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Professor Karen J Pine

Individuals with BDD are more likely to identify upside-down images of famous faces as they focus on individual features rather than process them as a whole. Jennifer Anniston image courtesy of Angela George at http://flickr.com/photos/sharongraphics/

What do you see when you look at other people’s faces? Do you focus on a specific feature or do you look at their face as a whole?  Do you think you could recognise people’s faces when they are upside-down?

New research by Professor Keith Laws from the School of Psychology has shown that people who have an obsession relating to their body image, where they believe that they have a defect in their appearance, have an exceptional skill of recognising famous faces when they are upside-down.

Most people find it difficult to recognise upside-down faces because they normally process faces as a whole image the right way up.  But people with a mental health condition known as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) process faces in a different way and overly-focus on the individual facial features rather than the whole face. This aids their ability to recognise inverted famous faces as they are more intimate with specific facial features such as David Beckham’s eyes or Angelina Jolie’s lips for example.

People with BDD are often attractive individuals who focus negatively on specific features of their own body, especially their face.  They engage with time-consuming compulsive behaviours such as mirror-checking, applying make-up to camouflage and seeking reassurance about their appearance – up to fifteen per cent of people who seek cosmetic surgery meet the criteria for a BDD diagnosis.

The paper will be published in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders.

Dr Maisoon Ghaleb, together with Prof Soraya Dhillon and Dr Cinzia Pezzolesi, from the School of Pharmacy has collaborated in a major study into GP prescribing.  While the vast majority of prescriptions written by family doctors are appropriate and effectively monitored, around one in twenty prescriptions contain an error.

In the study, a sample of fifteen GP practices across three areas in England found that where there were prescribing and monitoring errors, most were classed as mild or moderate. But around one in every 550 prescription items was judged to contain a serious error. The most common errors were missing information on dosage, prescribing an incorrect dosage, and failing to ensure that patients got necessary monitoring through blood tests.

The research, commissioned by the General Medical Council is the largest-scale study of its kind.  It recommends a greater role for pharmacists in supporting GPs, better use of computer systems and extra emphasis on prescribing in GP training.

The report can be found at http://bit.ly/JRWTnq

Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium at Keats House

On Friday 20^th April 2012, members of the Stoker family joined scholars, novelists and critics to mark the centenary of the death of Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker.    The Open Graves, Open Minds Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium led by Dr Sam George was held in Hampstead, London and included a visit to Golders Green crematorium to pay respects to Bram Stoker’s ashes. 

The romantic, period setting of Keats House, in Hampstead, was a fitting venue for the symposium.  Keats himself explored forbidden pleasures in his poem “Lamia” (1819), becoming synonymous with the female vampire.  Hampstead too has its links to Stoker and vampirism, featuring a number of times in the novel “Dracula”.

Through an exclusive programme of talks and discussions, the centenary symposium celebrated Dracula as the undisputed king of vampires.  The dark gothic legacy created by Stoker standing firm against the newer trend for the “sweetie” vampires of the Twilight series and American TV shows – a new, romantic type of vampire. 

The weather added to the eeriness of the occasion.  A sudden bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and a deep roll of thunder made the windows and curtains quiver before the skies opened with torrents of rain –an auspicious omen before setting out for the crematorium to view the urn containing ashes of Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker.

At the crematorium, the many tributes to Bram and his world-wide legacy of Dracula were led by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grand-nephew, who wrote “Dracula the undead” (the sequel to the original novel).

More information can be found on the Open Graves, Open Minds website.

Dacre Stoker (great-grand-nephew) with Bram Stoker’s ashes

 

Influential gestures: touching a ring finger to suggest a ring

What do eyewitnesses recall? Can interviewers influence eyewitnesses? 

Research to date has showed that eyewitnesses can be influenced by misleading questions, but what impact do gestures have?  New research conducted by Dr Daniel Gurney shows that gestures made during interviews can also mislead, and sometimes without the eyewitnesses even realising. The research findings were presented at last week’s British Psychological Society Annual Conference.

In the research, Dr Gurney interviewed people about the contents of a video they had watched. During the interviews, he deliberately performed misleading hand gestures to suggest inaccurate information about the detail in the video. These hand gestures included such actions as chin stroking to suggest someone had a beard, although the man in the video did not have a beard.   Interviewees were three times more likely to recall seeing a beard when one was gestured to them, than those interviewees who were not gestured to.

Other hand gestures used in the research included touching a ring finger (to suggest a ring), grasping a wrist (to suggest a watch) and pretending to pull on gloves. All of these gestures implied details that did not actually appear in the video and the results were similar to those with the misinformation about the beard.

For professionals in the police, legal and other sensitive areas of work where questioning and recall of detail is important, the impact of hand gestures during interview needs to be fully appreciated.

Hertfordshire Dementia Champions at inaugural symposium

Dementia is one of the biggest challenges of our time – it is a disease that steals lives and has a major impact on families and NHS resources.  Currently, there are about 750,000 people in the UK with dementia with an estimated cost to society of £23 bn; and this number is projected to rise to 940,000 by 2021

And it doesn’t just affect older people; people affected by this condition are getting younger.  So what is being done to support this and change the public perception of dementia?  What is being done to improve the quality of diagnosis, treatment and care for those living with dementia?

At a recent one-day meeting, over 120 health-care professionals from across the county attended the inaugural Dementia Champions Symposium hosted by the University in partnership with the NHS in Hertfordshire and the Alzheimer’s Society.  This event took place just days before the government announced extra funding for research into dementia to tackle the UK’s national crisis in care – doubling the dementia research budget to £66 m by 2015.

Hertfordshire Dementia Champions are forming a Community of Practice, hosted by the University’s Centre for Research in Primary and Community Care, to create a high quality county-wide support network for clinicians.  This network will provide on-going encouragement, support and, more importantly, a framework for the sharing of information about new dementia resources and national and local policy.

An artist’s conception of the planetary system around HD10180. One of the new Super-Earth planets HD10180j is seen in the foreground (on the left hand side of the picture), with the nearby Neptune-like planet HD10180e in the background (on the right-hand side of picture with blue cloudy atmosphere). The central star and the other 7 planets can be seen in the distance, including the second new Super-Earth HD10180i, third out from the central star. Picture credit: By J Pinfield, for the RoPACS network (04/12).

How many planets does a planetary system need to break a record?  According to a study conducted by Mikko Tuomi from the Centre for Astrophysics Research, the answer is nine – one more than our own Solar system!  This significant discovery of the planetary system around the star named HD 10180 is the first time that astronomers have discovered a star with more planets than the Sun. Located 130 light years away, the star is not within reach of foreseeable human space travel, but in astronomical distances, it is still considered to be in the Solar neighbourhood!

Originally reported to be orbited by seven planets in 2010, re-analysed data from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) now indicates that the star has nine planets.  The study, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, verifies the existence of the previously announced seven planets and shows that there are likely to be two additional planets orbiting the star.

The two newly detected signals are probably those of planets classified as hot super-Earths.  These new planets are closer to the star’s surface than the Earth is to the Sun which makes them too hot to be able to maintain water on their surfaces in its liquid form. 

Future observations are required to verify the existence of these planet candidates and to establish the HD 10180 star system as the richest planetary system known to humankind – certainly a star worth keeping our telescopes on into the future.

Almost everyone reports experiencing mind-pops at some time or another, but some experience them more than others according to research conducted by Professor Keith Laws, Professor Lia Kvavilashvili and Dr Ia Elua from the School of Psychology

Mind-pops are those little thoughts, words, images or tunes that suddenly pop into your mind at unexpected times and are totally unrelated to your current activity.

In the paper to be published in Psychiatry Research, findings suggest that mind-pop experiences are related to hallucinations in those people suffering from schizophrenia.

The researchers compared the frequency of mind-pops in people with schizophrenia, people with depression and mentally healthy individuals.   Their study found that all 100% schizophrenia patients reported experiencing mind-pops, compared to 81% of the depressed patients and 86% of the mentally healthy individuals.  In addition, schizophrenia patients experienced mind-pops significantly more frequently than depressed patients and mentally healthy people.  

Based on the findings of the research, the team has suggested that verbal hallucinations, the chief symptom of schizophrenia, may be related to the mind-pop phenomenon that almost everybody experiences, but just manifests itself in a different way!

Detail of the star-forming area known as G305 in the Milky Way

Two sky surveys of the Milky Way led by Dr Phil Lucas from the School of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics have been combined to show more than one billion stars in a near-infrared image.  British-built telescopes were used to take the images: the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) based in Hawaii covered the northern part of the Milky Way; and the VISTA telescope in Chile covered the southern part.

This combined data on over a billion stars represents a scientific legacy that will be exploited for decades in many different ways. The image provides a three-dimensional view of the structure of our spiral galaxy – showing the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a bulge in the middle!  Many structures of our spiral galaxy can be seen in the image, such as star clusters, gas and dust clouds where new stars are forming, and also stars all the way over on the far side of the galaxy.

The image has been published online with an interactive zoom tool. Zooming into the image reveals the wealth of detail on the small structures.

The UKIRT study (the UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey) was led by the University of Hertfordshire, while the VISTA study (VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea, or VVV) was co-led by astronomers in Chile at the Pontifica Universidad Catolica and at the University of Hertfordshire.  The picture itself was put together by the survey archive team at the University of Edinburgh.