The best job you can possibly do

The day began, as the best student-focused events do, with a promise to explain why psychology is the best job you can possibly do. Dr Fiona Fylan (Brainbox Research) outlined a problem of real significance – the thousands of people dying on British roads each year – and then turned to a perhaps unlikely source for answers, in health psychology.

To this young audience, driving means freedom, independence. Yet unlike just about any career stretching out before them, driving comes with no CPD. Cars change, highways change, yet Dr Fylan says ‘nobody does anything about it’. Driver and rider education is focused on basic vehicle control; the test doesn’t consider the context of driving, the impact of personal characteristics etc. Fylan explained that health psychologists can identify target behaviours, review the literature, identify population sub-groups, define theoretical models and understand barriers, and then design / evaluate interventions. Her Integrated Driver Model considers the norms, attitudes, self-identity and biases that can increase risk on the roads. Then Fylan described the different types of speeding driver identified in her Department for Transport report, ranging from ‘Sleepy’ (didn’t know they were speeding) through ‘Grumpy’ (more positive attitudes to speeding) to ‘Happy’ (often the younger drivers, who actively enjoy taking risks and breaking rules). An intervention Fylan ran with a focus on 20mph zones successfully challenged attitudes, gave insight and even led to drivers becoming advocates for better behaviour. Unusually, there was a particularly positive impact on male drivers.

Dr Bhismadev Chakrabarti (University of Reading) took to the stage with an overhead pleading ‘Like me’ which, followed by the standard academic colon, promised a look at ‘the role of imitation and reward in understanding social cognition and autism.’ Dr Chakrabarti’s career began with genes and molecules, and he reassured the audience ‘we do see the light at different points in our life.’

The word ‘like’, according to Chakrabarti, presents an interesting case: It can refer both to a rewarding stimulus (e.g. ‘I like cake) and a case of imitation (e.g. ‘I will eat like a horse’). These two processes of imitation and reward are intricately linked from very early on in human development. Early interactions between caregiver and infant use reciprocal imitation that strengthens to bond between the two, arguably through increasing their mutual reward value. As adults, we tend to prefer those who imitate us more, and imitate those who we prefer more. Chakrabarti went on to discuss the behavioural, psychophysiological and neuroimaging studies that led his lab to develop this theoretical model linking imitation and reward. For example, he found that genetic variation in the cannabinoid receptor CNR1 (involved in reward processing) modulates reward response, gaze duration (to happy faces) and trait empathy.

Chakrabarti ended with emerging evidence that atypical coupling between imitation and reward might provide a vital clue to understanding some of the key features of autism, and he had a take-home message for the audience of budding psychologists: ‘never trust one experiment or one technique’.

Before lunch, Professor Susan Golombok (Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge) revisited her talk from this year’s Annual Conference on parents and children in new family forms (including lesbian and gay parents, assisted reproduction and surrogacy). Her optimistic conclusion, that children are most likely to flourish in warm, supportive, stable families, whatever their structure, is one that is well worth repeating.

Professor Bruce Hood (University of Bristol) began his talk with a call to ‘spread the word, spread expertise, talk to each other’ via his Speakezee website. Hood is a passionate science communicator, and his most recent book is an attempt to solve a conundrum: that the human brain has actually shrunk in size over the past 20,000 years.

Hood turned to Charles Darwin for answers, and his prediction that ‘Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation’. The brain apparently lost around a tennis ball of volume around the end of the last Ice Age, when humans experienced a change in environment and lifestyle and began to domesticate. Brains shrink in domesticated animals too, and Hood’s theory is that changes in testosterone and metabolic processes are behind this.

YouTube videos (always a winner) illustrated Professor Hood’s point that a lot of development is parents teaching their children the skills that they need to have to be accepted in the tribe. Demonstrations of ‘baby morality plays’ (Kiley Hamlin) and prosocial toddlers (Felix Warneken) drew plenty of ‘awws’ from the crowd, but Hood jokingly warned ‘they’re Machiavellian… they’re not promiscuously social, they’re just trying to find out who the good guys are.’

Hood concluded with a view on our ‘brave new social world’: he says that self and identity are being challenged by a new ability to communicate across time and space in our modern networked world. ‘We’re becoming preoccupied by the validation of others.’

Closing the day was Dr Nicholas Blagden (Nottingham Trent University), with a call for the assembled students to engage critically with whether we can rehabilitate sex offenders. Dr Bladgen vividly described the unsettling nature of work with this highest risk, highest need group. After an assessment, he may think ‘I could imagine going for a beer with this guy in a different context – what does that actually say about me?’ Anyone working in the area needs to learn to separate the person from the act, and realise that sex offenders are actually the most diverse of offending groups. By and large, sex offenders actually have a low base rate of reoffending, regardless of treatment, but Blagden’s work aims to get this even lower by focusing on dynamic risk factors such as impulsivity and poor problem solving. The ‘Core Programme’ considers healthy sexual functioning (masturbating a dozen times a day is not ideal), and how offenders often promote children’s relationships and emotions to adult status (‘she was my affair’). Interestingly, Blagden says those that deny their offending are actually less  likely to recidivate: ‘a lot of time and effort goes into getting offenders to take responsibility, but it’s not actually related to reoffending’.

This is perhaps because admitting offences often leads to a loss of network and status, and people are more likely to offend if they are isolated. This leads Blagden to conclude that community engagement is key, and this is ‘a difficult message to sell’. He referred to efforts in Germany with Project Dunkelfeld, and his own charity Safer Living Foundation. In ‘Circles of Support’, groups of 4-6 volunteers befriend a high risk sex offender being released from prison into the community. To end the day, there could be no better illustration of the deep, dark and endlessly fascinating ocean that so many of these psychology students could end up plunging into.

- The London event takes place on 1 December. For more from the speakers at this year’s events, see our special digital edition.