Nicholas Troop

File:Nick Troop.jpg

Nicholas Troop is a health psychologist and a principal lecturer in health psychology at University of Hertfordshire. His range of works include the role of life events, coping and crisis support in the aetiology of eating disorders, stress- and trauma-responses, and mobility into the social rank and attachment.

He received his BSc Psychology from University of Dundee in 1992. Troop did his PhD on “Coping and Crisis Support in Eating Disorders” in the Eating Disorders Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry in London with Professor Janet Treasure as his supervisor. Prior to joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Troop was a lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

More recently, Troop have been investigating self-compassion, self-reassurance, involving the use of expressive writing He explored the use of expressive writing to reduce stress in parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In 2013, he assessed the use of an expressive writing task to increase self-reassurance and reduce self-criticism using a randomised controlled design.

His works in psychological well-being have also led him to begin exploring the role of music and song-writing on well-being.

He released three albums under the name CatDesigners. Chemical Jazz and Strange Little Creature are original material while Tomorrow Never Knows is a cover of the Beatles’ Revolver album. A fourth album of original material, Zuta Minute (Yellow Minute), has been recorded but not yet released. In 2009, he illustrated how some word types in David Bowie albums correlate with how long they spend in the charts. Troop has written a song that amplifies these results, maximising the use of these words to create the "ideal" Bowie lyric. Due to the fact that he is a psychologist, songwriter and musician, he is considered to be a psychomusicologist.