Recently, we launched a new business forum, blogg and showcase called ‘bizface’. The plan is to develop it as a true community, allowing organizations to communicate, learn and promote their company – all for free. But why on earth did we do it? We run a small consultancy business (Crosslight Management Ltd) and have always gained business through word of mouth, but everyone tells us the key is to network. Yet whenever we try networking face to face, we end up pinned to people we don’t know anything about and (often) who we will never buy from/sell to. Inevitably we cannot make the time anyway to attend the face to face sessions, especially when they are lunches or breakfast meetings. Running the business takes all of our time. There are a number of benefits of doing networking online, at least initially. Firstly, you can ‘get to know’ people a little bit, find out if you have shared interests, get a feel for their responsiveness, even get ‘feedback’ about them from others, without getting too involved or spending too much time on it. You can then communicate with them asynchronously, so you don’t both need to be there at the same time. If you want to meet up at a face to face network you can exchange photos and agree to meet to discuss specific times, making best use of your networking.

When we looked for something that would allow us to network online, most of the forums gave some things for free, but charged for ‘premium’ services. Some were inactive, others had many members but seemed to have no ‘soul’. It also seemed hard to match people in your own area, something we felt was important. Furthermore, between us the team at Crosslight have many years experience, and multiple degrees in diverse subjects including psychology, IT, marketing, project management, change management and business administration – so we felt we had a lot to offer.

We decided to launch Biz Face and start populating the site with tips, white papers and a broad range of general information that would be helpful to businesses. I personally am very interested in the link between IT and psychology (interests shared with Temi) so have been developing that area, including inviting colleagues at the British Psychological Society to join in. Psychology can also help with all areas of managing people, so we are building quite a knowledge base there.

One thing I want to do some research on, and need to make time to do, is to consider online registration. Even though we stress that BizFace is free, and that email details will not be used or sold-on, people are very reluctant to actually join. Our main principle is that we will keep everything accessible so that as broad a range of people as possible can find our information and tips, so we allow guests to read all posts and bloggs. Only if they wish to download or actually start creating their own bloggs (or posts except in the guest room) do they need to join. I think that is fair, yet perhaps that is why some don’t join – they don’t need to…I have discussed some of this on my blogg

In summary, I think the psychology around joining websites such as BizFace is about commitment, exchange, and social identity. People may be nervous about both the time and effort involved with becoming members, may wonder whether they will get sufficient back from other members, and be unsure about whether the site and membership is a good ‘match’ to their own social identity. Although we can try to be of broad appeal whether they identify well with us and start to feel a part of a community is partly up to the individuals too (and of course most marketing courses will tell us we have to segment the population and target specific types of people – how well we can do that with online resources is something I guess we have to learn). Once people get involved they may find themselves not only feeling a part of the community, but they may start to experience flow (optimal flow experience is a state where you find time flies, you are lost in the moment and find the experience rather pleasurable). Research has shown that this happens regularly when people are online (as well as work and pleasure activities), but I suspect that could also backfire – busy business people may wonder if it was time well spent – it is up to us to give them high value services.

— Post by Dr Stephanie Morgan —–

The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true.

The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind’s bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933_2.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Freud’s contribution to the development of mental health in my opinion is one of the most significant breakthroughs in mental health care. Freud was the first person to argue that mental health patients should not be locked up and medicated, but could be cured merely by talking to them. This argument did not find much favours when Freud first put it forward, but over the years, Freud’s theory gained credibility.
Today, over 400 therapies that help cure or alleviate mental health difficulties can be directly or indirectly attributed to Freud’s pioneering theory in this area.
Dr. Colin Crampton wrote an excellent article that looked at the history of metal health care in the last hundred years; titled: A Hundred years of talking cure . Dr. Crampton has kindly granted Haabaa permission to use this article, it can be found at Haabaa InfoPool

Being tasked with starting a Psychology Blog on Haabaa blogs, my first though was; where the heck do I start and what topic do I start with? The answer came to me after the first wave of panic subsided, ‘why not start from the beginning’ so I will start at the very beginning of Psychology (At least that is where most institution seem to started teaching Psychology) the definition of Psychology.

Defining Psychology is a huge task, there is no agreement among Psychologist about a single universal definition of Psychology, and there are almost as many definitions for Psychology as there are Psychologist. Though most Psychologists seem to agree on a rough definition that goes like this: Psychology is the science of mental processes and behavior. But when other Psychologist start to scrutinize that definitions it starts to fall apart, some Social Psychologists for example do not agree that Psychology is a science hence the will love to hack off the part of the definitions that mention the word ‘Science’ by the time other schools of thoughts in Psychology hack off the bit they do not like about the above description there won’t be much left.

This lack of agreed definition of Psychology makes it necessary for most Psychologists to fashion their own definition. My favorite definition of Psychology used to be ‘The study of the blindingly obvious’ because most people see Psychological theories and finding achieving only a very modest advance on common sense; this allegation both from within and outside Psychology keeps Psychologist on the defensive most of the time.

Eysench (1998) countering the above attack on Psychology argued that the above argument does not stand up to scrutiny, he argued further that commonsense does not include a coherent body of knowledge about human behavior.

I find Eysench’s argument a powerful one, this and my observing of friends and relative wrestling with various human challenges which I think a little knowledge of Psychology could have alleviated made me arrive at a new definition for Psychology; ‘The Human Experience Users Guide’

Haven defined Psychology my way, I will now list some definition of Psychology by real Psychologists and not wannabe like me, and here we go:

Definition of Psychology

Are you a Psychologist, how would you define Psychology? please define Psychology your way in the comment box, if you like I can add it to the definitions on the body of this blog.

Some well know definition of Psychology: