Last week, Lower Sixth psychology students attended the Psychology in Action event at Warwick Arts Centre, where we listened to a series of engaging lectures from leading psychologists. The talks covered a wide range of topics, such as how behavioural science can influence people’s decisions and how attention and concentration develop from childhood to adulthood, as well as some practical strategies for improving focus. In ‘This talk may cause side effects’ the speaker started with the story of a US Police officer who had apparently overdosed on Fentanyl, as it happens he hadn’t, but believed that he had. This belief was enough to cause him to collapse and go into respiratory failure before a colleague administered an antidote. This ‘Nocebo’ effect reflects the darker side of the placebo effect, explaining how our expectations of medications and drugs can sometimes cause us to experience negative symptoms. The final talk introduced us to ‘Mr Fur Potato’ (seen in the picture) to offer some light-hearted relief to the subject matter: “psychopaths” and what is meant by this term. Entitled ‘Is your teacher a psychopath?’, we were relieved to find out that teachers are at the top of people least likely to be psychopaths!
