ideas for stickies

snorlax

Hey just wondering if anyone has any suggestions as regards stickies that could forward the quality of this forum?

It would be good to get some contributions from the posters. I was also considering stickying that thread on psychology courses as it seems to be quite informative.

p.pete

I get a "BPS Research Digest" email sent to me every 2 weeks with 5 or 6 short articles similar to the following:

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2. Detecting psychological distress from where a patient sits

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Patients suffering from depression or anxiety are more likely to choose to sit to their left when visiting the GP, an observation that has implications for the detection of psychological distress among patients. That’s according to a study by Dr. Peter Luck, at Christmas Maltings Surgery in Suffolk.

“The seating arrangement I now use in my surgery allows patients to choose their spatial orientation (left/right) with me during face-to-face consultations. I use this system to alert me, when patients choose to sit to their left, that there is a greater possibility that they may be suffering from psychological distress “, Dr. Luck told the Digest.

During Luck’s research, a GP’s consulting room was arranged for five months so that two chairs were positioned an equal distance to the left or right of the GP’s desk. The choice of chair made by 756 patients seeing their GP was recorded, and after their consultation each patient was tested for anxiety and depression using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Their handedness was determined according to the hand they wrote with.

Among the 674 right-handed patients, Dr. Luck found that those who scored positively for anxiety or depression (358 of them) were significantly more likely to sit in the left-hand chair facing the GP (59 per cent of them did) than those who weren’t anxious or depressed (27 per cent of them sat on the left). A similar effect was not found among the 82 left-handers, possibly because they were too few in number.

The right-handed patients who weren’t depressed or anxious tended to choose the right-hand chair, reflecting their attentional preference for the left side of space, consistent with past research. Somehow, psychological distress seems to affect this usual attentional bias, thus explaining the Dr. Luck’s pattern of results. The finding adds to past research showing that depressed mothers tend to cradle their baby on their right, the opposite of the usual bias among mothers to hold their baby on the left (see Digest issue 26, item 1; http://tinyurl.com/95f8z). __________________________________

Luck, P. (2006). Does the presence of psychological distress in patients influence their choice of sitting position in face-to-face consultation with the GP? Laterality, 11, 90-100.

Abstract weblink: http://tinyurl.com/9u5sv

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS RESEARCH? HAVE YOUR SAY AT THE DIGEST BLOG: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/

In the A-level syllabus: [AQA spec A]: A2 module 5, individual differences and perspectives, psychopathology, depression; [AQA spec B]: A2 module 4 options, psychology of atypical behaviour, mood disorders; [SQA higher]: domain psychology of individual differences, therapeutic approaches in specific common disorders.

It's not something that I pay to receive and this is quite a small forum, so I'm sure there'd be no problem if we created a sticky and I could paste in the articles as I get them.

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for anyone who'd like to receive the email themselves go here: http://www.bps.org.uk/publications/rd/rd_home.cfm