First chapter

Hi. I'm a psychology lecturer at Keele University in the United Kingdom. Midway between Manchester and Birmingham (click here to see Keele's location on Google maps), Keele's peaceful leafy campus has been a fantastic work base for me since 1999.

I won an Ig Nobel prize in 2010 for one of my main research interests, what you could call the psychobiology of swearing. Partly inspired by the Igs, the idea of this cool psychology blog is to discuss the kind of psychology research that is so fascinating that you can't help but say "Wow - that's cool!". That's why the blog is called "Cool Psychology". Swearing will be a common theme that I return to in the blog, but really any psychology research is game.

I hope people enjoy reading my cool psychology blog and find the research I talk about as enthralling as I do.

Entering its second year, the cool psychology blog has been attracting more readers. That's great - it's nice to know that the cool psychology blog is being read. The cool psychology blog has received over 2000 hits since it began. More recently the cool psychology blog has been receiving around 200 hits per month. Cool psychology blog readers are mainly from the US and UK and most cool psychology blog readers use Firefox. That must say something about cool psychology blog readers, but I'm not sure what! The most popular post on the cool psychology blog has been the one on daydreaming and driving. The next most popular post on the cool psychology blog has been the one on rat park. The website that has referred most readers on to the cool psychology blog has been my own Keele University webpage. Just thought I'd share that!