Research

The department has been recognised as producing high quality work in several national Research Assessment Exercises. In the 2008 RAE, all faculty members were research active and 85% of our research outputs were classified as being of at least international standing.

You can read about some of our research projects here, and find details of publications listed on staff home pages.

Research Groups

Research in the department is also a collaborative enterprise, being organised around four main research groups:

• Neuroscience Research Group
• Developmental Psychology Research Group
• Cognitive Psychology Research Group
• Social Psychology Research Group

The aims, membership and research activities of these research groups are highly flexible and emergent. Rather than rigid structures imposed in a top down fashion, the groups are designed to facilitate intellectual exchange and debate, to accommodate the diversity of research interests in the department, and to provide a resource rich environment in which members can develop their research most productively. Their membership includes postgraduate students as well as research and academic staff; it also encompasses a large number of national and international collaborators.

Research Centres and Units

The department offers excellent resources for conducting psychological research. One of the ways in which we support and develop our research strengths is through interactions at the level of centres and units:

• A unique Centre for Research in Human Development houses our state-of-the art developmental psychology laboratories.
• The Investigative Expertise Unit provides a centre of excellence for research and training in law enforcement investigative practice.
• The Atypical Development Unit brings together research expertise across a range of psychological topics, and is designed to stimulate collaborations with schools, education and health professionals.
• The recently established Sensory Neuroscience Unit houses our eye-movement recording equipment, EEG and multichannel evoked potential recording facilities, and two sound-proofed booths for auditory research.
• Social Psychology is organised into several research units that also draw on expertise from elsewhere in the department. You can find out more about the Conflict and Solidarity research unit and the Prosocial Behaviour, Social responsibility and citizenship unit and look at the work being done in the area of National and European identities.
• Falling within a broad theme of cognitive psychology, the department has expertise in visual cognition and memory.

Facilities

The research facilities in the department are designed to make our projects run more effectively, so that we operate at the cutting edge of the relevant topics. For example, neuroscience research in the department also benefits from a dedicated fMRI analysis suite. We use a professional Experiment Management System to advertise, recruit and administer research studies that make it easy to organise studies and helps our participants to keep track of their involvement in research. The department uses modern cognitive and social psychology laboratories, including rooms for computer-based group and individual testing, and a social psychology research suite.