Ego.

I thought that my room needed brightening up so I ordered myself another batch of moocards from my favourite Flickr photos and edged my noticeboard with them (as you can see on the left). I really like it and already the place feels more homely. =] I think I'm also gonna get to work on some drawing's or something to brighten the room up, as it just doesn't feel like my room, it's too bare!

In other news I got another A* on my weekly test! Which now makes he count 1 A-, 5 A+'s and 2 A*'s, not bad going methinks.

And in even more brainy news, I've been given a humanities award from Stratford College. Go me.

A new leaf?

I'm blogging twice in quick succession could this be me turning over a new leaf? Who knows.

The weather here seems to have taken a very sudden turn for the worse, it wasn't that bad when I woke up but now the wind is howling and it's starting to rain. On the plus side though the strong wind does seem to be blowing the rainclouds away, so maybe it'll brighten up soon. I just hope the weather isn't too bad in Snowdon for poor old Rob, as I got a text from him yesterday telling me his coat had frozen!

I also realised that I didn't actually say in my last post we raised enough money for all of our staff to get dressed up for Children in Need! This meant that on Thursday I was learning all about T-tests from Batman, an amusing concept indeed. There was also Andy Pandy and Looby Loo, Cruella Deville and a dalmation, Robin Hood and Maid Marion, Wonder Woman and Supergirl, Robin to go with Batman, a half man half woman (Mike even shaved half his beard off for this) and Darth Vader and Princess Leia. Darth Vader was hilarious as he was Prof. Thierry who is French and hearing his talking about the dark side in a French voice was hilarious!

Update. =]

I'm getting really bad at updating this blog! So here's a "what's happened this week" post.

I attended the scholarship presentation on Tuesday, which was rather nice. Mum and Chris came and watched and it was really good to see them. =] Sadly it meant having my photo taken whilst I was up there, but getting £3000 in exchange I guess it's worse a few little photos. =P

Thursday saw another corridor meal and this time it was Qi Li's turn to cook, he is one of the chinese students on my corridor and this always makes for an interesting meal. I very much enjoyed the rib things and the rice dishes but passed on what was apparently a kind of tree fungus... An update on the shithead loser table, Mo is way out in front on 11 loses but I am sadly in second place with 8, and with only 3 weeks to go this is quite dangerous I think!

Last night a few of us went to the cinema to see Quarantine. It's basically just your typical next step up from zombies, stuck in a house horror. Not bad, but not great either, but it did at least have a few good jumpy edge of your seat moments in it. I felt very sick after leaving the cinema though as it was a pretty gory film and I had eaten ALOT of food previously, but oh well.

I'll blog again soon! (possibly. =P)

xx

Finally a non-Psychological post!

I'm a little worse for wear whilst writing this post so I'll apoligise in advance for spelling and grammatical errors! Me and some of my flatmates played a lengthy game of drinking Monopoly last night, which I can assure you is brutal! I didn't actually crawl into bed until about 5:55 this morning and woke up not long after so I'm feeling understandably fragile!

But anyway I thought it was time to blog as I havn't for a very long time now! Mum and Chris come up to see me on Tuesday and I finally get presented with my scholarship money so that should be cool. =] Spoke to Rob on Skype this morning and heard of his fruitshoot escapades last night (hopefully he'll blog about it); made me laugh ALOT.


It's less than 4 weeks until Christmas break too! Which I can't actually belief, this semester has flown by, I don't know where it's gone.

Schizotypy.

Here is a very long overdue blog!

Last weeks research colloquium was cancelled so I'll just talk about the one before it on here, which was about Schizotypy and Flexible Learning; looking into whether having a particular level or type of schizotypy could actually be a positive thing.

To begin with I should probably explain that there are 3 main dimensions of schizotypy; positive, negative and cognitive disorganisation, and you can exhibit schizotypal behaviour without being schizophrenic.

The hypothesis of this study was that healthy positive schizotypals would be better at rehearsal learning that negative ones. Participants did a test devised by Raine to determine schizotypy scores and those with very high +ve and low -ve, or low +ve and high -ve were selected, along with some average for a control group.

They were then giving a gambling task to do where they got to keep their winnings. One pile to chose from was low risk, low reward and one was high risk, high reward, it was better to go with the low pile as you always got more money this way and all participants were able to do this. The two piles were then reversed 4 times during the next test, and the participants had to continually relearn which pile to draw from for success (reversal learning). Again all the participants succeeded in doing this, but the high -ve and control group showed very similar results whereas the high +ve participants had much larger successes, showing that flexible learning is increased in those with a high level of positive schizotypy.

In other news I got another A+ in my weekly test. Don't know how much longer this will continue for though as I found today's one very hard!!