I came across this rather fun little study: This experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection. Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no […]
Read moreAuthor: Cara Flanagan
AQA A A2 students are encouraged to include evaluation points relating to issues, debates and/or approaches. Common debates include determinism/free will and reductionism a. Popular issues include gender bias and cultural bias. The following comments from the AQA Report on the Examination provide some very useful advice for students on these debates/issues; January 2013 report: Determinism All […]
Read moreA team of Californian researchers, led by Susan Charles, recently published a study linking daily hassles to depression ( Charles et al., 2013 ). A group of just over 700 participants were studied for eight consecutive days. On each day they reported daily hassles and also how negative they were feeling. Ten years later the same participants were re-assessed. […]
Read moreI’ll say at the outset that I am not a believer in paranormal phenomena – but the research reported below shows that we should always keep an open mind. There may be quite rational explanations for some supposedly paranormal (or anomalistic) experiences. Then, of course, they are not anomalistic after all. Some people claim to […]
Read more
A few months ago there was an item on this blog about the comments on AQA A markschemes that stated that answers using psychoanalysis as a psychological therapy for schizophrenia would be unlikely to gain high marks. We do not believe this is a justifiable position. However, regardless of whether the board is right or wrong […]
Read more
Some of you will be familiar with research that shows that emotional feelings can be triggered by the body, rather than the other way round. We are happy because we smile, rather than smiling because we are happy. For example, if people put a pencil between their teeth and are asked to rate a cartoon […]
Read more
An interesting analysis was recently published showing that the Russell group of Universities have a strong tendency to publish research with significant findings only. Actually a ‘strong tendency’ is an understatement. The analysis found, for example, that researchers from the University of Birmingham published 119 pieces of research during the study period of which only 9% […]
Read moreSome of you may be familiar with the MacDonald’s incident of 2005 where a hoax caller masqueraded as a policeman and delivered orders over the phone. Astonishingly he was obeyed despite the extreme nature of his instructions (read about the event here ). I recently gave a talk in London including this event in my talk […]
Read more
There are many theories about why we sleep and dream, and many of these involve memory in some way (including Freud’s theory of why we dream). A relatively recent theory has been gathering support, variously called synaptic renormalisation hypothesis or synaptic homeostasis hypothesis (aka ‘SHY’ – first proposed by Tononi and Corelli, 2003). The basic […]
Read more