malaise with the preferable situation in the East, where they 'draw on strategies of either hemisphere more or less equally'.

The second half of the report features responses from 13 academics and thinkers, some of whom attended a workshop at the RSA in November. Among them was Chartered Psychologist Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. She said McGilchrist's book was 'in a deserved class of its own for the breathtaking range and erudition of his account'. However, she noted that it outlines the 'provenance' of our problems and does not attempt to provide solutions. '[T]here is little of immediate application in this book ...,' she said. 'More is to be found in the behavioural sciences literatures... '

Adam Cooper, a neuropsychology PhD and Head of Social Science Engagement at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, saw parallels between McGilchrist's characterisation of left-hemisphere thinking and the use of economics in government, but he wondered: '...does it matter that there might be a neuropsychological underpinning to this effect ...?'.

The philosopher-medic Ray Tallis was more critical of the whole enterprise, which he found 'self-undermining'. In particular he pointed out the irony of McGilchrist's work, with its painstakingly assembled detail and references, looking very much like the left-hemisphere in action. 'Does he repudiate his own work - given that he says that the left hemisphere "doesn't understand things but only processes them"?' Tallis also highlighted McGilchrist's 'gigantic generalisations', which 'overlook the teaming ocean of particulars that make up our shared world... '.

The writer, broadcaster and cultural historian Kenan Malik, a graduate in neurobiology, took to his blog (tinyurl.com/csqo3uc) to criticise McGilchrist for propagating what Indian historian Raghavan Iyer has called 'the dubious notion of an eternal East - West conflict, the extravagant assumption of a basic dichotomy in modes and thoughts and ways of life'. According to Malik (who was invited but unable to attend the RSA workshop), 'McGilchrist has taken a long-standing dubious argument about cultural differences and modernized it by locating it in the brain. Doing so has not made a dubious argument any less dubious.'

Report co-author Dr Jonathan Rowson told us: 'It is not news to say that the brain is physiologically both divided and profoundly asymmetrical, but this news has been a footnote rather than a headline fact in psychology and related disciplines because we have been looking at the nature of this asymmetry in the wrong way.' He said the main take-home message for psychologists was the shift in perspective, 'from asking what a hemisphere does to asking what the hemisphere is like'.

'I would therefore ask psychologists to give at least a few hours of their time to this work before deciding what you think about it,' Rowson added. 'It is a grand theory of sorts...[and] I deeply admire and respect the two decades of scholarship that succeeded in weaving together such diverse strands of knowledge. I remain unsure about the extent to which we can derive practical implications from this perspective, but it is been a lot of fun trying to figure it all out, and I would be very grateful for feedback and further explorations.'

Christian Jarrett

Download the RSA's Divided Brain, and let us know what you think on psychologist@bps.org.uk

The largest analysis of its kind has identified several genetic markers that were each associated with the five psychiatric diagnoses studied - autism, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (The Lancet; tinyurl.com/bmveboa). The Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, funded by the National Institutes of Health, analysed the genetic code of 33,332 people of European descent with one of these diagnoses and 27,888 controls, and they found four distinct genetic variations (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) that were associated with all five conditions. Three had a similar strength of association across all the conditions; the fourth varied, being most strongly associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Some of the identified markers are linked to genes involved in calcium signalling in the brain, which suggests a possible shared biological vulnerability that may underlie these diverse psychiatric diagnoses. 'Our results provide insights into the shared causation of psychiatric disorders,' the researchers said.

Christian Jarrett

The mother of a teenager who died while being treated in hospital for anorexia has told an inquest in Bristol of her concerns about the transition from child to adult services. Laura Willmott was discharged from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) shortly before turning 18 in February 2011. Her state of health declined profoundly through the year and she was eventually admitted to hospital in October.

At the inquest, Willmott's mother Mrs Vickie Townsend, a nurse, decried the way she had been kept in the dark as soon as her daughter turned 18. 'I do not believe she was in a fit state to make decisions herself. I really struggle to see how Laura was any different at 17 years and 364 days than she was at 18 years and one day,' she said.

BPS Fellow Dr Lorraine Bell is Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Portsmouth Eating Disorders Service. She is unable to comment on the particulars of this case, but she told us that eating disorders clinicians are well aware of the need to manage the transition from CAMHS to adult services. 'AN is a severe psychological disorder or mental illness which can grossly impair one's capacity to look after oneself,' she explained. 'This impairment is at the very heart of the disorder. The important issues here are: How were the patient's risks monitored? Was the patient assessed under the Mental Health Act and, if so, was the outcome appropriate? Finally, a patient turning 18 should not preclude the involvement of relatives.'

Christian Jarrett

A pair of US psychologists have written a commentary in Nature calling for more collaboration between researchers and industry to create video games with cognitive and social benefits (doi:10.1038/494425a). Daphne Bavelier and Richard Davidson highlight, on the one hand, the increasing amounts of time that people spend playing video games (US children play an average of one hour, 13 minutes daily; nearly a third of game players are aged over 50); and on the other hand, the growing evidence for the games' beneficial effects. This includes shooting and action games being associated with improvements in attention, navigation and mental imagery, and a helping game leading to real-life increases in prosocial behaviour.

The pair explain that game benefits are not always intuitive, and that it is difficult for academics to get games to market. 'An important challenge for both academics and the games industry', they said, 'is to collaborate on the development of games as compelling as those in which many young people now indulge, but that help cultivate positive qualities such as empathy and cooperation.' They also cautioned that this would not 'provide carte blanche for video-game bingeing' - beneficial effects documented to date are based on playing times that are a fraction of many young people's gaming habits.

Christian Jarrett

Edge.org, the online soapbox for scientists and other intellectuals, has published the answers to its latest annual question - What should we be worried about? As usual, numerous psychologists were invited to contribute, including many of our home-grown colleagues. Recurring anxieties were cultural homogenisation and the march of technology, especially the internet (read the answers).

At the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore believes we should be concerned about the effect of environmental factors on the development of the adolescent brain, something she says we know little about. She highlighted the possible adverse effects of excessive gaming and social networking, and the UNICEF estimate that 40 per cent of teenagers worldwide lack access to secondary education. 'Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world's teenagers access to education,' she said.

For Susan Blackmore, what's worrying is that we're losing our manual skills and developing an ever deeper dependent relationship with technology. 'Whether it's climate change, pandemics, or any of the other disaster scenarios... and we can no longer sustain our phones, satellites and Internet servers. What then?' she asks. 'Could we turn our key-pressing, screen swiping hands to feeding ourselves? I don't think so.'

The availability of superficial knowledge at the touch of a button is creating 'a drearily level playing field', according to Nicholas Humphrey at the LSE. We used to have to work hard to discover and learn things, he said, and the journey was arguably more important than the ultimate facts. But 'soon no one will be more or less knowledgeable than anyone else,' Humphrey warned, '...it will be knowledge without shading to it, and, like the universal beauty that comes from cosmetic surgery, it will not turn anyone on.'

The loss of death, that's what Kate Jeffery, Head of the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences at UCL, thinks we should be worried about. Death allows species to improve and flourish, she said, and yet genetic research promises to create a world filled with not just your grandparents' parents' parents, and their parents, but everyone else's too. 'Truly would the generations be competing with each other: for food, housing, jobs, space.'

Away from the concerns of technical and medical progress, it's the persistence of the gap between C.P. Snow's two cultures that worries Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. In particular, he thinks the gap may have widened when it comes to the way that sex differences are understood. '[T]he debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture,' he said, 'with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary.'

Meanwhile, Bruce Hood, Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol, argued that we should be worried about the recent trend towards placing so much value on the societal 'impact' of science research, especially its economic merits. 'I would submit that focusing on impact is a case of putting the cart before the horse or at least not recognizing the value of theoretical work,' he said.

Among the international contingent of psychologist contributors were Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who developed the concept of 'flow', and Alison Gopnik the author and developmental psychologist. Like many of his British colleagues, Csikszentmihalyi highlighted his anxieties about technology, especially the arrival of 3D immersive role-playing games. The 'incessant warfare' involved in such games is not virtual to the child, he warned - it's the child's reality - and within one or two generations Csikszentmihalyi believes our children will grow up unable to tell reality from imagination. 'Of course humanity has always had a precarious hold on reality,' he said, 'but it looks like we are headed for a quantum leap into an abyss of insubstantiality.'

Alison Gopnik is also worried about children; in particular she's worried that many parents worry about the wrong things - middle-class concerns like the direction of push-chair seats or the rights and wrongs of co-sleeping - but that as a society we don't worry enough about the bigger picture, the huge numbers of children who continue to live below the poverty line and who lack a safe, stable environment in which to develop. 'Children, and especially young children, are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group,' she said. 'This number has actually increased substantially during the past decade. More significantly, these children not only face poverty but a more crippling isolation and instability.'

Christian Jarrett

What do you think we should be worried about? Send your thoughts to psychologist@bps.org.uk

Social commentators often bemoan the loss of family values and rise in selfishness in contemporary Britain. A new survey of the nation's values paints a far more positive picture.

Last December, the Barrett Values Centre asked 4000 people across the UK to pick the 10 values or behaviours that most reflect who they are. The five most commonly chosen values were 'caring', 'family', 'honesty' and 'humour/fun'. Respondents also said they experienced values in their local community that largely matched their own values, in terms of family and friendship.

It was a different story at the national level, where there was a striking disconnect between the values people would like to see reflected in the way the UK operates, and the values they perceived to be operating. The top three desired values were: employment opportunities, caring for the elderly and caring for the disadvantaged. Yet the top three perceived values at the national level were: bureaucracy, crime and violence, and uncertainty about the future. The UK's 'cultural entropy' score (based on the proportion of negative values selected by respondents) was higher than eight of nine other European nations surveyed, and higher than in the US, Canada and Australia.

The survey was supported by the Action for Happiness movement and the UK Office for National Statistics. The chief executive of Action for Happiness, Dr Mark Williamson, said: 'At a time when many people fear we are losing our moral foundations, this research shows that what people in the UK actually value most of all is caring for others.'

Critics may have concerns about the survey methodology. As well as the reliance on self-report, respondents' choice of values was inevitably constrained by the values they were given to choose from. For instance, in the list of 93 national values, people could choose 'animal welfare' but not 'mental health', which wasn't in the list; 'environmental pollution' but not 'green space' or 'scientific progress'; 'tolerance' but not 'uncontrolled immigration'.

The United Kingdom Values Survey: Increasing Happiness by Understanding What People Value is available in PDF

Christian Jarrett

Edited: 26/02/2013 at 02:46 PM by jonsut

January saw a British Red Cross psychosocial support team hurry to Algeria to help Britons who had been involved in the four-day siege and hostage crisis. The team, including clinical psychologist Dr Sarah Davidson, travelled to North Africa the day after militants overran a gas plant facility.

Davidson, Deputy Clinical Director on the professional doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of East London, said: 'We went as part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's rapid deployment team, which is responsible for supporting Britons overseas. We were there to provide emotional support and practical help to British nationals caught in the situation, and their relatives.'

Part of the team's role was 'bearing witness'. Davidson said: 'We listened to what the people affected wanted to share and helped them think of ways of understanding their traumatic experiences and how to deal with them. Those who escaped were worried for those they'd left behind and they felt a huge responsibility for getting the best outcome possible. We helped them focus on what they could do, but also to recognise the limitations of what they could do. We also worked with them on looking after themselves, for example trying not to spend lots of time imagining what their friends were going through, and encouraging them to seek support from friends and partners. As they begin to recover it will be important to not constantly retell the story but to plan points to grieve and mark what happened.'

Jon Sutton

Davidson wrote about her work in The Psychologist in April 2010