Recall exhibition: Memory, History, Mind

Exciting times-Memory, History, Mind is a new exhibition at the Illuminations gallery at Maynooth University. This exhibition arose out of a multidisciplinary project funded by the Irish Research Council I was working on between 2017 and 2019.

The exhibit draws on reminiscences included in the online archive at the Digital Repository of Ireland. A small selection of highlights from the archive are showcased at the exhibition. We combined stories and photographs provided by research participants with publicly available images of the times and places discussed.

The launch for the exhibition was 29th January. It was great to see so many participants from the research project at the evening. As there were different groups participating in the study, it was a chance for participants to meet others who had taken part in different groups and take in some of the other memories that had been shared throughout the project.

The exhibit wouldn't be possible without these people who shared their memories with us, as well as Dr Caoilainn Doyle who assisted in running the project. Dr Richard Roche put a lot of effort into bringing this all together, and we've had a lot of help from Derek Walsh at the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University in creating the audiovisual material for this exhibit. Thanks are also due to Professor Colin Graham for hosting this exhibition at Illuminations.

The exhibition will run at the Illuminations gallery, Iontas building, Maynooth University, until the 8th March 2020.

Related posts
Revisiting Recall
Thoughts on oral history and psychology
Time out of mind

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Stereotype threat and performance effects: are they REALLY REAL?

Stereotype threat is a situation where an individual feels that may confirm stereotypes about a group to which they belong. Anxiety around confirming the stereotype may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the person starts to perform badly due to the ensuing nervousness. Much has been written on the topic, and a lot of research in this area has been conducted. The extent of its effect has been under some discussion, with a particular caveat being that stereotype threat should not be treated as the primary cause of observed group differences in performance.

A recent large study found that evidence was lacking that girls aged 13-14 were affected by stereotype threat on mathematics performance. The researchers either gave students an instruction to heighten stereotype threat (being informed that there was a gender difference in performance on the test), or told there was no previous observed difference. The kids were then required to solve mathematics problems. They also completed measures of gender identification and math anxiety. Long story short, despite a large sample size and a careful design, this study did not find evidence for an effect of stereotype threat on maths performance.

A cursory reading of these results could be taken as evidence that stereotype threat is either no longer a thing, or if it is, that it does not impair performance. However, a negative effect of stereotype threat is no doubt something which at least some people have experienced at least some point in their lives. Like consciousness, it's just one of those things that you have to have to feel, man. The fact that something exists does not mean that it is easy to demonstrate reliably in a sample of individuals.We can take this as a cautionary note about using psychology experiments as hard evidence that something does or does not exist when the concept itself is slippery.

And slippery it is! Because there are so many different kinds of stereotype, there are a corresponding wide variety of forms for stereotype threat to take. It's thus a moving target of a concept, one that can change between different demographics, probably morph intersectionally, and change over time as different stereotypes fade or become more widespread. Stereotype threat may impair performance through heightened anxiety, but of course it can also motivate people to perform harder to defy stereotypes.

Flore, P. C., Mulder, J., & Wicherts, J. M. (2018). The influence of gender stereotype threat on mathematics test scores of Dutch high school students: a registered report. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 3(2), 140-174.


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What's leading to burden in dementia carers?

For the second half of my time with University College Cork, I was involved in a project researching carer burden in people caring for family members with dementia. As part of this project, I had the opportunity to sit in on a specialist memory clinic, as well as a parallel old age psychiatry clinic. Although some people (usually with less severe problems with memory) attended the clinic by themselves, the large majority of patients would have family members with them.

Over the space of two years we collected caregivers' responses to a series of short questionnaires assessing carer burden, as well information on challenging behaviours (e.g. shouting), levels of help required for activities of daily living (e.g. getting dressed) , cognitive performance, and patient safety (e.g. driving, risk of falling). Driving can be a particularly thorny issue for older people living in rural areas, where stopping driving represents a major loss of independence.

The results indicated that patient age, cognition, and level of dependence were associated with carer burden, and even after controlling for these factors, safety issues and challenging behaviours were associated with further increases in burden. We also followed up a subset of carers at 6 months and 12 months, and changes in patient safety seemed to be the most powerful predictor of changes in carer burden. I should note this data was only available for those who had follow-up data from repeat visits, so it is likely these carers could differ in systematic ways from those who did not attend again. Nonetheless, I would speculate that those who do not attend the clinic again within a year are probably likely to have experienced less change in the care situation than those who attend again (the latter are likely to have some change, leading to greater motivation to attend).

One reviewer of a draft of the paper suggested that safety could be highlighted and discussed in greater detail. It was one of those occasions when a peer reviewer suggested that a manuscript might be underselling an aspect of the findings. The literature in this area has tended to focus more on behaviors that can challenge caregivers or increased dependency of patients. However, safety issues are a major source of anxiety for carers, and can be the decisive factor in whether a person with dementia will go into long-term care home. Carer training programs and easily available information on how to address or minimize problems around safety can save carers a lot of distress.


Allen, A.P., Buckley, M.M., Cryan, J.F., Ní Chorcoráin, A., Dinan, T.G., Kearney, P.M., O'Caoimh, R., Calnan, M., Clarke, G., Molloy D.W. (in press). Informal caregiving for dementia patients: The contribution of patient characteristics and behaviours to caregiver burden. Age & Ageing. doi: 10.1093/ageing/afz128

Related posts
He ain't heavy, he's my carer

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Film review: "Hereditary" (2018)

"Hereditary" is the debut feature film of Ari Aster, who more recently has released "Midsommar", and previously directed a number of short films, including "The Strange Thing about the Johnsons". Although Aster's work in general tends towards the scary, "Hereditary" is his film most firmly placed within the horror genre, though at its heart it is a family tragedy. Ellen, the late matriarch of the family, doesn't have a speaking role in the film. Nonetheless, her death is a catalyst for the story, or rather it is at a surface level, as the events that unfold appear to have already been part of Ellen's more long-term machinations.

Grief is a clear theme of this film, but guilt is also dealt with in some depth. In the aftermath of death, Annie (played by Toni Colette) argues not only about to whom blame should be given, but also about the depiction of the death in her own work as an artist. When her husband confronts her about how her son will react to it, she asserts that her work is a neutral or objective view of the incident. From the outside looking in, the work does appear to be reasonably objective, but of course no family member can approach such personal work without baggage. The apparent absence of guilt on Ellen's part (a note from Ellen cryptically promises "our rewards will be great") thus contrasts with her daughter's nuclear family, where guilt is deeply felt and passed from one person to the next.

Psychological disorder has been alluded to in many scary films over the years, with a differing level of flippancy, sympathy or exploitation. Annie's psychiatrist husband assumes that her fears of a supernatural evil are just manifestations of a disturbed mind, although Annie's view is ultimately vindicated. Perhaps more interesting is how Annie refers to a history of schizophrenia and psychotic depression in her family during a group therapy session. The idea of inheriting psychological disorder is always in the background, as discussed in some depth elsewhere, but given the supernatural element later in the film the viewer is left to wonder if mental disorder (at least in this family) is reified as a curse. Or perhaps paranoia and self-destruction are being framed as rational coping strategies in the face of some terrible, transcendent evil.

The film indulges in a few horror tropes while also adding some striking and original imagery. Towards the climax of the film, a sense of the uncanny is realised through the use of sound (or lack thereof) and unnaturally fluid or jerky movements. This creates a sense of unfamiliar terrain that's too often lacking in the horror genre. Small details are easy to miss-Annie appears to knock over a small bottle of paint, but on careful viewing it's clear that it falls over of its "own accord".

"Hereditary" is a rich and detailed movie that bears repeated viewing. Aster has said in interview that he wanted this film to be in the vein of modern horror classics of the 1970's such as "Don't Look Now" or "Rosemary's Baby". I think this film will be regarded as a classic of the genre decades from now. Having enjoyed "Midsommar" (though it's not quite so scary as this film), I am curious to see where Aster (who's still only 33) will go next.

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The psychology of tension and suspense

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Conference review: reserve and resilience in cognitive ageing and dementia workshop 2019

Having had the good fortune of receiving a generous travel award from its committee, I visited Washington D.C. for the Reserve and Resilience workshop. The meeting is the first of three annual meetings that aim to create a consensus around definitions of key concepts in this area, such as cognitive reserve, brain reserve, and resilience.

The conference had a very focused structure, with keynote speakers giving very brief presentations restricted to three PowerPoint slides. Each was required to give the definitions they used for key terms relevant to the meeting, such as cognitive reserve, brain reserve and resilience. This made visible some of the distinctions between how people in the field had somewhat different conceptualisations of the same words. To give just one example, in defining resilience, Catherine Kaczorowski included the repair and replenishment of the brain in response to damage, whereas Emrah Duzel was working with a definition of resilience as preventing a decline in neural resources in the presence of manifest pathology.

Such differences in how the same concept may be understood or operationalised could undermine replicability of research. For any given study, larger researcher degrees of freedom allowed by different definitions of the "same thing" could lead to Type 1 errors, and even if a further piece of research is labelled as a conceptual replication at one level, if the concept in question is being operationalised in different ways then it may not be that findings relating to specific outcomes are as reliable as we might think.

The keynote presenters talks were kept unusually short in order to allow more time for questions from the floor. Although this sometimes fell into people trying to plug their pet projects rather than grappling with the key problem of the meeting, there was some very productive discussion. One  point that influenced a lot of subsequent discussion is how the definitions we work with can be looked at at a conceptual, operational, and mechanistic level. There was also some discussion about whether to combine some terms, such as brain and cognitive reserve, although my impression was that by the end of the meeting the delegates felt that it still be useful to have the distinction between brain and cognition (notwithstanding the occasional statement that came close to endorsing a simplistic one-to-one correspondence between the brain and cognition).

The meeting closed with a commitment to continue working together between now and next year's meeting. The organisers are keen to promote data-sharing between people involved at the meeting to further collaboration. They have also helpfully made the presentation slides available online.

At larger conferences it can be easy to get lost when their range of topics are so broad and aims so diffuse, but this was a smaller and intensely focused meeting. The inclusion of three key papers to read posted in advance on the conference website was surely a statement of intent, and the organisers were careful throughout to keep pushing for the key aims of the meeting to try and sound out how we should talk about these concepts. By the close of the third meeting it is hoped that there should be some broad consensus on reserve and resilience-for anyone working in this area it will be worth feeding into this process in the coming two years.

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Conference review: APS Young Investigator colloquim


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Dementsploitation

Media doesn't come to us from without- we get the media we demand. Stories that tap into the fear and neurosis of our times sell.

I'd rather raise questions than level accusations, but it's worth thinking about the number of times dementia has come up in recent and not-so-recent TV shows. While the older Sherlock Holmes sketch in Mitchell and Webb show has a high degree of pathos, a sketch from a reunion of The Fast Show is played more for laughs, albeit there is pathos (I think) here as well. Besides comedy, the Black Mirror episode Playtest plays dementia for the horror genre.

It is perhaps not surprising that the horror and comedy have dealt with dementia-these genres often trade on the collision between our subjective sense of self and the objective world around us, seen at a distance from a third person's perspective. What could be a more intense version of this than the juxtaposition of a person's subjective life story and their sense of autonomy with the undermining of this by dementia?

Where does entertainment or even raising awareness etc. start to descend into exploitation? There are many facets to this, but one point I'll make is that although depictions of dementia can be used to inject an emotional punch into a story, this isn't so great if it just leaves the viewer with a sense that dementia is the worst thing that could happen to anyone, as if there were no help whatsoever. People with dementia can have a good quality of life. The understand together campaign is aiming to tackle stigma towards people with dementia: https://www.understandtogether.ie/

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Stigma "goes meta"
The loved ones

You can follow me on Twitter: @ArchivePsych

It's all in your body, mind or soul: causal attributions for depression

Given how depression can manifest in different ways, and the multiple methods of intervention from talk therapy to pharmacological to lifestyle change to ECT, it is hardly surprising that people hold mixed opinions on where depression "comes from", and what the best choices are for help-seeking and therapeutic intervention.

A cool new study employed an online survey platform to run an experimental study of how different vignettes emphasising different causal attributions for depression might affect attitudes towards intervention, both in terms of help-seeking and treatment options. Although lifestyle interventions or psychotherapeutic treatment were generally preferred to medical intervention, a vignette that emphasised biological attributions (compared to social or biopsychosocial attributions) for depression reduced the perceived efficacy of less biological treatments

The results suggest that encouraging a less Cartesian, body OR mind understanding of the etiology of depression might affect attitudes towards different intervention modalities. Such an approach may help to overcome ethical concerns the authors raise of "manipulating" patient's attitudes/causal attributions towards major depression. Of course, it can be easier to say this than it is to achieve it, when it is so easy to lapse into traps such as, for example, using phrases like "medical treatment" to mean pharmacological treatment, even though many physicians prescribe things like exercise or going to a therapist for cognitive behavioural therapy.  

Interestingly, a clear majority of respondents to the online survey reported a history of major depression. Those with a personal history tended to rate a more medical approach to treatment more highly than people with no personal history of depression. Having a high proportion of respondents with a personal history of depression is not unusual or surprising, particularly as the study was advertised as examining treatment preferences for depression. It might nonetheless be interesting to see whether one would observe similar results in a large cohort of more clearly "naive" respondents (e.g. with no personal history of depression or history of depression in family/close friends, and who report no training/particular interest in major depression).

Nolan, A. & O'Connor, C. (2019). The Effect of Causal Attributions for Depression on Help-Seeking and Treatment Preferences. Journal of Affective Disorders, 257, 477-485.

Related articles: 
Stigma goes meta
I felt a funeral in my brain

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