• Question: Which has been your most interesting study?

    Asked by anon-283674 on 5 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-286295, anon-283830, anon-284699, anon-287332.
    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      This is a great question! The answer unfortunately is a little underwhelming! I have only run two studies so far as part of the project (and the two tie together as 2 parts to the same study) so I guess my first study! For this study I was identifying videos in which awareness of threat changed. By this, what I mean is >
      I had 10, 50 second long videos, each split into 5 segments of 10 seconds (now have 50 videos, each 10 seconds long). Then we asked people about the likelihood of violence – if the segments are labelled A, B, C, D, and E, and the likelihood is 10, 15, 20, 20, 80 – we can see that the last segment provides considerable threat compared to other segments. Then we explored differences in the likelihood for each segment / video considering police, general population, martial artists and street fighters. This was a neat experiment to start and is pretty cool!

      However, I am sure once I have a few more experiments under my belt, I’ll have a favourite from all of them!!

    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      The first experiment of my PhD was pretty interesting, I think! We got people to do a task where they had to tell me either the shape or the colour of the object on screen. The rule (tell me shape, or, tell me colour) changed every couple of times, however we varied how they were told that the rule changed! People either had to read a rule and ignore a sound they heard saying the opposite, or they had to listen to a rule and ignore words that said the opposite (so you might read ‘colour’ but hear ‘shape’). We found out that people are anxious struggle to jump between different rules, if they had to read the rule and ignore the sound they did extra bad, but if they had to listen to the sound and ignore the writing they did extra well – so basically people prefer to listen to instructions rather than read them. This is because our brain has to translate written words in to spoken words in their heads, and translating the words uses up resources which anxious people struggle to manage!

    • Photo: Ellen Smith

      Ellen Smith answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hi Harry! I think my most interesting study so far has been the first study of my PhD. I looked at a supplement called resveratrol, which is found in grapes and red wine and how taking that once or over a period of 3 months might impact a huge range of different outcomes. I had participants come into the research centre and take the supplement and measured their performance on cognitive tasks, mood and cerebral blood flow. I also took blood samples to measure changes in inflammation and some other biomarkers. And looked at urine and stool samples to see any changes in gut bacteria. I’m still finalising the analysis of the results, but this was a really interesting study to design and run.

Comments

  • Photo: Dennis

    Dennis commented on :

    My research looks into blogging as a way to promote positive mental health. There’s also a bit of language involved on my research. There are studies that show that word choices and the way people use pronouns can change depending on the state of their mental health. We need to stop hitting mental health with the same hammer; maybe (and just maybe) my research can offer another hammer.