The Open University Psychology Society is organising a conference on ‘Society and Psychological Well-being’ to be held from 6-8 July 2012 at the University of Warwick.

It will bring together experts in psychology, economics, government policy and education, amongst other areas.

See here for more information.

Recent research showed that 71 per cent of people considering access to Higher Education in England are either unsure or feel they don’t have enough information about the study funding options available to them*.

The video takes potential students on a whistle-stop tour through the Government’s tuition fee loans, financial support for those with low incomes, the OU’s own loan system OUSBA, employer sponsorship and paying upfront.



Bev Stewart, Director, Student Recruitment and Financial Support, says: “There is a perception that the increase in university fees has made university study inaccessible for many, but this isn’t the case. There is a wide range of payment options for new part-time students which means cost shouldn’t be a barrier to gaining a university-level education.”

How you can help spread the word
The OU is encouraging members of its community to spread the word about this video to help new students in England understand the funding options available to them, should they decide to take up OU study. You can share this link on your blogs, Facebook and Google+ pages and by sharing the message below on Twitter.

Find out more:

• Study for a qualification with the OU
• OU launches ‘ways to pay’ video for new part-time students

*Research commissioned by The Open University in April 2012 showed that 71 per cent of people interested in entering Higher Education in England were either unsure or felt they didn’t have enough information around the funding options available to them. The research was undertaken by DJS Research on behalf of The Open University. Sample: 1,590 respondents who were interested in studying at university in the next five years.

Psychology in the Pub in Sheffield returns on Thursday 21 June with Dr Gail Coleman on racicm in the mental health.

Does racism continue to play a role in our mental health system today and what is the impact of racism on the individual? Clinical
Psychologist Gail Coleman will explore these questions in a presentation looking at the historical roots and reality of racism in psychology and in British society today.

Dr Coleman will consider the way BME people have been pathologised by psychiatric/psychological professions. She will also reflect upon the impact on children, given that nearly 88,000 racist incidents were recorded in Britain's schools between 2007 and 2011. In conclusion, Dr Coleman will discuss what can we do to promote change in the NHS, in our education systems,in our families and in our communities today.

• Find out more about Psychology in the Pub
   

I would like to share my animation 'How we think, dementia and dementia drugs' with any other metaphorical neurologists out there.

Hope you like it.

Thanks

Luke

It seems that the seaside really does make us happy, writes Dick Skellington

Researchers found that the 'bracing' seaside vistas of Skegness with its sea air have a far greater positive impact than a simple visit to the countryside or an afternoon in an urban park. The psychological boffins believe the outcome is all down to the 'innate preference' for the sound of water, of the tide lapping the shore.

The study, for the European Centre of Environment and Human Health, questioned 2,750 people in England and Wales over two years and found that people's perceived well-being was considerably enhanced by a visit to the coast. The greatest sense of pleasure came from exercising beside the sea – regardless of factors such as age, where respondents lived and who they were with when they were visiting. Six different age groups reported that the seaside was always identified as being a more positive experience than other inland parks or country walks, especially if the person was travelling alone.

Researchers believe that the findings could be related to cultural expectations. We believe that the seaside is more beneficia,  and therefore it is little surprise that we report this positive impact when questioned – especially if the perception is enhanced by pleasant childhood memories of a seaside visit, a paddle in the sea, making sandcastles, candy floss, sticks of rock, the big dipper and fish and chips.  

'the bracing seaside vistas of Skegness have a greater positive impact than a visit to the countryside'

As always with research there, is in the recommendations, a call for more research: "…there is a lot of work on the beneficial effects of visiting natural environments, but our findings suggest it is time to move beyond a simple urban versus rural debate and start looking at the effect that different natural environments have on people's health and well-being".

What a pity those risque postcards by Bamforth, Pedro and particularly Donald McGill are now a thing of the past, though you can see many originals at the Donald McGill Museum on the Isle of Wight, including 21 postcards withdrawn after McGill was put on trial and fined for obscenity over his saucy designs. 

McGill's cheeky and cheerful cards often featured a comically rotund woman or man, blissfully unaware of the impact of their actions, trailed by a tiny spouse, who is thwarted in their attempts to live life to the full. His cards depict discussions between husbands and wives, brides-to-be, worried mothers and vicars;  and the subjects include drinking, matrimony, religion, parenthood, and married life, to name but a few.  His card designs are simple, uncomplicated, and inevitably saucy — but rarely coarse and never crude, and sum up all human nature in a line or two, bit like this blog really. Through the cards it’s possible to see the changes and subsequent relaxation of the many unspoken social rules and boundaries which were once set very solidly into the British psyche.  

Do visit the Donald McGill Museum, it is better than any psychologist's recommendation. It is in Ryde.

Dick Skellington 27 April 2012

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

The OU’s senior lecturer in Psychology Dr Meg Barker is due to hold a free public lecture on ‘Rewriting the Rules? Non-monogamies and other adventures in non-normative relationships.’
 
The annual lecture will be held at the University of Ulster, Magee College in Derry, on Wednesday 2 May 2012.
 
This talk is set to look at our changing understanding around relationships and the emotional and psychological impact this has on both those who try to follow ‘the rules’ and those who step outside them.
 
As well as being a senior lecturer in Psychology at the OU, Dr Barker is also a sex and relationship therapist. In collaboration with Darren Langbridge she is the co-editor of the journal ‘Psychology and Sexuality’ and is the co-organiser of the critical sexology group which presents open interdisciplinary seminars on sexuality three times a year, along with many other projects.
 
 The talk is also set to co-inside with her new book ‘Rewriting the rules’ which will be released later this year.
 
To book a place on the course click on this link and fill in the application form before Monday 30 April.

 

Using the inspiring lens of Simone de Beauvoir's writing, Meg Barker reminds us of the risks we take if we enforce gender identity onto children and limit what they are able to become. 

On International Women’s Day, with the theme ‘Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures’, I would like to take the opportunity here to celebrate my own favourite feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). I will look back to the past to see if what she had to say about gender still holds today, and what her theories and key quotes might mean for the kinds of futures that we want to inspire – for girls and for everyone. 

'One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman'

Perhaps the most famous quote from de Beauvoir's writing on gender, The Second Sex, is this one. Here she is arguing, from autobiographical experience and from the available evidence at the time, that the things associated with womenhood (such as being passive, concerned with appearance, childlike and in need of protection, and wanting to care for others) are imposed upon women by society rather than being innate characteristics they are born with. 

Current understandings of gender view it – like so much of human behaviour – as a complex biopsychosocial interweaving rather than something that can be simplistically put down to 'nature' or 'nurture'. Gender theory alerts us to the diversity of possible gendered identities and roles available, whilst emphasising the limited patterns of masculinity and femininity which we are pushed to repeat and repeat until they feel 'natural'. Biological findings on neuroplasticity reveal that the likely underlying brain processes are neural pathways which are strengthened by such repetitions. So we could say that gendered identity is a process of narrowing down from the possibilities which are available at birth. 

There are, of course, some biological limits on what is possible from the start, which differ from person to person, but de Beauvoir emphasises the social limits which constrain these. Her focus here is on freedom, the fact of humanity that her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasised in his work. Sartre highlighted the importance in life of becoming aware of the meanings which are imposed upon us by others (societal assumptions about what people like us should be like, or family expectations about what we are going to do) and breaking free of these. De Beauvoir pointed out that such breaking through of 'the ceiling which is stretched over their heads' is easier for some than for others. Embracing one's freedom may be virtually impossible for those who are enslaved, and may be easier for some than others even in times and places where everyone is regarded as 'free'. 

'The lie to which the adolescent girl is condemned is that she must pretend to be an object, and a fascinating one, when she senses herself as an uncertain, dissociated being, well aware of her blemishes.' 

Focusing on this aspect of 'being an object' in particular, we can see that women are still regarded very much in terms of their appearance, although these days they are encouraged to beautify themselves for their own pleasure and 'fun' rather than explicitly for the pleasure of others. However, it is often difficult to disentangle the pleasure derived from feeling one looks good from the pleasure derived because someone else thinks you look good. Appearance is a key focus of women's magazines, and the ideals of feminine beauty are so narrow that many are excluded from it, and even minor deviations from it are considered remarkable (as in the recent Guardian article about models who 'break the mould'). 

The other focus in women's magazines, and in movies and TV shows aimed at women, are relationships with men. De Beauvoir comments that 'a great many adolescent girls when asked about their plans for the future, reply . . . “I want to get married”. But no young man considers marriage as his fundamental project'. Miranda on Sex and The City echoed this concern several decades later when she stormed out of a café complaining that all that her (very successful) friends talked about was men, but it is revealed later in the episode that she was only upset because she wasn't really over her ex-boyfriend. 

'The less she exercises her freedom to understand, to grasp and discover the world about her, the less resources will she find within herself, the less will she dare to affirm herself as a subject.' 

De Beauvoir argues that, in such ways, women are encouraged into 'being for others' rather than 'being for themselves'. Many women struggle to tune into their own desires and needs due to seeing pleasure as something to be gained from pleasing others, and put themselves through unhappiness or pain feeling that this is what they are supposed to do. 

Responsibility can be scary
Of course we can question the benefits of both the 'for others' and 'for themselves' sides of the binary. It is problematic to feel that our only identity is in the role that we have in other people's lives (as many women find when they lose such roles), and troubling to have to constantly monitor their body and self to ensure that they are pleasing to others. On the other hand, as de Beauvoir pointed out, there are benefits to such a position: not having to feel responsible for your actions because you don't believe that you have power to affect the world, and real pleasure when you are approved of or desired. Being 'for themselves' (as men are encouraged to be) involves the weight of responsibility which comes from being called upon to make autonomous choices and to be self-sufficient and protective of others, when we may well actually feel scared, incapable and vulnerable ourselves. Also, as de Beauvoir suggested, mutual relationships are very difficult indeed if one person needs to be constantly affirmed as a beautiful object, or one person is constantly denying the other the freedom and responsibility that they have themselves. 

De Beauvoir further (and perhaps controversially) highlights the role of women in limiting other women. She points out what a threat it can be for a mother to see a daughter breaking through and embracing their freedom and resisting the roles being thrust upon them in ways they were unable to do themselves. Perhaps we can relate this to the women-produced magazines that still welcome women in to a self-scrutinising, appearance- and relationship- obsessed world; as well as the tendency to point to the lack of freedom of women in 'other' places as a way of obscuring our own situation. 

Inspiring futures 
If people become their gender rather than being born into them, and if we regard freedom to become, without limitations, as a vital part of the picture, perhaps the important thing to do is open up possibilities for becoming as much as we can. 

We could link this to recent pressures from intersex activists who have argued for intersex people (the 1-2% of people who are born with anatomy or physiology which differs from contemporary ideals of 'normal' male and female) to be able to make their own choices about the gendering (or not) of their bodies later in life, rather than having this imposed upon them with surgeries in childhood which often have no medical necessity, as has previously been the case. 

There has been a furore in the media recently about families who have made similar decisions  about apparently non-intersex children, demanding their right to decide upon their own gender later on in life rather than having it imposed upon them from birth. Many commentators have seen this as deeply problematic or even abusive.  However, we could – from de Beauvoir's perspective – view it in another way: locating the problem in a society that enforces particular ideals of gender onto children; thus limiting what they are able to become. 

Find out more

The following, more recent, books all raise interesting issues in these ongoing discussions:

• Caitlin Moran: How to be a woman 
• Norah Vincent: Self made man 
• Kate Bornstein: My gender workbook 
• Cordelia Fine: Delusions of gender  

Meg Barker 8 March 2012

Meg Barker is an Open University lecturer teaching mainly on counselling courses, and is also a therapist specialising in relationships and a blogger.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain