Thoughts of a Psychology Student

Happiness is a perplexing concept. I, like millions of others, live by the unwritten and elusive belief that happiness is a deserved emotion for the individual. The way our country exists has a certain sense of 'me-ness' about it. I consistently fall into the trap of thinking if I buy certain things, i'll be happy. Or if I travel around the world to 'find myself', then i'll be happy. For some people it might be: "if I had a boyfriend, i'd be happy" or "if I won the lottery, then happiness would be mine". All these thought processes have one thing in common: they're selfish cognitions. They run on a basis of: if  I get this, then I'll be happy. Recent studies however have shown that happiness is created in quite the opposite way. Happiness has been proved to be directly linked with gratitude. I came across this correlation on a youtube channel called SoulPancake, on a video entitled "The Science Of Happiness". ...

This blog post is going to be slightly different from previous ones in that I'm simply going to document my day as it's been an interesting mix of focussed work and nonchalant wanderings... My day began at The Natural History Museum in Oxford. My college had organised a biology workshop in which we would be taught how to extract our DNA to assess whether or not we possessed the TAS2R38 gene that enables us to taste a bitter chemical called PTC. The practical involved us learning many modern techniques used frequently in laboratories in many universities. These included the Polymerase Chain Reaction, HaeIII Restriction Digestion and Gel Electrophoresis. The fiddly and careful procedures that we carried out in order to complete the experiment were made worthwhile when we viewed our results under UV light - a clear representation of our individual genotypes; a considerably startling and fairly mind-blowing sight. I then had one of the loveliest afternoons I've had...

I'm going to start this blog post by introducing you to the "Baaer Meinhof" phenomenon. This is essentially a named phenomenon that you will have almost definitely experienced without realising it was named. The Baaer Meinhof phenomenon is that temporarily bizarre stage in life where you learn, hear or see a new piece of information, commit it to memory and as a result begin seeing it everywhere. This is exactly what has inspired this blog post, and before I start I want to state that I realise this topic is controversial. I don't claim to be an expert, I am simply a student formulating my thoughts on this topic. On Thursday the 3rd of October, I watched part two of the harrowing and challenging documentary "Women Behind Bars" presented by Trevor Mcdonald. The documentary followed the famous newsreader around Indiana Women's Prison and Rockville Correctional Facility as he interviewed a select few of the female criminals that were imprisoned ther...

So after reading that Introversion has been included in the latest version of the DSM, I felt the need to write a post about it and write out my thoughts on the new term used in psychology: medicalisation. In James Davies new controversial book "Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good", it explains that Medicalisation is the process by which more and more of our human characteristics are seen as needing medical explanation and treatment. In essence, it highlights the problem of psychiatry medicalising ordinary reactions and responses. A prime example of this is the issue of Introversion featuring in the DSM. For those of you that don't know, Introversion is a personality type. Online dictionaries define it as "a  person predominantly concerned with their own thoughts and feelings rather than with external things" or "t o concentrate one's interests upon oneself". Immediately however, this gives off a negative impression of int...

Though I haven't posted on here in a while, it has seemed that a topic keeps cropping up in every day happenings so much so that I decided I should write about it. The topic in question is Stories. More precisely, the importance of stories in a literal sense but also as an abstract concept. I suppose this thought process began whilst I was debating whether or not to take a gap year before university. The idea of being able to travel the world in pursuit of so called 'self discovery' has always appealed to me, just as it did to Forster's Lucy Honeychurch and indeed John Green's  Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. But the more I thought about it, the more it  occurred  to me that perhaps this idea of finding out 'who you are' is just an idea found in story books and the first world. For want of a better phrase, self discovery is ultimately a "first world problem". So what does this have to do with stories? Well during a discussion with one of the teache...

It is known that teenagers’ body clocks are far from normal. Staying up till early morning is all too common for whatever reason, whether it’s because you are re-watching your favourite TV series again and can’t draw yourself away from the compelling storyline or whether, for some unknown reason, as soon as the clock hit 9pm, you developed the energy of several condensed suns. Inevitably this causes us to wake up well into the hours of early afternoon the next day, leaving little time for any productivity and ironically, no energy either. From what I can gather (through some regrettably brief and incomplete research), we need sleep because: during sleep, a growth hormone is released our body needs a chance to replace tissue and chemicals that are used up or destroyed during the day our brain needs a chance to “sort through” the information we have processed during the day So the firs two reasons are bodily reasons why sleep is so important. It seems to suggest that wit...

I am an ordinary teenager. I go to bed too late and struggle to rise in the morning. I mindlessly complain about having to go to school, having to do homework, having to revise; the list is endless. Like many teenagers, I have wild and unrealistic dreams about how good it would be to stop going to college and travel the world to experience different cultures and meet new people. Making my way across continents in a campervan, reading books and writing poetry. However it is depressingly obvious that these dreams are out of the question and that getting decent grades to get to a good uni to complete a highly regarded degree to get a well paid job is what is expected of us all in today’s society. So, when I stumbled across this video this afternoon on Facebook, I realized that it’s not learning and education that’s the problem, its school itself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-eVF_G_p-Y Now don’t get me wrong. I  love  to learn and I thrive on discovering new...