Category / Health, Wellbeing & Society

Sports England Hackathon Challenge!

 

Technology awards sport

I’m trying to get a team of six together for the UK’s first sport hackathon. The challenge is to create an app that facilitates social change through sport at the Sport England Sport Technology Awards Hackathon. It will take place over 25 hours on 2-3 October 2015 during which time teams will have just 24 hours to develop their concept that will help a particular demographic group become more physically active.

The winning team will be awarded a bursary of £10,000 to help them build the app.

If you’re interested can you please get in touch with me, Clare at: cfarrance@bournemouth.ac.uk

Team registration closes on 7th September. Would be great to have a BU team there!

More details can be found at:

http://www.sportandrecreation.org.uk/news/06-08-2015/uk%E2%80%99s-first-sports-hackathon-launches

Fusion Investment Fund: Neuroscience has found that emotions are a primary factor in learning to change behaviour: A project to apply and study these findings in many areas of practice (for example, public health, sports science, youth work, neurological rehabilitation, special education, and potentially many others).

Fusion, Fusion Investment Fund

 

We were very fortunate to receive Fusion funding for our collaboration between colleagues and students in Health and Social Sciences, Sports Science, and a variety of external practice partners. Essentially the funding will enable us to obtain psychophysiological recording equipment to be used to measure emotional responses in a wide variety of learning and training settings. Below is a screenshot of a typical recording from this kind of equipment.

 

Image-1

 

Huge progress has been made over the last couple of decades in our understanding of emotion and feelings. A compelling conclusion from this enormous body of work is the primacy of emotion in how we operate in the world. Darwin knew this, as did Freud, but many still cling to the notion of the achievements of homo sapiens (“wise man”!) as founded on cognition and rational thinking. For them, feelings are a vestigial remnant of our evolutionary past, not dissimilar to the appendix – no longer having any purpose, and also potentially a threat to our well being.

Affective neuroscience completely opposes this so-called rational approach: emotions and feelings guided our survival in our evolutionary past, but the big news is that they still do! Accumulations of theory and research from fields such as affective neuroscience, positive psychology, and health psychology support this simple but crucial switch in emphasis. Some everyday practice reveals the primacy of emotion, for example emotionally skilled doctors tend to bring about better health outcomes for their patients, children are taught to pay attention to their ‘uh oh’ signs (involuntary emotional responses of sweaty palms and heart beating faster) to keep them safe. So emotions are not the redundant and fickle “appendix” of our behavioural systems, but in fact are their driving force.

Despite an array of pragmatic findings about the way emotions and feelings work, this largely ‘pure’ body of neuroscience has not been directly applied to any particular field of practice. This project aims to correct that omission. The applications of affective science to how we learn and change our behaviour are potentially enormous, as the physiological emotional measures offer a straightforward ‘window’ into the person’s emotional responses.

The Fusion funding enables us to build on one of the applications, through running a study developing a previous pilot. This will be based on a form of training using natural horsemanship that has been demonstrated to be very successful in behaviour change for young offenders and young people who do not engage with school. This is an example of what it looks like (thanks to TheHorseCourse for the picture):

 

TheHorseCourse picture

 

The equipment, and experience gained through carrying out the initial study, will also allow for projects with other practice partners to go ahead, for example, work with people with acquired brain injuries, and children with profound learning disabilities. If any of this interests you, please get in touch with Sid Carter or Emma Kavanagh, and we’d be glad to tell you more.

 

New publication by BU PhD student Jib Acharya

Publishing, student research

Jib paper India 2015

Congratulations to FHSS Ph.D. student Mr. Jib Acharya, whose paper ‘Study of nutritional problems in preschool aged children in Kaski District in Nepal’  has just been published in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Healthcare [1].  The academic paper, based on his Ph.D. thesis, reports on his mixed-methods Public Health study addressing attitudes and knowledge of mothers of young children (pre-school aged) in one particular district in Nepal.  The research comprises a quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups.   Jib Acharya, who is originally from Nepal, compares and contrasts the attitudes, knowledge and behaviour of poor rural and poor urban women (=mothers) in that district.   The research is supervised by Dr. Jane Murphy, Dr. Martin Hind and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.

SAM_3423

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Reference:

  1. Acharya, J., van Teijlingen, E., Murphy, J., Hind, M. (2015) Study of nutritional problems in preschool aged children in Kaski District in Nepal, Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Healthcare 1(2): 97-118.

Understanding how people with depression think about how the past could have turned out differently

Fusion, Fusion Investment Fund

The period of funding from the BU Fusion Investment Fund (Co-Creation and Co-Production Strand) has just finished for my joint psychology and psychiatry research project into the role of counterfactual thinking in depression. Counterfactual thinking is thinking about how the past could have been different. It is closely tied-up with the emotion of regret but can help people prepare to deal more effectively with similar situations in the future. For example, a person who thinks that an intimate relationship that failed would have survived if they had taken more account of how their partner was feeling (counterfactual thinking) can adapt their behaviour accordingly in their next intimate relationship in order to try to prevent the breakdown of the relationship and ensure its longevity.

My collaborator on the Fusion-funded project is Dr Paul Walters who’s a Consultant Psychiatrist for Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust (DHUFT) based at Weymouth. A student from the Psychology Department’s Foundations in Clinical Psychology Master’s degree course (Stephen Richer) worked on the project by interviewing DHUFT patients who are diagnosed with depression. The project ran from December 2013 to July 2015, in which time a total of 29 patients were assessed. Although the project funding has ended, participant recruitment will continue until the required number of 65 participants is reached, which should be by October 2015.

Preliminary analysis of the data from the project suggests that the patients assessed tend to focus on aspects of the self (e.g., personality characteristics) when thinking counterfactually about a negative social event from their past. This finding contrasts with the counterfactual thoughts of people that have not received a formal clinical diagnosis of depression who, our previous research has found, tend to focus more on factors that are external to the self (e.g., other people’s behaviour) when mentally ‘undoing’ a previous negative social event. Once the data are collected from all 65 participants with depression, more meaningful comparisons between the counterfactual thoughts of depressed and non-depressed people will be drawn. Ultimately, Paul Walters and I hope that the findings of the project will aid in the refinement of the cognitive behavioural therapies that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists administer for the treatment of depression. Once the results of the data from all 65 participants have been analysed and written-up for publication, Paul and I plan to submit a funding bid to the National Institute of Health Research for a follow-on intervention project into tailoring cognitive behavioural therapies for depression based on the factors that influence the counterfactual thoughts of the patients with depression.

Overall, the BU Fusion funding has been immensely beneficial for engaging students and a key external stakeholder in the local community (DHUFT) in a valuable piece of applied research that has important psychotherapeutic implications for mental health patients and professional best practice implications for mental healthcare professionals.

Thank you, Fusion Investment Fund, I couldn’t have done the research without you.

Dr Kevin Thomas, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science and Technology.

Global Food Security – new programme of research to be announced

Funding opportunities

 Chicken and globe

The Global Food Security (GFS) Programme will soon be announcing a new five-year interdisciplinary programme of research.

The programme has been co-designed by BBSRC, ESRC, NERC, Defra and FSA, in partnership with wider stakeholders, and will address a major food security challenge: Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context

For more information click here

The Midwifery quilt online- URA scheme funded project

Fusion, Women's Academic Network

As part of my EdD thesis on ‘The essence of the art of a midwife..’ http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/16560/    I created a reflexive textile quilt, with each of the squares representing an entry in my research diary. Whenever I have been to conferences with my quilt the question has always been asked ‘what do the squares mean’? Though I anticipate that anyone looking at it will gather their own interpretation of the squares my stories behind them are now accessible online. In the spring of this year I applied, and was pleased to receive, funding from the BU Undergraduate research assistantship scheme in order to create a web site for the quilt. For the past six weeks George Upson undergraduate student from the BA (Hons) Media Production course has been active in designing and creating the web site with me and learning about the world of academia in a small way. I am indebted to him for his creative abilities and to Garratt Lynch and Richard Wallis for their early support in the process, and also for the URA scheme!

The Midwifery quilt maybe accessed here http://www.midwiferyquilt.co.uk/

Dr Jenny Hall

Ethical fundraising : Protecting vulnerable adults from aggressive fundraising techniques

Festival of Learning, Research Ethics

Dr Lee-Ann Fenge

Dr Lee-Ann Fenge

There is growing awareness in the government and media of the importance of recognising and responding to the risks posed by financial abuse of vulnerable older people. My last two blogs have focused on financial scams and mass marketing fraud, but it is now becoming recognised that the charity sector are also employing dubious marketing techniques to elicit money from vulnerable individuals.

The marketing techniques and fundraising methods of charities have come under the spotlight since the death of Olive Cooke, 92, in May. Although her family insist that the numerous approaches she received from charities were not to blame for her death, the fact that she received 267 charity letters in one month alone started alarm bells ringing. Some charities working with emotionally upsetting issues (such as animal cruelty) sometimes employ shocking imagery which has been described as psychoactive advertising (Bennett, 2015). These types of marketing approaches seek to evoke a positive emotional response to fundraising, but can be upsetting for those who receive such material through the post.
As a result of governmental concern about the fundraising methods employed by some charities, changes will be
introduced as amendments to the Charities Bill. This new legislation will tighten rules on how fundraisers approach people who are vulnerable, and how vulnerable adults should be protected from high-pressure marketing tactics.

Some charities have already responded to these concerns by suspending operations with call centres which use
high pressure fundraising techniques.It is interesting to note that although the government is seeking to put a brake on aggressive fundraising techniques, this comes at a time when the remit of the Charity Commission to effectively regulate the sector has been reduced due to budget reductions following the UK Treasury’s Comprehensive Spending Review 2014–15. This has resulted in a reduction in the Commission’s regulatory engagement with charities. As part of the government response to concerns about unethical fundraising tactics, Sir Stuart Etherington, Chief Executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), will chair an urgent review of fundraising self-regulation.

It is important that the charity sector develop good practice guidance which embraces the responsibility to safeguard vulnerable groups, and put an end to working with companies which use aggressive fundraising techniques.

The National Centre for Post-Qualifying Social Work at BU is currently working collaboratively with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) to develop good practice guides and advice for professionals working with vulnerable citizens and their families/carers about responding to the risks posed by financial scams. We will be hosting an event as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science on 10th November to explore with the sector how we develop better responses to safeguarding those most at risk of financial exploitation. Details of how to book onto this event will be posted in the near future.

Reference:

Bennett, R. (2015) Individual characteristics and the arousal of mixed emotions: consequences for the effectiveness of charity fundraising advertisements, International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 20: 188–209