Selected Readings: Mind-brain relations in mental illness and clinical practice

Miresco M.J. & Kirmayer, L.J. (2006). The persistence of mind-brain dualism in psychiatric reasoning about clinical scenarios. American Journal of Psychiatry, 163, 913-918.

Pitman, M.M. (2002). Psychotherapy is delicate psychosurgery. South African Journal of Psychology, 32 (4), 1-8.

Welcome - 2011

Welcome to my blog site on research interests and research supervision. My intention is to use this site as a means to communicating more effectively regarding my research interests, potential topics for supervision, suggestions for further reading, etc., first as an aid in the process of supervisor allocation and, later, as a mechanism for keeping track of progress in ongoing research projects.

Since I started this site at the beginning of 2009, I have supervised six postgraduate projects on music: three on music imagery (one honours project, one MA project), two on emotional (chill) responses to music (honours project), and one EEG-based study on the processing of musical syntax/structure (honours project). I have also supervised a study on the impact and bibiometric analysis of qualitative research in Psychology.

Please note that, in general, posts on this site are in no particular order – please judge their relevance to you by their title and content.

Regards

Michael Pitman

Overview: Michael's Research Interests for Postgraduate Supervision

One obvious place to start would be with the interests and topics that I have typically listed on the Psychology Department’s hand-out for postgraduate students:

Extract from the departmental hand-out on supervisor research interests

Areas of Research Interest:

Consciousness; Cognitive Studies & Neuroscience; Free Will & Agency; Philosophy of Mind & Psychology; Philosophical Psycho-pathology; Methodology & Epistemology; Maths Anxiety.

Possible Topics and Topic Areas:
I am especially interested in empirical and experimental investigations of theoretically and philosophically interesting phenomena – for example:

a. Music Imagery (having a tune ‘in your head’), its nature and consequences (cognitive, emotional)

b. Responses to music (e.g. ‘chills’ and emotional responses), their nature, variations and determinants

c.  The effects of background music (on work, studying, etc.)

d. Verbal overshadowing (the disruptive effects of ‘thinking too much’)

e. Attitudes towards mind-body relations amongst professional psychologists (esp. clinicians)

f.   Emotion and cognition

g. Embodied approaches to perception and cognition

h. Change Blindness and/or Inattentional Blindness

i.   The Phenomenology of Agency & Free Will

It would also be of value for trends in research in Psychology, and specifically at Wits or in SA, to be examined and evaluated:

j.   Trends in Postgraduate Research in Psychology: e.g. topics, methods, epistemological frameworks, samples (e.g. use of student samples, ‘vulnerable’ populations)

k.  Trends in Research in South African Psychology: e.g. topics, methods, epistemological frameworks, samples (e.g. use of student samples, ‘vulnerable’ populations), impact of SA research

Overview: Recently Supervised Postgraduate Research Projects

2005                                      Daphne Desouza, BA Honours in Psychology

                                                Research Topic: Stress and Sense of Coherence: experiences of international postgraduate residence students

Julia Halstead-Cleak, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Transformative grief: exploring psychological well-being in bereaved parents following the death of a child

Hadar Kadosh, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Change blindness in the South African context: replicating the phenomenon

2006                                      Hadar Kadosh, MA by Dissertation

Dissertation: Effect of isolated facial feature transformations in a change blindness experiment involving a person as the object of change

Faraaz Mahomed, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Gender differences in the relationship between personality characteristics of the self and expressed preference of personality characteristics of a potential partner

Jarrod Payne, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: SMS text and English text: looking for a difference in processing time

2007                                      Andrea Lawrence, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Psychological research trends: shifts in the nature of research in relation to democracy in South Africa

Bronwyn Sherriff, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: The phenomenology of agency: adjudicating between Libertarian and Compatibilist accounts

Sasha Wickstrom, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: The relationship between perfectionism, gender and academic achievement in a South African undergraduate population

2008                                      Hayley Donaldson, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: The relationship between the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test and reading achievement in the early school grades

                                               Kerry Gordon, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Personality and the ‘chill’ effect: the relationship between personality and emotional responses to music

Haylee Waldorf, BEd Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Traditionally-trained teachers and inclusion: approaches to understanding and dealing with emotional and behavioural difficulties

2009                                       Nahaal Binazir, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Chill passages: musical characteristics and the responses they invoke

Granville Matheson, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Investigating the nature of the recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus in musical syntax processing

Azra Moolla, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: The effect of background music on cognitive performance

2009-2010                         Bronwyn Sherriff, MA in Psychology (CW/RRep)

Research Report: Exploring everyday musical imagery: an experience-sampling study

2010                                     Mary Fraser, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Experiences of Spontaneous Musical Imagery

Rob Peers, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Examining the bibliometric impact and legitimation of qualitative research in psychology

Angelika Ronge, BA Honours in Psychology

Research Topic: Familiarity and Emotional Responses to Instrumental Film Music