About Generally Thinking

This site is about psychology – the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. So it’s about you and me, what makes us tick, why we do what we do.

The point of this site is to help you, as a psychology student, do better in your course, whatever level you’re studying at. To that end, there are several sections to the site:

The Book – If you’ve never put dedicated effort into improving your study habits and practices, you’ll be able to make huge improvements with just a few little tweaks. The book tells you exactly what you need to do, not only to get better grades but also to improve your understanding of the subject, so that you’re not just ’studying for the test’.

The Blog – Regularly updated with articles on all areas of psychology – including study tips.

The Archives – All previous blog posts organised chronologically. Currently over 130 articles!

The Research Wiki – A wiki pointing you to the research of the various sub-fields of psychology, to help you work on your papers and do background reading. It’s a work in progress so feel free to get involved!

The Store – Recommended books and other useful purchases (coming soon)

About Me

I’m Warren Davies, the owner of GenerallyThinking. I’m a master’s student in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, and I graduated from the same place last year with a first class bachelor’s in psychology.

Although I got a good final grade, it didn’t help that I spent pretty much the entire first half of my degree either drunk, sleeping or hungover. About halfway through the second year I realised I had no good marks to speak of; I had failed some modules, others I scraped through on the re-sit exam, and I got the minimum possible score for just about every module that counted towards my final grade.

That was a lot of fun, but it’s a pretty dire situation, academically. Since I actually did want to do well in the course and I’d already messed up a number of important modules, I had to get better grades than I normally would, in less time than I’d normally have to bring my average back up. So I had to learn a few tricks of the trade, so to speak; which is what the study guide is about.

Apart from studying for my course, my time is taken up by working on this site, which is my full-time job, and I’m also learning Spanish (contact me if you want to trade Spanish lessons for English lessons or mentoring for your psychology course).

If you’re new to GenerallyThinking, be sure to subscribe using your favoured method, and you can also follow me on Twitter.

Popular Posts

Five things everybody needs to know about materialism – Fight Club inspired piece about the known correlates of being materialistic (focused on money and material possessions).

Strengths and Weaknesses – Overview of the strengths movement, and portal to the other strengths resources on the site.

How to be Happier – 10 Scientifically Supported Ideas – How to achieve happiness is one of the more sought-after topics in psychology at present. Although this is a young field and there’s much work to do, a number of effective exercises have been devised and tested; here are 10 of them.

The Buddhist Brain – What happens to the brain if you spend 44,000 hours in focused meditation? Neuroscientists have taken veteran Buddhist monks with decades of meditation experience, and subjected them to modern brain imaging techniques. This is what they found.

Positive Priming – ‘Priming’ is a well-documented psychological phenomenon where exposure to a certain stimuli makes a particular behaviour or physiological response more likely to happen. It can make people smarter in IQ tests, work harder in physical endurance tests, and even become biologically younger. This is an overview of some of the findings in this area.