the psychologist vol 28 no 4 april 2015 www.thepsychologist.org.uk What has neuroscience ever done for us? Jonathan Roiser considers the case of mental health letters 254 the exciting side of boredom 278 news 264 seeing through the double blind 288 careers 318 the power of personality 296 reviews 326 looking back: Baddeley on memory 334 Contact The British Psychological Society the psychologist... 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR ...features 0116 254 9568 www.bps.org.uk The Psychologist www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.psychapp.co.uk [email protected] What has neuroscience ever done for us? 284 tinyurl.com/thepsychomag Jonathan Roiser (winner of the Society’s Spearman Medal 2013) considers the case of @psychmag mental health Advertising The exciting side of boredom 278 Reach 50,000 psychologists. Our journalist Ella Rhodes speaks to Display Aaron Hinchcliffe psychologists who think boredom has had 020 7880 7661 a bad press [email protected] Recruitment (in print and online at www.psychapp.co.uk) 284 Seeing through the double blind 288 Giorgio Romano 020 7880 7556 A randomised control trial is quality science, [email protected] right? Not necessarily. Lewis Killin and Sergio Della Sala explain (see also ‘interview’) March 2014 issue 52,574 dispatched The power of personality 296 John D. Mayer argues that ‘personal Printed by intelligence’ shapes our lives Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled New voices: Calling time on Alzheimer’s 300 paper. Please re-use or recycle. Could circadian rhythms be the key? ISSN 0952-8229 Brianne Kent with the latest in our series for first-time authors Cover The Trumpeting Brain ...debates created by Alexander Leemans 278 www.providi-lab.org letters 254 White matter fibre tract pathways making writing readable; legal highs; dyscalculia; shown with different colours and repatriation; autism; and more widths to emphasise the local degree of uncertainty along their trajectories. The trumpet-shaped ending when pathways are projecting into cortical regions represents the more complex The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum for architectural organisation than communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object the coherently aligned white of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’. matter fibre bundles. © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society Managing Editor Jon Sutton Journalist Ella Rhodes unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Production Mike Thompson Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). For further information Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson about copyright and obtaining Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff permissions, e-mail Interviews Gail Kinman Reviews Emma Norris Viewpoints Catherine Loveday [email protected]. International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus the psychologist vol 28 no 4 april 2015 the issue ...reports Piecing together the puzzle of mind and behaviour is no simple task, so news 264 it is no surprise that we regularly the business of people; new podcasts; action on austerity; whistleblowing; journal carry articles that make use of bans null hypothesis significance testing; behaviour change event; and more various explanatory levels in attempting this. What does surprise society 304 me is the response these often get. President’s column; Society milestones; Scottish Branch event; and more My own sense is that alarmist fears over reductionism can lead the more ...digests socially and politically inclined to throw the neuroscientific baby out visual illusions and open-mindedness; recruitment; six forms of resistance in with the bathwater, particularly Milgram’s studies; effective teaching; when psychotherapy doesn’t work; and more, around mental health; the more in the latest from our free Research Digest (see www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog). biologically inclined, on the other For the first episode of the Research Digest podcast PsychCrunch, see hand, tend to take it as read that http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/02/episode-one.html 272 multiple factors act on our brains. On p.284, Jonathan Roiser ...meets argues that psychology and neuroscience have each ‘much to interview 292 learn from the other, since they Sergio Della Sala lets Lance Workman into his world to dispel some mind address the same questions but in a myths and debunk pseudoscience (see also p.288) complementary fashion, at different levels of explanation. Ultimately they careers 318 require integration: “mindless” we hear about the journey of a psychologist in public health from neuroscience and “brainless” Amanda Bunten; and we get three perspectives on volunteering, from psychology are both incomplete Samara Aziz, Sahdia Parveen and Jan R. Oyebode explanatory frameworks.’ To me, the one on one 336 same sentiment, applied within with Sue Llewelyn, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University psychology, should be uncontroversial. So why does past experience tell me it’s anything but? ...reviews Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag How I Learned to Drive; The Domesticated Brain; Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory; new podcasts; The Secret Life of Four-Year-Olds; new Jon Ronson book; and more 326 326 ...looks back How it all began 334 Alan Baddeley describes the origins of the multi-component model of working memory Two years ago The Psychologist and Digest Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk Editorial Advisory Committee for our archive, Catherine Loveday (Chair), Phil Banyard, including our Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Harriet Gross, special issue on Rowena Hill, Stephen McGlynn, Tony humour and Big picture centre-page pull-out Wainwright, Peter Wright laughter A baby’s view of the protoface. Punit Shah is the winner of our ‘Big Picture’ competition. read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk Making writing readable LETTERS Simon Oxenham and Jon Sutton audience and try to write in smaller words some targets to achieve. (‘Words and sorcery’, March 2015) for bigger circles.’ In a recent study Barbic et al. (2015) lucidly considered the causes and Such advice is not practical. We need calculated the readability of 504 articles consequences of bad writing in something more basic, and some ways of in psychiatry journals and came up with psychology. They provided several enforcing it. First of all I recommend that mean Flesch scores of 5.66, 4.14 and 5.41 quotations from psychologists who had writers measure for the abstracts, eventually seen the light. But in their the readability of introductions and methods four-page article they only provided one their prose by sections. Earlier my the applying psychologist colleagues and I (Hartley, paragraph telling writers what to do about vol 28 no 3 march 2015 it: ‘…take time over your writing: it a standard www.thepsychologist.org.uk Pennebaker & Fox, 2003) matters. Don’t drain it of colour. Put readability measured the readability of yourself and others back into the worlds formula. Next, these same sections for you write about. Above all consider your we need to set articles in 80 educational From a mature student perspective, reading ‘Words and sorcery’ this is something which in the March edition of The Psychologist was a breath of fresh air. begins at the undergraduate Throughout almost the entirety of my degree I wondered if I was level. In terms of my own the only person questioning why academics sometimes explain experience, I have had a straightforward concepts in such highly convoluted terms. At lifelong passion for writing, Words and first I was convinced it was solely down to me ‘not sorcery but since studying Simon Oxenham and Jon Sutton consider the causes of bad writing understanding’ the concepts and methodology discussed, but as in psychology, and its impact psychology I have struggled the years went by and I gained more knowledge (which is letters 172 eldercare: the new frontier 202 with what is expected in news 184 sweet memories 206 careers 236 sexual identity at work 212 obviously still nowhere near complete) I started to realise that reviews 244 masculinity, trauma and ‘shell shock’ 250 the field… I admit on more after reading a paper a few times a light bulb would go off (‘Ah, than one occasion feeling as so that’s what they mean!’), subsequently jotting down some though I went through deleting plain, easy to understand notes so I could quickly remind myself all of the ‘colour’ out of my work of the paper’s main points when needed. in hopes of emulating the type of journal articles I had previously For the inexperienced student, the abundance of articles using read. It is easy to see how this style perpetuates, when published this ‘bad writing style’ results in an inflated inferiority complex; journal articles – the highest available standard a student has there is a strange assumption that qualifications equal an access to – routinely fall into the trap of using a lot of big words to automatic understanding of these more ‘difficult’ papers, and it describe not that much at all. is a comfort to read that even highly successful and experienced Unfortunately, this writing style (again from my perspective) academics get exasperated in a similar way to us lowly students. seems like such an ingrained approach in psychology I cannot see Of course I am not suggesting all academic papers succumb to things changing anytime soon.