Psychology
Academic staff research interests
The table below shows the main research interests of individual members of staff, which may serve as a guide to potential areas for postgraduate research supervision. Further details of individual staff expertise and publications may be obtained by clicking on the staff names shown below or via the individual staff pages of this site.
Mr Dee Anand
Personality disorder; psychopathy; sexual offending; risk assessment and schema theory.
Dr Lucy Akehurst
Detecting deception in children and adults; criteria-based content analysis; interviewing children for legal purposes; the effect of social conformity and misinformation on eyewitness testimony.
Prof Kim Bard
Developmental processes of emotion, cognition, and socialisation in infancy of great apes and humans, including intersubjectivity, attachment, mirror self-recognition, tool-use, imitation, culture, and communication. Use of observational, comparative, and ethological methods; primatology.
Dr Hartmut Blank
Social influences on remembering; memory interference; hindsight bias; eyewitness suggestibility; social cognition; cognitive consistency; meta-analysis.
Dr Julie Cherryman
Police interviewing of vulnerable witnesses (particularly adults with learning disabilities); police investigative interviewing of suspects; earwitness identification / voice recognition; eyewitness identification.
Prof Alan Costall
Ecological psychology; theory and history of the human sciences; anthrozoology; pictorial representation, including children's drawings; ‘affordances’.
Dr Marina Davila Ross
Social communication and emotions in great apes and humans; laughter; social play; vocalizations; evolution of language; emotional contagion and empathy; imitation; morality and fairness; conservation.
Mr Simon Easton
Phobic travel anxiety, whiplash and other post-trauma responses after road traffic accidents; stress at work and quality of working life; happiness.
Dr Alessandra Fasulo
Language socialization; therapy talk; agency; narrative as mediator of socio-cultural development and vehicle of situated knowledge; written and oral autobiography.
Dr Mike Fluck
Cognitive and language development; early number development; social and cultural foundations of cognitive and language development; microgenetic studies of developmental change.
Mr Mark Haydon-Laurelut
Intellectual disability, its social construction, effective supports for family's and systemic psychotherapeutic practices with men and women with intellectual disability and their networks of significant relationships.
Dr Anne Hillstrom
Attention; object and scene perception; human factors; usability; neuropsychology.
Dr Lorraine Hope
Eyewitness memory; biases in recall and decision-making; impression for mation; social cognition; criminal stereotypes; scene of crime interview tool development; juror and jury decision making.
Dr Sherria Hoskins
Social cognitive approach to understanding learning. Specifically interested in what impacts learners’ self-efficacy and self-theories (eg Implicit Theories of Intelligence) and the effect of these on learning behaviour (ie readiness, decision making, effort, resilience etc.) and learning outcomes.
Dr Treena Jingree
Power relations in interactions between individuals with learning disabilities and others, the social construction of identities such as the learning disabled identity, discourse analysis and conversation analysis.
Dr Endre Kadar
Perceptual control of action; navigational skills in humans and robots; movement disorder in parkinson’s disease; visual control in car racing; exploratory learning.
Dr Maggie Linnell
Aging, health and well- being; anxiety and pain perception/symptom reporting; positive effects of negative emotions (grumpiness).
Dr Beatriz Lòpez
Developmental psychology, atypical development, in particular autism. Social influences on cognitive development, cultural differences in cognition.
Dr Samantha Mann
Deceptive behaviour and the detection of deception, particularly in police officers.
Dr Roger Moore
Psychophysiology; the neuroscience of anxiety; biological theories of personality (particularly Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory); ethics in psychological research.
Dr Paul Morris
Animal / personality / emotion; ecological psychology.
Dr Ed Morrison
Evolutionary approaches to behaviour; evolutionary psychology; mate choice; facial attractiveness; facial dynamics.
Dr Claire Nee
Offender behaviour and decision making; criminality in children; understanding female crime; interventions with young offenders; personality disorder; emotional intelligence in offenders; methods of self-reported offending, use of qualitative techniques, eye-tracking and EEG.
Dr Adrian Needs
Contextual influences on therapeutic and other outcomes in prisons; personal change in offenders; life events as precursors of homicide; interpersonal skills in custodial settings; psychological consequences of interpersonal events; attachment and the self; post- traumatic stress and adjustment difficulties in ex- servicemen in the prison population; subjective contexts of violent offending and personality disorder.
Dr Michelle Newberry
Interpersonal relating and offending; cognitive distortions of stalkers; beliefs about animal cruelty.
Dr Karl Nunkoosing
Social construction of disability; gender, masculinity and fatherhood; community and culture; social psychology of secrets; discursive psychology / discourse analysis.
Dr James Ost
Remembering (including false / recovered memory; Bartlett’s reconstructive theory; social nature of and social influences on remembering; meta-memory); personality and memory errors; pseudoscience in psychology; anomalistic psychology; eyewitness memory and suggestibility.
Prof Vasu Reddy
Emotional engagement and disengagement; humour, teasing and deception; social understanding in infancy and autism; ecological approaches to development; the development of self-consciousness.
Dr Jim Sauer
Eyewitness memory, decision making and confidence; jury and juror decision making; feeling of knowing, perceptual fluency and priming; decision making by security and crowd control personnel.
Prof Chris Sinha
Spatial language and cognition, including cross-linguistic and cross-cultural acquisition and development of spatial language; cognitive-functional linguistics; cognitive typology; culture in communication and cognition; language evolution.
Dr Stefanie Sonnenberg
Identity construction and economic practices; the social psychology of money and ‘rational choice’; money in close relationships; materialism; social construction of gender; national identities; qualitative epistemologies and methods.
Dr Lorenzo Stafford
Drug addiction and cognitive processes; drug-induced mood and performance alterations; the influence of olfaction in behaviour and the nature of olfactory memory; mood-congruent effects on attention and memory.
Dr Mark Turner
Motion sickness; human factors; human computer-interaction; display technology.
Dr Darren Van Laar
Quality of working life (qowl) of employees. Staff attitude surveys. All aspects of colour perception, especially applied areas and including cognitive, social, emotional and individual; human factors, human computer interaction; psychocartography; careers destinations of psychology graduates.
Prof Aldert Vrij
Verbal and nonverbal correlates of deception; detection of deception; interviewing children; interviewing suspects.
Dr Bridget Waller
Facial expression, non-verbal behaviour and emotion; primate communication; evolutionary psychology; animal behaviour and ethology; comparative psychology; human and non-human primates; the evolution of sociality.
Dr Clare Wilson
Research interests include: the use of Self Help (bibliotherapy) to improve mental health; how self stories and morality (including forgiveness) influence wellbeing; constructions of the ‘self’ (identity) and their implications for wellbeing
Dr Jörg Zinken
Universals and diversity across languages and cultures; language and thought; figurative language.