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 [...]

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 [...]

Only the other week I was talking about the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes‘ task that Baron-Cohen employed in his 1997 research looking at high functioning adults with Autism and Aspergers. In order to validate the Eyes Task as a theory of mind task, participants in the two clinical groups (ASD & Tourette’s) were [...]

A short article in the current BJ of Psychiatry where psychologits are asked to condense an important point, concept or theory into only 100 words.  A need for succinctness required.  This time around Baron-Cohen was asked for Autism in 100 words … here’s what he said:  Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) occur in 1% of the population, are [...]

I’ve written a lot about Autism here over the years and spoken about the different ways in which it has been suggested it was possible to find out if a person or child was autistic; from the Sally-Anne test to this more recent suggestion from Baron-Cohen et al. – the eyes and emotion recognition.  In [...]

Hodder Education presents OCR Psychology for AS a brand new text for the 2008 OCR AS Psychology specification, covering all 15 core studies, contextualising, presenting and evaluating each study in full, in order to make it relevant to the student. The textbook is highly accessible and readable, with useful guidance on comparing studies, applying themes, [...]

A good while back I compiled a list of references and more importantly full text links for all of the core studies. Well now the new 2008 spec has been finalised it’s time for the updated references. If you’re looking for the ‘old’ (2000-2007) spec studies see this page. All of the files are being [...]

Simon Baron-Cohen has become well known in the media for the development of empathising-systemising (E-S) theory.   Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour [...]

After the popularity of the last two autism research carnivals (one & two) it’s time for another one. I would love to write and comment on all of these studies but if I did this would be an autism blog as there is so much research going on in the field of autism at the [...]

All those lucky teachers out there now have another fantastic resource to help in their teaching of psychology. Classic Studies in Psychology is brought to us by Dr. Steve Taylor. The Short Cuts packages consist of a number of short video clips designed to give teachers the flexibility to integrate illustrative video material into their [...]