Child Psychology MSc: Who teaches this course

• Staff teaching on this course

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences teaches this course. Students benefit from a lively study environment, thanks to the wide range of postgraduate courses on offer.

Programmes cover everything from English literature and music to human rights and politics.

The Faculty provides a vibrant and forward-thinking environment for study with:

• courses designed in collaboration with industry professionals – keeping you up to date with the latest developments;
• established connections with the London arts and media scene – with a range of guest speakers, professors and lecturers visiting the University; and
• committed and enthusiastic staff – many of whom are expert practitioners as well as leading academics and researchers.

The Faculty's combination of academics and practitioners makes it a unique environment in which to further your studies and your career.

Where is the Faculty based? Most students are based at the University's Penrhyn Road campus, with our music and education courses taught at the Kingston Hill campus.

Chris Askew

Research areas: Abnormal/developmental psychology; development of fear and anxiety

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• The role of vicarious (observational) learning in anxiety disorders
• Investigating the effects of visual information on fear-related beliefs, attitudes and behaviour for novel stimuli

Skills that may be acquired: Critical review of literature; understanding issues in anxiety and associative learning research; using cognitive measures; experimental design; development of experimental materials; data collection, and statistical analysis.

Dr Elisa Back

Areas of interest:

• Cognitive development and social cognition in typical and atypical populations.

Research interests:

• Autism
• Theory of mind
• Facial processing

Dr Georgia Butler

Research areas: Impulsivity and risk taking; recreational drug use; eating behaviours

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Identifying measures of impulsivity and risk taking and identifying the different factors of impulsivity
• Investigating the relationship between compulsive behaviours and impulsivity
• Investigating the relationship between recreational drug use, risk taking and impulsive behaviour
• Identifying measurements of eating behaviours which tap into impulsive behaviours
• The relationship between eating behaviours and impulsivity

Skills that may be acquired: Planning and designing research; the use of statistical analyses; conducting a literature review; questionnaire design.

Dr Fatima Felisberti

Research areas: Research areas: Face and emotion perception; visual attention; memory and social cognition.

The research in my laboratory aims to uncover environmental factors that modulate the way we identify emotions in others and recognize faces of unfamiliar people in different social contexts. Self-face recognition is investigated, especially how attachment style and personality traits affect the way one perceives his/her own facial features and attractiveness. Different aspects of visual attention and the visual aesthetics are also addressed.

Skills that may be acquired: Questionnaire and survey analysis; visual perception and cognitive testing; experimental programming, statistical analyses; literature review; use of bibliographic databases.

Dr Annukka Lindell

Research areas: Laterality; psycholinguistics; neuroaesthetics

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Computer-based experimental studies examining hemispheric asymmetries in cognitive processing. Topics could include assessment of hemispheric asymmetries for language processing (phonology, orthography, semantics); emotion recognition (facial vs. verbal); face perception; art appreciation.

Skills that may be acquired: Experimental design; understanding of causes and consequences of hemispheric lateralisation; basic computer programming (EPrime); data collection; statistical analyses; literature review; use of bibliographic databases.

Dr Julie Morgan

Research areas: Clinical psychology; cognitive biases in social anxiety disorder

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Experimental studies of the effect of rumination on social goal beliefs in anxious and non-anxious individuals
• Survey studies of the functional approach to autobiographical memory eg how current self-views influence what people remember about their past
• Comparing self-focus and mood induction techniques to examine memory biases
• Reviewing literature relating to memory and attention biases in social anxiety disorder

Skills that may be acquired: Experimental design; principles of clinical psychology; construction of questionnaires; construction of computerised tasks; cognitive testing; statistical analyses; literature review; use of bibliographic databases.

Dr Ana Nikčević

Research area: Metacognitive aspects of smoking behaviour

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Identifying the core metacognitive mechanisms in smoking behaviour through interviews
• Development of assessment tools (ie questionnaires) of maladaptive metacognitions involved in smoking
• Constructing theoretical accounts which explain persistence of smoking
• Development of metacognitive treatments aimed at smoking cessation

Skills that may be acquired: Interviewing; construction and psychometric testing of questionnaires; statistical analyses; literature review; use of bibliographic databases.

Dr Jess Prior

Research areas: Faces, facial disfigurement, appearance issues in childhood and adolescence

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Qualitative exploration of people's understanding, beliefs and experiences concerning facial appearance - of self and others; facial acne or other skin conditions that affect the appearance of the face; the experiences of children or adults with common visible differences (cleft lip/palate, birthmarks, moles, etc) and their experiences of 'living with' a visible difference
• Qualitative studies concerning various aspects of appearance (semi-structured interviews, diary methods, observations)
• Quantitative studies regarding children's experiences of friendship - for example children's social preferences towards peers with different visible differences (in wheelchair, missing limb, facial disfigurement)
• Bullying in childhood and adolescence
• Verbal descriptions of faces
• (Note that students who wish to recruit children under the age of 18 will need a full CRB check and will need to gain permission from a school to work with the children)

Skills that may be acquired: Qualitative research skills including planning and designing qualitative research; literature reviews; using qualitative methods (interviews, diary methods, observations); analysing talk and text (for example Grounded Theory, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Template Analysis); transcribing and presenting data.

Dr Harriet Tenenbaum

Research areas: Developmental

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations:

• Children's learning and participation in everyday conversations with peers, parents, teachers, and siblings (especially about gender, science, and emotion)
• Gender development
• Emotion understanding
• Science learning
• Children's reasoning about social issues, such as rights, race, and gender discrimination
• Achievement motivation and school adjustment; socio-cultural theory

Skills that may be acquired: Quasi-experimental design; experimental design; meta-analysis; methods of analysing conversations; longitudinal design; standardised testing, statistical analyses, literature review, use of bibliographic databases; coding data; inter-rater reliability.

Professor Philip Terry

Research area: Biopsychology; recreational use of drugs and alcohol

Examples of topics for dissertations:

• People's ability to estimate the alcohol content of a drink
• The arousing effects of caffeine
• Looking at alcohol's or caffeine's effects on time perception
• 'Binge drinking'
• Experimental studies of the effects of long-term cannabis use on behavioural responses to alcohol
• Survey and interview-based studies of why ex-users of drugs stop using recreational drugs
• Survey and interview-based studies of drug and alcohol use in hazardous situations (eg in relation to driving)
• (Note that studies related to cocaine and cannabis use will require that the student can identify a suitable sample of recreational drug users)

Skills that may be acquired: Experimental design; basic principles of psychopharmacology; construction of questionnaires and structured interviews; measuring drug effects; cognitive testing; statistical analyses; literature review; use of bibliographic databases.

Professor Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

Research area: Cognitive psychology; thinking and reasoning

Examples of topics for guided research activities or dissertations: In general terms, the research conducted investigates the importance of problem representation in solving problems and how these representations may be distributed between reasoners and artefacts. For example, in inductive reasoning tasks the way the information is presented determines the quality of the inferences. In turn, people's success at solving problems is examined when they can physically manipulate artefacts in their immediate environments. The focus of this research is how people naturally restructure the objects in front of them to help them reason better and solve problems more efficiently. Ideas such as representation, insight, creativity, and extended cognition inform these research efforts.

Skills that may be acquired: Experimental design; cognitive testing; data management and statistical analyses; literature review; poster preparation for conference presentation; use of bibliographic databases.