Student Wins 2008 Undergraduate H.T.A Whiting Prize

This is a national competition that received entries from Sport & Exercise Science and Psychology Departments across the British Isles, and is the second year in a row that a student from the department has won this prize after Christian Edwards won last year. Louisa's dissertation focused on the psychological effects of exercising in the presence and absence of other exercisers or an audience. She found that when people exercised alongside other exercisers they perceived that they were working harder than when they exercised alone but at the same exercise intensity.

Her results also revealed that when asked to exercise in front of an audience or alone, people who were more concerned about how others perceived them worked at a higher speed and cycled further. These results have implications for perceptions of exercise and work output in relation to who is present when the exercise is carried out. Louisa is hoping to present her research at the 2009 Annual BPS Conference in Brighton and her achievement follows a strong tradition in the Department for students winning prizes in the BPS and British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences student competitions.