Wednesday, April 14, 2010

“Research and Markets: Teaching Psychology in Higher Education is Aimed at European Universities Aligning with the ...” plus 2 more

“Research and Markets: Teaching Psychology in Higher Education is Aimed at European Universities Aligning with the ...” plus 2 more

Research and Markets: Teaching Psychology in Higher Education is Aimed at European Universities Aligning with the ...

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 11:59 AM PDT

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You, the Scientist! Personal Construct Psychology

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:48 PM PDT

Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Natasha Mitchell here with you. When you go to a psychologist do you ever wonder what principles underlie their approach? Well today on the show what's called Personal Construct Psychology, less in vogue today but its foundations lie in some compelling philosophical traditions.

It argues that we're all scientists continually putting our own models of reality to the test. And one clinical psychologist has even applied it to a shocking serial killer, one of the Moors murderers.

News montage: It's some of the bleakest countryside in all of England and when the police set up their road blocks before dawn, it was characteristically swept in freezing mist. ... Ian Brady has been behind bars for the past 36 years for the horrific Moors murders, crimes which so appalled Britain they have been described as a benchmark for evil ever since.

David Winter: I don't think one can view anyone as totally evil or totally good.

News montage: Now after years of speculation that there may have been more victims the remains of another child have been found on the moors. ... What those who have heard it will never forget are the screams and pleas for mercy of a 10-year-old girl, Lesley Ann Downey, being sexually abused and tortured.

David Winter: We don't try and look at the world through the eyes of someone like Brady because it is threatening. We like to separate ourselves off from people such as him, that his actions might derive from a coherent view of the world, that he's not necessarily pathological, his processes really are the same as everyone else's.

News montage: ...being sexually abused, tortured and killed. A tape recording the killers made at the time was played to the jury. Few people in court that day managed to restrain their tears. ... In recent years Brady wrote to the BBC expressing deep remorse for those murders ... and began transcribing books into Braille for the blind ... when the home office put a stop to his work and declined his offer to donate a kidney, Brady went on a hunger strike.

David Winter: In recent years we've been told very much what evil is, indeed George Bush was telling us where it was located, the 'axis of evil', but I think the boundaries between good and evil are maybe rather more blurred and that's a very threatening prospect because it makes us look at the evil in ourselves as we look at perhaps the good parts of someone like Ian Brady. I mean trying to understand someone even if they have committed heinous crimes, it's really the only chance we have of trying to change them or trying to prevent future such crimes.

Natasha Mitchell: What does it mean to be a constructivist in psychology, in clinical practice?

Bill Warren: A credulous approach, that is we take what the person is telling us no matter how bizarre it seems as telling us something about how they see the world. We have to be generalist clinicians both credulous and paranoid, that is we have to believe everything the person tells us and yet not believe anything they tell us. That's the dilemma all the time. So the credulous approach is to be: 'You're telling me these things, they seem bizarre and odd to me, but I'm going to try and make sense of your world, I'm not going to make any judgment but I'm just going to really try and understand how you construe your world. And then I'm going to try and show you how it goes to the problem you've brought me.

If you haven't brought me a problem, if you're not sitting there as my client saying I'm depressed or anxious, or can't stop watching pornography on the box or something, then we've got nothing to work with. But if you say I'm doing this behaviour and I want to stop it, now we want to try and see how you're construing this behaviour, what does this behaviour do in terms of elaborating your world. So everyone would be different, everyone who watches illegal pornography will have a different set of understandings about why they do it, what they gain from it so that the traditional question from a constructivist is what do you gain by being depressed. And people will say get out it's terrible, and you say well people don't do things without a purpose, not a reason, not a cause but a purpose. Someone who does crimes of some sort, it might be about power, it might be about anything, the point is to try and understand it from their system. So the defining characteristic is to stay with a person's construct system and try and help them elaborate it to make sense of the problem they're bringing me.

Natasha Mitchell: Clinical psychologist Bill Warren a conjoint associate professor at the University of Newcastle and author of Philosophical Dimensions of Personal Construct Psychology—or PCP as it's also known. In 1955 the American psychologist George Kelly channelled a lifetime's work into two volumes called The Psychology of Personal Constructs. It was described as a fundamentally different way of understanding psychological life and represented a landmark event in the study of personality.

Now Bill Warren you've described Personal Construct Psychology as a disciplined study of the inner outlook rather than a psychology of the outer 'inlook'. What do you mean by that?

Bill Warren: It means that I'm trying to understand how somebody sees the world rather than impose upon them from another theoretical perspective how I might think they might see the world. So for example if somebody says I've had a dream and outer perspective would be to interpret that dream in terms of some set of symbols, whereas the constructivist perspective will say well you know yourself better than anybody else does, what do you think it means about your outlook on the world? It's about the meaning you're imposing on the world, a construct is a way of giving meaning in the world, so it's coming from inside me to the outside world, the inner outlook.

Natasha Mitchell: How does that approach depart from other realms of psychology, from mainstream psychological practice?

Bill Warren: Well I suppose mainstream psychological practice hasn't any longer any real connections to any philosophical traditions. Kellians was saying way back in the 1950s that what we have is a ragbag of techniques: CBT, DBT, CAT and so forth. They don't have an underpinning philosophical tradition to which they attach except in one or two cases and after the event, usually. So there's a kind of lack of philosophical integrity and rather than see them as theories they are essentially a set of practices.

David Winter: Most of the major cognitive theorists and therapists acknowledge a debt to Kelly.

Natasha Mitchell: David Winter is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and author of Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice.

David Winter: The main thing that a personal construct therapist would be trying to do would be really to get the client to acknowledge that there are alternative ways of viewing the world. And whereas the cognitive therapist might be pushing the client down a particular direction of viewing the world, the personal construct therapist would merely be getting them to acknowledge that there might be different ways of looking at things without saying that any one way is necessarily right or valid.

Natasha Mitchell: It seems to me that it fundamentally challenges the way many clinical psychologists might see their role as an expert in that therapeutic relationship.

Bill Warren: Well that's a very good observation, because the concept of an expert is a very difficult one for personal construct psychologists. Don Bannister writing about this talked about if we're experts on human behaving you'd think our own personal lives and our parenting might be really gold standard. But he goes on to say that if you look at how we end up with our own lives and whether our children end up any better than anybody else's children, that as as psychologists we find lamentably that they do not. In fact he has a rather amusing reference to this as it's as if scientific psychologists were bald headed barbers selling hair restorer. If it works, why don't we take it? So the concept of the expert, he says, is an illusion derived from this idea that we can study human behaving only scientifically.

Natasha Mitchell: It's kind of damning appraisal of psychologists isn't it?

Bill Warren: Only the ones who think that they're experts.

Natasha Mitchell: And George Kelly presented a real challenge to this expert status with his personal construct psychology, and to the dominant psychological theories and figureheads of the time, like Sigmund Freud's psychodynamic theories. David Winter.

David Winter: He didn't understand how anyone could produce such nonsense, he said, as Freudian theory. Really all of the dominant psychologies of the time, which were both psychodynamic and behavioural, really he regarded as deterministic, viewing people as determined by their histories, either their early childhood in Freudian theory or their history of reinforcements in behavioural theory. And he regarded them as reductionist and mechanistic, really, treating people like machines. He would give people interpretations but he realised that they were interpreting those interpretations in their own way, coming up with their own constructions—which led him on to thinking about the way in which everyone construes their world in their own individual way.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean the founder of personal construct psychology George Kelly described us as all being in a sense scientists, or scientist-psychologists, that we all had that capacity. And that was really core to his thinking wasn't it—what did he mean?

Bill Warren: Like so much in this area the ground kept shifting, but if we take science in its original sense of enquiry, trying to find out, then this is what every human being does. It's not a matter of what motivates it, it's what the human condition is, we try to make sense of the booming, buzzing, confusion we're part of. And he tells a story of seeing one of his PhD students followed by a patient, a client what everyone calls them these days, then another PhD student then another client and he asked himself at the end of his busy day what was the difference between my PhD student and my client. And his answer was nothing, they were each trying to make sense of something. The PhD student make sense of the data of his studies and the client make sense of the data of his world.

Natasha Mitchell: Just play that a little over further for us, like what does it mean for each of us to be in a sense scientists of the self, of our self?

Bill Warren: Well science of everything, science of making sense of narrow domains, eating behaviour, death, what it makes to be a good school teacher. So if I'm confronted with some phenomenon I give it meaning, so it's a matter of framing hypotheses about how things are and then seeking to validate those hypotheses just like scientists do.

Natasha Mitchell: Constantly putting our own constructions of the world and interpretations of our own experiences in the world to the test.

Bill Warren: Absolutely, that's what makes this resist the attacks that it's merely a bourgeois individualist theory when in fact that's that testing that I do by listening to your construction and the construction of others and realising that my construction might be just a bit off track and then I might modify mine a little bit and then test it again. So it's a constant process of framing hypotheses, testing them, changing the hypothesis if it's not validated, or if I'm mentally unwell sticking to it even in the face of its invalidation.

Natasha Mitchell: Right, so getting trapped in a sense in a way of thinking.

Bill Warren: Well trapped in a refusal to undergo the process of engagement with the world.

Natasha Mitchell: Bill Warren, suggesting that mental illness results from a failure, refusal even, to engage with and challenge our own unhealthy constructs of the world. And he says personal construct psychology also has trouble with the diagnostic labels used in psychiatry to classify and describe mental illness. Clearly an interpretation that won't wash will all clinical psychologists about all illnesses. You're tuned to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, on Radio Australia and as podcast with me, Natasha Mitchell and so to another controversial application of personal construct psychology.

Ian Brady has been in the British news again these past few weeks as the search continues for one of the five children he and Myra Hindley murdered on the moors near Manchester in the 60s. Brady has been on a hunger strike for 10 years—he wants to die.

News montage: Ian Brady is one of the moors murderers. ... Refusing solids for 500 days when the High Court ordered he be forced fed. What astounded many is that a little over a year and a half he managed to write a 300 page book on the work of three other serial murderers: the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe and the poisoner Graham Young.

David Winter: I got interested in him because in 2001 he wrote a book on his specialist subject of serial killing, and a lot of it in fact was based on what he described as interviews with other serial killers whom he'd met in the succession of prisons that he's inhabited since the 1960s.

Natasha Mitchell: David Winter, who's speaking with Anita Barraud about his response to the unnerving prospect of serial killer Ian Brady penning a book about serial killing.

David Winter: And reading the book I was very struck by similarity in some of Brady's descriptions and the writings of George Kelly, in the relativism of the two approaches, and Brady who describes himself as a moral relativist. The difference between the two approaches is that personal construct psychology would certainly not condone actions which harm or impose one's views on other people. So while it might be relativist in some ways there are some fundamental values in personal construct psychology to do with respecting the other person's view of the world, not imposing your views upon them. I guess killing them is the ultimate in imposing your views upon the other person.

Brady talks about guilt in a very similar way to the way in which Kelly does, he talks about punishment in a very similar way. And that led me eventually to write to Brady just to ask if he'd ever read any personal construct psychology, which he hadn't in fact, and this led to a correspondence between us and a couple of meetings with him.

Anita Barraud: The creator of personal construct psychology George Kelly, he wrote that peering at the world through another person's spectacles can permanently affect one's eyesight. So what then did peering through the eye-glasses of a serial killer do to your eyesight?

David Winter: It was certainly quite threatening, to say the least. The first time I met him I was ushered into a windowless room and sat there quite anxiously. He was led in to the room and was a tall. impressive looking man, still with this teddy boy hairstyle that he had in the 1960s and wearing dark glasses and smoking a cigar. I was with him for three hours in that meeting and my head was spinning rather with the cigar smoke and he was there sitting under the no smoking sign puffing away. But you know I automatically held out my hand to shake his and then found myself flinching a bit, remembering what that hand had done.

And I guess that was a bit of a metaphor for the whole process of coming close to a serial killer, trying to understand their world, perhaps even seeing some positive aspects of their view of the world. I've certainly come in for quite a bit of criticism for trying to see the world through Ian Brady's eyes.

Anita Barraud: Why did you try to see the world through Ian Brady's eyes?

David Winter: For me it was to do with trying to explore the limits of personal construct psychology and of the credulous approach. Serial killers are people and they have human attributes as well as the attributes that have led them to go down the particular path they've followed. Ian Brady for many years was making Braille books for the blind and that was done out of compassion I think for blind people. He'd had a blind friend.

Natasha Mitchell: How do you view David Winter's dialogue with Ian Brady, because it raises a whole range of interesting questions, doesn't it?

Bill Warren: It does. and he took some flak over that, that it was somehow condoning or normalising what was to many people a very abnormal way of construing the world. But as I understand David's perspective it was simply trying to understand how this behaviour, serial killing, helped Brady elaborate his world. And I would suspect having heard some of his talks about this that it was a narrowing of a way of understanding your world. If he was governed by perhaps one or two constructs that I must rid the world of certain types of people, then he would be construing very narrowly in terms of a set of constructs. But I don't know the case in any more detail than that.

Natasha Mitchell: Bill Warren your great interest has been in the philosophical heritage of personal construct psychology hasn't it, and there's a deep, deep connection there.

Bill Warren: Well I just think it has connections with very strong philosophical traditions or schools, so I suppose if I had to highlight some, the adventure that existentialism engages with the human condition is very compatible with the personal construct approach. And when we look at it from an existential perspective we see that which we are trying to make sense of is full of contradiction, full of paradox, and what a fantastic interesting exercise it is to wade into that. So fantastic and challenging some people refuse to do it, and we might then be all mentally unwell, not living, as we would say, optimally.

It's fairly well accepted that the American pragmatism is probably the most significant contributing philosophical tradition to personal construct psychology, and the essence of that is the individual person as an agent, an active construer of meaning making a sense which is unique to them, rather than a passive recipient of information from the outside world.

Natasha Mitchell: So there is a real sort of active engagement with the world, not all the time though I might say. I think people run a mile from having that sort of active inner engagement with their place in the world with their own constructs.

Bill Warren: In a way I suppose you can't get away from your constructs. You can get away from your life, your biography: a constructivist would say you're not a slave to your biography—if you construe your life as ruined, or tragic because of some past experience then you are slave to your biography. If you can get past that, and I think at higher levels of some sorts of philosophy you can get past anything, any ideas you hold. So the connection of PCP to, for example, the anarchist tradition, that is that if you have an idea you can't let go of, then the idea controls you. So a constructivist would say then you are restricting yourself, why don't you try to construe a world without authority, or without government, or without electricity. It's challenging, it's asking you to have another look and if you look again and still stick with your construct then fine, it's not for me to say you should change it.

Natasha Mitchell: Well that's interesting. It's not for you to say you should change it, but many in the field have contemplated the limits of this approach. And certainly David Winter, who in communicating with one of the moors murderers, Ian Brady, who's still alive, he really confronted and was quite challenged by how far you should go in accepting someone else's constructs. Here he was being challenged in a sense to accept the constructs of a serial murderer.

Bill Warren: Well I suppose understand thenm and accept them might be two different things and this is where I come up with the question of whether personal construct psychology being content-less. We can come back to pragmatism, pragmatism's greatest exponent in the USA was John Dewey, and John Dewey was a great believer in democracy. And if you will allow me to use democracy not as a system of external constraints, elections and so forth, but as an outlook on the world and use the term 'egalitarian outlook', then I think that Kelly, via Dewey, accepted and assumed a democratic society, or more generally an egalitarian outlook on life, which is we treat each other as equal to ourselves in rights and regard, then that would negate acceptance, for example Nazi death camps: if that made great sense to me as a Nazi to kill another race, or if it makes sense to me as a murderer to kill other people, then it would be negating this idea of egalitarianism which in other terms might manifest as an ethic of love in the world.

So I think while it's not there in personal construct psychology, a good case could be made that we are not morally neutral at the end of the day. But as a clinician trying to make sense of a person's world it's not for me to change the moors murderer, it's for him to try and ask me to help change if he wants to, if he doesn't, then we forget about psychology and put him in jail.

David Winter: Kelly speaks about guilt as a person feeling dislodged from what Kelly called their core role, so the way they characteristically view themselves. That doesn't necessarily mean behaving in a morally bad way so for example in traditional psychiatry psychopaths are regarded as not having guilt feelings—personal construct psychologists would say they suffer from guilt just as much as anyone else, but they might feel guilty if they find themselves behaving in a humane way if their core role is of someone who's manipulative and callous. And Brady in his book takes a very similar view of guilt as a person being dislodged from their own moral values. So I think Kelly would have been intrigued by those sorts of similarities.

Anita Barraud: Would he have felt threatened a little?

David Winter: I imagine he would, yes.

Anita Barraud: Because you did I think, didn't you, you felt quite....

David Winter: I felt threatened and I felt particularly concerned when I sent Ian Brady some of my writings and he wrote back that it was gratifying that George Kelly's theory was validating his own view of the world. And that really made me wonder about the direction that I was going in.

Natasha Mitchell: I can imagine, David Winter analysed Ian Brady's book using personal construct psychology or PCP, and while it reveals a lot about Brady himself he says it wasn't generalisable across all serial killers, and let's be clear here, this is one case, one man, we're not saying all serial killers are attracted to PCP because of its relativistic view of the world. But it certainly does confront the limits of that view. And so to the tools of PCP: how do you tease out whether someone's personal constructs might be causing them distress? It starts with a tool called repertory grid which has found use beyond psychology in all sorts of places, from workplaces to marketing. David Winter.

David Winter: Generally what is involved is getting the person to think of important people in their life and aspects of themselves—for example how they are now, how they'd like to be, how they might be if they lost aparticular problem that they have. And the usual procedure is that you give the person groups of three of these people, for example themselves, their mother and their father, and ask them to tell you some important way in which two of those people are alike but different from the other one. And in answering that question what they're doing is giving you one of their what Kelly called personal constructs. So they might say mother and father are depressed and I am happy, and then you go through different groups of three people until you have a reasonable selection of the individual's constructs, and then you ask them to rate all of the people on all of the constructs, usually on something like a seven point rating scale.

So you end up with a grid, a matrix of numbers. One of the dimensions of the grid is the people and the other dimension is the constructs, and that can then be subjected to various methods of analysis. There are numerous software packages now for analysing repertory grids. and the sort of information you can get out of it is for example similarities between how particular people are viewed. Grids I think are very good at picking up dilemmas or conflicts, for example the depressed person who might associate being depressed with being kind and sensitive. I mean one thing you might do is initially point out to the client that their grid indicates that sort of dilemma. and then maybe in almost a psychodynamic way look at what point in their life did they develop the view that depressed people are compassionate and happy people are arrogant. for example.

It may be that they'd identify that their mother was depressed and compassionate, their father represented the opposite pole of that construct. And then one technique would be what Kelly called 'time binding', saying that that particular construction was valid at that point in their life but maybe now it's an anachronism and maybe now they can move on to an alternative way of viewing the world.

Natasha Mitchell: Certainly it's a view, Bill Warren, of mental illness that would be considered as highly controversial amongst many psychologists. By saying that people refuse to in a sense alter their constructs by looking into the world and realising that their particularly delusional point of view for example might be incorrect or inaccurate, I mean that's placing a huge responsibility on an individual to reinvent themselves when they might actually be very unwell.

Bill Warren: Well it depends on what sort of condition one starts with. Current work in neuroscience would certainly reduce not only mental illness but mental function generally to some sort of deterministic level in terms of function, electrical and chemical, of the brain. A constructive perspective would not do that and would see those things as secondary to problems in our intra-personal life and our inter-personal life. In other words the brain mucking up in its chemistry electrical activity is itself an outcome of my mucking up in the way I think about myself internally and relate to you inter-personally.

Natasha Mitchell: So how would personal construct psychology work with someone with schizophrenia for example?

Bill Warren: I haven't worked in that area, but one of the original English workers John Bannister, he had a colleague and friend who had schizophrenia and so he spent a lot of his time trying to really understand how that person construed the world which led them to look at the world in such an objectively (to everyone else) bizarre way. And if modern day understandings can detect some chemical imbalances or structures in the brain, in their functioning, which are smaller or less effective it explains that sort of condition, then that would be a contribution. But that's not what personal construct psychology is about. And the other thing they would have to account for is each person with schizophrenia has a different experience of the phenomena of that condition. One's drawn back to this reductionism that all schizophrenia is the same and all the experiences of schizophrenia are the same. Well that's just not in fact the case.

David Winter: One main message that Kelly was giving was really a very optimistic one in saying that no matter how horrendous the world might appear to be, there are always alternative ways of construing it.

Natasha Mitchell: Clinical psychologists: David Winter from the University of Hertfordshire and Associate Professor Bill Warren from the University of Newcastle. And personal construct psychology's approach isn't widespread but its philosophies offer an opportunity for deep reflection don't they? Feel free to spill some of that reflection into the comment section of our website, just click on the heading for this week's edition and look for 'add your comment', or head to my All in the Mind blog to do that too. Audio, transcripts and much else at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind, thanks to co-producer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Angie Grant, I'm Natasha Mitchell, I'll catch you next week.

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Psychology courses require 4 hours of experiment participation

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 10:11 PM PDT

Even if you ace all the exams and papers, you can still fail a psychology course.

As a requirement for course completion, students in many courses must participate in four hours of experimental research for each of the first two courses they take in the psychology department. Through their participation, undergraduates form the human subject pool for graduate students and faculty researchers. Undergraduate psychology majors are not allowed to use the subject pool  for research because of size constraints.

"We can't do our science without the subject pool," said Shane Blackman GS, a first-year graduate student. "The questions that you can ask without human subjects are very limited."

Psychology professor Kenneth Norman said that undergraduate participation not only allows graduate students to collect data, but offers undergraduates a firsthand look at how psychologists study emotions and behavior.  "The point of participating in the experiment is to understand the question that the researcher is interested in," Norman said. Following a debriefing given to subjects after the test, "you get some explanation as to why you did what you did," he added.

But Christine Mak '13, who is enrolled in two psychology courses this semester, questioned the benefits to undergraduates who participate in these experiments. "I think our participation in the studies is more for the graduate students, so that they can have a large subject pool to draw from, rather than for the undergraduate students who participate in them," she said in an e-mail. "Most of the studies were mindless, some of them to the point of tedious."

Studies last 30 minutes, one hour or two hours, and researchers debrief their undergraduate subjects following the experiment.

But, Mak noted, "Not all the people who ran the experiments bothered to explain the study to you personally. Most just handed you a piece of paper, which would go unread in most cases."

Psychology concentrator Ana Sollitto '11 said that familiarity with the system makes the requirement easier to fulfill. "You gauge which experiments would be surveys you take online, and which ones you have to go to Green Hall for," she said. Once she figured this out, "It wasn't that bad."

Like Sollitto, Mak — who was required to complete eight credits — said the time commitment was not overly burdensome. "Even though I had twice as many credits to complete ... it didn't take as long as I thought it would." She added that she completed some of the requirement over spring break, "which probably helped."

Blackman noted that he has not encountered disinterested students while running his experiments. "They were very engaged and interested in what's going on in my experiment," he said.

He added that, in his experience, the level of engagement between paid participants and credit participants was "about the same." At the University, paid subjects are compensated a maximum of $12 for hour-long studies and $8 for half-hour studies.

Blackman said that trust between the researcher and subject is necessary for successful experiments. "It's very easy for someone in a subtle way to ruin someone's research," he said, adding, "There's a huge element of trust."

Though the vast majority of students enrolled in psychology courses participate in studies, they can also choose to complete writing assignments instead.

"It would be unethical of us to compel people to participate in experiments," Norman explained. Each writing assignment is worth 30 minutes of credit, such that students must complete eight writing assignments to forgo all research participation.

Rosemarie Stevenson, the department's human subjects administrator, said in an e-mail that only about five students per semester select this option.

Writing assignments require students to examine psychology papers and "extract the core meaning of the experiment," Norman said. Though writing assignments do not offer students the same experience as participating in studies, they are "the next best thing," he explained.

Writing assignments may also be assigned if students fail to reschedule a missed appointment. Students are assigned one paper for every half hour they miss.

Stevenson said that failing to fulfill the research requirement is not a common occurrence.

"Over the years, I have only encountered a handful of students who did not complete this requirement," she said, adding that in those cases, "there were other course issues involved."

Norman said that regardless of how students choose to complete it, the participation requirement is central to the department's efforts to educate students. "It really gets at the core of our teaching and research mission," he said.

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