The Psychologist News

Conduct disorder - working with parents

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:49:35

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

Little harm from TV

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:46:02

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.'

Predicting reoffending?

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:42:38

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

Autism research priorities

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:37:21

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

Frontiers of brain research

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:33:12

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

Psychologist appointed Vice-Chancellor

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:31:11

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

He's in the army now

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:29:53

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

Memory matters

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:21:28

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.

Mixed results for anti-stigma campaign

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:18:31

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

Face blindness - recognition sought

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-23 16:17:11

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

Towards an activity map of the brain

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 14:20:55

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

Publishing psychology's 'dirty little secrets'

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 14:17:48

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

Psychosis in children guidelines

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 14:13:37

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

Rifts develop on the divided brain

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 14:03:37

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

Common causation?

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 13:54:44

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

Anorexia transition

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 13:53:45

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

Games to do good

Jon Sutton — 2013-04-02 13:52:37

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

Worrying on the Edge

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:54:08

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

Surveying our values

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:37:42

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

Rapid deployment

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:33:30

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

fMRI retrospective

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:17:30

Last year marked 20 years since the first functional MRI paper was published, a milestone that's prompted a series of retrospectives on the field (see also News, October 2011). The latest appears as a special section in the January issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The emphasis of the (mostly US) contributors is on ways that functional MRI has indeed informed and constrained cognitive psychology theories.

Recalling the advent of the technology, the section editors Mara Mather (USC Davis), John Cacioppo (University of Chicago) and Nancy Kanwisher (MIT) observed in their introduction how 'few events are as thrilling to scientists as the arrival of a novel method that enables them to see the previously invisible'. But they also noted the later onset of scepticism. For instance, Michael Page (University of Hertfordshire) wrote in 2006 that the explosion of fMRI 'has not resulted in a corresponding theoretical advancement, at least with respect to cognitive psychological theory'. Was he right?

Denise Park and Ian McDonough (University of Texas at Dallas) argued for the major theoretical contribution of fMRI in the field of ageing. Traditional cognitive theories - such as limited resource theory and speed of processing theory - tended to espouse a view of ageing as 'a passive model of decline', they said. Since then, findings from fMRI, showing, for example, bilateral activation in older brains versus unilateral activation in younger brains (to the same tasks), had fundamentally changed this view, leading to more dynamic models of adaptation 'characterized by plasticity and reorganization of function in response to neural degradation and cognitive challenge'.

Examples of fMRI research advancing cognitive theory are rare, admitted Michael Rugg (University of Texas at Dallas) and Sharon Thompson-Schill (University of Pennsylvania), but examples do exist. The pair described work comparing brain-activation patterns associated with colour memory versus colour perception. Results have shown that the amount of anatomical overlap depends on task difficulty and subject factors (such as a preference for verbalisation or visualising information). These findings suggest colour is represented at different levels of abstraction, available for both perception and memory - 'it is arguable that no other method possesses the combination of spatial resolution and coverage necessary to identify this phenomenon,' Rugg and Thompson-Schill said.

It's also important to note that the relationship between cognitive theory and functional brain imaging isn't just one way - cognitive theory also influences the way we interpret fMRI findings, so said John Wixted and Laura Mickes (University of California San Diego). They gave the example of memory experiments in which participants say whether a stimulus is merely familiar to them (they 'know' they've seen it before), or if they can actually 'remember' encountering it. 'Remember' responses tend to be associated with increased hippocampus activity, but how to interpret this depends on cognitive psychology theory. The dual-process signal-detection model says this means the hippocampus supports recollection. By contrast, the continuous dual-process (CDP) model says that 'remember' responses reflect the strength of the memory signal (regardless of whether it's based on recollection or familiarity), and that hippocampus activity is therefore a mark of memory signal strength, not recollection per se.

A more sceptical contribution came from Max Coltheart (Macquarie University, Sydney). He highlighted a review he published with others last year of cognitive neuroimaging articles published in leading journals between 2007 and 2011. Of the 199 articles concerned with cognitive functions, just 10 per cent had attempted 'any kind of evaluation of cognitive theories.' Coltheart also warned against what he called the 'consistency fallacy' - the tendency for brain imaging researchers to report ways that their results are consistent with some cognitive theory without pointing out 'explicitly what pattern(s) of neuroimaging data that are inconsistent with the theory could plausibly have been obtained in the neuroimaging study'.

Wrapping up the special section, Mara Mather and her co-editors shared their view that fMRI can inform cognitive theory by helping to answer four questions: 'Which (if any) functions can be localized to specific brain regions? Can markers of Mental Process X be found during Task Y? How distinct are the representations of different stimuli or tasks? And, do two Tasks X and Y engage common or distinct processing mechanisms?' But the editors also listed fMRI's limitations, including its inability to demonstrate the causal role of brain activity, and the limits of its spatial resolution, with each voxel reflecting
the activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons.

'The best approach to answering questions about cognition', they concluded, 'therefore is a synergistic combination of behavioral and neuroimaging methods, richly complemented by the wide array of other methods in cognitive neuroscience.'

Christian Jarrett

All 12 contributions to the special section are at pps.sagepub.com/content/8/1.toc

Please send your verdict on the contribution of fMRI to cognitive theory to psychologist@bps.org.uk

Spotting the gorilla on the lung

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:12:45

When our attention is consumed by a challenging task, it leaves us surprisingly oblivious to the unexpected. In a dramatic new study, this 'inattentional blindness' led 20 out of 24 experienced radiologists to miss the presence of a surprise matchbox-sized gorilla located on five slices of a lung CT scan (click here to view picture). The radiologists had been searching through several such scans looking specifically for light, circular nodules, which are a sign of lung cancer, although they would usually be expected to also notice any other aberrant structures.

Trafton Drew, Melissa Vo and Jeremy M. Wolfe (Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard University), who conducted the study, were interested in the extent to which expertise at a primary challenging task can offset the effects of inattentional blindness.

As expected, the radiologists exhibited less inattentional blindness than a control group of 25 non-medical participants, none of whom spotted the gorilla. The radiologists also spotted more of the nodules (55 per cent vs. 12 per cent). Nonetheless, the degree of inattentional blindness exhibited by the radiologists was striking. Eye-tracking records showed that 12 of the radiologists who missed the gorilla had in fact looked right at it for an average of half a second.

'It would be a mistake to regard these results as an indictment of radiologists,' Drew and his colleagues concluded. 'As a group, they are highly skilled practitioners of a very demanding class of visual search tasks. The message of the present results is that even this high level of expertise does not immunize against inherent limitations of human attention and perception.' The researchers said that furthering our understanding of these processes will help in the design of optimal medical and other search tasks, so minimising the risk of important information being missed.

Christian Jarrett

The study is in press at Psychological Science

Cosmetic surgery guidelines

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:09:04

Psychological assessment is at the heart of new cosmetic surgery 'professional standards' guidelines published by the Royal College of Surgeons. The new document states that it should be standard practice to discuss relevant psychological issues with a patient during consultation prior to cosmetic surgery. 'It is neither possible nor necessary for every patient to undergo a detailed psychological assessment with a clinical psychologist,' the document states. 'However, all practitioners should consider if they should refer a patient to a clinical psychologist before proceeding with further consultations or treatments and referral pathways should be in place.'

The guideline draws particular attention to patients with a history of psychiatric problems, especially eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder or personality disorders. Concerns about cosmetic gynaecological surgery are also addressed, and it's stated that: 'High levels of anxiety regarding body image where appearance is within the normal range should trigger psychological referral.'

Among the contributors to the professional standards document were Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow Dr Andy Clarke, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Royal Free Hospital; and Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow Professor Nichola Rumsey, Research Director of the Centre for Appearance Research, University of the West of England.

Click Here for Professional Standards for Cosmetic Practice

Christian Jarrett

Silent witnesses: Using theatre to combat crime

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:06:00

How can we reduce the risk of children who witness or experience violent crime becoming perpetrators themselves? Perhaps some answers will be gleaned from Silent Witnesses, an 18-month long collaboration between Theatre Centre and senior developmental psychologists Dr Edward Barker and Dr Natasha Kirkham from Birkbeck, University of London.

Working with Year Five pupils across 10 inner-city primary schools from Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, London and Manchester, Silent Witnesses will aim to help children deal with violence they may have witnessed in their community, on television or in computer games. The project also seeks to raise awareness among parents and teachers of the role they can play in improving children's safety and well-being. It will culminate with a tour of a new play by Ed Harris in spring 2014, commissioned and produced by Theatre Centre.

The project comprises three stages. First, the pupils will participate in a two-day residential programme run by playwright Ed Harris and Dr Kirkham. These involve creative writing workshops and group discussion. Then Harris will draw upon the material created in the workshops and the conversations held in schools to create a script that will be developed and rehearsed by Theatre Centre. The production will then be toured to targeted primary schools across the UK. Children, teachers and parents of children at participating schools will complete pre-play and post-play questionnaires evaluating their attitudes to violence and their responses to the play.

By the end of the 18-month long project researchers from Birkbeck will have gathered evidence from over 5000 children, teachers and parents about the role of creative expression in changing responses to, and understanding of, violent behaviour.

Dr Barker said: 'We hope that by including children's voices in the development of the play we will help to engender an atmosphere where children can talk to adults about their experiences of witnessing violence, and adults are equipped to support children and help them reduce their potential to react aggressively themselves.'

Emma Penzer, Headteacher at Mandeville Primary School, Hackney, said: 'This project will be of great benefit to the children and staff at Mandeville Primary School. Gilpin Square and other neighbouring areas experience a high level of crime. Many children have witnessed shootings, knife crimes and criminal damage, amongst other crimes. Very rarely do they talk about them, particularly to school staff.'

Jon Sutton

Suicide rates rising

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 14:04:24

Months after the UK government launched its new suicide prevention strategy for England, the latest published figures from the Office National Statistics show that suicides rose significantly in the UK in 2011, with 437 more people taking their own lives compared with 2010 (a rise of 11.1 to 11.8. deaths per 100,000 population).

The latest figures show men remain at particular risk, with three times the number of suicides compared with women. For both men and women, the rate of suicide was highest among the middle-aged.

A decade prior to 2010, male suicides had been almost consistently in decline. Female suicides declined from 2004 to 2007, but have mostly been rising ever since.

For information on a recent Samaritans report on suicide and the government suicide prevention strategy, see November News.

Christian Jarrett

The grand dame of British science

Jon Sutton — 2013-02-26 11:37:23

Desert Island Discs' Kirsty Young introduces Professor Uta Frith as a 'grand dame of British science'. This is in light of her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of autism, which led to an honorary damehood. Uta explains that to develop an understanding of autism it is necessary to look behind the behaviours to comprehend what is at the core of this phenomenon. Can we take the same approach to discover what is at the core of the phenomenon that is Uta Frith?
Born in Germany in May 1941, Uta describes a childhood which was largely protected from the harsh realities of war. She reveals her mother's sense of determination and her father's artistic talents, which appear to have influenced her self-confidence and capacity to look at the world differently. Motivated by a passion to learn, Uta arrived in England where her interest in cognitive psychology was further inspired. It was here that she nurtured her career and her family, having two sons with her husband Chris Frith.
Uta explains that her ability to manage a successful scientific career and a family was achieved by the employment of a full time nanny. Although recognising that this decision would be unpopular to some, Uta reflects that these choices were based on her own views of what she thought was right. Although this issue would not be presented in the same way to a man, Uta does not adopt an overt feminist stance but retains the clear mindedness of a scientist.
Uta's sense of pragmatism and humility appear to be attributes which are woven throughout her personal and professional relationships. A fellow Professor, Athene Donald, recently described her as 'the exact opposite of a jerk', and for somebody who studies deficits in social communication it was striking how adept she was at complimenting Kirsty Young on her questions.
I was also struck by Uta positioning her intellectual contributions to science as a small (albeit integral) part of the narrative. Her heroes are her participants with autism and their parents, from whose perspectives she has learned a great deal. Now in her retirement, she supports today's female scientists, hoping to inspire them to make time for fun via her 'science and shopping network'.
Uta's enduring love for a profession which loves her right back was clear. She will never tire of discovery, admitting she is just as baffled by autism as she always was, and describing the brain as a garden, full of the most interesting things that have to be cultivated and constantly checked. It was also fascinating to hear of Uta's discovery of psychology, and her excitement at a pioneering time: the overturning of psychoanalysis. 'You don't have to just fall in with these big stories, you could look at it in a different way'.
Accompanying her to the desert island will be a handwritten medieval manuscript and the doll's house made for her by her husband and sons. Uta says she remains a very great puzzle to herself, but to me these items reveal what is at her core; an inquisitive mind with a passion to understand others and a loving woman whose life is intrinsically woven into her family's genealogy.
- Listen again
- Reviewed by Donna Peach, who is a postgraduate student who volunteered for this review by following us on Twitter

Red Cross psychologist in Algeria

Jon Sutton — 2013-01-24 10:25:44

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 (FCO) 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.'
Davidson wrote about her work with the British Red Cross in The Psychologist in April 2010.

The Hobbit - a philosophical review

Jon Sutton — 2012-12-18 09:52:18

Much of the early discussion of Peter Jackson's new film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, has focused on Jackson's use of the latest 3D technology by shooting at 48 frames-per-second. Some viewers complain that the picture quality is so eye-poppingly clear that it becomes distracting and even disquieting. Jackson himself has remarked that it may take the average filmgoer half the movie before he or she feels truly comfortable.
Comfort, in fact, is a major theme in the film, as it is in the classic children's book on which it is based. Bilbo, 'a Baggins of Bag End', spends a good portion of the film praising, then longing for the comforts of home. On the first page, author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that Bilbo's home meant 'comfort'. For French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the 'house allows one to dream in peace'. Without a house, 'man is a dispersed being'. In the climactic scene of the film outside Gollum's cave, Bilbo finally commits himself wholeheartedly to the quest, telling Thorin that because he likes his home so much he wants to help the Company take back their own home from the dragon who made them refugees.
Having already survived a difficult childhood, Tolkien lost several of his closest friends in the trenches of World War I. Tolkien, like Bachelard, understood that 'home' can have conflicting psychological resonances. Home can connote warmth, comfort, security, but also stagnation, risk-aversion, and constraint. In the film Gandalf warns Bilbo that when he returns from his journey he will be changed and may not be so comfortable at home as he has been.
The Hobbit has long appealed to psychologists for its obvious correspondences to the process of maturation. As the book opens, Bilbo is effectively a fifty-year-old child nestled in his comfy hobbit hole. By the end of the tale Bilbo has achieved Jungian individuation or Maslowian self-actualization by stepping out of his comfort zone, resolving his inner conflicts, and growing in courage, self-confidence, and self-understanding by confronting challenges and dangers.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a flawed but very good film. It is over-long, the dialogue occasionally limps, and there is too much dwarfish and trollish clownishness.
Otherwise, the film triumphantly succeeds. It is visually and technologically stunning, the action scenes are terrific, Andy Serkis' Gollum is brilliant beyond words, and (unlike The Lord of the Rings films) the many changes Jackson makes to Tolkien's original storyline are nearly always effective.
Our advice, then, is to step outside your own comfy hobbit hole and see Jackson's Hobbit film the way it was meant to be seen: as a cutting-edge work of art in 3D format. It will be an adventure.

- Gregory Bassham is a Professor of Philosophy at King's College Pennsylvania. Eric Bronson is a visiting Professor in the Humanities Department at York University Toronto. The pair are editors, with William Irwin, of The Hobbit and Philosophy (Wiley, 2012).

In pursuit of awe

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:58:16

For a few eerie minutes on Wednesday 14 November local time, just after sunrise, people living in Northern Australia will be shrouded in darkness as the Moon falls into perfect alignment with the Sun. One person who will be returning to her homeland to witness this total eclipse is the Chartered Psychologist Kate Russo, of Queens University Belfast.

Since 1999, when she experienced her first total eclipse, Russo has become hooked. Like other 'eclipse chasers', Russo travels the world in search of these darkest of shadows. November's experience will be her eighth total eclipse.

By day, Russo helps people with chronic health conditions find meaning in their lives. She also co-directs a doctoral training programme in clinical psychology, where she is an expert in phenomenological research. Recently she's applied these professional skills to her hobby, in search of an answer to why total eclipses have such a profound effect on some people, to the extent that they'll navigate the globe repeatedly in pursuit of the next eclipse event.

In her new book Total Addiction, The Life of an Eclipse Chaser (Springer, 2012), Russo reports the results of the in-depth phenomenological interviews she's conducted with nine eclipse chasers, including the amateur astronomer Sir Patrick Moore. The others are categorised as 'enterprising chasers', 'introspective chasers' and 'occasional chasers'.

'The experience of totality can be described as a "mystical experience with a kick",' says Russo. 'There is an eerie atmosphere in the lead-up to totality. We feel SPACED - a Sense of wrongness, Primal fear, Awe, Connection, Euphoria, and a Desire to repeat. These emotions are intense, and appear to happen in a way that affects us on a very physical level - people are often overwhelmed and unprepared for such a strong reaction. The beauty of the total eclipse itself is then revealed, leaving us in complete awe as we see the elusive corona for those few magical moments.'

The corona is an extremely high temperature atmospheric halo around the Sun. Normally it's invisible, but during a total eclipse the ghostly rays can be seen extending outwards into space. The total eclipse itself occurs every 18 months or so, when a privileged slice of the earth's surface is darkened by the Moon's apparent identical diameter completely obscuring the view of the Sun.

Coincidentally, a study is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science that explores one aspect of the eclipse experience - the effect of awe on people's time perception. Researchers at the Universities of Stanford and Minnesota, led by Melanie Rudd, used
a variety of devices to induce awe in some of their participants, including having them watch a video about astronauts in space, or describing a real-life awe experience of their own. Compared with participants who were induced to feel happy, those who experienced awe felt like they had more time, showed less impatience and were more willing to volunteer their time. They also experienced a brief boost to their life satisfaction. 'These results...underscore the importance and promise of cultivating awe in everyday life,' the researchers said.

Watching a total eclipse is one way to find awe, with many people feeling personally changed by the event. 'There is a recognition that the experience is significant, although it is difficult to make sense of, and difficult to communicate to others,' says Russo. 'We feel we are at the edge of our language abilities. We come to understand that this cannot be a one-off event. We are hooked. Another eclipse chaser is born.'

Christian Jarrett

See www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog for a chance to win a copy of Russo's book

Abuse definition widens

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:51:54

The Home Office has announced that it's widening the cross-government definition of domestic violence, to take into account psychological factors, and to include young people aged 16 and 17, who were previously excluded.

The new definition of 'domestic violence and abuse', coming into effect from March next year, now includes: 'Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. This can encompass, but is not limited to, the following types of abuse: psychological, physical, sexual, financial and emotional.'

The change comes after a consultation of local authorities and voluntary sector support groups on whether the definition used by government departments should be widened. Although the definition is not statutory, it's hoped it will help raise awareness of abuse within relationships, and make it easier for victims to seek help. The age range to which the definition applies has been lowered based on evidence that the experiences of many older teens are more akin to the domestic abuse suffered by adult victims, than to child abuse per se.

In related news, the Centre for Social Justice has published a new report Beyond Violence: Breaking Cycles of Domestic Abuse, co-authored by Chartered Psychologist Elly Farmer (NSPCC) and Samantha Callan. Among their many recommendations, Farmer and Callan suggest introducing into the curriculum a module for adolescents on how to 'build equal and non-abusive relationships', and offering early help to children living in a household with domestic abuse, even if no mental health symptoms are yet apparent.

Christian Jarrett

Suicide

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:49:28

Men aged between 30 and 50, particularly those from poorer economic backgrounds, are the demographic most likely to die by suicide in the UK, according to a new report published by The Samaritans - Men, Suicide and Society, Why Disadvantaged Men In Mid-life Die By Suicide (PDF).

With contributions from the Chartered Psychologist Professor Rory O'Connor and doctoral psychology student Olivia Kirtley (both at Stirling Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory), the Samaritans' report argues that middle-aged men from working-class backgrounds are at particular risk in part because of a range of sociocultural factors, including their beliefs about masculinity, the loss of traditionally male industries, and a lack of social support, especially after relationship break-up. Statistics show that about 3000 middle-aged men on average take their own lives each year, with men from poorer backgrounds at 10 times the risk compared with men from more affluent backgrounds.

Among the report's recommendations is the need for prevention strategies to take account of men's views of what it means to be 'a man'. 'Men compare themselves against a masculine "gold standard" which prizes power, control and invincibility. When men believe they are not meeting this standard, they feel a sense of shame and defeat,' the report says.

In related news, the UK government launched its new suicide-prevention strategy for England in September, backed by the Samaritans, with up to £1.5 million being made available for new research (research applications are invited). The strategy identifies six key areas for action, including more support for vulnerable groups, and more advice and support for those left bereaved by suicide.

Christian Jarrett

Wiley Prize nominations sought

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:38:04

The British Academy is calling for nominations for the Wiley Prize in Psychology. This annual prize, made in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell, provides an award of £5000 in recognition
of excellence in research in psychology. Past winners are Professor Dr Michael Tomasello,
Dr Essi Viding and Dr Martin Seligman.

In 2013 the award will be for lifetime achievement by an international scholar. The award winners will be announced at the British Academy's AGM in July 2013.

www.britac.ac.uk/about/medals/wiley.cfm

funny and thought-provoking

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:36:08

Imagine, after reading this news article, you were to make an estimate of its word length. A lean to the left while you made your guess and it's likely you'd predict a lower number than if you leaned to the right.

That's based on the results from astudy that's just won the psychology prize in this year's Ig Nobel awards, for research that makes you laugh, then think. The winning paper, published in Psychological Science by Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe, involved participants standing on a Wii Balance Board and making numerical estimates, such as the height of the Eiffel tower or the number of hits Michael Jackson scored in the Netherlands.

Participants standing on a board that, unbeknown to them was slightly left-leaning, estimated the Eiffel Tower to be 12m shorter, on average, than participants leaning to the right. Eerland and her colleagues think the effect happens because leaning to the left makes smaller numbers on the left-hand end of the mental number line easier to access.

Eerland's team received their award at the 22nd annual Ig Nobel ceremony held at Harvard University in September. The neuroscience prize went to a team led by Craig Bennett who exposed the perils of poor brain-imaging analysis by revealing evidence of brain activity in a dead salmon. A book about the Ig Nobel movement - This is Improbable - was published by One World in September.

Christian Jarrett

To sleep, perchance to learn

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:30:14

For years, quack educational tapes have made false promises about our ability to learn their detailed material while we sleep. Such productive use of time spent in slumber remains little more than a dream. But a research team led by Anat Arzi at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has provided the first demonstration of entirely new information being learned by humans during sleep (Nature Neuroscience).

Without waking them, the researchers exposed dozens of participants to pleasant (deodorant or shampoo) or unpleasant (rotten fish or carrion) odours while they slept. The pleasant smells provoked deeper sniffs from the dozing volunteers. The smells were then paired with distinct auditory tones. Later in the night, the tones were presented alone and the still-sleeping participants showed signs that they had learned the smell - sound associations. That is, they sniffed more deeply to tones previously paired with a pleasant smell. Moreover, the learned associations were in evidence in the morning. After the participants had woken, they still sniffed more deeply to the tones paired with pleasant smells. This was despite the fact they had no memory of the smells or tones from the night before.

A notable detail was that although the learning of tone - smell pairings took place during both REM and non-REM sleep, only learning during non-REM sleep persisted into wakefulness the next day.

'Our results reveal learning of novel information during natural human sleep and implementation of this new learning in sleep and ensuing wake,' the researchers concluded. 'This implies that...humans may be able to utilize toward learning new information, a state in which they spend about a third of their lives.'

Christian Jarrett

Stroke guidelines

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:25:28

New guidelines for the commissioning, organisation and delivery of stroke care have been published.

The National Clinical Stroke Guideline was launched at a joint British Association of Stroke Physicians and Royal College of Physicians event in September. Promising the most comprehensive coverage of stroke care to date, the document recommends commissioning stroke services across the whole pathway and integrating services.

It includes updated sections for rehabilitation, longer-term care after a stroke, and secondary prevention, as well as profession-specific concise guides for psychologists, nurses, dietitians and other professions. New features include a section on public awareness of stroke, and the incorporation of the stepped-care model for psychological care after stroke.

Dr Audrey Bowen (University of Manchester) and Dr Peter Knapp (University of York), represented the British Psychological Society on the Royal College of Physicians Intercollegiate Stroke Working Party. Dr Bowen told us: 'We led a subgroup of psychologists who appraised the evidence and drafted the guidelines related to the psychological impact of stroke. The psychological impact of stroke is rightly emphasised in these guidelines. There is a clear message that promoting well-being is not just for psychologists, and the newly recommended stepped approach encourages developing levels of skill within multidisciplinary team members.'

Jon Sutton

For further information see www.rcplondon.ac.uk. The guidelines will be free to download from December.

Liberal bias in social psychology

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:20:05

When US morality researcher Jonathan Haidt asked the 1000-strong audience at a social and personality psychology conference last year if there were any conservatives in the room, only three people raised their hands. It was a crude test of liberal bias in the discipline, but now a survey by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands has provided more compelling evidence (Perspectives on Psychological Science). Their findings expose an irony. It appears a discipline that's often focused on the topic of prejudice and how to reduce it, is itself guilty of discrimination.

Inbar and Lammers surveyed 1939 members of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Of the just over 500 who answered, 4 per cent admitted being conservative in relation to social issues; 18 per cent were economic conservatives; and 10 per cent were conservative on foreign policy matters. Six per cent described themselves as conservative 'overall'. For comparison, a Gallup poll in 2010 found 42 per cent of Americans describing themselves as either very conservative or conservative.

Although the sample were overwhelmingly liberal, most respondents overestimated the prevalence of liberal views among their peers. This may be because many social psychologists keep their conservative beliefs hidden. In a follow-up survey, the more conservative a psychologist, the more likely they were to report experiencing a hostile climate in the profession. And no wonder - one third of the sample as a whole said they'd be inclined to discriminate against conservatives when making hiring decisions; one quarter said the same in relation to grant applications.

Does it matter? One possible consequence of the liberal bias is the skewing of topics chosen for research and the silencing of conservative issues. 'Even those who fundamentally disagree with conservatism will agree that silencing political opponents will not convert them,' Inbar and Lammers concluded. 'By excluding those who disagree with (most of) us politically, we treat them unfairly, do ourselves a disservice, and ultimately damage the scientific credibility of our field.'

The new results attracted a mixed response in several invited commentaries. Among these, Linda Skitka at the University of Illinois criticised the survey methodology, including 'a focus on hypothesis confirmation instead of hypothesis testing'. Deborah Prentice of Princeton University said the findings merely reflect the predominance of liberal views in academia more generally. Others were more supportive. Richard Redding of Chapman University said 'the discrimination must be overcome because sociopolitical diversity is vital for scholarly inquiry, pedagogy, and for ethical professional practice'.

Christian Jarrett

Thomas Szasz

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:09:21

Thomas Szasz has died aged 92. The world's foremost critic of psychiatry, Szasz believed that mental illness was a myth used to control people who were inconvenient to wider society. Hungarian by birth, he spent much of his career as professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, retiring in 1990. He wrote 35 books and hundreds of articles during his career, including the seminal The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, published in 1961.

In 2010, The Psychologist published a 'Looking Back' article on Szasz's life and continuing influence, by Ron Roberts.

Christian Jarrett

Fanaticism - a form of madness?

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 13:05:41

Earlier this year, Anders Behring Breivik - the killer of 77 people in Norway in the summer of 2011 - was declared sane in court and sentenced to 21 years in jail. It had been an unusual case, with Breivik and his team pushing for a declaration of sanity, whilst the prosecution hoped for him to be found insane, therefore ensuring his imprisonment for life.

Before the official court verdict, the question of Breivik's sanity was tackled at the 45th Maudsley Debate, held at the Institute of Psychiatry in July. The first proposer for the motion - 'Insane? Cases such as Anders Breivik demonstrate that fanaticism is a form of madness' - was the consultant psychiatrist in private practice and former TV regular Dr Raj Persaud.

Persaud labelled Breivik a 'lone wolf' killer and compared him to other similar mass murderers with a known history of mental problems, including the 'London nail bomber' David Copeland. Whereas many ruthlessly violent people through history (for example, the soldiers who perpetrated the Nanking massacre) have overcome their natural inhibition towards violence through group processes and fear and propaganda, Persaud argued that killers like Breivik and Copeland are isolated and find their motivation through their own dysfunctional thought processes. Persaud also saw a contradiction in Breivik's claiming sanity whilst simultaneously insisting on the existence of a (fictional) 'Knights Templar' group. For Persaud, if the roots of these kinds of atrocity lie back in people's pasts, in psychological disorder and poor emotional literacy, then an appropriate memorial to those who died last year would be 'if we could improve mental health services, and improve emotional literacy in society' and thereby prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again.

Seconding the motion was Professor Max Taylor, a psychologist at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University. Taylor said he'd been reluctant to support the motion at first, but then decided to think of the issue backwards from the end point of wishing to protect the public. Viewed this way, he said Breivik was 'different' from most other terrorists and violent offenders. In fact, Taylor said he considers Breivik to be evil and, whilst he would be in favour of execution, he realises that's not possible, and so the best way to 'dispose' of Breivik is for him to be placed in a secure hospital where he could potentially be changed, and would be unable to inspire other prisoners. Another thing, Taylor added, is that by labelling Breivik as disturbed and mentally ill we make it more difficult for other fanatics to 'carry his flag.'

The motion was opposed by Professor Simon Wessely, Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research, and Maajid Nawaz, Chairman of the counter-extremism think-tank Quilliam. Wessely said that the shocking scale of Breivik's crime left people incredulous and labelling him as mad was their way to make sense of his actions. But according to the two key tests - having intact reason and knowing that his actions would be considered wrong by others - Wessely said that Breivik was clearly sane. Pointing to his meticulous planning, Wessely added 'there cannot be any scintilla of doubt... that he knew exactly what he was doing'. And contrary to the arguments that Breivik was isolated and irrational, Wessely argued further that there are others who share Breivik's extreme views, and that Breivik had spelled out a justification for his actions, which whilst abhorrent, betrayed a rational mind (for instance, he said he'd killed the children of the political elite because they were already supporting and furthering the multicultural agenda).

With a final flourish, Wessely quoted from a letter writer to The Guardian, who'd taken former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to task for labelling Osama Bin Laden insane. 'Mr Bin Laden may not, by all accounts, be a pleasant man,' wrote the correspondent, 'but this does not render him psychotic, and to brand him thus merely stigmatises mental illness. It yet again reinforces the stereotype that bad equals mad.' The author of the letter? Dr Raj Persaud.

Up next, Maajid Nawaz provided a different perspective. Why, when Muslims perpetrate violent acts, he asked, does no one ask if they are mad? Why was it assumed that the perpetrators of the Beslan school siege were terrorists and not lunatics? Labels are important, he argued, and the 'insane' label takes away responsibility.

Nawaz said that when Muslim extremists commit terrorist acts, there's an expectation from society at large for the Muslim community to redouble their efforts to challenge extremist views within their culture. Yet when a white European man - Breivik - commits a mass killing, one that's motivated by radical views held by other far-right, fascist Islamaphobes, immediately people reach for the insanity label. Nawaz lamented how this double-standard will undermine his and other people's efforts to get Muslims to challenge the extremism in their own ranks. 'If we don't adopt a consistent approach, and rather we turn a blind eye to non-violent extremism, perhaps we are the mad people,' he said.
Members of the audience raised concerns about the stigmatisation of mental illness, in labelling Breivik as mentally unwell. Others were worried that Professor Taylor appeared to be advocating the use of psychiatry for political ends, as a way to 'dispose' of inconvenient people. Another questioner wondered, if Breivik is insane, what the proposed treatment would be? No answer was forthcoming. Before the debate, 48 people voted for the motion, 127 against, and 22 abstained. By the end, support for the motion had slipped further still.

Christian Jarrett

Kahneman warns of 'train wreck looming'

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 12:59:09

In the wake of the recent scandals and replication failures that have afflicted social psychology, especially in the field of social priming, the Nobel Laureate and psychology grandee Professor Daniel Kahneman, of Princeton University, has taken the unusual step of publishing an open letter to researchers in the field (a PDF is available via the Nature website).

Social priming involves exposing people to reminders of particular concepts, often below the level of conscious awareness. For example, in one highly cited study published in 1996 (PDF), subtle exposure to words related to old age led participants to walk away from the lab more slowly (although a recent attempt to replicate this finding ended in one failure, and a demonstration that the effect only worked when researchers were themselves primed to expect the right result).

Kahneman says that he is a 'general believer' in social priming effects and he agrees with John Bargh, the lead investigator on the elderly priming study, that priming effects are subtle and require high-level skills to detect. But Kahneman argues that, rightly or wrongly, the field is 'now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research,' and that he sees a 'train-wreck looming' with the first victims likely to be young researchers working in the area.

To remedy the situation, Kahneman urges his colleagues in social psychology to confront the doubts by forming a 'daisy-chain' of five labs, with each lab attempting to replicate the findings of its neighbour. Such a project would require only 10 trips and would be relatively cheap and easy to complete, he says. 'The main point of my letter,' Kahneman concludes, 'is that you should do something, and that you must do it collectively. No single individual will be able to overcome the doubts, but if you act as a group and avoid defensiveness you will be credible.'

Professor Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, for research he conducted into decision making with his long-time colleague, the late Amos Tversky (Herbert Simon is the only other psychologist to have received a Nobel prize). Kahneman's recent book for a general audience Thinking Fast Thinking Slow, How the Mind Works and Makes Decisions has been a bestseller, shipping over 100,000 copies in this country alone. It was also named recently in the long-list for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, alongside Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, and 12 other contenders.

Christian Jarrett

See our May 2012 issue for an opinion special on the place of replication in psychology

On anonymous data

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-29 12:29:23

Websites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk offer psychologists a goldmine of potential research participants sitting at their computers around the world. But against this promise of abundance and variety is a lack of control and supervision. Surely the quality of data collected anonymously over the internet must suffer? A new study by Laura Germine and her colleagues at Harvard claims not. Thousands of participants recruited anonymously via testmybrain.org completed tasks including memory and face-recognition tests, with their data proving similar to, and just as reliable as, data collected from lab participants (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review).

However, another new study (see 'Digest'), suggests that when it comes to questionnaires, anonymity may come at a price. The researchers reported that a promise of confidentiality 'may serve to sanction half-hearted survey completion rather than freeing students up to respond with greater honesty.'

Christian Jarrett

fMRI court controversy

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-02 11:52:02

A US judge has ruled that fMRI-based lie-detection evidence is inadmissible in a murder trial. According to local media reports, Judge Eric M. Johnson of the Montgomery County Circuit Court, Maryland heard evidence from experts including Frank Haist, a professor of psychiatry who was representing the company No Lie MRI, and New York University psychologist Liz Phelps, who was sceptical of the technology. In the absence of expert consensus, the judge said local statutes meant the evidence was inadmissible. Nonetheless, the case is just the latest example of neuroscience technologies finding their way into the courtroom.

Last year an Italian judge commuted the sentence of a woman convicted of murder after fMRI evidence purportedly showed a series of structural abnormalities in her brain relative to controls. And according to a Royal Society report published last year on neuroscience and the law, the number of US cases in which neurological evidence or behavioural genetics is submitted has been rising steadily over the last decade. The same report warned that a particular weakness of fMRI lie-detection is the ease with which suspects can deploy countermeasures.

This point was at the heart of the recent debate in the Montgomery court. Both the defence, who wanted to submit the fMRI evidence, and the prosecution, cited a study published in 2011 that showed distinct brain activity in participants who lied about seeing their birth date appear onscreen. However, the same study showed that making a subtle toe movement to specific non-birth-dates was enough to undermine drastically the accuracy of the lie-detection.

Coincidentally, a study published this August showed that judges considering a fictional case were more lenient in their sentencing of a psychopath when they heard neurobiological evidence about the causes of the condition, including information on associated brain abnormalities (tinyurl.com/d8ldwcm). Another relevant study published last year found that mock jurors were particularly persuaded by fMRI lie-detection evidence compared with more traditional technologies like the polygraph.

Professor Paul Burgess of UCL, a psychologist who's been involved in a UK court case where brain-based evidence was submitted, told us that neuropsychologists are likely to play a growing role in court as our understanding of psychological and neurological conditions affecting behaviour increases, and as new technologies are created for detecting these conditions. 'However,' he added, 'this role is always likely to concern the degree to which the brain scan (or other form of evidence) can be considered a good indicator of the state of mind of the individual at the time of the action. At our current state of knowledge, most people (scientists included) do not consider there to be a transparent and inevitable correspondence between this kind of evidence and the action being considered.'

Regarding the worry that brain scan and genetic evidence may be disproportionately influential, Burgess predicted this may change as the general public becomes more familiar with this kind of information. 'Here the psychologist also has a key educational role to play,' he said.

Christian Jarrett

Make the ethical everyday

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-02 11:45:03

Following a succession of research fraud scandals in social psychology, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) has published an open letter to its members (tinyurl.com/9zeycel). SPSP President Patricia Devine, professor of social psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said that opportunity came out of crisis and she urged social psychologists to 'make discussions of ethical behavior part of the everyday discussion in your lab'.

The organisation has appointed a Task Force on Responsible Conduct, chaired by Jennifer Crocker of Ohio State University, which first met in January this year. An initial report from the group is available and includes a number of recommendations, including setting up a website for replications and failed replications to be deposited, encouraging journals to publish replication special issues, and encouraging but not mandating data sharing.

Professor Devine said her organisation was also planning to hold a symposium devoted to these issues at their meeting in New Orleans next January. 'SPSP is taking initiative to develop new workshops, policies, and standards for responsible conduct in research,' she said.

The SPSP was founded in 1974 after breaking away from the APA and has over 7000 members worldwide. The organisation publishes Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, and a favoured outlet of Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna, the three social psychologists who recently departed their posts under scandal. SPSP also publishes Personality and Social Psychology Review - also highly regarded in the field - and Social Psychological and Personality Science, a new electronic journal that's published jointly with other social psychology bodies.

The SPSP letter and plans attracted a luke-warm reception online. Dan Simons at the University of Illinois felt that as a publisher of major journals, the organisation hadn't gone far enough. But what troubled him most was Levine's claim that one SPSP Task Force objective was to promote the scientific credibility of the discipline. 'Perhaps a good place to start would be taking actual steps to bolster the foundations of the science itself,' Simons wrote on his blog.

Elsewhere the influential Neuroskeptic blog complained that the SPSP report failed to acknowledge that 'enterprising researchers' have already established a website for replication attempts: http://psychfiledrawer.org/ (see also the Reproducibility Project, and our May 2012 issue). The pseudonymous blogger also argued that 'replicability', not replication, is the key to effective science: 'Failure to replicate findings is a symptom of problems with those original findings, rather than being a problem in and of itself. Good results replicate; we want better results to be published.'

Christian Jarrett

Animal consciousness

Jon Sutton — 2012-10-02 11:39:00

Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists are among the signatories to a new declaration of the presence of consciousness in animals, 'including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses'. The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, was published at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, held in July.

Written by the neuroscientist Philip Low, the declaration was edited by the psychologists Jaak Panksepp and Diana Reiss (among others), and was signed by all attendees at the conference in the presence of Stephen Hawking.

'The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states,' the declaration states. 'Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.'

Christian Jarrett

Feeling in the brain

Jon Sutton — 2012-08-07 16:27:08

Christian Jarrett reports from a conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness

What can neuroimaging tell us about human emotions that we don't know already? The technology has come in for a lot of stick lately, with doubts raised about the field's statistical methods and critics calling it the new phrenology. These doubters should have come to Tania Singer's (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany) enthralling keynote lecture, on viewing emotions through the lens
of social neuroscience.

Speaking at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, held in Brighton in July, Singer began by outlining a series of studies that looked at social factors affecting the way the brain responds to the sight of another person's pain. For instance, using an economic game, Singer and her colleagues have shown that men, much more so than women, show a reduced pattern of empathy-related brain activity when they see pain inflicted on an opponent whom they judge to have played unfairly.

Group membership can also affect the brain's empathic response. A study with fans of the football teams FC Zürich and FC Basel found that participants' brains showed more empathy-related brain activity (in the insular cortex) to the sight of a member of their own football team being in pain, and in turn this was associated with a greater likelihood that they would agree to help that person by 'sharing' their pain. Singer has even uncovered the neural correlates of schadenfreude, finding evidence that reward-related activity in the nucleus accumbens is enhanced when a rival team player, or an unfair opponent in an economic game, is seen to be in pain.

Other studies have pinpointed a brain region that's involved when we attempt to overcome what Singer calls our 'egocentric bias'. These ingenious experiments involved contrasting the way a participant's brain responded to the sight of another person being touched in an unpleasant way (for example, by a slimy slug), compared with when he or she (the participant) was touched simultaneously in a pleasant way by something fluffy. The latter scenario requires that the participant override their own tactile experience in order to empathise with the tactile experience of another. Overcoming egocentric bias in this way was associated with increased activity specifically in the right supramarginal gyrus (located on the parietal lobe), a finding that was confirmed by using transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt function in this area temporarily, the consequence of which was a five-fold increase in egocentricity.

Perhaps most fascinating of all were Singer's forays into ways that the brain's empathic response can be changed through training. For instance, when Singer scanned the brain of a monk looking at a person in pain, the pattern of neural activity he exhibited was unlike anything she'd ever seen, no doubt because he's spent 30 years devoted to compassion-based meditation. Rather than feeling 'as if' he were experiencing their pain, he 'felt for' them, including seeing them as a meaningful other, and this was associated with activity in a distinct array of brain regions including the ventral striatum, medial orbito-frontal cortex and mid insula. Supporting this, studies with ordinary participants have shown that a day's worth of empathy-based or compassion-based training
leads to differences in the way the brain responds to another person's pain: the former being associated with enhanced activation of classic empathy-related networks; the latter with areas similar to those that were activated in the monk.

'The Zurich Prosocial Game' - a videogame designed by Singer and her colleagues - has shown that short-term compassion training has behavioural consequences too, in terms of increased helping behaviour. Next, Singer plans to look at the long-term consequences, on brain and behaviour, of a year-long compassion training programme of 20 minutes per day. She's also looking at the contrasting subjective experiences of empathy and compassion. Her volunteer monks say the main difference is warmth - that is, compassion feels warmer. Writing from the perspective of a rainy British July, perhaps if we all worked to be more compassionate, we could finally get this summer started!

Playing with body ownership
The sense that our bodies belong to us seems so instinctive and immutable, but psychologists using illusions are exposing this to be a fallacy. With toy-shop props and virtual-reality sets, participants have been led to believe they've had sensations in a rubber arm, shrunken bodies and even out-of-body experiences. In a gripping talk, Manos Tsakiris (Royal Holloway, University of London) described how he's extended this line of work, including conducting fascinating experiments looking at how sense of body ownership is weaker in some people (e.g. those with anorexia) than others.

A consistent finding in this research is that heart-rate sensitivity appears to be a useful proxy for strength of body ownership. Consider a task in which a participant looks at a strange face in a computer monitor, and whenever the participant is stroked on his or her face, the face on the monitor is stroked in synchrony, in exactly the same place, almost as if the participant is looking into a mirror, but it's a stranger's face looking back rather than their own. Tsakiris has morphed the face to look increasingly like the participant and asked him or her to indicate at which point the face in monitor feels like it is them. People who are poorer at detecting their own heart rate (i.e. they have low 'interoceptive awareness') tend to say that they feel ownership of the monitor face sooner.

Moreover, these studies have shown that the effect of congruent touching (of their own and the monitor face) has a much more powerful effect on people with low interoceptive awareness. In a particularly dramatic demonstration of this effect, Tsakiris and his colleagues made it so that the face in the monitor appeared to be sliced down the cheek with a blade of glass. People with poor heart-rate sensitivity showed greater skin-conductance response to this sight, providing further evidence that they find it easier to feel a sense of ownership over that face.

Intriguingly, Tsakiris' studies have also shown that interoceptive awareness can be manipulated. For example, a person who's usually poor at feeling their own heart beat, improves when they look at themselves in the mirror, or even if they simply look at words that are self-relevant. There are social effects too - children with low interoceptive awareness become more aware of their hearts when in the company of their parents.

Tsakiris is planning a range of exciting extensions to this work, including experiments to look at the effects of other relationships on interoceptive awareness, such as the presence of a partner, and also the part that attachment styles might play.

Psychology vs. literature

Jon Sutton — 2012-08-07 16:23:15

Karen Goodall (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh) listened to the debate

'Who understands the human mind better: Psychologists or crime writers? This was the theme of a free public event organised by the Society's Scottish branch, which took place on 21 June 2012 at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.

Despite the summer downpour the venue was full, a testament to the popularity of the speakers: best-selling novelist Ian Rankin and psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman. Rankin, arguably Scotland's best crime writer, is author of 33 titles, including the hugely popular Inspector Rebus series. He recently received the OBE for services to literature. Wiseman researches the psychology of luck, self-help, persuasion and illusion, and is the most followed UK psychologist on Twitter. His bestselling books have been translated into over 30 languages and he was named one of the top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live.

Prior to the event, Dr Elizabeth Hannah, a Chartered Psychologist and Honorary Secretary of the Branch, commented: 'Ian's Rebus novels provide real insight into the human mind, so it will be interesting to see who the audience feels has the better understanding. As a psychologist, I have high hopes for Richard!'

The evening started on a lighthearted note, with Rankin, who is currently finishing his 18th Inspector Rebus novel, admitting that he might have finished his final draft, had he not committed to the event. For the audience, it was a worthwhile sacrifice as the unscripted conversation between Rankin and Wiseman provided a unique insight into the overlap between psychological understandings of the human mind and the writer's craft.

Topics that were explored included the function of novels in imposing order on an often chaotic and unfathomable world, for both writer and reader. Rankin illustrated this by recounting the feelings of helplessness and incomprehension he experienced when his younger son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. He noted that writing alleviated his distress and allowed him to 'play God'. He was told that his son would never walk; Rebus' daughter was then subjected to an accident which left her in a wheelchair, although she later regained use of her legs as Rankin admitted that he 'felt a bit mean'!

Literature, as a way of 'trying on other guises' was explored. Rankin admitted to enjoying 'acting as Rebus', as the physical and confrontational character of Rebus is the antithesis of his own personality. Wiseman pondered whether literature is a way of enabling readers to explore darker aspects of their personality in safety, which led to a discussion of the complexity of evil. Rankin recounted his conversations with prisoners on death row in America whilst researching his television series Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts. He noted the relative ease with which we can feel an empathic response towards an individual during face-to-face interaction, whilst the 'cognitive part of the brain' simultaneously baulks at the severity of the crimes they have committed.

Empathy as a bridge between minds was proposed as a key element in literature, for both the reader and novelist with Rankin discussing how characters come alive only when both the reader and writer feel empathy towards that character. After an enlightening 90 minutes the audience was left with a strong impression of the interface between psychology and literature. Who won the debate? The jury is still out as Rankin and Wiseman's skillful handling of the topic opened up further questions to be pondered as we filed back out into the rain. A rematch has been promised though, so watch this space!

Adult autism

Jon Sutton — 2012-08-07 16:16:28

So much attention is given to diagnosing and treating autism in childhood, it's easy to forget that the condition is lifelong and that many people reach adulthood without a diagnosis. In June the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published new guidelines for professionals working with adults with autism and autism spectrum disorders. The new advice provides information on diagnosing autism in adulthood and makes recommendations for ways to support adults with autism in finding work.

Richard Mills, Director of Research at the National Autistic Society and member of the Guideline Development Group, said: 'While there are estimated to be around 332,600 people of working age in the UK with some form of autism, only 6 per cent have a full-time paid job.' The new guideline was developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH), of which the Society is a partner. The NCCMH established a Guideline Development Group, which was chaired by BPS Fellow Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and included BPS Fellow Professor Patricia Howlin. Christian Jarrett

Heroin role

Jon Sutton — 2012-08-07 16:13:23

A new report from the NHS National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse has documented the systemic changes that need to be made to help heroin addicts in England overcome their dependence on 'opioid substitution treatment' (OST), such as methadone. At present about 150,000 heroin addicts in the country are on a substitute medication, and whilst effective as an initial treatment, there are concerns that many remain on these drugs indefinitely.
'It is not acceptable,' the report says, 'to leave people on OST without actively supporting their recovery and regularly reviewing the benefits of their treatment (as well as checking, responding to, and stimulating their readiness for change)'. A key facet of the approach endorsed by the report is for psychosocial support to be adapted to each client's individual needs: for example, making use of peer role models, self-help groups, employment support and couples or family therapy (where the family member is a non-user).

Several psychologists were members of the Recovery Oriented Drug Treatment Expert Group that compiled the new recommendations, including: Chartered Clinical Psychologist and BPS Associate Fellow Professor Alex Copello, a consultant at Birmingham University; Chartered Clinical Psychologist Dr Luke Mitcheson, a consultant at the NHS National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse; and Chartered Clinical Psychologist Dr Stephen Pilling, Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health.

Dr Mitcheson told us that psychologists should have a central leadership role in helping to challenge the English commissioning and treatment system to ensure that psychological treatments are available and used by service users. 'This report should lead to opportunities for psychologists to design programmes as well as provide training and supervision of staff,' he said. 'The goal is to recalibrate the system to one that is more psychologically informed and focused on client outcomes.' Christian Jarrett
I Access the report

Towards 'personal connectomics'?

Jon Sutton — 2012-07-02 11:36:40

Researchers in Los Angeles working on an ambitious programme to create a complete wiring diagram of the brain - the Human Connectome Project - have turned their attention to one of the most famous brains in the history of neuroscience, the one belonging to Phineas Gage.

Gage of course was the 19th-century railway worker who survived an explosives accident in which an iron rod shot through the front of his brain. Several attempts have been made over the years to estimate the precise brain damage that Gage suffered - no easy task given that his brain was never preserved.

Before now the most comprehensive reconstruction of Gage's injuries was published in 2004 by Peter Ratiu and his colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. They overlaid a 3D representation of a brain within a 3D reconstruction of Gage's skull and simulated the path of the iron rod. Their conclusion was that Gage suffered damage to the left frontal lobe only, just as Gage's doctor Harlow had speculated in 1868.

Now John Darrell Van Horn and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, University of California, Los Angeles have made the first-ever attempt to estimate the damage that Gage suffered to the white-matter pathways of his brain (PLoS One). To do this, they averaged MRI and diffusion tensor scans of 110 healthy men of similar age to Gage at the time of his injury, to create an estimate of his 'connectome' - the term used to describe the brain's long-distance communications network (diffusion tensor scans use the movement of water molecules down the brain's neurons to build a connectivity map). The researchers then employed Ratiu's reconstruction of the path of the iron rod to see which aspects of Gage's connectome would have been compromised by his accident.

Their estimate is that 4 per cent of Gage's grey matter was damaged in the left hemisphere and 11 per cent of his cortical white matter. Among the important connective bundles that the researchers believe were damaged are the uncinate fasciculus (which connects the frontal lobes with the limbic system), the cingulum bundle (connecting parts of the limbic system with each other), and the superior longitudinal fasciculus (long-distance fibres linking the front and back of the brain).

This spread of damage to Gage's white-matter tracts would have affected not only the left frontal lobe, the researchers said, but indirectly would have affected the functioning of the right hemisphere too. Moreover, they explained that abnormalities in the uncinate fasciculus have previously been associated with mental illness and related to cognitive deficits in traumatic brain injury. Taken together, Van Horn's team said their findings suggested Gage's injuries would have had 'a considerable impact on executive as well as emotional functions', and 'likely combined to give rise to the behavioural and cognitive symptomatology originally reported by Harlow'.

The degree to which Gage was affected by his injuries is a matter of ongoing debate. Traditional accounts say that Gage's personality changed dramatically and permanently; that he went from being a conscientious, sociable employee to a drunken aggressive waster. In recent years, however, the Australian historian and psychologist Malcolm Macmillan and his colleague Matthew Lena have argued that Gage made an impressive psychosocial recovery, including working as a stagecoach driver in South America.

At first the new results appear to be at odds with this idea, but as Macmillan explained to us, the findings are likely only to apply to the immediate years after Gage's accident. 'If Lena and I are right about the post-accident Phineas gradually changing from the commonly portrayed impulsive and uninhibited person into one who made a reasonable "social recovery",' he said, 'we need to know if and how changes in the tracts contributed. As I see it, and unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we will ever be able to reconstruct those long-term changes.'

As well as shedding light on the Gage myth, the new findings are part of the broader, ongoing mission of the Connectome Project to find out how the brain's connective pathways are related to mental function, including predicting the chances of rehabilitation after injury or illness.

Van Horn told us that several studies have already been published attempting to 'identify those imaging-based white-matter biomarkers which can predict clinical outcome and accordingly guide treatments.' He also explained that it's becoming routine in most major medical centres around the world with the available technology to collect structure and diffusion tensor imaging from brain-injured patients. 'We look forward to an era of "personalised connectomics",' he said, 'in which individual patients with traumatic brain injury as well as degenerative diseases (e.g. Alzheimer's, Huntington's, frontotemporal dementia, etc.) can have their unique patterns of connectivity mapped to help physicians tailor and customise patient-specific treatments and lead to improved clinical outcomes.'
Christian Jarrett

Parenting classes on trial

Jon Sutton — 2012-07-02 11:33:58

A two-year trial of parenting classes for the parents of children aged five or under has launched at three locations in England - Middlesbrough, High Peak in Derbyshire, and the London Borough of Camden. Parents in those areas can pay for classes using a £100 voucher provided by the government and distributed via Boots, the high-street chemist. Third-party organisations, including the National Childbirth Trust, Barnardo's and Parent Gym, are running the classes.
The trial has attracted accusations of nanny-statism in some sections of the media, but the government says long-term evidence shows that early support for parents leads to better outcomes for children.
Announcing the 'CANParent' trial last year, the Minister for Children and Families, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, said the aim was to overcome the stigma attached to parenting classes and that the participating organisations 'will attract and engage parents through a mixture of face-to-face and online classes, and in a variety of community settings including schools and children's centres'.
Information released by the Department for Education says that the classes will adhere
to evidence-based principles, including: helping parents develop secure attachment
and stimulate their child's development; using engaging delivery styles likely to engender behaviour change; and maintaining workforce training and supervision for those delivering the classes to ensure they stick to evidence-based principles.
The CANparent trial is being evaluated by BPS Fellow and past-president Professor Geoff Lindsay (University of Warwick), a Chartered Educational Psychologist, together with colleagues at the research agency TNS-BMRB, Bryson Purdon Social Research and London Economics. 'Bringing up a child is one of, if not the most important tasks we carry out,' Lindsay said. 'There is now substantial evidence for the effectiveness of evidence-based parenting classes. Our research will provide evidence to inform the development of effective policy, for the benefit of parents and their children across the country.'
Christian Jarrett
- Geoff Lindsay was interviewed in our 'Careers' section last month

Promoting the right type of intergroup contact

Jon Sutton — 2012-07-02 11:30:51

A pair of social psychologists at the University of Kent say that for multiculturalism to work, social policy needs to recognise the way our minds have evolved to respond to outsiders.
Writing in the prestigious journal Science, BPS Fellow Professor Richard Crisp and postgraduate researcher Rose Meleady explain that we have two cognitive systems for thinking about social groups. The first is fast and automatic and allowed our ancestors quickly to identify allies from foes in a world where intergroup contact was rare. Studies today show this system in action when observers are able to classify people by social category in a matter of milliseconds.
However, a second system also evolved that allowed crude ingroup/outgroup categorisation to be overruled, making it possible to forge new alliances. Research shows that this second system can be activated when attention is drawn to an outsider having multiple group memberships, especially if these co-occur relatively rarely (e.g. a German Muslim). This reduces prejudice by highlighting the person's individuality. Research also shows that prejudice can be reduced if attention is drawn to an outgroup member belonging to social categories that overlap with an ingroup member (e.g. the outgroup member may belong to a different ethnic category but the same age category).
Crisp and Meleady argue that policy makers need to recognise the kind of social contexts that switch-on the second system. They explained, for example, that simply bringing two groups together will do little other than activate System 1. By contrast, 'when policy encourages individuals to embrace new, cross-cutting bases for social affiliation, particularly those that defy category-based expectancies, then activation of System 2's coalition-building function may more readily reduce the negative emotions that inhibit intergroup contact, and in turn promote more positive engagement with outgroups'.
Crisp and Meleady's paper 'Adapting to a multicultural future' is part of a Science Special Section on human conflict, which is open access via free registration.
Christian Jarrett