Foreign Perspectives

Seeing as I’m restarting the psychology next month, I’ve been keeping my eye out for events in that line. We’re quite well served with them locally and I’ve managed several full-day conferences as well as a number of shorter presentations.

Last week was the occasion for a “Thinking Well” event which is part of the ongoing series of events that the civil service health promotion Well programme runs. This is something of a new departure for them as up to now they’ve generally concentrated on physical health and with relatively short presentations compared to the three hour long one last Friday.

Usually, these work-based mental health programmes concentrate on stress to the exclusion of all else so it was a refreshing change to have one that looked more at one’s own behaviours and the thinking modes of others for a change. Quite an interactive session though fortunately it wasn’t billed as such as that would have almost certainly put people off what was an enjoyable and, I think, useful session.

The two presenters passed the presentation back and forth pretty much seemlessly and used a whole bunch of techniques that they later explained to manipulate a number of people in the room surprisingly successfully. One session at the end designed to show how easily people developed mirrored body language was almost scary in how closely some people dropped into the mirroring with two people in the group almost at the point of appearing as an couple.

As in all psychology models, there were idealised groups into which people were categorised, in this case auditory, visual, kinesthetic and autitory-digital and there was a fair bit of talking around the most effective means of interacting with each of those categories.

Overall, quite an enjoyable little course and one that has elements which may be useful in the future.