All in the Mind

Why is being ostracised a painful experience? This is one of the questions Professor Kip Williams explores in experiments in his psychology lab at Purdue University, along with measuring aggressive behaviour which ostracism can stir up in someone given the silent treatment. He tells Claudia Hammond that the tools of his trade include a computer game called Cyberball and bottles of hot chilli sauce...

New research conducted by Matthew Longo at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London has found that feelings of claustrophobia could be related to our sense of personal space. And it could be determined by the length of our arms. Suicide and Bereavement: On average there is one death from suicide in the UK every 90 minutes. This means of course that a higher number...

Professor James Fallon tells Claudia Hammond his tale of self-discovery: a story with some dark and disturbing turns involving psychopaths and brain scans, family skeletons, some very personal genetic revelations and the power of parental love. Two people who experience mirror-pain and mirror-touch synaesthesia explain what it's like to see someone being hurt and feeling the sensation of pain or t...

Presenter Claudia Hammond starts a new series of All in the Mind by joining mothers and babies at a travelling, high-tech language lab in a Children's Centre in London's East End. The testing session is just one of many to be carried out over the next two years in the communities of two of London's most deprived boroughs, Tower Hamlets and Newham. Parents and babies are being invited to participat...

One in four of us is said to have a mental health problem. It's a statistic that's almost as well-used and well-known as the entreaty to eat your five a day. But where has this near-ubiquitous statistic come from, and is there research that backs it up ? Claudia talks to neuroscientist, Jamie Horder, about his personal quest to find the original source for the one in four figure and to Til Wykes,...

Adoption These days the secrecy surrounding adoption has lessened and many children are interested to know where they come from and may receive letters from their birth families or even meet up with them. Claudia Hammond reviews the evidence for this approach and also looks at how social networking could change adoption.

Portraits of the Mind Portraits of the Mind, is a collection of images visualizing the brain from antiquity through to the present day. How to map the brain. The Human Connectome Project is a major new project which will map how different areas of the brain connect to each other and help understand what makes us human. Others say we would learn more about our minds by looking at the minute detail,...

John O'Donoghue's first admission to a psychiatric hospital came when he was 16 years old. He experienced the final days of the huge old asylums like Claybury and Friern Barnet well as ECT, homelessness and prison. He tells Claudia Hammond about how education turned his life around. He's a poet and now teaches creative writing. This year his memoir, Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, scooped the MIND...

Flashbacks are intrusive memories that can plague people after a traumatic incident. Now there's a possibility that playing certain kinds of computer games in the hours after the traumatic event could prevent images flashing back into the mind when they're not wanted. Emily Holmes at Oxford University wants to develop what she calls a cognitive vaccine. This would be used in the hours straight aft...

Forensic Science, Psychology and Human Cognition: When the Oregon attorney, Brandon Mayfield, was arrested for the Madrid bombings six years ago, the FBI's fingerprint examiners claimed they were 100% sure that his fingerprints were on the bag containing detonators and explosives. But they were wrong. And this sensational error has drawn attention ever since, to the widely held, but erroneous beli...

Psychologists at the University of Exeter have found that young offenders are two to three times as likely as everyone else to have had a head injury. Huw Williams, Associate Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at Exeter University spoke exclusively to Claudia Hammond about the implications of his study. Twenty Four Hour Memory Loss: A few years ago a film came out called 50 First Dates. It star...

John, an infantry officer for 19 years, was held up at gunpoint, bombed and saw friends and colleagues killed in action. He tells Claudia Hammond about the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he suffered when he left the armed forces. And in the first-ever UK study of military personnel in a theatre of war, in Iraq, to test mental health, the military is revealed to have experienced less psycholog...