Tagged / psychology

Webinar: Emotional Processing Scale from Prof Roger Baker 6th Oct 2pm

eps

Professor Roger Baker, the lead author of the Emotional Processing Scale, is running a webinar on Thursday 6th October 2-3pm, hosted by Hogrefe UK.

Roger Baker is a clinical psychologist and has taught clinical psychology at BU.  He specialises in emotions and the treatment of anxiety disorders and has worked as a researcher and clinical psychologist at several universities and NHS Trusts.

Please follow this link to sign up to the webinar:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7941554061013769986

eps-head

The Emotional Processing Scale is a questionnaire measure of a person’s emotional processing style, their typical way of processing emotional situations and it can be applied to mental health, pain, medical conditions and psychosomatic conditions.  For more information please visit: http://emotionalprocessing.org/

New paper FHSS Dr. Sarah Collard

PG research, Publishing, writing

Sarah Collard 2016Congratulations to Dr. Sarah Collard on her latest paper ‘The psychosocial impact of exercising with epilepsy: A narrative analysis’ in Epilepsy & Behavior.  The paper offers valuable insight into the psychosocial benefits of and barriers to exercising with epilepsy and draw attention to the individual differences in how a person with epilepsy copes with uncontrolled seizures and their impact on his/her exercise routine. This knowledge can lead to future research in exploring how a person with epilepsy can overcome these barriers to exercise and encourage more people with epilepsy to enjoy the benefits of exercise.

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

New paper by Dr. Sarah Collard in Psychology of Sport & Exercise

Publishing, writing

Collard + Marlow 2016Dr. Sarah Collard (based in FHSS) had her article “It’s such a vicious cycle”: Narrative accounts of the sportsperson with epilepsy accepted in the scientific journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise. [1]  The paper, co-authored with Caroline Marlow, addresses the issues of the psychosocial barriers and benefits of exercising for the sportsperson/people with epilepsy (SWE). Her qualitative research presents the narratives of SWE over time and as a result, offers a deeper understanding of the psychosocial impact of exercising with epilepsy.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

Collard, S.S., Marlow, C. (2016) “It’s such a vicious cycle”: Narrative accounts of the sportsperson with epilepsy, Psychology of Sport and Exercise 24: 56-64.

  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1469029216300073

ESRC funded project: “Dementia Friendly Architecture – Reducing Spatial Disorientation in Dementia Care”

ESRC logo New ESRC-funded project in Psychology and BUDI

This week saw the start of a two year ESRC-funded project entitled “Dementia Friendly Architecture: Reducing Spatial Disorientation in Dementia Care Homes”. The project, which has been awarded to Dr Jan Wiener (Psychology/BUDI), aims to develop design guidelines for dementia-friendly architecture that minimise spatial disorientation, one of the earliest signs of dementia.

Post-Doctoral researcher Dr Ramona Grzeschik, who started on the first of December, and Chris Hilton (PhD student) will test how different aspects of build environments affect orientation and navigation abilities in people with dementia. In order to do so, they will use cutting-edge virtual environments and eye-tracking technology (https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/wayfinding/) which allows for systematic manipulations of environmental properties.

This international multidisciplinary project brings together researchers from cognitive psychology, dementia research and architecture. It is a collaboration between Bournemouth University’s Wayfinding Lab, BUDI (Bournemouth University Dementia Institute), Northumbria University (Prof Ruth Dalton, Co-I), UWS (Prof Anthea Innes, Co-I) and the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (Prof Wolbers, Prof Nestor, both project-partners).

 

Paper ahead of its time?

Publishing

Presentation1Sometimes my co-authors and I wonder why a particular paper get more cited after a few years of publication.  Is is because the paper and the research were are ahead of their time?  Or is there simply a lag time between publication and other researchers publishing in the field finding your paper (or stumbling upon it perhaps)?

Take for example the following paper published in 2006 when I was still based in the Department of Public Health at the University of Aberdeen: Promoting physical activity in primary care settings: Health visitors’ and practice nurses’ views and experiences in  the Journal of Advanced Nursing.[1]

 

Published in 2006 our paper was first cited in Scopus in 2007 (just once),three time in the following year (2008), five times in 2009 and then just a few times per year until this year. In 2015 we have six citations already and the year is not even finished.

We really wonder what lies behind that increased popularity of this 2006 paper.

citations JAN

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

  1. Douglas, F., van Teijlingen E.R., Torrance, N., Fearn, P., Kerr, A., Meloni, S. (2006) Promoting physical activity in primary care settings: Health visitors’ and practice nurses’ views and experiences Journal of Advanced Nursing, 55(2): 159-168.

Paper by BU academics used as example in Dutch university newsletter

Publishing, Research Integritiy

The March 2015 newsletter of the Dutch University of Groningen’s School for Behavioural & Cognitive Neurosciences dedicated two pages to the question: ‘How to pick the right journal?’    The author of the English-language newsletter contribution, Liwen Zhang, offer its readers a brief introduction on journal selection for a scientific manuscript.  The newsletter piece is based on two papers which both share their submission stories and suggestions of journal selection.  We were pleased to see that one of these two papers is by two Bournemouth University professors: Hundley and van Teijlingen.  Their paper which gives advice on one specific aspect of academic publishing is called ‘Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper’ [1].  It was published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing in 2002.

 

 

Reference:

  1.  vanTeijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2002) Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper, Journal of Advanced Nursing 37(6): 506-511.

Psychology PGR student Simon Ferneyhough wins Santander Award and BPS Postgraduate Study Visit grant

Congratulations to Simon Ferneyhough, second year PhD student in Psychology (SciTech), for obtaining funding from both the Santander Mobility Award scheme (£1000) and the British Psychological Society Postgraduate Study Visit scheme (£400).  In combination, these funds will be used to support a two week research placement at the University of the Balearic Islands, working with long-standing laboratory collaborator and newly appointed Visiting Professor in Psychology, Dr. Fabrice Parmentier.

Simon’s PhD research examines the impact of normal cognitive ageing on a specific aspect of working memory performance known as feature binding: the ability to integrate different features of objects and events (e.g., colour, shape, sound, location) into unified episodic representations. While existing research indicates that we will all face decline in feature binding performance as we get older, not all types of feature binding seem to decline equally – memory for objects in locations, for instance, appears to be particularly impaired; while memory for an object’s intrinsic features (such as colour and shape) appears to be relatively preserved.  Simon will use the visit to collaboratively develop a paradigm widely used in the auditory distraction literature to study auditory-spatial feature binding (that between a sound object and its location in space) across younger and older adult samples.

Simon’s PhD is supervised by Dr.Jane Elsley (Psychology) and Dr. Andrew Johnson (Psychology).

Dr Andrew Mayers’ research on children’s sleep receives excellent media coverage

Throughout November, the work that Dr Andrew Mayers (a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, in the school of Design, Engineering and Computing) has been doing with children’s sleep has been receiving a great deal of attention on national television and on national and local radio. Over the last few years, Andrew has been running a series of sleep workshops with parents, in a unique partnership with Winton Primary School and Barnardo’s Bournemouth Children’s Centres. Over that time, there have been several reports in the local press about the work, but it is only in the last six months that this has received national attention, starting in July with articles in the Times Educational Supplement (TES: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6264998) and Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2180003/Parents-offered-child-sleep-classes-pupils-turn-lessons-tired.html) and a live interview with Talk Radio Europe (http://www.talkradioeurope.com/clients/amayers.mp3). However, it is this last month that the attention has become more intense, with two features on national television and four live interviews on BBC radio (including one session at 12.30am!).

ITV Daybreak, November 1st: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd_OaMieSks

BBC Radio 5 Live, Drive show, November 16th http://www.andrewmayers.info/Radio5Nov162012.mp3

BBC Radio 5 Live, Tony Livesey late night show, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/Radio5Nov212012.mp3

BBC1 Breakfast/BBC News Channel, November 21st http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20423289

BBC Radio Sheffield, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/RadioSheffieldNov212012.mp3

BBC Radio Solent, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/RadioSolentNov212012.mp3

Andrew has been reflecting on these experiences. He said “I am extremely grateful for the incredibly hard work put in to these workshops by Pat Bate at Winton Primary School and Patrick Ives at Barnardo’s – without them this would not have happened. It is also testimony to the effectiveness of a good personal web page. Much of the initial media attention came about because a journalist was conducting research online about children’s sleep, and found my web page. The rest is history!”

Andrew’s website can be found at: www.andrewmayers.info

Andrew also said “Once a website like this is established, it is important to keep it updated, especially when there is a chance of media attention. A few days after the BBC features, I noticed that visits to my website increased six-fold in the first day, and is still well above normal levels of traffic. As a result of the media attention and increased web site visits, I have established several potentially very lucrative new partnerships with leading academics in the field, some with a very high profile media presence. I also received support and requests for collaboration with several educational psychologists and other professionals across the UK”.

Research by BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers will appear on ITV Daybreak this Thursday

In a bid to tackle children’s sleep problems, BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing, has been running workshops for parents at Bournemouth primary schools for several years now. The workshops started because staff at Winton Primary School noticed that pupils were struggling to get through the day without falling asleep, and were often difficult to engage because of tiredness. Andrew welcomed the opportunity to work with the school, an activity that reflects the ambition of the university to undertake more public engagement. The success of these workshops have been receiving a great deal of national media attention, with previously reported features in the Daily Mail, TES, and an interview with Talk Radio Europe. To follow on from that, Andrew’s work with children’s sleep at Winton Primary School will feature on ITV Daybreak on Thursday November 1st, as part of a series that the channel is showing across the week. It is due to be aired at around 6.50am. While Andrew welcomes the media attention, he hopes that this will help publicise his ambition to develop a professional online resource for children’s sleep, working in collaboration with some of the leading UK sleep charities.

Intranasal inhalation of oxytocin improves eye-witness identification: RDF grant report

Post-award

In 2011 myself and Ben Parris from the Psychology Research Centre were awarded a small RDF grant to investigate whether intranasal inhalation of the hormone oxytocin can improve eye-witness identification.  We designed an experiment where participants viewed a short video-clip of a perpetrator stealing a wallet from someone’s bag.  Participants then inhaled either an oxytocin or placebo nasal spray, and after a 45 minute interval to allow central oxytocin levels to plateau, were presented with a line-up of ten faces from which they had to either select the perpetrator or state that he was absent.  To date we have tested 70 participants and found a facilitation in the oxytocin condition.  In a second experiment, we asked participants to complete the ‘One-in-Ten’ task, a test of spontaneous eye-witness memory that has been well-used in previous work.  Again, we found a clear facilitation in performance in the oxytocin condition.

These findings follow recent work that has demonstrated that oxytocin can improve face recognition performance in standard cognitive tasks in lab-based settings.  In addition, work from our lab is currently under review for publication demonstrating that oxytocin can improve face recognition in individuals with prosopagnosia (face blindness).  This RDF grant has therefore given us the funding to carry out key investigations demonstrating novel applications of oxytocin inhalation in more applied settings.

I also presented findings from the oxytocin project at the April meeting of the Experimental Psychological Society, and was delighted to meet Dr Markus Bindemann from the University of Kent who is something of an expert in eye-witness identification.  We are now collaborating with Markus, and have plans to develop a bid to the Leverhulme Trust on the back of the publications that we hope will result from these investigations.  We are also about to welcome a new PhD student to our lab, who will be further developing the forensic aspect of this work in more real-world national security settings.

The pump-priming that was made available to us via the RDF scheme has provided us with the opportunity to collect the initial data and publication basis that we need to develop a large external bid, and we hope that this is the beginning of a fruitful line of research for our laboratory.

Reducing sleep problems in children – BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers’ research features in the TES

Over the past couple of years BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing, has been working with Bouremouth primary schools to try and reduce sleep problems in school children. Working in schools, sleep is probably the most common problem that is reported by teachers, head-teachers and staff, and Andrew stresses the importance of all children receiving enough sleep to prevent adverse effects on their education and health. He is currently studying the effects of CBD Gummies For Sleep after school staff noticed pupils were struggling to get through the day without falling asleep.

Andrew is currently exploring the possibility of conducting studies that examine the mental health and well-being of children, including how poor sleep affects their emotional, cognitive, social and educational development. He hopes the outcomes will help to offer a clearer understanding of the implications of sleep deprivation in children.

You can read the full TES article here: Can’t sleep, won’t sleep (published 27 July 2012).

Andrew’s research also featured in the Daily Mail: Parents offered ‘get your child to sleep’ classes as pupils turn up to lessons too tired (published 27 July 2012).

Andrew’s website is available here: http://andrewmayers.info/

Find out about the ‘Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition’ Lab in Psychology

Successful spatial navigating is one of the most fundamental behavioural problems and requires complex cognitive operations. To navigate in both familiar and unfamiliar environments, we need to monitor various internal and external cues, build, access, and update mental representations of space, plan and execute movements. In the Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition Lab we conduct research into the psychological processes underlying navigation and wayfinding behaviour addressing both fundamental and applied research questions. We make use of a variety of methods including behavioural navigation experiments, virtual reality techniques, static and mobile eye-tracking and cognitive modelling.

Click on image to see a short video of our virtual reality setup that we now combined with a head mounted (mobile) eye-tracker. This allows us to study visual attention across a large field of view while participants solve navigation tasks in highly controlled virtual environments that are build to exactly match the experimental demands.

The “Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition Lab” is currently involved in a number of fundamental and applied research projects:-

 

 

 

 

  • We just received funding from “Army of Angels” and the BU Foundation to start an exciting new project investigating the relationship between PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and navigation.

 

Dr. Jan Wiener in the Psychology Research Centre leads the “Wayfinding and Spatial Cognition” lab. For more information about our projects, the team, and our publications, please visit our lab page at www.spatial-cognition.org. You can also follow us on Twitter.

We are always eager to discuss new project ideas and collaborations, so please get in contact by dropping me an email: jwiener@bournemouth.ac.uk

British Psychological Society Postdoctoral Study Visits and Research Seminar

Funding opportunities

Postdoctoral Study Visits

 

The British Psychological Society has announced the establishment of a new grant scheme to support the work of postdoctoral researchers and lecturers.

The scheme provides grants to enable UK based psychology postdoctoral researchers and lecturers to undertake a study visit to another institution. The scheme is aimed at supporting postdoctoral researchers and lecturers to acquire skills directly relevant to their research/lecturing. The applicant must be employed at a UK institution as a postdoctoral researcher/lecturer and be within three years of the completion of their doctoral research degree in psychology.

Six awards, two in each of the following categories, are available each year:

  • Up to £250 to visit an institution in the UK
  • Up to £400 to visit an institution in Europe
  • Up to £600 to visit an institution elsewhere in the world

 

HowtoApply

The following documentation should be sent to the Society:

  • an application form, available from the Board Administrator
  • a supporting statement from the applicant’s Head of Department
  • a supporting statement from the proposed host institution
  • a copy of the applicant’s current CV

SeminarCompetition

 

Research Seminar Competition

 

The Competition provides grants to enable institutions to co-operate to hold a series of at least three scientific seminars.

The proposed seminars should have tangible goals and should focus on developing and extending the understanding of a psychological process in any field of scientific psychology.

Four grants are available each worth up to £3,000. These provide funding for travel and accommodation expenses for those attending the seminars.

HowtoApply

As a minimum of two institutions will be involved, submissions should be made by a primary applicant and a co-applicant, at least one of whom should be a Society member. Further details and an application form are available from the Board Administrator.

Research Seminars Funded in 2011

  • Paediatric traumatic brain injury: developing and evaluating complex interventions. University of East Anglia and the University of Exeter
  • Neurodevelopmental disorders: exploring sensitive methods of assessment across development. Kingston University, Institute of Education and Newcastle University
  • The social psychology of citizenship: the politics of inclusion and exclusion in language, public space and national identity. University of Winchester, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Dundee, and the Open University

Research Seminars Funded in 2010

  • Psychology and dentistry: future directions. University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, University of Birmingham and King’s College London.
  • Multi perpetrator rape: setting the research agenda. Middlesex University and University of Birmingham
  • The role of emotional processes in the development of Autism Spectrum Disorder. City University London and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.

Both calls for nominations open in June. The closing date for both nominations is 28 September 2012.

The RKE Operations team can help you with your application.

TheHorseCourse – changing behaviour in prisoners

Dr Ann Hemingway from BU’s School of Health and Social Care is working with Dr Rosie Meek from the University of Southampton to work with prisons to deliver TheHorseCourse, where horses are used to challenge offending behaviour.

The horses are trained to give clear and unbiased feedback on mental and emotional self control. Tasks are progressive and challenging, requiring the participants to remain calm and focused… or lose the plot! 

Prisoners are coached to overcome frustration and failure by taking control over their thoughts and feelings. The horses provide both motivation and feedback, and reliably create positive change with even the most difficult individuals.

Initial findings are extremely positive, with participants showing results such as:

  • better self control
  • greater engagement with available education
  • confidence as learners
  • stronger focus on positive goals
  • hope

The horsemanship goal of the 7 sessions is to gain Parelli Level 1 accreditation, the more important goal is to have the skills to lead constructive and satisfying lives.

One of the participants has commented: “”I’ve been on anger management courses, alcohol courses, things like that – this is much different, you’re learning it physical, not mental if you know what I mean. It’s helped me more, without a doubt. I don’t like talking. …Normally, with other courses you’re in a group of people… you have to talk about your issues and things like that, but here you get it out in a different way, you’re doing physical things not just talking. I’ve been doing that since I was 6 years of age and it’s never worked. I learnt a lot about myself. I can actually do things. I always say I can’t but I can.”

‎”From the video based evaluation undertaken so far it is clear to me that this intervention shows real innovation and promise and may indeed have the potential to reduce reoffending. To date there has been no published longitudinal evaluation focused on this type of intervention. It is for this reason that we have committed to undertaking a pilot evaluation.” Dr Ann Hemingway, Bournemouth University, (Public Health Interventions)
 
Reliably changing behaviour in the most difficult prisoners, to donate please visit: https://mydonate.bt.com/charities/thehorsecourse
 
Join TheHorseCourse Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/TheHorseCourse
 
Dr Ann Hemingway is also the course lead for BU’s MSc Public Health course (part-time and full-time options). Read more about the course to see how you could bring about positive changes in health promotion and influence policies to improve public health and wellbeing locally, nationally and internationally.