BPS Cyberpsychology Conference 2025
I spoke at my first ever conference last week! It was a poster presentation about ‘Behaviour Change and Social Connectedness in Gamified Learning Platforms’. Aside from getting an opportunity to speak about my work in progress and get feedback from more experienced academics, I met a bunch of wonderful people and learned a lot about different aspects of cyberpsychology.
The keynotes were delivered by Dr Joanne Lloyd (University of Wolverhampton) and Professor Andrew Przybylski (University of Oxford). In addition to learning from their expertise I also had the opportunity to attend talks and workshops around a whole host of topics – public perceptions of social media, AI threats to cyber security, nostalgic experiences in video games, barriers to social media engagement among people with dementia, improving equality, diversity and inclusion in gaming, cybersecurity behaviours and technologically facilitated behavioural analysis – to name but a few!
Perhaps my most valuable takeaways were:
- There are other people researching similar things all over the world, and my work has value.
- It is always beneficial to discuss struggles you have. In this case, finding other folks from industry entering the academic world really helped me feel less alone.
- In-person conferences are worth the investment; they may cost a lot of energy, time and money, but the opportunities for connections, conversations and shared memories are priceless.
- Academics aren’t lofty – they are just people who have spent time studying and talking about their passions.
- I know a lot more about Birmingham than I thought and I could probably side gig as a tour guide if I wanted to.
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