Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. What an inspiration - Neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, aged 94 and still making new research discoveries about the human brain.

2. More than 40,000 people are likely to die by suicide in the US this year, a grim new milestone. A Newsweek article details this "Suicide Epidemic" and asks - "Why are we killing ourselves and how can we stop it?"

3. The Scitable blog network from Nature has re-launched with a new psychology blog Mind Read, which kicks off with a post about synaesthesia, and a new neuroscience blog Brain Metrics, which asks: "Are There Really as Many Neurons in the Human Brain as Stars in the Milky Way?"

4. 60 short videos of emotion experts talking about ... emotion.

5. "Nine lessons for innovators from a Nobel Prize-Winning Psychologist" (yes, it's Danny Kahneman again).

6. Seven tools for thinking from Dan Dennett, excerpted from his new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

7. Anyone can become an expert in anything with 10,000 hours of practice? Maybe Not - Annie Murphy Paul breaks news of a new study that debunks the popular myth.

8. A brief history of mental illness in art. From the always excellent Ferris Jabr.

9. The history and future of lie detection technology. BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by psychologist Geoff Bunn.

10. New Scientist has an interview with a man who was convinced his brain was dead. (Earlier this week I reported the results of a scan of this man's brain).

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Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond: On Sunday in Hay on Wye, Consultant psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely, sociologist Steve Fuller, and clinical psychologist Richard Bentall are debating the value of psychotherapy (there are other psych/neuro events too). On Tues in Bristol, Dan Dennett is talking about his new book: "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking". Across the pond, in New York on Friday, Carl Zimmer is hosting a workshop on how to measure consciousness.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The mindbus technique for resisting chocolate - should we climb aboard?

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers

If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was the challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques.

Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive defusion", the essence being that "you are not your thoughts". The students were told to imagine that they are the driver of a mindbus and any difficult thoughts about chocolate are to be seen as awkward passengers. The students chose a specific method for dealing with these difficult thoughts/passengers and practised it for five minutes - either describing them, letting them know who is in charge, making them talk with a different accent, or singing what they are saying.

Another group of students were taught an acceptance technique known as "urge surfing". They were instructed to ride the wave of their chocolate cravings, rather than to sink them or give in to them. A final group of students acted as controls and were taught a relaxation technique.

As well as trying to resist the bag of chocolates, the students in all conditions were asked to avoid eating any other chocolate as far as possible, and to keep a diary of any chocolate they did eat over the five days.

The key finding is that the mindbus group ate fewer chocolates from their bag as compared with students in the control group. By contrast, the urge surfing group ate just as many of their chocolates as the controls. Diary records showed the differences between groups in their other chocolate consumption were not statistically significant, although there was a trend for the mindbus group to eat less (13g vs. 52g in the urge surfing group and 44g in the control condition). Another way of describing the results is to say that 27 per cent of the mindbus group ate some chocolate over the five-day period, compared with 45 per cent of the urge surfers and 45 per cent of controls.

A habits questionnaire suggested the mindbus technique was more effective because it reduced the students' mindless, automatic consumption of chocolate more than the other interventions. Jenkins and Tapper said their results show the mindbus "cognitive defusion" technique is a "promising brief intervention strategy" for boosting self-control over an extended time period.

The serious chocaholics among you may not be so convinced. Although the students were recruited on the basis that they wanted to reduce their chocolate consumption, they appeared to show saintly levels of abstinence. On average, even the control group participants ate just 0.69 chocolates from their bag over the five day period (compared with an average of 0.02 chocolates in the mindbus condition; 0.27 in the urge surfing condition). The controls' other chocolate consumption amounted to the equivalent of little more than four individual chocolates over five days. You've got to wonder - how serious were these participants about chocolate and just how tasty were the chocolates in that bag*?

Another thing - the researchers included a measure of "behavioural rebound". After the students returned to the lab on day five, they were presented with a bowl of chocolates and invited to eat as many as they liked. The groups didn't differ in the amount of chocolates they consumed, which the researchers interpreted as a good sign - after all, the mindbus group hadn't compensated for their restricted intake during the week. But hang on, they also showed no evidence of greater resistance to the chocolate. Sounds to me like the passengers had taken over the bus.

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Jenkins, K., and Tapper, K. (2013). Resisting chocolate temptation using a brief mindfulness strategy. British Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12050

*Co-author Katy Tapper got in touch on Twitter to tell us: "The chocolates were very tempting Cadbury's Celebrations!"

--Further reading--
Video of the mindbus technique. 
Self-licensing: when you indulge through reason, not lack of willpower
Good news and bad for a popular willpower-enhancing strategy
The first detailed study of daily temptation and resistance

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Psychotherapy Outcome (Psychotherapy).

Asexuality (Psychology and Sexuality). Editorial is open access.

Poverty and Class (virtual special issue from British Journal of Educational Psychology). Open access.

Australian Forensic Psychology (virtual special issue of the Australian Psychologist). Open access.

The Teenage Brain (Current Directions in Psychological Science).

Specificity, Methodology and Psychopathology of Emotional Attention (Biological Psychology).

Transcending Nativism and Empiricism in Cognitive Development (Cognitive Development).

Neural Plasticity, Behavior, and Cognitive Training: Developmental Neuroscience Perspectives (Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience).

Specificity, Methodology and Psychopathology of Emotional Attention (Biological Psychology).

Confronting Unsustainable Behaviors (Ecopsychology).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Scanning a brain that believes it is dead

What is going on in the brain of someone who has the deluded belief that they are brain dead? A team of researchers led by neuropsychologist Vanessa Charland-Varville at CHU Sart-Tilman Hospital and the University of Liege has attempted to find out by scanning the brain of a depressed patient who held this very belief.

The researchers used a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner, which is the first time this scanning technology has been used on a patient with this kind of delusion - known as Cotard's syndrome after the French neurologist Jules Cotard. The 48-year-old patient had developed Cotard's after attempting to take his own life by electrocution. Eight months later he arrived at his general practitioner complaining that his brain was dead, and that he therefore no longer needed to eat or sleep. He acknowledged that he still had a mind, but (in the words of the researchers) he said he was "condemned to a kind of half-life, with a dead brain in a living body."

The researchers used the PET scanner to monitor levels of metabolic activity across the patient's brain as he rested. Compared with 39 healthy, age-matched controls, he showed substantially reduced activity across a swathe of frontal and temporal brain regions incorporating many key parts of what's known as the "default mode network". This is a hub of brain regions that shows increased activity when people's brains are at rest, disengaged from the outside world. It's been proposed that activity in this network is crucial for our sense of self.

"Our data suggest that the profound disturbance of thought and experience, revealed by Cotard's delusion, reflects a profound disturbance in the brain regions responsible for 'core consciousness' and our abiding sense of self," the researchers concluded.

Unfortunately the study has a number of serious limitations beyond the fact that it is of course a single case study. As well as having a diagnosis of Cotard's Delusion, the patient was also depressed and on an intense drug regimen, including sedative, antidepressant and antipsychotic medication. It's unclear therefore whether his distinctive brain activity was due to Cotard's, depression or his drugs, although the researchers counter that such an extreme reduction in brain metabolism is not normally seen in patients with depression or on those drugs.

Another issue is with the lack of detail on the scanning procedure. Perhaps this is due to the short article format (a "Letter to the Editor"), but it's not clear for how long the patient and controls were scanned, nor what they were instructed to do in the scanner. For example, did they have their eyes open or closed? What did they think about?

But perhaps most problematic is the issue of how to interpret the findings. Does the patient have Cotard's Delusion because of his abnormal brain activity, or does he have that unusual pattern of brain activity because of his deluded beliefs? Relevant here, but not mentioned by the researchers, are studies showing that trained meditators also show reduced activity in the default mode network. This provides a graphic illustration of the limits to a purely biological approach to mental disorder. It seems diminished activity in the default mode network can be associated both with feelings of being brain dead or feelings of tranquil oneness with the world, it depends on who is doing the feeling. Understanding how this can be will likely require researchers to think outside of the brain.

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Charland-Verville, V., Bruno, M., Bahri, M., Demertzi, A., Desseilles, M., Chatelle, C., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Hustinx, R., Bernard, C., Tshibanda, L., Laureys, S., and Zeman, A. (2013). Brain dead yet mind alive: A positron emission tomography case study of brain metabolism in Cotard's syndrome. Cortex DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.03.003

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Stand by me: Close friendships appear to counteract genetic vulnerability to depression in girls, but not boys

Publication of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code has provoked renewed debate in recent weeks over the extent to which mental illness ought to be framed as a psychosocial or a biological problem. The answer of course is that it is both. A new Canadian study captures this interplay, showing how close friendships appear to mitigate the risk for girls whose genes mean they are more vulnerable than average to depression.

Mara Brendgen and her colleagues studied 294 pairs of twins aged ten years old (147 girls). Some of the twins were identical (they share the same genes), the others were non-identical (sharing just half their genes). Each twin pair was raised together in the same family.

The researchers obtained ratings of the children's signs of depression from their teachers and classmates. They also gauged their close friendships by asking each child to nominate up to three best friends in their class, and to indicate who was their very best friend. Reciprocal nominations were a sign of mutual friendship. The children also answered questions about the quality of their friendships, including whether they do fun things together or get angry with each other.

Consistent with past research, there was evidence of the role of genes in depression. That is, correlations in signs of depression were much higher between identical versus non-identical twins. If one of a pair of identical twins had signs of depression, this was taken as an indication that the second twin had genetic vulnerability for the condition. If one of a pair of non-identical twins showed signs of depression, this was also taken to mean the other twin had genetic vulnerability, but less so than in the case of identical twins.

Here's the main result. Genetic vulnerability to depression in girls was less likely to manifest if they had at least one close friend. Stated differently, the apparent protective effect of having at least one close friend was magnified in girls who were genetically vulnerable to the condition. This means that for girls there was an interplay between genetic risk and the protective effect of friendship. This was not the case for boys. Friendships did appear to protect boys from depression, but this was not related in any way to their genetic vulnerability. Perhaps, the researchers surmised, there is a gender difference because "girls tend to rely more on social relationships as a source of self-definition and self-validation, and their friendships are also characterised by greater intimacy, self-disclosure, empathy and emotional support."

Separate from any issues of genetic vulnerability, another gender difference was that boys, but not girls, showed an apparently additive protective effect against depression of having more friends. The researchers said this may be because girls more often have intimate one-on-one friendships, whereas boys are more often part of friendship groups.

Other details to emerge from the study: better quality friendships were more protective against depression (regardless of genetic vulnerability); genetic vulnerability to depression wasn't associated with the likelihood of a child having friends, but it was negatively associated with the perceived quality of their friendships.

The study has some limitations, particularly the relatively small sample size, the reliance on observer ratings of depression, and the cross-sectional design, which means a causal role for friendships cannot be assumed. It's possible that the manifestation of depression symptoms in genetically vulnerable girls leads to fewer friends, rather than more friends reducing signs of depression (note however that social support is a known mitigating factor against depression). Also, the results may be specific to this age group.

Despite these shortcomings, this is an innovative study on an important topic. Children who show signs of depression pre-adolescence are at heightened risk for having problems in their teens and beyond, so the more we understand about mitigating this risk, the better. The researchers said their results "emphasise the importance of  teaching social interactional skills that promote positive relations with others to help prevent the development of depressive behaviour in children."

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Brendgen, M., Vitaro, F., Bukowski, W., Dionne, G., Tremblay, R., and Boivin, M. (2013). Can friends protect genetically vulnerable children from depression? Development and Psychopathology, 25 (02), 277-289 DOI: 10.1017/S0954579412001058

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the last week:

1. How too much empathy can actually lead us to do the wrong thing - thought-provoking essay by Paul Bloom. (related research covered on the Digest).

2. Thanks to books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and, most recently, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are discovering the manifold biases that muddle human judgment. So how come there hasn't been a revolution in good sense and shrewd decision making? Samuel McNerney may have the answer.

3. The Digest nearly won an award this week (hold the applause), reaching finalist position for psychology/neuroscience in the inaugural Science Seeker blogging awards. Many congratulations to all the winners, especially to Aatish Bhatia winner of the psych/neuro category; to psychologist Pete Etchells who won "best post about peer-reviewed research"; and to Virginia Hughes, who won "post of the year" for her superb story about hypersomnolence.

4. The build up to the release of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code (DSM-5) continued this week as the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology published a statement calling for a "paradigm shift" in psychiatric diagnosis "away from an outdated disease model" towards "an approach which pays far more attention to the complex range of life experiences of people experiencing mental distress."

5. The story broke at the Observer on Sunday with an unfortunate spin that implied psychology was at war with psychiatry. Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, a psychiatrist, showed there is in fact a great deal of consensus ("Mindless psychiatry is as unhelpful as brainless psychiatry, and the psychiatrist who ignores the social environment is, well, not a psychiatrist").

6. How to spot a murderer's brain (or not).

7. Ed Yong reported on an ambitious and controversial new study of super-brainy participants that's looking to pin down the genetic influences on intelligence.

8. Do nice guys really finish last?

9. If only there were somewhere you could get an expert, no-nonsense discussion of psychology research that's been splashed all over the media ... hang on, psychologist and writer Tom Stafford has started a new column for The Conversation that does just that - first off, can a poster of staring eyes really deter bike thieves?

10. The 2013 illusion of the year has been chosen - check out the winner and runners up.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Experienced job interviewers are no better than novices at spotting lying candidates

For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Marc-André Reinhard report that experienced job interviewers are in fact no better than novice interviewers at spotting when a candidate is lying.

The researchers filmed 14 volunteers telling the truth about a job they'd really had in the past and then spinning a yarn about time in a job they'd never really had. The volunteers were offered a small monetary reward to boost their motivation. These clips were then played online to 46 highly experienced interviewers (they'd conducted between 21 and 1000 real-life job interviews), 92 interviewers with some experience (they'd interviewed at least once), and 214 students who'd never before acted as a job interviewer. The participants' task was to identify the clips in which the interviewee was speaking truthfully about their work experience, and the clips in which the interviewee was fabricating.

Overall the participants achieved an accuracy rate of 52 per cent - barely above chance performance, which is consistent with a huge literature showing how poor most of us are at spotting deception. But the headline finding is that the more experienced interviewers were no better than the novice interviewers at spotting lying job candidates - the first time that this topic has been researched. Greater work seniority, having more work experience and having more subordinates at work were also unrelated to the ability to spot lying job candidates.

There was a glimmer of hope that interview lie-detection skills could be taught. Participants who reported more correct beliefs about non-verbal cues to lying (e.g. liars don't in fact fidget more) were slightly more successful at recognising which job candidates were lying (each correct belief about a non-verbal cue added 1.2 per cent more accuracy on average). Experienced and novice interviewers in the current study didn't differ in their knowledge about lying cues, which helps explain why the veterans were no better at the task. The more experienced interviewers were however more skeptical overall, tending to rate more of the clips as featuring lying.

"Our results provide the first evidence that employment interviewers may not be better at detecting deception in job interviews than lay persons," the researchers said, "although it is a judgmental context that they are very experienced with."

Although the main gist of the results is consistent with related research in other contexts - for example, studies have found police detectives are no better at spotting lies, despite their interrogation experience - this study has some serious limitations, which undermine the applicability of the findings to the real world. Above all, the study did not involve real interviews, which meant the participants were unable to interact with the interviewees in a dynamic manner.

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Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., and Müller, P. (2013). It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (3), 467-479 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence

Do fluent presenters make
learning feel too easy?

Eloquent and engaging scientific communicators in the mould of physicist Brian Cox make learning seem fun and easy. So much so that a new study says they risk breeding overconfidence. When a presenter is seen to handle complicated information effortlessly, students sense wrongly that they too have acquired a firm grasp of the material.

Shana Carpenter and her colleagues showed 42 undergrad students a one-minute video of a science lecture about calico cats. Half of them saw a version in which the female lecturer was confident, eloquent, made eye-contact and gestured with her hands. The other students saw a version in which the same lecturer communicated the same facts, but did so in a fumbling style, frequently checking her notes, making little eye contact and few gestures.

After watching the video, the students rated how well they thought they'd do on a test of its content ten minutes later. The students who'd seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. In the case of the students in the fluent lecturer condition, this wasn't as good as they'd predicted. Their greater confidence was misplaced.

A second study was similar - 70 students watched either a fluent or fumbling lecturer, but this time the students had a chance afterwards to spend as long as they wanted reviewing the script. On average, both groups of students devoted the same amount of time (perhaps out of habit). But only among the students who'd watched the fumbling lecturer was there a link between time spent on the script and subsequent performance on the test. This suggests only they used the time with the script to fill in blanks in their knowledge.

"Learning from someone else - whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent - may create a kind of 'social metacognition'," the researchers said, "in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, 'can I explain it clearly?'".

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren't picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class.

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Carpenter, S., Wilford, M., Kornell, N., and Mullaney, K. (2013). Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0442-z

--Further reading--
Co-author on this study, Nate Kornell, wrote a guest Digest post in 2008 with study tips for students. 
How fluency affects judgement, choice and processing style

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Paul Clarke Wikipedia Commons. 

Occupational hazard - links between professions and suicide risk have changed over time

Suicide rates have fallen among farmers

Among the various risk factors for suicide, psychologists have recognised for some time that a person's occupation plays an important part. Suicide rates have tended to be unusually high in professions that provide ready access to guns, drugs, or open water, such as in farming, medicine, dentistry and maritime careers.

A new analysis has examined whether this still holds true. Stephen Roberts and his colleagues accessed the UK suicide rates for dozens of occupations in 1979 to 1983 and compared these with similar data recorded between 2001 and 2005.

Consistent with the ready access theory, vets, pharmacists, dentists, doctors, and farmers were all among the top 15 occupations with the highest suicide rates back in the late 70s, early 80s. But this had all changed when looking at the more recent data. In the early noughties, none of these professions were in the top 30 occupations in terms of suicide rates. Instead, the occupations with the highest rates of suicide were largely manual, including coal miners, builders, window cleaners, plasterers and refuse collectors.

Stated differently, of 55 high-risk occupations, 14 had shown reductions in suicide rate in the noughties compared with the late seventies, and these were almost exclusively highly educated professional roles like doctors, radiographers and judges, as well as farmers, actors and authors. In contrast, five of the 55 high-risk professions showed an increased rate of suicide in the later data, and these were exclusively manual professions - coal miners, labourers, plasterers, fork-lift drivers and carpenters.

The new findings are published at a time when arguments are raging over the relative prominence that should be given to biological or social explanations of mental illness.

According to this new analysis, socio-economic forces appear to have become an increasingly major factor in occupational suicide risk. The percentage of variation in suicide rates explained by an occupation's socioeconomic grouping (e.g. managerial, trade, admin etc) almost doubled from 11.4 per cent in the early data to 20.7 per cent in the early noughties. Bear in mind these figures were from before the recession, so if anything it seems likely this trend will have intensified in more recent years.

The data also showed that suicide rates were much higher among men than women, and that among men, the most at-risk occupations tended to be manual, whereas in women they were more often (non-manual) professional.

If the pattern of these results are replicated in other European and Western countries, the researchers said this "could help in developing new suicide prevention interventions that can be targeted at specific occupational groups."

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Roberts, S., Jaremin, B., and Lloyd, K. (2013). High-risk occupations for suicide Psychological Medicine, 43 (06), 1231-1240 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712002024

--Further reading--
More Digest reports on suicide.
Men, suicide and society - why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide (Samaritans report).

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Love this - "Neuroscience may be sexier than psychology right now, and it certainly has a lot more money and celebrity. But they really cannot get along without each other." Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal on How The Brain Really Works.

2. New Scientist has started a new column written by people with "mysterious neurological conditions". The first is by Heather Sellers who has a severe form of prosopagnosia (AKA face blindness).

3. There's been lots of coverage this last week about NIMH director Thomas R. Insel's announcement that his organisation - the world's largest funder of mental health research - will be moving away from US psychiatry's DSM categories, just as the profession is about to publish the latest version of its diagnostic manual. My favourite round-up of the affair was by Christopher Lane for Psychology Today. Other bloggers pointed out that the big news isn't really that surprising at all. (also, check out this measured response from the chair of DSM5).

4. "Probably the most boring book in the world" - that's how Prof Sir Simon Wesseley described the DSM on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind as he told presenter Claudia Hammond that the diagnostic code really isn't that relevant here in the UK. The programme also covered recent research that looked at rates of crying by therapists in therapy (check out my coverage of the research earlier this year).

5. The Guardian covered the psychological tricks that restaurant menu-compilers use to influence your dinner order.

6. Newly posted TED talk by positive psychology researcher Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit.

7. A new play on tour in the UK "Mess" sets out to demystify anorexia and it's getting rave reviews. It's written by and stars Caroline Horton, who has first-hand experience of the condition. (There's also a new book out soon about anorexia: Ministry of Thin, How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out of Control).

8. I enjoyed this charming account of the decades-long research relationship between Suzanne Corkin and amnesiac Henry Molaison. (Corkin's new book about Molaison is out now in hardback and Kindle).

9. Nathan Azrin, the psychologist who pioneered the use of "token economies" on psychiatric wards has died aged 82. "It would be difficult to name a population that wasn’t affected by his work," said Alan Kazdin in this NYT obituary.

10. Bad news for "Tiger" parenting enthusiasts - "Children of parents ... classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or "easygoing.”

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Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond. There's a workshop this Saturday and Sunday in London on Havening Therapy, which promises to cure trauma in minutes. Here's why I won't be going. Later in the week in Oxford, there are still tickets available for three Pint of Science brain-related events.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.