Hallo,
I hope that it’s OK for me to post this here. I know that some sites do not allow people to solicit their membership for this kind of activity, which I completely understand.
My name is Nick Brown and I am a student on the Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of East London in England.
As part of my course, I am conducting a research project that aims to identify whether certain moods/emotions that people feel at the start of the day might affect their ability to “self-regulate”. Self-regulation, in the context of this project, means keeping to your goals in dieting – i.e., not exceeding your calories for the day – or smoking – i.e., not smoking at all, or not smoking more than X cigarettes. (While I understand that this site is about the combination of diet and exercise, I’m specifically looking at the “dieting” side when it comes to weight loss.) The aim is to see whether being in a good mood – and, maybe, a specific good mood (psychologists like to divide good moods into things like “Alert” and “Inspired” and “Excited”) – helps with self-regulation. Or, maybe being in a good mood makes you celebrate (read “with lunch”), and so it might be better to be feeling a bit less good? That’s why we call psychology a science.
This is genuine scientific research (references are available on request; contact details for me and my supervisors are on the project website; the results will be submitted for publication to an academic journal) and there is no financial or other form of personal gain for me in this. (In fact, it involves me sitting in front of a computer for rather longer than I’d like!)
The survey will run until the end of May 2013, for up to 60 days per participant (you will be able to provide data to it on one day or all 60, or any number in between). Every time you provide data, you will get an entry into a draw, with three prizes of $50 Amazon gift vouchers (or an equivalent).
One feature of the survey that may be of interest to QSers is that you can export a table of your results (in Excel/XML format) at any time. So you can compare your outcomes with your moods across the duration of the study.
If you are interested, please go to http://www.srstudy.org/ to sign up. And whether you join or not, please pass this message on to your friends and family, if you think that they might be interested.
Thanks for reading, and I hope that you will be able to take part!
Nick