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In these days of interactive games, brain training, and other make ‘yourself better’ programs Mind Habits brings something to the table that is supported by research and looks at stress, self-esteem and confidence in a fun and practical way.
Worrying about your next date or the big presentation to your boss? Feeling low? Instead of running [...]

We all experience pain in different ways depending on individual differences, arousal at the time and habituation to chronic pain.  Some good examples of this is recent research which has shown that doctors can actually ‘turn off’ parts of their brain which would react to seeing others in pain.
What is central to future research into [...]

One of the most talked about studies, both here on PsychBLOG and throughout popular psychology, is Milgram’s study of obedience.  Here he asked a volunteer sample of men from the New Haven area to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person (a confederate).  How many people, both teachers and students alike asked themselves the [...]

Could social influence be having a positive effect for once?
It’s easy to blame those people around us when we try to rationalise why some take up habits.  It’s just easy to say that the behaviour is learned from those around us - social learning theory - who’s behaviour is imitated.  I have been one of [...]

Back in January I talked about a fascinating video from a TED conference where Vilayanur Ramachandran discussed a new ‘treatment’ for phantom limb pain that he had come up with: the mirror box. I’m fascinated by phantom limb pain as I feel that it provides massive support for the thesis that pain perception is [...]

It’s widely accepted that when a person suffers from stress this has massive negative effects on that person; both psychologically and physically.  Much research has provided support to the idea that a being stressed can effect our immune system quite drastically making us prone to illness.  However, could being exposed to a stressed parental environment [...]

I have written about Health Promotion a bit in the past but over the last few months there’s been quite a lot of talk about it so here I am going to collate it into another carnival of research.
1) Increase the costs to get them doing it.
The Health Belief Model states that we need to [...]

The influence of our role models on behaviour is something of particular interest to psychologists and we study it through the entire psychology course. More specifically we look at the research conducted by Bandura and his work into Social Learning Theory (SLT) in the imitation of aggression. In a television advertisement called [...]

In the A2 health module we look at pain perception and what can affect this. One of the most fascinating disorders within pain (well in my opinion at least) is phantom limb pain. Phantom limb pain is when pain is perceived in a limb (although it can be experienced in other parts of [...]

Which gender experiences the most pain? The age old question is still rife: what hurts more, child birth or being kicked in the … well .. man bits?  I try to raise this question when talking about measuring pain in the Health section of the A2 using the McGill Pain questionnaire to quantify - well [...]