Graduate School

Psychology research overview

The Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth has a thriving postgraduate research programme.  We welcome enquiries and applications from prospective full time and part time UK, EU and international postgraduate researchers.

Our postgraduate research students conduct independent and original research on a chosen topic, working closely with a supervisor team led by a First Supervisor who guides and advises them throughout their study.

For more information about how to apply please contact the Faculty of Science using the Contact us page.

If you have any questions about studying for a research degree at the University of Portsmouth, please complete our enquiry form.

Key Facts

RAE rating: We are an active department committed to the dissemination of high quality basic and applied research. In the recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, our researcher's work was rated 80% "internationally recognised or above", with 31% of the research outputs rated "internationally excellent or world-leading".  The Department's research projects in each of our three research centres was assessed as "internationally excellent", with special mention to research in primatology, forensic psychology and visual attention.

Academic staff: 35, please see staff list webpage.

Postgraduate research students:32

Internal links: Our interdisciplinary interests are reflected in our links with the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies and the Language across Borders research cluster of the Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR), both in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

External links: The Department's research teams have attracted funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the British Academy, the Home Office, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the European Union, the US government and the British Psychological Society.

Our current research collaborations include links with the Universities of Abertay, Campinas, Leicester, Maastricht, Minas Gerais, Rondônia, Sheffield, South Carolina, Staffordshire; Emory University, Flinders University, Florida International University, Aarhus University, Lund University, Macquarie University, and the Max-Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen).

Resources

The Department of Psychology boasts a range of purpose-built facilities including practical and project rooms, a student computing suite, and several specialised laboratories for conducting research in colour vision, human movement, psychophysiology, visual and auditory perception.

Our research facilities allow postgraduate research students to gain experience on a wide range of techniques used in contemporary psychological research and practice. We place high priority on integrating our researcher's work and interests within the teaching programme, providing students with an opportunity to learn about many theoretical and practical issues of importance in psychology today.

Please see our Laboratories and Facilities webpage for more information.

Research Centres

International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology
The International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology has an established international reputation for conducting a broad range of criminological and forensic psychology research. The Centre comprises an impressive team of researchers and postgraduate research students.Our innovative work in forensic psychology has been a cornerstone of the Department of Psychology since 1990, delivering high quality research at national and international level.

Centre for Human Ecology, Culture and Communication (CHECC)
The Centre was formed in 2007 from two existing research groups, Ecological Psychology and Language and Communication. The Centre integrates the categories of meaning and materiality, by extending the ecological approach from the individual level to the sociocultural, and by relating cultural and linguistic differences to historical and cultural processes in the human shaping of the material world. These themes are central to the work of the Centre, with its emphasis upon extended, situated embodiment, meaning, place and materiality.

Centre for the Study of Emotion
The Centre for the Study of Emotion was established in 2001 by developmental, comparative and neuro psychologists to support convergent interests in emotion research. The Centre provides a home for scholarly activities across the following three domains: nature and processing of emotional expression; emotions and the self; and neural processing of attention and emotion. A fourth area involves emerging interdisciplinary projects with medicine, robotics, prisons and animal welfare

Research Areas

Forensic Psychology

Interventions with offenders
Our researchers work and provide high quality research supervision in fields such as: Dialectical behaviour therapy with female offenders;Social climate as a mediator of adjustment and response to therapeutic interventions in custodial settings; Interventions with young offenders; Moral disengagement in young offenders; Processes involved in personal change.

Detecting deception
If your research interest lies in this field, our researchers can provide excellent supervision in topics including: Verbal and nonverbal detection of deception; Polygraph; Criteria based content analysis; Malingering in medico-legal contexts.

Witness memory
The witness memory researchers undertake research and supervision on the following fields: Eyewitness testimony; Earwitness testimony; Identification procedures; Child witnesses ; Tools and interventions for improving witness performance.

Decision making in the forensic context
In this area, our researchers conduct research and supervision in topics such as: Investigative interviews with vulnerable witnesses and suspects; Burglars' decision-making; Jury decision-making; Contextual influences on homicide; Stereotypes and prejudice; Assessment centres for recruitment of prison officers.

Suggestibility
We can offer excellent supervision in this fascinating area of research, which includes topics such as:Hindsight bias; Memory conformity; False memory.

Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology

Attention and Neuroscience
The Attention and Neuroscience researchers work and supervise postgraduate research students in topics such as: Visual attention to dynamic events and objects and perceptual reorganization; Internal and external variables in temporal attention and visual awareness; Dyadic and triadic attention in chimpanzees; Emotion, personality, and neural processing; Attention to the self; d=Dyadic and triadic engagements with 4-month-old infants; Conceptual and perceptual processing in children with autism; Visual attention in primates.

Emerging Interdisciplinary Studies of Emotion
If your interests lie in this area of research, we can offer excellent supervision in the fields of:: Emotion developmental approach to the design of robotic systems; Emotional beliefs and attitudes toward controversial topics and belief in animal emotions; Experience of pain and negative emotion following traffic accidents without obvious physical damage; Interpersonal behaviour and self-regulation of emotion in offenders and those who work with them.

Multimodal Production and Perception of Emotion
Our research and student supervision in this are includes the following topics: Evolution of facial expression ; Role of emotion and olfaction in cognition; Emotional contagion and vocal laughter ; Multimodal socio-emotional communication and chimpanzee gesture ; Perception of emotion; Expressions of joy in one-year old infants and shyness in early infancy ; Gestural development in chimpanzees ; Dynamic information in facial expressions.

The Self
This includes research and supervision on: Self conscious emotions and communication in mirrors in early infancy; Self awareness in human and chimpanzee infants and neonatal imitation as engagement of self with other; Complex animal emotions: jealousy in dogs and personality in horses; Self-efficacy in student learning.

Animal Behaviour
Our researchers are undertaking research and supervision in specialisms such as: Primatology, Human Evolutionary Psychology, and Human-Animal Interaction.

Affective and Cognitive Neuroscience
Our researcher's methodological interests and areas of supervision range from neural processing (with EEG) to facial muscle movement (with EMG) and eye tracking. On the Brain-behavioural area, we can supervise you on a range of topics from neural processing and personality traits, to emotional facial expressions, understanding visual attention and visual awareness.

Situated Action and Communication

Ecological Psychology
If your interests lie in this area, we can offer excellent supervision on fields such as: Use of everyday objects; Building and design as social practice and against theory of mind; Robotics; Visual control and exploratory learning.

Language, Gesture and Mind
The researchers in this area conduct innovative research and supervision on topics including:: Language ontology and cognitive typology of space and time; Linguistic diversity, linguistic style for self-help and understanding metaphor; Grammar of human and non-human gesture, social cognition and food sharing in apes; Emergence of numerical understanding, Flint knapping; morphology and etymology of learning to spell; Language socialisation, narrative, agency in verbal and embodied communication.

Cultural Psychology
Our researchers investigate and conduct supervision on specialisms including: Experience of older people coping with reduced resources; Places of meaning, social network and health; Narratives of retractions; Contested claims of childhood sexual abuse; Experience of fathers of disabled children and discourse analysis of referral documents about CB and Intellectual Disability.

Other specialisms also include: Vygotskyan approaches to intersubjectivity and communication and indigenous theories of development and life-span; Communicative interactions and analogical cognition in great apes; Cognitive similarities and differences across culture; Directing and complying in infancy; Deception and its socio-cultural supports.

Human Factors
The Human Factors researchers work in a wide-range of specialisms and can provide you with high quality supervision in fields such as:Including research on: Use of colour coding with complex displays; Link between cartography and the use of colour in control room applications; Quality of working life of employees; How people detect counterfeit currency; How computer monitor use affects binocular reading;  Factors affecting detection of threat items in X-ray images of luggage.

In addition, our researchers can supervise you in the following topics: Colour in GIS displays;  Causes of motion sickness; Mobile communication; Theoretical problems of goal-directed behaviour and their implications for problem solving in complex cognitive tasks; Ecological designs for complex medical displays; Robotic implementation of movement control strategies.