Tag: Psychology

Psychopharmacology: The Brand-Name Debate

4 March 2014 / Sinead

One of my modules this year is Psychopharmacology- the study of drugs and how they affect people. One topic I often come across when researching drugs and medicines, which is often ill-explained, is what “generic drugs” are and whether generic drugs are ineffective, or different from brand-name medications.

When medicines are created,they are usually patented to one person or company, who become the only people who can make that medication. After a period of time, often 15 years, the active ingredient of that medicine (the medicinal molecule) goes off-patent, so can now be developed by other people. (This is similar to how music and books go out of copyright, and into the public domain).

Participant Effects and Popular Science

1 March 2014 / Sinead

As you’ve gathered from the last few posts, I’ve been spending the majority of my non-lecture time in uni, hiding out in my semi-underground lab and testing people. I’ve found the process of researching interesting, but it has also worried me a bit: doing my dissertation research has shown me there are many more things to take into account than I expected.

While organisation isn’t my strong point, it can be resolved fairly easily in normal lecture and seminar environments. During data collection, on the other hand, keeping track of many different variables and responsibilities becomes incredibly important, and my difficulty with it has almost got me into trouble already.

I am a (published) scientist!

30 January 2014 / Sinead

You may remember I said I had good news? Well, here it is:

Last year, I helped out with a research study for my placement module. Once the study was finished, the head of it said that he would be writing it up and hopefully submitting it to a professional body this year. We hadn’t heard anything about it for a while, so I’d almost forgotten about this, assuming it may not have been accepted.

However, I got an email on Tuesday saying that the paper has been submitted to the British Journal of Educational Technology, and that I and the two other students who helped research it are all being listed as co-authors.

The first thing I said after reading that was “Does this mean I can call myself a scientist yet?”.

Joking aside, this is really good news, and I’m excited even though it won’t be ready for another few months yet. I’m not quite sure how often undergraduates get to be part of published research, but I don’t think its very common unless you’re either very skilled, or very lucky (like I was). Either way, its both something that may come in useful, and something I’ve had a lot of fun doing.

Dissertation Progress Update- January

26 January 2014 / Sinead

I’m now 4 months into my dissertation, which is a scary half-way through. A lot of interesting uni-related things have happened in the last week.

I had originally planned to have collected most of my data by now, which didn’t happen as one of my approval forms went missing. (My uni is good at teaching, but not at organisation- a recurring theme throughout the last three years).

Luckily, as my study is low-risk, I was approved quite easily. The delay meant I couldn’t do anything towards collecting data over the Christmas break, so I instead started writing the other parts of the dissertation such as the history of what I’m studying, the method I’m using, and the introduction. This has been going surprisingly well, and its now about 25% done.

Halo 3 and The Minimal Group Paradigm

18 August 2012 / Sinead

I’ve spent a large proportion of this summer gaming when I meant to be doing psychology work, so I figured I could at least combine the two so it looks like I’ve done some work!

I first got the idea of this combination when I was playing Halo 3 online- while the game is good, an annoying part of the online experience is that people on the opposing team will in many cases jump away and lose a point for committing suicide rather than lose a gunfight and have the other team gain a point. Even though these two options have the same outcome mathematically, many people will choose to take the deliberate loss rather than let someone else gain any status. While this seems like an irrational decision, the principle is common in real-life as well.

Crowds and Myths

13 January 2012 / Sinead

The weird thing for me about crowds is that while much of psychology focuses on how complicated individual humans are, they are even more confusing and complicated when they are put together into groups- there is an entire branch of psychology (known as, not surprisingly, crowd psychology) dedicated to understanding the difference between people as individuals and in a crowd.

The media, psychology, and sociology, have many stereotypes of crowds- most of these lead to the conclusion that crowds are irrational, suggestible and even dangerous, a sort of hive mind run by its collective not-quite-conscious. Most of these views, and the theories behind them, are taken from examples of destructive crowds, such as riots and demonstrations. (Annoyingly, the example of a riot and crowd behaviour used in my A-level textbook was actually about Bristol- not the best side of the city…).

However, looking at studies and observations of crowd behaviour, it is only a minority of crowds that become so destructive; non-violent crowds are researched much more rarely, which doesn’t seem fair.

One of the biggest stereotypes is that crowds are fuelled by their anonymity, as people lose their identities and rationales in the process of deindividuation– this is a popular notion, described in detail by social psychologists like Zimbardo. However, while this does sound like a good explanation, and is useful in some circumstances, it fails to take into account that most people in crowds aren’t anonymous- they normally go to events with friends or family, meaning their actions will be seen so they would be accountable for anything they did while part of the crowd.

A new theory of how people behave in crowds, and to me a more useful one, is Convergence Theory. This theory says that crowd behaviour is not caused by the crowd: instead individuals take their behaviours into the crowd, meaning crowd actions reflect beliefs that are already there. Using this theory, crowd behaviours stop being irrational violence, becoming a more sensible reaction to popular views.

So if convergence theory is true, then the media shouldn’t be so quick to declare crowds as violent and irrational and should instead look towards the reasons behind the crowd, for that will probably provide a much better picture of what behaviour to expect and why.

Is Psychology just common sense?

29 December 2011 / Sinead

When I tell people I’m studying psychology, one of the reactions I sometimes get (mainly, I’ve observed, from older people) is confusion: many seem like they can’t see the point of psychology as a subject. In this case, they will often say psychology doesn’t need to be studied as it is just “common sense” (something I apparently have nowhere near enough of).

Although I haven’t yet tried it, an easy way around their confusion could be to just asking them what common sense actually is, because it’s surprisingly difficult to get an agreed-upon definition.

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt.3

14 December 2011 / Sinead

Today’s topic of choice is another group of people with amazing memories- Mnemonists. Unlike the people with developmental disorders that I talked about a few weeks ago, mnemonists don’t often have physical brain differences to explain their memory abilities (apart from a small difference in the area linked to memorising long lists of numbers, which seems more of an effect than a cause).

Instead, their memories are so strong due to practice, and the use of Mnemonic techniques. Almost everyone has used some kind of mnemonic before; for example, SOHCAHTOA (for remembering when to use sin, cos, and tan in a triangle), or Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (for remembering the colours of the rainbow).However, the method used by mnemonists are much more detailed and involved than this.

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt.2

30 November 2011 / Sinead

Part 2 is about how memory is affected by developmental disorders such as autism, Down’s syndrome, and especially savant syndrome, and how the abilities of people with these disorders could be linked to savantism.

People with autism spectrum conditions can often have memory and expertise that is described as “very deep but very narrow”. In other words, they concentrate obsessively on one small area and learn everything they can about it, even if that area is not needed or used. (For example, I once read about an autistic boy who loved to memorise camera statistics and model numbers, but had no interest in using a camera).

Does Photographic memory exist? Pt. 1

18 November 2011 / Sinead

Photographic memory is one of those concepts that is understood and shown by pop-psychology and the media a lot more than it is shown by academic psychology. Just think of how many films, books and TV shows you’ve seen featuring a character with perfect factual recall or full memory of almost every experience they’ve had.

But in real life, photographic memory cannot be easily found – scientists and researchers are still debating whether it actually exists. While people have often come forward saying they have an exceptional or photographic memory, they are found to be mistaken, and there are only a few cases where a person could genuinely have a photographic memory.

From my existing psychology education, I know of three reasons why someone can have a much better memory than average. For each of these, I have mini-theories of whether these could turn into photographic memory if it exists, and how they might work. The first condition, Hyperthymesia, is below the cut.