PsychBLOG.co.uk

I’ve spoken about health promotion a few times in the past, and echoing the title of my last post: have we gone too far? As of the 1st July smoking in an enclosed public place became illegal. As psychology students you learn about health promotion and ways to make the masses ‘more health [...]

I’ve made a few posts on here about pain and the perception of pain. The gate theory of pain suggests that perception of pain can be influenced by external influences like distraction. Could smell have a similar effect on the perception of pain? Well a new study would have us believe that [...]

When researching crime (and most other things come to think about it) in psychology we tend to have to resort to self-report measures. The gut reaction to any self-report measure when thinking about evaluation issues is that the participants may give socially desirable answers – especially when asking about offending behaviour.
The Deception Blog has recently [...]

Pain is a funny thing (well it’s not the funny if you’re in pain). Perception of pain, some would argue, is a largely psychological phenomenon which is influenced greatly by the mind. Be it the mind making you feel pain in a limb that doesn’t exist, or you mind blocking out pain so [...]

In the A2 Crime course we look at Interview and Negotiation techniques and investigate which ones are effective at soliciting the most information out of witnesses to an offence.
Shifting uncomfortably in your seat? Stumbling over your words? Can’t hold your questioner’s gaze? Police interviewing strategies place great emphasis on such visual and speech-related cues, although [...]

Recently I made a post about the AIDS campaign in France where rather graphic images were used to get the message about safe sex across. New Scientist has two more stories that relate to the ways that people are promoting healthy behaviour or bringing awareness of health issues.
The first story relates to smoking and the [...]

“I remember Mattingburg’s most famous case: the case of the bloody knife. A man was found next to a murdered body, he had the knife in his hand, thirteen witnesses that seen him stab the victim, when the police arrived he said, “I’m glad I killed the bastard.” Mattingburg [...]

Well, they say that sex sells, so I thought that it was about time that I jumped on that band-wagon. We all know the dangers of unprotected sex, or at least we should do, so how can we get the message across to those who still aren’t paying attention? In the Health module [...]

In the A2 Crime module we study Morality and Crime and study if morality is innate or something that is learned from those around us. Some psychologists (Kohlberg) have also developed theories of moral development which predict that we will progress through, and become more moral as we grow older in a linear fashion [...]

The practice of jury selection, choosing those people who are going to be the ‘representative’ group of peers that are there to judge the defendant. Is this process becoming more of a dark art or is it a science based on the lawyers previous experience?
“Despite all the reforms of the latter half of the [...]