A new book, Mental Health and Wellbeing: Educational Perspectives which has been edited by Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Ros Shute, draws together the efforts of 47 contributors in an examination of wellbeing promotion in schools.

Professor Shute is a member of the Flinders Research Centre for Student Wellbeing and Prevention of Violence. The book is the Centre’s first publication, and one of its aims is to make university research available to a wider audience.

Published by Shannon Research Press, the book is available by emailing katherine.dix@pa.edu.au

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Flinders University’s 2011 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Early Career Researchers were announced late last year. Dr Amy Slater and Dr Tobias Loetscher from the schoool of Psychology shared with 8 others in the $25,000 prize pool.

Congratulations to Tobias, Amy and everyone else who has been recognised.

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Professor Marika Tiggemann has been elected as one of 26 new Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her sustained and distinguished contribution to psychology as well as a very high level of scholarly distinction.

Professor Tiggeman, who  is also the Chair of Academic Senate at Flinders, is one of two Flinders academics elected as Fellows by their respective peak academic bodies.

Marika has an extensive record of international publication that has come out of her research into body image among women, adolescents and children as well as issues around eating behaviour.

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Emeritus Professor Norman Feather will present a keynote address to the Annual Conference of the Australian Psychological Society in October.

Professor Feather has long been interested in tall poppies and our reaction to them. Do we feel sorry for them or enjoy watching them get it wrong?

His research has show that our response depends on whether we feel the person deserves their misfortune. "Deservingness is a very important variable in our feelings of schadenfreude or, in other words, our feelings of pleasure in someone else's negative outcome," Professor Feather said.

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When people experience food cravings they have vivid images of the food they desire, and interfering with the associated cognitive processes can reduce cravings and binge eating.

This is what the research efforts of Professor Marika Tiggemann and Associate Professor Eva Kemps from the School of Psychology have discovered using methods of experimental cognitive psychology.

They recently presented an overview of their research at the Flinders University Victoria Square campus in a public lecture to an interested audience of ninety, made up of dietitians, government health agencies, weight loss specialists, psychology and health sciences students and academics, and interested members of the general public.

The lecture was the second in a series of public lectures being presented by the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Associate Professor Robyn Young from the School of Psychology received one of 9 ALTC citations awarded to Flinders for teaching excellence.

"For enhancing domestic and international students' therapeutic skills in clinical and family settings through the development of a sustainable intervention program for children with disabilities"

 

 

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Left-handed people consistently perform worse than right-handed people in measures of cognitive ability, or IQ, with the 'level of disability' equivalent to being prematurely born.

This is the finding of a recent study led by Professor Mike Nicholls, newly-appointed Director of the Brain and Cognition Laboratory in Flinders University’s School of Psychology, which dispels the common myth that left-handed people are more likely to be gifted.

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Sleep Well, Live Better is a book that aims to help the five to 10 per cent of the population – that’s up to two million Australians – who have problems with getting to sleep or staying asleep through the night.

Written by Flinders psychologists Professor Leon Lack and Dr Helen Wright, the book explains the basics of sleep, describes how sleep cycles and patterns change as we age, and identifies the various types of insomnia.

Based on a book originally published in 2004, the new version has been expanded to include step-by-step practical treatment methods that draw on recently trialled techniques.

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It’s not just Australians who stay glued to electronic devices until bedtime – the Americans are at it too, according to Flinders psychologist Dr Michael Gradisar.

Dr Gradisar (pictured) recently completed a stint as a guest researcher in the largest annual sleep study in the world, run by the National Sleep Foundation in the US.

The 2011 National Sleep Poll had technology as its theme, and found that 97 per cent of the 1500 respondents used some type of electronic device – television, computer, video game or cell phone – within an hour of going to bed at least a few nights a week. With almost half of Americans aged between 13 and 64 complaining that they seldom get a good night’s sleep on weeknights, Dr Gradisar said that there is plenty of scope to investigate the part played by technology in restless, disrupted or unrefreshing sleep.

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