This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week took place betwee Monday 13 to Sunday 19 May. The focus for this year was ‘movement’. The breadth of this theme allowed for a variety of related events to be put on throughout the week.  On Monday 13 May, a Mental Heath Forum was held in the Marten Library, with the aim of encouraging open and honest discussions with … Continue reading Mental Health Awareness Week 2024

Whether we recognize it or not, almost all of us experience loss aversion daily. This cognitive bias, where the fear of loss outweighs the pleasure of equivalent gain, significantly influences our decision-making. From stockpiling on ‘Get out of Jail Free’ cards in Monopoly to packing free toiletries from hotels, loss aversion subtly but powerfully impacts our behaviour. Pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, this … Continue reading Loss Aversion

Traditions have always been an integral part of any society, and this article is here to provide psychological and sociological explanations as to why we as humans form them, and why we maintain them through the two academic disciplines of Psychology and Sociology. The psychological lens is more analytical and scientifically comprised as opposed to the latter which aims holistically scrutinise society as a whole, … Continue reading The Psychology and Sociology of Traditions

Of all the people I could ask to define for me what graphology is, an interestingly large percentage would say either one of three things – “useless”, “pretty handwriting”, or “sorry?”. Of those who could answer correctly, “the study of handwriting”, very few would actually know very much about it at all, which is exactly what I intend to rectify in this article. Graphology as … Continue reading Graphology, Psychologically Speaking – An Insight into the Powerful Pseudoscience

Imagine you’re stuck on an assignment, running late for a lesson, and your phone just notified you of another firefly task which you know you can’t do. Your heart races, your palms sweat, and your mind conjures up a thousand ways this day could get worse. Well, I think we’ve all experienced some form of this anxiety, and this is what we call stress! At … Continue reading The Biochemistry of Stress: How Hormones and Neurochemicals Affect Our Mental State

Decision-making processes which are often attributed to individuals’ consciousness are also often affected by external relationships and groups that alter one’s behaviour. Maybe you have been peer-pressured into playing Junior League Cricket in F or didn’t go to a society talk because lots of people in your block went for a game of bums. The study of social psychology analyses and distinguishes the external factors that affect a person’s decisions and … Continue reading Social Psychology – Panacea to Humanity or Pseudoscience?

For football fans, there is nothing more exciting than a penalty shootout. The final decider between two teams, still deadlocked after hours of football. There is also nothing in football that generates as much debate as penalties. Should you take first or second? Should you predetermine where you are going to shoot? How long should you wait for before shooting? How can the best footballers in the world fail to score … Continue reading The Psychology Behind Penalty Shootouts

Picture this: it’s 11:47 PM, and your next EW is due at midnight. You’re frantically typing away, fueled by a potent mix of panic and a fourth cup of a caffeinated drink which you swore would be your last. Sound familiar? Well, if so, welcome to the not-so-exclusive club of procrastinators – a place where your future self is perpetually more responsible than the present … Continue reading Procrastination: Why We Delay and How to Overcome it

There are many models of addiction that have been developed over the years that attempt to explain the mechanisms behind addiction, and in this article I will be explaining their main ideas in simple terms. Incentive-sensitisation theory (first proposed by Robinson and Berridge in 1993) suggests that changes occur within the brain during initial use of a substance that lead to a hyper-sensitisation to the … Continue reading Psychological Models of Addiction

In the modern day, we are learning to put just as much emphasis on mental illness as pathogenic diseases as we realise how important it is to try to help people overcome mental challenges. A very apparent mental problem is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is a condition triggered by trauma which causes extreme stress and is much more common than most people realise. I intend … Continue reading Mental Scars and PTSD