And so this is 2015, and what have you thought? My psychological year in review 2015

2015: I embark on a project on family dementia caregiving and its impact on the mind (and body). An interesting paper came from Brazil early this year looking at caregiver stress and cognitive performance. Family caregivers performed worse at tasks assessing episodic memory, executive function and working memory-the latter effect even persisted after controlling for age, anxiety, depression and medication use. The authors also observed reduced brain derived neurotrophic factor in caregivers, and this correlated with working memory performance, suggesting an underlying neural mechanism. 

As part of my current research we are looking at the impact of mindfulness-based stress reduction in carers. It was therefore interesting to see a Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper on mindfulness with Posner, a major name in the cognitive psychology of attention, give his two cents in this area. There seems to be a sharp methodological distinction between cross-sectional research in this area, which often compares expert meditators to non-meditators, with intervention work, which (understandably) looks at more short-term periods of meditation (e.g. an 8-week course).  

An interesting paper on dual processes of reasoning caught my eye. It was interesting to see people breaking down cognitive processes into further steps that might help to tie up some of the differing hypotheses on how Type 1 and Type 2 thinking may interact (with a very quick-and-nifty graphical abstract). I previously discussed dual process interactions somewhat generally but particularly with regard to creative thinking, and I think Pennycook et al.'s ideas are perhaps particularly relevant to a longer-term cognitive process such as creativity.   

Books-wise I didn’t get around to many psychology titles this year. The paperback of "How We Are" by Vincent Deary was out. An apparent attempt to write somewhat of a “theory of everything” for practical psychology, Deary grapples with how the small worlds we inhabit as individuals can be shaken by change. There is a touch of "the granny could have told you that" about this book, although it would have to be a highly eloquent grandmother. "Black Sheep" by Richard Stephens is a very readable and entertaining book about how things that seem bad for us can often be advantageous (tell that to your grandmother...) 

Mindfulness update: 6 months on

Christmas shopping, I hear someone asking a shop assistant for mindfulness colouring books. Six months on from the end of the mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) course, how mindful am I?

Why not use the same questionnaire I ask research participants to fill in? I look through the questions on the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills? Some examples:

I don't pay attention to what I'm doing because I'm daydreaming, worrying, or otherwise distracted.

I am somewhat of a daydreamer, although when trying to be mindful (e.g. when walking home from work) I can bring my mind back in focus when it strays, albeit it will need to be brought back again after a while.

I pay attention to sounds, such as clocks ticking, birds chirping, or cars passing.

I do think I am slightly more attuned to things happening in the present-before going into the class I was someone very occupied with the future and the past, as well as imagined scenarios, schemes and dreams. This is still true of me, but I think the present tense is breaking through more frequently.

I believe some of my thoughts are abnormal or bad and shouldn't be that way. 

This touches on the non-judgmental aspect of mindful awareness. In general I haven’t been prone to telling myself I shouldn’t be thinking a certain way, at least not in many years, so I doubt the course was going to change that.

I had low to moderate stress levels going into the course, so perhaps I didn’t have the same motivation to use the techniques involved as someone coming to this technique with more problematic stress levels. Meditation is something I'm doing on and off at present. Nonetheless, sometimes when I feel stress coming on, or particularly when a broken-record stream of stressed consciousness arises, I can bring my attention back to the present (so maybe I do think some of my thoughts shouldn't be the way they are after all...).

The study I’m currently running involves a 6-month and a 12-month follow-up, to see if any changes induced by MBSR classes persist over time. Change is inevitable, progress in controversial. Changing people’s behaviour in a lasting manner, including one’s own behaviour, is tricky. Informal feedback from the caregivers has been positive so far, but it will be interesting to see what happens to cognitive performance (particularly sustained attention) and biomarkers of stress 6-12 months down the line. And I wonder if that shopper will be stressed if they don't get that colouring book... 

Related posts:

Mindfulness: Weeks 1-4

Mindfulness: Week 5+

Thin ice: the psychology of climate change scepticism

Today I participated in the local march to coincide with the climate talks at Paris.

What does psychology have to say on climate change? Clearly, behaviour change at an individual level will be hard-pressed to address the problem. Why change our behaviour in the sense of making large individual sacrifices when we can work as a society to make the things we enjoy renewable? Nonetheless, such change takes political will, and this is driven by social psychology. 

While working towards a PhD at Cardiff I became aware of the research of psychologists such as Nick Pidgeon and Lorraine Whitmarsh, who were working to gain a greater understanding of people's attitudes towards climate change. One aspect of public attitudes towards climate change they have looked into is scepticism towards anthropogenic climate change (no doubt a roadblock to political will to fight climate change).

Research by this team at Cardiff found that people who held sceptical attitudes towards climate change assimilated information in a given article differently from those with less sceptical views. A fairly classic result, although interestingly the attitudes of the two groups did not become polarised (i.e. the scepticism of the sceptical group did not increase more markedly). Another study indicated that levels of certainty on this issue were higher among "believers" in climate change compared to those holding more sceptical views, suggesting that the sceptics may be more amenable to change their viewpoint. However, it should be noted that levels of scepticism were low in the (British) cohort studied. 

Work done across Europe and the USA has brought home the idea that climate change is often secondary to other issues and concerns in people's lives. Efforts to build support for fighting climate change may have to frame concerns about climate change in a manner that chimes with other localised concerns (flooding in Cork?) to actually generate political will. Recent research from Australia*, which I dare say has broader applicability, has indicated that people with a stronger sense of global attachment have lower levels of scepticism around anthropogenic climate change compared to those with a stronger place attachment at a national level. Interestingly right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance seemed to mediate the effect of national place attachment on climate scepticism. (I wonder where these nationalistic climate deniers are going to send asylum seekers when Nauru is underwater, but I digress).

Clearly such scepticism is in the interest of those who gain from fossil fuels. Perhaps the biggest issue is to create more motivation/incentives to get more people moving us faster toward 100% renewables? As one speaker at our local event noted, if/when we make enough renewable energy to do everything we want to do, then much of this fight will be over.

*Australia has been found have a higher level of climate scepticism than either the US or the UK.

Fiction review: "Daniel Martin" by John Fowles

"Daniel Martin" follows the character of the title back and forth through between his youth and middle age. Though it is not without plot, the book is more of a character study, and does not have the same narrative drive, as the more widely-read "The Magus". John Fowles does not follow the "show, don't tell" school of describing people's feelings. Inner lives are laid out in clinical detail, either in the protagonist's thoughts about himself and his life, or in conversations like chess games with other characters. Notwithstanding the rather postmodern self-awareness of the characters, the book manages to touch rather directly on some topics.

One theme running through the novel is that of intergenerational concerns (particularly the middle aged Daniel's concerns about his previously estranged daughter, as well as the contrast between his life as a film producer and his own father's quiet life as a minister). It's an interesting time to read the novel, when the characters in their twenties would now be around the age of an older Daniel Martin (the book was written in 1977). Some passages have interesting parallels with contemporary complaints which are often presented as if unique to a post-Web 2.0 era-consider the following, concerning people taking cameras on holidays: 

"A lifelong avoider of other tourists, he had forgotten the extent to which every man is now his own image-maker. It was almost frightening, this obsession with capturing through one sense alone, and one that required...so little thought or concentration: a mindless clicking....Perhaps it was the ultimate privilege...merely to duplicate seeing, to advertise in some future that one had been there."  

The book also has a particular preoccupation with "Englishness". It's not outlandish to suggest that particular nations have distinct characteristics, including the case of one with a colonial past like England. At the same time I feel that there's little Fowles says about the Englishness that could be applied to other places. In writing a novel in my early twenties I recall wanting to write a book not about being an Irish person particularly but one about being a person of the Western World (hence the characters were a mix of Irish, UK and US citizens). As a film producer, Daniel Martin divides his time between the UK and US (as well as travelling to Egypt and Syria later in the text), although Fowles seems to use this more to draw contrasts than to note commonalities of the Western experience. Perhaps this urge on my part is partly borne of globalisation having taken great hold than in the 1970's.

If you're willing to spend some time with characters that aren't going to plead for their own likeability, this novel has enough enjoyable insight to reward the reader.

Related posts
Review: "A girl is a half-formed thing"

Performance under pressure

Speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person...number two was death...this means to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy

Jerry Seinfeld


There are various methods of inducing acute stress in order to look at its effects on psychology. Indeed, some people use psychological tests themselves as a stressor (e.g. an attention task that requires multitasking under time pressure). However, a method that's been of interest to my colleagues and me over the last few years is the Trier Social Stress Test (or TSST for short), a method that capitalises on most people's fear of public speaking.

Picture the scene: you are requested to take part in a study assessing the effects of stress. On appearing at the laboratory, you are then informed that the study will involve you giving a 5-minute presentation on why you are the ideal candidate for a job of your choice. You are led into a room with two evaluators who have been trained not to give any encouraging feedback (including non-verbal signs such as nodding or smiling), where you must make your presentation.  

This is a relatively real-world-style stressor (most people will have to make a presentation like this at some point in their lives, although hopefully to a more encouraging audience). Not surprisingly, most people find it fairly aversive. The TSST has been shown to increase reported stress, anxiety, and broader measures of negative mood in general, as well as heart rate, the stress hormone cortisol and immune system activation.

The TSST has been used to look at the effects of stress on cognition. There is some conflicting evidence on its effects on memory, with some findings indicating that higher cortisol spikes led to better word recall, but other findings indicated the opposite relationship. It is possible that the effect of stress on word recall may be moderated by the emotional valence of the words used, with more emotional and particularly more negative words being easier to recall. Context-dependent memory strikes again!

More complex cognitive tasks have also been put to the stress test. A particularly interesting paper has indicated that a modified version of the Trier with a greater social rejection component led to improved creative performance. This effect was more pronounced in those with high levels of the hormone DHEA-S, which the authors point out has been linked to depression. This could have some interesting implications for the whole creativity and depression archetype, although that's a whole debate in itself...

What is unfortunate (but understandable) in the area of research using the TSST is the lack of research using performance on the speech task itself as a measured performance outcome. It's unfortunate as this is cognitive performance that is occurring when the stressor is present, or at least at its most pressing. It's understandable as performance on a task such as giving an interview speech is harder to score objectively than a dry recall test. This would be the case even if everyone were applying for the same job, although in practice, as research participants generally choose the job they would want most as an individual, you end up with 30 people saying why they would be best for any number of different career types. Nonetheless, one could imagine a method like the consensual assessment technique being used in collaboration with someone from a recruitment agency (who could score talks for characteristics that are generally desirable in interviews across a variety of occupations).

Allen, A. P., Kennedy, P. J., Cryan, J. F., Dinan, T. G., & Clarke, G. (2014). Biological and psychological markers of stress in humans: Focus on the Trier Social Stress Test. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 38, 94-124.

Related Posts
Stress and creativity

But is it creative?

If you write an article, draw a picture, or simply daydream of an interesting plot for a film, what makes your idea creative (or not)?

Typically, there are two aspects to definitions of creativity-one is that of novelty, the other is value/usefulness. Robert Weisberg (who has written one of the most interesting books on the psychology of creativity that I have read) begs to differ. In the book "Creativity" and more recently in an article in Creativity Research Journal he suggests that we define a creative product simply as being something novel that is produced deliberately-without the need for value.

As Weisberg points out, tastes in evaluating creative outputs change over time. Van Gogh would never have won the X-factor if there were an equivalent for the visual art of his time. Music that might have sounded chaotic and devoid of musicality to an earlier audience might be a rocking tune to (some) modern ears. A technical invention that does one thing when it is invented might be useful in other ways when combined with newer technology that gets made decades later, thereby increasing its value. However, if we want to take a psychological approach to studying creativity, is there not something absurd about implying that the same cognitive processes go from creative to uncreative, based on the fact that the critical appraisal or technical needs of the outside world change over time?

A focus on novelty over value could perhaps move the field in a more objective direction. If you look at methods used within creativity research, the consensual assessment technique involves judges appraising the value or quality of a creative work-it would be very difficult (and perhaps contradictory) for these judges to set aside their ideas on the value of a creative work. Not that appraising originality is always easy, but it should be easier for two people with the same information in front of them to judge whether the latest contribution to the field overlaps with something that has gone before. As Weisberg points out, there are different levels at which we can judge novelty-coming something that's new for everyone is a high bar, but coming up with something that new to you requires a certain creativity, even if you could have relied on rote memory had you known it before.

Although these are valid points, I feel that focusing purely on novelty would lose some of the nuance of studying creative output. Certain psychometric tests of creativity look at the level of elaboration of an idea. A particularly complex new idea, even if it does not meet certain other criteria for "high value" within its field, may nonetheless draw on different cognitive processes than a more minimalist idea (notwithstanding the deliberation that can go into ideas that are very simple on the surface-hence it's good to look at the process and not just the product). Thus, even though two ideas may both be completely (and thus equally) new, they may differ in other relevant characteristics. However, I will admit that elaboration is more an interesting aspect of creative work rather than a defining feature.

Frankly I'm undecided on whether this would be a good move. At a first blush, there seems to be something liberating about not having to worry about whether a song is going to push a genre of music in new directions. However, when creativity is a driving force behind (sustainable?) economic development, and improved lifestyles, I can understand why some people are happy to live with the contradictory idea of someone becoming creative after death.  

Weisberg, R.W. (2015). On the usefulness of "value" in the definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 27(2), 111-124.

Related posts
The Zoo of the New
Creativity and two different modes of thought

Mindfulness update: week 5 onward

I previously reported on how my initial attempts at mindfulness were going during the first half of a course of mindfulness-based stress reduction. Rather belatedly, here are some thoughts how the second half went:

Week 5: On the bus from Cork to Dublin I attempt some more body scan (slowly paying attention to different parts of one's own body). A captive audience to my own mind, I run through a full bodyscan a few times-I think I'm getting the hang of it. Or at least I'm becoming more accepting of my mind-wandering.

Week 6: At class, an exercise in compassion. Initially we think about compassion for ourselves and others we care about, then for people we encounter in our daily lives we don't know (I think of a few staff I see in a shop). Then the tricky one: compassion for someone who we don't get on with. We're told this doesn't have to be someone who's done us wrong-it could just be someone we're distant from. Ever in search of challenge I pick a randomer who knocked a book out of my hand in the street and threw it over a nearby pub.

Another idea is to start using a self-compassion mantra. When a day-long bout of nasty sickness hits on Friday I am in need of a mindful approach to how I feel-I come up with the simple "I am doing well". When I get headache I find that focussing closely on my head makes me wonder if what I feel is REALLY pain or more of a dull pressure near the skull.

Week 7: At this week's class we are doing a mountain and a lake meditation. The meditations involve imagining either a mountain or a lake. You think of how they persist over time, retaining their essential selves despite the wind, rain, snow and sun that wash over them over the years. Then one imagines becoming this mountain or lake. We are seated in chairs; I have a feeling one might feel slightly more mountain-shaped sitting in the lotus position. It's tricky initially to move from visualising the mountain to try to think of actually embodying it. I find my imagination wandering to the scene from "Fantasia" where a mountain is actually a huge demon.

For some reason (maybe a practice effect?) I find it easier to imagine myself as the lake. I feel myself melt into the back of the chair, flattening out against the bed of the water. I can picture someone jumping into the lake, visualising how they descend below the surface, where the great depth of the lake becomes apparent.

I have a lot of songs in my head (particularly doing the mountain meditation). It's something I knew before beginning this mindfulness course, but it's something that seems to persist even as the practice continues. Of course, this does come back to the point that it's not necessarily about having an EMPTY mind. What still concerns me more is that I do still find a certain impatience with the body scan-when thoughts of things I want to do creep in I find myself moving through the scan more quickly.

Looking through the online course, as well as the mountain and lake meditations, they highlight some ways of dealing with interpersonal conflict. Some of the advice given here about forgiveness may be easier to hear than to practice. (Particularly if someone throws your book over the book, uurrr).

Week 8: The focus is on developing one's own practice. Some suggestions from the mighty Kabat-Zinn include a focus on one's breath. He also suggests lying in bed just after waking up to focus on breath (not likely for me-I wake up early most days and jump straight out of bed to avoid getting groggy). His closing remark is that the real meditation is your life. (It reminds me somewhat of the idea that Mass is not about being a good Catholic just for an hour or so on a Sunday). Being mindful is something you can do just you set time aside to meditate, but it can also be a more pervasive approach to one's psychological life.

Indeed, one aspect of practice I do find myself having some success is in drawing on mindfulness when confronted with a stressor. I can be prone to ruminating on negative thoughts when faced with stress (often going off on a tangent of negative things to think about that are irrelevant to what set me off in the first place). Bringing my awareness back to the present-either my physical self or even just my immediate surroundings-is a good way to interrupt any cycle of stress.

Related posts:
Mindfulness and the mind
Mindfulness update weeks 1-4