Good Luck

I am very busy with my last semester with coursework and my dissertation. I just wanted to wish all the visitors good luck on their exams. I hope this blog helped you in some way. I wish you all the best :).

Beer Goggles - Perception of Beauty

Researchers recently went into bars to test the popular theory of beer goggles - where drunk people will find unattractive people attractive. Armed with a laptop and some images they tested drunk participants to see which mate they would choose.
Facial symmetry is a sign of gene quality in humans, the ability to distinguish poor facial symmetry from good is important if you want to reproduce quality offspring. The researchers think that being drunk impairs our ability to distinguish poor facial symmetry and this is part of the reason that drunk people can find unattractive people attractive. Click here for the video

Girls and Facebook: Building Self-worth?

For all students out there you may wonder why females post more pictures on facebook than men. A recent study suggests it's all about self-worth. Basically Western culture puts a lot of emphasis on female physical appearance, posting pictures allows people to comment on how good they look which boosts their self-esteem.

How Evil are You? Deindividuation in the Real World

Derren Brown is a mentalist who recently began a new mini-series entitled 'The Experiments.' This experiment is on deindividuation made famous by Zimbardo's prison experiment. The audience gets to choose what happens to an innocent person on a Friday night. They always have a choice between something negative and positive. Guess what the majority always chooses? Watch till the end, it is a very powerful way to show the effects of deindividuation.

Video Games Increase Violent Tendencies? An Unorthodox Experiment Suggesting the Contrary

I came across an interesting episode of Bullshit! (Penn and Teller, 2009) regarding video game violence. It's an age old topic in psychology and is very politically charged. Most research tends to be correlational, for example showing that as children play more games you are more likely to commit violent acts in the real world. So the general concern is that children as young as nine who play Call of Duty are going to turn into killing machines if given real weapons. So what happens if you give a nine-year-old who spends many hours of his day playing Call of Duty the chance to shoot a real gun? Something quite shocking happens actually (watch until the very end, I won't spoil it).

Penn and Teller are not bound by the ethical code psychologists must follow. They are therefore allowed to have a nine-year-old shoot a real rifle with real bullets on TV under the supervision of a weapon specialist. I don't see anything like this getting past a university ethics committee, but I'm sure the mother gave consent. I won't spoil what happened, but this is one powerful way to show that any concerns about young violent video gamers actually gun toting given the opportunity is ill-conceived, and as far as I'm aware this is the first piece of evidence of its kind. Despite its many flaws this mini experiment certainly makes its point.

Biological Updated with Videos

Looking at my stats for this blog I noticed that Biological is by far the most popular.  I have updated it with more information and embedded video clips from Simpsons and House to illustrate theories and concepts.  Hopefully this brings the theories to life a bit more which is one of IB Psych Revision's main goals.

CAS Southpark Style

I saw this south park episode a while ago and thought it was an interesting take on the interaction between physiology (aging) and cognition (thoughts about the world).  Stan has had a birthday and his outlook on life changes, he develops CAS.  This can be thought of as aging affecting Stan's cognition, I won't spoil anything just have a gander. This puts an entertaining twist on the otherwise fairly dry cognitive part of the syllabus.