Our academic staff

Dr Jordi Asher

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual Field Loss; Migraine with (and without) Visual Aura; Megacognition, confidence and perceptual learning

Dr Kathryn Buchanan

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Improving subjective well-being through the identification of happiness-enhancing activities; The Darker Side of Seeing Others Kindness

Dr Alasdair Clarke

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Dr Geoff Cole

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Nicholas Cooper

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Philip Cozzolino

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

Dr Emily Cross

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Romantic Relationships; Sexism and Gender Attitudes; Aggression and Family Violence; LGBTQIA+ Interpersonal Dynamics; Prejudice

Dr Katie Daughters

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Research Interests:

Dr Rael Dawtry

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.

Dr Carina De Klerk

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Kevin Dent

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

Professor Madeline Eacott

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

Dr Maria Filippetti

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Dr Tom Foulsham

Reader, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Nicolas Geeraert

Reader, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Acculturation, acculturative stress & well-being in acculturation; Cross-cultural differences in social cognition; Acculturation in migrants and international students; Acculturation within the family context; Social Psychology

Dr Helge Gillmeister

Reader (R), Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual body representations and effects of body image in 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; The bodily self in depersonalisation-derealisation disorder

Dr Yan Gu

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Perception of time; Child language acquistion; Language and thought; Immigrants and migration; Aging and pension planning; Language and economics; Cross-cultural / linguistics comparison; Multimodal communication; Gesture and prosody; Drug use and well-being; Chinese Sign Language

Dr Eva Gutierrez-Sigut

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Cognitive psychology of language; Reading; Deafness; Hearing impairment; Atypical language development; Sign Language processing; Psycholinguistics; Experimental Psychology; Deafness; Sign Language; Altered Language Experience; Atypical Language Development; Reading; Literacy; Reading Acquisition; Visual Word processing; Orthographic Processing; Phonological Processing; Electrophysiology; Event Related Potentials; Brain Lateralization for Language; Development of brain lateralisation

Dr Paul Hanel

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Human values; Stereotypes and prejudice; Political psychology; Working from home/remote work; Cross-cultural research; Similarities

Professor Paul Hibbard

Professor, Department of Psychology

Research interests: binocular vision; image statistics; visual discomfort; virtual and augmented reality; sensory processing in migraine

Dr Anna Hughes

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Visual search; Visual camouflage and mimicry; Cognitive modelling

Dr Gethin Hughes

Reader, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Marie Juanchich

Reader (R), Department of Psychology

Research interests: Risk communication; Gender equality

Dr Steffan Kennett

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

Dr Megan Klabunde

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Interoception; Neurodevelopment; fNIRS; fMRI; Social Cognition; Adolescence; Interoceptive Development; Mental Health Development; Somatic Symptoms in Children

Dr Sebastian Korb

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Embodiment in facial emotion recognition

Dr Veronica Lamarche

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Trust and interdependence; Motivated cognition and relationship maintenance; Risk, vulnerability and uncertainty regulation; Romantic relationships

Dr Vanessa Loaiza

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Nikhila Mahadevan

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: social status and inequality; social inclusion; self-esteem; narcissism; emotion and well-being; interpersonal behaviour; decision-making

Dr Keith May

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.;

Dr Angela Meadows

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Weight stigma; Physical activity behaviour; Stigma resistance

Dr Rick O'Gorman

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Cooperation and altruism; Computer modelling of social phenomenon; Applications of social cognition techniques to evolutionary questions; Biosocial psychology; Evolutionary psychology

Professor Sheina Orbell

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 Silke Paulmann

Head of Department - Professor (R), 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

Professor Reinhard Pekrun

Professor, Department of Psychology

Dr Gerulf Rieger

Reader, Department of Psychology

Research interests: General Research Interests: My work has focused on sexual orientation: how it develops, how it is organized, and how it affects a person’s life. I use a wide diversity of methodologies, ranging from behavioral observation, to physiological sexual activity, to twin designs, and employ an array of quantitative skills, in order to pursue my research. I have used childhood videos and photographs to examine how behavioral signals of early masculinity-femininity predict adult sexual orientation. I have studied identical twins with discordant sexual orientations to quantify the nongenetic impact on their development. I study genital sexual arousal to gather objective information on sex differences that pure self-report studies could never reveal: in women bisexual arousal is common across sexual orientations, whereas in men bisexual arousal is possible, but rare. I validated a non-intrusive measure of sexual arousal, pupil dilation, which will allow studying diverse age groups or different cultures, and for whom genital arousal measures are unsuitable. My studies have broad relevance for understanding the development of differences between and within the sexes, and for how people perceive themselves and others.

Dr Silvia Rigato

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Face and emotion processing in infancy.; The development of body representation and tactile localisation.; The development of the neural basis of shared touch.; Perinatal mental health.

Dr Maxwell Roberts

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

Dr Tracy Robinson

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Jonathan Rolison

Reader (R), Department of Psychology

Research interests: Decision making and risk taking behaviour; Risk communication; Road safety; Adult development and ageing

Dr Alex Sel

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Understanding brain networks underpinning higher order cognitive functions in the human brain

Dr Andrew Simpson

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

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

Dr Miroslav Sirota

Reader, 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.; Why people expect antibiotics even when not needed?; Risk and probability communication; Why people (do not) correct their own errors in judgments and reasoning (e.g., intuitive and deliberate errors, effect of feedback)

Professor Gijsbert Stoet

Professor, Department of Psychology

Dr Elia Valentini

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Climate and ecological emergency; Existential and symbolic threats; Pain and sensory threats; Emotional facial expressions; Self-harm and trauma

Dr Wijnand Van Tilburg

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Boredom; Nostalgia; Economic psychology; Entropy

Dr Pascal Vrticka

Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Hyperscanning; Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience; Attachment; Bio-Behavioural and Interpersonal Neural Synchrony; Caregiving; Epigenetics; (Functional) Magnetic Resonance Imaging - (f)MRI

Professor Geoffrey Ward

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

Dr Motonori Yamaguchi

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Research interests: Cognitive Control; Visual Attention; Skill Acquisition; Cognition & Emotion; Implicit Biases; Computational Modelling of Human Cognition

Dr Joshua Baker

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Liam Chawner

Senior Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Rita De Sepulveda

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Hasibah Hashim

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Charlie Leedham

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Alice Mariuzzo

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Ayesha Merali

Postgraduate Research Student, School of Health and Social Care

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Zeel Pansara

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)

Postgraduate Research Student, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Chloe Richmond

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Connor Sherlock

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Guyan Sloane

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, Department of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Student, Department of Psychology

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Heather Statham

Research Assistant, Department of Psychology

Denise Wallace

Graduate Laboratory Assistant, Department of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Student, Department of Psychology

Research Officer, Department of Psychology

Dr Tania-Elena Gudu

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Dr Matteo Lisi

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Dr Abigail Webb

Visiting Fellow, Department of Psychology

Professor John Hanley

Emeritus 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

Professor Deborah Roberson

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

Professor Arnold Wilkins

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