The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) published a report in May on the psychology of scams, compiled by psychologists at the University of Exeter. Professor Stephen Lea, Dr Peter Fischer and Dr Kath Evans conducted interviews with scam victims and near-victims; mined the text of real-life scams; and performed a simulated scam of their own.
Their investigations threw up a number of counter-intuitive findings. For example, scam victims often had more background experience than non-victims in the financial domains exploited by scammers, such as lotteries or investments. Moreover, victims tended to spend more time considering a would-be scam, not less, as you might expect. Non-victims, by contrast, often deleted or disposed of scam material without even looking at it. Another finding was that victims often concealed their involvement in a suspected scam, for fear of being reprimanded by friends or family. Lea's team said it was almost as if their rational selves realised the danger but decided to proceed anyway.

The report makes a number of recommendations for helping prevent people fall victim to scams. For example, it might help to educate people to consider what they have to lose, rather than focusing on what they have to gain, from a suspected scam. Based on the finding that many victims appear to harbour suspicions, it might also help to advise people to trust their gut instinct when they sense something isn't right.

The University of Exeter psychologists won the contract to produce the report after the OFT put the project out to tender. 'It's different from other academic research in the sense that someone has given you a problem, but it's not as different as you might think,' Lea told The Psychologist. 'And in some ways the differences are very positive - the OFT were good to work with, they have very sharp staff, ideas of their own, and above all they have a lot of resource. For example, part of our research depended on a corpus of scam materials, which they'd collected over the years, which would have cost us enormous effort to acquire. They also put us in touch with people who had been victims of scams, so there are huge advantages to working with a body like that.'
Lea said he would recommend that other psychologists get involved in similar collaborations with government organisations. 'I believe it's very important that we do get involved in this kind of work. It's a sure thing that psychological explanations will be advanced with this sort of phenomenon, much better that they come from qualified psychologists,' he said.

'It was a very interesting challenge,' he added. 'We found ourselves applying theories that we had thought about in quite different contexts to a different and challenging and socially important problem.'

'The one thing you have to watch with government bodies is that they often work to different time scales [from university-based psychologists] but it's not difficult to work things out,' Lea said.

According to the OFT, 3.2 million adults in the UK (around 1 in 15 people) collectively lose around £3.5 billion to mass marketed scams each year.

The new report The Psychology of Scams: Provoking and Committing Errors of Judgement, is available free online.


--Christian Jarrett

Psychologists have identified four people who appear to be extraordinarily gifted at recognising faces - a group they've dubbed 'super-recognisers' (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review).

Richard Russell at Harvard University and colleagues said the discovery came about following their studies of developmental prosopagnosia, or 'face-blindness'. The face-blindness research was widely reported in the media and prompted several people to come forward claiming to have extraordinary prowess at recognising faces. 'I've learned to stop surprising people with bizarre comments like "Hey, weren't you at that so-an-so concert last fall... I recognise you",' one person recalled.

Russell's team put four such people - C.S., C.L., J.J. and M.R. - through a series of challenging memory tests, including requiring them to identify the faces of celebrities before they were famous, and to identify previously presented faces when shown later from a novel angle, or under impoverished viewing conditions. The four 'super-recognisers' significantly outperformed 25 age-matched control participants.
A second experiment, which required participants to match an array of digitally morphed faces to a target face according to degree of similarity, confirmed that the super-recognisers also had enhanced facial perception skills relative to 26 new controls and 26 participants with developmental prosopagnosia.

On tests of facial memory and perception, the super-recognisers were superior to controls by about two standard deviations, which is similar to the amount by which developmental prosopagnosics are inferior to controls. Russell's team said this suggests facial memory and perceptual skills are distributed more widely than previously thought, and that both prosopagnosics and super-recognisers are quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from controls.

The researchers also said their discovery of super-recognisers had important implications for the real world. 'Various social institutions are premised upon the false assumption that all people have similar face recognition ability,' they said, pointing to the security professions and eyewitness accuracy as two possible areas where face recognition could be usefully assessed.


--Christian Jarrett

Two new studies have cast fresh illumination on the nature of the association between schizophrenia and violence. From a wide-ranging literature search, Matthew Large and colleagues in Sydney identified 18 studies involving over 16,000 murders. They found that regions with a high rate of homicides by people suffering from schizophrenia also tended to have a higher total homicide rate (Schizophrenia Research). This contradicts the widely held view that rates of homicide by those with schizophrenia are somehow fixed, reflecting an aspect of the illness itself, and highlights instead the role played by social and other extraneous factors.

The Psychologist put it to Dr Large that his new study contradicts work he published last year showing that rates of murder in the UK by people with mental illness have fallen steadily since 1979, even while overall homicide rates have risen (see News, August 2008). 'Interesting question and on the face of it they do contradict. I believe that the natural tendency is for normal and abnormal to be correlated - however it seems likely that community treatment can intervene and dissociate the two rates. The rate of abnormal homicide in the UK is now lower than it has been, and lower than might be predicted from the total homicide rate.'

Large's team said: 'Our findings suggest that measures to prevent homicide by those diagnosed with schizophrenia should include not only an attempt to provide optimal treatment to reduce the effects of symptoms, but also attention to those factors known to be associated with higher rates of all homicides, such as social deprivation, access to weapons, and substance misuse.'

Indeed, a new study from psychologist Martin Grann (Stockholm University) and colleagues examined Swedish crime registers and found that rates of violent crime by people with schizophrenia were higher than among the general population, but that this difference disappeared when the comparison was restricted to people with schizophrenia who didn't also have a substance misuse problem (JAMA). 'Hence the idea that people with schizophrenia are generally more violent than those without is not true,' said lead author Niklas Långström.

Misunderstandings about the link between violence and mental illness encourage stigma and can deter people with mental illness from engaging with services (click to download a related BPS leaflet).


--Christian Jarrett

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is to change the way that it funds postgraduate training. Instead of funding individual departments and courses,
the ESRC plans to create a network of around 25 Doctoral Training Centres, each to be hosted in one or more institutions, and Doctoral Training Units, which will be greater in number and more specialised. Each Doctoral Centre will receive a guaranteed annual quota of between five and 40 studentships for a five-year period. A peer-reviewed competition is to be launched this month, in which institutions will be able to submit proposals to create Doctoral Centres and Units. The results are expected to
be announced in late summer 2010, allowing institutions to begin recruitment of students to start their studies in October 2011. Julie McLaren, ESRC's Head of Postgraduate training, said it was hoped the new framework 'will lead to greater opportunities for institutions to develop innovative approaches and purposeful interdisciplinary training required to address increasingly complex research questions'.


--Christian Jarrett

Edited: 15/06/2009 at 02:18 PM by jonsut

Prejudice and animosity between groups derives largely from the idea that 'they' are somehow different from 'us'. Hundreds of studies have shown that this animosity can dissolve when members of different groups make contact with each other - becoming friends, colleagues and neighbours. Unfortunately, contact between members of different groups isn't always possible. Just think of the segregation in parts of Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Promisingly, however, research has shown that so-called 'extended contact' can also help break down prejudices - that is, simply having a friend who is friends with a member of the outgroup can improve a person's attitudes towards that group. Now an exciting new study has taken this line of research even further, showing that merely imagining positive contact with members of an outgroup can help improve attitudes towards that group.

In an initial experiment, Society award winners Rhiannon Turner and Richard Crisp had half of 25 students aged between 18 and 23 spend two minutes imagining a positive encounter with an elderly person, whilst the remaining students imagined an outdoor scene. These were the specific instructions for the imagined contact group: 'Imagine yourself meeting an elderly stranger for the first time. Imagine that during the encounter, you find out some interesting and unexpected things about the person.'

Afterwards, the students who'd imagined meeting an elderly person subsequently showed more positive attitudes towards elderly people than did the control group. This was true whether their attitudes were tapped using an explicit questionnaire, or using a test of implicit, subconsciously held, attitudes - the IAT. Briefly, this measures how easily people associate pairs of categories, such as old people and negative words, or young people and positive words, by allocating the categories to the same or different response keys.

A second experiment replicated this finding but in the context of non-Muslim participants' attitudes towards Muslims. In this case, the control condition required the participants to merely 'think about Muslims' in contrast to the intervention which required participants to imagine a positive encounter with a Muslim person. Again, the participants who imagined a positive encounter subsequently showed more positive attitudes, explicit and implicit, compared with the control group. This shows that it is specifically imagining a positive encounter with an outgroup member that is beneficial, not just thinking generally about that outgroup.

Writing in the British Journal of Social Psychology, the researchers said: 'Given that direct intergroup contact is a highly effective means of reducing prejudice, these findings suggest that imagined contact is an exciting alternative to direct contact that can be used in contexts where face-to-face contact is not possible'.

The Health Professions Council (HPC) has announced that it is maintaining the entry-level qualifications for psychologists to be admitted to the statutory register of practitioner psychologists.

The HPC had suggested that psychologists would be able to join the register with master's-level qualifications, but the British Psychological Society had strongly advised that the entry level needed to be the same as the Society's current 'doctorate level'. Sue Gardner, President of the British Psychological Society, said: 'We are delighted that the HPC listened to our advice about education entry levels. We are the existing voluntary regulator and have been since the late 1980s. We are the experts in knowing what level of education and training is required before a psychologist is deemed safe to practise independently, and this level has been agreed with the largest public sector employers - the health and education services.'

The HPC's decision on the entry-level threshold recognises promises made by the government to the Society that standards would not drop as a result of the transition from voluntary to statutory regulation. However, Sue Gardner added that 'it is disappointing that the HPC chose not to explicitly mention the Doctorate routes in forensic and health psychology. It is also disappointing that our advice to protect the title "psychologist" was not taken on board, as this would have been comprehensive and less confusing for the public.'

The transfer of the data of those chartered psychologists automatically eligible for entry on to the HPC register goes ahead on 1 July, and all those individuals should receive letters from the HPC and the Society shortly after that date.

Christian Jarrett with news from the Association for Psychological Science 21st Annual Convention 22 - 25 May, San Francisco

When it comes to judging the value of advice, we're wooed by people's confidence. Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University asked participants to guess the weight of people from their photographs. To help them were four 'advisers', whose confidence in their own judgements was made public. The participants consistently bought more advice from the most confident advisers. (Source: New Scientist) The findings adds to past research showing we're more likely to heed advice that's expensive.

We're in the midst of a global economic crisis, but our optimism still rides high. That's according to Matthew Gallagher at the University of Kansas who reported the results of a survey involving 150,000 adults across 140 countries. Eighty-nine per cent of those asked said they expected the next five years of their life to be as good as or better than the present. The most optimistic countries were Ireland, Brazil, Denmark and New Zealand, while the least optimistic were Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria. (Source: USNews.com)

Emotion expert Paul Ekman, the inspiration behind, and consultant to, the hit US drama Lie to Me, said he fact-checks the scripts but allows some artistic licence. For example, the series implied that nose scratching could be a sign of lying when really it isn't. In real life, Ekman heads a consulting firm that advises the FBI. Of his fictional counterpart Cal Lightman, he said he 'solves crimes more quickly and with more certainty than I've ever done'. (Source: PsychCentral)

To help prevent driving collisions, cars of the future might be equipped with vibrating steering-wheels. Robert Gray at Arizona State University had participants undertake a driving simulation test in foggy conditions, whilst distracted by a hands-free phone call. Drivers alerted by a vibration on their arm reacted to hazards three times as quickly as participants who weren't given a warning. Visual warnings gave no response advantage, whilst audio warnings speeded driver reactions two-fold. (Source ScienceNOW)

There's a growing trend for American parents to seek uncommon names for their children. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University analysed 325 million applications for social security numbers submitted between 1880 and 2007. In 1955 just over 30 per cent of boys had a name that was among the top ten most popular. In 2007 by contrast, this proportion had dropped to 9 per cent. Among girls, the drop was from 22 per cent to 8 per cent. Twenge said whereas people in the past wanted their children to fit in, today they want them to stand out. (Source: USA Today)

People are beginning to associate status with having green credentials. Vladas Griskevicius primed students with one of two stories. The first required them to imagine they had a new job at a successful company with a swanky lobby, and was designed to provoke a desire for prestige. The second story involved the student losing a show ticket but then finding it again and was intended not to provoke a desire for prestige. Afterwards, those students primed by the business story were more likely to choose the eco-friendly rather than the luxurious models from among equally priced pairs of cars, dishwashers and cleaners. (Source: Time)


--Christian Jarrett

A new study claims that being bullied can increase a child's risk of developing psychotic symptoms (see Archives of General Psychiatry). Previous research had already suggested there might be a link between bullying and later psychosis, but these studies had severe limitations, including being cross-sectional or retrospective in design. The current study, by contrast, was prospective and longitudinal.

Psychologist Dieter Wolke at the University of Warwick and his colleagues, including lead author Andrea Schreier, drew on interviews conducted with over 6000 children when they were aged 8, 10 and 12. Unlike previous studies, teacher and parent reports of bullying were also gathered. It emerged that children who were bullied more at ages 8 and/or 10 were between two and four times more likely to report experiencing psychotic symptoms at the age of 12. There was a dose - response relationship, so that children who experienced more severe or chronic bullying were at greater risk of developing later psychotic symptoms. The type of bullying - whether overt or more subtle and emotional - seemed less important as a predictive factor.

Is it possible that the cause lies not with bullying, but with the fact that children at risk of developing psychotic symptoms are somehow different from their peers and therefore more likely to be targeted by bullies? 'Reverse causality is always a possibility but we do not believe this is the explanation,' Wolke told The Psychologist. Wolke pointed to the fact that the association between bullying and later psychotic symptoms was largely unaffected even after taking the children's baseline mental health and family adversity into account.

However, Wolke cautioned that previous research had shown that bullying victims tend to be different from non-victims, for example having fewer friends and being less popular. An ideal study would measure early evidence of psychotic-like symptoms, prior to measures of bullying. This is tricky, though, as Wolke explained: 'For example, it is part of children's normal developmental experiences to believe in Santa Claus or fairies but these are not hallucinations or delusions but developmentally appropriate.'
In their report of the research, the researchers said there were several possible mechanisms that could explain the link between being bullied and developing psychotic symptoms. For example, being bullied could chronically over-activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis system causing exaggerated cortisol release and stress sensitivity. Alternatively, according to cognitive models, perhaps victimisation by one's peers leads to attributional biases and dysfunctional schemas of the self and world. 'A major implication is that chronic or severe peer victimisation has non-trivial, adverse, long-term consequences,' the researchers said.


--Christian Jarrett

A new brain-imaging study claims to provide robust evidence inconsistent with the idea that the human brain contains 'mirror neurons' - postulated cells thought to respond both when an action is executed and when it is observed (PNAS).

Such neurons have been identified via single-cell recording studies in monkeys, and their possible existence in humans has been linked with a number of cognitive functions including empathy and language development. Indeed, the seriousness of the new claim that human mirror neurons might not exist is perhaps best captured by a reminder of the hope that was pinned on them in 2000 by celebrated neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Writing for Edge Magazine he predicted 'that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.'

The new study by Alfonso Caramazza and colleagues at the Universities of Harvard and Trento depended on cellular adaptation to detect the presence of mirror neurons. Adaptation is the tendency for the response of cells to gradually reduce with repeated stimulation. There were two key tests of adaptation in Caramazza's experiment: during the observation of hand movements followed by the execution of those same movements, and secondly, during the execution of the movements followed by their observation. Unlike previous adaptation tests of mirror neurons, the current study used the observation and execution of meaningless actions not involving objects, to ensure that the results weren't contaminated by brain activation involved in anticipation or object perception.

Scans of 12 participants' brains using fMRI revealed areas of adaptation when the same hand movements were first observed and then executed, but crucially not the other way around. According to Caramazza and colleagues, this 'failure to find cross-modal adaptation for executed and observed motor acts is not compatible with the core assumption of mirror neuron theory, which holds that action recognition and understanding are based on motor simulation.'

However, leading mirror neuron researcher Marco Iacoboni (University of California) was not convinced by the new paper. 'In life science in general and in brain imaging in particular a negative result can't possibly prove the non existence of a phenomenon. It is surprising that Caramazza's paper makes those claims and that a high profile journal like PNAS publishes it,' he told us.

Beyond this general point, Iacoboni told us there were multiple, fatal flaws with Caramazza's study. For a start, he said the technique of detecting cellular adaptation using fMRI had been shown to be profoundly unreliable. 'Some initial results were promising but careful studies looking at the neural correlates of fMRI adaptation paradigms have revealed that the results of fMRI adaptation studies are uninterpretable with regard to the activity of specific neuronal populations (the mirror neurons, in this case)' (see for a review).

Iacoboni added that there isn't any reason to think mirror neurons should exhibit adaptation in the same way that sensory neurons do. 'Although nobody has done a thorough study on adaptation in mirror neurons, inspection of the single unit recordings in neurophysiological studies does not suggest that mirror neurons adapt.' What's more, he said that our understanding of most neuron types is heavily dependent on monkey work, so it doesn't make sense to doubt human mirror neurons on this basis. 'To question the existence in humans of any kind of neurons recorded only in monkeys is tantamount to questioning the evolutionary framework itself and even the ethical grounds for doing neurophysiological studies in monkeys', Iacoboni said.

But Alfonso Caramazza was staunch in defence of his findings. Providing some background, he said there was every reason to doubt the existence of mirror neurons in humans - people with apraxia, for example, who are impaired in using objects, nonetheless can have normal recognition of the use of those objects. 'There is no meaningful evidence for such a mirror neuron system in humans,' Caramazza told us. 'That is, there is no evidence that there is a motor-based system that plays a causal role - as opposed to just an associative role - in the recognition of motor acts.'
Caramazza also denied the suggestion that his paper used a negative finding to disprove a phenomenon. 'We did not report negative results,' he said, 'we reported clear and robust interactions showing that one can get reliable fMRI repetition adaptation in predicted areas but not for the theoretically critical condition.'

In further remarks, Caramazza defended the use of fMRI to study cellular adaptation, and he argued there was every reason to think postulated mirror neurons would show adaptation, given that he and others have previously shown that the relevant brain areas exhibit repetition adaptation. 'It is not theoretically impossible that mirror neurons have radically different properties from other neurons,' he said, 'but such a claim is plainly ad hoc and would constitute a remarkable discovery if true.'

Caramazza also questioned the way the monkey results have been interpreted. 'The mere fact that some premotor neurons respond both in executing an action and seeing the action does not imply that those neurons play a causal role in action recognition,' he said. 'It is an elementary error to confuse correlation with cause. So-called mirror neurons may be responding as a consequence of, and not as the basis for, action categorisation. The monkey data is better explained as the result of learning to associate a motor pattern to a perceptual event .'

--Christian Jarrett

The University of Bath launched the Bath Centre for Pain Research in June, with an evening of public lectures and poster presentations by research staff, including Centre Director and Founder Professor Chris Eccleston and fellow psychologists Dr Lance McCracken and Dr Ed Keogh.

A major focus of the Centre's research is on developing novel treatments for children with persistent pain, and raising the profile of childhood pain and suffering.

The British Academy has joined forces with publishers Wiley-Blackwell to create a new prize for an outstanding contribution to psychology. The Academy's new annual Wiley Prize in Psychology, worth £5000, will recognise excellence in research in psychology - alternately rewarding lifetime achievement by an outstanding international scholar and promising early career work by a UK-based psychologist.

The first award, for 2009, will be awarded to one of the leading pioneers of modern psychology - Professor Martin Seligman, currently Albert A. Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the university's Positive Psychology Center. Professor Seligman is a world-renowned expert on depression and happiness. He will receive the prize in September at the British Academy's annual ceremony, and he will also give the 2009 British Academy/British Psychology Society's Annual Lecture.

The President of the British Academy, Baroness O'Neill, said: 'I am delighted to be able to announce this important new collaboration. It is vitally important that we celebrate major scholarly achievements in fields such as psychology, which has such a profound impact on all our lives. And no one demonstrates that better than Martin Seligman.' Philip Carpenter, Managing Director, Social Science and Humanities publishing at Wiley-Blackwell, said: 'We offer our warmest congratulations to Martin Seligman, whose influence on modern psychology has been immense.' Martin Seligman commented: 'I am grateful for this splendid honour.'

The 2010 Wiley Prize will be awarded to a UK-based psychologist whose early career (defined as within five years of receipt of doctorate) shows outstanding promise. Nominations are invited via link

--Jon Sutton

A newly declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee into the treatment of detainees in American custody, combined with the declassification of four CIA memos, has turned attention once again to the role played by psychologists in interrogation practices during the Bush era. The documents make it clear that psychologists, along with other health professionals, were closely involved in the design and application of interrogation practices, including waterboarding (simulated drowning) and stress positions.

In response, American Psychological Association President James Bray reiterated his organisation's policy towards interrogation, which includes prohibiting members from working in detention settings where international law is violated, and the explicit condemnation of named interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding. Bray named two CIA-employed psychologists identified by the media as having been involved in designing interrogation techniques - James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen - but said they cannot be punished by the APA because they are not members. 'It is also my fervent hope that the American people ­ - and the world - will not judge all psychologists by the few who were involved in this sorry chapter in our history,' Bray concluded, 'but by the tens of thousands of psychologists who spend their professional lives working for the public good.'

Meanwhile, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), an independent organisation based in Washington, has called on the Obama administration
to launch an 'independent, nonpartisan commission to fully investigate US torture and prisoner abuse under the Bush Administration', and for the commission to include a special focus on the role played by psychologists in interrogation. In their statement, PsySR encourages all psychologists to sign an online petition (see tinyurl.com/akcqxu), organised by Physicians for Human Rights, which calls for just such a commission. 'Foremost, as a profession we must confront the mindsets and networks - of power, privilege, and influence - by which our own core healing principles were abandoned for purposes that evoke our outrage, our bewilderment, and our shame,' said PsySR's president-elect Roy Eidelson.

--Christian Jarrett

Less apparent than the hallucinations and delusions are the cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia. And yet it is often these impairments in learning and memory that can be the most debilitating. Now two new studies suggest intensive computer training in basic sensory and learning tasks can lead to sustained improvements in global cognitive functioning among patients with schizophrenia, leading ultimately to improved quality of life.

Sophia Vinogradov at the University of California and colleagues had 29 patients with schizophrenia undertake 50 hours of computer-based training for 10 weeks. Twenty-six control patients spent the same amount of time, and received the same amount of supervision, playing computer games.

The computerised training focused on improving the patients' basic auditory skills and learning. Example tasks included distinguishing between easily confusable syllables, and recalling conversations. 'The basic notion is that by improving the speed and accuracy of information processing in the auditory system, higher-order functions such as verbal encoding and verbal memory retrieval have more reliable signals on which to operate,' the researchers explained.

A key facet of the training was that it exploited the fact that procedural learning appears to be intact in schizophrenia. The training was therefore deliberately sustained and rewarding, with difficulty continually adjusted so that patients achieved an approximately 85 per cent correct response rate.

Crucially, the patients who received the training showed improvements not just in their auditory skills but on global measures of cognition, as compared with the control patients (in press at American Journal of Psychiatry). A sister study followed up 32 of these patients for six months - 10 from the control condition and 22 from the training condition. Twelve of the training patients received a further 50 hours training, which broadened out to include visual and cognitive control exercises (Schizophrenia Bulletin)

The exciting finding at six months was that improvements in cognition appeared to be sustained, and that these improvements were associated with gains in quality of life. Cognitive improvements were broadest among those patients who received the more sustained and comprehensive training package.

The researchers said their results provided 'tantalising early evidence' for the effectiveness of computerised, neuroplasticity-based cognitive training. However, significant hurdles remain. For example, few prior studies have involved such extensive training, which makes it hard to tell whether the outcomes were due to the content of the intervention or its intensity. That same intensity also places a question mark over the practicality of this intervention in real-life settings - a caveat compounded by the fact the patients in these studies were all clinically stable.


--Christian Jarrett

Psychology professor Antonia Bifulco at Royal Holloway, University of London, has become co-director of a newly launched research centre dedicated to helping prevent crimes against children. The Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies , which launched at the end of March, aims to 'further the understanding, treatment and policy implications of abuse and trauma and its consequences'.

The Centre's other director is Professor Julia Davidson, a criminologist from Kingston University. This month the Centre will begin a 30-month Europe-wide investigation into the behaviour of men who seek to groom children and young people online. Professor Davidson said: 'We hope the results of this very innovative study will be used to inform preventative advice for parents and schools to reduce risks to children from internet abuse.'

Other research projects include evaluating social learning interventions in previously abused young people in residential care, and interviewing child victims of sexual abuse about their experience in police investigations. The Centre also undertakes workshops and training for CPD for psychologists and social workers.

Last month the Centre held a 'Route Mapping' event at the House of Lords on the current crisis in child protection services, attended by around twenty academics and experts from different children's service agencies. Professor Bifulco said: 'Our aim was to highlight some practical ways forward to influence policy and practice in this very difficult area following from recent cases such as the death of Baby P. Psychologists can play a central role in working with children and families around abuse issues, and psychology research is fundamental in understanding the consequences for abuse on disorder across the lifespan.'

--Christian Jarrett

Three new studies published simultaneously at the end of April have provided the strongest evidence to date for the genetic basis of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). The two studies in Nature (study 1; study 2) and another published in Molecular Psychiatry Molecular Psychiatry involved thousands of children with ASD and thousands of controls. All three papers identified new common genetic variations that seem to be associated with an increased risk of developing ASD. In other words, these are genetic variants which are often seen in the normal population but seem to be disproportionately more prevalent among children with ASD.

Nearly all the implicated genes are known to either influence communication between neurons or influence the growth pattern of neurons during brain development. The team leader on the Molecular Psychiatry paper, Professor Tony Monaco of the University of Oxford, said: 'This does seem to fit with what we know from brain scans - that people with autism may show different or reduced connectivity between different parts of the brain. This new knowledge allows us to focus our studies on developing new treatments and intervention therapies for the future.' Although he welcomed the new findings, psychologist and autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge said genes were just one part of the puzzle. He told New Scientist: 'The challenge for future research will be to establish which aspects of autism they [the genes] can explain, how many of these genes are necessary and sufficient to cause autism, and how they may interact with environmental factors.'


--Christian Jarrett

Edited: 18/05/2009 at 03:37 PM by jonsut

Seeing one person be rude to another can stunt a person's creativity, impair their mental performance and make them less likely to be civil themselves. Christine Porath and Amir Erez, who made this finding, say it has profound implications for
the workplace, where rudeness has been described by some as a modern epidemic.
Across three studies in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (tinyurl.com/qlmw3o), Porath and Erez recruited students to take part in what they were led to believe was an investigation into personality and task performance. Porath and Erez contrived situations in their lab so that the participants witnessed either a researcher be rude to a student for turning up late, or one student be rude to another student for taking so long over a consent form.

Witnessing an act of rudeness, whether committed by a researcher or student, led the participants to solve fewer anagrams, come up with fewer uses for a brick (and to come up with more aggressive uses!), made them less likely to offer to participate in another study, and lowered their mood.

A third study showed that the harmful effects of witnessing rudeness were greater when students were enrolled in a collaborative group task, compared with when they were enrolled in a competitive group task where they had something to gain from the rudeness victim's ordeal. Although the harmful effects were lower in the competitive scenario, they were still present.

Porath and Erez said this is the first study to investigate the direct effects of merely witnessing rudeness, and that future research should explore the underlying mechanisms. 'The conclusion that rudeness may not be contained within the instigator - target dyad and that it affects performance is theoretically and practically significant because it implies that the organisational functioning and climate could be affected by isolated rude incidents,' the researchers said.

--Christian Jarrett

Less apparent than the hallucinations and delusions are the cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia. And yet it is often these impairments in learning and memory that can be the most debilitating. Now two new studies suggest intensive computer training in basic sensory and learning tasks can lead to sustained improvements in global cognitive functioning among patients with schizophrenia, leading ultimately to improved quality of life.

Sophia Vinogradov at the University of California and colleagues had 29 patients with schizophrenia undertake 50 hours of computer-based training for 10 weeks. Twenty-six control patients spent the same amount of time, and received the same amount of supervision, playing computer games.

The computerised training focused on improving the patients' basic auditory skills and learning. Example tasks included distinguishing between easily confusable syllables, and recalling conversations. 'The basic notion is that by improving the speed and accuracy of information processing in the auditory system, higher-order functions such as verbal encoding and verbal memory retrieval have more reliable signals on which to operate,' the researchers explained.

A key facet of the training was that it exploited the fact that procedural learning appears to be intact in schizophrenia. The training was therefore deliberately sustained and rewarding, with difficulty continually adjusted so that patients achieved an approximately 85 per cent correct response rate.

Crucially, the patients who received the training showed improvements not just in their auditory skills but on global measures of cognition, as compared with the control patients (in press at American Journal of Psychiatry). A sister study followed up 32 of these patients for six months - 10 from the control condition and 22 from the training condition. Twelve of the training patients received a further 50 hours training, which broadened out to include visual and cognitive control exercises

The exciting finding at six months was that improvements in cognition appeared to be sustained, and that these improvements were associated with gains in quality of life. Cognitive improvements were broadest among those patients who received the more sustained and comprehensive training package.

The researchers said their results provided 'tantalising early evidence' for the effectiveness of computerised, neuroplasticity-based cognitive training. However, significant hurdles remain. For example, few prior studies have involved such extensive training, which makes it hard to tell whether the outcomes were due to the content of the intervention or its intensity. That same intensity also places a question mark over the practicality of this intervention in real-life settings - a caveat compounded by the fact the patients in these studies were all clinically stable.

--Christian Jarrett

Psychology professor Antonia Bifulco at Royal Holloway, University of London, has become co-director of a newly launched research centre dedicated to helping prevent crimes against children. The Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (www.cats-rp.org.uk), which launched at the end of March, aims to 'further the understanding, treatment and policy implications of abuse and trauma and its consequences'.

The Centre's other director is Professor Julia Davidson, a criminologist from Kingston University. This month the Centre will begin a 30-month Europe-wide investigation into the behaviour of men who seek to groom children and young people online. Professor Davidson said: 'We hope the results of this very innovative study will be used to inform preventative advice for parents and schools to reduce risks to children from internet abuse.'

Other research projects include evaluating social learning interventions in previously abused young people in residential care, and interviewing child victims of sexual abuse about their experience in police investigations. The Centre also undertakes workshops and training for CPD for psychologists and social workers.

Last month the Centre held a 'Route Mapping' event at the House of Lords on the current crisis in child protection services, attended by around twenty academics and experts from different children's service agencies. Professor Bifulco said: 'Our aim was to highlight some practical ways forward to influence policy and practice in this very difficult area following from recent cases such as the death of Baby P. Psychologists can play a central role in working with children and families around abuse issues, and psychology research is fundamental in understanding the consequences for abuse on disorder across the lifespan.'

--Christian Jarrett

In a move that it's hoped will bring advantages to all involved, the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol has formalised its relationship with the nearby Fosse Way School for students with special educational needs. Together, the Psychology Department, the National Autistic Society, members of the local community and the school now form the Fosse Way School Trust.

Dr Chris Jarrold, a reader in the department, helped set up this arrangement and is now one of four Trust directors. Another lecturer, Dr Liz Pellicano, has become one of the school's 15 governors.

'We've had a long-standing relationship with Fosse Way School for the last ten years or more,' Jarrold told The Psychologist. 'We've worked with children there who have autism or Down syndrome and others who don't have a particular diagnosis. We've also previously given talks at the school about our work. Now the school has decided to formalise its relationship with us - to get us more involved, not in the day-to-day running or management of the school, but in the direction of it.'

'We are also looking to do joint research projects with the school to see if we can tailor our research more around things the school will find useful - carry out more educationally minded research,' Jarrold said. The Psychology Department also hopes to support the school in writing grant proposals for funding from educational trusts and charitable bodies.

Fosse Way School is located in Norton-Radstock, has 145 pupils with a range of learning difficulties, and has consistently been rated as outstanding by Ofsted. Jarrold said the new Trust was the latest example of the school's forward-looking approach. 'This is a chance for us to give something back to a school that's been very supportive of us in the past,' he added.

--Christian Jarrett

nspired by their recent investigation into chess expertise, a team of psychologists has written to the Times Higher Education Supplement voicing concerns about assessment procedures used as part of the recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) - a UK-wide review that influences how much funding universities receive.

Professor Fernand Gobet at Brunel University, Dr Merim Bilali´c at Tübingen University, and Dr Peter McLeod at Oxford University, specifically challenged the assumption that panels of experts in a given subject area are equipped to review accurately research from an area outside their particular specialisation. The finding that chess experts' performance declines when solving problems outside their specialisation 'sheds some worrying light on this assumption', Gobet's group wrote.

The study with chess players involved asking an expert in one particular opening style to remember and solve chess situations both related and unrelated to their favourite opening style. The results showed that operating outside one's specific area of expertise diminished performance by about one standard deviation or 'class level', relative to completing the same feats within one's area of expertise. So, for example, a 'grandmaster' would perform to the typical, lesser standard of 'international master' when operating outside his or her favoured domain

The idea of extrapolating from these findings to the RAE came from Professor Gobet, who was in charge of the psychology RAE 'return' at Brunel. He'd noticed how reviewers often wildly disagreed about the quality of submitted papers, even when they all came from the same domain of specialisation.

Gobet explained to The Psychologist how the problem of expertise transfer would apply to the RAE: 'Say one panel member is a world expert in research into problem solving, a subfield of cognitive psychology, and that she has mostly used standard behavioural experiments in her research. She would be the equivalent of a top chess grandmaster specialising in the French defence, to use one kind of player we had in our paper. Now she has to evaluate papers say in clinical psychology. That would be the equivalent of finding a good move in a Sicilian position.

So our claim is that, while she would be the equivalent of a grandmaster in evaluating papers in her field of problem solving, she would be the equivalent of an international master when evaluating papers in clinical psychology. Still an expert, but now very far from the top experts.'

Gobet said that in all likelihood the situation would actually be worse in the RAE than in chess because the gap between domains of psychology is greater than between different opening styles in chess. 'The cognitive psychologist using behavioural experiments in problem solving research would have a very hard time to evaluate papers on perception using brain imaging - although both domains belong to cognitive psychology,' he explained.

So how could the next research assessment (the so-called Research Excellence Framework) be improved? 'That's the tough question,' Gobet said. 'Using information about citations or other type of bibliometric information is clearly a step forward, but there are issues as well with this. Given the huge cost of the RAE, one should consider the option of doing away with it entirely, and using other ways of allocating money. But here, I'm well beyond my domain of specialisation.'

--Christian Jarrett



Edited: 18/05/2009 at 02:14 PM by jonsut