Psychology (PhD / MPhil) - 2013/2014 entry

This programme provides an excellent forum for you to develop and enhance your specialist skills, as well as more general, transferable research skills. It is designed to allow you to gain insight into different research methods and acquire valuable experience both in carrying out large-scale research projects and in teaching.

Our current research interests include: brain and cognitive development (development of perceptual, cognitive and linguistic abilities); cognitive modelling (Bayesian approaches to human reasoning; connectionist modelling of language, memory, executive functions, cognitive development, developmental disorders and neuropsychological syndromes; cognitive architectures); perception, attention and emotion/anxiety (investigations of relevant processes using behavioural, electrophysiological, TMS, and hemodynamic measures of brain activity); child, family and health psychology (social and emotional development; early childcare; family stress; qualitative approaches); and genetics of human development and behaviour.

You will be given general training in research during the first year of your degree. Lectures and workshops are supplemented by seminars providing methodological and theoretical frameworks for research – seminars are structured according to research council guidelines. As work progresses, you will be given the opportunity to contribute to a programme of postgraduate seminars.

• To ensure that we have an appropriate supervisor for your area of research, you should contact the course team to discuss it before submitting your application.

• Jennifer Aydelott, BA, MA, PhD: Speech perception, psycholinguistics and aphasia; the neural bases of language; acoustic variation and lexical access in
  normal and language-impaired populations.
• Dr Edward Barker, PhD: the development of antisocial behaviours and the identification of factors (social and biological) that may underlie heterogeneity in the development of antisocial behaviours, as well as the evaluation of preventive interventions
• Jacqueline Barnes, BSc, MSc, PhD: Community in relation to children and families; evaluation of childhood interventions; the impact of family illness on child development and family relationships.
• Geoff Bird, BSc, PhD: Neural and functional mechanisms of social interaction.
• Belinda Brooks-Gordon, PhD: Forensic psychology; perspectives on individual and group therapy; therapeutic programmes in a forensic context; sexuality, sex work, and sexual offending.
• Richard Cooper, BMath, PhD: Cognitive modelling of executive processes; cognitive processes of action selection; computational cognitive neuroscience.
• Eddy Davelaar, MSc, PhD: How people control their memory and attention. Research includes cognitive experimentation, taking individual differences into account, and detailed computational modelling.
• Naz Derakhshan, BSc, PhD: Cognition and emotion; emotional information processing in anxiety and repressive-defensiveness; cognitive and psychophysiological indices of anxiety; event-related potentials and behavioural indicators of the time course of emotional information processing; eye-movement analysis; attention and memory for threat; emotion regulation.
• Fred Dick, BMus, PhD: Behavioural, MRI and fMRI studies of auditory and language processing over development and into adulthood in healthy individuals, as well as atypical populations, such as language-impaired children and aphasic patients.
• Roz Dixon, BSc, MSc, PhD: Applied psychology and counselling.
• Virginia Eatough, BA, MA,PhD: the investigation of emotion and emotional experience from a phenomenological qualitative perspective; feelings; adult crying; living with chronic neurodegenerative disorders; relationship between phenomenology and neurosciences. 
• Martin Eimer, Diplom, PhD, Habil: Cognitive psychophysiology, using event-related brain potentials and behavioural measures to study selective attention, perceptual–motor interactions and higher order visual processing.
• Simon Green, BSc, PhD: Neuroscience; psychobiological aspects of human psychopathology; health psychology, especially factors in coping with chronic stressors, such as long-term illness.
• Mark Johnson, BSc, PhD: Visual perception and cognition in infants; functional brain development; developmental disorders.
• Natasha Kirkham, BA, BSc, PhD: Developmental cognitive neuroscience;  early learning mechanisms and strategies; statistical and probabilistic learning in infants and children; cognitive control, executive processes, and selective attention in children and adults.
• Dr Matthew Longo, BA, MA, PhD: The mental representation of our body and how this shapes perception; psychophysics and behavioural testing; MRI; TMS; EEG.
• Denis Mareschal, BA, MA, DPhil: Developmental psychology and connectionist modelling, especially perceptual categorisation, object processing, reasoning in infants and children.
• Emma Meaburn, MA, PhD: molecular genetic, transcriptomic and epigenomic approaches to investigate the genetic and environmental basis of behaviour and cognition in childhood and adolescence. 
• Edward Melhuish, BSc, PhD: Development psychology; longitudinal studies; social development; childcare and pre-school education; developmental research and social policy.
• Dr Anne Miles, PhD: Cancer screening as well as public understanding of cancer.
• Anne Richards, BSc, PhD: Effects of emotion on ambiguity resolution; emotional influences on processing emotional facial expressions; automatic and strategic influences in the interpretation of ambiguity; attention and emotion; emotions and hemispheric processing; childhood anxiety.
• Angelica Ronald, BA, PhD: Genetic and environmental causes underlying autistic spectrum disorders and related conditions, by combining quantitative genetic and molecular genetic approaches with methodology from cognitive psychology and developmental neuroscience.
• Marty Sereno, BS, PhD: Mapping visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor areas in the human cortex using functional MRI and surface-based methods; relation between sensory maps and higher cognition; visual neurophysiology; natural and artificial symbol-using systems.
• Alex Shepherd, BA, MSc, PhD: Visual and attentional processes in migraine; visual perception – colour vision; low-light vision.
• Jonathan A Smith, BA, MSc, DPhil: Application of qualitative methodologies in social, health and clinical psychology; interpretative phenomenological analysis; psycho-social aspects of the new genetics; life transitions, self and identity.
• Dr Marie Smith: How information-processing networks make use of available visual information when perceiving faces, objects and scenes and how this processing is affected by top down biases introduced by task demands, emotional content and expectations; use of a variety of neuro-imaging measures (EEG, MEG and fMRI), along with patient studies and behavioural measures.
• Tim Smith, BSc, PhD: Visual Cognition using behavioural methods, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, and computational modelling; attention, perception and memory; naturalistic scene perception and perception in visual media. 
• Fiona Tasker, BA, PhD: Developmental psychology – family processes and structure, especially post-divorce and non-traditional families; adolescence; attachment theory; sexual identity.
• Michael Thomas, BSc, MSc, DPhil: Psychology of language; developmental cognitive neuroscience; developmental disorders; connectionist modelling.

• You can apply at any time of the year.