• Question: What works have you done. What positive impact have your works had on the society.

    Asked by anon-290040 on 27 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-290039, anon-290065.
    • Photo: Alex Baxendale

      Alex Baxendale answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hello!
      So far my work has found that listening to instructions instead of reading them makes people with high anxiety perform better, so if someone is very anxious then you should help them by giving them instructions they can hear.
      We followed this work up by testing people with math anxiety and got them to do math equations whilst reading instructions out loud, or doing everything in silence – we found that reading instructions out loud helped everyone to do better, with even bigger benefits for people with anxiety!
      We’re hoping that with some more work we can help people struggling in school and in their every day lives!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hi,
      Whilst I have yet to finish my current experiments, I reall hope and and optimistic that my research can really benefit a large portion of young people and their families in helping prevent, detect and treat serious mental illness (namely schizophrenia). I hope this can impact society in a positive way!

    • Photo: Dennis Relojo-Howell

      Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hi kept430hmm. As a PhD student, I’d say I haven’t made an impact yet with my work. I’m in the early stages of my research.

      As an online content creator, I feel that I’m sort of offering something of value to the field of psychology by making it accessible to the wider public. My online psychology magazine (https://www.psychreg.org) is read by more than 250,000 people each month; while my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/psychreg) has more than 22K subscribers.

      If some of my digital contents becomes a useful resource for people who are interested in psychology, then I know I have built a simple legacy. I will die a satisfied scientist.

    • Photo: Harry Piper

      Harry Piper answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hi! This is a great question! Impact is so important in science! I’ve been working with North Wales Police (NWP) exploring threat detection and have been investigating differences between the general population and police members. We found that police are more accurate (but still under predict violence). However, as years of experience in the police increase, the level of threat increases, which is the opposite to what we find with the general population (detect less threat). This can impact scrutiny boards when considering if police action was appropriate and we are also aiming to create a tool. If you’ve done your driving theory test, imagine something like that. Clicking when threat is presented. We could also use pictures rather than videos (or both) as well as written scenarios and assess decision making on what action is appropriate. This could influence lots of different things – training, policy, decision making and more!

    • Photo: Amrita Bains

      Amrita Bains answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      Hi this is great question! I always hope that there is a way to make sure that my experiments can make an impact on society and can provide practical benefits in the real world. My work looks at reading motivation and at the moment I am trying to establish how we can measure motivation without having to use questionnaires (as this can lead to bias or people may not always tell the truth) and hopefully by having a good measure of motivation we can begin to learn how to improve it for reading. With the experiments I am running I am also working with the Reading Agency which is a charity that focuses on bringing reading to different people in different places for example in libraries and schools

    • Photo: Lisa Orchard

      Lisa Orchard answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      I have been researching the best ways to use social media for breastfeeding support. I have been working with breastfeeding charities to help improve their online content, and hope that I can help social media a more positive environment.

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