The Nocebo Effect

The Placebo Effect: a psychological effect in which a treatment which contains no active medical substance causes an improvement in symptoms. For example, a participant in a trial takes a sugar pill believing it could be real medication and find their back pain goes away. This effect has been well documented and is relatively well … Read more

Resilience – innate or acquired?

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! I’m back after having a few weeks off blogging, and plan to stick to my schedule of 1 post a week in 2018 (usually posted on Thursdays, 4pm GMT). To start off this year, I thought I’d talk about a concept in psychology which is being applied more to … Read more

Why do we dream?

Have you ever stopped to wonder why we dream at night? From sweet dreams to recurring nightmares, our mind is rarely silent – regardless of whether we can really remember their content in the morning. Sometimes, we find our dreams are linked to things going on in our lives right now, worries about future events … Read more

A week of Mindfulness

I’m sure by now you’ll have heard of mindfulness. It seems to have exploded in popularity in recent years, and is recommended as everything from a cure for severe depression to improved concentration. Mindfulness can be described as being aware of the present, in particular how we feel on the inside. It generally involves bringing … Read more

Why do we find things scary?

Happy Halloween! Ever wondered why you don’t like clowns, or why just hearing creepy music on a film makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end? Today’s blog post is keeping things topical and asking why is it that we find certain things scary. When we watch a scary film, it … Read more

Perfect Memory Syndrome

Can you imagine being able to remember every single day of your life? This is the case for people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) – an extremely rare condition which affects fewer than 100 people in the world. In contrast to the majority of us, who can probably recall some details about what we’ve been … Read more

Orthorexia – a new type of eating disorder?

You might have heard some of the negativity in the press recently about so called ‘clean eating’ and it’s advocates, who promote a lifestyle which involves cutting out any processed food and often entire food groups (gluten/dairy etc). This is not because of any medical reason, but simply just to be as ‘healthy’ as possible. … Read more