• Question: what made you choose to research your subject area?

    Asked by anon-297412 on 30 Jun 2021.
    • Photo: Sophie Bettles

      Sophie Bettles answered on 30 Jun 2021:

      I had always been interested in why people commit crimes (as I think a lot of people are!) especially as I have always been someone that sticks to the rules and hates getting in trouble! It always fascinated me that there were people who would make such different choices to myself and I was curious to understand why and see if I could help to change that. I got interested in the psychology side of it specifically because my mum was a relationship counsellor and I used to think it sounded so interesting to talk to people and help them resolve their problems.
      Now I’m doing the job I have learned that it is very complex, but there is ALWAYS a reason why people make certain choices so it’s like an ongoing jigsaw puzzle that I love to solve 🙂

    • Photo: Lisa Newson

      Lisa Newson answered on 30 Jun 2021:

      I research around diabetes, heart disease and obesity. i have an interest in these topics. Some of my colleagues research pain, or sexual health for example, but these are just not what i want to get involved with or read about so I don’t go there.

      Though I often as a Health Psychologist get pulled into other projects where i can bring specific topic or methodological expertise.

      For example I have recently been awarded a grant to work with an external company, a housing association, we have put together a project on healthy homes, healthy tenants, health communities- it will be a multi-disciplinary project including business, health, maths, built environment, public health- so this research is going to keep me on my toes and challenge me to think outside my box!

    • Photo: Jennifer Deane

      Jennifer Deane answered on 30 Jun 2021:

      I really fell into it. I had never heard of health psychology before my degree. I started the degree thinking i’d like to train as a clinical psychologist. Then I did a health psychology module and I loved it. My sister is a type 1 diabetic and the stuff we were learning made sense to me based on what my sister did. So when we could pick our topics in the third year I picked health psychology. Then when i finished my undergrad and moved on to do a masters in health psychology I got a job working at another university as a research assistant and it was with cancer patients who were having treatment for colo-rectal cancer. I really enjoyed it and started to look at working within cancer. I’m interested in lots of different areas in health psychology but I always seem to end up in cancer research!

    • Photo: Naomi Heffer

      Naomi Heffer answered on 30 Jun 2021:

      During my neuroscience degree, I became fascinated by individual differences in perception – the fact that two people can look at exactly the same thing and perceive it so differently is amazing to me! I first became interested in this in the context of depression. People who are depressed typically show ‘negative information processing biases’ so they are more likely to interpret emotional information negatively. These perceptual biases seem to play a causal role in depression, because people who improve after antidepressant treatment stop exhibiting these negative biases. Now I research how individuals with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder interpret emotional information to try and understand more about the perceptual biases in these different groups of people.

    • Photo: Samantha Harrison

      Samantha Harrison answered on 1 Jul 2021:

      It is as simple as I wanted to look do something that “sounds cool” and to me nothing sounded cooler that looking at brains. I explored the field a bit, found some topics within neuroscience that interested me, and it all sort of evolved from there 🙂

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