(Above) The British Science Festival has over 250 events, exhibitions, activites and trips
Do you know someone with a great job, brilliant personal relationships, and a happy life? While this person is probably an intelligent, self-made, out-going optimist, they may have acquired their positive outlook as a result of a superior working memory, the function which provides an ability to remember and manually process short-term information.
This mood/memory correlation forms half of Neuromantics, a pioneering research project launched by the British Science Association to analyse public response from online surveys. The other half of the study looks at our susceptibility to bend to different advertising techniques, presenting findings from both areas at the British Science Festival in Birmingham.
The Memory Game considers working memory in relation to mental health and draws upon a recent survey of 20-year-olds in which, of those whose outlook on the world was "glass half empty", the individuals who had a good working memory were less likely to suffer from depression.
In the study, run by Dr. Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, those with poor memory skills were more likely to struggle in their working and personal lives and potentially get in trouble with the law.
"Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" asks psychologist Dr Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, who devised the test.
"With this study, we want to investigate how important working memory can be to your levels of happiness and how it could change your outlook on life."
Adlab, the second part of Neuromantics, investigates the influence of advertising on our behaviour, whether we hold beauty over science, imagery over words, or pedestal celebrity endorsement.
It was created by co-editor of the European Journal of Marketing, Professor Nick Lee, and a leading cognitive neuroscientist, Dr Carl Senior, both from Aston University in Birmingham.
"Adlab is an exciting attempt to understand how advertising works, but also more importantly how we react to different types of messages – in particular, whether we do it rationally or not," says Professor Nick Lee.
"However, in order to draw any firm conclusions, we need a huge amount of people to take part – the more opinions we have, the more confident we are about our findings. The study is really short, and might even be a little bit of fun."
Surveys are available online now at www.neuromantics.co.uk. The British Science Festival takes place 14-19 September.
