‘What we do is a way to give back to the community that took me in’

Weather seems to be quite a factor in Swansea life… I've arrived here fairly windswept!

When it is sunny it's absolutely stunning. You could honestly be abroad somewhere. But equally, when it's raining, it's still just as nice!

I know you've actually done research around the weather in Wales, and the sunshine?

Yes… I started as a database assistant when I finished my PhD… a Welsh government-funded project in Swansea. The aim was to map out health and social care data sets that exist in Wales, working with local health boards, local authorities, charities, third-sector organisations and so on to see whether they would be interested in having that data included as part of a larger databank. And then I was fortunate enough to work with the research teams.

We were a very diverse research team. Having come from a psychology background, I was pleasantly surprised, to be a part of a team where we had somebody who was purely a statistician, and somebody else who'd worked in elements of history… it was bringing together lots of different people, backgrounds, and expertise.

We worked on a project looking at incidences of multiple sclerosis in Wales, and possible differences depending on location and month of birth, related to various theories: hours of sunlight, vitamin D, or access to different types of food, such as fish through living in a coastal area, and time spent outside and exercising. You said you walked from The Mumbles today, they've got that on their doorstep.

You found lower rates of incidence in Eastern and coastal areas… and that was partly related to maternal exposure to sunlight during pregnancy?

Yes, and there are a few different explanations. It's multifaceted, but it does suggest there are environmental factors linked to levels of vitamin D. The other key aspect for that project was seeing whether any differences would emerge even within a smaller region, rather than, say, comparing incidences across areas that are further apart in latitude. 

That was when you were working more in medicine… have you brought that multidisciplinary way of working, the use of large-scale health and social care data sets, into your work in psychology?

I have. A lot of my previous work had been focused on experimental theoretical, lab-based research. So, working on the health and social care data sets project opened my eyes to what else can be done, and how I could apply the knowledge base I had built up to understand things in real-world settings.

I've now been afforded the opportunity to work on more experimental-applied work with multidisciplinary teams. For example, I've been working with the Assistive Technologies Innovation Centre in Swansea, and we recently had a human factors day. We brought in people from psychology, people from a Health and Safety Executive background, and a local human factors company, bringing all our expertise together to look at real-world issues linked to human performance.

You're quite a small team here. Do you think it's easier to bring that knowledge together when there are just a few of you? Do end up working together pretty much all the time?

Yes. We've found there are elements that we can work on together, but also have distinctiveness in terms of what we do.

One example would be last year, I was awarded a British Psychological Society Undergraduate Research Assistant grant. The project linked to work that Paul Hutchings and Ceri Phelps do, in terms of social interaction decision-making. It was bringing together aspects from social psychology about perceptions of people who wear prosthetic limbs, but then adding in the cognitive element of decision making. 

It also links to work with a company called Limb-art, based in North Wales, who design these quite funky, bold, prosthetic limbs. We wanted to delve into how other people would perceive the person who has chosen to wear a prosthetic limb that's almost attracting attention… so, the perception element, but then also the decision as to whether they would want to engage in a conversation with them in a social setting, for example.

So the work has gone off on different tangents, but I've seen how the work that I've done in the past can fit into more applied settings.

In terms of that fit, with your department, with Swansea… say a job comes up next week, say at the University of York. Would you and your work in psychology make sense in York?

Well, I was originally from a small rural village in Wales, and I started having dancing lessons in Swansea when I was young. I absolutely fell in love with the place. I felt really drawn to Swansea. I sounded quite different to people in Swansea in terms of my accent, and was maybe a bit concerned about that when everybody else in these dancing classes were all from Swansea. But I felt welcomed, and part of a team.

That's what I have found about everything that I've done in Swansea. The people are absolutely amazing… the people make it what it is. When I finished school, I moved to Swansea. I did all my education, went to college, went to university, everything in Swansea.

I feel I owe something back to Swansea for giving me so many opportunities that I don't think I would have had if I'd stayed where I was. I'm only where I am today from everything that's happened that I've been involved with in Swansea. I get quite emotional just thinking about it…

I didn't mean to get you emotional! But that's an interesting thing in itself…

I just feel I would want to stay in Swansea because it's been so good to me. It is a fantastic place. Yes, there are areas of deprivation… here at UWTSD we're a widening participation university, we give people the opportunity to come to university to get an education that maybe they wouldn't normally have had. What we do is a way to give back to the community that took me in.

That's lovely. You've mentioned the people and the deprivation that is common with quite a lot of UK coastal areas. Do you think that has an impact, or that there's anything psychologically distinct about the people or the issues they face?

That resilience… despite people experiencing their own hardships, they will keep going, keep at it, really want to make things better, to enjoy their time. With Swansea it's not just the people, it's the location, and what is available to people that can help make such a difference in people's lives. 

The beach, the coastal path, all the way down to Mumbles and on to the Gower… there's a lot of beauty in and around Swansea. But at the same time, there's the city centre, the shops, nightlife bars, restaurants, a hustle and bustle. I think there's something unique about Swansea. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's definitely something magical.

Dylan Thomas called it an 'ugly, lovely town'. I've only started coming here in the last year or so, but it's certainly grabbed me. You're developing a Welsh Language Learning course. Are there implications of 'doing Psychology' in Welsh?

Yes, quite a few, and we're finding out more as we delve deeper. 

The Welsh Government has got the Welsh language strategy – a million Welsh speakers by 2050, for example. But Swansea is maybe not considered as having a strong Welsh language focus – there are not as many Welsh language speakers in Swansea as there may be in other parts of Wales.

Here though, we're a Welsh language University as well, and we have students who maybe work in the care sector and have learnt basic Welsh terms but feel like they need something a bit more specific to their roles. I'm a Welsh speaker myself, and my grandfather spoke Welsh, and couldn't really speak English that well.

Particularly as he got older I used to take him to hospital appointments in the local area, and you could tell he couldn't really understand what was happening. Being elderly and having issues with memory anyway, he found it even more challenging to then be told quite complicated information about his health in a language that he wasn't familiar with.

So the idea behind the project is to create a bespoke Welsh Language Learning course that specifically focuses on terms related to psychology, counselling, and mental health. With the students, first of all, and then hoping to open it up to the wider community, for example, charities or organisations in mental health.

What is also interesting to me is that we have some students who will have their personal tutor meetings in Welsh. They think in Welsh, and I suppose from a cognitive perspective they may find it challenging to be on a psychology course taught through the medium of English. And on the flip side, some Welsh-speaking students ask to have the meetings in English, because they know that the course is in English.

That difference and how the ability is transferred across is interesting from a cognitive perspective. Particularly when students come to university, they're learning psychological terms, which can be quite technical. How do those terms translate to Welsh? Is there an equivalent Welsh word for a very specific technical, psychological term?

It's certainly interesting to think of it in those cognitive terms. You've also looked at this kind of area with the Psychological Evaluation Research and Consultancy hub?

Yes, PERCH is the consultancy hub within the Psychology Department at UWTSD, and something we're focusing on in relation to cognition is education. Trying to understand why and how we remember and forget information, and applying that to educational scenarios. Take the amount of feedback students get on work. Is there such a thing as too much? Does the main point or what they need to focus on get lost if they've been given lots and lots of feedback? Does it become cognitively overwhelming? 

Does it?

It's complicated. Although some people may feel that they want more feedback, whether in the long term that is of benefit is another matter. We're looking at whether students might receive written comments in a box, and then maybe a rubric on where their work fits into marking criteria… so perhaps being able to see in different ways where their work needs to be improved.

I would imagine there are big individual differences in it as well, and perhaps it's changing over time… probably an over-generalisation, but do students increasingly just want to do whatever gets them that golden degree at the end of it all? Perhaps that links in with your Life Design Initiative to improve student employability?

Yes. A lot of the focus in PERCH is on evaluating the usefulness of initiatives, in educational settings, organisations etc. The Life Design Initiative was developed by a department within the university to promote student employability and life skills. They wanted to focus on developing self-efficacy and self-esteem, encouraging students to recognise the things they could go on to do.

They started with postgraduate students and received feedback that it might be beneficial for level four undergraduate students, particularly if they came from non-traditional backgrounds, to help build that confidence and get them settled into university.

It was a longitudinal project… we captured their life orientation, their self-efficacy, and their self-esteem, at baseline and then at eight-week time points throughout the course of the academic year. The Life Design Initiative had a positive effect in terms of making them feel supported, and generally a bit more confident in university. But we do need to explore more whether it's the students who don't attend these types of sessions that would actually benefit from them the most.   

Going back to how we remember and forget information… one of your papers is titled 'Memorable objects are more susceptible to forgetting', which I struggled to get my head around!

The Retrieval Induced Forgetting work involved trying to understand what aspects of objects that we see in the world, such as their shape, colour, the design of them, make them more memorable, and whether that memorability could potentially be a detriment to that object. The paradigm, originally developed by Anderson, Bjork and Bjork, 1994, involves practising and rehearsing certain items that are linked or connected to a category of items.

When you're subsequently tested, are items that you weren't tested on forgotten more if they have a common link? So for example, you study the categories of fruits, vehicles, occupations, etc, and each of those categories has its own list of word associations, such as fruit-banana, fruit-orange, fruit-apple, etc.

You're then asked to practice or rehearse half of those items from half the categories, so maybe only fruits and vehicles, but not occupations and something else. And then even within that category, maybe only banana and orange, not pear and apple. Is your memory for pear and apple even worse, because you practised banana and orange, than a category that wasn't practised at all?

We took that idea and extended it to see whether the effect would occur with images: visual representation and visual memory.

And then you're looking at how memorable an item is? So, I don't know if this is the case, but if a banana is considered more memorable than an apple, maybe because of its distinctive shape, you're finding that if it wasn't one of the practice items in the Retrieval Induced Forgetting paradigm, it's more likely to be forgotten, even though it is more kind of memorable on its own?

Yes… there are inhibitory versus non-inhibitory theories to try to explain the RIF effect. But the idea is that if an item is particularly strong, in relation to its category, it creates more competition, when you're trying to remember the items you need to remember. It needs to be pushed out, so then it's subsequently forgotten to a greater extent.