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Posts published during May, 2010
Dreams, drugs, intelligence, memory, infant brains, psychoanalysis, human evolution and many more – Loads of online broadcasts from Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ Radio 4 series to be found here – all free – it makes one proud to be a licence payer….
May 18, 2010 The death of Richard Gregory was announced on Monday of this week
. He was an extremely well-known figure in Psychology, most notably for his work on visual illusions and his classic book Eye and Brain. His website has examples of some of his illusions. He also researched artificial intelligence, was an inventor with many patents to his name and founded the At-Bristol hands-on Science Museum, as well as appearing frequently on radio and TV.
I had the privilege of hearing him speak on several occasions and felt he had quite a magical ability to communicate enthusiasm and ideas.
Interesting footnote – Gregory was taught by Frederic Bartlett as an undergraduate and claimed Bartlett inspired him to take up psychology.
Three recent small studies (see here or here) looked at the effects of various 12-16 week exercise programmes on sufferers from schizophrenia. The types of exercise varied from more physically strenuous ones, such as strength training and jogging, to less energetic yoga.
There were small improvements in physical health but greater improvements were found in mental states. Improvements in anxiety and depression from exercise were greater than similar improvements in standard care without an exercise component.
These studies support the findings of two earlier studies, which suggests the importance of further research into the effects of exercise programmes in the treatment of schizophrenia plus initiatives looking into how to implement such programmes and engage sufferers in taking part.
In the AQA A AS Complete Companion we have subdivided conformity into majority and minority influence. There was a reason for this – when the new specification was first published minority influence was a named topic so we wrote material on it. However, in a very late revision, minority influence was removed from the specification. However we (as well as other textbooks) left it in because it is an important part of the social change topic – social change is due to minority rather than majority influence.
It is arguable as to whether ‘conformity’ refers only to majority influence or can include minority influence – for example, the Scottish higher exam talks about conformity to majority and minority influence. We elected to include minority influence under the heading ‘conformity’. However, AQA’s ruling is that conformity is solely concerned with majority influence. This means that, in the exam, students will get no marks for material or research studies on minority influence in a question on conformity.
However material on minority influence can be made creditworthy when asked about the implications of social influence research for social change, so it remains an important topic of study.
Thanks to Emma Marsh for raising this issue.
Research in the USA is showing up a link between obese pregnant women and their babies’ body fat composition. This might not seem surprising, but the concern is that being born with a higher proportion of fat could lead to future adult health disorders for these newborn babies. And the proportion of obese adults, whether or not mothers, is increasing fast and is a real health issue.
Recently published sleep research suggests that
- adolescents who cut down on sleep risk an increase in body weight, and
- sleeping less than 6-8 hours a night leads to a 12% increase in the risk of dying early, and
- even short periods e.g. one night of very reduced sleep can lead to resistance to the hormone insulin and potentially to developing type 2 diabetes.
These studies’ conclusions do not, however, mean that a few nights of reduced sleep will make you fat, develop type 2 diabetes or die in the near future; the message seems to be that 6-8 hours sleep a night is not just the norm, but really, really good for us !
There really are some beautiful charts and diagrams here…. truly ‘descriptive statistics’. I can’t really do any of it justice by cramming it into a tiny blog post, but it’s well worth having a look at this venn diagram about drugs, for example. Or this interactive representation of the link between stress and work.
I showed this video at a number of recent psychology conferences when I was talking about research methods, and thought I would share it on this site because it is quite entertaining.
Change blindness describes how people are quite poor at noticing change, something demonstrated in a number of studies (see also Daniel Simon and Daniel Levin’s classic ‘door study‘ or Richard Wiseman’s colour changing card trick or just look up change blindness).
Change blindness is different from inattentional blindness where people do not see things which are in plain sight – famously demonstrated in this video (and by Daniel Simons) this one from Richard Wiseman.
You may ask why I was using the video when talking about research methods – I suggested that students might think of ways to further test these phenomena. For example there is evidence that people are more likely to notice change if the other people are the same age as themselves.