Profile
Sam Parsons
today I'm meeting with young peoples groups to promote the www.oxfordARCstudy.com to help investigate mental health in teens during and after lockdown
My CV
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Education:
St Birinus Secondary School, 2001-2006, Didcot Sixth Forms, 2006-2008; University of Stirling, 2008-2012; Oxford Brookes, 2013-2014; and University of Oxford 2014 to present.
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Qualifications:
GCSEs in all the standard subjects, nothing out of the ordinary here 🙂AS in PhysicsA levels in Maths, Further Maths, Philosophy2008-2012 BSc in Psychology @ Stirling2013-2014 MSc in Psychology @ Oxford Brookes2014-now DPhil in Experimental Psychology @ Oxford
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Work History:
I’ve also worked for a few years during my Undergraduate and Masters’ degrees as a Support Worker for people with learning disabilities.
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Current Job:
I am DPhil (PhD) candidate.
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About Me:
I am a Postdoctoral researcher in adolescent mental health, specifically cognitive processes and worry
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I live in Oxfordshire with my wife and our Cat, Beau (“Bo”). I’m a Type 1 Diabetic, which I try to manage as much as possible with a Primal/Paleo diet and a solid exercise regime. I used to watch too much South Park, but with Netflix this has been replaced by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which is the perfect anti-sitcom.
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My work centres on investigating how the way we process emotional information relates to psychological resilience and wellbeing. Biases in the processing of emotional information in attention, interpretation, and memory (amongst others) has been found to associate with emotional disorders. It is the current goal of my research to investigate whether similar mechanisms are involved in positive mental health. For this, I use computerised cognitive tasks and a variety of experimental methodologies and analytic strategies. I also have a side project examining the reliability of the cognitive measures involved in the field of experimental psychopathology. This is an important issue that can render interpretations of our analyses inaccurate, yet has been under-investigated and reported.
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My Typical Day:
At the moment, way too much sitting in front of a laptop. I spend most of my time working on the oxford ARC study: Achieving Resilience during (and after) COVID in adolescence
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In a typical day for the next few months, I will spend most of the day writing. By writing I mean the combination of writing sections of a paper or thesis chapter from my jumbled notes, and revising sections that I had already written based on my own or supervisors’ comments. I will typically also revisit some of the published literature to ensure that I have good support for the arguments I have made. I typically have a reasonable amount of email communications to keep on top of as well, including discussing issues and updates with my supervisors, talking with some of my collaborators and other researchers in my field. If I have time between my own writing, I will read research papers, blog posts about science and statistics. I also listen to podcasts like “Everything Hertz” and “the Black Goat” on the walk into and from the office.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Early Career Researcher.
What did you want to be after you left school?
Originally, I wanted to be a Psychiatrist or Clinical Psychologist.
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