We offer a well-resourced and stimulating intellectual environment for research, which includes competitive top-up scholarships, teaching fellowships and financial support to attend national and international conferences and other forms of professional development.
Our research students are vital contributors to our excellence in research. They enjoy a supportive and rigorous environment within both their area of specialisation and the wider school community.
Our researchers actively collaborate with other researchers across the University through multidisciplinary initiatives, including:
Our clinical psychology research broadly examines the psychological, sociocultural, emotional, intellectual, neuropsychological and behavioural aspects of human functioning in an effort to promote understanding of various disorders, evidence based treatments, healthy development and adjustment.
Training and research clinics provide assessment and intervention for a range of presentations for the university and broader community, as well as facilitating research. Specialist clinics within the School include the Psychology Clinic, the Child Behaviour Research Clinic, the Gambling Treament and Research Clinic and the Healthy Brain Ageing Clinic.
Eating disorders from the perspective of:
Cognitive psychology explores the internal brain processes that people use to store, process, retrieve, transform and use information to interpret objects and events in the world and to solve problems, make decisions, speak and act.
Developmental psychology is concerned with describing and explaining psychological changes that occur as individuals progress from conception to death. Such changes have many sources, including physical maturation, learning, social interaction and other experiences. Developmental Psychology is thus best described as an approach to psychological investigation which can concern itself with typical and atypical development in all domains of psychology, from language and cognition to emotion and social behaviour.
Forensic psychology is the application of psychological knowledge and theories to all aspects of the justice system, including the processes and the people.
Health psychology relates broadly to questions about how people stay physically well, and how to optimise their experience and that of their families, when they become ill. Overall, Health Psychologists study the factors which promote and maintain good health and prevent illness, lead people to take up optimal screening to detect illness at an early stage (such as mammograms for the detection of breast cancer), and ensure early and accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, good psychological adjustment to acute and chronic illness, optimal quality of life and optimal end-of-life care.
Health behaviours are key to good health, and are amendable to psychological interventions, so these are a key interest for health psychologists. Health psychologists are also interested in the analysis and improvement of the health care system and health policy formation.
The psychology of learning is concerned with understanding how experience shapes behaviour. Learning research with humans and other animals examines the effect of external stimuli and events, internal physical states, motivation, attention and higher order cognition on the performance of a wide range of simple and complex behaviours, from reflexive biological responses to reasoned decision making.
The study of learning seeks to reveal the theoretical, functional and neurophysiological underpinnings of these behavioural changes.
This group is concerned with the philosophical, theoretical and methodological aspects of research in psychology. These include: the analysis of philosophical and theoretical assumptions that underpin psycho-social research; theory construction; the concept of measurement; evaluating research designs, research types, and the use of descriptive and inferential statistics.
Neuroscience is the study of the biological basis of all aspects of psychology, and is both a basic science and a clinical process to understand and treat psychological and psychiatric disorders. The scope of neuroscience is extensive and neuroscientists employ a wide range of techniques:
Studying the physiology of neural tissue, using animal models of behaviour to investigate the molecular biology and neurochemistry of fundamental psychological processes, and application of neuroimaging techniques to associate brain activity with human perception, action, attention, memory, language, emotion and mood.
Organisational psychology focuses on the application of the research, theory and practice of psychology to the enhancement of life experience, work performance and development of organisations and groups. Coaching psychology encompasses executive coaching, workplace coaching, leadership development and personal coaching at both group and individual levels.
In coaching the key theoretical frameworks include solution-focused, cognitive-behavioural, and psychodynamic theory, complexity/systems theory and adult developmental theory.
The process by which signals from the sensory periphery (receptors in the eyes, ears, skin etc) are interpreted and organised to produce a meaningful experience of the external world. By representing the objects and attributes of our surrounding environment, perception allows us to interact with our world.
We run an informal discussion group and journal club where we discuss a broad spectrum of topics in perception.
Our research focus is on the understanding of (a) trait theories of intelligence (including traditional notions of and emotional intelligence), metacognition and personality; (b) the core individual characteristics (cognitive/metacognitive abilities, normal and abnormal personality, mental and, religion and spirituality, and decision-making paradigms) that influence/predict different life outcomes; and (c) the ways these individual differences serve as the bases of much of contemporary psychological assessment in educational, clinical, cross-cultural, forensic, and organizational settings.
What makes social psychology social is that it focuses on how people are affected by other people. In particular, social psychology is the scientific investigation of attitudes, feelings and behaviour, and the interactions between these components. A fundamental goal of social psychology is to understand the factors that shape people's interpersonal relationships and their experiences in the social world.