The media spotlight shone brightly on the psychological needs of the nation once again in October, this time thanks to publication of the latest report from the government's Foresight programme: the Mental Capital and Wellbeing project. Led by psychologist Cary Cooper of Lancaster University, and with the involvement of psychologists Usha Goswami, Felicia Huppert and Barbara Sahakian of the University of Cambridge, the report makes a plethora of recommendations to government, including in the areas of learning difficulties, work and old age.

Two years in the making, the report draws on over 80 commissioned scientific reviews and received input from over 400 experts from a range of fields. A life-span approach is adopted, with the report's authors attempting, for example, to predict the long-term consequences of a failure to recognise a person's dyslexia or dyscalculia in their early childhood.

'Think about mental capital being in a sense like a bank account of the mind, which you're debiting and crediting through life,' Coooper told us. 'Even pre-birth, your mental capital is affected by the diet and behaviour of your mother in the womb, all the way up to when you die.'

Another focus of the report is on abseenteism and presenteeism at work. The latter refers to people who go to work stressed out - they're scared they'll lose their job if they don't. However, because they're stressed or mentally unwell, they're not contributing added value to products and services. 'Presenteeism costs the nation £900 million every year and we're going to see more of it during the recession,' Cooper warned. 'We're going to need more and more psychologists doing work in this area.'

The report also highlights the future costs and benefits to society of an ageing population. By 2071, the UK Office of National Statistics estimates that the number of people aged over 65 years will have doubled to nearly 21.3 million, while the number of people aged 90 plus will have tripled to 9.5 million.

The report states: 'Although the impacts of population ageing are most often seen negatively, in terms of a "burden" of rising costs, an authoritative study of the costs and benefits of improving health estimated the contribution to US economic wellbeing of the increase in life expectancy since 1970 to have been $73 trillion, or about $2.6 trillion per year.'

Of course, any benefits to society of an ageing population depend greatly on older people remaining as mentally and physically healthy as is possible. '...[T]he pressing and growing problem of cognitive ageing presents special challenges,' the report warns. 'Among these are the facts that: the assessment of change is technically difficult and demands unusually burdensome studies; most studies are observational; the influences in cognitive ageing are heterogeneous, demanding collaboration amongst biomedical, physical and social scientists; and some of the theoretical constructs in the field require further clarification.'

'This [report] is the first time any government, anywhere in the world, has done anything like this,' Cooper said. 'This is wonderful for psychology. It's showing the real importance of psychologists: I'm talking educational psychologists, clinical psychologists, occupational psychologists and health psychologists. There's recommendations for every single one of them in this report, about early detection, about treatment, it's all there. This is a blueprint for how psychology can improve the mental capital and wellbeing of our population. We've been given a real fillip, I think, in this work.'

Edited: 19/11/2008 at 08:39 AM by christian

This year's joint British Academy / British Psychological Society lecture, held at the London School of Economics in October, was delivered by Professor David Clark: one of the country's leading experts on CBT, and clinical advisor to the government's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPTs) programme. As well as providing an eloquent survey of the rationale and evidence for a cognitive approach to treating anxiety disorders, Clark also took the opportunity to answer some of the criticisms frequently aimed at the evidence for cognitive-based therapies.

Some critics have argued, for example, that the evidence for the effectiveness of CBT derived from randomly controlled trials does not translate into the messiness of the real world. Responding to this charge, Clark described how his team trained local NHS staff in Northern Ireland to provide brief CBT to people suffering from PTSD in the wake of the Omagh terrorist bombing. There were no exclusion criteria or other restrictions that you'd expect in a controlled study and yet the improvements experienced by the patients were as significant as shown in research settings.

Another common criticism is that, during trials, therapists are more effective when delivering CBT, as opposed to a comparison treatment, simply because of their enthusiasm for CBT. Yet Clark pointed to a study that showed cognitive therapy (CT) was just as effective whether delivered by a Frankfurt based centre with a CBT bias or by a centre in Freiberg with an orientation towards Interpersonal Therapy.

Yet another charge levelled at CBT is that outcomes in therapy have much more to do with the therapist delivering the treatment than the type of therapeutic approach they use. However, Clark said that in CBT/CT trials, the treatment effects related specifically to the therapist were modest, and were anyway mostly explained by levels of training.

What about the IAPTs plan to open up clinics to self-referrals? Clark said critics have claimed the doors will be knocked down by a rush of Guardian-reading folk from the chattering classes. But that wasn't the experience at the IAPTs trial site in Newham where patients who self-referred were more often from an ethnic minority background (than GP referrals), were equally severe, more chronic, but just as likely to recover.

All in all, Clark argued the evidence for the cognitive-based treatment of anxiety disorders is overwhelming. Across all the RCTs testing CT as a treatment for social phobia, panic and PTSD, 82.5 per cent of patients have shown a significant recovery (4/5 have lost their diagnosis), with just a 2 per cent drop out rate.

It's just as well the evidence base is strong. Clark reminded the audience that when Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced the government's increased funding of psychological therapies last year, he claimed that 900,00 more people will be treated and that 450,000 will 'be cured'. As Clark observed, that's quite some expectation for psychologists and other therapists to meet. And there'll be no hiding the results of the IAPTs programme, as integral to the scheme is the idea that patient progress will be recorded on a weekly basis.

It's a scandal of our supposedly more enlightened times that women continue to be paid less than men for performing the same jobs. One potential cause for this anomaly, little explored until now, is psychological. Perhaps the views of employees about traditional gender roles somehow affect the pay they earn. New research by organisational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston at the University of Florida certainly suggests this is the case (published in the Journal of Applied Psychology).

From a longitudinal survey of over 12000 participants, Judge and Livingstone found that men with traditional gender views earned substantially more than their egalitarian minded male colleagues, while women with egalitarian attitudes earned slightly more than their traditional minded female colleagues.

An initial sample of 12,686 participants were interviewed four times between 1979 (when they were aged between 14 and 22 years) and 2005. Men with traditional views, who agreed with statements like "A woman's place is in the home, not the office or shop", earned over the course of the study period an average of $8459 more annually than men with egalitarian views, and $11374 more than traditional minded women. By contrast, the wage gap between egalitarian men and women was far smaller, at $1330.

Crucially, these differences generally held even after controlling for factors like educational background, type of job, hours worked and whether a participant had children or not. The researchers aren't certain how people's gender role attitudes are affecting their earnings, but they've speculated that it may have to do with their approach to negotiating pay terms and/or a tendency, possibly subconscious, for employees with traditional attitudes to be treated differently because of the way they behave.

Dr Judge told The Psychologist that this latter possibility could point to a way for firms to help remove the gender wage gap. 'We, obviously, did not study subconscious biases, but it's an explanation consistent with our results. Research from social psychology suggests that while such biases are hard to eliminate entirely, their effects can be mitigated by conscious processes: i.e., self-talk whereby one can keep in mind, "Just because this women acts and dresses traditionally doesn't mean she deserves less pay".'

Other results from the study showed that traditional gender views have weakened with time, and that people who are less educated, less intelligent and married are more likely to hold such views.

Parental training and psychological interventions are at the heart of new National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines on the diagnosis and management of ADHD, published in September.

Specifically, drug treatment is not recommended for pre-school children with suspected ADHD, nor for older children and adolescents with moderate ADHD. Instead, the parents of children and adolescents with ADHD should be offered a group training programme based on the principles of Albert Bandura's social learning theory. There should also be the option of group psychological treatment or social skills training for the child or young person, and the option of individual psychological therapy should be considered for older adolescents.

The new guidelines do recommend drug treatment as the first line intervention for children and young people with severe ADHD and for adults with ADHD. However, such treatment should always form part of a comprehensive care package that includes psychological and educational components. In particular, adults who don't want a drug treatment should be able to access psychological help instead.

Other notable aspects to the new guidance include: a call for multidisciplinary specialist ADHD teams and/or clinics to be established; a recommendation that teachers with necessary training should provide behavioural interventions in the classroom; an unequivocal statement that dietary fatty acids are not recommended; and a recommendation that GPs do not initiate drug treatments for ADHD, although they may continue prescribing and monitoring such treatment once started by a suitably qualified expert.

Paul Cooper, a Chartered Psychologist and Professor of Education at the University of Leicester, told The Psychologist that the new guidelines are to be welcomed for the way in which they locate the use of medication in the treatment of ADHD within the context of a multi-modal approach, and for stressing the primacy of social and psychological interventions for young children. 'It is a pity, however, that recommended educational interventions are restricted solely to behaviour management strategies,' he said. 'A more educationally informed approach to ADHD would emphasise the ways in which teachers can exploit the cognitive features of ADHD for pedagogical purposes, thus reframing aspects of ADHD as differences in cognitive style rather than deficits. This should be an important focus for future research.'

-The full guidelines can be accessed online.

Changes in levels of cleanliness and facial expression can interfere with people's ability to recognise a child's face. Vicki Gier at Mississippi Sate University and David Kreiner at the University of Central Missouri, who made the new finding, said their work could have implications for missing persons campaigns.

Dozens of undergraduates viewed the faces of 60 children. Ten minutes later, after completing an irrelevant distraction task, the undergraduates viewed 60 more faces and had to say for each one whether it had appeared earlier or not (40 had, 20 were new).

Crucially, the students' accuracy and confidence were significantly affected by whether the cleanliness and emotional expression of a child's face was the same or different in the two presentations. If the same face was shown clean and happy, or dirty and miserable, on both presentations, accuracy was 79 per cent or 92 per cent, respectively. By contrast, faces that appeared first clean/happy and then dirty/miserable were only correctly recognised 11 per cent of the time, while faces that were first dirty/miserable and then clean/happy were correctly recognised just 26 per cent of the time.

The findings were replicated in a second experiment that increased the gap between the first and second presentation of the faces to up to 12 weeks. The effect of a change in appearance on confidence grew the longer the gap between presentations, while accuracy was affected just the same regardless of the gap length.

Campaigns to find missing children often use recent school photos in which the lost child appears happy and clean. The researchers warned their findings suggest that if an abducted child is in a dirty, bruised and unhappy state, the chances of him or her being recognised from their school photo are likely to be slim.

Writing in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Gier and Kreiner advised '...[P]erhaps parents should have both types of pictures (clean with positive affect and dirty with negative affect) available. If both types of facial appearance are shown to the public or possible eyewitnesses, based on the current study, the chances of recognising the child may increase.'

Psychologists have warned that government plans to increase healthcare choice could have a detrimental effect on patient trust. Carolyn Tarrant of the University of Leicester, together with Society member Andrew Colman and Tim Stokes, surveyed 243 patients about their last GP consultation, their anticipations for future care and the trust they have in their doctor.

The strongest predictor of trust was 'interpersonal care' as indicated by a doctor's demonstration of patience and concern, followed by past experience of cooperation with a doctor and expectation that the same GP would provide follow-up care in the future.

Writing in the British Journal of General Practice where their article is in press, the researchers said their findings indicate that government plans to increase access and choice (via walk-in centres and polyclinics), at the expense of ongoing interpersonal continuity, could harm patient-doctor trust.

'Ways of minimising this in primary care could include encouraging GPs to ask patients to come back to see them again personally,' the researchers advised, 'and putting practice systems in place to ensure that this is made easy for the patient (for example, flexible appointment booking systems).'

In the hope of uncovering how faith can alter pain perception, psychologists at the University of Oxford gave electric shocks to Catholic and non-religious participants, and scanned their brains in the process (published in Pain). Earlier testing showed the two groups to be equally sensitive to pain, but when the shocks were applied during presentation of a religious painting - 'Vergine annunciate' by Sassoferrato - the Catholic participants, but not the atheist and agnostic controls, showed reduced pain sensitivity. Sight of the painting was associated with increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex of the religious participants, and Miguel Farias and colleagues speculated that the picture led these participants to emotionally reinterpret the pain sensation. A non-religious painting by Leonardo Da Vinci failed to have the same analgesic effect.

Researchers in Austria have found that we treat the front of cars rather like human faces - attributing personality traits to them in a systematic way based on the configuration of their physical features.

Sonja Windhager at the University of Vienna and colleagues asked 40 participants to rate digital mock-ups of the front view of 38 cars along 19 traits. Sixty per cent of the participants said that they could perceive a face in the front of at least 70 per cent of the cars, and there was strong agreement between the traits the participants allocated to the different cars.

Variation in the allocation of traits was largely explained by two over-riding factors. For example, if a car scored high on any of the following 'power' traits: adult, dominant, arrogant, angry, masculine or hostile, then it also tended to score highly on the others. Similarly, high scores on the following 'sociable' traits also tended to correlate: satisfied, happy, open, submissive-dominant, child, and agreeable. Overall, participants tended to say they liked those cars they rated high in 'power' traits more than those they rated low - perhaps the researchers surmised because such cars are seen as valuable for 'daily battles on the roads'.

Analysis of the configuration of the cars' physical features showed that higher scores on 'power' traits were associated with lower and wider vehicles, slit-like or angled headlights and a wider but lower air intake. Sociability traits were associated with an upward shifting of the lateral-most points of the air intake, rather like a smile.

Writing in the journal Human Nature, the researchers said their research could have practical implications for car designers. 'How the perception of car fronts affects our daily life (i.e. driving or pedestrian behaviour) remains to be investigated,' they said. '[For example] Does one change lanes and give way sooner when an "aggressive" car appears in the rear-view mirror?'

Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for the treatment of complex and chronic mental disorders is more effective than a range of short-term interventions, including cognitive therapy. That's according to researchers in Germany who have conducted what they believe to be the first ever meta-analysis of studies in this area. The news comes against a backdrop of controversy concerning what some clinicians have claimed is the government's over focus on short-term, largely CBT-based, interventions as part of their Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme.

'...[L]ong-term psychotherapy is associated with higher direct costs than short-term psychotherapy,' Falk Leichsenring and Sven Rabung wrote in JAMA. 'For this reason, it is important to know whether the benefits of LTPP exceed those of short-term treatments. In this meta-analysis, LTPP was significantly superior to shorter-term methods of psychotherapy with regard to overall outcome, target problems, and personality functioning.'

Leichsenring and Rabung identified 11 randomised controlled trials and 12 observational studies published since 1984 that met their strict methodological criteria - treatments had to have lasted at least a year, or for at least 50 sessions; to have involved identification of transference and resistance in line with Gunderson and Gabbard's definition of psychodynamic psychotherapy; and reliable outcome measures had to have been used.

Overall, the 23 studies involved 1053 patients who received long term psychodynamic psychotherapy and 257 patients who underwent comparison treatments. The patients were diagnosed with a range of chronic and complex conditions, including personality disorders and chronic depression.

Professor Tony Roth, Joint Course Director of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at UCL, told us he welcomed the study in the sense that he is keen to see psychodynamic approaches develop their evidence base (see his review of the evidence). In this regard, he said, a randomly controlled trial by Anthony Batemand and Peter Fonagy had been 'fantastically helpful.'

However, Roth said the current meta-analysis had really set up a 'straw-man', adding: 'I don't think anyone would argue that if you've got a condition like borderline personality disorder, that you'd give short-term CBT. It's being set-up as if there's some oppositional issue, when, for most people, I don't think there is.'

Moreover, Roth pointed out that the meta-analysis actually identified very few studies that compared LTPP with shorter term treatments (in most cases the comparison was with 'treatment as usual'), and not one compared LTPP against CBT. 'This study is a polemic really. It's not unhelpful polemic - it's reminding people that if you look around, there is an evidence base. What's less scientifically justifiable is when people want to over-egg the pudding. That's really what's been done here and it provokes unnecessary arguments.'

The striking altruism of the many contributors who post content to sites like Wikipedia and YouTube for little or no financial gain has been difficult to explain. But now Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at the Social Computing Lab in California may have uncovered at least part of the answer: attention. They analysed the viewing history of over nine million videos posted to YouTube by 579,471 contributors and found that as a person's videos were watched more, they tended to post more videos, and vice versa. Huberman's team also found that prolific contributors tended to be affected more by how their current viewing performance measured against their past performance, whereas infrequent contributors tended to be affected more by how their viewing performance compared against the performance of others. The findings are published in the Computers and Society section of the arXiv preprint repository at Cornell University.

Psychotherapy delivered over the telephone is associated with far lower client drop out rates than traditional face-to-face therapy. That's the suggestion of a new meta-analysis of 12 studies looking at outcomes from telephone therapy for depression versus treatment as usual (for example, receiving anti-depressant medication from a GP).

Clients who participated in telephone therapy showed superior improvement compared with control clients. Moreover, attrition rates averaged at just 7.6 per cent, compared with rates of between 14 and 64 per cent that have been recorded in studies of face-to-face therapy.

Lead author David Mohr of Northwestern University said: 'The problem with face-to-face treatment has always been very few people who can benefit from it actually receive it because of emotional and structural barriers. The telephone is a tool that allows the therapists to reach out to patients, rather than requiring that patients reach out to therapists.'

However, writing in the journal Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, the researchers said the new results should be treated with caution until telephone therapy is compared directly with face-to-face therapy in the same trial.

Results from a Cochrane systematic review suggest that St. John's wort plant extract (Hypericum perforatum) may be as effective as conventional anti-depressants for the treatment of depression, but with fewer side-effects. Klaus Linde of the Centre for Complementary Medicine in Munich and colleagues analysed the results from 29 studies involving 5,489 patients, most of whom were diagnosed with mild to moderately severe depression. Although patients treated with St. John's wort tended to recover to a similar degree to patients taking anti-depressant drugs, the results were compromised somewhat by the fact that trials in German-speaking countries (where there is a long tradition of using St. John's wort) tended to report more positive results. The researchers also warned that there is great variation in the precise ingredients of different St. John's wort preparations, and that the supporting evidence only pertains to those specific versions tested in the trials. 'The findings of this review most likely apply to products (using ethanol 50 to 60% or methanol 80% for extraction from dried plant material) with daily extract dosages of 500 to 1200 mg with a ratio of raw material to extract of 3-7:1,' the researchers said.

There's still time to catch the psychology-themed play On Emotion, showing at Soho Theatre in London until 20 December. The play is the result of a second collaboration between clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks (author of Into the Silent Land) and director Mick Gordon - the first being 'On Ego' which explored the nature of personal identity.

'"On Emotion" is the first of a planned trilogy of plays mapping the hinterlands of emotion and magical thinking,' Broks told The Psychologist. 'We always start with a question, in this case: "Are we the puppets of our emotions?" We then interrogate the question applying the tools of theatre to contemporary psychological issues. In "On Emotion" a cognitive behavioural therapist becomes emotionally enmeshed with his puppet-maker client, exposing fissures in his relationship with his daughter and autistic son in the process. We use puppets as well as actors, poking and probing the mind's thin partition between reality and imagination.'

'On Emotion' features puppetry by Blind Summit and stars Rhian Blythe, Caroline Catz, Mark Down and James Wilby. A trailer can be viewed online at YouTube

Following the American Psychological Association (APA) membership vote to prohibit members from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures in locations where people are held in violation of, or outside of, international law or the US Constitution (see Nov news), APA President Alan Kazdin wrote to (then) President Bush in October to inform him and his administration of the new policy and its implications. Kazdin's letter ended with the following plea: '...[T]he American Psychological Association strongly calls on you and your administration to safeguard the physical and psychological welfare and human rights of individuals incarcerated by the U.S. Government in such detention centers and to investigate their treatment to ensure that the highest ethical standards are being upheld.' Read the full letter.

Few topics fascinate the public and psychologists alike as much as autism. Theory follows theory, each as plausible as the last, but this neurodevelopmental condition still stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets. Not least among these is how social, communicative and behavioural impairments can coexist with rare talent. 'Savant' skills are much more common in autistic spectrum condition groups than in the general population, and almost all such individuals are surprisingly good at something, even if this ability - for example, noticing minor changes in a room - can be a curse. In September, eminent names in the field gathered under the joint auspices of the Royal Society and the British Academy to examine what drives these talents, and to ask whether there could be a savant lurking inside all of us.

Francesca Happé (Institute of Psychiatry), who organised the event with Uta Frith (University College London), began proceedings by suggesting that the mindblindness aspect of autism may enhance talent. Imagine not having to spend time and neural space on all the social 'savant' skills that 'neurotypicals' manage on a daily basis. But Happé thinks that the real 'starter motor' for talent is an extraordinary eye for detail, a processing bias that allows people with autism to ignore the 'known gestalt', which among neurotypicals can inhibit tasks like realistic drawing. With new data from a twin study, Happé showed that it was the detail focus associated with repetitive behaviour and interests that was most strongly linked with parental reports of 'striking skills'.

Other speakers agreed. Michael Fitzgerald (Trinity College, Dublin) said that unlike typical accounts of creativity that focus on divergent thinking, autistic creativity was founded on a convergent style of thought - a narrow focus. Simon Baron-Cohen (University of Cambridge) spoke of how children with autism display this narrow focus in their concept learning, for example choosing to familiarise themselves with all the different types of apple rather than the prototypical concept. He pointed to strong systemising and sensory hyper-sensitivity as the origins of that tendency. Evidence suggests that autism is characterised by the drive to analyse or build systems, whether that system is mechanical, natural, abstract or taxonomic. A good example of this drive was provided by Ellen Winner (Boston College), who talked of 'precocious realists' - young children who produce strikingly accurate drawings - trying to 'crack the code' of representational artists.

However, unlike Happé, who has suggested it might be time to move away from a single explanation of autism, Baron-Cohen feels there could be an underlying common factor to autistic talent in the molecular neurobiology of sensory hypersensitivity. Supporting this, he and his colleagues have found new evidence of superior acuity amongst people with autism across auditory, tactile, olfactory and visual senses: in the latter, to near the level of birds of prey. New brain-imaging findings presented by Laurent Mottron (MacGill University Montreal) are also consonant with this account - his team found additional activation in the extrastriate (i.e. perceptual) areas of autistic brains relative to typicals. Mottron proposes an 'enhanced perceptual functioning' model, by which savants detect patterns and fill in missing information: important mechanisms in their talents.

A candidate for the neurobiological explanation Baron-Cohen seeks was provided by Manuel Casanova (University of Louisville), who believes autism is a 'minicolumnopathy'. Minicolumns are the smallest processing module of neurons in the cortex; vertical arrangements of cells that seem to work as a team. Casanova has found that people with autism have more neuronal minicolumns in their brains, and that they are smaller, thinner and closer together. A possible consequence, according to Casanova, is that activation suffuses to adjacent minicolumns more easily, removing the 'curtain of inhibition' that characterises neurotypical processing.
This idea linked neatly with Allan Snyder's (University of Sydney) assertion that knocking out that inhibition via the use of magnetic coils on the side of the head (TMS) can bring out the latent savant in us all. Adults receiving TMS to the left inferior temporal lobe tended to improve on numerosity and drawing tasks, and even reported fewer false memories. Snyder believes that we have evolved the ability to inhibit raw sensory input, in order to form concepts and make decisions more quickly. Creativity could stem from freeing ourselves from 'top down' interpretations and gaining access to another level of perceptual processing, in much the way people with autism seem to do .

The idea of such 'trade offs' permeated other talks during the event. For example, Eleanor Maguire (University College London) highlighted a lesser-known finding from her famous study of the hippocampal volume of London taxi drivers. She found increased grey matter in the mid-posterior part of the hippocampus of those with 'The Knowledge' when compared with bus drivers, and this correlated with experience. However, these drivers had less grey matter in the anterior part, and were much worse at acquiring new visuo-spatial information. Maguire said that expertise is a story of loss as well as gain, and she called for more research into the costs of talent.
Kate Plaisted Grant (University of Cambridge) has explicitly tested the idea that autistic strengths might be the result of compensation for weaknesses elsewhere. Using Navon stimuli (a big letter made up of little letters) and other tasks, Grant's team found no evidence for superior processing at a local level at the expense of group-level processing (results that do not sit comfortably with the theory of detail focus). Instead, other research, using visual stimuli and IQ test items suggests that the mental processing of children with ASC is qualitatively different from that of typical children, even if final performance is the same. 'They have unique ways that they come to the same conclusions we do,' she said.

Other speakers discussed the output from autistic talent. Ian Hacking analysed four autobiographies by authors with autism: Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Tito Rajarshi Mukhodpadhyay, and Daniel Tammet. Hacking's was a mixed message. 'I encourage you to read these books,' he said, whilst also cautioning that there's no way these books can be seen to be representative of the typical person with ASD. He was particularly critical of the marketing of such books as offering a view from 'inside the autistic mind' as if there were only one kind. Douwe Draaisma (University of Groningen) was similarly cautious, warning of the intricate interaction between the scientific view of autism, the way it is prolifically portrayed in literature and film, and the reality of life for and with an individual with autism. The label may change the child, and the child may change the label.

Turning to art, Roger Cardinal (University of Kent) presented a slide show of 'outsider' works, 'wild, thrilling and spontaneous' pieces outside of the stereotype of any mainstream genre. For example, there's the mimetic, photo-realistic art of Stephen Wiltshire; the erotic overtures of Roy Wenzel's dominant female forms; the 'truly visionary' alternative worlds of George Widener; and the mundane stillness of James Castle's farm scenes. 'Art is a privileged medium of human contact,' Cardinal said. 'We can begin to move beyond a superficial reading of these paintings, beyond pleasure to learning something about ourselves.'

Meanwhile, in a blind comparison, Ilona Roth (Open University) had asked experts and non-experts to compare the poetry of people with autism and those without. She found no evidence for prodigious talent among the poets with autism, but there was clearly some accomplishment. The poets with autism weren't confined to a single form, nor were they confined to formalisms as one might expect (given systematising tendencies). However, the content of their poems was narrower, tending to be about the self, and there were fewer examples of wholly original metaphor.

So what do people with autism stand to gain from their talents? Are they simply destined for life as performing seals? Patricia Howlin (King's College, London) said it was important that savant skills are developed more effectively to enhance social functioning and social inclusion. A video presentation from Darold Treffert (University of Wisconsin) seemed to confirm this: Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film Rain Man, said that it changed his life. 'These skills are not frivolous,' said Treffert. 'They can act as a "conduit to normalisation".'

Celebrated professor Temple Grandin (University of Colorado), who has autism, agreed. She said that 'talent has to be trained into employment' (as hers has been, designing handling facilities for livestock using an uncanny eye for minor details which can stress the animals). In particular, she argued that 'young Aspies' need to be taught job skills and the importance and pleasure that can come from doing tasks for others.

Given the constellation of impairments most people with autism have, this teaching might be easier in theory than in practice. Indeed, Pam Heaton (Goldsmiths) acknowledged that communication difficulties present special challenges for music educators. She's identified a group of children with autism who have excellent auditory analytical skills and a recognised passion for music, but who have yet to be offered formal music education. Heaton opined that the benefits - for individual and social development - make it imperative that music teachers are trained to teach children with ASD, and that music instruction is made freely available.

However, there is still debate over the extent to which such education could allow savant skills to flourish into something that would be generally acknowledged as 'genius'. Michael Fitzgerald has written about autistic traits evident in the biographies of history's 'greats' like Einstein and Newton, but Allan Snyder offered a word of caution from Beate Hermelin: 'There are no savant geniuses about. No savant will discover a new mathematical theorem, initiate a novel stylistic movement, or render a revealing interpretation of a Beethoven piano sonata.' Grant appeared to concur. 'Society celebrates the savant performance skills,' she said. 'But we need greater recognition of the skills like attention to detail that are so useful to industry and academia. These skills need to be nurtured too.'

-Talent and Autism was a two-day discussion meeting held at the Royal Society in October in association with the British Academy.

-Report written by Jon Sutton and Christian Jarrett

Not many scientific workshops feature a lunch-time piano concert. But this was 'Music, Science and the Brain', held at the University of Plymouth in September to celebrate the climax of the European Commission-funded EmCAP musical cognition project.

As the performer Lola Perrin tickled the audience's auditory neurons, I'm sure I wasn't the only one to feel a shiver dance down my spine. According to David Huron of Ohio State University, who appeared via video-link later that afternoon, such shivers or frissons occur when the frontal cortex dampens down a fear response triggered by some feature of the music.

Specifically, it tends to be loudness, low pitch, infrasound, surprise, crescendo and scream-like sounds that trigger a frisson. However, not everyone experiences musical frissons and women are seven times more susceptible than men. We also know that frisson-responders tend to be less adventurous and daring than non-responders.

While Perrin's performance certainly moved me, it was also a reminder of my own musical ineptitude - I can't sing or play any instruments. In fact it's tempting to say I'm tone deaf. But according to simple tests given by Lauren Stewart of Goldsmith's College, I and many other non-musical types like me, aren't tone deaf at all. We can hear when there's a change in pitch direction and we wince when there's a clash of dissonant notes. Our problem is with musical output not musical perception.

There are however, a small minority of people who are impaired on these perceptual tests, who really are tone deaf - these 'amusics' as they're known have a specific learning impairment akin to dyslexia. Many amusics actually find music unpleasant or offensive, and they seldom use it for reminiscence or for mood-altering purposes the way the rest of us do.

Amusia is heritable and associated with abnormal brain functioning in the form of a disconnect between the frontal and temporal lobes. Stewart is currently studying three generations of a family in Northern Ireland (the middle generation features four normal siblings and four siblings with amusia) with the hope of identifying those
genes that are involved in the condition.

Amusics aside, a message that permeated the workshop was just how remarkable are the innate musical abilities of humans. As Stewart put it, 'just being able to make sense of musical sounds is an incredible accomplishment.' The innateness of our musical ability was strikingly demonstrated by the research of Istvan Winkler of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Using EEG recordings of the brains of newborns,
Winkler has been able to show that babies detect when a beat is missing from a short sequence of notes, or when there is a change in a repeating pitch interval.

'We're born with capabilities perfectly suited to extracting the main components of music,' Winkler said. It's likely these skills also play a role in language development. For example, the ability to recognise melodic contours contributes to the processing of prosody (the lyrical emphasis in speech). And the ability to extract beats probably aids
conversation, allowing a person to judge when it's the right time to reply. Indeed, other research shows infants learn these skills even before they start to speak. 'Our genetic inheritance and skills are geared towards communication,' Winkler said, 'and music is an important form of communication.'

Another presentation gave some clues as to why music videos have become such an essential part of the pop industry. Stefan Koelsch of the University of Sussex described research showing that horror music and light-hearted jingles both led to more amygdala-related activity when they were combined with a neutral video-clip. It's as though the addition of visual imagery fires up the effect of music on the
imagination.

Koelsch's talk also served up some late-afternoon controversy. Specifically, the amygdala was shown to be not just the brain's 'fear centre', as it is popularly characterised, but also involved in the processing of positive emotions. Blaming Joseph LeDoux (neuroscientist and lead singer with the amygdaloids), for the persistence of this misapprehension, an exasperated Koelsch said: 'We can't hold onto this wrong notion any longer.'

For eleven days in September, a cast of five actors at Jacksons Lane Theatre in North London recreated the musical hallucinations and seizure-induced reminiscences of Mrs O'Connor - the 88-year-old nursing home resident first described by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his book 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'.

The play 'Reminiscence' raised some profound questions about the interaction between our biological brains and our subjective mental lives. While the music Mrs O'Connor hears and the childhood memories she revisits are clearly brought on by seizures in her temporal lobe, questions remain over the part played by her psychological motives. Given the blandness of her nursing home existence, together with her sense of a lost childhood (she was orphaned at age five), Mrs O'Connor
actually finds relief in her symptoms and turns down the offer of medication to eradicate them.

A related point of mystery highlighted in the play concerned the accuracy of Mrs O'Connor's relived experiences. In his original account of the case, Sacks believed strongly that her awoken memories were unembellished: 'her sudden epileptic "transports" back to the world of early childhood...were undoubtedly "reminiscences", and authentic, for, as [Canadian neurologist] Penfield has shown beyond doubt, such seizures grasp and reproduce a reality - an experiential reality, and not a fantasy: actual segments of an individual's lifetime and past experience.' However, where once human memory was seen as a permanently etched record, today's experts recognise that memory is a reconstructive process prone to errors - a fact acknowledged by Sacks in his return to the case in his latest book Musicophilia.

The challenge of portraying Mrs O'Connor's experiences on stage was met with the use of an intricate rope-controlled set, energetically performed Balkan folk music, and inventive props (at one point, an overhead projection of jelly generated a disturbingly realistic brain on the stage backdrop). A particularly notable scene featured Mrs
O'Connor aware of her doctor's real presence, but simultaneously inhabiting a memory from her childhood - a splitting of consciousness known as mental diplopia.

There's no doubt the play made for a lively audio-visual experience and that it raised some profound issues. But whether all this, the music, the lights, the props, amounted to a convincing portrayal of Mrs O'Connor's story remains for each audience member to decide.

One certainty was the scientific integrity of the play, thanks to the input of Society member Dr Vaughan Bell. From the authentic clicking sound of the brain scanner to the balanced handling of the philosophical issues, Bell's erudition was written all over the performance. He was also a shining ambassador for the profession at two post-show scientific forums, where he answered questions from the audience with encyclopaedic eloquence.

The play was supported by the Wellcome Trust, and Bell was approached by the production team through his involvement with the medical charity's Sci Art funding scheme. 'It was an incredibly stimulating experience,' Bell told The Psychologist, 'not least because I was working with a company who were drawing drama and personal meaning from the scientific literature, when as a psychologist, I'm often trying to do the reverse to find how personal meaning can be understood scientifically.'

Bell said he'd definitely recommend other psychologists get involved in similar projects if they're given the chance. 'It's fascinating seeing how people trained in a completely different school of thought make sense of the same material, which has taught me a lot in itself, and the result was a gripping way of engaging the public in ethical and scientific issues.'

- Reminiscence, produced by Theatre DeCapo with support from The
Wellcome Trust, ran from 9-20 Sept at Jacksons Lane Theatre, Highgate,
London.

Two US-based psychologists have published a list of the most effective actions American individuals and households can take to help prevent climate change - the gist of which is also relevant to the UK.

Writing in Environment magazine, Gerald Gardner, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Paul Stern, director of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Climate Change at the National Research Council, argue that many people are motivated to change their behaviours to protect the planet, but have been left uninformed by environmental campaigns as to what actions are the most effective.

American research conducted during the energy crises of the late 70s and early 80s suggested that without appropriate guidance, people tend to focus on highly visible, curtailment-based actions - turning out lights, turning down thermostats - which are actually relatively ineffective compared with more pro-active behaviours, such as installing insulation or switching to a more energy efficient car.

Gardner and Stern argue that investing in energy-efficient equipment, as well as curtailing use of inefficient equipment, is the most effective way to reduce consumption and also has the advantage of being psychologically appealing. 'Not only is efficiency generally more effective than curtailment,' they wrote 'but it has the important psychological advantage of requiring only one or a few actions. Curtailment actions must be repeated continuously over time to achieve their optimal effect, whereas efficiency-boosting actions, taken infrequently or only once, have lasting effects with little need for continuing attention and effort.'

These are important issues given just how much energy is consumed by households as a proportion of a country's total usage (38 per cent in America, including non-business travel; 31 per cent in the UK, not including travel). If an American household were to carry out all 17 actions on Gardner and Stern's list they could potentially reduce their energy consumption by half (assuming they hadn't completed the actions before, and that old equipment was only replaced at the end of its natural life).

Co-incidentally, not long after Gardner and Stern published their article arguing that people need to be educated about the disproportionate benefits of adopting energy-efficient equipment and materials, the British government announced plans to supply free cavity wall and loft insulation for pensioners and poor households, and to offer 50 per cent off the cost of insulation for all households.

'I'm glad to hear of this initiative,' Stern told The Psychologist. 'It certainly goes a long way towards overcoming the financial barriers - a 50 per cent rebate can be quite effective if it is easy to collect and if it is marketed strongly, using many approaches including personal contacts.'

Gardner agreed, adding that the non-financial aspects of such initiatives are particularly important: 'factors such as how well it is marketed, the use of community groups and word of mouth; how easy it is to apply for the rebate, how easy it is for a typically busy homeowner to comply with the requirements.'

However, while Stern and Gardner welcomed these recent initiatives by the UK government, they told us they felt psychologists could be doing more to help. 'They tend to do the wrong things, such as focusing on attitudes only, or on relatively unimportant behaviours,' they said.

THE LIST

Gardner and Stern's list is broken down into separate categories, taking into account that while costly actions might be more effective, there is also a need for people to know the relative effectiveness of cost-free or low cost actions.

* For individuals/households, the most effective low cost/short-term green behaviour in relation to transportation is to share car journeys or "carpool"; in relation to the home, it's to replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

* For longer-term benefits, with a higher financial cost, the most effective action in relation to transport is to buy low-rolling resistance tyres. The next most effective action is to buy a more fuel-efficient car. The latter action is complicated by the issue of whether one's current car is still useable. If it is, then the energy cost of producing the new car counts against any gains.

* Finally, for home-owners (as opposed to tenants who can't really do these things), the most effective low-cost/short-term action is to weather strip the house, while the most effective, but more costly, longer-term action is to buy a more efficient heating system.

For the full list of 17 actions, see the original article.



Edited: 10/07/2008 at 04:12 PM by christian

There's a closer link between basic number sense and more formal mathematics ability than previously realised (Nature). Justin Halberda at Johns Hopkins University and colleagues repeatedly tested the ability of fourteen-year-olds to say which of two briefly presented groups of dots was the greater. The task taps into a basic sense of number than e