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 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 Anthony Esgate

Areas of interest: Anthony's main areas of teaching are quantitative research methods and applied psychology. The latter especially include ergonomics and sports psychology. He is a chartered psychologist, a full (founding) member of the BPS division of sports and exercise psychology and a registered member of the Ergonomics Society. Anthony has held research posts in the areas of stress and performance and also in human-computer interaction. In addition, he has interests in the areas of laterality and the psychology of music and of mathematics.

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 Chris Hewer

Areas of interest: Social representations - beliefs and behaviour, critical psychology.

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 Ron Roberts

Areas of interest: Social representations - beliefs and behaviour, critical psychology.

Dr Muthanna Samara

Areas of interest: Research in child development, bullying, aggression and anti-social behaviour.

Dr Harriet Tenenbaum

Areas of interest: Children's cognitive, social and emotional development in the context of relationships, gender, development, science learning and academic achievement.

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 Fred Vallee-Tourangeau

Areas of interest: Representational determinants of creative hypothesis testing.