Journey Through Psych

SOUTHERN CROSS UNIVERSITY   I have read and understand the Rules Relating to Awards ( Rule 3 Section 18 – Academic Misconduct Including Plagiarism ) as contained in the SCU Policy Library. I understand the penalties that apply for plagiarism and agree to be bound by these rules. The work I am submitting electronically is entirely my own work.   Learning and Memory (Session 1, 2020 Abstract Eye-witness memory is sensitive to bias, inattentional blindness, decay and misinformation effects. One attention-bias is the weapon focus effect, whereby attention and memory are increased for the central aspect and hence decreased for the peripheral aspects of an incident. This study aims to create a weapon focus effect depicting a close to real-life situation featuring a context narrative about an illegal luggage operation on CCTV footage. Attention is directed either towards a perpetrator or the luggage. 148 students and staff from a regional university participated in the study. The re...

  SOUTHERN CROSS UNIVERSITY   I have read and understand the Rules Relating to Awards ( Rule 3 Section 18 – Academic Misconduct Including Plagiarism ) as contained in the SCU Policy Library. I understand the penalties that apply for plagiarism and agree to be bound by these rules. The work I am submitting electronically is entirely my own work. Learning and Memory (Session 1, 2020) Abstract Associative networks within long-term memory influence the working memory during tasks of immediate serial item recall. Semantically related word lists were remembered better than unrelated lists. These results were interpreted through semantic similarity effects, the reconstruction hypothesis, and the spreading activation model of semantic processing. This study further examined semantic priming effects in differently framed lists and found that related and unrelated cue words before encoding affected memory performance as well as item order. Thematically relat...

More often we read about the negative aspects of gaming. It’s refreshing to hear something positive. I received a Gameboy when I was 10. I have great memories of the games I played, either by myself or against someone. I have a daughter who is 7 and a son who is 2. I often wonder if I should allow them to play computer games. We are one of the few families that doesn’t have a tablet for the kids to play on. My kids get one hour of TV every day and I think it’s too much. I was a web-designer, studied film, I love animation, movies, I binge watch series and I used to play hours of hours of computer games with my friends. I was a Tekken master, you could not beat me. But my kids get nothing of all that. I feel that it’s much more important for them to go outside, to imagine, to come up with their own games, to read, to be bored, yes to be bored out of their skins, to dream about their day. We love playing lots of games: card games, board games, silly games… When they are old...

How can we create the most inspiring and versatile places with the space that we have? There is so much to add to this topic. Living nearby a recreational park potentially increases our well-being, but who is lucky enough to have such a park nearby, and are you using it regularly? So, to me the next question is: how can we achieve that people are using these spaces? What exactly are the purposes of these spaces? Many towns are built for cars. We have distinct areas where we live, distinct areas where we shop, and distinct areas where we chill out. One problem is that all these areas are set apart and we need a car to get from one to the other. Many open green spaces are exactly just that: vast green boring lawns. There are no trees to provide shade, there are no water features to play in, there is no café adjacent to it, there might be a plastic playground with a shade cloth if you’re lucky. My plaidoyer is: create more places where people can meet, play, rest, walk, talk,...

 The study presented was able to show that there is a positive link between humour and a buffer against post-traumatic stress disorder in firefighters. My mother’s life changed dramatically when she fell ill with Multiple Sclerosis. She went through years not knowing why she had problems with movements and tiredness, and sometime later I was born into a family trying to manage with her fading away bit by bit. For us, nothing was normal, each day could be very different, and on many of them we struggled. But my mother had the most funny and beautiful laughter. Her laughter would explode suddenly and loudly, she’d laugh until she ran out of breath and then she inhaled with a loud shriek, gasping for air to set off into another round of laughter. It was contagious. It was awkward. It was healing! My mother’s humour was fantastic. She came up with tricks and shenanigans to tease our neighbours, with jokes to dry my tears, and most impressively she could laugh about hersel...

 One very strong association that I have with frightening lucid dreaming is a story written by Franz Kafka called the Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa awakes after having strange dreams and finds himself transformed into a big, repulsive bug-like being. It takes a while for Gregor and for the reader to recognise that he’s not having a lucid dream, that odd as it seems, he will not suddenly wake up and be human again. I have had lucid dreams like this, caught in some Kafkaesque environment, bizarre humans with bizarre rules, and I try to find a way to get back home, or elsewhere. I wonder how much control we can have in lucid dreams, because not everything is controllable. I know I am dreaming, and I have the capability to detach myself and take the view of an observer to evaluate the situation, then go back into the ’dream-me’, what I decided to do does not create the story I would have anticipated. Can we practice the way we interfere with our dreams? Can we initiate lucid...

  SOUTHERN CROSS UNIVERSITY   I have read and understand the Rules Relating to Awards ( Rule 3 Section 18 – Academic Misconduct Including Plagiarism ) as contained in the SCU Policy Library. I understand the penalties that apply for plagiarism and agree to be bound by these rules. The work I am submitting electronically is entirely my own work. MOTIVATION, BEHAVIOUR CHANGE, IMPACT OF STRESS ON PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR Pro-Environmental Behaviour Change As a world community we are facing the collective challenge to develop and uphold behaviours that ensure a stable environment and a resourceful planet. It is evident that we, as a society, need to change our behaviour and do so without delay. Intricate interrelationships between personal factors and social factors make this behaviour change cumbrous (Gifford & Nilsson, 2014). Thought-provoking results come from a study that found a connection between experiences...