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John Hudson wins the 2015 BPS poster competition

Our very own John Hudson, PhD student under the supervision of Dr Ashley Weinberg has won the poster competition at the Annual Conference of the BPS!

His poster looked at factors connected to job-related stress in the public sector. You can find his poster here.

john

Congratulations John!

 

Follow John on Twitter: @brucierooster

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@salfordpsych applied psychology Blog engaging people media media psychology political psychology reflection

The age of celebrity politics

In an article published in the latest edition of The Psychologist magazine, I explore the contribution Psychology can give to understanding the phenomenon of celebritisation of politics.

http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/may-2015/age-celebrity-politics

 

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@salfordpsych applied psychology brain and behaviour community engaging people Hong Kong media mental health online OUHK political psychology technology

New media and new perspectives on the crisis in Hong Kong

by Stephanie Szeto (@StepSzeto)

Stephanie Szeto

 

 

 

 

 

The high penetration of the new mobile technology and social media enables some Hongkongers, who don’t have much prior knowledge of computer, to access internet media and enjoy spontaneous mobile mass communication, such as Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.   In past few decades, only few TV media existed in Hong Kong. Television Broadcasts (TVB) is completely monopolising the media market as Asia Television (ATV) produces limited domestic programmes and is facing major financial problem that has to terminate some news broadcasts.  People are now used to read news from wide variety sources for having different perspectives, for example independent press, rather than from the traditional mass media, such as the two existing free-to-air terrestrial television stations, (TVB) and (ATV). Young people are more accessible and develop critical views to various news angles and discover nested interests of different media stakeholders may affect the political stands or economic positions of various commentaries or social media blogs.

 

In last October 2013, tens of thousands of protesters marched to the government headquarters of the Hong Kong SAR claiming the violated Hong Kong’s core values of freedom as the monopolisation of existing TV public media eventually led to rejection from the government in issuing an additional free-to-air TV licence to the Hong Kong Television Networks (HKTV).  The march originated from a social action organised with the help of a Facebook page claiming to gather ten thousand of HKTV supporters and simultaneously gained nearly five hundred thousand LIKES.  Facebook has become a powerful social media to magnify the tearful speeches of HKTV staff and celebrities that were spreading quickly on the web which explained the underlying nested interests of politicians in rejecting the license application.  Protesters claiming that, despite a 85% of respondents in a public survey conducted by The University of Hong Kong indicated more free-to-air TV choices, the government turned down HKTV’s application as a result of politically decision.  Mr. Ricky Wong Wai-kay, the boss of HKTV, presented that he would create a station that will truly belong to Hongkongers by giving alternative choice, such as ‘dark’ comedy and drama, which allows different political satire may capture the popular sentiment.  Therefore, Hongkongers believed that the government was crushing the city’s core values of freedom and vowed to have social movement against the media monopolisation.  Wong questioned whether Hong Kong was still governed by the rule of law and the HKTV, in the end, resorted to broadcast by over-the-top online platform.

 

With more easy access to online platforms, Hongkongers are now relying less on traditional TV news as they believe it offers more pro-government perspective to the audience.  On the other hand, posts of independent press and internet radio have acquired a higher share of media influence.  This situation is confirmed by the findings of crisis communication research that some people give higher level of credibility to new media than to traditional media in terms of having different perspective of the crisis (Jin, Liu, & Austin, 2014). One would see the new media has become a real battle ground for people to exert their political influence and gaining publicity through the emerging mobile technology.

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@salfordpsych applied psychology Blog learning self belief

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”

 

Written by:  Dr Simon Cassidy, 13th March 2015Simon Cassidy

 

 

 

 

The quote in the title (and variations of it) is attributed to Henry Ford, the prolific American pioneer, leader and industrialist. And he could be right according to initial findings of a study conducted here at the University of Salford examining psychological resilience, also referred to as emotional or psychosocial resilience. What the quote suggests is that people’s beliefs about their abilities determine their chances of completing a task successfully (or not).  We—psychologists I mean—refer to these beliefs about ability as self-efficacy. You could call it confidence but that would be too easy for us scientists. In actual fact calling it confidence would be an oversimplification and a little inaccurate. Self-efficacy emerged in the 1970s as a central construct in Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (subsequently Social Cognitive Theory); he defines it as “the belief in one’s capabilities to organise and execute the course of action required to manage prospective situations”. Studies of self-efficacy have been pretty consistent in finding that it is associated with, and in some cases, predictive of, positive outcomes and performance. So our judgements and beliefs about our capabilities are important in real terms. It seems that judging yourself to be capable of success increases your chances of actual success, while judging yourself as not capable of success reduces your chances of actual success. Henry was right!

 

This raises the question of what exactly is it that people who believe that they are capable of success do? We know in general terms that self-efficacious (big unwieldy term I know, but hey I’m a scientist) individuals are more persistent and more motivated, but what we are less clear on is the specific actions that individuals with positive self-efficacy beliefs take that makes them more likely to succeed. Not knowing this makes it difficult to exploit the potential advantages of positive self-efficacy.

 

We know from Bandura that self-efficacy is particularly important when individuals face adversity. Adversity can be defined as difficult, challenging or unpleasant events, situations or circumstances. Faced with adversity, some people have the capacity to bounce back from failure, to beat the odds and do better than might be expected given the circumstances. These people are considered to be resilient and resiliency is considered an asset because of its obvious benefits. One way to explore the specific behaviours associated with self-efficacy is to investigate how it relates to resilience and resilient (or adaptive) responses. Looking at how individuals respond when faced with adversity and how these behaviours are connected to self-efficacy may give us some insight into why self-efficacious (there’s that term again) individuals are more likely to succeed and may help us develop interventions aimed at building resilience.

 

Both self-efficacy and resilience make most sense when studied and measured in specific contexts – it’s difficult to accept that someone has the same belief in their capabilities or responds to adversity in the same way irrespective whether we are talking about relationships, bereavement, learning or health. Because of this and because understanding issues of student achievement and wellbeing is a priority for those of us working in the field of psychology and education, my study focussed on academic self-efficacy and academic resilience in students. Once students’ academic self-efficacy had been measured, they were presented with a case study describing academic adversity and failure and asked to select, from a list of potential behaviours, how they would respond. A second version of the case study described a fellow student who was facing the same academic adversity and students were now asked to select, from the same list, how their colleague should respond.

 

OK, what did the study find? Well initial results were presented at the BPS Division of Educational and Child Psychology Annual Conference in Durham in January, although detailed analysis is still underway. So far findings show that academic self-efficacy is a strong predictor of academic resilience. Positive self-efficacy beliefs predict increased resilience in students when faced with academic adversity. This finding is important but was anticipated, so no surprises there. What is valuable is that the study measured resilience by asking students to select specific responses to adversity that were either more or less resilient and compared the responses of low and high self-efficacy students.  Further analysis of this will provide, I hope, some of the details we are missing about how students who believe in their academic capability behave in different ways to those students who doubt their capability. When responses to personal adversity and adversity faced by a fellow student were compared, students showed greater resilience for their colleague. That is, students selected more resilient responses for colleagues than they did for themselves. This is an important finding for two reasons. Firstly it suggests that students are aware of what are the most adaptive responses to academic adversity, but don’t necessarily select them. Secondly, students are likely to be a good source of resilience for colleagues who are facing challenging situations, which is encouraging for peer assisted learning and mentoring schemes.

 

What I’m working on at the moment is extracting the detailed information about differences in specific responses to adversity of believers and non-believers (in the self-efficacy sense). The goal is to use this as a device to instil greater resilience in students. It’s tough out there and applying our knowledge and skills as psychologists can help. For now though the message is clear “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”

 

That should have been the end of the piece but as I’m writing about resilience I couldn’t resist adding another of Henry Ford’s quotes (and in doing so ruining the dramatic end to the post): “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”. I think the quote captures a lot of what there is to capture about resilience. Thank you Henry for your contribution to psychology and to this post.

 

 

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applied psychology graduate stories learning Level 6 psychology

Thinking like an educator! Educational Psychology in the final year of undergraduate studies

For the Educational Psychology module in the final year of our undergraduate programmes, students are required to think like an educator and produce a seminar proposal for teachers on a selected topic from the field of Educational Psychology. Last year we decided to showcase students’ work for the module (see here). The post was very popular so we’ve decided to do it again.

carmen
Carmen-Florentina Ionita

Carmen-Florentina Ionita, BSc (Hons) Psychology graduate (and winner of  Best Psychology Student 2014), developed a seminar proposal for teachers on the socio-emotional development of gifted and talented children. Carmen is now studying her MSc in Neuroimaging for Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences at the University of Manchester and kindly agreed for her Educational Psychology work to be showcased on our blog (see below).

Educational Psychology can be “…loosely defined here as the application of psychological theories, research and techniques to the educational development of young people in the context of the home, school and community” Holliman (2013, p. xxii).  More broadly, educational psychology also considers how people of all ages learn, how teaching and learning practice can be improved, whether different people should be taught differently, and how learning can transform the person and impact upon their lives.  The Educational Psychology module assignment focuses on the application of theory to teaching practice.

Happy reading!

Educational Psychology Assignment by Carmen-Florentina Ionita from SalfordPsych
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applied psychology community community psychology engaging people radio

Psychology FM – challenging disability and embracing the community

One of our psychology lecturers, Michael Richards, was awarded a public engagement grant from the British Psychological Society in 2013. In collaboration with All FM radio station and Manchester Metropolitan University, Michael will use this grant to produce 8 radio shows that embrace different psychologies including forensic, health and clinical psychology. Michael will collaborate with a group of men labelled with learning difficulties from Manchester, to help connect the community with psychology. The shows will bring psychology to a wider audience in an accessible and fun way. The shows will contain music, interviews and discussions about the main issues, positives and negatives that accompany the range of psychologies we learn on BPS courses. Below are the dates of the shows, which will take place every two weeks at 2pm and will be broadcast on All FM.

29.01.14 – 2pm – Show 1 – What is Psychology?

12.02.14 – 2pm – Show 2 – Neuropsychology

26.02.14 – 2pm – Show 3 – Clinical Psychology and Counselling Psychology

12.03.14 – 2pm – Show 4 – Health Psychology and Sport/Exercise Psychology

26.03.14 – 2pm – Show 5 – Forensic Psychology

09.04.14 – 2pm – Show 6 – Developmental Psychology

23.04.14 – 2pm – Show 7 – Community and Critical Psychology

07.05.14 – 2pm – Show 8 – The way forward for psychology – the Big Society and learning difficulties

You can contact Michael if you want to know more on M.Richards2@salford.ac.uk or via Twitter @mikepsychology or if have any ideas or views that might contribute towards the shows.

 

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applied psychology conferences engaging people graduate stories learning Level 6 psych and counselling psychology summer

Educational Psychology: Creating a seminar for teachers

By Jenna Condie

In the final year of our undergraduate programmes (BSc Hons Psychology, BSc Hons Psychology and Counselling, BSc Hons Psychology and Criminology), one of the option modules that students can chose to take is Educational Psychology.  Educational Psychology can be “…loosely defined here as the application of psychological theories, research and techniques to the educational development of young people in the context of the home, school and community” Holliman (2013, p. xxii).  More broadly, educational psychology also considers how people can learn better, how teaching and learning practice can be improved, whether different people should be taught differently, and how learning can transform the person and impact upon their lives.

For the assessment, students taking this module propose a seminar for teachers, selecting a topic from the field of educational psychology that they consider is both current and of practical use in the training of teachers.  The emphasis is on the application of theory to teaching practice.  Last year, BSc (Hons) Psychology and Counselling student (now graduate!), Jessica Tomes created a seminar for teachers that focused on mental health stigma and how teachers can educate students to reduce the stigma associated with mental health issues in the school environment.  You can read her work below.

Educational psychology seminar assignment: Jessica Tomes from SalfordPsych

Jessica also presented her work as a poster ‘Reducing Mental Health Stigma Through Educational Seminars’ at the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Conference which took place at The University of Northampton (3-5 July, 2013).

Jessica Tomes Educational Psychology Poster Presentation at CAMHS, 3-5 July 2013 from SalfordPsych

It is fantastic to see how an assignment can be taken further to embrace opportunities such as presenting at conferences and sharing your ideas and work beyond the module.

For more information about the Educational Psychology module, please contact Jenna Condie, j.m.condie@salford.ac.uk , Twitter: @jennacondie

 

 

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@salfordpsych applied psychology Blog conferences employability enterprise learning twitter volunteering

Five ideas for maximising your summer as a psychology student

By Jenna Condie

To say I spent the summer months during my undergraduate psychology degree sleeping and watching daytime TV is not quite true.  I did work a variety of psychology-relevant jobs and pick up the odd book or two.  However, I am now aware that I didn’t really make the best use of those breaks to develop my psychological knowledge and skills and ready myself for the graduate job market.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing! On that note, here are five ideas for making the most of your summer as a psychology undergraduate.  These ideas are inspired by recent opportunities I have noticed or stories I have been told…mostly via Twitter (hint hint!).

1.  Volunteering

Most psychology students I speak to are already volunteering for various organisations.  A local opportunity I spotted recently (call still open at the time of writing) was for the British Red Cross as a Bridge Group Project Volunteer in Manchester on Wednesday afternoons.  The Bridge Group aims to help male refugees and asylum seekers cope with and adapt to a new city and culture.  Activities include IT taster courses, tours of the city centre, first aid training and football tournaments.  Due to the nature of the work, the volunteering positions are available to males only.  Based on my graduate experience of working with ‘hard to reach’ and marginalised communities such as Gypsies and Travellers, I cannot emphasise the value of such experiences for developing communication skills and deepening your understanding of other cultures.  At the same time, you could be reading up on psychological theory and research around migration and the processes people go through when adapting to a new place.

Another local opportunity that cropped up in my Twitter newsfeed today was for Mind Manchester, a voluntary organisation that works to improve the lives of people with mental health needs. @ManchesterMind particularly want young people (18-25) and people from ethnic minority backgrounds as these groups are currently underrepresented on their boards.

 

2.  Season work

Get away! Literally! Being a season worker or ‘seasonaire’ can be great fun.  To make the most of it, there are a number of ways this experience can be relevant to psychology.  For example, companies such as PGL Travel and Esprit Sun have positions that provide relevant work experience for those considering a future career with children and young people.  Further afield, there’s also the ever popular Camp America.   It could be a bit late for this summer, but next summer maybe?

To combine ideas 1 (volunteering) and 2 (season work), check out organisations that arrange volunteering work in developing countries.   SL Volunteers is an organisation that recently grabbed my attention as it is led by students and graduates.  Their work is based in Sri Lanka where they run various projects such as The Children’s Home Project.  They also have a clinical psychology placement scheme.  There are often costs associated with these volunteering schemes but the organisations involved try to keep costs as low as possible.  Perhaps you could be enterprising (see below!) and generate some sponsors and/or apply for funding opportunities

3.  Enterprise

The organisation mentioned above, SL Volunteers, was established in 2010 by graduates from the University of Manchester and one of the founders, Lucy Nightingale, studied psychology!  Maybe you’ve noticed a gap in services for university students – start talking to people across campus who might be interested in your idea.

By enterprising, I don’t necessarily mean starting a business.  I mean create something, start something, bring people together with a common goal.  If you don’t like the ways things are, change it.  You might have an idea to start a group or a Facebook page or a blog for example.  There is nothing wrong with starting small but thinking big.  Perhaps there are opportunities for you to be ‘intrapreneurial’ (being entrepreneurial within an organisation) within the companies and organisations you are already working for or associated with.

Having the status of ‘student’ attached to you can be a massive advantage for starting an enterprise.  If you are at Salford, check out the Careers and Employability Service’s enterprise page: http://www.careers.salford.ac.uk/enterprise.

4.  Events

There are lots of events and conferences going on throughout the summer, some of which are free.  An interesting event I spotted today (Twitter again!) is a talk by the poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay MBE called ‘GOOGLE ME’ – A talk on identity from someone finding theirs, organised by the University of Huddersfield (10th July 2013, 6-7.30pm).  This is a fantastic opportunity to hear Lemn speak.  Here’s a previous talk he gave for TED:

Attending events can give your ideas for dissertations, develop your critical thinking, and provide opportunities for networking.  If there is a cost to attend an event, one option is to offer to help out so you can attend for free or at least get a reduced fee (enterprising again!) whilst gaining more work experience.   Another option is to offer to write a review or a blog post about the conference or event…this has worked for me in the past and leads nicely onto the final idea for summer.

5. Developing your online presence

Last but not least, you could invest some of your summer into your online presence.  Your professional online identity is now crucial for job (and potentially university) applications.  Don’t believe me? Just Google ‘Paris Brown’ or ‘EmmaWay20’!  A nice starting point for developing your professional self is to create a profile on the professional networking site LinkedIn.  Because it’s the most professional of the major social networks, it can help you position yourself differently to how you might do on personal networks such as Facebook for example.  We have set up a group on LinkedIn called SPNet to provide a network of students and staff to support each other on this platform and to start making connections with one another.

Another place which I have already mentioned is Twitter.  This is the network where I get most of my up-to-date news and information about the latest opportunities…as this blog post demonstrates!  For ideas about what to tweet and how to construct a professional self on Twitter, check out the @salfordpsych twitter archive and previous blog posts from current students about using Twitter for professional and learning purposes.

If you fancy going one step further…start your own blog like other Salford Psychology students such as Hannah Smith and Scott Robertson.  You can also write guest posts for collaborative blogs.  For example, this morning the BPS Social Psychology Section posted a call for blog posts on…you guessed it…Twitter (see below)!

Again, if you are at Salford, the Careers team can help with this and are available during the summer.  There’s some drop in sessions too: http://www.careers.salford.ac.uk/page/jobsandcareers

A Psychological Summer

If you are already having a psychological summer, great.  Maybe there’s one or two ideas here that you want to follow up or even better, this post has sparked some ideas of your own.  I expect the ideas in this post are just the tip of the iceberg…further ideas or suggestions are much appreciated, please leave them in the comments box below.  We’d also be really interested to hear about your work experiences over the summer…you can even guest blog about them here!

Contact details: Jenna Condie, Lecturer in Psychology, E: j.m.condie@salford.ac.uk or Twitter: @jennacondie

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applied psychology pain psychology seminar series reflection

Reflections on Presenting for the Psychology Seminar Series

By Lorna Paterson

Last Thursday, I presented my research for the first time to my peers and a couple of students (literally. Thank you both for coming). I did have some nerves however, I treated it like a usual lecture and I was confident about the information on the slides (see below); so I knew I was the expert in the room.

 

Psychology seminar series lorna paterson from SalfordPsych

The turnout wasn’t fantastic but that meant we were able to have more discussion around certain points and I could be a little more informal. I ended up quite enjoying it and think I created a very good impression with my colleagues, or at least that’s the feedback I’ve had.

This is the first time I have presented my prospective PhD data. Believe it or not, I lack confidence about my own work and writing. The PhD has been a long, arduous, individual learning curve and continues to highlight more of my own learning gaps. To have such a positive response from those who attended has been a much appreciated confidence boost.

P.S.  Do you realise the series acronym spells out SPSS? It really does underpin psychology.

Contact Details: l.paterson@salford.ac.uk

Salford Psychology Seminar Series

 

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applied psychology depression mental health postgraduate

Ten Years On: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies; The Case of Depression

lizBy Dr Liz Smith

Over ten years ago, after finishing my degree in Psychology, I secured funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to do a PhD investigating why clinical guidelines (which at the time had become an increasingly familiar component of health care) were not always implemented.  I knew that there was a massive gap between evidence and practice and that this was particularly true for depression.  At this time antidepressant prescribing had increased for all age and sex groups over the previous 20 years.  GPs regularly handed out anti-depressant drugs but very rarely referred patients for therapy even though this may have been the preferred treatment. So my PhD focused on how clinicians used clinical guidelines in depression.

prescription

The first couple of quantitative studies I carried out confirmed that (1) a gap existed between clinical guidelines and practice; (2) the GPs in my study tended to overprescribe relative to recommendations and (3) prescribing no drugs at all was extremely rare.  This led me to the question of why.  The next study I undertook  was one of the most enjoyable research studies I have ever carried out.  It was a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of GPs.  Here I aimed to elicit GPs’ views about the depression guidelines, how they used them in their practice and any barriers they thought there were that prevented them from implementing them.  The GPs who took part in the study were from general practices across the Scottish Grampian region and North East England.

The main findings were that (1) the GPs did not always agree with recommendations of the depression guidelines current at that time; (2) they thought the guidelines were insufficiently flexible to use with the variety of patients they see; and (3) lack of resources, particularly mental health professionals for referrals, were seen as the main barriers to guideline use.

For these GPs lack of resources emerged as a major barrier to following guideline recommendations. They had problems in referring patients to mental health specialists.  They reported having no specialist to refer them to, patients being misled about specialists’ qualifications, and problems with patient confidentiality issues. Several GPs reported that they had tried their best to follow the guidelines and refer patients for some form of talking therapy but by the time patients received appointments from mental health specialists, the patients reported that their depression problems had disappeared and they no longer wanted appointments. Waiting times reported were between 2 to 26 weeks for psychiatrists or community psychiatric nurses and 9 to 12 months for psychologists. These delays partially explained GPs’ tendency to over prescribe relative to recommendations.  In sum, these GPs saw the lack of mental health professionals as a main barrier to following depression guidelines.  When this study was published we recommended that those involved in guideline production should be demonstrating the case for more mental health professionals.

Since this time I have not given the issue much thought as I changed my career track and worked on research within a business school for 8 years.  However, last year I returned back to the realms of psychology, here at the University of Salford.  On checking out the courses which ran from here I discovered that there is a postgraduate course in Applied Psychology (Therapies).  The University advertises these courses as providing great opportunities for students to prepare to undertake a role in therapeutic interventions and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) which is high on the government agenda “Improving Access to Psychological Therapies” (IAPT).

The IAPT programme has its own website where it claims to support the frontline NHS in implementing National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines for people suffering from depression and anxiety.  The website states that the initiative was developed with the aim of offering patients realistic and routine first-line treatment, combined where appropriate with medication which they say was traditionally the only treatment available. It is amazing that something I found out to be true in my early research days has been addressed by the government and the institute where I carry out my current research actually trains people to prepare them for the IAPT programme.  In chatting with the leader of the course, Dr Simon Cassidy, he tells me that a substantial number of students graduating from the Applied Psychology (Therapies) course go on to work in this initiative.

It’s really great to see that someone somewhere has recognized the need for psychological therapies in the treatment of depression.  It would be marvelous to obtain funding for a follow up study to investigate how clinicians use clinical guidelines in depression today and to see if the gap has closed between evidence and practice.

Contact Details: Dr Liz Smith, Email: e.smith1@salford.ac.uk

Image courtesy of Jaypeg on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)