Help with Psychology final year project

Hi there. Just stumbled across this forum as I was searching so I thought I'd give it a go. I'd be grateful to anyone who can offer me some advice and insight on brainstorming for a topic/idea for my dissertation project.

I've been looking up various psychology sites and found a few idea but sadly, they are not narrowed down enough for me to start focusing towards a research questions. Any pointers or help to point me in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Initially, I wanted to focus on Social Psychology - Advertising then I realized it was too broad. So here are a few areas that interest me and hopefully, with your help I'd be able to narrow it down and get a move on with it.

1. Physical attractiveness - attractive people are perceived to be more intelligent, healthy, sociable thus leading into cosmetic surgery and self-esteem.

2. Women's dress sizes and confidence ratings. Some tend to dress a size up or down to make them feel better. Linked to self-esteem as well.

3. How perfectionism and being too 'in-control' hinders creativity and life.

4. Happiness and overthinking.

5. Self-knowledge and self esteem.

6. Culture and death perception.

If I would be able to get some feedback (if any at all) would be great.
I look forward to hearing your ideas and criticisms about the above ideas.

Reply 1

easter_bunny

I don't really have any direct criticisms/etc directly about the ideas, but what I would say is bear in mind the project will stay with you. At my university I found a lot of people did body shapes, advertising, etc, and that definetely is fashionable at the moment. If you really want this topic and that's what you genuinely want to do that's obviously fine, but if there's something grittier you're interested in then I'd go for it. If you do post grad stuff you will probably be asked about your project, and it's useful later on to say what you gained from it.

Reply 2

Liv1204

My Final Year Project was related to perfectionism, it was actually really interesting. :smile:

There's some interesting research out there about the consequences of perfectionistic dimensions (e.g. negative perfectionistic dimensions might hinder creativity, but positive perfectionism might not correlate so well?), and it's good to evaluate too. So the creativity/perfectionism research sounds like it could work as a study, so long as you can find ways to measure creativity accurately (which I guess might be difficult?)

I can't help much with narrowing down your options (I'm terrible at thinking of ideas!) but if you haven't already it's worth looking up those topics on your university's library/journal site or even Google Scholar - type in the key phrases and just see what comes up, and it might be able to give you some ideas to build on from the research you see (even if you just read the Abstracts!)

If you're interested in Advertising, have you looked up research about self-esteem and advertising? Like, maybe people with lower self-esteem are more likely to be influenced by advertisements (or vice versa?) I don't know what research is out there though!

Good luck anyways, I hope it goes well. :smile:

Help with Psychology final year project

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