Psychology

Psychology at Science Week

This year’s theme for science week was animals. To begin the week, we were visited by an expert in animal psychology, who gave a masterclass in the psychology behind animal behaviour.

On Thursday morning it was the science representatives’ assembly. The psychology representatives spoke on how animals can be studied to further our understanding of human behaviour and how animals can be used to assist us with psychological therapy. We presented on how bees were being taught to play football and how this furthered psychologists understanding of the social learning theory. Additionally, “Hans” the horse demonstrated that social cues play an important role in addiction. Finally, we discussed how animal assisted therapy resulted in lower pain levels for cancer patients and reduced the anxiety, irritability and loneliness of dementia patients.

On Thursday lunch time the animal theme continued during Psychology club. We watched the Ted Talk ‘Depressed dog, cats with OCD - what animal madness means for us humans.’

In this talk Laurel Braitman explains that animals can experience mental health issues in the same way that humans do. Then we read an article about Twiglet the dog, who was offered to students at Cambridge university to help de-stress students during exam times. However, Twiglet began to show signs of stress himself and his service was eventually removed to prevent any unnecessary distress. This article presented the negatives of animal assisted therapy and demonstrated the potential effects on the animals used.

Hannah Leathem, Year 12 The Mind-Body Illusion

TEDx talk Guardian article

The heavily disputed philosophical Mind-Body debate originates from Descartes telling us that our mind and body are separate which is supported by recent psychological research. The phenomenon hypnosis experiment illustrates that the mind controls the body’s action. In this experiment, participants were asked to hold their palm open, which then the experimenter says “I’m going to put a very hot coin in your palm, and I want you to hold it for as long as you can”. The participants were placed in a hypnotic trance and repeatedly told this, and when the ‘hot coin’ made contact with their skin, participants in a deep hypnotic trance experienced extreme blisters on their skin. However, the ‘hot coin’ was in fact actually at room temperature. This is a clear example illustrating how the mind has the power to control the body’s reaction, thus supporting dualism which is the view that the mind and body function as separate entities.

On the other hand, there is the concept of Monism – the belief that ultimately the mind and body are the same ‘thing’. Behaviourist Psychologists believe that they should only be concerned with actions that are observable, therefore a distinct stimulus-response reaction. For example, thinking which is a daily mental process triggers your muscles to move, resulting in your physical mobility. Therefore, this suggests because thought processes in the mind cannot be scientifically and subjectively studied, we have to exclude this. Therefore this supports the idea of materialistic monism which disregards the belief that nothing exists apart from the material world as the reality is what we can see, touch and feel.

There are so many different approaches to understanding this debate, and if you are interested to know more there are a few links below to Psychological research that has been done that provide you with an insight into both sides of this debate.

Sakithya Sothinathan, Year 12