News and Media, July 2009

Psychology of scams
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) published a report in May on the psychology of scams, compiled by psychologists at the University of Exeter. Professor Stephen Lea, Dr Peter Fischer and Dr Kath Evans conducted interviews with scam victims and near-victims; mined the text of real-life scams; and performed a simulated scam of their own.

Their investigations threw up a number of counter-intuitive findings. For example, scam victims often had more background experience than non-victims in the financial domains exploited by scammers, such as lotteries or investments. Moreover, victims tended to spend more time considering a would-be scam, not less, as you might expect. Non-victims, by contrast, often deleted or disposed of scam material without even looking at it. Another finding was that victims often concealed their involvement in a suspected scam, for fear of being reprimanded by friends or family. Lea's team said it was almost as if their rational selves realised the danger but decided to proceed anyway.

The report makes a number of recommendations for helping prevent people fall victim to scams. For example, it might help to educate people to consider what they have to lose, rather than focusing on what they have to gain, from a suspected scam. Based on the finding that many victims appear to harbour suspicions, it might also help to advise people to trust their gut instinct when they sense something isn't right.

The University of Exeter psychologists won the contract to produce the report after the OFT put the project out to tender. 'It's different from other academic research in the sense that someone has given you a problem, but it's not as different as you might think,' Lea told The Psychologist. 'And in some ways the differences are very positive – the OFT were good to work with, they have very sharp staff, ideas of their own, and above all they have a lot of resource. For example, part of our research depended on a corpus of scam materials, which they'd collected over the years, which would have cost us enormous effort to acquire. They also put us in touch with people who had been victims of scams, so there are huge advantages to working with a body like that.'

Lea said he would recommend that other psychologists get involved in similar collaborations with government organisations. 'I believe it's very important that we do get involved in this kind of work. It's a sure thing that psychological explanations will be advanced with this sort of phenomenon, much better that they come from qualified psychologists,' he said.

'It was a very interesting challenge,' he added. 'We found ourselves applying theories that we had thought about in quite different contexts to a different and challenging and socially important problem.'

'The one thing you have to watch with government bodies is that they often work to different time scales [from university-based psychologists] but it's not difficult to work things out,' Lea said.

According to the OFT, 3.2 million adults in the UK (around 1 in 15 people) collectively lose around £3.5 billion to mass marketed scams each year. CJ
I    The new report The Psychology of Scams: Provoking and Committing Errors of Judgement, is available free online: tinyurl.com/lqfqqq

 

ESRC doctoral funding
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is to change the way that it funds postgraduate training. Instead of funding individual departments and courses, the ESRC plans to create a network of around 25 Doctoral Training Centres, each to be hosted in one or more institutions, and Doctoral Training Units, which will be greater in number and more specialised. Each Doctoral Centre will receive a guaranteed annual quota of between five and 40 studentships for a five-year period. A peer-reviewed competition is to be launched this month, in which institutions will be able to submit proposals to create Doctoral Centres and Units. The results are expected to be announced in late summer 2010, allowing institutions to begin recruitment of students to start their studies in October 2011. Julie McLaren, ESRC's Head of Postgraduate training, said it was hoped the new framework 'will lead to greater opportunities for institutions to develop innovative approaches and purposeful interdisciplinary training required to address increasingly complex research questions'.

 

Recognising talent
Psychologists have identified four people who appear to be extraordinarily gifted at recognising faces – a group they've dubbed 'super-recognisers' (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review: tinyurl.com/lqklax).

Richard Russell at Harvard University and colleagues said the discovery came about following their studies of developmental prosopagnosia, or 'face-blindness'. The face-blindness research was widely reported in the media and prompted several people to come forward claiming to have extraordinary prowess at recognising faces. 'I've learned to stop surprising people with bizarre comments like "Hey, weren't you at that so-an-so concert last fall… I recognise you",' one person recalled.

Russell's team put four such people – C.S., C.L., J.J. and M.R. – through a series of challenging memory tests, including requiring them to identify the faces of celebrities before they were famous, and to identify previously presented faces when shown later from a novel angle, or under impoverished viewing conditions. The four 'super-recognisers' significantly outperformed 25 age-matched control participants.

A second experiment, which required participants to match an array of digitally morphed faces to a target face according to degree of similarity, confirmed that the super-recognisers also had enhanced facial perception skills relative to 26 new controls and 26 participants with developmental prosopagnosia.

On tests of facial memory and perception, the super-recognisers were superior to controls by about two standard deviations, which is similar to the amount by which developmental prosopagnosics are inferior to controls. Russell's team said this suggests facial memory and perceptual skills are distributed more widely than previously thought, and that both prosopagnosics and super-recognisers are quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from controls.

The researchers also said their discovery of super-recognisers had important implications for the real world. 'Various social institutions are premised upon the false assumption that all people have similar face recognition ability,' they said, pointing to the security professions and eyewitness accuracy as two possible areas where face recognition could be usefully assessed.

Schizophrenia and violence
Two new studies have cast fresh illumination on the nature of the association between schizophrenia and violence. From a wide-ranging literature search, Matthew Large and colleagues in Sydney identified 18 studies involving over 16,000 murders. They found that regions with a high rate of homicides by people suffering from schizophrenia also tended to have a higher total homicide rate (Schizophrenia Research: tinyurl.com/mas3hz). This contradicts the widely held view that rates of homicide by those with schizophrenia are somehow fixed, reflecting an aspect of the illness itself, and highlights instead the role played by social and other extraneous factors.

The Psychologist put it to Dr Large that his new study contradicts work he published last year showing that rates of murder in the UK by people with mental illness have fallen steadily since 1979, even while overall homicide rates have risen (see News, August 2008; tinyurl.com/lcl9n6). 'Interesting question and on the face of it they do contradict. I believe that the natural tendency is for normal and abnormal to be correlated – however it seems likely that community treatment can intervene and dissociate the two rates. The rate of abnormal homicide in the UK is now lower than it has been, and lower than might be predicted from the total homicide rate.'

Large's team said: 'Our findings suggest that measures to prevent homicide by those diagnosed with schizophrenia should include not only an attempt to provide optimal treatment to reduce the effects of symptoms, but also attention to those factors known to be associated with higher rates of all homicides, such as social deprivation, access to weapons, and substance misuse.'

Indeed, a new study from psychologist Martin Grann (Stockholm University) and colleagues examined Swedish crime registers and found that rates of violent crime by people with schizophrenia were higher than among the general population, but that this difference disappeared when the comparison was restricted to people with schizophrenia who didn't also have a substance misuse problem (JAMA: tinyurl.com/lhxgko). 'Hence the idea that people with schizophrenia are generally more violent than those without is not true,' said lead author Niklas Långström.

Misunderstandings about the link between violence and mental illness encourage stigma and can deter people with mental illness from engaging with services (to download a related BPS leaflet, see tinyurl.com/lt4xnl).

HPC heeds advice on entry levels

The Health Professions Council (HPC) has announced that it is maintaining the entry-level qualifications for psychologists to be admitted to the statutory register of practitioner psychologists.

The HPC had suggested that psychologists would be able to join the register with master's-level qualifications, but the British Psychological Society had strongly advised that the entry level needed to be the same as the Society's current 'doctorate level'. Sue Gardner, President of the British Psychological Society, said: 'We are delighted that the HPC listened to our advice about education entry levels. We are the existing voluntary regulator and have been since the late 1980s. We are the experts in knowing what level of education and training is required before a psychologist is deemed safe to practise independently, and this level has been agreed with the largest public sector employers – the health and education services.'

The HPC's decision on the entry-level threshold recognises promises made by the government to the Society that standards would not drop as a result of the transition from voluntary to statutory regulation. However, Sue Gardner added that 'it is disappointing that the HPC chose not to explicitly mention the Doctorate routes in forensic and health psychology. It is also disappointing that our advice to protect the title "psychologist" was not taken on board, as this would have been comprehensive and less confusing for the public.'

The Society and the HPC are working together to ensure the smooth transfer of chartered psychologists to the HPC register on 1 July. All those eligible individuals should receive letters from both the HPC and the Society shortly after that date.

Bullying and psychosis link

A new study claims that being bullied can increase a child's risk of developing psychotic symptoms (see Archives of General Psychiatry: tinyurl.com/mx9zkt). Previous research had already suggested there might be a link between bullying and later psychosis, but these studies had severe limitations, including being cross-sectional or retrospective in design. The current study, by contrast, was prospective and longitudinal.

Psychologist Dieter Wolke at the University of Warwick and his colleagues, including lead author Andrea Schreier, drew on interviews conducted with over 6000 children when they were aged 8, 10 and 12. Unlike previous studies, teacher and parent reports of bullying were also gathered. It emerged that children who were bullied more at ages 8 and/or 10 were between two and four times more likely to report experiencing psychotic symptoms at the age of 12. There was a dose–response relationship, so that children who experienced more severe or chronic bullying were at greater risk of developing later psychotic symptoms. The type of bullying – whether overt or more subtle and emotional – seemed less important as a predictive factor.

Is it possible that the cause lies not with bullying, but with the fact that children at risk of developing psychotic symptoms are somehow different from their peers and therefore more likely to be targeted by bullies? 'Reverse causality is always a possibility but we do not believe this is the explanation,' Wolke told The Psychologist. Wolke pointed to the fact that the association between bullying and later psychotic symptoms was largely unaffected even after taking the children's baseline mental health and family adversity into account.

However, Wolke cautioned that previous research had shown that bullying victims tend to be different from non-victims, for example having fewer friends and being less popular. An ideal study would measure early evidence of psychotic-like symptoms, prior to measures of bullying. This is tricky, though, as Wolke explained: 'For example, it is part of children's normal developmental experiences to believe in Santa Claus or fairies but these are not hallucinations or delusions but developmentally appropriate.'

In their report of the research, the researchers said there were several possible mechanisms that could explain the link between being bullied and developing psychotic symptoms. For example, being bullied could chronically over-activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis system causing exaggerated cortisol release and stress sensitivity. Alternatively, according to cognitive models, perhaps victimisation by one's peers leads to attributional biases and dysfunctional schemas of the self and world. 'A major implication is that chronic or severe peer victimisation has non-trivial, adverse, long-term consequences,' the researchers said.

IN BRIEF
Christian Jarrett with news from the Association for Psychological Science 21st Annual Convention 22–25 May, San Francisc I When it comes to judging the value of advice, we're wooed by people's confidence. Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University asked participants to guess the weight of people from their photographs. To help them were four 'advisers', whose confidence in their own judgements was made public. The participants consistently bought more advice from the most confident advisers. (Source: New Scientist) The finding adds to past research showing we're more likely to heed advice that's expensive (tinyurl.com/43fcu8).
We're in the midst of a global economic crisis, but our optimism still rides high. That's according to Matthew Gallagher at the University of Kansas who reported the results of a survey involving 150,000 adults across 140 countries. Eighty-nine per cent of those asked said they expected the next five years of their life to be as good as or better than the present. The most optimistic countries were Ireland, Brazil, Denmark and New Zealand, while the least optimistic were Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria. (Source: USNews.com)

Emotion expert Paul Ekman, the inspiration behind, and consultant to, the hit US drama Lie to Me, said he fact-checks the scripts but allows some artistic licence. For example, the series implied that nose scratching could be a sign of lying when really it isn't. In real life, Ekman heads a consulting firm that advises the FBI. Of his fictional counterpart Cal Lightman, he said he 'solves crimes more quickly and with more certainty than I've ever done'. (Source: PsychCentral)

To help prevent driving collisions, cars of the future might be equipped with vibrating steering-wheels. Robert Gray at Arizona State University had participants undertake a driving simulation test in foggy conditions, whilst distracted by a hands-free phone call. Drivers alerted by a vibration on their arm reacted to hazards three times as quickly as participants who weren't given a warning. Visual warnings gave no response advantage, whilst audio warnings speeded driver reactions two-fold. (Source ScienceNOW)

There's a growing trend for American parents to seek uncommon names for their children. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University analysed 325 million applications for social security numbers submitted between 1880 and 2007. In 1955 just over 30 per cent of boys had a name that was among the top ten most popular. In 2007 by contrast, this proportion had dropped to 9 per cent. Among girls, the drop was from 22 per cent to 8 per cent. Twenge said whereas people in the past wanted their children to fit in, today they want them to stand out. (Source: USA Today)

People are beginning to associate status with having green credentials. Vladas Griskevicius primed students with one of two stories. The first required them to imagine they had a new job at a successful company with a swanky lobby, and was designed to provoke a desire for prestige. The second story involved the student losing a show ticket but then finding it again and was intended not to provoke a desire for prestige. Afterwards, those students primed by the business story were more likely to choose the eco-friendly rather than the luxurious models from among equally priced pairs of cars, dishwashers and cleaners. (Source: Time)