News
From the British Association Festival
Christian Jarrett reports from Dublin.
The problem of prejudice
MULTICULTURAL Britain remains blighted by racial prejudice. Race
attacks are increasing, and 40 per cent of white people polled by The
Guardian last year said they’d rather not have a black neighbour. It’s
against this bleak backdrop that the BA Psychology Section convened for
its symposium ‘The problem of prejudice’.One antidote for prejudice is
to encourage greater contact between society’s disparate groups.
Rhiannon Turner (Oxford University) said young white adults in Britain
with more Asian friends were more aware of Asian people’s individuality
and were more trusting of them as a group. Having friends who had
friends who were Asian – so-called extended contact – also predicted
reduced prejudice.
Ed Cairns (Ulster University) said research showed intergroup contact
helped reduce prejudice in Northern Ireland too, especially when people
were made conscious that they were interacting with the other
community. ‘Children from the different communities should be brought
together with knowledge of each other’s differences,’ Cairns said, ‘not
by papering over the cracks.’
The media can also help fight prejudice, according to Elizabeth Levy
Paluck (Yale University), who reported encouraging findings from Rwanda
where the Dutch
NGO La Benevolencija has been playing two programmes on Radio Rwanda
intended to teach people about the causes of ethnic hatred. Among the
study participants (70 per cent of whom had lost relatives in the 1994
genocide), those who’d been listening to the radio programmes were less
likely to agree with statements such as ‘It’s naive to trust people’ or
‘There’s mistrust in my village’.
Despite all the attention paid to interracial prejudice, especially the
case in Britain since the recent London terror attacks, Dominic Abrams
(University of Kent) reported the results of a survey showing ageism is
the most common form of prejudice in Britain. Among 1843 people polled,
65 per cent reported suffering from prejudice in the last year, with
ageism, against both young and old, experienced more than any other
form. Participants tended to see older people as friendlier and younger
people as more capable. ‘We should guard against this sympathetic but
patronising form of prejudice,’ Abrams said. Again, contact between
groups helped reduce prejudice: participants with
a friend aged over 70 were less likely to believe in these stereotypes.
At the other end of the research spectrum, Pamela Walker (Oxford
University) showed how intergroup contact affects the brain’s response
to faces of another race. For example, 300ms after we look at a face,
there’s a spike in the brain’s electrical activity (the P300) that is
normally larger when we view faces from another race. But Walker found
this effect of race on the P300 was reduced among white people who
spent more time with black people.
Meanwhile, Richard Crisp (Birmingham University) reported that the
frontal lobe may be implicated in our ability to overturn stereotypes.
He found people with frontal lobe damage were particularly impaired at
remembering information that contradicted stereotypes: that a
fictitious librarian was outgoing and amusing, for example.
Miles Hewstone (Oxford University), who chaired the symposium,
criticised the media’s interpretation of research on the neural
correlates of prejudice as meaning it is hardwired and intractable.
Hewstone said the opposite was true, that neuroscience was showing how
experience shapes the brain’s social responses.
Weblinks
Information on the Radio Rwanda project: www.labenevolencija.org
Test your own implicit prejudices: www.implicit.harvard.edu
The extreme of the male brain?
SIMON Baron-Cohen, of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge,
believes autistics are good at understanding systems but poor at
empathising because they have brains that are extremely male in nature.
If his conceptualisation is right, non-autistic boys ought, in general,
to be poorer at skills related to empathy than girls. To find out,
David Skuse’s (Institute of Child Health) team tested the social
intelligence of 600 children aged between six and 17 years. Skuse found
six-year-old girls tended to be better than six-year-old boys at
recognising emotions, but that this difference had largely disappeared
by late adolescence. There was no difference at any age in boys’ and
girls’ ability to remember faces or to detect eye contact. ‘The theory
that autism is the extreme of the male brain is not strongly supported
by these data,’ Skuse said.
An unexpected finding was that around the age of puberty, teenagers
actually showed a temporary deterioration in their ability to recognise
emotions. ‘This may go some way to explaining the ‘Kevin’ phenomenon,
described so perceptively by Harry Enfield,’ Skuse said. ‘One wonders
sometimes if teenagers understand anything you are saying. It would
appear that this is a function of their brain at that time.’
The findings will appear in the Journal of Applied Statistics.
Remembering faces
AFTER witnessing a crime, people are notoriously poor at creating a
recognisable image of what the perpetrator looked like, despite
replacement of the old photofit method with a more high-tech electronic
system. For example, when participants are asked to create an image of
a face they’ve just looked at, only 20 per cent of other people who
know the face are subsequently able to recognise it. The difficulty
arises because we usually view faces holistically, whereas police
identikit systems require witnesses to work with the different facial
features separately.
Vicki Bruce (Edinburgh University) described ways in which she, Peter
Hancock and Charlie Frowd (Stirling University) are trying to improve
the situation. One way is to average the photofit images created
independently by several witnesses. Using this approach, 44 per cent of
participants could tell which of six alternative faces the ‘witnesses’
were trying to recreate, compared with 25 per cent of participants
using the standard system. Future work is planned to test the
advantages, if any, of also using three-quarter perspectives of faces,
and to introduce context into the images. If a suspected criminal is
seen on a bus, for example, a witness may find it easier to recreate an
accurate image of the criminal against that backdrop.
Hancock and Frowd have also developed an entirely new identikit system
called EvoFIT that presents witnesses with successive arrays of faces
from which they select the one with the greatest likeness to a
suspected criminal. Based on their selections, EvoFIT uses genetic
algorithms to present them with each new, morphed array. As the
selection process is repeated over and over again, the witnesses get
ever closer to a face with a true likeness to the suspect. The system
has the advantage over traditional methods in that it allows witnesses
to select faces holistically, rather than according to individual
features.
Weblinks
EvoFIT: www.evofit.co.uk
Stirling Face Perception Lab: www.psychology.stir.ac.uk/faceslab
GORILLA TACTICS
What we say only tells half the story. Our intended meanings often
arise from a combination of words, gestures, facial expressions and
touch. Consider a person waving with a smile on their face, compared
with a frown on their brow. According to Gillian Sebestyen Forrester
(Sussex University), it’s the same story with gorillas.
Whereas most primate researchers have tended to focus on either body
language or vocalisations, Forrester has used new dual-camera
technology to observe how gorillas at the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park
in Kent communicate across multiple modalities at the same time. She’s
currently analysing her findings, but early observations have revealed
that, unlike humans, gorillas also communicate using their body
orientation. So, for example, when crossing paths, gorillas of a lower
social status will keep a greater distance from gorillas of higher
status, and will maintain their head and shoulders oriented towards the
other gorilla.
DON’T WASTE YOUR BRAIN
Brain research is being hampered by a lack of healthy brain tissue to work on. According to Kirsten Goldring (UK Parkinson’s Disease Society Tissue Bank at Imperial College), for every 25 brain donations they receive from deceased people who had Parksinson’s disease, they only receive one donation from someone who died with a healthy brain. Yet researchers need healthy brain tissue to compare with diseased tissue so that they can identify what has gone wrong. ‘Like your kidneys and your heart, don’t throw away your brain when you have finished with it, since it could help save people’s lives too!’ Goldring said.
In brief
Psychologists at the Children’s Research Centre, Trinity College
Dublin, showcased their approach to developmental research. Sheila
Greene said their qualitative research with children, not on children,
aimed to discover ‘what it is like to be them’, recognised ‘the
individuality and diversity of children’s childhoods’, and involved
children in research design and data collection. For more information
see www.tcd.ie/childrensresearchcentre.
Ian Robertson (Trinity College Dublin) said that when it comes to
keeping your marbles, the old adage ‘use or it lose it’ was a fact, not
a myth. He outlined seven secrets for staying sharp into old age:
exercise, stimulate your mind, keep learning, avoid stress, socialise,
eat healthily and have a young attitude.
Kylie Barnett (Trinity College Dublin) has tested 62 synaesthetes –
people who experience a mixing of their senses – from 53 families. She
found different forms of synaesthesia – experiencing tastes from words,
or smells from sounds, for example – often ran in the same family,
suggesting a single genetic mechanism may underlie all types of
synaesthesia. For more information see www.tcd.ie/Psychology/synres.
Andy Ellis (York University) said that people with Alzheimer’s disease
could be reliably distinguished from age-matched controls by
calculating the average ‘age of acquisition’ of the words they were
able to think of belonging to a given category, such as fruits or
animals. People with Alzheimer’s tended to think of fewer words that
are learnt later in childhood.
Driven to distraction
IN 2003 a law was introduced in the UK banning the use of hand-held
mobile phones while driving, but allowing for the use of hands-free
sets. That’s despite the fact that research suggests it’s not just the
handling of the phone that impairs driving performance – attentional
factors play a role too. Now an Australian study published in the BMJ
reports that drivers are four times more likely to have a crash when
using a mobile phone, even if it’s a hands-free set, than when not
using a phone (see tinyurl.com/a3535).
The statistic was reached by interviewing drivers who had been taken to accident
and emergency after a crash. Suzanne McEvoy (University of Sydney) and
her colleagues used phone company records to compare the drivers’ phone
use before the crash with phone use at earlier, control intervals, when
participants confirmed they had also been driving.
The researchers said: ‘More and more new vehicles are being equipped
with Bluetooth technology, facilitating voice activation and therefore
totally hands-free phone use. Though this may lead to fewer hand-held
phones being used while driving…our research indicates this may not
remove the risk… if this new technology actually increases mobile phone
use in cars, it could contribute to even more crashes.’
In a separate development, psychologists at the University of Illinois
have shown that people’s performance on a driving simulator is impaired
when they’re concurrently focused on either a listening or a speaking
task. Compared with when they drove without distraction, participants
were less able to maintain a steady speed, or a steady distance, from
the vehicle in front, when, at the same time as driving, they were
either telling the researchers the relative location of different
university buildings (speech production) or judging the accuracy of
spoken statements about the location of those buildings (speech
comprehension). Tate Kubose and colleagues said their findings support
the notion ‘that it’s the cognitive demands associated with
communication via wireless phones, rather than use of the phone itself,
that interferes with driving’.
But why is hands-free more distracting than talking to a passenger?
Tate Kubose told us it’s probably because unlike a caller on the phone,
a passenger can see when the driver is in a difficult situation and
will therefore stop talking, especially if they are an experienced
driver themselves. ‘By examining driving performance of both older and
younger drivers (who differ in amount of driving experience) while
carrying on conversations with partners either in the car or via
cellphone, we hope to verify these initial notions,’ Kubose said.
If you really can’t avoid talking on your phone while driving, Kubose
said that one way to reduce the risk is to tell your caller that you’re
driving. ‘The partners may then relax their usual standards for the
time-course of the conversation. That is, the partners might not expect
immediate responses, and be more agreeable to restate portions of the
conversation that the driver might miss,’ he told us.
Paradoxically, Kubose and colleagues’ recent study also showed that
lane maintenance was better when participants were distracted by the
secondary speech production task, compared with just driving or driving
and listening. ‘One interpretation of this result is that better lane
maintenance while speaking was due to active prioritisation of lane
maintenance in response to the perceived greater difficulty of
speaking,’ the researchers said. Their findings are due to appear in
the Wiley journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Commenting on the government’s failure to ban the use of hands-free
phones while driving, despite evidence of the risks, chartered
psychologist Dr Anthony Reinhardt-Rutland at the University of Ulster
said: ‘What is paradoxical is the contrast between attitudes to safety
regarding private and public transport. As an example, in public
transport millions has been spent by the railways in replacing
‘slam-door’ carriages – all to save a very few lives. In contrast,
whenever private motorists’ “freedom” is even trivially threatened, a
chorus of protest arises, even if the threatened activity has
self-evident safety implications.’
The Department for Transport told us: ‘While we agree that using any
mobile phone while driving is distracting, we believe that making the
use of hands-free phones a specific offence would be largely
unenforceable. Nevertheless, the police are able to prosecute drivers
for failing to have proper control of their vehicle or for careless or
dangerous driving as a result of any in-car activity that distracts the
driver.’
Elsewhere, cognitive psychologists are looking at ways of using
multisensory cues to improve driver awareness. Drivers currently get
visual or auditory warnings, but Charles Spence (Oxford University) and
his colleagues have recently shown that vibrating cues can be used to
improve the speed and accuracy of their response to hazards. For
example, vibration on a person’s back can prompt them to look forward
into the rear view mirror, in order to detect the hazard behind. Their
report, due to appear in the journal Transportation Research Part F:
Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, suggests using tactile warning
systems linked to an onboard collision detector. CJ
UNDISCOVERED AUTHOR?
A NATIONAL writing competition aimed at seeking out new literary
talent has been set up by publishing company BookForce. Entries can be
on any subject, in the categories of General Fiction, Non-Fiction and
Academic. There are prizes of £1000 per category for each of 16
regions. Regional winners are then entered into a national final with
prizes of up to £10,000.
- More information online at www.undiscoveredauthors.co.uk.
DEPRESSION IN CHILDREN
A ONE-day conference to introduce the new NICE clinical guidelines on depression in children will be held on 2 November 2005 at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London. The keynote speaker is Professor Al Aynsley Green, Children’s Commissioner for England.
- Call 020 7977 6654 for details.
US psychologists concerned about violent video games
THE American Psychological Association has called on violence to be
reduced in all video games designed for children and young people. Its
Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media made the
policy announcement after reviewing research literature showing that
violence in video games leads to increased aggressive thoughts,
aggressive behaviour and angry feelings in young players.
Because these effects can be mitigated by teaching children to
distinguish better between fantasy and reality, the committee also
called for parents and teachers to help young people be more critical
of the games they play.
Reacting to the announcement, Professor Barrie Gunter, Director of the
Centre for Mass Communications Research at the University of Leicester,
told us: ‘Differences in the underlying epistemologies of media
research that have dominated in the US and Europe have meant that the
results of media effects research have been more readily accepted in
the US. Despite these differences in viewpoint, it is nevertheless the
case that a significant body of research exists on media violence based
upon psychological experimentation and large-scale, one-off or
repeat-panel surveys that collectively has indicated links between
exposure and enhanced aggressive disposition or propensities to enact
aggressively in certain circumstances, especially ones in which an
individual is provoked by another person.’
Professor Gunter said less research had been conducted on the
psychological effects of violent video games than had been conducted on
TV and film violence, but that technological advances had undoubtedly
made the games more sophisticated and psychologically powerful. He said
people already predisposed to aggression who play games intensively are
more likely to be affected by the violence in games.
‘To the extent that this prognosis is accurate, and initial research
evidence with video game players suggests that it could be, then it
does support the call for close monitoring of video game themes,
experiences and effects in the future, especially as the games
themselves become more sophisticated technically and in terms of
production quality.’ Gunter said. CJ
Bringing psychological support to Iraq
TWO and a half years after Baghdad fell to US forces, psychological
support and research in Iraq remains virtually non-existent.
Psychologists from overseas are deterred by the continuing violence,
while resident psychologists tend to be trained to graduate level only,
and so lack clinical expertise. According to a recent report on the
health situation in Iraq by UK-based charity Medact, just 1 per cent of
consultant grade doctors in Iraq are psychiatrists, compared with 13
per cent in the UK. ‘Community based mental health services are almost
non-existent and people do not consult until their condition becomes
chronic,’ the report says.
However, efforts have been made to improve mental health support for
Iraqi citizens. Psychologist Dr Amer Hosin of London Metropolitan
University told us that in July 2004 in Jordan, and the following month
in Istanbul, several Iraqi psychiatrists and doctors were given
training in PTSD in children, trauma rehabilitation and child
psychiatry. The first workshop, held in association with the
Psychosocial Trauma Centre, University of Missouri Medical School, was
sponsored by the Arab Medical Union in Europe and GlaxoSmithKline
(regional office, Amman). The WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office
sponsored the Istanbul meeting. Lack of funding meant Iraqi delegates
were unable to attend a third workshop held earlier this year in the
United Arab Emirates.
Consultant psychiatrist Dr Riadh Abed at Rotherham District General
Hospital is chair of the newly formed Iraqi Mental Health Forum (IMHF),
‘an association for all mental health professionals who may wish to
offer their help to Iraq’. He told us one probable reason why more
British psychiatrists than psychologists are involved in Iraq is the
relatively larger number of British psychiatrists of Iraqi origin. The
IMHF were due to hold a meeting in London in September to discuss ways
of improving the mental health situation in Iraq.
Meanwhile, consultant psychiatrist Dr Majid al-Yassiri of the South
West London and St George’s Mental Health Trust chairs the London-based
Centre for Psychosocial Services in Iraq. About 18 months ago his
organisation established the Centre for the Treatment of Survivors of
Torture in Baghdad, which has treated over 300 patients to date. Dr
al-Yassiri told the BBC: ‘There are efforts to organise research
looking at mental health services, what would be feasible economically
and culturally. There are a lot of things happening. But it will take
years.’ CJ
Psychology and the music of Michael Tippett
FEW composers have acknowledged the role of psychology in their
creative endeavour as consciously and overtly as the English composer
Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this year.
Tippett embraced the modern age wholeheartedly, but psychology was
central to his œuvre. For example, one of the main characters in
Tippett’s third opera The Knot Garden is Mangus, a psychoanalyst, and
Jung had great personal and professional significance for Tippett. A
reading of Psychological Types (1921) was instrumental in Tippett’s
personal and creative transformation in the 1930s. Many of his works,
most notably his first opera The Midsummer Marriage, make extensive use
of Jungian concepts of myth, archetype and individuation.
The synthesis of psychology and musical composition that we find in
Tippett’s work offers unique insights that are not available through
music or psychology alone. Indeed the vision that his works continue to
express transcends the limitations of Jungian psychology and
communicates his experience of the human condition through the
universal language of music.
- Eugene Sadler-Smith is Professor of Management Development and
Organisational Behaviour, School of Management, University of Surrey.
E-mail: [email protected].
A full article by Eugene Sadler-Smith on psychology and the music of
Michael Tippett can be found on the website only, under this month’s
issue. This is part of a continued attempt to integrate our print and
web coverage and to offer something extra to members. Web-only material
is not peer-reviewed, allowing us to deal more effectively with
time-sensitive issues. The website can also host longer articles than
we have room for in print, particularly at a time when submission rates
and advertising levels remain high. If you are interested in writing a
web-only article, e-mail the editor on [email protected].
As part of the Tippett centenary celebrations, the Royal Opera House in
Covent Garden will stage Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage from 31
October to 18 November. For more information see www.tippett100.com.
How babies lose the rhythm
BABIES have been shown to be better than adults at differentiating
between foreign speech sounds, and at distinguishing both between
non-human primate faces, and between the faces of people from a
different racial group. Similarly, research has shown that Western
six-month-old babies are also better than Western adults at perceiving
differences in foreign, non-Western music. Now Erin Hannon at Cornell
University and Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, have shown
this ability is already degraded by 12 months.
Like adults, but unlike six-month-olds, 52 12-month-old infants were
unable to tell the difference between a Balkan folk-dance melody with
an intact pattern of beats and
a modified version with a disrupted beat pattern – something they and
Western adults were, however, able to do with conventional Western
music that has a simpler rhythmic structure (music samples available at
tinyurl.com/b5pnq). ‘By the time babies
are 12-months-old, they much more closely resemble adults who are more
sensitive to rhythms in their own culture’s music than to rhythms in a
foreign musical culture,’ Hannon said.
However, in a further experiment, Hannon and Trehub showed that after
the 12-month-olds were exposed to the Balkan music twice a day for two
weeks, their ability to distinguish between beat-disrupted and
non-disrupted versions of the folk music recovered to match the ability
shown by Western six-month-olds. In contrast, Western adults didn’t
benefit from exposure to the foreign music. ‘Infants’ representations
of musical meter [the underlying pattern of strong and weak beats] may
be considerably less robust [than adults’] and consequently, more
susceptible to modification,’ the authors said. ‘Adults become less
sensitive to foreign rhythms because they become more efficient at
processing familiar rhythmic structures of their own culture – this is
natural and adaptive,’ Hannon added.
‘Early learning about faces and voices is often viewed as evidence of
their social and biological significance. [Now] music must be added to
the list of socially and biologically significant stimuli,’ the authors
concluded in their report on the work, ‘or it must be acknowledged that
the phenomenon of rapid perceptual attunement coupled with early
flexibility is more widespread than is currently believed.’
To judge whether infants could distinguish between two melodies, the
researchers exploited the fact that babies are known to look longer at
novel stimuli. Melodies were paired with computer monitors showing a
David Attenborough nature programme. The babies were acclimatised to
the unmodified melodies, then they were introduced to the
beat-disrupted version. If they could detect the melody had been
altered, it was assumed they would look longer at the monitor playing
the new version than the monitor playing the unmodified version.
The study is published in the 30 August issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (tinyurl.com/a64kz). CJ
DYSLEXIA Myth?
DYSLEXIA will continue to hit the headlines this month, with a conference under the banner ‘The Death of Dyslexia?’ (see tinyurl.com/cly5j).
Debate raged about the scientific status of dyslexia following an
article by Society member Professor Julian Elliott (Durham University)
in the Times Educational Supplement, followed by a Channel 4
documentary The Dyslexia Myth. In the article Professor Elliott said
‘there is no consensus about how it should be defined or what
diagnostic criteria should be used’, and ‘a diagnosis of dyslexia tells
us virtually nothing about how best the individual can be helped to
become a better reader’. He argues that it is hardly surprising that
‘the widespread, yet wholly erroneous, belief that dyslexics are
intellectually bright but poor readers would create a strong, sometimes
impassioned demand to be accorded the dyslexic label’.
Although there was much comment following the article, hardly any of it
came from other psychologists. Send your views to ‘Letters’ at
[email protected], or contribute to our forum via www.thepsychologist.org.uk. JS
Graphics pack for the visually impaired
PSYCHOLOGISTS at the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams (NCTD)
have developed and evaluated a ‘Core Graphics Pack’ for psychology, to
make the visual aspects of British psychology courses more accessible
for blind and partially sighted students.Last year the NCTD appealed to
Psychologist readers for help with their project (‘Get in touch about
graphics’, The Psychologist, March 2004; see tinyurl.com/ey353).
Consultation with blind and partially sighted students, psychology
lecturers and other curriculum specialists, led to a pack of 54 key
images in a tactile format, covering the BPS core domains.
Dr Gemma Gray (NCTD) said: ‘Several higher education institutions have
already purchased their pack, in line with the Disability
Discrimination Act guidance for advance preparation of accessible
materials for disabled students.’ JS
- You can order a pack from www.nctd.org.uk/cgp.
For the research, design and evaluation of the pack, see Gray &
Morley Wilkins (2005) in the British Journal of Visual Impairment, 23,
31–37.
From the Research Digest
The Society’s free Research Digest service now has around 14,800 subscribers. To join them, send a message to [email protected]. Here’s a sample, by the Digest editor Christian Jarrett.
WHERE DID ALL THE MEMORIES GO?
What’s your earliest memory? If you’re an adult, it’s unlikely to be
from before you were three and a half to four years old. So what
happens to your memories from before that age? It’s not that you never
had any: two- and three-year-olds gladly talk about events from over a
year ago, suggesting these earlier events were once encoded in verbally
accessible long-term memory.
Carole Peterson and colleagues at the Memorial University of Queensland
in Canada wondered at what age these earlier memories become
inaccessible. Perhaps younger children have access to earlier memories
than teenagers and adults do. So they asked 128 children and teenagers
aged from six to nineteen about their earliest memory.
They found children aged six to nine years had earlier first memories
(from when they were about three) than the older children and
teenagers, but that beyond age 10 there was no difference: a typical
10-year-old’s first memory was no earlier than a typical 19-year-old’s,
usually being from when they were around three and a half to four years
old. So what happens to these earlier memories when children reach the
age of 10?
Peterson and colleagues don’t have the answer: ‘…this report adds to
the paradox,’ they sai
(Please note that some pictures may have been removed for copyright reasons)
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