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Hello, everyone. I hope you’ve had a great weekend. Today’s blog post will be on developmental psychology. Focusing on the effects of poverty on child development. Personal update: Wow, this past week has been very busy as I’ve been home from University for the past week and I’ve been doing a lot of creative projects as well as seeing family. But as the busy week is mainly as a result of writing, let’s move into the writing update. Writing update: When it came to study week, I had 3 main focuses besides seeing family and they were finishing Garro: Heresy, record the podcast episodes and record A Guide to Mental Health and Treatment around the World. (I may edit that title in the future. Especially, as in my head I always call the book Global Mental Health. Comment down below your thoughts on the title) Basically, the main focuses sort of got done but a lot more happened as well. So, the podcast recordings went very well, and I’ll be releasing the first episode in two-week times so I’m excited! And it turns out that I love podcasting because I can express myself in the audio format and I don’t know… it feels good to be able to connect with readers easily. I managed to write 7 chapters of Garro: Heresy and I have another 8 to do which I will do this week. However, something that I love about writing is it can evolve and change as you’re writing. I’ll brief hint at two such occurrences while writing this book. The first is that I knew something was going to happen to Maura and make her character a mystery between Garro book 3 and book 4. But I didn’t know what and when I got to writing it. I created a very interesting and a much more complex storyline than I originally intended. (Don’t worry it’s still a very engaging storyline) then the other occurrence is to do with the God Magi which if you read or listen to the Garro: Short Stories. You’ll probably love the concept of her. Anyway, it turns out that I’ve managed to engineer a very shocking twist in the tale of the God Magi and given her a physical form of one of the main characters from the last series. You won’t be able to guess who the God Magi is though. Anyway, the whole point is that I love the ability to be able to evolve and develop my stories as I write because some authors don’t allow this evolution in their stories which I think is a shame. In addition, I have an idea for another Garro series which I’m still developing but I just wanted to let you all know that Garro books 7-9 could be created and published in 2021- so it’s something to look forward to. I know I’m talking for quite a while now, so I’ll summarise the rest: · In roughly March/April 2020 I’m going to be looking at merchandise. Like: mugs, art prints and more because I found a print on demand service for merchandise called: Cafepress.com which I’m interested in as it means that I can create potentially 100s of merchandise products without having to order, store or dispatch them myself. COMMENT DOWN BELOW IF YOU HAVE ANY SPECIFIC THINGS YOU WOULD WANT TO SEE IN MY MERCHANDISE IDEAS. · I’ve recorded A Guide to Mental Health and Treatment Around the World, so I’ll edit and publish it this week and then I’ll email my subscribers about when that’s available on Amazon as it takes a few weeks. But you should be able to find it on Kobo, your local library and other major stores (not amazon, audible or iTunes) by Sunday. · Finally, I’m going to write some business books for the purpose of writing for the market (writing for the purpose of making money) compared to writing the psychology and sci-fi fantasy books which I write for pleasure mostly. This I will keep separate from this website and this main business but if any of you are interested in business books. I’m going to releasing them in November/ early December so just contact me if you’re interested in knowing more. The business books before Christmas will be on Business Skills, Leadership, Personal Finance and Time Management. Wow, that was a lot of information- onto the developmental psychology blog! Developmental Psychology- Effects of poverty on child development: As previously mentioned last week was my study week at university and as I don’t have any new content that could easily form a blog post. I decided to show you an extract from my book Developmental Psychology. (You can get an extra £1 off this book if you buy before the 4th November 2019) Extract from Developmental Psychology: Chapter 8 Poverty is the state of having no or little means to fulfil basic needs and as a result of that, a number of outcomes can arise that inhibit development. Brooks and Dunn (1997) summarised that poverty has a number of key outcomes: · Physical health as poverty leads to stunted growth, malnourish and low birth weight. · Lower cognitive ability · Poorer school achievement · Emotional as well as behavioural outcomes such as showing more aggression or fighting behaviour while feeling depressed or anxious on the inside. The researchers suggested a number of pathways as well. These pathways are other factors that affect development in addition to family income. · Availability of nutrition · The physical condition of the home · Amount of time parents spent with children · Parenting style · Punishment practices · Parent’s mental health · Neighbour conditions · And many more… Models of poverty: There are two main models or theories that try to explain and predict the deciding factors in the argument of what factors affect development the most. · The family stress theory states that the main variables that affect development are family-related. Like: parenting styles and communication strategies. · The investment model states that the most important pathways that affect development are associated with real goods. Such as nutrition, opportunities to learn and enriched environments. Personally, if you combine the two theories, I believe that you would be spot on and both are very true explanations to the factors that affect poverty the most. Pollitt (1995) · Researchers carried out a study on four very poor villages in Central Guatemala for the course of 8 years. · The participants were made up of over 2000 children and mothers. · As protein was the main nutrient missing from the villager’s diet. The villagers were given a nutrient supplement. · Participant from two villages received a high protein supplement whereas the two other control villages got a supplement that contained far less protein. · Results showed that a significant drop in infant mortality in both sets of villages, but with a 69% decrease in villages taking the high protein supplement compared to only a 24% decrease in the other two villages. Children on the lower protein supplement suffered a slower rate of growth and a slower rate of recovery from infection. They also learned to crawl and walk slightly later on average. Because these undernourished children remained small for their age, adults may have treated them as if they were younger than their actual age. · In conclusion, this shows how poverty can affect psychological development. Critical thinking: A positive of this study is that it has high ecological validity as the experiment uses a natural, real-world setting. In turn, this increases the generalizability of the findings, so we apply the results of the experiment to different situations. However, as a result of this high ecological validity where other factors that could influence cognitive development aren’t controlled. We cannot say with unshakable certainty that protein was the only factor that could have given us these results. As factors could have potentially played a role. Like: illness, genetic factors and other missing nutrients from their diet. Summary: Poverty can have a number of impacts on development. There are a number of factors that impact development as well as family income. The two main theories or models in relation to the effects of poverty on development are: · The family stress theory · The investment model Pollitt (1995) demonstrated how important protein is in cognitive development. I hope that you found that psychology post interesting and if you want to learn more about developmental Psychology then please check out my book: Developmental Psychology and if you buy before the 4th November 2019 then you can save yourself £1. Have a good week. Kind regards Connor.

Hello, everyone. I hoped that you had a great weekend. Today’s post will be on the social psychology of persuasion. Personal and writing update: This week has been a very busy one. In terms of university, I had a lot of interesting psychology lectures and I have a lot of ideas for new books as well as various other projects. For example: I can definitely see a Forensic Psychology book forming in my mind as compared to other lectures. My Forensic Psychology lectures are very linear and clear cut. Meaning that there’s one main topic and only that psychological topic. Compared to my social psychology lectures which I think are a lot more mess in terms of book creation as you have the main topic like: Persuasion. Then you have all the sub-topics that make writing a book more challenging as you have so much information and you need to keep it interesting. For instance, in persuasion you have what is persuasion, the various models and theories about how persuasion works, persuasive techniques and when persuasion does and does not work so there’s a lot of information and I’ll find it interesting to see the result. However, there’s exciting news! I’ve started to record my podcast episodes and to be honest I do love podcasting because the problem with recording audiobooks is that when recording audiobooks you need to read without emotion and emphasis and you need to be a narrator, not a person. Although, what I like about podcasting is that I can talk about my topics as well as what I love whilst being me and a genuine person. I will fully admit that I’m still new and raw as a podcaster but I’m learning and on the 11th November 2019. I’ll release the podcast. Social psychology of Persuasion: Persuasion is when you try to change someone’s behaviour, in its simplest form. The process of persuasion tends to have one of four outcomes: · Opinion change · Perception change · Emotion change · Action change Nevertheless, persuasions need four steps as supported by Howland, Janis and Kelley (1953) · You need to pay attention · You need to comprehend the message · You need to accept the message · You need to retain the message Without those four steps, the target of the persuasion attempt will not be persuaded by you. There are many things that will increase the likelihood of the attempt being successful, but this is a brief overview: The source (the persuaders) ideally needs to be: · Attractive- Eagly and Chaiken (1975) found that attractive people are more persuasion. · Be familiar to the target as we tend to like familiar or similar people more. The message needs to be: · Strong as long and strong messages are more effective than long and weak messages. · Repeated- Tellis (1987) shows that 2-3 times a week is best. Finally, some reasons why persuasion attempts fail include: · Reactance- when the persuader annoys the target and they end up disliking you, in its simplest form. · Avoidance- they simply avoid you as the persuader or they avoid people who would try and get them to change their behaviours. For example: smokers might try and avoid medical professionals. · Forewarning- if people have prior knowledge that someone is going to try and persuasive them then this gives them time to prepare and come up with counter arguments. · Counterarguments · And many more… This is a quick overview of the social psychology of persuasion and I’ll explore this topic is greater depth in my new social psychology book next year. Sign up for my newsletter today to make sure that you don’t miss out on new releases and other interesting psychological content. Have a great week! Reference: Sutton, R.M., & Douglas, K.M. (2013). Social psychology. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan

Hello, everyone. I hope that you all had a great weekend. Today’s post is a quick look at the social psychology behind attitudes. Personal update: Wow, this last week’s been busy because as I mentioned last week it’s the university’s employability Festival and me being me decided to sign up for tons of relevant and irrelevant talks and trying to fit everything else in has been… interesting. For example: I’ve been for a month now and my weekends are typically free to you on you; my wonderful readers; but I’m sorry to say that the only piece of interesting work that I did was start Garro: Hersey and that was only 3 chapters compared to the 6 I wanted to get done. However, a more comical piece of personal news is that I started my Italian course last Tuesday which I was really looking forward to but when I got there and we started to the course. It reminded me of how bad I am at languages. As in the UK when you’re in High school or 12-16 education we must do a language; well I did, and I did French, but as much as I loved the concept of learning another language and culture. I was just awful at it. Mainly because of my pronunciation. Which actually brings me back to a point that I often think about or say and that it’s a massive failure of the English education system that we don’t take other languages seriously and we need to start teaching children other languages when they’re a lot younger as other countries do. As most countries start to teach their children English at about 5 or 6 (It’s a rough guess) and it’s because of that learning at such a young age that they’re so good at English. Basically, if we start to teach other languages earlier than our children will better at them and appreciate them more. (May that’s a new book idea) I quite enjoyed that section. Moving on the writing update. Writing update: Honestly, it’s been a very hit and miss week for writing as I’ve wanted to get a lot done but I’ve had to prioritized what I’ve wanted to get done. Such as: over the weekend I had to do 4 hours of reading for university. Mainly, as a result of me wanting to get all my reading done so, I can I enjoy, relax and focus on writing activities during my reading week (a week off from university) Although, I have managed to achieve some things with my writing this week. Including: · I’ve written the first 3 chapters of Garro: Hersey which I’m excited about because of the plot and pace that it’s progressing and its interesting see Garro without Kortana and his team. · I’ve joined an author network called: The Dreamteam Network. This is an author network that focuses on joining up to promote everyone’s books and grow each author’s readership. Personally, I like it because in the first week I’ve already joined a few promos and after writing this blog post. I’m going to post in the Facebook group to see who would be interested in doing a multi-author boxset. A very exciting week indeed. Finally, that last I had a brilliant email from a reader that asked me to do more Garro and it felt great to know that someone loved my books so THANK YOU to that reader for reassuring me that I'm not wasting my time. The social psychology of Attitudes: So, on Wednesday I was sitting in my Social Psychology lecture and I was really interested in this topic because I knew that I needed a topic for today’s post and this topic seemed perfect. (As always this blog post is just a very brief introduction to the topic that I’ll explore more in future books) Therefore, attitudes are preferences in their simplest form and these attitudes can be positive, negative or both. In addition, we have two types of attitudes. We have explicit attitudes which are easy to measure in social psychology because you can merely ask people to have them. For example: What do you think about smoking? Then we have implicit attitudes. These attitudes are harder to measure because as humans we aren’t fully aware of our own attitudes, as well as these attitudes are hard to change and are very quick to activate. Functions of attitudes: Interestingly, Katz (1960) suggested that there are four functions of attitudes: · Knowledge function- we have attitudes so it feels like we understand a complex social world. · A utilitarian function- attitudes help us get rewarded and avoid punishments. For example, parents may reward you for having a similar attitude to them on Brexit. · Value expressive function- attitudes allow people to express their deep-seated values on different topics. · Ego defensive function- having attitudes protect us from psychological harm. Personally, I find all these different functions to be very logical and interesting because I would say that they’re all true and correct as I can think of ways of how personal attitudes can fulfil each function. I’ll examine this in more depth in next year’s book. Formation of attitudes: The last topic that I’ll mention at attitudes; the rest I’ll mention in next year’s book; is how attitudes can be formed. They can be formed several ways including: · Mere exposure- the more we’re exposed to a particular stimulus; for example, Chinese food; the more we tend to like it. (To a certain point. I’ll explore the concept of over-familiarisation in the future) · Conditioning- in short when you’re rewarded for having a certain attitude. · Genetics- as supported by various twin studies. It’s suggested that political conservatism and other attitudes are partly genetics. (Bouchard et al 2000) · Social processes- our interactions with our cultural and social groups can impact our attitudes. · Echo chambers and confirmation bias- we seek people who support our world views and thus strengthen our beliefs in them. I hope you found this post interesting. Please check out my other books for more information on psychology topics and sign up for my newsletter and receive a free book to receive news about my books. Have a great week! Kind regards Connor. Reference: Sutton, R.M., & Douglas, K.M. (2013). Social psychology. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan