If my name was Jo this would be Jo's blog

I just had a health psychology lecture which was a guest lecture by Associate Professor Richie Poulton, director of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development study. He talked about the project and research they have found on genetic bases of maltreatment, aggression and depression. Last year I heard Dr Shyamala Nada-Raja talk about their research findings on self harm. The DMHDS has always intriged me and apparently the restof the world. They get funding from Britain and the States. They will NOT take funding from drug companies which is a very sensible thing. They are now 4 weeks off finishingphase 32 where they interview and test all the participant at age 32. After all this time they still have a 96% retention rate of original participants. Did you know that if you have a vunerable non protected COMT gene then you are 5 times more likely to get psychosis from taking marijuana than someone with a non vulnerable gene if you are using during adolescence. Don't let the idea that you are an adult after 19 fool you, biologically you are an adolescent until afteryou are 22! So teenagers steer clear of drugs for the sake of your mental health! Vulnerability is much increased if a family member has had any history of mental illness. The 5-HTT gene is important to those people interested in incidence and genetic predisposition to depression. It comes in 3 polymorphised forms, short-short, short-long and long-long. 5-HTT helps to control the neurotransmitter serotonin. The short-short allele is the most prone to depression. The long-long allele is a protectivefactor against depression. Basically it's the nature vs nurture debate but ion reality its nature via nurture. The short-short allele may make you vulnerable but nurture almost necessarily needs to be a factor for life stresses to lead to depression. The world health organisation predicts that soon depression the world's second largest disease of burden (next to cardiovascular disease) causing death. I know i've been ranting on and this may beboring for some people. If you are really interested asI am then there are nearly 1000 scholarly papers written about aspectsof this study and can be accessed by contacting them via their webpage whichis on the Universityof Otago website.

Here we are again

I have had a 3 hour lecture for development of brain and behaviour and in 20 minutes I have a 3 hour lecture for developmental psychology. Tonight for worship team I have choir practice for both morning and evening services and it's 'prayer and praise' night so lots of singing there too. In between I should be working on my presentation for next week. Thursday's are always so long and hungry! After a long day yesterday I went home to read a Baron-Cohen treastise, I can't get away! Well actually I don't want to get away! What tomes of wisdom shall I expell today? Don't bother trying to interpret yur children's drawings cos there is absolutely no reliablity or validity between children's drawings their intelligence, personal well-being or possible sexual abuse. Just in case you were gonna, cos lots and lots of people use the DAP (draw a person) tool as a measurable factor and in the states in's even admissable in court! How possibly could you think that giving a child paper and a pencil and asking them to draw your father (5 minutes) draw your mother and draw yourself could actually validly and reliably tell you anything? Ha ha autistic savants would totally throw a spanner in the works for that one! I am rambling on cos hey I can, nobody need care, read or agree with me on anything. But you can agree that if I don't head off to class now i'll be late! I'll be back!!!

Major 2nd

Yes this is my second post today but this is all new and exciting and now I actually have something to say! I should be working on my powerpoint presentation of language disorders but that can wait. I have just had a meeting with my supervisor and now I have 120 parental consent forms to give to parents of 3 and 4 year olds. Yay! We talked about my study and other studies of similar research and about Asperger syndrome. He gave me a video with Temple Grandin and Simon Baron-Cohen on it, just for interest. It's great talking about Autistic Spectrum Disorders, I could talk about them until someone tells me to shut up! Any takers? Ted (supervisor) also said I could possibly do my PhD with Simon Baron-Cohen which would be a dream come true! Can't get better than that! Said I should drop his name in cos "name dropping really helps".

The first post (as opposed to the last post)

Well this is my blog spot, I finally decided to create one. I went to prayer meeting at church at 7:00am and now i'm at uni apparently working diligently, but hey nothing wrong with setting up a blogspot is there? So are you going to get amazing life changing thoughts from me? Hopefully eventually, right now i'm just figuring this thing out!