Question: What is your thesis about?

Sam Parsons answered on 20 Sep 2017:

Thanks for the question georgiaa!

My thesis title is “The cognitive characteristics of resilience and optimal health”. Now, if you think that sounds super vague, you would be right. There are cognitive biases (such as an automatic attention bias for threatening information), that relate to emotional disorders (in this case anxiety). But, while lots has been done to investigate these biases in ‘what is wrong’, my thesis aims to investigate these biases in ‘what is right’. For example, my first study asked people questions about their wellbeing, and they completed an attention task, an emotion recognition task, and a memory bias task. I found some interesting relationships that I started to follow up, hoping to create a cognitive account of positive mental health.

Thanks for the great question!