Hello, everyone. I hope that you all had a great weekend. Today’s post will be on, what is Forensic Psychology and what are forensic psychology’s real-world implications? But first I have some interesting news to share with all of you in the writing update. Personal update: The last week was very busy because last week I gave myself a lot of projects to do in addition to psychology lectures and psychology reading that I had to for university, but I love being extremely busy and productive. But on Friday I had a extremely interesting lecture on the psychology of sexual offending that I was hoping to do a blog post on today but some of the content I believe could be upsetting to people so I think that I will save the topic of sexual offending for my Forensic Psychology book that I’m hoping to release in January/ February time. However, when I thought about it, I realised that all I would have to do is created Christmas themed stories with the themes of faith, light, hope and family. Meaning that I will not have to create light-hearted stories. Writing update: So I had a crazy thought last week after finishing Garro: Heresy and I decided to try and write a new fiction book for Christmas- Garro: Christmas Short Stories. Originally, I was horrified with myself because whilst I love Christmas. I never thought that I would want to butcher my Garro universe with light-hearted jolly Christmas stories. However, when I thought about it, I realised that all I would have to do is created Christmas themed stories with the themes of faith, light, hope and family. Meaning that I will not have to create lighthearted stories. In fact, some of them so far have quite dark moments but following the theme of Christmas. After that I was more convinced about the idea of a Christmas short story book so I contacted my author network wanting to get an idea if everyone would be interested in helping me promote it; as the idea is to write the book in a way that’s perfect for building upon the other Garro books for my current readers but to entice and introduce new readers to the Garro universe as well. And the response was very positive a lot of authors wanted to help me promote as I offered them a chance to include a link to their book in the backmatter so that everyone wins. As a result of so much interest in the promotion, I decided that I had to write, edit proofread and publish the stories this week so hopefully, the sci-fi fantasy book will be available for pre-order by Sunday at the latest. Currently, I’ve written 15 of the 25 short stories in the past two days so I’m hopeful. As the idea was to have a story for each day of Christmas but I’m going to have 25 short stories, so you have one short story for each day counting down to Christmas. Make sure you sign up to the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss out on this great book! Plus, I have a new author twitter account. Just search at @whiteleyscifi on twitter. What is forensic psychology? Forensic psychology is the activities of all psychologists whose work is related or contributes to the criminal justice system. Now, this is a very broad definition of forensic psychology but there is a lot of overlap between forensic psychology and other areas of psychology as in the quest to explain criminal behaviour you need to draw upon the knowledge of other subfields of psychology. These other psychological areas that are related to forensic psychology include but are not limited to: · Social psychology as it’s important to know the social processes involved in criminal behaviour. · Clinical psychology as it’s important to understand the possible effects of mental health on criminal behaviour and the Criminal Justice System. · Cognitive psychology because it’s important to find out what mental processes are involved in deciding to commit illegal actions. · Developmental psychology due to it’s to important note if developmental disorders can increase the likelihood of people committing crimes. Overall, forensic psychology is an amalgamation of psychology work and practices. In addition, forensic psychology is a fast-evolving field and you can be a researcher and a practitioner. This fact is very important for research and the great good of the field of forensic psychology as this allows researchers to gain first-hand experience with real offenders and real people. Which this interaction can be used to fuel practical treatment research than is useful to practitioners treating these offenders. As in other fields of psychology, there is sometimes conflict or disagreements between researchers and practitioners about the usefulness of research in the practical sense and real-world applications. Within forensic psychology, there are many possible research areas including: · Gang research · Sexual aggression · Firesetting · Violence · Child abuse · Terrorism What are the real-world impacts of forensic psychology? Forensic psychology has a lot of real-world impacts as it helps to progress the justice system by: Improving eyewitness testimony Informing police procedure Being able to tell us what is involved in crime Informing treatment. Overall, forensic psychology has a lot of interesting and important real-world implications. I hope you found today’s post useful. Please sign up for my newsletter to get your FREE book and tweet me at @Whiteleyscifi on twitter. Have a great week. Kind regards Connor. Source: Howitt, D. (2018). Introduction to forensic and criminal psychology. Essex, UK: Pearson. 6th edition.

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

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast is on Resilience on we will be focusing on social psychology and developmental psychology. If you want to read more about developmental psychology, then please check out DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY SECOND EDITION. Personally, I thought an episode on psychological resilience would be rather timely as at the time of writing, a lot of people are going back to school, work or in a few weeks university. Therefore, it was important to talk about psychological resilience during this difficult time. What is Resilience? Moving onto the topic itself, the term resilience is not easy to define as there isn’t a universally accepted definition. However, one definition from my book is: “Resilience is the ability to recover from negative events and adapt to stressful experiences. Resilience is a key skill in life which allows us to be strong and cope with the world’s hardships.” Resilience isn’t always up to you? As much as I would love to be able to tell you all one easy tip to improve your resilience. You need to realise straight away that resilience isn’t up to you. As a result of a few social psychology factors. Like: external factors. These can be your socioeconomic background, your childhood as well as other factors. In addition, your genetics (biological psychology) can play a role in your resilience as your parents’ resilience can be passed on to you and how they bring you up is another critical factor. How to Build Up Resilience? Overall, resilience is about developing and using ways to deal with adversity. This adversity can be anything from bullying to grief to discrimination. Additionally, there are multiple ways how you can increase your resilience. For example, you can nurture and invest in your social relationships as well as you can become useful to others. This allows you to create your own social support network and this means you have multiple people to turn to in your time of need. Also, as you’re becoming useful to people it means these will most likely turn into real relationships. Instead of fake online ones. Furthermore, don’t be rigid. Be flexible. This is important because you need to be able to bend, but you don’t want to break. Therefore, to help your resilience you should accept your feelings and try and adapt. For example, yes you are upset about the job interview. But you know what you need to work on and how to improve in the future. That’s adapting the negative experience. Finally, you should take problem solving action. I know this is easier said than done but if you find yourself with a problem where you need to show resilience then you should try and solve the problem. For instance, if you don’t do well at a job interview (the problem) then examine the interview to see what went wrong and work on those areas to improve. This is the solution. I hope you found today’s social psychology episode of The Psychology World Podcast useful. If you want to learn more then please check out the links below. DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY SECOND EDITION FREE 8 Psychology Book Boxset Have a great day, Connor. Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202003/lessons-coronavirus-we-are-more-resilient-we-feel Developmental Psychology 2nd Edition by Connor Whiteley I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcasts goes into cognitive psychology and social psychology as the psychology podcast episode is on the Psychology of Cults. Firstly, I just wanted to give a massive thank you to Lawrence for his very kind comment on last week’s show. I love hearing from you all. It means a lot to me to know that you enjoy the show. The Self-Soothing Prejudice: This type of prejudice is when we discount a lot of people, mass or bulk discounting, so we can maintain peace of mind when we feel threatened. For example, if you’re attending a party and someone comes up to you. Making you feel threatened then quite naturally you might go: You might be the best footballer in the school but I’m the best worker at my firm. I don’t know. It’s just an example. However, you get the idea because you discount those people who make you feel threatened by pointing out you’re better at something else. Overall, this type of prejudice is perfectly natural as it helps us to sustain our peace of mind. Although, this self-soothing prejudice has a highly negative side when it reaches extreme levels. As a result, the self-soothing prejudice corrupts us and if you engage in Absolute self-soothing prejudice then this truly as well as absolutely corrupts you. This happens when we constantly bulk ourselves up with the self-soothing prejudice. You can easily compare it to using trump cards. Whenever you face a threat you use a trump card and instantly you have the winning answer to the threat. The Social Psychology of Self-Soothing Prejudice: This podcast episode now turns towards human relationships and by extension social psychology. Due to when we constantly as well as continually bulk ourselves up with self-soothing prejudice, it becomes toxic to our friends and other relationships. Also, they may call you names. Like: you’re a sociopath or psychopath. Leading you to, what guess, pulling out another trump card to show to yourself that you are far better than these name-callers. Overall, these trump cards come from Cults. The Psychology of Cults and The Self-Soothing Prejudice: Interestingly, Cults give out trumps cards to their members as part of their appeal and it has a lot of interesting effects of their members. Nonetheless, the members take these trump cards so they can be better than everyone else, and they are willing to be brainwashed. Although, the members come to the Cult because the Cult has discovered the ‘truth’ and everyone else believes in the lies. Yet the members fail to see that these trump cards are no different from other cults. Regardless of the Cult’s ‘truth’ Building upon this further, the trump cards allow the members to become absolute in their perfection and their mistakes aren’t mistakes as well as they become infallible. All to provide themselves with a fantasy break from the jealous anxiety of everyday life. Over time this becomes addictive and engaging with the self-soothing prejudice and the trump card becomes more natural than rational thoughtfulness. Overall, engaging in extremely high levels of self-soothing prejudice is very dangerous. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode on the social psychology and cognitive psychology of Cults. If you want to learn more then please check out the following links: FREE 8 Psychology Book Boxset Cognitive Psychology 2nd Edition Sociocultural Psychology 2nd Edition Have a great day everyone! Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/ambigamy/201807/why-people-become-narcissists-gaslighters-and-cult-members

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast will be on cognitive psychology as we look at the impact advancements in Artificial Intelligence and other technology could have on human behaviour as well as mental processes. Note: I highly recommend listening to the podcast episode on this topic as this blog post is only a summarised version to some extent. Artificial Intelligence News: Firstly, I did want to say that I was going to have an AI voice double for you but I couldn’t get the tech to work but I promise you that this technology is real. You can see it in action on www.deepzen.io or www.descript.com The first AI-generated textbook was published in April 2019. “Writing in the introduction, Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger (a human) says books like this have the potential to start “a new era in scientific publishing” by automating drudgery.” [The Verge] [Forbes] “We’re moving inexorably toward a subscription-driven, human-driven, emotion-driven, ad-free, funnel-free, big brand loyalty-free world.” Mark W Schaefer, Marketing Rebellion A human’s greatest psychological need is to belong, and yet there is a belonging gap in the world – people are lonelier than ever.” – Mark W. Schaefer, Marketing Rebellion The Theory: In addition, I just wanted to say upfront that technology does have an impact on our cognition, and you can read Cognitive Psychology 2nd Edition for more information. However, in short, we know that our experience of the world shapes our neuronal connections in our brain because of neuroplasticity. (Biological Psychology 2nd Edition) However, as more and more of humanity is becoming exposed to technology it’s reasonable to assume that our cognition could change because of our exposure to technology. Finally, I wanted to say that Artificial Intelligence will change the world because whilst AI is similar to the internet of the 1970s. If we think about how far the internet has come since that decade and how important the internet has become to our lives. Then it is only logical to presume a similar thing will happen to Artificial Intelligence. Let’s move onto my three predictions… 1) Our Cognition Will be Influenced It is ridiculous to say that our cognition will not be influenced by Artificial Intelligence because technology and our experience is constantly shaping our mental processes. Whether it be our memories, our schemas, thinking patterns and even our thinking biases. Furthermore, here are some studies that highlight the impact of technology on our behaviour. · Rosser et al (2007) found that surgeons who played first-person video games were faster and more accurate in surgery simulations. · Sanchez (2012) showed that playing first-person video games and other technology that requires spatial abilities could help students to understand abstract scientific concepts. · Rosen and Cheever (2013) showed that students who surrounded themselves with more technology while studying scored lower average grades than others. Overall, I hope that you can see that technology does have an impact on our behaviour and Artificial Intelligence will be no different. 2) Humanity and Social Interaction will be more important than ever As we have seen with the rise of the internet and by extension social media, people have reportedly felt lonelier than ever and as Artificial Intelligence spreads and creates Virtual Conferences, perhaps. Then we may feel the need to use this technology that could create the same experience instead of going out to see our friends or connect with people. Due to instead of typing in a comment on social media or Facebook group, in the future, we may be able to ‘go’ into the group and comment by talking to the person. Nevertheless, this will still create artificial relationships that aren’t real, and it will be most important than ever to connect with real people. Moreover, with Artificial Intelligence allowing us to create voice doubles, AI films, write books and more. People will NOT be able to tell the difference in the future. This means people might be less likely to trust big companies or inhuman brands. Making human branding more important than ever. This applies to the job market as well because if AI can write articles and content for companies, then why would a company ever want to employ you? Resulting, in you needing to double down on being human and what makes you unique against the AI. 3) Education will be More Accessible Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have already seen a massive increase in Online learning and personally I like it- and this is going to continue through the first term of my second year at university. In other words, online learning is the new norm but it is limited. There’s no sense of community. You can’t talk to your friends and it is very different from the lecture theatre at university. Also, it’s harder to ask questions. Also, textbooks and other needed course materials are very expensive. However, Artificial Intelligence and other advancements could change this. As Deepzen.io is creating AI narrated audiobooks and this could bring textbooks into audio formats. I would love this! In addition, Virtual Reality could create virtual lecture theatres so the experience would be identical to ‘normal’ learning with all the normal benefits instead of the problems associated with remote learning. Furthermore, as this is The Psychology World Podcast, this advancement in technology could make education more accessible to other people. As you aren’t constrained by physical capacity so you could have 1,000s of people all over the world logging on to attend this lecture. This is already happening in the author world as you go to webinars to learn about different topics and there are 1,000s of people attending each session from ALL other the world. Meaning as a result of technology, this knowledge can be accessed by everyone. So, I doubt this wouldn’t happen to formal education unless the Universities decide to seriously capitalise on this by charging extremely high prices. Who knows? I hope you've enjoyed today’s episode. Please check out the references for more information and have a great day! References: Cognitive Psychology 2nd Edition Links in Article I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast is The Effects of Reframing a Diagnosis so we’ll looking at clinical and abnormal psychology today. In the world, there is a lot of judgement as well as stigma. This is especially true in the case of mental health because unlike physical health, people don’t rally around you and they just abandon you. In addition, if people know you’re going to therapy then people will judge you and you will be subjected to stigma. This is a massive problem in psychotherapy and treatment in general because this is a barrier to treatment. As why go to treatment if you’re going to be subjected to so much stigma? As always, I encourage you to go to treatment if you want because it may end up changing your life for the better. Allowing you to possibly live a better and healthier life. Additionally, even if you or your clients made it to therapy (that alone is a massive achievement so a massive well done to you) they could still feel weak and disempowered. This is where changing or reframing the diagnosis comes in because it is the job of the therapist to reframe the client’s perception of their mental health diagnosis, so they fill empowered as well as strong. There are many ways how you can do this and I’m not going to tell you how to do it because everyone is different, and each mental condition requires a different approach potentially. However, I will say this and hopefully this will tell you everything you need to know: If you only focus on the negatives, then you will never see the positives of the diagnosis. For example, the diagnosis could allow you to get treatment, support, and many other benefits that you didn’t have before, and most of all you aren’t suffering in silence anymore. Overall, reframing your client’s perception of their diagnosis is critical to breaking the stigma, this goes for both self-stigma and societal stigma. Finally, by helping our clients change their perceptions, we can increase their self-efficacy as well as their self-esteem. Yet the most important benefit is that they can become be active in the recovery process. As well as they can be role models for other people to help them break stigma. I hope you’re enjoyed today’s abnormal psychology episode of The Psychology World Podcast if you want to learn more then check out Abnormal Psychology 2nd Edition and consider signing up for my mailing list. To get your FREE 8 book boxset. Have a great day, Connor. I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal. Reference: Sickel, A. E., Seacat, J. D., & Nabors, N. A. (2019). Mental health stigma: Impact on mental health treatment attitudes and physical health. Journal of Health Psychology, 24, 586–599. http://dx.doi.org.holyfamily.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/1359105316681430

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast is about stress reduction by reading books. Therefore, this episode comes under the psychology subfields of social psychology, abnormal psychology and health psychology. Currently, there are a lot of stressors in the world from the COVID-19 pandemic to job losses, death of friends and family, political arguments and many, many more. Equally, there are a lot of well-known stress reducers that can help you to reduce your stress which is supported by social psychology research. For instance, going for a walk, listening to music and more. However, research done by the University of Sussex had shown an amazing result. They demonstrated that if you read a book that transports you into your character’s world for as little as 6 minutes. Then you should experience a 68% reduction in stress as well as lowered heart rate and muscle tension. Interestingly, the stress reducing power of reading outshone listening to music, taking a walk, having a cup of tea as well as other common ways to reduce psychological stress. Furthermore, therapists recommend reading to their clients as a result of these findings. Personally, as a sci-fi fantasy author, I’m very pleased with these findings because it means that my books can help people to destress and relax more, so if you wanted to check out any of my fiction then please click here. Furthermore, there are other benefits to reading in terms of psychological wellbeing. For instance: · Reading can enhance your Theory of Mind. This is seen as a skill to help you understand the emotions and intentions of others. You can read more about it in my book: Developmental Psychology 2nd Edition. · According to research published in Social Science & Medicine, book readers tend to live an average of two years longer than non-readers. · Finally, reading can help to build sexual tension. This is probably when they’re reading a romance or erotica book or when they’re reading a book involving Unresolved Sexual Tension between the two main characters. Overall, I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. If you want to learn more about psychology then you might want to check out the following links: Health Psychology Sociocultural Psychology 2nd Edition (A Book on Social Psychology and Cultural Psychology) Abnormal Psychology 2nd Edition Have a great day, Connor. I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal. References: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/5070874/Reading-can-help-reduce-stress.html 2. Letting Go: The Maryland Shores and Second Chances: The Maryland Shores; www.loriannoberlin.com/fiction 3. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/19/coronavirus-what-americans-are-buying-online-while-in-quarantine.html 4. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/19/coronavirus-what-americans-are-buying-online-while-in-quarantine.html 5. https://www.infodocket.com/2020/06/23/new-data-from-npd-u-s-adult-fiction-sales-rise-as-covid-19-lockdowns-subside/ 6. https://tinyurl.com/y6dhwub3 7. https://tinyurl.com/wqgbglk 8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953616303689 9. http://tribemedicine.com/tribemedicineblog/romance-novels 10. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523084443.htm 11. https://tinyurl.com/y4yratre

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast is on What to Say to a Depressed Person to Help them so this falls within the areas of social psychology, clinical and abnormal psychology. Depression is a fairly common mental condition along with anxiety so I thought that it would be useful to do a podcast episode on it. Overall, we’re going to be looking at 5 things to say to a depressed people to help them. I’m Here for You: This may seem rather easy as well as common sense, but it isn’t that often that our friends as and families know that we are truly there for them. I mean I know they we assume that they know we are here for them. Yet unless we actually tell them, they won’t know that we truly are here for them. Overall, this can help a depressed person feel less alone as well as it supports them some social support while they go through their difficulties. What Can I do to Help? To be honest, a lot of these suggestions about what to say to a depressed person can be considered common sense. However, it’s usually common-sense things that we don’t say or do. Despite how easy they are. Overall, even saying this to be a depressed person can be helpful as it shows they aren’t alone, you want to help them and you’re a great family member or friend. I Like X, Y and Z about You: This is a slightly more interesting tip because if you say for example: I like the way you dress, you’re funny and everyone like you. Then you are providing them with positive reinforcement as well as you are, very importantly, challenging their negative thoughts. And it’s only by challenging these negative thoughts and ultimately changing them will the depressed person ever to be to recover. Yes, that is bad: Of course, you would have to say it more naturally than that, but you get the idea. You need to acknowledge the depressed person’s difficulties, so they know that they aren’t being ignored and people don’t think that the person is just making it up. Or even worse believing that the depressed person is attention seeking. Ultimately, acknowledging their difficulties helps them to feel valued and more positive. There are Ways Through This: When you’re saying this point, you would generally be talking about the depressed person maybe getting professional help as well as perhaps going through psychotherapy. Again, being in therapy isn’t weakness or anything else that society can make you believe. Therapy is potentially going to help you live a better, happier life. Therefore, by saying to the depressed person about therapy, you are helping them take the first step to recovery and living a better life. I’ve been through it too: Of course, this isn’t applicable to everyone but if you’ve suffered from a mental condition that’s the same as the person you’re trying to help. Then tell them. Make them know that they aren’t alone. Make them ask to you questions about how you coped and dealt with the difficulties. Overall, I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast and if you want to learn more about Depression then please check out my book Abnormal Psychology 2nd Edition. Have a great day, Connor. I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal. Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-shrink/201507/6-things-you-can-say-support-someone-whos-depressed?

Today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast is on developmental psychology and social psychology. So we’ll be looking at language development. What Influences Language Development? Well, it turns out that a lot of different factors can and do influence a child’s language development, but let’s focus on a few key factors. Therefore, two key factors that can influence language development are the quantity of language input to the child as well as the quality of language input to the child. Quantity of Language Input: One of the best ways to help a child speak is to talk in front of them and to them, but this is problematic as adults may differ hugely when talking to a child. In terms of words per hour, sentences per hour and sentence length when talking to a child. Nonetheless, why is this quantity important for language development? It’s important because the variance in the quantity of language predicts a child’s vocabulary development and processing speed. (Marchman &Frenald, 2008; Hurtado, Marchman and Fernald, 2008) In other words, the higher the quantity of input to a child. The better vocabulary and processing speed they should have. Finally, this is true for teachers and children in the classroom as well. (Huttnlocho, Vasilyeva, Cynerman and Levine, 2002) Quality of language input: Although, there must be high quality in language input as well as a high quantity of language input. One of the main reasons why quality is important is because the lack of quality in language input can explain the variance in a child’s poor language development that is usually attributed to a child’s poor socioeconomic status. Nonetheless, another main and extremely important reason why quality is important is that the role of interaction with a child must be interpersonal. I mean if you merely put a child in front of a TV; a possibly higher quantity of language input; then the child will still struggle with language development. As Roseberry, H Hirsh-Pasek, Parish-Morris and Golinkoff (2009) found that only if someone is live sitting beside a child describing the TV can a child learn from a TV. Cognitive Brain Systems Involved in Language Development: As a quick final section on language development, I wanted to quickly mention that a lot of different brain systems are involved in language. For instance, · Auditory and visual system as you need to match what you hear to what you see · Memory system as you need to remember what you’ve learned and seen · Attention system- pay attention to what people are saying · Processing system- link words to meaning · Inferencing system- interpret the message Parting Note: We cannot forget that human communication is a two-way street so it partially relies on the child’s socio-cognitive skills as well. I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s psychology podcast episode on development and social psychology. If you want to learn more about developmental psychology, then please check out my new Development Psychology book Second Edition. Have a great day, Connor. I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

In today’s episode of The Psychology World Podcast, we’ll going to be looking at 5 powerful ways to overcome social anxiety, so we’re looking for something under the umbrella of abnormal psychology So, social anxiety is a fairly common condition as I talk about more in book and if you want to learn more about anxiety as well as different conditions. Then please check out Abnormal Psychology 2nd Edition. 5 Ways to Overcome Your Social Anxiety: 1. Challenge Your Negative Thoughts: I did a podcast episode on how to overcome your negative thoughts a few weeks ago so please go to the podcast tab to find that useful episode. Yet you need to challenge your negative thoughts because quite often anxiety sufferers feel disempowered and helpless. But if you challenge your thinking and possibly realise that you have nothing to be fearful of. Then you might be able to change your thinking and you might start to feel less anxious. 2. Go to a Coffee Shop: When I first read this idea, I was extremely surprised, because how would going to a place that makes you anxious help? Well, it turns out if you go to a coffee shop and do something that you enjoy. Such as: watching a film or playing a game. Then this can help you to get use to the situation and ‘climatize’ you to the amount of people around. Overall, this helps you to get use to the amount of people around so you potentially feel less anxious in a given situation. 3. Adopt a Healthier Lifestyle This shouldn’t really surprise too many, but how does a healthier lifestyle does social anxiety sufferers? Interestingly, the mind as well as the body are linked; and I discuss this more in my book Cognitive Psychology 2nd Edition. Therefore, if you make small lifestyle changes, this improves your self-confidence. Reducing your anxiety as well as having other benefits. Here are some healthier options or small changes you could make in order to overcome your social anxiety: · Avoid or limit your caffeine intake. · Avoid energy drinks as these drinks act as stimulants and this increases anxious symptoms. · Make exercise a priority in your day as this has many psychological benefits as different hormones and neurotransmitters get released. This is before you consider the long-term benefits! 4. Find social situations and engage Another powerful way to help overcome social anxiety is to actively try and find supportive social situations so you can try and overcome your fears. For example, you could try to find a social anxiety support group and engage with them. this would have the additional benefit of you learning from other people to see how they manage their anxiety. 5. Be Kind to Yourself Finally, you need to be kind to yourself. Nobody is perfect and everyone takes time to learn things. So just be kind to yourself, take things at your own pace and you will be fine. I hope that you found this psychology podcast episode useful today, and if you want to learn more about anxiety and other mental conditions then please check out my book: Abnormal psychology 2nd Edition. Have a great day, Connor! I truly hope that you’re enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal. Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/calmer-you/202007/12-powerful-ways-help-overcome-social-anxiety?