Our academic staff

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: The cognitive psychology (and neuropsychology) of aspects of language production Lexical selection in spoken word production (eg, picture naming, reading aloud) Stroop and picture-word interference tasks Bilingual word production and language control Written and typed word production;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Improving subjective well-being through the identification of happiness-enhancing behaviours or activities; Promoting the uptake of eco-friendly behaviours; The capabilities of digital technologies to change behaviour;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Cognitive neuropsychology; Visual cognition; Comparative psychology; Colour vision;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Transcranial magnetic simulation (TMS); Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS); Mirror neurons; Stress & Ageing;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Mortality awareness; The psychology of liberty; Perceptions of, and reactions to, (in)equality and (un)fairness; The formation and maintenance of trust and helping in society;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Social cognition; political psychology; social comparison; relative deprivation; inequality; socioecological psychology; applied social psychology; just-world theory; immanent justice reasoning; judgment and decision making. I have a particular interest in how socioecological factors (e.g., economic structure, culture, institutions) shape political cognition, beliefs and attitudes.;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: imitation; facial mimicry; action processing; development of the mirror neuron system;;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual cognition; Understanding basic mechanisms of visuo-spatial attention; Visuo-spatial short-term memory; The effects of experience on object and word processing;

Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education) and Professor (R), Department of Psychology

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: The development of body awareness; Tactile interactions; Development of interoception;

Reader, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual cognition; Perception of pictures and videos; Eye movements; Cognitive neuropsychology;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Stress-trajectories in acculturation; Cross-cultural differences in social cognition; Social perception and social cognition;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual body representations and effects of body image eating and body dysmorphic disorders; Somatosensory processes, multisensory processes involving somatosensation; Sensorimotor learning, neural plasticity, integration of external objects/tools into the body schema; Mirror touch, action representation, and social cognition;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Disorders of reading, writing, memory, and face processing; Learning to read in different writing systems; Speech production; Tip-of-the-tongue states; Effects of irrelevant speech on memory;

Head of Department - Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: binocular vision; image statistics; visual discomfort;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Sense of Agency; Metacognition; Action Understanding; Multisensory Integration;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Multisensory attention and perception; Tactile effects on visual spatial attention; Viewing the skin changing tactile judgements; Changes in body posture modifying spatial attention; Methods ERPs, EOG, TMS, Reaction time;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Veronica is a relationship scientist interested in:; Trust and interdependence; Motivated cognition and relationship maintenance; Risk, vulnerability and uncertainty regulation;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: working memory; cognitive ageing; long-term memory; executive functioning; conscious recollection; cognitive modelling;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: My work investigates the processing performed by the human visual system. My research mainly falls into the following areas: perceptual encoding, edge processing, visual grouping, visual attention, and coding efficiency. I also work on face perception and memory.;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Evolutionary psychology; Pro-social behaviour; Social norms; Leadership and group functioning; Intergroup conflict; Computer modelling of social phenomenon; Applications of social cognition techniques to evolutionary questions;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Intention-behaviour relation; Self-regulation; Social psychology of volition and volitional strategies in behavioural change; Motivational models of health-related behaviour; Social psychology of sexual health; Social-cognitive accounts of motivation and health-related behaviour; Cervical screening; Colorectal cancer screening;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Social language processing in normal and special populations (e.g., bilinguals, brain damaged, aging); Emotional and attitudinal language processing across different cultures; Motivational prosody processing; Event-related brain potentials;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: My work focuses on sexual orientation: how it is organized, how it develops, and how it affects a persons life. I use a diversity of methodologies, including self-report, behavioural observations, physiological activity and neurological correlates, and employ an array of quantitative skills in order to pursue my research. I use videos and photos from childhood to examine whether masculine and feminine behaviours during early development predict adult sexual orientation. I also investigate the social impact of these signals. I have used large data sets of family members to investigate potential evolutionary reasons for sexual orientation. In another line of research, I study the association of sexual orientation with physiological sexual arousal in order to illuminate sex differences in sexual response. With a different methodology, pupil dilation, I am currently conducting research that will aid in explaining how early sex and sexual orientation differences in sexual attraction emerge. These studies have broad relevance for understanding how people perceive themselves and others, for the consequences of these perceptions, and for the development of differences between and within the sexes.;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Face perception and processing in infancy. I am interested in the infants ability of integrating the information coming from the eye region and the emotional expression. There is growing evidence that infants, and even newborns, are expert in recognizing faces and processing their inner features. They show visual preferences and different brain activation according to specific gaze-expression combinations.; The development of body representation and tactile localisation. As we move and act on the world, we need to continuously update the sense of our posture and the position of our limbs (&ldquobody schema&rdquo). This involves taking into account the visual and proprioceptive cues about our body, based on which a mental representation of the body is formed. I investigate how infants develop the ability to locate a touch on their body while taking into account their own postural changes.; The development of the neural basis of shared touch. When observing the experiences of others, we not only understand what they experience but often empathically share their states. One set of mechanisms that contribute to this ability are neural regions where seeing the states of others triggers representations of corresponding states in our brain. I study how this process develops in the infant brain.;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Inductive and deductive reasoning; Individual differences in reasoning strategies; The cognitive psychology of intelligence; Spatial reasoning and imagery; The development of expertise;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: The role of emotion and anxiety in attentional biases;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: A major focus of my research is risk taking behaviours across adulthood. My research in this area is aimed at explaining why people become more cautious in older age and whether age changes in risk taking behaviours are beneficial or harmful. There are both theoretical and applied aspects to my work in this field. As an applied focus, I investigate the risks faced by young and elderly drivers with a view to understanding whether drivers of these ages are a danger to themselves and to other road users. Through my applied work, I have introduced new statistical tools for the assessment of driver crash risk.; A second theme in my research explores perception and communication of health risks and health-related decision making. One of my aims in this area is to develop methods for overcoming barriers to effective risk communication. For example, my recent work has shown that maths anxiety impedes understanding of numerical health risks, but that some of the negative effects of maths anxiety can be alleviated with graphical presentation aids.;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: The emergence of inhibitory control in children. Inhibitory control is the capacity to regulate our thoughts and behaviour, and so take charge of our own lives.;

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: In my research, I am trying to understand how people estimate, judge, reason and make decisions in situations of uncertainty and risk, how people perform these processes on their own and in the presence of the others, and how people perform these processes in the lab and in the wild.; My basic research interests include perceptions of verbal probabilities, statistical reasoning, and intuitive and deliberative processing. My applied research interests include uncertainty and risk communication (e.g., climate change communication, communication between patients and doctors), and diagnostic and management decision-making of doctors.;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: My research investigates how people perceive negative valence information, how they interpret both physical and psychological events as threatening.; Some keywords in my projects are therefore threat, pain, anxiety, emotion, attention. Current projects would involve measuring electroencephalography and other psychophysiological measures, subjective reports (i.e. from sensory ratings to personality questionnaires), cognitive and behavioural performance in a multisensory setting .; This interest led to the development of experimental questions adressing topics that span from basic processing of sensory stimuli to the complex interaction between cognition emotion and body representation in the brain.;

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: My main research areas are visual perception, visuomotor performance and multi-sensory perception and action. In other words, I am interested in how the human brain transforms the sensory information it receives into adequate perceptual interpretations and goal-oriented behavior. I use psychophysical and behavioral methods in addition to ideal-observer modelling to investigate these topics.;

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Similarities and differences between different memory tasks, especially immediate serial recall and free recall; General properties of episodic memory; Memory structures and processes; The use of technology to enhance human memory;

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Immediate verbal and visuo-spatial memory; Retrieval Induced Forgetting; Long-term serial position effects; Use of technology and life logging for memory augmentation; Semantic error detection in language acquisition;

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, Department of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Student, Department of Psychology

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, Department of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Student, Department of Psychology

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Tutor in Psychology, Essex Pathways

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, Department of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Student, Department of Psychology

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Evaluation Assistant, CER - Outreach

Visiting Fellow, CER - Outreach

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: The relationship between language and thought; The development of categorization in children; Categorization of colors, face identity and facial expressions; Categorical perception;

Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology

Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual perception, including colour vision and the design of ophthalmic tints; Use of ophthalmic tints in autism and multiple sclerosis; The response of the brain to visual stimuli measured using near infrared spectroscopy; Lighting and its biological effects; Visual dysfunction in migraine; Photosensitive epilepsy and migraine; Reading disorders and the design of text for children; Spectral and chromatic analysis of uncomfortable images;