New Psych Blog

There's a new Psych blog that just nicked the Oedipus thing - apparently it's several Senior Examiners, including one that used to work here. Might be worth a look in the future....

Worth the time it takes to load for sheer novelty value.

The Oedipus Complex : The Game

Depression Questionnaire

On-line questionnaire for identifying symptoms of depression. Read carefully before answering.... you might not like the response!

Dreaming...

For use in the poster task...

Jung's theory of Dreams 1

Short general article on the development and history of dream theories...

More intellectual article on dream theory Beyond Freud and Jung.

The whole of Freud's famous book on interpreting dreams!

Short summary of Freud's Dream Theory.

Good chapter on Dream Theory (including Freud and updates)

Philosophy and Freud's Dream Theory.

Activation-Synthesis Theory at Erratic Wisdom

Activation-Synthesis at Everything 2

Reverse Learning and Activation-Synthesis.

Memory Consolidation theory

Some evidence for Memory Consolidation Theory.

Long but reasonably readable article on all the theories of dreams

Are You A Lark Or An Owl?

Go to this page and complete the questionnaire.

This is also a decent revision page - plenty of old and new information here for the essay that's to come in a few weeks...

Colour Constancy

Here is the page on colour constancy that could be useful for one of the Perception essays....

Trippy Eye

Or Motion Aftereffect illusion...

This was found in class by Nathan and works as a pretty good example of what we were talking about in class...

The Joy of Visual Perception

This is a really great site for visual illusions. Check out the 'Fun things in vision' section.

Gender and Helping Behaviour (Coursework)

This one looks at similarities between males and females in terms of most psychological variables - brief reference to Eagly and Crowley on helping behaviour.

Here you can examine the effect of sex and mood on helping.

This time it's Eagly and Crowley's meta-analysis in detail.

Gender related traits and helping behaviour.

Predicting helping behaviour - focused on gender roles .

Research for fear

There's a good write up on this link about Mineka and how she taught monkeys to fear.

http://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/emotion/Mineka.html

'Laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys do not show a fear of snakes, so this fear is not innate. After lab-reared monkeys observed for only a few minutes a wild-reared monkey reacting with intense fear to a live boa constrictor...'

Gender & Conformity (Coursework)

There is an incredibly useful article available on blackboard for this project title. Go to the coursework resources section under AS Psychology.

Coursework Proposal Form

In case you're bored or confused...

... you might fancy having a trial go at the coursework proposal form... here it is... this is what we'll be filling in the week i come back from Paris...

remember, you can be getting on with the first draft of your introduction while i'm away...

Gender and Obedience (Coursework)

Table for Milgram experiments around the world - some specify differences in results using male and female participants. Extract from a book including a section on gender differences in obedience.

Eyewitness Testimony (Coursework)

Study from Cornell Uni showing how memory of an event can be affected by our judgment of the person involved - read on.....

Faulty memory issues (Coursework)

More Loftus material here. This one has useful reference details too!

Leading Questions & Eyewitness Stuff (Coursework)

Useful link to an article by Loftus. This covers loads of her own research as well as reference to a study by Harris on leading questions and the height of basketball players...

More Cwk things

Perceptual Set - with some ambiguous figures

Change Blindness Demo - someone was thinking of doing this I think...

More Change Blindness

And even more Change Blindness links

Environmental Stressors - scroll down for an intro.

A wiki on environmental stressors - some good references

Online book on Aggression

Schemas - intro

mindhacks and matt ruff

i dont know if this link has been posted further back in the archives here, but its a blogg thats definately worth a look. www.mindhacks.com . its regularly updated and has links to articles on new psychology research on pretty much anything. a little taster of whats on the site:

"Mirror touches:
Nature reports on a recently discovered form of synaesthesia where affected individuals actually feel a sensation when they observe someone else being touched.
Synaesthesia is a condition where senses become crossed, so people might seeing colours when they encounter numbers, or tastes when they hear certain words."

ive found out some really odd things on there.

i read saxon's blogg entry on sybil, a film about a girl with MPD, and on a similar note:



set this house in order is worth a peek if your into that kinda thing.

Some sources for Coursework

I'll add these when I find them:

Something on Gender and Conformity - you have to scroll down and look!

more on gender and conformity here and here and here and here

helping behaviour is here and here (general social psych articles/slides/powerpoints etc) and here

webpage for Elizabeth Loftus

An Abstract of a study on conformity and age

Heyer and Barrett abstract on interference and sensory modality

allport and postman schema study

bits and bobs about schemas - useful as a starting point for searches

interference - Underwood and another article on Underwood himself

more studies on interference - scroll down

the piliavin helping behaviour experiment on the subway

lots of experiments on helping behaviour

intro to helping behaviour

large article on State Dependent Memory and Forgetting

online book on memory and forgetting

fear and appearance of animals

even better on fear and appearance of animals

Isabel Quaresma, Portuguese Chicken Girl

Isabel was born in 1970 Tabua, Portugal to a mentally deficient mother. Isabel was the only child of three not to be fathered by a family member. Isabel was found at the age of nine and had spent the last eight years shut up in a hen-coop, deprived of human interaction and socialisation. Members of the neighbourhood regarded the situation as a family matter and would not get involved. Isabel was finally found and taken to hospital where a series of tests were conducted. After these tests she was sent back to the family who had treated her so badly.

For a nine year old, her growth was seriously stunted. She wasn't toilet trained and she could not talk. Isabel held her arms in the position of hens wings and the palms of her hands were calloused. She had been fed on scraps (the same as the hens feed) and one eye was affected by a cataract, supposedly due to a chicken scratch. She flapped her arms and clawed the ground with her feet to show emotion.

Eventually Isabel was taken to an institution for handicapped children. Eighteen years later she still hadn't grown much and made little progress generally. She could understand simple orders but had she been asked to fetch two items she would only be able to understand one of the two orders at the time and could only retrieve one of the items. Isabel had an estimated mental age of a two year old.

Isabel did show more signs of progression socially than in any other area. She was able to interpret expressions of others and understand whether they were happy or sad. Physically she had learnt to walk but still suffered a delicate stomach. Isabel was still unable to talk.

On average, there are 301 baked beans to a regualr sized can. (apparently)

Joke

Three women are being tested for the armed forces, on how well they obey orders. They are given a gun, and told to go into a room, where their husband is sitting, and shoot him.
The first woman says straight away that she cannot shoot her husband.
The second woman goes into the room, and after a few seconds, comes out and tells the men that she could not shoot her husband.
The third woman goes into the room, and, after muffled bangs, comes out again. She wipes her brow, and says, "The gun wasn't loaded, so I had to beat him to death with the chair!"


(Circulated the internet a few years ago.)