Welcome to the University of Hertfordshire Research Blog

This blog is a snapshot of some of our research and shares the views of our researchers on global developments.

Our research is innovative, progressive and relevant to the needs of industry and society and in the latest Research Assessment Exercise over eighty-five percent was internationally recognised including forty-five percent as either world-leading and internationally excellent.

It is carried out across three Research Institutes:

  • Health and Human Sciences
  • Science and Technology
  • Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities

Our posts are archived within these categories, listed on the right.

We are world-leaders in a number of fields:

  • Our Centre for Astrophysics Research is one of the largest astronomy groups in the UK and is developing its international standing in key areas of astronomy research;
  • Our researchers are world leaders in the development of robots as social companions and in the use of robots to help children with autism and other disabilities to develop social skills.
  • We work with industry to reengineer business processes to reduce business costs and improve efficiency.
  • World-leading researchers in the Health and Human Sciences Research Institute (HHSRI) conduct research into new means of drug delivery and ways to enhance patient safety, which is being rolled out across Europe.

You are welcome to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog at http://feeds.feedburner.com/hertsresearch or via a feed reader, such as Google Reader.

The Media & PR team write the blog on behalf of the University research community which contributes the research stories and comments. We welcome your comments on these themes.

Please observe the usual rules of civility and courtesy. To comment, please complete the form at the bottom of each post and we aim to respond within 48 hours.

If you would like further information about any of the posts, please email us at: research-blog@herts.ac.uk

Latest Entries

Psychology Professor in top 50 list on Twitter

Posted on May 11, 2012

Professor Karen Pine features in a “top 50” list of psychology professors to follow on Twitter.   The list compiled by OnlineSchools.com identifies psychology professors who share some of their expertise with the Twitterverse!  Being prolific authors and brilliant researchers as well as expressing themselves through social media, this is a list of plugged-in professors who have really made an impact.

Check out Professor Pine on Twitter @Karenpine,

Professor Karen J Pine

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What body obsessive people see in famous faces

Posted on May 10, 2012

Individuals with BDD are more likely to identify upside-down images of famous faces as they focus on individual features rather than process them as a whole. Jennifer Anniston image courtesy of Angela George at http://flickr.com/photos/sharongraphics/

 

What do you see when you look at other people’s faces? Do you focus on a specific feature or do you look at their face as a whole?  Do you think you could recognise people’s faces when they are upside-down?

New research by Professor Keith Laws from the School of Psychology has shown that people who have an obsession relating to their body image, where they believe that they have a defect in their appearance, have an exceptional skill of recognising famous faces when they are upside-down.

Most people find it difficult to recognise upside-down faces because they normally process faces as a whole image the right way up.  But people with a mental health condition known as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) process faces in a different way and overly-focus on the individual facial features rather than the whole face. This aids their ability to recognise inverted famous faces as they are more intimate with specific facial features such as David Beckham’s eyes or Angelina Jolie’s lips for example.

People with BDD are often attractive individuals who focus negatively on specific features of their own body, especially their face.  They engage with time-consuming compulsive behaviours such as mirror-checking, applying make-up to camouflage and seeking reassurance about their appearance – up to fifteen per cent of people who seek cosmetic surgery meet the criteria for a BDD diagnosis.

The paper will be published in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders.

 

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A good standard of GP prescribing – but improvement possible

Posted on May 2, 2012

With over 990 million prescriptions per year dispensed in England, errors in GP prescribing are not unknown.  But how many errors are made?  And more importantly, how serious are these errors?

Dr Maisoon Ghaleb, together with Prof Soraya Dhillon and Dr Cinzia Pezzolesi, from the School of Pharmacy has collaborated in a major study into GP prescribing.  While the vast majority of prescriptions written by family doctors are appropriate and effectively monitored, around one in twenty prescriptions contain an error.

In the study, a sample of fifteen GP practices across three areas in England found that where there were prescribing and monitoring errors, most were classed as mild or moderate. But around one in every 550 prescription items was judged to contain a serious error. The most common errors were missing information on dosage, prescribing an incorrect dosage, and failing to ensure that patients got necessary monitoring through blood tests.

The research, commissioned by the General Medical Council is the largest-scale study of its kind.  It recommends a greater role for pharmacists in supporting GPs, better use of computer systems and extra emphasis on prescribing in GP training.

The report can be found at http://bit.ly/JRWTnq

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Dracula, the king of the vampires, and Bram Stoker’s ashes

Posted on April 27, 2012

Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium at Keats House

On Friday 20th April 2012, members of the Stoker family joined scholars, novelists and critics to mark the centenary of the death of Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker.    The Open Graves, Open Minds Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium led by Dr Sam George was held in Hampstead, London and included a visit to Golders Green crematorium to pay respects to Bram Stoker’s ashes. 

The romantic, period setting of Keats House, in Hampstead, was a fitting venue for the symposium.  Keats himself explored forbidden pleasures in his poem “Lamia” (1819), becoming synonymous with the female vampire.  Hampstead too has its links to Stoker and vampirism, featuring a number of times in the novel “Dracula”.

Through an exclusive programme of talks and discussions, the centenary symposium celebrated Dracula as the undisputed king of vampires.  The dark gothic legacy created by Stoker standing firm against the newer trend for the “sweetie” vampires of the Twilight series and American TV shows – a new, romantic type of vampire. 

The weather added to the eeriness of the occasion.  A sudden bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and a deep roll of thunder made the windows and curtains quiver before the skies opened with torrents of rain –an auspicious omen before setting out for the crematorium to view the urn containing ashes of Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker.

At the crematorium, the many tributes to Bram and his world-wide legacy of Dracula were led by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grand-nephew, who wrote “Dracula the undead” (the sequel to the original novel).

More information can be found on the Open Graves, Open Minds website.

Dacre Stoker (great-grand-nephew) with Bram Stoker’s ashes

 
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Sun-worshipping robot puts Bayfordbury on the world map

Posted on April 26, 2012
A robot installed at the University’s Bayfordbury Observatory has just joined the worldwide network AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), which is coordinated by NASA. The robot is a sun photometer, an automatic instrument for measuring the properties of atmospheric aerosols, such as industrial pollution. During the day the photometer checks if the sun is shining, and if it does, carries out a sequence of automated scans of the sky to determine the amounts of aerosol that are present. Until recently, the observatory has been used mainly for astronomy but it is now being equipped for atmospheric measurement by the Centre for Atmospheric and Instrumentation Research. More information can be found on the Centre for Atmospheric & Instrumentation Research website.
 
 

The sun photometer installed at the University's Bayfordbury Observatory

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Can interviews influence eyewitnesses nonverbally?

Posted on April 24, 2012

 

Influential gestures: touching a ring finger to suggest a ring

Continue reading →

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Hertfordshire Dementia Champions form Community of Practice

Posted on April 17, 2012

Hertfordshire Dementia Champions at inaugural symposium

Dementia is one of the biggest challenges of our time – it is a disease that steals lives and has a major impact on families and NHS resources.  Currently, there are about 750,000 people in the UK with dementia with an estimated cost to society of £23 bn; and this number is projected to rise to 940,000 by 2021

And it doesn’t just affect older people; people affected by this condition are getting younger.  So what is being done to support this and change the public perception of dementia?  What is being done to improve the quality of diagnosis, treatment and care for those living with dementia?

At a recent one-day meeting, over 120 health-care professionals from across the county attended the inaugural Dementia Champions Symposium hosted by the University in partnership with the NHS in Hertfordshire and the Alzheimer’s Society.  This event took place just days before the government announced extra funding for research into dementia to tackle the UK’s national crisis in care – doubling the dementia research budget to £66 m by 2015.

Hertfordshire Dementia Champions are forming a Community of Practice, hosted by the University’s Centre for Research in Primary and Community Care, to create a high quality county-wide support network for clinicians.  This network will provide on-going encouragement, support and, more importantly, a framework for the sharing of information about new dementia resources and national and local policy.

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Astronomer finds evidence for record-breaking nine planet system

Posted on April 12, 2012

An artist’s conception of the planetary system around HD10180. One of the new Super-Earth planets HD10180j is seen in the foreground (on the left hand side of the picture), with the nearby Neptune-like planet HD10180e in the background (on the right-hand side of picture with blue cloudy atmosphere). The central star and the other 7 planets can be seen in the distance, including the second new Super-Earth HD10180i, third out from the central star. Picture credit: By J Pinfield, for the RoPACS network (04/12).

How many planets does a planetary system need to break a record?  According to a study conducted by Mikko Tuomi from the Centre for Astrophysics Research, the answer is nine – one more than our own Solar system!  This significant discovery of the planetary system around the star named HD 10180 is the first time that astronomers have discovered a star with more planets than the Sun. Located 130 light years away, the star is not within reach of foreseeable human space travel, but in astronomical distances, it is still considered to be in the Solar neighbourhood!

Originally reported to be orbited by seven planets in 2010, re-analysed data from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) now indicates that the star has nine planets.  The study, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, verifies the existence of the previously announced seven planets and shows that there are likely to be two additional planets orbiting the star.

The two newly detected signals are probably those of planets classified as hot super-Earths.  These new planets are closer to the star’s surface than the Earth is to the Sun which makes them too hot to be able to maintain water on their surfaces in its liquid form. 

Future observations are required to verify the existence of these planet candidates and to establish the HD 10180 star system as the richest planetary system known to humankind – certainly a star worth keeping our telescopes on into the future.

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Mind-pops more likely with schizophrenia

Posted on March 30, 2012

Have you had a mind-pop experience today?  Were you cleaning your teeth this morning and thinking about what you were going to wear for work when all of a sudden an unrelated word or tune popped into your mind? Did you think “where on earth did that come from”? 

Almost everyone reports experiencing mind-pops at some time or another, but some experience them more than others according to research conducted by Professor Keith Laws, Professor Lia Kvavilashvili and Dr Ia Elua from the School of Psychology

Mind-pops are those little thoughts, words, images or tunes that suddenly pop into your mind at unexpected times and are totally unrelated to your current activity.

In the paper to be published in Psychiatry Research, findings suggest that mind-pop experiences are related to hallucinations in those people suffering from schizophrenia.

The researchers compared the frequency of mind-pops in people with schizophrenia, people with depression and mentally healthy individuals.   Their study found that all 100% schizophrenia patients reported experiencing mind-pops, compared to 81% of the depressed patients and 86% of the mentally healthy individuals.  In addition, schizophrenia patients experienced mind-pops significantly more frequently than depressed patients and mentally healthy people.  

Based on the findings of the research, the team has suggested that verbal hallucinations, the chief symptom of schizophrenia, may be related to the mind-pop phenomenon that almost everybody experiences, but just manifests itself in a different way!

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Milky Way image of one billion stars

Posted on March 29, 2012

Detail of the star-forming area known as G305 in the Milky Way

Two sky surveys of the Milky Way led by Dr Phil Lucas from the School of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics have been combined to show more than one billion stars in a near-infrared image.  British-built telescopes were used to take the images: the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) based in Hawaii covered the northern part of the Milky Way; and the VISTA telescope in Chile covered the southern part.

This combined data on over a billion stars represents a scientific legacy that will be exploited for decades in many different ways. The image provides a three-dimensional view of the structure of our spiral galaxy – showing the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a bulge in the middle!  Many structures of our spiral galaxy can be seen in the image, such as star clusters, gas and dust clouds where new stars are forming, and also stars all the way over on the far side of the galaxy.

The image has been published online with an interactive zoom tool. Zooming into the image reveals the wealth of detail on the small structures.

The UKIRT study (the UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey) was led by the University of Hertfordshire, while the VISTA study (VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea, or VVV) was co-led by astronomers in Chile at the Pontifica Universidad Catolica and at the University of Hertfordshire.  The picture itself was put together by the survey archive team at the University of Edinburgh.

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