A new, and unique, oportunity to study a MSc Teaching of Psychology. The course will be delivered primarily through e-learning combined with an optional two-day residential workshop on selected modules. This programme provides excellent CPD for practising teachers of post-16 Psychology who wish to obtain a Masters level qualification to maximise progression through the teaching profession.

The course looks really exciting and Mark and I are both really looking forward to starting the course in September. For more information on the course see the Glyndwr University’s Teaching of Psychology MSc page.

Course modules

Indicative modules include:

• Teaching Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology
• Teaching the Core Psychology Curriculum
• Contemporary Issues in Psychology
• Learning and Assessment
• Reflective Practitioner
• Negotiated Learning
• Dissertation

This programme will support your professional development through an advanced study of theoretical developments and contemporary issues in psychology, combined with the development of your teaching and assessment skills.

Guy Brandon is a counsellor, author and the founder of www.StressingOut.org, a website dedicated to resources for stress, depression, anxiety and related conditions.

Stress is a very normal and natural occurrence which happens in response to a wide variety of circumstances. It is an evolutionary response that it triggered by feelings of a lack of control, priming our bodies to react to a challenging situation. Stress has numerous effects on [...]

It is my belief that at the centre of our misunderstanding of success and creativity lays our ego.  In the deep dark depths of our psyche we allow mutual myth perpetuation and self-importance to cloud the truth about “talent”.  That is, that all those artists, designers and thinkers would have to admit that they did not simply sit and spark perfection from nowhere but their brilliant brains.  But instead [...]

Just added a summary of this study on holah.co.uk

It’s not the best summary ever written as it is difficult to do justice to such an influential 40 page experimental case study. I would like to delete a few bits to make it shorter and easier to read but would also like to add more about the quantitative data collected and add a bit more evaluation too. [...]

Mind Changers is a recent series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century. More information available from the BBC Radio 4 website.

Four excellent episodes for you to listen to. Enjoy.

The Pseudo-Patient Study

Claudia Hammond revisits David Rosenhan’s Pseudo-Patient Study

The Hawthorne Effect

The 1920s experiment in a Chicago factory that gave rise to the Hawthorne Effect

Harlow’s Monkeys

Revisiting Harry Harlow’s surrogate mothers experiment, which revolutionised parenting.

Arden House

Revisiting Langer [...]

With $55 million, a collection of frozen human brains and robots capable of processing 192 brain slices a day, the Allen Brain Institute is attempting to do the impossible: systematically map out the expression patterns of more than 20,000 genes that make our grey matter tick.

The science behind the techniques isn’t new. Researchers have probed neurons with specific RNA bits in a revealing game of genetic hide-and-seek for 40 [...]

“… Rational choice theory predicts that people will not gamble, thus it is theorised that regular gamblers gamble because they make the wrong decisions – that cognitive bias (irrational thinking) distorts their reasoning. The aim of this study was to increase understanding of the cognitive processes and behaviour of persistent fruit machine gamblers.”

Almost 18 months ago I interviewed Mark Griffiths about his 1994 research into cognitive bias and skill [...]

We all like to think that we have good memories for events and that if we were to be witness to a crime or incident that we would be able to recall in detail the events of the day. However our memories are not that reliable at all.  This has implications on many levels, but especially in the courtroom and with the police.

For example:
“Some researchers in Bologna demonstrate the [...]

There has been an almost widespread consensus amongst social psychologists that tyranny triumphs either because ordinary people blindly follow orders or else because they mindlessly conform to powerful roles. Much of this consensus has been influenced by the work of Milgram and Zimbardo

However, more recently, British psychologists S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher have written numerous papers criticising these views. They argue that Milgram and Zimbardo were wrong [...]

This video clip is not taken from the original 1950s experiments but is in fact a ‘made for telly’ version, from I think (guessing at the fashion of the actors). the late 1970s. The acting isn’t bad though.

Solomon Asch was interested to find out about conformity and in particular, the circumstances in which people would be more likely to conform.

In 1955 Asch conducted a classic experiment on majority influence. [...]