Postgraduate Prospectus

www.essex.ac.uk/psychology | Psychology
Staff and their research interests
Chris Barry, BSc London, PhD
St Andrews, C Psychol AFBPsS
(Professor)
Cognitive neuropsychology; the cognitive
psychology of language processing;
age-of-acquisition effects in lexical
processing; recognition memory and false
memory; face and person recognition
Mitch Callan, BA MSc PhD Calgary
(Lecturer)
Justice motivation/belief in a just world;
responses to victimization; relative
deprivation; social psychology of gambling;
temporal discounting; psychology of law
Geoff Cole, BSc Bolton, PhD Keele
(Lecturer)
Cognitive neuropsychology; visual
cognition; attention; comparative;
colour vision
Nick Cooper, BSc Westminster,
PhD Imperial (Lecturer)
EEG; transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS); near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS);
attention; consciousness; mirror neurons
Philip Cozzolino, PhD Minnesota
(Lecturer)
Motivated social cognition; the psychology
of liberty; perceptions of, and reactions to,
(in)equality and (un)fairness; ‘worldview
defence’ (terror management theory);
‘worldview capitulation’ (transcendence
management theory); the formation
and maintenance of trust and helping
in society
Deborah Fantini, BSc Pennsylvania,
MA PhD New York (Lecturer)
Processing of complex sounds by
normal-hearing listeners; loudness
perception; the processing of
dynamically modulating sounds;
perceptual organisation
Tom Foulsham, BSc PhD Nottingham
(Lecturer)
Visual cognition; attention; perception
of pictures and video; eye movements;
cognitive neuropsychology
Elaine Fox, BA PhD Dublin (Professor)
Affective neuroscience, especially
interactions among emotions, moods and
cognitive processes; selective processing
biases in emotional disorders; gene x
environment interactions in emotion
processing
Nicolas Geeraert, BSc MA Ghent,
PhD Louvain-la-Neuve (Lecturer)
Social cognition; mental control and
procedural rebound; social perception
of self, others (attributions), and groups
(stereotypes); cross-cultural differences
in social cognition; intercultural contact
and acculturation
Helge Gillmeister, BSc UCL, PhD
Birkbeck (Lecturer)
Perception, action and attention;
somatosensory processes, body
representations and integration of external
objects/tools; multisensory processes
involving somatosensation and neural
plasticity; spatial frames of reference
and movement preparation; links between
perception and action, sensorimotor
learning and social cognition; the role
of attention in these processes and the
sense of self
Rick Hanley, MA Dundee, PGCE
Glasgow, PhD Lancaster (Professor)
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
Catherine Jones, BSc PhD UCL
(Lecturer)
Neuropsychology and functional anatomy
of motor and perceptual timings; cognition
and perception processing in autism
spectrum disorders, particularly relating to
emotion processing, time perception and
everyday memory
Steffan Kennett, BA Cambridge,
PhD Birkbeck (Lecturer)
Multisensory attention and perception;
tactile effects on visual spatial attention;
viewing the skin changing tactile
judgments; changes in body posture
modifying spatial attention; method: ERPs;
EOG; TMS; reaction time
William Matthews, BA PhD Cambridge
(Lecturer)
Human judgement; perceptual
judgements; financial judgements;
psychophysics; time perception
Ray Meddis, BSc PhD London
(Emeritus Professor)
Hearing; auditory selective attention;
hearing impairment and the development
of computer models of hearing
Rick O’Gorman, BSc UCC, Cork, PGCE
Sheffield Hallam, MA UCD, Dublin, PhD
Binghamton, New York (Lecturer)
Evolutionary psychology; morality;
pro-social behaviour; altruism; social
norms; leadership and group functioning;
intergroup conflict; computer modelling
of social phenomenon; applications of
social cognition techniques to
evolutionary questions
Sheina Orbell, BSc Birmingham, PhD
Queen’s Belfast (Professor and Head of
Department)
Attitudes; intention-behaviour relation;
self-regulation; social psychology of
volition and volitional strategies;
self-regulation and volitional strategies
in behaviour change; habit; 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;
informal care; social psychology of care
of the elderly
Silke Paulmann, MA Paderborn, PhD
Max Planck Institute Leipzig/Potsdam
(Lecturer)
Emotional language (prosody and
semantics) processing in normal and
special populations (eg bilinguals or
brain damaged)
Tim Rakow, BSc Durham, PGCE
Greenwich, MSc PhD London (Senior
Lecturer)
Judgement and decision making;
pre-decisional information acquisition;
risky choice, including decisions from
experience; strategies/heuristics for
choice; intuitive versus rules-based
judgement; risk communication and
risk perception
Debi Roberson, BSc Essex, PhD London
(Professor)
The relationship between language
and thought; the development of
categorisation in children; categorisation
colours and faces; categorical perception
Max Roberts, BSc PhD Nottingham
(Lecturer)
Inductive and deductive reasoning;
individual differences in reasoning
strategies; the cognitive psychology of
intelligence; spatial reasoning and
imagery; the development of expertise
continued
Postgraduate Prospectus 2012 | 193