Category Archives: Research

This will be a review of new research

The Apes that Can!

The question as to whether humans are the only ones on this planet who have the ability to comprehend and use language has been of great argument since the beginning of psychology. At the moment we follow the progression of Washoe (RIP) and her ‘learning’ of American Sign Language and with the arrival of [...]

Phantoms: Where does it hurt?

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 [...]

All together now? Police Lineups.

There has been quite a bit of research on the effectiveness of police lineups and whether presentation of the ’suspects’ could affect the reliability of the outcome (see here for a huge list of research). One of the big questions is should we show all the suspects together (as above) or is identification more [...]

PSYlent: 23rd March 2008

Here is the next PSYlent, the weekly overview of those stories that I think are pretty interesting in psychology but don’t really apply to OCR. Seems a shame to miss out on them just because I can’t get them to fit into the specifications. So, here are those studies that would have been [...]

Stress: Think of the children!

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 [...]

PSYlent: 17th February 2008

Here is the next PSYlent, the weekly overview of those stories that I think are pretty interesting in psychology but don’t really apply to OCR. Seems a shame to miss out on them just because I can’t get them to fit into the specifications. So, here are those studies that would have been [...]

Ordinary People - Unspeakable Acts

There has been a lot of talk about Phil Zimbardo recently - he seems to be getting everywhere making sure that we all know about his new(ish) book - from appearances on popular US television to lectures on evil and the Lucifer Effect there’s been plenty of discussion.
We study (well at least at the moment) [...]

Griffiths: Role of cognitive bias and skill in fruit machine gambling

Over the next few weeks I am going to cover the five new studies on the 2008 specification and see what resources are around for them already. I was lucky enough to go the the OCR inset in Leeds on Wednesday where both Griffiths and Richer & Haslam were speaking. It was a [...]