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With all my efforts being put into teaching and getting my little darlings ready for their exams it’s been a quiet time around here recently. To add to that loosing this weekend to a marking meeting (at least it was in the beautiful Cambridge) has meant that I haven’t had time to write; but I [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

With all the conferences that are going on lots of us are starting to look forward to the new 2008 specifications: what are the studies like; what else have the authors done? One of the new studies in the physiological psychology module of the AS is Maguire’s research into the size of London cabbies’ [...]