What is Selective Mutism? A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.

So moving on to the psychology news section, we're reading from the British Psychological Society Research Digest.

And the first one is, "New framework broadens the search for unstudied sensory experiences.

From the ceaseless stream of sensory information which is streaming into our brains, we make sense of the world.

Most of the time, our conclusions are very simple.

Open quote, 'Most people agree on whether things are blue versus green, loud versus quiet, pleasant versus unpleasant,' note researchers at the University of Sussex.

Some people sense the world differently, however.

About 8% of the population, for example, suffer from myopia and feel profound anger or anxiety at specific sounds, usually chewing.

About the same proportion have a vision deficiency, generally known as colorblindness, whilst around 4.4% experience synesthesia." And please know, I am dyslexic, so I am very bad at pronouncing these names.

"And sensory over or under sensitivities are relatively common in autism.

Until now, these differences have been treated as learning conditions," write the researchers.

"However, in this paper, the team describe a newly formulated and overarching sensory diversity framework which allows for the mapping, systemic categorization, and even prediction of sensory differences." Okay, wow, so this is brilliant.

I flat-out love new frameworks, new psychological models, and this is just brilliant.

Because frameworks are really, really nice to work from because they allow us to understand very complex, extremely complex systems and research, and it collaborates all of this into a nice, easy to understand framework, so we can try and understand and formulate about how different things work a lot easier.

And as an aspiring clinical psychologist, these frameworks, whilst they are not perfect, whilst there will always be that massive gap between what a theory says and what actually happens in real life, it's still critical.

It's still useful, because we can build evidence-based interventions and our more practical research studies on theoretical frameworks and theoretical findings.

So these are brilliant, and I'm really, really happy that researchers have come up with this.

For sensory experiences, there is a massive overlap.

There must be connections between these different sensory experiences- And how they impact a person's mental health.

Or if we take this from an educational psychology point of view, how it impacts their educational outcome, how it impacts their motivation, their learning styles, and their academic performance.

So all of these things must be interconnected.

And frameworks like this help us to understand it better.

But I also quite like the idea of sensory diversity frameworks, because this is actually quite a more holistic way.

And it is also a more compassionate way.

Because before, I sort of have a feeling that like anything to do with the DSM-5, and any sort of these diagnosis models, we basically say, right, you are not normal because you experience this.

Therefore, there must be something wrong with you.