The psychology of success is about how to live a life of achievement and happiness. Understanding and applying the principles of success enables us to have more rewarding careers, better relationships, better health and a happier life.

Over the years a vast literature on this topic has developed and is generally referred to as the ‘self-help’ literature. While this enjoys a huge readership, it is of a very variable quality in terms of effectiveness of the principles that it promotes.

More recently, the academic discipline of ‘Positive Psychology’ has been established. Psychologists have conducted a series of scientific studies investigating the behaviours and attitudes that really make a difference to the level of success and wellbeing in our lives. Analyses have shown that there are five major principles of success. This lecture will describe each of these and demonstrate how they can be applied to bring achievement, happiness and fulfilment in all areas of our lives.

Please see www.patrickwjordan.net and www.patrickwjordan.com for more information.

The image that many of us hold about ourselves and present to others tends to be a flattering version of reality. Psychologists have long recognized this propensity for an enhancement bias in self-evaluation. However, the literature is mixed as to whether overly positive self-views are psychologically adaptive. In this presentation, I will emphasize the distinctions among several forms of bias in self-evaluation: misperception, exaggeration, lying, and delusion. These biases can differ in their underlying motives and in their short-term and long-term implications for psychological wellbeing. Bias can result from concerns with our public impression, the intention to deceive, and psychopathology - but also private motives for how we want to perceive ourselves in a particular context. I will discuss these issues using highlights (and lowlights) from a program of research on students' tendency to exaggerate their academic performance. As you will see, students who exaggerate tend to improve in their academic performance over time. However, there are many twists and bumps in the road linking exaggeration with improvement.

Dr Richard Gramzow is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Southampton, and a Member of the Centre for Research on Self and Identity. He is Associate Editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Journal of Research in Personality and Personality & Social Psychological Science.

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Shamanism, loosely defined, is an archaic technique of altering one's consciousness at will, which, in part, is done in order to communicate with Nature in the name of one's community. In many of the cultures still practicing shamanism this alteration is often mediated by Nature directly, through the ingestion of psychoactive plants. In turn shamans can be seen to be the custodians and caretakers of the local ecosystem that sustains their community, though it remains unclear to what extent this role is the product of the state of consciousness induced by the shamanic trance, and how much of it is due to the environment itself or the cultural milieu in which the shaman exists. At the most extreme confluence of psychology and ecology the shaman occupies a unique mental terrain that might offer something of value to our understanding of ecopsychology. Having searched for the source of the connection between shamanism and animism in the jungles of South America, armed only with Occam's Razor and the scientific method, the speaker raises numerous questions about the shaman's reality that take the study of psychology to some exotic new places.

David Luke, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich where he teaches an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experiences. Currently he is also President of the Parapsychological Association. As a writer and researcher he has a special interest in altered states of consciousness and he has studied ostensibly paranormal phenomena and techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites. He lives life on the edge, of Hackney, in London.

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Increasing car use causes various collective problems, such as congestion and increasing CO2-emmisions. Therefore, many argue that car use should be changed. It is often assumed that pricing policies are an effective strategy to change car use, but these policies are often not implemented due to a lack of public support. Hence, it is important to understand which factors influence the acceptability of transport pricing policies. In this seminar, four studies are presented in which various factors that affect the acceptability of transport pricing are examined. Also, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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The idea of positive "Mental health"' is an elusive concept, and mental health problems remain to trouble many people. This talk explores both the ways in which psychological, medical and social concepts of mental health have changed over the past 50 years, and how those changes are affecting the help available today.

John Hall is a clinical psychologist by background. He is Professor of Mental Health at Oxford Brookes University, and has for many years been involved in the development of mental health services.

Hypnotic suggestions allow most people to experience a change in the perceived voluntariness of motor and cognitive actions. The experience can be strong, surprising, and of clinical importance. Dienes and Perner (2007) proposed that the essence of hypnotic responding was the use of executive intentions without awareness of those intentions. That is, hypnosis is intimately linked to the way we become aware of what mental states we are in. In the talk I will discuss predictions of the theory and empirical tests.

Dienes, Z., & Perner, J. (2007). The cold control theory of hypnosis. In G. Jamieson (Ed.), Hypnosis and conscious states: The cognitive neuroscience perspective. Oxford University Press, pp. 293-314.

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Formally a Chemist before retraining for Anglican ministry, Bill gained experience as a Children's/Maternity Chaplain in handling loss issues where he completed his MPhil in Theology looking at the theology of grief. His doctorate in Psychology from Warwick was on the "Loss of a child: the long term impact on the parent-child bond". His current research looks at the impact of the loss of a child cross-culturally and he has written a number of self-help books for adults and children on grief issues. Bill is currently the lead Chaplain at Bournemouth University and the Art's University at Bournemouth.

According to previous research people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have a deficit in attributing mental states to facial expressions, especially when only the eyes are presented (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). Indeed, one view is that because people with autism pay insufficient attention to the eyes then they also lack the ability to use this information. The studies that I will present challenge previous findings as results suggest that individuals with autism can use dynamic information from the face and particularly the eyes to attribute mental states.

Back, E., Ropar, D., Mitchell, P. (2007). Do the eyes have it? Inferring mental states from animated faces in autism. Child Development, 78, 397-411.

Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “reading the mind in the eyes” test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241-251.

There is a large body of evidence suggesting that exposure to stress can increase the risk of disease. Exposure to stress triggers physiological responses in different organ systems. One of the major psychoneuroendocrine pathways is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis with its end product cortisol. Activity of this axis is linked to activity in limbic and prefrontal brain areas, and cortisol acts at its receptors in multiple organ systems, particularly affecting metabolic and immune system activity. As cortisol can be measured from saliva, it presents a relatively easy to assess endocrine indicator of stress exposure. One part of this seminar will present methods and findings of studies on HPA axis activity in association with psychosocial stress with an emphasis on assessments in daily life. However, not all individuals confronted with stress will proceed to develop disease. The concept of psychobiological stress reactivity is thought to explain part of the differences in the association between stress and disease. The second part of the seminar will present and discuss findings from research on stress reactivity, including psychoendocrine covariance and assessment of perceived stress reactivity.

Gender inequality is still an issue of high relevance in European societies as stated by the European Commission. Although a neglected field of research, previous findings indicate that language contributes to gender inequality in various ways: Gender-related information is transmitted through formal and semantic features of language, such as the grammatical category of gender or genderrelated connotations of role names (i.e., stereotypes) for example. As a formal system and as a communicative means, language passively reflects culture-specific social conditions, but in active use also expresses and potentially perpetuates these conditions. Intrinsic characteristics of language also play a major role in establishing and maintaining gender inequalities. There is considerable variation in how the sexes are cognitively represented and how these representations are realised linguistically (e.g., grammatical forms), and the presentation will address some of those linguistic realisations.

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