History and Theories in Psychology, The Musical

Chatting to folks during the conference I realised just how much music I use in my teaching. So here is something I have joked with students about, the music to History & Theories the Musical.

Freud

A quick introduction to the Greek fable which inspired Freud's Oedipus complex.

Following that we have a song that I use to demonstrate how Freud has penetrated popular culture

This next set of music is meant to be evocative of the 1940s through to the 1960s.

Woody Guthrie's Tear the Fascist Down.

A satirical song, that nevertheless illustrates cold war sentiment

Then we move into the sixties

Finally I do some work on positive psychology (well I give it the good kicking it deserves) and I use the last two clips during a lecture on measuring happiness.

So now all I need to do is write the script...

Why academics go to conferences

This is going to be posted on the Psychological Sciences blog once I am back in work, meant mainly for an undergraduate audience

From time to time a lecturer might not be on campus because they are 'at a conference'. In this post I am going to explain what academics do at conferences, why they go, and why undergraduate students should consider going to at least one conference during their time as a student. This post will of course be heavily based on my own experiences of going to conferences, and therefore biased towards psychology.

What is a conference?

Normally at a conference there will be a series of presentations (papers) from academics, and students, talking about their most recent research. There may also be poster sessions, themed symposiums when there are three or four papers on the same theme with additional time for discussion, and other ways to communicate research findings.

As well as the people giving presentations there will be others with an interest in the subject at the conference. Very often at any university there are a limited number of specialists in any particular field, at a conference there are very many experts in the same general area.

Conferences can be single day or longer. They are often based at universities and if multiple day conference delegates will normally stay in the local town, or sometimes in halls of residence on campus.

Learning about what is happening in the academic speciality

To get a paper (poster or other presentation) accepted at a conference one has to send an abstract, or sometimes an extended summary, to the conference organising committee. There will be some peer review of these abstracts, and depending on how many papers are submitted some choices are made about which presentations will be accepted for a conference.

It is, of course, worth noting that these presentations do not go through a full peer review process, and while in the current climate of promoting public engagement press releases may be written and sent out, conference papers should not normally be used as reference material.

With that caveat in mind conference papers are where new ideas are first tested in front of the academic community. So they are an excellent way to learn about the new ideas circulating in the specialist community, this might act as inspiration for future research directions. It is also an essential way to stay up to date in the field.

Testing out your new ideas and recent research

Giving a conference paper on research that you have just completed is a great way to test out the reaction to that research. It will give the presenter some ideas about what they need to do to publish the research in a peer reviewed journal article. While this developmental stage is not always necessary in writing up research it can be a very useful exercise. The majority of the audience at a conference can be classified as friendly critics, and as well as the formal question and answer session there is normally a chance to chat though ideas with people more informally.

Chatting to like minded academics

Several of the delegates spoke about being the only person interested in conceptual and historical issues at their university. This can be quite isolating at an intellectual level and being able to chat to people with more in common, academically, is very useful and can be therapeutic. At this conference there were a number of international delegates, sharing experiences with them can give a wider perspective to some of the issues faced.

Networking

With my new module on Gender and Sexuality starting next academic year it was very good to hear four papers on that topic. I hope to be in touch with all of those presenters in the near future, and am hoping to do a short video piece with one of them for use on the module. One delegate from the USA thought we had something in common academically and we will be chatting over email to see if anything concrete can come out of that.

This might be even more important for students, looking towards post graduate or post doctoral studies, or in professional areas looking for supervisors as part of their training.

The History and Philosophy of Psychology section has, some, student bursaries available, for students giving papers. This might be of interest to any students of our degree interested in pursuing a Conceptual and Historical Issues dissertation.

What I learnt at the History and Philosophy Psychology Section Conference

Yesterday, 16 May, I got back from the annual conference for the History and Philosophy of Psychology conference. I am going to write a slightly more formal report of the event for the Psychological Sciences blog, but here I am going to reflect on the stuff that I found out at the conference, that I think is really interesting.

This section conference is a really friendly meeting, and I was pleased to see a number of students and a high ratio of international delegates. The day prior to the main event there was a workshop about the ways that Historians, Psychologists and Philosophers can work together. That was also an excellent event but here I am going to concentrate on the main event.

Almost all of the papers were of a very high standard.

Andrea Von Hohenthal taught me about the World War One history of German Psychology, but more particularly about the way that the British and German psychologists almost immediately at the cessation war scientific exchange once more.

Katherine Hubbard taught me about how the projective test movement in the 1950s acted as a site of liberatory practice for women and lesbians.

From Alison Torn I found about a 19th century project at New York Lunatic Asylum, to create a patient's periodical, and of the circumstances around being allowed to write for the periodical, what people were allowed to write and how power worked within the Asylum.

Natasha Bharj's paper on continuing colonial and racist discourses in contemporary psychology taught me about how the individualist versus collectivist  categorisation of societies can be racist. It also reinforced the need not to see racism in psychology as a problem in the past.

John Hall is doing really interesting work in being part of creating a critical history of clinical psychology in the UK. Also, and very interestingly, the way the clinical psychology trainers are beginning to see the need for teaching their students about CHiPs.

Philip Thomas reinforced my antipathy to some of the poorly conceptualised usages of functional brain images, this time in the field of psychosis.

John Jackson's presentation taught me about the ontological gerrymandering that Evolutionary Psychologists have done in creating their caricature of how the social sciences work, which they call the "Standard Social Science Model".

Peter Hegarty's wonderful presentation on "The Denaturalisation of Sexuality in 21st Century Time" taught me lots, especially how much I need to update to do a currently relevant course on the Psychology of Gender and Sexuality. Also it taught me much more about the linkages between some of the biological determinist work on (mostly male) gay sexuality and the struggles for equal rights in the USA.

Natalia Loginova's paper on history of psychology in Russia a fascinating insight into what is very often a hidden history to anglophones.

Elena Demke's paper on the role of psychologists acting as expert witnesses for the defense in cases of child abuse was an important lesson about the potentially very damaging consequences of psychologists trying to prove their professional status at the expense of children's well being.

Finally from Katrina Roen I had a thorough education in problems around using surgery to create normality for children in two cases, cochlear implants and Hypospadias. 

All in all a very good conference for me.

Some thoughts on Education, Genetics and Heritability and IQ

Some of you may have seen this story in the Guardian. I have been avoiding commenting on it until after the comments section was closed, because I hope to do some discourse analysis on both the newspaper report and the comments section, to try to find out how people are using the terms intelligence and heritability in everyday(ish) language.

The Guardian also usefully made the source material available. What I want to do in this blog entry is discuss the substantive points Dominic Cummings makes with regard to education, genetics, heritability and IQ.

IQ as a measurement of Cognitive Ability

On page 68 of  Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities Cummings suggests that if you ask the question of people what proportion of kids with an IQ of X could master integration, and then goes on to say that research on children with different cognitive ability should be done.

IQ, of course, isn't a measure of cognitive ability. If one wanted to do this research then measuring actual cognitive ability (in mathematics) would be the thing to do, not measuring IQ. One reason for this is that IQ tests are made up of several different abilities, another is that the nature of standardisation of the IQ tests obscures the underlying cognitive abilities.

It may be that the people that Cummings has asked this question are just being polite by saying that no empirical research has been done, rather than pointing out to him the stupidity of the question.

IQ not the only thing that affects academic performance

Cummings cites Lewis Terman on the idea that IQ is not the only thing that affect academic performance. This is of course true, but given that IQ was developed to predict educational attainment I tend to see this as a proof of failure of concept rather than anything else.

The extremely limited capacity of short term working memory (p72)

In talking about the way that basic research is being ignored in education Cummings talks about the extremely limited capacity of short term working memory being a reason why information may not be retained from a lecture. I often use short term memory as a great example of the difference between academic and lay understandings of psychology concepts. Short term memory refers to the few seconds after being exposed to, say a list of words, and the capacity of short term memory is normally seen as 7 plus or minus two things.

Working memory is a different topic it is a theoretical framework that refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information.

So short term memory doesn't include memory of what happened over the last hour.
And short term working memory appears to be a conflation of two separate things.

On page 72 Cummings begins his confused ramblings about genetics.

The heritability of educational outcomes

Cummings cites with approval some work by Plomin on using heritability statistics on things such as phonics tests (70% heritability), reading and maths tests (at ages 7,9 and 12) as showing 60-70% heritability and GCSE as showing approximately 60% heritability.

Cummings is careful to talk about heritability as being about the amount of variance as due to genetic factors, but, like Plomin, seems to have a willfully ingenuous view on what, if anything, heritability statistics might reveal.

Like that other greatly misused statistic regression there appears to a tendency to conflate the assumptions of the test with what the test can tell us.

With regression one of the assumptions of a regression model is that the predictor variables cause the dependent variable; however it is often used as if the regression equation reveals whether or not a predictor variable (in a battery of tests) is causal.

With heritability there are a whole bunch of assumptions that need to be met before the statistic can be used.

The heritability statistic was created by Ronald Fisher who is also responsible for creating the ANOVA statistic so beloved in social sciences. A lot of Fisher's work related to problem particularly in crop breeding, where it could be know with a high degree of certainty the precise environment crops were exposed to, and a good idea of what we would now call the genetic background of the crops.

While there is no need to know which gene (or genes) are responsible for any trait that may be open to heritability analysis if it is assumed there is more than one gene they need to act upon each other in an additive way, rather than interacting with each other.

The other assumption is that 'the environment' acts in an additive way rather than interacting with the genetic component.

These assumptions seem far fetched when it comes to IQ tests. They are stretched beyond any credible breaking point when it comes to testing educational outcomes.

I have no doubt that genetics and environment play an important role in educational outcomes, but I am sceptical that we can reduce the complexities of their interactions to a single number. Even if we can then heritability is not that number for any trait where there is interaction between genes or interaction between genes and the environment.

Why study Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology

I expect that this will be covered either in the editorial or one of the earlier articles.

The position is the one that Dai Jones has developed writing in our books, and that I teach to in the current year three module.

Even if Psychology were a natural science there would still be good reasons for studying historical and conceptual issues.

• Interest - historical gossip, who did what to whom and how it affects the academic discipline.
• Understanding - Why did theory (x) being and why did it drop out of fashion.
• Learning past lessons - There are lots of examples of poor psychology, how can we avoid that in future,
• Critical understanding - Trying to understand psychology in its social context.

Different reasons for studying history need different types of historical writing.

However if psychology is not a natural science, because of the reflexivity issue (what psychologists say about human psychology directly and indirectly changes human psychology) then it becomes more important to study historical and conceptual issues.

There are also a bunch of reasons to do with current psychology and a need to understand how things have reached this position.

• In 2013 the Clinical Division of the BPS published a position paper highly critical of DSM V. (http://dcp.bps.org.uk/dcp/the_dcp/news/dcp-position-statement-on-classification.cfm)
• In the UK professional psychology is overseen by the Health Professions Council
• What are the relationships between psychology and health professions, how might these impact upon psychology?

There is an historical precedent, with the way that psychotherapists lobbied to become part of the medical profession in the 1910s, this had several impacts on the discipline and on the practice of psychotherapy in the USA.

• Upon formation of the Coalition the current government set up the 'Nudge Unit' using insights from psychology to change people's behaviour without recourse to legislation.
• Seligman the founder of positive psychology has met the PM. Positive psychology techniques have been used by the Nudge Unit.
• What networks does psychology as a discipline tie into, how might this affect the discipline?

Psychology has long tried to have influence with government, and some of things psychologists do seem to tie into this, but also governments (mis)use psychological findings a process which needs to be critically interogated.

• The American Psychological Association excuses psychologists working with the CIA and US military from normal ethical processes. "Enhanced interrogations" normally have a psychologist present.
• How have ethical codes developed and why are they important?
• What is the relationship between psychology and the military? 

Psychology has long had relationships with the military, from the Great War forwards. The military often have protected budgets and can be a good source of research funding.

• Cohen (1992) suggests Psychology studies are chronically underpowered.
• Straightforward replications are hardly ever published.
• Fraud in published psychology papers threatens our attempts to be taken seriously (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/13/scientific-research-fraud-bad-practice)
• The credibility of psychology has also been undermined by a recent US supreme court ruling. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201304/can-video-games-cause-violence
• Why are we so bad at quantitative methods when part of the way that, some, define psychology as a science is by the methods being used. 

I argue that part of the reason for this is the mechanical way that methods in psychology are understood, arguably a lingering affect of methodological behaviourism.

Historical understanding helps to open up these questions, and in addition helps to tie psychology back into its philosophical background.

Emebedding Conceptual and Historical issues in the Psychology curriculum

Opportunity for a possible paper, just about to send an abstract off for this, after chance to review and revise it for a special issue of of History and Philosophy of Psychology, coming out of some workshops on teaching CHiP Dai and I have contributed to over the last two years.

As it seems to help my process of writing I intend to blog about the paper as I write it.

Here is the first draft of the abstract.

For over a decade the CHiPs coverage at the University of Gloucestershire was isolated in three stand alone modules. The optional year two module recruited poorly, losing out to traditional applied modules, and although the compulsory year three module always had enthusiastic support from a minority of students, module evaluations revealed a group of students who felt that the coverage came too late in the degree. Spurred by University wide changes following the new fees regime in England the whole degree was redesigned for the 2012 academic year. A commitment to teach CHiPs across the whole of the first year provision was established. Integrating conceptual and historical issues into first term research methods teaching, in particular, has led to the opportunity to consider how psychological knowledge production works, rather than teaching research methods as a set of procedures to follow. In addition combining this with material on critical thinking has enabled us to move beyond seeing critical thinking as merely the application of scientific methods to everyday life and towards helping our students be critical about the ways that psychology operates in society. Initial student evaluation of this material has been much more positive than for the stand alone modules.

Any comments welcome. The abstract needs to be submitted by 30 September.

Pre-registration and Psychology publications

A couple of months ago the Guardian published this article on pre-registration of (mainly) psychology studies. This was followed by this article arguing against pre-registration.

This second article made me despair.

So I am going to look at it point by point after a bit of an introduction.

While there are a range of methods used in psychology the discipline has taken to a possible over reliance on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST).

There are conditions where NHST is great, especially when effect size estimations are also used, clinical trials, and in psychology when you are testing for an effect where you have a good idea of what size of effect matters outwith the laboratory, and you have a good model of that process to test in the laboratory. If NHST is the right way to understand data then there are a set of rigorous procedures that need to be followed else the results are likely to be inaccurate.

Now despite the fact that every psychology degree includes extensive research methods training it does appear that psychologists generally don't really understand what NHST is for, possibly because we use some fairly inaccurate short hand to try to introduce the concept to students.

We tend to say things like, probability that the effect is non-random, or that the effect is real.

However the NHST is not telling us the probability, it is telling us if an effect in a particular study will apply to the population that the sample was drawn from.

Obviously not all research is suited for NHST, I do qualitative research and historical research, neither of which use NHST, but also if you do not have a representative sample then NHST are not the thing you should be using. There are also arguments for using Bayesian statistics more generally, but that is not the argument I am making here. All quotes hereafter are from the Times Higher article.

Limiting more speculative aspects of data interpretation risks making papers more one-dimensional in perspective.

One of the issues is that these 'speculative' aspects of data interpretation tend to be done with NHST after looking at the data, that is not speculative it is wrong. Where exploratory data analysis is done it should clearly be labelled as such, and reporting significance levels shouldn't happen.

..commitment to publish with the journal concerned would curtail researchers’ freedom to choose the most appropriate forum for their work after they have considered the results.

I am not sure what this means, the meaning I can put on it is that if you find something unexpected, by doing statistical tests ad hoc you may want to publish these somewhere. Well you can but as you have broken the fundamental rules of NHST then that is fraudulent unless you clearly mark it as exploratory data analysis. The correct thing to do in this case is to design a study to test the potential phenomena, and pre-register that study.

With no results to go on, reviewers would be more likely than ever to rely on reputation, which would count against junior scientists.

 Most journals claim their review process is blind. Good to see proof that it actually isn't. I have long suspected this, even without names one tends to know what colleagues are working on in the same field. It might be important to work out how we can do genuine blind peer reviewing else our discipline is a laughing stock.

In addition, the requirement to refine studies and their interpretation prior to data collection would prevent us from learning from our mistakes along the way.

This tends to lead to data peaking and changing stimulus materials, instructions and even measures as one goes along, all of which invalidates NHST. The correct thing to do is of course to learn the lessons and run a fresh study.

Moreover, in my fields (cognitive neuroscience and psychology), a significant proportion of studies would simply be impossible to run on a pre-registration model because many are not designed simply to test hypotheses.

Well yes, so in those studies NHST results are not being erroneously reported, no problem with that at all and that is a good point. Psychology needs to look carefully at what it is doing and what science actually might be. However it does on

...many of the participant populations introduce significant sources of complexity and noise

 And these participant populations are not ones that can be used to make statements about the general population, so why exactly would NHST be used here.

So in summary, lots of reasons not to use NHST, however, we want to use them badly and fear pre-registration might stop that being done.