As adults, we take it for granted that we know what others are thinking may be different to our own view. Not everyone likes the same things, or has the same beliefs. However, knowing that others have their own interpretations of the world is a skill which is acquired during childhood, and is known as … Read more
Hi everyone, thought I’d do a slightly different post today – I’m just about to start my last term as a psychology student and I wanted to do a kind of reflection/why psychology/what next post to look back at my time at university and to look forward at what I want to do after. To … Read more
Following on from the post about my dissertation.. now on to the next thing that’s been taking up quite a lot of my time this year – my research project. For this part of my degree, I had to carry out my own experiment on something which had not been shown before, and analyse the … Read more
Would you help a stranger if it looked like they were in trouble? What if there were lots of other people around, and you thought they would be better suited to help, or they just didn’t look that worried? Most people would be certain that regardless of the circumstances, they’d help someone in need. But … Read more
This blog post will look at what hallucinations are, what causes them, and what can be do to help people who suffer from them. Normally, we are pretty good at identifying what’s real in the environment, but occasionally this processing is distorted, and people see things which aren’t there. This is a hallucination, and the … Read more
Can you imagine constantly feeling as though people are plotting against you, or that they are watching you and spreading rumors? These are common symptoms of people who suffer from delusions, which is turn is a symptom of schizophrenia. Delusions are defined as implausible, unfounded and strongly held beliefs which are personal to the individual … Read more
Another for the Brainteaser series now – The Rubber Hand Illusion. This involves tricking your brain into believing that a rubber hand is actually your own – sounds a bit weird I know! Botvinick & Cohen (1998) found that participants experience ownership of a rubber hand after they have viewed it receiving the same tactile … Read more
Bit of a change from neuroscience now to look at one of the most famous areas of social psychology. This aspect was made famous by a series of highly controversial experiments by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, which investigated why people obey authority figures. To set the scene a bit, a lot of the social … Read more
Dyslexia is a disorder which affects a person’s ability to read fluently, despite normal intelligence and comprehension. In order for a person to read, they must be able to decode the words and understand them – both of these processes are needed. It can also affect a person’s writing – letters are likely to be written … Read more
If you think about it, it’s pretty impressive that, given the complexity of language, infants learn to speak their first word by the time they are about a year old, and are able to talk in sentences by the age of 2. It takes us years to become fluent in a second language as adults, … Read more