• Question: What do you think is the most interesting aspect of relationships in psychology is to study? eg. jealousy, toxic relationships, children

    Asked by Sarah to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 14 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      Hi Sarah! Good question! Personally I’m really interested in how people influence other people! So for example like in the old Milgram obedience study with the electric shocks, but also the things that are happening nowadays such as in politics! There are so many things going on in the world just now that people never thought would happen, so I’m interested in how these have come about! For me, there’s nothing more interesting than trying to understand the strange things that people do! That said, that’s what makes all aspects of psychology interesting! 🙂

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      I’m very interested in how we understand what another person is thinking and feeling without them having to tell us. This area of research is generally called ‘social cognition’ (which means the cognitive processes involved in understanding the social world). Understanding others is very complicated – it involves things like detecting very subtle facial cues, verbal cues (like voice tone), taking the perspectives of others and imagining being in their situation. Some research has shown that a tiny percentage of the population of the world are geniuses at detecting very very subtle facial cues, which makes them excellent at spotting when someone is lying. I research what might make people better at these very important skills.

    • Photo: Sam Carr

      Sam Carr answered on 21 Jun 2017:

      For me, it’s “love.” I think that for as long as humans have been civilized “love” has been a huge part of our culture and our life. I think love has such a powerful impact on our well-being and the lack of love has such a detrimental influence on us too.

      In this sense, huge questions like “what is love,” “what different kinds of love are there,” “how does love influence us,” “can love heal us” are always really important for science to consider, think about, and try to answer.

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