A member of staff passed on this opportunity from Newnham College, Cambridge:
Cambridge University’s Department of Social & Developmental Psychology is offering a new prize for a student essay in the field of social & developmental psychology. Schools and colleges are invited to submit essays by up to three different pupils in their first or second year of study for A-level, A/S level, Scottish Higher Level or an equivalent qualification.
A maximum of three entries per school are allowed. Each essay must be on an area of social & developmental psychology and should be accompanied by confirmation from a psychology teacher or the head teacher of the school or college that it is the work of the pupil, who should have completed not more than two years of full-time study post 16 years of age.
Examples of potential topics for the essay include antisocial behaviour; child-child relationships; the cultural relevance of psychological theories; families; fathers; fertility; mothers & daughters; personality and individual differences; same-sex parents; sex differences and their origins; etc.
Essays must not exceed 2,000 words in length (excluding the bibliography: figures, tables, etc). All debts to other scholars (including teachers, books, articles and web sites) should be acknowledged. Essays must be on a topic relating to the study of social & developmental psychology and must be written in the English language. We reserve the right to check submitted essays for plagiarism using online tools.
The First Prize in the Competition is £1,000: £600 for the pupil and £400 for his or her school or college. In the case of a tie for first place the prize will be divided. The writers of the winning essays with their subject teachers will be invited to an award ceremony held at Newnham College, Cambridge. Expenses within the UK will be paid for the winner and his or her teacher to attend.
The closing date for receipt of entries is 31st May 2009. You can download these details from the University website: http://www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk/psy/
Friday 30 January 2009
Monday 26 January 2009
World's cleverest child...
Great preparation for the topic 'Intelligence' later this term would be to watch:
'The world's cleverest child and me' which can be seen on Channel 4 on Wednesday night.
Thinking with analogy
The idea of using an analogy to explain something is common in everyday life and in the classroom. In psychology it is particularly important, as many key ideas cannot be seen or easily visualised. An example of such an analogy is to liken the brain to a computer hard drive and the mind to an operating system.
You can liken the problem to the difficulty in comprehending the large quantities of size and distance in the field of astrophysics. A commonly used analogy for planetary sizes is the relative sizes of fruits. I've come across a couple of examples recently of using comparison images, such as this example of the planets Earth and Neptune.
These maintain the key idea (size ratio), while leaving out such minor details as actual sizes or positions. So an analogy has one key characteristics of what we are attempting to explain, with other details being ignored. Many models and theories in psychology also rely on analogies in a sense, computer analogies being especially popular.
The concept of analogy also comes into IQ testing, with items such as:
"Hand is to palm as foot is to ____?"
These ask people to recognise that two different relationships have a common pattern. Artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter feels this is so fundamental to thought, that he says in an interview, "analogy is really at the core of thinking", and describes it as "stripping away irrelevancies to get at the gist of things".
You can liken the problem to the difficulty in comprehending the large quantities of size and distance in the field of astrophysics. A commonly used analogy for planetary sizes is the relative sizes of fruits. I've come across a couple of examples recently of using comparison images, such as this example of the planets Earth and Neptune.
These maintain the key idea (size ratio), while leaving out such minor details as actual sizes or positions. So an analogy has one key characteristics of what we are attempting to explain, with other details being ignored. Many models and theories in psychology also rely on analogies in a sense, computer analogies being especially popular.The concept of analogy also comes into IQ testing, with items such as:
"Hand is to palm as foot is to ____?"
These ask people to recognise that two different relationships have a common pattern. Artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter feels this is so fundamental to thought, that he says in an interview, "analogy is really at the core of thinking", and describes it as "stripping away irrelevancies to get at the gist of things".
Couple of links
Here are a couple of revision-related links:
Mini-articles from the BBC website on memory techniques - simplistic but useful, and the discussion comments are interesting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/improve/no_mistakes.shtml
A short video about stress from the same site (there's also a transcript):
Mini-articles from the BBC website on memory techniques - simplistic but useful, and the discussion comments are interesting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/improve/no_mistakes.shtml
A short video about stress from the same site (there's also a transcript):
Friday 23 January 2009
Slumber quality important for learning
(From BPS digest, see http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog for more info)
It's not just the amount of sleep we get that is so important for learning, but the quality of that sleep. That's according to a new study that made precise use of beeping noises to disrupt deep "slow-wave" sleep among 13 elderly participants (average age 60 years), without actually waking them up.
The beeping was used in such a way that although the participants' were deprived of deep sleep, their total sleep time and number of sleep stages were unaffected (compared with a comparison night of undisturbed sleep). After a night of either shallow or deep sleep, the participants had their brains scanned while they viewed 50 images of houses and landscapes. The next day they had to say which of 100 images were repeated from the daybefore.
The participants' performance was superior when a night with deep sleep had preceded the learning of the images, compared with a night of shallow sleep, even though total sleep time was the same in each case (36.6images correctly identified versus 31.4 images, on average). Moreover, the brain scans showed that during the initial viewing of images, activity in the hippocampus, the seat of human memory, was reduced aftershallow versus deep sleep, but only for those images that were subsequently recalled....
Van Der Werf et al (2009). Sleep benefits subsequent hippocampal functioning. NatureNeuroscience. In press.
It's not just the amount of sleep we get that is so important for learning, but the quality of that sleep. That's according to a new study that made precise use of beeping noises to disrupt deep "slow-wave" sleep among 13 elderly participants (average age 60 years), without actually waking them up.
The beeping was used in such a way that although the participants' were deprived of deep sleep, their total sleep time and number of sleep stages were unaffected (compared with a comparison night of undisturbed sleep). After a night of either shallow or deep sleep, the participants had their brains scanned while they viewed 50 images of houses and landscapes. The next day they had to say which of 100 images were repeated from the daybefore.
The participants' performance was superior when a night with deep sleep had preceded the learning of the images, compared with a night of shallow sleep, even though total sleep time was the same in each case (36.6images correctly identified versus 31.4 images, on average). Moreover, the brain scans showed that during the initial viewing of images, activity in the hippocampus, the seat of human memory, was reduced aftershallow versus deep sleep, but only for those images that were subsequently recalled....
Van Der Werf et al (2009). Sleep benefits subsequent hippocampal functioning. NatureNeuroscience. In press.
Autism debate
You may have come across the recent research and debate into the causes of autistic spectrum disorders.
See for example this article by Simon Baron-Cohen, a prominent researcher in the field, who famously used the Sally-Anne test to investigate limitations in 'theory of mind' - the ability to attribute thoughts and knowledge to other people - as a possible central trait in autism.
Autism is also prominently featured in the current issue of Psychology Review, if you are interested in reading more.
See for example this article by Simon Baron-Cohen, a prominent researcher in the field, who famously used the Sally-Anne test to investigate limitations in 'theory of mind' - the ability to attribute thoughts and knowledge to other people - as a possible central trait in autism.
Autism is also prominently featured in the current issue of Psychology Review, if you are interested in reading more.
Thursday 22 January 2009
Broadmoor
I recently read an article on Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, an well-known institution in England which detains people who are viewed to be dangerously metally ill and criminal.
The history of the place is fascinating, as are the cases of some of its inmates. The wikipedia page includes links to some of the many infamous cases, such as the serial killer Robert Maudsley, the assassin Daniel M'Naghten, plus the genius twins who wouldn't speak, June and Jennifer Gibbons. There are many others who you may have heard of from current or older news stories.
It is notable how many of them had very disturbed childhoods, and how many have multiple psychological disorders.
The Titanic & social psychology
Monday 19 January 2009
Features of a good sample
Another mnemonic...
While teaching one of this year's classes, I noticed that the Marking Instructions (MIs) from 2006 exam paper presented us with a good mnemonic for 'features of a good sample':
The question is: 'State the features of a good sample', and the MIs say:
Is representative of the target population; avoids bias; allows generalisation to the target population.
So we can have:
Generalisable
Representative
Avoids Bias
Or 'GRAB'.
While teaching one of this year's classes, I noticed that the Marking Instructions (MIs) from 2006 exam paper presented us with a good mnemonic for 'features of a good sample':
The question is: 'State the features of a good sample', and the MIs say:
Is representative of the target population; avoids bias; allows generalisation to the target population.
So we can have:
Generalisable
Representative
Avoids Bias
Or 'GRAB'.
Wikispaces
As you'll have seen from the email, I have started a 'wiki', come and visit http://hutchiepsychdept.wikispaces.com/
There is info on unit 1 & 2 topics, plus some exam advice.
There is info on unit 1 & 2 topics, plus some exam advice.
HM is dead
Some papers and magazines recently included an obituary of H.M., the memory-loss patient who died last month.
In 1953, H.M. had an operation which aimed to reduce the frequency of his epileptic seizures. This included removal of a structure known as the hippocampus on both sides of his brain.
The result was that from then and for the rest of his life, H.M. has severe anterograde amnesia - he was unable to encode any new episodic or semantic memories, causing him to 'live in the past'. He was able to encode new procedural memories, however, and his working memory was intact too.
His case, although tragic, was hugely important in helping psychologists to locate memory functions, which had previously thought to be distributed throughout the brain.
In 1953, H.M. had an operation which aimed to reduce the frequency of his epileptic seizures. This included removal of a structure known as the hippocampus on both sides of his brain.
The result was that from then and for the rest of his life, H.M. has severe anterograde amnesia - he was unable to encode any new episodic or semantic memories, causing him to 'live in the past'. He was able to encode new procedural memories, however, and his working memory was intact too.
His case, although tragic, was hugely important in helping psychologists to locate memory functions, which had previously thought to be distributed throughout the brain.
Stress article
Good article on stress in the Psychology Review magazine, which you can find in the stand in the library, outside the computer room (FLS).
It focusses on biological aspects - a follow-up on psychological theiries and stress reduction is due to be in the next issue.
It focusses on biological aspects - a follow-up on psychological theiries and stress reduction is due to be in the next issue.
RI update
Since my last post back in October, most of you are well underway with the final RI now.
Some of you completed the practice RI, some didn't; if you did then hopefully it was enjoyable and useful practice, but either way it is time to move on!
Things to be thinking about:
Some of you completed the practice RI, some didn't; if you did then hopefully it was enjoyable and useful practice, but either way it is time to move on!
Things to be thinking about:
- If you have not already gathered your RI data, this is your top priority. Of course, you can't start until you have prepared all task meterials, consent forms, instructions etc, but this should not take long, especially if you split these jobs among your group.
- Background research. The introduction section of your write-up needs to show a good, broad knowledge of background research, so get reading!
- Analyse the data. Strictly speaking, this should be done individually. As you are all doing experiments, it should be quite easy - mean, mode, median, range and standard deviation for each condition, plus a graph, probably comparing the means.
- When the above tasks are done, you should be able to write up your first draft quite easily. This is due in after the February week, but I'm willing to look over your work sooner if you wish.
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