Department of Psychology

Dr Lucy Akehurst: When our first year undergraduate students arrive at the Department of Psychology, I think they feel part of the community straight away.

We pride ourselves on our tutorial system at the University of Portsmouth. Staff are working with students from the word go.

We have a number of laboratory facilities and each of them house specialist equipment. We've got a baby and infant lab. We have a suite of labs, there's observation facilities, one way mirrors and recording equipment. We also have a Psychophysiology lab which has an EEG machine and eye tracking. We also have a motion capture laboratory. We have special cameras that pick up the sensors that the students have placed on their participants just to see how the human body moves when we perform particular actions.

The nice thing about coming to Portsmouth is that undergraduate students from the word go have access to those facilities. 

Leanne Proops: Here in the psychology department at the University of Portsmouth. We really pride ourselves in having all of our staff being research active, not only for the research that they do themselves, but also so that we can inform our teaching and really be at the cutting edge of each of our fields. We research a whole wide range of different areas. Here in the department, we have four longstanding research fields and they include our International Centre for Research into Forensic Psychology, our Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology, the Centre for Interaction, Development and Diversity and our Quality of Life, Health and Well-Being Group. 

[International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology] 

Renan Saraiva: Some of our research is on lie detection in forensic contexts, eyewitness testimony, risk assessment, and jury decision-making. The overarching goal of our research is to create safer and more just societies in terms of improving our criminal justice systems, not only in the UK but also worldwide. So achievable goals, a lot of our research focuses on, for example, creating better procedures for investigations and creating innovative procedures for risk assessment. 

[International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology – Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology]

Ed Morrison: My research generally is in the area of human evolutionary psychology. So the idea of this is seeing how evolution shapes our behaviour and in particular within the area, I look at human mate choice. As soon as we meet anyone, we'll make a kind of instant judgement sort of based on what they look like. Do I like them? Do I not like them? Are they a threat? So it has big personal importance and then big evolutionary importance as well, because finding a partner that's going to be the way that you pass your genes on to the next generation. 

Mohammed Ismeil Abdul Kader: The research is really important because in terms of understanding how we make judgements about each other in social situations, we almost are never presented with pictures except when we look at pictures online or on devices. So we constantly make judgements on moving people. So either they're walking or they're talking or they're gesturing. So it's essential to understand that element of it. So we understand the complete picture of the way that we interact with each other and the kind of decisions that we make about each other. 

[International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology – Centre for Interaction, Development and Diversity]

Beatriz Lopez: We have really a very wide set of projects, but they tend to look at how we interact with others, babies and infants, but also in adulthood. So for instance, one of the things we've done is develop profiling assessment tools for autistic people at work. And those have been because we develop them with policymakers, local authorities, with the autistic community. So they've been shown to improve job retention in autistic people, to improve quality of life. But also they have been implemented now in the autism strategy at national level. 

[International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology – Quality of Life, Health and Wellbeing Research Group]

Miznah Al-Abbade: I'm interested in how we can better manage chronic or long-term conditions. More specifically, or more recently, I'm interested in chronic pain and actually women's health. So a recent project is looking at how we can better understand things like period pain. This research is really important because, I mean, it affects 50% of the population. It brings new insights into the project and things that we might not have considered before. It just will make it more comprehensive, really, in tackling things from different angles. 

Nills Niederstrasser: We're using the Core Pressure to induce pain and then we're seeing if the way you experience pain is related to your decision-making in a moral choice, dilemma, scenario. Further to that, we have the prevention of pain as well. So how do people recover from injuries? So if people engage in their rehab exercises. Does that lead to less pain during the rehabilitation process, say, following the surgery? Absolutely proud of it. It's always raising some eyebrows when you say you do research in pain, but when you actually start talking about it, people understand that it's worthwhile. It has societal impact and people understand that it's valuable. 

Renan Saraiva: I'm very proud to be a part of the centre and seeing those solutions and creative ideas emerging on a daily basis. 

Beatriz Lopez: All the members, we have a real passion for what we do and a real passion for doing things that really matter to the community. 

Leanne Proops: Portsmouth is a really great place, I think, to come here and conduct research both as a student and as a colleague. We pride ourselves in being really collegiate and working together as a team. We have lots of support for our researchers and we also really like to engage our students in the research process. So it's really important for us to be able to go out to different field sites, to be able to understand different cultures and really get a good understanding of what it's like to be a human across the globe.