Advancing the state of knowledge surrounding creativity, perception, behaviour and the very processes involved in thinking itself. A Sunday Times top-10 department.
Are you creative? If you answered 'no', you may have underestimated yourself.
Creativity isn't just about painting pretty pictures. People exhibit creativity in all sorts of ways - in art and performance, but also in problem-solving, in organising and administration, in technical innovation, even in thinking about creativity itself.
ILLUME is a new centre for research into creativity that has brought academics together from across the University. Directed by Dr Paul Sowden, members are drawn from our experimental, organisational, social, environmental and neuro-imaging teams in psychology (a discipline where creativity research has decades of history) but also from our groups of experts in mathematics, in English literature, in business management, in sociology, and in music.
ILLUME projects will pick apart the creative thought process using a multi-layered, multi-disciplinary approach in order to understand creativity on all its different levels, join them up, and develop new methods that will help all kinds of people and organisations to improve their innovative thinking.
Chocolate. Children. Parents will instantly understand the problem.
In a paper published in the journal Appetite, Professor Jane Ogden and three of her students reported on two naturalistic experiments in which parents were asked either to restrict or not restrict the amount of chocolate their children had access to. Study 1 involved a 75g bag of chocolate coins, while Study 2 focused on the Easter eggs the children received over Easter.
At the end of the studies, all the parents were asked how preoccupied with the chocolate their children had become and how much chocolate they had eaten. Though the children given unrestricted access to the chocolate initially showed most demand for it (and, predictably, ate more of it), the children who had their chocolate rationed ate less of it but showed most eagerness for it by the end of the experiments.
The study suggests that parents can reduce children's consumption of a potentially unhealthy food item through restriction, but that this may actually increase their child's long-term desire to eat it.
It's a tricky choice, but at least Professor Ogden and her students have given parents some information to bear in mind next time the kids are pleading for an unhealthy treat.
The restorative effects of nature and natural landscapes have long been observed, but not necessarily well understood.
What are the particular aspects of a natural environment to which our brains and bodies react positively? What are the processes driving these beneficial outcomes? Are the types of stimuli and responses individual, cultural or universal?
These are some of the questions being asked – and answered – by our environmental psychology researchers, in collaboration with partners such as the National Trust and Surrey Wildlife Trust.
As well as reinforcing the case for protecting natural environments, this work will also prove beneficial in creating buildings and urban areas that keep our spirits up when we need it most.
It is widely accepted that relentless media depictions of thin, attractive people can prompt dissatisfaction with our own appearance. But could there be a relatively simple way to buffer women against the psychological effects of seeing stereotypically perfect female faces and bodies in the media?
Professor Jane Ogden and her undergraduate students in the School of Psychology designed an experiment to see if young women could be helped to feel more satisfied with their own bodies after a basic tutorial on the tricks and techniques used by the media (such as digital manipulation, make-up, lighting and the use of increasingly thin models).
Women who received this information did not seem to feel immediately happier with their own bodies but, encouragingly, when asked again a month later, reported improved feelings of confidence, attractiveness and satisfaction with their appearance compared to the women who hadn’t undergone the intervention.
This suggests that a simple information intervention could help young women to develop a long-term ability to pick apart the distorted and unrealistic media depictions of idealised beauty, helping them to avoid unduly negative feelings about their own bodies.
Human brains have evolved complex, varied, interacting structures and processes to help us learn new skills and store information.
School of Psychology research in neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience is examining how learning and memory can be facilitated, what brain mechanisms are involved, how the brain changes in different learning environments, and how adaptable the brain is at different stages in life.
Using equipment here on campus and at nearby partner institutions, our academics employ functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity during different tasks, and even stimulate or suppress specific regions of the brain through transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
For example, Professor Bertram Opitz's research suggests (among many other things) that music expertise acquired in adolescence improves very specific language-learning processes later in life, that advanced proficiency in a newly learned language involves increased activity in the same part of the brain normally associated with the use of our first language, and - perhaps most surprisingly - that we use a completely different part of our brain to learn new biographical information about celebrities than we do for similar information about ordinary strangers.
Phone: +44 (0)1483 681 681
For postgraduate taught and research admissions enquiries, please see the individual course pages.
Tuesday 07 May. 2013
Wednesday 15 May. 2013
