44th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society “Rethinking Language and Communicative Development”; May 29-31, 2014; San Francisco, USA

Conference Report from Christel Schneider

I recently attended the 44th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in San Francisco, USA, “Rethinking Language and Communicative Development”; May 29‒31, 2014.

http://www.piaget.org/Symposium/2014/index.html

The focus of the conference was the complex relationship between language, mind and culture, and the role communicative development plays in our ability to learn from others. The meeting was part of a series of conferences on Cognition and Social Development aimed at directing future research in the discipline.

Amongst others, the following Expert Plenary Speakers were present: Prof. Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London), Prof. Eva Jablonka (Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv) and Prof. Katherine Nelson (City University of New York). I found these plenary sessions particularly interesting and educational.

I was invited to speak at the Symposium, “Comparative perspectives on language and communicative development: Joint attention, gestural communication, and non-linguistic vocalizations in non-human primates and human infants.” The symposium was organised and chaired by Prof. Malinda Carpenter (University of St. Andrews and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig/ Germany). It consisted of three talks: Tanja Kaller (University of York), who presented data on joint attention skills in wild chimpanzees and Ugandan and British mother-infant dyads; discussing similarities and differences between these species and cultures. Verena Gersken (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) presented her work on the variety of non-linguistic communicative systems that typically developing toddlers use during their second year of life to engage in referential communication with others. Finally, my own talk was based on work and publications from my doctoral dissertation. I presented findings on the onset of gesturing, and acquisition processes involved, in our closest living relatives, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans living in captivity.

Our symposium attracted many attendees and elicited interesting discussions in relation to the role comparative approaches can have in developing our understanding of communication development in human and non-human great apes (i.e., bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans).

All in all a very interesting and productive experience and I would like to thank UEL’s School of Psychology, Guarantors of Brain and Free University of Berlin (Germany) for supporting my attendance at the meeting.

UEL gets one of only ten BPS Undergraduate Research Studentships

Each year, the British Psychological Society gives ten awards to researchers to allow them to provide an undergraduate with 'hands-on' experience of research during the summer vacation, to gain an insight into scientific research and to encourage them to consider an academic career. The scheme is a prestigious award that marks out a student as a future researcher and potential academic. It is hoped that the senior researcher, to whom the award is made, will develop the student's potential and interest in research.

We are very pleased therefore that this year, one of these awards has been given to Ashok Jansari to employ Victoria Jefferies, who has just completed her 2nd year, to work on a project with him exploring cognitive deficits in children with atypical development. Of all cognitive functions, the most elusive to understand and assess have been the 'higher level' processes that facilitate and optimise an individual’s approach to unfamiliar situations; over time these have become known as executive functions (EFs). While assessments such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) have been used to assess the integrity of the EFs, research has shown that many of these tests can prove very insensitive (e.g. Shallice & Burgess, 1991) which highlighted the need for the development of more 'ecologically-valid' assessments. Jansari et al (2004) used non-immersive virtual reality to develop a 'multiple-errands task' known as JEF© (the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions) to address this need. JEF© yields eight different measures: planning, prioritisation, selection, creative-thinking, adaptive-thinking, action-based prospective memory (PM), event-based PM and time-based PM. Using JEF©, Jansari et al (2004) were able to differentiate patients who had performed in the 'non-impaired' range on standard clinical assessments, from matched healthy controls. Subsequently the assessment has been used to look in healthy controls at the impact on EFs of ecstasy, alcohol, cannabis and nicotine (Jansari et al, 2013, Montgomery, Jansari and colleagues, 2010, 1011, 2012).

Given that the frontal parts of the brain are the last to develop in humans and the lack of reliable objective measures of EFs in children, recently, a new assessment, specifically for use with younger individuals known as JEF-C© has been developed. As always, this involved quite a number of people working with Ashok including Caroline Edmonds, Tony Leadbetter, an Erasmus student Nadine Wanke and a number of MSc students  Rebecca Gordon, Alex Devlin, Meryl Hughes, Harriet Fisher and Mandy Cracknell (Jansari et al, 2012). JEF-C© is able to show the developmental progression of EFs through childhood and adolescence that mirrors the subjective ratings given by parents or teachers on the BRIEF that is used by clinicians and educational psychologists (GIoia et al, 2000). Since a number of disorders of atypical development such as Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are thought to involve executive impairments, the aim of the study that Ashok and Victoria will conduct is to use JEF-C© to investigate EFs in these groups.

The main aims of the project are:

•          To evaluate the suitability of JEF-C© in children with ADHD and ASD.

•          To compare the performance of children with these developmental disorders to that of typically developing children to identify the specific loci of difficulties as well as islets of normal performance. This information will greatly help educational psychologists working with such children.

•          To use the data in conjunction with cognitive theories of the two disorders to suggest possible avenues for future research to develop therapeutic interventions for the specific areas of difficulty.

The benefits that Victoria will hopefully get are:

•          Learning to administer neuropsychological assessments.

•          Working with children with atypical development in a research context.

•          Being trained on data analysis.

•          Learning how to interpret findings relative to original predictions and extant literature.

It is hoped that through this studentship, Victoria will consider staying in research hopefully to do a PhD - at UEL if there is funding.....  :-)

Ash Jansari

Out of the Consulting Room into the Frying Pan? Counselling Psychology and the Fear of Blogging

Edith Steffen is a lecturer on the Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and a practising counselling psychologist in community mental health in the NHS. She joined UEL in February 2014.

Edith writes her own blog and, with her permission, I have pasted below an article that she has blogged about the pros and cons of blogging for counselling psychologists.

As Edith is relatively new to UEL, I have asked her to introduce herself, "Clinically, my main interest is in third-wave CBT, particularly ACT, DBT and MBCT, but I also draw on psychodynamic theory for reflection. My clinical work has been predominantly with clients with severe and complex mental health difficulties, particularly those diagnosed with personality disorders and psychosis. I obtained my doctorate in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology from the University of Surrey in 2011. My doctoral research was on ‘sense of presence’ experiences and meaning-making in bereavement; I am generally interested in integrating existential and socio-cultural perspectives. Prior to joining the course team at UEL at the beginning of 2014, I worked as an associate lecturer at the Open University for five years. I have also been a research supervisor and teacher at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling and a research fellow at the University of Surrey. Since 2012, I have been an associate editor of Counselling Psychology Review.

 

At UEL, my responsibilities include teaching, leading clinical consultation groups and acting as clinical tutor to a number of counselling psychology trainees, doctoral research supervision and examination. I am module leader for one masters-level and one doctoral-level module. I would be interested to foster social justice-driven community engagement and research (dissemination) on a broad scale and to help increase the output and impact of trainee research."

 

Caroline Edmonds

Out of the consulting room into the frying pan? can be found here

Widening our engagement

As counselling psychologists we are motivated to engage with the ‘Other’, to listen, to facilitate, to serve. The most common form for this engagement is the one-to-one encounter with an individual client, a particular type of meeting with an Other that — while being grounded in specific historical and cultural processes — may more often than not feel so natural to us that we stop considering other ways and forms of engagement in which we can practise counselling psychology. Some of us have moved towards systemic and family work, which could be seen as a way of bringing more people into the existing set-up while widening relational possibilities. Some of us have ventured out of the consulting room, for example into organisational arenas (which may transport our work into offices and board rooms, canteens and cafeterias, and, indeed, corridors and lifts…), or they have moved beyond any kind of four-walled enclosure, for example, in the shape of eco-therapy in open spaces.

In his edited volume Therapy and Beyond: Counselling Psychology Contributions to Therapeutic and Social Issues, published in 2010, Professor Martin Milton of Regent’s College, London, a leading counselling psychologist, made a case for counselling psychology’s engagement beyond the consulting room:

‘Of course, it [counselling psychology] is interested in psychological therapy, but its knowledge base is equally relevant to research, social policy and understanding the effects of oppression and exploitation. It is engaged with the personal and political, its knowledge and skills mean it has contributions to make at a therapeutic and policy level and with the overlap of the ethical and the scientific.’ (p. xxv)

Such broader engagement undoubtedly includes some kind of presence that can be perceived more widely and thus requires the use of media. While one contributor to Milton’s edited volume, Lucy Atcheson, usefully sketched out different forms of media engagement for counselling psychologists, these mainly revolved around traditional media such as books, journals, magazines, radio and television. 4-5 years ago, there was probably less of a need to consider other forms of media involvement, but, as we are all aware, time has marched on considerably in the last few years, and if we want to keep up with and get through to our clients or, indeed, the ‘Other’ in the shape of individuals, groups or wider networks of people, it is incumbent on us to engage with if not embrace the social media sphere of the 21st century.

Welcoming the 21st century?

Many of us have been resistant to the changes that this century has brought. As a critical discipline, we have rightly found much fault with new forms of media, and for some of us, the first time we heard about Facebook & Co was when a client reported virtual bullying, harassment and abuse or an increased sense of loneliness on account of the greater visibility of their social isolation. No wonder then that many of us felt reluctant to cheer at the increasing dominance of social networking sites in our clients’ lives. However, as a profession that values a balanced perspective, we would also have acknowledged the positive aspects of the changing media landscape, in particular its democratic and creative potential. Many counselling psychologists are now regular Twitterati, and many have become involved with Facebook groups and networking groups on LinkedIn etc. However, when I was looking for examples of blogs by counselling psychologists, I drew a bit of a blank. Maybe I did not look carefully enough (and if readers of this blog can point these out to me, I should be extremely grateful), but the whole point of blogging should be that your penny’s worth can be instantly accessed by whoever cares to look for it, or am I wrong?

No more fear of blogging

Perhaps, counselling psychologists are still a bit afraid of blogging, for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, they might wonder how clients would be affected if they read their blogs. -> A very good concern; we should always consider this when we put something out.
• Secondly, they might wonder what happens if their colleagues and employers read their more critical musings. -> Yes, it is no different from standing on a soapbox in a public square, so you need to consider this too.
• Thirdly, they might be concerned about people’s comments and that they make themselves vulnerable, or, they might be worried that no-one will read the blogs and that might be even worse! -> That’s no different from appearing in traditional forms of media.
• Fourthly, they might view it as a narcissistic exercise. -> Again, as in any of our engagements, we may have greater or lesser narcissistic baggage. However, even the most altruistic and humble counselling psychologist would probably agree that without an ‘I’, there is no ‘Thou’, and that engaging with the ‘Other’ requires a ‘Someone’ who is not afraid to make their voice heard.
• Last but not least, they might lack the belief in having something to say or making a useful contribution. -> Two responses: a) It may not be a bad thing to ‘think before you blog’ and wonder whether this is, indeed, something that may be of interest to others, although you won’t know until you try b) Perhaps, as in other forms of human-to-human communication, it is not only about content but also about process. Thus, a blog could lead someone else to pick up on a clumsily expressed kernel of a thought and turn it into something really interesting or useful.

No presence, no community

Most of all, it strikes me that blogging could be a way of creating a greater presence for our profession, raise awareness within and outside of the discipline and enable us to share ideas, engage in conversation and develop new plans for action. It is the (inter)action in between many actors that creates a community.

Comments and responses welcome!

References

Atcheson, L. (2010). Counselling psychology and the media. In M. Milton (Ed.) (2010). Therapy and beyond: Counselling psychology contributions to therapeutic and social issues (pp. 277-291). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Milton, M. (Ed.) (2010). Therapy and beyond: Counselling psychology contributions to therapeutic and social issues. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Edith Steffen

ART (Ash's Research Team) Conference Summary

On Wednesday 4^th, June 2014, Dr. Ashok Jansari held a mini conference for members of his research team to present their work. Having run a workshop on how to formally give an oral talk, abstracts were requested and a formal conference programme was created. The first half of the conference was devoted  to facial processing research. Dr Friederike Zimmermann, who is on a one-year REF postdoctoral fellowship presented a talk on general issues in face-recognition particularly to do with rates of prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and super-recognition found in large-scale studies; these studies were conducted by Ashok during his Wellcome-funded Live Science residency at London's Science Museum and his involvement in Channel 4's Hidden Talent 'X-Factor meets Science' search for people who had cognitive skills that they were unaware of by using scientific principles to uncover them. Next, Sziliva Szekely presented her 3rd year project investigating the Own Race Bias (ORB). Szekely explained how she computer-generated faces to represent three different ethnicities, namely White Caucasian, South Asian and Black Afro-Caribbean. In a study using psychology undergraduates, it was found that students from each of these ethnic groups had better memory for the computer-generated faces from their own ethnicity than from other ethnicities. Szilvia finished her talk showing the real-world implications of using more ethnically-fair tests in the categorisation of prosopagnosics and super-recognisers. Next to present was Emily Farrell who was on a three month internship with Ashok. She presented the data from the 3rd year project conducted by Emily Green (who was unable to attend the conference); this research centred around the creation and validation of two new facial processing tests developed to address theoretical and practical limitations of existing tests used in the literature. The data, (which includes one sample size of 3,214 participants for one of the tests!) showed that the two new tests could be more sensitive than current tests at identifying people on the high and low end of facial recognition.

            There followed a tea-break which was catered for by one of Ashok's students (Rubina Akhtar) who runs a business making wonderful cup-cakes! During the break, the attendees could discuss each other’s research projects and network with one and other; in addition to the project students a number of guests were present including Dr Davide Rivolta & Dr Kirstie Soar, two members of the ReDS team (Sean Tonkin & Sonja Weirach), Dr Stephen Eastwood who is a lecturer in film who is interested in research in autism and even a playwright (Barry MacStay) who is writing a play involving an amnesic character and is consulting Ashok to ensure that his depiction is true to life .

            The rest of the conference was dedicated to students who are working with an assessment of 'executive functions' which are the cognitive abilities that allow us to plan, organise our behaviour, make decisions and multi-task. Using Tony Leadbetter's fantastic virtual reality programming skills, since 2003, Ashok has developed The Jansari assessment of Executive Functions (JEF^©). Ashok  gave a brief overview on the background to the research and the need for more ecologically-valid tests that led to the development of these two tests. Following this, Duncan Windsor, a 2nd year student who has been interning in the group, gave a demonstration of JEF^© and went over the double-blind procedure that was used in the latest studies on the impact of nicotine. Next to present was Rubina, whose 3rd year project  was taking further the findings that Ashok and Lynne Dawkins had published in 2013 which had showed that smokers deprived of nicotine for as little as two hours performed significantly worse than non-smokers on JEF^© implying a withdrawal-related decrement in executive functions which pay partially explain craving for more smoking. Rubina looked at whether this impact of deprivation led to permanent problems or whether it was reversible. She compared non-smokers, ex-smokers and current smokers who were deprived of nicotine. Her findings were very interesting showing that in fact, the impairment in executive functions is actually reversible since the ex-smokers performed similarly to non-smokers. . Next Victoria Douglas-Smith who has been awarded a UEL Summer Undergraduate Studentship presented the proposal for her study which will be extending Rubina's study as well as exploring the differential impact of method of nicotine delivery by comparing smokers who use regular cigarettes and those who use e-cigarettes. Finally, there was a presentation on a project funded by a BPS Summer Undergraduate Studentship; there are only ten of these given across all psychology departments in the UK and has been awarded to Ashok to employ Victoria Jefferies, a current 2nd year student. Victoria will be using a children's version of JEF^©, imaginatively named JEF-C^© that Ashok has developed to assess executive functions in children. Executive functions are the last to develop in the brain, not reaching full maturity until the early 20s (compared to, for example, the visual areas which are fully functional by the age of seven) and are implicated in a number of developmental disorders. Victoria's BPS-funded project will use  JEF-C^© to look at executive functions in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

            After the conference, ten of the delegates went for a meal at a Greek restaurant in Westfield to continue conversations which in true conference fashion were partly to do with the talks and partly to do with some of the other questions in life. The ART conference was a great success and truly gives the students the opportunity to own their research. It is a wonderful program that allows students to give a formal presentation in a relaxed atmosphere. The event not only allows students to present their own research, but to also learn about the other student’s research and see how their work contributes to the bigger picture. Hopefully some of these students will use this experience positively in their future careers.

Emily Farrell, BUNAC Intern Spring 2014