Doing Psychology: Manawatu Doctoral Research Symposium

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Care as a Contemporary Paradox in a Global Market
(Massey University, 2011) Rogerson, Ann; Morgan, Mandy; Coombes, Leigh
The contemporary mother faces difficult choices when deciding whether to be either a ‘stay at home’ or a ‘working mother’. Conflicting discourses of good and bad mothering revolve around a political divide under pressure, one that territorialises the public and private domains. Gilligan (1982) famously highlighted the existence of these domains by challenging Kohlberg’s findings that men were endowed with higher moral reasoning powers than women. Disappointed by what she identified as the masculinist bias of Kohlberg’s work, Gilligan conducted her own research, finding that men and women reasoned differently but equitably. Gilligan’s thesis now theoretically informs a feminist ethics of care that has reputedly transformed political spatial boundaries of the public and private domains, domains traditionally gendered as masculine and feminine. Yet the ‘care’ that Gilligan has drawn our attention to is seemingly a new phenomenon. Appearing in language around the same time as the birth of Gilligan’s feminist ethics and indeed amidst the growing dilemma of the working mother, this care shows no visible sign of its maternal origins. In this paper, I attempt to define and locate care amidst the dismantling of the spatial divide that separates the public and private, a dismantling that coincides with the commodification of care within a global market.
Refereed Proceedings of Doing Psychology: Manawatu Doctoral Research Symposium 2011
(Massey University, 2011) Busch, Robbie; Rogerson, Ann
Making Sense of Epistemological Conflict in the Evaluation of Narrative Therapy and Evidence-Based Psychotherapy
(Massey University, 2011) Busch, Robbie; Strong, Tom; Lock, Andy
This paper outlines the epistemological and theoretical formation of narrative therapy and implications for its evaluation. Two authoritative paradigms of psychotherapy evaluation have emerged in psychology since the mid- 1990s. The Clinical Division of the American Psychological Association established the empirically supported treatment (EST) movement. A more inclusive but medically emulative model of evidence based practice in psychology (EBPP) then emerged. Some therapies such as narrative therapy do not share the theoretical commitments of these paradigms. Narrative therapy is an approach that values a non-expert based, collaborative, political and contextual stance to practice that is critical of normalising practices of medical objectification and reductionism. Post-positivist theoretical influences constitute narrative therapy as a practice that values the social production and multiplicity of meaning. This paper problematises a conflictual relationship (a differend) between the evaluation of narrative therapy and evidence based psychotherapy. Firstly, it briefly outlines the EST and EBPP paradigms and their epistemology. This paper then provides an overview of some of the key epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of narrative therapy and concludes with some cautionary notes on its evaluation.
Preface - Refereed Proceedings of Doing Psychology: Manawatu Doctoral Research Symposium 2011
(Massey University, 2011) Busch, Robbie; Rogerson, Ann
The Problem with Death: Towards a Genealogy of Euthanasia
(Massey University, 2011) Ryan, Anne; Morgan, Mandy; Lyons, Antonia
A hugely contentious issue in society today is whether individuals have the right to choose when and how to die. The ethics, legality and morality of euthanasia have been hotly debated in many countries around the world. However, the phenomenon of euthanasia has not just emerged recently, on the contrary a wide ranging and diverse network of events have all played some part in our present day understanding. This paper presents a genealogical analysis, an overview of a Foucauldian ‘history of the present’, that addresses the issue of how euthanasia has emerged as a possible solution to terminal illness. It examines the conditions present at particular periods of time and a specific, but disorderly collection of incidents that have allowed our present constructions of euthanasia to come about. This focus recognizes the intrinsic relationship between discourse, knowledge and power as the construction of particular discourses of euthanasia that may prevail in our society today, and are accepted as ‘common sense,’ provide the potential to act in certain ways, while marginalizing alternative practices. This genealogy challenges both the origins and functions of our present day ‘knowledge’ regarding euthanasia and the assumptions of self-evidence and inevitability that accompany prevailing discourses.
Using a Storybook Method to Understand Young Children's Narratives of Illness
(Massey University, 2011) McIntosh, Caroline
Appreciation of the role that families play in young children’s meaning-making about the causes of illness could assist educators and healthcare practitioners to provide more effective support for young children and their families. To date, researchers have largely sought to determine children’s understanding at various stages of cognitive development rather than exploring how children might acquire, process, and share their knowledge within particular social contexts. Adopting a socio-constructivist perspective and a narrative methodology, I sought to identify ways in which young children’s illness causality concepts are embedded within the familial context. Fieldwork included in-depth interviews with five four-year-old children, their parents/guardians; sibling/s aged five to nine years, and two other family members. Participants from Manukau City, New Zealand, reflected a diversity of cultural communities, spiritual orientations, and family structure. To aid the elicitation of young children’s narratives of illness causality, child participants were invited to construct a storybook about ‘getting sick’ utilizing art materials and photographs of children experiencing illness. A social interactional approach was employed to interpret participants’ narratives and suggests that young children’s illness causality constructions are significantly influenced by the particular illness experiences, illness prevention messages and behavioural rules within families. Findings indicate that children’s existing understandings and associated family practices need to be utilized as the context for children’s learning about health and well-being.
Seeking the Voice of Experience: The Complexities of Researching Women’s Accounts of Their (Ex-) Partner’s Engagement with Living Free from Violence Programmes
(Massey University, 2011) Denne, Stephanie C; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy
Previous research into the effectiveness and impact of domestic violence programmes has often focused on recidivism and re-offence data or self-report measures. Such research is constrained by a reliance on incidences of violence being officially reported and by legal definitions of intimate violence, limiting our understandings of women’s lived experiences of safety. Missing voice research is problematic because of the tensions between research processes and the prioritisation of maintaining women’s safety. To be able to engage in the process of researching women’s experiences of their (ex) partners’ engagement with men’s Living Free from Violence programmes requires an understanding of the complexities of developing relationships and processes that privilege and protect women’s safety throughout the research journey, and necessitates an understanding of the barriers to participation. This involves a collaborative and supportive working partnership to be formed and developed between the researcher and the community, one that at all times maintains the awareness that women’s safety must be the focus of research, both in outcome and process. This paper discusses the complexities involved in our attempts to understand how women experience issues of change and safety as a result of their partner’s involvement in a local Living Free from Violence programme.
Stripping the Skin off Humour
(Massey University, 2011) Rangiwananga, Melissa; Coombes, Leigh; McCreanor, Tim
Culturally specific hegemonic processes produce authority over meaning and exclude possibilities for authentic ethical encounters. Contingent on a binary relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, humour holds social tensions in particular ways. Where contemporary understandings of humour tend to posit humour as self-evidently desirable (Billig, 2005), there is an absence of psychological attention to the social power relations that constitute the “performativity” of humour – or as Butler (1993, p. 2) suggests, “the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”. This paper draws on the experience of living the contradictions of hegemonic discourse that produces social positions where laughter is enacted to enable a ‘safe’ encounter. If humour occurs on the boundaries of social convention then what does that mean for the complex relationships at “the hyphen” (Fine & Sirin, 2007; Jones & Jenkins, 2008) between us/them? Is it possible that rather than simply maintaining a particular social order, humour may also enable a re-defining of the contours of social relations? Could humour open spaces at the boundaries through recognition of multiple competing political discourses and make it possible for an ethical response that seeks authentic encounters with the ‘other’?
The Bewildered Brain: Asymmetric Brain Activity as a Source of Cognitive Impairment in Depression
(Massey University, 2011) Campbell, Kathryn; Hill, Stephen; Podd, John
Individuals with depression commonly complain about cognitive deficits such as memory loss and poor decision making ability (Lahr, Beblo, & Hartje, 2007). However, despite considerable research, no single profile of cognitive deficits in depression has emerged (Ravnkilde et al., 2002). This may be a result of heterogeneity within the diagnostic category of depression. While typically diagnosed as a single disorder, the symptoms of depression may stem from different neurobiological causes leading to different profiles of cognitive deficits. Shenal, Harrison, and Demaree (2003) theorised that subtypes of depression could arise from dysfunctional brain activity in each of the quadrants of the brain (right frontal, left frontal, right posterior, and left posterior). For example, reduced left frontal activity in depression may be associated with impairments in tasks reliant on left frontal regions. Little research has directly investigated the possible link between variability in cognitive deficits and different patterns of dysfunctional brain activity in depression. The current paper reviews evidence for this link by describing depressed individuals’ performance on lateralised cognitive tasks, and discusses possibilities for future research.
‘Wade in the Water …': Rethinking adoptees' stories of reunion
(Massey University, 2011) Blake, Denise; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy
In 1955, the Aotearoa/New Zealand government legislated the closed stranger adoption period. Approximately 80,000 children were constructed as a legal fiction when deemed as if born to a legally married couple. Birth family information was permanently sealed. Yet being raised in a fictional subject position and being denied access to any family of origin has consequences for all involved. After ten years of lobbying, the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) came into effect. The power of that legislation was to overturn the strategies that suppressed adoptees’ rights to know details of their birth. Adult adoptees over the age of 20 years could access their original birth certificates, which provided a birth mother’s name. With this identifying information, reunions became possible. Birth family reunions involve a diverse range of experiences, reflecting the ways in which adoptees are contextually and historically produced. This paper reconsiders the identity implications of reunion stories using the theoretical concept of hybrid identity. The complexities of reunions are multiple, and adoptees negotiate their identities through being both born to and born as if and yet neither identity is safe. In the production of this hybrid story, it was possible to see the political and moral trajectories that enable and constrain a sense of self through the complexities of a legal context that produces binary subject positions.
Globalisation: The Experience of Malay Adolescents with Conduct Problems
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Daud, Mohd Najmi; Coombes, Leigh; Venkateswar, Sita; Ross, Kirsty
This paper attempts to explore the experiences of Malay ado-lescents with conduct problems within the Malaysian context of globalisation. It is undeniable that to some extent globalisation offers opportunities for a country to progress to be a greater and more competitive nation. In fact, the Malaysian government is highly inspired by the concept of globalisation in progressing towards the vision of becoming a developed nation by the year 2020. Nevertheless, globalisation as a process is very demanding requiring a lot of changes in the Malaysian political, cultural, economic, educational and social landscape. In addition, many of the changes require inculcating foreign cultural values that tend to be inconsistent with local practices. Without adequate preparation, such inconsistency potentially affects the locally defined well-being among vulnerable groups, especially adolescents. There is consistent evidence that shows a significant relationship between changes with respect to globalisation and conduct problems among adolescents. However, how far the affected adolescents understand and adapt with the globalisation process, particularly in the Malaysian context remains elusive. Therefore, it is essential to explore their understandings and experiences on different aspects of globalisation that significantly affect their lives.
Contemporary Masquerade: Work-Life Balance and Modern Tragedies of (Mis)Perceived/(Mis)Placed Social Agency
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Rogerson, Ann; Morgan, Mandy; Coombes, Leigh
Within contemporary life, women struggle within discourses of stay-at-home mothering and working mother in terms of the detriment to a child’s development. Although contemporary research tends to isolate work-life balance as a separate set of conflicting discourses to study, I suggest that this isolation is misleading. Work-life balance encompasses every aspect of a woman’s speaking being or conscious home, social, caring and working experiences. Considering work-life as allencompassing allows for interesting interpretations when framing women’s work-life experiences within the confines of a language that seeks to dissect them into discrete parts. Furthermore, conflict surrounding work and life is not new and provide a cornerstone of traditional psychoanalytic theories of human development. Within this paper, I consider contemporary discourses of work-life balance, within the context of Riviere’s psychoanalytical concept of masquerade and Lacanian psychoanalysis that rereads Freud’s original works as a theory of discourse.
Problematising Effectiveness: The Inclusion of Victim Advocacy Services in Living Without Violence Programme Provision and Evaluation
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Denne, Stephanie; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy
Advocacy services in collaboration with living without violence programmes have the potential to increase experiences of safety and well-being for the victims of domestic violence. However, advocacy services are not always offered within programmes and the influence of advocacy is often over-looked when evaluating the ‘effectiveness’ of programme provision. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of semi-structured interviews with five (ex) partners of men who had completed a living without violence programme found that advocacy services meaningfully increased victims’ feelings of safety and well-being independent from changes, or lack of change, in the men’s violent behaviour. Therefore, victim advocacy may be a valuable addition to living without violence programmes and can potentially offer a broader, multidimensional understanding of ‘effectiveness’ in evaluations of programme success.
Parenting and Fatherhood: Causal Attributions and Disciplinary Responses for Child Misbehaviour
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Mackie, Kayla; Evans, Ian M
Changing gender roles and a different emphasis on what it means to be a father in New Zealand have contributed to fathers being required to play a new, more involved role in their children’s lives. For many fathers today, contributing to decisions and application of discipline for bad behaviour is an important part of their parenting role. Research suggests that children benefit from consistent disciplinary routines. However, the attitude in New Zealand is that harsh discipline, particularly of a physical nature, is undesirable and needs to be discouraged. An important area for investigation is ways parenting decisions can be influenced in a positive direction, using simple psychological techniques that are easy to apply in the real world. Positive affective priming involves exposing people to stimuli, or primes, in order to influence their thoughts, emotions and behaviours in a specified direction. A potential practical application of positive affective priming may be in clinical use with fathers to influence their disciplinary choices in response to a child’s bad behaviour, in a positive (less harsh) direction. This paper considers the literature relevant to the use of positive affective priming for this purpose.
Te Turangawaewae o te Whakaohooho Mauri: The Conceptual Home-Place of the Re-Awakening Indigenous Spirit
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Waireti; (Roestenburg, Michelle)
Resilience of Indigenous identities, life-ways and knowledge is the topic of my doctoral thesis. To enable the holistic unity of Indigenous being, feeling, thinking, and doing to become visible and meaningfully viable to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people within and without the empirically dominated domain of academic positivism, a cosmologically sourced, ethnographically supported turangawaewae or conceptual home-place has been developed. An Indigenous space of meaning to investigate and provoke a discursive continuum of Indigenous resilience that enables resilient Indigenous identities, and the multiple phases they embody to be conceptualised and incorporated, while also embracing notions of Eurocentric resilience and the comparative psychological implications these unearth. To illumine the global process of re-emerging Indigenous identity resilience by exploring how Indigenous people experience the process of personal and collective reconnection to their ancestral Indigenous identities, tikanga Māori, Mana Wahine philosophies, and kaupapa Māori methodologies complete the home-place developed to receive and care for the research collaborators, and question. A place that enables ethical and congruent cultural interpretations of Indigenous identities and the liberation of Indigenous thought, practices, and discourse. This paper traces the developmental terrain of this turangawaewae or conceptual home-place.
Surviving and Thriving: An Introduction to Childhood and Youth Post-Disaster Recovery in the Context of the Canterbury Earthquakes of 2010-2012
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Mooney, Maureen F; Johal, Sarb; Paton, Douglas; Tarrant, Ruth; Johnston, David
Potentially traumatic experiences, such as disasters, represent particularly complex experiences. While generally agreed that adversity has definite effects at a population level, the nature of these effects is open to debate. Past research has tended to focus on vulnerability and trauma. However, recent research suggests that experiencing adversity can sometimes be resolved in terms of enhanced well-being, and capacities to adapt. The specific focus of this paper is on children and youth, as there has been minimal research on how models of adaptation and accommodation in adults may apply to young people. The study seeks to further understanding of factors and processes that promote positive coping, adaptation, and wellbeing. It will examine adaptation using a study of experience over the course of a recovery process. A repeated measures approach will examine recovery processes, including resilience and post-traumatic growth. It is hoped that results will inform future preparation for adversity, and increase support to children and youth recovering from challenging life experiences, including disasters.
The Mediating Role of Happiness in the Relationship Between Older Adults’ Intentional Activities and Health
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Henricksen, Annette; Stephens, Christine
The present study examined the nature of relationships between older adults’ intentional happiness-enhancing activities, happiness and health outcomes, and extended previous research by testing the prediction that happiness mediates the relationship between intentional activities and health. Multiple regression analysis of survey responses from a representative population sample of 2289 adults (aged 55-73 years) was employed to test predictions. Happiness was found to fully mediate the relationship between socially related activities and physical health, to partially mediate the relationships between personal interest and achievement oriented activities and physical health, and to fully mediate the relationships between these types of intentional activity and mental health. Results support the utility of investigating older adult’s intentional activities as a determinant of happiness and indicate that they also benefit health outcomes through happiness.
Into the Void: The Gap Between N-Back and Complex Span Tasks Suggests Inadequacies in Current Models of Working Memory
(School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Campbell, Kathryn; HIll, Stephen; Podd, John
The tasks used to assess working memory are a highly contentious issue in cognitive psychology. Previous research has found a weak relationship between two key types of working memory tasks: N-Back and Complex Span. This is commonly interpreted as evidence that one or both tasks possess poor construct validity. However, this finding may be a result of assessing different modalities of working memory. The current pilot study aimed to clarify the differences between the two tasks by assessing performance on each within the same modality. A spatial and verbal version of each task was used. Although, theoretically, these tasks assess the same construct, the pilot data revealed low correlations between them. This suggests that the current models of working memory may be inadequate, or that unidentified differences between the tasks may be influencing the results. Due to their widespread use and applications, it is important to better understand models of working memory and develop improved tasks.
The Politics of Policing Family Violence in New Zealand: An Overview
(School of Psychology, Massey University,, 2012) Benschop, Maria; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy; Gammon, Ruth
In 2012, the New Zealand Police introduced a new Family Violence Policy to guide police response to family violence occurrences including a new tool for assessing situational risk factors. The Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) is a 13 item actuarial measure for intimate partner assault recidivism developed in Canada (Hilton, Harris, Rice, Houghton & Eke, 2008). It is crucial to understand how the changes in police policy and procedures that involve ODARA affect the safety and wellbeing of domestic violence victims. Victim safety and protection are policing priorities. The police response and understanding of family violence has changed over the last 40 years from police viewing the domestic incident as a private relationship matter with minimal police intervention, to a criminal investigation developing from the pro arrest strategy (Ford, 1986; Ford, 1993). This paper traces the history of policing policy changes in family violence that led to the introduction of ODARA in 2012. Four key turning points are identified, with the aim of gathering an understanding of how policy emerges in policing family violence.
Refereed Proceedings of Doing Psychology: Manawatū Doctoral Research Symposium
(School of Psychology, Massey University,, 2012) Rogerson, Ann; Denne, Stephanie

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